8,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Bestselling author, Colin Murphy, explores the historical figures and events that have existed for centuries in the fringes and brings them out into the open for the reader. Full of historical stories which will intrigue you, captivate you, revolt you and even make you laugh! Colin Murphy welcomes you into the fringes of history where shocking stories and compelling facts await you... Fierce History is a collection of bizarre, grotesque and unexpected episodes from history from all over the world, and from ancient to more modern including: Siblings of famous people - Al Capone's brother who hunted down illegal distillers - Irishman Frank Shackleton, brother of legendary Antarctic explorer Ernest, who was pretty much rubbish at everything, and may have stolen the Irish Crown Jewels - Napoleon's sex-maniac sisterWeird historical incidents - Flaming camels of war, - Living turkey parachutes; - Crazy assassination attemptsBizarre medical practices: - Dr Evan O'Neill Kane, who in 1921 performed an appendectomy on himself. - 'Radioactive water' to cure arthritis, gout, neuralgias, poor circulation and a variety of other illnesses – eh, no, it just kills you.Remarkable children: - William Rowan Hamilton by the age of twelve could speak fourteen languages, and went on to discover the quaternion, essential to the development of modern theories of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, scratching his new mathematical formula on to the side of Broom Bridge in north Dublin
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
FIERCE HISTORY
Colin C. Murphy
Contents
Introduction
Most people are familiar with the famous figures in history, like Julius Caesar, Aristotle, Cleopatra, Henry VIII, George Washington and so on. And most people have some vague sense of the times these people lived in, like the Victorian era, ancient Rome or the Dark Ages. These are the things we learned about in school, and continue to see explored in books, documentaries and movies.
These figures and their cultures are responsible for much of the world we live in today, their influence still visible in our language, architecture, politics, religion and art. So it is fitting that such significant characters and events form the mainstay of our historical studies.
And while the great events, luminaries and movements of the past can be fascinating subjects, there are other, smaller histories that are also worth the telling, and that I’ve always found engrossing. For every great figure from the mists of time, there were countless others, mostly ordinary people, whose names have been long forgotten. There were also innumerable less well-known tales about famed figures that don’t usually make it into the history books. Similarly there were lesser-known events of note that were greatly overshadowed by more famed or influential happenings.
And yet these fringe events often make fascinating reading in themselves. I suppose in part I’ve always loved exploring these minor historical figures and events as they can often have more of a resonance with insignificant mortals like myself. What I mean is, I can never fully identify with, say, Julius Caesar or Napoleon, as I’ve never personally ruled an empire or commanded an army. At least not yet. But it’s a little easier to feel a connection with the lesser lights or events of history, most of which tales remain largely untold. Not because they brought down kings, changed societies, created philosophies or led invasions, but because they are often startling, touching, amusing, educational or quite simply unbelievable. In other words, Genghis Khan’s Mongol invasions might be extremely important historical subject matter, but wouldn’t you also like to learn about the women employed to test-drive Catherine the Great’s lovers, the man who survived the guillotine, the flaming camels of Mongolia or the real-life Frankenstein who went on tour ‘re-animating’ bodies with electricity?
This is a collection of just such real-life tales loosely gathered into a handful of what you might call ‘categories’, although some tales could easily reside in more than one of these groupings. They may not broaden your understanding of human culture very much, but they’ll most likely intrigue you, captivate you, revolt you or even make you laugh.
1
The Big Sleep
It is something of an understatement to say that death is rife throughout history. It is so common, in fact, that there have been about one hundred billion cases of it, if you include every human who has ever lived and died up to this point. Roughly speaking, of course. Naturally, most deaths are fairly unremarkable affairs, except for the immediate families, and nowadays, most are relatively painless. Some passings have become enshrined in history’s hallowed halls for the effect they produced or the drama of the event, such as Julius Caesar’s stabbing in the Roman senate, Christ’s crucifixion, JFK’s assassination and so on. Our history books also record less dramatic famous deaths of kings, queens, politicians, generals and the like by mundane things like heart attacks, old age, beheading etc. These famed figures’ followers often came to boringly generalised ends, such as ‘ten thousand men perished in the battle of such and such’, but as a general rule, most deaths barely even merit a statistic.
