In January 1966, a 26-year-old prisoner in a Rhodesian prison was admitted to hospital after swallowing nine bedsprings. He passed two of them into a bedpan but the others had to be removed by operation. He had swallowed the springs, he said, to keep his friend company.
His friend was his 28-year-old cellmate who between 1964 and 1965 had been admitted to hospital seven times after swallowing what were generically described as ‘foreign bodies’. These, later put on display at the museum in Westminster Hospital Medical School in London, included nails and screws of various shapes and sizes, and razor blades, broken and intact. The nails and razor blades had signalled a change in diet. The young man had previously had a taste for bedsprings. In December 1965, he was admitted to hospital after swallowing eighteen of them.
Soon after that episode, the prison governor received an ingenuous letter from Her Majesty’s Government instructing him ‘to withhold all types of edible foreign materials from this prisoner’. Though it read like an order to deprive him of imported foodstuffs, it was, of course, an instruction that no one could implement. With this young man, who could define what was ‘foreign’ and what was ‘edible’? The prisoner immediately demonstrated the fatuity of the instruction by devouring another fourteen bedsprings.
When HM Government demanded more information, the prison doctor reported that ‘the patient appears in no way to be unbalanced in mind’. The diagnosis was well founded. The man’s mind was healthily well balanced. After serving his sentence in Rhodesia, he was due to be repatriated to the Republic of South Africa, where he was wanted on gun-running charges and, if found guilty, would face a sentence of 25 years’ hard labour. His iron diet was designed to encourage the Rhodesian doctors to certify him as insane and thus unfit for extradition.
While in hospital, he described his technique for swallowing bedsprings: ‘I wrap each article in toilet paper, then throw my head back, press the handle of a knife to the back of my throat and slide the spring along the knife.’
Unlike his friend, he was unable to pass any of the items he’d ingested, and the accumulating ironmongery had to be removed in a series of operations. While he was in hospital recovering from one of them, his doctors discovered that he was suffering from another disease that he had not inflicted on himself. Blood tests revealed that he was anaemic. And the cause of the anaemia was ‘iron deficiency’. An ironic diagnosis.