This unexpected discovery was reported in a French journal, the Répertoire Generale d’Anatomie, in 1827. The patient was treated by Guillaume Dupuytren, the leading French surgeon of the day – although this was far from being one of his most celebrated cases:
Ann G—, forty-five years old, presented herself at a consultation of the Hotel-Dieu, requesting assistance for a … Read more
“How did it happen?” is a question every emergency physician will ask hundreds if not thousands of times during their career. The answer is usually mundane: “I fell off a ladder”; “I was playing rugby”; “I’d had a bit too much to drink.” But just occasionally the patient is mysteriously coy about the reasons for their admission to hospital, suddenly … Read more
In 1828 The Lancet reported a routine meeting of the London Medical Society. It began with a memorable presentation given by William Shearly, a surgeon at the Royal Naval Hospital in Deal:
After some ordinary business had been transacted, Mr. Shearly introduced to the notice of the Society a man who had suffered severe injury to the abdomen and loss … Read more
Unless you’re a marine biologist, the chances are that you’ve never used the word ‘lithophagus’. You may have eaten one, however: Lithophaga is a genus of mussels, some of whose species are edible, often served in a garlic, white wine and parsley sauce with plenty of crusty bread. Delicious.
But I digress.
‘Lithophagus’ comes from two Greek words: λίθος, … Read more
This strange little tale appeared in the London Medical and Surgical Journal in June 1832: 
A curious case of this description became the subject of investigation at the Bow-street Police Office, a few days ago.
Interestingly, this crime was not being investigated by what we would regard as the ‘official’ police. London’s Metropolitan Police had been set up just three … Read more
Maximilian Joseph von Chelius was a prominent 19th-century German surgeon who had a significant influence on medics right across Europe. His lectures were frequently quoted in the London and Edinburgh journals, and his textbook Handbuch der Chirurgie, translated into English as A System of Surgery, was widely used.
In a chapter devoted to chest injuries, Chelius … Read more
Albert Vander Veer was a distinguished New York surgeon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Civil War veteran, he was a notable pioneer in an age when operating inside the abdomen was almost a mission into terra incognita. An expert on the surgery of the uterus, he also performed daring operations on the gall bladder, intestines and … Read more
In 1834 the Lancet published a wonderfully unusual article by Walter Dendy, a surgeon from Blackfriars in London. The heading at the top of each page refers to it simply as ‘Mr Dendy’s Egg-Cup Case’ – a splendid description of a splendid case:
Mr Adams, a man 60 years of age, had been afflicted with inguinal hernia 25 years, which, … Read more
“In the midst of life we are in death”, in the words of the funeral service of the Book of Common Prayer. That sentence expresses the Christian notion that death is not the irrevocable end, but also a new beginning. Sometimes in medicine death and new life are indeed inextricably linked – as, for example, in this extraordinary case reported … Read more
This case sounds so implausible that you may start thinking it’s a spoof. I assure you it’s not: I came across it in Alfred Poulet’s Treatise on Foreign Bodies in Surgical Practice (1880), but it originally appeared almost a century earlier in a book by the French surgeon François Chopart.
Chopart was a pioneer of urology, the treatment of … Read more
