Occasionally a single operation is deemed so impressive that it goes down in history under the name of the surgeon who performed it. In 1817 the English surgeon Sir Astley Cooper astonished his colleagues by tying a ligature around the abdominal aorta, the largest blood vessel of the abdomen, to treat a patient with an aneurysm of the iliac artery. … Read more
Author: Thomas Morris
Mother knows best
Sometimes doctors don’t have all the answers. Here’s a case in which the medics actually gave up on their patient, who was then cured by her own mother. This story is taken from Dr S.D. Gross’s Practical Treatise on Foreign Bodies in the Air-Passages, a doorstopper of a book published in 1854. Dr Gross devotes an entire chapter to … Read more
Attempted suicide by spoon
When Dr Samuel White, a doctor from the town of Hudson in upstate New York, took on this case in 1806 he got more than he bargained for. He reported the unusual circumstances in The Medical Repository the following year:
May 22nd, 1806, George Macy, aged twenty-six, became a patient of mine, with a rheumatic white swelling of the left … Read more
A most fortunate escape
Here’s a tale of misadventure so stupid that it wouldn’t be out of place in the annual Darwin Awards. This case was reported to the Ohio Medical and Surgical Journal in 1849 by a Dr William Lindsay.
On the 27th of Nov., 1844, he [Dr Linsday] was called to see the young man who was the subject of the accident, … Read more
The soldier operated on himself
Isidor Glück was a Hungarian surgeon who emigrated to London and then the United States in the early 1850s. As a supporter of the failed revolution led by his compatriot Lajos Kossuth in 1848 he had little option but to leave his homeland, and spent the rest of his life in exile. In 1855 he was invited to give a … Read more
The spear and the eucalyptus tree
In 1891 The Lancet printed this case report by Andrew Ross, a doctor who some years earlier had been practising in the small Australian settlement of Molong in New South Wales:
On Dec. 25th a messenger arrived requesting my attendance on one “Harry,” an aboriginal, who had, in an encounter with another of the race, arising through some quarrel over … Read more
Rings on his fingers
In 1855 Dr D. D. Slade of Boston reported the following freak occurrence to The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal:
I was awakened at about 3 o’clock, a few mornings since, by a young man who said that he had lost the little finger of his right hand. The account given was as follows: being a clerk in the … Read more
An unexpected discovery
Today’s news is culled from an edition of The Northern Journal of Medicine published in 1845. It brings a new meaning to the phrase ‘biting your tongue’:
A German soldier was wounded in the battle of Gross-Gorschen (2nd May 1813) by a musket ball, which penetrated the left cheek, carrying away the four last molars of the upper jaw, and, … Read more
A most remarkable accident
Here’s a case from The Medical Museum published in 1764 – more than seventy years after the patient had been treated and cured. To be fair to the tardy journal editor, it is a pretty unusual story:
A most remarkable accident befell a young man near Hall in Saxony, whose name was Andreas Rudleff, being about twenty-six years of age, … Read more
A leech in the throat
Ever swallowed a leech by accident? Me neither. Here’s a tale told by Surgeon-Lieutenant T.A. Granger, a surgeon in the British army in India, in a letter to the British Medical Journal in 1895. It might make you a bit more careful about your drinking water next time you’re abroad:
Several days ago I received a note from the political … Read more