A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities 9781501733451

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Cabinet of Medical Curiooitieo

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4lo H,ob)

A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities “oft?

Jan Bondeson

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca

,

New

York

S.S.F.

PUBLIC LIBRARY

WEST ORANGE AVENUE

Copyright

©

1997 by Cornell University

Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from

All rights reserved.

thereof,

the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House,

512 East State

Street, Ithaca,

New York

14850.

1997 by Cornell University Press.

First published

Printed in the United States of America

Cornell University Press strives to utilize environmentally responsible suppliers

and materials to the

fullest extent possible in the

materials include vegetable-based,

publishing of

low-VOC inks and

either recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly

books. Such

composed of nonwood

10987 65432

Cloth printing

its

acid-free papers that are also fibers.

1

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Bondeson, Jan.

A cabinet of medical curiosities / Jan p.

Bondeson.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1.

0-8014-3431-9 (cloth

Medicine — Miscellanea.

R706.B66 610 — dc21

:

alk. 2.

paper)

Medicine — Anecdotes.

I.

Title.

1997 97-20749

Contents

Preface

vii

Spontaneous

Human Combustion

1

The Bosom Serpent 26 The Riddle of the Lousy Disease 51 Giants in the Earth 72

Apparent Death and Premature Burial 96

Mary Toft,

the Rabbit Breeder 122

Maternal Impressions 144 Tailed People 170

Three Remarkable Specimens Hunterian

Museum

in the

186

The Strange Story of Julia Pastrana 216

Note on Sources 245

Preface

In the seventeenth

medical

museums

and eighteenth still

centuries, natural history repositories

were

these kaleidoscopic displays, the most curious and dissimilar objects

exhibited side

by

horn, Egyptian

side:

and

resembled the old-fashioned cabinet of curiosities. In

a dried mermaid, the shin bone of a giant, a unicorns

mummies, and African

natives’ gear

were intermixed with

pickled and dried monstrosities, the skulls of hydrocephalics, and the death

masks of famous men. The layout of this book resembles

that of one of these

old medical cabinets of curiosities, rather than a conventional textbook on

medical history. In 1986 osities

It

aims to depict the odd, the bizarre, and the unexpected.

had occasion

I first

to read

of Medicine. This weighty

Gould and Yy\es Anomalies and

tome of 968 pages,

Curi-

originally published in

1897, contains a fascinating overview of the darker side of medicine.

seemed considerably more

interesting than the dry-as-dust textbooks

I

It

was

reading at the time, as a final-year medical student. With gusto as well as learning,

Gould and Pyle discussed strange

formations,

uncommon and gruesome ways

fasting or gluttony. In 1726 a country lass

convinced King George

Toft,

Mr.

St.

I,

diseases,

remarkable mal-

of death, and unlikely feats of

from Godaiming

in Surrey,

Mary

the Prince of Wales, the court anatomist

Andre, and a host of the learned and the ignorant that she had given

birth to seventeen rabbits.

nomenon

Her

attendants explained this extraordinary phe-

as the result of a “maternal impression.”

Her longing while preg-

nant for a meal of delicious jugged rabbit was supposed to have brought

about

sinister

changes

in

her organs of reproduction. Other phenomena dis-

cussed by Gould and Pyle were the colossal Irish Giant, the hairy “Ape-

woman” Julia Pastrana, and who had another living head, subjects discussed

and frogs

lice

Two-Headed Boy of Bengal, Some of the

had more than a hint of the macabre: colonies of snakes

living in the

devoured by

the marvelous

upside down, on top of his own.

while

human still

stomach, kings and emperors

living,

who had been

and the old horrors of premature

and spontaneous human combustion.

burial

Preface

Drs. George

vul

M. Gould and Walter

Pyle had been involved in the re-

search for the Index Catalogues, the great late nineteenth-century bibliog-

raphy of the contents of periodicals

in the U.S.

Surgeon General's

Although no longer up-to-date, these Index Catalogues are

still

Office.

a valuable

research tool for medical historians, and they provided a natural starting point

when

Gould and

I

started

Pyle. In

my own research into some of the subjects discussed by

many

instances,

it

seemed desirable not

to limit the dis-

cussion to merely a medical point of view but to bring in aspects of ethnology, folk medicine,

and

literary

and

among

The modern

cultural history as well.

computerized Citation Indices of medicine, science, and

arts

other databases, have proved invaluable in finding

and humanities,

new

references

and updating the research.

At the time of Gould and taneously

was

debated, and the majority of both doctors and laymen in

still

the United States

combusting spon-

Pyle, the possibility of people

believed in maternal impressions.

still

V no means

and the

Even

today, mater-

spontaneous

nal impression lore

is

human combustion

has recently been asserted in several popular books and

TV programs. out in some

forgotten,

Even the ludicrous "bosom

way

after

serpent,''

reality of

which has

to be enticed

having taken up permanent lodgings as a parasite in

human stomach, has been resurrected among the modern newspaper canards. These phenomena provide some of the most striking examples that

the

old medical errors die hard.

Sometimes, the opposite has proved the legendary "lousy disease,"

true:

modern research indicates that

which has even been used

unreliability of the old chronicles of medical marvels,

to exemplify the

may actually have

ex-

would have been caused by mites and not lice. Advances in teratology enabled me to determine that the Two-Headed Boy of Bengal was isted,

although

it

not a unique freak of nature but could be classified with the parasitic conjoined twins. In the case of Julia Pastrana,

show

attraction continued for

whose

pathetic career as a side-

more than a century

actually been able to examine her

after her death,

I

have

mummy and to have hair samples from her

beard and whiskers and radiographs of her dentition analyzed

in search of

an accurate diagnosis. I

thank Professor A. E. W. Miles, London, for valuable cooperation

in investigating the diagnosis of Julia Pastrana;

he also made useful com-

ments on several of the other essays. Mr. Arie Molenkamp, Loosduinen, has

my

thanks for finding several useful references on premature burial

and translating extracts of them from the Dutch.

I

am

also grateful to

Preface

Professor Birger Bergh,

Lund

University,

Sweden,

for checking Latin trans-

lations throughout.

The Crafoord Foundation, Lund, Sweden, provided generous financial support for

my

would not have been

and

written,

historical research; I

am

several years of

without

it,

this

grateful to the foundation.

book I

also

thank the Swedish Society of Writers for a generous scholarship that enabled

me

to

work

full-time

on

this

book

for several

months

in late 1995.

JAN BONDESON London

be

A

Cabinet of Medical Curiosities

Spontaneous Human Combustion So dhe wad burnt with

all her clothed,

And armd, and handd, and eyed and node; Till dhe

had nothing more

Except her

little

to lode

dcarlet dhoed;

And nothing elde but thede were found Among her adhed on the ground. Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann, The English Struwwelpeter,

N 1635 THE

I

Copenhagen was question.

A

1

2th ed.

BOARD OF THE UNIVERSITY OF called in to give

judgment on a

difficult forensic

Danish peasant named Peder Peders0n had expired, and

the cause of death had been given as ingestion of excessive amounts of cohol. This finding

was apparently challenged by some learned

judges,

al-

who

was possible for any person to drink himself to death without self-combusting. The verdict of the university professors, signed and sealed on December 19, 1635, was that it might well have been possible for did not believe that

a

man

it

to die of alcoholic excess

even though the flame of spontaneous com-

bustion had not been seen to issue from his

burned by the

mouth and

his lips

were not

fire.

Nineteen years

later,

Professor

Thomas

Bartholin, the famous Danish

1

A 2

Cabinet of Medical Curioj tiled

anatomist, discussed the problem of spontaneous tholin,

who

human combustion.

Bar-

discovered the circulation of lymph, was one of the leading

anatomists of the seventeenth century and an early supporter of William

Harvey.

He

wrote a monograph on the unicorn and

also

its

medicinal uses,

however, and in the somber Latin pages of his collection of six hundred curious anatomical findings

and case

reports, the

most astounding

tales

may be

encountered. Bartholin wrote about childbirth by the mouth, Siamese lets

trip-

with animal heads, and a cow pregnant with forty puppies. To put

mildly, he

had a credulous bent, and

his great interest in

it

monsters and

Thomas Bartholin was also spontaneous human combustion. It was

strange events sometimes got the better of him.

a firm supporter of the theory of

contrary neither to experience nor to reason, he maintained, that excessive quantities of strong liquor could ignite in the stomach,

case reports.

Moreau

One

of these had been sent to him by his old friend Professor

in Paris. In another,

from an obscure work by Everhard Vorstius, a

Polish gentleman, living during the reign of

two

and he gave several

Queen Bona

Sforza,

had drunk

large bottles of “brandy- wine”; suddenly, he vomited flames

burned

The

to death.

noblemen

at a

and was

elder Sturmius described the case of three Courlandish

tremendous “stag party,”

who drank

until

they were almost

unconscious. All at once, flames burst from the stomachs of two of them and

they were

killed.

The

fate of the third

nobleman

is

unknown, but

if

he sur-

vived both the risk of combusting spontaneously and the subsequent hangover, he

is

likely to

Three years

human been

have become much more temperate

later,

Thomas

in his habits.

Bartholin described yet another spontaneous

combustion, this time from his native Copenhagen.

sitting at a tavern all night

A

scholar had

drinking strong vodka with his friends, not

ceasing until a flame issued from his

mouth with such

force as to

make

speech impossible. His drunken friends managed to extinguish the flame by

pouring water on him, and the this

man

gruesome incident and decided

sions

on a nearby

street;

on the way

survived. to

walk home

there, he

comments on the strange death of this

He was

rather frightened

to his professorial

by

man-

suddenly dropped dead. In his

sottish professor,

added that he had often seen gangs of drunken peasants

Thomas

Bartholin

settled outside the

walls of Copenhagen, always lying on their backs with their mouths open to

allow the spontaneous flame to erupt from their mouths unimpeded, so that it

would not

suffocate or burn them.

In 1673 Bartholin’s the fiery death.

An

old

nephew Oliger Jacobaeus described another case of

woman

in Paris, so addicted to strong liquor that she

Spontaneous

Human

had consumed

Only her

^

little

fingertips

Combustion else for

two years, was found thoroughly

incinerated.

and the cranium remained.

The theory of spontaneous human combustion was incorporated

into

contemporary medical knowledge without any apparent objections. That a

own body did not men, who were willing

drunkard could be consumed by flames ignited within appear unlikely to early eighteenth-century medical to accept the

most bizarre hypotheses. The courts,

too,

his

were sometimes con-

vinced. In February 1725 a most intricate legal process took place in the

The corpse of the wife of Jean

ancient French city of Rheims.

