Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume V.djvu/143

 COMBUSTION (SPONTANEOUS) In 1840 the Bulletin de Therapeutique publish- ed an account by M. Bubbe-Lievin, surgeon in the army in Algeria in 1839, of the death of a Moor, a habitual drunkard, where the phe- nomenon was a bluish flame running all over the body, making frightful burns; but the sur- geon saw only the results of the combustion, and derived the details from the natives, who probably embellished the facts. In 1839 Du- puytren investigated a supposed case of spon- taneous combustion. The victim was an ex- cessively fleshy woman, and addicted to drink ; but Dupuytren discovered that she had been sitting over a foot stove filled with burning charcoal, and his theory was as follows : Stupor, due first to alcohol, and heightened by the fumes of the charcoal ; the clothes take fire ; the epidermis cracks open and streams of melted human fat run out and burn ; com- bustion continues as long as any fragments of cloth saturated with fat remain unconsumed ; the room is filled with dense black smoke; and, finally, the victim presents only a mass of charred flesh and bones. The case of the countess of Gorlitz, found dead in her chamber, June 13, 1847, excited attention throughout Europe. The upper part of her dress was burned, and her head, neck, and arms were charred. The floor and furniture were much damaged by fire. The physician who exam- ined the remains pronounced the case one of spontaneous combustion. In the year follow- ing, Aug. 11, the remains were exhumed, and Liebig and Bischoff, who examined them, pub- lished in 1850 their report, exploding the the- ory of spontaneous combustion. In March of that year Stauff, the count's valet, was tried and convicted for murdering the countess. Subsequently he confessed the crime, and said that the countess having surprised him in an attempt to rob her room, he strangled her, and afterward piled furniture around her body and set it on fire. In 1850 a supposed case had a wide circulation in the French and Eng- lish journals, and was quoted by Dean in his "Medical Jurisprudence." It was that of a laborer, drinking in a cabaret near the bar- riere de 1'Etoile, Paris. He wagered that he would eat a lighted candle, and had hardly brought it near his mouth when, with a faint cry, he fell lifeless. A bluish flame flickered about his lips, he consumed inwardly, and in half an hour his head and part of his chest were reduced to charcoal. On the publication of this extraordinary case, Liebig at once wrote to Professors Kegnault and Pelouze, and to Carlier, the prefect of police, asking for further information. This he immediately re- ceived from Carlier, to the effect that the case was wholly imaginary, originating only in the fertile fancy of a sensational journalist. In two cases in England, one in 1854 and the other in 1860, where all the accepted phe- nomena of spontaneous combustion were pres- ent, rigid examination by experts discovered that the victims had been murdered, and an COMENIUS 139 attempt made to burn the bodies to conceal the crime. But in the apparently authenti- cated cases cited above, as the victims were generally drunkards, the hypothesis has been that their bodies were rendered exceptionally combustible, and for a long while this theory obtained credence. But after a while chemists began to discredit the cases. It was shown that combustion could not occur without an abundant supply of oxygen ; that the soft parts of the human body contain 72 per cent, of water, which must be evaporated before con- sumption by fire can take place ; and instances of the extraordinary difficulty of consuming the bodies of persons burned at the stake were adduced. It is noteworthy, too, that nearly all of the supposed authentic cases agree essentially in the following particulars : That the victim is almost always a fat woman, an inebriate, and in some instances addicted to getting up in the night to smoke a pipe, or to sit by the fire ; nine out of ten of the supposed cases have occurred in cold weather ; and in nearly every case the remains were found near a grate, fireplace, or candle. Dr. Robert Mac- nish, in his "Anatomy of Drunkenness " (Edin- burgh, 1827), says that when "writers like Vicq d'Azyr, Le Cat, Maffei, Jacobseus, Rolli, Bianchini, and Mason and Good, have given their testimony in support of such facts, it re- quires some effort to believe them unfounded in truth." But he thinks that the witnesses in supposed cases " have been led into an un- intentional misrepresentation," and says fur- ther : " The subject has never been satis- factorily investigated ; and notwithstanding the cases brought forward in support of the doctrine, the general opinion seems to be that the whole is fable, or at least so much involved in obscurity as to afford no just grounds for belief." This was written long before the thorough examinations by Liebig, Bischoff, and other experts, since 1850, whose reports are decidedly adverse to the hypothesis of spon- taneous human combustion. COMEDY. SeeDEAMA. COMENIUS, John Amos, a Czech, whose real name was KOMENSKY, remarkable for his early attempts at reforming education, born at Kom- na in Moravia, March 28, 1592, died in Hol- land, Nov. 15, 1671. He studied in Heidel- berg and Herborn, and was a teacher in Pre- rau and Fulneck from 1614 to 1620, when, in the general persecution of Protestants which followed the reverses of the insurgents in Bo- hemia and Moravia, he lost all his fortune and was expatriated, and for some time lived a? a teacher in a retired part of the Bohemian mountains. From 1632 he was pastor of the sect of the Bohemian Brethren at Lissa, then in Poland. In 1641 he was invited to England to reform the schools, in which however he did not succeed, on account of the civil dissensions. At the request of Oxenstiern he now applied himself to the organization of a system for Swedish .schools, though residing in Elbing, "W.