TWO young girls were lucky to survive after the medicine they were carrying home to a sick horse quite literally exploded, in this list of close shaves compiled for our history series WHAT HAPPENED?
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We've scoured old Bendigo Advertiser issues to find some of the more extraordinary near-misses from the city's 170-odd years.
This list is not comprehensive by any stretch, but it does show how careful our ancestors needed to be when it came to mines, medicine and horses (especially horses).
Terrifying tincture triggers panic in High Street
Whatever you do, never, ever heat up horse medicine.
That was the take-home message for thousands of people in 1903 when a loud bang reverberated along High Street.
Crowds had spilled out of churches for Sunday strolls when they heard the explosion.
Within minutes, rumours were spreading that a little girl had been shot through the arm.
But no guns had been fired.
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Instead, a mixture of nitric acid and turpentine - known to vets of the era as black oil - had blown up in the hands of 10-year-old Annie Wilson and her 13-year-old cousin Millicent Wilson.
The pair had been popping back home from a chemist in the centre of town.
The amount of nitric acid was tiny - only the size of a few tablespoons, according to an account in the Advertiser the following day.
The chemist had carefully poured the highly volatile mixture into a soda water bottle and corked it.
The medicine was supposed to be applied externally to a sick horse in a stable owned by Annie's father.
But the girls had only gone a few hundred yards down the road when the bottle exploded in her hands.
"The girls reeled from the shock," the Advertiser reported.
Two bystanders immediately stepped in and discovered a deep gash stretching from Annie's wrist almost to the muscles of her shoulder.
"The blood flowed freely" and one bystander immediately carried Annie to a doctors surgery where she got 20 stitches.
The bystanders also helped Millicent, who was sobbing uncontrollably, and whose clothes had been rent by shards of glass.
She walked home after the explosion but her family quickly sent for a doctor after discovering a shard of glass an inch and a half long in her thigh.
Despite medical attention, "a piece of glass remained embedded in the flesh for some time", the Advertiser reported.
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Meanwhile, police officers were pushing back crowds at the doctor's surgery as people clamoured to watch Annie's treatment.
"The people showed all the curiosity of a crowd, and remained for a considerable time in the streets discussing the unusual character of the accident," the Advertiser reported.
"The dispenser who supplied the linament [sic] informed an "Advertiser" representative that it was not unlikely that the heat of the girl's hand, coupled with the warm weather, had caused the nitric acid to explode."
Trams roll onto tracks and into horses' nightmares
Horses play an outsized role in accounts of extraordinary escapes from death in the 19th and early 20th century.
Tales abound of injuries as skittish horses threw their riders.
Millicent Wilson's own father had been thrown from his carriage in the years prior to the horse medicine explosion.
In a short period of time he had died from his wounds.
Others were far luckier.
A man named W H Prior was dragged along a road when his buggy collapsed from under him in the spring of 1910.
His horse had been spooked by a tram and began playing up.
"In turning sharply, one of the front wheels of the buggy collapsed in an extraordinary manner," the Advertiser reported.
One eye witness told the paper that the wheel's spokes fell out "as though they had only been held by putty".
That proved too much for the horse, which bolted down the road.
Prior was thrown out of the buggy but the reins were wrapped around his hands.
"In this dangerous position he was dragged for 50 yards, the horse's mad careen being stopped by the buggy colliding with a tree on the side of the road," the Advertiser reported.
Prior was carried to a store over the road from the crash scene in a dazed condition.
Incredibly, he only had bumps, bruises and a sore shoulder.
He did not even need to go to the hospital, though he conceded that he should take a day or two off of work.
Trams appear to have become something of a menace around the turn of the century. They only added to the loud, alien noises on roads still brimming with horses - plus an increasing number of motor vehicles.
However, most horses quickly got used to the noise and many of the accounts surfacing in papers were about animals that had been brought into town from country areas.
Skull stops miners plunging to their deaths
A horse was not so fortunate in a somewhat disturbing story from 1871.
It died instantly when its head was crushed in mine machinery.
But its unwitting sacrifice saved two miners rising up from the earth in a cage that could be raised and lowered by horses at the surface.
Mining had become increasingly dangerous over two decades, as people delved ever lower.
Bendigo's miners risked cave-ins, flooding, suffocation and falls in their search for new veins of gold.
The miners in the cage that day were about two thirds up the 300-foot deep shaft when machinery attached to the horse's hauling rope snapped.
"And the cage began to descend with frightful rapidity, and it appeared that the miners were doomed men," an Advertiser story recounted.
"The beam of the whim [machinery associated with mining] in revolving struck the horse on the head with such violence as to fracture the poor animal's skull, and this had the effect of staying the velocity of the descent of the cage, which reached the bottom of the shaft with but with a comparatively slight shock."
The two men walked away with "nothing more serious than a severe shaking and fright".
This story is part of the Bendigo Weekly's regular history series WHAT HAPPENED?
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