Veritas (Atto Melani) (111 page)

Let us return to the eighteenth century. Soon several voices were raised against inoculation. The tragic case of Madame de Sévigné was pointed to; she, too, fell
ill of smallpox and died in 1711. However, it was not the illness that killed her but, amid atrocious suffering, the doctors’ treatment of it (cf. J. Chambon,
Traité des
métaux et des minéraux
, Paris 1714, p. 408 ff.). In the mid-eighteenth century Luigi Gatti, an Italian doctor in Paris, treated Madame Helvétius’s smallpox,
performing all sorts of somersaults and pirouettes in front of the invalid, firmly convinced that cheerfulness was the only possible remedy, and that it was only medical treatment that made
smallpox fatal. For mysterious reasons, Gatti was to change his opinion drastically, suddenly becoming a highly active (and extremely wealthy) inoculator.

Van Swieten, in the nineteenth century, reported that noble and wealthy patients almost all died, while the common people, who did not undergo any treatment, survived (cf.
Rapport de
l’Académie de Médecine sur les vaccinations pour l’année 1856
, p. 35).

That was not all: rumours began to circulate that inoculation, when it did not kill, was entirely useless. There were cases of people who, despite having undergone inoculation and having
suffered the smallpox caused by it, nonetheless fell ill of the disease, even years later. The
Mercure de France
of January 1765 (vol. II, p. 148), for example, reports the case of the
Duchess of Boufflers.

But the worst fear was yet to come: did inoculation unleash smallpox even in people who had already had it? It was well known, as Avicenna himself said, that “smallpox only strikes once in
a lifetime”, granting perpetual immunity. According to numerous doctors opposed to inoculation, artificially induced smallpox subverts this law of nature. The proof? A very famous case: Louis
XV of France, who had had smallpox at the age of eighteen, died in 1774 aged sixty-four. Of smallpox. In circumstances almost identical to those of Joseph I.

There was something special about Louis XV: as a child he was the only one who survived the incredible outbreak of fatal diseases that struck the children and grandchildren of his grandfather
the Sun King, decimating the Bourbon House of France between 1711 and 1712. Count De Mérode-Westerloo (
Mémoires
, Brussels 1840) reports that Palatine had prophesied these
deaths to him in 1706, describing them as murders. Little Louis in 1712 was just two years old, the second-born of the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne. His parents and elder brother had died of
smallpox, but Louis had been saved: his nurses, at the first signs of the child’s illness, had literally barricaded themselves in the bedroom with him, preventing the doctors from even seeing
him. They were convinced that it was the doctors themselves who had killed the other members of the royal family. And so Louis was spared Palatine’s prophecy, and when he attained his
majority he ascended the throne of France as successor to his grandfather Louis XIV. France, in the meantime, had been afflicted by years and years of Regency rule, during which the malign John
Law, the inventor of banknotes, had been given free rein, leading the kingdom to an unprecedented financial disaster, as recounted by the chimney-sweep.

But certain “prophecies”, sooner or later, always come true . . . At the age of sixty-four, Louis XV no longer had any brave wet nurses to protect him.

His death closely recalls that of Joseph I. Both were enemies of the Jesuits (Louis XV actually suppressed the Society of Jesus) and Louis XV, like Joseph, had to endure the menacing
announcement of his own death, unfortunately accurate, from a preacher. It was 1st April 1774, a Thursday in Lent, and the Bishop of Senez pointed at the King from the pulpit and exclaimed:
“Another forty days and Niniveh will be destroyed!” Exactly forty days later, on 10th May, Louis XV breathed his last (Pierre Darmon,
La variole, les nobles et les princes
,
Brussels 1989, pp. 93–4).

Up to a week earlier, examining his boils, he had continued to murmur in amazement: “If I had not already had it, I would swear that this was smallpox.” Finally on 3rd May,
realisation struck him: “It is smallpox! . . . It is smallpox.” With the mute assent of those around him, he turned his face away and said, “This is truly incredible.”

A bitterly ironic death in many ways, not least for the fact that Louis XV had always been a tenacious opponent of the practice of inoculation.

Having concluded our historical research into smallpox and having received Dr Buchwald’s opinion on Joseph’s death, we passed on to the final stage: the search for a
pathologist who would support our request to exhume the Emperor’s body and who would be prepared to analyse it.

We at once rejected the medical exhumers who are so fashionable today: they exhume the bodies of historical figures from the past essentially to develop new vaccines, and are usually sponsored
by the colossi of the pharmaceutical industry.

We turned to various Italian and Austrian university professors, but nobody was interested in the matter; indeed in many cases they actually seemed annoyed.

There was something familiar in all this: in 2003, when we needed to find graphological experts to examine the last will and testament of the King of Spain Charles II of Habsburg, most of the
experts had run a mile for fear of annoying the present Spanish king, Juan Carlos of Bourbon. So when it came to a matter of smallpox . . .

Meanwhile we sent an application by registered mail to the Denkmalamt of Vienna (the office in charge of preserving historical monuments) to start the paperwork for the exhumation of the body of
Joseph I. We knew that the procedure would be a long one and did not wish to lose any time.

In the hope of finding someone a little more courageous, we proceeded through mutual acquaintances. And so we hit upon the name of Professor Andrea Amorosi, a pathologist from the same city as
one of us. Amorosi works at the Department of Experimental Medicine and the clinic of the “Magna Grecia” University of Catanzaro, in southern Italy. Initially we had a very good
relationship. Professor Amorosi was attentive and helpful. After studying all the documentation that we sent him, he was excited by the idea of exhuming Joseph’s body; it was he who informed
us that smallpox is on the class A “special surveillance” list in the struggle against bio-terrorism. Our initiative, therefore, could cause a stir in the scientific community.

