1777 A fraudster is hanged
Dr John Dodd, a famous English preacher whose wasteful extravagance led to his forging financial documents in order to rescue himself from poverty and shame, was hanged on this day on the triangular gallows at Tyburn in London. After being cut down, his body was instantly taken away and attempts were made to revive him with a hot bath. Since hanging at this time usually meant death by strangulation instead of snapping of the neck in the drop, such efforts at revival occasionally succeeded. A 19th-century source tells us:
On the 16th August 1264, Henry III granted a pardon to a woman named Inetta de Balsham, who, having been condemned to death for harbouring thieves, hung on a gallows from nine o’clock of a Monday to sunrise of Thursday, and yet came off with life, as was testified to the king by sufficient evidence.
Dr. Plot, who quotes the original words of the pardon, surmises that it might have been a case like one he had heard of from Mr. Obadiah Walker, Master of University College, being that of a Swiss who was hung up thirteen times without effect, life being preserved by the condition of the wind-pipe, which was found to be by disease converted into bone.
Dr. Plot relates several cases of the resuscitation of women after hanging, and makes the remark that this revival of life appears to happen most frequently in the female sex. One notable case was that of a poor servant girl named Anne Green, who was condemned to death, at Oxford in 1650 for alleged child-murder, although her offence could only be so interpreted by superstition and pedantry. This poor woman, while hanging, had her legs pulled, and her breast knocked by a soldier’s musket [in order to hasten her demise]; she was afterwards trampled on, and the rope was left unslackened around her neck. Yet, when in the hands of the doctors for dissection, she gave symptoms of life, and in fourteen hours was so far well as to be able to speak. Eager inquiries were made as to her sensations from the moment of suspension; but she remembered nothing she came back to life like one awakening out of a deep sleep. This poor woman obtained a pardon, was afterwards married, and had three children.
A second female malefactor, the servant of a Mrs. Cope, at Oxford, was hanged there in 1658, and kept suspended an unusually long time, to make sure of the extinction of life; after which, being cut down, her body was allowed to fall to the ground with a violence which might have been sufficient to kill many unhanged persons. Yet she revived. In this case the authorities insisted on fulfilling their imperfect duty next day. Plot gives a third case, that of Marjory Mausole, of Arley, in Staffordshire, without informing us of its date or any other circumstances.
On the 2nd of September 1721, a poor woman named Margaret Dickson, married, but separated from her husband, was hanged at Edinburgh for the crime of concealing pregnancy in the case of a dead child. After suspension, the body was inclosed in a coffin at the gallows’ foot, and carried off in a cart by her relatives, to be interred in her parish churchyard at Musselburgh, six miles off. Some surgeon apprentices rudely stopped the cart before it left town, and broke down part of the cooms, or sloping roof of the coffin,—thus undesignedly letting in air. The subsequent jolting of the vehicle restored animation before it had got above two miles from the city, and Maggy was carried home a living woman, though faint and hardly conscious. Her neighbours flocked around her in wonder; a minister came to pray over her; and her husband, relenting under a renewed affection, took her home again. She lived for many years after, had several more children creditably born, and used to be pointed out in the streets of Edinburgh, where she cried salt, as Half-Hanged Maggy Dickson.
The instances of men reviving after hanging are scarcely less numerous than those of females. In 1705, a housebreaker named Smith being hung up at Tyburn, a reprieve came after he had been suspended for a quarter of an hour. He was taken down, bled, and revived. One William Duell, duly hanged in London in 1740, and taken to the Surgeons’ Hall to be anatomized, came to life again, and was transported. At Cork a man was hanged in January 1767 for a street robbery, and immediately after carried to a place appointed, where a surgeon made an incision in his windpipe, and in about six hours recovered him. The almost incredible fact is added, that the fellow had the hardihood to attend the theatre the same evening. William Brodie, executed in Edinburgh, October 1788, for robbing the excise-office, had similar arrangements made for his recovery. It was found, however, that he had had a greater fall than he bargained for with the hangman, and thus the design was frustrated.
On the 3rd of October 1696, a man named Richard Johnson was hanged at Shrewsbury, He had previously, on a hypocritical pretence, obtained a promise from the under-sheriff that his body should be laid in his coffin without being stripped. He hung half an hour, and still showed signs of life, when a man went up to the scaffold to see what was wrong with him. On a hasty examination, it was found that the culprit had wreathed cords round and under his body, connected with a pair of hooks at his neck, by which the usual effect of the rope was prevented, the whole of this apparatus being adroitly concealed under a double shirt and a flowing periwig. On the trick being discovered, he was taken down, and immediately hanged in an effectual manner.