Nil by mouth
John Hunter was one of the great medics of the eighteenth century. His name lives on today in the Hunterian […]
Primitive equipment
August 2015
Unusual treatments
Brain of hare and turd of dog
Digging around in an 1851 edition of The Monthly Journal of Medical Science, I stumbled across a long and rather
Unusual treatments
Wrapped in a dead sheep
One of the difficulties of surgery, even today, is keeping the patient’s body temperature at a safe level. Core temperatures
Horrifying operations, Unusual treatments
A fright for sore eyes
Bright sunlight has long been known to be bad for the eyes. Prolonged exposure to UV radiation can cause a range
Horrifying operations
The original Lead Belly
A weighty matter was reported in the Maryland and Virginia Medical Journal in 1860: One of the most extraordinary operations
Unusual treatments
Medicated cigarettes: the new panacea
Nineteenth-century opinion on the subject of smoking was sharply divided. On the one hand there were many prominent doctors who
Horrifying operations, Unusual treatments
The port-wine enema
Alcoholic drinks were an important part of the physician’s armoury until surprisingly recently. In the early years of the twentieth
Mysterious illnesses
The human pincushion
This extraordinary tale appeared in The Medico-Chirurgical Review in 1825: Rachel Hertz had lived in the enjoyment of good health up
Hidden dangers
Cycling will give you heart disease
March 1895, and in the pages of The Lancet, Dr George Herschell is worried. Very worried. Cycling, rationally pursued, is
Unusual treatments
Wine, the great healer
Tetanus is a bacterial infection usually contracted through a skin wound – in the days before a vaccine was widely