Please note: some images here contain partial nudity. Mario Gerth is probably better know for his black and white photographic series of Africa and her people. And while those photographs are some of the most incredible you will see . . . something is lost when the color is removed. Africa is one of the most colorful continents in the world and this is most evident in the dress and body ornamentation of her people. This list looks at twenty of the most incredible examples of the diversity of the African peoples as seen through the color lens.

Gerth is an interesting photographer in that he holds down a full time job as a banker in between his photo shoots—not unlike American composer Charles Ives who worked as an insurance dealer in-between composing some of the most significant classical pieces of the twentieth century. He is based in Germany but has travelled to over sixty-five countries on his photographic journeys. His work is found in countless magazines and international photographic exhibitions.

All of these images are copyright Mario Gerth. You can find many of his black and white photos on his Flickr page. I cannot recommend it enough.

Rather than commenting on each image I have merely noted the name, tribe, or region of each person.

It is rare to hear of someone suing himself. So rare that no one has even bothered to form a word for it yet. Perhaps we could just call it “self-litigation.”

The obvious problem with self-litigation is that the plaintiff is also the defendant and, depending on the circumstances, the only witness. Then there’s the issue of representation. Do you hire one lawyer or two? Can you represent yourself, or is that a conflict of interest?

Despite its rarity and the possible complications, tales of self-litigation have been reported since at least 1899.

10 Curtis Gokey

In 2006, Curtis Gokey slammed Lodi, California, with a $3,600 lawsuit after a dump truck owned by the city crashed into his car. The lawsuit would not have raised eyebrows except that Gokey was the one driving the dump truck. It meant he was practically suing himself for an accident he caused.

The city turned down Gokey’s claim because he obviously couldn’t sue himself. The case did not end there, though. Gokey’s wife, Rhonda, took it up and sued the city and, by extension, her husband, for $4,800—$1,200 more than what her husband had asked for. Lodi city attorney Steve Schwabauer stated that this was also impossible.^[1]

Under California law, a husband and wife were considered as one. While the wife could sue for certain things like divorce, she could not sue for negligence, which was what happened in this instance. Rhonda claimed that she had every right to sue the city because their dump truck damaged her vehicle. In her view, whoever was driving it was irrelevant.

The city prevailed.

9 Oreste Lodi

In 1985, Oreste Lodi dragged himself to a California court over an estate he owned. According to Lodi, he had tried to retrieve from himself an estate that he owned and gave to himself to manage, but he refused to release it to himself. The court dismissed the case, but the determined Lodi appealed the decision.

He filed two briefs for the appeal, one supporting himself for wanting to retrieve his estate from himself and the other against himself for not releasing his estate to himself. Again, the court dismissed the appeal because the plaintiff and defendant needed to be different people. In this instance, Lodi would have been the winner and loser no matter what decision was reached by the court.

The court categorized the appeal as frivolous and initially considered whether Lodi needed to pay for filing a frivolous appeal. It later decided that each Lodi—the plaintiff and defendant—had to pay for the appeal. This means Lodi paid twice.^[2]

It remains unclear why Lodi sued himself, but it is suspected to have something to do with taxes. At the time he pressed charges against himself, he sent a copy of the litigation to the Internal Revenue Service.

8 Lothar Malskat

In 1952, an artist called Lothar Malskat sued himself for art forgery. The backstory could be traced to 1942 when Britain bombed Lubeck, Germany. The bombing destroyed almost every building in the city, including the Marienkirche (St. Mary’s Church) that was built in the 1200s. The church sustained serious damage but its walls remained standing. The bombing revealed previously unseen Gothic frescoes that were hidden underneath its walls during construction.

After the war, the German government and the church commissioned Dietrich Fey, a famous art restorer, and Lothar Malskat, his assistant, to fix the frescoes. What Fey and Malskat never mentioned was that the frescoes had seriously deteriorated. They turned to dust on touch. However, the duo went to work and revealed what was initially thought to be the restored church paintings in 1951.

Everyone was impressed, and Fey and Malskat went on to do several other restorations. But Malskat was not content. Fey got all the credit for the restorations while Malskat got nothing. Fey also got the bulk of the money while Malskat received only a small portion, sometimes just one-fifth. This made Malskat reveal the fraud and, at the same time, sue himself for fraud.^[3]

No one believed Malskat until he pointed out that Mary Magdalene was not wearing shoes in the new painting even though she wore shoes in the original. The faces of the king and monks had also been replaced by those of random people, and a painting of an Austrian actress was added to the background. The frescoes also included some turkeys even though there were no turkeys in Germany in the 13th century.

The church removed the frescoes, leaving a small portion as a reminder of the forgery. Malskat received 18 months imprisonment for his involvement. He never got the fame he always wanted and remained a struggling artist until his death.

7 Robert Lee Brock

In 1995, Robert Lee Brock, who was serving time at the Indian Creek Correctional Center in Chesapeake, Virginia, sued himself for $5 million. However, he demanded that the state pay the damages because he had no money to give himself.

According to the lawsuit, Brock had drunk alcohol on July 1, 1993, which was against his religious beliefs. Besides, it made him commit a crime for which he was arrested. At the time that the lawsuit was filed, Brock was serving a 23-year sentence for burglary and grand larceny.

Judge Rebecca Beach Smith dismissed the case. While she agreed that Brock had been innovative in his approach to getting justice, it was ridiculous.^[4]

6 Larry Rutman

On August 5, 1996, the South China Morning Post reported that Larry Rutman of Owensboro, Kentucky, had sued himself for $300,000 and won. However, he will not pay himself a dime. The bills will be picked by his insurance company.

According to the news, Rutman was throwing his boomerang when it hit his head. The accident supposedly altered his memory and increased his sex drive.

Initially, Rutman wanted to sue the boomerang maker for the accident, but his lawyer told him to sue himself instead. He did and won. According to the judgment, Rutman was to pay himself $300,000 for causing “body damage through negligence and carelessness” to himself.^[5] As interesting as this incident sounds, there are claims that it never happened.

5 David Jennings

On January 8, 1899, The New York Times reported the story of David Jennings from Fort Scott, Kansas, who had sued himself and won. Jennings was the treasurer of Labette County, Kansas.

He sued himself after refusing to accept a tax payment he had made to himself. The tax was for a property that he used for his business. The court sided with Jennings and ordered that he should not force himself to pay any tax to himself.^[6]

4 John Fred Heiniger

On June 26, 1912, the Los Angeles Herald reported the story of John Fred Heiniger who had won a lawsuit he filed against himself to quiet title. “Quiet title” is legal terminology that refers to establishing a person’s title to a property while “quieting” any other claims or challenges to that ownership from others.

The newspaper did not provide any backstory about the case except that Heiniger had prevailed in court. Technically, this also meant that he lost the lawsuit.

Besides being the plaintiff and defendant in the case, Heiniger was also the only witness and the process server (the person who delivers or “serves” court papers to the defendant or others in a legal action).^[7]

3 Thomas Prusik-Parkin

In 2003, Thomas Prusik-Parkin sued himself while trying to fraudulently recover a house that he had lost after defaulting on a mortgage. The whole thing started in 1996 when his mother, Irene, transferred a house to him. Thomas took out a $200,000 mortgage on the property to start a business. The venture failed, and Thomas defaulted on his mortgage. The house was sold to Samir Chopra in 2003.

Coincidentally, Irene died the same year. However, Thomas gave the funeral director a fake social security number to keep Irene’s death hidden from the government. At the same time, he took the $700 she received from Social Security every month.

But Thomas did not stop there. He was not ready to lose the house, so he claimed that the deed transfer from Irene to him in 1996 had been forged—by him. Therefore, he argued that he couldn’t have legally taken out a mortgage on the house.

However, Thomas did not make the claim as Thomas but as Irene. To keep up the ruse, he sued himself for the forgery. To an outsider, it was Irene suing her son. But to Thomas, he was suing himself. At the same time, Chopra and (the real) Thomas dragged themselves to court, with each one accusing the other of fraud. Investigators became suspicious and did some digging. They discovered that Irene was dead.

To confirm their suspicions, they set up a meeting between Irene and Chopra. Interestingly, Irene attended the meeting. She was dressed in lady’s clothes, complete with painted nails and lipstick. She also had an oxygen tank.

However, investigators were not fooled. They were sure that Irene was dead and even had a picture of her tombstone as evidence. Apparently, Thomas was the one dressed in Irene’s clothing. The moment the scam was revealed, Thomas mentioned that he was his mother because his mother had died in his arms.

This was not the first time that Thomas had dressed up as Irene. Earlier, he had worn her clothes, wig, and sunglasses on a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew her license. He was handed a 13-year sentence on May 3, 2012. Mhilton Rimolo, Thomas’s accomplice who often followed the fake “Irene” to banks and pretended to be “her” nephew, received a three-year sentence.^[8]

2 Emert Wyss

In 2005, Illinois attorney Emert Wyss mistakenly sued himself. Three years earlier, his client Carmelita McLaughlin had purchased a house, which she later refinanced. However, the mortgage company handling repayment passed responsibility to another mortgage company, Alliance Mortgage.

Wyss saw an opportunity and advised McLaughin to sue Alliance Mortgage for what he called “illegal fees.” It was agreed that Wyss would receive 10 percent of the settlement paid to McLaughlin if the case was successful. Wyss only realized he was suing himself after Alliance Mortgage revealed that Centerre Title Company—which charged the fees that Wyss called “illegal”–was owned by Wyss.

The court determined that Wyss and the Centerre Title Company had to be parties to the lawsuit in order for the case to proceed. As a result, Wyss could no longer act as counsel for McLaughlin, so he quietly moved to the other side to become the defendant in a lawsuit he started. The judge later dismissed Wyss as defendant because he and the Centerre Title Company could be treated as different entities.

