ome phosphorous matches into his
rectum, causing death that night; there was intense inflammation of the
rectum. The woman was speedily apprehended, and committed suicide when
her crime was known.

Complete transfixion of the abdomen does not always have a fatal issue.
In fact, two older writers, Wisemann and Muys, testify that it is quite
possible for a person to be transfixed without having any portion of
the intestines or viscera wounded. In some nations in olden times, the
extremest degree of punishment was transfixion by a stake. In his
voyages and travels, in describing the death of the King of Demaa at
the hands of his page, Mendez Pinto says that instead of being reserved
for torture, as were his successors Ravaillac, and Gerard, the slayer
of William the Silent, the assassin was impaled alive with a long stake
which was thrust in at his fundament and came out at the nape of his
neck. There is a record of a man of twenty-five, a soldier in the
Chinese war of 1860, who, in falling from his horse, was accidentally
transfixed by a bayonet. The steel entered his back two inches to the
left of the last dorsal vertebra, and reappeared two inches to the left
and below the umbilicus; as there was no symptom of visceral wound
there were apparently no injuries except perforation of the parietes
and the peritoneum. The man recovered promptly.

Ross reports a case of transfixion in a young male aborigine, a native
of New South Wales, who had received a spear-wound in the epigastrium
during a quarrel; extraction was impossible because of the
sharp-pointed barbs; the spear was, therefore, sawed off, and was
removed posteriorly by means of a small incision. The edges of the
wound were cleansed, stitched, and a compress and bandage applied.
During the night the patient escaped and joined his comrades in the
camp, and on the second day was suffering with radiating pains and
distention. The following day it was found that the stitches and
plaster had been removed, and the anterior wound was gaping and
contained an ichorous discharge. The patient was bathing the wound
with a decoction of the leaves of the red-gum tree. Notwithstanding
that the spear measured seven inches, and the interference of
treatment, the abdominal wound closed on the sixth day, and recovery
was uninterrupted. Gilkrist mentions an instance in which a ramrod was
fired into a soldier's abdomen, its extremity lodging in the spinal
column, without causing th