About the middle of the last century there died near Manchester a maiden lady, a Miss Bexwick or Beswick, who had a great horror of being buried alive. To avoid this, she devised an estate to her medical adviser, the late Mr. Charles White and his two children, viz. Miss Rosa White and her sister, and his nephew, Captain White, on condition that the doctor paid her a morning visit for twelve months after her decease. In order to do this, it was requisite to embalm her, which he did; she was then placed in the attic of the old mansion in which she died, and in which the doctor took up his residence. Upon his leaving it, she was removed to the house erected by him in King Street, Manchester, and which stood on the ground now occupied by the Town Hall. At the death of Mr. White, the doctor, she was sent to the Lying-in Hospital, where she remained until she was removed to her present resting-place, the Manchester Museum of Natural History, where the mummy is suspended in a case with a glass-door.
Mr. de Quincey, when a boy at Manchester School, at the beginning of the century, became acquainted with the mummy, and in one of his works mentions it being taken from the case, and the body of a notorious highwayman being substituted; but this is an embellishment or exaggeration of the already extraordinary story.
[Hypochondriasis.]
In the year 1827 there was living at Taunton a person who had often kept at home for several weeks under the idea of danger in going abroad. Sometimes he imagined that he was a cat, and seated himself on his hind-quarters; at other times he would fancy himself a teapot, and stand with one arm a-kimbo like the handle, and the other stretched out like the spout. At last he conceived himself to have died, and would not move or be moved till the coffin came. His wife, in serious alarm, sent for a surgeon, who addressed him with the usual salutation, "How do you do this morning?" "Do!" replied he in a low voice, "a pretty question to a dead man!" "Dead, sir; what do you mean?" "Yes; I died last Wednesday; the coffin will be here presently, and I shall be buried to-morrow." The surgeon, a man of sense and skill, immediately felt the patient's pulse, and shaking his head, said, "I find it is indeed too true; you are certainly defunct; the blood is in a state of stagnation, putrefaction is about to take place, and the sooner you are buried the better." The coffin arrived, he was carefully placed in it, and carried towards the church. The surgeon had previously given instructions to several neighbours how to proceed. The procession had scarcely moved a dozen yards, when a person stopped to inquire who they were carrying to the grave: "Mr. ——, our late worthy overseer." "What! is the old rogue gone at last? a good release, for a greater villain never lived." The imaginary deceased no sooner heard this attack on his character, than he jumped up, and in a threatening posture said, "You lying scoundrel, if I were not dead I'd make you suffer for what you say; but as it is, I am forced to submit." He then quietly laid down again; but ere they had proceeded half-way to church, another party stopped the procession with the same inquiry, and added invective and abuse. This was more than the supposed corpse could bear; and jumping from the coffin, was in the act of following his defamers, when the whole party burst into an immoderate fit of laughter. The public exposure awakened him to a sense of his folly; he fought against the weakness, and in the end conquered it.
Here is an instance of a cure for hypochondriasis in Switzerland:—A wealthy and hypochondriacal farmer, who believed himself to be possessed by seven devils, applied to the Swiss doctor, Michael Schuppach, to rout the demoniac occupants of his distressed mind. "Friend," said Schuppach gravely, "you believe there are but seven devils in you; in reality there are eight, and the eighth is the captain of the band." To expel the eight unclean spirits the physician had recourse to an electrical apparatus, with which contrivance the farmer was of course utterly ignorant. For eight successive days the patient visited the doctor and underwent an electrical shock. At each of the first seven shocks the operator said, "There goes one of your devils." On the eighth day Schuppach said, "Now, we must relieve you of the chief of the evil spirits—it'll be a tough job!" As these words were uttered, a violent shock sent the patient fairly to the floor. "And now," cried the benevolent impostor, "you are free of your devils—that last stroke was a settler!" The cure was complete.
[STRANGE SIGHTS and SPORTING SCENES.]
["The Wonder of all the Wonders that the
World ever Wondered at."]
UNDER the title of "Horæ Subsecivæ," in the Dublin University Review, in 1833, vol. i., p. 482, by the late Dr. West, of Dublin, appeared the following amusing trifle:—