July, 2009
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July 6, 2009 Today's Perpetual Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Antimony
is an element that is gram-for-gram about as toxic as arsenic but on
a dose-for-dose basis it is less life-threatening simply because antimony
salts rapidly cause violent vomiting which expels most of the toxin
from the body before it can be absorbed. This curious ability of antimony
to trigger the muscles of the stomach to expel its contents generally
prevented antimony's misuse as a murder weapon. Antimony in one form
or another has been used in the treatment of disease for more than 3000
years. Antimony metal appeared in two guises in the Middle Ages: emetic
cups and perpetual pills, the former to cure a hangover and overindulgence,
the latter to cure constipation. At the end of an evening of eating
and drinking to excess, some wine was left in a special goblet made
of antimony to be drunk the following day, whereupon it would soon provoke
vomiting and empty the stomach. Perpetual pills were small balls of
antimony which were swallowed. These would irritate the gut thereby
promoting it to action to eject the irritant. The pill was then retrieved
from the expelled excrement, washed, and stored for further use. There
are reports that such pills were highly effective and passed from generation
to generation. Culled
from: The
Elements Of Murder Ugh. I'm so glad to be living in the era of single-use suppositories. |
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July 7, 2009 Today's Cheeky Yet Truly Morbid Fact! On December 18th, 2008, a 10 year-old 5th grader named Chao Qun Zheng went to his elementary school in HeNan, China. When his teacher, Guo, found out that young Zheng had not completed his homework, she flipped out. "She was very angry at the time," he said. "She ripped and twisted my cheeks with both her hands and then she lifted me off the ground." The teacher held the boy up until one of his cheeks actually ripped off and the boy was bleeding profusely. Without hesitation the teacher reached down and picked up Zheng’s cheek skin, put it on his face, and instructed the boy go home immediately.When the parents saw Zheng, they immediately took him to the hospital where it took 52 stitches to have his cheek sewn back on. Zheng’s father has reported the case to the police and is expected to press for damages.
Culled
from: Weird
Asia News I'm just relieved that boy cheek isn't considered a cure-all or aphrodisiac or something, or that boy might never have gotten that cheek back! |
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July 8, 2009 Today's Informed Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Under commission from the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Walter Reed went to Cuba in 1900 and used 22 Spanish immigrant workers to prove that yellow fever is contracted through mosquito bites. Doing so, he introduced the practice of using healthy test subjects, and also the concept of a written contract to confirm informed consent of these subjects. While doing this study, Dr. Reed clearly told the subjects that, though he will do everything he can to help them, they may die as a result of the experiment. He paid them $100 in gold for their participation, plus $100 extra if they contract yellow fever. Five people died during the study. Culled
from: Natural News How noble the desperately poor. |
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July 14, 2009 Today's Atrocious Yet Truly Morbid Fact! One of the odder atrocities performed by the Ku Klux Klan occurred in March, 1940 when 36-year-old black Atlanta barber Ike Gaston was charged with "cutting the hair of an inferior race with the same scissors used to cut the hair of white men." He was stretched between two trees and whipped with a metal-studded strap and later died of shock and exposure from the injuries. Culled from: An Underground Education |
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July 16, 2009 Today's Speedy Yet Truly Morbid Fact! A high fall is certainly among the speediest ways to die: terminal velocity (no pun intended) is about 200 kilometres per hour, achieved from a height of about 145 metres or more. A study of deadly falls in Hamburg, Germany, found that 75% of victims died in the first few seconds or minutes after landing. The exact cause of death varies, depending on the landing surface and the person's posture. People are especially unlikely to arrive at the hospital alive if they land on their head - more common for shorter (under 10 metres) and higher (over 25 metres) falls. A 1981 analysis of 100 suicidal jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco - height: 75 metres, velocity on impact with the water: 120 kilometres per hour - found numerous causes of instantaneous death including massive lung bruising, collapsed lungs, exploded hearts or damage to major blood vessels and lungs through broken ribs. Survivors of great falls often report the sensation of time slowing down. The natural reaction is to struggle to maintain a feet-first landing, resulting in fractures to the leg bones, lower spinal column and life-threatening broken pelvises. The impact travelling up through the body can also burst the aorta and heart chambers. Yet this is probably still the safest way to land, despite the force being concentrated in a small area: the feet and legs form a "crumple zone" which provides some protection to the major internal organs. Culled
from: New
Scientist |
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July 17, 2009 Today's Delicious Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Authorities say a man has died after falling into a vat of melted chocolate
in a New Jersey processing plant. A spokesman for the Camden County
Prosecutor's Office says the 29-year-old temporary worker at Cocoa Services
Inc. plant fell after a blade used to mix raw chocolate hit him. The
man's name has not been released. The accident happened around 10:30
a.m. Wednesday, July 8, 2009 as the worker was loading raw chocolate
into the vat where it's melted and mixed before being shipped elsewhere
to be made into candy products. The victim was said to have been trapped
in the vat for nearly 10 minutes before being freed. Officials said
a preliminary investigation has revealed that the worker may have suffered
a head injury while inside the vat. Prosecutor's spokesman Jason Laughlin
says a co-worker tried to shut off the machine and two others tried
to pull the man out of the 8-foot deep vat. Culled
from: CBS
News |
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July 18, 2009 Today's
Stupid Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Culled
from: Fox News "Stupid snake"? So, who is more stupid: the snake who finds an easy meal or the humans who keep a pet snake within striking distance of a baby? |
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July 19, 2009 Today's
Gentle Yet Truly Morbid Fact! The
