Following on from yesterday's article...
The movie The Thing often terrified me as a child, simply due to the thought that some alien species could invade the body and exist within the folds of the flesh. I did of course scoff at such a reality, but you may find the following account rather horrible!
The Harlein Miscellany Volume 10, page 448, by William Oldys: A most certaine and true relation of a strange monster or serpent found in the left ventricle of the heart of John Pennant, gentleman, of the age of 21 years, By Edward May…
‘…The young man died at his lodgings in St Giles parish, on the 6th October 1637, and the next day was dissected at the instance of his aunt, the Lady Elizabeth, wife of Sir Francis Herris, by Mr Jacob Heydon, a surgeon, under the direction of our author, in presence of Mrs Dorothy Pennant, the deceased’s mother and many other person’s…
..his heart, appearing on the left side very hard and tumid, they opened it and took out this monstrous worm, or serpent. The whole, was near thirteen inches long, it had a head like a snake; its body strait, about an inch round, and six inches long, of a white colour and very smooth; then it divided into two branches, of a flesh colour; the one, about two inches and a half long, the other somewhat shorter; which two branches again divided, and terminated in five long, thin fibres a piece. It was thought to have been growing three years, for so long the young man had complained of a pain in his breast, and the author had often noted an extraordinary sharpness in his eye, like the eye of a serpent…’
parasitic roundworm. Some of them can wind up in the circulatory system.
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