A matter of knife and death
Between 1799 and 1805, sailor John Cummings swallowed dozens of pocket-knives.
Welcome to The Quack Doctor, a weekly publication that unearths stories from the history of medicine and related themes.
It’s free to subscribe, but if you enjoy my work and would like to contribute a small token of appreciation, please visit my Ko-fi page by clicking the button below. Thank you!
A piece of paper, folded into the pocket of a deceased patient, carried a strange tale of misadventure. The dead man, an emaciated figure of just 33 years old, had written with his own ‘peculiarities of expression and style’, an account of the events leading to his demise. Now he lay on the dissecting table at Guy’s Hospital, his body corroborating his words.
The prolonged and avoidable downfall of American sailor John Cummings had begun ten years earlier, in 1799, in a tent near Le Havre, Normandy.
He and his shipmates rolled ashore, full of grog and looking for fun. The circus tent, surrounded by a crowd in a field two miles outside the town, showed promise. The lads scraped together enough money and went in.
Part of the show involved a knife-swallowing act, which gave Cummings a not-so-bright idea. Later that evening, back on board ship and with more drink consumed, he boasted that the performers weren’t the only ones who could swallow knives – he thought it was easy! He perhaps didn’t expect the rest of the crew to call his bluff.
‘He did not like to go against his word,’ Cummings wrote in his third-person account. ‘Neither was he anxious to take the job in hand; but, by having a good supply of grog inwardly, he took his own pocket-knife, and tryed it first, which slipped down his throat with great ease.’
The sailors wanted more; Cummings claimed he could swallow ‘All the knives on board the ship.’ Three more knives – folding ones, which gave him protection from the blades – were presented to him, and down the hatch they all went.
‘And by this bold attempt of a drunken man, the company was well entertained for that night.’
Over the next couple of days, three knives reintroduced themselves to the world in the natural way, though Cummings noticed with surprise that the first one in wasn’t the first one out. He didn’t know what happened to the fourth one. After that, the ship set sail back across the Atlantic and Cummings swallowed no more knives until 1805, when he boasted of his previous exploits to new acquaintances at Boston.
They didn’t believe him, so he proved it by swallowing a small clasp knife followed by five more. Word got round, and ‘he had the next morning a thousand visitors,’ who induced him to swallow eight more. Another day later, the 15 March (beware the Ides!), he suffered terrible pain and went to the hospital, where he was ‘safely delivered of his cargo’ over the next two weeks.
But did he learn his lesson? Of course not! In December the same year, ‘after drinking very heartily,’ he related his former follies to his new shipmates on the British frigate HMS Isis (onto which he had been press-ganged in Newfoundland). Predictably, they egged him on to repeat his bizarre feat.
A few days later, he could not keep food down and was in so much pain that he couldn’t even stand up. Nothing but a paper knife case had exited his body.
Ship’s surgeon Dr Benjamin Lara had seen a few things in his time, but this case astounded him. He didn’t immediately believe Cummings, but asked around among the crew and ascertained that the story was true, with the number of knives most likely 14. Then came the question of what to do about them.
‘How to act in this unparalleled case’, Dr Lara later wrote to Dr James Curry of Guy’s Hospital. ‘I confess I knew not.’
Cummings judged from experience that the knives were in his intestines rather than his stomach, so there was little chance of expelling them through emetics. Dr Lara decided to help nature along with occasional small doses of castor oil and opium, plus water-gruel enemas.
After a week, the knives had still not budged, so Dr Lara prescribed 30-40 drops of sulphuric acid up to five times a day. Later, his assistant suggested muriate tincture of iron. Neither of these treatments produced the knives but the patient vomited less frequently and managed a diet of sage, rice, tea, bread, cheese and beef soup. He was eventually able to do light duties, but in June 1807 he got discharged from the ship as incurable and made his way to Guy’s Hospital in London.
Although Dr Babington of Guy’s initially chucked him out as a hypochondriac, Cummings was later admitted and appeared to improve. In September 1808, however, he returned to Guy’s and would never again sail the seven seas or entertain incredulous shipmates with his grog-fuelled gulping. He could not digest food and died, emaciated, in March 1809.
Mr Travers, the Demonstrator of Anatomy, conducted a post-mortem examination and found ‘a blackish ferruginous tinge’ throughout the abdomen. Blades had perforated the intestines, but so gradually that they had not allowed the contents to escape into the abdominal cavity and cause infection. Medical student George Smart found it noteworthy that a knife found in the rectum still showed legible engraving of the name ‘Bateman’. Most of the fragments had congregated in the stomach; they were carefully removed and arranged in a glass case for the hospital anatomical museum.
They remain in the Gordon Museum of Pathology at King’s College to this day – a curious memorial to a drunken sailor’s ill-advised party trick.
Quite a shocking party trick! Thanks for sharing