The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities From the History of Medicine
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Copyright © 2018 by Thomas Morris
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Morris, Thomas (Thomas Neil Gareth), author.
Title: The mystery of the exploding teeth : and other curiosities from the history of medicine / Thomas Morris.
Description: New York, New York : Dutton, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018022919| ISBN 9781524743680 (hardback) | ISBN 9781524743697 (ebook)
Subjects: | MESH: Folklore | History of Medicine | Anecdotes
Classification: LCC R733 | NLM WZ 308 | DDC 610—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022919
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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For Jenny
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
1. UNFORTUNATE PREDICAMENTS
A fork up the anus ✴ Swallowing knives is bad for you ✴ The golden padlock ✴ The boy who got his wick stuck in a candlestick ✴ Shot by a toasting fork ✴ Mr. Dendy’s eggcup case ✴ Broken glass and boiled cabbage ✴ Honking like a goose ✴ Penis in a bottle ✴ The colonic carpentry kit ✴ Suffocated by a fish
2. MYSTERIOUS ILLNESSES
A hideous thing happened in High Holborn ✴ The incredible sleeping woman ✴ The dreadful mortification ✴ The human pincushion ✴ The man who fought a duel in his sleep ✴ The mystery of the exploding teeth ✴ The woman who peed through her nose ✴ The boy who vomited his own twin ✴ The case of the luminous patients ✴ The missing pen
3. DUBIOUS REMEDIES
Death of an earl ✴ The tobacco-smoke enema ✴ Saliva and crow’s vomit ✴ The pigeon’s-rump cure ✴ Mercury cigarettes ✴ The tapeworm trap ✴ The port-wine enema ✴ The snake-dung salesman
4. HORRIFYING OPERATIONS
The case of the drunken Dutchman’s guts ✴ If you can’t find a surgeon . . . ✴ The self-inflicted lithotripsy ✴ A high pain threshold ✴ A window in his chest ✴ The sad case of Hoo Loo ✴ All at sea ✴ An extraordinary surgical operation
5. REMARKABLE RECOVERIES
The wandering musket ball ✴ The miller’s tale ✴ In one side and out the other ✴ A bayonet through the head ✴ An interesting and remarkable accident ✴ The lucky Prussian ✴ A case for Dr. Coffin ✴ The healing power of nature ✴ Severed, replaced, reunited ✴ Give that man a medal ✴ A bit of a headache
6. TALL TALES
Sleeping with the fishes ✴ Death of a 152-year-old ✴ The combustible countess ✴ He sliced his penis in two ✴ Half man, half snake ✴ The human waxwork ✴ The slugs and the porcupine ✴ The amphibious infant ✴ The seventy-year-old mother-to-be
7. HIDDEN DANGERS
A surfeit of cucumbers ✴ The perils of being a writer ✴ Why children should never wear hats ✴ Killed by his false teeth ✴ Pegged out ✴ The cast-iron stove panic ✴ Brolly painful ✴ A flaming nuisance ✴ Cycling will give you heart disease
Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
A COUPLE OF YEARS ago I was sitting in a library, plowing through a rather dull nineteenth-century article about heart disease, when I spotted something more interesting on the previous page of the journal I was perusing. Underneath the promising headline “Sudden Protrusion of the whole of the Intestines into the Scrotum,” I found the following:
John Marsh, aged 50, a labourer, was brought into the hospital, having just been run over by a cart laden with bricks. His scrotum, on inspection, was found to be of most enormous size, extending two thirds downwards between the thighs, and measuring in circumference 17 inches. Its colour of a jet black; and its texture, from over distention, so exquisitely thin as to threaten immediate rupture from the slightest manipulation.
Questions whirled through my mind. Why was his scrotum so enormous? What on earth could a doctor do about such an injury in 1829? How long did the unfortunate John Marsh survive? Horrified and fascinated in equal measure, I could not stop reading. The answers proved to be just as intriguing. When the cartwheels had passed over Mr. Marsh’s belly, they had done so with such force that his intestines were squeezed through the inguinal canal, a narrow passage between the abdominal cavity and the scrotum. With his guts now competing with his nuts for scrotum space, as it were, the physicians had a simple task: Get them back where they belonged.
On being placed in bed the viscera were returned to their natural situation without much difficulty, merely by elevating the hips, depressing the shoulders, and applying moderate and careful pressure with flannels moistened in hot poppy fomentation.
Hot-water bottles, laxatives, opium and leeches (applied to the scrotum) completed the treatment. My assumption about Mr. Marsh’s survival prospects turned out to be unduly pessimistic.
On the twelfth day from the occurrence of the injury the patient was reported as quite convalescent, and able to sit up for some hours in bed, the precaution of applying a truss having previously been taken. At the end of the third week he was discharged cured.
Not quite cured, it turned out. A postscript adds:
He is compelled to wear his double truss both night and day, otherwise the viscera descend immediately into the scrotum in very large quantities.
I soon discovered that you can hardly flick through the pages of an old medical journal without stumbling across a story that is compellingly disgusting, hilarious or downright bizarre. In between long, dry dissertations on London sanitation or the treatment of yellow fever are scattered little anecdotal gems: tales of patients who glowed in the dark, performed surgery on their own bodies or vomited living slugs. Some are poignant or touching, a few are grim, but they all have more to offer than just a good yarn. However embarrassing the ailment or odd the treatment, every one of these cases says something about the beliefs and knowledge of an earlier age. While superstition and folk traditions can be seen influencing medics until surprisingly late, it is also clear that the practitioners of long ago were sometimes capable of immense sophistication. I began to collect these incredible tales from li
ttle-known corners of the medical literature: stories of weird treatments, jaw-dropping surgery and miraculous recovery from almost certain death.
The case histories in this book span three hundred years, from the early seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth. Medicine changed dramatically during that period, undergoing a partial transformation from an art into a science. Early modern clinicians were still heavily influenced by the theories of ancient medicine, especially the writings of the Greek physician Galen—even if the realization that his opinions were not, after all, infallible had stimulated a new age of inquiry and innovation. Nevertheless, many of their treatments were based on the Galenic idea that health depends on the correct balance among four bodily fluids, or humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. If a surfeit of one humor was suspected, equilibrium could be restored by evacuating the excess, using bleeding or purgative medicines to do so. There was no anesthesia, so operations were short, painful and brutal—and while physicians and apothecaries had a vast range of drugs at their disposal, few were of much use.
Three centuries later, the microscope had shown that most infectious diseases were caused by organisms too small to be seen by the naked eye. Doctors had learned to control infection and perform surgery on an unconscious patient and could prescribe drugs that were effective against a range of serious conditions including heart failure and epilepsy. But old remedies still lingered: Bleeding was being recommended by some old-fashioned physicians as late as 1894, and laxatives were prescribed with wild abandon by Victorian doctors, who seldom failed to inquire about the state of their patients’ bowels.
Many of the treatments offered in these stories may seem ludicrous, even barbaric, from a modern perspective, but it is worth remembering that the medics of the past were no less intelligent or assiduous than their modern counterparts. One thing that these case histories demonstrate is the admirably tenacious, even bloody-minded, determination of doctors to help their patients, in an age when their art left much to be desired. Where there were no effective remedies, they looked for new ones, and it was inevitable that many dead ends would be explored before they found the way ahead. The methods they used were consistent with their understanding of how the human body worked, and it is not their fault that medical knowledge has advanced considerably since then.
In 1851, James Young Simpson, the pioneer of chloroform anesthesia, wrote an article about the strange remedies employed by ancient Roman doctors. He cautioned that it was unwise to be too hard on the “extravagance and oddity” of their methods, adding presciently:
Perhaps, some century or two hence, our successors . . . will look back upon our present massive and clumsy doses of vegetable powders, bulky salts, nauseous decoctions, etc., with as much wonderment and surprise as we now look back upon the preceding therapeutic means of our ancestors.
The same could be said of twenty-first-century medicine, which is far from a perfected science. That said, some old treatments were misguided to the point of perversity, even by the standards of their time, and I have not resisted the urge to dole out a little gentle mockery where I thought it justified.
Most of these cases are extracted from the medical journals that started to proliferate at the end of the eighteenth century as a means for doctors to share their knowledge and experience; other source material includes surgical textbooks and newspaper reports. While a few (in the Tall Tales chapter) may be hoaxes, the vast majority are genuine case reports, written by medics who give an honest account of what they did and saw. Some are presented in their entirety; others have been edited to remove superfluous or uninteresting details; but I have not added or embellished anything.
Finally, a disclaimer: I am not a doctor, and nothing within these pages should be construed as medical advice. Readers who choose to treat their ailments by administering port-wine enemas, ingesting snake excrement or smoking cigarettes steeped in mercury do so at their own risk.
1
UNFORTUNATE PREDICAMENTS
A REGULAR FEATURE OF any hospital emergency department is the patient who turns up with an embarrassing and entirely self-inflicted complaint. When questioned about the nature of their ailment and how it came about, they may fall silent or offer a less than plausible explanation. In 1953, a man was admitted to a hospital in Barnsley with severe abdominal pain that he said had been plaguing him for almost a fortnight. Surgeons discovered severe tearing in the wall of his rectum, evidently inflicted just a few hours earlier, which they were able to repair. Asked how he had sustained this injury, the patient claimed that he was standing too near a firework “while in a stooping position,” and it had gone off unexpectedly. Pressed for the truth, he admitted that he had become frustrated in his personal life and had “decided to explode a firework up his seat.” That’s one way of dealing with it, I suppose.
