The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities From the History of Medicine

by Thomas Morris

  He went perpendicularly to the bottom, in which his feet stuck for sixteen hours before he was found. He himself says that he was no sooner underwater than he became rigid, and lost not only the power of motion, but also all his senses, except that of hearing, which was affected by the ringing of some bells at Stockholm.

  A strange predicament: stuck in a riverbed, listening to the church bells of Stockholm.

  He at first also perceived a kind of bladder before his mouth, which hindered the ingress of the water by that passage though it entered freely into his ears, and produced a dullness of hearing for some time after. This unfortunate man was in vain sought for during sixteen hours, at the end of which time he was taken up by means of a hook fixed in his head, and upon his total recovery said that he was sensible of that particular part of his fate.

  A hook in the head is something I would certainly prefer not to be aware of. But it’s better than being drowned, I suppose.

  Whether from the prevailing custom of the country, or the persuasion of particular persons, certain attempts were made in order to restore him to life: for this purpose he was wrapped up in blankets, lest the air entering too precipitately into his lungs should prove fatal to him. In this condition, being gradually warmed by means of sheets, he was rubbed and stimulated till the motion of his blood, which had been checked for so many hours, returned. At last he was totally restored by means of cordials, and anti-apoplectic liquors.

  The last of these remedies was a medicine produced by Dominican friars in Rouen, supposedly since the Middle Ages. Physicians all over Europe swore by their Elixir Anti-Apoplectique, whose recipe was a closely guarded secret—except that it included a lot of alcohol.

  He as yet bears the mark of the hook, and says that he is still subject to violent headaches. This singular accident, attested by the oaths of persons who had been eyewitnesses to it, induced the Queen to give him an annual pension, and he was introduced to the Prince, in order to give an account of what had befallen him.

  Sounds to me as if Her Majesty had been swindled. The Swedes seem to have specialized in this sort of thing, since Jackson goes on to give a second example, which at the time was thought so remarkable that the celebrated scholar Tilasius, librarian to the king of Sweden, signed a declaration swearing that it was true:

  There lately was in Dalia, commonly called Wormsland, a woman of the name of Margaret Larsdotter, who having the misfortune to be thrice drowned, remained the first time (she being then young) for three whole days under water, but the two other times had more speedy relief afforded her. She died in 1672, in the seventy-fifth year of her age.

  If you think three days underwater is stretching credibility a bit, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

  Some time ago, about four leagues from the town of Falung, a painter fell from a boat into the water in such a manner as to remain upright with his feet at the bottom. He was in vain searched for during eight days; at the end of which time, he appeared alive on the surface of the water.

  So he must have been submerged all that time, right? The local magistrate and priest were not entirely convinced, so interrogated him. They asked first whether he had been able to breathe underwater:

  To which he answered, he knew nothing of the matter.

  Convincing. They next asked

  Whether he had thought upon God and recommended his soul to him? To which he replied, very often.

  Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

  Whether he could see and hear? To which he answered, yes, and said that he would often have laid hold of the hooks employed in finding him, if he could have moved his arms. He also added that the fish proved highly offensive and uneasy to him, by the attacks they made on his eyes; and being asked by what means he guarded against these attacks, he answered, by moving his eyelids.

  These can’t have been particularly fearsome fish, if fluttering the odd eyelash was enough to put them off.

  When he was asked, whether had been sensible of hunger, and discharged his excrements? He replied, that he had not. Being interrogated, whether he had slept? He answered, he knew nothing of it, but believed he had, because he was some time deprived of all sensation and reflection; adding, that all the thoughts he remembered to have passed in his breast, had only God, and the means of his own deliverance, for their objects.

  A fine show of piety, but what was he really doing during the eight days that he was missing? One suspects that it was something a lot less holy than offering up watery prayers.

  None of these aqueous amateurs could come close to the undisputed underwater endurance champion, however. Rowland Jackson repeats a story first told by the Dutch-German physician Johann Nikolaus Pechlin in his 1676 work De aeris et alimenti defectu et vita sub aquis meditatio (Essay on Life Underwater in the Absence of Air or Food):

  The celebrated Mr Burmann assures us that in Boness of Pithovia* he heard a funeral sermon preached upon the death of one Laurence Jones, a man of seventy years of age, who as the preacher said, was drowned when sixteen years old; and continued seven weeks under water, notwithstanding which, he returned to life, and enjoyed good health.

  Right.

  However visionary and romantic this accident may appear, in the eyes of those who pretend to have divested their minds of vulgar errors, yet it has met with credit from the most penetrating and sagacious authors who lived at the time in which it happened.

  The general point is laudable—don’t dismiss things without thinking carefully about them first. But did a teenager really survive seven weeks underwater? I think you can answer that one for yourself.

  DEATH OF A 152-YEAR-OLD

  William Harvey is deservedly one of the most celebrated physicians who ever lived, despite the fact that he was an indifferent clinician with a notoriously poor bedside manner. His fame stems from the book he published in 1628, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise in the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals). De motu cordis, as it is generally known, documents the painstaking years of experimentation that led to his revolutionary discovery of the circulation of the blood.

