Diseases of the nervous system resulting from accident and injury.
- Bailey, Pearce
- Date:
- 1906
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Diseases of the nervous system resulting from accident and injury. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)
593/658 (page 571)
![ported, and then can only be held in the half-sitting and half-reclining posture, all the time evidencing great agony. When I stuck pins into her feet and legs, and touched them with my hands, she declared she could not feel any sensation, and I couldn't surprise her into any painful expression. The prognosis was given as unfavorable, and Fannie Freeman was paid $325 [or $425]. On June 6, 1894, Fannie Freeman, under an assumed name, brought claim against the New York, New Haven and Hartford Rail- road Company at Boston. This case was an identical reproduction of the preceding, even to the patient's maintaining that it was her first accident. But she was unfortunate in being visited by the same ex- aminer who had seen her a month previously for the West End Street Railroad Company, for the physician this time recognized the fraud, which he had failed to do in the first instance. On December 24, 1894, Mary Freeman claimed to the general superintendent of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Com- pany, Chicago, that her daughter Fannie had been injured by falling on her back in a car of the company. She alleged that her daughter was paralyzed from the waist down, and had lost all sensation in the legs; that there was no power over the rectum or bladder, and that the young girl was ruined for life. There were so many suspicious circumstances about the case that the family were watched. Before the expected visit of the company's doctor the alleged cripple was seen, from a hole through the floor of a room above hers, to get nimbly out of bed and put her feet in a tub of iced water, in order that they might feel cold and lifeless to the exam/lners. Some of the results of the medical examination, as embodied in the surgeon's report, are as follows: Pulse at first 104, but it changed so that at the last of the exami- nation it was 132. Her back was marked by a slight spot about the top of the sacrum, entirely superficial and movable over the underly- ing tissues, which may have been produced by some injury, or by the abrasion of some part of her clothing. Sensation existed about half- way down the thighs, but below this point it was alleged to be ab- sent. There were no evidences observed of incontinence of urine or faeces, and no girdle sensation was complained of. An unexpected test of raising the foot in the air caused it to stop there, though tests of physical endurance were applied and successfully with- stood. The doctors, satisfied of fraud, reported that there were no objec- tive evidences of the conditions complained of. The following day the three women were arrested. Fannie Free-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21270405_0593.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
