Category Archives: 19th century

1889: Three Bald Knobbers endure botched hangings

The Bald Knobbers were a vigilante gang active in southern Missouri during the 1880s. The group came together in 1883 to deal with bandits and cross-border raiders plaguing local farmers. By 1885, the Bald Knobbers had grown in size and become troublemakers as much as trouble-stoppers. They also adopted a crude but intimidating uniform: a black hood with eye and mouth holes removed and the corners tied to resemble ears or horns.

The lawless behaviour of the Bald Knobbers led to the formation of the Anti-Bald Knobbers, in effect a vigilante group formed to combat another vigilante group. In March 1887 Bald Knobbers in Christian County shot up the home of an opponent, killing him and another man. Three Bald Knobbers – Dave Walker, his son William and Deacon Matthews – were arrested, tried and sentenced to death.

Their hanging took place in Ozark, Missouri on May 10th 1889 but was appallingly handled:

“The trap was sprung at 9.53 this morning. Matthews went down while uttering a prayer. The stretch of the rope was so great as to let all the doomed men fall to the ground. The rope finally broke and William Walker fell loose and lay on the ground struggling and groaning. He was taken up by the sheriff and his deputies and again placed on the scaffold. Dave Walker was swung up and died in 15 minutes. John Matthews lived about 13 minutes and died with his feet on the ground. The scene was horrible in the extreme. William Walker was lifted almost insensible, helpless and groaning on the scaffold and the rope was again adjusted around his neck. The trap was again sprung and this time the poor wretch came to a sudden stop with his feet full 30 inches above the ground. He died without a struggle.”

A gunfight between Bald Knobbers, Anti-Bald Knobbers and lawmen in July 1889 ended most of the Knobber violence in Missouri. The Bald Knobbers later featured in the popular 1907 novel The Shepherd of the Hills and two film adaptations, including a 1941 release starring John Wayne.

Source: The Sedalia Weekly Bazoo (Missouri), May 14th 1889. 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.

1878: Man unfairly arrested for loitering in Paris urinal

A Paris urinal c.1880 – not much privacy for anything really

In the 1870s, Paris police and civic leaders railed against what they considered a significant problem: men soliciting sex from other men at public urinals.

Consensual homosexuality was not illegal in France (it was decriminalised during the Revolution) but public displays of homosexual behaviour were nevertheless prosecuted as “offences against public decency”. Between 1870 and 1872, more than 100 men were arrested for loitering or acting suspiciously around street toilets in Paris. In 1876, police even found Count Eugene de Germiny, a conservative member of the city council, in a lavatory clinch with a young man named Pierre.

After de Germiny’s arrest, the concern about nefarious activities in public toilets reached fever pitch. One Paris physician, Maurice Laugier, attempted to penetrate the hysteria with an 1878 essay titled Du role de l’expertise médico-légale dans certains cas d’outrage public a la pudeur (“The role of forensic evidence in certain cases of outraging public decency”).

Dr Laugier described several cases where men with verifiable medical conditions were unfairly dealt with by police, including one man:

“…suffering from a urinary tract infection… who was observed and questioned by the police [for his] very prolonged stay in a urinal and the manoeuvres that he was exercising on his penis.”

Men suspected of dubious activity in or around public toilets, wrote Laugier, should be questioned about their medical history and afforded a full medical examination before being charged or presented for trial.

Source: Dr Maurice Laugier, “Du role de l’expertise medico-legale dans certains cas d’outrage public a la pudeur” in Annales d’hygiene Publique et Medecine Legal, 1878. 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.

1847: Wash maternal bosoms in a young man’s urine

Henri Jouan (1821-1907) was a French naval officer. As a young man, Jouan spent years sailing around Asia, the Pacific and North America. He later rose to the rank of captain, before retiring in 1884.

