Early on a New Year’s Eve morning in Minnesota in 1980, a man named Wally Nelson stumbled upon the body of his friend lying in the snow just a few feet from his front door.
19-year-old Jean Hilliard’s car stalled as she was returning to her parents’ home after a night out. Wearing only her winter coat, mittens and cowboy boots, she set out into the minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit) night sky for the help of her friends.
At one point, she stumbled and passed out. Hilliard’s girlfriend’s body lay in the cold for six hours, robbing her of heat and leaving her in a “frozen state”.
“I grabbed her by the collar and slipped her into the pouch,” Nelson reported years later. In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio.
“I thought she was dead. She was frozen and harder than a board, but I could see some bubbles coming out of her nose.”
Without Nelson’s quick response, Hilliard might have been just another top player. thousands of dead You can get hypothermia every year. Instead, her story has become part of medical lore and scientific curiosity.
How can corpses survive in frozen conditions?
stories of people surviving Below freezing teeth rare enough Newsworthy, but not unusual. In fact, medical professionals in cold regions There is a saying: “Nobody dies until it gets warmer and dies.”
Recognizing that extreme hypothermia is not necessarily the end of life itself is the basis of treatment. Under controlled conditions, lowering body temperature slows metabolism and alleviates the body’s insatiable hunger for oxygen.
In rare cases, in medical settings and elsewhere, cooling the body can put a brake on the entire dying process, at least for a while, enough to cope with a slow pulse.
What stands out in Hilliard’s account is the extreme nature of her hypothermic state.
Forget the fact that her body temperature is barely 27 degrees Celsius, which is 10 degrees colder than a healthy human body temperature. She was – clearly – frozen.Her face is pale, her eyes are set, and her skin is pale. reportedly too difficult You will be injected with a hypodermic needle.
inside George Sather’s wordsthe doctor who treated her said, “The body was cold and completely frozen, like meat from a deep freeze.”
But within just a few hours, Hilliard’s body was back to health after being warmed by the hand warmer. She was speaking by noon, and her toes only became numb and blistered, but she was quickly discharged from the hospital and she remained unaffected by the night as a human popsicle, making a mediocre I lived my life.
To her friends and family in the community, Thank you for everything To the power of prayer. But where does biology stand on this issue?
Unlike many substances, water occupies more volume as a solid than as a liquid. This expansion is bad news for body tissues exposed to the cold. This is because there is a risk that the liquid contents will expand to the point of rupturing the container.
Even a few ice crystals that bloom in the wrong place can pierce cell membranes with needle-like fragments, leaving limbs with dark patches of dead skin and muscle, or a condition commonly known as frostbite. .
Various animals have evolved some nifty adaptations to cope with the dangers of sharply expanding ice crystals in sub-zero environments. For example, a deep-sea fish known as the Antarctic blackfin sea bass produces glycoproteins as a type of natural antifreeze.
tree frog change cell contents It floods its body with glucose, turning it into a syrup that helps it survive freezing and dehydration. Outside the cell, water is free to transform into a solid, enveloping the tissue in ice, giving it the appearance of a solid frog-shaped ice cube.
It’s difficult to say for sure how Hilliard’s body survived freezing, as nothing can be done other than observation from the outside. Was there something unique about her body chemistry? Or is it the composition of her tissues?
perhaps. A much more important question is what exactly “freezing” means in this case. Although Hilliard’s core body temperature was low, it was reportedly still well above freezing. There’s a world of difference between being figuratively “chilled to the bone” and literally freezing water in your veins.
The fact that Hilliard’s body felt solid; Common signs of severe hypothermiawhen muscle stiffness increases significantly, similar to rigor mortisthe rigor that occurs in corpses.
It may not be so surprising that the surface of her body was cold and white, and even her eyes appeared “hard” like glass. To maintain organ function, the body shuts down the routes to blood vessels under the skin, which causes the body to appear pale and remain noticeably cold to the touch.
Tenacious medical staff trying their luck with a smaller-gauge hypodermic syringe into a severely narrowed vein, especially when it is covered by a thin layer of dry skin pressed tightly against stiff muscle, may find the needle 1 ~ You might even imagine that you might end up with two bends.
Since we can’t know anything other than some surprising testimonies, we have no idea whether Hilliard’s “frozen” body was typical, if shocking, or in its ability to withstand such extreme changes in condition. We can only guess how strangely unique it actually was. But there is no doubt that she was lucky.
The more we learn about the amazing things the human body can accomplish, the more we may rely on medical advances and quick action to save lives like hers in the future, rather than relying on luck.
A previous version of this article was published in July 2021.
