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| Charles Dickens |
I am going to talk about three famous English writers, and their answers towards the pseudoscience of the time. One of them lived in the middle of the 19th century, another halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries, and practically all the work of the third was written in the 20th century.
Charles Dickens: His
brush with pseudoscience appears in one of his best works (in my opinion the
best): Bleak House. One of the
characters, called Krook (who is really a crook), dies of spontaneous combustion.
The idea that the human body can ignite spontaneously arose from a series of anecdotal cases of people, often alcoholics, burning to death under dubious circumstances. Some argued that ingested alcohol could ignite spontaneously within the body, even though doctors claimed that the amount of alcohol needed to do so would have to be so large that the person would have died of alcohol poisoning long before igniting.
