Automatic XML parsing discards text elements

Version: 2.3.11

When submitting a XML formatted POST request to my controller, it is automatically parsed into a Ruby Hash object. This would be really great, if it didn't discard all text elements from the XML. <elem foo="bar">Some text</elem> just becomes {'elem' => { 'foo' => 'bar' } } without any reference to the text element. If there's a way to disable automatic parsing, I could use hpricot to parse the XML.