In the 1820s a young Canadian, Alexis St Martin, was shot in the stomach by a musket-ball. He recovered from the injury, but the wound never healed. His doctors discovered that this opening (known clinically as a fistula) communicated directly with his stomach. In 1827 he had put up with this external opening to his gut for two years, and … Read more
Category: Bewildering research
The guillotine – life after death?
In 1799, as the French Revolution entered its final phase and Napoleon prepared to seize power, European medics engaged in a pertinent debate. The Medical and Physical Journal reports:
Among other singular questions lately agitated in France and Germany, the following is not the least curious: Whether the separated head of a person suffering on the scaffold be still, for … Read more
Smoking’s good for you – as long as you’re a priest
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
A dissertation on pus
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