Here’s a ‘news in brief’ item which appeared in the British Medical Journal in 1863, under this headline:
A warder of the Bagne at Toulon, has just met his death in the following manner: he was amusing himself, while off duty, with fishing in the dock, when, having caught a fish about seven inches long and two broad, and not … Read more
In February 1846 a group of gravediggers in New York had a truly spooky experience when they were asked to disinter a body from a burial ground on the corner of Broadway and Twelfth Street (a site now occupied by a branch of Pret a Manger – make of that what you will).
Their story was reported in the New … Read more
In 1734 James Jamieson, a surgeon from Thurso in the Scottish borders reported this case in the Medical Essays and Observations. It began with a common-or-garden accident:
Some Slates falling from the Roof of a House four Storeys high, upon the Head of a Girl about thirteen Years of Age, broke and shattered her Cranium at the Place where … Read more
In 1733 a book about depression and mental health was published in Dublin: The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distemper. The author, George Cheyne – born a Scot, though he moved to London – was convinced that the English were uniquely prone to depressive … Read more
This brief case report is a reminder that there are certain medical horrors which were once commonplace but which are never seen today in the developed world. Untreatable conditions would progress unhindered, often resulting in terrible deformity. Tumours could reach a size almost unimaginable to the modern mind – although in developing countries such cases do, sadly, still arise.
This … Read more
Recovering from the annual excess of mince pies and roast potatoes, I was amused to come across this passage from an important work published in 1829, Sir Robert Christison’s A Treatise on Poisons. Christison was one of the founders of nephrology, the branch of medicine devoted to the study of the kidneys, but was also influential in the fields … Read more
If you haven’t yet bought everything for your Christmas dinner, this tale from almost 200 years ago may cause you to remove a few items from your shopping list. Published in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions in 1814 by Thomas Chevalier, a distinguished surgeon and polymath also notable for his English translation of Pascal’s Pensées, it concerns a teenage boy who … Read more
You know those stories about old soldiers who suddenly develop mysterious back pain in their eighties, and discover that it’s caused by a bullet from the Second World War still deeply embedded in tissue? Most of them are true. Foreign bodies are often well tolerated by the body, and can lie dormant for decades before causing any problems.
This story, … Read more
Here’s a report of a criminal trial at the Old Bailey from a little over a century ago which truly made me grateful for modern medicine – and in particular for the modern regulation of the profession. In this case a doctor without any qualifications escaped with a slap on the wrist, despite having killed a patient.
On March 3… 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