MUIRHEAD'S MYSTERIES: The Bosom Serpent

Dear folks,

This information on the rather grotesque-sounding `bosom serpent` is taken from Dr Jan Bondeson`s article `The bosom serpent` in the Journal of The Royal Society of Medicine vol. 91 August 1998. Dr Bondeson kindly sent me a large amount of material on the basilisk and also a selection of material on medical curiosities after Weird Weekend 2009.

'According to one of the old Viking annals, the Flato Book, King Harald Hårdråde of Norway once visited the nobleman Halldor, whose daughter had been very ill. Fever, increasing abdominal girth and an unquenchable thirst were the major symptoms. The old woman gossiped about her being pregnant, but the young lady denied this with great vehemence. Since she was steadily declining, the King was consulted. His diagnosis was that she had accidentally swallowed the spawn of a serpent when she drank water, and the reptile had grown within her….

'The belief in living snakes, frogs, lizards and other animals as parasites within the human gastrointestinal tract is of considerable antiquity. Already in ancient Egyptian, Assyrian and Babylonian manuscripts there is mention of a `colic-snake` as a cause of painful stomach cramps. In De Morbis Vulgaribus, Hippocrates describes the case of a youth who had drunk a great quantity of strong wine. When he passed out on the ground, a snake slithered down his throat and caused his death from an apoplectic seizure….

'The bosom serpent also plays a part in one of the legends about the medical saints Cosmas and Damien, who were martyred in AD 283. A poor peasant was tortured day and night by a large snake that had crawled down his throat while he slept. No doctor could help him, but when he stepped into Cosmas and Damien`s church the serpent slithered up his throat with great haste…
'...In 1618, the Prebendary of Strasbourg, Dr Melchior Sebizius, reported another famous case. A 17-year-old youth had consulted him for stomach pains, melancholia, flatulence and epileptic seizures but he had been unable to diagnose the ailment. Some weeks later, the youth was found sitting dead in a bog-house; beneath the seat, a large snake was crawling about. In a thesis, illustrated with a figure of the snake…Melchior Sebizius concluded that the unhappy youth`s afflictions could all be explained by the presence of the snake in the stomach for an extended period of time, and that the strain of expelling it from his body had induced a fatal apoplectic fit….

'In 1694,the 12-year-old son of Pastor Zacharias Döderlein, of Berolzheim in southern Germany, was taken severely ill. After several fits and attacks of abdominal cramps, he vomited numerous insects, and later also 21 newts, 4 frogs and some toads…These uncanny happenings soon attracted notice among the clergy: many German parsons came to visit the house of their stricken colleague and their diagnosis was that the boy was possessed by the Devil; what particularly impressed them was that when the boy was led to take some fresh air near a pond with croaking frogs, his stomach - frogs croaked loudly in reply…In the late 18th century, most of the leading biologists, including Linnaeus, Buffon and Blumenbach, favoured the notion that snakes and frogs could live as parasites in the human gastrointestinal tract….

'In 1850, Professor Arnold Adolph Berthold, of Göttingen, published a momograph aimed at solving the burning question of the existence of living amphibians as parasites in the human stomach. He had noted that almost every German pathological museum of repute contained some snake, frog or newt which had allegedly been vomited by some patient after living for years within the human body. Berthold obtained permission to dissect several of these specimens and all had partly digested insects in their stomachs - a strong indication that they had been deliberately swallowed shortly before being vomited….

'Early in 1916, a remarkable story appeared in several English newspapers. A woman had swallowed frogspawn, which had developed inside her into a large frog. She was taken to Stroud Hospital…but the doctors were unable to operate since the animal moved about too fast. The woman was in such agony that the baffled medical men wrote to King George V in order to get his permission to kill her with poison, but his Majesty refused this plea.

'Another canard went the rounds of the newspapers in 1987. An 11 year old girl in Baku had got a 26-inch semi poisonous Caucasian cat snake in her stomach, which had slithered down her throat while she slept. The clever doctors managed to flush it out with a stomach-pump. The Scotsman added a further frisson by adding that she was still in hospital, being treated for the enraged reptile`s bites in the stomach wall.' (1)

Dr Bondeson concludes that the bosom serpent was likely psychosomatic or a parasite.

1. J.Bondeson. The bosom serpent. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Vol. 91 August 1998. pp.442-447