Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1: From the twelfth to the eighteenth centuryGriffiths, Arthur
History
Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1: From the twelfth to the eighteenth century
Griffiths, Arthur
Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England); Prisons -- England; Punishment -- Great Britain
Sir William Petty, the eminent surgeon in Queen Anne's time, owed
his scientific fame to his having resuscitated a woman who had been
hanged. The body had been begged, as was the custom, for the anatomical
lecture; Petty finding symptoms of life, bled her, put her to bed
with another woman, and gave her spirits and other restoratives. She
recovered, whereupon the students subscribed to endow her with a small
portion, and she soon after married and lived for fifteen years. The
case of half-hanged Smith was about the date 1705. He was reprieved,
but the reprieve arrived after he had been strung up; he was taken
down, bled, and brought to. Smith afterwards described his sensations
minutely. The weight of his body when he first dropped caused him
great pain; his "spirits" forced their way up to his head and seemed
to go out at his eyes with a great blaze of light, and then all pain
left him. But on his resuscitation the blood and "spirits" forcing
themselves into their proper channels gave him such intolerable
suffering "that he could have wished those hanged who cut him down."
William Duell, hanged in 1740, was carried to Surgeon's Hall, to be
anatomized; but as his body was being laid out, one of the servants
who was washing him perceived that he was still alive. A surgeon bled
him, and in two hours he was able to sit up in his chair. Later in
the evening he was sent back to Newgate, and his sentence changed to
transportation. In 1767, a man who had hanged for twenty-eight minutes
was operated on by a surgeon, who made an incision into the windpipe.
In less than six hours the hanged man revived. It became a constant
practice for a condemned man's friends to carry off the body directly
it was cut down to the nearest surgeon's, who at once operated on it
by bleeding, and so forth. The plan was occasionally, but rarely,
successful. It was tried with Doctor Dodd, who was promptly carried to
an undertaker's in Tottenham Court Road and placed in a hot bath; but
he had been too well hanged for recovery. A report was long current
that Fauntleroy the banker, who was executed for forgery, had been
resuscitated, but it was quite without foundation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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