thyroid, cricoid, and first three rings of
the trachea, and lacerating the sternohyoid and thyroid arteries; she
finally recovered.

There is a curious case of suicide of a woman who, while under the
effects of opium, forced the handle of a mirror into her mouth. From
all appearances, the handle had broken off near the junction and she
had evidently fallen forward with the remaining part in her mouth,
driving it forcibly against the spine, and causing the point of the
handle to run downward in front of the cervical vertebrae. On
postmortem examination, a sharp piece of wood about two inches long,
corresponding to the missing portion of the broken mirror handle, was
found lying between the posterior wall of the esophagus and the spine.
Hennig mentions a case of gunshot wound of the neck in which the musket
ball was lodged in the posterior portion of the neck and was
subsequently discharged by the anus.

Injuries of the cervical vertebrae, while extremely grave, and declared
by some authors to be inevitably fatal, are, however, not always
followed by death or permanently bad results. Barwell mentions a man of
sixty-three who, in a fit of despondency, threw himself from a window,
having fastened a rope to his neck and to the window-sill. He fell 11
or 12 feet, and in doing so suffered a subluxation of the 4th cervical
vertebra. It slowly resumed the normal position by the elasticity of
the intervertebral fibrocartilage, and there was complete recovery in
ten days. Lazzaretto reports the history of the case of a seaman whose
atlas was dislocated by a blow from a falling sail-yard. The
dislocation was reduced and held by adhesive strips, and the man made a
good recovery. Vanderpool of Bellevue Hospital, N.Y., describes a
fracture of the odontoid process caused by a fall on the back of the
head; death, however, did not ensue until six months later. According
to Ashhurst, Philips, the elder Cline, Willard Parker, Bayard, Stephen
Smith, May, and several other surgeons, have recorded complete recovery
after fracture of the atlas and axis. The same author also adds that
statistic investigation shows that as large a proportion as 18 per cent
of injuries of the cervical vertebrae occurring in civil practice,
recover. However, the chances of a fatal issue in injuries of the
vertebrae vary inversely with the distance of the point of injury from
the brain. Keen has recorded a case in which a conoidal ball lodged in
the body of the