I haven’t had much time for blogging recently, since I’ve been working hard on a book which will be published later this year. It’s a true-crime thriller about a murder case in nineteenth-century Dublin, which has entailed weeks spent sifting through Irish newspaper archives. I recently stumbled across one medical story in the course of that research which was too … Read more
Category: Unusual treatments
Emergency coffee
This story of misadventure and an unusual resuscitation method seems particularly appropriate for what Twitter tells me is International Coffee Day. It was published in the Pacific Medical Journal in 1866; the author, Dr Cachot, was an eminent physician from San Francisco.
The daughter of Mr. D–, aged 22 months, swallowed from a vial a portion of tinct. aconite, with … Read more
The bottom feeder
A couple of months ago I wrote about a case from 1812 in which a patient with a massive facial injury was kept alive by lemonade injected into the rectum. Coincidentally I’ve just come across this report, published in 1878 in the American Practitioner, which covers rather similar territory. It aroused considerable interest at the time, since it … Read more
An English emigrant to Canada
It’s been a little while since I’ve had the time to write a blog post. The reason for this hiatus is that my wife and I have been preparing for our move to Canada, where we’ll be living for the next twelve months. We arrived in Toronto earlier this week, and wasted no time in discovering the superb local craft … Read more
The child who swallowed a pin
The eighteenth-century surgeon William Boys, although a distinguished clinician and Fellow of the Royal Society, was perhaps better known as an antiquary and historian of his home county of Kent. Among his published works is an account of the Luxborough Galley, a notorious shipwreck in which the few survivors resorted to cannibalism to keep themselves alive – one of … Read more
Mr Trought’s tobacco enema
In June 1828 the Lancet published a pair of short case histories that contemporary readers must have found rather confusing. Printed on the same page, they both dealt with cases in which a strangulated hernia had been treated with a tobacco enema (yes, really: an infusion of tobacco administered via the anus). In the first case the treatment was a … Read more
The eye magnet
Today’s story first appeared in the Observationes, a collection of case reports by the German surgeon Wilhelm Fabry (1560-1634). Fabry, also known as Fabricius Hildanus, is sometimes referred to as the ‘father of German surgery’ and was a methodical and scientific operator whose careful descriptions of his work exerted a powerful influence on later generations of medics.
It isn’t … Read more
The pigeon’s rump cure
Eclampsia is a serious condition affecting women before, during or after childbirth. The name means literally ‘bursting forth’, an apt description for the seizures that characterise the condition, which arrive suddenly and dramatically. The cause of eclampsia has never been identified, although it is always preceded by pre-eclampsia – a combination of symptoms including high blood pressure and protein in … Read more
The most eccentric physician who ever lived
Dr Messenger Monsey was one of the best-known physicians in eighteenth-century London, although probably not one of the most capable. He began his career as an obscure country doctor in Suffolk, but his fortunes changed after he was summoned to the bedside of an influential aristocrat, the Earl of Godolphin, who had suffered a ‘fit of apoplexy’. Whether by … Read more
Normal for Norfolk
If you lived in rural Norfolk in the nineteenth century and wanted to get rid of a wart on your hand, there were several options open to you. You might, for instance, steal a piece of beef (it must be stolen, otherwise the cure would not work) and bury it; as the beef decayed, your wart(s) would fade away. Or … Read more