A move to sanction Wyss was abandoned after he agreed not to charge the Centerre Title Company any attorney fees. It didn’t matter anyway as he would have been the one paying himself.^[9]

1 Barbara Bagley

In 2015, 55-year-old Barbara Bagley sued herself over an accident she caused in December 2011. On the fateful day, she was driving in the Nevada desert when she crashed the vehicle. The impact threw her passenger and husband, Bradley Vom Baur, into a bush and seriously injured him. He died 10 days later.

Barbara demanded that the insurance company compensate her for the medical and funeral bills of her late husband. The insurance company refused. They argued that Barbara was not eligible for any compensation because she caused the accident. However, they were ready to pay for the car. A Utah appeals court ruled that Barbara could sue herself to receive compensation from the insurance company.

So Barbara (the widow and heir of the late Vom Baur) sued Barbara (the driver) for negligence. The complication of such legal action is that Barbara will need to provide evidence against herself to prove that she was negligent while driving.

She hired a lawyer to represent Barbara (the widow). Barbara (the driver) is represented by the insurance company’s attorneys because they would have to pay the judgment if Barbara (the driver) loses the case.

But that’s not all. Barbara is also the personal representative of her husband’s estate. That Barbara is also suing Barbara (the driver). So Barbara is two plaintiffs and one defendant in the same lawsuit.^[10]

As far as we know, the case has not been decided yet. But there is a bit of good news. The couple’s dog was in the car at the time of the accident. The dog ran away but was found almost two months later in good condition. No word on whether the dog is suing anyone.

While the possibility of time travel remains debatable, we have had people who’ve claimed to have traveled to the past, the future, or even parallel universes. One common argument against time travel to the past deals with the possibility of altering the past. If you travel back in time and kill your parents, what happens to you? Do you die off, just disappear, or what?

Claims of time travel to the future are more realistic and believable, since the future is unknown. Some who claim to have traveled to the future even offer predictions to back up their stories. These predictions could be all they need to validate their time travel claims, should their prognostications come true. Even when they don’t, the time travelers could argue that they averted the event or made us avert it simply by telling us.

10 John Titor

On November 2, 2000, John Titor posted a message on an Internet forum claiming to be a time traveler from 2036. Titor claimed he had traveled to 1975 to pick up an IBM 5100 computer and only stopped by in the year 2000 over what he called “personal reasons.” To prove he was a real time traveler, Titor added pictures of his time machine and said it was made by General Electric.

Titor claimed that a civil war started in the US in 2004 and evolved into a nuclear war with Russia, leaving millions of people dead. He was part of a military unit that had traveled to the past to retrieve crucial items necessary for the survival of humanity. He had been tasked with retrieving an IBM 5100 computer to debug a machine used in 2036.

Besides warning of a civil war, Titor predicted there would be no Olympics in 2004 and that the West would collapse in 2005. The same year would see an outbreak of mad cow disease, and whoever was president would attempt to emulate Abraham Lincoln. Titor offered to take some people to the future, but just like his predictions, that never happened because he suddenly disappeared in March 2001.

In 2009, John Hughston of Hoax Hunter speculated that “Titor” was actually brothers Larry and John Rick Haber. However, some believe Titor was real and must have averted the civil war by indirectly warning the US government when he dropped by in 2000. Besides, Titor already mentioned that by traveling into the past, he had created a “worldline” and altered history. In fact, he claimed to have witnessed certain alterations to history, like an opposing team winning a football match instead of the team that had originally won it.^[1]

9 Andrew Basiago

Andrew Basiago is a Seattle lawyer and another time travel claimant. Not only does he claim to have traveled to the future, but he also says he’s traveled to the past and Mars. Basiago claims he went to Mars in 1981 alongside a teenage Barack Obama and William Stillings, who were involved in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) effort to create a time machine.

Basiago claims the project, which was code-named Pegasus, was active between 1968 and 1972 and led to the creation of a real time machine. Basiago says he used the machine to travel to the year 1863, where he listened to one of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, and the year 2054. He added that the US government frequently used the machine to deploy military units to alter the past and future as it deemed fit.

Unlike other time travelers, Basiago failed to provide us with some predictions about the future, except that he will become president between 2016 and 2028. Some do not believe Basiago’s claims of interplanetary and temporal travel, since they whole could have been a ploy to create awareness for a book he was writing at that time. On the other hand, the book could be a further revelation of his claims. That is, if they are true.^[2]

8 Bryant Johnson

In 2017, police officers in Casper, Wyoming, were called to deal with a drunk man roaming the streets. The man turned out to be Bryant Johnson, who claimed he was a time traveler from 2048. Johnson stated that he had traveled to 2017 to warn us of an alien invasion that was supposed to happen in 2018. He said he originally intended to travel to 2018 but arrived one year earlier because the aliens got him drunk.

He even demanded to speak with the “president of the town” to warn him of the impending invasion. Johnson’s time travel claim was clearly an excuse to avoid a public drunkenness charge. Officers did not fall for it and promptly arrested him. They revealed he was so drunk that his eyes were bloodshot, and he could not talk properly.^[3]

7 Noah

Noah claims to be from the year 2030. In a video posted on YouTube, he claimed artificial intelligence had taken over, Bitcoin was an acceptable currency, and climate change had heated North America and cooled Europe. He added that electric cars were more reliable and that humans were already traveling to Mars and had found cures for certain cancers.

The weirdest of his predictions dealt with President Donald Trump. Noah said that Trump changed his name to Ilana Remikee after winning the 2020 election. Noah’s claims remain in doubt since he provided no evidence to back up what he’d said. He claimed he could not provide any because of a “paradox” that will not make people believe him, anyway.

He followed up his initial video with another one in which he supposedly took a lie detector test to confirm he was telling the truth. We say “supposedly” because the machine was not visible in the video. Noah could not be identified from the footage, since his face was blurred and his voice altered. His videos were posted on Apex TV, a YouTube channel known to feature people with questionable time travel claims.^[4]

6 William Taylor

William Taylor claimed to have traveled from 2005 to 3000 and finally 8973 before returning back to the present. He claimed to work for the “British Intelligence Agency” and to have been sent to the future as part of a time traveling experiment the agency had been working on since 1981. He first journeyed to the year 3000, when humans no longer walked on the ground but instead moved around in flying vehicles.

He later traveled to year 8973, where disease, death, war, and crime are nonexistent. All humans are tall and slim with big heads and eyes and live peacefully with robots and cyborgs. Taylor hinted that time travel seemed to be normal in the future, since no one was surprised when he mentioned he was a time traveler. In fact, he claimed to have met another time traveler from 2055.

Taylor also provided us with some insights into the British government’s alleged time travel project. He said the machine doesn’t just allow humans to travel through time but also to parallel universes. He added that other governments also have their own time travel projects, but they all keep them under wraps. However, the British government will unveil its own to the world in 2028.^[5]

5 Bella

Bella is an Albanian lady who claimed to have traveled to the year 3800. She even added evidence: a selfie she supposedly took in the future. Bella claimed she was able to go to the future with the help of a Belarus physicist called Alexander Kozlov. She says the process of traveling through time is not as cool as we think. Everything turned black while she traveled, and whatever she used to journey to the future passed very high voltage through her body.

Bella claimed the future was not cool, either. Everything we know has been completely destroyed, with robots ruling over man. Everywhere she looked, she saw rubble, robots, and dead people. Bella even claimed to have encountered one of the killer robots. It was huge and capable of talking and making facial expressions. It asked her where she came from, but she did not answer.

Many people criticized Bella’s claims over several irregularities. She said she took several pictures, so she should have provided more photographs as evidence instead of just one. Even the picture she did show was questionable, even though there were futuristic-looking buildings in the background. Besides, her lipstick somehow remained perfectly applied, something that should not have been possible, considering the chaos.^[6]

4 Unidentified Man

An unnamed man from Siberia has said he traveled to the year 4040. The man claimed to have worked in a physics lab, where he and another scientist collaborated to build a time machine. He tested the machine and found himself in the year 4040, when half of the world’s population was dead while robots held sway.

The man added that the groundwork for the destruction of humanity was laid in 2458, when humans contacted some aliens from another galaxy. The aliens lived longer than humans—between 400 and 450 years on the average—but had just come out of a disastrous war that left only 200,000 survivors. They migrated to Earth in 2460.

Humans experienced rapid development after the arrival of the aliens. Health care improved, and humans were living up to 200 years. In 3213, humans and aliens collaborated to create artificial intelligence. They built a very large computer that was half the size of Europe and put it in the Pacific Ocean. The computer controlled every other robot and electronic device on Earth.

The computer soon overtook humans in intelligence and turned the robots against the humans and aliens. Both engaged in a war with the robots until the year 4040, by which time half of the world’s human population was dead. The unnamed man ended his time travel story by warning us about the dangers of artificial intelligence. He said it was a disaster waiting to happen.^[7]

3 Hakan Nordkvist

Hakan Nordkvist is a Swedish man who claimed to have traveled to the year 2042. Unlike the other time travelers we’ve mentioned, Hakan did not use a time machine and only got to the future by accident. Hakan says it all happened on August 30, 2006, when he entered his kitchen to find his sink leaking. He opened the cabinet under the sink to repair the leak but could not find it. He reached into the cabinet, only to find himself in the year 2042.

