Generated by All in One SEO v5.0.0.1, this is an llms.txt file, used by LLMs to index the site.

# Thomas Morris

## Sitemaps

- [XML Sitemap](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website.

## Posts

- [New book announced: Blood on the Thames](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/new-book-announced-blood-on-the-thames/) - I’m very pleased to say that my next book, Blood on the Thames, has now been announced and is available for preorder. It tells the story of a baffling murder in London's docklands in 1805 - a case involving an apparently unassailable alibi, a missing weapon, and a groundbreaking investigation by the officers of Bow
- [The mystery of the exploding teeth](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-mystery-of-the-exploding-teeth/) - This post inspired the title of my book The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine. If that's what you're looking for, you can find out more here. Here’s an engaging little mystery which first appeared in the pages of Dental Cosmos – the first American scholarly journal for dentists
- [A tale of two inventions](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-tale-of-two-inventions/) - In my last post I wrote about an impressive operation performed in 1888 by the American surgeon George Ryerson Fowler, who successfully removed two bullets from a patient’s brain. Shortly after publishing that story I came across another of Fowler’s cases which, although not well known, deserves a place in the history books. It represented
- [A shot in the dark](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-shot-in-the-dark/) - At the age of 14, George Ryerson Fowler ran away from his parents’ home in Jamaica and stowed away on a ship to New York. The Civil War had just begun, and Fowler dreamed of joining the Union army as a drummer boy; but after a sleepless night in the rat-infested basement of a derelict
- [Metal in her mammaries](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/metal-in-her-mammaries/) - Henry Fryer was a surgeon from the market town of Stamford in Lincolnshire. When he died in 1823 he left £7,500 in his will for the foundation of a new hospital – and almost two centuries on, the Stamford and Rutland Hospital is still very much open. Fryer was in his early thirties and near
- [So much chaff called brains](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/so-much-chaff-called-brains/) - One of the most famous of all medical marvels is the case of Phineas Gage, the American railroad worker who somehow survived having a large metal rod driven straight through his head. It’s a truly amazing story, but has been written about so often that you might be led to think that it was the
- [Cover story](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/cover-story/) - Things have been quiet here for the last couple of months. I've been busy with a few other projects, including putting the final touches to my latest book The Dublin Railway Murder, which will be out later this year. My publishers Harvill Secker have done a wonderful job with the cover design, which I am
- [Painfully obvious](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/painfully-obvious/) - This spectacular case was published in the Medical Press and Circular, a leading Irish journal, in 1866. The author Dr Thomas Geoghegan was an eminent Dublin physician, particularly well known for his expertise in forensic medicine. (Dr Geoghegan makes a brief appearance in the book I’ve just finished writing, a true-crime thriller about an extraordinary
- [A real-life murder mystery from old Dublin](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-real-life-murder-mystery-from-old-dublin/) - News today of my next big project - I'm delighted to be writing a book for Harvill Secker, for publication in November 2021. The Dublin Railway Murder tells the story of a notorious crime perpetrated in the Broadstone railway terminus in Dublin in 1856. One morning that November, the station's cashier George Little was found
- [The cabbage catastrophe](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-cabbage-catastrophe/) - In 1803 a surgeon from Dumbarton in Scotland, Alexander Hunter, wrote to the London Medical and Physical Journal to report this remarkable lucky escape: An apprentice of William Ewing, a cooper, in this neighbourhood, had an ulcer on the fore-part of the tibia with considerable inflammation, for which he was ordered a poultice with acetate
- [The carrot cataplasm](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-carrot-cataplasm/) - Pretty much any substance you care to mention has, at one time or another, been touted as a cure for cancer. The historic medical literature is littered with unsuccessful specifics for the disease. Many of them were deadly poisons such as arsenic or belladonna – indeed, the use of poisons has persisted, in a more
- [A late arrival](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-late-arrival/) - Charles Delucena Meigs (1792-1869) was an American obstetrician of some eminence. His textbook Obstetrics, the Science and Art was influential and remained in print for many years. Perhaps the most notorious passage of this work is a section he added to the 1856 edition, explaining his opposition to the use of anaesthesia in childbirth. Chloroform
- [The perils of a sneeze](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-perils-of-a-sneeze/) - A few months ago I wrote about the criminal who was lucky to recover after inhaling a fake gold earring. By chance I’ve just come across another case report written by the same Victorian surgeon, Bernard Pitts. Not a well-known figure, principally because he wrote little and shunned publicity. But he seems to have been
- [The miller's daughter](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-millers-daughter/) - The Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, first published in 1773, was one of the earliest journals intended as a regular digest of the latest in medical scholarship - and the first to survive for any length of time. Its founder Andrew Duncan (the elder) was a professor at the University of Edinburgh, at a time when
- [An uncommon injury](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-uncommon-injury/) - It’s not often that a surgical emergency is caused by a lemon pip. OK, seeds and nuts of all kinds can be a choking hazard, but when was the last time you heard of a lemon-pip-related accident that necessitated emergency eye surgery? This, published in the New York Medical Record in 1887, is just such
- [A cautionary tale](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-cautionary-tale/) - This case was reported in the Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports – the in-house journal published by the London hospital of the same name – in 1879. The author of this article, William Steavenson, was a 29-year-old house physician at Barts (as those familiar with the hospital call it). Steavenson’s interests included chronic asthma – from
- [Under the skin](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/under-the-skin/) - There’s a good chance that you’ll be at the sharp end of a hypodermic needle over the next few months – at least, I hope you will. The various Covid-19 vaccines are finally reaching the people who need them most: 1,296,432 doses had been administered in the UK by the first week of January. Assuming
- [Libel and lithotomy](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/libel-and-lithotomy/) - In his textbook The Principles of Surgery (1801) the Scottish surgeon John Bell emphasised the importance of speed when operating to remove bladder stones, condemning those long and murderous operations, where the surgeon labours for an hour in extracting the stone, to the inevitable destruction of the patient. That quotation appears as a footnote underneath
- [Difficult to swallow](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/difficult-to-swallow/) - Years ago, many leading hospitals had their own journals, with most or all of the articles produced by the institution’s clinical staff. A couple of American centres (notably the Mayo Clinic) still lend their names to medical journals, but on this side of the Atlantic such in-house publications have largely gone extinct. This criminal caper
- [Moulded to the lid](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/moulded-to-the-lid/) - The Victorian surgeon Sir Jonathan Hutchinson was 'one of the great medical geniuses of his time', according to his entry in Plarr's Lives of the Fellows, the biographical reference work curated by the Royal College of Surgeons. Hutchinson had an astonishing range of interests - he was an expert in infectious disease (the world's leading authority
- [Resuscitated by a Romanov](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/resuscitated-by-a-romanov/) - I came across this case quite by chance, drawn in by a striking headline. But after investigating a little further I was amused to discover that one of those involved was an ancestor of mine. This story was first published two centuries ago, in the Annual Report of the Royal Humane Society. The humane societies
- [Death by onanism](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/death-by-onanism/) - Victorian society was famously paranoid about the dangers of masturbation. For teachers, priests and those with responsibility for young people, it was a question of morals and the corruption of youth – but the medical profession also agreed that self-abuse was a vice with terrible consequences. The old cliché that the practice ‘makes you go
- [The golden pin](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-golden-pin/) - This story has a delightful combination of youthful misadventure and surgical ingenuity. OK, so 'delightful' might be a bit of a stretch, but I suspect you've never read anything quite like it. The case was first published in a French medical journal, the Journal des Connaissances Médico-chirurgicales, in 1847. The headline translates as ‘Memoir and
- [The surgeon and the smugglers](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-surgeon-and-the-smugglers/) - Richard Elkanah Hoyle was not a famous surgeon. He never invented a new operation, or contributed to a medical journal, or belonged to a learned society. But he was responsible for one of the most unusual tales you’ll ever hear. In May 1845 a local newspaper, the Lincolnshire Chronicle, reported a mystery: An intense sensation
- [The woman with two wombs](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-woman-with-two-wombs/) - This exceptional paper appeared in the Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal, a relatively minor publication, in 1888. Thanks to its sensational subject matter it was soon picked up by journals all over the world. The author was a general practitioner who worked mainly in Birmingham, Alabama: In the spring of 1887 I was called to
- [The galley slave and the barrel hoop](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-galley-slave-and-the-barrel-hoop/) - This (almost) incredible case report was printed in The Medical and Physical Journal in 1812, but dates from almost forty years earlier, first appearing in the French medical literature. A galley-slave, a native of Nantes, entered the marine hospital at Brest the 5th of September, 1774. He complained of cough, pains in the stomach, and bowels; for
- [Specific gravity](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/specific-gravity/) - I came across this unusual case in a book published in 1876, A Dozen Cases: Clinical Surgery by William Tod Helmuth, a distinguished homeopathic surgeon. The phrase ‘homeopathic surgeon’ might sound like a contradiction in terms, if all you know of homeopathy is sugar pills and massively diluted tinctures. But in nineteenth-century America, where homeopathy
- [A gallon a day keeps the doctor away](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-gallon-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away/) - Bloodletting is one of the oldest medical treatments of all, employed for centuries in cultures all over the world. It’s also become a sort of lazy shorthand for the ignorance of our ancestors, the prime example of a useless and harmful technique that doctors persisted in using despite no good evidence for its efficacy. Although
- [An unusual route](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-unusual-route/) - It’s been a while! I haven’t managed to post on this blog in months, thanks to a work-in-progress, a true-crime book, which has been keeping me occupied for most of the last year. Now, however, I find myself in compulsory quarantine having just moved back to the UK from Canada, and with time on my
- [The bacon factory eyelid transplant](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-bacon-factory-eyelid-transplant/) - I haven’t had much time for blogging recently, since I’ve been working hard on a book which will be published later this year. It’s a true-crime thriller about a murder case in nineteenth-century Dublin, which has entailed weeks spent sifting through Irish newspaper archives. I recently stumbled across one medical story in the course of
- [The heart surgeon and the Nazis](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-heart-surgeon-and-the-nazis/) - The American Michael DeBakey was one of the giants of twentieth-century surgery. His extraordinary career spanned eight decades, beginning in the 1930s and ending only with his death at the age of 99 in 2008. He is best known today as a pioneering cardiac surgeon, but in the early 1950s he and his then colleague
- [A mystery diagnosis](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-mystery-diagnosis/) - The unusual case histories posted on this blog often defy easy explanation. Indeed, I have an entire category of posts entitled ‘mysterious illnesses’. But however exotic the symptoms it is usually possible to suggest some arcane diagnosis to explain them. Not this time. This case from 1825 has me utterly stumped. It is, by the
- [The boy with two skulls](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-boy-with-two-skulls/) - My jaw hit the floor – in a metaphorical, not a literal, sense, although the latter circumstance would itself be worthy of an entry on this blog – when I came across this little story. It concerns a case reported by Paul Broca, a French physician who played a key role in the early development
- [Emergency coffee](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/emergency-coffee/) - This story of misadventure and an unusual resuscitation method seems particularly appropriate for what Twitter tells me is International Coffee Day. It was published in the Pacific Medical Journal in 1866; the author, Dr Cachot, was an eminent physician from San Francisco. The daughter of Mr. D–, aged 22 months, swallowed from a vial a
- [Revolutions in surgery](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/revolutions-in-surgery/) - I was delighted to be asked to write a series of essays for the Wellcome Collection, a wonderful museum in London which houses an important collection of medical artefacts and also one of the greatest medical libraries in the world. The subject I chose to write about is Revolutions in Medicine - in six essays
- [Removed without the least difficulty](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/removed-without-the-least-difficulty/) - Sir William Fergusson was a leading figure in Victorian medicine. A great and widely respected surgeon, he began his career in Edinburgh in the 1820s before moving to London, and the professorship of surgery at King’s College, in 1840. In very little time he established himself as a pillar of the capital’s medical community, and
- [A pane in the eye](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-pane-in-the-eye/) - I have reported a few eye-watering tales on this blog in the past, but few stories deserve the epithet quite so literally as this one. It was published in a French journal of ophthalmic medicine, the Annales d’oculistique, in 1850. The author, Dr Collette, was a doctor from Liege in Belgium; a contemporary directory refers
- [A triumph of surgery](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-triumph-of-surgery/) - In June 1898, British newspapers reported an exciting medical story under the headline ‘Triumph in Surgery’. Their source was a case history published in that week’s edition of The Lancet. The author, Dr William Brown of Chester-le-Street, County Durham, was not a well-known figure; but for a few days, at least, he enjoyed a reputation
- [Nobody nose](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/nobody-nose/) - Leonardo Fioravanti was a celebrated – and later infamous – Italian doctor of the sixteenth century. You’ll find little information about him online, which is a shame, because his was a fascinating career. Like many Renaissance thinkers he did not restrict his investigations to one field but ranged widely across the arts and sciences, from
- [Do no harm](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/do-no-harm/) - ‘First, do no harm.’ You may be familiar with this aphorism, which in the last hundred years or so has become the unofficial motto of medical ethics. Almost all young doctors will hear the phrase at an early stage of their training – a useful encapsulation of a central tenet of medicine, that the physician
- [Pricked it all over with a fine needle](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/pricked-it-all-over-with-a-fine-needle/) - I recently came across the online archives of the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Journal, the in-house publication of the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Society. The society was founded in Bristol around 1874 and is still very much in existence - as is its journal, albeit in electronic form. In the very first volume of the BMCJ, published in 1883,
- [Conversation with a ghost](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/conversation-with-a-ghost/) - Spooky goings-on were reported in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal in an article published in 1826. The author was Dr Caleb Crowther, a physician from Wakefield and superintendent of the city’s celebrated West Riding Pauper-Lunatic Asylum: In December 1821, I was sent for to visit Mary Irvin, aged about 24, labouring under a severe attack of hysteria,
- [Hit in the face with a cow's stomach](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/hit-in-the-face-with-a-cows-stomach/) - In October 1852 a Bristol surgeon called Augustin Prichard gave a talk at the Bath and Bristol branch of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association entitled ‘Extraneous substances in the eye’. Dr Prichard was an eminent local practitioner with a particular interest in ophthalmic surgery: his MD thesis, based on research he conducted in Berlin,
- [The privy spider](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-privy-spider/) - This painful case was recorded in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1839. The author, Dr Isaac Hulse, was the surgeon in charge of the US Navy hospital in Pensacola, Florida: On the 7th of August last, Mr. Q. of this place, while in the privy, perceived himself to be stung by a
- [Off the scale](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/off-the-scale/) - It is not often that an author in a major medical journal thinks it necessary to state that they are not mad. But in 1891 Dr W.J. Galbraith, Professor of Surgery at Omaha Medical College, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reported a case so extraordinary that he thought it necessary to
- [The bottom feeder](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-bottom-feeder/) - A couple of months ago I wrote about a case from 1812 in which a patient with a massive facial injury was kept alive by lemonade injected into the rectum. Coincidentally I’ve just come across this report, published in 1878 in the American Practitioner, which covers rather similar territory. It aroused considerable interest at the
- [An English emigrant to Canada](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/english-emigrant-canada/) - It’s been a little while since I’ve had the time to write a blog post. The reason for this hiatus is that my wife and I have been preparing for our move to Canada, where we’ll be living for the next twelve months. We arrived in Toronto earlier this week, and wasted no time in
- [Magnifique! Delicieux!](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/magnifique-delicieux/) - The French surgeon Auguste Nélaton is one of those figures better known for the company he kept than for what he did. As well as acting as personal physician to Napoleon III, Nélaton famously treated Giuseppe Garibaldi, the unifier of Italy, for a bullet wound. It seems unfair that Nélaton is principally remembered for his
- [The stone bullet](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-stone-bullet/) - In 1829 a surgeon from Wolverhampton, William Lewis, contributed this unusual surgical tale to The Lancet: John Roden, a boy about 11 years of age, (of the Deanery-row,) of a spare habit and pale complexion, received a shot wound on the 5th of November last, while passing a door from behind which a pistol was discharged, loaded with
- [Bruit force](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/bruit-force/) - Committee reports aren’t exactly famed for their entertainment value. But while leafing through the 1850 volume of the Transactions of the American Medical Association I found one that contained an unexpected gem: Buried deep within this lengthy document is a section about aneurysms - a disorder of the blood vessels in which a localised weakness
- [A near miss](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-near-miss/) - This case was published in the Report of the Army Medical Department for 1873, an annual publication produced by the medics of the British military. Browsing its pages, my first reaction was astonishment at the sheer size of the British Army at the height of Empire, and how many parts of the world they were
- [The safety valve](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-safety-valve/) - This case was reported in 1896 in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions by a surgeon, Rickman Godlee, who was a distant relative of mine (my second cousin five times removed, since you ask). Godlee was the nephew of Joseph Lister, the originator of antiseptic surgery, whose innovations dramatically reduced the incidence of postoperative infection. A passionate advocate
- [Millipede meningitis](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/millipede-meningitis/) - Here’s a medical short story with a sting in the tail, first told in the French Gazette des Hopitaux in October 1860. The author is a Monsieur de Saint-Laurent, a surgeon at the Hôpital Cochin in Paris. L– George, aged four months, of a fine constitution and not emaciated, arrived at the hospital on June
- [Ulysse Trélat and an implausible discovery](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/ulysse-trelat-an-implausible-discovery/) - Ulysse Trélat was a prominent French surgeon of the nineteenth century. He served as surgeon-in-chief to most of the major hospitals of Paris, published important textbooks and received the highest honour the French state can bestow, the Légion d'Honneur. His name still appears today in medical dictionaries as the co-inventor of an operation to treat
- [A watch spring, a bean and a clove of garlic](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-watch-spring-a-bean-and-a-clove-of-garlic/) - An 1868 issue of a French journal, the Bulletin général de thérapeutique médicale et chirurgical, contains this case report contributed by Paul Pamard, chief of surgery at the Hotel Dieu hospital in Avignon. Pamard was unusual among surgeons in combining his medical practice with a successful political career – and at the time of this
- [The lemonade enema](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-lemonade-enema/) - The following remarkable narrative was published in The Medical and Physical Journal in April 1812. The author, Stephen Love Hammick, was in his mid-thirties when he reported this case; he was later made a baronet in acknowledgment for his service as personal physician to the Prince of Wales. He was also one of the original
- [The practical joke](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-practical-joke/) - In 1873 a physician from St Louis, Dr Walter Coles, recorded a particularly unusual home visit he had recently been asked to make. His report was published in the St Louis Medical and Surgical Journal: On the evening of the 1st of May, we were summoned in haste to the residence of a gentleman nearby,
- [Jules Cloquet: the surgeon as artist](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/jules-cloquet-the-surgeon-as-artist/) - The French surgeon Jules Germain Cloquet was a man of many talents. A member of the Paris Academy of Medicine, he made his name as an authority on hernias and took an interest in the latest medical developments: in 1829 he even performed a mastectomy on a patient who had been hypnotised to feel no
- ["Catch anything, darling?"  "Only Granny"](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/catch-anything-darling-only-granny/) - The New-Orleans Medical Journal for 1844 contains this tale of a lucky escape, an ingenious doctor and a very naughty grandson: In the summer of 1837. Mrs. * * * was enjoying her usual siesta, in the afternoon of a warm day, on a pallet spread upon the floor in a cool part of the
- [A bracing cure for madness](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-bracing-cure-for-madness/) - Dr G.G. Brown of Bath writes to the Annals of Medicine in 1799: If you have a vacant page in your Annals of Medicine for the present year, may I request you will, for the benefit of unfortunate individuals, insert the following simple method of cure in the apoplexia mentalis, or delirium fine febre. Dr
- [The electric scalpel](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-electric-scalpel/) - Earlier this week I spent a day in an operating theatre watching heart surgery. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life: six hours standing by as exceptionally brave and skilful people did things which would have been thought impossible fifty years ago. Several medics warned me that I might faint: “Lots
- [Chess and phrenology](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/chess-and-phrenology/) - In 1841 The Dublin Journal of Medical Science printed a short report of a meeting which had taken place earlier that year in London. It begins with a sarcastic little disclaimer: We are not quite satisfied that the subjoined paragraph, taken from a weekly London paper, contains a correct account of Dr. Elliotson’s Phrenological Lecture
- [Speaking of tongues](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/speaking-of-tongues/) - The Scottish surgeon James Syme (1799-1870) has been described as the boldest and most original operator of the end of the pre-anaesthetic era. He was fast and accurate, having begun his career at a period when the ideal operation should take no more than a minute or two. And he was a superb and innovative
- [Saliva and crow's vomit](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/saliva-and-crows-vomit/) - 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
- [Don't mess with an electric eel](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/dont-mess-with-an-electric-eel/) - Few creatures have provided such enduring fascination to the medical profession as the electric eel (Electrophorus electricus), a creature capable of delivering an electric shock of up to 850 volts (and 1 amp) on demand. Though remarkable, they are not unique: several other species of electric fish are known, including the electric catfish found in the
- [The worst job in the world?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-worst-job-in-the-world/) - Occupational diseases are those associated with a particular profession. The first to be identified was a type of scrotal tumour which disproportionately affected chimney-sweeps: the connection was made in 1775 by Percivall Pott. There are many well-known examples: miners developing the lung disease silicosis; phossy jaw, a disease suffered by match-makers, the result of exposure
- [Unfortunate injury of the decade](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/unfortunate-injury-decade/) - Here’s a story published 150 years ago in the British Medical Journal which made me wince on at least four separate occasions. At a seminar at the Liverpool Medical Institution in January 1863, the cases presented for discussion included the following: Dr. Nottingham brought forward a case of extraordinary wound of the penis. He said
- [Trees do not grow in humans](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/trees-do-not-grow-in-humans/) - In June 1879 the Chicago Telegraph made quite a splash with a story published under this headline: Probably the most wonderful phenomenon that has ever come under the observation of the medical fraternity of this city developed itself at the Montcalm House, on Erie street, in the person of a boy named Herbert G. Schwartz.
