Life
Kosminski was born in the Polish town of Kłodawa, which was then in the Russian Empire. His parents were Abram Jozef Kozminski, a tailor, and his wife Golda née Lubnowska. In 1882, at the age of 17, he emigrated to England, and embarked on a career as a barber in the Whitechapel district of the East End of London. Whitechapel was an impoverished slum that had become home to many Jewish refugees who were fleeing pogroms and economic hardship in eastern Europe and Tsarist Russia. His sisters, brother and widowed mother also left Russia and lived in Whitechapel.
On two occasions in July 1890 and February 1891, Kosminski was placed in Mile End Old Town workhouse because of his insane behaviour. On the second occasion, he was discharged to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, where he remained for the next three years until he was admitted on 19 April 1894 to Leavesden Asylum. Case notes indicate that Kosminski had been ill since at least 1885. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food dropped as litter, and a refusal to wash or bathe. The cause of his insanity was recorded as "self-abuse", which is thought to be a euphemism for masturbation. His poor diet seems to have kept him in an emaciated state for years; his low weight was recorded in the asylum case notes. By February 1919, he weighed just 96 pounds (44 kg). He died the following month.
Read more about this topic: Aaron Kosminski
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,—at the end of life just ready to be born,—affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.... So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)