A case published in The Medical Museum of 1781 is a reminder of a world we have gratefully left behind; one in which infection could rapidly maim or kill entire families, while doctors looked on helplessly. Life could be, in Thomas Hobbes’s phrase, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Hobbes was writing about war, but disease was as formidable an … Read more
Author: Thomas Morris
The winged ones: insects in the stomach
In 1824 the Transactions of the Association of Fellows and Licentiates of the King and Queen’s College of Physicians in Ireland reported an extraordinary case which would continue to be quoted in the medical literature for many decades. The case was reported in a paper whose lengthy title was abbreviated to the rather snappier ‘Dr Pickells’ case of insects in … Read more
Leeches: for external and internal use
If there’s one thing that everybody knows about early medicine, it’s the fact that doctors loved to use leeches. Attaching a leech, or even dozens of them, to remove a small amount of blood from a diseased part of the body was a favourite remedy for the best part of 2000 years – and was still being used well … Read more
The perpetual patient
In 1872 a case reported in The Lancet made quite a stir in the international journals. For once, it concerned a patient who was perfectly healthy – although he had spent four years persuading London’s leading doctors that he was gravely ill. He was regarded as a fraudster and condemned as a malingerer – but this looks a clear-cut case … Read more
Nil by mouth
John Hunter was one of the great medics of the eighteenth century. His name lives on today in the Hunterian Museum, a huge collection of anatomical specimens – both human and animal – which he amassed over many years for study and teaching. He was an innovative surgeon whose practice was heavily influenced by the discoveries he made at … Read more
Brain of hare and turd of dog
Digging around in an 1851 edition of The Monthly Journal of Medical Science, I stumbled across a long and rather dry article about Roman medicine by a Dr Simpson, professor of midwifery at the University of Edinburgh. His narrative is enlivened by a list of bizarre remedies favoured by Roman doctors. He then points out – rather in the … Read more
Wrapped in a dead sheep
One of the difficulties of surgery, even today, is keeping the patient’s body temperature at a safe level. Core temperatures can drop quite dramatically when a large incision has been made, and although it is theoretically possible to keep the patient warm by making the operating theatre hotter, in practice this makes conditions intolerable for the surgeons and other theatre … Read more
A fright for sore eyes
Bright sunlight has long been known to be bad for the eyes. Prolonged exposure to UV radiation can cause a range of problems, including cataracts and cancers. In 1802 a Dr Whyte, a physician with long experience of practice in Egypt and other hot climates, wrote an article for The Medical and Physical Journal about the dangers of sunlight in … Read more
The original Lead Belly
A weighty matter was reported in the Maryland and Virginia Medical Journal in 1860:
One of the most extraordinary operations in the annals of surgery has been performed recently in the extreme West, and deserves to be recorded on account of its boldness, successful result, and for the judicious method of procedure adopted by the surgeon. A man named Bates, … Read more
Medicated cigarettes: the new panacea
Nineteenth-century opinion on the subject of smoking was sharply divided. On the one hand there were many prominent doctors who condemned the practice as unhealthy, and even suggested that it caused cancers of the mouth; on the other, there were plenty of physicians who believed that smoking eased coughs and other respiratory disorders by promoting the production of mucus.
In … Read more