Decidedly Grim

Today’s Intolerable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

John Smith, who was hanged for fifteen minutes at Tyburn (England) on Christmas Eve, 1705, told his rescuers: “When I was turned off [from a cart] I was, for some time, sensible of very great pain occasioned by the weight of my body and felt my spirits in strange commotion, violently pressing upwards. Having forced their way to my head I saw a great blaze of glaring light that seemed to go out of my eyes in a flash and then I lost all sense of pain. After I was cut down, I began to come to myself as the blood and spirits forcing themselves into their former channels put me by a prickling or shooting into such intolerable pain that I could have wished those hanged who had cut me down.”

Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row

Facts

Today’s Disciplined Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

By the 1930s the militarization of the Japanese educational system resulted in it becoming regimented and robotic. A visitor to one of its elementary schools expressed pleasant surprise at seeing thousands of children waving flags and marching in unison in perfect lines; quite clearly the visitor had seen the discipline and order but not the abuse required to establish and maintain it. It was commonplace for teachers to behave like sadistic drill sergeants, slapping children across the cheeks, hitting them with their fists, or bludgeoning them with bamboo or wooden swords. Students were forced to hold heavy objects, sit on their knees, stand barefoot in the snow, or run around the playground until they collapsed from exhaustion. There were certainly few visits to the schools by indignant or even concerned parents.

The pressure to conform to authority intensified if the schoolboy decided to become a soldier. Vicious hazing and a relentless pecking order usually squelched any residual spirit of individualism in him. Obedience was touted as a supreme virtue, and a sense of individual self-worth was replaced by a sense of value as a small cog in the larger scheme of things. To establish this sublimation of individuality to the common good, superior officers or older soldiers slapped recruits for almost no reason at all or beat them severely with heavy wooden rods. According to the author Iritani Toshio, officers often justified unauthorized punishment by saying, “I do not beat you because I hate you. I beat you because I care for you. Do you think I perform these acts with hands swollen and bloody in a state of madness?” Some youths died under such brutal physical conditions; others committed suicide; the majority became tempered vessels into which the military could pour a new set of life goals.

Culled from: The Rape of Nanking

And this is how you turn decent human beings into killing machines…

Facts

Today’s Ineffective Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Slitting wrists is not the most effective form of suicide, with less than 2% of those that actually try, dying exclusively from it.

Culled from: Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages

Which is why you combine slitting wrists with overdosing on sleeping pills for maximum impact. The blood from the wrist slitting is done for aesthetic reasons (because you MEAN it, man! and all that red is pretty), and the drugs provide the whole “stopping your heart” aspect to the endeavor. That’s what I did. Of course, you might point out the fact that I’m not dead. Okay, but I would have been if I hadn’t been interrupted, and that’s the important thing!

But, of course, you know, as Big Fun say, Suicide – Don’t Do It.

Facts

Today’s Noxious Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Antimony is an element with probably the most colorful history on the period table. Nebuchadnezzar, the king who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the sixth century BC, used a noxious antimony-lead mix to paint his palace walls yellow. Perhaps not coincidentally, he soon went mad, sleeping outdoors in fields and eating grass like an ox. Around that same time, Egyptian women were applying a different form of antimony as mascara, both to decorate their faces and to give themselves witchlike powers to cast the evil eye on enemies. Later, medieval monks – not to mention Isaac Newton – grew obsessed with the sexual properties of antimony and decided this half metal, half insulator, neither one thing nor the other, was a hermaphrodite. Antimony pills also won fame as laxatives. Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve them and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from father to son. Perhaps for this reason, antimony found heavy work as a medicine, although it’s actually toxic. Mozart probably died from taking too much to combat a severe fever.

Culed from: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

Facts

Today’s Slowly Rotting Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

At the Auschwitz death camp, x-ray sterilization experiments were carried out on many prisoners. A group of young, healthy Polish men were probably given an unusually high dosage because, as the former orderly in the ward reported, “Their genitals started slowly rotting away” and the men “often crawled on the floor in their pain.” Ointments were tried, but the men did not improve; and after a long period of suffering, they were ordered to the gas chamber.

