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Originally posted by ProudAmerican
Here's an interesting site AV :
www.crystalinks.com...
Originally posted by Estragon
Quite so, I-love-p,
Many contend that Spontaneous Human Combustion is first documented in such early texts as the Bible, but, scientifically speaking, these accounts are too old and secondhand to be seen as reliable evidence. The first reliable historic evidence of SHC appears to be from the year 1763, when Frenchman Jonas Dupont published a collection of SHC cases and studies entitled De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis. Dupont was inspired to write this book after encountering records of the Nicole Millet case, in which a man was acquitted of the murder of his wife when the court was convinced that she had been killed by spontaneous combustion. Dupont's book on this strange subject brought it out of the realm of folkloric rumor and into the popular public imagination.
Continuing belief in SHC in the 1800's is evidenced in the number of writers that called on it for a dramatic death scene. Most of these authors were hacks that worked on the 19th century equivalent of comic books, "penny dreadfuls", so no one got too worked up about it; but two big names in the literary world also used SHC as a dramatic device, and one did cause a stir. The first of these two authors was Captain Marryat who, in his novel Jacob Faithful, borrowed details from a report in the Times of London of 1832 to describe the death of his lead character's mother, who is reduced to "a sort of unctuous pitchey cinder."
anomalyinfo.com...
Despite the mass media's tendency to characterize Spontaneous Human Combustion as "a person who bursts into flames," SHC actually describes a large group of occurences that has distinct types and variations. This fact is important because while some types of the phenomena may have been explained, others definitely have not. Here are the groupings that I percieve these cases breaking into:
Type 1: Fatal Cases
Sub-type 1: Classic Burnings
Sub-type 2: Witnessed Combustions
Sub-type 3: Selective Burnings
Type 2: Non-Fatal Cases
Sub-type 1: Mysterious Flames
Sub-type 2: Mysterious Burns
Sub-type 3: Mysterious Smoke