We asked if it would be possible, after all this time, to prove whether Joseph had been poisoned, killed by an artificial smallpox, or had instead died from natural smallpox. In the case of a
poison, he answered, it should not be too difficult, since at the time they mainly used metals, which can be traced by modern equipment. The poisons used today, he declared, leave no traces.

In the case of death by inoculation, the professor went on to explain, the question was more complicated, but not impossible. It would be necessary to exhume several bodies, not just
Joseph’s. The ideal situation would be to have bodies that had died from smallpox long before Joseph, when smallpox was not so lethal, in which case it would therefore be reasonable to assume
that death was due to natural smallpox – and bodies that had died from smallpox later in the eighteenth century, in the age of inoculation. Then DNA sequences would have to be taken from
these bodies and compared with those of Joseph I. Professor Amorosi kept us on the phone as he continued to explain all the possible ways to detect a possible artifical cause in the young
emperor’s death, using an abundance of scientific terms. Lacking his professional expertise, we are unable to report Professor Amorosi’s ideas and intentions with the appropriate
terminology.

We arranged with Amorosi that first of all he would send us the pages from Harrison’s manual on internal medicine concerning bio-terrorism, and in the meantime he would talk with some of
his colleagues, whom he did not identify as yet, with the aim of forming a team to carry out the exhumation and analysis of the bodies.

We never heard from him again.

We never received the photocopies from the Harrison manual (we got hold of them by ourselves), nor did we succeed in talking to Professor Amorosi again. He never replied to our emails. Our
numerous phone calls, over a period of months, all ran up against the insuperable barrier of his secretary, nurse or assistant, who regularly asked us for our names, put us on hold and then told us
that Professor Amorosi was not there. Then one day we shifted tactics, calling and refusing to accept yet another vague and off-putting response. We insisted, we called back five times the same
day, then the next day, and so on for a week. Each time we explained the whole matter from scratch, even though we could sense that the person at the other end of the line did not wish to listen to
us. We began to recognise their voices, and the voices recognised us. Our interlocutors contradicted themselves, and one of them after the briefest of greetings put the phone down on us. The people
on the other end of the line were armed with a good deal of patience; they could have treated us worse. In June 2006, when for the umpteenth time we pronounced the words “exhumation”,
“smallpox”, “inoculation”, finally a weary voice whispered to us: “Just how old are you? Do you realise what you’re doing? Let it go. And leave the professor
alone.”

We did not call again. For the first time since we had started our investigations into the past, we felt really frightened. The voice was not threatening. Quite the reverse: it seemed sincere.
It was clear: Professor Amorosi had been intimidated by someone, to the point that he refused any contact with us, even to the extent of simply inventing a pretext and wriggling out of the
business. Perhaps we really were playing with fire. We opened the chapter on bio-terrorism in Harrison’s manual on internal medicine. We read and re-read the same passage, as if it was only
now that its significance had struck us: despite the continual urgings of the World Health Organisation to destroy every test tube sample of smallpox, at the CDC in Atlanta in the USA they still
preserve these and carry out experiments of all kinds. The manual emphasised how the recombinant (or artificial) smallpox is much more devastating and dangerous than the natural one.

We went back to Professor Buchwald’s book. The book reports every sort of malpractice committed until just a few decades ago to hide the number of deaths due to the anti-smallpox vaccine,
and to pass them off as natural smallpox: substitutions of clinical records, suppression of reports and other things. The horrifying photos (pp. 49 and 50) of Waltraud B., a child horribly covered
with pustules and scabs from smallpox provoked by anti-smallpox vaccine, and of the blood issuing from the eyes and open mouth of the corpse of a young nurse who died at Wiesbaden in the sixties
from haemorrhagic smallpox, also caused by vaccination, caused our pens to drop. And not only metaphorically.

As this book goes to press, the registered letter containing the application for the exhumation of the body of Joseph I, and a subsequent reminder, have received no answer from the Denkmalamt of
Vienna.

The Flying Ship and its Inventor

The gazette of 24th June 1709 kept by Frosch reporting news of the arrival of the Flying Ship in Vienna is authentic. An example can be seen at the Vienna City and State
Library. It is not the only eye-witness account of the Flying Ship: other gazettes reported the flight of the extraordinary device. The Diary of Vienna gazette of 1st June 1709 actually contains an
engraving showing the Flying Ship (
Wiennerisches Diarium
Nr. 609, 1–4 June 1709, pp. 1–2) and the item read by the chimney-sweep is taken word for word from the newspaper.

Modern historians know perfectly well who the inventor and helmsman of the Flying Ship was: not the mysterious violinist Albicastro, as the chimney-sweep supposes, but a Brazilian priest, as
reported in the
Wiennerisches Diarium
, Bartolomeo Lorenzo de Gusmão (1685–1724). He was an extraordinary figure: a Jesuit, scientist, adventurer, inventor, possibly a
charlatan, undoubtedly a genius, who has gone down in history as having perhaps flown not only the first airship but also the first aerostatic balloon, decades before the Montgolfier brothers.

The flight of his wooden ship (if it really happened) was reported all over Europe; in addition to the Viennese gazette, printed news sheets were issued in London and in Portugal.

Did the ship projected by Gusmão really take off? Opinons differ. The expert on the history of flying, Bernd Lukasch, does not rule out the idea at all. But according to the historian
Fernando Reis, the Passarola (this is the name Gusmão gave it) was just a fable invented by Gusmão to draw the attention of detractors and inquisitive souls away from his real
experiments, centred on hot-air balloons. And the gazettes? According to contemporaries, they were the work of Gusmão and a close friend, the Count of Penaguilão, who had set up the
gigantic prank with the assistance of other friends. But this is not certain either. Gusmão’s life was shrouded in mystery up to the very end.