Napoleon's Penis: Plus Other Engaging and Outrageous Tales

NAPOLEON’S

PENIS

Plus Other Engaging and Outrageous Tales

Stanley M. Bierman MD, FACP

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©

Copyright 2012 Stanley M. Bierman MD, FACP.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Printed in the United States of America.

isbn: 978-1-4669-5983-5 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-5982-8 (hc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-5984-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012917642

Trafford rev. 09/19/2012

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Contents

Preface to Napoleon’s Penis

The Peripatetic Posthumous Peregrination of Napoleon’s Penis

Strangers in an Elevator

The Man with the Golden Penis

Scared to Death

Death and Fanny’s Red Dress

Yiddish as a Second Language

On Growing Old(Er) A Philosophic, Not So Scientific Treatise on The Subject of Aging

The Terrible Question

An Essay on Romantic Love

A Prescription for Melancholia

Dear Mom and Dad: The Nightmarish Letter to Home

Lemons and Lemonade

Basic Science . . . Who Cares?

South Africa: Visit to the Dark Continent

Bungee Jumping in Australia and New Zealand

Egypt: Up and Down The Nile Plus Jordan

The Seductive Charm of Rio, Macho Spell of Buenos Aires, and Genial Allure of La Paz

East African Safari

Tulips, Windmills, Goulash, Strauss Waltzes, and Beer Gardens

Israel Health Care: Example for USA

Transatlantic by QEII to London, The Tube, Museums, and Pub Beer

Legal Rights of Prisoners and Chunky-Style Peanut Butter Jailhouse Blues or How Maligned Criminals Should Be Treated More Kindly and Deferentially

Racism in America

The Underclass and Society

The Neurobiology of Homosexuality

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s through 1980s

Legal Aspects of Genital HSV Infection

Frictional Dermatitis of Onan

An Epihany: Rediscovering my Judaic Roots

Gustatory/Olfactory Conditioning: Quack, Quack, Quack

My Furry Friend Coco

Norman Cousins and Larry Flynt: You Got to Be Kidding

Horoscopes For Sale

John, Ken and Aids 1982: Three Sad Words

Yumps and The Herbal Industry

The Biermans Do Cordova Alaska

Twenty Guaranteed Ways to Insure Revocation and Suspension of Your License to Practice Medicine

Preface to Napoleon’s Penis

It is 3:41 a.m. on August 1, 2012, and I am attempting to write a preface to my book Napoleon’s Penis before sending the manuscript electronically to Trafford Publishing. What to say?

Joggers jog. Anorectics starve. Alcoholics drink. Politicians lie. Narcissists primp. Writers write. It may either be a genetic imprint or more likely elevated brain endorphin levels that give these obsessive compulsive individuals a narcotic high to continue their behavior. For me, I began serious writing fifty years ago, publishing a scientific paper in American Journal of Physiology based on the thyroid response of hamsters subject to a cold challenge. Some seventy or so technical articles later writing on a variety of subjects ranging from cancer to immunology to stress to herpes simplex to sexually transmitted diseases, I decided on writing to a lay audience. I figured that my patients would enjoy reading and learning of my personal reflections and experiences while in private practice of dermatology in an upscale Century City practice and teaching residents at University of California (UCLA) where I am Honorary Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine. Thus was born my publication entitled Bierman Dermatology Newsletter, sent quarterly to my patients over a thirteen-year time span from 1987 to 2000. Each issue highlighted a philosophic, psychological, or sociologic matter of my interest in a section of the newsletter entitled Reflections. I have chosen favorite selections from the newsletter that form the thirty-seven essays found in Napoleon’s Penis Plus Other Engaging and Outrageous Tales.

Apart from my newsletter, I was writing on the history of stamp collecting in philatelic society journals and published The World’s Greatest Stamp Collectors and More of the World’s Greatest Stamp Collectors (New York: Fredrick Fell Publishers, 1990). I received an award from the American Philatelic Society for my efforts and was entered into the APS Writers Hall of Fame. I also found time to write an essay for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a yearly award for the worst opening sentence of a never-written novel. I won honorable mention for Sister Mary’s Dill Enema: The vibrissae on her pet’s snout stood uniquely erect as Sister Mary Ignatius unceremoniously removed her vestments and absentmindedly stroked her cat’s fur in a vicarious counter clock fashion while contemplating breaking her holy vows of obedience, and acquiescing to the theatric act of self-immolation on Pesach at the Smithsonian Mall to protest the archdiocese’s abridgement of her academic freedom to teach a course in feline worship at the convent knowing full well that such an emancipating act of self-expression would immediately trigger an IRS audit. I challenge a reader of this book to do worse!

