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 day, whether she lay … Read more
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; by probing the Wound, … Read more
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 my common purging … Read more
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 balloons outwards.
What astonishes me … Read more
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 by the animal; nevertheless, … Read more
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 in circumference seventeen inches; its … Read more
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 … Read more
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 limbo of forgetfulness into … Read more
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 examination, I perceived … Read more
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 children in a skipping-rope … Read more