Around 7,000 people in the US are bitten by venomous snakes every year. Many of these are rattlesnake bites, but thanks to modern medicine there are only a handful of fatalities. The most important breakthrough of the last century was the invention of antivenin (also known as antivenom) – a remedy made by injecting rattlesnake venom into animals and then … Read more
Author: Thomas Morris
A fork up the anus
Some of the best titles in the history of medical literature are to be found in the early volumes of the Philosophical Transactions. This example comes from 1724, and was sent in by Mr Robert Payne, a surgeon from Lowestoft in Suffolk:
James Bishop, an apprentice to a ship-carpenter in Great Yarmouth, about 19 years of age, had violent … Read more
Like an elastic ball
The great French surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren was known to his unfortunate juniors as ‘the Napoleon of surgery’ and ‘the brigand of the Hôtel Dieu’, the Paris hospital where he reigned supreme. While he was a difficult character, he was also very good. His name is mainly associated today with Dupuytren’s Contracture, a condition which causes the fingers to curve … Read more
The man with the wax face
In May 1884 The Lancet’s Paris correspondent reported the following:
There is to be seen at Landrecies, in the Department of the North, an invalid artillery soldier, who was wounded in the late Franco-German War, when he was horribly mutilated by the bursting of a Prussian shell. The man’s face was literally blown off, including both eyes, there being … Read more
A diplomatic disaster
In 1824 King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu of Hawaii made a state visit to Britain. The kingdom of Hawaii had been established in 1795 and was known in Europe as the Sandwich Islands, a name given by Captain James Cook on his voyages in 1778. The king and queen arrived in May 1824, and toured London. They were due … Read more
The amputee obstacle course
It’s May 1852, and Dr Sandborn from Lowell in Massachusetts has had a very interesting morning:
The patient, Mr. Wm. Mason, 18 years of age, had been for a short time employed in the Tremont Cotton Mills, of this city, as a tender of a machine called the “picker.” On the morning of the 6th of May last, while in … Read more
Bolt from the blue
Last night was a dramatic one in London, with electrical storms and flash floods. It’s been a bad year for deaths by lightning: Bangladesh has seen a near-record 261 fatalities so far in 2016, and there have been an unusual number of deaths and injuries in Europe. This week is Lightning Safety Awareness Week in the USA, where over 50 … Read more
Amputating the bowels
Browsing an 1869 edition of The Lancet I stumbled across a short news article with this promising headline:
A cutting from an American paper gives us an account of a remarkable operation for umbilical hernia, in which the operator, Dr. G. D. Beebe, found it necessary to cut away between four and five feet of sphacelated small intestine.
‘Sphacelated’ is … Read more
Occupation: glass and nail eater
This case, reported in the Annals of Surgery in 1907, has one of the best patient histories I’ve ever read. The medical literature is packed with examples of people swallowing indigestible objects, but this example is surely one of the most extraordinary. The narrator is Arthur E. Benjamin, a surgeon from Minneapolis:
Mr. E. W., aged 47, American, 4 feet … Read more
A case for Dr Bell
When I first read this case I found myself thinking that it would not be out of place in a Sherlock Holmes story. Happily this is no coincidence – Holmes’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is very likely to have been familiar with it. It first appeared in an article in the Edinburgh Surgical Journal in 1875:
