David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

At a simple peasant meal in Wildbad, Germany, in 1793, 13 people shared a single sausage. Within hours they became seriously ill, and six of them died. Their disease became known as botulism — a word coined from the Latin for sausage, botulus . The powerfully toxic bacteria Clostridium botulinum inside the sausage could have been easily killed by boiling it for two minutes. Once in the body, botulism toxins attack the nervous system, causing paralysis of all muscles, which brings on death by suffocation.

Adolph Luetgert, a Chicago sausage maker, was so fond of entertaining his mistresses that he had a bed installed in his factory. Louisa Luetgert was aware of her husband’s infidelities and, in 1897, their marriage took a dramatic turn for the worse. Louisa subsequently disappeared, and when the police arrived to search Luetgert’s factory, they found human teeth and bones — as well as two gold rings engraved ‘L.L’. — at the bottom of a sausage vat. During his well-publicised trial, Luetgert maintained his innocence, but he was convicted of murder and spent the rest of his life in prison.

Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle , an exposé of conditions in the Chicago stockyards and meat industry, contained shocking descriptions: ‘There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage… there would be meat stored in great piles… thousands of rats would race about on it… these rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.’ Americans were deeply alarmed by the filth described, and in the same year the book was published, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

In October 1981, Joseph Guillou, an engineer on the Moroccan tanker Al Ghassani , was arrested, fined £50, and sentenced to two years in jail for insulting Morocco’s King Hassan. Guillou’s offence was hanging a sausage on the hook normally reserved for a portrait of the monarch. A sausage, said Guillou, was ‘more useful than a picture of the king’.

During home games at Miller Park, the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team holds ‘sausage races’ in which people costumed as different types of sausages run around the park between innings. During a game on July 9, 2003, as the runners passed the visiting team’s dugout, Randall Simon, the first baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, struck the Italian sausage, Mandy Block, with his bat, knocking her to the ground. After the game, Simon was handcuffed by Milwaukee County sheriff’s deputies, taken to a police station, and fined $432 for disorderly conduct. The sausage whacking was broadcast repeatedly, but Block ignored the controversy, accepting Simon’s apology. When he returned to Miller Park later in the season, Simon bought Italian sausages for a section of fans. Block was recognised by the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council with a certificate of bravery. ‘I’m proud of it,’ Block said. ‘I didn’t even know there was a hot dog council.’

Fine art can really make you sick. Or so says Dr Graziella Magherini, author of The Stendhal Syndrome . She has studied more than 100 tourists in Florence, Italy, who became ill in the presence of great works. Their symptoms include heart palpitations, dizziness and stomach pains. The typical sufferer is a single person between the ages of 26 and 40 who rarely leaves home. Dr Magherini believes the syndrome is a result of jet lag, travel stress, and the shock of an overwhelming sense of the past. ‘Very often,’ she says, ‘there’s the anguish of death.’ The disorder was named after the nineteenth-century French novelist who became overwhelmed by the frescoes in Florence’s Santa Croce Church. Particularly upsetting works of art include Michelangelo’s statue of David, Caravaggio’s painting of Bacchus, and the concentric circles of the Duomo cupola.

On February 26, 1992, Beijing worker Xu Denghai was hospitalised 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.

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’.

The desire to eat metal objects is comparatively common. Occasionally there is an extreme case, 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. In 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 had difficulty going to the lavatory.’

Officially known as Alien Hand Syndrome, this bizarre neurological disorder afflicts thousands of people. It is caused by damage to certain parts of the brain, and causes one of a person’s hands to act independently of the other and of its owner’s wishes. For example, the misbehaving hand may do the opposite of what the normal one is doing: if a person is trying to button a shirt with one hand, the other will follow along and undo the buttons. If one hand pulls up trousers, the other will pull them down. Sometimes the hand may become aggressive — pinching, slapping or punching the patient; in at least one case, it tried to strangle its owner. Says neurologist Rachelle Doody, ‘Often a patient will sit on the hand, but eventually it gets loose and starts doing everything again.’

Twenty-four men and women wrestled in calf-deep mud at the University of Washington. Within 36 hours, 7 wrestlers were covered with patches of ‘pus-filled red bumps similar to pimples’, and the rest succumbed later. Bumps were on areas not covered by bathing suits — one unlucky victim had wrestled in the nude. The dermatitis palastraie limosae, or ‘muddy wrestling rash’, may have been caused by manure-tainted mud.

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.

The case of Dianne Neale, 49, appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine . In a much-publicised 1991 incident, Neale apparently suffered epileptic seizures at hearing the voice of Entertainment Tonight co-host Mary Hart. Neale experienced an upset stomach, a sense of pressure in her head, and confusion. Laboratory tests confirmed the abnormal electrical 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 apologised on the air for the situation.