Unsettling May Have Occurred: Occasionally Uncomfortable Obscure True Stories from Human History

by Damn Interesting Editors, The

  When the mob reached the hospital they circled the large building and blocked the exits. The torch carrying crowd cried to lynch the doctors inside and might have except that all but one had escaped out the rear windows. Only Dr. Wright Post and three students remained inside to protect anatomical specimens. But they couldn't defy the rioters and everything from the rare specimens to surgical instruments were destroyed. Dr. Wright and his three students had been taken to the city jail by the sheriff in order to protect them.

  The mob's anger continued to build through the night. They were looking for vengeance and doctors as they moved from street to street. The crowd searched for John Hicks at the home of a prominent physician and would have found him had they looked in the attic.

  In the morning Governor George Clinton called out the militia and many doctors scurried to leave town. But the mob increased in size as the day progressed and they eventually headed towards Columbia College. They attacked the college and destroyed yet more specimens and medical tools. Future Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton tried valiantly to quiet them while future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Jay was knocked unconscious by a thrown rock. By evening the rioters had descended on the Manhattan jail and would not disperse. Baron Friedrich von Stueben, a hero of the American Revolution, was leading the militia and refused to use force -- that was until he was hit in the head by a brick. The order to shoot at the rioters was given.

  The militia fired. Eight were killed and many more were seriously wounded. The doctors treated the wounded, and the rioters disbanded in the morning.

  Weeks later the New York legislature passed a law allowing for the dissection of hanged criminals but the grave robbing continued as bodies started to arrive from Long Island. The resurrectionists and grave robbers didn't stop providing cadavers until the middle of the 19th century, thus making the riot completely in vain.

  Today a clandestine market still exists for cadavers and body parts in America. US law prohibits corpses from being traded and sold. Still, by using legal loopholes some corpses can generate above $10,000 per body.

  Originally published 18 February 2006

  http://dam.mn/the-doctors-mob-riot/

  Liver-Eating Johnson (1847 AD)

  Liver-Eating Johnson c. 1876

  From the cloudy reservoir of history it is often difficult to separate legend from reality, and such is the case with the story of the infamous American mountain man John Johnston. It is certain that throughout his life he was known by many names, but most famously he came to be known at the time as "Crow Killer" and "Liver-Eating Johnson."

  It is said that he earned these names through his penchant for killing Crow Indians, then cutting out and eating their livers; a symbolic way of completing a revenge slaying. His personal war against the Crow tribe was an errand to avenge the murder of his wife, who had been killed by Crow warriors in 1847.

  John Johnston was born sometime around 1824 as John Garrison, though little is known of his early life. Some say that he joined the navy as a young man to fight in the Mexican American War, but deserted after striking his superior officer during an unknown disagreement. In any case, when he was aged about twenty years he changed his name to John Johnston and headed west to become a hunter and fur trapper, setting out with Old John Hatcher as his guide.

  Hatcher-- an experienced mountain man of some repute-- took Johnston to his cabin on the Little Snake River in northern Colorado. There, he taught Johnston the trapping, hunting, and survival skills which a mountain man needed in order to live and profit. Johnston caught on quickly, proving handy with his .30 caliber Hawken rifle and Bowie knife. When Hatcher quit the mountain-manning trade several years later, Johnston took over the cabin and set out for the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, where a year earlier a Flathead Indian sub-chief had offered his daughter to Johnston in a trade. Johnston made the exchange, and he and his new wife set off to return to his cabin on the Little Snake River.

  During the journey of several weeks, Johnston had his wife begin to teach him the Salish language of her tribe out of respect for her, and he taught her how to use a rifle so that she might hunt to feed herself during the winter while he was away. Once they arrived at the cabin in early Autumn, Johnston spent the rest of the season putting together an ample supply of dry goods for her winter's stay, and set out to do his trapping.

  When he returned to his cabin in the following Spring, he was met with a gruesome scene. The remains of his wife-- little more than bones after lying exposed for months-- were lying in his cabin's open doorway. It was clear that she had been the victim of a Crow hunting party. Even worse, amongst her bones was a smaller skull... that of his unborn child. She had been about seven months' pregnant when she was killed.

  Soon the scalped bodies of Crow warriors began to appear throughout the Northern Rockies and the plains of Wyoming and Montana. Each had had his liver cut out, and presumably eaten by the killer. Eventually other mountain men and Indians learned of Johnston's ongoing vengeance slayings, and he soon became known as "Liver-Eating Johnson" (dropping the "t" in "Johnston"). Also known as "The Crow Killer," he was waging a mortal, solitary battle against the whole Crow tribe, and no Crow warrior was safe from his wrath.

  Many deaths followed. In time, the Crow decided to hand-pick their twenty best warriors and set them on a mission to hunt down and kill Johnston. How the battle played out, no one knows, but not one of the warriors would return.

