The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities From the History of Medicine

by Thomas Morris

  Then, however, he lets slip what is probably the genuine cause of the fire:

  The old lady was used, when she felt herself indisposed, to bathe all her body with camphorated spirit of wine; and she did it perhaps that very night.

  Camphorated spirits (a solution of camphor in alcohol) was often used to treat skin complaints, and as a tonic lotion. The fact that it is also highly flammable is, apparently, quite beside the point.

  This is not a circumstance of any moment; for the best opinion is that of the internal heat and fire; which, by having been kindled in the entrails, naturally tended upwards; finding the way easier, and the matter more unctuous and combustible, left the legs untouched. The thighs were too near the origin of the fire, and therefore were also burnt by it; which was certainly increased by the urine and excrements, a very combustible matter, as one may see by its phosphorus.

  So it was the “internal heat and fire” that caused the countess’s demise. Only an incorrigible skeptic would point out that an old lady who was the habit of bathing in inflammable liquids, before going to bed in a room lit by naked flames, was a walking fire hazard.

  HE SLICED HIS PENIS IN TWO

  The nineteenth-century French physician Auguste-Marie-Alfred Poulet died before his fortieth birthday, and his name is not associated with any significant breakthrough. But he did write one of the most horrifyingly compelling books in the entire medical canon, the two-volume Treatise on Foreign Bodies in Surgical Practice. It’s a fantastical collection of inappropriate objects inserted (and lost) in every orifice of the body, including several you didn’t even know you had. As well as diligently tracking down the most unusual cases in the literature, Poulet makes some astute observations about them—noticing, for instance, that when patients seek medical attention after sticking something up their urethra, the type of object is often influenced by their occupation:

  an end of a taper used by a nun, a piece of girdle by a Capuchin monk, a needle by a tailor, a sewing-box by a seamstress, a bone of mutton by a shepherd, a piece of a brush by a painter, a branch of a vine by a vinedresser, a pen-holder by a teacher, a pipe-stem by a smoker, a curling-iron by a washerwoman.

  Shortly after that arresting paragraph, Poulet tells a story so bizarre that I initially assumed it was a spoof, a fake case history concocted by a mischievous colleague. But Poulet is not to blame, since the tale first appeared almost a century earlier in a book by the Parisian surgeon François Chopart, Traité des Maladies des Voies Urinaires (Treatise on Maladies of the Urinary Tract). And however ludicrous the story, it came from an impeccable source:

  Gabriel Galien began to masturbate at the age of fifteen years, to such an excess that he practised it eight times a day.

  Well, that is a little excessive.

  Shortly afterwards the ejaculation of semen became rare, and so difficult, that he tired himself for an hour before obtaining it, which threw him into a condition of general convulsions; finally, only a few drops of blood, but no seminal fluid, escaped. He only used the hand to satisfy his dangerous passion until he had reached the age of twenty-six. Being then unable to produce ejaculation by this means, which only brought the penis into a condition of almost constant priapism,* he thought of tickling the urethral canal with a small stick of wood about six inches long. He introduced it to a greater or less distance without covering it with any fatty or mucilaginous substance capable of diminishing the harsh impression which it made upon such a sensitive part.

  Mucilaginous means “moist and sticky.” The point is that he did not use any lubrication—unwisely, as it turned out.

  The occupation of shepherd, which he had adopted, afforded him frequent opportunity of being alone and of easily giving himself up to his passion.

  An unusual criterion for choosing a job. “WANTED: Shepherd. No experience necessary. Pleasant working environment, competitive salary and benefits. Would suit enthusiastic masturbator.”

  At different times he employed a few hours each day in tickling the interior of the urethra with his stick. He made constant use of it for a period of sixteen years, and by this means procured more or less abundant ejaculation. The urethral canal, from the so frequently repeated and long continued friction of this kind, became hard, callous, and absolutely insensible. Galien then found his stick as useless as his hand, and considered himself the most unfortunate of men.

  Tormented by “continual erections” and by his “insuperable aversion” to women, Galien became depressed.

  In this condition of melancholia, which affected both his physical and mental condition, the shepherd often allowed his flock to stray; he continually busied himself in seeking some new means of self-gratification. After numerous fruitless attempts, he returned with renewed fury to the use of the hand and the stick of wood, but finding that these measures only stimulated his desires, he became desperate, and drew a dull knife from his pocket, with which he incised the glans along the urethral canal.

  If this doesn’t make you wince, it ought to. The glans, the tip of the penis, has the greatest density of nerve endings in the adult male body.

  This incision, which would have caused the most acute pain in another man, only produced in him an agreeable sensation followed by a complete ejaculation.

  M. Galien clearly had something very wrong with him.

  Enchanted with this new discovery, he resolved to make amends for his enforced abstinence, whenever his fury possessed him. Pits, bushes, and rocks served him as refuges in which to repeat or exercise this new measure, which always procured for him the pleasure and ejaculation which he desired.

  So the shepherd had now started using a blunt knife to pleasure himself. What could possibly go wrong?

