A collection of remarkable cases in surgery / by Paul F. Eve.

  • Eve, Paul F. (Paul Fitzsimmons), 1806-1877.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A collection of remarkable cases in surgery / by Paul F. Eve. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    215/842
    swallowed them ; and stated, moreover, that he had occasionally taunted her with the fact, when she corrected him. It appeared that her appetite was always capricious, occasionally very keen; and her sister informed the author that when a child she was in the habit of eating starch and slate-pencil, and that she had seen her biting pins. At seventeen years of age, she had vomited blood, and was ill for some time afterwards. Case IV. Extraordinary case of pin-swallowing. Lancet, 1854. In September last, a girl at Vienna, who labored under an aberration of intellect, attempted to destroy her life by swallowing a quantity of pins. The first dose consisted of seventy, which she took one after the other, each pin being enveloped in a wafer; but in consequence of their smallness they passed away without doing any mischief. Subsequently she again took to swallow- ing pins of a larger size, some of them two inches long. She was then seized with such severe illness, that she was taken to the hospital of the town, when it was instantly detected what she was suffering from, and she was placed under a course of treatment, which had the effect of dislodging the whole of the pins in succession from the bowels. There were no less than 242 pins passed, all of them of a black color. The girl is now in a fair way of recovery. Case V. Attempt to destroy an infant by making it svjallow ten pins, with the report of the trial, in which a case is mentioned of a young girl swallowing fourteen hundred pins; etc. London Med. Gazette—Med. Examiner, vol. ii. A very curious medico-legal fact is narrated in the Gazette des Tribunaux, and the Droit of the 16th of November. A servant girl, of seventeen, named Rose Melanie Selter, was tried before the Court of Assize of the Seine, for attempting to kill a child, aged two months and a half, by making it swallow ten pins. The case alleged was as follows:— The Sieur and Dame Fournereau have an only child, now about five months old.1 It was suckled by its mother, and was in the finest health, when, on the 7th of last April, it was attacked with dyspnoea and fits of suffocation, which made its parents fear for its life. On the following days its sufferings continued, and it seemed as if there was something in the infant's stomach and throat which obstructed respiration. However, on the 10th of April the pains ceased, and the infant recovered its health. The cause of the attack was unknown, until, on the morning of the 11th of April, Fournereau's wife found three pins in the child's stool, four more in the evening, and three the next morning; making a sum total of ten pins that the child had swallowed. Fournereau and his wife attributed what had happened to the malice of the servant girl, and discharged her. On their complaint, Selter was taken up, and confessed before the com- missary of police that she had made the child swallow ten pins on the 7th and 8th of April; and that she had done so in order to get herself discharged and sent home to her parents, who forced her to go to service. In the written statement, the prisoner still said that she had made the child swallow the pins, but asserted it was all done on one occasion; and that she must have lost her reason to do such a thing, for she loved the child, and had no cause for animosity against her master and mistress. She also alleged that at certain periods she was worried by her blood to such a degree that she did not know what she was about. It seems that three or four years ago the prisoner had some symptoms of insanity, consisting of a nervous agitation, which made her run about the 1 The indictment having been drawn up in June, as we suppose.—Translator.