But with all the billions of cases on the books, so to speak, inevitably more than a few unusual deaths or consequences of death have come to pass, and below are just a handful, randomly selected, of the innumerable curious, bizarre, creepy or downright funny samples of humans meeting their maker.
DEATH BY ANTIQUITY
Although this section is by no means chronological, we begin with one of the oldest recorded strange deaths, the victim of which also gave us a frequently used modern term. Around 620 BC, Draco, the Greek legislator of Athens, introduced a new set of written laws, said to have literally been written in blood and remarkable for their harshness – even trivial crimes were punishable by death. His name gives us the word draconian.
Despite the toughness of his code, he was a popular man in ancient circles. Folklore holds that after his address to the crowd in the Aeginetan theatre, the masses began to applaud enthusiastically and rain their hats and cloaks down on him in support. Unfortunately, they overdid the adulation a bit – Draco was buried under a small mountain of clothing and suffocated. But you can probably take that tale with a pinch of salt.
Remaining in the classical world but moving on a couple of centuries takes us to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. One of history’s great thinkers, he gave us such wonderful philosophical insights as, ‘There is nothing permanent except change,’ ‘Much learning does not teach understanding,’ and, ‘Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.’ Philosophy was clearly his thing.
Heraclitus.
Medicine wasn’t. When he developed dropsy, a painful accumulation of fluid beneath the skin, he reputedly experimented with various cures, mostly involving cow dung. One version of the story has him burying himself in a manure pit in a cowshed, believing that the manure would draw out the excess fluid. It didn’t, and he died in rather unpleasant surroundings. Another version has him smeared in dung and lying under the hot sun, essentially baking himself alive. But the most popular version of his death is the one in which he covered his entire body in dung, the stench of which attracted a pack of wild dogs who ate him alive.
By far the funniest – sorry, of course I meant most tragic – Classical death has to be that of Aeschylus, one of ancient Greece’s greatest playwrights. With supreme irony, he is known as ‘the father of the tragedy’. Much of Aeschylus’s work has survived, more than can be said for the man himself when he went on a trip to Sicily in 458 BC, aged roughly sixty-five.
Roman historian Valerius Maximus wrote that the balding Aeschylus was sitting outside, enjoying the warmth of the sun, when a passing eagle mistook his shiny head for a nice rock on which to smash open the tortoise shell it had clutched between its talons. Literary giant killed by falling tortoise. Death clearly has no favourites, and no regard for dignity.
The unfortunate end of Aeschylus.
BLOODY MESS
If you’re in any way squeamish, skip this bit. Botched executions are far more frequent in history than you might imagine, and are actually still a contentious issue today, especially in the US. They are frequently cited as an argument for abolishing capital punishment, and indeed they have resulted in such in certain countries or at the very least, the changing of the method of execution.
Anders ‘Sjællænder’ Nielsen.
Young people may be shocked to learn that France only abolished death by guillotine in 1981, and carried out its last execution by this method in 1977. Almost as shocking is that many European countries were still beheading people with an axe and block in the late nineteenth and even the twentieth century. Germany only abolished the practice in 1935 (Hitler replaced it with the guillotine). Sweden carried out its last beheading – by manual cleaver – in 1900. And in Denmark, the public execution of Anders ‘Sjællænder’ Nielsen in 1882 generated such a scandal and such widespread horror, that it would be a contributing factor in the abolition of capital punishment ten years later.
This execution was to take place as near as possible to where the crime (a murder) had been committed, presumably so the people most affected could see justice being carried out. Unfortunately, the executioner, one Jens Seistrup, had a nasty hangover after a night’s heavy drinking. His first swing of the axe hit Nielsen’s shoulder, and the man cried out in agony. His second blow cracked open Nielsen’s head and the axe lodged there, yet the man was still alive. The third blow finally decapitated him.
