Rare and peculiar
“How did it happen?” is a question every emergency physician will ask hundreds if not thousands of times during their […]
Unfortunate predicaments
February 2018
William Harvey at the Royal College of Physicians
The Royal College of Physicians in London, which celebrates its 500th anniversary later this year, is currently staging a small
Horrifying operations, Primitive equipment
The ear drill
You’ve heard of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut; but what about a drill (or rather two drills) to
Unusual treatments
Mr Trought’s tobacco enema
In June 1828 the Lancet published a pair of short case histories that contemporary readers must have found rather confusing.
Primitive equipment
Plagiarising the past
In 1850 a doctor from New Buckenham in Norfolk, Horace Howard, submitted this short case report to The Lancet: The
Mysterious illnesses
An enormous concretion
At a meeting of the Pathological Society of London in 1855, members were shown a specimen that might have been