The Case of Thankful Taylor----The Tennessan Magazine, Sun Dec. 9th, 1973

The Mag. is not often called upon for "reruns", but during year of so score of readers have written in asking about the strange case of Thankful Taylor, We have reprinted here, just as it appeared in the Magazine of Feb. 13, 1949, "The Case of Thankful Taylor" by the late Ed Belt, who was a Tennessean columnist and Murfreesboro correspondent for many years.
By Ed Bell

Old ones will tell you the spring where Miss Thankful Taylor drank still flow somewhere out in the flat country east of Christiana.

Rising from deep in the earth it makes a pool like a pretty mirror where frogs pipe the nights away and furred creatures slink for refreshment.
By the day bright birds splash and flutter at their baths while minnows and other squirmy little things flirt among the blue green shadows below.

One summer afternoon long ago the girl came from her work in the fields to slake her thirst. She knelt and dran in great life renewing gulps.

Thankful Taylor was a stringy girl then in her teens who lived and toiled on a Rutherford County farm with her mother, Didama Carroll, and her stepfather, William Carroll. She wasn't much in the way of looks but she was hardworking and of sturdy health.

Leaving the Cool Place, she walked back into the bright light of the fields, picked up her hoe and continued the chopping of cotton through the long afternoon, Afterwards, when the days of evil fell upon her, she told the family that she remembered something like a little string passing down her throat when she drank from the spring but she thought it of no consequence.

Many weeks passed without anything unusual to mark one dull day from another on the Carroll farm and then the girl was taken abed with a strange ailment. It consisted of a series of convulsions which grew in intensity until her days and nights merged in a longdrawn horror. The ordeal was to continue into her womenhood.

Dr. B. N White, a physician practicing in that part of the country, gave the girl extensive treatments to no avail. Gathering at night in the dimlit farmhouse, sympathetic neighbors could do little except sit and watch. Thankful lay in bed with a quilt over her.

We could see the movements of something in her stomach and sometimes it got so bad we could see it all the way across the room, one neighbor said. One of them gave her some wine once, hoping that it might bring relief.

What was in her seem to go wild, then sure enough, they said, "The poor girl suffered so she was part-time out of her mind."

Finally, Dr. J. M Burger, a middleaged practioner at Murfreesboro was called in on the case. He abandoned all previous theries as to what afflicted the girl and began new experimentations of treatment. At regular intervals something would appear in the girls mouth briefly and retreat to her stomach. It was a dark shape. Once a neighbor touched it and said it was cold and clammy. On another occasion it was caught but released when the patient cried out in terror of death.

When the doctor gave her strong dosages aimed at causing its expulsion, the thing would recede into the lower stomach and lurked there thrashing around until the effect of the medicine subsided. Dr. Buger had been called into the case in January, 1874. Surgery was practally in its infancy then and an adominal operation was too dangerous to consider. He had to wait, watch, experiment. His decision, after all the treatment failed was that the thing had to be trapped and extracted whatever the risk to the patient. He left orders for the family to seize it on its next appearance and call him immediately, regardless of the hour.

They sent for him on a hazy June night when the moon shed a pale glow over the flatlands. The doctor pressed his horse over the winding road. In the buggy beside him rode Miss Jonnie Batton, a friend who had become interested in the case. When they arrived at the farmhouse the family had brought the struggling girl out into the yard, supposedly so that she might breathe fresher air. Mrs. Carroll stood holding her and grasping a dark loop of something in the girl's mouth. It had come up her throat, turned and started back when the mother discovered it.

The doctor took hold and pulled a striped and scaled old water snake from Thankful Taylor's mouth and throat. While he held it up in the moonlight for the others to see, it writhed and lashed about his wrist brieftly and then died. It measured 23 inches from its evil head to the tip of its tail.

The girl said:"Doctor, I feel like a great load he been taken from my stomach". Five years have passed since she was first stricken

Dr. Burger Took the snake with him when he drove back to town that night. He placed it in a square glass jar, poured in some alcohol and sealed it tightly with wax. Afterwards he sat down and wrote a careful record of the case. It was well that he did. As it was, the good doctor was called every kind of liar in the book.

Newspapers spread the story far and wide, some doubting and some defending the doctor. County and state medical groups sent investigating committees to gather evidence at the scene. Kin of Miss Taylor, county magistrates, neighbors, ministers, made affidavits in support of Dr. Burger.

In a little bungalow at 701 East Street, Murfreesboro, Mrs Lena Burger Woodley Rogers, formerly of Mcminnville has the old water snake for all to see in the same jar in which her grandfather preserved it.

It coils there in its small fluid tomb: a blind, arrow-like head with a body about the thickness of a man's thumb, patterned dark brown and yellow, tapering off to a thin tail.

Mrs. Rogers is the wife of Rece Rogers, a Church of Christ minister and a teacher in the Rutherford county high school. She never knew Thankful Taylor but she heard her grandfather and grandmother tell the story many times and, besides the snake, she has pictures of Thankful (inscribed: "The women, grandpa got the snake out of"), also pictures of the doctor and some newspapers of the day recounting the furor that was touched off by the case. Along with these things she has affidavits of numerous people, who testified as witnesses to one phase or another of it.

Mrs. Lena Cobb, a little lady who lives over in the Fairfield community near Wartrace and is 87 years old, also knew Dr. Burger and says: "I'll vouch for the truth of anything he ever said." She, too, remembers the doctor's personal accout of his strange case.

Here is the Doctor's own record, minus certain passages, devoted to technical description:

"By request, I hereby submit the following report of the symptoms and treament of Thankful Taylor, while under my charge, and also the previous conditions of the case, as near as could be ascertained before she was placed in my care, to wit."

