The Northern Journal of Medicine was a short-lived periodical which appeared for only two years before being acquired by a more successful competitor. But it had some illustrious contributors: published in Edinburgh, it was able to include papers by some of the most eminent medical academics in Europe. The very first edition, which appeared in May 1844, included this article … Read more
Month: December 2017
The bladder shrimp
On the eve of the Battle of Waterloo the Duke of Wellington was making a final inspection of his troops when he spotted one of the medical officers smoking a cigar. The Duke confronted him.
“Well! Hennen, is that the fortieth cigar today?”
“No, my lord,” replied the surgeon, “it is only the thirty-eighth.”
The chain-smoking surgeon was John … Read more
The eye magnet
Today’s story first appeared in the Observationes, a collection of case reports by the German surgeon Wilhelm Fabry (1560-1634). Fabry, also known as Fabricius Hildanus, is sometimes referred to as the ‘father of German surgery’ and was a methodical and scientific operator whose careful descriptions of his work exerted a powerful influence on later generations of medics.
It isn’t … Read more
The pea pod polyp
In December 1761 a leading French journal, the Journal of Medicine, Surgery and Pharmacy, published a splendid little article by a surgeon from Bordeaux, a Monsieur Renard. The headline describes it as being about ‘a pea that sprouted in the cavities of the nose’:
On the 15th of June I was called to see a three-year-old child in whose … Read more
The foot-long bladder stone
This short article appeared in a Norfolk local newspaper, the Norwich Gazette, on June 7th 1746:
On Sunday last was cut for the stone by Mr. John Harmer, John Howse, gardener, from Porland, aged 49, from whom he extracted a stone of a prodigious magnitude, measuring 12 inches one way and 8 the other, and weighed upwards of … Read more
The lucky Prussian
Maximilian Joseph von Chelius was a prominent 19th-century German surgeon who had a significant influence on medics right across Europe. His lectures were frequently quoted in the London and Edinburgh journals, and his textbook Handbuch der Chirurgie, translated into English as A System of Surgery, was widely used.
In a chapter devoted to chest injuries, Chelius … Read more