- [Bolt from the blue](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/bolt-from-the-blue/) - Last night was a dramatic one in London, with electrical storms and flash floods. It’s been a bad year for deaths by lightning: Bangladesh has seen a near-record 261 fatalities so far in 2016, and there have been an unusual number of deaths and injuries in Europe. This week is Lightning Safety Awareness Week in
- [The champagne cure](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-champagne-cure/) - Pyaemia is a form of septicaemia (blood poisoning) in which a bacterial infection spreads from an abscess and becomes systemic. The disease is characterised by abscesses all over the body, and in the days before antibiotics it was generally fatal. The only hope was to open the abscesses with the scalpel and drain them, removing
- [The boy who choked on his gold](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/boy-choked-gold/) - I came across this interesting story in the Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Surgery at Paris, a collection of cases published in English in 1750. Until I looked into it more thoroughly I didn’t realise that this is not just a curiosity but a genuinely pioneering operation. It was documented in a treatise published
- [An enormous concretion](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-enormous-concretion/) - At a meeting of the Pathological Society of London in 1855, members were shown a specimen that might have been better suited to a geological society rather than one devoted to the study of disease. The object in question, which looked like a lump of brick, had been supplied by Edward Lacy, a surgeon from
- [Britain's first heart surgeon](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/britains-first-heart-surgeon/) - Earlier today I was interviewed on TalkRadio about a man I believe to have been Britain's first heart surgeon - an exciting discovery I made a few months ago. Listen to my conversation with Paul Ross here: When I wrote my history of cardiac surgery, The Matter of the Heart, I was struck by the
- [A wonderful accumulation](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-wonderful-accumulation/) - This notable case report was published in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions in 1852. The author, John Marshall, was a young surgeon in private practice in London; it is not clear how 'Mrs B.' came to be his patient, given that she lived in Oxfordshire. Marshall later became a well-known anatomist, a Fellow of the Royal Society
- [The missing member](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-missing-member/) - A strange case of mistaken identity was reported in the Berliner klinische Wochenschrift in 1874, and subsequently translated in the Medical Herald. It was given this striking headline: W. K., a strongly-built farmer, aged 57, was injured on the 25th of October, 1867, by falling from his wagon. As he got up, the horse forced him
- [The electric centipede](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-electric-centipede/) - In December 1831 The Lancet reported these strange goings-on in France: A farmer's wife, twenty-eight years of age, residing in the neighbourhood of Metz, had for a long time been affected with an unpleasant itching sensation in the nose with coryza… The OED informs me that coryza comes from the Greek κόρυζα, meaning ‘nasal mucous’.
- [The first caesarean in Ireland](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-first-caesarean-in-ireland/) - Caesarean section is now the most commonly performed major operation in many parts of the world. A study published in The Lancet a few months ago estimated that around 30 million caesareans take place worldwide every year; in the UK over a quarter of babies are now born by caesarean, some 175,000 per year. References
- [An infinite number of worms](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-infinite-number-of-worms/) - Many medicines prescribed by physicians of the past were chemicals now known to be highly toxic. Mercury, arsenic and antimony were among the harmful substances regularly administered for a variety of conditions. In this case, published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1759, a young boy was apparently cured by another chemical now known to be hazardous
- [A knotty problem](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-knotty-problem/) - I recently learned a medical term I hadn't heard before: 'true knot', meaning a knot that forms in the umbilical cord during pregnancy. Foetuses move around a lot inside the amniotic sac, and if the umbilical cord is long it is quite possible for it to loop and form knots - sometimes two or more.
- [Eighth time lucky](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/eighth-time-lucky/) - You may be familiar with this dramatic photo, which has been doing the rounds recently on social media (mainly thanks to Lindsey Fitzharris - @drlindseyfitz on Twitter – if you’re not following her, you should be) It shows Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov, a Soviet doctor who in 1961, while stranded at an Antarctic research station, succeeded
- [The child who swallowed a pin](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-child-who-swallowed-a-pin/) - The eighteenth-century surgeon William Boys, although a distinguished clinician and Fellow of the Royal Society, was perhaps better known as an antiquary and historian of his home county of Kent. Among his published works is an account of the Luxborough Galley, a notorious shipwreck in which the few survivors resorted to cannibalism to keep themselves
- [Four lambs and two puppies](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/four-lambs-and-two-puppies/) - This strange little tale appeared in various literary and medical journals in 1806. This version is taken from The Medical and Physical Journal, which appears to have been one of the first to publish it. It is a salacious snippet rather than a case report, and some contemporaries read it with scepticism: one leading doctor
- [Claws for concern](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/claws-for-concern/) - Philipp Franz von Walther was an eminent German surgeon highly regarded for his expertise in ophthalmology and as a pioneer in plastic surgery. While serving as professor at the University of Bonn he was also the co-editor of an influential periodical, the Journal der Chirurgie und Augenheilkunde. In 1822 he published this surprising clinical report, which was
- [The tin box](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-tin-box/) - Cases of unusual foreign objects can make entertaining reading, though often for the ‘wrong’ reasons. The medical literature is full of tales of bizarre items inserted in orifices where they weren’t meant to go, but such stories seldom add much to the sum of human knowledge – except perhaps provide yet more evidence of our
- [The spoon swallower](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-spoon-swallower/) - Here’s an intriguing snippet reported by the Paris correspondent of the Lancet in September 1882: We have now a patient in the Lariboisiere Hospital who has been operated on by Dr. Felizet for the removal of a spoon from the stomach. The patient was a waiter at a café who in a frolic accidentally swallowed a spoon.
- [Odds bodkins](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/odds-bodkins/) - This fascinating case report was published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1701, contributed by a distinguished Dublin physician, Thomas Molyneux. It is notable both for the unusual nature of the injury, and for the remarkably sophisticated surgery that followed. Dorcas Blake, a full-bodied sanguine maid, of about twenty years old… Ms Blake was ‘sanguine’ in a
- [The baby who was bathed in a tumbler](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-baby-who-was-bathed-in-a-tumbler/) - One area in which medicine has made gigantic strides in the last thirty years is the treatment of very premature babies. Pregnancy lasts on average 40 weeks; a baby born before 37 weeks’ gestation is classed as premature. Most premature babies are born in what is known as the ‘late preterm’ stage, only two or
- [He swallowed a serpent](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/he-swallowed-a-serpent/) - A curious phenomenon common to medical history and folklore is that of the bosom serpent – stories of snakes, frogs, lizards and other animals living inside the human stomach or intestines. According to the physician and medical historian Jan Bondeson, “no fewer than 68 case reports of live reptiles or amphibians inside the gastrointestinal tract”
- [Bedtime stories](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/bedtime-stories/) - If you enjoy reading this blog, and you like going to bed with an audiobook - good news! The audio version of The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth is out now. It contains more than sixty of my favourite medical curiosities - weird and wonderful tales drawn from the historical medical literature. Readings are by the fantastic
- [Stand well back](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/stand-well-back/) - It’s Guy Fawkes Night, the annual festival when we British celebrate (inter alia) the barbaric torture and execution of a religious dissident four hundred years ago by setting off brightly-coloured explosions in our gardens and public spaces. Which of these activities do you think is more immoral: selling fireworks to children, or sending them up
- [The fiery finger](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/fiery-finger/) - Can the human body spontaneously catch fire? For many years people believed that it could. Spontaneous human combustion was a topic that fascinated medics and the general public for many years. In the early nineteenth century it was widely believed to be a genuine phenomenon, caused by some quirk of human physiology (I’ve previously written
- [Shafted](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/shafted/) - Some time ago I wrote about Thomas Tipple, a Londoner who was impaled by his own carriage in 1812. The shaft of the vehicle passed right through his chest, causing massive injury, but he made a good recovery – even though he received the bare minimum of treatment. Thanks to the exceptional nature of that
- [A remarkable dislocation](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-remarkable-dislocation/) - Charles White was an eminent Manchester surgeon of the eighteenth century. As a young man he studied anatomy in London with William Hunter, and became friendly with William’s brother John, the outstanding medical scientist of the age. Returning to Manchester, he set up in private practice and co-founded the city’s infirmary in 1752. He also
- [Divine's intervention](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/divines-intervention/) - If you enjoy these stories of medical mishaps and surgical drama, why not buy my book? The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth is out now, published by Transworld. The American edition will be published on November 20th. In 1899 the Atlanta surgeon Dr Kinsman Divine dropped dead while performing an operation. The procedure was nearly complete, and
- [The viper's kiss](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-vipers-kiss/) - The year is 1840, and The Lancet brings us this snippet of medical news from Germany: A man who, from his youth, had been accustomed to catch and tame vipers, brought two, on the 24th March, to a shopkeeper. While playing with one of the animals, he put it in his mouth… I bet you
- [Commercial break](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/commercial-break/) - Just a quick update on a few exciting developments. My new book The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth will be on sale very soon. It's a collection of my favourite medical curiosities, including some of the hilarious, bizarre or otherwise notable stories featured on this blog - many of them revised and expanded, and with a
- [The pork cylinder](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-pork-cylinder/) - A few days ago I was reading an article about foreign bodies in the bladder – for what better way to while away a dull afternoon? In 1897 a doctor from Philadelphia, Francis Packard, wrote an analysis of more than 200 cases, all of which had been published in medical journals in the preceding fifty
- [Shear bad luck](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/shear-bad-luck/) - In 1809 the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal printed this striking report of an agricultural accident from a surgeon in Ripon: August 30th 1808, ten o’clock AM, I went to Norton Mills, about four miles from hence, to see John Brown, aged twelve years, who had received a wound in the abdomen by a pair of wool shears. It would
- [An immense plug of wood](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-immense-plug-of-wood/) - Sometimes a headline says it all. In June 1842 the London Medical Gazette printed a letter under this memorable title: The case report that followed was submitted by a retired naval surgeon called Archibald Blacklock (previously featured on this blog, and best known as the man who crept into Robert Burns's tomb one night in
- [Scalpel, suture and Swedish turnips](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/scalpel-suture-and-swedish-turnips/) - Here’s an intriguing article from the American Medico-Surgical Bulletin of 1895, summarising a paper published in a German journal: The author reports a successful case of strangulated hernia, in which, after resection of about 3 inches of intestine, he performed lateral intestinal anastomosis. Strangulated hernia is a condition in which a loop of the bowel protrudes
- [Occupational hazard](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/occupational-hazard/) - Here’s a striking report from The London Medical and Surgical Journal, originally published in March 1837. The headline is straightforward enough: Two remarkable cases of this kind I have had an opportunity of seeing weekly, for twelve months. The first occurred at Manchester; the second was in St. Bartholomew's Hospital, under the auspices of Mr.
- [Frightened to death](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/frightened-to-death/) - In 1873 Thomas Lauder Brunton was asked to give a lecture to the Abernethian Society of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. Lauder Brunton would later become famous as the pioneer of amyl nitrite, the first drug shown to be effective in treating angina pain. But in 1873 he was a little-known 29-year-old, only recently appointed
- [The woman whose skin turned blue](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-woman-whose-skin-turned-blue/) - An alarming case was revealed to a meeting of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London in November 1815, and reported in the Transactions of the society early the following year. It provides a good example of the fact that new medicines often carry dramatically unexpected side-effects. A Dr Albers of Bremen reported the following:
- [Jumping over a broomstick](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/jumping-over-a-broomstick/) - During a meeting of the New York Pathological Society in 1872, a local physician called Dr Post gave a short talk about one of his patients, who had discovered a highly novel method of injuring himself: On the 9th August, 1872, I was requested to see Mr. B., a young man 19 years of age,
- [Degloved by a donkey](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/degloved-by-a-donkey/) - Mercer’s Hospital, founded in 1734, was for many years one of the most important teaching hospitals in Ireland – but it is perhaps most readily associated today with a piece of music. In 1742 the first performance of Handel’s Messiah took place in Dublin in a fundraising concert for local charities – Mercer’s Hospital among
- [The stomach snail](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-stomach-snail/) - William Rhind, a Scottish surgeon of the nineteenth century, had impressively broad interests. He was a botanist of some eminence, publishing a 700-page textbook on the subject which remained in print for over forty years. He was also an expert in geology – although his firm view that the Earth was only around 4000 years
- [Fourteen fingers](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/fourteen-fingers/) - August is sometimes known as the ‘silly season’: a period of the year when little seems to be happening, politics grinds to a halt, and newspaper editors are forced to publish nonsense they wouldn’t even consider putting into print at other times of the year. This story, from an 1844 edition of a French journal,
- [A likely story](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-likely-story/) - The French surgeon Jean Civiale was one of the most significant figures in the history of urology, the branch of medicine dedicated to the urinary (and male reproductive) systems. In the 1820s he devised the technique of lithotripsy to treat bladder stones, the first minimally invasive surgical procedure. Until then, the only way to remove
- [Point-blank range](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/point-blank-range/) - Being shot in the head with a revolver is not exactly a minor injury. But in 1875 the Medical Record published this unusual story about a patient who managed to walk home, and talk to his family, shortly after receiving a bullet in his brain: On Friday, the 21th of March, early in the afternoon, Mr. M.
