by Clay, Jeremy
Now comes the most extraordinary part of the story – the Staffordshire mode of bringing him to life, and it was as follows: A hole was dug in the ground large enough to receive Drewe’s head, and into this hole his head was put, face downwards, and carefully covered up in the ‘mother earth,’ with the exception of a small hole left when breathing time came.
Wonderful to relate, there were soon signs of returning life, and Drewe so far recovered as to ‘unearth’ himself. Brandy was administered to him, and he was soon himself again.
The Grantham Journal, October 25, 1873
Cocaine in Hay Fever
The therapeutical uses of cocaine are so numerous that the value of this wonderful remedy seems only beginning to be appreciated. Almost daily we hear of some disease or combination of symptoms in which it has been tried for the first time and has answered beyond expectation.
It appears strange that so intractable a complaint as hay fever should be amenable to its influence, and yet such is the case. The account given by Mr Watson, of the Westminster Hospital of his sufferings and subsequent cure by tabloids of cocaine, is too circumstantial to admit of doubt, even had we not received confirmatory evidence from many sources.
It has been objected on theoretical grounds that cocaine must of necessity be inoperative, or at all events of comparatively little use, in those cases in which symptoms of an asthmatic type prevail.
Curiously enough, however, it has been shown that cocaine, when applied to the mucous membrane of the nostrils, has the power of allaying even this spasm. The observation, too, is not new; for many months ago Dr Bosworth, professor of laryngology at Bellevue Hospital Medical College, published a detailed account of a case of spasmodic asthma completely cured by cocaine. He pointed out at the time that many inveterate cases of asthma are dependent on, or at all events associated with, nasal disorders, the relief of which is promptly followed by an abatement of all the distressing symptoms. If this principle of associated treatment should be carried on in its integrity, it will be difficult to assign the limits of its sphere of action.
The Manchester Evening News, July 18, 1885
Extraordinary Cure of Blindness
A correspondent of the Sheffield Telegraph writes: A most extraordinary cure of blindness has recently taken place to a gardener named Geo. Parker, aged 82, who resides at Rose Cottage, Brimington, near Chesterfield. He has been troubled with cataracts and nearly totally blind.
The old man in May last dreamed that he had been applying petroleum to his eyes and had recovered his sight. His sons and the doctor advised him not to try the experiment, fearing it would injure the eyes. He, however, last August commenced to rub petroleum over the right eye, and persevered with his treatment till in the course of a week or 10 days the right eye was restored to its former state.
He then commenced the same operation on the left eye, which had been blind for six years, and in 14 days from his first applying it was able to see a little with that one, but it was feared that the cataract being on the left eye so long it has affected the inner portion of the sight. The right eye still remains perfectly clear, and it has been pronounced by four doctors to be one of the most extraordinary cures on record.
The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, October 21, 1881
A Home-Coming and Thanksgiving
An aged couple in Medway, Mass., had a merry thanksgiving. At the outbreak of the war their only son ran away to sea, and served under Farragut at New Orleans and with Cushing in the Albemarle exploit.
Here all trace of the sailor was lost, and it was supposed that he was drowned in the river when the torpedo exploded. His sister died a few years ago, and his parents have been living in retirement and poverty.
Late one night a man with a scar on his face knocked at the door and requested a lodging. He was admitted by the old lady, who asked her aged husband to entertain the stranger while she was making a cup of tea for him. The stranger kept his hat on, and the old lady noticed that his eyes followed her every movement.
To the old man he represented that he had formerly lived in the neighbourhood. When asked his name he gave an evasive answer, but asked if James Merrisk lived there yet. ‘I am James Merrisk,’ answered the old man.
The old lady had been watching the stranger closely. Before he could utter another word she stepped quickly to his side, lifted the hat from his head, gazed a moment to his face, and sank into the arms outstretched to receive her, loudly screaming ‘Jim! Our Jim!’
‘Yes, your Jim; come home for thanksgiving,’ exclaimed the stranger, as he kissed the aged face with joy and turned to his father, whose frame was trembling with gratitude.
After a while he related the eventful history of his wanderings. He had been severely wounded by the explosion of the torpedo, as the scar on his face testified. He was pulled from the river by one of the boats which came to the relief of the crew of the Albemarle.
He lost his senses by the concussion and wound, but after the latter healed he was permitted to go at large as harmless, knowing nothing of himself, not even his name. Finally he fell into the employ of a former surgeon of the rebel army, and with him went to a plantation outside of Raleigh, N.C.
One day, however, the surgeon examined his wound and determined to try an experiment. He opened the wound in the head, and found the skull fractured and pressing in the brain. With the aid of another surgeon the skull was lifted or trepanned, and the wound again closed gradually. Merrisk’s condition improved, but it was fully a year before his memory returned.
The Grantham Journal, January 3, 1880
A Wonderful Recovery after 65 Years a Deaf Mute.
Dr Livingstone, a resident of the little village of Bennetsville, Chenango County, N.Y., has regained the power of speech and hearing after having been a deaf mute for nearly 65 years.
