This case was reported in the Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports – the in-house journal published by the London hospital of the same name – in 1879. The author of this article, William Steavenson, was a 29-year-old house physician at Barts (as those familiar with the hospital call it). Steavenson’s interests included chronic asthma – from which he had suffered since … Read more
Under the skin
There’s a good chance that you’ll be at the sharp end of a hypodermic needle over the next few months – at least, I hope you will. The various Covid-19 vaccines are finally reaching the people who need them most: 1,296,432 doses had been administered in the UK by the first week of January. Assuming the entire population receives … Read more
Libel and lithotomy
In his textbook The Principles of Surgery (1801) the Scottish surgeon John Bell emphasised the importance of speed when operating to remove bladder stones, condemning
those long and murderous operations, where the surgeon labours for an hour in extracting the stone, to the inevitable destruction of the patient.
That quotation appears as a footnote underneath the dramatic headline of an … Read more
Difficult to swallow
Years ago, many leading hospitals had their own journals, with most or all of the articles produced by the institution’s clinical staff. A couple of American centres (notably the Mayo Clinic) still lend their names to medical journals, but on this side of the Atlantic such in-house publications have largely gone extinct.
This criminal caper was published in the St … Read more
Moulded to the lid
The Victorian surgeon Sir Jonathan Hutchinson was ‘one of the great medical geniuses of his time’, according to his entry in Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows, the biographical reference work curated by the Royal College of Surgeons. Hutchinson had an astonishing range of interests – he was an expert in infectious disease (the world’s leading authority on syphilis), in … Read more
Resuscitated by a Romanov
I came across this case quite by chance, drawn in by a striking headline. But after investigating a little further I was amused to discover that one of those involved was an ancestor of mine.
This story was first published two centuries ago, in the Annual Report of the Royal Humane Society. The humane societies were organisations set up with … Read more
Death by onanism
Victorian society was famously paranoid about the dangers of masturbation. For teachers, priests and those with responsibility for young people, it was a question of morals and the corruption of youth – but the medical profession also agreed that self-abuse was a vice with terrible consequences. The old cliché that the practice ‘makes you go blind’ was not said just … Read more
The golden pin
This story has a delightful combination of youthful misadventure and surgical ingenuity. OK, so ‘delightful’ might be a bit of a stretch, but I suspect you’ve never read anything quite like it. The case was first published in a French medical journal, the Journal des Connaissances Médico-chirurgicales, in 1847.
The headline translates as ‘Memoir and observations on a new … Read more
The surgeon and the smugglers
Richard Elkanah Hoyle was not a famous surgeon. He never invented a new operation, or contributed to a medical journal, or belonged to a learned society. But he was responsible for one of the most unusual tales you’ll ever hear.
In May 1845 a local newspaper, the Lincolnshire Chronicle, reported a mystery:
An intense sensation has been created in … Read more
The woman with two wombs
This exceptional paper appeared in the Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal, a relatively minor publication, in 1888. Thanks to its sensational subject matter it was soon picked up by journals all over the world. The author was a general practitioner who worked mainly in Birmingham, Alabama:
In the spring of 1887 I was called to see Mrs. B., … Read more