Note 13 — THE DEATH OF ‘MADAME'[12]

The report of Chamberlain, the English physician, says distinctly that it was oil. ‘The lower bowel was full of a bilious humour, with oil floating upon it’ (Mrs. Everett-Green’s Lives of the Princesses of England, vi. 589). This observation is important because Littré’s opinion has been disputed by Dr. Legué. ‘Littré maintains that the physicians noticed the presence of oil; but that is because he strains an equivocal phrase in the report of the autopsy—“full to its utmost capacity of a sanious, putrid, yellowish, watery substance, fat like oil.” Frankly, is this not giving to the text a signification which never entered into the mind of the physicians?’ (Médecins et Empoisonneurs, pp. 255, 256.) Neither Dr. Legué nor Littré, however, knew the English reports published by Mrs. Everett-Green.