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

by Thomas Morris

  Mrs. Friend, it seems, died in February 1830, very suddenly, having retired to rest almost in her usual health, and was lifeless before 3 o’clock the next morning. She was a hale, hearty old lady, 68 years of age, almost unacquainted with disease. It becoming necessary to remove the bodies of those buried in the ground described, the coffin of Mrs. F. was taken up with the rest, and was found to exhibit no indication whatever of decay; being as solid as when first placed in the earth.

  As the gravediggers lifted the coffin out of its not-so-final resting place, the lid was accidentally knocked off it. “An astonishing spectacle presented itself,” the report continues:

  The face and neck of Mrs. Friend exhibited all the fullness which it possessed in life, and indeed, the cheeks were somewhat larger, and, with the exception of the absence of the eyes, there was not the slightest appearance of decay. The surface, however, was covered with a thick, filmy white mould, and upon removing it, the skin presented the fairest, purest surface ever seen on alabaster! The flesh was as solid and hard as the purest sperm, and as perfectly free from disagreeable odor!

  You may be relieved to learn that the word sperm here has nothing to do with spermatozoa but is short for spermaceti, a hard, white waxy substance found in the head of the sperm whale. At this date, it was commonly used in the manufacture of medicines, cosmetics and candles.

  On further examination the whole person was found to be in the same wonderful state of preservation; body and limbs presented the same hard, undecayed appearance. Of 200 dead bodies interred in this burial ground this is the only one that has not returned to dust. The cap on her head, and the ribbons, had preserved their form and color.

  It sounds quite uncanny—but also entirely plausible. In Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658), Sir Thomas Browne’s celebrated meditation on death and interment customs, the author describes a body he saw exhumed ten years after its burial: A decade in damp soil had “coagulated large lumps of fat into the consistence of hardest castle-soap.”* In 1789, the French chemist Antoine François de Fourcroy made the same observation in bodies dug up from the Cemetière des Innocents in Paris, coining the term adipocere—meaning “fatty wax”—to describe it. The phenomenon is rare but most often occurs when a corpse is buried in a moist and oxygen-free environment. In suitable conditions, the combined action of enzymes and anaerobic bacteria slowly converts body fat into a white waxy material that after several years can become hard and shiny. One spectacular example of the phenomenon is a female cadaver disinterred in Philadelphia in 1875: Known as the Soap Lady, she is still on display at the city’s Mütter Museum.

  As for Mrs. Friend, a few days after she was dug up, her family—presumably rather shocked to see her again, sixteen years after her death—made preparations to rebury her at Harlem, on the other side of Central Park:

  But, fearing that there might be danger of its removal for scientific or other purposes, they had it taken up and conveyed back to the house, and with the original coffin enclosed in a mahogany case, with a lid entirely of glass, there it now lies, the subject of great interest to numbers who visit it daily.

  How tasteful—a real conversation piece, and no doubt the envy of her neighbors. Alas, there is no word on the subsequent fate of Mrs. Friend’s mortal remains; maybe she’s still propped up in a corner of somebody’s front parlor. Still, it might have been worse: According to an 1852 report in Scientific American, a large discovery of adipocere at a disused cemetery in Paris was put to ghoulish use . . .

  . . . by the soap boilers and tallow chandlers of Paris, for the manufacture of soap and candles. The French are a people of fine sentiment, and they certainly carried the quality to a charming point of reflection in receiving light from candles made out of the bodies of their fathers.

  I’m all in favor of recycling, but I think that’s taking things a bit far.

  THE SLUGS AND THE PORCUPINE

  According to an old journalistic adage, the correct answer to any yes/no question posed by a newspaper headline is always no. For example:

  “Do these incredible photos prove the Yeti is real?”

  “Did solar flares cause the London riots?”

  “Has a UFO been spotted crossing the moon?”*

  And, most glaringly, “Could x offer a cure for cancer?” whether x stands for “green tea,” “meditation” or “snake oil.”*

  This dependable rule of thumb, sometimes known as Betteridge’s law, applies in spades to the headline attached to an article by the London surgeon David Dickman, published in December 1859:

  To which the correct answer is indeed no. But the case report is well worth reading, if only to marvel at the sheer depths of the author’s credulity.

  Sarah Ann C., aged 12 years, had for the last two months complained of feeling sick at times, particularly after meals. On the 5th of August last, she vomited up a large garden slug, which was alive and very active. On the 6th she brought up two, both alive; and on the night of the 7th she was seized with violent vomiting and relaxation of the bowels, and threw up five more of various sizes, the smallest two inches long, and all alive.

  This is, of course, highly unlikely. The human stomach is a strongly acidic environment, maintained at a pH of between 1.5 and 2 when empty. During meals, when the gastric acid is diluted by food and drink, it can approach neutral (pH 7), but reverts to its usual level after a few hours. While some habitual parasites can survive in such extreme conditions, slugs are not among them.

  On the morning of the 8th, when I first saw her, vomiting and purging had ceased, and she complained of great pain in the left region of the stomach, and headache. I gave her opiate powders, which relieved her in every way until the afternoon of the 9th, when she felt something crawling up her throat.

