On the first day of the Ashes Test at Lord’s, here is a cricketing curiosity – a Romantic poet picking up an injury in the winter nets. And evidence that the team physio of the early 19th century always kept the leeches handy.
On Sunday 14th February, 1819, the poet John Keats sat down to write to his brother … Read more
One of the things that all first-aiders should know is that blades or other penetrating objects should never be removed from a stab wound. Extraction should only be attempted by medical professionals in appropriate surroundings, since catastrophic blood loss may otherwise occur.
Those with a background in emergency medicine would doubtless wince at the treatment given to a patient in … Read more
If you’ve ever shared a house with a habitual sleepwalker, you may be familiar with the strange experience of having a conversation at 2 am with somebody who is fast asleep. One of my sisters went through a sleepwalking phase in childhood, and we soon became used to guiding her back to her bedroom, while saving the weirdest of her … Read more
On June 29th 1865 Jacques Roellinger, a private in ‘B’ Company of the New York Volunteers, asked to be released from military service. When he appeared before an army board to make his case for a pension, he told the officers that three years earlier, in the early stages of the Civil War, he had been present at the … Read more
In 1829 a fifty-year-old labourer, John Marsh, was knocked down and run over by a cart laden with bricks. He was conveyed to Winchester County Hospital, where the doctor who examined him recorded that
his scrotum, on inspection, was found to be of most enormous size, extending two thirds downwards between the thighs, and measuring in circumference seventeen inches; its … Read more
