Some Obscurish facts
#18
1860 Suicide was, paradoxically, a capital offense in Great Britain in the 19th century, so if you survived your own attempt at killing yourself, the state would finish the job for you. Around 1860, according to Nicholas Ogarev, a Russian expatriate living in London, a man who had slashed his throat was taken to the gallows to be hanged for his crime. But physicians warned the executioner that hanging the man would be impossible; the pull of the rope would open the wound in his neck and force him to breathe. Paying the doctors no heed, they hanged him anyway, and, writes Ogarev, the wound in the neck immediately opened and the man came back to life again although he was hanged. It took time to convoke the aldermen to decide the question of what was to be done. At length the aldermen assembled and bound up the neck below the wound until he died.
1860 Suicide was, paradoxically, a capital offense in Great Britain in the 19th century, so if you survived your own attempt at killing yourself, the state would finish the job for you. Around 1860, according to Nicholas Ogarev, a Russian expatriate living in London, a man who had slashed his throat was taken to the gallows to be hanged for his crime. But physicians warned the executioner that hanging the man would be impossible; the pull of the rope would open the wound in his neck and force him to breathe. Paying the doctors no heed, they hanged him anyway, and, writes Ogarev, the wound in the neck immediately opened and the man came back to life again although he was hanged. It took time to convoke the aldermen to decide the question of what was to be done. At length the aldermen assembled and bound up the neck below the wound until he died.