Millet, the

landlord of the Lion d’Or tavern, had been found smoldering in the kitchen;

only the

legs, part

of the head, some dorsal vertebrae, and other large bones

could be identified; the rest of the body was a blackened, fatty mass. The

Rheims and

police arrested

setting the corpse

her prime and that girl

M.

on

M.

him with murdering his wife was well known that Mme Millet was past had cast his eyes on a comely young serving

Millet and charged

fire. It

Millet

from Lorraine. She had

lately

been employed about the tavern, since

Mme Millet was generally too drunk to do much work, even during the day. Although Jean Millet was one of the most respectable townsmen of Rheims, he was sentenced to death. Then one of his lodgers, the young surgeon Louis Nicholas Le Cat, saved him. Le Cat, well read in the recent medical ture, pointed out to the judges that

litera-

Mme Millet had, in all probability, com-

busted spontaneously. Jean Millet was released, but the grueling process and the threat of execution

remaining days

On

in

the morning of

mistress,

had broken him. The wretched publican spent

his

a lunatic asylum.

March

14, 1731,

Countess Cornelia Bandi,

countess did not respond

when

her

a chambermaid went to

her town house in Cesena,

in

name was

empty. The horrified servant saw, on the

floor,

called,

and her

wake her Italy.

state

The

bed was

four feet from the bed, a heap

of ashes containing the countesss legs with the stockings intact, as well as

her skull and three blackened fingers.

None

of the

bedroom

furniture

had

burned, not even the bed and bedsheets, but some candles on the bedside table

had melted. The room was

filled

with a greasy, foul-smelling soot, and

was thickly smeared with a moist, sticky substance. The bottoms of windows were covered with a yellow fluid of the most loathsome smell

the floor

the

and appearance. Beside the heap of ashes was a small it.

A piece

fused to eat

it.

The countess,

oil

lamp, with no

oil in

was black with soot, and several dogs rea lady of sober and temperate disposition, regu-

of bread in the pantry

3

A 4

used to bathe her entire body

larly

in

Cabinet of Medical Curioditieo

camphorated

spirits; this

dangerous

was of course blamed for her increased flammability. The clergyman Giuseppe Bianchini, who described Countess Bandi s demise, added a curious note about the uncommonly flammable perspiration of habit

the wife of one Dr. Freilas, physician to the archbishop of Toledo. Once, the erudite Padre Bianchini testified, her

underwear burst

into flames

on expo-

sure to the air “and shot forth like grains of gunpowder, " though he does not

say

if

he himself observed

In 1744 Bianchini

s

this

remarkable phenomenon.

account of the Bandi case was discussed before the

Royal Society of London, together with another astounding instance of spontaneous combustion,

this time

from the town of Ipswich. Mrs. Grace

an elderly fishermans wife, had the habit of going down into the kitchen

Pett,

late at night, “after

April

she

was

half undress'd, to

smoak a

pipe."

She did so on

1744, and the morning after, her daughter found the smoldering

9,

Pett's body near the kitchen grate. When the glowing fire was quenched with water, the corpse presented a most strange and macabre

remains of Mrs.

appearance. The trunk looked like a heap of charcoal covered with white ashes,

and the head, arms, and

legs

were

also

much burned. Mrs.

Pett

was

not a habitual drunkard, but according to one account, she had consumed a plentiful

amount of gin

that night to celebrate her daughter s recent return

from Gibraltar. The contemporary experts were

was burned

to death, since there

was no

fire in

at a loss to explain

how she

the grate and the candle had

guttered out in the socket of the candlestick beside her; a child’s clothes on

one side of the charred body and a paper screen on the other were both

untouched by the tion

fire. It

was concluded

that another spontaneous

had occurred: “The Manner of Fire burning

the workings of some inward Cause. "

in

her

Body is described as

Many of the townspeople believed that

Grace Pett was a witch and that she had used her magic from a neighboring farmer. To

rid

combus-

arts to steal

him of her persecution, a

sheep

local witch-

hunter had advised him to burn the body of a sheep, and the same evening

Grace Pett was consumed by the flames. In the early 1800s the belief in spontaneous

cepted throughout Europe. particularly

human combustion was

from France and the German

states: the victim's

badly burned

remains were found in a closed room, often but not always near the place.

The combusted

individuals

fire-

were often obese and elderly and usually

some charred bones and a heap of ashes were left. An soot covered the furniture in the room, and a disgusting smell was

female. oily

ac-

A great many very similar cases were reported,

At

times, only

Human

Spontaneous

Combustion

sometimes noted while the combustion took place, usually during the night. Oddly, the corpse’s

feet,

Some

casionally found intact. affected, while the

with the stockings and shoes undamaged, were ocbelieved that the victim s clothes could be un-

body was almost

totally

reduced to ashes within them,

but this never really took place. Another aspect of the mythology of spon-

taneous combustion was that water did not extinguish the flames, but

in-

deed fuelled them. After Lavoisier and Priestley clarified the basic chemistry of combustion,

was devoted to elucidating also the mechanisms under-

considerable research

humans. Several doctoral

lying the spontaneous variety of this process in

theses

were dedicated

to this subject; the first of

Dupont, of the University of Leiden,

them written by Dr. Jonas

in 1763. In the

seventeenth and eigh-

teenth centuries, most writers favored the simple hypothesis that alcohol

made

saturation

the drinkers

body flammable, but the French physiologist

Julia-Fontenelle cast doubt on this theory flesh that

had been immersed

The German physician

F. J.

in alcohol

A. Strubel,

when

and found

he tried to light lumps of that they

would not burn.

who wrote a doctoral thesis on spon-

taneous combustion in 1848, suggested that electric currents arose within the body, reducing the body water to hydrogen and oxygen gas; the resulting, highly flammable oxy-hydrogen gas could easily be ignited by an electric spark. Another thesis writer, Dr. B.

habitual topers

pounds that rendered spect,

and

chronicus,

it

Frank of Gottingen, believed that the

body became impregnated with phosphorus-containing comit

flammable; this theory was received with

was even accepted by Magnus Huss

one of the

classics of the literature

French physiologists claimed that a high easy to

ignite, others that

electricity

fat

in his

much

re-

famous Alcoholismus

on alcohol addiction. Some

content could

make

the

body

“inner heat’’ could be engendered through static

when the components

of the blood rubbed against one another.

The famous French surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren’s hypothesis is a model of clarity beside these wild speculations. combustibility. Rather,

denied that alcohol enhanced

rendered the victim semistuporous and

liable to

be

Once

the individual’s clothes had been set well alight, the

fat melted, fueling

a slow and particularly complete combustion of the

careless with

body

it

He

fire.

entire corpse. Dupuytren’s conclusions agree well with the

tion of the “candle effect.

modern explana-

’’

Another disbeliever was Jons Jacob Berzelius, one of the founders of modern chemistry. He was not at all impressed with the flood of second-rate

German and French commentary presented to the Swedish Academy of Sciences

research on spontaneous combustion emanating from the universities. In a

5

A 6

Cabinet of Medical Curiaoitieo

he declared himself skeptical about “these miraculous happenings” and concluded that

“it

phenomenon scientists.”

would be advisable not

until its existence has

Many

to construct theories to explain this

been irrefutably proven by unbiased

a later “combustionist” would have benefited by study of

the great chemist’s verdict.

In nineteenth-century Britain, spontaneous

cepted as a

human combustion was

sized the danger of bursting into flames during a period of intemperance,

the medical journals regularly published case reports.

vouard of Titchfield Williams,

of strong

rum

who was

daily,

friends carried

Street,

London.

by Dr. C.

one day took substantially more than that amount. His

when they held a lighted wretched man ignited and

called a surgeon, but

All efforts to extinguish the fire failed,

the entire body, except the head, legs, and parts of the arms,

though Williams’s flannel

They believed

down

shirt

was not burned. His

that the Devil

to the shades

Another remarkable

below

case,

had

set the sottish

mariner

it

as a curi-

alight, bring-

A

carter of

truthfully described,

wood named John Anderson

bottleful of ardent spirits each

day

beer and porter. Nevertheless, he was said to drive his cart and

his horses tolerably well,

driving homewards.

derson had caught

and he

liked to

smoke

his pipe as

he was

One day smoke could be seen rising from the cart. AnHe got out of the cart, staggered, and fell; when a

fire.

herdboy called for assistance figured,

finally,

for his wickedness.

had drunk, for several years, a common

manage

and

was consumed,

friends kept

which was perhaps more

occurred near Nairn in Scotland.

in addition to

De-

consuming more than two quarts

candle near Williams’s body, the flesh of the

ing him

L.

A sailor and part-time smuggler named

in the habit of

him home and

burned with a blue flame.

osity.

and

Th e London Medical and

Surgical Journal in 1832 published the astonishing tale told

Thomas

ac-

Novels, newspapers, and magazines continually empha-

reality.

fifteen

minutes

later,

body was

the

black, dis-

and burning. John Grigor, M.D., of Nairn examined the body and

was no ordinary combustion but “a case of progressive igneous decomposition” due to alcoholic excess. The editor of the London and Edinburgh Monthly Journal of Medical Science in which the report stated as his opinion that

it

,

was published The

in 1852,

doubted Dr. Grigor s theory.

early temperance

movement took the spontaneous combustion craze

as a God-given opportunity to have a serious talk with the innumerable al-

coholics of the early nineteenth century.

who shrugged

Even

the most hardened topers,

their shoulders at grisly descriptions of alcohol-induced de-

mentia and insanity, and laughed drunkenly

when

the drawn-out torments

Spontaneous

Human

Combustion

of hepatic failure were described, sat pale and trembling before the threat of the blue flame of intemperance, taking

An

awaiting them below.

man

Aime

Pierre

it

as a foretaste of the hellish torments

essay on spontaneous combustion by the French-

was

Lair, written in 1799,

particularly popular

temperance propagandists because even for the subject, in

macabre

it

among

The spontaneous combustion myth died hard among

detail.

and even

natical teetotalers,

late

the

was unusually rich fa-

nineteenth-century temperance publications

include horrific accounts of the fiery death in

all its

variety.

Some drunkards

belched flames like a factory chimney and died after the most miserable agonies; others

met

their fiery fate

when

a flammable belch or fart caught

a candle, and the flame resisted every attempt to extinguish

fire at

it.

