The book allows the reader to delve into the history of Napoleon's captivity on the island of St. Helena, a period that was "the last phase" of an extraordinary life. Several doctors took turn at his bedside and were the instruments of the prisoner's politics, and that of his gaoler, the Governor Hudson Lowe. Sometimes agents, messengers, intermediaries, and eventually doctors, though without much success, they were unique witnesses to the closed doors world called Longwood, the residence under surveillance of Napoleon.

After nearly 200 years, the causes of illness and death continue to raise questions. When one thinks of the little regard he bore himself to medicine, we can not fail to note the irony of these controversies. But the irony has never been absent from the story of his captivity.

Drawing on his sources mainly from the manuscripts of the era, some still unpublished in France, and contrasting them with the narratives and memoirs published later, the book is "The other St. Helena", the story of the truths and the lies, less publicly known, with, for thread, these doctors who have been actors, voluntary or not, of the controversy among which they found themselves.