CO p

Writers in the 1600s described the suddenness with which
this invisible gas would suffocate its victims. In one incident, a
band of eight men and one woman entered an area of a mine
where choke damp had collected and “fell down dead, as if they
had been shott.” Another account notes that choke damp smothered
its victim so quickly that the miner was “without access to
cry but once ‘God’s mercy.’” Miners would sometimes
encounter the gas while being let down the mine shaft on a rope
at the beginning of a shift and then fall from the rope to their
deaths. When exposure to the choke damp was not immediately
fatal, those afflicted were treated by their colleagues with “the
ordinary remedy”: digging a hole in the earth and laying the victim
belly down, mouth in the hole. As a last resort, they filled the
victim “full of good ale”; and if that failed, they would “conclude
them desperate.” Some who did survive were noticed to “have
some lightness of Brain thereafter.”