- ["Oh, I'll tell you another time"](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/oh-ill-tell-you-another-time/) - In 1811 the novelist Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy for suspected breast cancer. The operation was a total success: she lived for another 28 years without any recurrence of the tumour. Burney recorded her experience in a searing letter to her sister Esther. It’s a masterpiece of descriptive writing, an account so vivid that every
- [A disarming experience](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-disarming-experience/) - The French surgeon Alphonse Guérin is hardly a household name today – but for a brief period in the late nineteenth century he was a European celebrity. Summoned to Rome to treat Pope Pius IX for a leg ulcer, he made such an impression that the pontiff expressed his thanks by describing him as ‘the
- [An unusual method](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-unusual-method/) - At the 1887 Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association a surgeon from Sunderland, James Murphy, walked on stage brandishing a testicle. It was an arresting entrance, but no gimmick: he had a highly unusual story to tell. It concerned a patient who (for reasons which were not entirely clear) had decided to cut himself
- [The greatest phenomenon that nature has known](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-greatest-phenomenon-that-nature-has-known/) - In 1849 a Spanish journal, La crónica de los hospitales, published a case supposed to have occurred some forty years earlier in the Mexican port of Veracruz – at the time, a Spanish colony. It was recorded in private notes made in 1809 by Dr Faustino Rodriguez, a distinguished practitioner of the city, but for
- [Born under a manger](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/born-under-a-manger/) - In 1863 a surgeon from the small German town of Gräfenhainichen, Herr Geissler, wrote to one of the Berlin journals to share an extraordinary tale he had encountered in his practice. The publication to which he submitted the case Monatsschrift für Geburtskunde und Frauenkrankheiten, was devoted to gynaecology and obstetrics and indeed this story is about childbirth
- [A practical joke](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-practical-joke/) - Some of the greatest advances in nineteenth-century surgery were made by military surgeons. British surgeons were not exactly short of opportunities: the country's military forces began the century at war with France, and ended it fighting the Boers, with barely a peaceful year in between. While battlefield injuries provided horribly frequent opportunities for improving surgical
- [The wandering needle](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-wandering-needle/) - In 1889 a surgeon from the Adelaide Hospital in Dublin, Kendal Franks, wrote a notable case report for the British Medical Journal. His subject was renal calculus, otherwise known as kidney stones. During an operation in October that year he had removed a stone which was quite unlike anything he’d seen before. The specimen is
- [Get Out Of Jail Free](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/get-out-of-jail-free/) - In 1823 a prominent London physician, John Ayrton Paris, published a book in collaboration with a barrister called J. S. Fonblanque. Medical Jurisprudence was the first English-language textbook on the subject, and went through many editions. It was a valuable resource whenever the worlds of law and medicine overlapped – criminal trials, inquests, or claims
- [Irritating the genitals by various means](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/irritating-the-genitals-by-various-means/) - One of the most popular stories on this blog is that of the nineteenth-century Frenchman who cut his own penis in two for sexual gratification. If you type the keywords ‘man cut penis two’ into pretty much any search engine, it’s the top hit – on the entire internet. If that’s not success, I don’t
- [Finish what you started](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/finish-what-you-started/) - In 1847, at a meeting of the Paris Medical Society, Dr Jean-Baptiste Pigné gave a short talk about cancer. Pigné was the nephew of the great French surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren, and had been appointed curator of the pathological museum founded by him. He concluded his lecture by describing an exceptional operation performed more than a
- [Extraordinary and probably unique](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/extraordinary-and-probably-unique/) - This blog has previously included a few cases in which a patient performed surgery on their own body. One of my favourites is the story of Colonel Martin, who found an ingenious way to reduce the size of a bladder stone, inserting a file up his own urethra to scrape it into submission. That takes
- [A curious surgical case](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-curious-surgical-case/) - In 1846 John Kyle, a surgeon from the Ohio village of Cedarville, submitted the following case report to The Western Lancet. The headline gives some indication of the unusual nature of the circumstances: In the spring of 1846 I was called to see — Moore, a boy aged 2 years. He had been a very
- [She swallowed a mouse](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/she-swallowed-a-mouse/) - In 1833 one Dr Heymann, a doctor from the Westphalian town of Oldendorf, submitted a really rather extraordinary case to a German journal, Hufelands Journal der practischen Heilkunde. It is almost certainly without parallel in the medical literature, given that the headline translates as ‘A living mouse swallowed’: A desperately poor labourer in the village
- [An extraordinary quantity of worms](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-extraordinary-quantity-of-worms/) - In 1801 a contingent of 20,000 soldiers commanded by General Charles Leclerc, the brother-in-law of Napoleon Bonaparte, set sail for the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Their mission was to recapture the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, now under the control of the former slave Toussaint Louverture. Known as the Saint-Domingue expedition, the two-year campaign was
- [Revealed: the cure for hiccups](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/revealed-the-cure-for-hiccups/) - A striking report* was published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1845 by Dr George Dexter, a physician from New York: Some time since, a singular case of hiccough was placed under my treatment. Its origin evidently was from long-continued masturbation. Dr Dexter appears remarkably confident in this assertion. On what grounds, you
- [More than common danger](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/more-than-common-danger/) - Sir Astley Cooper was the best known, and best paid, surgeon in early nineteenth-century London. He was a great innovator in the field of vascular surgery, devising new methods of treatment for aneurysms and other conditions of the blood vessels. His expertise was both deep and broad: he was an authority on hernias, limb fractures
- [The trumpeter and the walking stick](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/trumpeter-walking-stick/) - In is not unheard of for a soldier to be killed as the result of a swordfight. But it is not often that the circumstances are quite as unusual as those of this case, published in The Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science in 1851 – with a patient who looked so little injured that
- [The dislocated neck](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-dislocated-neck/) - This remarkable story was told in a French publication, the Journal Complémentaire du Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales, in 1830. The author of the report was a German doctor, Dr Ehrlich, who had apparently treated the young man in question some forty years earlier: A young man of sixteen, of a strong constitution, attempted to carry
- [Cosmetic(s) surgery](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/cosmetics-surgery/) - 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,
- [Asleep while she gave birth](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/asleep-while-she-gave-birth/) - Things have been rather quiet on this blog in recent weeks, so apologies if you’ve been missing your regular fix of wince-inducing medical history. I’ve been busy working on a book which will be published in a few months’ time. The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth (and other curiosities from the history of medicine) brings
- [The poison taker](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-poison-taker/) - There is a long and often honourable history of self-experimentation in medicine. Medical pioneers have often been unwilling or unable to test a new therapy on living patients, since the potential harm to a volunteer was just too great to justify. But what if the researcher is convinced that the treatment they have spent years
- [Rare and peculiar](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/rare-and-peculiar/) - "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
- [William Harvey at the Royal College of Physicians](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/william-harvey-royal-college-physicians/) - The Royal College of Physicians in London, which celebrates its 500th anniversary later this year, is currently staging a small exhibition devoted to one of its most celebrated former Fellows. William Harvey was a prominent member of the College in the 17th century, when he was also personal physician to Charles I. In 1628 he
- [The ear drill](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-ear-drill/) - You’ve heard of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut; but what about a drill (or rather two drills) to crack a cherry stone? That is exactly what took place at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris in 1833. The surgeon responsible was the great Guillaume Dupuytren, and his unusual case was reported in the Bulletin
- [Mr Trought's tobacco enema](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/mr-troughts-tobacco-enema/) - In June 1828 the Lancet published a pair of short case histories that contemporary readers must have found rather confusing. Printed on the same page, they both dealt with cases in which a strangulated hernia had been treated with a tobacco enema (yes, really: an infusion of tobacco administered via the anus). In the first
- [Plagiarising the past](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/plagiarising-the-past/) - In 1850 a doctor from New Buckenham in Norfolk, Horace Howard, submitted this short case report to The Lancet: The patient, Maria N— aged twenty-three years, had experienced for a long time much irritation about the kidneys and urinary apparatus, for which different palliative remedies were administered, but with little relief. The patient was lost
- [The spermatorrhoea alarm](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-spermatorrhoea-alarm/) - In 1843 the Provincial Medical Journal published a landmark paper by Dr W.H. Ranking from Suffolk. It was a ‘landmark’ in that it was the first full-length publication in English to discuss a new disease that was soon to become the scourge of the male population: spermatorrhoea. Or, in plain English, involuntary ejaculation. The person
- [Hooked](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/hooked/) - In 1882 a young doctor from Clayton West in Yorkshire had his first paper published in a major medical journal. Dr Duncan Alistair MacGregor was not interested in making a name for himself: after completing his training in Edinburgh he had set up in practice as a country doctor, a vocation he would follow with
- [Making a mark](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/making-a-mark/) - One evening in 1877 a medical student at the University of Paris, a young man by the name of Vielle, made a little piece of medical history – although perhaps not in a way he might have hoped for. This is how he later recalled the experience: About 10 o’clock P.M., April 6th, 1877, I
- [Show and tell](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/show-and-tell/) - 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 lithophagus](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-lithophagus/) - 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
- [Born in a cesspit](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/born-in-a-cesspit/) - 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
- [A harrowing incident](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-harrowing-incident/) - In 1873 the Chicago Medical Journal published this article by a Dr Stewart from Muscatine, a small Iowa town on the banks of the Mississippi that would later become famous as the world-leading manufacturer of pearl buttons. The article’s matter-of-fact headline scarcely does justice of the drama to come: Anthony B., a lad aged 17,
- [A week entombed in a snowdrift](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/week-entombed-snowdrift/) - In a week that’s seen snow across much of Britain and record low temperatures in parts of the US, this story from the Annals of Medicine for 1799 seems particularly appropriate: A remarkable and well-authenticated case, of a woman surviving nearly eight days buried in the snow, without food, has occurred this spring, near Impington, in Cambridgeshire. It’s
- [A dangerous weapon](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-dangerous-weapon/) - The Northern Journal of Medicine was a short-lived periodical which appeared for only two years before being acquired by a more successful competitor. But it had some illustrious contributors: published in Edinburgh, it was able to include papers by some of the most eminent medical academics in Europe. The very first edition, which appeared in
- [The bladder shrimp](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-bladder-shrimp/) - On the eve of the Battle of Waterloo the Duke of Wellington was making a final inspection of his troops when he spotted one of the medical officers smoking a cigar. The Duke confronted him. “Well! Hennen, is that the fortieth cigar today?” “No, my lord,” replied the surgeon, “it is only the thirty-eighth.” The chain-smoking surgeon was John Hennen, known
- [The eye magnet](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-eye-magnet/) - Today's story first appeared in the Observationes, a collection of case reports by the German surgeon Wilhelm Fabry (1560-1634). Fabry, also known as Fabricius Hildanus, is sometimes referred to as the ‘father of German surgery’ and was a methodical and scientific operator whose careful descriptions of his work exerted a powerful influence on later generations
- [The pea pod polyp](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/pea-pod-polyp/) - In December 1761 a leading French journal, the Journal of Medicine, Surgery and Pharmacy, published a splendid little article by a surgeon from Bordeaux, a Monsieur Renard. The headline describes it as being about ‘a pea that sprouted in the cavities of the nose’: On the 15th of June I was called to see a
- [The foot-long bladder stone](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/foot-long-bladder-stone/) - This short article appeared in a Norfolk local newspaper, the Norwich Gazette, on June 7th 1746: On Sunday last was cut for the stone by Mr. John Harmer, John Howse, gardener, from Porland, aged 49, from whom he extracted a stone of a prodigious magnitude, measuring 12 inches one way and 8 the other, and
- [The lucky Prussian](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-lucky-prussian/) - 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,
- [In hospital for 34 years](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/hospital-34-years/) - In December 1886 the Cincinnati Enquirer published an exclusive from its New York correspondent. He had uncovered an amazing story at one of the city’s hospitals – the death of its longest-standing patient. She’d been an inmate there for three decades, but that wasn’t even the most interesting part of the tale: When Nellie Steele
- [All at sea](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/all-at-sea/) - When I first came across this stirring tale of improvised surgery at sea I wasn’t at all sure it was true. It appeared in 1852 in a minor journal called The Scalpel, which was published in New York between 1849 and 1864. The journal was edited, and largely written, by the indefatigable Dr Edward H.
- [The pigeon's rump cure](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/pigeons-rump-cure/) - Eclampsia is a serious condition affecting women before, during or after childbirth. The name means literally ‘bursting forth’, an apt description for the seizures that characterise the condition, which arrive suddenly and dramatically. The cause of eclampsia has never been identified, although it is always preceded by pre-eclampsia – a combination of symptoms including high
- [A dangerous hobby](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-dangerous-hobby/) - The Royal Academy of Surgery in Paris was founded in 1731 by Louis XV. It was abolished in 1793 following the Revolution, but for the sixty years of its existence it was one of the leading such institutions in Europe – its official journal, the Mémoires de l'Académie Royale de Chirurgie, was regularly translated into
- [An enormous eater](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-enormous-eater/) - 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 very hungry schoolboy](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-very-hungry-schoolboy/) - The name of Dr Richard Patrick Satterley is more or less unknown today, but in the early years of the nineteenth century he was regarded as one of the most talented young physicians in London. He died prematurely in 1815, before he had left much of a mark on his profession. But a few months
- [Mr Dendy's egg-cup case](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/mr-dendys-egg-cup-case/) - 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
- [The most eccentric physician who ever lived](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/eccentric-physician-ever-lived/) - Dr Messenger Monsey was one of the best-known physicians in eighteenth-century London, although probably not one of the most capable. He began his career as an obscure country doctor in Suffolk, but his fortunes changed after he was summoned to the bedside of an influential aristocrat, the Earl of Godolphin, who had suffered a ‘fit
- [The man with two penises](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/man-two-penises/) - On April 9th 1878 the professor of surgery at the University of Maryland, Dr Alan Smith, gave a talk at a meeting of the state medical society. His subject was lithotomy, the surgical removal of bladder stones, an operation he had performed many times. Dr Smith’s presentation referred to ‘fifty-two successful cases of lithotomy’, but
- [An interesting and remarkable accident](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/interesting-remarkable-accident/) - This is one of those cases that at first reading seems inherently unlikely – but, bizarre as it sounds, has a perfectly rational medical explanation. It took place in the 1830s but was only reported in any detail three-quarters of a century later. This article was contributed to the Buffalo Medical Journal by Dr Roswell
- [Cured by a collision](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/cured-by-a-collision/) - Serious rail accidents have become such rare events that it’s easy to forget just how dangerous the railways were in Victorian Britain. Between 1840 and 1900 there was not a single year without a death on the rail network. In 1873 alone there were 15 fatal accidents – more than one a month – and
- [The accidental hysterectomy](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-accidental-hysterectomy/) - In 1840 one Dr Drane, a physician from Louisville in Kentucky, wrote a short communication to the Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery. The editor was astonished, commenting that the case was “unique in the annals of obstetric medicine”. It’s certainly, ahem, special: A woman residing in Oldham county, in this State, was attended by
- [Media vita in morte sumus](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/media-vita-morte-sumus/) - “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,
- [Twice bitten](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/twice-bitten/) - On February 23rd, 1872, the Philadelphia Post published a breathtakingly crass news story: A thrilling scene occurred on Wednesday in this city. A lion-tamer came within an ace of being torn to pieces by a royal Bengal tiger, with which he was imprisoned in a cage. “Thrilling”? I wonder how many of the witnesses of
- [Cones and bones](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/cones-and-bones/) - You may have seen this recent story about a man who thought he had lung cancer before learning that his persistent cough had an altogether less sinister cause. Doctors discovered that the shadow on his chest X-rays was caused not by a tumour, but by a toy traffic cone he had inhaled as a child
- [Normal for Norfolk](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/normal-for-norfolk/) - If you lived in rural Norfolk in the nineteenth century and wanted to get rid of a wart on your hand, there were several options open to you. You might, for instance, steal a piece of beef (it must be stolen, otherwise the cure would not work) and bury it; as the beef decayed, your
- [Falling pregnant](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/falling-pregnant/) - The seventeenth-century French surgeon François Mauriceau was one of the founders of modern obstetrics. Over several decades he studied every aspect of pregnancy, childbirth and the health of newborn babies, attempting to put the discipline on a new theoretically sound and anatomically-informed basis. His masterpiece, published in 1668, is the treatise Des maladies des femmes
- [An arrow escape](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-arrow-escape/) - In 1871 the Surgeon-General’s office of the US Government published a document identified simply as Circular no 3. The dull bureaucratic title gives little hint of the varied material within: a comprehensive survey of surgical activity in the US Army during the preceding six years. As one London medical journal noted, the book gives some
- [The forgetful sailor](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/forgetful-sailor/) - In 1832 a surgeon serving aboard a British Navy vessel in the Mediterranean, David Burnes, sent an unusual case history to The Lancet. Five years later he wrote to the journal again, offering an update to this ‘singular case’. Here’s the complete story: Robert Sims, aged 23, was entered on the sick list of HMS Belvidera, about the
- [He sliced his penis in two](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/sliced-penis-two/) - 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
- [Fifty years ahead of his time](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/fifty-years-ahead-time/) - I’m writing this post on the 122nd anniversary of the first attempt at heart surgery, which took place in Norway on September 4th 1895. The surgeon, Axel Cappelen, opened the chest of a man who had been stabbed, and sutured his lacerated heart muscle. The procedure went smoothly, but the man died a few days
- [Not getting his hands dirty](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/not-getting-hands-dirty/) - If you haven’t been watching the BBC2 comedy Quacks, you’re missing a treat. It’s set in the world of mid-Victorian medicine, an era when the discipline was beginning its dramatic metamorphosis into a rigorous science. Anaesthesia had just arrived on the scene, and a younger generation of surgeons and physicians was eager to discard outmoded
- [A span in length](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-span-in-length/) - More strange news from the Philosophical Transactions, the venerable journal of the Royal Society. This brief report was contributed in 1720 by Abraham Vater, a German anatomist who was a particular authority on the digestive tract (the ampulla of Vater, a structure at the meeting of the common bile duct and pancreatic duct, is named
- [An unfortunate couple](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-unfortunate-couple/) - Johann Georg Steigerthal was an eminent German medic of the early seventeenth century. In 1715 he was appointed court physician the Elector of Hanover Georg Ludwig – otherwise known as George I of Great Britain. Steigerthal was also a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1720 he contributed this striking case history to the
- [An unwelcome visitor](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-unwelcome-visitor/) - A short news item published in 1843 by the Gazette Médicale de Paris contains the sort of case that would give a hypochondriac sleepless nights. It was submitted by Jean Guyon, an eminent military surgeon who spent much of his career studying tropical diseases, in particular yellow fever and cholera. Another of his interests was
- [Going for a dance](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/going-for-a-dance/) - In 1871 a coroner from the city of St Louis, Dr G. F. Dudley, sent a short paper entitled ‘Interesting Cases’ to the Medical Archives. They were all drawn from inquests over which he had presided, and they certainly are interesting – the first in particular. Mr. J. H. L., aged 38, of vigorous and
- [A forgotten thing](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-forgotten-thing/) - This case, published in the Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal in 1865, is one that makes you marvel at the resilience of the human body. The author, John C. Hutchison, was barely nineteen – young to be writing articles for medical journals – and working at the Marshall Infirmary in the city of Troy, New
- [The colonic carpentry kit](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/colonic-carpentry-kit/) - The ‘foreign correspondence’ pages of one 1861 issue of the Medical Times contain an eclectic selection of stories. The first concerns the ‘sucking apparatus of infants’ (i.e., babies’ mouths). But the following case was the one that caught my eye – headlined Foreign Body in the Transverse Colon: A very curious case of this affection
- [The healing power of nature](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/healing-power-nature/) - At the annual meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association in August 1844, a doctor from Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire, Edward Daniell, presented this unusual case. He prefaced his account with the observation that it would ‘perhaps be interesting more from its novelty than for its value in a surgical point of view’. He
- [Death of an earl](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/death-of-an-earl/) - On a warm August afternoon a man in his fifties is enjoying a game of bowls in the affluent English town of Tunbridge Wells. Suddenly he passes out and falls to the ground, apparently dead. If this scene were unfolding today, an ambulance would probably arrive in a few minutes, and paramedics would attempt resuscitation
- [The slugs and the porcupine](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-slugs-and-the-porcupine/) - According to an old journalistic adage, if a newspaper headline contains a question the correct answer is always ‘no’. For instance, ‘Could x offer a cure for cancer?’, to which the answer is always 'no', whether x is 'green tea', 'mushrooms' or 'snake oil'. This reliable rule of thumb, sometimes known as Betteridge’s Law, applies in spades
- [The 43-year pregnancy](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/43-year-pregnancy/) - In years gone by, it was quite common for a doctor to pass on his practice to one of his children: successive generations of medics might serve their local community for decades. The Watkins family, originally from the Northamptonshire town of Towcester, is an extreme example of such a dynasty: Timothy Watkins (1755-1834) was the
- [The other Horatio Nelson](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-other-horatio-nelson/) - The Canadian physician Henry Horatio Nelson was born six years after the Battle of Trafalgar, so it does not take much imagination to work out how his parents chose his middle name. Perhaps understandably, he chose to call himself Horace Nelson, a name less likely to cause his patients to smirk. Although little known today,
- [The amphibious infant](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-amphibious-infant/) - It is June 1873, and some very odd tidings are published in the latest edition of the Medical Notes and Queries: A story of an “Amphibious Infant” has found its way into some of the London papers. The subject is introduced thus:— “Strange results of very early training: a baby that paddles around under water for twenty-five
- [The cheese knife lobotomy](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/cheese-knife-lobotomy/) - This alarming headline was attached to a letter sent to The Lancet in 1838 by Dr Congreve Selwyn, a family physician in Cheltenham. His brief communication related the story of an unfortunate accident which had taken place in his practice some 17 years earlier: William Bishop, living at Hill Farm, Bosbury, Herefordshire, aged four years
- [The seventy-year-old mother-to-be](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/seventy-year-old-mother/) - Here’s a truly strange case that was reported in the Journal de Médécine de Paris in 1881. It concerns an elderly woman who was believed to have fallen pregnant. Such tales were commonly reported in the early medical literature – there are many to be found in 18th-century journals, for instance – but these examples
- [A receipt for making a rupture](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/receipt-making-rupture/) - In the 1820s the British physician John Cheyne made a special study of the numerous ways in which soldiers tried to get themselves invalided out of service. Cheyne is best known today as one of the first to identify Cheyne-Stokes respiration, a pattern of disordered breathing which is a useful diagnostic sign in identifying several