Under

the headline ‘‘Fire! Fire! Blood on fire!” the February 1863 issue of the Pennsylvania Temperance Recorder told the story of a drunkard to bloodletting; a pint

bowl of

his

blood was ignited, and

vivid blue flame, to the horror of the wretched patient.

it

As

who

submitted

burned with a late as

1913 a

French temperance magazine published a story about a dipsomaniacal omnibus conductor

who smoked

nited spontaneously gers. In

an

when

1905

reality of the

In

the

like

ig-

a torch in front of the startled passen-

Norwegian physician Johan Scharfifenberg wrote

a temperance journal ridiculing the old fad of spontaneous

article in

combustion,

a cigarette while clipping the tickets; he

and burned

many

readers wrote angry letters to the editor, insisting on the

phenomenon.

Germany

the

common

people had great faith in liquid manure as a

preventive for spontaneous combustion;

when a simple-minded farmhand or

a village idiot believed himself at risk to burst into spontaneous flame after a

good booze-up, he shoveled water into in

his

mouth.

large quantities of liquid

It is telling

manure and muddy

that this preposterous cure also appeared

Dr. Carl Roschs serious scientific

work on

alcohol abuse, Der Miss branch

geis tiger Getranke (1838).

Scandinavian folk medicine recommended an even

more unlikely substance

to extinguish the spontaneous flames.

Norwegian

woman,

to

human

Swedish and

urine, preferably freshly voided

by a

be thrown into the flaming mouth of the burning drunkard.

One

folklore prescribed

laconic nineteenth-century case report from Vastergotland (Westgothia) describes the fiery fate of a habitual toper

spontaneously:

“One

named

day, Zakris of Hester

Zakris,

who

suddenly ignited

burned with a blue flame while

he lay in bed. His wife sat astride his head and put out the flames by pissing in his

mouth; only a woman could do

this.

After

this,

he did not drink aquavit

any more.” These

tales of

drunkards igniting spontaneously and burning with a blue

7

A

Cabinet of Medical Curiooitied

flame issuing from their mouths appeared very early in Scandinavian folk

8

tradition.

What

appears to be the

first

recorded case of spontaneous

combustion dates from the early sixteenth century, but was

fatal

human

only to the

attending physician. Gampe-Saevrei, parson of the village of Rauland in

Telemark, Norway, was leaving church after Sunday service.

He saw a man

lying dead-drunk on the church green, the blue flame of spontaneous

bustion blazing from his open mouth. The philanthropic parson,

Fig.

1.

who wanted

A greedy old

German money changer combusts spontaneously as a divine punishment in this broadsheet from 1621.

com-

From

the au-

thors collection.

[dnod^etttibe ^cittuua fo ftcfi fctfcnv j

.uou

0o#

mvttimQfaibt tvuhfticr rmt$t buZnttiinq cpiutfjfam beriicftf. t£.

Spontaneous

Human

to save the life

Combustion

even of this intemperate nonchurchgoer, “pissed on the

to extinguish the flame."

The

patient

was rudely awakened from

knew nothing

stupor by this treatment, and since he

his

man

drunken

ol the current

therapy

for spontaneous combustion, he was highly affronted. The congregation took his part,

and Gampe-Saevrei had

rowboat, but the howling

mob

to run for his

life.

He managed

to reach a

followed him in other boats. After a furious

chase on land and sea, he was beaten to death with the candlestick from his

own and

altar. it

A sacred well was said

was shown by the devout

to

appear at the

villagers for

site

of the priest-murder,

many years.

Well into the mid- 1800s, the belief in spontaneous

human combustion

was widespread throughout Europe. Although some chemists doubted the existence of this phenomenon, the majority of medical men and forensic experts still accepted it. The sinister death of a German lady would change

many litz,

minds.

On June

13, 1847, the

a noble lady of temperate and religious habits,

room. The municipal medical to

charred corpse of the countess of Gor-

officer,

Dr. Johan

was found

Adam

examine her remains. The corpse was lying on the

Graff,

in

her bed-

was

called in

floor near a partially

burned writing desk, the head toward the windows of the room. Although the face

was badly charred, Graff couid

see that the

mouth was wide open

and the tongue protruding. Another pathologist might have concluded that

was a “combustionist," and he pronounced the death another case of spontaneous incineration. To be sure, the circumstances were unusual, for the poor countess had been a

the countess had been strangled, but Dr. Graff

middle-aged lady of healthy and vigorous constitution, and her consumption of wine — half a bottle a day — did not seem in any way excessive. The police made no further investigation, and the corpse was buried without autopsy. The strange happenings at the von Gorlitz mansion attracted much curiosity among the Darmstadt gossips. Some unscrupulous German news-

papermen did not

hesitate to declare that the countess

some accused Johann

Stauff, a valet

blamed the count von Gorlitz

nobleman had

to

demand

had been murdered;

with a bad reputation, and others

himself. In order to clear his

name, the old

a further inquest into his wife's death.

Soon

after,

the count’s cook found verdigris in a sauce intended for his lordship's table; this dish

had been

carefully prepared

by the

valet Stauff. Apparently, the

audacious menial had attempted to murder the count to prevent an inquest

from being held, and the police took him into custody. The inexorable Ger-

man

legal

machinery proceeded through three years of trials, appeals, medi-

cal certificates,

and exhumations of the body. Stauff was further incriminated

9

A 10

after His father

whose

was arrested while

trying to

Cabinet of Medical Curiosities

sell

a large lump of melted gold,

origin he could not satisfactorily explain;

it

was most

likely the re-

mains of the countesss jewelry.

When Johann

Staufif finally faced a

murder

trial,

his attorneys vigor-

ously maintained that the countess had combusted spontaneously, but they

had great

difficulty explaining

claimed

was

it

scientists

a fissure

the result of a blow.

in the corpse's skull.

The court president

The prosecutor

called in

two eminent

from the nearby university of Giessen, the chemist Justus von Lie-

big and the anatomist Theodor

Ludwig

nesses. Bischofif got hold of a corpse

Bischoff, to serve as expert wit-

and various combustible substances and

tried to reconstruct the fire in the cellars of the Giessen Institute of Anatomy.

He

discovered that a large quantity of external fueling was required for a

combustion as complete as that of the countess's body and that the the skull could not have been caused

head of

his

by

experimental corpse to prove

the high water content of the

it.

fissure in

and he handed around the

the heat,

Justus von Liebig claimed that

human body would prevent it from combusting

spontaneously, whether or not the tissues contained a large quantity of

cohol or the individual was excessively ently convinced the jurymen,

robbery, and arson; he

From an

who

acter

handed

would be

He

it,

He

imprisonment.

known as a slippery, dishonest charmany people had suggested that

in

America, but he lacked the price of

had caught him red-

put the corpse on a chair and stacked combustible sub-

setting

spontaneous

burn the corpse

it

alight to hide his crime. It appears that Staufif was

all

ruffian,

and he certainly had no knowledge of the

human combustion;

after

newspapers

it

was

just

chance that made him

he had strangled the countess, thereby nearly getting

the

macabre and exciting

over the world reported

servant soon became

and Liebig published the

many

al-

testimony appar-

money from a cupboard, he had knocked her down and then

more than a common

German

employed

better

away with murder. The public relished trial;

life

later confessed that, after the countess

stealing

stances near

lore of

scientific

and they convicted Johann Stauff of murder,

was sentenced to

early age, Stauff had been

strangled her.

little

The

could not live within his income;

his talents

passage.

fat.

known

as the

its

details of the

von Gorlitz

outcome, and the infamous

"demon

valet."

Both Bischoff

results of their investigations as pamphlets,

and

medical journals published extracts from them, along with extracts

from the

trial.

This led to a swift change in opinion

throughout Europe: before the convincing evidence

among medical men

in the

von Gorlitz

case,

most people agreed that spontaneous human combustion was merely an old

Spontaneous

fallacy. sic

Human

Combustion

The combustionists

rallied

around a long

article

by the French foren-

scientist A. Devergie, in which Liebig s theories were criticized, but their

number decreased swiftly during the was that according to

the opposition

only

human

One ingenious argument from common laws of physiology, not

1850s.

the

beings but also animals should belong to the population at risk.

There were no reports of spontaneously igniting cows and sheep lighting up the

German landscape

at night like

beacons or of faithful Fido, sleeping near

the fireplace, suddenly being transformed into a hot dog. influential

famous

German

Handbook

Praktisches

human combustion

When,

in 1860, the

forensic scientist J. L. Casper took Liebigs part in his

to be

der gerichtligen Medicin, declaring

mere

superstition,

it

was

the final

spontaneous

blow for the com-

Germany. From the year his book was published to the present word has been written on spontaneous combustion in the Ger-

bustionists in

day, not one

man

medical journals.

Although spontaneous combustion had been largely discredited on the

European continent, the theory died hard In 1870 the

in Britain

and the United

States.

well-known British physician Alexander Ogston published an

extensive review on this subject, expressing serious doubt whether the old

He was among its vic-

legend of the fiery death could really be completely disregarded. particularly impressed with the high percentage of alcoholics

some obscure process might render

tims, suggesting that

their tissues flam-

mable. His father claimed to have met with a case in which the body

was

saturated with alcohol that the fluid in the ventricles of the brain caught

and burned when vidual,

lit

by the

smell, taste

resembled gin to a marked

and inflammability." In 1888 Dr.

Mackenzie Booth, of the Aberdeen General Dispensary, was amine the remains of a perate habits.

fire

with a candle. The cerebrospinal fluid of another indi-

who had died after drinking a quart of gin,

degree, "as tested

so

sixty- five-year- old

The body was almost a

J.

called to ex-

pensioner of notoriously intem-

cinder; yet

it

had kept the form and

figure of the old soldier, including his military mustache.

Three years

later,

Dr. Ernest S. Reynolds, physician to the Ancoats Hospital, saw a similar case in Manchester. Like Ogston and Booth, he denied the existence of true

spontaneous combustion, but he believed that chronic alcoholism might

sometimes lead to the deposit of flammable substances

in the tissues of the

body, which explained these remarkable cases of increased combustibility, in

which the

individual’s

body was found almost totally consumed by fire, while

flammable objects nearby escaped the flames.

A friend of his, Superintendent

Tozer of the Manchester Fire Brigade, volunteered the information that he

11

A

Cabinet of Medical Curiooitieo

had several times seen human bodies burn vividly without additional

12

fuel

and that he was sure

that old alcoholics would burn much more easily than As late as 1905, several medical men objected when the British Medical Journal mocked the old fallacy of spontaneous human combustion,

other people.

sending

letters

and case reports

to the editor.

human combustion

In the United States belief in spontaneous

persisted

even longer. In the Therapeutic Gazette of 1889, Dr. Archie Stockwell pub-

many cases, both medical man described

lished a lengthy review detailing

foreign and American.

