Death by barley
Nineteenth-century medical journals are not short of ghastly occupational injuries. Factories, building sites and the new railways were frightening places, […]
Hidden dangers
Hidden dangers
Hidden dangers
A fishy business
In 1739 a surgeon from the village of Kelvedon in Essex wrote to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
Hidden dangers
Deafened by a kiss
Some injuries recorded in the medical literature were not the result of some ghastly accident, but had an apparently innocuous
Hidden dangers, Unusual treatments
A leech on the eyeball
Bloodletting is an inescapable theme of a medical blog set largely in the nineteenth century. Although venesection (opening a vein)
Hidden dangers, Mysterious illnesses
The mystery of the poisonous neckerchief
In 1873 The Medical Times and Register published an unusual case report from one Joseph G. Richardson, a doctor from
A nineteenth-century hacking scandal
In November 1870 a London surgeon took the unusual step of writing anonymously to The Times to complain about his
Mother knows best
Sometimes doctors don’t have all the answers. Here’s a case in which the medics actually gave up on their patient,
Hidden dangers
Rings on his fingers
In 1855 Dr D. D. Slade of Boston reported the following freak occurrence to The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal:
Hidden dangers
The perils of being a writer
Having spent most of the last year sitting in seclusion writing and editing my first book, I was amused to
Hidden dangers, Remarkable recoveries
Conceived by a bullet
There are many cases of supposed virgin births in the early medical literature, but few are as wonderfully unlikely as