In June 1852 the New Jersey Medical Reporter printed an article about brain injuries. The following month a doctor from Newark, W. Mortimer Brown, wrote in with his own striking contribution:
The cases, published in your last number, of injuries of the head, with loss of a portion of the brain, have brought to my mind a case which I … Read more
In 1873 The Lancet reported this case from Belford Hospital, an institution which had been founded eight years earlier, and the first to serve the largely rural population around Fort William in Scotland. This was probably the strangest case anybody concerned had dealt with:
Catherine M, aged twenty, a nurse-maid, was admitted on August 30th, 1872. The patient stated … Read more
In 1862 an Edinburgh-trained physician, Dr James Hastings, published a slim volume about the treatment of tuberculosis and other diseases of the lung. It advocates the use of substances which much of the profession would regard as unorthodox, as he acknowledges in his preface:
It has been suggested that the peculiar character of these agents may possibly prove a bar … Read more
On July 26th 1911 The Los Angeles Times carried what must be the most extraordinary classified ad in its history. The editor realised he had a story on his hands, promptly despatched reporters to find out more, and promoted the advertisement to a handsome slot on the front page. The headline certainly makes you want to read more. And … Read more
Here’s a tale from an edition of The Lancet published in 1843 which caused me to squirm more than once. And may cause you to check there are no houseflies in your bedroom before you turn the light off at night.
A case is recorded in the “Med. Zeitung”, in which a serious inflammation of the membrana conjunctiva resulted from … Read more
There were plenty of doctors in the nineteenth century who thought that smoking was good for you; so there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary in this excerpt from an article published in the Medical Press and Circular in 1871:
So much, and often so much nonsense, is prated about the evils of tobacco that its virtues rarely get a … Read more
The Scottish surgeon Archibald Blacklock is chiefly remembered today for the events of the night of March 31st, 1834, when he was one of a small group who entered the family mausoleum of Robert Burns in order to make a plaster cast of the poet’s skull.
Blacklock was an enthusiastic proponent of the pseudoscience of phrenology, the … Read more
In 1867 The Medical Press and Circular published a series of articles by the physician Dr John Chapman on a subject in which he was a world authority: flatulence. To be fair to Dr Chapman, he was also an influential publisher and an expert in psychology specialising in ‘neurotics’ – those we would now describe as suffering from anxiety disorders. … Read more
The English physician Samuel Merriman (1771-1852) was a leading authority on midwifery and the diseases of pregnancy. His best-known work, published in 1814, was Synopsis of the Various Kinds of Difficult Parturition, a treatise on the dangers of childbirth which was translated into several languages. In an engaging section on multiple births he includes a couple of wonderful anecdotes.… Read more
On December 6th 1848 the distinguished American surgeon Dr Valentine Mott read a paper at a meeting of the New York Academy of Medicine. It was subsequently published in the academy’s journal; and perhaps no more remarkable article ever appeared in that – ahem – organ.
The affection to which I refer has been humorously styled a fracture of … Read more
