Staunch with Sugar

Malcolm Gaskill

• Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650-1750 by Craig Spence
  Boydell, 273 pp, £65.00, November 2016, ISBN 978 1 78327 135 1

On 15 August 1737 Samuel Wood was working in a windmill on the Isle of Dogs, when a rope tied around his wrist became caught in the gear wheels. The gigantic brake-wheel pulled him into the mechanism, tearing off his right arm. Wood staggered a short distance before collapsing. Bystanders staunched the wound with sugar, which was known to have antiseptic and healing properties, while they waited for help to arrive. A surgeon patched Wood up, and sent him to St Thomas’s Hospital where to everyone’s surprise he made a full recovery within two months. This minor miracle – doctors were baffled by the lack of arterial bleeding – was celebrated in an engraving in which a lank-haired, classically draped Wood stares pensively at us over his scarred shoulder. A vignette of the accident occupies one corner of the composition, and in the foreground is the severed arm.