The 1843 volume of The Dublin Journal of Medical Science contains this gem from Mr Robert Twiss, a surgeon from Kerry. Though it’s only a short report it made quite a stir on publication, and was still being cited in textbooks of dentistry many decades later. The first sentence is nothing if not arresting:
On the 24th of April, 1841, … Read more
In 1874 The Lancet printed this cautionary tale by Thomas Whiteside Hime, who had discovered the hard way that things aren’t always what they seem. He began his article by reminding his colleagues of the ‘great importance of carefulness in diagnosing’ – particularly where a supposed pregnancy is concerned:
Early in July last, M. G., unmarried, aged seventeen, became a … Read more
In February 1793 a small British expeditionary force under the command of the Duke of York landed at Hellevoetsluis in the Netherlands. They were part of an international coalition whose aim was to invade and occupy Revolutionary France. Known as the Flanders Campaign, the effort was a failure: the French counterattacked and succeeded in annexing much of the Low … Read more
Occasionally a single operation is deemed so impressive that it goes down in history under the name of the surgeon who performed it. In 1817 the English surgeon Sir Astley Cooper astonished his colleagues by tying a ligature around the abdominal aorta, the largest blood vessel of the abdomen, to treat a patient with an aneurysm of the iliac artery. … Read more
Sometimes doctors don’t have all the answers. Here’s a case in which the medics actually gave up on their patient, who was then cured by her own mother. This story is taken from Dr S.D. Gross’s Practical Treatise on Foreign Bodies in the Air-Passages, a doorstopper of a book published in 1854. Dr Gross devotes an entire chapter to … Read more
When Dr Samuel White, a doctor from the town of Hudson in upstate New York, took on this case in 1806 he got more than he bargained for. He reported the unusual circumstances in The Medical Repository the following year:
May 22nd, 1806, George Macy, aged twenty-six, became a patient of mine, with a rheumatic white swelling of the left … Read more
Here’s a tale of misadventure so stupid that it wouldn’t be out of place in the annual Darwin Awards. This case was reported to the Ohio Medical and Surgical Journal in 1849 by a Dr William Lindsay.
On the 27th of Nov., 1844, he [Dr Linsday] was called to see the young man who was the subject of the accident, … Read more
Isidor Glück was a Hungarian surgeon who emigrated to London and then the United States in the early 1850s. As a supporter of the failed revolution led by his compatriot Lajos Kossuth in 1848 he had little option but to leave his homeland, and spent the rest of his life in exile. In 1855 he was invited to give a … Read more
In 1891 The Lancet printed this case report by Andrew Ross, a doctor who some years earlier had been practising in the small Australian settlement of Molong in New South Wales:
On Dec. 25th a messenger arrived requesting my attendance on one “Harry,” an aboriginal, who had, in an encounter with another of the race, arising through some quarrel over … Read more
In 1855 Dr D. D. Slade of Boston reported the following freak occurrence to The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal:
I was awakened at about 3 o’clock, a few mornings since, by a young man who said that he had lost the little finger of his right hand. The account given was as follows: being a clerk in the … Read more
