The Emperor and the Irishman - Hardcover

The Emperor and the Irishman: Napoleon and Dr Barry O'Meara on St Helena

Hardcover. Zustand: Very Good. Zustand des Schutzumschlags: Very Good. Hardcover, reprint with additional pictures, viii + 216pp + 4 pages of glossy colour plates, numerous b&w illustrations, photos and maps in text, pictorial endpapers, NOT ex-library. Gift inscription on the half-title page. Light wear, book is clean and bright with unmarked text, free of stamps, firmly bound. Very good, untorn, unclipped dust jacket (price concealed on the front flap). -- Written after some thirty years of research, this is an account of the remarkable relationship and unusual friendship that developed between Napoleon Bonaparte in his final exile and his personal physician, the Irish surgeon Dr Barry Edward O'Meara. After the Battle of Waterloo, the young Trinity College graduate O'Meara accepted the post of surgeon to Napoleon on the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena. The Dublin-born doctor first encountered Napoleon aboard HMS Bellerophon following the emperor's surrender in July 1815. Impressed by the young Irishman's fluent Italian and French, Napoleon personally requested that O'Meara accompany him into exile when his own physician refused to do so. What began as a professional duty evolved into a close and trusting relationship that lasted until O'Meara's departure in 1818. Drawing extensively on O'Meara's diary entries, which run to some eighteen hundred pages and record daily conversations with Napoleon on subjects ranging from politics and warfare to medicine and women, the author traces the evolving bond between doctor and patient against the increasingly hostile backdrop of life at Longwood House. Central to the narrative is the conflict with Governor Sir Hudson Lowe, whose oppressive security regime placed O'Meara in an impossible position as intermediary between the British authorities and the captive emperor - a tension that ultimately led to his dismissal from the island in 1818 and the subsequent destruction of his naval career. The author, himself a Dublin physician, brings a medical perspective to O'Meara's observations on Napoleon's deteriorating health, while also seeking to rehabilitate the reputation of a figure whose loyalties were questioned by both sides. The book contributes to a substantial body of Napoleonic captivity literature and offers an intimate, day-to-day portrait of Napoleon in private, far removed from the battlefield mythology. It will be of interest to readers of Napoleonic history, Anglo-Irish military biography and the broader history of medicine. Artikel-Nr. 013345

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