Ulysse Trélat was a prominent French surgeon of the nineteenth century. He served as surgeon-in-chief to most of the major hospitals of Paris, published important textbooks and received the highest honour the French state can bestow, the Légion d’Honneur. His name still appears today in medical dictionaries as the co-inventor of an operation to treat cleft palate, and for the … Read more
Author: Thomas Morris
A brace of bullets
On February 2 1888 the newly-founded Brooklyn Surgical Society held one of its regular meetings in New York. Local surgeons presented new research and reported on their recent surgical experience. But the most memorable event of the evening was a presentation by Dr George Fowler, a surgeon at St Mary’s Hospital. He began by asking one of his patients to … Read more
A watch spring, a bean and a clove of garlic
An 1868 issue of a French journal, the Bulletin général de thérapeutique médicale et chirurgical, contains this case report contributed by Paul Pamard, chief of surgery at the Hotel Dieu hospital in Avignon. Pamard was unusual among surgeons in combining his medical practice with a successful political career – and at the time of this case he was serving … Read more
The lemonade enema
The following remarkable narrative was published in The Medical and Physical Journal in April 1812. The author, Stephen Love Hammick, was in his mid-thirties when he reported this case; he was later made a baronet in acknowledgment for his service as personal physician to the Prince of Wales. He was also one of the original 300 fellows of the Royal … Read more
The practical joke
In 1873 a physician from St Louis, Dr Walter Coles, recorded a particularly unusual home visit he had recently been asked to make. His report was published in the St Louis Medical and Surgical Journal:
On the evening of the 1st of May, we were summoned in haste to the residence of a gentleman nearby, to see a boy … Read more
Jules Cloquet: the surgeon as artist
The French surgeon Jules Germain Cloquet was a man of many talents. A member of the Paris Academy of Medicine, he made his name as an authority on hernias and took an interest in the latest medical developments: in 1829 he even performed a mastectomy on a patient who had been hypnotised to feel no pain. But he was also … Read more
Britain’s first heart surgeon
Earlier today I was interviewed on TalkRadio about a man I believe to have been Britain’s first heart surgeon – an exciting discovery I made a few months ago.
Listen to my conversation with Paul Ross here:
When I wrote my history of cardiac surgery, The Matter of the Heart, I was struck by the fact that while it … Read more
A wonderful accumulation
This notable case report was published in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions in 1852. The author, John Marshall, was a young surgeon in private practice in London; it is not clear how ‘Mrs B.’ came to be his patient, given that she lived in Oxfordshire. Marshall later became a well-known anatomist, a Fellow of the Royal Society and professor of surgery at … Read more
The missing member
A strange case of mistaken identity was reported in the Berliner klinische Wochenschrift in 1874, and subsequently translated in the Medical Herald. It was given this striking headline:
W. K., a strongly-built farmer, aged 57, was injured on the 25th of October, 1867, by falling from his wagon. As he got up, the horse forced him against a tree, … Read more
The electric centipede
In December 1831 The Lancet reported these strange goings-on in France:
A farmer’s wife, twenty-eight years of age, residing in the neighbourhood of Metz, had for a long time been affected with an unpleasant itching sensation in the nose with coryza…
The OED informs me that coryza comes from the Greek κόρυζα, meaning ‘nasal mucous’. In colloquial English we … Read more