HOW DID NAPOLEON DIE??

NAPOLEANS DEATH

Even though the postmortem showed stomach cancer, rumours spread that the exiled French emperor had not died of natural causes. The controversy .. ..

Bonaparte was first treated on St. Helena by an Irishman named Dr.O'MEARA.He discribed the symptoms of the patient as : swollen gums with hole , insomnia, swollen legs, hot flushes and attackes of migraine.

He stated that Napoleon suffered from mild scurvy due to unbalanced diet.

Following his defeat at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, French emperor Napolean Bonaparte (born 1769) was sent into exile on the tiny island of St.HELENA in the South Atlantic.

Napoleaon spent five years on the british ruled island before he died on May5,1821.

During his exile Napoleaon's health declined steadily.Since September 1819. Bonaparte had been under the cure of DR. ANTOMMARCHI. The doctor had performed a postmortem, observed by five british doctors.He confirmed that the emperor had died of STOMACH CANCER.But many did not believe the official post mortem, and, until a few years ago, rumour prevailed that he died of ARSENIC POISONNING.

UNEXPLAINED INCONSISTENCIES

However, RENE MAURY , a modern French scientist described the symptoms as those of arsenic poisoning. Forensic toxicologists refuted the statement.

Maury put forth another argument, that pointed that Napoleon's body had not decomposed in the coffin even in 1840 (arsenic delays decomposition of the dead body).

The problem with this thoery was that the damp condition of St.Helena could have slowed down the decmposition process.

In the early 1960s, tests were carrried out on Napoleon's hair samples.The results shot down the arsenic theory. A second round of testing in 1994 revealed arsenic in small quantities.The poison could have come from food and water on St.Helena.

POSSIBLE SUSPECTS

1. An agent of the Bourbons , the french royal family, who were restored to the throne in 1814 , and owed this gain to Napoleon's defeat.

2. British doctors, who could have easily poisoned the emperor.

3.COUNT de MONTHOLON , responsible for the house hold of the emperor , however was the real suspect according to Maury.According to the emperor's will he stood to receive large sum of money.

CONCLUSION

In October, 2005, a document was unearthed in Scotland that presented an account of the autopsy, which again seems to confirm Antommarchi's conclusion.More recent analysis of the etiology and pathogenesis of Napoleon's illness also suggests that Napoleon's illness was a sporadic gastric carcinoma of advanced stage.

The original post-mortem examination carried out by Francesco Antommarchi Napoleon died of stomach cancer without knowing Napoleon’s father had died of stomach cancer. concluded.

An extensive 2007 study found no evidence of arsenic poisoning in the organs, such as hem­or­rhag­ing in the lin­ing in­side the heart, and also concluded that stomach cancer was the cause of death.

Opus Dei

In the past, many people called it the Holy Mafia, and considered it as some kind of catholic conspiracy to rule the world . The OPUS DEI is one of the Catholic Church's so-called seculiar institutes, an oganisation dedicated to good woks and service. For some time it has enjoyed the blessing of the Pope, who has even presided over the beatification of its Spanish founder.

Opus Dei, formally known as The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei, is an organization of the Catholic Church that emphasizes the Catholic belief that everyone is called to become a saint and that ordinary life is a path to sanctity.The great majority of its approximately 87,000 members are lay people.

Opus Dei is Latin for "Work of God", and the organization is sometimes known simply as "the Work"

The other three classes of members, numeraries, associates, and numerary-assistants, are celibate, and often live in special centers.

Supernumeraries, the largest type, currently account for about 70% of the total membership Typically, supernumeraries are married men and women with careers, devote a portion of their day to prayer, in addition to attending regular meetings and taking part in activities such as retreats. Due to their career and family obligations, they are not as available to the organization as the other types of members, but they typically contribute financially to Opus Dei, and they lend other types of assistance as their circumstances permit.

Numeraries, the second largest type of members of Opus Dei, comprise about 20% of total membership.They are celibate members who usually live in special centers run by Opus Dei. Both men and women may become numeraries, although the centers are strictly gender-segregated.They generally have careers and devote the bulk of their income to the organization.

Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 under the name Community of Priests of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei, by a young Roman Catholic priest, Josemaría Escrivá,who was particularly enthusiastic about the idea of sainthood, on 2 October 1928 in Madrid, Spain. Initially, Opus Dei was open only to men, but in 1930, Escrivá created a women's branch.
In 1939, Escrivá published The Way, a collection of 999 maxims concerning spirituality.In the 1940s, Opus Dei found an early critic in the Jesuit leader Wlodimir Ledochowski, who told the Vatican that he considered Opus Dei "very dangerous for the Church in Spain," citing its "secretive character" and calling it "a form of Christian Masonry."

COMMANDMENTS of the founder

He drew 999 maxims for the members to follow. Here are some:
1. Do not posrpone your work for the morrow.

2. You yourself are your greatest enemy.

3. To be a good example is to sow a good seed.

4. If obedience does not bring you peace, the reason is that you are arrogant.

5. It is my wish that you are happy on earth. This you will only be when you have freed yourself from the fear of suffering.

Corporal mortification

Much public attention has focused on Opus Dei's practice of mortification — the voluntary offering up of discomfort or pain to God. It has been endorsed by Popes as a way of following Christ's advice: "renounce yourself, take up the cross daily, and follow me."

Cilice: a spiked chain worn around the upper thigh for two hours each day, except for Church feast days, Sundays, and certain times of the year. This is perhaps the most shocking of the corporal mortifications, and generally Opus Dei members are extremely hesitant to admit that they use them. It is a painful mortification which leaves small prick holes in the flesh, and makes the Opus Dei members tentative about wearing swim suits wherever non-Opus Dei members may be.

Discipline : a cord-like whip which resembles macrame, used on the buttocks or back once a week. Opus Dei members must ask permission to use it more often, which many do. The story is often told in Opus Dei that the Founder was so zealous in using the discipline, he splattered the bathroom walls with streaks of blood.

Cold Showers : Most numeraries take cold showers every day and offer it up for the intentions of the current Prelate.

Meals : Numeraries generally practice one small corporal mortification at every meal, such as drinking coffee without milk or sugar, not buttering one's toast, skipping dessert, not taking seconds, etc. For the most part, eating between meals is not practiced. Opus Dei members fast on the Church's prescribed days for fasting, but otherwise must ask for permission to fast on their own. The Heroic Minute : Numeraries are encouraged to jump out of bed and kiss the floor as soon as the door is knocked in the morning. As they kiss, they say "Serviam," Latin for "I will serve."

Silences : Each night after making an examination of conscience, numeraries do not speak to one another until after Holy Mass the following morning. (They do not say "Good morning" to anyone as they are getting ready.) In the afternoons, they try to avoid speaking until dinnertime. On Sundays, numeraries generally do not listen to music, especially in the afternoons.

Critical Voices

Opus Dei has been called "the most controversial force in the Catholic Church".Critics say that Opus Dei is either a "cult", or at least "cult-like". Concerning the group's role in the Catholic Church, critics have argued that Opus Dei's unique status as a personal prelature gives it too much independence, making it essentially a "church within a church".Many think that the community enjoys too much independence and powerOthers acuuse it of supporting military dictatiship in latin america and take offence in its sympathetic stance towards the right wing in Spain.


Beatification

Inspite of the criticism, Opus Dei has developed into an inmportant constituent of the roman catholic church.Through the backing of the Holy Father , it enjoys specia protection and can no longer be reffered to as the holy mafia.In 1992 it recieved an even higher blessing : after a prepotory period of over 10 years , the organisation's founder was beatified on May 17 ot that year.Pope John Paul II said : 'Josemaria Escriva was an exemplary priest who succeded in opening new apostolic horizons foe missionary and evangelical work'.

THE BIG BANG

The Big Bang Theory is the dominant scientific theory about the origin of the universe. According to the big bang, the universe was created from a tremendously dense and hot state, sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter and in all directions.

The theory is based on the mathematical equations, known as the field equations, of the general theory of relativity set forth in 1915 by Albert Einstein.

The Big Bang theory developed from observations of the structure of the universe and from theoretical considerations. Observers determined that most "spiral nebulae" were receding from Earth, but did not grasp the cosmological implications of this fact, or realize that the supposed nebulae were galaxies outside our Milky Way.

In 1927, the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître was the first to propose that the universe began with the explosion of a primeval atom. His proposal came after observing the red shift in distant nebulas by astronomers to a model of the universe based on relativity. Years later, Edwin Hubble in 1929 found experimental evidence to help justify Lemaître's theory. He found that distant galaxies in every direction are going away from us with speeds proportional to their distance.

However, the universe's initial state was still unknown.

Two distinct possibilities emerged. One was Fred Hoyle's steady state model, whereby new matter would be created as the universe seemed to expand. In this model, the universe is roughly the same at any point in time. The other was Lemaître's Big Bang theory, advocated and developed by George Gamow. Hoyle actually coined the name of Lemaître's theory, referring to it sarcastically as "this big bang idea" during a program broadcast on March 28, 1949, by the BBC Third Programme. Hoyle repeated the term in further broadcasts in early 1950, as part of a series of five lectures entitled The Nature of Things. The text of each lecture was published in The Listener a week after the broadcast, the first time that the term "big bang" appeared in print.

While Hoyle's "steady state" and Lemaître's "Big Bang" were the two most popular models used to explain Hubble's observations, other ideas were also proposed, including the Milne model, Richard Tolman's oscillatory universe,and Fritz Zwicky's tired light hypothesis.

The big bang was initially suggested because it explains why distant galaxies are traveling away from us at great speeds. The theory also predicts the existence of cosmic background radiation (the glow left over from the explosion itself). The Big Bang Theory received its strongest confirmation when this radiation was discovered in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who later won the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

Although the Big Bang Theory is widely accepted, it probably will never be proved; consequentially, leaving a number of tough, unanswered questions.

Huge advances in Big Bang cosmology have been made since the late 1990s as a result of major advances in telescope technology as well as copious data from satellites such as COBE, the Hubble Space Telescope, and WMAP. Cosmologists can now calculate many of the parameters of the Big Bang to a new level of precision, leading to the unexpected discovery that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating.

The Big Bang, a scientific theory, is not based on any religion. Some people have found similarities, however, that they believe have both theological and philosophical implications, since some religious interpretations and world views conflict with the Big Bang origin of the universe.
Some interpretations of the Big Bang theory go beyond science, and some purport to explain the cause of the Big Bang itself (first cause). These views have been criticized by some naturalist philosophers as being modern creation myths. Some people believe that the Big Bang theory is inconsistent with traditional views of creation such as that in Genesis, for example, while others, like astronomer Hugh Ross, believe that the Big Bang theory lends support to the idea of creation ex nihilo