Some months

the simultaneous spon-

later,

another

taneous combustion of an elderly married couple at Seneca,

Three years

later

an even more remarkable case appeared

Medical and Surgical Journal. Dr. B. H. Hartwell of Boston his

Illinois.

was on a

call to

when he was summoned by a distraught man, who

mother had been “burned

Hartwell found the body of a

the outskirts

called out that

alive." Hastily driving to the place indicated,

woman

of the abdomen, and both legs. level of the body,

in the Boo ton

burning

at the shoulders,

The flames reached

and the clothing was nearly

fifteen inches

totally

consumed.

both sides

above the It

was

evi-

dent the body burned of itself, without any external fuel; in fact, the ground was damp after a rain. Her friends said that the victim was fifty-nine years old, of strictly temperate habits. Hartwell presumed that when she set fire to a pile of roots, she had accidentally ignited her own clothes. The case

seemed

human

Fig. 2.

clear evidence to Dr. Hartwell of increased combustibility of the

body.

The corpse of

the soldier described

by Dr. Booth

in the

British Medical Journal

of 1888.

From

the au-

thors collection.

Spontaneous

Human

Combustion

In the last theoretical article

the

New

on spontaneous combustion, published

Orleans Medical Journal in 1893, Dr. Adrian

Hava proved

in

a worthy

follower in the tradition of far-fetched hypotheses on this subject. Certain that spontaneous

combustion existed, he performed a

periments to prove his point.

First,

series of bizarre ex-

he thrice daily administered a dram of

brandy to twelve young roosters, no doubt hoping that one or more of them would some day spontaneously become a roasted broiler. His hope was not rewarded, though he continued the experiment for fourteen months, until alive. The doctor then came up with another being metabolized into carbon monoxide, was odd which was retained in the tissues, making them flammable. He devised another cruel experiment, putting roosters, rabbits, pigs, and other animals in a large glass case filled with carbon monoxide. The wretched animals were

only two roosters remained notion: that the alcohol

not taken out until they were unconscious. After several years of these bizarre experiments Dr.

Hava claimed

that a rabbit could be set alight after

"169 days of continued and careful administration" of carbon monoxide,

whereas a rooster took over eight months. In twentieth-century medical literature, nothing

taneous

human combustion. There were no more

much is said about spongrisly case reports,

fortunately for the animal kingdom, no one tried to replicate Dr.

perimental studies. There

combustion" on record,

is,

Havas

and ex-

however, one quite recent case of "spontaneous

in the

Annals of Emergency Medicine of 1991.

two-year-old habitual drunkard

was taken

into the

of Boston City Hospital for evaluation of a seizure.

A thirty-

emergency department

He had

another seizure

while he was there, and his attendants were mystified to see that the seizure activity

changed

after a

few minutes, the man arching

his

back and

franti-

They were even more surprised when smoke bilabdomen, and he appeared to be spontaneously combusting. Once his clothes were removed the doctors discovered the cause: two books of matches in his back pocket had rubbed together during the seically slapping his thighs.

lowed up from around

his

zure until they burst into flame. Apparently, the patient suffered no perma-

nent

r

ill

effects

from

his

unique experience.

^

By the mid-1900s the medical community had forgotten spontaneous human combustion, and historians mentioned it only to scoff at a ridiculous remnant of the age of superstition. But the fiery death received new supporters among the devotees of paranormal phenomena. That well-known re'

?

searcher of strange happenings, Charles Fort, natural cause to this

phenomenon, ascribing

was the it

first to

to the

assign a super-

work

of "things or

15

!

A 14

beings.''

Cabinet of Medical Curiosities

Like the werewolves, of whose existence Fort had as

little

doubt,

they preferred female victims. Several other theorists of the occult firmly

human combustion, none more than the who published the book Fire from Heaven, or

supported the notion of spontaneous

Michael Harrison,

British writer

How

Safe Are You from Burning? in 1976. Its preface declared

it

to

be the de-

monograph on its subject and described the evidence that people might, indeed, combust spontaneously as irrefutable. The book attempts to finitive

link

spontaneous

and

tivity, all

it

human combustion with psi phenomena and poltergeist acparallels to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra. In

draws

earnestness,

“Some Other

it

suggests that the combusting individuals were taken to

Place, for examination

why presumably

explain

with old alcoholics, from

by Some Other

superintelligent aliens

whom

little

People,''

but

would prefer

reliable information could

it

does not

to converse

be gleaned.

Another imaginative “occult philosopher'' has applied Michael Harrison's

come up with an even more

theories to

startling notion, published in the

journal Medical Hypotheses in 1983: the Resurrection of Christ could easily be

explained

if

the

which would

body was completely destroyed by spontaneous combustion,

also explain the scorch

marks on the Shroud of Turin

Michael Harrison's book has been by no means the only one devoted to the

“SHC" phenomenon,

ering the flood of amazing

as

staid

it is

known among the

new theories,

Fire from

initiates.

Indeed, consid-

Heaven might seem a rather

and conservative “standard work.'' The great Jons Jacob

who warned against undue theorizing until the man combustion had been established with

Berzelius,

existence of spontaneous hucertainty,

would have been

aghast at the harebrained speculations on this subject by latter-day amateur scientists.

Some

favor the poltergeist hypothesis; others blame “man's

still

electrodynamic being'' or geomagnetic qui

tue,

field fluctuations; in his

published in 1986, the French writer

spontaneous “Kundelini

human combustion with

fire,

''

an energy that

is

book Le feu

Emmanuel Peze attempts to link

UFO

activity.

Others suspect the

supposed to pervade the individual's astral

body, according to the teachings of Yoga. Chemical theories abound, some

even more imaginative than those of the nineteenth-century German thesis writers.

SHC

is

attributed, for example, to

ph osphoenolpyruvate, a

particularly “energy- rich’’

nineteenth-century theories died. There are cessive use of alcohol

phosphagens within the

in the

human

may

muscle

cells

an excessive accumulation of

can

still

compound. Nor have

those

who

believe that ex-

cause deposition of flammable, nitroglycerinlike tissue, or that split

the

a buildup of electrostatic charge

body water

into

oxygen and hydrogen.

Spontaneous

Human

Combustion

The writer Larry Arnold turned

to physics, postulating the existence of a

unknown subatomic particle, capable of starting a chain reaction that vaporizes the entire human being. Today, belief in spontaneous human combustion seems to be steadily increasing among the general population. Popular works such as the Reader's "pyrotron," a hitherto

Digest's Myoterieo of the Unexplained lic

and others of that

ilk

pander to the pub-

obsession with "unsolved mysteries'' with grisly tales of spontaneous

combustion, along with a veritable hodgepodge of ghost encounters, and the horrors of the tabloid newspapers, both in Britain porters.

Some

recent headlines

Bermuda and

My Hubby

UFO close

United States, are firm sup-

in the

would have delighted a nineteenth-century

temperance writer: "Preacher Explodes into Flames

mons Burned

stories,

Triangle. Furthermore, the

in the Pulpit,"

and "Man Eating

to a Crisp,"

"De-

Chili Bursts into

Flames and Dies"!

From 1600

to 1900, ninety-seven cases of spontaneous

tion or increased combustibility

were reported

western Europe and the United States.

in the

human combus-

medical literature of

A considerable proportion German

cent) occurred in France, 20 percent in the

states,

(34 per-

16 percent in

and 16 percent in the United States. A majority (about 70 percent) of the victims were women. Remarkably, in not less than 65 percent of all Britain,

cases,

it

was

positively stated that the victims

were

history of many years of abuse. Michael Harrison's

Spontaneous

Human

alcoholics, often with a

book and the more recent

Combustion by Jenny Randles and Peter

Hough add

a

good many mysterious twentieth-century fire incidents of varying reliability.

The

scientific

ridicule,

world has greeted these

silly

and credulous books with mere

but were the hard facts extracted from them and

and unreliable newspaper accounts weeded scientific

paper presenting

all

out, the result

the wild theories

would be a

slim

at least twenty-five verified twentieth-century in-

stances of preternatural combustibility.

Modern forensic science's policy with regard to spontaneous human combustion has largely been that of the ostrich: only two scholarly papers on

One of these was pubwidow of abstemious habits

increased combustibility are on record in this century. lished

by Dr. Gavin Thurston

in 1965.

A

slim

was found dead one morning, her charred body lying in the hearth. Her legs, including stockings and slippers, were quite intact, and there was little damage to the surrounding furniture, though the room was ders, just as in the classical cases.

It

was evident from

full

of soot and cin-

the postmortem that

15

A 16

Cabinet of Medical Curiosities

she had advanced cardiovascular disease, which was probably the cause of death;

was

it

further

presumed that she had

death and that the body had burned in a wick

own

its

fallen into the fireplace after fat,

with the clothes acting as

— a phenomenon sometimes called "the candle effect."

The most famous of all modern took place in 1951 in

St.

cases of alleged spontaneous combustion

Petersburg, Florida.

Mary

Reeser, an obese sixty-

seven-year-old widow, had last been seen sitting in her armchair, wearing a

flammable nightdress and dressing gown. She had taken sleeping pills and was a smoker. The next morning, the landlady found the doorknob of Mrs. Reeser s apartment too hot to grasp. The room was a horrible sight, full of greasy soot "with a peculiar odor."

were

left;

Of

the armchair only the coil springs

of Mrs. Reeser only a heap of ashes remained, together with a small

roundish object identified by some as the shrunken head, some lumps of charred

tissue,

bedroom

and the

slipper

left foot,

Newspapers on a

in place.

still

with the skin unburned and a black satin table nearby

were not even

scorched, but two candles had melted and a clock had stopped at 4:20.

Several distinguished forensic scientists and

fire analysts, as

well as the

experts of the FBI, had to declare themselves baffled by this strange case,

which resembles the

classical

spontaneous combustions in

many particulars.

A close reexamination of the Reeser case, performed by the American forensic analysts

Joe Nickell and John

F.

Fisher in the late 1980s, has cleared up

many of the obscure points. They have proposed that Mrs. Reeser set herself alight

with her cigarette while

the sleeping

Her body

pills.

to a very complete

sitting in

fat

her armchair in a stupor induced by

melted into the stuffing of the chair, leading

combustion of the body. That one foot did not burn was

probably explained by the fact that she had a the radius of the

fire.

The globular

stiff

leg

and the

foot

object found at the scene

fell

outside

was probably

the neck, not a shrunken head, for the intense heat must have burst the skull.

