April, 2011
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April 4, 2011 Today’s Frankensteinian Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Another great moment in the history of severed head research: In 1879, a murderer-rapist-necrophiliac named Prunier was guillotined in France and five minutes later, the head was given to Dr. E. Decaisne and his two colleagues. One doctor poised his lips over Prunier’s ear and shouted “Prunier” over and over but neither the eyes nor any part of the face showed any awareness. They tried pinching him, giving him ammonia smelling salts, put a candle flame near his eyeball. All negative, that is, until the experimenters tried jolting body parts with electricity. With Frankensteinian aplomb, they were able to make the eyelids flutter, teeth chatter. Taking the trunk, they were able to make his legs and arms move. “The [dead man's] fingers came to lock very firmly onto the hand of one of the researchers,” wrote Dr. Decaisne in the Bulletin de l’académie de medicin. “These muscular reactions persisted an hour and a half after decapitation, that is to say, at a time when other victims have been given over to the grave-diggers.” Culled from: An Underground Education |
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April 5, 2011 Today’s Petrified Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Dominican Republic health officials say they have removed the mummified remains of a fetus from the abdomen of a 59-year-old woman, who had no clue what was causing the sharp pain in her stomach for decades. Miladys Roman is the chief gynecologist at Luis Eduardo Aybar Hospital in Santo Domingo. She says the woman had carried the petrified fetus for at least 30 years. The Haitian woman told physicians she had long experienced pain but she never received adequate medical attention until she recently entered the public hospital with digestive complaints. Roman told reporters late Monday that the remains of the fetus weighed 3 pounds and 12 ounces Culled
from: WCVBTV.Com I wonder if she got to keep it? What a fine curio that would be! |
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April 7, 2011 Today’s Seething Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Sometime in the mid-1950's a young and inexperienced Scottish doctor called Murdoch was working as a locum junior surgeon in a hospital on a Shell oil field in Sarawak, Borneo. There were four doctors on the staff of the hospital looking after a workforce of 10,000 people, and they also offered a free service to the local people in the surrounding jungle. One afternoon a young man was brought in looking very sorry for himself. There were runnels of dried blood all over his face and his hand was firmly pressed to the top of his head as if he were holding on a hat. Murdoch sat the injured man down on a chair and asked him to put his hand down. When he complied, about half of his scalp fell forward over his face covering his eyes and nose. The inner surface of the scalp and the exposed part of his cranium were covered with a seething mass of maggots. Murdoch was taken aback, but he got the patient over to a sink, put a length of rubber tubing on the tap, and washed the wrigglers out. He was able to sew up the scalp and within a few days, the patient was discharged from the hospital. As the man was leaving, a friend explained the cause of the injury. The friend had been giving the injured man a ride on the cross bar of his bicycle along a jungle path when they hit a bump. The patient had fallen off and struck his head on a large stone. The friend, assuming he had been killed, and aware that the fine for riding two to a bicycle was $5, had left him where he lay and said nothing. The large, bleeding scalp wound had, of course, attracted flies and he had lain there, unconscious, for three or four days, during which time the eggs had hatched. Dr Murdoch later said, “Never before or since have I seen such remarkable wound healing. One thing is sure – I can certainly take no credit for the outcome. That, clearly, must go to the maggots.” Culled from: Medical Curiosities : A Miscellany of Medical Oddities, Horrors and Humors |
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April 8, 2011 Today’s Bestial Yet Truly Morbid Fact! In November 1937, after their successful invasion of Shanghai, the Japanese launched a massive attack on Nanking, the newly established capital of the Republic of China. When the city fell on December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers began an orgy of cruelty seldom if ever matched in world history. An estimated 20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of a “bestial machinery”. Tens of thousands of young men were rounded up and herded to the outer areas of the city, where they were mowed down by machine guns, used for bayonet practice, or soaked with gasoline and burned alive. For months the streets of the city were heaped with corpses and reeked with the stench of rotting human flesh. Years later experts at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East estimated that more than 260,000 noncombatants died at the hands of Japanese soldiers at Nanking in late 1937 and early 1938, though some experts have placed the figure at well over 350,000. The death toll of Nanking – one Chinese city alone – exceeds the number of civilian casualties of some European countries for the entire war. (Great Britain lost a total of 61,000 civilians, France lost 108,000, Belgium 101,000, and the Netherlands 242,000.) Culled from: The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II |
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April
