Napoleon's penis

• 1. Introduction

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  Napoleon's penis has one of the stranger documented afterlives in history. When Napoleon died on the island of Saint Helena on the 5th of May, 1821, no one could have predicted that a single body part would become the subject of legal disputes, auction failures, and a paper trail stretching across two centuries.

  The item allegedly entered the historical record during Napoleon's autopsy, performed by his physician François Carlo Antommarchi. According to some accounts, Antommarchi removed the penis along with several other body parts. Whether the act was intentional or accidental remains unresolved. One theory points to Napoleon's chaplain, who may have paid Antommarchi to take it as revenge for Napoleon having called the priest "impotent."

  None of the written accounts from Saint Helena mention such a removal at all. Napoleon's biographer Philip Dwyer called the entire claim "highly fanciful." And yet the object has changed hands repeatedly, been displayed in New York, failed to sell at Christie's, and is today held by the family of a urologist who paid $3,000 for it in 1977. What exactly the item is, and whether it is what anyone claims, is a question the current owner has chosen to leave largely unanswered.

• 2. The Autopsy Claim

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  François Carlo Antommarchi, the physician who conducted Napoleon's autopsy, left behind no record confirming that he removed any sexual organ. The claim that he did so appears in secondary accounts, none of them primary sources.

  The most colorful version of the story concerns Napoleon's chaplain. According to this account, the priest wanted to take something as retribution after Napoleon had publicly called him impotent. The chaplain allegedly paid Antommarchi to remove the item during the autopsy. Philip Dwyer, writing as Napoleon's biographer, dismissed this as speculation without documentary backing.

  What is notable is that the silence of the contemporaneous record has done nothing to stop the object from acquiring an elaborate chain of custody. Whether cut intentionally or accidentally, or not at all, the item that later passed through booksellers and auction houses has never been authenticated beyond doubt. The chaplain reportedly carried it out of Saint Helena and brought it to his home on Corsica, where it stayed within his family until 1916.

• 3. Booksellers and Buyers

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  Maggs Bros. Ltd., a London-based bookselling company, acquired the relic in 1916 from the chaplain's family. Eight years later, a Philadelphia bookseller named A. S. W. Rosenbach paid for it.

  Rosenbach brought the item to New York City in 1927 and displayed it at the Museum of French Art. A reviewer from Time magazine attended and compared it to a "maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace." Others at the exhibition described it differently, calling it a "piece of leather or a shriveled eel."

  After the exhibition, Rosenbach sold the object to a collector named Donald Hyde. When Hyde died, his wife passed it to John F. Fleming, a bookseller who had maintained a close relationship with Rosenbach. Fleming later sold it to another collector, who put it up for auction through Christie's. The auction attempt failed. During a subsequent legal matter, the attorney James Comyn, while reading an affidavit connected to a Napoleon collector named Eric LeVine, chose to describe the item as a "certain part" rather than name it directly. The $3,000 sale to John K. Lattimer in 1977 finally brought it to its current family line.

• 4. After Lattimer

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  John K. Lattimer was both a urologist and a collector of historical artifacts. He paid $3,000 for the item in 1977, and it passed to his daughter upon his death.

  His daughter has reportedly been offered at least $100,000 for the relic. She has declined to sell. The current policy around access is notably restrictive: the owner has permitted only ten people total to view the item, and it has never been recorded on camera.

  Judith Pascoe, writing in The New York Times, described the preserved object as "barely recognizable as a human body part." A documentary called Dead Famous DNA, which aired on Channel 4, described it as "very small" and recorded a measurement of 3.8 cm. That documentary represents one of the few instances where detailed physical description was made available outside a private viewing.

• 5. Authenticity and Doubt

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  No primary source from Saint Helena mentions the removal of Napoleon's penis during or after the autopsy. This absence of documentation is the central problem for anyone trying to establish the object's authenticity.

  Philip Dwyer's judgment, delivered as Napoleon's biographer, is that the amputation claim is "highly fanciful." Judith Pascoe described the preserved item as barely recognizable as human tissue, which compounds the difficulty of establishing what it actually is.

  The item has attracted collectors, booksellers, auctioneers, journalists, and documentary filmmakers over more than a century, but none of the scrutiny has produced a verified answer. The Lattimer family, in choosing to limit viewership to ten people and refuse all camera access, has ensured that whatever the object is, it remains beyond definitive examination. The Dead Famous DNA documentary's measurement of 3.8 cm stands as one of the few quantified facts attached to an object whose entire history rests on unverified accounts.