Today’s Increasingly Desperate Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The only surviving son of King Philip V of Spain, by his first marriage to Maria Luisa Savoy, the vacant and pasty-faced Ferdinand VI, became king at the age of thirty-three. He was severely paranoid and lived in constant dread of assassination. Eventually he became completely insane. Like his father, he was addicted to sex and became a slave to his short, very plain wife, Queen Barbara of Braganza, daughter of Portugal’s King John V. Queen Barbara was also a neurotic and lived in constant fear of being left a penniless widow. Her confidence that she would outlive her husband was, however, misplaced. In 1757 she took to her bed in terrible pain and became covered in boils. She died after a horrible and lingering eleven-month illness. It was discovered that her private apartment was crammed to the ceiling with Spanish currency which she had stashed away to see her through a comfortable widowhood.
Queen Barbara – gone too soon!
With his Queen dead, Ferdinand’s mental state went quickly downhill. He alternately starved himself and binged on food, and randomly attacked his servants. The last few months of his life were marked by a series of increasingly desperate suicide attempts. He tried cutting his wrists with scissors, hanging himself with bedsheets, and strangling himself with table napkins. When all else failed he begged his doctors to give him poison. King Ferdinand died in his sleep of natural causes age forty-six.
King Ferdinand, so unfortunate…
Culled from: Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty
Civil War Portrait Du Jour!
Sister Mary Joseph was a Sister of Mercy, a member of a nursing order that served at the Federal military hospital in Union-occupied Beaufort, South Carolina. Nurses daily witnessed horrors such as an anonymous survivor of Second Manassas describes:
There were six of us… and we six had had seven legs amputated. Our condition was horrible in the extreme. Several of us were as innocent of clothing as the hour we were born. Between our mangled bodies and the rough surface of the board floor there was a thin rubber blanket… There were plenty of flies to pester us and irritate our wounds. Our bodies became afflicted with loathsome sores, and—horror indescribable!—maggots found lodgings in wounds and sores, and we were helpless.
Culled from: Portraits of the Civil War
Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!
This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).
Here’s today’s entry:
September 30th. Very warm and sultry. At roll-call all detachments were filled up. Drew molasses in place of meat, a very poor substitute for these hungry starving skeletons. Tasted a sweet potato, which was a great luxury. A ration of a teaspoonful of soft soap was distributed throughout camp, and nobody knows what to do with it.
Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost