Category Archives: Death

1933: Doctor tries reviving the dead – with a see saw

robert cornish

Robert E. Cornish (1903-63) was a Californian physician, academic and medical researcher, best known for his attempts to revive the dead.

Born in San Francisco, Cornish was the Doogie Howser of his day: he completed high school at age 15, graduated from Berkley three years later and was licensed to practice medicine in his 21st year. In his mid 20s, Cornish returned to Berkeley as a researcher where he worked on a number of projects, from reading glasses to the isolation of heavy water.

Cornish’s pet interest, however, was the resuscitation of human and animal cadavers after death, which he believed entirely possible. By 1933 he had developed an unusual method of reanimation. Cornish’s ‘patients’ were strapped to a large see-saw, injected with adrenaline and heparin to thin the blood, then vigorously “teetered” to restore circulation. He attempted this bizarre experiment on several bodies without luck, coming to the conclusion that too long had elapsed since death for it to work.

In May 1934 Cornish turned his attentions to freshly euthanised dogs. He acquired five fox terriers, each pithily named Lazarus, and conducted his experiment. Three of them stayed dead while two were successfully revived, though both were rendered blind and insensible.

Despite this rather inconclusive outcome, the experiments were hailed as a great success. Cornish was feted in the press and a 1935 film, Life Returns, was made about his work. After lapping up the celebrity, Cornish returned to more mundane areas of research. But in 1947 he reemerged with a scheme to “teeter” a freshly executed human cadaver. He found a willing participant, a child killer named Thomas McMonigle, who would be carried straight from the gas chamber to the ‘Cornish teeter’:

“Dr Cornish, elated at the sensational success of his experiments with dogs, wants to make the attempt [on humans]. He is now seeking permission to experiment with a criminal executed by poison gas. Given the body after physicians declare the man to be dead, he would strap the body to a teeterboard and attach electrical heating pads to the limbs. Next a chemical known as methylene blue would be injected into the veins to neutralise the poisonous fumes that had caused death. Pure oxygen would then be pumped into the lungs through a mask and the teeterboard rocked slowly to keep the blood in circulation… Dr Cornish believes firmly that the dead man would live. He does not agree with other scientists that the brain of the man so revived would be hopelessly damaged.”

Thankfully, Cornish’s proposal was turned down by the state of California, and McMonigle was executed without “teetering” in February 1948. By the late 1950s Cornish had retired from medical research and was marketing his own product: “Dr Cornish’s Tooth Powder with Vitamin D and Fluoride”.

Source: “Can science raise the dead?” in Popular Science, February 1935. 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.

1896: Wealthy bachelor Ed Sheeran found gassed

In 1896, New York papers reported that Edward Sheeran had been found dead, suffocated by gas. Sheeran, a wealthy bachelor, owned a house in Brooklyn, which he shared with his sister, Sarah, and her husband, Michael Sheehan.

Late on the morning of October 4th, Sheeran’s sister went to his bedroom to rouse him. She found the door locked and noticed a distinctive smell of gas. Another relative was summoned to force Sheeran’s bedroom window:

“On the floor was the body of Edward, while the gas was pouring from the burner, which was turned on. The body was lying face downward, and in the dead man’s hand was his trousers.”

The coroner arrived to inspect the scene and speak to witnesses. Believing he may have turned the gas on intentionally, the coroner ordered that Sheeran’s brother-in-law be taken into custody. There is no record of Michael Sheehan ever being charged or tried, however, so it seems that Ed Sheeran’s sad demise – gassed to death while clutching his trousers – was a tragic accident.

Source: New York Tribune, October 5th 1896. 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.

1886: Henri Blot, Paris’ sleepy necrophiliac

By day, Henri Blot was a young waiter in a Paris cafe; by night he was a sleepy necrophiliac with a taste for young dancers. Blot’s 1886 arrest and trial shocked the French capital.

