Accident and injury ; their relations to diseases of the nervous system.
- Bailey, Pearce
- Date:
- 1898
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Accident and injury ; their relations to diseases of the nervous system. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![sensation, and I couldn't surprise her into any painful expression. The prognosis was given as unfavorable, and Fannie Freeman was paid three hundred and twenty-five [or four hundred and twenty- five] dollars. On June 6, 1894, Fannie Freeman, under an assumed name, made claim on the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad 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 examiner 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 Company, Chicago, that her daughter Fannie had been injured by falling on the 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 doc- tors 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 examiners. 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 examination it was 132. Her back was marked by a slight spot about the top of the sacrum, entirely superficial and movable over the underlying tissues, which may have been produced by some injury, or by the abrasion of some part of her clothing. Sensation existed about halfway down the thighs, but below this point it was alleged to be absent. There were no evidences observed of in- continence of urine or faeces, and no girdle sensation was com- plained 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 withstood. The doctors were satisfied of the fraud, and reported that there were no objective evidences of the conditions complained of. The following day the three women were arrested. Fannie](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21039471_0386.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
