The editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal surely had no idea of the furore that he was provoking in March 1839 when he published an inoffensive little article about parish priests:
Within less than twenty years a new disease has been developed in this country, which is almost exclusively confined to parish ministers. It is a loss of … Read more
I recently came across a charming little medical book aimed at children, and first published in Germany in the 18th century. Its author, Bernhard Christoph Faust, was personal physician to an obscure German nobleman, the Count of Schaumburg-Lippe in lower Saxony. In 1792 he published Catechism of Health, a short work which uses the question-and-answer form of the Christian … Read more
The index for Volume 5 of The Lancet, published in 1824, contains this intriguing entry:
Indexes are not often used to pursue feuds, but the story behind this entry was a bitter rivalry which lasted for several years. So who was ‘Simon Pure’, and why had he aroused the wrath of the editor of The Lancet? ‘Simon Pure’ … Read more
On April 1st 1841 Thomas Young, a labourer at a forge, walked into the Metropolitan Free Hospital in London and asked to be cured of his stutter. Now aged 21, he had been unable to articulate clearly since early childhood. Dr Bennet Lucas, who examined him, noted that
when he attempts to pronounce any word, he protrudes his tongue, … Read more
In 1785 the great English surgeon John Hunter and his Scottish colleague George Fordyce set up a medical society, the Lyceum Medicum Londinense. Its members met every fortnight in Hunter’s anatomical theatre, and the rules were fearsome: attendance was compulsory, every member present was obliged to present a paper, and there were fines for arriving late or leaving early.… Read more
Some truly bizarre goings-on were reported at the Exeter meeting of the Provincial Surgical and Medical Association in 1842. A Dr Davis, of Presteign, made this report:
A boy, fifteen years of age, the son of a labourer named Griffiths, living in the village of Bucknill, near Knighton, had for some months complained of pain in his stomach, which did … Read more
Here’s something to get unnecessarily worried about: apparently it’s possible to catch a disease through an electric wire!
As reported in the Medico-Chirurgical Review for 1833, a doctor treating a patient for a persistent case of ague (malaria) decided to try the fashionable galvanic therapy. This entailed a regular course of electric shocks administered to the patient’s body.
The … Read more
Samuel Auguste André David Tissot was an eminent Swiss physician of the eighteenth century, best known as the author of one of the first
scholarly studies of migraine, and for his much-cited work on the evils of masturbation, L’Onanisme.
In 1761 he published Avis au Peuple sur sa Santé, a little book aimed at the general public and … Read more
News of a strange malady, unique to the inhabitants of a single country, comes from the edition of The Medical Museum for 1764:
The Swiss are subject to a disorder, which is called by some Nostology, by others Nostomany, and by some again Philopatridomany.
As any medic with a working knowledge of ancient Greek will tell you, ‘philopatridomany’ means ‘ardent … Read more
William Harvey is deservedly one of the most famous physicians who ever lived. His demonstration that the heart is a pump which circulates blood throughout the body was a triumph of early modern science, a discovery that revolutionised medicine.
In addition to De Motu Cordis, the treatise in which he details the sophisticated experiments and subtle reasoning that led … Read more