Many medicines prescribed by physicians of the past were chemicals now known to be highly toxic. Mercury, arsenic and antimony were among the harmful substances regularly administered for a variety of conditions. In this case, published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1759, a young boy was apparently cured by another chemical now known to be hazardous to health – but … Read more
Month: January 2019
A knotty problem
I recently learned a medical term I hadn’t heard before: ‘true knot’, meaning a knot that forms in the umbilical cord during pregnancy. Foetuses move around a lot inside the amniotic sac, and if the umbilical cord is long it is quite possible for it to loop and form knots – sometimes two or more. (There is also something called … Read more
Eighth time lucky
You may be familiar with this dramatic photo, which has been doing the rounds recently on social media (mainly thanks to Lindsey Fitzharris – @drlindseyfitz on Twitter – if you’re not following her, you should be)
It shows Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov, a Soviet doctor who in 1961, while stranded at an Antarctic research station, succeeded in taking out his own … Read more
The child who swallowed a pin
The eighteenth-century surgeon William Boys, although a distinguished clinician and Fellow of the Royal Society, was perhaps better known as an antiquary and historian of his home county of Kent. Among his published works is an account of the Luxborough Galley, a notorious shipwreck in which the few survivors resorted to cannibalism to keep themselves alive – one of … Read more
Four lambs and two puppies
This strange little tale appeared in various literary and medical journals in 1806. This version is taken from The Medical and Physical Journal, which appears to have been one of the first to publish it. It is a salacious snippet rather than a case report, and some contemporaries read it with scepticism: one leading doctor quoted it in an … Read more