- [The man whose intestines twinkled like stars](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/man-whose-intestines-twinkled-like-stars/) - Every so often I read an old medical case that makes me wince and ask myself, “However did they recover from that?” This tale, reported 142 years ago in the Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal, falls squarely into this category. The initial injury was bad enough, but the circumstances of the case presented the surgeon
- [The case of the drunken Dutchman's guts](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/case-drunken-dutchmans-guts/) - On August 28th 1641 the 21-year-old English diarist John Evelyn visited the great university of Leiden in the Netherlands. He was unimpressed, declaring it ‘nothing extraordinary’, but one building took his fancy: Among all the rarities of this place, I was much pleased with a sight of their anatomy-school, theater, and repository adjoining, which is
- [If you can't find a surgeon...](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/cant-find-surgeon/) - ...employ a butcher. That, at least, is the advice implied by this unusual eighteenth-century case:The hamlet of Clogher in Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland, is a bit of an oddity. Although it has barely 500 residents, it also possesses a cathedral – one of the smallest settlements in the British Isles to do so. Between 1737
- [The lawn-tennis elbow](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/lawn-tennis-elbow/) - It has been a bad week for injuries at Wimbledon, with two of the favourites for the men’s title exiting the tournament with obvious signs of physical wear and tear. Yesterday the defending champion Andy Murray hobbled out in five sets, obviously impeded by a sore hip that has been affecting him, we now learn,
- [A flaming nuisance](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-flaming-nuisance/) - In 1886 a physician from Glasgow, Dr George Beatson, wrote to the British Medical Journal with a rather unusual tale. One of his patients had written to him to tell him about an alarming incident that had occurred early one morning: “A rather strange thing happened to myself about a week ago. For a month
- [A dubious paper](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-dubious-paper/) - In 1813 the editor of The Medical and Physical Journal, Samuel Fothergill, accepted for publication a paper by John Spence, a Scottish doctor who had moved to Virginia three decades earlier. Spence studied at the University of Edinburgh in the 1780s, a period when its medical school was the finest in the world. He was
- [Hook, line and Liston](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/hook-line-liston/) - In 1844 the great surgeon Robert Liston gave an influential series of lectures at University College London on the technique of surgery. The second lecture in this series, concerning operations on the neck, includes this unusual case: Occasionally you find very curious foreign bodies lodged in the throat. The following case came under my notice
- [The monk with a perfume bottle stuck up his bottom](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/monk-perfume-bottle-stuck-bottom/) - Today’s dose of medical mishap is excerpted from an influential textbook published in 1837 by George Bushe, a surgeon who died at the age of 39 and about whom little is known. Born and trained in Ireland, he emigrated to the US in his twenties and became a lecturer at Rutgers Medical School in New
- [Robot hearts](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/robot-hearts/) - The horrors of nineteenth-century medicine will return to this blog tomorrow, but here's a brief intermezzo: The Guardian recently printed a long extract from The Matter of the Heart, my new book about the history of heart surgery. It's an abbreviated version of the book's final chapter, which looks at some of the cutting-edge technology used by today's
- [The lancer lanced](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/lancer-lanced/) - On November 9th 1869 a private from the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, ‘Richard F.’, arrived at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley, a large military hospital on the south coast of England. He had been evacuated from Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, where he had been serving with the British forces before being invalided out of
- [A strange tale](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-strange-tale/) - Today’s tale is a ‘news in brief’ item published by The Medical Standard in 1895: Drs. Hart and Watts of the Bellevue Hospital staff report a case in which a machinist working at a wire machine heard something snap and felt a violent pain in his arm. The pain became so intense that he was
- [The 'first' heart transplant](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/first-heart-transplant/) - Do you know who performed the world's first heart transplant ? The surgeon usually credited with the feat is the South African Christiaan Barnard, who on December 3rd 1967 gave Louis Washkansky, a 54-year-old grocer, a new heart. The fiftieth anniversary of that celebrated operation falls later this year - but Barnard was not, in
- [An abominable, disgusting habit](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/abominable-disgusting-habit/) - There are plenty of common myths about Victorian social mores, but anything you have read about their disapproval of onanism (masturbation) is likely to be true. Nineteenth-century medics were apparently united in their condemnation of the practice, which was believed to cause not just blindness, but all manner of serious physical ailments – many of
- [The long road to recovery](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/long-road-recovery/) - Today’s post is something of a rarity, since it comes from a medical journal which only existed for a year, and was read by a very select group of physicians. The Confederate States Medical and Surgical Journal was published between January 1864 and February 1865, towards the end of the American Civil War. It was
- [Publication day!](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/publication-day/) - A brief diversion from normal service on this blog for a gratuitous advertisement: today is publication day for my book The Matter of the Heart, the culmination of two years' work. As well as spending innumerable hours in libraries reading medical papers, I had the great privilege of talking to cardiac specialists and even watching them as
- [Pins and needles](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/pins-and-needles/) - At a meeting of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1852, London physicians were treated to the following tale, as later reported in the Medical Times: A tradesman's wife, aged 41 at the time of her death, who had borne six children—the last in 1844—a tall, well-formed woman, who had suffered from the following symptoms
- [The golden padlock](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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
- [The human clarinet](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-human-clarinet/) - At a meeting of the Glasgow Pathological and Clinical Society on November 13th 1877, members had a rare treat. The British Medical Journal for the following month takes up the story: Dr. David Foulis showed the parts removed by him in the operation of excision of the larynx, viz.: the cricoid and thyroid cartilages. The
- [An extraordinary surgical operation](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/extraordinary-surgical-operation/) - Last week I came across an article which took my breath away. It was published in 1858, in an American journal, the Medical and Surgical Reporter, and it describes an operation of such audacity and skill that I can’t believe it isn’t better known. This is how it was reported: At the request of a
- [Like finding a needle in a pharynx](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/like-finding-needle-pharynx/) - In November 1828 several English-language journals picked up a case which had appeared in the Revue Medicale, a French medical journal, the previous month. It begins promisingly: A man, aged twenty-five years, was irritating his nostril with a needle… As you do. …when by some accident he suffered it to enter the nostril through which
- [An abnormal secretion](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-abnormal-secretion/) - This was the front page story in The Lancet on July 11th 1835. It’s a glorious case, but I think my favourite thing about it is the inclusion of the word ‘abnormal’ in the headline: can you imagine such an emission of milk ever being ‘normal’? It was reported by a Swiss medic, a Dr
- [The boy who got his wick stuck in a candlestick](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/boy-wick-stuck-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,
- [Cured by a lightning bolt](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/cured-lightning-bolt/) - On April 16th 1828 a ship called the New York sailed from its eponymous home port destined for Liverpool. She carried a full complement of passengers and cargo and – as reported in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal shortly afterwards, on the morning of the 19th, was struck by lightning, which shattered the main royal mast,
- [The exploding scrotum](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-exploding-scrotum/) - In February 1793 a small British expeditionary force under the command of the Duke of York landed at Hellevoetsluis in the Netherlands. They were part of an international coalition whose aim was to invade and occupy Revolutionary France. Known as the Flanders Campaign, the effort was a failure: the French counterattacked and succeeded in annexing
- [A freak accident](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-freak-accident/) - In March 1827 The London Medical Repository and Review included a short report of an inquest which had been held a couple of weeks earlier. The deceased was a small child, whose name is not revealed – and since children were often referred to at this date as ‘it’, it is not even possible to
- [Painful news from the Bobbin Factory](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/news-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
- [A large portion of chin](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/large-portion-chin/) - One night in May 1832 the duty medics at St Thomas's Hospital in London suddenly had a particularly difficult case to deal with. It was subsequently reported in the London Medical and Surgical Journal: Joseph B. aged 24, a Frenchman, of sanguine temperament, whilst partially inebriated, on the evening of May, in an hotel in Gracechurch Street,
- [An unwanted buzz cut](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/unwanted-buzz-cut/) - In 1869 The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal reported the following unusual case which had taken place a few years earlier in California: On our recent tour through Mendocino county, we made the acquaintance of B. F. Chase, a foreman in the Caspar mill, who received a wound in July, 1864, the nature of which,
- [The egested intestine](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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
- [Pitched upon a pitchfork](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/pitched-upon-pitchfork/) - After countless hours reading dreadful stories in medical journals I’m rarely shocked by a case, but this one [no need to stop reading – there’s a happy ending!] really gave me pause for thought. It was reported in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1853, by one Dr. Sargent from Worcester, Massachusetts: A
- [Death by barley](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/death-by-barley/) - Nineteenth-century medical journals are not short of ghastly occupational injuries. Factories, building sites and the new railways were frightening places, and there is barely an issue of a major journal that does not contain at least one article about terrible accidents caused by inadequate safety arrangements in the workplace. But this example, published in the
- [An X-ray vision](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/x-ray-vision/) - In December 1863 a New York physician, Samuel Ward Francis, sat down to write a letter to The Medical and Surgical Reporter. The medical achievements of Dr Francis – whatever they may have been – are forgotten today, but his work as an indefatigable amateur inventor lives on in the records of the US Patent Office.
- [A chainsaw to the spine](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-chainsaw-to-the-spine/) - In the early nineteenth century surgery was a primitive affair, generally limited to a few commonly performed operations. Most people know about agonising amputations, or the (possibly even more agonising) operations for bladder stones and mastectomy; others in the surgeon’s repertoire included basic procedures to remove cataracts or to release pressure in the skull. But
- [Spirits go straight to your head](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/spirits-go-straight-head/) - I recently stumbled across this intriguing snippet in John Cooke’s A Treatise on Nervous Diseases (1824): I am informed by Mr. Carlisle, that “a few years since a man was brought dead into the Westminster Hospital who had just drunk a quart of gin for a wager. The evidences of death being quite conclusive, he was immediately examined; and
- [Broken glass and boiled cabbage](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/broken-glass-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
- [The eye fungus](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-eye-fungus/) - My headline is somewhat misleading, for the 'fungus' referred to in today's article, published in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal in 1823, has nothing to do with mushrooms. It's a word which until the late nineteenth century was sometimes applied to certain forms of tumour. And in case you're thinking that a story about eye
- [The man who peed a bullet](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/man-peed-bullet/) - Gunshot wounds have always been a particular challenge for the medic. Some of the oldest surgical manuals contain advice on removing balls or bullets lodged superficially – it was often possible to remove missiles from soft tissue or bone near the skin. But if they had penetrated deeper into body cavities or damaged internal organs
- [Cart to heart](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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.
- [Hip hip](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/hip-hip/) - On 18th January 1824 The Lancet reported an operation of extraordinary daring. It had taken place two days earlier at Guy’s Hospital in London, and the surgeon was the celebrated Sir Astley Cooper. At the age of 55 he was at the height of his powers, recently elevated to a baronetcy and basking in the
- [A fishy business](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-fishy-business/) - In 1739 a surgeon from the village of Kelvedon in Essex wrote to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society to communicate ‘three extraordinary cases’ from his practice. The first and last are separated by over thirty years, which makes me suspect – perhaps unkindly – that not much of medical interest took place in
- [The stone-swallower](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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
- [The bone-breaking sneeze](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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
- [The dentist who made the blind see](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/dentist-made-blind-see/) - One interesting aspect of nineteenth-century medicine is the fact that many clinicians were convinced that every ailment could be traced ultimately to the same cause. Some were sure that most illnesses were triggered by problems with the liver; others that a disordered digestion could manifest in symptoms all over the body. Towards the end of
- [The snuff-eating nose centipede](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/snuff-eating-nose-centipede/) - Here’s an alarming pair of cases reported in the first volume of the Medical Essays and Observations, published in 1764: A woman of a good heal constitution, and about thirty-six years old, began to complain of a fixed pain in the lower and right side of her forehead. The adjective ‘heal’, an archaic form, means
- [Deafened by a kiss](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/deafened-by-a-kiss/) - Some injuries recorded in the medical literature were not the result of some ghastly accident, but had an apparently innocuous cause. Here’s an example from the Archives of Otology, published in 1880. It was reported by Daniel Bennett St. John Roosa, a specialist in diseases of the eye and ear who was one of the
- [A leech on the eyeball](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-leech-on-the-eyeball/) - Bloodletting is an inescapable theme of a medical blog set largely in the nineteenth century. Although venesection (opening a vein) was frequently used, for minor complaints the weapon of choice was the leech, which could extract a small amount of blood relatively painlessly. Doctors varied the numbers of leeches applied according to the severity of
- [The mystery of the poisonous neckerchief](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/mystery-poisonous-neckerchief/) - In 1873 The Medical Times and Register published an unusual case report from one Joseph G. Richardson, a doctor from Philadelphia: J. B., a farmer, 74 years old, residing near Darby, in the vicinity of Philadelphia, came under my care in the out-patient department of the Pennsylvania Hospital, January 27, 1873. His neck, face, and
- [Sleeping with the fishes](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/sleeping-with-the-fishes/) - One of the overwhelming priorities of medicine in the eighteenth century was the improvement of resuscitation methods. Drowning was a major cause of death, and physicians realised they needed better emergency procedures to treat those who had fallen into rivers, canals and lakes. Medical societies were set up in several European countries to investigate possible
- [The tapeworm trap](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-tapeworm-trap/) - In September 1856 a physician called J. Gotham wrote to an American journal, the Medical and Surgical Reporter, with news of an exciting new breakthrough: a tapeworm trap. As it is my desire to keep you advised of all the improvements in medical and surgical practice which this prolific age is ushering into being, it
- [The tin whistle](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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
- [The turpentine vapour bath](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/turpentine-vapour-bath/) - The year is 1874, and American medics are deeply concerned about the activities of quacks and unlicensed doctors who are damaging the reputation of the profession. One particularly worrying case is reported by The Medical and Surgical Reporter: The following account is sent us by a correspondent in Baltimore. It is needless to say that
- [The dislocated eyeball](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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
- [Toast and herbs](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/toast-and-herbs/) - William Salmon was a seventeenth-century physician and a prolific writer, the author of numerous books on surgery and internal medicine. He also practised alchemy and astrology in an age which regarded these disciplines as legitimate and empirical sciences (his contemporary Isaac Newton was also an enthusiastic alchemist). In 1687 Salmon published a book entitled Παρατηρηματα (‘Observations’,
- [The self-opening coffin](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/self-opening-coffin/) - In 1875 a physician from New York, Samuel Ward Francis, published a book called Curious Facts, Concerning Man and Nature. I say ‘book’, but it’s more of a pamphlet, a collection of disparate essays running to just 20 pages; this was the second volume in a series. Some of his articles express deep scepticism about
- [The punctured bowel](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-punctured-bowel/) - An edition of The Retrospect of Practical Medicine and Surgery from 1872 contains this remarkable tale, narrated by a London surgeon, Thomas Bryant: On August 18, 1871, my friend Mr. Kelson Wright, of Kennington, asked me to see with him a case of strangulated hernia in an old, half-childish man, aged 71. He had been the subject of a
- [The tooth ant](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-tooth-ant/) - In June 1873 a respectable American medical journal, The Clinic, published a ‘news in brief’ story which had been culled from a local newspaper in New Jersey. It was evidently reproduced more for entertainment than for its scientific value, since it was prefaced by the ironic comment ‘We give the following for what it is
- [Bled dry](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/bled-dry/) - Most visitors to this blog will probably be aware that for centuries bloodletting played a central role in Western medicine. This is partly the result of the extraordinarily long-lasting influence of the Greek physician Galen, whose humoral theory underpinned medical practice until the Renaissance. Strangely, bleeding remained commonplace until much later, persisting well into the
- [Quails and beer](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/quails-and-beer/) - Invalid diets could be unusual in the nineteenth century – and often included regular doses of strong liquor. But even by the standards of the era, this example struck me as eccentric. In 1874 Charles Wotton, a doctor from King’s Langley in Hertfordshire, wrote to The Lancet to report this case: C. R—, aged ten,
- [Better late than never](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/better-late-never/) - Today’s medical journals pride themselves on their topicality, publishing the latest research as soon as it’s available – but those news values did not apply in 1845, when the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal agreed to publish a case report almost half a century old. It was sent to them by a retired surgeon, William
- [The man with a snake in his heart](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/man-snake-heart/) - I was fascinated to stumble across this seventeenth-century autopsy report in an old edition of the British Medical Journal. It was unearthed by Benjamin (later Sir Benjamin) Ward Richardson, one of the great figures of Victorian medicine. His name is less familiar today than that of his friend John Snow, the leading British exponent of
- [Firearm fires forearm](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/firearm-fires-forearm/) - Today’s medical dispatch comes from St George’s Hospital in London, and was reported to The Lancet in 1850: A wound of a very unusual description was lately inflicted on a young man of twenty-three, who was admitted under the care of Mr. Tatum. From the patient's statement it would appear, that on the 25th he was
- [Up the spout](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/up-the-spout/) - One of the things that strikes me every time I look at a medical journal published between about 1850 and 1900 is quite how dangerous the early railways were. More or less every issue contains a report of a major accident in which passengers were killed, or railway workers maimed or injured after wholly avoidable
- [Evacuated with a spoon](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/evacuated-with-a-spoon/) - In 1836 a doctor from rural Ireland, J.L. McCarthy, encountered a highly unusual case which he then reported to The Lancet. The journal deemed it worthy of publication, although it is unlikely that many of its readers would ever need to know how to treat a patient suffering from this particular complaint: On Thursday, the
- [She cut off her nose with a carving knife](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/cut-off-nose-carving-knife/) - The image above shows the Jardin Royal (Royal Garden) in Paris – misleadingly named, since although it included a botanical garden it was primarily an educational institution. In addition to botany, it offered classes in chemistry, anatomy and surgery. One member of its faculty was the surgeon Pierre Dionis (c.1643-1718), who taught there for many
- [The ear maggots](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-ear-maggots/) - On Saturday, May 19th 1849 the Westminster Medical Society held one of its regular meetings. Here is an extract from the minutes, as reported in The Lancet: Dr. Routh exhibited to the Society two small maggots, which had come out of the ear of a gentleman. Well, that would certainly grab my attention. This gentleman held the
- [The girl whose sweat turned black](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/girl-black-sweat/) - Here’s a landmark case from the Philosophical Transactions, reported by the Plymouth surgeon James Yonge in 1709: A girl 16 years old, a daughter of Elizabeth Worth of this town, had about the end of last April a few hot pimples rise on her cheeks, which bleeding and a purge or two cur'd. She continued
- [A nineteenth-century hacking scandal](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/nineteenth-century-hacking-scandal/) - In November 1870 a London surgeon took the unusual step of writing anonymously to The Times to complain about his son’s headmaster. The son in question was a boy at Rugby School, and the letter was headlined ‘Rugby and its Football’: Sir,–– I use the expression because to my mind the game as it is
- [The spider's web cure](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/spiders-web-cure/) - Until the nineteenth century, spider’s web was often used as a folk remedy for superficial lacerations. The great tensile strength of spider silk was probably quite effective at holding the edges of a wound together, although doubtless it also brought the risk of infection. Until I came across an article published in The Dublin Quarterly
- [The forty-foot tapeworm](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/forty-foot-tapeworm/) - Medical journals do not often publish articles by undergraduates these days, but an 1847 edition of the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal included a short paper by one John D. Twiggs, described simply as a ‘student of medicine’. Mr Twiggs (we cannot call him ‘Dr’) betrays his inexperience in a certain lack of professional scepticism;
- [A festive night in a Victorian emergency department](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/night-victorian-emergency-department/) - Christmas is always a difficult time of year for practitioners of emergency medicine. In the UK, accident and emergency departments brace themselves for a flood of injuries caused by alcohol; most years there will be at least one newspaper article about drinking culture in the UK and how it is placing intolerable strain on the
- [Death by Christmas dinner](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/beware-christmas-dinner/) - If you haven’t yet bought everything for your Christmas dinner, this tale from almost 200 years ago may cause you to remove a few items from your shopping list. Published in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions in 1814 by Thomas Chevalier, a distinguished surgeon and polymath also notable for his English translation of Pascal’s Pensées, it concerns
- [Pegged out](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/pegged-out/) - In 1865 a young eye surgeon from Gloucester, Robert Brudenell Carter, sent a series of case reports for publication in The Ophthalmic Review. Carter was an unusually accomplished individual whose achievements went far beyond surgery. He performed with distinction as an army surgeon in the Crimea, and his dispatches from the conflict were published in
- [Shot by a toasting fork](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/shot-toasting-fork/) - This is one of my favourite nineteenth-century cases, which I originally intended to include in my forthcoming book but which didn’t quite make it to the final manuscript. It was written by Dr T. Davis, from the small Worcestershire town of Upton-upon-Severn, and published in the Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association in
- [A bayonet through the head](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-bayonet-through-the-head/) - In June 1809 a French military surgeon, M. Fardeau, read a paper at a meeting of the Société de Médecine de Paris. I can find little information about M. Fardeau, but he evidently served with distinction in the Napoleonic Wars, being rewarded with membership of the Légion d’honneur for his efforts. During the War of
- [A high pain threshold](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/high-pain-threshold/) - In 1878 an elderly surgeon from Birmingham, Dickinson Crompton, was persuaded to write a short article about his early career for Guy’s Hospital Reports, the house journal of Guy’s Hospital in London. He was then 73 and almost completely blind, reporting that I am now getting cataracts in my eyes, and at the present moment
- [Killed by his false teeth](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/killed-false-teeth/) - People who wear dentures sometimes lose them, as you might mislay a pair of glasses, but it’s rare to do it in quite this fashion. This case, from the 1842 volume of Guy’s Hospital Reports, was reported by one W.G. Carpenter. Mr. H., aged 35, the subject of the present case, was an Assistant to Mr.
- [The venomous boot](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-venomous-boot/) - Here's a tall tale from 1856, published in The Medical Times and Gazette: Some interesting experiments were made at the Society of Arts last week by Dr. Chambers, to test the efficacy of a plant known as Guaco in Central America, or a plant nearly resembling it, as an antidote to the bite of numerous snakes.
