From all appearances, the handle had broken off near the junction and she had evidently fallen forward with the remaining part in her mouth, driving it forcibly against the spine, and causing the point of the handle to run downward in front of the cervical vertebrae.

On postmortem examination, a sharp piece of wood about two inches long, corresponding to the missing portion of the broken mirror handle, was found lying between the posterior wall of the esophagus and the spine.
Hennig mentions a case of gunshot wound of the neck in which the musket ball was lodged in the posterior portion of the neck and was subsequently discharged by the anus.
Injuries of the cervical vertebrae, while extremely grave, and declared by some authors to be inevitably fatal, are, however, not always followed by death or permanently bad results.

Barwell mentions a man of sixty-three who, in a fit of despondency, threw himself from a window, having fastened a rope to his neck and to the window-sill.

He fell 11 or 12 feet, and in doing so suffered a subluxation of the 4th cervical vertebra.

It slowly resumed the normal position by the elasticity of the intervertebral fibrocartilage, and there was complete recovery in ten days.