And things became even more gruesome then. Several of the surrounding crowd rushed at the headless corpse with cupped hands in an attempt to catch the gushing blood, apparently driven by a local superstition that it could magically cure certain diseases. Whether they drank this or applied it to the skin is not recorded, which is just as well. Reports of the horrific scene caused the minister for justice to immediately bring an end to public executions and replace the axe with the guillotine. At least it was a start.
Not quite as gruesome, though not far behind, the execution by hanging of Robert Goodale in Norwich in 1885 was a horrific experience for executioner and witnesses, and quite likely the executed man. Robert Goodale was a fifteen-stone man, who’d been condemned for murdering his unfaithful wife. When executioner James Berry saw his size, he decided to shorten the rope length by a couple of feet, but not by enough. Because of Goodale’s weight, his head was torn completely off his shoulders, traumatising all present.
A parting of the ways for Robert Goodale.
Goodale’s horrific end was not the first or the last accidental decapitation. No less horrific was the execution of Thomas Ketchum in New Mexico in 1901. A train robber in the classic Wild West mode, Ketchum had moved up to murder before he was captured and sentenced to death. Ketchum put on considerable weight while in custody, and this was not factored into the length of the rope used, resulting in his decapitation. The sight was greeted with horror by most present, with the exception of a photographer who recorded the entire thing for posterity and likely made a tidy profit selling the images to the press. You can still buy postcards in Clayton featuring the gruesome shots – it seems to be the town’s only claim to fame.
In the interests of sexual equality, it seems fair to reference the botched execution of Eva Dugan, in Arizona in 1930. Dugan was convicted of murdering her chicken rancher employer with an axe, and the theft of his automobile and other possessions. The execution is notable for being the first of a woman in the state, and also the first with female witnesses present. Given what transpired, in retrospect they probably would have relinquished that honour.
The lever was pulled at 5am. Dugan dropped through the trapdoor, the rope severing her head. Her headless corpse crashed to the ground and her head reportedly rolled to the feet of the witnesses, five of whom (two women and three men) fainted at the horrific sight.
Following this, the gas chamber replaced the gallows, leaving Dugan with the dubious distinction of being the only woman executed by hanging in the state.
Our species has always been adept at developing new methods of capital punishment – sometimes for humane reasons, sometimes out of cruelty and sometimes as a deterrent. The famous guillotine, for example, despite its bloody reputation, was invented out of humanitarian motives.
Despite its name, it was very much not the invention of French doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. The highly respected physician was opposed to the death penalty, but he had expressed the view that as a first step towards its abolition, a more humane method of execution should be devised, such as a mechanical device. He reputedly said, ‘Now, with my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.’
The use of the words ‘my machine’ resulted in the renaming of the device, which had already been invented by one Antoine Louis, another Parisian doctor. In fact, Louis’s bloody contraption was known for several years as the Louisette, until Guillotin’s name became associated with it.
While Guillotin was horrified to have his name associated with the decapitation device, and his family unsuccessfully petitioned the government to change the name, poor Louis had to settle for a giving his name to a term that is virtually unknown to the general public – the angle of Louis is the medical term for a joint between the manubrium and body of the sternum (or ‘breastbone’).
The first use of Louis’s device was on a highwayman called Peletier on 25 April 1792, and a huge crowd gathered to witness the novel contraption. All went well, at least from the authorities’ point of view, as Peletier was decapitated in the blink of an eye. Despite the massive spillage of blood, the crowd were incensed at the lack of ‘entertainment’, the execution having been so quick. There were chants of ‘bring back the gallows!’ and ‘bring back the breaking wheel!’ The authorities would respond in subsequent years by providing a near endless supply of victims for ‘Madame Guillotine’, as the device became known, and countless hours of happy diversion for the bloodthirsty crowds.
