In 1859 The Medical Times and Gazette included this report from John Robert Kealy, a surgeon from Gosport. He relates how a patient stuck a pin in her ear – and recovered it through her mouth twenty-four hours later:
About six o’clock on a Monday evening in last month, I was requested to attend immediately at the house of Mr. … Read more
Today’s medical dispatch comes from the Canada Medical Journal, and was submitted to that publication in 1867 by Dr Thomas Jones, a physician from Montreal. It gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘putting lead in your pencil’.
Michael Creigh, a native of Ireland, aged forty-eight years, applied at the Montreal General Hospital, in December, 1862, for surgical assistance. … Read more
This is the most extraordinary and perplexing case of all the many I’ve sifted through while finding material for this blog. It was printed in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1827, and written by a Dr Salmon A. Arnold from Providence, Rhode Island. Dr Arnold acknowledges in a footnote that a shorter account of the case had … Read more
Here’s a tale from an edition of The Lancet published in 1843 which caused me to squirm more than once. And may cause you to check there are no houseflies in your bedroom before you turn the light off at night.
A case is recorded in the “Med. Zeitung”, in which a serious inflammation of the membrana conjunctiva resulted from … Read more
On December 6th 1848 the distinguished American surgeon Dr Valentine Mott read a paper at a meeting of the New York Academy of Medicine. It was subsequently published in the academy’s journal; and perhaps no more remarkable article ever appeared in that – ahem – organ.
The affection to which I refer has been humorously styled a fracture of … Read more
A short story, this one, but it packs quite a punch. In 1855 the Western Lancet published a letter from an anonymous army officer serving in the Crimea:
A curious thing occurred yesterday. A sapper was brought from the trenches with his jaw broken, and the doctor told me there was a piece of it sticking out an inch and … Read more
Some of the best titles in the history of medical literature are to be found in the early volumes of the Philosophical Transactions. This example comes from 1724, and was sent in by Mr Robert Payne, a surgeon from Lowestoft in Suffolk:
James Bishop, an apprentice to a ship-carpenter in Great Yarmouth, about 19 years of age, had violent … Read more
It’s May 1852, and Dr Sandborn from Lowell in Massachusetts has had a very interesting morning:
The patient, Mr. Wm. Mason, 18 years of age, had been for a short time employed in the Tremont Cotton Mills, of this city, as a tender of a machine called the “picker.” On the morning of the 6th of May last, while in … 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
In 1852 the editor of the North American Lancet, Dr Horace Nelson, reported an unfortunate turn of events. His prose can best be described as florid:
In the morning of one of the many days, with which we have been lately visited, when the thermometer ran down in the neighborhood of a baker’s dozen below 0, an individual retired … Read more