Here’s a story so replete with ghastly details that if it happened today it would immediately be featured in a TV reality documentary about emergency medicine, complete with dramatic reconstructions and lavish amounts of tomato ketchup. This was reported to the San Francisco Medical Press in 1860 by a Dr Peter Campbell from Sonoma in northern California:
In 1850, a … Read more
Here’s an entertaining snippet from Guy’s Medical Jurisprudence from 1812, concerning a young man who really didn’t want to be in the army:
Phineas Adams, a soldier in the Somerset Militia, aged 18 years, was confined in jail for desertion.
This barely does the poor lad justice – he was only imprisoned after numerous attempts to be invalided out of … Read more
A miraculous recovery today, taken from the pages of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This report was published in 1708 and, unusually, written by the patient, himself a doctor. Dr Robert Fielding practised in Gloucester, and during the Civil War was a prominent Royalist. On September 20th 1643 he fought in the First Battle of Newbury, … Read more
In 1807 the Philadelphia Medical Museum was sent an extraordinary case report by a local doctor who had been ‘sent it by a friend’. Neither he nor anybody else appeared to know who had written the report, so its authenticity is doubtful – but the events it describes were certainly worth reproducing:
In the evening of the 26th of September, … Read more
In 1843 a Dr T.O. Ward wrote to the London Medical Gazette on the subject of pain. A previous correspondent had suggested that victims of asphyxiation felt nothing and were insensible to pain. Dr Ward begged to differ, drawing on his own childhood as evidence:
When a boy, I was very fond of making boyish experiments on my powers of … Read more
An article published in The Lancet in 1848 contains a remarkable and early example of the power of the placebo effect. James Turnbull, a doctor at the Liverpool Northern Hospital, wrote an article about the history and effects of scurvy, the condition caused by a lack of vitamin C, for many centuries the scourge of sailors. It includes this gem:… Read more
In 1737 the Philosophical Transactions published a medical case so remarkable that it was still being quoted in journals well over a century later. It was reported by John Belchier, a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital in London and a Fellow of the Royal Society. The Gentleman’s Magazine from 1745 contains this anecdote about him:
One Stephen Wright, who, as a … Read more
In 1857 the Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery reported this unusual case of childbirth. What is particularly remarkable about it is that the birth itself was straightforward, and both mother and child were completely healthy – but it still bears repeated telling. The mother was a Mrs H., a ‘stout, healthy woman’ of 25. She was the wife of … Read more
Here’s an arresting story from 1870, reported to the Chicago Medical Times by a Dr J.F. Snyder:
James Thompson, sixty years of age, stout and robust, usually of active habits, suddenly commenced declining in health, without apparent cause. When I was consulted, he had been, as he expressed it, “under the weather for five or six weeks.” His symptoms were … Read more
On April 16th 1828 a ship called the New York sailed from its eponymous home port destined for Liverpool. She carried a full complement of passengers and cargo and – as reported in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal shortly afterwards,
on the morning of the 19th, was struck by lightning, which shattered the main royal mast, and, gliding down the … Read more
