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
Author: Thomas Morris
The man whose intestines twinkled like stars
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
The case of the drunken Dutchman’s guts
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
If you can’t find a surgeon…
…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
The lawn-tennis elbow
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
A flaming nuisance
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
A dubious paper
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
Hook, line and Liston
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
The amphibious infant
It is June 1873, and some very odd tidings are published in the latest edition of the Medical Notes and Queries:
A story of an “Amphibious Infant” has found its way into some of the London papers. The subject is introduced thus:— “Strange results of very early training: a baby that paddles around under water for twenty-five minutes; a … Read more
The champagne cure
Pyaemia is a form of septicaemia (blood poisoning) in which a bacterial infection spreads from an abscess and becomes systemic. The disease is characterised by abscesses all over the body, and in the days before antibiotics it was generally fatal. The only hope was to open the abscesses with the scalpel and drain them, removing the pus in which the … Read more