Morning journal and courier., 1880-10-08
Petrified While Alive.
Fisteen Years of Slow Torture Before
 Death-An Extra ordinary Story.

Fisteen Years of Slow Torture Before Death-An Extra ordinary Story.
 ''One of the most heart-rending that ever came under my notice" :" said a well known Louisville physician to several gentlemen who had been discussing Dr. Tanners prospects of miserable death, ''was that of man whose death could not affect his relations, because he had none but the manner of his dying was so awful that it was a call upon common human. | ity for sorrow. He was young fellow who, at the breaking out of the war, when he was 20 years old, enlisted and fought with courage under confederate banners. In the terrible l warfare about Nashville he was exposed to the rains and colds, and contracted inflammatory rheumatism, from which he never recovered, and which caused his resignation. He re- turned to his home miserable creature, and never was able afterward 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. Opiates Of course opiates were administered, but what of the moments when the influence had waned and when rushing upon him like wolves of torture, made raven ous by hunger, the pains broke through the veil of insensibility and tugged at his frame with teeth of cruelty? The very immunity which opium gave added another horror when it was withdrawn. He was kept under the infu- ence as much as possible. In nine years he had lost every power of muscular effort, and
 
 moved to his bed, where he became mummy with a spark of life still glowing. The time shortly came when he no longer lay in his bed but sitting in his invalid chair became the enthroned embodiment of asoul too miserable for life too sacred to be freed by other hands. So he sat, year after year, with his muscles fixed in iron his eyes looking upon world
 as dreary 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 cave rms of cannons' mouths without a finch. Fixed and rigid, the poor boy was sphinx, endowed with life and deprived of movement Every joint in his body became ossified by the chalky deposits, and not even a movement that provoked deathless agony became possible. Even the joints of his neck l became rigid, the fingers stiff, and the limbs petrified. He was a stone frame with a covering of flesh and the soul of living man. The muscles of the eye even failed, and the lids falling upon the weary balls shut in for ever the darkness that was about him like the gloom of the grave. Then came, with the same step of measured eternity, the justification of the joints of the jaw, and he was fed between the rigid teeth. How slowly death moved cannot be described, but when the infamma- tion had seized his heart in that last prolonged spasm, nature no longer could give warning of it's agency. What tortures took place under the drawn curtain of that human myS- tery can no more be told than the secrets of 1 those horrors in the lowest dungeons of the Inquisition. Death came, but it was like the 1 fading of the mist-line into the clouds, and as we stood about that chair no one dared to utter his thought-no one could tell whether the soul still lurked in the prison, or whether death was life or life was death When he was buried his fixed limbs were broken with hammers, in order that he might be placed in a coffin n