The Deputy Who Was 'More Dead Than Alive'—and Came Back
Shot in the back at North Yakima, Deputy U.S. Marshal Jack Jolly survived blood poisoning after a desperate abdominal operation in Tacoma.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Tacoma, July 16.—[Special.]—Jack Jolly, deputy United States marshal, who was shot in the back at North Yakima, is getting along finely. A prominent Tacoma policeman who remarked at the time he was shot, 'You can't kill a man like Jolly without cutting off his head and then hiding it,' is saying 'I told you so.' Dr. McKone, who watched over him at St. Joseph's Hospital, tells how Jolly came to overcome the attack of blood poisoning which it was expected for a time would surely carry him off: 'He had been sinking for several days. His pulse was 106. He had nausea and vomiting, and diarrhea, and could not hold anything on his stomach. A cold sweat had set in. He was much more dead than alive. On the day he looked as if he would die, I told him we would have to perform an operation, and he objected. He wanted to die. The next day he was worse, but wanted the operation performed. Accordingly we opened the abdomen, and found a large amount of pus about the spleen. A second incision had to be made to get the pus out and loosen the walls about the spleen. From that day on he took a new grip on life.'
“He was much more dead than alive. ... From that day on he took a new grip on life.”
Jolly’s recovery is a window into 1890s surgery, when an abdominal abscess was often a death sentence and doctors operated without modern antibiotics. It also recalls the risks faced by federal law officers in Washington’s interior—and the way newspapers turned a near-death medical drama into local legend.
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