In 1875 the American surgeon Charles Brigham recorded this wince-inducing case from his practice in San Francisco. The details are contained in a volume he published the following year, Surgical Cases with Illustrations. It’s a notable book, one of the earliest to feature extensive photographs of the cases described. Until the mid-19th century, most medical illustrations were engravings … Read more
Month: June 2016
Two spoonsful of brain on the pillow
Here’s a story so replete with ghastly details that if it happened today it would immediately be featured in a TV reality documentary about emergency medicine, complete with dramatic reconstructions and lavish amounts of tomato ketchup. This was reported to the San Francisco Medical Press in 1860 by a Dr Peter Campbell from Sonoma in northern California:
In 1850, a … Read more
The deserter
Here’s an entertaining snippet from Guy’s Medical Jurisprudence from 1812, concerning a young man who really didn’t want to be in the army:
Phineas Adams, a soldier in the Somerset Militia, aged 18 years, was confined in jail for desertion.
This barely does the poor lad justice – he was only imprisoned after numerous attempts to be invalided out of … Read more