PART TWO: 1917-1934
A wealthy Swedish woman called Christina Witlund died in Stockholm on 31 January 1914, aged 93. As a beautiful girl of 18, she was engaged to a dashing officer of the Royal Guards. Everything was ready for the wedding in 1839 when he broke off the engagement and subsequently married another. When Miss Witlund recovered from the shock, she made a solemn vow never to look on treacherous man again. Her parents being dead, she had sole control of her affairs and shut herself up in the house, where she lived in the dark with blinds drawn for the next 75 years, seeing no other human beings apart from her servant girls.
The engagement of a young (unnamed) Englishwoman of 21 in 1845 did not meet with the approval of her father, who forbade it. In a fit of pique, she took to her bed, where she remained for the next 72 years until her death, except that on one occasion she rose to leave Cambridge for Scarborough. She never suffered from any complaint until the end, when she was ill for two days, and died in Scarborough in January 1917, aged 94. Daily News, 3 Feb 1914; Reynolds’s Illustrated Newspaper, 14 Jan 1917.
An epidemic of hiccoughing [sic] caused much alarm in Budapest, Hungary, in late 1920. Victims were unable to sleep orcourse. Professor Benedict of the local medical faculty said: “I am afraid that this hiccoughing is a forerunner of influenza, but it is possible we shall be visited by an even more terrible plague.” [This was shortly after the Spanish flu pandemic.]
