A LIVING CHILD TURNING TO STONE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9455, 10 March 1894, Page 2 (Supplement)

A LIVING CHILD TURNING TO STONE.

Tiiw French Academy of Sciences has been making reports on an extraordinary case of selorema or petrifying of the skin and outer tissue of a human body. The case under consideration, which, by the way, is one of the rarest reported in medical literature, is that of on eighteon-monfchs-old child of St. Jeanne, a suburb of the French metropolis. When this doomed child was last made the subject of a clinic its flesh was as cold and almost as hard as marble ; and, while it still continues to live, it can only move the eyelids and lips. The poor little sufferer sleeps nearly all the time, lying with its eyes wide open, and breathing more like some cleverly devised automaton than a human being. The inner sides of the lips, thab porbion of the eyelids which folds up under the eyebrows, and a place about the size of a silver dollar under each arm, are. the only spots on the body which present any of the warmth or pliability characteristic of human flesh. In .June or July the child was as "well and healthy as any, of , St Joanne's many babies until it got a heavy fall, striking on the back of the head. The disease, which dates from this fall, and seem to have some mysterious connection between the tissues and the skin, is supposed to be the result of »he nervous shock. According to data this is the thirty-ninth case of the kind on record and the second in which the whole of the body was affected. The doctors in at- j endance say that death ia the only relief. i