9, 2011 The 1918 Influenza epidemic killed at least 20 million, and possibly more than 100 million, people worldwide but the true number can never be known. Many places that were bludgeoned by the flu did not keep mortality statistics, and even in countries such as the United States, efforts at tabulating flu deaths were complicated by the fact that there was no definitive test in those days to show that a person actually had the flu. But still, the low end of the mortality estimates is stunning. In comparison, AIDS had killed 11.7 million people through 1997. World War I was responsible for 9.2 million combat deaths and around 15 million total deaths. World War II for 15.9 million combat deaths. Historian Alfred W. Crosby remarks that whatever the exact number felled by the 1918 flu, one thing is indisputable: the virus “killed more humans than any other disease in a period of similar duration in the history of the world.” Culled from: Flu : The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic |
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April
10, 2011 Today’s Plentiful Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Real-life cowboys are remembered for bellying up to the bar, but many legendary figures, including Wild Bill Hickock and Kit Carson, preferred opium dens over saloons. During the Civil War, morphine was frequently more plentiful to the troops than food rations, such that veterans on both sides, an estimated 50,000 people, became opium addicts. In 1900 morphine addiction was considered such a serious social epidemic that a group called the Saint James Society offered free heroin in the mail to anyone wishing to kick morphine. By 1925 there were 200,000 heroin addicts in the U.S. Kit Carson died of a “ruptured artery in his throat,” a typical complication caused by smoking opium. Culled from: Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages Damn, heroin for free in the mail???? Now I know why they called them the Good Old Days! |
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April
11, 2011 Exiled emperor Napoleon Bonaparte died on May 5, 1821. The following day, doctors conducted an autopsy, which was reportedly witnessed by many people, including a priest named Ange Vignali. Though the body was said to be largely intact at the time of the undertaking, it seems the priest took home a souvenir. In 1916, Vignali’s heirs sold a collection of Napoleonic artifacts, including what they claim to be the emperor’s penis. While no one knows for sure if it really is Napoleon’s, uh, manhood, people have paid good money for the penis. Currently, it’s in the possession of an American urologist. Culled
from: Neatorama |
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April
12, 2011 On January 29, 1393, at the behest of French king Charles VI, a grand party was organized to celebrate the wedding of one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting at the Hotel de Saint Pol. The lady, twice widowed, was being married for the third time. A woman’s re-marriage was considered an occasion for mockery and often celebrated with all sorts of license, disguises, disorders, and loud blaring of discordant music and clanging of cymbals outside the bridal chamber. King Charles had let himself be persuaded by friends to join in a charade. Six young men, including the King, disguised themselves as “wood savages,” in costumes of linen cloth sewn onto their bodies and soaked in resinous wax or pitch to hold a covering of frazzled hemp, “so that they appeared shaggy and hairy from head to foot.” Face masks entirely concealed their identity. Aware of the risk they ran in torch-filled halls, they forbade anyone carrying a torch to enter during the dance. The deviser of the affair, “cruelest and most insolent of men,” was Huguet de Guisay, a man of wicked life who held commoners and the poor in hatred and contempt. If a servant displeased him, he would force the man to lie on the ground and, standing on his back, would kick him with spurs, crying, “Bark, dog!’ in response to his cries of pain.
In their Dance of the Savages, the masqueraders capered before the revelers, imitating the howls of wolves and making obscene gestures while the guests tried to discover their identity. Charles was teasing and gesticulating before the 15-year-old Duchesse de Berry when Louis d’Orléans and Phillipe de Bar entered the hall accompanied by torches despite the ban. Whether to discover who the dancers were, or deliberately courting danger, Louis held up a torch over the capering monsters. A spark fell, a flame flickered up a leg, first one dancer was afire, then another. The Queen, who alone knew that Charles was among the group, shrieked and fainted. The Duchese de Berry, who had recognized the King, threw her skirt over him to protect him from the sparks, thus saving his life. The room filled with the guests’ sobs and cries of horror and the tortured screams of the burning men. Guests who tried to stifle the flames and tear the constumes from the writhing victims were badly burned. Except for the King, only one other man, who flung himself into a large winecooler filled with water, escaped. The Count de Joigny was burned to death on the spot. Yvain de Foix and Aimery Poitiers died after two days of painful suffering. Huguet de Guisay lives for three days in agony, cursing and insulting his fellow dancers, the dead and the living, until his last hour. When his coffin was carried through the streets, the common people greeted it with cries of “Bark, dog!” Culled from: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century |
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April
