The University of Pavia in northern Italy is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1361. It has a distinguished history of experimental scientific research: Alessandro Volta, the pioneer of electrochemistry, was professor there for forty years beginning in 1779.
While Volta was working on his voltaic pile – the first electric battery – his colleagues in the … Read more
A post last week referred to Andrew Duncan, founder of the Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, the first regular medical journal published in the United Kingdom. In 1810 he wrote a paper for a publication slightly less well known for its original medical research, the Memoirs of the Caledonian Horticultural Society. His subject? Lettuce.
Opium, or the inspissated [congealed] … Read more
In 1865 the Medical Times and Gazette published a series of articles entitled ‘Report on cheap wine’. There was some concern that the increasing availability of inexpensive wines and spirits was not simply due to increased supply, but that unscrupulous producers were cutting corners or selling counterfeit goods, with serious implications for public health. A ‘Special Empirical Commissioner’ – today … Read more
This from the Medical Times and Gazette, published in 1869:
From an interesting article on cacao and chocolate, by M. Marchand, in a recent volume of one of the great French Medical dictionaries now in course of publication, we learn that chocolate is much more largely used in France than in this country as an agreeable basis for the … Read more
The Annals of Medicine for 1799 contains a letter from a Dr Guthrie, an Scottish physician then working in St Petersburg. At the invitation of the journal’s editor, he related a series of interesting cases he had encountered in his practice there. One of them came from a former housemaid, who had visited his study to tell of a simple … Read more
A curious book of remedies was published in London in 1700, entitled Dr. Lower’s, and several other Eminent Physicians, Receipts, Containing the Best and Safest Method for Curing Most Disease in Human Bodies. It was aimed at those without easy access to medical services – a compilation of home remedies which could be prepared by those without any pharmacological expertise. … Read more
The treatment of venereal disease was one of the main functions of the medical profession from the Middle Ages until the adoption of antibiotics in the late 1940s greatly reduced their incidence and seriousness. It was an uphill battle: although they had some success with mercury, there was little that was truly effective against infections like syphilis and gonorrhoea. In … Read more
Lupus is an autoimmune disease characterised by a skin rash, joint pain and fatigue. Although poorly understood even today, it is known to be caused by an anomalous response of the body’s immune system, which erroneously begins to attack otherwise healthy tissue.
In 1852, when the Canada Medical Journal reported this case, the condition was widely (and incorrectly) believed to … Read more
In 1849 Mrs Charlotte Winslow of Bangor in Maine invented a medicinal product for children which was as successful in its day as Calpol is now. Any comparison must, however, end there.
‘Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup’ was marketed as an effective analgesic, to be given to teething infants and older children with indigestion. A contemporary advertisement declared that ‘it is … Read more
I recently wrote about the horrifying animal remedies which one could buy in a London apothecary’s shop in the seventeenth century. These were far from being the most disgusting products on sale in these emporia. Apothecaries also traded in various human substances. There’s a useful catalogue in Robert James’s 1747 edition of the London Pharmacopoeia:
Homo, Man, is not only … Read more