Category Archives: 18th century

1725: Fork lost in man’s backside for “a month or more”

In 1725, Dr Robert Payne wrote to the Royal Society about a strange case at his surgery in Lowestoft, Suffolk. Earlier in the year Dr Payne was visited by James Bishop, a teenaged apprentice from the dockyards in Great Yarmouth. Bishop complained of severe abdominal pains, bloody urine and pus in his stools. On inspection of Bishop’s person, Dr Payne found:

“A hard tumour in the left buttock, on or near the gluteus maximus, two or three inches from the verge of the anus, a little sloping upwards… Shortly after the prongs of a fork appeared through the orifice of the sore… I made a circular incision about the prongs and with a strong pair of pincers extracted it, not without great difficulty, handle and all… the end of the handle was besmeared with excrement [and the fork was] six inches and a half long.”

As might be expected this procedure was excruciating for the patient, however he recovered after a few days’ rest. Bishop refused to tell Payne how the fork came to be in his posterior, however, Bishop’s family threatened to disown him if he did not confess the truth. According to Payne’s report, Bishop later admitted that:

“…being costive [constipated], he put the said fork up his fundament, thinking by that means to help himself, but unfortunately it slipped up so far that he could not recover it again… He says he had no trouble or pain till a month or more after it was put up.”

Source: Letter from Dr Robert Payne to the Royal Society of London, November 5th 1725. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1782: Bottom-like coconuts highly prized in the Seychelles

William Thomson was a late 18th century Scottish writer and theologian. The son of a Lothian carpenter, Thomson was an excellent student and received scholarships to study at St Andrew’s and Edinburgh universities.

After a brief stint in the clergy, Thomson moved to London and wrote extensively on military matters, history, law and poetry. He also travelled widely and published accounts of his experiences abroad. Writing in 1782 Thomson described a visit to Praslin, the second largest island of the Seychelles. Praslin was small and remote but according to Thomson had arable land with excellent soil and a good amount of tall timber.

Even better, it produced a type of coconut that looked and smelled like a human backside:

“These islands are remarkable for producing a tree which yields a kind of cocoa-nut, representing in the most striking manner the figure of a human breech [buttocks], thighs, etc. [and] having a fetid smell from an aperture of the fundament, like that of human excrement. The Indians, struck with this resemblance, set an enormous value upon these nuts…”

Source: William Thomson, Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa &c., 1782. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1790: Hindu wives kiss a priest’s private parts for fertility

John Macdonald was a servant to several 18th-century noblemen and colonial officials. According to his writings, Macdonald was the son of an affluent tenant farmer from Inverness. When his family was “ruined” in the 1740s, Macdonald, then just a young boy, was placed in service. He became a footman and valet and later spent more than 30 years traveling the globe with a succession of masters.

Better educated and more literate than his colleagues, Macdonald penned a memoir that contains rare glimpses of life as a working-class tourist abroad. It also describes racier aspects of foreign life, like this fertility ritual in western India:

“At Dillinagogue there was a tank where the Gentoos [Hindus] bathe themselves and the women in particular. At the end of the tank is a piece of rising ground with a cross fixed 12 feet high, where a priest sits most days, naked as he was born. When the women come to enter the bath they make the priest a grand salaam [greeting]. They have a shift on when they entered the water. When a young girl who has been betrothed for some years is going home to her husband… goes to take the bath, she makes a grand salaam to the priest and kisses his private parts, hoping he will pray that they may have children. I took a great delight in going to see those ceremonies.”

Source: John Macdonald, Travels in Various Parts of Europe, Asia and Africa &c., 1790. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1720: Autopsy finds 46-year-old petrified foetus

An anatomical diagram of the fractured mass found inside Anna Mullern in 1720

Anna Mullern was born in Swabia in 1626 and married late, probably in her 30s. Anna and her husband wanted children but for many years were unable to conceive. In 1674, when Anna was 48, she “declared herself to be with child”, having shown “all the usual tokens of pregnancy”. Anna experienced some swelling but when symptoms abated after a few weeks, her doctor declared this ‘pregnancy’ a false alarm.

All that was quickly forgotten when Anna conceived and delivered two healthy children, a son and a daughter. Her husband died soon after but Anna remained in excellent health, bringing up her children alone and living to the ripe old age of 94.

In March 1720, as Anna lay dying, she made an unusual request of her physician, Dr Wohnliche. Convinced that she had conceived a child in 1674, and that it remained trapped inside her, Anna requested her body be “cut open” after death. A Dr Steigertahl performed the requested autopsy – and quickly located the petrified body of Anna’s stillborn child from 46 years before:

“Her body was opened by the surgeon… he found within her a hard mass of the form and size of a large ninepin bowl, but had not the precaution to observe whether it lay in the uterus or without it… For want of a better instrument [he] broke it open with the blow of a hatchet. This ball, with the contents of it, are expressed in the following figures [see image, right].”

