It used to be thought dangerous to give a hot horse cold water; when I first heard this canard as a schoolboy I remember my informant telling me gravely that cold water kills horses instantly. Not having much to do with horses, it has taken me thirty years to discover that few, if any, equine deaths are attributed to … Read more
Author: Thomas Morris
A fatal nose job
This dramatic headline from an early edition of The Lancet caught my eye:
It’s a great illustration of the changing nature of surgical risk. If today a patient died after having a nose job, it would probably be on the front page of the newspapers; death is not an expected complication of a nose reconstruction. But 1827 was a very … Read more
The bird and the bees
In August 1868 the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in Norwich. One of the members invited to present a paper was Lydia Becker, an amateur astronomer and botanist; among her accomplishments she could count a gold medal from the Royal Horticultural Society and the respect of Charles Darwin, with whom she corresponded.… Read more
Roger ‘two urinals’ Clerk
In 1868 the Corporation of London published a slim volume entitled Memorials of London and London Life in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries. It contained extracts from the archives of the City of London. An editor at The Lancet read it, and found an anecdote which remained topical, half a millennium later:
One Roger Clerk professed to be … Read more
The mystery of the poisonous cheese
In 1835 the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal published a series of articles about cheese. For several months New England residents had been falling ill after consuming the delicious comestible, and nobody knew why. A Dr Alcott contributed this account of one such outbreak:
At the raising of a building belonging to Seth Thomas, Esq. in Plymouth, Litchfield county, Conn. … Read more
Le hundred-up club
In August 1895 the Paris correspondent of the Daily Telegraph reported the results of an unusual survey:
A census of centenarians has been taken in France, and the results, which have been published, show that there are now alive in this country 213 persons who are over one hundred years old. Of these 147 are women, the alleged stronger sex … Read more
Nutmegs is the best spice for students
In 1584 the Tudor physician Thomas Cogan published The Haven of Health, a guide to maintaining health primarily aimed at the student. The bulk of the book concerns food and the diet, working its way systematically through different types of meat, vegetable, fruit, herbs and spices – and paying attention to their medicinal properties as well as their nutritional … Read more
The supernumerary leg
Before the advent of antenatal screening, birth abnormalities were far commoner than they are today. Early medical journals had a particular fascination with these ‘monstrosities’, printing regular reports of children born without limbs or with anomalous or absent internal organs. Reading these reports today, there is often little sense that they were printed for any inherent scientific interest, but to … Read more
Monsieur Mangetout
Medical journals usually pride themselves on presenting cutting-edge research, but in 1851 The Medical Examiner reported a case which was already half a century old. It’s not clear what they thought it added to contemporary scholarship, but it’s certainly a good story.
Charles Demery, a native of Benche, on the frontiers of Poland, aged 21, was brought to the prison … Read more
Put a bandage on it
The treatment of venereal disease was one of the main functions of the medical profession from the Middle Ages until the adoption of antibiotics in the late 1940s greatly reduced their incidence and seriousness. It was an uphill battle: although they had some success with mercury, there was little that was truly effective against infections like syphilis and gonorrhoea. In … Read more