Four years after leaving the navy, Jouan penned a letter to US army captain John Bourke, detailing some of the strange cultural practices and medical treatments he had encountered, both at home and abroad. Among them was an Indian habit of rubbing a cow’s genitals, then one’s face, for luck:

“During a stay of three months in Bombay, I saw frequently cows wandering in the streets and Hindu devotees bowing, and lifting up the tails of the cows, rubbing the wombs of the aforesaid [cows] with the right hand and afterwards rubbing their own faces with it.”

No less bizarre was a remedy for toothache from his native Brittany:

“In our province when somebody in the peasantry has a cheek swollen by the effects of toothache, a very good remedy is to apply upon the swollen cheek (as a poultice) freshly expelled cow dung, or even human dung, just expelled and still smoking, which is considered much more efficient.”

Another Jouan encountered while in the port city of Cherbourg:

“In 1847, I was then 26 years old… once an old woman in Cherbourg came to me with a washing pan and asked me to piss into it. She told me that the urine of a stout, healthy young man was required to wash the bosoms of a young woman who had just delivered a child.”

Source: Letter from Captain Henri Jouan to Captain John G. Bourke, July 29th 1888. 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.

1889: Standing on one foot leads to masturbation

Mary Wood-Allen – both feet on the ground, girls.

Mary Wood-Allen (1841-1908) was an American physician, paediatrician and temperance advocate. Like many others of her generation, Wood-Allen was a social purist obsessed with the promotion of cleanliness, morality and wholesome thoughts.

By the 1890s, Wood-Allen was a public speaker in high demand and a prolific author of guidebooks on adolescence. Her message was strident and consistent: children must be protected from premature development, precocious sexual thoughts or activity and, above all, masturbation.

In her 1889 book What a Young Woman Ought to Know, Wood-Allen walked young girls through life from puberty to marriage, outlining the ‘cans’ and ‘cannots’ of these formative years. Reading novels, for example, was a strict ‘no no’:

“It is not only that novel-reading engenders false and unreal ideas of life, but the descriptions of love-scenes, of thrilling, romantic episodes, find an echo in the girl’s physical system and tend to create an abnormal excitement of her organs of sex, which she recognizes only as a pleasurable mental emotion, with no comprehension of the physical origin or the evil effects. Romance-reading by young girls will, by this excitement of the bodily organs, tend to create their premature development, and the child becomes physically a woman months, or even years, before she should.”

Another forbidden act was the seemingly benign habit of standing on one foot. According to Wood-Allen, continually favouring one foot could lead to uterine displacement, menstrual difficulties and constipation. That problem itself exerted pressure on sexual organs, something “known to incite self abuse”:

“..The common habit of standing on one foot is productive of marked deformities of both face and body and of serious displacements of internal organs… Standing continually with the weight on the left foot is more injurious than bearing it on the right foot, for it causes the uterus and ovaries to press upon the rectum and so produces a mechanical constipation, especially during menstruation.

Source: Dr Mary Wood-Allen, What a Young Woman Ought to Know, London, 1889. 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.

1871: Lawyer dies after using wrong pistol for demonstration

Clement L. Vallandigham, whose prepping for court didn’t go entirely to plan

Clement L. Vallandigham (1820-71) was a prominent Ohio lawyer and politician who served in Congress prior to and during the Civil War.

A pacifist by nature, Vallandigham made several inflammatory speeches against the war and those he deemed responsible for it, including Abraham Lincoln. In May 1863, Vallandigham was arrested and temporarily interned, before being deported to the Confederacy. The following year he sneaked back into the United States via Canada, with the aid of a new hairstyle and a false moustache.

After the war, Vallandigham returned to his native Ohio and to practising law. In June 1871 he was in the town of Lebanon, acting as lead defence counsel in a murder case. His client, a Hamilton ruffian named Thomas McGehan, was charged with shooting another man in the stomach during a bar room fight. Vallandigham’s line of defence was quite simple: the victim had in fact shot himself while trying to withdraw his pistol while rising to stand.