  Harvey’s insight laid the foundations for a new era in medicine, so it’s hardly surprising that his other writings are much less well known. He also wrote a long treatise on animal reproduction from conception to birth, describing the anatomy of the sexual organs and investigating the development of an embryo chick in an egg. But his Complete Works also includes an intriguing and much shorter document, first published in abbreviated form in 1668: a report of a postmortem he conducted on the body of England’s oldest man:

  Thomas Parr, a poor countryman born near Winnington in the county of Salop, died on the 14th of November, in the year of grace 1635, after having lived one hundred and fifty-two years and nine months, and survived nine princes. This poor man, having been visited by the illustrious Earl of Arundel when he chanced to have business in these parts (his lordship being moved to the visit by the fame of a thing so incredible), was brought by him from the country to London; and, having been most kindly treated by the earl both on the journey and during a residence in his own house, was presented as a remarkable sight to his Majesty the King.

  Parr was something of a celebrity even before he was presented to Charles I. In the same year John Taylor, the Thames ferryman and self-styled “Water Poet,” published a pamphlet entitled The Old, Old, Very Old Man, a romanticized verse biography of the supposed centenarian. Alas, the excitement of a royal audience seems to have been too much for the old, old, very old man, for within a few weeks of his presentation at court, Mr. Parr breathed his last. The king commanded Harvey (and several other royal physicians) to examine his mortal remains. This is what he found:

  The body was muscular, the chest hairy, and the hair on the forearms still black; the legs, however, were without hair, and smooth. The organs of generation were healthy, the penis neith
er retracted nor extenuated, nor the scrotum filled with any serous infiltration, as happens so commonly among the decrepit; the testes, too, were sound and large; so that it seemed not improbable that the common report was true, viz, that he did public penance under a conviction for incontinence, after he had passed his hundredth year.

  The crime of which old Mr. Parr was convicted had nothing to do with his bladder; this was sexual incontinence, adultery with a woman called Katherine Milton. His “public penance” was described by John Taylor:

  For laws satisfaction, ’twas thought meet,

  He should be purg’d by standing in a sheet,

  Which aged (he) one hundred and five year,

  In Alberbury’s parish church did wear.

  Being made to stand in church in a white sheet was a common punishment for sexual misdemeanors. Mr. Parr was probably required to do so only during services, when all his fellow parishioners could see him.

  Having examined the exterior of the old man’s body from all angles, it was now time for the medics to look inside it.

  The chest was broad and ample; the lungs, nowise fungous,* adhered, especially on the right side, by fibrous bands to the ribs. Shortly before his death I had observed that the face was livid, and he suffered from difficult breathing and orthopnoea.

  Orthopnea is breathlessness that manifests when the patient is lying down, and is relieved by sitting or standing. Harvey’s description is strongly suggestive of advanced heart failure.

  The intestines were perfectly sound, fleshy, and strong, and so was the stomach: the small intestines presented several constrictions, like rings, and were muscular. Whence it came that, by day or night, observing no rules or regular times for eating, he was ready to discuss any kind of eatable that was at hand; his ordinary diet consisting of sub-rancid cheese, and milk in every form, coarse and hard bread, and small drink, generally sour whey. On this sorry fare, but living in his home, free from care, did this poor man attain to such length of days. He even ate something about midnight shortly before his death.

  “Sub-rancid cheese” does not sound like a particularly enjoyable or nutritious diet but is unlikely to have killed him outright.

  All the internal parts, in a word, appeared so healthy, that had nothing happened to interfere with the old man’s habits of life, he might perhaps have escaped paying the debt due to nature for some little time longer.

  Harvey and his eminent colleagues concluded that the old man’s death had been the result of his sudden move from the healthy air of Shropshire to the pollution and muck of London,

  a city whose grand characteristic is an immense concourse of men and animals, and where ditches abound, and filth and offal lie scattered about, to say nothing of the smoke engendered by the general use of sulphurous coal as fuel, whereby the air is at all times rendered heavy, but much more so in the autumn than at any other season.

  This observation may well have some truth behind it. Harvey adds that the rich fare on offer at the king’s table would have been a shock to his humble stomach:

  And then for one hitherto used to live on food unvaried in kind, and very simple in its nature, to be set at a table loaded with variety of viands, and tempted not only to eat more than wont, but to partake of strong drink, it must needs fall out that the functions of all the natural organs would become deranged.

  The report observes that Parr retained his mental faculties to the end, even at the age of 152; and then comes the devastating conclusion, which I would like to think a beautifully understated piece of professional skepticism:

  His memory, however, was greatly impaired, so that he scarcely recollected anything of what had happened to him when he was a young man, nothing of public incidents, or of the kings or nobles who had made a figure, or of the wars or troubles of his earlier life, or of the manners of society, or of the prices of things—in a word, of any of the ordinary incidents which men are wont to retain in their memories.

  Funny, that.

