Bizarre But True! A 24-year-old man walked into Rangueil Hospital in Toulouse with a problem that required bomb disposal experts…
The problem was lodged in his rectum. It was a 20cm-long, 37mm brass-and-copper artillery shell from the Imperial German Army. From the First World War.
The hospital evacuated an entire section. Bomb disposal teams arrived. They extracted the shell carefully, confirmed it was genuine unexploded ordnance and declared the area safe. The man claimed it was a collector’s item. He said he inserted it himself for personal gratification.
But here’s what makes this story bigger than one bizarre medical emergency…
This Has Happened Before
In 2022, an 88-year-old patient visited Hospital Sainte Musse in Toulon with a WWI-era French munition measuring 8 inches long and more than 2 inches wide removed from his rectum. Surgeons cut open his abdomen to remove it. The size made standard extraction impossible.
Medical staff in Toulouse told La Dépêche newspaper they’re “accustomed to treating victims injured during sexual games.” One doctor reported: “An apple, a mango, or even a can of shaving foam – we’re used to finding unusual objects inserted where they shouldn’t be.”
The scale of this problem is surprisingly highly measurable too. From 2012 to 2021, there were an estimated 38,948 emergency department visits for rectal foreign bodies among individuals aged 15 and over in the United States. The annual incidence increased from 1.2 in 2012 to 1.9 per 100,000 persons in 2021…!
The Iron Harvest Never Stops
About 1.5 billion shells were fired during World War I. One in every four shells did not detonate.
That’s roughly 375 million unexploded shells buried across France and Belgium. The French Département du Déminage still recovers about 900 tonnes of unexploded munitions every year!
Since 1946, approximately 630 French ordnance disposal workers have died handling unexploded munitions. In just the area around Ypres, 260 people have been killed and 535 have been injured by unexploded munitions since the end of the First World War.
Close to five per cent of the shells fired during the First World War contained poisonous gas too. Ordnance disposal experts continue to suffer burns from mustard gas shells that were split open during recovery operations.
Current estimates suggest it will take somewhere between 300 and 700 years for France and Belgium to be free of unexploded ordnance. At the current rate of clearance, the Département du Déminage will still be finding these weapons nine hundred years from now…!
The Zone Rouge Still Exists
The zone rouge originally covered more than 1,200 square kilometres. It was deemed too physically and environmentally damaged by conflict for human habitation.
Restrictions within the Zone Rouge still exist today. The control areas have been greatly reduced, but they haven’t disappeared. Farmers still plough up shells. Construction workers still unearth grenades. Children still find bullets in fields. Every year, people die from munitions fired over a century ago.
The shells don’t care how much time has passed. Chemical degradation makes them more unstable, not less. The mechanisms corrode. The compounds become unpredictable.
What Happened To The Patient Next..?
At the time of reporting, the French national was set to be interviewed by police. Prosecutors were said to be considering legal action against the 24-year-old for handling “category A munitions.” Possessing unexploded ordnance is illegal in France. It doesn’t matter if you call it a collector’s item. And it doesn’t matter where you put it…!
