The stone-swallower
Eighteenth-century authors were fond of giving their books ridiculously long titles – often so lengthy that they weren’t titles at […]
Unfortunate predicaments
The bone-breaking sneeze
I recently wrote about a case of deafness believed to have been caused by a kiss – but here’s another
The dentist who made the blind see
One interesting aspect of nineteenth-century medicine is the fact that many clinicians were convinced that every ailment could be traced
The 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:
Hidden dangers
Deafened by a kiss
Some injuries recorded in the medical literature were not the result of some ghastly accident, but had an apparently innocuous
Hidden dangers, Unusual treatments
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)
Hidden dangers, Mysterious illnesses
The mystery of the poisonous neckerchief
In 1873 The Medical Times and Register published an unusual case report from one Joseph G. Richardson, a doctor from
Sleeping with the fishes
One of the overwhelming priorities of medicine in the eighteenth century was the improvement of resuscitation methods. Drowning was a
Bewildering research, Unusual treatments
The tapeworm trap
In September 1856 a physician called J. Gotham wrote to an American journal, the Medical and Surgical Reporter, with news
The tin whistle
Samuel Gross was a giant of nineteenth-century American surgery, the author of numerous influential textbooks, including the first manual of