Hakan claimed he met the 72-year-old version of himself in the future. The two of them even had the same tattoo. To confirm the 72-year-old man was truly him, Hakan asked him some personal questions, and he answered correctly. To make the whole thing believable, Hakan provided a very short video of his meeting with the 72-year-old version of himself.^[8]

2 Andrew Carlssin

On March 19, 2003, Yahoo! News reported the arrest of one Andrew Carlssin by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for insider trading. Andrew Carlssin had successfully traded 126 high-risk stocks, turning an investment of $800 into over $350 million in just two weeks—during a financial crisis when other investors were losing money. There was only one way that could have been possible: insider trading.

Carlssin denied participating in insider trading. He reportedly claimed he was a time traveler from the the year 2256 but teleported himself back to 2003 to trade in stocks. He said everyone in the future knew about the stock market failure of 2003, and he only returned to see if he could make some quick cash.

He never revealed the location of his time machine but promised to divulge certain information, including the location of Osama bin Laden and how to get the cure for AIDS, on the condition that the SEC left him alone. The SEC found Carlssin’s claims hilarious. Curiously, there was allegedly no prior record of Carlssin existing anywhere on Earth before December 2002.^[9]

Carlssin was supposedly charged but mysteriously disappeared before appearing in court. No one has heard of him ever since. Maybe he returned to the future? Or perhaps, as many believe, the whole story was a hoax. A big mark against the story is that Yahoo! News was essentially reblogging an article from Weekly World News, a tabloid known for its positively ridiculous claims.

1 Michael Philips

Michael Philips claims to be from the year 2070 and to have traveled back to 2018 to avert a war that will be fought in 2019. This conflict, which will become World War III, will be so deadly that World Wars I and II will seem like child’s play. Philips says his mission is to stop the war before it starts.

The basis of the war will occur late this year, when North Korea will attempt to launch a nuclear weapon at the US. The US will respond with two cruise missiles, and the war will quickly evolve into a nuclear conflict involving several enemy nations trying to nuke themselves into extinction.

Philips also provided us with some information about 9/11. He says it was caused by another time traveler we’ve already mentioned: John Titor. Titor traveled to 2000 to lay plans for the 9/11 attacks. The idea was to create an event that will unify the US and avert that civil war that should have happened in 2004 (or 2008, as Philips tells it).^[10]

Besides informing us about the averted civil war and predicting World War III, Philips also made more predictions for the future. He said Trump will win the 2020 election, and Elon Musk will build the first spacecraft to transport humans to Mars in 2025. Humans will be living on Mars by 2032. Of course, Philips’s prediction about Mars contradicts Basiago’s claim of humans traveling to Mars in the 1960s.

Suicide is an epidemic that we tend to think of as a modern thing. While suicide rates have gotten worse in the US^[1] and are projected to get worse in developing countries, humans have been taking their own lives for about as long as we’ve had the tools and knowledge to do so. It’s a tragic event for all parties involved, especially the friends and family of the person who passed on, leaving tens, hundreds, thousands, or, in the case of some recent celebrity suicides, millions of people with slews of questions, with panic, and with fear. Suicide forces us to think of our own mortality and the fragility of our own mental state—just how vulnerable are we to a bout of depression or life taking a wrong turn on us, leaving us with what, at least perceptively, feels like nothing worth living for?

With suicide, death isn’t certain, not even within a near margin. There are many more suicide attempts than actual suicides (25 attempts for every fatality), and those who try to kill themselves have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. While many assume that a bullet to the head will provide a clear path to a successful suicide, it’s not actually guaranteed, and many people have shot themselves in the head and lived to tell about it. Here are ten cases of such individuals who survived a suicide attempt by gunshot to the head.

10 Oleg Shegeda

In January 2018, a woman named Svetlana Shedega was found shot dead, and a man named Oleg Shegeda was found critically wounded in St. Louis, Missouri.^[2] Police were called when neighbors heard gunshot sounds coming from the apartment. Upon their arrival, they entered the apartment to discover Svetlana lying dead on the floor with several gunshot wounds and Oleg with one single gunshot wound and a gun in his hand.

The police took Oleg to the hospital to be treated for his injuries. Svetlana was 67 years old at the time of her death, and the two had lived in the apartment for 20 years. Oleg Shedega would be officially charged a week later with the murder of Svetlana Shedega.

9 Cameron Underwood

Cameron Underwood would be 26 years old when he would finally receive a new face in 2018 after he shot himself in the head in 2016.^[3] He was extremely fortunate in that his face was restored relatively quickly with surgery. Most patients have to wait longer to receive face transplants, leading to severe emotional trauma, such as the depression which stems from social criticism and feeling guilty.

Cameron spent months in the hospital after he attempted to end his own life with a gun, an act which removed most of his jaw, all but one of his teeth, and basically the bottom half of his face, on the night of June 26, 2016. He was fed through tubes and covered up to his eyes, which remained. Like all too many who commit or attempt suicide, Cameron had been battling severe depression and the resultant alcoholism, which hurt significantly more than it helped. But in the end, Cameron Underwood received the opportunity of a lifetime, the opportunity to smile again, when doctors completely rebuilt his entire face, giving him a new jaw, teeth, and everything else that had been damaged by the gunshot.

Today, Cameron is outspoken about his experience and tells about how he’s completely different from who he once was. Sometimes, through a failed suicide attempt, people can find a new appreciation for life.

8 Daniel Von Bargen

For many of us, it’s hard to fathom why someone like Daniel von Bargen would attempt to take his own life—he was a former actor on the hit television show Seinfeld and the movie Super Troopers, but this Hollywood star would end up turning a gun on himself and pulling the trigger back in 2012.

Shortly after he raised the gun to his temple and fired, 911 operators received a call about a man who had been shot—amazingly, the call was placed by von Bargen, moments after he’d shot himself.^[4] Even more insane, von Bargen was coherent and capable of holding a conversation with the operator while he awaited the arrival of emergency services.

The actor then went on to explain to the operator that he’d been suffering from diabetes for years and was supposed to have several toes amputated but didn’t want to go through with it. He said, “I’ve shot myself in the head . . . and I need help.” Then, when prompted, the actor explained that he had shot himself in the temple. Sadly, Daniel von Bargen died in 2015 from complications arising from his diabetes.

7 David Parnell

Featured on radio shows and television and making appearances as a public speaker, David Parnell is the last person you’d expect has survived a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He’s married and has fathered seven children and travels the world to engage live audiences to tell his story.^[5] In 2003, after an extremely long history of drug abuse that had spanned 23 years, David’s wife Amy had had enough of his antics and decided to leave him—for David, this was his world collapsing around him.

David then took his SKS assault rifle, placed it beneath his chin, and pulled the trigger. But rather than the bullet traveling through his brain and exiting through the top of his skull, killing him in an instant like David had planned, the bullet exited through the front of his skull between his eyes, breaking almost every single bone in his face. But David had been high on meth at the time and didn’t even fall unconscious. He sat on the floor while Amy called emergency services, holding two halves of his split head together, and was actually capable of speaking, telling everyone how sorry he was for what he’d done.

This wasn’t actually David’s first attempt, but it would prove to be his last. Three years prior, David hanged himself, but after he had fallen unconscious, someone found him and cut him down. He now tells his story and of the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, being featured all over the world on Internet sites, in interviews, and in public speaking engagements to let people know where such radically poor life choices can ultimately lead in hopes of saving a few lives from experiencing the agony that he has—or worse.

6 Katie Stubblefield

Katie Stubblefield was only 18 years old when her boyfriend broke up with her in 2015, leading to an event that would dramatically change her life forever. That’s when Katie took a gun, put it to her face, and pulled the trigger. Every part of her face, from her mouth to her nose, her sinus cavities, and her eyes, were all damaged in the blast. And like Cameron Underwood, Katie would receive a face transplant through the hard efforts of surgeons. The same surgeon worked on both Katie and Cameron.

She had taken her brother Robert’s hunting rifle in an attempt to take her own life, one that went horribly wrong. The shot didn’t kill her but left her horribly disfigured, and the photos from the events following are striking.^[6] But ultimately, Katie would receive her new face and then have to deal with the adjustment period of returning to as close to a normal life as she could manage. She is, however, extremely fortunate, as only 40 procedures like Katie’s had been done at the time that hers was, and of all the facial damage the surgeons had worked on prior, Katie’s was the most severe. These are the miracles of modern medicine.

5 Victor Sibson

The case of Victor Sibson is one of the most tragic stories of survival out there. Sibson was a young man of only 21 years old when he shot himself in the head after a night of drinking on April 19, 2017. Even more tragic than such a young man attempting to take his own life and failing is that his 22-year-old girlfriend was present at the time and attempted to stop him, but he was able to discharge the firearm anyway. The bullet from Sibson’s gun traveled through his head and into the chest of his girlfriend, Brittany-Mae Haag, after entering through her armpit that sat beneath her raised hand.

Police and paramedic services arrived at the scene to find both laying on the floor with bullet holes. Victor had an exit wound through the top of his head, and both were rapidly dying. Medical teams were able to save Victor’s life, but Brittany-Mae died from the critical injuries to her internal organs, telling them with her last breaths what had happened—that Victor had shot himself purposely and her accidentally.^[7]

Victor Sibson would go on to be charged in the death of Brittany-Mae Haag and turned himself in to stand trial. He was formally charged with murder in the second degree.

4 Bed Bath & Beyond

In 2011, another man would survive a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head and live to tell about it when he attempted suicide in the highly public parking lot of a Bed Bath & Beyond in Portsmouth, Maine.^[8] Police initially responded to a suspicious shooting and found the man but thought that someone else had actually pulled the trigger. Upon investigation, they quickly determined that the man himself had decided to take his own life in a highly public place—and failed.

He was taken to the hospital and survived. It’s unknown why the man chose the Bed Bath & Beyond parking lot, but it definitely goes down in history as one of the most unusual places to attempt a suicide.

