The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities From the History of Medicine
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Further burnishing his credentials as father of the year.
The bath was prepared and the child undressed, when the father dropped his knife into the bath and asked the child to go and get it, at the same time placing him upon the edge of the bath, with his chubby little legs in the water. The child plunged in at once, and appeared to have much better control of his movements in the water than out. He soon handed the knife to his father, although the water was fully three feet deep. Five or six white peppermint lozenges were then tossed in different parts of the bath, in pursuit of which the child eagerly went, and he was fully three minutes under water endeavoring to secure them, as he dropped them again almost as fast as he picked them up.
Spare a thought for the journalist, who must have thought he was in the presence of a maniac.
Mrs. Schultz, although now satisfied there is no danger to be expected from the treatment of her child, is by no means reconciled to it, and expressed the belief that when the affair becomes public her husband will be prosecuted and imprisoned for his unnatural conduct.
She had a point.
Schultz, on the contrary, considers that he is doing humanity a service by initiating a practical and certain method of obviating all danger to human life by drowning, and asserts his belief that the day is not far distant when the acquisition of this amphibious faculty will be as prevalent a practice as vaccination is now, and will be made compulsory, if necessary, by law.
Strangely, this prediction has yet to come to pass. The editor of Medical Notes and Queries* plainly thought the whole thing ludicrous, and concluded his response with a withering lesson in basic physiology.
Before the practice of attempting to render children amphibious becomes as “common as vaccination”, it would be as well if those who would essay the feat were informed that the blood, to serve its functions, requires to be oxygenated as well as circulated, and further, that if not oxygenated it will cease to circulate. The oval hole unfortunately provides no means for the supply of oxygen to the vital fluid. A still more important fact for such experimenters to remember is this: that should the experiment fail from any cause—and any experiment may fail at some time or in some hands—the person to whom the failure occurs will be made to compound for his want of success by a commitment for manslaughter.
Mr. Schultz seems to have escaped such a fate, although there’s no further trace of him or his aquatic offspring in the archives. Now, why might that be? Possibly because they never existed. The 1870s was the golden age of the newspaper hoax, when writers including Mark Twain entertained themselves by publishing stories about made-up massacres, fatal fires at nonexistent theaters and (my personal favorite) imaginary man-eating trees of Madagascar. In the absence of any corroborating evidence, I suspect the amphibious infant was an inspired piece of fake news.
THE SEVENTY-YEAR-OLD MOTHER-TO-BE
In 1895, a Mrs. Henry from Donegal in Ireland died at the impressive age of 112. Her surviving relatives included a daughter who was herself a sprightly 90, but when a careless printer left off a zero, it was erroneously reported by one newspaper that she was only nine. As a result of this unfortunate misprint, Mrs. Henry has attained undeserved fame as the woman who gave birth at the age of 103.
Tales of unusually late pregnancy were a recurring feature of early medical journals, with sexagenarian, septuagenarian and even nonagenarian mothers recorded in the literature. Most such cases were little more than hearsay, with medics happily passing on a good story whether or not they had witnessed it at first hand. In an era when it was difficult or impossible to prove a patient’s age, most of these cases would not have stood up to anything like rigorous scrutiny.
In 1881, a French medical journal published an article under the headline “Late Pregnancy,” which at first glance fits squarely into the same category. But what makes this example so odd is that it was submitted by physicians at a major Paris hospital and printed without question—at a period when most medics accepted the axiom that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The unusual event was reported by a surgeon identified only as M. Latour; his facetious tone does little to reassure the reader of its veracity.
We have just admitted to the Clinic of the School of Medicine a seventy-year-old woman in an interesting condition—interesting to the staff, that is. This brave woman lives in Garches.
Today part of the Parisian suburbs, but in the nineteenth century, Garches was a village a few miles west of the capital.
She is known as the widow T. Strongly adhering to the principle that ‘wine is the milk of old people’ she is an inveterate drinker, and about six months ago, returning home after a rather more prolonged binge than usual, she had sat down by the side of the road, waiting until she felt able to continue on her way.
Truly heroic drinking for a woman of her advanced years.
A young man of twenty-four, who knew her, noticed her in this state, and suggested that he escort her home. The widow T. agreed, and as night was falling and the woods unsafe, she offered her gallant knight a bed for the night. It was not one night that he remained, but four: it seems that his audacity was rewarded and that he had found treasures that were thought to have been lost for a long time. In short, to her great astonishment, the septuagenarian Venus was one day obliged to loosen her belt.
M. Latour’s gift for euphemism is certainly impressive. He cannot bring himself to write that the young man seduced the old lady, who later found her abdomen swelling alarmingly.
A midwife whom she went to consult, and then the physician of Garches, summoned in his turn, could only note the fact that autumn (almost winter, in fact) had bestowed the fruits denied by the spring.
This metaphor is at least rather poetic.