Source: Dr Steigertahl, “An Account of a Foetus that continued 46 years in the mother’s body” in Philosophical Transactions, vol. 31, 1721. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1744: Boy, 3, drinks ale, lifts cheese, has pubic hair

In 1747, the noted physician and obstetrician Thomas Dawkes reported a rare case of advanced ageing in Cambridgeshire. The subject, Thomas Hall, was born in Willingham in October 1741. At nine months of age Thomas was already beginning to show signs of puberty. Dawkes first examined Thomas in 1744, a few weeks before his third birthday, and found that he had pubic hair:

“…as long, as thick and as crisp as that of an adult person. The glans of his penis was quite uncovered [and] he could throw, with much facility, a hammer of 17 pounds weight… He had as much understanding as a boy of five or six.”

By Thomas’ third birthday he stood almost four feet in height. According to Dawkes, he could lift a large Cheshire cheese and balance it on his head, and drink a two-gallon cask of ale without difficulty. By the age of four, Thomas walked and talked like an adult. He had also started to grow a beard.

Sensing an opportunity for profit, Thomas’ father turned him into a public spectacle. The boy spent more than a year ‘performing’ in local taverns, where “he was often debauched with wines and other inebriating liquors”.

Dawkes examined Thomas again just after his fifth birthday. At this point he stood four feet six inches tall, weighed 85 pounds and had a penis six inches long and three inches in circumference. But Thomas’ rapid growth was also taking a toll on his health, which deteriorated rapidly through 1747. Dawkes visited Thomas in late August, a week before his death, and found him:

“…a piteous and shocking spectacle [with] several bald spaces in his head, and his visage and gesture gave the lively idea of a decrepit old man, worn out with age.”

Thomas Hall died in September 1747, shortly before his sixth birthday. He was buried in the churchyard at Willingham. On the evidence, it appears that Thomas suffered from progeria or a similar genetic disorder.

Source: Thomas Dawkes, Prodigium Willinghamense, 1747; The Scots Magazine, vol. 10, 1747. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1797: Prussian scientistic dabbles in electrified rectums

An artist’s depiction of Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was a Prussian eclectic who made some significant contributions to natural history. He was also not averse to using electricity to experiment on himself.

Humboldt was born in Berlin to an affluent military family. As a child he spent most of his spare time collecting and categorising different animal and plant species. By his early 20s, Humboldt had completed courses in finance, business, Spanish, anatomy and geology.

In 1792, Humboldt set up a residence and laboratory in Vienna, where he carried out thousands of experiments using electricity and drawing on earlier research by Luigi Galvani and Franz Karl Achard. Humboldt was particularly interested in the relationship between electricity and living tissue. Most of his experiments involved applying mild charges to live animals of different species, from worms and other invertebrates to amphibians, fish and large mammals.

Humboldt once attempted to revive a dead finch by inserting a silver electrode into its rectum and another into its beak, then sending through a current:

“To my amazement, at the moment of contact the bird opened its eyes and raised itself on its feet by flapping its wings. It breathed anew for seven or eight minutes and then expired quietly.”

Humboldt was also given to using his own body for experimentation. On one occasion, he electrified his own skin to see if frogs placed on his back would hop. During another test, Humboldt replicated the finch experiment by placing a zinc-tipped electrode into his mouth and a silver electrode “approximately four inches” into his rectum. The outcome of this was not pleasant:

“The introduction of a charge into the armatures produced nauseating cramps and discomforting stomach contractions, then abdominal pain of a severe magnitude… followed by involuntary evacuation of the bladder… What struck me more… is that by inserting the silver more deeply into the rectum, a bright light appears before both eyes.”

Humboldt survived these torturous self-experiments to fulfil his dreams of becoming a scientific explorer. In 1799, he joined a Spanish expedition to Cuba and South America. During this trip Humboldt researched everything from volcanoes to bird droppings. While travelling on the Orinoco River Humboldt was delighted to capture some electric eels, which he used to deliberately administer shocks to himself and an assistant. Fortunately for the eel, Humboldt’s rectum played no part in this self experiment.

Source: Alexander von Humboldt, Versuche über die gereizte Muskel und Nervenfaser nebst Vermutungen über den chemischen Prozess des Lebens in der Tier und Pflanzenweldt, Berlin, 1797. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1753: The Earl of Chesterfield notes similarities in dog farts

Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694-1773) was an English Whig politician and, from his father’s death in 1726, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield.