  Johnston's killings continued for years, and the Crow seemed helpless to respond. But one winter, as Johnston was traveling over five hundred miles to visit his Flathead kin, he was ambushed by a group of Blackfoot warriors who intended to present him to the Crow for a handsome reward. The Blackfoot overtook Johnston and captured him, placing him in a teepee and binding him with leather straps. A young warrior guard was placed just outside. But Johnston turned out to be an unmanageable prisoner.

  Inside where he couldn't be seen, Johnston eventually managed to chew through the leather straps which bound him, and he slipped out of the exit. When he confronted the guard outside, Johnston-- who was a large man of about six feet and two hundred pounds-- landed a devastating blow to the man's nose before he was able to act. Johnston wasted no time in taking the warrior's knife, which he used to saw one of the Indian's legs off at the hip. Armed with the leg as a blunt instrument and with the warrior's knife, Johnston managed to fight his way out of the Blackfoot camp and make his escape into the woods.

  As Johnston began the two hundred mile journey back to his cabin, the guard's leg proved to be useful as more than just a weapon. He used it as a source of food for lack of anything better in the harsh winter, and it sustained him until he reached his destination.

  After almost twenty years and countless Crow deaths, Johnston finally ended his vendetta against the Crow and made peace. This truce was so complete that he thereafter referred to the members of the Crow tribe as "his brothers."

  Liver-Eating Johnson never ate another human liver, but during the Civil War he did join the Union Army in St. Louis. He worked as a sharpshooter, and was honorably discharged the following year. During the 1880s he was appointed deputy sheriff in Leadville, Colorado and later as a town marshal in Red Lodge, Montana.

  In December 1899, aged seventy-six years, the Crow Killer was admitted to a veteran's hospital in Los Angeles, where he died on January 21, 1900. He had lived a long and adventurous life, and his story was passed on through the generations. While some of the events from his life are verifiable, many of the stories are no doubt improved upon from over a century of retelling and embellishment.

  Originally published 22 January 2006

  http://dam.mn/liver-eating-johnson/

  Phineas Gage's Brain Injury (1848 AD)

  His "constant companion," an iron tamping rod.

  In 1848, a twenty-five-year-old construction foreman named Phineas Gage won nationwide fame by way of a hole in his head. While working on a railroad proje
ct in Vermont, he experienced a severe brain injury when a three-foot-long, fourteen pound tamping iron was violently propelled through his skull. Astonishingly, he lived to tell about it.

  At the time of the accident, one of Gage's duties was to set explosive charges to remove unwanted sections of large rocks. Typically, a long, narrow hole was drilled into the rock which was then filled with gunpowder and ignited. Before lighting the fuse, the hole was topped off with sand, and a three-foot-long, 1.25" diameter iron tamping rod was used to pack down the gunpowder. However on 13 September 1848, Gage was distracted momentarily while in the process of preparing a blast, and he neglected to add the protective barrier of sand. When he thrust the iron tamper into the hole in the rock, it created a spark, and the gunpowder was ignited.

  The resulting explosion propelled the fourteen pound iron rod straight into the air with the force of a cannon, causing it to pass through Gage's skull in the process. It entered through the bottom of his left cheekbone and exited through the top of his head, then continued to fly in an arc across the sky, landing almost 100 feet behind him.

  The unscheduled explosion got the attention of his fellow railroad workers, who rushed over to see if there was a problem. What they found was Phineas Gage slumped on the ground with a hole through his skull. Amazingly, the man was still alive and breathing. Even more amazingly, within moments his eyes were open and he was speaking to his fellow workers. The injured Gage was quickly loaded into a cart, and transported back to his boarding house, some 45 minutes away.

  When Dr. John Martyn Harlow arrived, Phineas was conscious and had a regular heartbeat, and both of his pupils reacted to light normally. He was reported to be "in full possession of his reason, and free from pain." He was under the care of Dr. Harlow for ten weeks, at which point he was sent home to Lebanon, New Hampshire. But while he was recovering, the doctor noted some changes in the man's demeanor and personality. People who had known him before the accident described him as hard-working, responsible, and popular with his workers, but after the traumatic injury, Phineas Gage was not the same man.

  In regards to his patient, Dr. Harlow wrote:

  Gage was fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was 'no longer Gage'.

  Several months after the accident Gage felt strong enough to return to work, yet due to his personality changes, his previous employers would not entrust him with the foreman position he had previously held. In the following years, he took various jobs caring for horses, driving stagecoaches, and doing some farm work. He also briefly appeared at a museum in New York which was curated by the infamous P. T. Barnum, alongside the tamping iron which had impaled his brain.

  Not much is known about his years after the injury, but eleven years after the accident, when he was aged thirty-seven years, Gage began to experience epileptic seizures. He died several months later, on 21 May 1860. His brain was not subjected to any medical examination at that time, but seven years later his body was exhumed so that his skull might be studied. It has since been subjected to much scrutiny.

  It was determined that damage occurred to Gage's skull in three places: There is a relatively small area under the cheek bone where the tamping iron first impacted, the orbital bone behind the eye socket, and very large hole where the iron rod emerged. The bone fragments over the exit wound were very skillfully put back in place by Dr. Harlow-- so much so that it was hardly visible from outside the skull-- but the original hole was about three and a half inches long by two inches wide.

