The Canada Medical Journal for 1870 has news from the Raj:
We mentioned the other day the severe injury sustained by one of the young lions at the park from a mauling of its tail by one of the tigers in the adjoining compartment. At first there was reason to believe that no dangerous results would follow, but on Friday … Read more
In 1799, as the French Revolution entered its final phase and Napoleon prepared to seize power, European medics engaged in a pertinent debate. The Medical and Physical Journal reports:
Among other singular questions lately agitated in France and Germany, the following is not the least curious: Whether the separated head of a person suffering on the scaffold be still, for … Read more
News of a curious case reaches London from France:
Mademoiselle Melanie had enjoyed good health up to the age of twenty-one, when she began to suffer from dry cough, with pain in the chest and headache; in January, 1841, she was attacked by pleurisy of the right side, and since then has continued to suffer from pain in that region.… Read more
A previous post about the boy who vomited millipedes proved surprisingly popular – so when I came across this tale of a girl who cried spiders it seemed too good to waste.
On February 5th 1840, Dr Lopez, a physician from Mobile, Alabama, visited a young woman in Charleston. The previous week she had been staying with friends in … Read more
Compulsive swallowers have always featured heavily in medical literature. There are numerous cases in 19th-century journals – but most of the individuals concerned were obviously suffering from some kind of mental illness. This, from the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions for 1823, is the first I’ve come across in which the patient was swallowing knives for a laugh.
In the month … Read more
On September 22nd 1846, Dr James Tunstall of Bath wrote to Sir Charles Napier, the Governor of Scinde (then part of the Raj; now Sindh Province in Pakistan). The province had been suffering from an epidemic of cholera, and Dr Tunstall believed he could help:
Sir -The alarming fatality that has attended the progress of the cholera morbus in … Read more
The editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal surely had no idea of the furore that he was provoking in March 1839 when he published an inoffensive little article about parish priests:
Within less than twenty years a new disease has been developed in this country, which is almost exclusively confined to parish ministers. It is a loss of … Read more
I recently came across a charming little medical book aimed at children, and first published in Germany in the 18th century. Its author, Bernhard Christoph Faust, was personal physician to an obscure German nobleman, the Count of Schaumburg-Lippe in lower Saxony. In 1792 he published Catechism of Health, a short work which uses the question-and-answer form of the Christian … Read more
The index for Volume 5 of The Lancet, published in 1824, contains this intriguing entry:
Indexes are not often used to pursue feuds, but the story behind this entry was a bitter rivalry which lasted for several years. So who was ‘Simon Pure’, and why had he aroused the wrath of the editor of The Lancet? ‘Simon Pure’ … Read more
On April 1st 1841 Thomas Young, a labourer at a forge, walked into the Metropolitan Free Hospital in London and asked to be cured of his stutter. Now aged 21, he had been unable to articulate clearly since early childhood. Dr Bennet Lucas, who examined him, noted that
when he attempts to pronounce any word, he protrudes his tongue, … Read more