Today’s tale is a ‘news in brief’ item published by The Medical Standard in 1895:
Drs. Hart and Watts of the Bellevue Hospital staff report a case in which a machinist working at a wire machine heard something snap and felt a violent pain in his arm. The pain became so intense that he was brought to Bellevue Hospital.
Today’s post is something of a rarity, since it comes from a medical journal which only existed for a year, and was read by a very select group of physicians. The Confederate States Medical and Surgical Journal was published between January 1864 and February 1865, towards the end of the American Civil War. It was a valuable resource for doctors … Read more
Last week I came across an article which took my breath away. It was published in 1858, in an American journal, the Medical and Surgical Reporter, and it describes an operation of such audacity and skill that I can’t believe it isn’t better known. This is how it was reported:
At the request of a committee of the San … Read more
In November 1828 several English-language journals picked up a case which had appeared in the Revue Medicale, a French medical journal, the previous month. It begins promisingly:
A man, aged twenty-five years, was irritating his nostril with a needle…
As you do.
…when by some accident he suffered it to enter the nostril through which it passed and fell … Read more
In 1869 The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal reported the following unusual case which had taken place a few years earlier in California:
On our recent tour through Mendocino county, we made the acquaintance of B. F. Chase, a foreman in the Caspar mill, who received a wound in July, 1864, the nature of which, and his complete recovery, furnishes … Read more
After countless hours reading dreadful stories in medical journals I’m rarely shocked by a case, but this one [no need to stop reading – there’s a happy ending!] really gave me pause for thought. It was reported in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1853, by one Dr. Sargent from Worcester, Massachusetts:
A lady, of about 37 years … Read more
I recently stumbled across this intriguing snippet in John Cooke’s A Treatise on Nervous Diseases (1824):
I am informed by Mr. Carlisle, that “a few years since a man was brought dead into the Westminster Hospital who had just drunk a quart of gin for a wager. The evidences of death being quite conclusive, he was immediately examined; and within … Read more
Gunshot wounds have always been a particular challenge for the medic. Some of the oldest surgical manuals contain advice on removing balls or bullets lodged superficially – it was often possible to remove missiles from soft tissue or bone near the skin. But if they had penetrated deeper into body cavities or damaged internal organs they posed an altogether more … Read more
One of the overwhelming priorities of medicine in the eighteenth century was the improvement of resuscitation methods. Drowning was a major cause of death, and physicians realised they needed better emergency procedures to treat those who had fallen into rivers, canals and lakes. Medical societies were set up in several European countries to investigate possible resuscitative techniques. In 1774 the … Read more
Today’s medical journals pride themselves on their topicality, publishing the latest research as soon as it’s available – but those news values did not apply in 1845, when the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal agreed to publish a case report almost half a century old. It was sent to them by a retired surgeon, William Collyns, who had apparently found … Read more
