This is the most extraordinary and perplexing case of all the many I’ve sifted through while finding material for this blog. It was printed in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1827, and written by a Dr Salmon A. Arnold from Providence, Rhode Island. Dr Arnold acknowledges in a footnote that a shorter account of the case had … Read more
Month: September 2016
Toast and herbs
William Salmon was a seventeenth-century physician and a prolific writer, the author of numerous books on surgery and internal medicine. He also practised alchemy and astrology in an age which regarded these disciplines as legitimate and empirical sciences (his contemporary Isaac Newton was also an enthusiastic alchemist).
In 1687 Salmon published a book entitled Παρατηρηματα (‘Observations’, for those few … Read more
In one side and out the other
Volume 6 of the Medical Facts and Observations, published in London in 1795, includes four cases submitted by a Dr Henry Yates Carter, who described himself as “surgeon at Kettley, near Wellington, in Shropshire”. He was no mere country doctor: he had studied medicine in America and practised on the battlefields of the Revolution before returning to England in … Read more
Severed, replaced, reunited
In June 1852 the New Jersey Medical Reporter printed an article about brain injuries. The following month a doctor from Newark, W. Mortimer Brown, wrote in with his own striking contribution:
The cases, published in your last number, of injuries of the head, with loss of a portion of the brain, have brought to my mind a case which I … Read more
The woman who vomited pins
In 1873 The Lancet reported this case from Belford Hospital, an institution which had been founded eight years earlier, and the first to serve the largely rural population around Fort William in Scotland. This was probably the strangest case anybody concerned had dealt with:
Catherine M, aged twenty, a nurse-maid, was admitted on August 30th, 1872. The patient stated … Read more
Snake poo salesman
In 1862 an Edinburgh-trained physician, Dr James Hastings, published a slim volume about the treatment of tuberculosis and other diseases of the lung. It advocates the use of substances which much of the profession would regard as unorthodox, as he acknowledges in his preface:
It has been suggested that the peculiar character of these agents may possibly prove a bar … Read more
She needs a finger
On July 26th 1911 The Los Angeles Times carried what must be the most extraordinary classified ad in its history. The editor realised he had a story on his hands, promptly despatched reporters to find out more, and promoted the advertisement to a handsome slot on the front page. The headline certainly makes you want to read more. And … Read more
Flies in his eyes
Here’s a tale from an edition of The Lancet published in 1843 which caused me to squirm more than once. And may cause you to check there are no houseflies in your bedroom before you turn the light off at night.
A case is recorded in the “Med. Zeitung”, in which a serious inflammation of the membrana conjunctiva resulted from … Read more
The King of Smokers
There were plenty of doctors in the nineteenth century who thought that smoking was good for you; so there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary in this excerpt from an article published in the Medical Press and Circular in 1871:
So much, and often so much nonsense, is prated about the evils of tobacco that its virtues rarely get a … Read more