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French Woman's Fiery Stomach

The Legend:
Sometimes previous to 1654, when an account of the event was printed, a French woman died in the vicinity of Lyon when a flame erupted from her stomach.

However...
The above story is Larry Arnold's interpretation of an event he claims is described in a book printed in 1654, entitled the Historiarum Anatomicarum Rariorum by Thomas H. Bartholini. Unfortunately for Arnold, the text he quotes from that book is not as clear as he may think:

    "Doctors from Lyon, at the confluence of the Saone and the Rhone rivers, studying the corpse of a certain woman to determine the cause of death, report that an enormous flame, filling the entire abdominal cavity all around, burst forth but was quickly extinguished."
The flame could either have been what killed the woman or an event that occurred while the corpse was being studied after her death; in the second case, decomposition and natural stomach gases mixing with oxygen would be a non-supernatural explaination for the event. I will try to track a copy of both Bartholini's book and of the earlier source of the story -- the full text quoted by Arnold mentions that Bartholini got the story from an earlier written account by a Parisian scholar named Renatus Moraum.

Theories
Bartholini mentions two theories on the part of the French doctors for the cause of the flame. They felt it was caused by either the wine often drunk by the woman, or an overly hot batch of an antidote for poisonous bites. The second theory begs the question: what bit the woman, and did the bite kill her?

Sources:

  • Ablaze!, Larry E. Arnold, 1995 M. Evans and Company, Inc: New York, pg. 19.

See Also:

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