The subject of spontaneous human combustion was of sufficient importance for Alfred Swaine Taylor to devote to it one of 12 sections in his exhaustive The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence of 1865… “In many experiments made on different organs and on different bodies, I have not observed that different parts of the same body or the parts of different bodies have varied in their degree of combustibility.”

The imagined vision of this rather dour individual (according to all portraits of him) doggedly comparing the flammability of organs and bodies by trying to set fire to them, in order to establish his point, is one not without a certain ghoulish satisfaction.