  Creepy!

  This sensation brought on the most violent efforts of vomiting to expel what she felt at the upper part of her throat, and she frequently introduced her fingers to seize what she felt, but did not succeed. I happened to call just when all this suffering was beginning to subside, at which time the sensation was felt lower—about halfway between the mouth and stomach.

  A skeptic might remark that this was rather convenient, because it meant that the doctor would not be able to spy the creature by looking down the girl’s throat.

  As expulsion by vomiting seemed hopeless, it occurred to me that ammonia and camphor might destroy the creature, and that the digestive powers of the stomach would do the rest when the animal was dead. The dose was repeated every four hours for two days, and afterward three times a day for two days more, with entire success. After the first dose of the ammonia and camphor, all sensation of movement ceased; and she now seems as well as ever she was.

  Success is here rather loosely defined, since the surgeon had only the girl’s word for it that any “crawling” had taken place in the first place. He then offers an explanation for the original symptoms:

  During the summer she had gone frequently into the garden and eaten freely of its produce, especially of lettuces, of which she was very fond. It appears to me that a family of very young slugs had been feeding on the lettuces, which the child had swallowed with very little mastication, and the gastric juice not being strong enough to act on them when alive, they fed and grew in their new habitation to their usual dimensions.

  So, according to Mr. Dickman’s piercing analysis, these hypothetical slugs had survived for days or even weeks inside the girl’s stomach.

  During the time they must have been in the stomach, she was fonder than ever of vegetables and fruits, and would put aside the meat on her plate, and eat the vegetables only.

  Considerately providing her mollusk parasites with their favored diet, a theme on which our gullible medic expands.

  The three slugs that came up first were not preserved; but at my request the five others have been kept alive and fed on vegetables, which they preferred being cooked, havi
ng at first refused to eat them raw.

  What is this, if not proof?

  They are now fed on raw vegetables.

  A mystifying aside that rather suggests he had decided to keep them as pets. Mr. Dickman concludes his article with further evidence of his willingness to believe any old nonsense.

  Another circumstance connected with my interesting patient is, that she was born without the left hand. During pregnancy the mother was frightened by a porcupine that an organ boy had in the street; and an impression ever after remained on her mind that something would not be right with the child’s hand.

  A scenario that will be familiar from the tale of the “snake man” elsewhere in this chapter. To be fair to Mr. Dickman, many people still believed that the mother’s imagination could affect the physical characteristics of the child, but by 1859, most professional medics would have scoffed at the idea. In fact, the story is an unusual combination of two venerable folk traditions, since tales of slugs, snakes, insects and other unlikely creatures living happily inside the human stomach have also been around for centuries. Sometimes known as “bosom serpents,” these beasts feature in the folklore of cultures all over the world. Reports of similar infestations were submitted to medical journals with such frequency that in 1865 an American doctor decided to investigate whether it really was possible for slugs to inhabit the human stomach.

  Dr. J. C. Dalton, a professor of physiology from New York, made a couple of obvious points that his London colleague had overlooked: Slugs are air-breathing, soft-bodied animals that could not possibly survive inside the human digestive tract without being suffocated and then digested. Not content with mere theorizing, Dr. Dalton turned to experiment, and found—surprise, surprise—that when slugs were immersed in stomach acid, they were dead in a matter of minutes, and completely digested in a couple of hours. The answer to the question “Can the garden slug live in the human stomach?” was an unqualified “NO.”

  So what was wrong with Sarah Ann? Her illness was probably mental rather than physical—like that of Mary Riordan, the Irish woman we encountered at the beginning of this chapter, it manifested in symptoms that, while bogus, were so peculiar and exotic that they could not fail to arouse astonishment and concern. But whatever it was that ailed her, it certainly wasn’t a family of mollusks sitting inside her stomach, munching contentedly on fresh vegetables.

  THE AMPHIBIOUS INFANT

  In June 1873, a new periodical entitled Medical Notes and Queries hit the shelves of Britain’s bookshops. Written by “a large staff of eminent medical authorities,” it was aimed at the general public, specifically the “tens of thousands of persons who lack either the means or the opportunity to call in a medical man at a moment’s notice for every trifling ailment.” Both in title and format, it was a shameless rip-off of the hugely successful Notes and Queries, a literary and antiquarian journal* founded twenty-four years earlier: Readers were encouraged to send their medical questions, which were then answered by experts.

  These “queries” were prefaced by several pages of “notes,” brief and breezy articles dealing with everything from the benefits of cod-liver oil to the best thing to drink in hot weather.* But in the inaugural issue of Medical Notes and Queries one news item stands out:

  A story of an “Amphibious Infant” has found its way into some of the London papers. The subject is introduced thus: “Strange results of very early training: a baby that paddles around under water for twenty-five minutes; a German who has succeeded in making his dog and infant amphibious.”

  Er, what?

  Dr Louis Schultz, of Chicago . . .

