In June 1852 the New Jersey Medical Reporter printed an article about brain injuries. The following month a doctor from Newark, W. Mortimer Brown, wrote in with his own striking contribution:
The cases, published in your last number, of injuries of the head, with loss of a portion of the brain, have brought to my mind a case which I … Read more
The Scottish surgeon Archibald Blacklock is chiefly remembered today for the events of the night of March 31st, 1834, when he was one of a small group who entered the family mausoleum of Robert Burns in order to make a plaster cast of the poet’s skull.
Blacklock was an enthusiastic proponent of the pseudoscience of phrenology, the … Read more
In 1840 an American physician, Dr Pliny Earle, visited the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. He wrote an account of what he saw there, subsequently published in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences. It’s a document of great value, not least because he describes a number of exhibits which were destroyed when a … Read more
Today’s surgeons are quite adept at reattaching parts of the body when they have been severed. Fingers, hands and even entire arms have been successfully reunited with their owners. You might think that such feats were only made possible by the paraphernalia of the modern operating theatre: microscopes, superfine suture materials and so on. That’s not entirely true – here’s … Read more
In 1855 The Lancet reported the proceedings of the most recent meeting of the London Medical Society. Here is one highlight:
Mr. Henry Smith showed a portion of tobacco pipe, nearly two inches in length, which he had extracted from behind the ear of a boy who, between two and three years previously, had fallen down whilst holding a long … Read more
There are many cases of supposed virgin births in the early medical literature, but few are as wonderfully unlikely as this one published in The Lancet in early 1875:
The following rich gynaecological contribution is reported in the columns of the American Medical Weekly for Nov. 7th, 1874, by L. G. Capers, M.D., Vicksburg, Mississippi. On the 12th of May, … Read more
I’ve documented a few extraordinary injuries in this blog, but perhaps none as remarkable as this one. The New England Journal of Medicine for 1869 contains this arresting case, submitted by a Dr Wardwell from New Hampshire:
I was summoned by telegraph March 1st, 1869, to Berlin, New Hampshire, to attend Chester Bean, who had been injured by going under … Read more
In May 1884 The Lancet’s Paris correspondent reported the following:
There is to be seen at Landrecies, in the Department of the North, an invalid artillery soldier, who was wounded in the late Franco-German War, when he was horribly mutilated by the bursting of a Prussian shell. The man’s face was literally blown off, including both eyes, there being … Read more
Browsing an 1869 edition of The Lancet I stumbled across a short news article with this promising headline:
A cutting from an American paper gives us an account of a remarkable operation for umbilical hernia, in which the operator, Dr. G. D. Beebe, found it necessary to cut away between four and five feet of sphacelated small intestine.
‘Sphacelated’ is … Read more
This case, reported in the Annals of Surgery in 1907, has one of the best patient histories I’ve ever read. The medical literature is packed with examples of people swallowing indigestible objects, but this example is surely one of the most extraordinary. The narrator is Arthur E. Benjamin, a surgeon from Minneapolis:
Mr. E. W., aged 47, American, 4 feet … Read more