Paperwall: Centipede Venom

Today’s Paperwall article comes from The Des Moines Leader on October 30th, 1888.    It proves that you should A) never reheat old coffee and B) always watch out for foreign objects in your food when camping:

Title:  Poisoned by Centipede Venom

A family of six persons by the name of Boulding, moving by wagon from Tennessee to Texas, camped on the line of Baxter and Boone counties, in Arkansas, one night.   They had coffee at supper, which was prepared in a tin vessel without a cover.  Next morning Mrs. Boulding warmed over the coffee that had been left, of which she and two of the children drank freely.

Scarcely had the breakfast been finished when the entire party — father, mother, and four children — were seized with the most excruciating pains.  Their screams brought a neighbor to the rescue, who summoned a physician.  When the doctor arrived, the mother and (indecipherable) of the children were dead, and the other members of the family were only saved by the skill of the physician, who administered antidotes for poisoning.

Examination of the coffee revealed the fact that a mountain centipede had crawled into the coffee pot during the night, and had been boiled for breakfast.

(Nathan’s commentary:    Ew.   And did anyone else notice the inconsistency — if only “she and two of the children drank freely”, how did all of them be affected by the poison?   Maybe the others only sipped and didn’t ‘drink freely’?)

The Paperwall Feature: For the next few weeks, this blog will be running a regular feature called, “Paperwall”. You can view all postings in this category by clicking here. These are small excerpts from very old newspapers that were used as wallpaper backing in a house I used to live in.   When I redid the bathroom and pulled down the walls, these were exposed.   I kept a majority of the very large pieces and have scanned them and poured over them for interesting bits and pieces.    The newspapers I can identify are The Des Moines Leader of Des Moines, IA; The Sheffield Press of Sheffield, IA; and The Weekly Constitution of Atlanta, GA.   There were only two datelines I could find — November 16th, 1886, and October 30th, 1888.   The sheer age of these papers and that they’ve been preserved this long is impressive.    I found it terribly interesting to see what they had to say.

For some historical context of these excerpts, Grover Cleveland was President, the Civil War just got over in 1865 and everyone’s still recovering; the Washington Monument was just opening and Jack the Ripper was terrorizing London.   Kodak was just being patented, and the National Geographic Society was just being formed.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2009. | Permalink | One comment. One lonely comment looking for a friend. | Subscribe RSS