  Having given the utmost possible play to his passion, he finally, after perhaps a thousand trials, divided the penis into two exactly equal parts from the meatus urinarius to that portion of the urethra and corpora cavernosa which is found above the scrotum and near the symphysis pubis.

  The meatus is the opening of the urinary tract, at the tip of the penis. He had managed to cut his penis into two equal parts, from top to bottom—quite a feat, even if that had been the intended outcome. But surely this would all result in horrendous loss of blood? Luckily, he had this covered:

  When profuse haemorrhage occurred, he arrested it by tying a piece of string around the penis, and he tightened the ligature sufficiently to stop the flow of blood without interrupting its course through the corpora cavernosa.

  The corpora cavernosa are the masses of spongy tissue that, when filled with blood, produce an erection.

  Three or four hours later he unloosened the ligature and left the parts to themselves. The various incisions which he made upon the penis did not extinguish his desires. The corpora cavernosa, though divided, often caused an erection and diverged to the right and left. Dr Sernin, surgeon-in-chief at the Hôtel-Dieu of Narbonne, who communicated this case to me,* was a witness of the phenomena of this erection.

  Oh my word. Two erections, right and left.

  Being unable to use his knife any farther, because the section of the penis extended to the pubis, Galien found himself in new distress. He resumed the use of another piece of wood shorter than the first; he introduced it into the remainder of the urethral canal, and tickled, at will, this portion of the canal and the orifices of the ejaculatory duct, thus producing an emission of semen.

  He was now inserting a stick through the stump of his penis for sexual pleasure. Without, apparently, stopping for a moment to ask himself what had gone wrong with his life.

  This truly extraordinary masturbator amused himself in this manner for the last ten years of his life, without feeling the slightest uneasiness with regard to the division of his penis.

  The original French is even better: “Ce masturbateur vraiment extraordinaire.” It has a certain ring to it, but it’s not a phrase I’d like on my gravestone
.

  The long-continued practice which he had in the use of this stick rendered him bold and sometimes careless in its use. June 12, 1774, he introduced it so carelessly that it slipped from his fingers and fell into the bladder.

  Not long afterward, he started to feel the consequences. Symptoms included sharp abdominal pain, difficulty urinating, fever, vomiting and worse.

  Tormented by these symptoms, he made attempts to rid himself of his cruel enemy. He introduced the handle of a wooden spoon into the rectum more than a hundred times, and forcibly pushed the spoon from behind forward in order to cause the stick to escape the same way that it had entered; but the condition did not yield to the measures which he adopted.

  I think it’s fair to say that these “measures” were not terribly sensible ones.

  He was finally induced to return to the hospital of Narbonne, in which he had been received three times during a space of two and a half months, and which he always left without experiencing any relief, as he would never consent to an examination in order to determine the cause of his disease. What was the surprise of Dr Sernin, when, upon examining the hypogastric region of this unfortunate shepherd, who complained of retention of urine, he found two penises, each of which was almost as large as a normal penis.

  Well, yes, I imagine that he might have been surprised.

  This peculiarity attracted the attention of the surgeon, and although the patient at first assured him that this conformation was congenital, an examination of the parts, of the very apparent scars, and of the callouses along the whole extent of the division, led him to believe that this was not a natural vice of structure. Galien then gave the history of his life, and entered into all the details which we have reported above.

  The surgeon used a probe to confirm the presence of a foreign body in the bladder, and then decided to extract it. This would entail making an incision in the perineum, the surface between the scrotum and anus—a procedure similar to that for removing a bladder stone.

  The patient, tortured by frightful pains, and not experiencing any relief after taking 100 drops of Sydenham’s anodyne solution, submitted to the operation.

  “Sydenham’s solution” is laudanum, a tincture of opium in alcohol. It is named after Sir Thomas Sydenham, the great seventeenth-century medic who popularized the use of laudanum in the treatment of a variety of conditions. The tincture was a strong opiate and (usually) effective for pain relief.

  The incision having been made, the finger was carried to the foreign body in order to change its direction, and one end was turned toward the wound. The stick was extracted with a polypus forceps.

  The term polypus forceps is still in use today: It’s an instrument for removing polyps (abnormal growths affecting a mucous membrane). The patient’s symptoms were relieved, but complications soon set in.

  Slight haemorrhage, quiet sleep, the urine escaped without difficulty; on the fifth day a cough, which had tortured the patient for a long time, increased. Fever, irregular chills, relaxation of the bowels, gangrene over the left thigh, buttocks and sacrum. All these symptoms gradually yielded to appropriate treatment.

  This sounds like the result of infection, in which case he was lucky to survive. Alas, the “truly extraordinary masturbator” did not live for much longer:

  The thoracic affection continued, and the unfortunate shepherd died three months after recovery from the operation of perineal section. At the autopsy a considerable collection of greenish pus was found in a sac formed between the pleura and right lung.

  This is an empyema, a collection of pus in the space around the lungs. On its own, it’s unlikely to have caused his death, but it may have resulted in sepsis, which would quite rapidly prove fatal.

