The Panama Canal: to determine whether he was fit to be extradited, two eminent physicians examine the stools of Dr Cornelius Herz, who had fled France to escape the results of his mismanagement of the canal's financing. Watercolour drawing by H.S. Robert, ca. 1897.

After the success of the Suez canal, the engineer Ferdinand De Lesseps turned his attention to building a canal through the isthmus of Panama. In 1879 a company was formed for this purpose, the Compagnie universelle du canal interocéanique de Panama, in which De Lesseps, his son Charles, and Gustave Eiffel were involved. The company raised a large amount of capital mainly from small investors, their prospects having been exaggerated by the press, parliamentarians, government ministers, and the banks, all of whom were later alleged to have been receiving bribes from the company's financiers, especially Baron De Reinach and Cornelius Herz (both Jewish). In 1889 the company collapsed and many of the shareholders were ruined. After a period of government cover-up, the scandal was revealed in 1892, an enquiry was instituted and those involved were prosecuted. Baron De Reinach died (either from natural causes or by suicide; one of the present drawings shows him being murdered), Ferdinand and Charles De Lesseps and Gustave Eiffel were sentenced to prison terms (which they never served), and Herz fled to England: the present drawings show him living in Bournemouth and claiming that his diabetes gave him not long to live. The antisemitism to which the matter gave rise contributed to the climate of the Dreyfus Affair, which started in 1894. The enquiry finally issued its report in 1897, which may be the date of the drawings of which this is one: Herz, shown in these drawings as still alive, died in the following year, having suffered cruelly from diabetes (whence the title of this series, "Un diabétique")

Herz was examined by Dr Russell Reynolds and Sir Andrew Clark FRCP in 1892; by Dr Paul Brouardel and Professor J.-M. Charcot in January 1893 (Maron J. Simon p. 172); by Brouardel again and Georges Dieulafoy in November 1893 (ibid.); and by Sir Richard Quain in July 1894. By 1897 it is unlikely that the artist remembered who had examined Herz, and the physicians shown are not necessarily portraits rather than a pair of contrasting types: one is thin and the other plump, one is bearded and the other clean-shaven etc. Both physicians wear a decoration of the Légion d'Honneur on their left lapel, suggesting that they denote the French rather than the British physicians

[Paris?], [1897?]

1 drawing : pencil and watercolour ; sheet 14.7 x 10.5 cm.

Deux princes de la science furent chargés à leur tour de se rendre exactement compte .... de ... l'état de l'illustre malade ....

Author tentatively identified as "H.S. Robert" from indistinct signature on all the drawings, apparently consisting of H and R in monogram with a small s between them, the R being the initial letter of Robert. Noone of this name has yet been identified from other sources

Maron J. Simon, The Panama affair, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, [1971]

Wellcome Collection 532784i