Some of the greatest advances in nineteenth-century surgery were made by military surgeons. British surgeons were not exactly short of opportunities: the country’s military forces began the century at war with France, and ended it fighting the Boers, with barely a peaceful year in between. While battlefield injuries provided horribly frequent opportunities for improving surgical … Continue reading A practical joke
Author: Thomas Morris
The wandering needle
In 1889 a surgeon from the Adelaide Hospital in Dublin, Kendal Franks, wrote a notable case report for the British Medical Journal. His subject was renal calculus, otherwise known as kidney stones. During an operation in October that year he had removed a stone which was quite unlike anything he’d seen before. The specimen is … Continue reading The wandering needle
Get Out Of Jail Free
In 1823 a prominent London physician, John Ayrton Paris, published a book in collaboration with a barrister called J. S. Fonblanque. Medical Jurisprudence was the first English-language textbook on the subject, and went through many editions. It was a valuable resource whenever the worlds of law and medicine overlapped – criminal trials, inquests, or claims … Continue reading Get Out Of Jail Free
Irritating the genitals by various means
One of the most popular stories on this blog is that of the nineteenth-century Frenchman who cut his own penis in two for sexual gratification. If you type the keywords ‘man cut penis two’ into pretty much any search engine, it’s the top hit – on the entire internet. If that’s not success, I don’t … Continue reading Irritating the genitals by various means
Finish what you started
In 1847, at a meeting of the Paris Medical Society, Dr Jean-Baptiste Pigné gave a short talk about cancer. Pigné was the nephew of the great French surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren, and had been appointed curator of the pathological museum founded by him. He concluded his lecture by describing an exceptional operation performed more than a … Continue reading Finish what you started
Extraordinary and probably unique
This blog has previously included a few cases in which a patient performed surgery on their own body. One of my favourites is the story of Colonel Martin, who found an ingenious way to reduce the size of a bladder stone, inserting a file up his own urethra to scrape it into submission. That takes … Continue reading Extraordinary and probably unique
A curious surgical case
In 1846 John Kyle, a surgeon from the Ohio village of Cedarville, submitted the following case report to The Western Lancet. The headline gives some indication of the unusual nature of the circumstances: In the spring of 1846 I was called to see — Moore, a boy aged 2 years. He had been a very … Continue reading A curious surgical case
She swallowed a mouse
In 1833 one Dr Heymann, a doctor from the Westphalian town of Oldendorf, submitted a really rather extraordinary case to a German journal, Hufelands Journal der practischen Heilkunde. It is almost certainly without parallel in the medical literature, given that the headline translates as ‘A living mouse swallowed’: A desperately poor labourer in the village … Continue reading She swallowed a mouse
An extraordinary quantity of worms
In 1801 a contingent of 20,000 soldiers commanded by General Charles Leclerc, the brother-in-law of Napoleon Bonaparte, set sail for the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Their mission was to recapture the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, now under the control of the former slave Toussaint Louverture. Known as the Saint-Domingue expedition, the two-year campaign was … Continue reading An extraordinary quantity of worms
Revealed: the cure for hiccups
A striking report* was published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1845 by Dr George Dexter, a physician from New York: Some time since, a singular case of hiccough was placed under my treatment. Its origin evidently was from long-continued masturbation. Dr Dexter appears remarkably confident in this assertion. On what grounds, you … Continue reading Revealed: the cure for hiccups