At breakfast one morning, Vallandigham showed his legal team how he intended to demonstrate this in court – but made a fatal error:

“Mr McBurney [another lawyer] had expressed some doubts as to the possibility of Myers [the victim] shooting himself in the manner described by Mr Vallandigham, when the latter said ‘I will show you in a half a second’. He picked up a revolver and putting it in his right pocket, drew it out far enough to keep the muzzle touching his body, and engaged the hammer. The weapon exploded and sent its deadly missile into the abdomen at a point almost corresponding with that in which Myers was shot. Mr Vallandigham immediately exclaimed that he had taken up the wrong pistol… There were two revolvers on the table, one loaded and the other unloaded. Unfortunately Mr Vallandigham seized the former.”

Vallandigham was carried to bed and doctors were summoned but they were unable to locate the bullet or stem his internal bleeding. He died some 12 hours later. His corpse was packed in ice and returned to his home in Dayton for burial. Vallandigham’s wife Louisa, who was attending her brother’s funeral at the time of her husband’s demise, was grief stricken; she died from a heart attack seven weeks later. Vallandigham’s client, Thomas McGehan, was retried twice and eventually acquitted.

Source: The Stark County Democrat (Ohio), June 22nd 1871. 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.

1856: Toad hibernates for 25 years under palm tree

Natural historians have recorded several anecdotes about frogs and toads hibernating for prolonged periods, sometimes several years, and often in confined or unlikely places.

The early 19th century naturalist Dean Buckland reported a live frog being found in a block of freshly mined coal. Buckland tested theories of amphibian hibernation with a series of experiments, entombing frogs in tree cavities and blocks of porous stone. Most of these proved unsuccessful and produced only dead and shrivelled up frogs and toads – but some of Buckland’s imprisoned subjects survived for up to two years.

Another amazing account comes from a Mr Adlington of Jersey, who in 1856 found a large toad encased in the roots of palm tree:

“The creature looked dead; the tree had ground round it… When [his gardener] began to cut the truck into sections he discovered the toad and split the tree in two to liberate it. The wood was simply rotten fibre, very white, and had evidently grown round the live creature, for when it came out of its hole, a perfect mound was left of it… Of course we thought it was dead and so buried it, but for fear it should come to life we poured boiling water on it. After about half an hour it showed signs of life. In about three days it began to swell out and get moist and hide under big leaves in the garden. In a month it was difficult to distinguish it from other toads, and it was very lively.”

Adlington had sections of the tree examined by his local museum, which estimated that the toad had been buried for as long as 25 years. There is no mention in his report of the toad singing and dancing.

Source: Letter from M. Adlington, cited in Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts, v.57, October 1909. 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.

1881: Man hammers a four-inch dagger into his own skull

In 1891, the Lancet reported a case documented by Dubrisay, a Paris physician. Dubrisay was called to attend to a 44-year-old labourer who had attempted suicide by pounding a 10-centimetre (four-inch) dagger into his own skull. According to the Lancet’s account:

“He held the dagger in his left hand and given it with the right several blows with a mallet, believing that he would fall dead at the first blow. To his profound surprise he felt no pain and observed no particular phenomenon. He struck the dagger in all about a dozen times. The man was a drunkard but was sober at the moment of the attempt.”

By this stage the man had nine-tenths of the blade embedded in his skull – but had suffered no pain, loss of consciousness or other ill effects. Unsure what to do next, he changed his mind about suicide and agreed to Dr Dubrisay being summoned. Dubrisay arrived two hours later, however his initial efforts to extract the dagger proved fruitless:

“For half an hour unsuccessful attempts were made to get the dagger out. The patient was placed on the ground, two vigorous persons fixed his shoulders and, aided by a strong pair of carpenter’s pincers, repeated attempts were made, but without success.”

The patient remained conscious and ambulatory during these failed attempts. He was taken to a nearby coppersmith’s, where the dagger was pulled out with the aid of a steam winch. Again, he endured this ordeal with “the greatest coolness”, suffering some bleeding and discomfort but no significant pain.