- [Bunged up](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/bunged-up/) - Most of the injuries chronicled on this blog were caused by bad luck, and a few by misadventure; but here’s one which can only be attributed to rank stupidity. In 1852 The Half-Yearly Abstract of the Medical Sciences published this report from an Italian surgeon, Signor Riali: In December, 1848, a peasant was admitted into the
- [The perils of the Christmas pudding](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/perils-christmas-pudding/) - Continuing this blog’s recent Christmas theme, here’s a short article originally printed in the Medical Adviser in 1825. It was at about this time that one of the staples of the modern Christmas dinner – the Christmas pudding – began to be a regular feature of festive meals. More usually referred to as a plum
- [Reeking from the jaw of the living animal](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/reeking-jaw-living-animal/) - The 1843 volume of The Dublin Journal of Medical Science contains this gem from Mr Robert Twiss, a surgeon from Kerry. Though it’s only a short report it made quite a stir on publication, and was still being cited in textbooks of dentistry many decades later. The first sentence is nothing if not arresting: On
- [Pregnant with a toothbrush](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/pregnant-with-a-toothbrush/) - In 1874 The Lancet printed this cautionary tale by Thomas Whiteside Hime, who had discovered the hard way that things aren’t always what they seem. He began his article by reminding his colleagues of the ‘great importance of carefulness in diagnosing’ – particularly where a supposed pregnancy is concerned: Early in July last, M. G.,
- [An exercise in futility](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/top-gear-steam-edition/) - This blog usually deals with medical matters; but I couldn’t resist reproducing this article from the first number of the American Medical and Philosophical Register, published in 1814, even though it was contributed to the non-medical section of the journal. An engineer called James Sharples – holder of a patent relating to steam engines –
- [A window in his chest](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-window-in-his-chest/) - Occasionally a single operation is deemed so impressive that it goes down in history under the name of the surgeon who performed it. In 1817 the English surgeon Sir Astley Cooper astonished his colleagues by tying a ligature around the abdominal aorta, the largest blood vessel of the abdomen, to treat a patient with an
- [Mother knows best](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/mother-knows-best/) - Sometimes doctors don’t have all the answers. Here’s a case in which the medics actually gave up on their patient, who was then cured by her own mother. This story is taken from Dr S.D. Gross’s Practical Treatise on Foreign Bodies in the Air-Passages, a doorstopper of a book published in 1854. Dr Gross devotes
- [Attempted suicide by spoon](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/attempted-suicide-spoon/) - When Dr Samuel White, a doctor from the town of Hudson in upstate New York, took on this case in 1806 he got more than he bargained for. He reported the unusual circumstances in The Medical Repository the following year: May 22nd, 1806, George Macy, aged twenty-six, became a patient of mine, with a rheumatic
- [A most fortunate escape](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-most-fortunate-escape/) - Here’s a tale of misadventure so stupid that it wouldn’t be out of place in the annual Darwin Awards. This case was reported to the Ohio Medical and Surgical Journal in 1849 by a Dr William Lindsay. On the 27th of Nov., 1844, he [Dr Linsday] was called to see the young man who was the
- [The soldier operated on himself](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-soldier-operated-on-himself/) - Isidor Glück was a Hungarian surgeon who emigrated to London and then the United States in the early 1850s. As a supporter of the failed revolution led by his compatriot Lajos Kossuth in 1848 he had little option but to leave his homeland, and spent the rest of his life in exile. In 1855 he
- [The spear and the eucalyptus tree](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/spear-eucalyptus-tree/) - In 1891 The Lancet printed this case report by Andrew Ross, a doctor who some years earlier had been practising in the small Australian settlement of Molong in New South Wales: On Dec. 25th a messenger arrived requesting my attendance on one “Harry,” an aboriginal, who had, in an encounter with another of the race,
- [Rings on his fingers](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/rings-on-his-fingers/) - In 1855 Dr D. D. Slade of Boston reported the following freak occurrence to The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal: I was awakened at about 3 o’clock, a few mornings since, by a young man who said that he had lost the little finger of his right hand. The account given was as follows: being a clerk
- [An unexpected discovery](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-unexpected-discovery/) - Today’s news is culled from an edition of The Northern Journal of Medicine published in 1845. It brings a new meaning to the phrase ‘biting your tongue’: A German soldier was wounded in the battle of Gross-Gorschen (2nd May 1813) by a musket ball, which penetrated the left cheek, carrying away the four last molars of the upper jaw,
- [A most remarkable accident](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-most-remarkable-accident/) - Here’s a case from The Medical Museum published in 1764 – more than seventy years after the patient had been treated and cured. To be fair to the tardy journal editor, it is a pretty unusual story: A most remarkable accident befell a young man near Hall in Saxony, whose name was Andreas Rudleff, being about twenty-six years of
- [A leech in the throat](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-leech-in-the-throat/) - Ever swallowed a leech by accident? Me neither. Here’s a tale told by Surgeon-Lieutenant T.A. Granger, a surgeon in the British army in India, in a letter to the British Medical Journal in 1895. It might make you a bit more careful about your drinking water next time you’re abroad: Several days ago I received
- [Incorrigible](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/incorrigible/) - The Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales, published in France between 1812 and 1822, was the first encyclopaedic dictionary of medicine. It’s a massive work, running to 60 volumes. To get a sense of its scale, consider the fact that volume seven, a tome of some 700 pages, deal only with the alphabet between COR and CYS.
- [A hopeless case?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-hopeless-case/) - In 1868 the Richmond Medical Journal reported an extraordinary accident which had befallen a 9-year-old boy at a cotton press in Missouri. Since few of my readers are likely to have an instant mental image of one of these pieces of machinery, here’s a quick description. A cotton press was a substantial contraption typically made
- [Sand, to be taken twice daily](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/sand-to-be-taken-twice-daily/) - 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
- [The perils of being a writer](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-perils-of-being-a-writer/) - Having spent most of the last year sitting in seclusion writing and editing my first book, I was amused to come across an essay by the eighteenth-century Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot. Tissot is perhaps best known today for his work L’Onanisme, the first scholarly examination of masturbation (executive summary: he was not a fan). In
- [Cured by a nightmare](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/cured-by-a-nightmare/) - Here’s a strange little tale which – unusually for this blog – does not involve a single doctor, since the patient recovered from a long-standing medical condition as the result of a dream. It comes from a short paper which was read at a meeting of the Royal Society on February 4th 1748 by one
- [A pin in the ear](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-pin-in-the-ear/) - 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
- [Sheathed in a pig's gut](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/sheathed-pigs-gut/) - In 1870 a Dr John P. Gray, of Utica, told this strange and rather sad little tale to a meeting of the New York State Medical Society, about a patient he had recently encountered. The case was then reported in The Medical Record: The individual was a native of Germany, and had always been considered as
- [The missing pencil](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-missing-pencil/) - 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,
- [The woman who peed through her nose](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/woman-peed-nose/) - 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
- [In one side and out the other](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/in-one-side-and-out-the-other/) - Volume 6 of the Medical Facts and Observations, published in London in 1795, includes four cases submitted by a Dr Henry Yates Carter, who described himself as “surgeon at Kettley, near Wellington, in Shropshire”. He was no mere country doctor: he had studied medicine in America and practised on the battlefields of the Revolution before
- [Catching a disease through an electric wire](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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 in the Medico-Chirurgical Review for 1833, a doctor treating a patient for a persistent case of ague (malaria) decided to try the fashionable galvanic therapy. This entailed a regular course of electric shocks administered to
- [Severed, replaced, reunited](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/severed-replaced-reunited/) - In June 1852 the New Jersey Medical Reporter printed an article about brain injuries. The following month a doctor from Newark, W. Mortimer Brown, wrote in with his own striking contribution: The cases, published in your last number, of injuries of the head, with loss of a portion of the brain, have brought to my
- [The woman who vomited pins](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/woman-vomited-pins/) - In 1873 The Lancet reported this case from Belford Hospital, an institution which had been founded eight years earlier, and the first to serve the largely rural population around Fort William in Scotland. This was probably the strangest case anybody concerned had dealt with: Catherine M, aged twenty, a nurse-maid, was admitted on August 30th,
- [Snake poo salesman](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/snake-poo-salesman/) - In 1862 an Edinburgh-trained physician, Dr James Hastings, published a slim volume about the treatment of tuberculosis and other diseases of the lung. It advocates the use of substances which much of the profession would regard as unorthodox, as he acknowledges in his preface: It has been suggested that the peculiar character of these agents
- [She needs a finger](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/she-needs-a-finger/) - On July 26th 1911 The Los Angeles Times carried what must be the most extraordinary classified ad in its history. The editor realised he had a story on his hands, promptly despatched reporters to find out more, and promoted the advertisement to a handsome slot on the front page. The headline certainly makes you want to read
- [Flies in his eyes](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/flies-in-eyes/) - 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
- [The King of Smokers](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-king-of-smokers/) - There were plenty of doctors in the nineteenth century who thought that smoking was good for you; so there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary in this excerpt from an article published in the Medical Press and Circular in 1871: So much, and often so much nonsense, is prated about the evils of tobacco that its virtues
- [The poet's skull and a boy's bowels](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/poets-skull-boys-bowels/) - The Scottish surgeon Archibald Blacklock is chiefly remembered today for the events of the night of March 31st, 1834, when he was one of a small group who entered the family mausoleum of Robert Burns in order to make a plaster cast of the poet’s skull. Blacklock was an enthusiastic proponent of the pseudoscience of
- [On flatulence and Darwin](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/on-flatulence-and-darwin/) - In 1867 The Medical Press and Circular published a series of articles by the physician Dr John Chapman on a subject in which he was a world authority: flatulence. To be fair to Dr Chapman, he was also an influential publisher and an expert in psychology specialising in ‘neurotics’ – those we would now describe as
- [The man with 87 children](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/man-87-children/) - The English physician Samuel Merriman (1771-1852) was a leading authority on midwifery and the diseases of pregnancy. His best-known work, published in 1814, was Synopsis of the Various Kinds of Difficult Parturition, a treatise on the dangers of childbirth which was translated into several languages. In an engaging section on multiple births he includes a
- [The fractured penis](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-fractured-penis/) - 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
- [The cure of Thomas Tipple](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-cure-of-thomas-tipple/) - In 1840 an American physician, Dr Pliny Earle, visited the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. He wrote an account of what he saw there, subsequently published in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences. It’s a document of great value, not least because he describes a number of exhibits which were
- [Reattached with a sticking plaster](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/reattached-sticking-plaster/) - Today’s surgeons are quite adept at reattaching parts of the body when they have been severed. Fingers, hands and even entire arms have been successfully reunited with their owners. You might think that such feats were only made possible by the paraphernalia of the modern operating theatre: microscopes, superfine suture materials and so on. That’s
- [The missing tobacco pipe](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/missing-tobacco-pipe/) - In 1855 The Lancet reported the proceedings of the most recent meeting of the London Medical Society. Here is one highlight: Mr. Henry Smith showed a portion of tobacco pipe, nearly two inches in length, which he had extracted from behind the ear of a boy who, between two and three years previously, had fallen down whilst holding a
- [The extra jaw](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-extra-jaw/) - 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
- [Conceived by a bullet](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/conceived-by-a-bullet/) - There are many cases of supposed virgin births in the early medical literature, but few are as wonderfully unlikely as this one published in The Lancet in early 1875: The following rich gynaecological contribution is reported in the columns of the American Medical Weekly for Nov. 7th, 1874, by L. G. Capers, M.D., Vicksburg, Mississippi.
- [The mysterious bullet in the heart](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/mysterious-bullet-heart/) - In 1852 The Monthly Journal of Medical Science published a report from Burma, where British forces had just begun to fight the Second Anglo-Burmese War. They landed on April 12th and captured the city of Rangoon shortly afterwards, setting up a field hospital in a priest’s house requisitioned for the purpose. Six surgeons travelled with
- [Brolly painful](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/brolly-painful/) - It’s a great headline, but I can’t take any credit for it. When I was at school one of my contemporaries suffered an unfortunate injury. As he was bending over to pick something up, a friend thought it would be amusing to prod him in the bottom with a golf umbrella. The joker sadly misjudged
- [The sad case of Hoo Loo](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/case-hoo-loo/) - Great surgeons are usually remembered for their successes rather than their failures. Sir Astley Cooper, one of the preeminent figures of early 19th-century medicine, had many notable successes – such as his operation for popliteal aneurysm, in which he saved the leg of a cab driver by tying a ligature around a major blood vessel.
- [The sleepwalker](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-sleepwalker/) - Those who have first-hand experience of somnambulism will know that sleepwalkers are often capable of surprisingly complex tasks. While most may do nothing more than get out of bed and walk into the next room, others can hold conversations or even drive cars before they regain consciousness. In 1856 The Journal of Psychological Medicine and
- [A saw head](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-saw-head/) - I’ve documented a few extraordinary injuries in this blog, but perhaps none as remarkable as this one. The New England Journal of Medicine for 1869 contains this arresting case, submitted by a Dr Wardwell from New Hampshire: I was summoned by telegraph March 1st, 1869, to Berlin, New Hampshire, to attend Chester Bean, who had
- [Rattlesnakes and brandy](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/rattlesnakes-brandy/) - Around 7,000 people in the US are bitten by venomous snakes every year. Many of these are rattlesnake bites, but thanks to modern medicine there are only a handful of fatalities. The most important breakthrough of the last century was the invention of antivenin (also known as antivenom) – a remedy made by injecting rattlesnake
- [A fork up the anus](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-fork-up-the-anus/) - 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
- [Like an elastic ball](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/like-elastic-ball/) - The great French surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren was known to his unfortunate juniors as ‘the Napoleon of surgery’ and ‘the brigand of the Hôtel Dieu’, the Paris hospital where he reigned supreme. While he was a difficult character, he was also very good. His name is mainly associated today with Dupuytren’s Contracture, a condition which causes the
- [The man with the wax face](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/man-wax-face/) - In May 1884 The Lancet’s Paris correspondent reported the following: There is to be seen at Landrecies, in the Department of the North, an invalid artillery soldier, who was wounded in the late Franco-German War, when he was horribly mutilated by the bursting of a Prussian shell. The man’s face was literally blown off, including
- [A diplomatic disaster](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-diplomatic-disaster/) - In 1824 King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu of Hawaii made a state visit to Britain. The kingdom of Hawaii had been established in 1795 and was known in Europe as the Sandwich Islands, a name given by Captain James Cook on his voyages in 1778. The king and queen arrived in May 1824, and
- [The amputee obstacle course](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/amputee-obstacle-course/) - 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
- [Amputating the bowels](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/amputating-the-bowels/) - Browsing an 1869 edition of The Lancet I stumbled across a short news article with this promising headline: A cutting from an American paper gives us an account of a remarkable operation for umbilical hernia, in which the operator, Dr. G. D. Beebe, found it necessary to cut away between four and five feet of sphacelated small intestine. ‘Sphacelated’
- [Occupation: glass and nail eater](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/occupation-glass-nail-eater/) - 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.,
- [A case for Dr Bell](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/case-dr-bell/) - When I first read this case I found myself thinking that it would not be out of place in a Sherlock Holmes story. Happily this is no coincidence – Holmes’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is very likely to have been familiar with it. It first appeared in an article in the Edinburgh Surgical Journal
- [Death from peas](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/death-from-peas/) - In July 1842 the London Medical Gazette printed one of the most intriguing headlines in the history of the journal: The story accompanying it was told by George Johnson, a physician’s assistant at King’s College Hospital in London. This is what he had to relate: John Lydbury, aged 60, labourer, was brought to the hospital on
- [The double monster](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-double-monster/) - The phenomenon of conjoined twins was poorly understood until the twentieth century. Though even the earliest medical journals contain reports of many cases, the predominant tone is one of horror and even fear rather than compassion or detached interest. Right up until the end of the nineteenth century, words such as ‘monster’ or ‘monstrosity’ were
- [The horn of a dilemma](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-horn-of-a-dilemma/) - 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
- [Killed by a corkscrew](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/killed-by-a-corkscrew/) - At a meeting of the Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society in 1850, a Professor Miller spoke about an unusual case from his own practice. The patient was suffering from what the doctor described as an inguinal aneurysm* – a balloon-like swelling in an artery in the groin: The man was about sixty years of age, robust and
- [Saved for posterity](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/saved-for-posterity/) - In 1875 the American surgeon Charles Brigham recorded this wince-inducing case from his practice in San Francisco. The details are contained in a volume he published the following year, Surgical Cases with Illustrations. It’s a notable book, one of the earliest to feature extensive photographs of the cases described. Until the mid-19th century, most medical
- [Two spoonsful of brain on the pillow](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/brain-on-pillow/) - Here's a story so replete with ghastly details that if it happened today it would immediately be featured in a TV reality documentary about emergency medicine, complete with dramatic reconstructions and lavish amounts of tomato ketchup. This was reported to the San Francisco Medical Press in 1860 by a Dr Peter Campbell from Sonoma in northern California:
- [The deserter](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-deserter/) - Here’s an entertaining snippet from Guy’s Medical Jurisprudence from 1812, concerning a young man who really didn’t want to be in the army: Phineas Adams, a soldier in the Somerset Militia, aged 18 years, was confined in jail for desertion. This barely does the poor lad justice – he was only imprisoned after numerous attempts to
- [The largest tumor on record](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/largest-tumor-record/) - In 1851 a physician from Ohio, Dr P.J. Buckner, was at a meeting of the State Medical Society when he got chatting to a colleague, Charles Beach. Dr Beach told him of a case so extraordinary that Buckner decided to travel 220 miles to see the patient for himself. He was determined to get visual proof,
- [Honking like a goose](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/honking-like-goose/) - This blog has on several occasions chronicled the unlikely range of foreign objects which patients have managed to get stuck in various parts of their anatomy. See, for instance, the tale of the man who swallowed knives, the wine glass up the bottom, and the barometer stuck in the bladder. But I think the following
- [Sugar is good for your teeth](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/sugar-good-teeth/) - With debate raging about the virtues (or otherwise) of eating a low-fat diet, it was interesting to come across this story from the Philosophical Transactions. It has long been known that eating sugar is bad for your teeth – but in 1728 one doctor, at least, thought the exact opposite. Dr Frederick Slare wrote this:
- [The wandering musket ball](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/wandering-musket-ball/) - A miraculous recovery today, taken from the pages of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This report was published in 1708 and, unusually, written by the patient, himself a doctor. Dr Robert Fielding practised in Gloucester, and during the Civil War was a prominent Royalist. On September 20th 1643 he fought in the First
- [The dreadful opening](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-dreadful-opening/) - In 1807 the Philadelphia Medical Museum was sent an extraordinary case report by a local doctor who had been ‘sent it by a friend’. Neither he nor anybody else appeared to know who had written the report, so its authenticity is doubtful – but the events it describes were certainly worth reproducing: In the evening of
- [How to treat hay fever?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/treat-hay-fever/) - This is hay fever season (if you’re reading this in the northern hemisphere, at least) – the time of year when airborne pollen makes life a misery for anybody unlucky enough to be allergic to the stuff. The condition is incurable, but a range of drugs including antihistamines can reduce the symptoms significantly. No such
- [The fire-proof man](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/fire-proof-man/) - In 1828 The Lancet reported the antics of a person they called ‘the fire-proof man’, a Cuban with extraordinary abilities: The French medical journal, La Clinique, gives an account of the experiments of M. Martinez, the fire-proof man, as he is called, who is now one of the principal objects of attraction at Paris. M.
