Here’s a story published 150 years ago in the British Medical Journal which made me wince on at least four separate occasions. At a seminar at the Liverpool Medical Institution in January 1863, the cases presented for discussion included the following:
Dr. Nottingham brought forward a case of extraordinary wound of the penis. He said it was more properly a … Read more
Few creatures have provided such enduring fascination to the medical profession as the electric eel (Electrophorus electricus), a creature capable of delivering an electric shock of up to 850 volts (and 1 amp) on demand. Though remarkable, they are not unique: several other species of electric fish are known, including the electric catfish found in the Nile (… Read more
How about this for a lucky escape? It’s the sort of grisly farm accident which might be featured in a medical documentary like 24 Hours in A&E, with one significant difference. Anybody unlucky enough to be impaled by a stake today could expect major surgery and a lengthy hospital stay – but this patient made a total recovery after … Read more
Recovering from the annual excess of mince pies and roast potatoes, I was amused to come across this passage from an important work published in 1829, Sir Robert Christison’s A Treatise on Poisons. Christison was one of the founders of nephrology, the branch of medicine devoted to the study of the kidneys, but was also influential in the fields … Read more
As Christmas celebrations fade away and battered livers dubiously await the assault of New Year’s Eve, now is a good time to consider one of medicine’s oldest questions: how to counteract the effects of alcohol. Nineteenth-century medical writers seem to have been more concerned with prevention than cure: journal articles say little about curing a hangover, but contain several methods … Read more
As a seasonal antidote to all the misery and medical disasters usually documented on this blog, here is something genuinely heart-warming. The Victorians were particularly good at Christmas – they invented most of the domestic Christmas traditions we enjoy today, from the meal to the tree. A story published in the British Medical Journal in December 1869 shows them extending … Read more
In the last (I promise) of my trilogy of Christmas disasters, here is a warning of the dangers of festive decorations. This Christmas tree-related incident from 1849 was documented in The Household Narrative, the almanac published by Charles Dickens between 1850 and 1855. In the section tastefully entitled ‘Accident and Disaster’, Dickens reports the following incident:
An accident, fortunately … Read more
Continuing this blog’s recent Christmas theme, here’s a short article originally printed in the Medical Adviser in 1825. It was at about this time that one of the staples of the modern Christmas dinner – the Christmas pudding – began to be a regular feature of festive meals. More usually referred to as a plum pudding, this boiled pudding containing … Read more
If you haven’t yet bought everything for your Christmas dinner, this tale from almost 200 years ago may cause you to remove a few items from your shopping list. Published in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions in 1814 by Thomas Chevalier, a distinguished surgeon and polymath also notable for his English translation of Pascal’s Pensées, it concerns a teenage boy who … Read more
Insects and spiders colonising the human body were a regular feature of medical journal articles in the 19th century. For instance, there’s the woman with spiders in her eyes, and the remarkable case of the boy who appeared to have a millipede colony in his stomach. This report involving a beetle appeared in the American Journal of the … Read more