To sum up, the beautiful lover is at the Clinic where she is being pampered, or cherished, because the case is a most curious one. The inhabitants of Garches are anxiously awaiting the result; they are even willing, if necessary, to contribute to the cost of baptism and—who knows?—to the wedding expenses. After all, spouses should be properly matched.
This final phrase (“il faut des époux assortis” in the original) is tricky to translate, since it’s an old French proverb, used as the title of satirical cartoons, novels and at least one play. It’s an allusion that would have raised a smile from contemporary readers.
If she gave birth, and it was possible to verify her age, she would be comfortably the oldest mother on record. That is, among those who have conceived naturally: Since the advent of IVF, there have been numerous examples of sexagenarian mothers, and in 2009, an Indian woman gave birth to her first child at the age of seventy.
But did the widow T. have her child? Frustratingly, I can find no further trace of her. It’s possible, of course, that she was never pregnant. The doctors may have been wrong, failing to diagnose another condition that mimicked pregnancy. The journal article caused something of a storm in the European medical press—but, mysteriously, things went very quiet thereafter. That silence, I suspect, speaks volumes.
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HIDDEN DANGERS
THE WORLD IS a dangerous place, and unexpected threats lurk in the unlikeliest of places. Professional sportspeople seem to have a particular talent for finding them: In 1993, the Chelsea goalkeeper Dave Beasant missed the start of the soccer season after dropping a jar of salad cream on his big toe, while the England cricketer Derek Pringle once injured his back while typing a letter. But these are far from the most exotic dangers to have been recorded by medical writers: Dentures, hat pegs and even hats themselves are a few of the objects implicated in illness and injury in the pages that follow.
Nineteenth-century doctors were particularly adept at finding life-threatening situations pretty much anywhere they looked. Children’s games, organized sport, even using a pen: All were thought at one time or another to be hazardous to health. To be fair to the physicians of the past, understanding ri
sk has always been, and remains, one of the most ferociously difficult aspects of medicine. The Victorian cardiologist who noticed that several of his patients were keen cyclists naturally assumed that there was a connection between their heart disease and their newfangled hobby—and in the framework of contemporary medicine, the theory made perfect sense.
Perhaps the most exotic threat to health was identified in the 1830s, when a worrying new disease swept through the ranks of America’s priests. Doctors everywhere from California to New Jersey reported that pulpits were falling silent as the nation’s clergymen succumbed to a “loss of tone in the vocal organs,” causing hoarseness and an inability to speak in public. Many (“a multitude of divines,” according to a contemporary report in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal) were said to have resigned their livings after finding themselves no longer capable of addressing their flock or even leading daily worship.
What could have caused this ecclesiastical catastrophe? One sage observer observed that the priests of olden times had preached as much, if not more, than their modern counterparts, and their voices “were the last to fail.” So what had changed? Dr. Mauran, a distinguished physician from Providence, Rhode Island, thought he had the answer. The clergymen of yesteryear were all enthusiastic smokers, he pointed out, and were rarely seen without a pipe or cigar in their mouth. Chewing or smoking tobacco, he argued, “kept up a secretion in the neighborhood of the glottis, favorable to the good condition and healthy action of the voice box”—as demonstrated by the habits of another profession:
Lawyers speak hours together, and when leisure permits, many of them smoke; and, as a general rule, the leading advocates are very great smokers—and yet, who ever heard of a lawyer who had lost his voice?
Clerics, on the other hand, had largely forsworn tobacco since the rise of the temperance movement, and were now paying the price. Dr. Mauran strongly recommended that ministers who wanted to ensure a long and healthy career should resume their cigarettes and pipes without delay. And that is how a major medical journal came to warn its readers about the dangers of not smoking.
A SURFEIT OF CUCUMBERS
In 1762, a doctor from Malling in Kent, identifying himself only as “W.P.,” sent a highly unusual report to the editors of the Medical Museum in London. Malling was a small place in the eighteenth century, so it isn’t difficult to identify the author as Dr. William Perfect, son of the local vicar. He was also a prominent Freemason, a journalist and—in his own words—a minor poet.* Perfect developed a reputation as an expert on insanity, publishing books on the subject and eventually opening a small private asylum, a sort of cottage hospital for the mentally ill.
Even before he opened this institution, Dr. Perfect—known as a kind and gentle man—was in the habit of accommodating patients in his family home. Given the exceptional nature of the death he recorded in this article, it is tempting to ask whether mental illness might have played some part: His patient had apparently died as the result of eating a vast number of cucumbers.
It may be necessary to observe that this unhappy woman had all the symptoms of a bilious colic, to the most extreme degree, from the time of her being first attacked to the time of her death, which was three days after her eating the cucumbers.
Dr. Perfect suspected that the woman’s condition was caused by an excess of bile in her digestive tract.
