In 1824 King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu of Hawaii made a state visit to Britain. The kingdom of Hawaii had been established in 1795 and was known in Europe as the Sandwich Islands, a name given by Captain James Cook on his voyages in 1778. The king and queen arrived in May 1824, and toured London. They were due … Read more
Month: June 2016
The amputee obstacle course
It’s May 1852, and Dr Sandborn from Lowell in Massachusetts has had a very interesting morning:
The patient, Mr. Wm. Mason, 18 years of age, had been for a short time employed in the Tremont Cotton Mills, of this city, as a tender of a machine called the “picker.” On the morning of the 6th of May last, while in … Read more
Bolt from the blue
Last night was a dramatic one in London, with electrical storms and flash floods. It’s been a bad year for deaths by lightning: Bangladesh has seen a near-record 261 fatalities so far in 2016, and there have been an unusual number of deaths and injuries in Europe. This week is Lightning Safety Awareness Week in the USA, where over 50 … Read more
Amputating the bowels
Browsing an 1869 edition of The Lancet I stumbled across a short news article with this promising headline:
A cutting from an American paper gives us an account of a remarkable operation for umbilical hernia, in which the operator, Dr. G. D. Beebe, found it necessary to cut away between four and five feet of sphacelated small intestine.
‘Sphacelated’ is … Read more
Occupation: glass and nail eater
This case, reported in the Annals of Surgery in 1907, has one of the best patient histories I’ve ever read. The medical literature is packed with examples of people swallowing indigestible objects, but this example is surely one of the most extraordinary. The narrator is Arthur E. Benjamin, a surgeon from Minneapolis:
Mr. E. W., aged 47, American, 4 feet … Read more
A case for Dr Bell
When I first read this case I found myself thinking that it would not be out of place in a Sherlock Holmes story. Happily this is no coincidence – Holmes’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is very likely to have been familiar with it. It first appeared in an article in the Edinburgh Surgical Journal in 1875:
Death from peas
In July 1842 the London Medical Gazette printed one of the most intriguing headlines in the history of the journal:
The story accompanying it was told by George Johnson, a physician’s assistant at King’s College Hospital in London. This is what he had to relate:
John Lydbury, aged 60, labourer, was brought to the hospital on Monday, June 27th, when … Read more
The double monster
The phenomenon of conjoined twins was poorly understood until the twentieth century. Though even the earliest medical journals contain reports of many cases, the predominant tone is one of horror and even fear rather than compassion or detached interest. Right up until the end of the nineteenth century, words such as ‘monster’ or ‘monstrosity’ were commonly used to describe them, … Read more
The horn of a dilemma
In 1852 the editor of the North American Lancet, Dr Horace Nelson, reported an unfortunate turn of events. His prose can best be described as florid:
In the morning of one of the many days, with which we have been lately visited, when the thermometer ran down in the neighborhood of a baker’s dozen below 0, an individual retired … Read more
Killed by a corkscrew
At a meeting of the Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society in 1850, a Professor Miller spoke about an unusual case from his own practice. The patient was suffering from what the doctor described as an inguinal aneurysm* – a balloon-like swelling in an artery in the groin:
The man was about sixty years of age, robust and florid; he had been … Read more