His wonderful recovery has excited much comment, and is regarded by many as a miracle. The old man is very well known in his own as well as adjoining counties. One night about two weeks ago he awoke in the night with a severe pain in his head, as if he had been struck with a club.
He called out to his wife, who was sleeping beside him. At the sound of his voice she awoke, astonished to hear him pronounce her name. She had never before heard him speak. As soon as she recovered from her surprise she asked him what was the matter. Her words were the first he had heard since he was an infant, and the revelation of his changed condition astounded him.
The pain in the meantime felt less acute, and he and his wife talked until morning of his wonderful recovery. The news spread quickly, and all the next day the doctor was overwhelmed with congratulations.
Conversation at first caused him great annoyance, but he has gradually become accustomed to it. His vocabulary, which at first was limited, has increased, and he has no difficulty in expressing himself. When Dr Livingstone was three years old a severe attack of scarlet fever left him entirely deaf. The few childish words he knew gradually were forgotten, and by the time he was six years old he became a mute.
Despite his past affliction the old man is intelligent and well-read. He is at a loss to account for his strange good fortune, and the physicians in the neighbourhood can shed no light on the mystery.
Dr Livingstone is anxious to have his case investigated by the medical fraternity in hope that some explanation as to his recovery can be given. The pain which he felt in his head gradually passed down his spine into his legs and then left him entirely. Though 71 years old he is in excellent health.
The Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, July 14, 1893
A New Disease
Attention has lately been drawn in one of our medical contemporaries to a disease met with in Siberia, known to the Russians by the name of ‘Miryachit.’
The person affected seems compelled to imitate anything he hears or sees, and an interesting account is given of a steward, who was reduced to a perfect state of misery by his inability to avoid imitating everything he hear
d and saw.
One day the captain of the steamer, running up to him, suddenly clapping his hands at the same time, accidentally slipped and fell hard on the deck. Without having been touched, the steward instantly clapped his hands and shouted; then, in helpless imitation, he, too fell as hard and almost precisely in the same manner and position as the captain.
This disease has been met with in Java, where it is known as ‘Lata.’ In the case of a female servant who had the same irresistible tendency to imitate, one day at dessert her mistress, wishing to exhibit this peculiarity, and catching the woman’s eye, seizing a large French plum, made pretence to swallow it whole.
The woman rushed at the dish and put a plum in her mouth, and, after severe choking and semi-asphyxia, succeeded in swallowing it, but her mistress never tried the experiment again.
The Western Daily Press, Bristol, June 25, 1884
Curious Cure For Insanity
Mrs Teresa Nally, wife of John Nally, a New York truckman, shot herself recently while insane. She had made many previous attempts to destroy herself.
Mrs Nally found the rifle, loaded it, placed the muzzle under her chin, and pressed the trigger with her toe. The bullet bored through her chin and tongue, and perforating the roof of her mouth, lodged in the brain.
The coroner, who took her ante-mortem statement, found that she had recovered her senses. She told him clearly and in an intelligent manner that she had been in ill-health for a long time, and had undergone a serious operation.
Commitment papers have been made out, and she is to be taken to the Long Island State Hospital, at King’s Park. ‘But I’m not crazy now,’ she said, ‘the bullet has cured me. I may die, but I won’t die crazy.’
The Worcestershire Chronicle, January 27, 1900
A Dumb Man Cured by Excitement
A curious ‘cure’ is exciting much interest in medical circles, as well as among the general public, in Germany. A twelvemonth ago a Bavarian cattle-dealer was kicked by a horse, with the result that he became quite dumb.
A day or two ago he was riding a horse to its fate in the knacker’s yard, when the animal suddenly began to plunge and kick. The man, taken by surprise, lost his head in wild excitement, and after a few moments began to talk, and completely regained language, to the boundless astonishment of his friends.
The Evening Telegraph, Dundee, August 9, 1895
An Octogenarian and his Drugs
Mr Coates, of Boston, Massachusetts, the millionaire, who intends bequeathing his collection of drugs to the University of Boston, gathered them together in rather a curious way.
He has reached the age of 83 years without ever having taken any medicine. It must not be thought, however, that he never called in medical men; on the contrary, he seems to have had recourse to his doctor whenever he had the slightest ailment. He had all the prescriptions religiously executed at the chemist’s.
Only, he never swallowed the drugs, but carefully put them away in his cupboard, and today he finds himself the possessor of a most original collection – 1,900 bottles of sundry medicines, 1,370 boxes of various powders, and 870 boxes of pills.
The Evening Telegraph, Dundee, September 8, 1894
Curious Cure for Headache
A noted physician has, it is said, met with great success in his treatment of persistent cases of ‘nervous’ headaches, and he has finally disclosed the secret. In each case, he says, after the patient had laid bare a long tale of woe – of sleepless nights and miserable days – he prescribed, briefly, a simple hair cut.
It is not necessary that the hair should be cropped-off short, after the fashion of convicts. The curative property of the treatment is based on the fact that the tube which is contained in each single hair is severed in the process, and the brain ‘bleeds,’ as the barbers say, thereby opening a safety valve for the congested cranium.
