Her body became so combustible that one night while lying on a straw couch she was spontaneously burned to ashes and smoke.

The evident cause of this combustion is too plain to be commented on.

In the Lancet, 1845, there are two cases reported in which shortly before death luminous breath has been seen to issue from the mouth.
There is an instance reported of a professor of mathematics of thirty-five years of age and temperate, who, feeling a pain in his left leg, discovered a pale flame about the size of a ten-cent piece issuing therefrom.

As recent as March, 1850, in a Court of Assizes in Darmstadt during the trial of John Stauff, accused of the murder of the Countess Goerlitz, the counsel for the defense advanced the theory of spontaneous human combustion, and such eminent doctors as von Siebold, Graff, von Liebig, and other prominent members of the Hessian medical fraternity were called to comment on its possibility; principally on their testimony a conviction and life-imprisonment was secured.

In 1870 there was a woman of thirty-seven, addicted to alcoholic liquors, who was found in her room with her viscera and part of her limbs consumed by fire, but the hair and clothes intact.