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, […]
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.
Sometimes doctors don’t have all the answers. Here’s a case in which the medics actually gave up on their patient, […]
When Dr Samuel White, a doctor from the town of Hudson in upstate New York, took on this case in
Here’s a tale of misadventure so stupid that it wouldn’t be out of place in the annual Darwin Awards. This case
Isidor Glück was a Hungarian surgeon who emigrated to London and then the United States in the early 1850s. As
In 1891 The Lancet printed this case report by Andrew Ross, a doctor who some years earlier had been practising
In 1855 Dr D. D. Slade of Boston reported the following freak occurrence to The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal:
Today’s news is culled from an edition of The Northern Journal of Medicine published in 1845. It brings a new
Here’s a case from The Medical Museum published in 1764 – more than seventy years after the patient had been
Ever swallowed a leech by accident? Me neither. Here’s a tale told by Surgeon-Lieutenant T.A. Granger, a surgeon in the
The Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales, published in France between 1812 and 1822, was the first encyclopaedic dictionary of medicine. It’s