As many as 200 men were subjected to x-ray castration, and of about 180 of those to amputation of at least one testicle, 90 of these operations taking place on one day, December 16, 1942. While overall statistics are uncertain, the general estimate is that approximately 1,000 prisoners, male and female, underwent x-ray sterilization or castration, and about 200 of these were subjected to surgical removal of testicles or ovaries. Whatever statistics are available derive from the Auschwitz policy of keeping relatively accurate surgical records of these experiments.

Culled from: The Nazi Doctors

Facts

Today’s Tall and Athletic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

For the few surviving inmates of Mauthausen concentration camp, one visitor in the autumn of 1941 left an indelible memory. Tall and athletic, Aribert Heim was the camp doctor for only two months and the 27-year-old enjoyed his time in the Austrian town. On one occasion, he picked out a prisoner passing his office. After checking his teeth, Heim persuaded him to take part in a medical experiment with the vague promise of release. Heim killed the man with an injection of poison to his heart, later severing his head and using the skull as a paperweight. Injections to the heart — with petrol, water or poison — were a favorite experiment of Heim’s, who timed patients’ deaths with a stopwatch. Sometimes, out of boredom, he carried out operations without anesthetic, removing organs from conscious victims. Heim was arrested after World War Two but he was later released and was soon practicing as a doctor again. He moved to Baden Baden, a small town in western Germany.

But survivors of Mauthausen did not forget the camp doctor who delighted in seeing the fear of death in his patients’ eyes. Police were sent to re-arrest Heim. The night before they were due to call, he disappeared. Now German prosecutors are on Heim’s trail again. They believe he is still alive because his wife and children have yet to claim money he left in a Berlin bank account. Their search is the last gasp of the post-war hunt for Nazi war criminals. Prosecutors in Germany and the Austrian government have contributed to a reward of 310,000 euros ($448,000) for information leading to Heim’s capture. “We will pursue Heim even if our search ends up at a gravestone,” said one German police investigator, who asked not to be named.

The hunt has taken them from Spain to South America. On a visit to one town in South America, investigators ran a check to find local German men aged over 90. More than 300 names came up. Efraim Zuroff, who helped restart the pursuit of Heim, is carrying on the work of one of the world’s best-known Nazi hunters, Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal was instrumental in helping Israeli secret service agents bundle Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann into a plane from Argentina, later to be hanged. A Mauthausen inmate, Wiesenthal never forgot the strapping young doctor but he died before he could hunt Heim down. “There is a serious effort being made to find Heim but that’s certainly not the case as far as others are concerned,” says Zuroff, speaking by phone from Israel. “I think people are just tired. This is a subject which requires zeal. There are no political obstacles to prosecution in Germany but they do things in such a bureaucratic way.”

Zuroff says many countries are opting for the “biological solution”. “In a few years these people will die and with their deaths, the problem has been solved. If these countries just wait it out, then they will spare themselves enormous expense and unwanted attention and be done with the problem.” Later this year, Zuroff will make a final tour of Nazi hideouts, where hundreds of war criminals are believed to be living out their twilight years, before he retires.

Culled from: Reuters
Generously submitted by Katchaya

Facts

Today’s Reptilian Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Mansur, an eight or nine-year-old boy, was mauled to death by a Komodo dragon in east­ern Indo­ne­sia on June 2, 2007. He was with his uncle mending fish­ing nets (or reliev­ing him­self in a bush) on Komodo Island – one of the larg­est in the Komodo nat­ional park – when the dragon att­acked him. It clawed his right leg, bit him in the stom­ach with its serr­ated teeth and shook him in an att­empt to break his neck. His uncle and other men pelted the creat­ure with rocks until it re­leased the boy, who was uncons­cious and bleed­ing heav­ily. Before a boat could be arr­anged to take him to a doctor, he had died of his injur­ies. Even if he had sur­vived the init­ial attack, say experts, he would have been killed by blood pois­on­ing from the bact­eria in the drag­on’s saliva.

