A WOMAN TURNED TO BONE.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume VII, Issue 2003, 30 May 1885, Page 2

A WOMAN TURNED TO BONE.

At Martinsville, a village thirty milos from Indianapolis, there died recently a young woman, whose case is of a unique and mysterious nature. The lady, Miss Hannah Stout, was the daughter of Mr John Stout, a well-to-do farmer of Hynsdale, in Morgan County. About twenty years ago, when she was three years of age, she was affected by a rigidity of the muscles of the arm, which was amenable to no treatment. Instead of being relieved in the least, its severity increased,' and spread to qther parts of the body, and was accompanied or followed by a stiffening of the joints and final ossification of neaJy all the joints in' the body. But this ossification or unnatural deposit pf calqareous or chalky matter, did not end with the solidifying of tho joints. Her affliction, though it steadily grew worse, did not confino her to her bed until her fifteenth year, when she

becamo incapublo of any motion whatever, and so shejremained for tho last eighfcyears of her life. About the Bame time the muscular tissue of horwhole bodybeganto bo replaced by a deposit resembling bone in its hardness and weight, The bones of the spinal column were united firiifflKid inseparably into one; the ribs were touted by their connecting tissues, being turned to bone. All her breathing was done by the diaphragmand musclesof the abdomen.: The limbs, though small, were compact, as though muscles, bones, and sinews were all united in one large bone. At the time of her death there was little musoular tissue left in the body, and it is a great wonder she lived so long. Her mind waj not apparently affected, her memory beingj astonishingly ready and retentive. one occasion she recognised a physician whom she had not seen for ten years. Although calcareous degeneration is frequent in some parts of the body, such as the cartilage of joints which have become immovable for.some time, the valves of the heart, and sometimes even m the arteries,-yet it is believed that there is no case on record of so great an extent of bony deposits as was manifested in this unfortunate girl. The body weighed nearly 300 ft.