On Friday evening, the 23rd of January 1874, I was sent to see Thankful Taylor. On my arrival I could see she was very strangely affected, laboring under an inexplicable kind of convulsions,..there protruded from her mouth a foreign living substance of a dark appearance, which remained in her mouth for several minutes, but she would not permit me, at the time, to extract it, for reason that she was afaid it would kill her.

It then receded from her mouth down into the oesophagus. I remained for some time with my patient, noting every manifestation, and after its disappearance, she seemed to be much relieved, and there was a cessation of the convulsions.

I was called again the following evening and found the patient laboring under the same convulsions as the evening previous. On the third day I met in consultation with Dr. B. N. White, Doctor White having formerly had charge of the case of Thankful Taylor. He gave it as his opinion that she was laboring under tapeworm, and has so treated the case for about 12 months without affording relief.

I was of the opinion that the patient was afflicted with a species of reptile, the symptoms not all corresponding with the ordinary tapeworm symptoms. The girl continued robust to a remarkable degree, instead of being emaciated, and the appetite instead of being ravenous, was fickle, at times taking scarcely any food.

A very remarkable feature of the case was the motion or movement in the stomach that was, clearly perceptible to any person across an ordinary room, and this train of symptoms attended the patient from the time I took charge of the case until the extract it.

The antheimintic remedies, having a more appreciable effect than the other modes of treatment when first administered, would cause the reptile to contract violently and writhe and twist in her stomach, and after a continuance of the medicine, would cause it to pass from the stomach to the intestines,, where it would remain until a discontinuance of the remedy. Then it would return to the stomach, its seeming habitation...

On the evening of the 26th of June 1874, the ease reached its final termination by the extraction of the snake, twenty-three inches in length and three-fourths of an inch in diameter of light and dark brown stripes on sides, with white abdomen, being covered with a slimy, mucous coating, and presenting a cold clammy sensation to the touch. It lived for several minutes after its extraction.

There are two causes in my opinion that might have produced its death, first being exposed to the atmosphere, an element to which it had hitherto been unaccustomed, at least for several years: and secondly, from the violence of the patient in with her teeth on its appearance in her mouth, and from the grasp of her mother in holding it for my arrival, as I had previously instructed them to hold it until they could get me there.

It appeared from the position in which I foud it upon my arrival, that it came up headforemost into the mouth of the patient, and was trying to return to the stomach with its head downward, and in that position formed a loop by which the patient's mother held it, and I immediately took hold of it and with but little effort drew it out, and in my opinion, so far as I was able to judge, it must have been not more than six or eight inches down the oesophagus, if it did not reach the stomach, and I am inclined to the latter opinion.

The Rev. Whit Ransom, a near neighbor, being sent for to see the patient several times, stated to me that he had seen a black living substance come up the throat into the mouth of the young lady, and did extend even beyond her teeth sufficiently far that he was able to take hold of it with his hand as often as five or six times.

The remainder of Doctor Burger's report concerned the description of the snake as given by the minister who said that although he had been unable to extract it from the girl's mouth, he had been able to inspect it closely and considered that it definitely was a snake.

The reverberation from Dr. Burger's report echoed across the years. A committee from the county medical association, headed by Dr. J. B. Murfree, investigated but submitted only Dr. Burger's report, the snake and the
testimony of the girl. The members did not commit themselves with any opinions. The state medical association named one committee which turned in a skeptical report, declaring among other things that the gastric juices would have destroyed the snake, that it couldn't have lived in the stomach that long for lack of air and that Miss Thankful Taylor had "less than half sense" anyhow.

This started a new uproar. Among the defenders of Dr. Burger was a contributor to the McMinnville, New Era who signed himself "Obscurus" and directed a series of scathing criticisms at the committee. The state association named another committee to reopen the case.

This committee's report, as published in the Nashville Daily American on April 5 1877, follows:
Gentlemen, at the last meeting of this society, the undersigned having been constituted a committee to reconsider the case of a snake said to have been extracted from the throat of a woman in Rutherford County and reported on by Dr. J. M. Burger, M. D., a member of this society, beg leave respectfully to state at this meeting that their endeavors to collect additional facts relating to this particular case have been unsuccessful, while at the same time they found no one willing to impeach the veracity of the reporter, and they therfore submit the following considerations for the adoption of the society.
1. That according to the rules of sound philosophy it is not admissible to lay down the line of the possible in natural phenomenon by a priori reasoning.
2. That we know of no valid reason why a living reptile of many of the lower forms of animal life could not exist a certain time in the human stomach.
3. That many instances are on record, apparently veracious, where such living animals have been the occupants of the stomach of man for days and months.
4. That we are bound to accept the statements of Dr. Burger regarding what he saw and believed until positive testimony to the contrary is adduced.
5. That the reception of the report of this report of this case by the society does not commit it to any new or erroneous theories in medicine, and that the whole subject belongs rather to the domain of the natural sciences than to the department of medicine proper.
Herewith is presented to the society the statement of Dr. Burger himself, and also several instances of living substances found in the stomach and bowels. All of which is pespectfully Submitted.


*****Note
The report bears the signatures of Drs. J. R. Buist, W. K. Bowling, J. B. Lindsley and R. D. Winsett.
Sometime after the climax of his famous case Dr. Burger moved to Warren County, where he enjoyed a long and distinguished practice.
Little is known about the life of the patient after her deliverance. In September of 1874 Mrs. Cassie Newman a nearby neighbor of the Carrols, wrote
that the young woman had visited in her home often since that night in June and seem to be perfectly relieved.
The story of Thankful Taylor fades out at the point... No other records are available, and the old folks do not remember how long she lived, where and
with whom she dwelt, the quality of her health, or what dreams haunted her to her grave.


Submitted by Sharon Perry