Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on the southern Atlantic island of Saint Helena on May 5, 1821. The following day an autopsy was conducted by the emperor’s doctor, Francesco Antommarchi in the company of 17 witnesses, including… a priest named Vignali and a manservant, Ali…

A detailed account by an eyewitness, Thomas Reade, states that… Antommarchi and Vignali might’ve been alone with the imperial corpse at some point… In a memoir published in 1852… Ali the manservant claimed that he and Vignali had removed bits of Napoleon’s body during the autopsy…

In 1916 Vignali’s descendants sold his collection of Napoleonic artifacts to a British rare book firm, which in 1924 sold the lot for about $2,000 to a Philadelphia bibliophile, A.S.W. Rosenbach. Among the relics was “the mummified tendon taken from Napoleon’s body during the post-mortem.” A few years later Rosenbach displayed the putative penis, tastefully couched in blue morocco and velvet, at the Museum of French Art in New York. According to a contemporary news report, “In a glass case [spectators] saw something looking like a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace or shriveled eel.” The organ has also been described as a shriveled sea horse, a small shriveled finger, and “one inch long and resembling a grape.”

The Vignali collection changed hands a few more times… in 1977, the penis was put up for sale again at a Paris auction house… John K. Lattimer, professor emeritus and former chairman of urology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, bought it for $3,000 and acknowledged having it in 1987…

Gregor Rasputin (1872-1916), lovingly dubbed ‘the mad monk’ was in his day the sex cult leader and boy toy to Czarina Alexandra, the wife of Czar Nicholas II…The Rasputin family’s maid (and lover) was present during this snippet of the revolution and she took it upon herself to save the monk’s penis. She then offered it to Rasputin’s daughter Marie, who in the end was the only non-bastard Rasputin to survive the revolution. The daughter kept the penis, and wrapped it in newspaper or some other packing material when she fled to Paris where the sex cult was quite popular, then again to Buenos Aires, and finally to California, where she eventually died in 1977 at the age of 78. It somehow makes sense that she lived her last happy days in LA, in the 70s.

But if Rasputin’s daughter and his penis were in LA, how did it get back into Russia?…Dr. Roberta Ripple of Santa Monica is the author of various books and essays about Rasputin…When Dr. Ripple came into possession of Marie’s manuscripts, that package also included various photographs of Rasputin, and his penis, which came in a velvet bag and a post it note from Marie. The exact wording of this note is an elusive point, but then – what would a daughter note about her father’s dong?

In 1994 Dr. Roberta Ripple died and at a storage-locker sale Mike Augustine bought as a bulk lot all the author’s effects….he soon dealt the Rasputin penis to an American dealer in London, Victor Osterling….Bonham’s Auctioneers of Kensington sent Augustine a check for nearly 400 pounds….And someone purchased it from Bonham’s at auction. It is a mystery where the penis has resided for the past decade, but it now looks quite black and withered and strangely pickled in a jar in a museum in Petersburg, Russia.

Btw, anyone know why Napoleon’s penis is kept in the United States? It doesn’t seem very French for them to let us hold on to that.

….unless you know of similar offers from live, intact people…

/just kidding //happily married

But I went to the site. And saw the picture. Um. loss for words

Russian Museum to Exhibit Rasputin’s Penis http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/04/28/rasputin.shtml

“…There is one exhibit in the museum which makes Knyazkin be especially proud of. This is the 30-centimeter preserved penis of Grigory Rasputin. “Having this exhibit, we can stop envying America, where Napoleon Bonaparte’s penis is now kept. 
 Napoleon’s penis is but a small ”pod“ it cannot stand comparison to our organ of 30 centimeters
” the head of the museum said.”

• from Mosnews.com