- [Boiling water and birch twigs](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/boiling-water-birch-twigs/) - In 1843 a Dr T.O. Ward wrote to the London Medical Gazette on the subject of pain. A previous correspondent had suggested that victims of asphyxiation felt nothing and were insensible to pain. Dr Ward begged to differ, drawing on his own childhood as evidence: When a boy, I was very fond of making boyish
- [A rotten trick](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-rotten-trick/) - Here’s a cracking ‘news in brief’ item from an 1851 edition of The Lancet: A few days back a curious case occurred at a roadside inn, known by the name of the “Rummer”, a few miles from Norwich. Stoke Cross, to be precise. The Rummer Inn was a venerable watering hole which finally closed in
- [Champagne ad libitum](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/champagne-ad-libitum/) - Morning sickness is a common affliction which affects the majority of pregnant women. A few suffer a far more debilitating form known as hyperemesis gravidarum, in which vomiting is so severe that dehydration and weight loss can occur. The Duchess of Cambridge required hospital treatment for the complication while pregnant with Prince George. In September
- [Plum stone colick](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/plum-stone-colick/) - In 1781 an eminent Scottish doctor, Thomas Simson, reported this unusual case in the pages of the Medical Museum: A girl about twelve years of age, who had been long troubled with colick pains, was last year under my management. She complained of pains fixed in one part about two inches below the short ribs of
- [Mass delusions](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/mass-delusions/) - An article published in The Lancet in 1848 contains a remarkable and early example of the power of the placebo effect. James Turnbull, a doctor at the Liverpool Northern Hospital, wrote an article about the history and effects of scurvy, the condition caused by a lack of vitamin C, for many centuries the scourge of
- [A head of wheat in the bladder](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/head-wheat-bladder/) - In December 1871 Dr B. B. Leonard, a general practitioner from West Liberty, Ohio, was summoned to examine ‘J.J.’, a 41-year-old farm worker from a neighbouring village. This is what he subsequently reported to the Cincinnati Lancet and Observer: On the 3rd of July, Mr. J was binding wheat in the field, and when about
- [Eye eye](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/eye-eye/) - Have you ever woken up after a night on the town, not entirely sure how the evening ended? In 1850 this happened to a Belgian fisherman who soon found out that the evening had ended very badly indeed. This case was first reported in a French ophthalmic journal before being included in the later editions
- [Dancing testicles](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/dancing-testicles/) - The runaway winner of the prize for Best Book Title of 1833, had such an award existed, would surely have been James Russell’s Observations on the Testicles. This monograph was the work of a distinguished Scottish professor who was the leading trainer of surgeons at a period when the Edinburgh medical faculty was arguably the
- [The incredible shrinking man](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/incredible-shrinking-man/) - It must have been a slow news week when The Medical Record decided to print the following story in July 1874. Any journalist is familiar with the terror of an imminent deadline and acres of empty space that need to be filled, but I’d like to think I’d never be so desperate that I had
- [Worms in the nose](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/worms-in-the-nose/) - In 1783 the Medical Commentaries received a striking communication on a curious subject: worms in the nose. It came from a surgeon based in Jamaica, Mr Thomas Kilgour: A Gentleman of Montego-bay in Jamaica, aged twenty-six, of a middle stature, and robust make, about the middle of July 1777, complained for three days, of a
- [A beetroot up the bottom](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-beetroot-up-the-bottom/) - On the 19th of May, 1846, a Dr Harris from Harrisville in Virginia was summoned to treat a young man who had got himself into a situation of some delicacy. This is how the doctor reported the case to the Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery: He had been suffering from an attack of piles,
- [The miller's tale](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-millers-tale/) - In 1737 the Philosophical Transactions published a medical case so remarkable that it was still being quoted in journals well over a century later. It was reported by John Belchier, a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital in London and a Fellow of the Royal Society. The Gentleman’s Magazine from 1745 contains this anecdote about him: One
- [Replete of vermin](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/replete-of-vermin/) - In 1869 Dr Felix Rubio, a physician in Colombia, wrote to the Medical Times and Gazette on the subject of carbolic acid. This substance, known today as phenol, was one of the first antiseptic compounds to be used in medicine – Sir Joseph Lister was an enthusiastic proponent. Since adopting its use, Dr Rubio had
- [Scared to death?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/scared-to-death/) - The invention of the guillotine in 1789 coincided with a dark era in French history. The phase of the revolution known as the Terror saw tens of thousands executed by the device, which remained the French executioner’s weapon of choice until the twentieth century. The medical aspects of the guillotine provoked a number of journal
- [The redoubtable Mrs H](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/redoubtable-mrs-h/) - In 1857 the Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery reported this unusual case of childbirth. What is particularly remarkable about it is that the birth itself was straightforward, and both mother and child were completely healthy – but it still bears repeated telling. The mother was a Mrs H., a ‘stout, healthy woman’ of 25.
- [Inexpressibly loathsome and sickening](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/inexpressibly-loathsome-sickening/) - Unlikely tales were often swallowed unquestioningly by the editors of medical journals in the nineteenth century, so it was a welcome corrective to find this preface to a case report published in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1854: An esteemed correspondent has sent us an account of “a most extraordinary case,” which he says he
- [The man who coughed up a knife](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/man-coughed-knife/) - Here’s an arresting story from 1870, reported to the Chicago Medical Times by a Dr J.F. Snyder: James Thompson, sixty years of age, stout and robust, usually of active habits, suddenly commenced declining in health, without apparent cause. When I was consulted, he had been, as he expressed it, “under the weather for five or
- [The glow-in-the-dark Easter feast](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/glow-dark-easter-feast/) - An essay by Dr Robert Graves of Dublin, published in The London Medical and Surgical Journal in 1835, contains this seasonal gem: When three Roman youths, residing at Padua, had bought a lamb, and had eaten part of it on Easter day, 1562, several pieces of the remainder kept till the day following, shone like so many candles, when
- [The human piggy bank](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/human-piggy-bank/) - Eels seem to have featured regularly in this blog, for some reason. First there was the physician who had a shocking experience with an electric eel, and more recently we’ve had the dubious tale of the boy with an eel in his stomach. Here’s another story involving an ingested eel, and much more besides. In
- [The bird and the bees](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-bird-and-the-bees/) - In August 1868 the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in Norwich. One of the members invited to present a paper was Lydia Becker, an amateur astronomer and botanist; among her accomplishments she could count a gold medal from the Royal Horticultural Society and the respect of Charles Darwin, with
- [A difficult labour](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-difficult-labour/) - This blog usually takes a fairly light-hearted approach to its subject: I tend to look for cases which arouse amusement as well as horror. While looking through the archives of the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal I came across this story which is, well, not a barrel of laughs. But I’ve decided to include it, because
- [A suicidal machine](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-suicidal-machine/) - In 1837 The Lancet reported a cause of death previously unknown in the annals of medical science. Its report begins: The following is an account of the post mortem examination of the body of Mr. Robert Cocking, aged sixty-one, who fell with a suicidal machine called a parachute, from the cord of a balloon which ascended from Vauxhall Gardens, on
- [Death by cucumber](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/death-by-cucumber/) - In 1763 a doctor from Malling in Kent, identifying himself only as ‘W.P.’, reported this strange case in The Medical Museum. His patient had died, apparently from eating a vast number of cucumbers: It may be necessary to observe, that this unhappy woman had all the symptoms of a bilious cholic, to the most extreme
- [The man with three testicles](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/man-three-testicles/) - In September 1842 a young man called William Howard went to the army recruiting depot at Coventry, hoping to join the 35th Infantry Regiment. As is usual on these occasions, he was examined by the medical officer, one Dr Macann. The good doctor had a surprise in store, as he later reported to the Provincial
- [The stomach eel](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-stomach-eel/) - Earlier this week a reader of this blog introduced me to a term I hadn’t encountered before: the ‘bosom serpent’. The phrase apparently originated in the study of folklore, and describes an ancient tradition of stories in which the human digestive tract is colonised by other animals. These are typically snakes – as you’d expect
- [Jaundice and night blindness](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/jaundice-night-blindness/) - English is littered with words which were originally medical in their application but which have found broader or figurative usage. Melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic are three good examples – all deriving from the terms for specific bodily fluids and the temperaments associated with them. Another is jaundiced, often used to mean ‘hostile’ or ‘prejudiced’, but
- ['Powder a Toad' - Wesley's Primitive Physick](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/powder-toad-wesleys-primitive-physick/) - John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was one of the most celebrated Englishmen of the eighteenth century. He spent years travelling the country, speaking in fields and town squares and preaching his distinctive version of Protestantism, one which stressed personal holiness, charity and asceticism – though without any of the puritanical excesses of Calvinism. One
- [Lost and found](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/lost-and-found/) - Years ago I remember watching a TV documentary about the Royal Navy Field Gun Competition, a yearly tournament in which rival teams of gunners race to disassemble and transport a large and immensely heavy antique field gun across an obstacle course, before reassembling and firing it – a process which commemorates a similar feat achieved
- [An intestinal... mouse?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/intestinal-mouse/) - As regular readers of this blog may be aware, early medical journals often carried tales of unlikely creatures found living inside the human body. Examples include beetles found in the bladder, millipedes and winged insects in the stomach, and the curious case of the girl with spiders in her eyes. This is, however, the only
- [Leeches for everybody](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/leeches-for-everybody/) - Most people are aware that leeches used to play a major part in medicine: a convenient way of taking a few ounces of blood from a sick patient, they were much used in the days when bleeding was a crucial therapeutic strategy. But where did all those leeches come from? I’ve previously written about French
- [Mütter’s operation - plastic surgery, 19th-century style](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/mutters-operation/) - In 1855 the editor of the Western Lancet, Dr T. Wood, published an article in his own journal on the subject of plastic (reconstructive) surgery. This clinical sub-discipline was still in its infancy, but a handful of surgeons had achieved wonders in treating severely disfigured patients. The leading American expert was Thomas Dent Mütter, who
- [The boy who vomited his own twin](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-boy-who-vomited-his-own-twin/) - This delightful case was reported in the London Medical and Surgical Journal in 1835, having previously appeared in a Greek journal, the Sother. The original article was by a Dr Ardoin – a Frenchman, it appears, in practice in Greece. His patient was a young boy called Demetrius Stamatelli: On the 19th July last, when
- [The man with a tooth in his ear](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-man-with-a-tooth-in-his-ear/) - In 1847 a Dr Mervin Coates wrote to The Lancet to tell them a funny story, an unusual case which he came across in his practice on the Isle of Wight: In the summer of 1846, being myself absent from home, a friend was called upon to attend an old, poor man, who had suffered
- [Oshkosh, by gosh](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/oshkosh-by-gosh/) - Here’s a spectacular head injury (and recovery) reported in the Transactions of the Wisconsin State Medical Society in 1869. This lucky, lucky man survived an accident which left him with a large portion of his brain hanging out of his skull. The unusual case was reported by Dr Linde of Oshkosh, Wisconsin – a city
- [The man who ate chalk](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-man-who-ate-chalk/) - In November 1774 the following extraordinary case was presented to the French Academy of Surgery, and subsequently reported in Paul Eve’s A Collection of remarkable cases in Surgery (1857): André Bazile, a galley-slave, aged 38 years, a man of ravenous appetite, who would often eat chalk, plaster or earth, with his food, was received into
- [King George's heart](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/king-georges-aortic-aneurysm/) - George II is the only British monarch known to have died while defecating. At about seven o'clock on the morning of October 25th, 1760, one of the page boys at Kensington Palace heard a loud noise from the King's private apartment, as if a piece of furniture had fallen over.* When the valet went to
- [Killed by shaving](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/killed-by-shaving/) - Here’s a case which wouldn’t surprise a modern medic, but which caused considerable puzzlement when it occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century: a patient who died while being shaved. This tale, first reported in Marryat’s London Metropolitan Magazine, was cited by one Dr Joseph Comstock in a letter to the Boston Medical
- [The electric spectacles](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-electric-spectacles/) - Exciting news from the world of medical technology was reported in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1850. The following announcement was a late example of the mania for galvanic (i.e., electrical) medicine which began in the eighteenth century. For many decades, after the investigation of electrical phenomena began in earnest, electric current was
- [Medicinal pancakes](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/medicinal-pancakes/) - It being Shrove Tuesday, I thought I’d write a short post about pancakes. Not how to make them, or the reasons for eating them today, but their little-known nineteenth-century medical uses. Yes, really. Oddly, the pancake enjoyed a short-lived vogue in the world of gynaecology and obstetrics. Why it should have been particularly associated with
- [Penis in a bottle](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/penis-in-a-bottle/) - A regular feature of any hospital accident and emergency department is the patient who turns up in an embarrassing and self-inflicted predicament. When questioned about the nature of the injury and how it came about, they come up with an utterly implausible explanation. One example: “I was standing on a chair in the nude, trying
- [A ludicrous mistake](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-ludicrous-mistake/) - Every experienced midwife will have a story about the patient who didn’t even realise she was pregnant until she went into labour. So-called cryptic pregnancies are fairly common – a spectacular example occurred a few years ago when a British soldier on active duty in Afghanistan suddenly went into labour and gave birth at the
- [More astonishing than true](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/more-astonishing-than-true/) - Some stories are just too good to be true. This astonishing tale appeared in the Medical and Surgical Reporter in 1867, repeating an unlikely-sounding yarn first reported in a Canadian newspaper, and involving a Dr Hamilton from Hamilton City in Ontario: Some weeks since the advice of Dr. Hamilton was procured in the case of a young
- [Benjamin Rush in The Lancet](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/benjamin-rush-in-the-lancet/) - Physician, chemist, writer and revolutionary: Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) was a remarkable man in a remarkable age. Arguably the greatest physician America had yet produced, he was an early and tireless advocate for vaccination, an authority on epidemic disease and wrote the first American textbook on mental health. He was also controversial: during a dreadful outbreak
- [A beetle in the bladder](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/beetle-in-bladder/) - Insects and spiders colonising the human body were a regular feature of medical journal articles in the 19th century. For instance, there's the woman with spiders in her eyes, and the remarkable case of the boy who appeared to have a millipede colony in his stomach. This report involving a beetle appeared in the American Journal
- [Dragging his bowels after him](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/dragging-his-bowels-after-him/) - Medics and their journals have always loved a curiosity, however long ago it occurred. This case was reported in the Medical and Surgical Journal in 1871, more than a century after the ghastly events it relates had taken place: John Stetson, aged thirty-eight, farmer, also accustomed to slaughter cattle, July 19, 1768, in a paroxysm
- [A medical duel](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-medical-duel/) - Medical disputes could be dangerous affairs in the old days. Two hundred years ago two physicians settled their differences not in the pages of the medical journals, but by fighting a duel. This arresting story appeared in a January 1828 edition of The London Medical Gazette: A Duel was fought last Saturday about three o’clock in the afternoon, between Dr.
- [Fruit, feathers and hair](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/fruit-feathers-and-hair/) - In 1838 a French specialist in bladder stones, Professor Civiale, wrote a remarkable paper for the Gazette des Hôpitaux in which he recorded the extraordinary variety of objects which he had been asked to remove from the urinary systems of his patients. He relates a collection of one hundred and sixty-six cases of foreign bodies
- [Suffocated by a fish](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/suffocated-by-fish/) - Here’s a ‘news in brief’ item which appeared in the British Medical Journal in 1863, under this headline:A warder of the Bagne at Toulon, has just met his death in the following manner: he was amusing himself, while off duty, with fishing in the dock, when, having caught a fish about seven inches long and
- [A dismal tail](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/dismal-tail/) - We’ve all heard of student pranks that went too far, but this story takes youthful high jinks to a truly excessive, even psychopathic, level. This case was reported by an Italian doctor, Marchetti, in the 17th century*, and documented by the New York surgeon Charles B. Kelsey in his 1882 textbook Diseases of the Rectum
- [Putting a patient to sleep (without anaesthetic)](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/putting-a-patient-to-sleep-without-anaesthetic/) - Have you ever wondered how patients in the era before anaesthetics were persuaded to undergo excruciatingly painful operations? The answer – fairly obviously – is ‘with great difficulty’. Some brave souls were able to grit their teeth and bear it, and others made things simpler for the surgeon (and themselves) by simply passing out from
- [A medical old wives' tale](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/medical-old-wives-tale/) - This story, attributed to the great American physician Benjamin Rush and repeated in a medical journal in 1839, is almost certainly apocryphal – but it has a good punchline. We are apt to believe a merry companion the happiest fellow in the world, and envy him, perhaps, his light heart and airy spirits; but such
- [The woman who turned to soap](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-woman-who-turned-to-soap/) - In February 1846 a group of gravediggers in New York had a truly spooky experience when they were asked to disinter a body from a burial ground on the corner of Broadway and Twelfth Street (a site now occupied by a branch of Pret a Manger – make of that what you will). Their story
- [Killed by a cough](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/killed-by-a-cough/) - In 1734 James Jamieson, a surgeon from Thurso in the Scottish borders reported this case in the Medical Essays and Observations. It began with a common-or-garden accident: Some Slates falling from the Roof of a House four Storeys high, upon the Head of a Girl about thirteen Years of Age, broke and shattered her Cranium
- [The seven-foot tumour](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/seven-foot-tumour/) - This brief case report is a reminder that there are certain medical horrors which were once commonplace but which are never seen today in the developed world. Untreatable conditions would progress unhindered, often resulting in terrible deformity. Tumours could reach a size almost unimaginable to the modern mind – although in developing countries such cases
- [Dead or alive at will](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/dead-or-alive-at-will/) - In 1733 a book about depression and mental health was published in Dublin: The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distemper. The author, George Cheyne – born a Scot, though he moved to London – was convinced that the English were
- [Dead from too much pie](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/dead-too-much-pie/) - Recovering from the annual excess of mince pies and roast potatoes, I was amused to come across this passage from an important work published in 1829, Sir Robert Christison’s A Treatise on Poisons. Christison was one of the founders of nephrology, the branch of medicine devoted to the study of the kidneys, but was also
- [Impaled on a stake](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/impaled-stake/) - How about this for a lucky escape? It’s the sort of grisly farm accident which might be featured in a medical documentary like 24 Hours in A&E, with one significant difference. Anybody unlucky enough to be impaled by a stake today could expect major surgery and a lengthy hospital stay – but this patient made
- [Sober up the nineteenth-century way](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/sober-up-nineteenth-century/) - As Christmas celebrations fade away and battered livers dubiously await the assault of New Year’s Eve, now is a good time to consider one of medicine’s oldest questions: how to counteract the effects of alcohol. Nineteenth-century medical writers seem to have been more concerned with prevention than cure: journal articles say little about curing a
- [A Victorian hospital Christmas](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-victorian-hospital-christmas/) - As a seasonal antidote to all the misery and medical disasters usually documented on this blog, here is something genuinely heart-warming. The Victorians were particularly good at Christmas – they invented most of the domestic Christmas traditions we enjoy today, from the meal to the tree. A story published in the British Medical Journal in
- [The hidden dangers of a Victorian Christmas](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/hidden-dangers-christmas/) - In the last (I promise) of my trilogy of Christmas disasters, here is a warning of the dangers of festive decorations. This Christmas tree-related incident from 1849 was documented in The Household Narrative, the almanac published by Charles Dickens between 1850 and 1855. In the section tastefully entitled ‘Accident and Disaster’, Dickens reports the following
- [There was an old woman who swallowed a fork...](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/woman-swallowed-fork/) - In 1868 the Medical and Surgical Reporter contained a report of an unusual case received from the physicians of the insane asylum at Zutphen, a town in the Netherlands. The patient was a woman 64 years old, affected with lypemania… Lypemania is an archaic term, meaning an excessive fondness for melancholy. Today a patient suffering
- [Somewhat silly in his manner](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/somewhat-silly-in-manner/) - Fans of nominative determination – the idea that a person’s name can have a bearing on their choice of career – may enjoy this little tale from the Virginia Medical Journal, reported in 1857. It concerns a urologist from Guy’s Hospital, one Mr Cock. Stop giggling at the back: Mr. Cock, at Guy’s, has recently
- [All hail the strawberry](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/all-hail-the-strawberry/) - A number of fruits and vegetables which are part of our regular diet were more prized in past centuries for their medicinal qualities. The strawberry is one of the gastronomic highlights of the British summer, but until the early 19th century the fruit was just as much cherished for its varied therapeutic uses. One Anglo-Saxon medical text contains
- [The man with the rubber jaw](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/man-rubber-jaw/) - Maxillofacial surgeons are some of the most ridiculously overqualified people on the planet. In the UK it is compulsory for them to hold degrees in both medicine and dentistry, and they can only practise after well over a decade of training. This enviable expertise equips them to undertake a wide range of procedures on the face,
- [The case of the missing pen](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/case-missing-pen/) - You know those stories about old soldiers who suddenly develop mysterious back pain in their eighties, and discover that it's caused by a bullet from the Second World War still deeply embedded in tissue? Most of them are true. Foreign bodies are often well tolerated by the body, and can lie dormant for decades before causing any problems. This
- [The perforated private](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/perforated-private/) - In 1777 a local surgeon wrote to the Medical and Philosophical Commentaries to pass on a story he had heard from a former patient. It concerns an officer in the East India Company who had been injured during the siege of Janna. I can find no trace of a siege of this name, but the
- [Is that it?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/is-that-it/) - In 1842 a Scottish doctor, Edward Binns, published a fat volume under the snappy title The Anatomy of Sleep; or, the Art of Procuring Sound and Refreshing Slumber at Will. It’s a big book, with big ambitions: Dr Binns claims to be able to teach his readers a universally successful method which will reliably put
- [Nothing to worry about](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/nothing-worry-about/) - In 1833 the London Medical and Surgical Journal caused a bit of a stink with an article which was given the headline ‘Bad Effects of Smoking Tobacco’. Its controversial thesis was that smoking was, well, not very good for you: The practice of smoking is now so general, that our atmosphere is strongly poisoned with
- [Struck dumb](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/struck-dumb/) - Today's likely tale comes from the Canada Medical Journal, where it appeared in 1870. Dr Chagnon from the wonderfully-named St Pie in Quebec submitted this curiosity, with tongue firmly in cheek: In July, 1868, came to my office a woman with the following history: Two days previous, during a thunder storm, she, according to her own expression, swallowed the thunder!