  It’s easy to dismiss M. Galien as a pervert, but he must surely have been suffering from a psychiatric disorder of some kind. The obsessive pursuit of sexual pleasure is variously known as sex addiction or hypersexual disorder, among other terms—but it’s poorly understood and the subject of much disagreement. Evidently, his was a particularly extreme case.

  HALF MAN, HALF SNAKE

  A niece of the thirteenth-century pope Nicholas III is said to have given birth to a child who was covered in hair and had bears’ claws instead of fingers and toes.* Like her uncle, the young woman was a member of the Orsini family—whose name means “little bears” in Italian. The palazzo in which she lived was liberally decorated with pictures of the animal, and she believed that it was her daily exposure to ursine imagery that had caused the strange deformity of her child. Learning of her misfortune, the pope ordered the destruction of all pictures of bears throughout Rome—a measure intended to prevent any further monstrous offspring.

  The belief that troubling experiences during pregnancy could have a significant effect on the unborn child is an ancient one, recorded in the medical works of Hippocrates and Galen. Though long dismissed by many as an absurd superstition, the idea gained new traction in the early eighteenth century after the publication in 1714 of Daniel Turner’s De morbis cutaneis, the first English-language book about dermatology. Turner devoted an entire chapter to the assertion that birth abnormalities were often attributable to the expectant mother’s state of mind, giving it this heading:

  Of spots and marks of a diverse resemblance, impressed upon the skin of the foetus by the force of the mother’s fancy: with some things, premised of the strange and almost incredible power of imagination, more especially in pregnant women.

  There was fierce opposition to his theory, but many physicians were convinced that the “power of imagination” posed a danger to the unborn child. A case reported in America in 1837 demonstrates just how long this misconception endured: the story of Robert H. Copeland, the “snake man.”

  This most singular being, perhaps, has not a parallel in medical history. He is now about twenty-nine years old, of ordinary stature and intellect. His deformities and physical peculiarities are owing to a fright his mother received from a large rattlesnake attempting to bite her, about the sixth month of her pregnancy. For several minutes after the snake struck at her, she believed herself bitten just above the ankle, and so powerfully was her mind affected that when she was delivered, the child’s will was found to have no control over his right arm and leg; which are smaller than his left extremities.

  Despite his deformed leg, young Robert learned to walk, although he always hobbled. But these were not his only peculiarities.

  The wrist joint is looser than usual, and his hand stands at an angle with his arm. His front teeth are somewhat pointed and inclined backward like the fangs of a snake. The right side of his face is sensibly affected; his mouth is drawn considerably further on the left side; his right eye squints, has several deep grooves radiating from it, and has a very singular appearance much resembling a snake.

  Tenuous, you say? But the similarities didn’t end there. The young man’s right arm was said to resemble a snake’s head and neck. More disturbingly, it appeared to have a mind of its own, like a sort of reptilian version of Dr. Strangelove’s right hand.

  The whole arm will strike at an object with all the venom of a snake, and precisely in the same manner, sometimes for two or three, and sometimes for four or five strokes, and then the arm assumes a vibratory motion, will coil up, and apply itself close against his body. His face is also excited; the angle of his mouth is drawn backward, and his eye snaps more or less, in unison with the strokes of his hand, while his lips are always separated, exposing his teeth, which being somewhat pointed like the fangs of a snake, causes his whole visage to assume a peculiar and snaky aspect.

  Not the most scientific language you’ll ever read in a medical paper. I like to imagine the doctor examining Mr. Copeland and then solemnly writing “Appearance: a bit snaky” in his notes. The next passage is almost a foreshadowing of Sigmund Freud:

  The sight of a snake fills him with horror, and an instinctive f
eeling of revenge; and he is more excitable during the season of snakes; and even conversation concerning them excites him, and his arm appears more anxious to strike than when no such conversation is going on. This singular being was born in Carolina, and moved to Georgia in the year 1829; where he has since remained, performing such labor as he could with one hand, and by unremitting exertions has maintained his wife and an increasing family.

  When this description of Mr. Copeland was submitted to the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal in late 1837, the editor decided to delay publication until he had seen the “human snake” for himself. Alas, the opportunity never arose, so to reassure his readers of its veracity, he appended the names of six physicians, a sheriff and an attorney who would swear that the story was true.

  Robert H. Copeland certainly existed: He lived to the age of seventy-nine, fathered thirteen children and worked as a farmer. He also had a deformed and virtually useless right arm—and even if his mother did have a bad experience with a rattlesnake during pregnancy, we can be pretty sure that that was not what caused his disability.

  THE HUMAN WAXWORK

  In February 1846, a gang of Manhattan gravediggers was asked to disinter a body from a burial ground on the corner of Broadway and Twelfth Street. The land the cemetery occupied was being sold off for redevelopment, and all human remains were being exhumed and, if possible, reburied. The gravediggers had already performed this operation dozens of times without alarm, but when they came to dig up one particular grave, things turned very spooky indeed. The experience at least gave them a story to tell their grandchildren—and, more immediately, a local newspaper reporter. As they explained to the man from the New York True Sun, the plot in question belonged to a Mrs. Friend: