Jaffa appears in the book as the setting of a 1799 episode that tests the limits of medical duty during war. When plague struck Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops there, Napoleon proposed that patients be given an overdose of opium to end their suffering and reduce the danger they posed to the army. The chief medical officer, René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes, refused. The episode’s significance lies in that refusal: even under military pressure, he treated preserving life as a physician’s obligation rather than accepting death as a means of relief or expediency.

The Plague and the First Refusal

In May 1799, Napoleon told Desgenettes that, if he were a doctor, he would give the plague patients an opium overdose; he added that he would want the same done for himself. Desgenettes later recalled disagreeing both on principle and because some patients survived the disease. His position was succinctly grounded in his professional duty to preserve life.

Retreat and the Hospital Patients

Less than two weeks later, as Turkish troops approached, Napoleon ordered that hospital patients too weak to join the retreat be poisoned with laudanum, an opium tincture. Desgenettes again refused. The chief pharmacist instead poisoned roughly fifty patients left in the hospital, but apparently administered an insufficient dose. When Turkish troops arrived, they found several patients alive and protected them. The episode therefore ends not with the physician’s compliance, but with his refusal, the pharmacist’s action, and the unexpected survival of some patients.

Historical and Ethical Significance

The book uses Jaffa as a historical case in its account of the longstanding conflict between preserving life and intentionally hastening death. Desgenettes’s refusal exemplifies the Hippocratic commitment to life even in the extremity of a military retreat, while the pharmacist’s intervention shows that the order was not simply abandoned when the physician declined to carry it out. The survival of some patients also underscores why Desgenettes’s opposition was not only a matter of principle: the patients thought close to death were not all beyond recovery.

Place in the Book’s Argument

The Jaffa episode is presented as a documented historical example amid a discussion of claims that wartime mercy killings of injured soldiers are common in fiction but difficult to establish in real cases involving physicians. It also precedes the account of nineteenth-century advocates who argued that anesthetic drugs might be used not only to ease dying but to hasten it. Jaffa thus anchors a broader ethical distinction in a concrete place and crisis: allowing illness to take its course was treated as different from deliberately causing a patient’s death.