Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 November 1882 — LIFE AND DEATH. [ARTICLE]

LIFE AND DEATH.

Cases' of Recovery from Sup- 1 posed Mortal Wounds. The extinction or continuance of the “vital sparks/’ physicians agree, is a problem that is never solved until the final extinction is absolutely determined. It is easy to tell that-a man is dead, but it is very seldom certain that he will die, since there are pases of recovery that no sane man would think of prefl ictingi-. Foruxample, no person would hive supposed for a moment that the niaAibJtfassachusetts whose case has %o Wtßffbeen quoted would have lived twelve years after having a tamping iron blown directly through his head, entering under his jaw and coming out <hai time, and eyen enjoyed ’health. And it would not occur to any ordinary man that he could live long with a hole in the side of hijMtomach, yet if Saint Margin had not clone .that very thing the physicians agree that comparatively little would ho to-day of the marvelous processes ’that go on inside the laboratory of fhw-hody. other hand, one who is accusto seeing the enormous strains i and, shocks the human frame withstands is often surprised, at seeing how little a tJjjngAsiJl “|fto«e the,silver cord.” Not tfrfcpehk of ine and fatal maladies that are often brought about by seemingly absurd trifles, such as a little too much ice-water when one is overheated, or the swallowing of some indigestible morsel, the accidents that cause death are often trivial in all but the result. A man steps on a bit of orange-peel, or his friend sportively pulls away his chair, with the idiotic idea that he is joking, aiui the Victim sits down too far, fractures his spine, and is picked lip dfcacl.' A s treng man scratclies his finger-and lockjaw. A large nfem? bfehdiug, (flue ways in his chair, . trying to button his shoes, loses his ball] ddo, rolls fcvqnon the carpeted floor I and breaks his arm. Gangrene sets in ’’ftfflT*fr(*'dies. are otrrecord, and go to show how slight the real iiold on* life is. And yet the inevitable death that was formerly . supposed to f attend upon any serious accident to tfie main organs of the body / doiiS net always come, and men live, not.tmly wfth bullets in their brain, thejr stfcipach, dislocated spine and actual wounds in the heart itself, but - eAfli witK open vounds ' clear through the body itself. Gen. Henry A. Barnum, -of Brooklyn, Wrote, while President Garfield lay dying, a letter to the press, in which he told of his own wound, which he received in battle during the civil war. It remained an open aperture through his body and has never. hffldod, and for years his treatment of it has been simply to wear in the hole a roll of prepared lint. This is renewed daily, and the suppuration of the wound is .constant, sometimes greater ajid sometimes less, but never entirely ceasing. .Gen. Shields, of Missouri, had a similar wound ex•Wffng thrbffghTits' body and- open in - front and behind. His wound, it is was received, in-the Mexican war, J ind-he Wears, not lirrt, blit a silk handkerchief in it. This he can draw diTeCfly through h’s body. Some three or four years ago a boy in Paterson, N. J:, picking up skivings in a carpenter’s shop, fell backward against a buzz-saw that was revolving with immense rapiditys . Ljqepvering Iris equilibrium he Watired,Am aided, to fitb-ug store near

;*t«y j»mul asked to have his wound jilrqjpcd.. ’.He complained of having a terrible headache, and th s was not doubted when it was found on examination that the saw had divided his head almost in two. One end of the cut was l)a|f-way between the forehead and the crown of the head, and the other end «'#aa just«at theba.se of the skull. A line from one end to the other r would have passed almost through the middle of the head, but the saw was a small one and its outside edge had, beyond a question, cut far beyond such a right line. Yet the boy lived several days and retained his con ciousness to the time of his death. It was supposed that the saw had passed between the two lobes of the brain, but that was never as the boy’s father refused, to allow a postmortem examination. In Reporting this case, the writer learned of two inore,J>oth living in Patterson at the time, each of whom Carried a bullet in his brain for a number of years. One of them had been shot in the eye, and the physician who attended him declared that the bullet was, beyond a doubt, lodged against the skull at the back of the head. Both of these men enjoyed good health. A fracture of the skull is generally supposed to be a fatal injury, and generally proves so, and yet there are not lacking cases where death has not ensued, at least for a long time. In the Gutermuth case it will be remembered that the victim’s skull was badly fractured, and yet he was supposed to be recovering a week after the injury was received, and was well enough to walk out and pay visits—or at least supposed himself to be. Other cases could be cited of a similar nature if it were desirable to make a catalogue. There are ca c s on record—there were many of them during the War of the.llebmlhm--jn \Yjlicli meu were repeatedly hurt so that death appeared inevitable. No sioner. would they recover from oho apparently mortal wound than tttey "wdftild receive another. The Hartford Times not long ago published a sfory that was widely copied of a man whose history wap ,told by himself to a correspondent in Michigan, and whose personal appearance bore out his story, * s<r the em-qspondpnt said. He claimed that hit troubles’ began when lie was only 5 ''Veins old, when he fell through the roof of a shed, breaking aril his ribs, both collar bones, his breast bone, his right arm in two places, his left arm above the and the bones of his left hand. It was thought that he could hot recover, but he did. Ten years later his hip, was dislocated twice in the same year; and his right ankle was broken,, In 1856 he was shot in the ankle in a fight on a Mississippi steamboat. During this time he had had : Asiatic cholera, yellow fever, and, in i Centraj America, the spotted fever. This last disease stayed with him four months, and “peeled him off like a snake.” It was not until the war broke but, however, that this remarkable man had full the arjgsphe was bayoneted in the left km <j m fMr battle oT CHfniSvilla hnd captured by the Confederates. During Lis imprisonment of three months he

