This alarming headline was attached to a letter sent to The Lancet in 1838 by Dr Congreve Selwyn, a family physician in Cheltenham. His brief communication related the story of an unfortunate accident which had taken place in his practice some 17 years earlier:
William Bishop, living at Hill Farm, Bosbury, Herefordshire, aged four years at the time of the … Read more
Here’s a truly strange case that was reported in the Journal de Médécine de Paris in 1881. It concerns an elderly woman who was believed to have fallen pregnant. Such tales were commonly reported in the early medical literature – there are many to be found in 18th-century journals, for instance – but these examples were often supported … Read more
In the 1820s the British physician John Cheyne made a special study of the numerous ways in which soldiers tried to get themselves invalided out of service. Cheyne is best known today as one of the first to identify Cheyne-Stokes respiration, a pattern of disordered breathing which is a useful diagnostic sign in identifying several conditions. He moved to … Read more
Every so often I read an old medical case that makes me wince and ask myself, “However did they recover from that?” This tale, reported 142 years ago in the Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal, falls squarely into this category. The initial injury was bad enough, but the circumstances of the case presented the surgeon with practical complications … Read more
On August 28th 1641 the 21-year-old English diarist John Evelyn visited the great university of Leiden in the Netherlands. He was unimpressed, declaring it ‘nothing extraordinary’, but one building took his fancy:
Among all the rarities of this place, I was much pleased with a sight of their anatomy-school, theater, and repository adjoining, which is well furnished with natural … Read more
…employ a butcher. That, at least, is the advice implied by this unusual eighteenth-century case:
The hamlet of Clogher in Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland, is a bit of an oddity. Although it has barely 500 residents, it also possesses a cathedral – one of the smallest settlements in the British Isles to do so. Between 1737 and 1743 the Dean … Read more
It has been a bad week for injuries at Wimbledon, with two of the favourites for the men’s title exiting the tournament with obvious signs of physical wear and tear. Yesterday the defending champion Andy Murray hobbled out in five sets, obviously impeded by a sore hip that has been affecting him, we now learn, for much of his … Read more
In 1886 a physician from Glasgow, Dr George Beatson, wrote to the British Medical Journal with a rather unusual tale. One of his patients had written to him to tell him about an alarming incident that had occurred early one morning:
“A rather strange thing happened to myself about a week ago. For a month or so I was troubled … Read more
In 1813 the editor of The Medical and Physical Journal, Samuel Fothergill, accepted for publication a paper by John Spence, a Scottish doctor who had moved to Virginia three decades earlier. Spence studied at the University of Edinburgh in the 1780s, a period when its medical school was the finest in the world. He was prevented from graduating by … Read more
In 1844 the great surgeon Robert Liston gave an influential series of lectures at University College London on the technique of surgery. The second lecture in this series, concerning operations on the neck, includes this unusual case:
Occasionally you find very curious foreign bodies lodged in the throat. The following case came under my notice years ago, though the patient … Read more