The extensive destruction of

body they ascribed to the "candle effect," here facilitated by the chair stuffing, which acted as an enormous wick, far more effective than the victim's clothes alone would have been. the

Such a "prolonged human combustion" takes considerable

body

fluids gasify

bone and the

New

and the melted

fat

burns with

internal organs. In a later, even

Scientist in

time: the

sufficient heat to destroy

more puzzling

case, described in

man

1988 by John Heymer, a seventy- three-year-old

combusted very completely,

sitting in his

armchair before the

fireplace.

Only

a heap of ashes, a blackened skull, and both legs, with socks and parts of the

trouser legs, remained.

It

was presumed

that he

had slumped forward

into

Spontaneous

Human

Combustion

thus igniting his clothing, and then fallen back into his chair, where

the

fire,

his

body had been burned even more completely than Mrs. Reeser s.

'"A? From the earliest literature, it is evident that the notion of spontaneous human combustion emanated from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

popular belief that the drinking of strong

spirits

flame in the stomach. Since this belief had

its

might

light

a spontaneous

origin in Scandinavia,

it

was

was the first scientist to no coincidence that the Dane Thomas assimilate it into seventeenth-century medicine. The idea of aquavit drinkers Bartholin

bursting into spontaneous flames thus preluded the

first

mentioning of the

phenomenon we can call increased combustibility by more than 100 years; first of these odd postmortem reports of bodies found extensively destroyed by fire without major damage to the surroundings was published in 1673. Many others have followed, and at least 120 well-attested cases of this

the

phenomenon

exist

on record. There has been no satisfactory instance of any

individual combusting jpontaneouoty,

external source of fire

The “candle

is

effect'’

and

in the greater part of the cases

an

apparent.

explanation put forth by modern forensic experts

seems perfectly applicable to the majority of both

new and

old instances

of preternatural combustibility, but the lack of any solid experimental data

phenomenon leaves some important questions unanswered, mainly whether some people are more combustible than others, as many writers have presumed. One would imagine that the bodies of veiy obese people were more susceptible to undergoing combustion by the candle effect, but of this

many

victims have been slim. Dehydration and old age have been pro-

posed as risk factors by some writers, but without much hard evidence. The

preponderance of alcoholics among

historical victims, although not

twentieth-century ones, remains a mystery. ies

were

really

more combustible.

be more clumsy with

fire,

It is

Instead, a

among

very unlikely that their bod-

drunken individual

is

prone to

and might be too befuddled, drowsy, or even un-

conscious to escape. Furthermore, some early accounts would imply that

clergymen and temperance advocates sometimes exaggerated the drinking habits of the victims of increased combustibility. factors

were considerably more

critical.

ing ought to have great importance:

it

The

had

It is likely

that external

quality of the individual ’s cloth-

to be flammable, yet

burn slowly,

generating enough heat to crack the skin and melt the subcutaneous

fat,

as

well as being durable enough to act as a wick during the combustion process.

The presence or absence of a

draft in the

room may

also

have been impor-

17

A 18

tant. In

theory

it

would naturally

Cabinet of Medical Curioditieo

would be easy to test these hypotheses, but ethical problems arise

about the procurement of suitable corpses for experi-

ment; the time-honored device of snatching fresh corpses from the morgue

Nor would

or churchyard has long been discredited.

committee encourage a researcher

two hundred unconscious pigs

who proposed

to

the university grants

drop lighted pipes on

human

easy chairs and wearing

sitting in

clothing ranging from silk night dresses to jackets and plus fours,

some

in

drafty rooms and others in sealed ones.

Captain Mariyat s once famous novel Jacob Faithful, which was lished in 1834, classic"

is

not frequently read today;

and vainly struggles against

fascinating the youthful mind. Perhaps

its

pulp novels would have been increased

if

not excluded the powerful scene in the

Mrs.

Faithful,

very

fat,

evening

pub-

has been labeled a "modern

with a greater capacity for

ability to

compete with modern

the present abridged edition had

first

chapter, depicting the death of

Jacob s mother, from spontaneous combustion. This lady was

and her son used

was." She usually sat

One

it

literature

first

all

to say that "locomotion

day

in

was not her

taste

— gin

her cabin, below decks in the family barge.

when Jacob was on deck and

his parents sat drinking below,

he heard a terrible scream. His father came running up the hatchway and dived into the river without a glance at his son, never to be heard of again.

Clouds of

thick,

empyreumatic smoke billowed from the hatches, and poor

Jacob could not run down

to see

what had happened

to his mother.

unhappy

the

smoke had cleared ten minutes

lost

both his parents at a single stroke, one dead by water and the other by

fire:

later,

the

lad

saw

When

that he

only an unctuous pitchy cinder in the middle of the bed was

mother s voluminous body, and

his father

left

had

of his

had gone mad when she com-

busted spontaneously before his eyes. The bed with her remains was taken ashore for further investigation of her strange death, but only one conclusion

was

possible.

Poor Mrs. Faithful was a textbook

case.

Thousands of people

flocked to see her grisly remains, and Jacob’s guardian collected the

young orphan from them, before

selling the bed, cinder

money for

and

all,

to a

doctor for twenty guineas. first writer to use spontaneous human comproved useful as a dramatic, horrifying phenomenon bustion in a novel. The climax and a convenient means to dispose of a "spent" character. Already in 1 798 the American Charles Brockden Brown had had an old man erupt into

Captain Mariyat was not the

flames in the novel Wieland, as a divine judgment; this event plunges his son into a bout of melancholia,

and he ends up butchering

his entire family. In

Spontaneous

Human

Combustion

the novel Redburn, published in 1849,

Herman

having the combustion occur aboard ship. smell in their

cramped

some

quarters,

Melville followed Marryat in

When

attribute

the sailors notice a strange it

dead

to a

but others

rat,

take a look at their dead-drunk shipmate lying in his bunk: "Blast that rat!

"

cried the Greenlander.

"He's blasted already", said Jackson. shipmates,

that’s

dead, and here he

.

.

.

"Its a water rat,

is."

As they speak, flames

flicker

over the man’s face. Later, the burning body

lowered into the

where

it

sea,

sinks "like a phosphorescent shark."

other American writers, including

Mark Twain and Washington

had minor characters combust spontaneously, tive.

in

is

Some

Irving, also

order to enliven the narra-

Nikolai Gogol in his famous Dead Souls had a drunken blacksmith die

enveloped

intemperance. Another remarkable literary

in the blue flames of

spontaneous combustion occurs set in

Angola

in early 1873.

in

Un

capitaine de quinze ans

by Jules Verne,

A native ruler, the king of Kazonnde, falls victim

to his craving for the white traders’ spirits

and

ignites spontaneously while

drinking a bowl of flaming punch. The king burns like a demijohn of paraffin,

and when one of

his ministers tries to save

he too bursts into spontaneous light in

fire. If

him by smothering the

their ambition

had been

fire,

to "strike a

darkest Africa," the king and his chancellor succeeded beyond their

wildest dreams.

known

Jules Verne was science fiction,

for his imagination,

famous as a progenitor of

and therefore he might be expected

dent in one of his novels.

It is

to include such

an

inci-

more remarkable that the great naturalist Emile

Zola depicted a similar incident

in the novel

Le Docteur

Pascal,

published in

1893 and translated into English by Mr. Ernest A. Vizetelly the same year.

When finds

Felicite visits

him sleeping

in his trousers,

liquid fat

was

her brother-in-law, the drunken old

in his chair,

a.

M. Macquart,

lighted pipe lying in his lap.

she

Through a hole

she can see his thigh burning with a blue flame.

"Now

the

dribbling through the cracks in his skin, feeding the flame

which was spreading

And Felicite realized that he was burning alcohol. He had been saturating himself for years

to his belly.

up, like a sponge soaked in

with the strongest, most inflammable of spirits. Soon, doubtless, he would be flaming from head to feet." Zola’s revival of spontaneous combustion lore

caused some consternation among the contemporary

Zola himself denied

by the

it,

earlier literary

the reviewers

presumed

that he

critics,

and although

had been influenced

spontaneous combustions. The main character of the

novel, a skillful physician,

is

able to

make a

spot diagnosis

when he

later has

19

The sad end of the king of Kazonnde, an illustration by Henri Meyer for the 1879 English translation of Jules Verne’s Un capitainc de quinze arid. Reproduced by permission of the British Library, London.

Fig. 5.

Spontaneous

Human

Combustion

occasion to see the remains of poor

Doctor Pascal discusses

“Now he ing

away of his own

it?

consumed in the funeral pile of his away by his own enthusiasm, the doctor arms, as if to embrace the imaginary scene: “Can accord,

Carried

flung out his see

So drunk

that he could not feel himself burning,

lighting himself like a Saint- Jeans

smoke,

Gallic eloquence,

died a royal death, like the prince of drunkards, blaz-

own body!” you

M. Macquart. With

this strange occurrence:

first

fire,

dispersing himself in

spread over the four corners of this kitchen, dis-

solved in and floating in the

air,

bathing

all

objects he

then escaping in a cloud of vapour through this as

I

opened

owned,

window as soon

flying off into the sky, filling the horizon?

it;

.

.

.

Verily an admirable death: to disappear, to leave nothing of oneself behind,

except a handful of ashes and a pipe by one s side!”

A little-known literaiy spontaneous combustion occurs in Edwin Brett s novel The Darling of Our Crew, a story for boys which appeared in 1880.

board a

ship, the

On

purehearted young hero of the story looks on aghast while

a witchlike hag called Mother Shebear seizes a pint of raw brandy and puts it

over the

fire until it

seems on the point of exploding. She blows out the

blue flames visible at the top and drinks half of it at a draft, chucking fiendishly.

Advancing upon the

petrified lad,

Mother Shebear

long talons and shrieks, “Now, boy, you shall be

stretches forth her

my victim.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

”

Mother Shebear is herself ignited by the brandy. A bluish lambent flame bursts from her mouth and curls in fantastic wreaths about her face. The boy tries to extinguish the But before she can toast poor Jack over the

flames with water, but

it

turns at once to steam. Before his eyes, the hag

becomes “an incandescent mass of matter like the center of

a

fire,

like

a statue, burning and glowing

fire.”

