Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine [255]
"No satisfactory explanation seems to be obtainable as to the means by which the dancers in this extraordinary performance are able to escape injury. Apparently they do not suffer from any burns. Doubtless some protection is afforded by the earth that is applied to their bodies."
Spontaneous combustion of the human body, although doubted by the medical men of this day, has for many years been the subject of much discussion; only a few years ago, among the writers on this subject, there were as many credulous as there were skeptics. There is, however, no reliable evidence to support the belief in the spontaneous combustion of the body. A few apochryphal cases only have been recorded. The opinion that the tissues of drunkards might be so saturated with alcohol as to render the body combustible is disproved by the simple experiment of placing flesh in spirits for a long time and then trying to burn it. Liebig and others found that flesh soaked in alcohol would burn only until the alcohol was consumed. That various substances ignite spontaneously is explained by chemic phenomena, the conditions of which do not exist in the human frame. Watkins in speaking of the inflammability of the human body remarks that on one occasion he tried to consume the body of a pirate given to him by a U. S. Marshal. He built a rousing fire and piled wood on all night, and had not got the body consumed by the forenoon of the following day. Quite a feasible reason for supposed spontaneous human combustion is to be found in several cases quoted by Taylor, in which persons falling asleep, possibly near a fire, have been accidentally ignited, and becoming first stupefied by the smoke, and then suffocated, have been burned to charcoal without awaking. Drunkenness or great exhaustion may also explain certain cases. In substantiation of the possibility of Taylor's instances several prominent physiologists have remarked that persons have endured severe burns during sleep and have never wakened. There is an account of a man who lay down on the top of a lime kiln, which was fired during his sleep, and one leg was burned entirely off without awaking the man, a fact explained by the very slow and gradual increase of temperature.
The theories advanced by the advocates of spontaneous human combustion are very ingenious and deserve mention here. An old authority has said: "Our blood is of such a nature, as also our lymph and bile: all of which, when dried by art, flame like spirit of wine at the approach of the least fire and burn away to ashes." Lord Bacon mentions spontaneous combustion, and Marcellus Donatus says that in the time of Godefroy of Bouillon there were people of a certain locality who supposed themselves to have been burning of an invisible fire in their entrails, and he adds that some cut off a hand or a foot when the burning began, that it should go no further. What may have been the malady with which these people suffered must be a matter of conjecture.
Overton, in a paper on this subject, remarks that in the "Memoirs of the Royal Society of Paris," 1751, there is related an account of a butcher who, opening a diseased beef, was burned by a flame which issued from the maw of the animal; there was first an explosion which rose to a height of five feet and continued to blaze several minutes with a highly offensive odor. Morton saw a flame emanate from beneath the skin of a hog at the instant of making an incision through it. Ruysch, the famous Dutch physician, remarks that he introduced a hollow bougie into a woman's stomach he had just opened, and he observed a vapor issuing from the mouth of the tube, and this lit on contact with the atmosphere. This is probably an exaggeration of the properties of the hydrogen sulphid found in the stomach. There is an account of a man of forty-three, a gross feeder, who was particularly fond of fats and a victim of psoriasis palmaria, who on going to bed one night, after extinguishing the light in the room, was surprised to find himself enveloped in a phosphorescent halo; this continued for several