The park, and the west­ern and north­ern coast­lines of neigh­bour­ing island of Flores, are the nat­ural hab­itat of the dragon, the world’s larg­est mon­itor liz­ard, which can grow up to 10ft (3m) and weigh as much as 300lb (136kg). It can sprint at 15mph (24km/h) and its usual prey are monk­eys, wild deer and rats. There are an est­im­ated 3,000 re­main­ing in the park and surr­ound­ing areas. While att­acks on humans are extrem­ely rare, a local story per­sists of a Swiss tour­ist who van­ished while on an exped­it­ion to photo­graph the creat­ures in the wild a decade ago. His bin­ocul­ars and torn cloth­ing were found in the jungle.

In 1974, an eld­erly Europ­ean tour­ist, Baron Rudolf von Reding Bib­er­egg, fell and in­jured his knee on a hiking trip on Komodo Island. His guide re­turned to a vill­age to seek help. All the search party found was the man’s hat, camera and a blood­stained shoe. In 2001, the hus­band of film star Sharon Stone was bitten on the foot by a Komodo in Los Ang­eles Zoo. Phil Bron­stein, 50, needed surgery to reatt­ach ten­dons and re­build his big toe, plus a mass­ive dose of anti­biot­ics to avert septi­cæm­ia.

Culled from: Fortean Times
Generously submitted by: Amos Quito

Facts

Today’s Gasping Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The influenza virus of 1918 preyed on the young and healthy. One day you are fine, strong, and invulnerable. You might be busy at work in your office. Or maybe you are knitting a scarf for the brave troops fighting the war to end all wars. Or maybe you are a soldier reporting for basic training, your first time away from home and family.

You might notice a dull headache. Your eyes might start to burn. You start to shiver and you will take to your bed, curling up in a ball. But no amount of blankets can keep you warm. You fall into a restless sleep, dreaming the distorted nightmares of delirium as your fever climbs. And when you drift out of sleep, into a sort of semi-consciousness, your muscles will ache and your head will throb and you will somehow know that, step by step, as your body feebly cries out “no,” you are moving steadily toward death.

It may take a few days, it may take a few hours, but there is nothing that can stop the disease’s progress. Doctors and nurses have learned to spot the signs. Your face turns a dark brownish purple. You start to cough up blood. Your feet turn black. Finally, as the end nears, you frantically gasp for breath. A blood-tinged saliva bubbles out of your mouth. You die – by drowning, actually – as your lungs fill with a reddish fluid.

And when a doctor does an autopsy, he will observe your lungs lying heavy and sodden in your chest, engorged with a thin bloody liquid, useless, like slabs of liver.

Culled from: Flu : The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic

Facts

Today’s Hungry Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

It is often true of serial murderers that their blood lust becomes more urgent and irresistible the longer they continue to kill – as if (to quote Hamlet) “increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on.” Each new atrocity only makes them hungrier for more. The intervals between their killings – the so-called “cooling-off periods” – grow shorter and shorter. Eventually, they may lose control altogether and give way to a frenzy of sadism. To cite just one notorious example, Jeffrey Dahmer’s first two murders were separated by a nine-year span; his last two victims were slaughtered only four days apart.

Culled from: Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer

Facts

Today’s Ruthless Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The greatest sexual sin of the Renaissance was birth control, whether as contraception or abortion. So concerned were the French about abortion and infanticide that in 1556 the Parlement passed an extraordinary edict: every expectant mother must register her pregnancy and have witness to the birth. If she did not, and the infant died, she was liable for the death sentence on a murder charge. This unprecedented intrusion by the state into the act of childbirth made infanticide into a crimen exceptum, in the words of Edward Peters “the crime so dangerous to the civil community that the very accusation acted to suspend traditional procedural protection to the defendant, and opened the way for the most ruthless and thorough kind of prosecution, undertaken to protect the state from its most dangerous enemies.” Not even witchcraft was a crimen exceptum in France, but infanticide was.

Culled from: Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts

It sure is feeling very 16th century in America these days, isn’t it?

Facts