The patient was able to walk to hospital, remaining there for ten days while his wound healed. He was then discharged, apparently in perfect health. The fascinated Dr Dubrisay later replicated the incident in a series of experiments, hammering daggers into the skulls of human cadavers.

Source: The Lancet, London, v.2, 1881. 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.

1891: The foreskin: an “evil genie” that will land you in jail

Peter Remondino (1846-1926) arrived in the United States from Italy in the 1850s and was raised in rural Minnesota. He later studied medicine in Philadelphia and served as a doctor during the American Civil War.

In the 1870s, Dr Remondino relocated to California and became one of San Diego’s most prominent and sought after physicians. Though best known for his specialisation in respiratory illnesses, Remondino was also a vocal advocate for circumcision. His central argument was that the foreskin was a redundant organ. When man was a hunter-gatherer, the foreskin:

“..provided him with a sheath, wherein he carried his procreative organ safely out of harm’s way during wild steeplechases through thorny briars and bramble… This leathery pouch also protected him from the many leeches, small aquatic lizards or other animals that infested the marshes or rivers… or served as a protection from the bites of ants or other vermin…”

But now, Remondino argues, the foreskin is nothing but trouble, exerting:

“…a malign influence in the most distant and apparently unconnected manner. Like some of the evil genies or sprites in the Arabian tales it can reach from afar the object of its malignity, striking him down unawares in the most unaccountable manner; making him a victim to all manner of ills, sufferings, and tribulations… and other conditions, calculated to weaken him physically, mentally and morally… to land him perchance in the jail, or even in a lunatic asylum.”

It goes without saying that Dr Remondino recommended circumcision to treat or circumvent a number of ailments, including masturbation, nocturnal emissions, bedwetting, venereal diseases, timidity and insecurity, even cancer. Remindino also called for the “wholesale circumcision of the Negro race”, a measure he claimed would curtail the interest of black men in white women, reducing a great deal of racial tension and a “great number of lynchings”.

Source: Dr Peter Remondino, History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the President, Philadelphia, 1891; “Questions of the Day: Negro rapes” in National Popular Review, v.4, January 1894. 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.

1801: Welshman killed by a bread loaf to the private parts

Welsh coronial records from the spring of 1801 contain a brief but thought-provoking summary of the death of William Hopkin. According to an inquest held in Cardiff, Hopkin succumbed after being hit in the groin by a flying loaf of bread:

“At the Coroner’s inquest taken at Cardiff before the Bailiffs, William Prichard and Henry Hollier, on a view of the body of William Hopkin, found that he met his death through injuries received at the hands of Morgan Hopkin of Cardiff, labourer, who threw a twopenny wheaten loaf at the deceased and thereby inflicted a mortal blow upon his private parts, resulting in death a few days after such assault.”

Sadly, further research was not able to uncover the nature of William Hopkin’s injuries, why or how the loaf was thrown and whether the perpetrator was brought to justice. The fate of the deadly bread is also unknown.

Source: Glamorgan Calendar Rolls (Cardiff), Spring 1801. 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.

1846: James Brown finds John Kerry in bed with his wife

In October 1846, the Sunday Times reported that James Brown had appeared in court charged with assaulting John Kerry, after finding Kerry in bed with his wife. The Browns had been married for four years but often quarrelled.

According to James Brown he had left London on business – but returned after receiving an anonymous letter informing him of John Kerry’s dalliances with his wife:

“Determined to sift the matter he came to London, and on proceeding to the bedroom of his lodgings, he heard his wife and Kerry talking together in a loving and affectionate manner. Feeling satisfied that they were on the bed together, he burst open the door [and] commenced beating both of them, giving Kerry a sound drubbing.”

James Brown’s wife refused to press the charge of assault against her husband, however Brown was convicted of assaulting John Kerry and fined three pounds or two months’ imprisonment.

Source: The Sunday Times (London), October 25th 1846. 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.