Leeches: for external and internal use
If there’s one thing that everybody knows about early medicine, it’s the fact that doctors loved to use leeches. Attaching […]
Unusual treatments
Unusual treatments
Unusual treatments
Brain of hare and turd of dog
Digging around in an 1851 edition of The Monthly Journal of Medical Science, I stumbled across a long and rather
Unusual treatments
Wrapped in a dead sheep
One of the difficulties of surgery, even today, is keeping the patient’s body temperature at a safe level. Core temperatures
Horrifying operations, Unusual treatments
A fright for sore eyes
Bright sunlight has long been known to be bad for the eyes. Prolonged exposure to UV radiation can cause a range
Unusual treatments
Medicated cigarettes: the new panacea
Nineteenth-century opinion on the subject of smoking was sharply divided. On the one hand there were many prominent doctors who
Horrifying operations, Unusual treatments
The port-wine enema
Alcoholic drinks were an important part of the physician’s armoury until surprisingly recently. In the early years of the twentieth
Unusual treatments
Wine, the great healer
Tetanus is a bacterial infection usually contracted through a skin wound – in the days before a vaccine was widely
Unusual treatments
The petrol cocktail: a cure for cholera
On September 22nd 1846, Dr James Tunstall of Bath wrote to Sir Charles Napier, the Governor of Scinde (then part
Bewildering research, Unusual treatments
Smoking’s good for you – as long as you’re a priest
The editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal surely had no idea of the furore that he was provoking
Hidden dangers, Unusual treatments
Catching a disease through an electric wire
Here’s something to get unnecessarily worried about: apparently it’s possible to catch a disease through an electric wire! As reported