Endurance of Pain, Part 2

Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine
by George M. Gould, M.D., Walter L. Pyle, M.D.

(Page 17 of 44)

"The last of the actors in this singular entertainment was a stout man with a careworn face, who apparently regarded his share as a melancholy duty which he was bound to perform, and the last part of it, I have no doubt, was particularly painful. He first took a handful of hay, and, having bared the whole upper part of his body, lighted the wisp at the brazier and then passed the blazing mass across his chest and body and over his arms and face. This was but a preliminary, and presently he began to sway backward and forward until one grew dazed with watching him. The drums grew noisier and noisier and the chant louder and wilder.

The man himself had become maudlin, his tongue hung from his mouth, and now and then he ejaculated a sound like the inarticulate cry of an animal. He could only totter to the fire, out of which he snatched the balled instrument already described, which he thereupon thrust with a vicious stab into the pit of his stomach, where it was left to hang. A moment after he pulled it out again, and, picking up the piece of stone used before, he drove it with a series of resounding blows into a new place, where it hung, drawing the skin downward with its weight, until a companion pulled it out and the man fell in a heap on the floor."

To-day it is only through the intervention of the United States troops that some of the barbarous ceremonies of the North American Indians are suppressed. The episode of the "Ghost-dance" is fresh in every mind. Instances of self-mutilation, although illustrating this subject, will be discussed at length in Chapter XIV.

Malingerers often endure without flinching the most arduous tests. Supraorbital pressure is generally of little avail, and pinching, pricking, and even incision are useless with these hospital impostors. It is reported that in the City Hospital of St. Louis a negro submitted to the ammonia-test, inhaling this vapor for several hours without showing any signs of sensibility, and made his escape the moment his guard was absent. A contemporary journal says: -

"The obstinacy of resolute impostors seems, indeed, capable of emulating the torture-proof perseverance of religious enthusiasts and such martyrs of patriotism as Mueius Scaevola or Grand Master Ruediger of the Teutonic Knights, who refused to reveal the hiding place of his companion even when his captors belabored him with red-hot irons.

"One Basil Rohatzek, suspected of fraudulent enlistment (bounty-jumping, as our volunteers called it), pretended to have been thrown by his horse and to have been permanently disabled by a paralysis of the lower extremities. He dragged himself along in a pitiful manner, and his knees looked somewhat bruised, but he was known to have boasted his ability to procure his discharge somehow or other. One of his tent mates had also seen him fling himself violently and repeatedly on his knees (to procure those questionable bruises), and on the whole there seemed little doubt that the fellow was shamming.

All the surgeons who had examined him concurred in that view, and the case was finally referred to his commanding officer, General Colloredo. The impostor was carried to a field hospital in a little Bohemian border town and watched for a couple of weeks, during which he had been twice seen moving his feet in his sleep. Still, the witnesses were not prepared to swear that those changes of position might not have been effected by a movement of the whole body. The suspect stuck to his assertion, and Colloredo, in a fit of irritation, finally summoned a surgeon, who actually placed the feet of the professed paralytic in "aqua fortis," but even this rigorous method availed the cruel surgeon nothing, and he was compelled to advise dismissal from the service.

"The martyrdom of Rohatzek, however, was a mere trifle compared with the ordeal by which the tribunal of Paris tried in vain to extort a confession of the would-be regicide, Damiens. Robert Damiens, a native of Arras, had been exiled as an habitual criminal, and returning in disguise made an attempt upon the life of Louis XV, January 5, 1757. His dagger pierced the mantle of the King, but merely grazed his neck. Damiens, who had stumbled, was instantly seized and dragged to prison, where a convocation of expert torturers exhausted their ingenuity in the attempt to extort a confession implicating the Jesuits, a conspiracy of Huguenots, etc. But Damiens refused to speak. He could have pleaded his inability to name accomplices who did not exist, but he stuck to his resolution of absolute silence. They singed off his skin by shreds, they wrenched out his teeth and finger-joints, they dragged him about at the end of a rope hitched to a team of stout horses, they sprinkled him from head to foot with acids and seething oil, but Damiens never uttered a sound till his dying groan announced the conclusion of the tragedy."

The apparent indifference to the pain of a major operation is sometimes marvelous, and there are many interesting instances on record. When at the battle of Dresden in 1813 Moreau, seated beside the Emperor Alexander, had both limbs shattered by a French cannon-ball, he did not utter a groan, but asked for a cigar and smoked leisurely while a surgeon amputated one of his members. In a short time his medical attendants expressed the danger and questionability of saving his other limb, and consulted him. In the calmest way the heroic General instructed them to amputate it, again remaining unmoved throughout the operation.

Crompton records a case in which during an amputation of the leg not a sound escaped from the patient's lips, and in three weeks, when it was found necessary to amputate the other leg, the patient endured the operation without an anesthetic, making no show of pain, and only remarking that he thought the saw did not cut well. Crompton quotes another case, in which the patient held a candle with one hand while the operator amputated his other arm at the shoulder-joint. Several instances of self-performed major operations are mentioned in Chapter XIV.