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:
“When this ring
Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)