- [Bleeding you well](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/bleeding-you-well/) - More from Lorenz Heister’s surgical textbook Chirurgie, published in 1718, on which I have written before. The practice of bloodletting, also known as phlebotomy, was a staple treatment for millennia and still had influential advocates at the end of the nineteenth century. Most people will be aware that doctors used to bleed their patients, but
- [The eye-brush](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-eye-brush/) - Scarification is a medical practice which was popular until the early nineteenth century and which thankfully has now been consigned to the history books (and blogs). In concept similar to – but less dramatic than – bleeding, it entailed using a rough implement or blade to make abrasions on the surface of the body. In
- [In praise of temperance](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/in-praise-of-temperance/) - It seems appropriate on a Friday to share this warning about the dangers of binge drinking, from William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine. Published in 1808, and aimed at the patient rather than the doctor, this book offers advice on treating the commonest ailments, as well as such matters as clothing, diet and personal hygiene. Dr Buchan
- [Pipe dreams](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/pipe-dreams/) - HMS Grampus, a battleship launched in 1802, ended her days as a hospital ship moored off Greenwich. Between 1816 and 1831, when she was replaced by another retired naval ship – HMS Dreadnought – a steady stream of naval patients was treated on board. In 1821 the ship was taken over by the Seamen’s Hospital
- [The owl-eyed girl](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-owl-eyed-girl/) - Mr J.S. Webster, a surgeon from East Dereham, wrote to the London Medical Journal in 1787 to pass on an unusual case he had encountered in his practice among the poor and needy of Norfolk. Helen Bunnett, or, as she is commonly called, the owl-eyed girl, is thirteen years old, of a fair complexion, with
- [Medicine or marinade?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/medicine-or-marinade/) - Early nineteenth-century doctors had some funny ideas about treating infectious disease. Before the discovery of microbes, next to nothing was known about what caused infections, or how to cure them. For many years, physicians believed that stimulating the outer surfaces of the body would have an effect. Several methods of doing so were employed: cupping,
- [Trouble at t'mill](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/trouble-at-tmill/) - Last week I revealed the dangers of working in the mirror manufacturing trade in 19th-century Bohemia. Here’s another tale of occupational peril, published in The Western Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences in 1833. Mr. J., about twelve weeks since, while standing near the end of the arbor of a heavy grindstone revolving rapidly
- [The do-it-yourself hernia operation](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-do-it-yourself-hernia-operation/) - In the nineteenth century medical attention was a luxury which had to be paid for, and which not all could afford. What, then, would you do if you were living in abject poverty and developed a serious illness? Many people put their faith in traditional remedies or prayer; a few took matters into their own
- [Glass half-empty](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/glass-half-empty/) - The remarkable headline above graced the pages of the American Journal of the Medical Sciences in April 1849. In case you’re wondering, the two injuries are not related: the author just thought he’d put his two most spectacular cases in the same article. Dr W.S.W Ruschenberger, surgeon to the US Navy, writes: While recently on
- [A fatal nose job](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/fatal-nose-job/) - This dramatic headline from an early edition of The Lancet caught my eye: It’s a great illustration of the changing nature of surgical risk. If today a patient died after having a nose job, it would probably be on the front page of the newspapers; death is not an expected complication of a nose reconstruction.
- [A case for Dr Coffin](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-case-for-dr-coffin/) - In 1837 a Canadian teenager tripped over while walking back to his parents’ house. The accident did not hurt much, but it made him strangely famous: journals on both sides of the Atlantic reported the case with astonishment, and the story was reproduced in several anthologies of medical curiosities. And it really is extraordinary. The
- [An 'unnatural propensity' and its perils](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/an-unnatural-propensity-and-its-perils/) - Until the early twentieth century, medicine had little to say about heart disease. Although the best specialists of the nineteenth century became remarkably adept at distinguishing between different types of congenital defects using little more than the stethoscope and physical symptoms, they remained almost clueless about acquired conditions – and, in particular, what caused them.
- [Don't try this at home](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/dont-try-this-at-home/) - The medical experiments of earlier centuries often look odd to the modern eye. So odd, in fact, that it’s easy to dismiss them as stupid or gratuitously cruel. But we need to remember just how little was known two hundred years ago: things which seem obvious today were not yet even suspected. One example can
- [Lettuce, a Class A drug](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/lettuce-a-class-a-drug/) - 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
- [Aleing all day, and oiling all night](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/aleing-all-day-and-oiling-all-night/) - Those who think that morbid obesity is a uniquely modern phenomenon should read William Wadd’s ‘Comments on Corpulency’, published over several issues of the London Medical Gazette in 1828. In a long essay he considered dozens of cases he had encountered, many of whom would be today under the care of a bariatric surgeon. Here’s
- [Brained by a bull](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/brained-by-a-bull/) - A remarkable recovery from a goring by a bull was recorded in 1774 in the pages of the Medical and Philosophical Commentaries. Published in Edinburgh, this was the first regular medical journal to be published in the British Isles and had been founded the previous year by the physician Andrew Duncan (the elder). Dr Robert Maclagan
- [Stay of execution?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/stay-of-execution/) - An angry Dr Tuson from Fitzrovia writes to the London Medical Journal in 1831. He begins with an apology: Though I may incur the displeasure of many of the female part of the community in investigating a subject, the province of which they may consider peculiarly their own, yet on perusing my observations they will perceive that
- [Almost to the ground](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/almost-to-the-ground/) - An article from an 1831 edition of the London Medical Gazette begins unpromisingly: Enlargement of the testes, scrotal tumors, and hydrocele, are common diseases to which the inhabitants of Tahiti, and other islands in the Southern Pacific, are subject; nor are they confined to the natives alone, as Europeans, after a long residence, are equally liable to
- [The case of the luminous patients](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-case-of-the-luminous-patients/) - In June 1842 the Provincial Medical Journal devoted no less than ten pages to a long essay by the physician Sir Henry Marsh – an eminent namesake of the contemporary neurosurgeon, who was a leading light in Irish medicine and became physician to Queen Victoria. What subject could be so important that a leading journal
- [Electrical anaesthesia](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/electrical-anaesthesia/) - News of an exciting new anaesthetic reaches the Medical Times and Gazette in 1865: In a short article in the Lombardy Gazetta Medico, March 13, an account is given of a demonstration made by Dr. Rodolfi, at the Brescia Hospital, in the presence of a large number of Medical Practitioners, of the power of the electrical current to induce local anaesthesia.
- [Lively and clean on the palate](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/lively-and-clean-on-the-palate/) - 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
- [Medicated chocolate? No thanks](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/medicated-chocolate-no-thanks/) - 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
- [The child with Bonaparte in his eyes](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-child-with-bonaparte-in-his-eyes/) - At least twice a year one or other of the newspapers prints a story about one of those mysterious apparitions in which the likeness of Jesus is burnt on to a piece of toast, or can be seen (if you squint) in the seeds of a watermelon. In 1828 the London Medical Gazette reported a strange Napoleonic
- [The perils of toast](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-perils-of-toast/) - A cautionary tale from the Medical Facts and Observations, published in 1795: On Tuesday, the 25th of March last, a French gentleman was sent to me by an Apothecary in this neighbourhood, complaining of a pungent, hot, and irritating sensation in the rectum ; which was considerably augmented during every evacuation per anum. These painful
- [Hard to stomach](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/hard-to-stomach/) - In 1823 The Lancet’s regular summary of goings-on at the London hospitals contained this interesting report of an early public demonstration of the stomach pump. The experiment documented here took place at Guy’s Hospital: Friday, Nov. 21. At half past one o’clock the operating theatre was crowded to excess, in consequence of its having been stated
- [Heal thyself](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/heal-thyself/) - 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
- [Death by cold water](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/death-by-cold-water/) - It used to be thought dangerous to give a hot horse cold water; when I first heard this canard as a schoolboy I remember my informant telling me gravely that cold water kills horses instantly. Not having much to do with horses, it has taken me thirty years to discover that few, if any, equine
- [Roger 'two urinals' Clerk](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/roger-two-urinals-clerk/) - In 1868 the Corporation of London published a slim volume entitled Memorials of London and London Life in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries. It contained extracts from the archives of the City of London. An editor at The Lancet read it, and found an anecdote which remained topical, half a millennium later: One Roger
- [The mystery of the poisonous cheese](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-boston-cheese-poisonings-a-mystery/) - In 1835 the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal published a series of articles about cheese. For several months New England residents had been falling ill after consuming the delicious comestible, and nobody knew why. A Dr Alcott contributed this account of one such outbreak: At the raising of a building belonging to Seth Thomas, Esq.
- [Le hundred-up club](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/le-hundred-up-club/) - In August 1895 the Paris correspondent of the Daily Telegraph reported the results of an unusual survey: A census of centenarians has been taken in France, and the results, which have been published, show that there are now alive in this country 213 persons who are over one hundred years old. Of these 147 are
- [Nutmegs is the best spice for students](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/nutmegs-is-the-best-spice-for-students/) - In 1584 the Tudor physician Thomas Cogan published The Haven of Health, a guide to maintaining health primarily aimed at the student. The bulk of the book concerns food and the diet, working its way systematically through different types of meat, vegetable, fruit, herbs and spices – and paying attention to their medicinal properties as
- [All flesh is grass](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/all-flesh-is-grass/) - I imagine that most doctors have had to treat at least one patient who has been unlucky or stupid enough to end up with a foreign body lodged in one of their orifices. Early journals are full of such cases, from pieces of metal swallowed by mistake to insects which took up lodgings in a
- [Put a bandage on it](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/put-a-bandage-on-it/) - 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
- [The supernumerary leg](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-supernumerary-leg/) - Before the advent of antenatal screening, birth abnormalities were far commoner than they are today. Early medical journals had a particular fascination with these ‘monstrosities’, printing regular reports of children born without limbs or with anomalous or absent internal organs. Reading these reports today, there is often little sense that they were printed for any
- [Monsieur Mangetout](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/monsieur-mangetout/) - Medical journals usually pride themselves on presenting cutting-edge research, but in 1851 The Medical Examiner reported a case which was already half a century old. It’s not clear what they thought it added to contemporary scholarship, but it’s certainly a good story. Charles Demery, a native of Benche, on the frontiers of Poland, aged 21,
- [The black sheep](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-black-sheep/) - In the days before the NHS, when physicians charged patients for their services, there was an unspoken agreement that members of the medical profession would waive their fees when the patient was a colleague or a member of their family. In countries with no national health service this convention persisted for longer: in the late
- [Poisoning pooches in the park](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/poisoning-pooches-in-the-park/) - [with apologies to Tom Lehrer] Articles in early scientific journals are often little more than a series of anecdotes, without experimental controls or any attempt to reach sound conclusions through quantitative means. This flaw is particularly apparent in articles on medical subjects, where a successful ‘cure’ of a patient is often accepted at face value,
- [Portrait of a quack](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/portrait-of-a-quack/) - In 1804 The Medical and Physical Journal decided to name and shame some of London’s most notorious quacks. One of the unscrupulous practitioners exposed to public humiliation was a certain Dr Day: He was born in Holland, though of German parents, of the name of Dies, which the Doctor has translated into the English synonym
- [Medical qualifications: optional](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/medical-qualifications-optional/) - Here’s a report of a criminal trial at the Old Bailey from a little over a century ago which truly made me grateful for modern medicine – and in particular for the modern regulation of the profession. In this case a doctor without any qualifications escaped with a slap on the wrist, despite having killed a
- [The self-inflicted lithotomy](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-self-inflicted-lithotomy/) - The output of the French baroque composer Marin Marais contains an oddity: a musical depiction of a surgical operation. A piece from the fifth book of his Pieces de Viole is entitled Le Tableau de l’Opération de la Taille (Portrait of an Abdominal Operation – you can listen to it here), and is an attempt
- [Do no harm - unless it's a criminal](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/do-no-harm-unless-its-a-criminal/) - In 1875 the British Medical Journal had some fun digging around in the archives: BARBAROUS PUNISHMENT: A SURGEON’S OCCUPATION. - 1720, March 29th. On Wednesday, Thomas Hayes, formerly the commander of a merchantman, stood in the pillory at Charing Cross, for the hour of twelve to one, when a surgeon, attended by the prison officers,
- [A 19th-century doctor's guide to etiquette](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-19th-century-doctors-guide-to-etiquette/) - In the nineteenth century the medical profession had something of an image problem. The archetype of the pompous or unscrupulous doctor was well established, and authors like Charles Dickens had much fun sending them up with satirical depictions which were painfully close to the mark. In The Pickwick Papers, the young doctor Bob Sawyer uses
- [Such is the fortitude of females](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/such-is-the-fortitude-of-females/) - Rhinoplasty is one of the oldest surgical operations, known to have been practised by the Indian surgeon Sushruta in the 1st millennium BC, and with great sophistication in the 17th century by the Italian physician Gaspare Tagliacozzi, who created new noses from the muscles of the upper arm. This case reported in the 1830s in
- [The rocket man](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-rocket-man/) - November 5th has long been a busy night for practitioners of emergency medicine. Injuries caused by fireworks are as old as the things themselves – but one case reported by a Dr Beaumont in The Lancet in 1862 was a particularly lucky escape. The patient sustained a serious brain injury and somehow escaped with his
- [The cod-liver oil binge](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-cod-liver-oil-binge/) - 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
- [The self-performed caesarian](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-self-performed-caesarian/) - A jaw-dropping case was reported in The New York Medical and Physical Journal in 1823, one in which a patient conducted an operation on herself. The best-known example of self-operation occurred in 1961, when a Soviet surgeon working on an Antarctic base was forced to take out his own infected appendix; this much earlier case
- [Worms on the pillow](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/worms-on-the-pillow/) - A peculiar case was reported to readers of The Lancet in 1856 by Dr Jonathan Green, the proprietor of a London business offering therapeutic sulphur baths. One day he encountered a mysterious patient who would not give her name: She came to my establishment, as it were, determined not to be recognised, wrapped up in
- [Opium - perfect for babies](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/opium-perfect-for-babies/) - 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
- [Fingers crossed](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/fingers-crossed/) - A short but - to me - fascinating article from the Medico-Chirurgical Review. Surgeons are now quite adept at reattaching fingers, toes or even entire hands after cases of accidental amputation, assuming the separated part has been carefully preserved: celebrated cases include Arsenio Matias, who had both hands reattached after an industrial accident, and Everett Knowles,
- [All's well that ends well](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/alls-well-that-ends-well/) - A grisly tale, but one with a happy ending: John Nedham wrote to the Philosophical Transactions in 1756 with news of a road traffic accident and its consequences: On the 3d of January 1755, Mr. N. was called to the son of Lancelot Watts (a day-labourer, living at Brunsted) a servant boy to Mr. Pile, a farmer at Westwick, near North-Walsham, Norfolk, aged 13 years. He was overturned
- [It makes you go blind, you know](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/it-makes-you-go-blind-you-know/) - Nineteenth-century medical journals were much preoccupied with the sin of self-harm. One authority on mental illnesses even suggested that masturbation was the leading cause of insanity in asylum patients. An edition of the Canada Medical Journal published in 1870 contains a typical report: Case 1st: J.C., aged 18. Was called to see him in the fall
- [Mummies and rhubarb](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/mummies-and-rhubarb/) - 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,
- [Adventures in digestion](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/adventures-in-digestion/) - In the 1820s a young Canadian, Alexis St Martin, was shot in the stomach by a musket-ball. He recovered from the injury, but the wound never healed. His doctors discovered that this opening (known clinically as a fistula) communicated directly with his stomach. In 1827 he had put up with this external opening to his gut
- [The dreadful mortification](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-dreadful-mortification/) - A case published in The Medical Museum of 1781 is a reminder of a world we have gratefully left behind; one in which infection could rapidly maim or kill entire families, while doctors looked on helplessly. Life could be, in Thomas Hobbes’s phrase, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Hobbes was writing about war, but
- [The winged ones: insects in the stomach](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-winged-ones-insects-in-the-stomach/) - In 1824 the Transactions of the Association of Fellows and Licentiates of the King and Queen’s College of Physicians in Ireland reported an extraordinary case which would continue to be quoted in the medical literature for many decades. The case was reported in a paper whose lengthy title was abbreviated to the rather snappier ‘Dr
- [The perpetual patient](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-perpetual-patient/) - In 1872 a case reported in The Lancet made quite a stir in the international journals. For once, it concerned a patient who was perfectly healthy – although he had spent four years persuading London’s leading doctors that he was gravely ill. He was regarded as a fraudster and condemned as a malingerer – but
- [Nil by mouth](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/nil-by-mouth/) - John Hunter was one of the great medics of the eighteenth century. His name lives on today in the Hunterian Museum, a huge collection of anatomical specimens – both human and animal – which he amassed over many years for study and teaching. He was an innovative surgeon whose practice was heavily influenced by the
- [Leeches: for external and internal use](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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 a leech, or even dozens of them, to remove a small amount of blood from a diseased part of the body was a favourite remedy for the best part of 2000 years – and was
- [Brain of hare and turd of dog](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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 dry article about Roman medicine by a Dr Simpson, professor of midwifery at the University of Edinburgh. His narrative is enlivened by a list of bizarre remedies favoured by Roman doctors. He then points out
- [Wrapped in a dead sheep](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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 can drop quite dramatically when a large incision has been made, and although it is theoretically possible to keep the patient warm by making the operating theatre hotter, in practice this makes conditions intolerable for the
- [A fright for sore eyes](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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 of problems, including cataracts and cancers. In 1802 a Dr Whyte, a physician with long experience of practice in Egypt and other hot climates, wrote an article for The Medical and Physical Journal about the
- [The original Lead Belly](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-original-lead-belly/) - A weighty matter was reported in the Maryland and Virginia Medical Journal in 1860: One of the most extraordinary operations in the annals of surgery has been performed recently in the extreme West, and deserves to be recorded on account of its boldness, successful result, and for the judicious method of procedure adopted by the
- [Medicated cigarettes: the new panacea](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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 condemned the practice as unhealthy, and even suggested that it caused cancers of the mouth; on the other, there were plenty of physicians who believed that smoking eased coughs and other respiratory disorders by promoting the
- [The port-wine enema](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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 century, brandy (or whiskey, in the US) was still being administered to patients as a stimulant after they had undergone major surgery. Every tipple you can think of – from weak ale to strong spirits
- [The human pincushion](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-human-pincushion/) - This extraordinary tale appeared in The Medico-Chirurgical Review in 1825: Rachel Hertz had lived in the enjoyment of good health up to her fourteenth year; she was then of a fair complexion, and rather of the sanguineous temperament. In August 1807, she was seized with a violent attack of cholic, which induced her to apply to
- [Cycling will give you heart disease](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/cycling-will-give-you-heart-disease/) - March 1895, and in the pages of The Lancet, Dr George Herschell is worried. Very worried. Cycling, rationally pursued, is one of the most health-giving forms of amusement; but when indulged in to excess, or under improper conditions, one of the most pernicious. I have been led to choose this subject for my paper from
- [Wine, the great healer](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/wine-the-great-healer/) - Tetanus is a bacterial infection usually contracted through a skin wound – in the days before a vaccine was widely available, cases were fairly common and could follow something as trivial as pricking a finger on a thorn. Before the twentieth century physicians had few therapeutic options. But in 1798 a doctor from New York found
- [Anaesthesia for lions (and bears)](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/anaesthesia-for-lions-and-bears/) - The Canada Medical Journal for 1870 has news from the Raj: We mentioned the other day the severe injury sustained by one of the young lions at the park from a mauling of its tail by one of the tigers in the adjoining compartment. At first there was reason to believe that no dangerous results would follow, but
- [The guillotine - life after death?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-guillotine-life-after-death/) - In 1799, as the French Revolution entered its final phase and Napoleon prepared to seize power, European medics engaged in a pertinent debate. The Medical and Physical Journal reports: Among other singular questions lately agitated in France and Germany, the following is not the least curious: Whether the separated head of a person suffering on the
- [The woman who could smell with her feet](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-woman-who-could-smell-with-her-feet/) - News of a curious case reaches London from France: Mademoiselle Melanie had enjoyed good health up to the age of twenty-one, when she began to suffer from dry cough, with pain in the chest and headache; in January, 1841, she was attacked by pleurisy of the right side, and since then has continued to suffer
- [Breaking news: swallowing knives is bad for you](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/breaking-news-swallowing-knives-is-bad-for-you/) - Compulsive swallowers have always featured heavily in medical literature. There are numerous cases in 19th-century journals – but most of the individuals concerned were obviously suffering from some kind of mental illness. This, from the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions for 1823, is the first I’ve come across in which the patient was swallowing knives for a laugh. In
- [The petrol cocktail: a cure for cholera](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/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 of the Raj; now Sindh Province in Pakistan). The province had been suffering from an epidemic of cholera, and Dr Tunstall believed he could help: Sir -The alarming fatality that has attended the progress of
- [Spiders in her eyes](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/spiders-in-her-eyes/) - A previous post about the boy who vomited millipedes proved surprisingly popular - so when I came across this tale of a girl who cried spiders it seemed too good to waste. On February 5th 1840, Dr Lopez, a physician from Mobile, Alabama, visited a young woman in Charleston. The previous week she had been staying with
- [Smoking's good for you - as long as you're a priest](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/smokings-good-for-you-as-long-as-youre-a-priest/) - The editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal surely had no idea of the furore that he was provoking in March 1839 when he published an inoffensive little article about parish priests: Within less than twenty years a new disease has been developed in this country, which is almost exclusively confined to parish ministers.