The medical literature is brimming with misguided individuals, the forebears of this proctological pyrotechnician, who inserted strange objects in places where they weren’t meant to go. One of the earliest stories concerns a monk who tried to ease his colic by coaxing a bottle of perfume inside his gut; another relates how a surgeon rescued the dignity of a farmer who had somehow ended up with a goblet wedged inside his rectum. But these are prosaic achievements compared with some of the bravura feats recorded in the following pages. What is so impressive about many of these tales of mishap is the sheer ingenuity that had gone into creating a highly regrettable situation—often matched by the imaginative manner in which a physician or surgeon went about treating the unfortunate patient.
Medicine has improved almost beyond recognition in the past few centuries, but some things never change. The human capacity for mischief, misadventure and downright idiocy is apparently a trait that progress cannot eradicate.
A FORK UP THE ANUS
Modern medical journals aren’t exactly famous for their snappy headlines. The professional terminology doesn’t help: It’s not easy to write a zinger of a heading if the subject of your article has a name like bestrophinopathy, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura or necrotizing fasciitis.
But recent years have seen a fightback against such sterile jargon, with a few researchers trying to grab their readers’ attention by means of literary allusions, pop culture references and bad puns. One recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine made a desperate pitch to George R. R. Martin fans with the headline “Game of TOR: The Target of Rapamycin Rules Four Kingdoms.” Another, about foreign bodies in the bladder, was headed “From Urethra with Shove.”* And for sheer chutzpah, it’s difficult to beat “Super-mesenteric-vein-expia-thrombosis, the Clinical Sequelae Can Be Quite Atrocious”—the improbable title of an article about a serious complication of appendicitis.
But my favorite medical headline of all was written almost three hundred years ago. In 1724, the Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society, published a letter from Mr. Robert Payne, a surgeon from Lowestoft in Suffolk. The title is unimprovable:
James Bishop, an apprentice to a ship-carpenter in Great Yarmouth, about nineteen years of age, had violent pains in the lower part of the abdomen for six or seven months. It did not appear to be any species of the colic; he sometimes made bloody urine, which induced Mr P. to believe it might be a stone in the bladder. He was very little relieved by physic; at length a hard tumour appeared in the left buttock, on or near the glutaeus maximus, two or three inches from the verge of the anus, a little sloping upwards. A short time after, he voided purulent matter by the anus, every day for some time.
This is the old sense of the word tumor: not necessarily indicating abnormal tissue growth, but a swelling of any description. This example was, as it turned out, some sort of cyst, and eventually its surface broke. The surgeon suspected it was an anal fistula—an anomalous channel between the end of the bowel and the skin. But events soon proved him wrong:
Shortly after the prongs of a fork appeared through the ori
fice of the sore, above half an inch beyond the skin. As soon as the prongs appeared, his violent pains ceased; I divided the flesh between the prongs, according to the best of my judgment; and after that made a circular incision about the prongs and so with a strong pair of pincers extracted it, not without great difficulty, handle and all entire. The end of the handle was besmeared with the excrement, when drawn out.
Naturally. This was a surprisingly large item of cutlery:
It is six inches and a half long, a large pocket-fork; the handle is ivory, but is dyed of a very dark brown colour; the iron part is very black and smooth, but not rusty.
The young man was reluctant to explain how he had managed to get himself in this predicament; at least, not until he was threatened with the withdrawal of his allowance.
A relation of his, a Gentleman in this neighbourhood, who sent him to be under my care, the Reverend Mr Gregory Clark, Rector of Blundeston, on whom, in a great measure, his dependence is, threatened never to look upon him more, unless he would give him an account how it came; and he told him, that, being costive,* he put the fork up his fundament, thinking by that means to help himself, but unfortunately it slipped up so far, that he could not recover it again.
Mr. Payne adds a postscript:
PS: He says he had no trouble or pain till a month, or more, after it was put up.
A fact that does not alter the moral of this cautionary tale: If you’re constipated, it’s better not to stick a fork up your fundament.
SWALLOWING KNIVES IS BAD FOR YOU
Compulsive swallowers have always featured heavily in medical literature. There are numerous cases in nineteenth-century journals—but most of the individuals concerned were obviously suffering from some kind of mental illness. This, from the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions for 1823, is the first I’ve come across in which the patient was swallowing knives for a laugh.