Prominent court reporter and Le Figaro columnist Albert Bataille described Blot as “something of a pretty boy, 26 years of age, though he has a livid complexion and a feline quality in his physique”. According to Bataille’s account, in March 1886 Blot entered a small cemetery in Saint-Ouen shortly before midnight and:

“…went to a mass grave, to a cross marking the coffin of a young woman of 18, Femando Méry, a theatrical dancer buried the day before. He removed the soil and lifted the body of the girl onto an embankment. Setting the bouquets aside and kneeling on white paper, he practised his sordid work on the corpse. He then fell asleep, waking with scarcely enough time to leave the cemetery unseen, though not enough time to replace the body.”

An insane man was wrongly arrested for this crime, which allowed Blot to strike again. On June 12th, he broke into the grave of another young woman, a ballerina (Blot apparently had a thing for dancers). Again, he violated the corpse and again, he fell asleep next to it. This time, however, the snoozing Blot was discovered by the cemetery caretaker. He was quickly arrested and committed to stand trial for gross indecency and interfering with graves.

When interrogated by the judge about his motives, Blot’s reply was simple: “Everyone has their tastes; mine is corpses”. Blot was sentenced to two years’ in prison; his fate after this is unknown.

Source: Albert Bataille, Les Causes Criminelles et Mondaines, 1886. 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.

1909: Missing Texas boy turns up in cotton bale in England

In December 1908, a Texas cotton farmer, George Hartman, reported his two-year-old son Alfred missing. Young Alfred had accompanied his father on a delivery run to Fredericksburg but went missing while Hartman Snr. was conducting business.

An extensive search of the town failed to turn up any sign of Alfred. It was presumed he had wandered into a local waterway, drowned and sank to the bottom. The mystery was solved six months later, with:

“…the finding of the dead body of the infant in a bale of cotton opened in Liverpool, England… The child having crept into the press while open and, falling asleep, was ginned into the bale of cotton. The cotton was sold to a Texas concern, placed in a warehouse for several weeks and finally exported to Liverpool.”

Source: The Gettysburg Times, May 10th 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.

1691: Bursting a genital boil claims Benjamin Franklin’s uncle

Josiah Franklin (1657-1745) was the father of Benjamin Franklin, pre-revolutionary British America’s most famous citizen. In 1717, Franklin Senior penned a short essay about his family. He focused mainly on his father, Thomas, and his six older brothers. Josiah wrote most affectionately about one of his brothers, John.

Going by Josiah’s account, John Franklin was an intelligent and charming conversationalist, a generous philanthropist and quite popular with the ladies. He was also a mentor to Josiah, taking him in as an apprentice in 1666 and acting “as a father to me and helping me through my troubles”.

According to Josiah, John Franklin met an unfortunate end in June 1691:

“The cause of his death was a boil or swelling which came by a hurt he got while mounting a horse… It being in his privities, and thinking to keep it secret, he opened it with a needle before it was ripe, which caused gangrene up into his body. It killed him in three day’s time.”

Josiah Franklin emigrated to New England in 1683 and heard about his brother’s unfortunate demise by mail. Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706, 15 years after a gangrenous boil ended his uncle’s life.

Source: Josiah Franklin, “A Short Account of the Family of Thomas Franklin of Ecton”, June 21st 1717. 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.

1940: Florida man’s seven year affair with a corpse

Maria Elena de Hoyos, as she appeared when found in 1940

Karl Tanzler (1877-1952) was born in Germany and spent years travelling through India, Australia and the Pacific before emigrating to the United States. Tanzler arrived in Key West, Florida in 1927 and took a job as a radiologist at a local military hospital.

In April 1930, Tanzler met 19-year-old Maria Elena de Hoyos, a Cuban-American beauty queen receiving treatment for severe tuberculosis. He became infatuated and spent the next 18 months caring for the ailing de Hoyos, showering her with gifts and attempting to gain her affections.

When she died in October 1931, Tanzler funded the construction of an ornate mausoleum, where he reportedly spent several hours every day. In April 1933, a year and a half after de Hoyos’ death, Tanzler kidnapped her body from the mausoleum, hauled it to his house in a child’s wagon and laid it out in his own room.