A no less ludicrous literaiy spontaneous combustion occurs in Husmannsgutten (The farm laborer s son)

by Hans Andersen

Foss, a late nineteenth-

century Norwegian author of veiy popular rural melodramas. The novel’s

young

proletarian hero

is

prevented from mariying his fiancee by her father,

a haughty country squire much given to drunkenness. The disappointed young Norwegian then emigrates to the United States, where he works at a factoiy for two years, saving eveiy penny he earns before returning to his native country. With his newly acquired fortune, he purchases the impoverished squires house and farm and settles there with his wife, the squire's daughter. While traveling home from a drinking party in his horse-drawn

21

!

A 22

Blue smoke belches from his innards

sleigh, the squire ignites spontaneously.

up through

open mouth — a strange spectacle indeed

his

in the cold, clear

way s

for

any passersby

Scandinavian night. This absurd old novel was one of Nor-

books of all times and was even filmed

best-selling

No

Cabinet of Medical Curioditied

in the 1930s.

a poet than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was inspired by the

less

fiery death in his Wedt-ddtlicher Divan,

which was written

spontaneous combustion craze reigned Schenke hier! Noch eine

in

in 1819,

when

the

Germany:

FLuche

Diede Becher brign ich ihr

Findet die ein Haufdchen Adche,

Sagt die: Der verb ran nte mir.

translate the verse in the following

I

Another beaker! How

way:

it fladhed!

Thid I condecrate to thee; If you find a heap of ad hed, Say, he wad condumed by me.

One

of Sweden's finest poets of the late nineteenth century, Gustaf Froding,

also thought about spontaneous combustion, as evidenced

poems

in the collection

Stank och F/ikar, presented here in

by one of the

my translation:

I am a bed of blackened coal,

Of burned -out ludt and death; I breathe a flame with aLohol, The fire

The

known

best

on

id

my breath.

of all literary spontaneous combustions

is

that of

“Lord

Chancellor” Krook in the Charles Dickens’s famous Bleak Hoiide. Dickens’s fascination with spontaneous combustion

work.

He

mentions

it

is

in describing a fainting

already evident in his early

woman in the article “The Pris-

oner's Van’’ written in 1835: “All the female inhabitants run out of their

houses, and discharge large jugs of water over the patient, as

dying of spontaneous combustion, and wanted putting out.” In Carol,

when

spirit,

Ebenezer Scrooge believes that he “might be

room

the

is

if

A

she were Chridtmad

suddenly illuminated by the coming of the second at that

very moment an

interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation

of knowing

and-bone if

it.

”

seller,

he were on

BLak Houde, Mr. Krook is a cadaverous, withered old ragwhose breath is “issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as

In

fire

within. ”

One

day,

when

the gin-sodden old

man is sleeping

.

Spontaneous

in front

Human

Combustion

of the fireplace, he ignites spontaneously, and foul-smelling, greasy

smoke billows out through that

someone has burned

the windows. his

chops on the stove, and that they were not

particularly fresh to begin with.

Krooks rooms, they

find

them

Some people walking by presume

When Mr. Snagsby and Mr. Guppy

full

enter

of a greasy soot, the windowsill covered

They suspect that Krook has committed suicide and try to find the body. Finally, they see Krook s vicious cat, Lady Jane, stand snarling before his empty chair, on the seat of which a small piece of coal can still be seen. They realize what has happened, and with the cry

with a repulsive yellow

"Horrors! It is

He is

fluid.

here!" they rush out into the street.

apparent that Dickens based Krook s death on one of the most famous

eighteenth-century cases, that of Countess Bandi in 1731; as the soot It is

and the yellow fluid on the windowsill, were given almost verbatim.

unlikely that Dickens had studied the original literature, but the lore of

spontaneous combustion was extremely widespread ian countess's fieiy fate

was

could easily have read of Register,

tion

many details, such

and one

it

retold in

in his time,

many books and

in either the

in

Ital-

Dickens

Gentlemans Magazine or the Annual

literary historian has suggested that

on spontaneous combustion

and the

periodicals.

he also studied the sec-

Robert ts/\a.cn\A\s Anatomy ofDrunkenness

4 "The Appointed Time " from Bleak Houde. A drawing by Fig.

"Phiz" in the 1933 edition of Dickens’s col-

lected works.

From

the authors collection.

23

A 24

Other writers have implied Register.

that

Cabinet of Medical Curiooitieo

Dickens found

his inspiration in the Terrific

This loathsome periodical abounded in bloodcurdling tales of mur-

der, rape, incest, torture, at detailed

and dismemberment, and

editors did not sneer

accounts of spontaneous combustion, including a grisly descrip-

tion of the Italian countess being reduced to ashes.

considerable readership at the

its

its

The

Terrific Register

time, including, as he himself later confessed,

young Charles Dickens, while he was at Wellington House Academy. Charles Dickens was one of the leading novelists of his time, and many

thousands of people eagerly read each of them

was

the literary critic George

the scientific debate findings of Liebig

new

installment of Bleak Houde.

Henry Lewes, who was a jour with

and

Bischoff.

He

publicly faulted Dickens for reviving a

He

evidently believed that spon-

taneous combustion was possible, and instead of claiming

attempted to prove that

spired

A drawing in-

One

on the spontaneous combustion question, including the

vulgar error, and Dickens took umbrage.

Fig. 5.

had a

this

phenomenon

artistic license,

really existed. Since he

was out of

ALARMING CASE OF SPONTANEOUS

by the sponta-

COMBUSTION.

neous combustion controversy between Dickens and Lewes, from Diogenes, January 8, 1853. From the authors collection.

“

On! Law

!

thebe's. Pa’s

boots— jiot

wh hue's

he

Pa?'

"

Spontaneous

his

depth

in

Human

Combustion

medical matters, he turned to his friend Professor John Elliotson

was a rather credulous character He was a zealous phrenologist,

for support. Unfortunately, the professor

and not the soundest guide

and

in these matters.

stubborn defense of Mesmer’s teachings, by which he claimed to cure

his

everything from headache to cancer, had cost him his chair at the London University College. In spite of Elliotson’s dubious reputation, Dickens relied

many older

wholly on a manuscript of his, quoting literature.

Lewes and

sources from the medical

were unimpressed by these

his literary associates

ar-

guments, and Dickens was generally considered the loser of the debate; he

was even

ridiculed in the comic magazines as the last

neous human combustion. Nonetheless, even section as

his critics

on Krook's death had the masters touch;

it is

champion of spontahad

to agree that the

today frequently quoted

an example of Dickens’s power to create an atmosphere of impending

horror. Dickens remained unrepentant, as a

book

in 1852,

and when Bleak House was published

he vigorously defended the fiery death

the chapter about Krook's death ended with the

same death

body

itself,

eternally,

and

engendered

that only

deaths that can be

in the

same

in the preface,

fateful

words:

and

“It is the

corrupted humours of the vicious

— Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of the

died.’’

For several years after Bleak House was published, the existence of spontaneous

human combustion was debated

in the

newspapers and

in private

Thomas Woolner, Krook’s came case up at a country house where Woolner was staying. When a scientific gentleman made the point that it was very dangerous for a drunken conversation. According to the Life of the sculptor

person to go near a candle or any open the Irish butler

who was

leave the room.

The host hoped

scared the butler,

fire for fear

clearing the table

who was

of igniting spontaneously,

was seen

to turn pale

and

hastily

that the talk of spontaneous combustion

had

altogether too fond of drink. Shortly afterward,

the butler returned with a Bible,

which he placed before a clergyman

guest,

asking to be sworn immediately. Placing a trembling hand on the Bible, he

solemnly pronounced: a candle again

!

"I,

Patrick O’C. swear

never, never, never to

— blow out

25

The Bosom Serpent ^

r

'

I have formerly heard, that

p

get into a

Mane

Stomach,

if a

Serpent chance to

it will

not do him the

Leaot hurt, but will immediately get out, if you do

but hang the patient by the Heelo, and lay a Pan full of warm

Milk near bio Mouth.

Fran£ois Rabelais, Pantagruel

A some

ccording to one of the old viking annals, the Flat0 Book, ited the

King Harald Hardrade of Norway once vis-

nobleman Halldor, whose daughter had been very

time. Fever, increasing

abdominal

girth,

and an unquenchable

ill

for

thirst

were the major symptoms. The old women gossiped about her being pregnant, but the dition

was

was

young lady denied

this

with great vehemence. Since her con-

steadily worsening, the king

that she

was

also consulted. His diagnosis

had accidentally swallowed the spawn of a serpent when she

had grown within her stomach and nearly killed bosom serpent, she must thirst for several days without being given any water; after that, she was to be taken to a waterfall and there open her mouth wide so that the thirsty snake could hear the drank water, and the her.

To

streaming water.

26

reptile

rid herself of this

When

it

slithered

up her

gullet

and stretched

its

head out

The Bojom Serpent

between the king had

girls jaws, her father

was

to strike

Halldor's house, this cure

left

with his sword.

it

was performed exactly

The bosom serpent was decapitated and the

prescribed.

When

the

as he had

restored to

girl

Another Norse legend described the brutal methods used by King

health.

Olaf Tryggvason when he was christianizing the heathen Vikings by force.

Once,

men were

his

torturing a staunch Icelander,

the faith of his fathers.

man

him. The

When

everything else

tried to save himself

torturers forced

it

down

reptile later thrust its

his throat

effect

cross of

frail

These dramatic

by blowing on the

stories

eagerly discarded the

its tail.

the

human

enough

had a powerful

hammer of Thor in

illustrate the ancient be-

and other animals can

live as parasites

within

gastrointestinal tract. Already in ancient Egyptian, Assyrian,

Babylonian manuscripts, there painful stomach cramps. In

case of a youth

The

Christ.

from the Norse legends

that snakes, frogs, lizards,

is

mention of a

De morbid

who had drunk

“colic snake'' as

vulgaribuo,

and

a cause of

Hippocrates describes the

When

he

and caused

his

a great quantity of strong wine.

passed out on the ground, a snake slithered

down

his throat

death from an apoplectic seizure. In his Contractae ex

veteribad medicinae tetra-

many symptoms attributed to the presence of frogs, salamanders in the human stomach, ranging from fever, vomiting,

Aetius

toads, or

irons to

films of the present day,

who

White

lief

biblod,

snake's head, but the

by applying red-hot

jaws. This dreadful sight, horrific

its

most exaggerated horror

on the other Icelanders,

favor of the

refused to give up

they put a snake into

head out through the Icelanders abdomen with the

wretched mans heart between for the

who

failed,

lists

and stomach pain

the

to tremor, stiffness,

and confusion. This diagnosis must

often have been considered in difficult cases. In his Natural Hidtory, Pliny

mentions snakes and frogs as gastrointestinal parasites

and the Talmud has several Very early

in

men and

beasts,

similar tales.

on, however, there

seems to have been some opposition to the

The learned Alexander of Tralles, century, was once consulted by a woman

established belief in the stomach snake. living in

Lykia during the sixth

who was

certain she

she

was a

had a snake

hysteric, the

in her stomach.