3 Lance Paulson

It would be over a year before Lance Paulson would finally start the process of standing trial for his crime: the murder of his longtime friend Steve Gagnon, who was 50 years old at the time of the shooting.^[9] The incident took place in April 2017 El Cerrito, California, a city on the east side of the San Francisco Bay.

Apparently, there was a financial dispute which caused the event in which Paulson, then 51, drew a gun and shot Gagnon and then turned the gun on himself in an attempt to end his own life. He was rushed to the hospital, and no one thought he would make it, but Paulson survived. It would take a full month to heal from his injuries, though charges were officially brought against him within 72 hours of his arrest, per state law.

The district attorney alleged that the motive behind the murder and attempted suicide was a $20,000 debt, and witnesses testified that this was the case, by Paulson’s own admission. Two lives were completely ruined over money.

2 Cody Mark Patrick

Cody Mark Patrick was an American traveling abroad, a tourist in Cambodia, when he made an attempt on his own life in 2008. Police found drugs in the tourist’s hotel room, though they declined to say which kind, after the man went to a shooting range in the Ang Snuol district of the Kandal province of the country.^[10]

The 33-year-old man walked into the gun range, purchased ten bullets, fired off seven of them, and then discharged the eighth round into his own head. He was treated for his injuries at a hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, where he would survive. As there are no laws against attempted suicide in Cambodia, Patrick would not be brought up on charges of attempted suicide for the event. In some countries, such as Nigeria, merely attempting suicide is a crime.

1 Erik Kramer

Erik Kramer is a former NFL football player for the Atlanta Falcons, Detroit Lions, Chicago Bears, and San Diego Chargers in the United States and also played for the Calgary Stampeders in Canada. He, too, would go on to attempt suicide himself, proving further that fame, status, and wealth don’t always exempt people from the cold, hard facts of life that can sometimes lead them to try to take their own lives.^[11]

Kramer had it all planned out to the last detail back in 2015. He had been suffering from severe depression as the result of the recent overdose death of his son, written a suicide note to those closest to him, and dropped off his children. He then proceeded to shoot himself in the head. But miraculously, Erik Kramer survived.

When police and ambulances arrived, they noted that he had a non-life-threatening gunshot wound and took him to the hospital. Erik Kramer would be another person who went on to tell his story of depression and survival, giving interviews and spreading his tale of sadness, suicide attempt, and hope.

I was always raised to avoid eating lobster, because they’re cooked alive. If they’re dead before cooked, they can be quite dangerous, as the bacteria in them spreads much faster than normal. While some people argue that the way they’re cooked (put in a pot which is slowly brought to boil) means they feel no pain, it’s really a matter of how much trust you put in your chef.

But when the animal you’re about to eat is still alive when you bite into it, that’s a pretty different story altogether. Below are ten examples of animals that are prepared and consumed alive. Be warned—some of the entries can be quite graphic.

Sannakji is a dish served in Korea, and probably the most well known item on this list through videos that have circulated online. Usually seasoned with sesame seeds and sesame oil, the main component of sannakji is nakji, which is a small octopus. The tentacles are usually cut from the live octopus and brought straight out to the customer, although sometimes it is served whole.

The main “appeal” of this dish is that when chewed, the tentacles are still wriggling. But because of this, the suction cups on the tentacles are still active also, and so they can become stuck in the throat of whoever’s eating it.

Going into the sea to collect your own sea urchins and eating them straight away has become a popular practice in Italy, where they call them Ricci di Mare. Since the edible part—the roe—is on the inside of the sea urchin, there is a special tool to open them up—though it can also be done with a scissors.

They can be eaten with a spoon, although many people prefer to lick them out with their tongues. But given the extremely spiky nature of sea urchins, you’d want to be careful when ingesting them.

Odori Ebi is a type of sashimi that contains a baby shrimp. The shrimp has its shell removed, and sometimes its head as well. These can be deep fried and served alongside the rest of the shrimp, which is still moving its legs and antennae while being eaten. The shrimp can be dipped in the alcoholic drink sake to intoxicate it and make it easier to eat. It only dies, finally, when being chewed. Odori Ebi is quite expensive to order in a restaurant, because to serve the shrimp alive, it must be prepared quickly and skillfully.

Drunken shrimp is similar to the last entry, but with a few differences. Firstly, it comes from China, not Japan, and is not always served live. But when it is, it is always served in a bowl of Baijiu, a drink with about forty to sixty percent alcohol content.

Another main difference is the size of the portions: this recipe involves full grown shrimp, rather than infants. Furthermore, there would usually be around ten of them served, making this more of a main course as opposed to Odori Ebi, of which many people would eat a single serving.

By far the biggest difference is that the shrimp are far more active. They jump around, trying to escape, and the consumer has to catch it and stuff it in his mouth before it gets away. They can even carry on moving after being swallowed—provided you haven’t chewed them to death. Charming.

Noma, based primarily in Copenhagen (although it has recently become a pop-up restaurant across the globe) has ranked as the best restaurant in the world for three years now, so it’s not all that surprising to find that they have some innovative ideas.

Unfortunately, one of these ideas is their salad—their ant salad. They serve a salad crawling with ants, which are chilled so that they move slower, and which are supposed to taste like lemongrass. Chilled or not, the fact remains that there are ants crawling all over your lettuce leaves. Plenty of cultures consume insects, true—but not many of these cultures charge over $300 for an insect salad.

If, for some reason, you want to try this, I’d suggest that you simply pour some sugar in the back yard. Much more cost effective.

Casu Marzu is a traditional Sardinian cheese made from sheep’s milk. Now obviously milk isn’t an animal, so you must be wondering what this is eaten with. Well the answer is, in my opinion, the most disgusting one so far: maggots.

The cheese is brought to a stage that some consider to be decomposition. Larvae of the cheese fly (Piophila casei) are brought to the cheese to help break down its fat. They eat through the cheese, making it soften, and seep a liquid known as lagrima (teardrop). While some people remove the maggots before consumption, many people consume the cheese maggots and all. When doing so, people are advised to cover their eyes, as the maggots can leap out in an attempt to escape.

This one is relatively famous, as the video of it being made caused quite a stir last summer. For this dish, a frog is kept in the kitchen until somebody orders the frog sashimi, at which point it is taken out and sliced open on a cold platter. The sashimi bits are taken off, and then the rest of the frog is simmered to make a soup.

Presumably, if you’re ordering this dish you have no qualms about watching a frog be disemboweled alive in front of you and then cooked for your culinary pleasure—but as disturbing as that would be for most people, it doesn’t end there. For the dish contains, of all things, the still-beating heart of the frog. No matter the taste, there is definitely something more than a little demented about that.

Also a type of sashimi, ikizukuri means “prepared alive”, and is a fish dish. Generally, as with lobster, there is a large tank in the restaurant where patrons can go up and choose the fish they want to eat. That alone is objectionable enough for many people, but ikizukuri goes a lot farther than lobster in the cruelty department.

When the fish is selected, the chef will gut it and serve it almost immediately. What sets it apart from other entries in this list is that the point of ikizukuri is for the chef to slice off a few pieces of fish, but leave the whole thing largely intact. Not only that, but the bits that are cut off are to be done in such a way that the person eating it can see the fish’s heart beating and mouth moving while they eat it.

It’s almost as if this is a secret conspiracy to try and guilt-trip people into becoming vegetarians.

We’re probably all familiar with the concept of ying and yang, which in this case refers to “dead and alive fish”. It is pretty similar to the last dish—with one major difference. While ikizukuri is gutted, chopped up, and served alive, ying yang yu is completely deep fried, except for the still-attached head.

It is served with sweet and sour sauce, with the fish still completely alive and the head still moving. It is prepared extremely quickly, with care not to damage the internal organs, so that the fish can remain alive for a full thirty minutes. The reason these live dishes became so popular was so restaurants could boast about how fresh their food was. In more recent years, this dish has caused a lot of controversy, but it is still quite popular among some people.

The reason I chose to place this as the number one entry is because it’s a much less extreme way to wind down the list, and also because most people who eat oysters don’t even realize that they’re alive at the time (to be fair, it’s often difficult to tell).

Oysters are generally served live because they deteriorate much faster than most other animals when dead. When their shells are cracked open, they can survive for a significant amount of time. It is only when the flesh is actually separated from the shells that they begin to die; this is why oysters are almost always sucked directly out of their shells. So while this is much less extreme than most of the other entries, it is a lot more common. It is quite likely that many of you will have eaten oysters without knowing this—and it probably won’t be too long until you’re offered them again.

Simon is a twenty-two-year-old university student who likes to adhere to Irish stereotypes, such as drinking and loving the potato. You can follow him on twitter ( @simongireland), or like his extremely long tongue on Facebook to see if he can break the world record.

This list will detail ten unfortunate individuals who have suffered from severe disfigurements. A few of these people, with the help of modern medicine, have been able to live a more normal life. Some of the following tales are tragic, and others inspire hope. Here are ten shocking stories:

SEE ALSO: 10 Heartbreaking Backstories Of Famous Sideshow Freaks

Rudy Santos, a 69 year old from the Philippines, suffers from the ultra rare condition known as Craniopagus parasiticus or parasitic twin. He is the oldest person with this condition. Attached to Rudy’s pelvis and abdomen are an extra pair of arms and a leg, which developed when his twin was absorbed into his body during pregnancy. Also connected to his body are an extra pair of nipples and an undeveloped head with an ear and hair.

Rudy became a national celebrity whilst traveling with a freak show during the 1970s and ’80s. He would earn up to 20,000 pesos per night as the main attraction. It was at this show where he gained his stage name—the ‘Octoman’. Rudy was likened to a god, and women would line up to be with him.