  Many attempts have been made to corroborate the unlikely chronology of Parr’s life. In the nineteenth century, his “last will and testament” was published, containing the recipe of a miracle elixir supposed to have been responsible for his incredible longevity; inevitably, it was a fabrication, a marketing ploy for a quack remedy called Parr’s Life Pills. Hard facts have been much more difficult to come by: Apart from one document proving that he was already married by 1588, the outlines of Thomas Parr’s biography remain frustratingly elusive.

  THE COMBUSTIBLE COUNTESS

  Do human beings ever burst into flames? Two hundred years ago, many people believed that they could, especially if the victim was female, elderly and a heavy drinker. Spontaneous human combustion became a fashionable topic in the early nineteenth century, after a number of sensational presumed cases were reported in the popular press. At a period when candles were ubiquitous and clothes often highly flammable, most were probably simple domestic fires in which the unfortunate victim’s subcutaneous fat acted as supplementary fuel. Nevertheless, the circumstances in which some were discovered—with the body almost totally incinerated, but nearby objects left untouched—led some to believe that these conflagrations must have another, more mysterious, cause. Numerous theories were put forward to explain the phenomenon: some supernatural, others scientific.

  One of the true believers in spontaneous combustion was Charles Dickens, who even killed off Krook, the alcoholic rag dealer in Bleak House, by means of a fire that left nothing of the old man except an object looking like a “small charred and broken log of wood.” Dickens had read everything he could find on the subject and was convinced that its veracity had been proved. His description of the demise of Krook was based closely on that of an Italian aristocrat, Countess Cornelia di Bandi, who was consumed by a fireball in her bedroom. Her case was reported in 1731 by a clergyman called Giuseppe Bianchini, and subsequently translated by a famous Italian poet and Fellow of the Royal Society, Paolo Rolli:

  The Countess Cornelia Bandi, in the 62nd year of her age, was all day as well as she used to be; but at night was observed, when at supper, dull and heavy. She retired, was put to bed, where she passed three hours and more in familiar discourses with her maid, and in some prayers; at last falling asleep, the door was shut.

  The following morning, the maid noticed that her employer had not appeared at the usual time and tried to rouse her by calling through the door. Not receiving any answer, she went outside and opened a window, through which she saw this scene of horror:

  Four feet distant from the bed there was a heap of ashes, two legs untouched from the foot to the knee with their stockings on; between them was the lady’s head; whose brains, half of the back part of the skull, and the whole chin, were burnt to ashes; amongst which were found three fingers blackened. All the rest was ashes, which had this particular quality, that they left in the hand, when taken up, a greasy and stinking moisture.

  Mysteriously, the furniture and linen were virtually untouched by the conflagration.

  The bed received no damage; the blankets and sheets were only raised on one side, as when a person rises up from it, or goes in; the whole furniture, as well as the bed, was spread over with moist and ash-coloured soot, which had penetrated the chest of drawers, even to foul the linen.

  The soot had even coated the surfaces of a neighboring kitchen. A piece of bread covered in the foul substance was given to several dogs, all of which refused to eat it. Given that it probably consisted of the carbonized body fat of their owner, their reluctance to indulge is understandable.

  In the room above it was, moreover, taken notice that from the lower part of the windows trickled down a greasy, loathsome, yellowish liquor; and thereabout they smelt a stink, without knowing of what; and saw the soot fly around.

  The floor was also covered in a “gluish moisture,” which could not be removed. Naturally, strenuous efforts were made
to establish what had caused the blaze, and several of Italy’s best minds were put to the problem. Monsignor Bianchini (described as “Prebendary of Verona”) was convinced that the fire had not been started by the obvious culprits:

  Such an effect was not produced by the light of the oil lamp, or of any candles, because common fire, even in a pile, does not consume a body to such a degree; and would have besides spread itself to the goods of the chamber, more combustible than a human body.

  Bianchini also considered the possibility that the blaze might have been caused by a thunderbolt but noted that the characteristic signs of such an event, such as scorch marks on the walls and an acrid smell, were absent. What, then, did cause the inferno? The priest came to the conclusion that ignition had actually occurred inside the woman’s body:

  The fire was caused in the entrails of the body by inflamed effluvia of her blood, by juices and fermentations in the stomach, by the many combustible matters which are abundant in living bodies, for the uses of life; and finally by the fiery evaporations which exhale from the settlings of spirit of wine, brandies, and other hot liquors in the tunica villosa* of the stomach, and other adipose or fat membranes.

  Bianchini claims that such “fiery evaporations” become more flammable at night, when the body is at rest and the breathing becomes more regular. He also points out that “sparkles” are sometimes visible when certain types of cloth are rubbed against the hair (an effect caused by discharges of static electricity) and suggests that something similar might have ignited the “combustible matters” inside her abdomen.

  What wonder is there in the case of our old lady? Her dullness before going to bed was an effect of too much heat concentrated in her breast, which hindered the perspiration through the pores of her body; which is calculated to about 40 ounces per night. Her ashes, found at four feet distance from her bed, are a plain argument that she, by natural instinct, rose up to cool her heat, and perhaps was going to open a window.