He

soon understood that

snake existing only in her imagination.

He

asked her

what she thought the animal looked like and then procured a similar specimen, which he put in her bowl of expectorations! The woman was completely cured, and she was most grateful to her clever phyto describe exactly

sician,

who, one supposes, did not leave the sickroom without pocketing a

considerable

fee.

27

A

Cabinet of Medical Curioditied

Snake- Expelling Saints

28

In medieval times, there serpent, in medical

works

was frequent mention of the legend of the bosom

as well as the annals of the saints.

According to a

young lad with a snake in his stomach was taken to the holy Monegunde, after many doctors and quacks had pronounced him incurable. With her hand, the holy woman could feel the snake moving in his intestines. She then fastened a small cross to a grape leaf, which was tied to the boy s stomach. This magic talisman had the desired effect: in a vulcanic opening of the bowel, the snake was expelled like a projectile. Similar, albeit less dramatic, tales were told about Saint Simeon and Abbot Hugo de Clancy. One of the votive gifts to Saint Leonhard of Lavantal was a small iron snake, which was given especially by people affected by story from the sixth century, a

diseases of the stomach.

The bosom serpent also plays a part in one of the legends about the mediCosmas and Damien, who were martyred in A.D. 283. Their most famous miracle is to have transplanted the leg of a dead Negro onto a church servant who suffered from gangrene. The man was said to have lived for several years with one black leg and one white as a symbol of the devout cal saints

brothers’ operative

who was

his throat while

Fig.

1.

Saints

Cosmas

and Damien expel a snake from the stomach of a peasant. From an early fourteenthcentury fresco in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mistra.

From

the authors collection.

skills.

Another of their miracles concerned a poor peasant

tortured day and night

he

slept.

No

by a

large snake,

which had crawled down

doctor could help him, but

noiWDroiwr

when he stepped

The Bodom Serpent into

Cosmas and Damiens church,

the serpent slithered

up

his throat

great haste. Together with the rest of the congregation, the peasant his

with

fell

on

knees to praise the Lord and the two saints with song and prayers. This

miracle

is

depicted on an early fourteenth-century fresco in the Metropolitan

Cathedral in Mistra, as well as on the two medical saints' reliquaries in

Mu-

nich and Krakow.

The worldwide

distribution of the legend of the

daso mention that

well

is

year 339, an Indian gentleman had the misfortune

in the

water snake

to get a

bosom serpent

from many parts of the world. The annals of Buddha-

attested in folk tales

in the

stomach

after accidentally

having swallowed

snake spawn while drinking water. After being tortured by the animal, which gnawed his entrails, he consulted the rajah, who was evidently as skilled as his Norwegian counterpart in curing this disease. The man was well bathed and provided with a comfortable bed, but forcibly kept awake for seven days and nights. When he was finally permitted to fall asleep, he lay snoring with his mouth wide open. The rajah put a piece of meat tied with a string in his mouth. The starved snake crawled up his gullet, bit the meat, and tried to pull it down to its lair. The royal snake-fisherman managed to land his catch,

however, and he put

in a

it

bowl of water for the inspection of all and sundry.

was

In an old Gaelic folk story, a beggar with newts in the stomach

by a

cured, again

powers

curative

meat to

up

He

eat.

his gullet

prince. Royalty seems to have

been invested with great

This time, the

in these difficult cases!

man was

given

salt

then knelt by a stream of water, and the thirsty newts raced

and jumped

into the brook.

In several ancient folk tales from the Balkan Peninsula, important parts are played

by snakes

living in the

human

stomach. In one of these

wicked stepmother tricked her naive stepdaughter taining snake spawn.

became

large

As

illicit

employed as a goosegirl

like

intrigue,

girl's

and her family ostracized

a

stomach

up her throat and thrust

a periscope, in order to take

fortunately passing by, cut

it

her.

She was

When she fell asleep in the fields one

at a royal farm.

day, the snake slithered

mouth,

the snake inside her grew, the poor

tales,

water con-

and swollen. The stepmother then accused her of being preg-

nant as the result of an

who was

into drinking

its

in

its

head out through her

bearings.

A noble young prince,

two with

his sword.

The

tale

con-

cludes with the customary marriage and happiness for the young couple and frustration of the stepmother's schemes.

A better-known tale after accidentally

swamp. His

is

that of

King Devasakti,

who was

taken badly

ill

imbibing a young snake while drinking foul water in a

evil relatives

considered this invalid unfit to reign, and they ex-

29

A 30

him from the

pelled staff

dressed in rags and equipped with a beggars

capital,

and begging bowl. After the

wandered from town

to

Cabinet of Medical Curiosities

town

king, with the snake in his stomach,

had

for several years, his luck finally turned.

A

princess in a distant country had offended her father, the king, in an argu-

ment, and as a punishment, he ordered that she had to marry the

first

nal or beggar that set foot within the royal castle. This individual

course the wretched King Devasakti,

who came

in

crimi-

was of

hope of consulting the

court physicians about his stomach ailment. Instead, he found himself forcibly married to the princess

day, as her cess

saw a

and deported

husband lay snoring, large snake

poke

its

his

to a

farm in the provinces.

head resting on a termite

head out of

his

way

dropping princess went home to prepare a sakti,

One

the prin-

gaping mouth. The snake

conversed with another snake living in the termite wise enough to detail exactly the only

hill,

nest,

and they were un-

they could be

The eaves-

killed.

terrible laxative for

King Deva-

containing grated sephonantus and mustard, following the blabbering

parasite reptiles stools.

own

recipe: the animal

was expelled

in the

The enterprising princess then went to the termite

other snake to death with boiling prescription.

oil

hill

kings copious

and scalded the

and water, again according

to

its

own

She seized the treasure of money and jewels which the snake

had been guarding, and with

this fortune

Devasakti and his wife were able

to reclaim their royal positions.

Snakes and Frogs

Many of the

in the

Stomach

collections of curious

and abnormal medical cases from the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contain stories of snakes, frogs, toads,

and newts lus

living in the

Donatus and the

human stomach. Both

the Mirab ilia medica of Marcel-

Observationes medicoruni rariorum of Johannes

contain several cases of such bizarre parasites. Schenckius

Schenckius

was convinced

spawn could adhere to the stomach and develop there, and breeding with ease w'ithin the human gastrointestinal canal. The frogs would deprive the patient of nourishment. The famous Conradus Gesner reported a strange epidemic that killed more than that swallowed frog

the colony of frogs living

three thousand people in the city of Theis.

Many snakes and newts left their

bodies through the mouth or by the stools, and in the stomach of a recently

dead young woman, two snakes had been found. Another sad instance of a

postmortem diagnosis of a snake

A

in the

stomach was reported

in the old

shoemaker had committed suicide by stabbing himself after having been tortured by intractable stomach pains for more than ten years.

Ep hemerides.

t

*

The Bodom Serpent After burial his coffin

was

was presumed

It

was dug up

for his wife to

have a

last

31

look at him. She

mans arm lying beside the corpse. had made its egress from the body

horrified to see a snake the length of a

bosom serpent

that the

through the stab wound. In 1618 the prebendary of Strasbourg, Dr. Melchior Sebizius, reported

A

another famous case.

seventeen-year-old youth had consulted him for

stomach pains, weakness, malancholia,

flatulence,

and

was found

sitting

dead

epileptic seizures,

Some weeks

but the doctor was unable to diagnose his ailment.

an outhouse, and beneath the

in

later,

jP^. 2.

mi

Sit

i.

he

seat, a large snake

A German

yf rf'lMiche /37cn>c ‘etmma /fo

broadsheet from 1530,

fiuhqcrn twi VuutcritditdHC

depicting several in-

df&crctt/

^ofrmcr'juf %cn'4gcn'foc.

;

stances of reptiles as gastrointestinal parasites. To the right can be seen the corpse of a

maiden of good family

who was found to have two snakes

in

her intestines at autopsy.

From the

thors collection.

w# reran.*hm

r**»»

Mntttcwrfcte r*at.nAi-.ri4$>h$» 2>-m« ..

;

nmm

»*>

\mnxtv.ea,l Line oln s-littfcFieMs TAeUunl emceup lllanleindnriH dry 'e/rvdonm. Zcfe Seventeen Coney Is en erne cortceal'd, Ondmade jack Quacks /AeJpe/rtrpfiburt&Tcrnnz. JPcmrlSl&xrj Toll the 7o~al tJ only meule, TheVAcchte errBir th ndienarer 17 appectra l/7iile be-/'J\£8.irtynxts do perform their Trade prs * t/a Aap'dn/tdl brinyJhrhd Pillory /vzdHu rtlausi/hi-riJ sn/Z’crr-e-iya

One^W^Moule g /fcreJurpriye a//mid,

,

.

l

;

SffM aittfu grocer/ Slurp

Fig. 3.

tbs

The Surrey Wonder by

confiscated

by the crown,

comer of Dxtndon Street ire

James

Co ueniry

ftreed up onepayr afslmrf Tuladzlly

Vertue, another drawing of Mary and her rabbit children,

which was

since one of the characters behind the rabbit breeder resembled the Prince of

It is likely that the drawing was inspired by the enactment of the obstetrical farce at the Theatre Royal, Lincolns Inn Fields. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum, British Museum.

Wales.

©

A 132

could

now

debate:

it

Cabinet of Medical Curiosities

claim a resounding victory over his adversaries in the sooterkin

was indeed

men

the medical

woman to give birth to animals. Most of Mary s rabbit breeding was due to the force

possible for a

believed that

of the imagination and that her wanton longing for rabbit meat had trans-

formed her unborn child

into a

had indeed warned about

women

whole warren of these animals. Dr. Maubray

this possibility in his

not to ‘please themselves so

Apes, &c.,"

lest their child

resemble

much

its

Female Physician, advising

in playing

with Dogs, Squirrels,

mothers favorite

pet.

Manningham and Douglas were very skeptical of the whole business, human conception of a rabbit was about as likely as rabbit conception of a human child. With their assistants, who were however, and Douglas thought

elected from the foremost nobility

— only

dukes were put on the

roll for

emergency duty — they took turns to

make

sure that she

When to

to watch the rabbit breeder day and night was not supplied with fresh rabbits from outside.