Anyway, I will end the preface by thanking the Lou Fuewntes of Trafford Publishing for picking up the challenge to publish this book. I also wish to thank Czar Nicholas of Russia for his autocratic rule that resulted in my grandfather Sergeant Harry Bierman to go AWOL and immigrate to America in 1907. Were it not for the Czar’s ignoble and tyrannical rule, I would currently be in a Russian gulag and not writing from the comfort of my Beverly Hills home on a Wednesday morning.

The Peripatetic Posthumous Peregrination of Napoleon’s Penis

Few patients who have visited my medical office have failed to be informed of my interest in stamps and books about stamps. I may unfairly condemn collectors in a generic sense by suggesting that they are generally an odd and somewhat eccentric group of individuals. They are often compulsive in nature, though intellectually curious by disposition, and passionate in their pursuits. I doubt that a more bizarre but true story of collecting exists than that I call The Peripatetic Posthumous Peregrination of Napoleon’s Penis. Readers who are easily offended by reference to the male copulatory organ are advised not to read further!

At the height of his power, Napoleon was quoted by his aid, Bourrienne, as saying that his desire for victory in war was not for fame, glory, or power, nor even for France, but rather for love! As a conqueror, he could possess every beautiful woman he desired. Napoleon’s many romantic triumphs have been the subject of historical accounts, although the chronicle of the emperor’s reproductive organ after death is a little-known, but well-documented, yarn. According to Charles Hamilton, who recounted this remarkable saga in Auction Madness (Everest House, 1981), the posthumous peregrinations of the little corporal’s amorous appendage began in a dimly lit cottage at Longwood on the island of St. Helena, a craggy little fist of rock off the west coast of Africa.

On the morning of May 5, 1821, the fifty-two-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte, whose army came close to crushing all of Europe, passed into a deep coma, and died at 5:49 pm. A death mask was cast, and the greatest soldier since Hannibal was prepared for postmortem. On May 6, in the presence of a dozen spectators including two personal aides, the Abbe Vignali, a semiliterate priest, and Ali, Napoleon’s valet, the body was examined by the emperor’s surgeon, Professor Francesco Antommarchi. Popular myth suggests that the proximate cause of Napoleon’s death was cancer of the stomach. Medical historians today believe that he died of a perforated ulcer and liver abscess from Malta fever (a bacterial infection due to Brucellosis). Another popular belief, partially substantiated by biochemical analysis of his hair, is that he was poisoned with arsenic by his British captors. In a detailed official report made on May 6, 1821, eyewitness Sir Thomas Reade confirmed that the six doctors and faithful aides executed their charge at the autopsy of the exiled self-crowned Emperor of France.

Ninety-two years later, in his Hunterian Lecture, Professor Keith, conservator for the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, questioned whether Antommarchi’s surgical scalpel could have slipped, and cut off Napoleon’s flaccid sexual appendage during the autopsy without attracting undue attention. In a memoir published in 1852 in Revue des Mondes, Napoleon’s valet, Ali, claims that the structure was surreptitiously cut from the corpse by Viganli. It is known that the Abbe Vignali administered the last rites to Napoleon, conducted his funeral, and was rewarded for his services with the emperor’s knives and forks, a silver cup, a handkerchief marked with Napoleon’s emblem, his shirt, white breeches, and death mask. It is also believed that the priest clandestinely took the excised love-muscle that had served its owner so well during his many conquests. The mementos were brought to Vignali’s home in Corsica, the Mediterranean island of Napoleon’s birth. The Abbe was slain in a vendetta in 1828, and his sister Roxane Vignali Gianettini inherited the keepsakes, which at her death passed to her son, Charles-Marie Gianettini.

