Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 084

• First: a black eye.
• Second: application of a traditional Far Eastern remedy in the form of a frog meat poultice.
• Third: contamination of the frog with Spirometra tapeworm larvae.

Dysprosody or Foreign Accent Syndrome.

One of the first case reports of dysprosody was of a 28 year old Norwegian woman, Astrid L, who sustained a shrapnel injury to the left side of her brain during a bombing raid in 1941. She subsequently developed a strong German accent – even though she did not speak German and had never been to Germany – and was shunned by Oslo’s wartime community.

Several dozen cases have since been documented, following traumatic brain injury or stroke.

Wild duck paste sandwiches.

In 1922, 8 members of a fishing trip to Loch Maree in Scotland fell ill after eating a picnic, mysteriously developing diplopia, dysphagia and respiratory paralysis.

They died one-by-one in the remote Loch Maree Hotel. Each victim had eaten wild duck paste sandwiches: the pot from which these had been made was found to be contaminated with botulism.

• Reference: The ripe olive scare and hotel Loch Maree tragedy: Botulism under glass in the 1920’s. Horowitz BZ. Clin Toxicol (Phila). 2011 Apr;49(4):345-7.

By drowning and crush injury.

The London Beer Flood of 1814 was the world’s first “beer-nami”.

A 22-foot high vat, holding a million pints of beer, gave way at the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road. Surrounding vats collapsed in a chain reaction, and a wave of beer – reportedly 15 feet high – swept through the slum of St Giles, demolishing two houses and a pub.

Various answers could be considered correct.

In 1993, a seminal report from the Western Infirmary A&E Department described 3 cases of severe buttock laceration resulting from the collapse of fractured porcelain lavatory pans. (Reference: Wyatt JP, McNaughton GW, Tullett WM “The collapse of toilets in Glasgow“. Scottish Medical Journal 38 (6): 185. PMID 8146638)

…the authors went on to win an IgNobel Prize for Public Health.

Readers are advised to be on the lookout for tell-tale cracks.