Spontaneous Combustion and the Sectioning of Female Bodies

Humanity has never been kind to the climacteric female. In the early years of the twentieth century, scholars claim, menopause was often “portrayed in the medical literature as a terminal illness—the ‘death of the woman in the woman.’“ ¹ Among the Victorians, “menopausal women were more harshly discussed, more openly ridiculed, and more punitively treated than any other female group.” ² During the Enlightenment, medical literature foretold dire consequences for these women. Dr. William Buchan (1729–1805), of the prestigious Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, warned that the cessation of the menses “is sufficient to disorder the whole frame, and often to destroy life itself. Hence it comes to pass, that so many women either fall into chronic disorders, or die about this time.” ³ If being old and female in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries was difficult, it was extremely dangerous in the seventeenth century. The idea that “bodies of aged persons are impure,” as William Fulbeck wrote in 1618, was directed primarily at old women, who were frequently associated with witchcraft. ⁴ Reginald Scot, author of Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), connected witchcraft with menopause, and because it was agreed that the primary characteristics of a witch were those of an old woman, any old woman might be suspect. ⁵ Poverty was regarded as another likely trait, thus making old women from the lower socio-economic classes even more vulnerable to charges of witchcraft. This stereotype prevailed into the early years of the eighteenth century. ⁶

Such attitudes contaminated literature as well, and the misogyny of Augustan satirists is well-known. It is ironic that, among men famous for their nasty infighting, there was total harmony on the subject of Woman. Her vanity, her loquaciousness, her pride, her frivolities, and her mental vacuity are satirized in many of Steele and Addison’s periodical essays (1709–1712); Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” (1712–1714); Colley Cibber’s “The Refusal” (1721); Edward Young’s “Love of Fame, the Universal Passion” (1725); Swift’s “The Furniture of a Woman’s Mind” (1727); and countless other works. Attacks on the female body are more savage, reducing it to its parts, by Restoration and eighteenth-century poets like John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester; William Wycherley; John Oldham; and Jonathan Swift.

Much less well-known are writings published in England, France, and elsewhere in eighteenth-century Europe that focused on working-class women who, it was said, had perished by spontaneous combustion. Described as elderly, sedentary, corpulent, and addicted to the “vice” of drunkenness—in short, indolent and morally lax—these women were just as despised as those of the preceding century who were executed as witches. They too were punished for their sins (chiefly intemperance) by burning. Reports of these incidents were carried in The Annual Register, Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Journal de médecine, and other respectable publications. ⁷ Judging from the many subsequent references to these reports by doctors, the medical community accepted the phenomenon. In fact, spontaneous combustion of the human body was to remain a “more or less accepted fact of pathology and legal medicine in the nineteenth century.” ⁸ As we shall see, certain factors contributed to the conceptualization of this theory, among them eighteenth-century anatomical studies of the female body, dehumanization of the female body by literary satirists, and a fear of witchcraft.

In 1800, the Frenchman Pierre-Aimé Lair collected these descriptions of spontaneous combustion, carefully citing his original sources, in a paper published in the Journal de Physique entitled “Essai sur les combustions humaines produits par un long abus des liqueures spiritueuses.” He also included excerpts from an essay on spontaneous combustion by Monsieur Le Cât (1700–1768), a famous French surgeon. ⁹ Lair’s paper was immediately translated into English and appeared in Tilloch’s Philosophical Magazine (London) as “Combustion of the Human Body, Produced by the long and immoderate use of Spirituous Liquors.” Twelve cases are presented by Lair, all involving intoxicated, superannuated, obese women who burned to death without apparent cause. ¹⁰ Certain lurid similarities—notably, images of...