In July 1842 the London Medical Gazette printed one of the most intriguing headlines in the history of the journal:
The story accompanying it was told by George Johnson, a physician’s assistant at King’s College Hospital in London. This is what he had to relate:
John Lydbury, aged 60, labourer, was brought to the hospital on Monday, June 27th, when … Read more
The phenomenon of conjoined twins was poorly understood until the twentieth century. Though even the earliest medical journals contain reports of many cases, the predominant tone is one of horror and even fear rather than compassion or detached interest. Right up until the end of the nineteenth century, words such as ‘monster’ or ‘monstrosity’ were commonly used to describe them, … Read more
In 1852 the editor of the North American Lancet, Dr Horace Nelson, reported an unfortunate turn of events. His prose can best be described as florid:
In the morning of one of the many days, with which we have been lately visited, when the thermometer ran down in the neighborhood of a baker’s dozen below 0, an individual retired … Read more
At a meeting of the Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society in 1850, a Professor Miller spoke about an unusual case from his own practice. The patient was suffering from what the doctor described as an inguinal aneurysm* – a balloon-like swelling in an artery in the groin:
The man was about sixty years of age, robust and florid; he had been … Read more
In 1875 the American surgeon Charles Brigham recorded this wince-inducing case from his practice in San Francisco. The details are contained in a volume he published the following year, Surgical Cases with Illustrations. It’s a notable book, one of the earliest to feature extensive photographs of the cases described. Until the mid-19th century, most medical illustrations were engravings … Read more
Here’s a story so replete with ghastly details that if it happened today it would immediately be featured in a TV reality documentary about emergency medicine, complete with dramatic reconstructions and lavish amounts of tomato ketchup. This was reported to the San Francisco Medical Press in 1860 by a Dr Peter Campbell from Sonoma in northern California:
In 1850, a … Read more
Here’s an entertaining snippet from Guy’s Medical Jurisprudence from 1812, concerning a young man who really didn’t want to be in the army:
Phineas Adams, a soldier in the Somerset Militia, aged 18 years, was confined in jail for desertion.
This barely does the poor lad justice – he was only imprisoned after numerous attempts to be invalided out of … Read more
In 1851 a physician from Ohio, Dr P.J. Buckner, was at a meeting of the State Medical Society when he got chatting to a colleague, Charles Beach. Dr Beach told him of a case so extraordinary that Buckner decided to travel 220 miles to see the patient for himself. He was determined to get visual proof, so – naturally enough … Read more
This blog has on several occasions chronicled the unlikely range of foreign objects which patients have managed to get stuck in various parts of their anatomy. See, for instance, the tale of the man who swallowed knives, the wine glass up the bottom, and the barometer stuck in the bladder.
But I think the following tale takes … Read more
With debate raging about the virtues (or otherwise) of eating a low-fat diet, it was interesting to come across this story from the Philosophical Transactions. It has long been known that eating sugar is bad for your teeth – but in 1728 one doctor, at least, thought the exact opposite. Dr Frederick Slare wrote this:
I have had reason … Read more