was and afterward nearly starred to* death, and was only paroled ‘whei» hircaptors supposed him to be without the ability to do further service. In a long march the veins in his left leg burst, ' fiild he almost died of hemorrhage. At Chancellorsville he was knocked down byu spent cannon ball, and while lying prostrate.was run overby a field piece of six-pound caliber, which passed directly over his head and body. After recovering again and getting his discharge he undertook one day to cut down a tree, but, by a not uncommon accident, the butt of the tree flew up as the tree fell, and this man standing in the way, as was to have been expected of a man of. his habits, was knocked a distance, he says, of forty feet. He lay on the snow insensible for eight hours, and on getting his senses again found that his skull was broken and his brains were leaking out, and that eight of his teeth were gone. In three months he was entirely well —that is, all that was left was well, but in handling some blasting powder he managed to ignite it, and the loss of one eye was the consequence. These were the principal accidents this man related, but he said he had had many minor ones. In spite of all he had been through he was w ell and claimed 4o be ready to fight any man of his age and weight, but complained that Iris blood was so thin that he was unable to keep warm even in summer. In olden time such a man would have been thought by the superstitious destined for the gallows, but there is some question whether hanging would be a successful operation. Whether the story is true or not, it is all possible, and there is nothing in it that cannot be duplicated in the medical record, except the fact of so many accidents to the same victim. To multiply the list of men who have survived “mortal injuries,” or what have been supposed to be mortal, would be to make this article a catalogue. as hinted above. TJiere aro such, cases without number, and each has its own peculiarity. “Bill” Poole, the gambler, it is well known, lived sopie days with a bullet in his heart. A negro in this city, some ten years ago, murdered his mistress and then cut his own throat with the same razor with which he had killed her. Then with the irritated fear that sometimes animates would-be suicides, he ran away to escape arrest. He remained hidden in an outhouse for over forty-eight hours. Then, being hungry, he crawled out and surrendered to the police. He was faint with the loss of blood, and his windpipe was completely severed. An unfortunate man who hangs around an Eighth avenue saloon, in this city, carries a bullet in his brain cavity, which, it has been found by the use of the “indicator” fused by surgeons), now lies some four incflies below its first resting place. This bullet entered his temple, the hole being still apparent, during the war of the Rebellion. He was a strict teetotaller before and during the war, but since he was shot he has had a terrible thirst for liquor. A common remark of the saloon-keeper is, “Don’t give Tom a glass; it’ll make . him blind drunk.” There is no end to such cases, but another branch of the subject should be mentioned. It is a well-known and common fact that a man may so habituate himself to the use of poisons (of many kinds) that he may take with impunity and carry around in his system a sufficient amount to kill twenty other men. Probably the commonest instance of this is the use of nicotine. There aie hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men in this city who have been in the habit for years of inhaling (not swallowing, but breathing) the smoke of cigars or cigarettes. If any one of them should die and an autopsy should be made, his lungs could lie squeezed in a common lemonsqueezer, and enough of the pure oil of nicotine would exude to kill a dozen, perhaps a hundred, men. Yet the habit, despite what the doctors say, does not always kill, or, if it does, the time it takes enables the victim to die of old age first. A less frequent, but still common, case, is that of the abuse of laudanum. Two friends of the writer were once playing billiards, and ordered cocktails. One swallowed the other’s drink by mistake, and it took two physicians twelve hours to bring him out of his danger. The second player had the.laudanum habit, and what almost killed his friend was his ordinary drink. Not many months ago a man w r as taken to the Charity Hospital who had been for a long time the victim of the morphine habit. This had grown on him to such an extent that the poison swallowed had no effect whatever upon him. He had to take it by hypodermic injections to obtain the desired effect, and, being poor and without the proper tools, he would hack his skin with knife or scissors or any sharp tool he could get and rub the poison in. In this uncouth manner he took enough daily to kill an ordinary man a dozen times over. A similar case with other poisons was reported last May by Dr. Thomas, of the Chambers Street Hospital, to whom was brought a gentleman who had shut himself up in a hotel room and ate nothing and drank nothing but great quantities of champagne. When he was brought to the hospital he called for bromide and chloral, saying he was in the habit of taking both. The usual amount of chloral given in such cases (he was bordering on delirium tremens) is fifteen grains, but, considering what he said, Dr. Thomas gave him thirty grains of chloral and ninety grains of bromide, and repeated the dose in two hours. In twenty-four hours he had taken 685 grains of bromide and 273 grains of chloral, and the drug had not produced any apparent result. In sev-enty-two hours he had taken 920 grains of bromide, 412 grains of chloral and five-eighths of a grain of morphia. This is said to have been a larger amount than is on record elsewhere, but the man got over his “spree,” and laughed when the doctor warned him against a recurrence of it. - With such cases in their books it is n£ t marvelous that physicians always say, “While there is life there is hope.” —New York Herald.