14, 2011 Dr. Horst Schumann, SS-Sturmbannführer, participated in brutal sterilization and castration experiments at Auschwitz and was particularly interested in the mass sterilization of Jews by means of X-rays. Schumann’s brutalization in Auschwitz is also revealed by a lesser-known research project he conducted on a fungus condition of the face, a form of ringworm spread by large numbers of men being shaved with the same brush. Although experience had shown that the condition could be readily treated with various medicines, Schumann seized the occasion to try the efficacy of his X-rays. These caused severe skin eruptions and infections, and in many victims impairment of salivary and tear-duct functions along with paralysis of face and eyes, which in turn caused a number of men to be send to the gas chamber. Culled from: The Nazi Doctors |
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April
15, 2011 Gettysburg resident Elizabeth S. Myers gave an interesting account of the death of one Union soldier shot on July 1, 1863 at the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg, who perished either in her house or nearby in one of the field hospitals of the First Army Corps. Myers was a local teacher who lived on West High Street in Gettysburg. On the first day of battle many Union field hospitals were initially set up in the borough. The overflow of wounded from the churches and other public buildings ended up in a few private dwellings. She stated the following regarding Corporal Wilson D. Race, Company A, 149th Pennsylvania Infantry, 2nd Brigade, 3rd Division 1st Corps: Wilson Race was wounded on the 2nd [actually the 1st], through the lungs, but the wound was of such a nature that the physician entertained hopes of his recovery. I wrote for his father and he came a short time after, intending to take him home as soon as he was able to travel. His father was much excited at the thought of meeting his son under such circumstances that he did not give me sufficient time to inform him of his arrival, but rushed to him and the two wept in each other’s arms. He never recovered from the shock, but commenced to decline. His father’s business would not allow him to remain more than a few days, and he started for home, leaving directions for me in reference to Wilson. Wilson was very calm and spoke but little. In a conversation with me the evening before his death, he remarked, ‘I have always been governed by religious principles.’ He died on the 25th and the body was embalmed and sent home. The 149th Infantry claimed 336 casualties out of 450 engaged; most were lost along the Chambersburg Pike on the Edward McPherson farm. Culled from: Killed In Action: Eyewitness Accounts of the Last Moments of 100 Union Soldiers Who Died at Gettysburg |
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April
17, 2011 In his will, English novelist Thomas Hardy specifically requested to be buried with his beloved first wife. His friends, however, didn’t think this was good enough for the author and lobbied to have him buried in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey instead. An ugly fight between Hardy fans and family ensued, until they reached a compromise. The author’s heart was removed and buried with his wife; his ashes were preserved in a bronze urn inside the Abbey. There’s also a long-running (but unsubstantiated) rumor that Hardy’s sister’s cat snatched the heart off a table, and that a pig’s heart had to be substituted for the burial ceremony. Culled
from: Neatorama |
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April
18, 2011 Recent scientific evidence suggests that a taste for savagery is encoded in our DNA, an evolutionary inheritance from our earliest primate ancestors. In his book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham demonstrates that chimpanzees (who are “genetically closer to us than they are even to gorillas”) routinely commit acts of torture and mayhem as appalling as anything humans might do. Not only do they prey upon vulnerable members of their own species, but their assaults “are marked by a gratuitous cruelty – tearing of pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, or drinking a victim’s blood – reminiscent of acts that among humans are regarded as unspeakable crimes during peacetime and atrocities during war.” Culled from: Fatal : The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer |
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April
19, 2011 In the last few months of World War II Soviet armies advanced in the east while American, British and French forces pressed Germany in the west. In response to these offensives, the Nazis decided to evacuate and dismantle concentration camps hoping to conceal their heinous crimes. The massive transfer of hundreds of thousands of sickly and emaciated inmates became known as the ‘death marches’, in reference to the enormous number of fatalities resulting from the ordeal. When the evacuations began, there were some 700,000 prisoners in concentration camps throughout Europe, run by approximately 40,000 SS guards and administrators. It has been estimated that almost a quarter of a million camp inmates died in forced marches across central Europe from January to May, 1945. The evacuations occurred in camps throughout German occupied territories, and everywhere the camp population was brutalized and tormented. Ill-clad, they froze in sub-zero temperatures; exhausted, they received little more than stale bread and water for their daily rations. Not surprisingly, many prisoners succumbed to the bitter cold, to hunger, or to the effects of typhus. But a staggering number of victims died at the hands of their guards. Many were shot or beaten to death because they were too weak to keep pace, or because they had fallen down. Victims included women as well as men, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah Witnesses, Soviet prisoners-of-war as well as Spanish republicans, although Jews accounted for at least half the number of fatalities. The persecution continued even as the Third Reich crumbled, even after Hitler’s suicide on April 30th. Ironically, the last death march began on May 7th, the same day that Germany surrendered to the Allies. Culled from: Road to Hell: Recollections of the Nazi Death March |
