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I was talking to a friend about the way Houdini died, of a perforated appendix, and peritonitis, and we got on the topic of the fact that many of the women who died of back-alley abortions died of uterine abscess, and essentially also either peritonitis or septicemia. I got to thinking how many people died slow deaths from those sorts of infections before penicillin: US Pres. Calvin Coolidge's son got septicemia from an infected blister; two of the US presidents who were assassinated (Garfield and McKinley) lingered for a long time after being shot in the abdomen, and died of infection rather than organ damage from the bullet. The famous toothpick death of Sherwood Anderson was a peritonitis death, albeit, one that might have been fixed with exploratory surgery if he hadn't been aboard a ship. Charles Dawson, of the Piltdown hoax died of septicemia, although I'm not sure how he contracted it.
Anyway, here's what I'm wondering: what would happen if JTR nicked himself with the knife he used on his victims? It was usually covered in blood, and the blood of more than one person. Rinsing in cold water doesn't kill everything. Plus, he cut open bowels, and the sex organs of women who may have had venereal diseases, or may have recently had sex with men who had venereal diseases. And, then, we are talking about a metal knife that easily could have harbored tetanus.
It seems unlikely that at some point, he wouldn't eventually nick himself, and once he did, he'd be very lucky not to get some sort of really awful infection. Do hospitals still have records of people who came in with gangrenous or gangrenous-type (I'm not sure what they would have called a localized staph infection), or some other odd type of infection that required amputation, or caused death by septicemia. I'm not sure what would happen if you had blood to blood transference of syphilis-- if that would transfer the disease at all, or possibly accelerate the rate at which it progressed. Then, there's tetanus. Maybe there were cases of tetanus where the patient would say how he was infected, or claimed not to know, or had an implausible story.
Gosh, I'd love to go to London for six months, just to look up stuff like this. I wish I had a Brent Carradine (it's so funny that Josephine Tey picked that as an American sounding name).
Anyway, here's what I'm wondering: what would happen if JTR nicked himself with the knife he used on his victims? It was usually covered in blood, and the blood of more than one person. Rinsing in cold water doesn't kill everything. Plus, he cut open bowels, and the sex organs of women who may have had venereal diseases, or may have recently had sex with men who had venereal diseases. And, then, we are talking about a metal knife that easily could have harbored tetanus.
It seems unlikely that at some point, he wouldn't eventually nick himself, and once he did, he'd be very lucky not to get some sort of really awful infection. Do hospitals still have records of people who came in with gangrenous or gangrenous-type (I'm not sure what they would have called a localized staph infection), or some other odd type of infection that required amputation, or caused death by septicemia. I'm not sure what would happen if you had blood to blood transference of syphilis-- if that would transfer the disease at all, or possibly accelerate the rate at which it progressed. Then, there's tetanus. Maybe there were cases of tetanus where the patient would say how he was infected, or claimed not to know, or had an implausible story.
Gosh, I'd love to go to London for six months, just to look up stuff like this. I wish I had a Brent Carradine (it's so funny that Josephine Tey picked that as an American sounding name).
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