A bizarre footnote to the above: During France’s Reign of Terror, there were multiple accounts of severed heads blinking, lips moving, even of heads moaning or speaking. In one famous case, the executioner raised the severed head of assassin Charlotte Corday and slapped her cheek, and the crowd were amazed to witness an apparent expression of indignation forming.
Ghoulish curiosity about severed heads’ possible consciousness led to an experiment by one Dr Beaurieux in 1905. He was given permission to examine the head of an executed prisoner called Henri Languille. It is difficult to imagine a purpose for this exercise, other than morbid curiosity, but then you’re probably going to continue reading this bit for the same reason …
So, what did Dr Beaurieux witness?
Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. This phenomenon has been remarked by all those finding themselves in the same conditions as myself for observing what happens after the severing of the neck …
I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession, or as in those just dead. It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions – I insist advisedly onthis peculiarity – but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.
The execution of Henri Languille by Guillotine in 1905.
Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out.
It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement – and the eyes took on the glazed look, which they have in the dead.
The whole thing had lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds.
One method of execution was so horrific that its conception almost defies belief, given that it was used in relatively modern times. ‘Blowing from a gun,’ as it became known, was a method of execution used on and off since the sixteenth century, although it was more off than on, given its nature. It really came into its own with the British authorities in India in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The execution involved securing a prisoner with the small of his back against the barrel of a cannon, although occasionally the prisoner was tied facing the weapon, with his stomach pressing against the muzzle. A blank cartridge or grapeshot was usually used, but the use of cannonballs was not uncommon. The gun was fired, and one can imagine the result. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, as George Carter Stent, British officer, writer and lexicographer, left us a first-hand account:
The prisoner is generally tied to a gun with the upper part of the small of his back, nesting against the muzzle. When the gun is fired, his head is seen to go straight up into the air some forty or fifty feet; the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air, and fall at, perhaps, a hundred yards distance; the legs drop to the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun; and the body is literally blown away altogether, not a vestige being seen.
The method was only used on native soldiers found guilty of desertion or mutiny, and was done in front of the massed ranks of other native soldiers, as a deterrent. Yes, it probably would have something of a deterrent effect, I would imagine.
Of course, like most methods of execution, it didn’t always go according to plan. Here is a contemporary account by the pacifist American Peace Society:
One wretched fellow slipped from the rope by which he was tied to the guns just before the explosion, and his arm was nearly set on fire. While hanging in his agony under the gun, a sergeant applied a pistol to his head; and three times the cap snapped, the man each time wincing from the expected shot. At last a rifle was fired into the back of his head, and the blood poured out of the nose and mouth like water from a briskly handled pump. This was the most horrible sight of all. I have seen death in all its forms, but never anything to equal this man’s end.
‘Blowing from a gun’.
Let us make one last visit to the bloody pool of state-sponsored killing, notable for its incredible brutality. If you’re squeamish, skip the next bit.
William the Silent, as he was known, was silenced forever in July 1584 by an assassin called Balthasar Gérard. William, also known as the Prince of Orange, led the Dutch revolt against the Catholic Spanish Hapsburgs that sparked the Dutch War of Independence. Gérard, on the other hand, was a Catholic and supporter of Philip II of Spain.
Gérard managed to break into William’s palace in Delft. He waited until the nobleman passed, then sprung out and shot William with two pistols, killing him. He fled, but was captured immediately and severely beaten. Before his trial, his gaolers devised some punishments of their own. They put wet leather boots on his feet and then dried them over a fire, causing the leather to contract tightly, crushing and burning his feet. He was hanged from a post outside his cell and flogged on a daily basis.
