When Napoleon died in exile on the island of St. Helena in 1821, his doctor surreptitiously took his penis during the autopsy and gave it to a priest, who smuggled it to Corsica. The priest was killed in a bizarre blood vendetta, says Perrottet, but passed it along to his family. They kept it until 1916, when a British collector got hold of it.
Perrottet says it was put on display once, in New York in 1927, and crowds turned out to see it. "It was described as being like a piece of leather or a shriveled eel," he