Sir Richard

Manningham had been sent by the king to fetch Mary

London, he had inspected a specimen alleged Although John Howard had accepted

rabbit.

mented

that

started to

it

looked more

weep

to be the placenta of the last

Manningham

like half a hog's bladder.

At

this

bluntly com-

remark,

Mary

He

asked

profusely, exacerbating Sir Richard's suspicions.

for a hog's bladder,

and the resourceful rabbit man midwife of Guildford was

able to produce one from his

and both had

it,

“the

museum; the two specimens were exactly alike,

same strong

Manningham brought

urinous Smell peculiar to a Hog's bladder."

the bladder with

him

to

London, and since Mary's

labor pains had miraculously ceased as soon as she entered the Bagnio, this

unprepossessing specimen served as cynosure;

it

was handed around and

Manningham and Douglas wanted to announce in public that they suspected a trick, but St. Andre and Howard persuaded them to wait a few more days. They predicted that Mary would soon breed new rabbits. St. Andre declared that he did not find the birth of examined

until

it

was almost worn

half a hog's bladder

out.

any more remarkable than Mary's previous breeding of

seventeen preternatural rabbits, but even his

wisdom of this

statement. St.

Andre managed

own

supporters doubted the

to retain his sang-froid,

assured the noblemen and courtiers that great wonders were

still

and he

to be ex-

pected from his vulgar protegee. He bullied and insulted the medical men who wanted access to the rabbit breeder, preferring an audience of peers and lecherous men-about-town for his births.

pompous

lectures about Mary's strange

Once, he even turned Dr. Douglas himself away, and

indignantly dismissed the whole

monster was a-breeding."

affair,

commenting as he

left

this

gentleman

that

"some new

Mary

Rabbit Breeder

Toft, the

^

133 an unhappiness

’Tis

That people

ne’er

Lamented

to be

know when

to be contented,

Had breeding seventeen Rabbits satisfied Poor Mary Toft the Plot had still been hid; But fond to make

the

The prying World the

On December Mary

Number up a

A the obstetrical farce at the Bagnio accelerated once more.

suffered violent labor pains,

and Dr. Maubray and the German obste-

Manningham that “someAndre and Howard were much

Dr. Limborsch agreed with Sir Richard

trician

would soon

thing

score,

secret did explore.

issue

from the

uterus ."

St.

enlivened by the good news and bragged about the great things to come.

That same evening, disaster struck. Thomas Howard, porter

went before

Sir

had bribed him

Thomas

at the Bagnio,

Clarges, justice of the peace, to state that

to bring a rabbit to her.

Mary Toft

Under interrogation Mary confessed

attempted bribery of the blabbering domestic; she stubbornly main-

to the

tained that she had

wanted the animal only

was pregnant with more gated,

rabbits.

Two

days

to

cook and eat

later,

it

Mary was

and that she

again interro-

and Manningham threatened her with a horrible operation

her pelvic organs

if

she did not confess.

Some wags claimed

to explore

that he

had

promised to send a chimney sweep s boy up her Fallopian tubes to explore them! At any deal,

down

rate, this dire threat

woman

a great

day. This was taken Manningham, James Douglas, Lord Baltimore,

and she promised a public confession the next before Sir Richard

and the duke of Montague, and at the

frightened the wretched

Hunterian Library

in

it is still

Glasgow.

preserved

among

the Douglas

files

Mary had put quartered rabbit bodies

into a special “hare pocket" inside her skirt

and had introduced them

her vagina whenever she was not closely watched.

Then she would

fall

into into

way and surrender the unsavory trophy to her puzzled obstetrical attendants. Mary was agreeably surprised that it took so little skill to fool men such as Howard and St. Andre. When she was taken to London, “labor" in a theatrical

was of course more difficult for her to obtain rabbit parts, since she had not had the wit to bring some from Guildford. When the medical men had grown impatient, she had made the desperate attempt to bribe the porter

it

which brought about her Sir

ruin.

Richard Manningham published an “Exact Diary" of his attendance

Mary Toft, in which the extraordinary imposture was unveiled to the public. He emphasized his own part in detecting the woman’s tricks, which on

A 134

Cabinet of Medical Curiosities

James Douglas, who soon published his defense, An Advertisement occasion’d by Some Passages in Sir R. Manning hams Diary. Lord Onslow, a prominent justice of the peace, had gone to Guildford to inquire into the rabbit trade there; several rabbit mongers and other witnesses deposed that Joshua Toft had been a frequent purchaser of young rabbits at the time of greatly offended

his wife's lying-in.

Cyriacus Ahlers feared that his part in the bizarre pro-

ceedings in Guildford would jeopardize his promising career at court, since

Andre had published some

St.

affidavits

from John Howard and others

in

the second edition of his notorious rabbit pamphlet, alleging that Ahlers had also

Mary really bred rabbits and that he had promised

been convinced that

her a pension from the king. Ahlers published a pamphlet of his own, Some

Woman

Observations concerning the

Howard

better than a

little

had examined

of Godlyman in Surrey.

assumed an unusual, not

dressed only in a nightgown and had

to say indecent, posture while "touching" her.

riacus Ahlers did not dwell

on

his

own

newborn

He emphasized

that one of

dung had been proved to contain hay, straw, hinted that Howard had been a party to the plot from

rabbit's pellets of

and corn. Ahlers

also

an early date, and Guildford

Cy-

doings in Guildford and asserted that

he had suspected foul play from the beginning. the

considered John

quack and impostor; the Guildford man midwife

when he was

his patient

He

may

by no means

this is

well have been impressed by the ease

tricked the great medical

man midwife of with which Mary

unlikely; the rabbit

men from London, and encouraged by

promise of money from both

St.

Andre and Ahlers.

It is

the vague

certain that he, too,

was prosecuted for his part in the affair. So great was public interest in the rabbit business that Londoners talked of little else during the winter months of 1726, and a declaration of war or a second Gunpowder Plot would hardly have been noticed. There was a great upsurge

in interest in the

female genital anatomy: terms such as "uterus,"

"perinaeum," and "Faloppian tubes" (so spelled) were on every man's After the imposture leteers,

was

detected,

Grub

Street

had a

field day.

lips.

The pamph-

draftsmen, and writers of lugubrious verse were hard at work in their

chambers, and the presses were busy for several months with the production of pamphlets, squibs, broadsides, and ballads about the wretched rabbit breeder.

Most of

London laughed

One

these

made poor

Andre the butt of

their wit,

and

all

at him.

Much Ado about Nothing was alleged to Some have attributed it to Jonathan Swift, but tirade, meant to be in Mary's own words (and

scurrilous publication titled

be Mary's true confession. this

St.

vulgar and unladylike

spelling!)

seems beneath the dignity of

this great writer.

She claimed that

Mary

Toft, the

Rabbit Breeder

John Howard had always told her that she was “a Woman as had grate natand a large capassiti ” and that he had "served” her rabbits "tost up

turui parts,

skin

and

man who him

all

with

its

eres prickt up”!

She described Maubray

and she declared,

cried out a Sooterkin, a Sooterkin,”

at all.”

Manningham was "an

and the worst of them

all,

as "that

squab

"I don't like

ugly old gentleman in a grate black wig,”

James Douglas, "a

fare faced long-nosed Gentil-

man, with the neck of a Crain: he was for purformin an oppurashun, and tawkt of making Insishuns, and Cesariums and the Lord knows what.” Jonathan Swift was certainly interested in the

Mary Toft affair, and tradition has

him of writing another pamphlet, The Anatomist Dissected, under pseudonym Lemuel Gulliver. This satire at St. Andre's expense also

also accused

the

seems rather heavy-handed but perhaps

it

was written

hurriedly, in order to

cash in on the rabbit hysteria. Gulliver was particularly incensed that the

own worthy memoirs, The public, it seems, now pre-

rabbit affair had adversely affected the sale of his

which had previously been quite a best

seller.

ferred the rabbit pamphlets to serious literature.

On December 20 Alexander or,

The Squire

turn'd Ferret, ” a

Pope published

his ballad

"The Discovery;

bawdy song that was much in favor at rowdy

gatherings in the alehouses of the metropolis. Pope suggested that ferrets

should have been used to hunt the rabbits out from their hiding places within

woman. Unlike the other authors of songs and squibs about breeder, Pope was disposed to let St. Andre off rather easily,

the unfortunate the rabbit

since the rabbit doctor

three

months

(the Squire)

had treated him

for

an injury to the hand two or

before. Pope's version of the conversation

and

St.

Andre

neux gets the idea of using

is

By Help

may descry

of Telescope.

The Instrument himself did make,

He

rais d

and

leveld right

But all about was so

opake,

It could not aid his Sight.

On

Tiptoe then the Squire he stood,

(But first

when Moly-

his astronomical telescope in the gynecological

examination: If ought within we

between Molyneux

particularly funny, especially

He gave Her Money) e ’er He could,

Then reach d as high as

And cryd, Ifeel a CONY.

135

A 136

Id it alive? St.

It

id;

Cabinet of Medical Curioditied

Andre cry d;

I feel it dtir.

Id it full grown? the Squire replyd; It

id;

FUR.

dee hered the

The rabbit was well taken care

He

lap d

it in

of,

once

it

was

safely born:

a Linnen Rag,

Then thank d Her for Her Kindnedd; And cram d it in the Velvet bag

That derved

hid

Royal Highnedd.

This was one of many allusions to the involvement of the Prince of Wales in the scandal.

Another poem, the

more

ribald.

illustrated,

twelve-stanza “Doctors in Labour" is even

A verse such as

The Rabbit all day long ran

At Night I dreamt I had him Methought he

there

my head. in my Bed:

in

a Burrough tryd

to

make

Hid head I patted and I dtroak d hid Back.

My Hudband wak d me and cryd Mollfor Shame Lett go

— What

twcid he

meant I need not Name.

must have caused much coarse laughter

in the ale-houses

!

Yet another poem,

“The Rabbit-Man-Midwife," was written by Dr. John Arbuthnot, who

wanted

to satirize

Lord Peterborough, a well-known

lecher,

by naming him

tracts,

and poems had

as the rabbits’ father:

The Doctor dearch d both high and

low,

And found no Rabbit there. But peeping nearer cryd, Soho, I'm sure

They

I

have found a hare.

all affirm with one Accord,

When

they had dearch d her thorough,

That Bunny d Dad mudt be a Lord,

Whode name

By become

doed end in Burrough.

the nineteenth century, the quite valuable,

many

and complete

pamphlets,

collections

sold for fifteen to twenty guineas. Today, they

bound

in rabbit skin

command

were

high prices at rare

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