Unfortunate predicaments - Thomas Morris

The golden padlock

In 1827 The London Medical and Physical Journal published a short report on what it called a case of ‘infibulation’. I was unfamiliar with this term, so had to look it up. It usually refers to an extreme form of female genital mutilation (FGM), the barbaric practice intended to prevent women from enjoying – and sometimes even engaging in – … Read more

The boy who got his wick stuck in a candlestick

The year is 1827, and if you wish to apprise yourself of the latest and most important developments in medicine you could hardly do better than browse the pages of The London Medical and Physical Journal. It is everything a medical journal should be: up-to-date, authoritative, and – above all – serious. What, for instance, could be less frivolous than … Read more

Painful news from the Bobbin Factory

Here’s something that will make you wince, and then marvel at the human body’s recuperative abilities. In 1849 Dr Thomas Sanborn, a surgeon from Newport in New Hampshire, wrote to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal:

A young man, aged 23 years, engaged in the Bobbin Factory, was caught, while standing over a revolving arbor or shaft, by his … Read more

The egested intestine

The Annals of Medicine for the Year 1802 are the source of today’s extraordinary goings-on. This case was reported by John Bower, a surgeon from Doncaster:

January 17, 1796: Ed. Cooke, aged 40, a day-labourer, was returning to his home, about two miles from Doncaster, between ten and eleven o’clock at night. Being in a state of intoxication, … Read more

Broken glass and boiled cabbage

Here’s a case reported in the London Medical Gazette in 1839 which we must file under ‘unbelievably stupid things done by young men’. It comes originally from a book published in 1787 by Antoine Portal, a distinguished physician who was personal doctor to Louis XVIII, and the founder of the French Royal Academy of Medicine. He recalls:

I saw … Read more

Cart to heart

In 1837 the Dublin Medical Journal published a short article by a Dr Lees entitled, simply, ‘Wounds of the Heart’. According to popular belief at the time, injuries to the heart were inevitably fatal, and often instantaneously. Many doctors still subscribed to this notion, but there was a growing body of evidence to the contrary. Dr Lees collected a number … Read more

The stone-swallower

Eighteenth-century authors were fond of giving their books ridiculously long titles – often so lengthy that they weren’t titles at all, but rather pedantic descriptions of each volume’s contents. Today I came across the longest book title I think I’ve ever seen – and it’s a medical book, first published in 1781: Hugh Smythson’s Compleat Family Physician. (That’s only … Read more

The bone-breaking sneeze

I recently wrote about a case of deafness believed to have been caused by a kiss – but here’s another story – rather more plausible – about a man who broke a rib with a single sneeze. It was reported originally in a Swiss journal, and translated in the Glasgow Medical Journal in 1863:

Ulrich B., of Suniswald (Canton de … Read more

The tin whistle

Samuel Gross was a giant of nineteenth-century American surgery, the author of numerous influential textbooks, including the first manual of pathological anatomy ever published in the United States. He is also the subject of one of the great American paintings, The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins, which depicts him performing an operation on a young man’s femur.

One of Gross’s … Read more

The dislocated eyeball

Here’s a wince-inducing case published in the Dublin Medical Press in 1853, and contributed by a Dr Jameson:

Peter Nowlan, aged 30, a powerfully able and muscular man, a corn porter, was admitted into Mercer’s Hospital on the 3rd of November, at half past twelve at night. His wife informed me that he came home that evening at ten o’clock … Read more