manacles were one of the "gentler tortures" used in 16th century
Scotland. Standing on a stool, the accused was hung by the wrists against
a wall, wearing iron gauntlets that could be gradually tightened as
necessary; the stool was then removed, and the accused left dangling
for many hours. The sadistic Richard Topcliffe, who tortured the Jesuit
Father Edmund Campion more than ten times, remarked: 'It will be as
though he were dancing a trick or figure'. When Campion was tried in
Westminster Hall in 1581, he was incapable of lifting his hand to plead,
and two of his fellow priests had to raise it for him. Culled from: The History Of Torture |
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July 22, 2009 Today's
Hairy Yet Truly Morbid Fact! It may not be the most appetizing reading before a hearty holiday meal, but the New England Journal of Medicine devoted part of its Thanksgiving, 2007 issue to a giant hairball -- and not the feline kind. Doctors say this hairball removed from a woman's stomach weighed 10 pounds. The prestigious journal detailed the case of a previously healthy 18-year-old woman who consulted a team of gastrointestinal specialists. She complained of a five-month history of pain and swelling in her abdomen, vomiting after eating and a 40-pound weight loss. After a scan of the woman's abdomen showed a large mass, doctors lowered a scope through her esophagus. It revealed "a large bezoar occluding nearly the entire stomach," wrote Drs. Ronald M. Levy and Srinadh Komanduri, gastroenterologists at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois. For the uninitiated, a bezoar is a hairball. "On questioning, the patient stated that she had had a habit of eating her hair for many years -- a condition called trichophagia," they wrote. "It seemed like she'd been doing this for several years," Levy told CNN. The woman underwent surgery to remove the mass of black, curly hair, which weighed 10 pounds and measured 15 inches by 7 inches by 7 inches. Five days later, she was eating normally and was sent home. A year later, the pain and vomiting were gone, the patient had regained 20 pounds "and reports that she has stopped eating her hair." Culled
from: CNN And
here's an image of the bezoar itself. Isn't it lovely? |
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July 23, 2009 Today's Sharp Yet Truly Morbid Fact! A woman who lived with an 8-centimeter (3.1-inch) pencil lodged in her brain for 55 years has had most of it removed in a complex operation in August, 2007. She is now looking forward to a life without headaches and nosebleeds and hopes to also regain her sense of smell. "When I was four years old I fell down in Dessau with a pencil in my hand. The pencil bored its way through my skin -- and disappeared in my head," Margret Wegner, 59, told the mass circulation newspaper Bild. "It was incredibly painful." The pencil missed her optic nerve and a major artery by just millimeters. A doctor treated the wound, but no one dared to operate on her brain. She decided to have the life-threatening operation after 55 years, and it was successfully carried out by a surgeon in a Berlin hospital. Most of the pencil -- six centimeters of it -- was removed but the 2-centimeter-long tip has grown in so tightly that it will remain lodged in her brain. Culled
from: Spiegel
Online |
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July 24, 2009 Today's Poetic Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (sometimes spelled as Esenin) was a Russian lyrical poet. Through his collections of poignant poetry about love and the simple life, he became one of the most popular poets of the day. In the fall of 1921, while visiting the studio of painter Alexei Yakovlev, he met the Paris-based American dancer Isadora Duncan, a woman 18 years his senior who knew only a dozen words in Russian, while he spoke no foreign languages. They married (Sergei's third marriage) on May 2, 1922. Yesenin accompanied his new celebrity wife on a tour of Europe and the United States but at this point in his life, an addiction to alcohol had gotten out of control. Often drunk, his violent rages resulted in him destroying hotel rooms and causing disturbances in restaurants. This behavior received a great deal of publicity in the international press. His marriage to Duncan was brief and in May 1923 he returned to Moscow. The last two years of Yesenin's life were filled with constant erratic and drunken behavior, but he also created some of his most famous poems. In 1925 Yesenin met and married his fifth wife, Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya, a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy. She attempted to get him help but he suffered a complete mental breakdown and was hospitalized for a month. Two days after his release for Christmas, he cut his wrist and wrote a farewell poem in his own blood, then the following day hanged himself from the heating pipes on the ceiling of his room in the Hotel Angleterre. He was 30 years old. Sergei's farewell poem: Goodbye, my friend, goodbye. My dear one, you are in my breast. A predestined parting Promises a reunion ahead. Goodbye,
my friend, without a touch of hand, without a word, Don't be sad and
do not frown, Dying is nothing new in this life, And living, of course,
isn't any newer. Culled from: Wikipedia |
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July 25, 2009 Today's Jerky Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Executions by elephant were often held in public in India as a warning to any who might transgress. To that end, many of the elephants were especially large, often weighing in excess of nine tons. The executions were intended to be gruesome and, by all accounts, they often were. They were sometimes preceded by torture publicly inflicted by the same elephant used for the execution. An account of one such torture-and-execution at Baroda in 1814 has been preserved in The Percy Anecdotes: "The man was a slave, and two days before had murdered his master, brother to a native chieftain, called Ameer Sahib. About eleven o'clock the elephant was brought out, with only the driver on his back, surrounded by natives with bamboos in their hands. The criminal was placed three yards behind on the ground, his legs tied by three ropes, which were fastened to a ring on the right hind leg of the animal. At every step the elephant took, it jerked him forward, and every eight or ten steps must have dislocated another limb, for they were loose and broken when the elephant had proceeded five hundred yards. The man, though covered in mud, showed every sign of life, and seemed to be in the most excruciating torments. After having been tortured in this manner for about an hour, he was taken to the outside of the town, when the elephant, which is instructed for such purposes, was backed, and put his foot on the head of the criminal." Culled
from: Wikipedia |
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