- [Why children should never wear hats](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/why-children-should-never-wear-hats/) - I recently came across a charming little medical book aimed at children, and first published in Germany in the 18th century. Its author, Bernhard Christoph Faust, was personal physician to an obscure German nobleman, the Count of Schaumburg-Lippe in lower Saxony. In 1792 he published Catechism of Health, a short work which uses the question-and-answer
- [Centipedes in your bacon](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/centipedes-in-your-bacon/) - Some truly bizarre goings-on were reported at the Exeter meeting of the Provincial Surgical and Medical Association in 1842. A Dr Davis, of Presteign, made this report: A boy, fifteen years of age, the son of a labourer named Griffiths, living in the village of Bucknill, near Knighton, had for some months complained of pain
- [A dissertation on pus](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-dissertation-on-pus/) - In 1785 the great English surgeon John Hunter and his Scottish colleague George Fordyce set up a medical society, the Lyceum Medicum Londinense. Its members met every fortnight in Hunter’s anatomical theatre, and the rules were fearsome: attendance was compulsory, every member present was obliged to present a paper, and there were fines for arriving
- [Busted!  A medical plagiarist exposed](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/busted-a-medical-plagiarist-exposed/) - The index for Volume 5 of The Lancet, published in 1824, contains this intriguing entry: Indexes are not often used to pursue feuds, but the story behind this entry was a bitter rivalry which lasted for several years. So who was ‘Simon Pure’, and why had he aroused the wrath of the editor of The
- [A painful way to 'cure' a stammer](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-painful-way-to-cure-a-stammer/) - On April 1st 1841 Thomas Young, a labourer at a forge, walked into the Metropolitan Free Hospital in London and asked to be cured of his stutter. Now aged 21, he had been unable to articulate clearly since early childhood. Dr Bennet Lucas, who examined him, noted that when he attempts to pronounce any word,
- [In event of drowning, blow smoke up bottom](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/in-event-of-drowning-blow-smoke-up-bottom/) - Samuel Auguste André David Tissot was an eminent Swiss physician of the eighteenth century, best known as the author of one of the first scholarly studies of migraine, and for his much-cited work on the evils of masturbation, L’Onanisme. In 1761 he published Avis au Peuple sur sa Santé, a little book aimed at the
- [The Swiss disease](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-swiss-disease/) - News of a strange malady, unique to the inhabitants of a single country, comes from the edition of The Medical Museum for 1764: The Swiss are subject to a disorder, which is called by some Nostology, by others Nostomany, and by some again Philopatridomany. As any medic with a working knowledge of ancient Greek
- [Death of a 152-year-old (or was he?)](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/death-of-a-152-year-old-or-was-he/) - William Harvey is deservedly one of the most famous physicians who ever lived. His demonstration that the heart is a pump which circulates blood throughout the body was a triumph of early modern science, a discovery that revolutionised medicine. In addition to De Motu Cordis, the treatise in which he details the sophisticated experiments and
- [Difficulty getting it down](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/difficulty-getting-it-down/) - Here’s a painful tale from The Journal of Foreign Medical Science and Literature, published in 1823: not for children or the squeamish – and likely to make men in particular wince. On March 17th 1822 Thomas Calloway, a London surgeon, was asked to visit a ‘healthy, muscular’ man aged 44: On Saturday night, the 8th
- [Half man, half snake](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/half-man-half-snake/) - Until the late nineteenth century, many people remained convinced that emotional experiences during pregnancy could have major psychological or even physical effects on the unborn child. An 1839 edition of an American periodical, The Family Magazine, contains an extreme example, a young man called Robert H. Copeland who exhibited himself at freak-shows and county fairs:
- [The combustible countess](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-combustible-countess/) - Spontaneous human combustion became a fashionable topic in the early nineteenth century, when a number of sensational presumed cases were reported in the popular press. Charles Dickens even killed off Krook, the alcoholic rag dealer in Bleak House, in this manner. Sometimes the body of the victim was the only thing that had been burnt,
- [Mercury snuff](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/mercury-snuff/) - Mercury has a long history as a therapeutic drug. Used by Arab doctors in the Middle Ages to treat skin disorders, it became the most popular treatment for venereal disease after the major outbreak of syphilis (thought by some to have been brought back from the New World by Columbus’s crew) in the late fifteenth century. Until
- [At least it got rid of the tapeworm...](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/at-least-it-got-rid-of-the-tapeworm/) - On the 14th of May, 1867, Dr Jewett of Summit County, Ohio, was called to see Joel Lenn, 27, a French coal miner, who had suffered a serious injury. While blasting coal in the works of Messrs. Cross & Payne, near this village, the blasting barrel (a 5/8 inch gas pipe four feet in length)
- [A bad use for good wine](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-bad-use-for-good-wine/) - This promising headline appeared in an issue of the Philosophical Transactions published in 1755. ‘Success’ is an interesting choice of word, since all the patients died, some within a matter of hours. One wonders what ‘failure’ might have looked like. Early medical writers made frequent reference to a condition they called dropsy. By this they
- [The twelve-hour tonsillectomy](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-twelve-hour-tonsillectomy/) - Until fairly recently, tonsillectomy was quite a common procedure – and for many children their first experience of surgery. Because it’s a straightforward operation, doctors would often recommend that children had their tonsils out even if they had had only a few minor bouts of tonsillitis. It was even used as a precautionary measure: many
- [On leeches, and how to catch them](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/on-leeches-and-how-to-catch-them/) - Leeches were one of the most commonly prescribed medical treatments until the late nineteenth century. They were a convenient way of taking blood from a patient in days when this was believed a beneficial procedure, and 20 or 30 were often applied at a time: in one case a woman with bowel problems had no fewer than 400
- [John Keats: Ode to a Black Eye](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/john-keats-retired-hurt-0/) - On the first day of the Ashes Test at Lord’s, here is a cricketing curiosity – a Romantic poet picking up an injury in the winter nets. And evidence that the team physio of the early 19th century always kept the leeches handy. On Sunday 14th February, 1819, the poet John Keats sat down to write
- [The woman who could read with her stomach](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-woman-who-could-read-with-her-stomach/) - Catalepsy is a strange condition in which the patient keeps a fixed, rigid posture, even one which looks abnormal and uncomfortable. The limbs often display waxy rigidity, meaning that it is possible to move them into any position without resistance. It is a typical feature of a catatonic state – in which patients are apparently
- [Your cooker will give you typhoid](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/your-cooker-will-give-you-typhoid/) - There’s a menace lurking in your kitchen. From The Lancet, 1868: When the attention of the Academy of Sciences of Paris was drawn, some time since, by M. Carret, one of the physicians of the Hotel Dieu of Chambery, in several papers, to the possible evil consequences of the use of cast-iron stoves, but little
- [The hearing-aid chair](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-hearing-aid-chair/) - John Harrison Curtis was a prominent nineteenth-century specialist in diseases of the eyes and ears who became an intimate of the royal family. He was also, according to some, a quack. The sixth edition of his medical bestseller, A Treatise on the Physiology and Pathology of the Ear (1836) contains this ingenious invention: This chair
- [A bit of a headache](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-bit-of-a-headache/) - One of the things that all first-aiders should know is that blades or other penetrating objects should never be removed from a stab wound. Extraction should only be attempted by medical professionals in appropriate surroundings, since catastrophic blood loss may otherwise occur. Those with a background in emergency medicine would doubtless wince at the treatment given
- [Heart disease?  Have you tried using a swing?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/heart-disease-have-you-tried-using-a-swing/) - We've already established that skipping ropes should be avoided at all costs, but it's not all bad news for those who enjoy childish pursuits. James Wardrop's On the Nature and Treatment of the Diseases of the Heart (1831), written in an age when most forms of cardiac disease were essentially untreatable, contains some advice which reflects the frustration felt by
- [The man who fought a duel in his sleep](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-man-who-fought-a-duel-in-his-sleep/) - If you’ve ever shared a house with a habitual sleepwalker, you may be familiar with the strange experience of having a conversation at 2 am with somebody who is fast asleep. One of my sisters went through a sleepwalking phase in childhood, and we soon became used to guiding her back to her bedroom, while
- [Give that man a medal](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/give-that-man-a-medal/) - On June 29th 1865 Jacques Roellinger, a private in ‘B’ Company of the New York Volunteers, asked to be released from military service. When he appeared before an army board to make his case for a pension, he told the officers that three years earlier, in the early stages of the Civil War, he had
- [Fishing line and marine sponges: the operating theatre of 1888](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/fishing-line-and-marine-sponges-the-operating-theatre-of-1888/) - In 1888 the great American surgeon Rudolph Matas saved the life of a patient who had been shot in the arm. The operation was a significant moment in the evolution of vascular surgery, since it introduced an entirely new technique for dealing with aneurysm - a condition in which an artery wall is weakened and
- [Wrong](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/wrong/) - The Athenaeum tries a spot of prognostication in 1854: If we may judge by our library table, homoeopathy is not in 1854 what it was in 1851. However frequently new delusions arise to occupy the human mind, there is a sure and inevitable law by which the old ones die. Homoeopathy is evidently hastening towards that
- [The incredible sleeping woman](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-incredible-sleeping-woman/) - The first issue of Medical Observations and Enquiries, a medical journal founded in London in 1757, contains this sad little tale: Elizabeth Orvin, born at St. Gilain, of a healthy robust constitution served the curate of that place for many years very faithfully, till the beginning of 1738, that she became very sullen, uneasy, and so
- [The case of the poisonous pheasants](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-case-of-the-poisonous-pheasants/) - In the month of February, 1791, several persons in Philadelphia were seized, in about three hours after dining upon pheasants, with giddiness, violent flushing of heat and cold in the face and head, sickness at stomach, and repeated vomiting. Some of the afflicted Philadelphians became delirious, or lost the power of speech. Some recovered after
- [A case of hiccups](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/a-case-of-hiccups/) - Towards the end of May 1797 Miss A.B., a young woman from the Isle of Man, was afflicted by a particularly tenacious bout of hiccups. It sounded like the panting which occurs after violent exercise, or like an aspirate pronunciation of the interjection Ha! The pulse, respiration and speech were not in the least disturbed....It
- [Skipping-ropes: the silent killer](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/skipping-ropes-the-silent-killer/) - April 29th, 1905, and the 'Minor Comments' section of the Journal of the American Medical Association has a stark warning: Even among the apparently milder forms of children's athletics there are some that are capable of producing injury or are even deadly at times. The newspapers have recently reported the death from heart failure of three
- [Injured by the imagination](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/injured-by-the-imagination/) - Forget drinking in pregnancy; here's something far more dangerous. From the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1695: A lady was delivered of a girl, with a wound in her breast, above 4 fingers long, extended obliquely downwards, over the whole breast. I found not only the wound outwardly in the skin, but after a nearer
- [The child that cried in the womb](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-child-that-cried-in-the-womb/) - Remarkable news reaches The Medico-Chirurgical Review (June 1822) from Prussia: Crying of the Foetus in Utero. A lady, during pregnancy, had experienced some distresses of mind, and had had several discharges of the liquor amnii. In the eighth month of pregnancy while in bed, and while several of her friends and relations were supping in her bed-room, the cries of
- [Dear oh dear](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/dear-oh-dear/) - In 1829 a fifty-year-old labourer, John Marsh, was knocked down and run over by a cart laden with bricks. He was conveyed to Winchester County Hospital, where the doctor who examined him recorded that his scrotum, on inspection, was found to be of most enormous size, extending two thirds downwards between the thighs, and measuring
- [That's one way to give up smoking](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/thats-one-way-to-give-up-smoking/) - The museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, in Dublin, contains the picture of a man whose face was eaten away by a pig, while he was lying in a state of intoxication. The entire nose, both cheeks, and parts of both ears, in fact, all the most eatable parts of his face, were chewed off
- [Hemlock and millipedes](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/hemlock-and-millipedes/) - In September 1762 Ann James, a fifty-five-year-old woman from Boughton Monchelsea in Kent, came to the attention of Josiah Colebroke, FRS. For some years she had been in chronic pain: She complained of most excruciating stabbing pains in both breasts, which prevented her having any rest in the night, and made her so very miserable all
- [Curing conjunctivitis with frogspawn](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/curing-conjunctivitis-with-frogspawn/) - Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) was one of the most celebrated English physicians of the seventeenth century. His Observationes Medicae (Medical Observations, 1676) contains a chapter which – perhaps optimistically – is entitled ‘Complete Methods of Curing Most Diseases’. This is his remedy for conjunctivitis: Take ten ounces of blood from the arm, and next day exhibit
- [The worm: a horror story](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-worm-a-horror-story/) - Sometimes in early medical journals a case history begins conventionally enough, before turning into something startlingly unexpected. This is from Medical Essays and Observations, 1782: In February last a young Man was wounded in a Duel with a small Sword, which entred about four Inches below the right Nipple, and a little towards the Back;

## Pages

- [Home](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/) - Thomas Morris is the award-winning author of Blood on the Thames, The Dublin Railway Murder, The Matter of the Heart and The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth.
- [The Matter of the Heart](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-matter-of-the-heart/) - The thrilling story of heart surgery and the pioneers who created it, told through eleven extraordinary operations. Read a free chapter (pdf) Download now For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the
- [The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-mystery-of-the-exploding-teeth-book/) - A fascinating and entertaining collection of curiosities from the history of medicine, including some of the most perplexing cases ever recorded. Read a free chapter (pdf) Download now From seventeenth-century Holland to Tsarist Russia, from rural Canada to a whaler in the Pacific, many are monuments to human stupidity – such as the sailor who
- [The Dublin Railway Murder](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-dublin-railway-murder/) - The gripping true story of a Victorian murder mystery, shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2022. Read a free chapter (pdf) Download now Dublin, November 1856. George Little, the chief cashier of the Broadstone railway terminus, is found dead, lying in a pool of blood beneath his desk. What appears to be a
- [Blood on the Thames](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/blood-on-the-thames/) - A shocking murder. A suspect with an alibi. A trial that gripped a nation. Coming November 2026 Preorder now! September 1805. On a stormy night by the London docks, shipbreaking magnate Isaac Blight is found shot dead in his own armchair. Within hours, rumours spread across London and all fingers point to his business partner,
- [Who Killed Isaac Blight?](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/blight/) - Explore the evidence in the 1805 murder of Isaac Blight — an interactive investigation from Blood on the Thames by Thomas Morris. Coming November 2026.
- [Medical curiosities](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/medical-curiosities-archive/) - Vol. XII · No. 504 Compiled by Thos. Morris Anno Domini MMXXVI Medical Curiosities An archive of medical misadventure, wonder & horror —drawn from five centuries of real cases. Welcome to the internet's most extensive collection of weird and wonderful stories from the history of medicine. More than five hundred strange and unsettling cases from
- [About](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/about/) - Thomas Morris is a writer and historian. His first book, The Matter of the Heart (2017), a critically acclaimed history of heart surgery, won a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction. The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth (2018) was chosen by Mental Floss as one of the best books of the year. The
- [Books](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/books/) - Click on a cover image for more information
- [The complete works](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-complete-works/)
- [Contact](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/contact/) - To get in touch, or to discuss a writing commission, please fill in the form below. For rights and translation enquiries, please contact my agent Patrick Walsh at PEW Literary.

## Categories

- [Uncategorised](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/uncategorised/)
- [Mysterious illnesses](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/mysterious-illnesses/)
- [Hidden dangers](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/hidden-dangers/)
- [Dodgy predictions](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/dodgy-predictions/)
- [Notable deaths](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/notable-deaths/)
- [Unusual treatments](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/unusual-treatments/)
- [Unfortunate predicaments](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/unfortunate-predicaments/)
- [Prodigies and monsters](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/prodigies-and-monsters/)
- [Primitive equipment](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/primitive-equipment/)
- [Horrifying operations](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/horrifying-operations/)
- [Bewildering research](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/bewildering-research/)
- [Medical shenanigans](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/medical-shenanigans/)
- [Remarkable recoveries](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/category/remarkable-recoveries/)

## Tags

- [History](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/tag/history/)
- [Medicine](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/tag/medicine/)
- [Alternative medicine](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/tag/alternative-medicine/)
- [Surgery](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/tag/surgery/)
- [Health](https://www.thomas-morris.uk/tag/health/)