  There is still some controversy over the extent of damage to Phineas' brain. It is certain that it passed through the anterior frontal cortex and white matter, but it has not been determined with certainty whether the lesion involved both frontal lobes or was limited only to the left side. In any case, the damage caused by the accident was roughly equivalent to a frontal lobotomy.

  Today, Gage's skull and the tamping rod which damaged it are on permanent display at Harvard's Countway Library of Medicine. The incident did much to advance the field of neurology, as it was among the first evidence suggesting that damage to the frontal lobes could alter aspects of personality and affect social skills. Before Gage's brain injury, the frontal lobes were largely thought to have little role in behavior.

  Originally published 16 January 2006

  http://dam.mn/phineas-gages-brain-injury/

  Better Call Sol (1859 AD)

  On 10 January 1709, pioneering weather observer William Derham recorded an historic event outside his home near London. He examined his thermometer in the frigid morning air and jotted an entry into his meticulous meteorological log. The prior weeks had been typical for an English winter, but overnight an oppressive cold had lodged itself over the Kingdom. As far as Derham was aware, London had never experienced so few millimeters of mercury as it did that morning: -12º C.

  The remarkable cold lingered in Europe for weeks. Lakes, rivers, and the sea froze over, and the soil solidified a meter deep. The cold cracked open trees, crushed the life out of livestock huddling in stables, and made travel a treacherous undertaking. It was the coldest winter in the past 500 years, and one of the coldest moments in a larger global phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age. Likely causes include volcanic activity, oceanic currents, and/or reforestation due to Black-Death-induced population decline. It is nearly certain, however, that it has something to do with the unusually low number of sunspots that appeared at that time, a phenomenon referred to as the Maunder minimum.

  We now know that such solar minima correlate quite closely with colder-than-normal temperatures on Earth, but science has yet to ascertain exactly why. Solar maximums, on the other hand, have historically had little noteworthy impact on the Earth apart from extra-splendid auroral displays. But thanks to our modern, electrified, interconnected society these previously innocuous events could cause catastrophic economic and social damage in the coming decades.

  Astronomers first began to monitor sunspots in the early 1600s. Although no one knew the nature of the dark blemishes on the surface of the sun, the sort of people who keep painstaking records of things began to keep painstaking records of sunspots. Scientists have since learned that sunscabs arise when the sun's magnetic field lines twist and tangle due to layers of plasma inside the sun rotating at different rates. This tangling produces magnetic loops which can protrude from the photosphere and smother the underlying convection, thereby decreasing the amount of heat reaching the surface. Sunspots only appear dark in contrast to the extremely bright areas around them; viewed in isolation a sunspot would still be quite squint-worthy. Over time the field lines become more and more tangled, resulting in more protruding loops, until the magnetic disarray reaches a tipping point at about 11 years where the magnetic field snaps into a new orientation and the cycle starts anew.

  Plasma traveling along magnetic loops protruding from the sun's photosphere.

  Occasionally these magnetic loops become so twisted that positive and negative sections are forced together, causing an explosive solar flare. The most potent of these coronal explosions can fling billions of tons of plasma out into space at about a million miles per hour in a coronal mass ejection (CME). During a solar minimum these events occur about once per week, and during a maximum they can o
ccur several times per day. The vast majority of CMEs belch off into unoccupied space, but occasionally we Earthlings happen to be in their path. Solar flares are classified A, B, C, M, or X based on the amount of electromagnetic energy they carry. C-class and smaller flares are too weak to cause any kerfuffle for humanity, M-class can cause minor inconvenience for astronauts and radio enthusiasts, and X-class are capable of serious geomagnetic agitation.

  A CME plasma wave is magnetically charged, with positive and negative poles inherited from the magnetic loop that spawned it. Consequently, when such a wave impacts the Earth's magnetic field the nature of the interaction depends upon the relative orientation of the two magnetic fields. The way that magnets work is that opposite poles attract and like poles repel; so if a powerful wave hits the Earth's magnetic field aligned mostly positive-to-positive, the plasma will be repelled. If it hits positive-to-negative essentially all of the plasma will pour into the atmosphere via the north and south poles, causing a geomagnetic storm.

  In late summer 1859, the sun was in a particularly persnickety solar maximum, and a complex cluster of tightly packed sunspots was drawing a lot of attention from astronomers. On 28 August the night sky was alight with brilliant auroras much further from the poles than usual. Operators of the fledgling telegraph system reported some unusual technical glitches the same evening. There were widespread outages, electrical arcs from telegraph receivers, and a few small fires at telegraph stations. Unbeknownst to the telegraphers and astronomers these effects were due to a CME causing extreme magnetic variation in the atmosphere. Faraday's law of induction observes that a magnetic field changing with time will induce a voltage changing with time, and some telegraph wires were long enough to be exposed to a quite a range of magnetic variation. Consequently a high-voltage induced current was created up and down the wires.