Pyaemia is a form of septicaemia (blood poisoning) in which a bacterial infection spreads from an abscess and becomes systemic. The disease is characterised by abscesses all over the body, and in the days before antibiotics it was generally fatal. The only hope was to open the abscesses with the scalpel and drain them, removing … Continue reading The champagne cure
Author: Thomas Morris
The monk with a perfume bottle stuck up his bottom
Today’s dose of medical mishap is excerpted from an influential textbook published in 1837 by George Bushe, a surgeon who died at the age of 39 and about whom little is known. Born and trained in Ireland, he emigrated to the US in his twenties and became a lecturer at Rutgers Medical School in New … Continue reading The monk with a perfume bottle stuck up his bottom
Robot hearts
The horrors of nineteenth-century medicine will return to this blog tomorrow, but here’s a brief intermezzo: The Guardian recently printed a long extract from The Matter of the Heart, my new book about the history of heart surgery. It’s an abbreviated version of the book’s final chapter, which looks at some of the cutting-edge technology used by today’s … Continue reading Robot hearts
The lancer lanced
On November 9th 1869 a private from the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, ‘Richard F.’, arrived at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley, a large military hospital on the south coast of England. He had been evacuated from Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, where he had been serving with the British forces before being invalided out of … Continue reading The lancer lanced
A strange tale
Today’s tale is a ‘news in brief’ item published by The Medical Standard in 1895: Drs. Hart and Watts of the Bellevue Hospital staff report a case in which a machinist working at a wire machine heard something snap and felt a violent pain in his arm. The pain became so intense that he was … Continue reading A strange tale
The ‘first’ heart transplant
Do you know who performed the world’s first heart transplant ? The surgeon usually credited with the feat is the South African Christiaan Barnard, who on December 3rd 1967 gave Louis Washkansky, a 54-year-old grocer, a new heart. The fiftieth anniversary of that celebrated operation falls later this year – but Barnard was not, in … Continue reading The ‘first’ heart transplant
An abominable, disgusting habit
There are plenty of common myths about Victorian social mores, but anything you have read about their disapproval of onanism (masturbation) is likely to be true. Nineteenth-century medics were apparently united in their condemnation of the practice, which was believed to cause not just blindness, but all manner of serious physical ailments – many of … Continue reading An abominable, disgusting habit
The long road to recovery
Today’s post is something of a rarity, since it comes from a medical journal which only existed for a year, and was read by a very select group of physicians. The Confederate States Medical and Surgical Journal was published between January 1864 and February 1865, towards the end of the American Civil War. It was … Continue reading The long road to recovery
Publication day!
A brief diversion from normal service on this blog for a gratuitous advertisement: today is publication day for my book The Matter of the Heart, the culmination of two years’ work. As well as spending innumerable hours in libraries reading medical papers, I had the great privilege of talking to cardiac specialists and even watching them as … Continue reading Publication day!
Pins and needles
At a meeting of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1852, London physicians were treated to the following tale, as later reported in the Medical Times: A tradesman’s wife, aged 41 at the time of her death, who had borne six children—the last in 1844—a tall, well-formed woman, who had suffered from the following symptoms … Continue reading Pins and needles