Connecticut western news., 1880-09-01
PETRIFIEO WHILE ALIVE.
Fifteen Years of Slow Torture Before Death--An Extraordinary Story
 by Western Physician.

"One of the most heart-rending cases that ever came under my notice," said well-known Louisville physician, "was that of man whose death could not af- feet his relations, because he had none; but the manner of his dying was so aw- full that it was call upon common hu- manity for sorrow. He was young fellow who, at the breaking out of the war, when he was twenty years old, en- listed and fought with courage.
 "His gallantry was so marked that he was promoted from the ranks and be- came 8 captain, with the prospect of further advancement as the war pro- gressed. In the terrible warfare about Nashville he was exposed to the rains and the colds, and contracted infamma- tory rheumatism, from which he never recovered, and which caused his resig- nation. He returned to his home mis- erable creature, and never was able af- terward to walk. For fifteen long years he was dying as slowly and surely, and with as much torture as the most refined cruelties of human invention might have produced. Do you know what infam- matory rheumatism is? No? We'll, imagine that you are lying perfectly still, with not muscle in play, and the most excruciating pains shooting like barbed hooks through every limb and joint You try in the delirium of agony to as- sume another position.
 "The mere movement of joint is such an awful cruelty that the rack is an infant horror by the side of it. The in nerve and muscle to the most delicate pitch of sensibility, and if each nerve in the body were barred and torn simulta- neously the pain could not be greater. Moments become hours, and hours be- come ages of suffering. Imagine these tortures prolonged through fifteen years of time, every year dragging out like century, and you can picture to yourself what his life was. Opiates? Of course, opiates were administered, but what of the moments when the influence has waned, and when, rushing upon him like wolves of torture made ravenous by hunger, the pains broke through the vail of insensibility, and tugged at his frame with teeth of cruelty? The very immunity which opium gave added an other horror when it was withdrawn.
 He was kept under its influence as much as possible. In nine years he had lost every power of muscular effort, and sat in his chair living corpse, only to be moved to his bed, where he became a mummy with the spark of life still glow ing. The time shortly came when he no longer lay in his bed, but, sitting in his invalid chair. became the enthroned em- bodlment of 8 soul too miserable for life, too sacred to be freed by other hands. If there were in the Sphinx of Egypt an immortal soul and human intelligence can you fancy it's torture? Day after day looking upon the same hot waste for centuries; day after day with fixed gazing upon molten horror of sun and not blind year after year smothered in an awful silence which makes every pain so exquisite that it almost becomes audi ble and living persecutor.
 "So he sat, year after year, with his muscles fixed in iron, his eyes looking upon world as dreary as misery could paint it; his voice sinking in his throat only to be expelled by hunted nature in wild and piteous cries when the pain racked into hopeless cowardice the strong heart that had led his men up to the dreadful caverns of cannons' mouths without finch. But there came a time when the restless days and nights of active torture became to him as delight full reminlscence. The time came slowly and like eternity. If you were to con- fine man and let one drop of water fall on his head every five minutes it would kill him. But before death would come years of suspense that would move like the change of fixed stars.
 "There would come that awful sus- pense of time when the pitiless drop would fall like the crash of universe upon the doomed head. The time came when the very life stood still and the soul was imprisoned in @ mausoleum. Fixed and rigid, the poor boy was 8 sphinx, endowed with life and deprived of movement. Every joint in his body became ossiied by the chalky deposits, o,1 mt ova,, o p,ouapoapt fl,ot ,,rovrlyal death like agony became possibly. Even the joints in his neck became rigid, the fingers stiff, and the limbs petrifed. He was stone frame, with covering of flesh and the soul Of living man. The muscles of the eyes even failed, and the lids falling upon the weary balls shut in forever the darkness that hung about him like the gloom of the grave.
 "Then came, with the same step of measured eternity, the justification of the joints of the jaws, and he was fed be- tween the rigid teeth. How slowly death moved cannot be described, but when the inflammation had seized his heart in that last prolonged spasm, nature could no longer give warning of its agony
 What tortures took place under the drawn curtains of that human mystery can no more be told than the secrets of those horrors in the lowest dungeons of the Inquisition. Death came, but it was like the fading of the mist-line into the clouds, and as we stood about | ,4 ok fn 11ftar