Pioneering scientific analysis

Some early pathologists theorised that spontaneous human combustion was in certain circumstances caused by the body producing gases that combusted or `caught fire’  on exposure to quantities of oxygen.
The distinguished scientist Baron Karl von Reichenbach wrote of the ‘miasma of putrefaction’ of human bodies, for instance. But Liebig could find no evidence of such a gas, ‘in health, in disease, nay not even in the putrefaction of dead bodies.’

`Spontaneous combustion’ of a corpse

Dixon Mann and W. A. Brend, in their Forensic medicine and toxicology (1914) give the case of an overweight man who died two hours after admission to Guy’s Hospital, London, England, in 1885.
The following day his corpse was found bloated, the skin distended all over and filled with gas, although there was no sign of decomposition.
They stated: ‘When punctures were made in the skin, the gas escaped and burnt with a flame like that of carburetted hydrogen; as many as a dozen flames were burning at the same time.’
If the man had died at home near a fire, another case of ’spontaneous human combustion’ would have been reported, which would have confused researchers even further.
However, gases within the body tissues of the sort suggested would be fatally toxic, and the victim would have been gravely ill or dead. And generally there are no such symptoms: victims have often been seen alive shortly before their flaming. Nor does this theory account for the observed fact of clothes that are left unburnt on a charred corpse.

The bodily malfunction theory

As an alternative to the disease theory, we might consider organic or mechanical malfunctions of normal processes within the body. Ivan Sanderson and, before him, Vincent Gaddis, speculated about the build-up of phosphagens in muscle tissue, particularly the vitamin BIO, vital to normal energy supplies.
A technical paper in AppliedTrophology (December 1957) included this relevant paragraph:
`Phosphagen is a compound like nitro-glycerine, of endothermic formation. It is no doubt so highly developed in certain sedentary persons as to make their bodies actually combustible, subject to ignition, burning like wet gun-powder under some circumstances.’
This may explain the readiness of some bodies to blaze, but we still have to identify the source of ignition – the factor that actually causes spontaneous human combustion.