The University of Pavia in northern Italy is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1361. It has a distinguished history of experimental scientific research: Alessandro Volta, the pioneer of electrochemistry, was professor there for forty years beginning in 1779.
While Volta was working on his voltaic pile – the first electric battery – his colleagues in the … Read more
The medical experiments of earlier centuries often look odd to the modern eye. So odd, in fact, that it’s easy to dismiss them as stupid or gratuitously cruel. But we need to remember just how little was known two hundred years ago: things which seem obvious today were not yet even suspected. One example can be found in the Medico-Chirurgical … Read more
A post last week referred to Andrew Duncan, founder of the Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, the first regular medical journal published in the United Kingdom. In 1810 he wrote a paper for a publication slightly less well known for its original medical research, the Memoirs of the Caledonian Horticultural Society. His subject? Lettuce.
Opium, or the inspissated [congealed] … Read more
In June 1842 the Provincial Medical Journal devoted no less than ten pages to a long essay by the physician Sir Henry Marsh – an eminent namesake of the contemporary neurosurgeon, who was a leading light in Irish medicine and became physician to Queen Victoria. What subject could be so important that a leading journal would make it the main … Read more
News of an exciting new anaesthetic reaches the Medical Times and Gazette in 1865:
In a short article in the Lombardy Gazetta Medico, March 13, an account is given of a demonstration made by Dr. Rodolfi, at the Brescia Hospital, in the presence of a large number of Medical Practitioners, of the power of the electrical current to induce local … Read more
In 1823 The Lancet’s regular summary of goings-on at the London hospitals contained this interesting report of an early public demonstration of the stomach pump. The experiment documented here took place at Guy’s Hospital:
Friday, Nov. 21. At half past one o’clock the operating theatre was crowded to excess, in consequence of its having been stated on the preceding … Read more
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
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
[with apologies to Tom Lehrer]
Articles in early scientific journals are often little more than a series of anecdotes, without experimental controls or any attempt to reach sound conclusions through quantitative means. This flaw is particularly apparent in articles on medical subjects, where a successful ‘cure’ of a patient is often accepted at face value, without any attempt to establish … Read more
In 1841 The Dublin Journal of Medical Science printed a short report of a meeting which had taken place earlier that year in London. It begins with a sarcastic little disclaimer:
We are not quite satisfied that the subjoined paragraph, taken from a weekly London paper, contains a correct account of Dr. Elliotson’s Phrenological Lecture on the cranium of De … Read more