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 […]
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.
In 1868 the Richmond Medical Journal reported an extraordinary accident which had befallen a 9-year-old boy at a cotton press […]
Having spent most of the last year sitting in seclusion writing and editing my first book, I was amused to
Here’s a strange little tale which – unusually for this blog – does not involve a single doctor, since the
In 1859 The Medical Times and Gazette included this report from John Robert Kealy, a surgeon from Gosport. He relates
In 1870 a Dr John P. Gray, of Utica, told this strange and rather sad little tale to a meeting
Today’s medical dispatch comes from the Canada Medical Journal, and was submitted to that publication in 1867 by Dr Thomas
This is the most extraordinary and perplexing case of all the many I’ve sifted through while finding material for this
William Salmon was a seventeenth-century physician and a prolific writer, the author of numerous books on surgery and internal medicine.
Volume 6 of the Medical Facts and Observations, published in London in 1795, includes four cases submitted by a Dr
In June 1852 the New Jersey Medical Reporter printed an article about brain injuries. The following month a doctor from