The Arena, Volume 18, No 1, by . Published July 1897.

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Ainslee’s, Vol 15, No 6. Published July 1905.

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Buchanan’s Journal of Man, Volume 1, Number 6, by Joseph Rodes Buchanan. Published July 1887.

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The Evils that need attention, mentioned in the Journal for May, are as rampant as ever. The big combination in Chicago to raise the price of wheat by a corner, utterly burst on the 14th of June, leaving a few ruined speculators. The Chicago News says: “What is called buying and selling futures in grain, is no more buying and selling in the innocent and proper interpretation of the words than the wagering on horse races is buying and selling horses. It is a species of gambling as pernicious to public morals as it is contrary to public policy.” The Chicago Herald says, “No one is in love with a cornerer who corners. Nobody wastes any pity on a cornerer who gets cornered himself.” Such crimes in a petty way may be punished, but we need law for the millionaire gamblers who not only rob each other, but fleece the entire nation at the same time.

From Buchanan’s Journal of Man, July 1887.

The report comes from Tacoma that the cuticle of Tom Blanck, a desperado who was killed a few days ago, will be tanned and made into pocketbooks. While in jail in Seattle Blanck made a wooden imitation of a pistol, with which he held up the janitor and escaped. He was followed by the jailor and a posse and killed, as he would not surrender. Exactly how the pocketbooks will be disposed of is not stated, but judging from the results of several enterprises of this kind in the past, the owners of Blanck’s skin will have no difficulty in disposing of their manufactured stock. One of the inhuman practices brought to light by the investigation set on foot by General Benjamin F. Butler into the affairs of the Tewkesbury (Mass.) poorhouse was the skinning of dead patients and the making of souvenirs of various kings of the skins, for which the keepers or others in the scheme found a ready market. The same state of affairs is said to have existed at the Ohio State Prison, in Columbus, fifteen years ago. Prisoners were knocked in the head or shot on the slightest provocation by the keepers and guards, who were all banded together for the traffic in human skin souvenirs. These outrages finally became so flagrant that an investigation was held, which resulted in the turning out of all the keepers and guards in the prison. None of the men were ever prosecuted, as it was impossible to get tangible evidence. There must have been money in this human skin traffic or the men engaged in it would not have taken such chances. There are many persons whose morbid tastes make them delight in the possession of just such grewsome souvenirs and it is not infrequent that some man of a reckless, roving disposition and a checkered past is seen proudly displaying a tobacco pouch, purse or other “pocket novelty” made from the skin of a human being.

[tags]Ann Arbor Register, July, 1895[/tags]

The Arena, Volume 4, Issue 2 (July 1891), edited by B. O. Flower

Thanks to Richard J. Shiffer for post processing this issue!

That belief the Chinese have in the remedial qualities of substances forming a part of the human body seems to be irradicable, says the New York Times. Thinking that Europeans still held the same ideas led as much as anything else to the Tien-Tsin massacres of twenty-five years ago. Prehistoric man drank from a human skull, believing that the uncanny goblet had a certain potency. Not so long ago the skull of a suicide was used in Caithness as a drinking-cup for the cure of epilepsy. Cases have been cited where superstitious people, within the last thirty years, have dug up bodies so as to possess themselves of skulls for the same purpose. As late as 1678 in the official pharmacopoeia of London College of Physicians mention is made of the skull of a man who had died a “violent death.” For centuries in the past, for the manufacture of certain quack nostrums, notably an ointment, ground skulls were used. The medical books of Nuremberg of 200 years ago always cite mumia–or the embalmed flesh of mummies–as a sovereign cure for certain diseases. The Egyptian mummy was a specific for one malady, the Teneriffe mummy for another. Excluding all the other strange substances employed in early medicine, there is a trace of cannibalism in the used of these mummied substances. It has been shown that cannibalism does not arise in all cases from hunger, but that to heat human flesh is a religious rite and favored by the gods. In some remote manner it has something to do with sacrifice. Describing superstitions, the fact is cited that to-day Irish peasants use skulls to hold water in under the belief that the water thus becomes curative.

[tags]Ann Arbor Register, July, 1895[/tags]

The quaint little town of St. Nicholas, in East Flanders, boasts the possession of two children of such extraordinary abnormal growth as to put completely in the shade all similar infant prodigies of the past or present. These veritable Brobdignagian youngsters are boy and girl. The leder, Master Clement Smedst, is 15 years of age and weighs no less than 420 pounds (30 stone); the circumference of his body is 6 feet 6 inches; he measures 36 inches around the leg and 28 inches around the arm. His sister Bertha, is 8 years old, and turns the scale at 224 pounds (16 stone). In spite of their enormous dimensions their activity is remarkable, for they trip and skip about with all the agility of other children their age. It is an astonishing sight to see these infant mountains of humanity romping about in country lanes with other children of the village. One would imagine them to be the offspring of a race of giants, so high do they tower over the heads of their little playfellows. Their appearance is decidedly interesting, both having extremely handsome and regular features. Bertha, like other girls of tender years, delights in nursing a doll, which seems ludicrously out of place and proportion in the arms of the young giantess. The couple are attracting the attention of the country around, and on fine days crowds of people flock into the quiet little town in order to catch a glimpse of these colossal children.

[tags]Ann Arbor Register, July, 1895[/tags]