PENALTY FOR A LIE

Shannon News, 24 February 1928, Page 1

PENALTY FOR A LIE

A strange story of & * 1 curse’% which a family believed to have des-? cended upon them because of a lie a ■ young girl told about an apple plucked; from a tree has been investigated by, a Lancashire (doetorl Dr. E. R. 4V.j Gilmore, assistant school medical; officer of Salford, quotes it as an *‘old( wives' tale,but is sufficiently impressed with the result of his investigation to record in the “British Medical Journal ’’ the facts. A girl was brought to him in the first place suffering from a deformity of the fingers and thumbs, and on tracing the ancestral history of the family ho found that it went back several gen erations. The striking feature, from the medical point of view, was that this deformity had been transmitted through both male and female members of the family. The mothcT of the child brought to the doctor said the curse was a matter of.family history, and she was convinced of it. “The i great-great-grandmother when she was young lied about an apple’which she had plucked from a tree, whereupon her parents threatened her with the curse that her children later on would be borß with deformed hands.