A forgotten thing
This case, published in the Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal in 1865, is one that makes you marvel at the […]
I began writing this blog while researching my first book The Matter of the Heart, a popular history of heart surgery, which was published by Bodley Head in June 2017. I spent many hours reading early medical journals and found that they were full of extraordinary and often scarcely believable stories, which though irrelevant to the book seemed too good to waste. In my spare time I collected some of the most quirky, bizarre or surprising cases I encountered and published them online for others to enjoy.
The blog quickly picked up a following, and its stories were featured on other websites including Listverse and BBC Future. Eventually a selection of my favourite cases became the basis for my second book The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth.
I am no longer adding new stories to the several hundred already published – but they are collected here for you to enjoy. A complete list can be found here.
This case, published in the Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal in 1865, is one that makes you marvel at the […]
The ‘foreign correspondence’ pages of one 1861 issue of the Medical Times contain an eclectic selection of stories. The first
At the annual meeting of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association in August 1844, a doctor from Newport Pagnell in
According to an old journalistic adage, if a newspaper headline contains a question the correct answer is always ‘no’. For
The Canadian physician Henry Horatio Nelson was born six years after the Battle of Trafalgar, so it does not take
This alarming headline was attached to a letter sent to The Lancet in 1838 by Dr Congreve Selwyn, a family
Here’s a truly strange case that was reported in the Journal de Médécine de Paris in 1881. It concerns an
In the 1820s the British physician John Cheyne made a special study of the numerous ways in which soldiers tried