In a few hours after she expired I opened the body, and found the stomach dilated and swelled to the size of a child’s head, but of a more oblong form, and resembling in figure and tension a large bladder filled with wind: the external or membranous coat of the stomach appeared florid and inflamed; and upon making an incision through that and the subjacent coats, a most amazing quantity of sliced cucumbers, porraceous matter . . .
Porraceous, a decidedly niche word, means “resembling leeks.”
. . . and vesicles filled with air, issued out at the opening.
Much of the upper part of the gut was inflamed, and the small intestine was “so much inflated, as to render it impossible for anything to pass through it.”
The colon, caecum and rectum were not so much inflamed as the lesser intestines; but, what was very extraordinary, the lower part of the latter was mortified for several inches: the lungs, particularly some part of the left lobe, appeared as if they had been boiled, with several livid spots dispersed over them. The liver, spleen, and uterus were the only viscera which preserved their natural complexion. The pancreas, pleura, and mediastinum were inflamed; a very large quantity of water was found in the pericardium: the kidneys were inflamed, and the vesica* was in a very flaccid state, without containing any urine. The patient, I was informed, had had frequent motions to urine for some time before her death, but was never capable of making a drop.
These observations suggest that an excess of cucumber was not the only ailment from which the woman was suffering. In particular, the “water” found in the pericardium (the sac around the heart) was a serious finding with all sorts of possible causes. If enough fluid had accumulated there, it might even have caused the heart to stop beating.
It seems that this is a unique case: Although the recent literature contains reports of cucumber poisoning by bacteria and chemicals, there is no record of anybody else dying from a surfeit of the delicious salad vegetable.
THE PERILS OF BEING A WRITER
In an earlier chapter, we encountered the Swiss physician Samuel Auguste André David Tissot, eighteenth-century Europe’s leading expert on the dangers of masturbation. It’s a shame that he is chiefly remembered for his work on that subject, L’Onanisme (1760), because in other respects, he was an imaginative, humane and sensible clinician. He wrote an influential book about neurology, which contains a rigorous discussion of migraine regarded as a classic even today. Tissot was an early advocate of inoculation against smallpox and opposed some of the more radical measures employed to treat the disease, such as drastic bloodletting. Noted for his campaigns to improve public health among the poorest members of society, his clinic also became a fashionable destination for European aristocrats.
Nine years after the appearance of his famous study of the “solitary vice,” Tissot published a book about the perils of another occupation usually performed indoors and in private. An Essay on Diseases Incident to Literary and Sedentary Persons (1769) is a catalogue of the various ailments that afflict scholars, writers and all those who spend too much time poring over a book. And the dangers are truly formidable.
Tissot’s thesis is simple:
It has long since been observed, that a close application to study is prejudicial to health.
Much of his case is hard to argue with—particularly when he suggests that a sedentary lifestyle might not be the best way to a long and healthy life.
The diseases to which the learned are particularly exposed arise from two principal causes, the perpetual labours of the mind, and the constant inaction of the body.
Tissot believed that it was not just inactivity that was damaging; overexertion of the brain could also have grievous consequences.
That we may understand the influence the workings of the mind have upon the health of the body, we need only remember in the first place, the fact that, firstly, the brain is in action during the time of thinking. Secondly, that every part of the body which is in action becomes weary; and that if the labour continues for any length of time, the functions of the part are disturbed.
Tissot points out that the brain is connected to the rest of the body by a vast network of nerves, which play a vital role in regulating all our activities. Mental fatigue therefore affects the entire organism.
These evident principles being once established, everyone must be sensible that when the brain is exhausted by the action of the soul, the nerves must of course be injured; in consequence of which, health will be endangered, and the constitution will at length be destroyed without any other apparent cause.
After an assiduous application for the space of four months, without any previous symptom of disease, his beard, his eyelashes, his eyebrows, and in short all the hair of his head and body fell off.
Today we would call this idiopathic alopecia: spontaneous hair loss of unknown cause.
This phenomenon was certainly brought about by the little bulbs, which are the roots of the hair, being deprived of nourishment.
The “little bulbs” alluded to are the follicles. Tissot suggests that their sudden starvation might have had three possible causes: an upset stomach; problems with the nerves; or “that kind of low fever men of letters are subject to”—an ailment that apparently throws hair follicles into “a state of consumption and decay.”
This fever is often produced by the irritation the heart receives from the too earnest application of the mind, in consequence of which its pulsations become more frequent.
I am (a) a writer and (b) almost completely bald, so on the face of it, M. Tissot’s hypothesis is self-evidently true. But far more disturbing were the psychological symptoms displayed by another scholar:
Gaspar Barloeus, an orator, poet, and physician, was sensible of these dangers, and often used to warn his friend Hughens of them; but he was, notwithstanding, regardless of himself, and weakened his brain so much by excessive study that he thought his body was made of butter.