Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

by Sheri Fink

After Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops were struck by plague in Jaffa, in May of 1799 he told his army’s chief medical officer, René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes, that if he were a doctor, he’d put an end to the sufferings of the plague patients and the danger they represented to the army. He would give them an overdose of opium, a product of poppies that contains the opiate painkiller morphine. Bonaparte would, he said, want the same done for him. The doctor recalled later in his memoirs that he disagreed, in part on principle and in part because some patients survived the disease. “My duty is to preserve life,” he wrote. Less than two weeks later, Turkish troops closed in on their position. Bonaparte ordered that those in the hospital not strong enough to join the retreat be poisoned with laudanum, a tincture of opium. Dr. Desgenettes refused. The remaining fifty or so patients in the hospital, seemingly close to death, were poisoned instead by the chief pharmacist, but apparently he gave an insufficient dose. The Turks found several alive in the hospital and protected them.

Interesting