Strangely, Rudy vanished in the late ’80s and ended up living in extreme poverty for over ten years. In 2008, two doctors examined him to see whether surgery would be viable or not. They concluded that they would be able to remove the parasitic twin, but Rudy decided not to have the operation. He said that he had become fond the extra growth.

Manar Maged—born in Cairo in 2004—also suffered from parasitic twin. Manar and her twin sister were fused together at the head. Her twin had no limbs and could only smile, blink and cry.

At ten months of age, Manar was taken to a hospital in Cairo after she became very ill. It was decided that without the removal of the parasitic twin, they would both die. Unfortunately, after they were separated, the twin died as it used the blood supply of Manar and could not survive without her. Less than a year later, Manar also died due to a brain infection which was caused by complications from the surgery.

Minh Anh is a Vietnamese orphan who was born with a mystery skin disorder which causes his skin to flake and form scales. His condition is thought to have been caused by Agent Orange—the defoliate chemical used by the USA during the Vietnam War. This condition causes him to overheat and his skin can become very uncomfortable without regular baths. Fellow orphans have nicknamed him ‘Fish’. Minh used to be violent to staff members and other children at the orphanage, so they had to restrain him by tying him to his bed.

When Minh was young, he met Brenda, aged 79 from the UK and she travels to Vietnam annually to see him. They have formed a close bond over the years and have become good friends. Brenda has helped Minh in many ways at the orphanage—she persuaded the staff not to tie him up when he is violent and she has found him a friend to take him swimming every week, which is now Minh’s favourite hobby.

Probably the most well-known person on this list is Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. Born in 1836, the Englishman became a celebrity in London and also gained fame around the world. He was born with proteus syndrome—a condition which causes huge lumps to develop on the skin and the bones to deform and thicken.

Joseph’s mother died when he was eleven and he was rejected by his father. He left home at a young age and worked in Leicester before contacting a showman. He was the main act and gained his stage name—the ‘Elephant Man’.

Due to the size of his head, Joseph had to sleep sitting up. His head was so heavy that it was impossible for him to sleep lying down. One night in 1890, he attempted to sleep ‘like normal people’ and dislocated his neck in the process. He was found dead the next morning.

Didier Montalvo, from rural Colombia developed congenital melanocytic nevus, which causes moles to grow all over the body at an incredibly fast rate. As a result of this disease, a mole grew so large that it covered Didier’s entire back. He was dubbed ‘turtle boy’ by his peers as the huge mole looked like a shell.

Apparently, Didier was conceived on an eclipse and the locals believed his mole was the work of the devil. For this reason, he was shunned by other children and banned from the local school. When British surgeon Neil Bulstrode heard about Didier’s condition, he travelled to Bogota so he could operate and remove the mole. Didier was six years old when the surgery was performed. It was a success and the whole mole was excised. After the operation, Didier now goes to school and lives a normal, happy life.

Mandy Sellars, from Lancashire, UK, was diagnosed with proteus syndrome—the same medical condition as Joseph Merrick. Proteus syndrome is extremely rare and it’s thought to affect only 120 people worldwide. It has caused Mandy’s legs to become extremely enlarged, weighing a total of 95 kilograms and measuring one meter in circumference. As her feet are so large, she has to buy specially fitted shoes which cost around $4000 dollars. She also has a personalized car, allowing her to drive without using her feet.

Doctors decided to amputate one of Mandy’s legs after she contracted deep vein thrombosis and MRSA. After the operation, the remaining section of leg kept growing and became too heavy for her prosthetic. She has now received a new prosthetic leg which should last the rest of her life.

Petero Byakatonda is a boy from a small, rural town in Uganda who suffers from crouzon syndrome. This affects about one in every 25,000 births, but Petero’s case is an extreme one. Crouzon syndrome causes malformation of the skull, which in turn pushes the eyeballs out of their sockets and the ears down, leading to problems with sight and hearing. In developed countries, the deformities caused by crouzon syndrome are usually treated very soon after birth but Petero did not receive this treatment as he lives hundreds of miles away from a hospital.

Petero’s neighbors tormented and shunned him for his appearance and he locked himself away in his room, hardly ever leaving the house. A doctor noticed his condition when driving through Petero’s village. The doctor raised enough money for Petero to travel to Austin, Texas, for life-changing surgery. He spent six months there while doctors re-shaped his skull. This put a lot pressure off his optic nerve and brain. A second operation was needed to reconstruct the bone around Petero’s eyes. Complications occurred during the second surgery—he lost 80% of his total blood volume and his condition turned critical. Luckily, he survived and he now lives a happy life in his village.

José Mestre from Lisbon, Portugal, developed a huge facial deformity which started growing on his lips when he was fourteen. Over the years, this tumor grew to be over five kilograms in weight. It caused him to become blind in one eye and made it very hard for him to breathe, eat and sleep. He spent forty years of his life without treatment because of “years of medical misinformation, some misdiagnosis, lack of finances, and reluctance to undergo treatment due to religious beliefs.”

In 2010, José travelled to Chicago to undergo four operations to remove his tumor and restore his facial features. The tumor mass was removed completely in the first operation and the next three aimed to reconstruct the face. The operations were successful and José travelled back to Lisbon a few weeks after treatment.

Dede Koswara is an Indonesian man who, for most of his life, has endured the extremely rare fungal infection, Epidermodysplasia verruciformis. This causes large, hard fungal growths to protrude from the skin which looks remarkably like tree bark. This had become extremely uncomfortable for Dede, preventing him from performing basic functions with his hands, as they were so large and heavy. The fungus grows all over the body but it’s mainly found on the hands and feet.

In 2008, Dede received treatment in the USA to remove six kilograms of warts from his body. After this was done, skin grafts were applied to the hands and face. Unfortunately, this surgery did not stop the fungus from growing and he had further operations in 2011. There is no cure for Dede’s condition.

Fetus in fetu is an extremely rare developmental abnormality that occurs in one out of every 500,000 births. The reason for this condition is unclear, but many scientists believe that it occurs in the early stages of pregnancy, when one fetus is enveloped by the other. Many parasitic twins are small and undeveloped, but others can grow to a large size. Alamjan Nematilaev, from Khazakstan, had a parasitic twin that developed hair, limbs, teeth, nails, genitals, a head and a basic face. Alamjan’s twin had been living inside him for over seven years before it was discovered…

In 2003, Alamjan’s school doctor noticed the swollen abdomen and sent him to the hospital. Doctors examined him and believed that the lump was a cyst. The following week, Alamjan was operated on and to the doctor’s surprise, they found a baby measuring two kilograms in weight and twenty centimeters in length. The doctor who carried out the surgery said that Alamjan looked like he was in the sixth month of pregnancy. The boy’s parents believed that his condition was caused by radiation from the Chernobyl disaster, but experts have dismissed this idea. Alamjan fully recovered from the operation, but to this day, he still does not know that his twin grew inside him.

Caleb is a Listverse author and moderator from Cornwall, UK. You can follow him on twitter.

Trains have been staples of our travel, shipping, and overall culture for a long time. Over the centuries, trains have grown up and expanded from the humble steam-powered versions of old to the modern, technologically advanced, driverless trains which cross entire continents with ease today and serve as the backbones of our transportation infrastructures.

In fact, many trains today are wholly automated. But even with modern technology, they are still extremely difficult to slow down in a short amount of time. Anything in their way is likely to experience a not-so-nice collision if it doesn’t get out of the way quickly.

Some statistics are quite surprising when it comes to trains. Did you know that a person or a vehicle gets hit by a train every two hours in the United States? This includes the most disastrous of all accidents—a train-on-train collision, which can have catastrophic consequences.

Approximately 1,000 people per year are killed in train accidents. However, the individual hit by the train sometimes survives and lives to tell the story of what it was like.

10 Sebring, Florida

In one of the most unusual cases of someone getting hit by a train, a 34-year-old woman in Sebring, Florida, was walking along the tracks just before 5:30 AM on August 17, 2018. The woman was suddenly hit by a passing train that she had not seen coming.

Almost unbelievably, the woman was still conscious afterward and capable of calling for paramedics to tell them that she was injured. At almost exactly the same time, another phone call came in to emergency services: It was the train crew reporting that they had hit someone on the tracks.^[1]

When paramedics arrived, they had to dig through some groves to find the woman. She’d been off the beaten path of the road. Nevertheless, they managed to take her to the hospital and treat her injuries. Imagine being able to tell that story for the rest of your life.

9 Eugene Barb

In the middle of the night on October 3, 2018, in Cincinnati, Ohio, 43-year-old Eugene Barb was walking along the train tracks after having been drinking—a lot. To put it plainly, Barb was drunk. As an oncoming train barreled down on him, the stumbling Barb tried to get off the tracks. But he didn’t quite make it in time, and the train hit him.

A man on the train reported that he had seen Eugene Barb hanging his legs over the rail that ran alongside the train tracks and then Barb moved out of sight as the train approached. The man heard a thud, which was the train hitting Barb.^[2]

The man got off the train to see if Barb was okay and knew instantly what had happened. Surprisingly, Barb was not only standing but walking toward the man’s general direction. Barb looked at the man, turned, and drunkenly stumbled off.

Rail authorities found Barb hours later close to where the accident had happened, but they didn’t press charges against him for trespassing. It seems that being hit by a train was punishment enough.

8 Darryle See

Darryle See is one of the more interesting stories about a survivor who came head-to-head with a moving train. One major cause of train accidents involving pedestrians or people in vehicles is headphones—the people simply don’t hear the train coming until it’s too late.

This was the case with 22-year-old See. He was hit in August 2013 when his headphones prevented him from hearing the approaching train until it was too late.^[3]

See was casually walking on the tracks and listening to music when the screaming mass of speeding metal smacked straight into him at 177 kilometers per hour (110 mph). It threw See like a toy over 6 meters (20 ft), and the force launched his shoes off his body. They landed approximately 46 meters (150 ft) away.

