François Carlo Antommarchi

François Carlo Antommarchi (1780 to 1838) was the physician who attended Napoleon on Saint Helena from 1819 until the emperor died in 1821. He studied in Livorno and took a doctorate in philosophy and medicine at the University of Pisa in 1808, then worked at the Santa Maria Nuova hospital in Florence, earned a surgeon's diploma in 1812 and was appointed prosector, serving under the anatomist Paolo Mascagni from 1813. Napoleon's mother and uncle arranged his posting to replace Barry O'Meara, but Napoleon was not impressed with his skill and dismissed him several times before taking him back. After the death he wrote The Last Moments of Napoleon, concluding that the cause was stomach cancer, and took the plaster cast of Napoleon's face from which many death masks descend. He published Mascagni's anatomical plates under his own name in 1823 to 1826. He later served as inspector of Polish hospitals during the 1831 uprising, lived in Louisiana and Mexico, and settled in Santiago de Cuba, where he practised, taught anatomy and operated on cataracts until he died of yellow fever in 1838. The sources disagree on whether he was born in 1780 or 1789.