But his pain was far from over. Tried and found guilty, the magistrates delivered a sentence that was gruesome even by the brutal standards of the age. One has to imagine them sitting down and discussing the sentence in detail before agreeing to it, with each of them tossing in increasingly barbarous and perverse elements. Balthasar Gérard was sentenced to, eh, well, let’s leave it to a contemporary, French historian Seigneur de Brantome, to explain:
The assassin of William of Orange was abandoned to what seems like an infinity of vengeance. On the first day, he was taken to the square where he found a cauldron of boiling water, in which was submerged the arm with which he had committed the crime. The next day the arm was cut off, and, since it fell at his feet, he was constantly kicking it up and down the scaffold; on the third day, red-hot pincers were applied to his breasts and the front of his arm and on the fourth day, the pincers were applied similarly on the back of his arm and on his buttocks; and thus, consecutively, this man was tortured for eighteen days. On the last day, he was put to the wheel and ‘mailloti’ [beaten with a wooden club]. After six hours, he was still asking for water, which was not given him. Finally the police magistrate was begged to put an end to him by strangling, so that his soul should not despair and be lost.
By some accounts, he was actually still alive even at this point, but they weren’t done yet. Next up he was to be disembowelled, quartered and his heart torn from his chest and flung in his face. ‘His lips were seen to move up to the moment when his heart was thrown in his face. Then,’ said a looker-on, ‘he gave up the ghost.’
The assassination of William the Silent.
But just to be absolutely sure, the magistrates had further decreed that his head was to be severed. They didn’t believe in half measures back then.
We can look back at the horror of these events now from the comfort of our moral high ground, safe in the knowledge that modern society has moved on from such barbarities. Unfortunately, executions are still a daily part of life in many developed countries, and nightmarish scenarios like the botched executions described above are a regular occurrence in certain middle-eastern countries. In reality, humanity will only have moved on when terms like gas chamber, electric chair and beheading are as obsolete on the planet as the practice of crucifixion.
DYING FOR A LAUGH
Death is no laughing matter, but given enough time and distance from the event, we can sometimes have a good giggle with a clear conscience.
Among those whose passing has raised a chuckle or two down the years was Hans Steininger in 1567. The burgomaster or chief magistrate of the Bavarian town of Braunau (more famous as the birthplace of Adolf Hitler), Steininger was already notable for having possibly the world’s longest beard – almost one-and-a-half metres, or almost five feet. When walking about, he would be obliged to roll the thing up and pin it to his chest in a leather pouch. Long beards were very fashionable at the time, and he was clearly out to impress the ladies with the length of his.
Hans Steininger.
Unfortunately, when fire bells sounded one day, Hans scrambled to his feet to flee, having forgotten to gather his beard, and crashed to the ground, snapping his neck. Hair today, gone tomorrow.
You are what you eat, goes the saying, and if that’s true, then King Adolf Frederick of Sweden was a meal consisting of substantial portions of lobster, caviar, smoked herrings, saurkraut and champagne, topped off with fourteen servings of his favourite dessert: semlor, a very filling sweetened bun stuffed with cream and served in warm milk. Yum. He dropped dead soon after this dinner, entering posterity as ‘the king who ate himself to death’.
The scales of justice have a strange way of balancing out on occasion, as evidenced by a courtroom drama enacted in Ohio in 1871. A man called Thomas McGehan was brought to trial for the alleged shooting dead of one Tom Myers. His defence attorney was Clement Vailandigham, a famed and controversial political figure who had headed an anti-war faction in the Democratic party and opposed the abolition of slavery.
Clement Vailandigham.
During the trial, Vailandigham decided to prove that Myers had accidentally shot himself while rising from a kneeling position and simultaneously drawing his weapon. He repeated the action with a borrowed pistol he believed to be unloaded, but the gun apparently snagged on his pocket as he rose. It discharged, shooting him in the abdomen, and he died of blood poisoning the following day. At least the demonstration proved effective, as Thomas McGehan was subsequently acquitted.
Returning to royalty, and the strange tale of Sunandha Kumariratana, the daughter of Mongkut, the King of Siam, he upon whom the famous Oscar-winning musical The King and I was based. Because the royal family was considered kind of divine, mere mortals like the entire population was forbidden from laying hands on them, under pain of death. Besides reducing certain earthly pleasures, such as getting a back rub, this particularly superior attitude had other drawbacks that probably hadn’t been foreseen.