Tanzler would spend the next seven years trying to prevent the corpse from decomposing – a difficult proposition in the heat and humidity of southern Florida. When de Hoyos’ sister discovered the corpse in October 1940, it was encased in plaster and wax and fitted out with a wig and glass eyes. She immediately informed police and Tanzler was arrested:

“Deputies Bernard Waite and Ray Elwood said the body, well preserved with the aid of wax, was in a bedroom of the isolated home of [Tanzler]…

‘One day’, Tanzler told officers, ‘I opened her coffin and found that the body was decaying. I did not want one so beautiful to go to dust. I stole the body about two years after she died and have had it with me ever since.’

The body, wrapped in a silken robe, lay on one of the two twin beds in the room. On the wrists were gold bracelets and in the hair was an artificial rose.”

The corpse of Maria Elena de Hoyos

Two doctors present at the examination of de Hoyos’ remains later claimed to have seen evidence of sexual interference, including the insertion of a paper cylinder to serve as a makeshift vagina. This information was not officially recorded or publicly released, however.

Tanzler was psychologically examined and found fit to stand trial for disturbing a corpse but the charges against him were eventually dropped. Tanzler escaped the spotlight by moving to mainland Florida. He was given a death mask taken from de Hoyos’ face, which he lived with until his own death in 1952.

Source: The Palm Beach Post, October 6th 1940. 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.

1909: Tony Blair shot dead in the henhouse

From Nolan, West Virginia comes the sad story of Tony Blair, who in 1909 tried scaring his little sister – with fatal results:

tony blair

Source: The Planet (Richmond, Virginia) February 20th 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.

1833: Librarian suicides “under the influence of poets”

In September 1833, a London newspaper carried a grim report of a suicide in the French city of Marseilles. The unfortunate chap, a Monsieur Hollingsworth, had taken his life while “under the influence of poets”. A librarian by profession, Hollingsworth:

“…was of a melancholy temperament, possessed of an ardent imagination and, like those individuals to whose steps he followed, of a poetic turn of mind.”

Hollingsworth took his life around midnight on Tuesday September 3rd. According to reports from the scene:

“The pistol with which he destroyed himself was loaded to the muzzle. A part of his skull was blown against the window with such force as to break the glass. A piece of his cheek with the moustache on it was found sticking against the wall.”

Source: London Morning Chronicle, September 11th 1833. 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.

1835: Madman tries to kill the French king – with 20 guns at once

assassination
The messy aftermath of the “infernal machine”

In July 1835, assassins targeted the French king, Louis-Philippe, as he reviewed troops in Paris. News of the attempt on the king’s life was conveyed by telegram to the French ambassador:

“An atrocious act was attempted this morning during the review [of troops]. The King of the French was not touched, although his horse was killed. None of the Princes were wounded. The Duke of Treviso was killed. Several guards, aides-de-camp and National Guardsmen were killed or wounded. The deed was committed by means of an infernal machine placed behind a window… Paris is quiet and indignant.”

The leader of this bizarre assassination attempt was Giuseppe Marco Fieschi. A former soldier and serial thief, Fieschi served several years’ hard labour in his native Corsica before escaping to Paris.

Once in the capital, Fieschi took up with political radicals and began to plot the king’s murder. But unlike John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, Fieschi and his accomplices left nothing to chance. They designed and constructed their “infernal machine”: a battery of 20 muskets attached to a wooden frame, all rigged to fire simultaneously.

The machine was aimed at the royal party from an elevated window overlooking the Boulevard du Temple. The firing of the “infernal machine” proved devastating: it killed 18 soldiers, including a marshal and former prime minister. Louis-Philippe and other royals were not seriously injured, however, one shot grazed the king’s temple and another struck his horse.

The backfiring from the “infernal machine” also took its toll on Fieschi, who was hit in the head with shrapnel and badly burned. He was quickly captured and given medical attention, then put on trial for attempted regicide. Fieschi and two of his accomplices were guillotined in February 1836.

Source: Telegram to the French ambassador in London, July 28th 1835. 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.