the
deceased said he had stabbed himself twenty-two months prior to his
death. There is a collection of cases in which bullets have been lodged
in the heart from twenty to thirty years.

Balch reports a case in which a leaden bullet remained twenty years in
the walls of the heart. Hamilton mentions an instance of gunshot wound
of the heart, in which for twenty years a ball was embedded in the wall
of the right ventricle, death ultimately being caused by pneumonia.
Needles have quite frequently been found in the heart after death;
Graves, Leaming, Martin, Neill, Piorry, Ryerson, and others record such
cases. Callender mentions recovery of the patient after removal of a
needle from the heart.

Garangeot mentions an aged Jesuit of seventy-two, who had in the
substance of his heart a bone 4 1/2 inches long and possibly an inch
thick. This case is probably one of ossification of the cardiac muscle;
in the same connection Battolini says that the heart of Pope Urban VII
contained a bone shaped like the Arab T.

Among the older writers we frequently read of hairs, worms, and snakes
being found in the cavities of the heart. The Ephemerides, Zacutus
Lusitanus, Pare, Swinger, Riverius, and Senac are among the authorities
who mention this circumstance. The deception was possibly due to the
presence of loose and shaggy membrane attached to the endocardial
lining of the heart, or in some cases to echinococci or trichine. A
strange case of foreign body in the heart was reported some time since
in England. The patient had swallowed a thorn of the Prunus spinosa
(Linn.), which had penetrated the esophagus and the pericardium and
entered the heart. A postmortem examination one year afterward
confirmed this, as a contracted cicatrix was plainly visible on the
posterior surface of the heart about an inch above the apex, through
which the thorn had penetrated the right ventricle and lodged in the
tricuspid valve. The supposition was that the thorn had been swallowed
while eating radishes. Buck mentions a case of hydatid cysts in the
wall of the left ventricle, with rupture of the cysts and sudden death.

It is surprising the extent of injury to the pericardium Nature will
tolerate. In his "Comment on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates," Cardanus
says that he witnessed the excision of a portion of the pericardium
with the subsequent cure of the patient. According to Galen, Marulus,
the son of Mimographus, recovered after a similar operation. G