Princess Sunandha Kumariratana
In 1880, fourteen years after her father’s death, Sunandha and her daughter, Kannabhorn Bejaratana, were travelling to the royal palace when their boat capsized. Although it was near to shore and there were many onlookers, clearly none of them was a sufficiently devoted subject to commit suicide by rescuing the queen or her daughter, neither of whom could swim. So they just stood there, no doubt shaking their heads and ‘tut-tutting’ about it being such a shame, while the two royals disappeared beneath the surface. Killed by royal snobbery, you might say.
The death of Arius – the famous, some would say infamous, fourth-century theologian of Constantinople – is among the grossest in the history books, so if you’re eating, stop now.
Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that Arius had expressed views regarded by many as heretical. After he’d rowed back on his most extreme statements in 336 AD, the Holy Roman Emperor largely forgave him, and ordered Bishop Alexander of Constantinople to receive him.
But the Bishop wasn’t in a forgiving mood. He prayed fervently that Arius would drop dead before he reached the Bishop’s palace. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened, and in the grossest way imaginable. Church historian Socrates of Constantinople – writing almost a century later it must be said, so to be regarded with a pinch of salt – described what happened on that fateful morning:
The rather gruesome death of Arius.
… going out of the imperial palace he paraded proudly through the midst of the city, attracting the notice of all the people. As he approached the place called Constantine’s Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius, and with the terror a violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore enquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine’s Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died.
Given the obvious antipathy towards Arius (even by the historian), and the Bishop’s stated wish to see Arius drop dead, one would be forgiven for smelling a rat, not to mention the unfortunate Arius’s innards, even at this remove. He didn’t so much evacuate his bowels as exterminate them.
SEX AND DEATH
Although it sounds suspiciously like an early Woody Allen movie, for quite a number of minor historical figures this was no laughing matter. Let’s start with those supposedly devout celibates, the popes.
There is little recorded history regarding Pope Leo VII, especially as he only served as Pope for three years, and in that time made little impact on world or religious affairs. His mistress evidently did make something of an impact on him, however – in 939, he died of a massive heart attack while in flagrante delicto.
Just a few popes later came John XII, who made Leo look like an angel and a saint rolled into one. Incredibly, John was only an unprecedented eighteen when elected Pope, principally through the influence of his father. In the full flush of hormone-fuelled youth, he obviously decided that he wasn’t going to waste his time on anything as trivial as God – not when he had the entire Catholic faith at his beck and call.
The holy father Pope John XII.
Most of his papal acts came about through the actions of his advisors, as it seems that John was too busy fornicating, gambling and toasting the devil. A contemporary described him as ‘worthy of being the rival of Elagabalus [the decadent Roman emperor – see Chapter 8] … a robber, a murderer, and an incestuous person, unworthy to represent Christ upon the pontifical throne …’
John XII met his maker aged just twenty-seven, thanks entirely to his insatiable sexual appetite. Multiple versions of his end have been told. Among the most popular is that he had a massive stroke while having sex with an adulterous wife called Stefanetta. Another version is that Stefanetta’s husband found the two having sex, and either beat the Pope to death with a mallet or threw him out of a high window, leaving one unholy mess in the Vatican courtyard below.
Lots of other popes before and after these two were sexually active, but we have to leap forward to the fifteenth century to find the next successor of Saint Peter to actually meet Saint Peter while enjoying some carnal distraction. This was Pope Paul II, who died in 1471. He introduced printing to the Papal States, bringing books to the masses. On the other hand, he was virulently anti-Semitic, and introduced a ‘carnival’ that saw Jews forced to run naked down a street in Rome for the amusement of Christians. He also made it compulsory for Jews to wear a yellow handkerchief to indicate their faith, an idea that the Nazis borrowed in the 1930s and 1940s.
Another debauched pope – Paul II.
