More strange news from the Philosophical Transactions, the venerable journal of the Royal Society. This brief report was contributed in 1720 by Abraham Vater, a German anatomist who was a particular authority on the digestive tract (the ampulla of Vater, a structure at the meeting of the common bile duct and pancreatic duct, is named after him). It’s quite … Read more
Category: Remarkable recoveries
The boy who choked on his gold
I came across this interesting story in the Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Surgery at Paris, a collection of cases published in English in 1750. Until I looked into it more thoroughly I didn’t realise that this is not just a curiosity but a genuinely pioneering operation. It was documented in a treatise published in 1620 by the … Read more
A forgotten thing
This case, published in the Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal in 1865, is one that makes you marvel at the resilience of the human body. The author, John C. Hutchison, was barely nineteen – young to be writing articles for medical journals – and working at the Marshall Infirmary in the city of Troy, New York:
Lydia Lista, a little … Read more
The healing power of nature
At the annual meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association in August 1844, a doctor from Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire, Edward Daniell, presented this unusual case. He prefaced his account with the observation that it would ‘perhaps be interesting more from its novelty than for its value in a surgical point of view’. He wasn’t just being modest: as … Read more
The 43-year pregnancy
In years gone by, it was quite common for a doctor to pass on his practice to one of his children: successive generations of medics might serve their local community for decades. The Watkins family, originally from the Northamptonshire town of Towcester, is an extreme example of such a dynasty: Timothy Watkins (1755-1834) was the first of seven generations of … Read more
The cheese knife lobotomy
This alarming headline was attached to a letter sent to The Lancet in 1838 by Dr Congreve Selwyn, a family physician in Cheltenham. His brief communication related the story of an unfortunate accident which had taken place in his practice some 17 years earlier:
William Bishop, living at Hill Farm, Bosbury, Herefordshire, aged four years at the time of the … Read more
The man whose intestines twinkled like stars
Every so often I read an old medical case that makes me wince and ask myself, “However did they recover from that?” This tale, reported 142 years ago in the Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal, falls squarely into this category. The initial injury was bad enough, but the circumstances of the case presented the surgeon with practical complications … Read more
The case of the drunken Dutchman’s guts
On August 28th 1641 the 21-year-old English diarist John Evelyn visited the great university of Leiden in the Netherlands. He was unimpressed, declaring it ‘nothing extraordinary’, but one building took his fancy:
Among all the rarities of this place, I was much pleased with a sight of their anatomy-school, theater, and repository adjoining, which is well furnished with natural … Read more
Hook, line and Liston
In 1844 the great surgeon Robert Liston gave an influential series of lectures at University College London on the technique of surgery. The second lecture in this series, concerning operations on the neck, includes this unusual case:
Occasionally you find very curious foreign bodies lodged in the throat. The following case came under my notice years ago, though the patient … Read more
The lancer lanced
On November 9th 1869 a private from the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, ‘Richard F.’, arrived at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley, a large military hospital on the south coast of England. He had been evacuated from Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, where he had been serving with the British forces before being invalided out of the service with … Read more