  I must pause here to point out that “Dr.” Schultz was nothing of the sort. Though fascinated by medicine during his youth in Prussia, he had no formal training or qualifications. He was a butcher, and when he enlisted for military service, it was perhaps his skill at jointing carcasses that resulted in his appointment as a surgeon’s assistant. That is, until

  an unfortunate blunder with the knife, resulting in the death of a wounded soldier, ended his medical career ingloriously.

  In short: not a doctor, by any stretch of the imagination. Anyway, “Dr.” Schultz

  arrived at the conclusion that the reason why amphibious animals have the power of living under water, and terrestrial animals have not, is because in the former the “oval hole in their hearts” remains patent,* whereas in the latter it closes from disuse.

  The “oval hole,” known as the foramen ovale, is an opening between the left and right atria, the upper two chambers of the heart. This is one of two temporary channels that are a feature of the fetal circulation.* When a fetus is still in the womb, it has no need of its lungs, since the blood is oxygenated by the mother via the placenta. The ductus arteriosus and foramen ovale allow most of the circulation to bypass the lungs during gestation; their job done, they usually close naturally within a few days of birth.

  If by any means this foramen ovale could be prevented from closing, then he should expect that animals which now live on land only would be able to acquire aquatic habits also; for the blood which passes through the lungs while the animal is on land would be able to circulate from right side to left through the “oval hole” when they were below water.

  If “Dr.” Schultz was attempting to take credit for this idea, he was being dishonest. The great eighteenth-century naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, had made the same (incorrect) assertion a century earlier. In a chapter of his Natural History devoted to aquatic mammals such as seals and walruses, Buffon wrote:

  By means of this perpetual aperture . . . these animals have the advantage of breathing or not at pleasure.

  Buffon believed that diving mammals were able to stay underwater for long periods because their blood bypassed the lungs while they were immersed, allowing it to circulate even while they held their breath. He was completely wrong: The reason they are so good at diving is that the muscles of such animals (unlike those of humans) contain high levels of myoglobin, a protein that stores large amounts of oxygen. Nevertheless, the fake doctor Schultz was convinced:

  Dr Schultz resolved to experiment. Having some newborn setter puppies, he within an hour after birth immersed them in water heated to blood heat, and kept them under first for two minutes, subsequently for five minutes; and, finding that no unpleasant consequences followed, he soared to the determination of experimenting upon his own infant son.

  Or, to put that another way: Having narrowly failed to drown a litter of puppies, he resolved instead to drown his own son. The Chicago Times published a detailed account of this quite astonishing display of parental idiocy:

  One rainy, windy night, Louis Schultz, Jr., was ushered into the world. The midwife was dismissed as soon as convenient. The child was, if anything, small and delicate. The exhausted mother was now sleeping; all attendants had gone, when Schultz, pale and agitated, at two a.m. on the morning of September 20th, proceeded to execute his unnatural resolution. Stealthily he took the babe from the bed of the young mother.

  That’s right: In order to perform this appallingly reckless experiment, he had to kidnap his own newborn son.

  Water, heated to about blood heat, was placed in a common tin pail; the reckless father laid his open watch on the table in front of him, and without hesitation immersed his infant with his own hands for the space of four minutes, keeping one hand on the babe’s breast, so that the pulsations of the heart could be felt. Schultz stated that it was more than twenty seconds after immersion before the blood found its way again along its old channel, with a bounding percussion which startled him with its power, while it relieved his anxious suspense. Feeling, then, the apparently natural beating of the heart, he had no more anxiety, but upon removing the babe from its dreadful situation, it was ten seconds before the lungs resumed their duties and the circulation proceeded in the natural manner.

  As if this weren’t already bad
enough, it transpires that Schultz continued his investigations without bothering to mention it to his wife.

  During the ensuing day this thrilling experiment was repeated no less than five times, the father always seizing the opportunity when the child awoke crying to take him into the other room for the ostensible purpose of wishing to look at and pacify him, but in reality to renew his hazardous experiment.

  Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Schultz was not so happy about it when she found out.

  It was not until his wife was able to leave her bed that Schultz found it necessary to acquaint her with his proceedings, and he then informed her as delicately as he could, assuring her there was no danger to the child, but a certain fortune to them if she kept the matter a secret. But poor Mrs. Schultz could not understand it, and it is not surprising that the shock occasioned by this unheard-of intelligence prostrated her again for nearly two weeks.

  Let’s face it, her objections were not exactly unreasonable.

  In spite of the severity of the winter, Schultz never neglected the regular immersion of his child five times a day, for periods of time ranging from five minutes to, on one occasion, 25. On this latter occasion considerable maceration was observed, and immersion for so long a time was not repeated.

  Maceration is a white pallor, the consequence of prolonged soaking in water. The newspaper’s journalist claimed to have witnessed the amphibious child in action:

  The boy is a golden, curly-haired, blue-eyed little fellow, and exhibits physical powers uncommon in a child of his age. His flesh is hard, white and shining, and the writer was assured the infant was entirely free from the peevishness and fretfulness common to children of that tender age. A room is fitted up especially for him, containing a large bathtub with a thermometer suspended in it, and the writer was allowed to witness his immersion. The father slated that very often he would voluntarily enter the water, but usually they were obliged to resort to some compulsion.