A Nosography of Don Carlos I on the 100th anniversary of regicide

Abstract

In a country of gentle customs, the assassination of a King and a
President of the Republic, have taken place in recent history. At the
beginning of the XXth century amidst turbulent times in Europe, where
political conflicts were resolved with bullets and bombs, attacks were
usually perpetrated by highly charged anarchists. In this way perished
Don Carlos I, and the President Sidónio Pais of Portugal, Humberto I
of Italy, Jorge I of Greece, Nicolau II of Russia and paradigmatically,
the Archduke Francisco Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
whose homicide in Sarajevo lead to the First World War.
The death of a king constitutes, at all times, a phenomenon of
grand social and political impact, particularly if it occurs in tragic
circumstances or if it threatens to compromise the course of history,
as happened in the cases of D. Sebastião and D. Carlos I.
Medicine has always given great attention to royal figures and the
most reputable doctors of the kingdom were summoned if an illness
threatened the integrity of the monarch.
During the XIXth century and fruit of the advances which characterised the evolution of knowledge, the preoccupation that clinicians
had in discovering the causes of illness and death of royal figures is
notorious, a process which was important for the progress in scientific
methodology used. The practice of regularly embalming monarchs of
the Bragança dynasty, together with the consequent necropsy study,
left shrewd anatamo-clinical records of surprising accuracy.
A retrospective study of illness and death in the royal family, a
process accompanied by the most well-known faces of medicine
at the time, offers an interesting panorama of the medical concepts of the epoch.
On the 100th anniversary of regicide, which ended the life of King
D.Carlos I and the Crown Prince D.Luís Filipe, precipitated the end of
the monarchy in Portugal, conditioned decisively the course of national
history, a small nosography of the last king of Bragança, based on an
analysis of the bibliographical material available is made.