“ ... of all punishments, it is the most cruel and most terrifying.” Cicero, First Century AD
The New Year has begun, because the ritual wailing of happy Xmas (war is Over) is only now receding, like the Doppler wash from a runaway train.
Leaving aside his genius as a composer, I never much liked John Lennon. It was to do with his hypocritical attempts to reject his solid, middle-class upbringing with Aunt Mimi, and cultivate the myth of working-class hero – the put-on Scouse accent; proclaiming Socialism while voting Conservative.
For some reason this “prolier than thou” attitude has infected many in the public eye. Perhaps the erstwhile plummy-voiced violinist Nigel Kennedy had Lennon’s example in mind when he decided to speak like a barrow boy.
My dislike of Lennon was cemented with the release in 1969 of The Ballad of John and Yoko.
Three years after claiming that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, Lennon, seemingly in thrall to what he thought was his own messianic portent – and hardly dissuaded in this by Miss Ono – penned the line: “The way things are going/ They’re gonna crucify me”.
Well, the way things went, he didn’t get crucified; he got shot.
Despite the Romans having perfected crucifixion thousands of years ago, it still retains its allure for some in the present day. Take, for example, Harry McCartan, a self-confessed car thief and joyrider from Belfast, who, according to a report in the Observer (November 10, 2002) was found nailed to wooden posts, with two rusty six-inch nails hammered through his palms.
Slogans daubed on the walls of the nearby Seymour hills estate included, “Seymour Hill Romans 1/Joyriders 0” and “All joyriders will be crucified”. McCartan’s feet appeared to have been spared on the day of his crucifixion, possibly due to the constraints of time being uppermost in the perpetrators’ minds, although 18 months previously, the report notes, “... the IRA smashed his ankles with hammers in a so-called punishment beating in republican west Belfast.”
Those in search of a dispassionate appraisal of crucifixion will benefit from De Pasquale and Burch’s “Death by Crucifixion”, published in the American Heart Journal (1963, 66: 434–435).
They note that crucifixion, as practised by the Romans, was a relatively bloodless affair, since the idea was to promote a lingering death, which would ultimately result in death by suffocation.
Typically, the idea was to stretch out the agony for at least three to four hours. This contrasts with the relatively rushed job of Harry’s crucifixion. However, a 58-year-old taxi driver adopted an altogether more thorough approach when he set out to crucify himself.
A newspaper report in the South Korean Joongang Daily (5 May 2011), told how “Kim ... a devout Christian ...” crucified himself on Good Friday. he drove to a remote quarry, bringing along hammer and nails, wood, saw, rope, wire, electric hand drill and a three-page manual on do-it-yourself crucifixion.
Autopsy results showed that having first nailed his feet to the cross, Mr Kim drilled holes into his palms, which he then slipped over hammered-in nails that he had prepared earlier. The causes of death were bleeding – he had taken care to inflict a wound on his lower right abdomen – and suffocation, since he had somehow tied his neck to the cross.
His aim of ensuring a successful outcome was emphatically achieved. And Mr Kim had taken the trouble to dress appropriately for the occasion; he was found wearing boxer shorts and a crown of thorns. A police spokesman speculated that since it was easter, “we assume he was hoping for resurrection.”
As far as I am aware the self-crucified taxi driver’s resurrection has not yet occurred (if it had, it would surely be on YouTube), thus leaving Jesus, according to popular opinion, as the only person to have achieved this feat. The so-called resurrection of Jesus can be debated elsewhere but the circumstances of his death have exercised the imaginations and pens of medics over the years.
Summarising these in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2006, 99: 185–188), Maslen and Mitchell investigate “Medical theories on the cause of death in crucifixion”. The ten theories they examine in relation to crucifixion in general and that of Jesus in particular include cardiac rupture, hypovolvaemic shock, asphyxia and pulmonary embolism.
More recently, in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine (in press, at the time of writing), Dr Jw Bergeron considers “The crucifixion of Jesus: Review of hypothesised mechanisms of death and implications of shock and trauma- induced coagulopathy”. According to his reading of the available facts, trauma- induced coagulopathy was a likely cause of Jesus’ death: “It would explain how [it could occur] so rapidly, namely six hours, rather than several days ... [and] ... how blood could flow from Jesus’ corpse when his chest was impaled by the spear.”
It hardly gives a ringing endorsement of mankind’s capacity for civilised behaviour that the journal Accident and Emergency Nursing (2002, 10: 235–239) thought it instructive to its readers to publish De Boer and Maddow’s “emergency care of the crucifixion victim”.
I wonder what Mr Kim listened to before he nailed himself down. Surely not The Ballad of John and Yoko.
Image courtesy of Dakiny, Creative Commons