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April
20, 2011
Hundreds of Kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope… Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of country schools the day’s routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man. During a lynching at Durant, Oklahoma, in 1911, the exuberant and proud lynchers bound their victim to some planks and posed around him while photographers recorded the scene. A black-owned newspaper in Topeka, Kansas, in printing the photograph, wanted every black newspaper to do likewise, so that “the world may see and know what semi-barbarous America is doing.” Many photographs of lynchings and burnings would reappear as popular picture postcards. Culled From: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America The Without Sanctuary website has a collection of some of the grim photographs from the book, which is one of my favorite ghastly photographic collections. Here’s the review I wrote on the book back in the day: Without
Sanctuary: Lynching Photography In America Also
recommended by Einstein Shrugged: ***** – Upsetting But Essential! |
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April
22, 2011
Culled from: A Morning’s Work: Medical Photographs from The Burns Archive & Collection 1843-1939 |
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April
23, 2011 Harold Baumgarten, M.D., on landing in Normandy, France on D-Day, June 6, 1944: Sergeant Barnes got shot down right in front of me, and Lieutenant Donaldson; Sergeant “Pilgrim” Robertson, from my boat team, had a gaping wound in the upper right corner of his forehead. He was walking crazily in the water, without his helmet. Then I saw him get down on his knees and start praying with his rosary beads. At this moment, the Germans cut him in half with their deadly crossfire, which was coming from pillboxes, and what I thought was a reinforced building overlooking the beach. I saw the reflection from the helmet of one of the snipers and took aim and later on, I found out, I got a bull’s eye on him. It was the only time that rifle fired, due to the bullet that hit my rifle. It must have shattered the wood, and the rifle broke in half and I had to throw it away. Culled from: Day Of Destiny: The Photographs Of D-Day |
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April
25, 2011 Charles Freeman was a 19th century farmer who lived in the town of Pocasset, MA with his wife, Hattie, and two young daughters – six-year-old Bessie Mildred and four-year-old Edith, her father’s favorite. Freeman was a devout member of the Second Advent Church, a millenialist sect that had been gathering adherents in New England. He had frequently spoken of the need to prove his faith through sacrifice and in the latter half of April, 1879 he became convinced that God required the ultimate test of his faith. On the night of April 30, 1879 he told his wife, “The Lord has appeared to me. I know who the victim must be – my pet, my idol, my baby Edith.” Weeping, his wife tried to dissuade him, but Freeman replied, “The Lord has said it is necessary.” His wife finally relented: “If it is the Lord’s will, I am ready for it.” Singing praises to the Lord, Freeman grabbed a large sheath knife and entered his daughter’s room. He silently prayed that Edith not awaken and that God might stay his hand at the last moment, as Abraham’s had been stayed. He lowered the bedclothes covering Edith and raised the knife high above his head. At that instant, Edith opened her eyes and gazed at her father. The look on her face did not stay Freeman’s hand nor did divine intervention. He drove the blade deep into her side. “Oh, Papa,” she gasped. A moment later, she was dead. Climbing into bed beside his child’s corpse, Freeman took her into his arms as though lulling her to sleep and remained there until daybreak. He suffered “a good deal of agony of mind” which eventually was overtaken by a great feeling of peace, even exultation. He had been tested and found worthy. He had done God’s will! The following day, several dozen of Freeman’s neighbors were summoned to his home to share in his revelation. After an hour long sermon, he drew back the covers and revealed to his neighbors the glorious sacrifice that he had made at God’s behest. Freeman assured them that they need not be concerned for the child. In three days, Edith would rise again. Her resurrection would be a sign that the Son of Man had come! The next day, Freeman was arrested and eventually he would be declared insane and sent to the asylum at Danvers. Contrary to his expectations, his slaughtered child did not return to life. Three days after her murder – on the morning of her promised resurrection – the dead girl disappeared forever into the sod of Pocasset cemetery. A plaque on her coffin read: “Little Edie – lived only 57 months. She shall surely rise again – John vi. 39“. Culled from: Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer |
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April
27, 2011 Today’s Sightless Yet Truly Morbid Fact! A man who gouged out his eyes while in Miami-Dade County jail has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for gouging his wife’s eyes after he was released. Eugene Roman pleaded guilty Monday, April 19, 2011 to aggravated battery and kidnapping charges in the May 2006 attack. Roman’s estranged wife was left blind in her right eye and partially blind in her left. Roman was also sentenced to 10 years probation. The 50-year-old cried in court and asked for forgiveness. His wife told The Miami Herald she wanted him kept away from her and her children. Roman gouged out his eyes while serving a 364-day sentence for attacking his wife and police officers inside the couple’s home in 2005. He was released early when his wife agreed to take him back. Culled