He also lavished vast amounts of money on purchasing jewels – an inventory after he died found a treasure horde fit for an Arabian tale. And talking of his death, the official story was that he had over-indulged in melon and had a heart attack. But he had previously been given the nickname Maria Pietissima (Our Lady of Pity), due to his propensity for crying and appearing pitiful when he wanted his own way, his effeminate manner and his propensity for dressing up in excessive finery, and some historians had little doubt he was homosexual. All of which supports the alternate version of his end – that he died while being sodomised by a pageboy.
Similarly ignominious was the passing of Félix François Faure, President of France for four years up to 1899. Of course, unlike in most western countries, it is almost de rigueur for male French politicians to have mistresses, although most of them tend to keep such affairs as private as possible.
Faure’s mistress at the time was Marguerite ‘Meg’ Steinheil, a woman well known for her sexual liaisons with prominent people – including writers Emile Zola and Pierre Loti, composers Jules Massenet and Charles Gounod and diplomat and Suez canal developer Ferdinand de Lesseps. The President was her biggest catch yet.
On 16 February 1899, Marguerite paid Félix a visit in the Élysée Palace. Soon after she’d entered his private apartments, the President’s aides heard frantic screams emanating from the rooms. They rushed in, to discover both in a state of undress, the President unconscious, his hand holding Marguerite’s hair in a vice-like grip. His hold was so tight, they had to cut her hair to free him for treatment. But it was no use, as during their throes of passion, he had suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage. He died later that night.
President Félix François Faure and Meg Steinheil
Madame Steinheil’s position relative to the President, and the fact that he was clutching her hair, led the press and public to speculate that she’d been fellating him. This caused widespread tittering, and was the source of a few new jokes, including a nickname for Marguerite – ‘la pompe funèbre’ (meaning the mortician), based on a French pun on the word ‘pump’, also a euphemism for fellatio.
As if that wasn’t enough scandal and intrigue for Marguerite, nine years later, she was arrested on charges of strangling her husband, Adolphe Steinheil, and her stepmother. The trial was a sensation, as many of Marguerite’s lovers, past and present, were brought up to attest to her scandalous nature (among the most recent of these was King Sisowath of Cambodia!), causing widespread embarrassment for these society figures and much hilarity for the general public.
She was eventually acquitted, although suspicions remained and nobody else was charged with the murders. The judge described her evidence as ‘a tissue of lies’. Marguerite lived to the ripe old age of ninety-five.
Britain, not to be outdone by the French, beat them to it with their own political sex and death scandal almost half a century earlier. Or so the rumour mill said at the time. Officially, Prime Minister Lord Palmerston passed away after a bout of pneumonia at the age of eighty. But rumours abounded at the time, and lingered ever since, that he actually died of a heart attack while having sex with a young maid on a billiard table.
British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, who clearly had a strong constitution.
What diminishes this scandalous tale a little is that Lord Palmerston had long since retired from politics at that stage. What enhances it, however, is the fact that he was still able to mount both a billiard table and a young maid at the age of eighty.
Death offers no favour to the powerful and wealthy, as we’ve seen, although a woman called Megan Marshack was quite happy to offer favours of a certain kind to one of the richest men on the planet, Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller’s wife at the time was Margaretta Large Fitler Murphy (I kid you not), more commonly known as ‘Happy Murphy’, but she must have been anything but happy at the events of 26 January 1979.
Screwed by the Grim Reaper.
The official version of the event had Rockefeller writing a book about his private art collection in the Rockefeller Centre when he suffered a major heart attack. In reality, the seventy-year-old was in the apartment of his pretty, bespectacled, blonde, twenty-six-year-old aide, Megan. The commonly held belief is that they were not discussing interest rates or political ambitions, but that Nelson had a heart attack in Megan’s bed mid-orgasm.
His death famously caused New York magazine to remark, ‘He thought he was coming, but he was going.’
