REALLY UNUSUAL
MEDICAL CONDITIONS
ART ATTACKVideos by VICE
MUD WRESTLER’S RASH
CUTLERY CRAVING
The desire to eat metal objects is comparatively common. Occasionally, there is an extreme case, however, such as that of 47-year-old Englishman Allison Johnson. An alcoholic burglar with a compulsion to eat silverware, Johnson has had 30 operations to remove strange things from his stomach. As of 1992, he had eight forks and the metal sections of a mop head lodged in his body. He has repeatedly been jailed and then released, each time going immediately to a restaurant and ordering lavishly. Unable to pay, he would then tell the owners to call the police and eat cutlery until they arrived. Johnson’s lawyer said of his client, “He finds it hard to eat and obviously has difficulty going to the lavatory.”
ELECTRIC PEOPLE
According to British paranormalist Hilary Evans, some people are “upright human [electric] eels, capable of generating charges strong enough to knock out streetlights and electronic equipment.” Cases of “electric people” date back to 1786; the most famous is that of 14-year-old Angelique Cottin, whose presence caused compass needles to gyrate wildly. To further investigate this phenomenon, Evans founded SLIDE, the Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange.
CARROT ADDICTION
In its August 1992 issue, the highly respected British Journal of Addiction described three unusual cases of carrot dependence. One 40-year-old man had replaced cigarettes with carrots. He ate as many as five bunches a day and thought about them obsessively. According to two Czech psychiatrists, when carrots were withdrawn, he and the other patients “lapsed into heightened irritability.”
MARY HART EPILEPSY
The case of Dianne Neale, 49, appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine: In a much-publicized 1991 incident, Neale apparently suffered epileptic seizures upon hearing the voice of Entertainment Tonight cohost Mary Hart. Neale experienced an upset stomach, a sense of pressure in her head, and confusion. Laboratory tests confirmed the abnormal electric discharges in her brain, and Neale held a press conference to insist that she was not crazy and resented being the object of jokes. She said she bore no hard feelings toward Hart, who apologized on the air for the situation.
In another bizarre case, the theme from the show Growing Pains brought 27-year-old Janet Richardson out of a coma. She had been unresponsive for five days after falling out of bed and hitting her head, until, according to her sister, the TV theme “woke her up.”
HULA HOOP INTESTINE
On February 26, 1992, Beijing worker Xu Denghai was hospitalized with a “twisted intestine” after playing excessively with a hula hoop. His was the third such case in the several weeks since a hula-hoop craze had swept China. The Beijing Evening News advised people to warm up properly and avoid hula-hooping immediately after eating.
UNCOMBABLE HAIR SYNDROME
Also known as “hair felting,” this condition causes hair to form a tangled mass. In a case reported in 1993 in the Archives of Dermatology, a 39-year-old woman’s hair fell out and was replaced by dry, coarse, curly hair so tangled that it was impossible to comb. It lacked knots, kinks, or twists that would explain the tangling. The hairs themselves were strangely shaped: The cross-sections were triangular, grooved, or shaped like kidneys instead of circular. The usual solution to this problem is to cut off the solidified mass of hair. In one case, a woman from Indiana wanted to keep her hair, having spent 24 years growing it. After two and a half months of lubricating her hair with olive oil and separating the strands with knitting needles, the hair became normal.
FOREIGN ACCENT SYNDROME
There are about 50 recorded cases of foreign accent syndrome, in which people who have suffered strokes or other injuries adopt a new accent. For example, Tiffany Roberts of Florida suffered a stroke and then began speaking with an English accent. She even adopted such Anglicisms as “bloody” and “loo.” Roberts had never been to Great Britain and was not a fan of British television shows.
Perhaps the oddest case concerned a Norwegian woman who fell into a coma after being hit on the head by shrapnel during an air raid in 1941. When she woke up, she spoke with a thick German accent and was ostracized by her neighbors.
