Victorian Strangeness: A gruesome end to an argument

Author Jeremy Clay tells the story of the woman who cut off her leg to spite her husband.

He wouldn't take no for an answer, that much was clear. The man had turned up unannounced at the London home of The Lancet with a mysterious package under his arm and an urgent look in his eyes. It was late. It was emitting a faint but disagreeable smell. But he demanded to be heard, and wasn't going to budge.

And so he was led to the editor's office, where events immediately took an unexpected turn. The visitor dumped the bundle on a desk and yanked out a human leg. "There!" he cried, brandishing the limb with the triumphant air of someone who had just proved a conclusive point in an ongoing row. "Is there anything the matter with that?"

The assembled staff of the medical journal gazed upon it. No, they were forced to conclude, drawing deep from their accumulated specialist knowledge, there was nothing outwardly wrong with it at all, save for the fact it was longer attached to a body.

"Did you ever see a handsomer one?" challenged the visitor. Perhaps they had, perhaps they hadn't, but it was certainly an attention-grabber. "A very fair symmetrical lower extremity," the Shields Daily Gazette noted in November 1862, "which had evidently belonged to a woman."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27836559