2
Enough to Make You Sick
Advancement in the medical sciences crawled along for millennia, and it is only in the past hundred years or so that serious progress has been made in treating human ailments. But even in the early twentieth century, mercury was still being used to treat such minor conditions as children’s coughs; in the 1950s, companies in the US were selling the ‘Z-Ray Applicator’, which ‘expanded the atoms in your body’ and thus relieved rheumatism and arthritis in the elderly (just to be clear, there’s no such thing as a ‘Z-Ray’); and, most horrifyingly, lobotomies as a treatment for mental illness were still common up to the late 1960s! So perhaps we shouldn’t scoff too much at the medical practices and practitioners of the distant past. Yet they often make for fascinating, if sometimes gruesome and occasionally buttock-clenching, reading.
SPIN DOCTORS
History has thrown up quite a few doctors who either prescribed the oddest of treatments, had the most unusual methods or simply needed to have their own heads examined.
Dr Robert Liston was a Scottish surgeon whose fame came primarily from his speed in performing amputations. This was in the age before anaesthesia, when lessening the agonies of the patient and minimising the risk of infection could be best served by getting the operation over as quickly as possible. Undoubtedly skilled as he was, however, Liston also became legendary in medical circles as the only man ever to perform an operation on one man and yet achieve a 300 percent mortality rate. But more of that anon.
Even those of us with the strongest stomachs and nerves can only imagine the force of will and the composure it takes first to slice into the leg or arm of a man or woman, and then to commence sawing through their bones, all while the restrained patient is fully conscious and shrieking in agony. Clearly, the sooner the limb was removed the better. Recognising this, Liston prided himself on rapid incision and sawing techniques, and could amputate a leg in two-and-a-half minutes. He is said to have carried out amputations in less than thirty seconds, but one has to assume that these were of hands or even fingers.
Dr Liston at work.
Liston entered the record books on 21 December 1846, becoming the first surgeon in England, and possibly even in Europe, to perform an operation using anaesthetic (ether), administered by a Dr Squire. This was a successful above-the-knee amputation on a Mr Frederick Churchill, at University College Hospital, London. He remarked afterwards to his audience of medical professionals, ‘This Yankee dodge, gentlemen, beats mesmerism hollow.’ More of so-called ‘mesmerism’ later.
Two illustrations of Liston’s surgical procedures.
Liston’s term ‘Yankee dodge’ refers to the first operation in the world carried out using anaesthetic – performed by William TG Morton on 16 October 1846, in Massachusetts General Hospital, for which all those needing surgery on the planet can be eternally grateful.
English medical historian and surgeon Richard Gordon recounts Liston’s most gruesome moment, though you have to take this tale with a pinch of salt. He once amputated a man’s leg in less than three minutes, but the patient subsequently died of gangrene poisoning. Unfortunately, in his haste, Liston had also severed two fingers of a young colleague’s hand, his assistant also perishing from gangrene. And lastly, his flashing scalpel slashed through the pants of another colleague, who was so alarmed at the possibility of damage to his privates, he dropped dead of a heart attack. Thus Liston achieved a triple death rate, even though there was only one patient.
Another Scot, and a contemporary of Liston, was Andrew Ure, who besides his medical practice, was also a reputable chemist, business theorist, scholar and scriptural geologist. ‘What the hell is a scriptural geologist?’ you might well ask. I had to look it up too. The nearest modern equivalent I could find was a creationist, and even back then, this earned Dr Ure some scorn.
That’s not why he’s featured in this book, though, but because of his experiments in re-animating the dead, which he revealed in 1818. Yes, you read that correctly. Bringing the dead back to life. And although Frankenstein was officially published that same year, Mary Shelley had started writing it a couple of years beforehand, so I can’t credit Ure as a source of her inspiration.
Ure had been carrying out experiments on a hanged murderer called Matthew Clydesdale. Inserting metal rods into the body, he applied an electrical current to the phrenic nerve, which runs from the neck to the diaphragm. He startled the medical community by claiming he’d brought the corpse back to life, albeit briefly. He described the experiment thus:
