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Auction: 316 - The Collector's Series
Lot: 1257

Napoleonic: O´Meara, Barry Edward (1786-1836). Irish surgeon, founding member of the Reform Club, accompanied Napoleon in his exile to St. Helena, becoming his physician; served aboard HMS Bellerophon, the ship on which Napoleon surrendered in 1815; dismissed in 1818 on suspicion of being the former Emperor´s spy; author of Napoleon in Exile, or A Voice From St. Helena (1822) in which he accuses Sir Hudson Lowe of mistreating Napoleon. Autograph Letter Signed "Barry E. O´Meara". 2 1/5 pages, 4to, [London], February 8, 1826. He writes Emmanuel-Augustin-Dieudonné-Joseph, Comte de Las Cases in Paris: "I am much obliged to you for the introduction of your sensible and well informed friend Dr. Grimaud. I introduced him to Mr. Lawrence, who felt great pleasure in conducting him through St. Bartholomew hospital (to which he is a surgeon)…Mr. Lawrence speaks very highly of the pamphlet upon artificial anatomical preparations and expresses his conviction of their ultimately becoming of great utility in this country, where subjects are so very difficult to procure…I am much obliged by your kind offer of your services in making an application to [French financier] M. Laffitte, which I accept with great pleasure, more especially as I am suffering under considerable temporary embarrassment, caused by the failure of Sir Walter Stirling´s bank…" O´Meara adds in a postscript: "You are mistaken about the appointment of the ex-Governor [of St. Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe, who had dismissed him] he is not governor of Ceylon, he is merely employed as a major general and second in command there…It is said that the assassin who attempted your life has been arrested. Is that so?..." Age-toned, with seal hole and some fold wear, otherwise Very Good. French atlas-maker and chamberlain to Napoleon, Las Cases had been on St. Helena with O´Meara and the exiled emperor, and had published what was the canonical account of the exile. Dr. William Lawrence, a friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, whose views on Vitalism or "animal electricity" influenced the writing of "Frankenstein", rose to become England´s top surgeon. O´Meara´s comments on the paucity of anatomical subjects in no exaggeration; three years earlier, the infamous William Burke was hung from the gibbet for murdering vagrants so he could sell their corpses to medical schools.

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