In the month of June 1799, John Cummings, an American sailor, about twenty-three years of age, being with his ship on the coast of France, and having gone on shore with some of his shipmates about two miles from the town of Havre de Grace, he and his party directed their course towards a tent which they saw in a field, with a crowd of people round it. Being told that a play was acting there, they entered, and found in the tent a mountebank, who was entertaining the audience by pretending to swallow clasp-knives. Having returned on board, and one of the party having related to the ship’s company the story of the knives, Cummings, after drinking freely, boasted that he could swallow knives as well as the Frenchman.
[…]
Eager not to disappoint them, he put his penknife in his mouth and swallowed it, washing it down with yet more booze.
The spectators, however, were not satisfied with one experiment, and asked the operator “whether he could swallow more?”; his answer was, “all the knives on board the ship”, upon which three knives were immediately produced, which were swallowed in the same way as the former; and “by this bold attempt of a drunken man”, (to use his own expressions) “the company was well entertained for that night.”
[…]
The next morning he had a motion, which presented nothing extraordinary; and in the afternoon he had another, with which he passed one knife, which however was not the one that he had swallowed the first. The next day he passed two knives at once, one of which was the first, which he had missed the day before. The fourth never came away, to his knowledge, and he never felt any inconvenience from it.
[…]
After this great performance, he thought no more of swallowing knives for the space of six years. In the month of March 1805, being then at Boston, in America, he was one day tempted, while drinking with a party of sailors, to boast of his former exploits, adding that he was the same man still, and ready to repeat his performance; upon which a small knife was produced, which he instantly swallowed. In the course of that evening he swallowed five more. The next morning crowds of visitors came to see him; and in the course of that day he was induced to swallow eight knives more, making in all fourteen.
[…]
This time, however, he paid dearly for his frolic; for he was seized the next morning with constant vomiting and pain at his stomach, which made it necessary to carry him to Charleston hospital, where, as he expresses it, “twixt that period and the 28th of the following month, he was safely delivered of his cargo.”
[…]
Having “emptied the hold,” Cummings boarded a vessel traveling to France. But on the return journey, his ship was intercepted by HMS Isis, and he was press-ganged into service with the Royal Navy.
One day while at Spithead, where the ship lay some time, having got drunk and, as usual, renewed the topic of his former follies, he was once more challenged to repeat the experiment, and again complied, “disdaining,” as he says, “to be worse than his word.”
[…]
On the next morning the ship’s company having expressed a great desire to see him repeat the performance, he complied with his usual readiness, and “by the encouragement of the people, and the assistance of good grog”, he swallowed that day, as he distinctly recollects, nine clasp-knives, some of which were very large; and he was afterwards assured by the spectators that he had swallowed four more, which, however, he declares he knew nothing about, being, no doubt, at this period of the business, too much intoxicated to have any recollection of what he was passing.
[…]
This, however, is the last performance we have to record; it made a total of at least thirty-five knives, swallowed at different times, and we shall see that it was this last attempt which ultimately put an end to his existence.
[…]
The physicians dissected his body and found that the inside of the abdomen presented an extraordinary sight: The tissues were stained a dark rusty color. Several blades were found inside the intestines, one of them piercing the colon. This alone would have been enough to kill him. But that wasn’t all:
The stomach, viewed externally, bore evident marks of altered structure. It was not examined internally at this time, but was opened soon afterwards, in the presence of Sir Astley Cooper and Mr Smith, surgeon of the British infirmary, who happened to be present at that moment, when a great many portions of blades, knife-springs, and handles, were found in it. These fragments were between thirty and forty in number, thirteen or fourteen of them being evidently the remains of blades; some of which were remarkably corroded, and prodigiously reduced in size, while others were comparatively in a state of tolerable preservation.
Source:
Morris, Thomas. “Unfortunate Predicaments.” The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine. Dutton, An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018. 6-11. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Alexander Marcet, “Account of a man who lived ten years after having swallowed a number of clasp-knives; with a description of the appearances of the body after death,” Medico-Chirurgical Transactions 12, pt. 1 (1823), 52-63.
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