The Lincolnshire Chronicle, June 2, 1896
Remarkable Determination of a Boy.
Cutting Off His Own Finger
A Galashiels correspondent telegraphs: An extraordinary occurrence took place near here on Sunday. A boy named Brockie, the son of a shepherd at Buckholm, was out with the sheep when he was bitten on the finger by an adder.
He became alarmed lest the bite should prove fatal, and resolved to cut the finger off close to the palm. This he attempted to do with his pocket-knife, but as it would not cut through the bone he cut it away at the first joint. He then went to the nearest farmhouse, whence he was driven to Galashiels. Here a doctor amputated the remainder of the finger. The lad refused to take chloroform, and, although weak is doing well.
The Evening Telegraph and Star, Sheffield, August 25, 1891
Paris ‘Pigeon’ Cure.
An Extraordinary Superstition
If the following facts, writes a Paris correspondent, were not vouched for by a highly distinguished physician, Dr G. Legue, it would be permissible to regard them as an invention suggested by sundry of the marvellous ‘cures’ in vogue in the Middle Ages.
Dr Legue was put on the track of his curious discovery by one of his patients, who informed him in the most casual manner, and as if there were nothing extraordinary about the statement, that she had tried the ‘pigeon cure’ for meningitis, and for the first time with limited success. Dr Legue had to confess his entire ignorance of the cure in question, and to ask for an explanation of its nature.
It was then revealed to him that in this sceptical age, and in Paris, of all places in the world, there are people who believe in the efficaciousness, as a remedy for certain maladies, of the blood of a freshly killed pigeon.
The head of the patient to be treated is shaved, and then the breast of the pigeon is ripped open by the ‘operator,’ and the warm and bleeding carcase immediately applied to the bared skull.
The believers in this cruel and senseless cure imagine that all fever is drawn out of the body by the hot life blood and the quivering flesh of the pigeon. The extraordinary thing is that faith in the cure is widespread, and recourse to it frequent.
Dr Legue, who had thoroughly investigated the matter, has been able to obtain the address of the shop in the Central Markets at which nothing else is sold but live pigeons destined to this strange purpose. The business done is so brisk that the late proprietor, Mme. Michel, has been able to retire, after making a small fortune.
Her successor declares that the pigeon cure is considered a sovereign remedy for influenza, since the appearance of which she has been unable to meet the demand that has arisen for birds. They are also used, it seems, in cases of typhoid fever, but in this instance two pigeons are necessary, and they are applied to the feet of the patient.
The Evening Post, Dundee, February 15, 1900
COINCIDENCE and LUCK
Preface
They buried the Truby boys in one grave. Three brothers, side by side in the Pennsylvanian dirt.
They’d died within twelve hours of each other; three lives snuffed out in three separate accidents that brought three separate messengers to their bewildered mother’s door.
Railwayman John was the first to go, breaking his neck on a summer’s night in 1885 when he tripped while running to change the points on the track. Before word of his death reached home, his brother Jason stumbled into a quarry pit filled with rainwater, striking his head as he fell. The news arrived in their village just as the body of their older brother Wyman was being carried out from the mill where he worked. He’d suffocated in a grain silo.
Just when you think this desolate story couldn’t get much worse, the newspaper report turns to the widowed Mrs Truby, concluding with one of the most cheerless closing sentences of the century: ‘The succession of cruel blows so overwhelmed her that she is not expected to live.’
Coincidence was a recurring theme in the work of many of the nineteenth century’s greatest authors, and a regular motif in newspapers of the era too. At a time when science was hacking away at the old certainties, the Victorians liked to savour life’s s
urprises.
And some of them liked it to an irksome extent. An article in the New Monthly Magazine in 1852 tore into the types who saw parallels wherever they looked. ‘The life of the coincidentalist is a perpetual succession of wonders, though nothing after all is new to him. If you mention to him some casual circumstances, too trivial for remembrance beyond the moment of its occurrence, he receives it like an old acquaintance. He finds a subject for comparison in everything and nothing happens that is not extraordinary, surprising or remarkable.’
There must have been a fair few of them working in journalism. A search for the phrase ‘singular coincidence’ in the British Newspaper Archive throws up more than 10,000 articles.
Extraordinary Occurrence
An extraordinary coincidence is reported as having occurred in Dublin Bay. The other morning two Ringsend fishermen, named James Hodgens and George Roden, were fishing in a trawler about six miles east of Howth when, on drawing in the net, they were horrified to find that it contained the body of a man.
On the remains being pulled into the trawler the features were examined and one of the men, Roden, discovered the body to be that of his own brother, who was also a fisherman, and who was drowned in the bay on the 14th December, 1890.
The Star, Guernsey, December 8, 1891
Father and Son Killed by Mare and Foal
About twelve months ago a groom in the employ of a gentleman at Dyserth, near Rhyl, was kicked to death by a mare belonging to his employer, who at once, of course, got rid of the brute.
