According to this story, the idea that people could spontaneously combust was developed and promoted by supporters of the temperance movement since they believed this was far more likely to happen to alcoholics than others.
Moralists have long advocated abstaining from alcohol, but in the United States, during the radical reform era of the nineteenth century (when causes ranging from abolition to vegetarianism to phrenology all promised to cure all of society’s ills), the temperance movement found fertile ground. Teetotalers including Carrie A. Nation and Frances Willard started a slow boiling fervor that would finally boil over when the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919—and it wasn’t long before the threat of Spontaneous Human Combustion was added to their arsenal.
The February 1863 issue of the Pennsylvania Temperance Recorder, for example, carried a story of a medical student, Jacob C. Hanson under the subdued title of “Fire! Fire! Blood on Fire!” The story claimed that Hanson had been working in a physician’s office when a drunkard stumbled in and admitted to the doctors that he had consumed two gallons of rum in five days. Hanson, alarmed at the imminent possibility of Spontaneous Human Combustion, suggested drawing blood to avert the catastrophe; according to the Recorder, “a pint bowl filled with this fluid was handed to one of the spectators who ignited a match, and on bringing it to contact with the contents of the bowl, a conflagration immediately ensued: burning with a blue flame the space of twenty-five or thirty seconds.”
You have been warned. Hope this doesn't dampen your New Year's celebration.