Stanhope was born in Westminster and educated by tutors before studying at Cambridge. After completing a grand tour of Europe he returned to London and, in 1715, won a seat in the House of Commons. Stanhope’s maiden speech was a fiery attack on the Tories; according to an apocryphal legend they responded by threatening to fine him £500 for speaking in the Commons before his 21st birthday, which was still six weeks away.

Stanhope survived this early hiccup to serve more than 50 years as a parliamentarian. He also spent several years on the continent as a diplomat and ambassador. Stanhope’s best known literacy legacy was a collection of letters he wrote to his son, also named Philip, during the 1740s and 1750s.

Most of Stanhope’s letters are informative, educational and advisory, an attempt to prepare his son for the earldom but he occasionally lapsed into whimsy. In October 1753, Stanhope penned a long missive to Philip Junior that explored Jewish culture, Turkish history and how to conduct oneself around women. Stanhope interrupted this lecture to tell his son he had purchased a new dog:

“I have had a barbet [water dog] brought me from France, so exactly like [your dog] Sultan that he has been mistaken for him several times, only his snout is shorter and his ears longer than Sultan’s. [I] have acquired him the name of Loyola… My Loyola, I pretend, is superior to your Sultan… I must not omit too that when he breaks wind, he smells exactly like Sultan.”

Source: Letter from the Earl of Chesterfield to Philip Stanhope, October 19th 1753. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1764: Keep the skin white by boiling down “four little dogs”

It is common knowledge that in the 18th century, aristocratic and wealthy bourgeois women smothered their faces with whiteners and rouges. In some circles it was considered scandalous to appear in public under-powdered or even unpowdered, such as Lady Ilchester did when she attended the opera in 1777. The custom was even more exaggerated in France, where the madams and mademoiselles attempted to outdo each other with alabaster-white faces, fluorescent red rouges and enormous beauty spots.

Many of these cosmetics, of course, contained substances now known to be poisonous: ceruse (white lead), cinnabar (red mercury) and other substances thick with arsenic or sulphur. Doctors of the mid-1700s, alert to the dangers of excessive make-up, came up with a radical new beauty regimen – simply washing the face and keeping it clean – but this was slow to catch on.

In 1764, Antoine Hornot, a distiller to the royal family and prolific writer, offered his own recipe for keeping the skin healthy and pale, using only natural ingredients:

“A distillation of four calves’ feet, two dozen egg whites and egg shells, a calf’s cheek, one chicken skinned alive, a lemon, a half ounce of white poppy seeds, half a loaf of bread, three buckets of goats milk and four little dogs, one or two days old.”

Source: Antoine de Hornot (writing as M. Dejean), Traitee des Odeurs, 1764. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1744: For consumption, sniff turf and “suck a healthy woman”

John Wesley (1703-91) was an English theologian and religious reformer, best known as the founder of Methodism. Wesley also had an interest in the natural sciences, physics and medicine. In 1744, he penned Primitive Physic, or an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases, a volume of medical receipts and treatments.

Most of Wesley’s medical advice is standard for the time, though there are a few bizarre tips, such as his treatment for insanity:

“Put the madman under a great waterfall, for as long as his strength would bear, or let him eat nothing but apples for a month.”

His advice for consumption (tuberculosis) is no less strange:

“Cut up a little turf of fresh earth and, laying down, breathe into the hole [for] a quarter of an hour. Have known a deep consumption cured thus. In the last stage, suck a healthy woman. This cured my father.”

Source: John Wesley, Primitive Physic, or an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases, 1744. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1766: Army captain suspended for a year for being insulted

Captain Benjamin Beilby, a British army officer with the 11th Foot Regiment on Minorca, was court martialed in September 1766. Beilby’s ‘crime’ was that he had been abused and insulted by another officer, Captain Robinson, but had done nothing about it. As a consequence, Beilby was charged with:

“..having received from Captain Robinson language unbecoming of the character of an officer and a gentleman, without taking proper notice of it.”

According to witnesses Robinson had been taunting and abusing Beilby for some time, on one occasion being heard to call out:

“Is that the way you march your guard, you shitten dirty fellow? Is that the way you make your men slope their arms, you dirty dog?”

Beilby’s toleration of these grievous slurs outraged his fellow officers, apparently more than the slurs themselves. Honour demanded the insulted party confront Robinson and challenge him to a duel – but Beilby had done nothing, bar write his abuser an angry letter.

Beilby was ostracised by his own colleagues, who refused to dine in the same mess as him. The court martial found Beilby guilty of neglect and he was suspended from duty for one year. When records of the court martial reached the Admiralty in London, however, it was immediately overturned. Captain Robinson was not court martialed or sanctioned for his insults.

Source: Court Martial Records, 71/50, September 1766. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.