In 1916 Vignali’s descendents sold the Napoleonic collection to Maggs and Co., a British rare book firm. In 1924, Dr. A.S. Rosenbach, the high cockalorum of American bibliophiles, journeyed to London on a buying trip and acquired all the Vignali heirlooms including the mummified pecker for only $2,000. Returning to Philadelphia, Dr. Rosenbach, who was delighted with his wonderful new acquisition, enshrined it in an elaborate presentation case of blue morocco and velvet. The copulatory instrument of the Emperor of France was offered for sale to the delectation of the bibliophile’s more prurient clients. Three years later, the relic was displayed by its owner at the Museum of French Art. New York newspapers covering the affair observed that Maudlin sentimentalizers sniffled; shallow women giggled and pointed. In a glass case they saw something looking like a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace or shriveled eel. These are cruel words about the private part with which le Petit Caporal hoped to found a dynasty.

After two decades of ownership, Dr. Rosenbach sold the shriveled short arm to Donald Hyde, a collector of the books and letters of Dr. Samuel Johnson. When Hyde died, his wife, Mary, returned the desiccated Napoleonic passion probe to Rosenbach’s capable successor, John Fleming. Sometime later, a youthful, wealthy, and obviously naive collector named Bruce Gimelson acquired the Vignali collection for a reported $35,000. An autograph dealer, Gimelson was subsequently unable to sell his prize and offered it at a Christie’s sale in London, where the dried-up . . . mummified tendon failed to meet its reserve price. When the reproductive organ failed to sell, a British tabloid carried the lurid headline: NOT TONIGHT, JOSEPHINE!

For eight years, the general’s withered cock languished in Gimelson’s possession before being consigned to the famed gallery Drouot Rive Gauche, where lot 54, the stellar item of the sale sold for $3,000 to an American urologist named John K. Lattimer, M.D., Professor and Chairman Emeritus of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. I possess a handwritten letter dated December 16, 1987, from Dr. Lattimer in which he jokingly refers to owning Napoleon’s dick and . . . examining the ‘evidence’ by our new ‘noninvasive’ technique.

Some people collect baseball cards, others like automobiles, while antique beer bottles evoke intense envy in a few. But to acquire Napoleon’s genital organ and display that dried heir-bearing ancient non-erectile hard-on in an ornate presentation box on your office desk! That’s chutzpah!

Strangers in an Elevator

With the release of a movie, Sergeant Bilko starring Steve Martin, I recalled a poignant, if not hilariously funny, event that transpired in an elevator some forty years ago. Phil Silvers, a balding comedic genius played the Sgt. Bilko character of the then-popular television series You’ll Never Get Rich. Silvers was but one of a marvelous stable of American television comedians who brightened my ten-inch black-and-white TV screen during the 1960s and early 1970s. It was a golden era of television entertainers with the like of Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, and so many other funny men and women. Their wonderfully staged antics helped me to laugh away some of the problems that life and the medical profession seemed to have heaped upon me.

Phil Silvers (the actor, not the man) was somehow different in his style and comedic delivery than the others: He was abrasive, manipulative and his verbal repartee was swift and deadly to the slow-witted. There was no question as to who was top banana when he was on screen. The coterie of GIs in his platoon was the frequent butt of his conspiracies, although he usually got his fair comeuppance. Silvers’ character portrayal of Sgt. Bilko was certainly somewhat less than what the US Army would have wished to be depicted for a career soldier. It was this particular sociopathic behavior that I found so fascinating and disarming.

Phil Silvers’ Bilko character was surely the entertainer’s yin to my conventional medical yang. Bilko was anti-establishment (I was nurtured in a medical community that championed conformity); he was effusive, manipulative, and conniving (I was quiet, reserved, and reflective); he was a wheeler-dealer looking for the easy mark (my life was one of propriety with devotion to the common good). Phil Silvers’ portrayal of Sgt. Bilko conveyed the antipode of social values that seemed to have shaped my life and set its goals. Subsequently, I was to see Phil Silvers (the man, not the actor) in a television interview in his home. He was a warm, thoughtful, thoroughly decent individual, and not at all the flawed character he portrayed on television.

In 1964 I established my office practice of dermatology in Westwood Village to be close to the UCLA Medical Center, where I received my medical training, internship, and residency. My workweek usually ended on Friday at 3 p.m., at which time I would take the elevator from my tenth-floor office suite to the basement parking structure.

Now elevators are not among my favorite places to visit, nor my fondest means of transportation, given some unhappy childhood memories of being trapped momentarily in one such immobile closed steel structure. Elevators may be necessary facts of life, but nevertheless, entering one gave me the same sense