At a meeting of the Glasgow Pathological and Clinical Society on November 13th 1877, members had a rare treat. The British Medical Journal for the following month takes up the story:
Dr. David Foulis showed the parts removed by him in the operation of excision of the larynx, viz.: the cricoid and thyroid cartilages.
The thyroid cartilage is the … Read more
Last week I came across an article which took my breath away. It was published in 1858, in an American journal, the Medical and Surgical Reporter, and it describes an operation of such audacity and skill that I can’t believe it isn’t better known. This is how it was reported:
At the request of a committee of the San … Read more
In November 1828 several English-language journals picked up a case which had appeared in the Revue Medicale, a French medical journal, the previous month. It begins promisingly:
A man, aged twenty-five years, was irritating his nostril with a needle…
As you do.
…when by some accident he suffered it to enter the nostril through which it passed and fell … Read more
This was the front page story in The Lancet on July 11th 1835. It’s a glorious case, but I think my favourite thing about it is the inclusion of the word ‘abnormal’ in the headline: can you imagine such an emission of milk ever being ‘normal’? It was reported by a Swiss medic, a Dr Koller:
H.V., 21 years … Read more
The year is 1827, and if you wish to apprise yourself of the latest and most important developments in medicine you could hardly do better than browse the pages of The London Medical and Physical Journal. It is everything a medical journal should be: up-to-date, authoritative, and – above all – serious. What, for instance, could be less frivolous than … Read more
In March 1827 The London Medical Repository and Review included a short report of an inquest which had been held a couple of weeks earlier. The deceased was a small child, whose name is not revealed – and since children were often referred to at this date as ‘it’, it is not even possible to establish whether it was a … Read more
Here’s something that will make you wince, and then marvel at the human body’s recuperative abilities. In 1849 Dr Thomas Sanborn, a surgeon from Newport in New Hampshire, wrote to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal:
A young man, aged 23 years, engaged in the Bobbin Factory, was caught, while standing over a revolving arbor or shaft, by his … Read more
One night in May 1832 the duty medics at St Thomas’s Hospital in London suddenly had a particularly difficult case to deal with. It was subsequently reported in the London Medical and Surgical Journal:
Joseph B. aged 24, a Frenchman, of sanguine temperament, whilst partially inebriated, on the evening of May, in an hotel in Gracechurch Street, suddenly declared … Read more
In 1869 The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal reported the following unusual case which had taken place a few years earlier in California:
On our recent tour through Mendocino county, we made the acquaintance of B. F. Chase, a foreman in the Caspar mill, who received a wound in July, 1864, the nature of which, and his complete recovery, furnishes … Read more
The Annals of Medicine for the Year 1802 are the source of today’s extraordinary goings-on. This case was reported by John Bower, a surgeon from Doncaster:
January 17, 1796: Ed. Cooke, aged 40, a day-labourer, was returning to his home, about two miles from Doncaster, between ten and eleven o’clock at night. Being in a state of intoxication, … Read more