Though he doesn’t remember being hit at all, See was conscious and coherent by the time the police arrived. Except for a few broken bones, he was perfectly fine.

7 The Manhattan Incident

In mid-December 2017, an unidentified 41-year-old man was hit by a train in Manhattan in the worst of ways. He was standing on the platform of the New York subway at Union Square when two men crossed the tracks to assault him. They punched him in the head and fled the scene.^[4]

As he was punched, the 41-year-old victim fell to the ground and his head crossed into no-man’s-land. At that moment, the southbound Q train hit him directly in the head and fractured his skull. He was bleeding, as would be expected when someone gets hit by a train.

Miraculously, the man was okay. Police followed up on the incident by releasing video taken by the subway’s cameras of the two men responsible in hopes of catching the people who punched the victim.

6 Chicago, Illinois

In December 2018 in Chicago, Illinois, a man stepped onto the train tracks at the corner of 71st Street and South Exchange Avenue. He simply didn’t see the oncoming train.

The man walked right into the path of the train and was hit. The force knocked him to the ground onto the rocks surrounding the tracks. That’s when bystander Terrence Sims approached the victim, who was still conscious. The man asked, “What happened?” Sims replied, “You got hit by a train.”^[5]

The man simply said, “Nah.” Sims replied, “Yeah.” That was the extent of their exchange. Sims called 911 and waited with the man until help arrived.

5 Martha Sharp

In November 2018, 36-year-old Martha Sharp was hit on her butt by a train. The only reason she survived is that the train struck the left side of her body, propelling her away from the tracks and the moving train rather than sucking her underneath to be crushed by the train’s massive wheels.

The incident happened around 4:04 PM on East Fort Wayne Street in Warsaw, Indiana. Sharp was taken to the hospital and treated for cuts to her head from the force of being launched aside by a moving train.^[6]

4 Opole, Poland

In a terrifying incident that was caught on CCTV in Opole, Poland, a man was struck by a train in November 2015. The video is shocking. It shows the man approaching the train tracks on his bicycle at the exact moment that a speeding train comes seemingly out of nowhere. The cyclist runs right into the moving behemoth.

The CCTV video of the incident was posted on YouTube in December 2015 and quickly garnered over one million views. The footage shows the man instantly launched from his bicycle with ferocious speed. It’s a wonder he survived the accident—but he did.^[7]

3 Melbourne, Australia

Probably the most miraculous tale of survival on this list was caught on CCTV in Melbourne, Australia. In October 2009, the person struck by the train was a six-month-old baby—and he lived through the incident.

As the train approached, the baby was sitting in a stroller that was just a little too close to the tracks. As the child’s mother looked away for a moment while tugging at her pants, the stroller rolled into the path of an oncoming train.

The baby and stroller were carried along the metal tracks for a full 30 meters (98 ft). The driver had frantically slammed on the brakes, but trains are difficult to stop quickly.

When it finally came to a halt, everyone was amazed that the baby was still alive and had only suffered a bump on the head. Authorities said that the six-month-old just needed a good meal and a nap.^[8]

2 Elijah Anderson

Elijah Anderson was just four years old when Atlanta doctors started calling him Superman. On November 5, 2009, Elijah was out with his dog, Poochy, when the Jack Russell terrier ran off toward the train tracks. Elijah was trying to catch the dog when an oncoming 1,594-meter-long (5,229 ft) train struck the boy at 48 kilometers per hour (30 mph). Elijah didn’t even see it coming. He was too focused on getting Poochy home safely.^[9]

When paramedics arrived, they took Elijah to the hospital. He was treated for a concussion and received stitches in his head. Surprisingly, within 24 hours, his condition was upgraded from critical to stable. Two days later, the boy was back home and returning to a normal life with Poochy. The dog was unharmed and had also returned home shortly after the accident.

1 Friendship Heights Station

The accident which took place at the Friendship Heights Station in Washington, DC, caused major delays and almost took the life of the woman who’d been hit by the train. In a wheelchair, she approached the platform to board the train just like every other day. But this day would take a drastic turn for the worse.

CCTV video from the station captured this event as the woman went a little too far. She drove off the platform and onto the tracks—right into an oncoming Red Line train, which knocked the wheelchair-bound woman some distance. The staff quickly cut the power to the tracks. They found her still alive and rushed her to the hospital to be treated for her injuries.^[10]

For most of us, memory is the cornerstone of who we are. Our past defines us and shapes both who were are now and who we will become. Many of us deliberately set out to make memories that we can enjoy later.

It is commonly known that memories fade a little with age, and conditions such as dementia can rob people of parts of their former selves. But for people with neurological conditions like amnesia, the loss of memory can prove utterly devastating and leave them with no clue as to the person that they are.

10 Henry Molaison

Born in 1926, Henry Molaison, or H.M. as he was referred to in medical journals, had suffered epileptic seizures since the age of ten, possibly as a result of being run over by a bicycle at age seven. His seizures increased in severity, and by the time he was 16, he was suffering major seizures daily. The seizures continued until 1953, when he was offered an experimental procedure which would remove parts of the left temporal lobe. Though the surgery was a success as far as controlling the epilepsy went, Molaison was left with profound amnesia.^[1]

Molaison could remember his childhood. He knew his name and those of his family. He even remembered the Wall Street Crash of 1929. However, he had trouble remembering things from roughly a decade preceding the surgery. He also lost the ability to make new memories. He would wake every day without any memory of the day before.

Henry Molaison allowed neuroscientists to study his brain for over 50 years, until his death in 2008. This has resulted in major discoveries about how we make and store memories. He even donated his brain to science after his death.

9 Ansel Bourne

Ansel Bourne was an evangelical preacher. In 1887, he “woke up” to find himself running a general store, without any knowledge of how he had arrived there. The last date he remembered was two months prior to his arrival in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

Bourne is said to have experienced a disassociative fugue, causing him to forget his own identity. People in this state often adopt a new identity and travel long distances. The fugue state is most often brought on by trauma, and there is no treatment, though the condition is often temporary. Bourne’s is probably the best known case of disassociative fugue and may have been Robert Ludlum’s inspiration when he came to naming his character in The Bourne Identity.^[2]

Though many people doubted the truthfulness of Bourne’s account of his “lost weekends,” there seems to be little to suggest that he was doing anything disreputable while he was away. In fact, he spent most of his time selling sweets and going to church. He made very little capital out of his adventure. In fact, his fugue-state self seems to have been remarkably boring.

8 W.O.

A patient, identified only as “W.O.” or “William,” visited the dentist in March 2005 for root canal surgery. Up until the time of his injection, W.O. could remember his life as well as anyone else. Since that time, however, he can only store memories for 90 minutes before they are wiped out again. Neuroscientists are baffled as to the cause of the condition.

W.O., who is believed to suffer from anterograde amnesia, can remember getting into the chair and being injected with local anesthetic but nothing from that point onward. He wakes up every morning believing that it is still 2005. His wife has written notes of major events for him in a file labeled “First Thing—Read This.”

Neuroscientists are baffled as to why the anesthetic might have caused the memory loss. Since 2005, W.O. has only managed to remember one new thing: his father’s death. It is thought that his powerful grief forced itself along the memory tracks of his brain, when everything else just slipped away. Doctors treating him hope that this means they will be able to build on this to help him create new, happier memories.^[3]

7 Clive Wearing

Clive Wearing was an accomplished classical musician when, in 1985, he contracted herpesviral encephalitis. The virus attacked his central nervous system, damaging his ability to store new memories. His loss of memory is so profound that he can hold on to current memories for no longer than 30 seconds.

The condition has left him in a constant state of confusion. He cannot understand what has happened to him, and when people try to explain, he has forgotten the question long before they reach the end of the answer. Wearing also remembers little of his life before 1985, except his love for his wife. He has kept a diary of his thoughts over the years, which has consisted of repeated variations of the same sentence: “Now I am awake.”^[4]

Astonishingly, however, Wearing’s ability to play the piano has not diminished. He continues to be able to read and play music. However, when the sheet music calls for him to repeat a section, he will repeat it over and over again, forgetting each time that he has already played it.

6 Anthelme Mangin

Anthelme Mangin was a French soldier who fought in World War I. In 1918, he was sent home suffering from amnesia, along with 65 other casualties, all of whom had, literally, lost their minds. Unlike most, however, Mangin was not carrying any identification. He gave his name as “Anthelme Mangin.” He was diagnosed with a form of dementia and placed in an asylum in France.

In 1920, a newspaper published a feature with the pictures of several unidentified patients. Some 300 families, desperately looking for missing loved ones, claimed Mangin as their own. He met with each family to try to spark recognition, but without success.

He was finally identified in 1930 as Octave Monjoin, who had been taken prisoner on the Western Front in 1914. No one knows what happened to him between his capture and his discovery in 1918. Mangin was taken to his hometown. He was left at the train station, and his caregivers watched from a distance as he walked from the station directly toward his father’s house. He recognized his hometown, including the local cafe and the lightning-struck tower of the church, but did not know his father or brother.

Though it seemed the mystery was solved, other claimants to “the ghost man” refused to accept that Mangin was not their own missing son, and he was kept in the psychiatric hospital until a court case was decided. By the time the case was over, and he was officially declared to be Octave Monjoin, his father and brother were both dead.