from: The
Boston Channel Never trust a man who gouges his eyes out, that’s what I always say! |
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April
28, 2011 Between February, 1864 and April, 1865 it is estimated that 45,000 Union prisoners were confined in the Confederate stockade, Camp Sumter, near Anderson Station, Georgia, forever to be remembered as Andersonville. Of that number, approximately 25,000 men survived their prison experience and returned home to tell their tale of suffering. It is unknown how many survivors, with their health and lives shattered, died as a direct result of their captivity after returning to civilian life. Close to 13,000 Union soldiers did “give up the ghost” at Andersonville, and it was the ghost of Andersonville that haunted the survivors for the rest of their lives. The following is an excerpt from the account of Private George Weiser, who arrived in Andersonville on May 25, 1864: Through the center of the prison was a ditch of water about one foot deep and three feet wide… On both sides of the ditch the ground was low and muddy; the mud in some places was knee deep. The men could not stay on this low land. All who tried to live there would soon get sick and die… This low muddy ground was used by the sick men who could not reach or get to the sink or ditch. In fact, many of the men were so sick that they could not walk down to the low land, and they had to dig little holes in the ground, and after using them they would cover them over, and these holes, thousands of them, would get full and by the effect of the hot sun and rain they would boil over and run down the hill. This was the cause of creating millions of maggots, and when we would lay down to sleep hundreds of these maggots would crawl over us. Some of them would crawl in our ears and in our mouths. Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up The Ghost Incidentally, I visited Andersonville back in 2003 and wrote a travelogue on my experience: Anderson Vile! |
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April
29, 2011
Although in its infancy, anesthesia, even at the onset of the American Civil War, was routinely employed – contrary to the commonly held misconception today and at the time that amputations were performed without anesthesia. Indeed, a soldier undergoing surgery without anesthesia was the exception rather than the rule, and it generally occurred only when supplies were exhausted. Chloroform and ether were first used by U.S. troops during the Mexican-American War in 1847. Chloroform was used at least 75% of the time since it was nonflammable, more easily transported, and more readily attainable than ether, especially in the blockaded South. Ether was also found to worsen shock and lower blood pressure and is now known to be a potent vasodilator. Records collected after the war show that of 8,900 examined cases of anesthesia administration, only 43 deaths could be attributed directly to the anesthetic. This 0.4% mortality rate was remarkable considering the lack of monitoring equipment and supplemental oxygen. The low death rate was ascribed to the open-drop technique, wherein the anesthetic was applied to a cloth held over the patient’s nose and mouth and withdrawn after the patient was off to sleep. More than 80,000 cases of anesthesia were reported, a testament to its widespread use. In addition to anesthesia, opium was used for pain control, not only for injuries but for painful dressing changes. The typical way of administering opium was by pill form or by dusting it on the wounds. It is much less effective in the latter form. Near the end of the war it was also being given by hypodermic injection, a much more effective but less common technique. Culled from: Orthopaedic Injuries of the Civil War |
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April
30, 2011 A few weeks before she was expected to deliver a girl, Rosemary Newman held on to hope that she eventually would reconcile with her estranged boyfriend. But on the Saturday night that Newman drove to a south suburban restaurant to work things out with Deandre Minkens, the father of her unborn child, he had a plan to kill her. Minkens, 20, of Calumet City, and Shante Thomas, 19, of Chicago, a longtime couple who worked together at a fast-food restaurant, appeared in a Markham, Illinois courtroom Friday (April 29, 2011) on charges of first-degree murder and intentional homicide of an unborn child. The couple are accused of conspiring for weeks to kill Newman, 18, of Alsip, so Minkens wouldn’t become a father. “They put together a plan that was as cold as you want to hear,” said Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart. On Saturday, April 23, 2011, Minkens drove to meet Newman for dinner in Crestwood as Thomas hid in the trunk. As Minkens and Newman, left the restaurant in his car, Minkens played a song titled “I Hate You” on the stereo. Then he turned up the volume, signaling to Thomas to crawl out of the trunk. Thomas choked Newman with a cell phone cord and Minkens hit and punched Newman. When they arrived at a forest preserve near Calumet City, the couple beat and choked Newman until she died, then they left her in the woods and went to a nightclub. On Sunday morning, a jogger found Newman’s body. She was nine months’ pregnant. “This was very cold-blooded. Very calculated. Very, very tragic,” Dart said. Culled from: Chicago Tribune So what would YOUR murder cue song be? “Die Die My Darling” by Misfits comes to mind immediately, but that might be too obvious… “Kill You” by Eminem, perhaps? |
