'Eaten of worms' / by W. Curran.

  • Curran, William, 1927-
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: 'Eaten of worms' / by W. Curran. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    4/47
    “EATEN OF WORMS.” Discussing some time ago, with a friend, the chief points of a paper of mine on sudden death, that had appeared a year or two previously in an Indian periodical, he suddenly asked me, in allusion to some remarks I had made therein on the liability of certain reigning families, our own included, to this contingency, why I had not in- cluded the House of Herod amongst them. I answered, after looking over the account that is given of the death of Herod Agrippa in the twelfth chapter of the Acts, that the circumstance had, in the first place, escaped my notice, and secondly, that even if it had not, that the occurrence was of too sacred or miraculous a complexion for inclusion by me in a collection of such a purely personal nay so profane or common place a character as I had made. He acknow- ledged the justice of this explanation, but seemed to think that the event was not so exclusively sacred or solitary as I had supposed, and I lost sight of the matter for the time. Having lately, however, come across passages in certain ecclesiastical or historical writers, which will be named hereafter, that led me to believe that he was right, or rather that this event was not so entirely unparalleled as I had suppos ed, I looked further into the literature of the sub- ject, and now subjoin the results of my inquiries. Though these led me somewhat into the dangerous regions of theology and hermeneutics, they also, involved a good deal of recondite medical speculation and research, and this is, of course, the feature of the case with which I am most con-