In a sad conclusion the unknown soldier’s story, Anthelme Mangin lived out the rest of his life in the asylum, dying in 1942 of malnutrition and neglect.^[5]

5 Michael Boatwright

In 2013, an unconscious man was found in a motel in Southern California and was taken to a hospital. His identification documents named him as Michael Boatwright, a former US Navy aircraft engineer and a native of Florida. When he finally came to, however, Michael Boatwright could remember nothing of his life in Florida or his military service. He didn’t even recognize his name, his nationality, or his language.

Michael Boatwright believed himself to be Johan Ek. And he also believed he was Swedish.

Despite being shown photographs of his previous life, he could not feel any affinity with Michael Boatwright. And, indeed, his previous life appeared to have been rather complicated. When found, he had five tennis rackets in his room but had no idea why. Investigators discovered that Boatwright had at some point married a Japanese woman and had a son, taught English in China, and ran a consultancy company with a Swedish name.

Boatwright appeared to be in a fugue state, the cause of which is most often trauma or an accident. He spoke only Swedish and appeared to have forgotten the English language. He remained at the hospital for five months while social workers tried to uncover his past. Despite finding a sister in Louisiana, Boatwright moved to Sweden, believing that this was his true home. Unfortunately, his life took another strange turn, and he was found dead in his new apartment soon after, from what is believed to have been suicide.^[6]

4 Kent Cochrane

In 1981, Kent Cochrane, or Patient K.C. as he came to be called, had a motorcycle accident which resulted in the loss of parts of his memory. Cochrane was able to recall facts but not personal memories.^[7]

Cochrane was unable to form new memories, nor could he remember events immediately prior to his crash. He knew facts about himself but couldn’t generate memories from them. So, he could, for example, look at a photograph and recognize the people in it and even the occasion when the picture was taken, but looking at it would not trigger any memories outside of the photo.

However, Cochrane’s intellect did not seem to be damaged by his memory loss, and he could learn, albeit with much repetition. He learned, for example, to check the refrigerator door for messages from his family and how to file books in the library where he worked.

Kent Cochrane was the subject of over 30 scientific papers, and his brain was studied by neuroscientists around the world. He died in 2014.

3 Michelle Philpots

In 1994, Michelle Philpots developed epilepsy as a result of two car accidents, both of which caused head trauma. Her seizures grew steadily worse, and Michelle began to become forgetful. She was eventually fired from her job after photocopying a single document over and over again, forgetting each time that she had already done it.

And then her memory stopped working altogether. Michelle Philpots is now permanently stuck in 1994. Every day when she wakes up, she is the person that she was then. Her rare form of anterograde amnesia means she wakes up next to a husband, who, to her, has aged a quarter of a century overnight. She cannot even remember her own wedding, relying on the photos to prove it really happened.^[8]

To remind herself who she is, she leaves herself notes around her home. She is rarely able to leave home alone and has to use sat-nav to walk to her local shop. Damaged brain cells were removed during an operation in 2005, but although the operation managed to control her seizures, there is no way to repair the brain damage or restore her memory.

Michelle Philpots is destined to live in 1994 forever.

2 Susie McKinnon

Susie McKinnon does not have amnesia, despite the fact that she cannot remember being a child or, indeed, any age other than the age she is now.

Having had the condition since birth, it was years before McKinnon realized that when other people told stories from their past, they weren’t just making up the details as they went along. It was only when a friend who was studying medicine asked her to take part in a memory test that she realized that her memory did not work in the same way as other people’s. She could recall events from her past but could not remember what it felt like to be there.^[9]

McKinnon suffers from Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory, or SDAM. She cannot remember how she felt when she was at school or imagine how she will feel when she goes on holiday in the future. She is unable to recall any fond memories. On the upside, however, she is never plagued by self-doubt and is incapable of holding a grudge because she forgets why she was annoyed in the first place. Her condition also means that she does not feel painful things, such as grief, as profoundly as other people.

Researchers have so far failed to discover any disease or injury which may have caused her condition. However, McKinnon also suffers from aphantasia, or the inability to picture things in her mind. Researchers are still investigating whether there is a link between her lack of autobiographical memory and her “blind mind.”

1 Giulio Canella

In 1927, Mrs. Giulia Concetta Canella saw a newspaper photograph of a man who had been found wandering around a cemetery in Turin in the dead of night. The man had been trying to steal a copper vase, but when approached, he began to cry, saying he had no idea who he was.

Mrs. Canella recognised her husband, Professor Giulio Canella, a philosophy scholar who had been missing in action since World War I. She visited the hospital and, convinced that the man was her husband, took him home, which would have been fine, except that a few days later, an anonymous letter claimed that the man was, in fact, an anarchist and petty criminal named Mario Bruneri.

Bruneri’s family were traced, and his wife, son, brother, two sisters, and his mistress all identified him immediately. Canella/Bruneri is said to have fainted when he saw them, possibly from the trauma but probably from embarrassment.^[10]

Mrs. Canella, after her beloved husband had come back to her from the dead, would not give up so easily. When Bruneri’s fingerprints were discovered in the police archives and found to match those of the amnesiac, she took the whole thing to court. After several years of trials and retrials, the court concluded that the amnesiac was Bruneri. Mrs. Canella, the man she was sure was her husband, and the three children they’d had together in the meantime all moved to Brazil.

Prof. Canella/Bruneri died in 1941 in Brazil, and his wife spent the rest of her life trying to prove that her husband had not been an imposter.

Ward Hazell is a writer who travels, and an occasional travel writer.

If we were told our names would be immortalized forever, most of us would probably cheer. Which proves most of us don’t know squat. For every figure who lends their name to something cool like a machine gun or ninja bear, there are plenty of others who get stuck as shorthand for terrible things.

10 Henry Shrapnel

The word “shrapnel,” referring to broken bits of shell, bomb, and bullet that maim civilians, is usually heard coming from the lips of shocked newsreaders. Few know that it comes from Henry Shrapnel. An officer in the British Army, Shrapnel was the guy who came up with the idea of using bits of excess metal in bombs to kill as many people as possible.

The year was 1784, and Shrapnel was a plucky 23-year-old soldier. At the time, troops were starting to fire random bits of metal from guns to increase casualties. Shrapnel was the first to realize that you could increase them even more by preloading those fragments into a bomb, lighting the fuse, and hurling it.

Although the specific meaning has drifted since then, the negative connotations haven’t. Not that Shrapnel cared. He received a lifetime stipend from the British Crown for his contributions to bloodshed.

9 Captain Lynch

Captain William Lynch was a man with a horrifying hobby. Nope, not stamp collecting. The captain was a man who believed in rough justice. And that meant one thing for the petty criminals and wrongly accused in his town. He and his “Lynch-men” would, well . . . lynch them.

Although the term today has connotations of racial violence, the original lynchings weren’t specifically targeted at black people. Lynch and his men felt the government was too remote to dispense justice on outlaws, so they launched their vigilante group to target them.

Unfortunately, their methods were less like Batman and more like the Punisher. Captain Lynch and his men tortured, strung up, and murdered so many strangers that his name became synonymous with one of the cruelest forms of mob rule in US history.

8 Thomas Bowdler

If you bowdlerize a book, you cut out all the juicy bits (the sex and death) and replace them with worse bits, ruining the book. This was something at which Thomas Bowdler excelled. In the late 18th century, the doctor, philanthropist, and prison reformer published a “polite” version of Shakespeare’s plays. His edited version was so bad that it made him a literary villain.

Bowdler had a tin ear and no gift for drama or character. In Hamlet, he rewrote Ophelia’s suicide (spoilers) so she accidentally drowned. In Henry IV, Part 2, he deleted the prostitute character of Doll Tearsheet. He turned exclamations of “God!” into “Heavens above!” He also expunged Othello entirely.

Bad as Bowdler was, others were worse. This trend culminated when an editor replaced the celebrated Tempest quote “Full fathom five thy father lies” with “Thy Daddy’s dead.”

7 Christopher Leyland

A former officer in the British Navy, Christopher Leyland retired in 1889 to dedicate himself to gardening. Until his death in 1926, his vast garden was his life. He built an arboretum, imported rare palms, kept a menagerie of deer, ostriches, and bears, and proved himself to be one of the greatest silviculturists in history.

Unfortunately, this talent would be his undoing. After crossing two strains of cypress fir, Leyland created one of the most reviled plants in Britain: the leylandii.

It’s hard to express just how much gardeners today hate the leylandii. The Oxford Biographical Dictionary has called it “an object of fear and loathing” and called Leyland’s name “a curse.” Collins’ Tree Guide has named it “the most hated tree in Britain.” Many now consider it less a plant than a pest and go out of their way to burn them down. For proud gardener Leyland, this would be the worst form of immortality imaginable.

6 Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin

You may have heard that the guillotine was named after its inventor, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. What you may not know was that Guillotin didn’t invent the guillotine and was an anti–capital punishment humanitarian who spent the rest of his life pleading with the French government to name the guillotine after someone else.

Before the guillotine, beheadings were frequently botched. This upset Dr. Guillotin so much that he petitioned the French government to make a humane alternative. They eventually agreed and got a French doctor and a German harpsichord maker to come up with something to decapitate a criminal with a single blow. To Guillotin’s horror, they named their new device after him.

Within a year of the guillotine’s creation, it was being used in the Reign of Terror. Guillotin was so upset that he tried to get the device’s name changed, but no one would listen. As late as the dawn of the 20th century, his descendants were still petitioning the French government to rename the guillotine.

5 Nicolas Chauvin

Chauvinist is used today as a synonym for “sexist.” It suggests that the target is dim, superior, and, in its modern usage, antifeminist. All of which means that Nicolas Chauvin is likely turning in his grave. If he’d had his way, the word would mean “a loyal soldier.”

Chauvin was a soldier who fought fiercely for his ruler, Napoleon. In return for nothing, Chauvin went into the thick of the fighting, getting seriously wounded on nearly 20 occasions. Even in Napoleon’s darkest days, Chauvin stood by his side, ready to die for the emperor’s vision of what France could be.

