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1 Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, written in 1896 by physicians George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, tells the story of a soldier wounded during a Civil War battle. “The fighting was fierce, hope was slim and a split second after our soldier was shot, a piercing cry was heard in a house near the battleground, but remote enough to have warranted the expectation of safe protection. Examination of the wounded soldier showed that a bullet had passed through the scrotum and carried away the left testicle. The same ‘minie bal’ with some spermatozoa upon it had apparently penetrated the left side of a woman’s abdomen midway between the umbilicus and the anterior of the ileum, and become lost in the abdomen. She suffered an attack of peritonitis. Two hundred and seventy-eight days after the reception of the ball, she was delivered of a fine boy, weighing eight pounds, to the surprise of herself and the mortification of her parents.”
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2 Baudelaire, “Burial” in Les Fleurs du mal. A similar image turns up in Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites: “Nothing prevented me from seeing in the garbage can the momentary and marvelous figure.” The figure here is the body of Genet’s lover, a resistance fighter who died on the barricades. Genet’s incredible conceits constantly transfigure the body of his dead soldier into the most incommensurate things, from a Venetian flask to a sausage feeding the city of Paris.
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