In the
Lancet, 1845, there are two cases reported in which shortly
before death luminous breath has been seen to issue from the
mouth.
There is an instance reported of a professor of mathematics of
thirty-five years of age and temperate, who, feeling a pain in
his left leg, discovered a pale flame about the size of a
ten-cent piece issuing therefrom. As recent as March, 1850, in a
Court of Assizes in Darmstadt during the trial of John Stauff,
accused of the murder of the Countess Goerlitz, the counsel for
the defense advanced the theory of spontaneous human combustion,
and such eminent doctors as von Siebold, Graff, von Liebig, and
other prominent members of the Hessian medical fraternity were
called to comment on its possibility; principally on their
testimony a conviction and life-imprisonment was secured. In 1870
there was a woman of thirty-seven, addicted to alcoholic liquors,
who was found in her room with her viscera and part of her limbs
consumed by fire, but the hair and clothes intact. According to
Walford, in the Scientific American for 1870, there was a case
reported by Flowers of Louisiana of a man a hard drinker, who was
sitting by a fire surrounded by his Christmas guests, when
suddenly flames of a bluish tint burst from his mouth and
nostrils and he was soon a corpse.
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