After Napoleon got his butt handed to him by the British, such blind devotion fell out of fashion and Chauvin came to be seen as a relic. It was then that his name acquired its negative connotations, eventually metamorphosing into our modern insult.

4 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Imagine waking up one morning to find your name has become a byword for hilarious sexual deviance. That’s exactly what happened to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In 1883, Richard von Krafft-Ebing was looking for two new terms to classify sexual disorders. He named the first, sadism, after the Marquis de Sade. The second, masochism, was named after Sacher-Masoch.

The problem? The Marquis de Sade was long dead and couldn’t object. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, on the other hand, was still very much alive.

In 1870, Sacher-Masoch had published an erotic book called Venus in Furs, in which a man signs his life away to a woman who sexually tortures him. It was only one of about 15 novels that Sacher-Masoch had written. Yet it wound up being the one that defined him for life. Sacher-Masoch had to live with the shame of being the inspiration for masochism for 12 whole years until he finally died.

3 The Marquis de Sade

We mentioned above that the Marquis de Sade gave his name to sadism. The libertine writer was infamous long before then. In his own lifetime, de Sade’s novels—which feature murder, sexual violence, bestiality, pedophilia, incest, and necrophilia—had him jailed for over 30 years.

But de Sade was a publicity hound who would be pleased by his continuing notoriety. His family, on the other hand, was mortified by it. Thanks to this one black sheep, the Marquis’s descendants felt themselves unable to speak their family name or use their title for 200 years.

Unless your surname is “Hitler,” you probably can’t imagine what this felt like. The de Sades kept their name secret and didn’t even speak about the Marquis in their own homes. It wasn’t until 2014 that Elzear de Sade finally reclaimed the title of Marquis for the family, two centuries after his notorious ancestor had died.

2 Barbara And Kenneth Handler

Compared to having a sexual perversion named after you, the story of Barbara and Kenneth Handler doesn’t seem bad. The two were the inspiration for one of the most famous toy couples of all time: Barbie and Ken.

Unfortunately, this opened a Pandora’s box of Freudian nastiness. See, the real-life Barbie and Ken weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. They were brother and sister.

The dolls were invented by their parents, who named them after their kids as a tribute. Both children grew up to hate the association. Aside from most of the world thinking they were lovers instead of siblings, they claimed to hate what the dolls represented.

Barbara complained that Barbie was a bimbo airhead. Kenneth was annoyed at Ken’s squeaky clean, boring persona. Both children felt that the association with the dolls ruined their lives.

1 The Nazi Doctors

So far, this list has covered ordinary people who didn’t deserve to have their names immortalized as terrible things. But there’s another category: terrible people who didn’t deserve to have their names immortalized as ordinary things.

Such is the case with the Nazi doctors. Thanks to their medical experiments on Jews and others, many Nazi scientists discovered new medical conditions. Seventy years later, those conditions are still named after them.

Reiter’s syndrome, for example, is named after Hans Reiter, whose experiments killed over 250 at Buchenwald. The “Clara cell” comes from Max Clara, who used the bodies of Holocaust victims to get his samples. Wegener’s granulomatosis comes from Friedrich Wegner, who experimented on Jews in the Lodz ghetto. The list goes on and on.

Even when the Nazi connections were discovered, people kept using the names. Since 1977, there has been a campaign to rename Reiter’s syndrome “reactive arthritis.” As of 2012, less than half of all doctors had started using the new name.

Doctors heal us and, if they are not sociopaths, do their best not to hurt us. But doctors work with us when our bodies are weakest. It is inevitable that, sometimes, a doctor’s intervention will kill rather than cure.

10King George V

Kings can usually count on the best of everything. The best food, the best castles, and the best medical treatment. That is why kings generally live longer lives than the peasants they rule over.

King George V of the United Kingdom was actually killed by his status. The king was already dying but not nearly swiftly enough to be convenient. Once he fell into a coma, it seemed that the monarch’s last breath would happen too late for the deadlines of the morning papers. This would result in the king’s passing being reported in the evening papers. To make sure the prestigious morning papers got the story instead, the king’s doctor, Lord Dawson, injected him with cocaine and morphine to speed up his death.

9President Garfield

Being President of the United States definitely takes its toll on health—the before and after photos of presidents show how it ages them. Even worse is the risk of assassination.

President Garfield was shot in 1881 by Charles Guiteau. The assassin’s bullet lodged behind the president’s pancreas but almost certainly was not fatal by itself. What seems to have killed the president was infection caused by his doctors.

Immediately after the shooting, they probed the wound to find the bullet with their fingers. Their unsterilized digits introduced germs that brought on a fever. They tried again and again to find the bullet, each time without sterilizing hands or tools, one doctor even puncturing the president’s liver with his finger. Eighty days after the shooting, the president succumbed to infection.

8Sigmund Freud

Not all famous people who die at the hands of their doctors are the victims of misconduct, ignorance, or malice. Sigmund Freud is often quoted as saying, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” but other times, a cigar is cause of oral cancer The psychiatrist was fond of his phallic nicotine delivery systems, smoking up to 20 a day.

For the last decades of his life Freud suffered from painful cancers of the mouth. When he came to the end of his life, Freud told his doctor how he wanted to exit the world—painlessly. At Freud’s request, his doctor eased his passing with injections of morphine.

7President Washington

Of all the medical terrors that may face us, a sore throat is probably not the first that comes to mind.

George Washington went out riding one day in the snow, dined without changing from his wet clothes, and the next day reported a sore throat. When an infection in the president’s throat swelled it uncomfortably, his doctor gave the preferred treatment of the times—he bled him. When this failed, a second doctor raised a blister on his throat to draw out liquids. Then he was bled again. Then an enema was given. Then he was forced to vomit. All these interventions weakened the president, allowing the infection to worsen.

Thanks to the tender ministrations of his doctors, Washington’s last words included: “Doctor, I die hard.”

6Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was preparing for a new world tour when he suddenly died in 2009. The cause of his death was a powerful anesthetic, propofol.

You may have encountered propofol if you have had a general anesthetic. Jackson’s doctor was using it to treat the singer’s insomnia caused by the stress from the upcoming tour. Using propofol to get a night of sleep is like using an atom bomb to dig a vegetable patch. Sure, you will get the job done, but your cabbages will glow in the dark.

The doctor was sentenced to four years in prison for involuntary manslaughter and was released after two.

5Joan Rivers

The comedienne Joan Rivers was never shy about talking about her cosmetic surgery. She played on it in her routines, joking that “I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I’d look like without plastic surgery.” In 2014, she went into hospital for a routine operation. Complications arose, and she died. Many assumed that this was a case of those who live by the scalpel dying by the scalpel.

In fact, Rivers died after a botched examination of her throat, nothing to do with her devotion to plastic surgery. In 2016, Rivers’s doctors settled a malpractice suit and accepted responsibility for her death.

4Abraham Lincoln

Everyone knows what killed President Lincoln. While he was enjoying a trip to the theater, John Wilkes Booth shot him at point-blank range in the head. Even today, such a wound is likely to be deadly. Case closed?

Not quite. In the Civil War, many people had taken bullets to the brain and lived, so just because it was a dreadful wound does not mean it was a fatal one. It is possible that medical treatment rather than the gun finished off the president.

Doctor Charles Leale was in the theater at the time of the shooting and was the first to reach the president. He reported, “The coagula I easily removed and passed the little finger of my left hand through the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball.” Massive damage was done by the bullet but the probing of the wound, repeated later by other doctors, may have caused deadly blood loss.

3King Charles II

We have seen that position and power is no guarantee of flawless medical care. King Charles II of England suffered from an overabundance of doctors. Fourteen medics cared for him in his final days, and all wished to try their treatment on the king when the king suffered some sort of fit while shaving. The fit was only the beginning of his ordeal.

He was bled, blistered, bled again, given an emetic, had his head shaved and blistered, given an enema, and dressed with plasters made of pigeon droppings. That was only the first day of his treatment. Over the next few days, ever more blood was taken, and stranger remedies were tried.

The Merry Monarch died in pain but still found time for courtesy. When visitors were allowed to see him, he apologized: “You must pardon me, gentlemen, for being a most unconscionable time a-dying.”

2Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of the masterpieces of historical writing. There is, however, a fact about the historian that is often left out of the history books. Gibbon suffered from a swelling of the testicles.

People today may laugh over the absurd tightness of skinny jeans, but they have nothing on the tightness of breaches in the 18th century. There was no disguising the ailment. Gibbon decided to have the illness dealt with. “If the business goes off smoothly, I shall be delivered of a small burden (it is almost as big as a small child).”

Four quarts of watery fluid were drained off in the first operation, which was repeated several times, each drawing out similar amounts. While these treatments relieved the painful and embarrassing condition, they also caused an infection that killed the man.

1Charles II Of Navarre

The second Charles II on this list suffered a bad death, even by the standards of a man known as Charles the Bad (a sobriquet he earned by playing the English and French against each other during the Hundred Years War and switching sides whenever it seemed advantageous).

When Charles fell ill, unable to use his arms and legs, his doctors took an unorthodox approach to curing him. They prescribed wrapping the monarch in brandy-soaked cloth. To give him the maximum exposure, the king was sewn into the cloths at night.

One night, the lady sewing him in had a length of thread left. Instead of cutting off the excess, she decided to burn it off with a candle. As anyone but the lady might have expected, the candle set the alcohol-impregnated bed aflame, killing the king. According to the chronicler Jean Froissart, the king lingered in agony for two weeks before dying, giving moralists a fitting end to the story of Charles the Bad.