In 1823 a prominent London physician, John Ayrton Paris, published a book in collaboration with a barrister called J. S. Fonblanque. Medical Jurisprudence was the first English-language textbook on the subject, and went through many editions. It was a valuable resource whenever the worlds of law and medicine overlapped – criminal trials, inquests, or claims of medical negligence.
It also … Read more
One of the most popular stories on this blog is that of the nineteenth-century Frenchman who cut his own penis in two for sexual gratification. If you type the keywords ‘man cut penis two’ into pretty much any search engine, it’s the top hit – on the entire internet. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is.
That … Read more
In 1847, at a meeting of the Paris Medical Society, Dr Jean-Baptiste Pigné gave a short talk about cancer. Pigné was the nephew of the great French surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren, and had been appointed curator of the pathological museum founded by him. He concluded his lecture by describing an exceptional operation performed more than a decade earlier. It was subsequently … Read more
This blog has previously included a few cases in which a patient performed surgery on their own body. One of my favourites is the story of Colonel Martin, who found an ingenious way to reduce the size of a bladder stone, inserting a file up his own urethra to scrape it into submission.
That takes some beating, but in … Read more
In 1846 John Kyle, a surgeon from the Ohio village of Cedarville, submitted the following case report to The Western Lancet. The headline gives some indication of the unusual nature of the circumstances:
In the spring of 1846 I was called to see — Moore, a boy aged 2 years. He had been a very strong, healthy and fleshy … Read more
In 1833 one Dr Heymann, a doctor from the Westphalian town of Oldendorf, submitted a really rather extraordinary case to a German journal, Hufelands Journal der practischen Heilkunde. It is almost certainly without parallel in the medical literature, given that the headline translates as ‘A living mouse swallowed’:
A desperately poor labourer in the village of Lashorst, in addition … Read more
In 1801 a contingent of 20,000 soldiers commanded by General Charles Leclerc, the brother-in-law of Napoleon Bonaparte, set sail for the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Their mission was to recapture the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, now under the control of the former slave Toussaint Louverture. Known as the Saint-Domingue expedition, the two-year campaign was a disaster for all … Read more
A striking report* was published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1845 by Dr George Dexter, a physician from New York:
Some time since, a singular case of hiccough was placed under my treatment. Its origin evidently was from long-continued masturbation.
Dr Dexter appears remarkably confident in this assertion. On what grounds, you might reasonably ask – with … Read more
Sir Astley Cooper was the best known, and best paid, surgeon in early nineteenth-century London. He was a great innovator in the field of vascular surgery, devising new methods of treatment for aneurysms and other conditions of the blood vessels. His expertise was both deep and broad: he was an authority on hernias, limb fractures and amputations, and many other … Read more
In is not unheard of for a soldier to be killed as the result of a swordfight. But it is not often that the circumstances are quite as unusual as those of this case, published in The Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science in 1851 – with a patient who looked so little injured that the regimental medical officer assumed … Read more
