The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities From the History of Medicine
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* I.e., toward the upper part of the bowel
* This story is already bad enough, but even worse is how it got there: It had migrated from the man’s stomach, up his esophagus and then down the trachea toward his lungs.
* In colonial India, a bheestie was a domestic servant whose job was to keep the household supplied with water.
* Soft palate
* A long instrument, generally made from a piece of sponge on a stick, used to dislodge foreign objects in the esophagus
* Swollen
* Fleshy
* I.e., the thorax
* Round
* His unfortunate students were required to give up their Christmas vacations in order to attend them. “I know that it may be considered, by indolent men, as no charitable act on my part to break in upon your holiday time,” said Richardson. “At the same time, I offer no apology for the act.” Merry Christmas, guys!
* They identified themselves simply as “a society of physicians in London.”
* An archaic term for the outermost layer of skin. To “burn the scarff skin” implies the formation of a blister.
* Gangrenous
* A bacterial skin infection
* Armpit
* Most of us have had the oh-God-I’m-naked-and-everybody-else-has-their-clothes-on anxiety dream. Imagine it happening for real! The horror.
* Drop by drop
* A condition known as patent urachus
* Hilariously, several old medical dictionaries include the word oturia, defined as “urine discharged from the ear”—a word for a phenomenon that does not (and cannot) occur.
* The dried leaves of a marine plant found in the Mediterranean
* The root of a South American plant then commonly used to treat dysentery
* His shaved head
* A glimmer or trace
* Those who administered the tobacco enema without due care and attention were liable to get a mouthful of the patient’s rectal contents, a frightful possibility that made it a hazardous undertaking—not to mention an altruistic one. This is the origin of the expression “to blow smoke up someone’s ass,” meaning to behave in an ingratiating fashion. For more information on the delights of the tobacco enema, see the next case.
* Spoiled, corrupted
* From the Greek words iatros (“physician”) and aleiptes (“anointer”)
* Mercury (I) chloride, a laxative
* An herb, often used as an antispasmodic
* A strong-smelling substance produced by the musk deer, also used as an antispasmodic
* Administered orally as an emetic, or in a poultice as a stimulant
* Liver
* Mercury (I) oxide
* Sims is a hugely controversial figure today, owing to the fact that he developed the procedure by performing experimental surgery on black slave women, possibly without informed consent.
* Seriously. Google it before you read the next story. You won’t be disappointed.
* Robert Gooch, an English physician and one of the leading obstetricians of the early nineteenth century. In 1821, he was the first to describe this method of arresting postpartum hemorrhage, which was widely adopted.
* Auguste César Baudelocque, nephew of the far more eminent Jean-Louis, the obstetrician who delivered Napoleon II
* Charles Jamrach was a German emigré who became the most successful trader of exotic animals in nineteenth-century England. His warehouse in Wapping, in London’s docklands, contained an unlikely menagerie of lions, tigers, crocodiles, bears, zebras and numerous smaller fauna. Mr. Rice, a competitor who chose injudiciously to set up shop in the same street, has left barely any trace on the historical record.
* A flammable liquid hydrocarbon
* Oxalic acid is present in many foods but toxic in high concentrations.
* Known today as hydrofluoric acid, and unspeakably bad for you in large doses. Even skin contact can be fatal.
* Carbon disulfide, a pleasant-smelling but highly toxic liquid
* An intimate acquaintance or friend
* I.e., awaited the operation
* Relieved, soothed
* Abscess
* Bandaged
* The salary of the British poet laureate traditionally includes a butt (barrel) of sack, and even today, the incumbent receives part of her stipend in the form of six hundred bottles of sherry.
* Tuberculosis
* A thin, blood-tinged liquid discharged from ulcers or infected wounds
* In the shape of a cross
* Plasters smeared with mustard paste, intended to cause the sensation of burning. According to a doctrine fashionable at the time and known as counter-irritation, a malady in one part of the body could be cured by creating an artificial “irritation” in another.
* Scar
* Also known as lymphatic filariasis, and caused by the parasitic roundworm Wuchereria bancrofti. But this diagnosis is uncertain; it may simply have been an enormous tumor.
* Unconsciousness
* Pit of the stomach
* Quoting John Armstrong, a maverick antiestablishment physician of the early nineteenth century
* The parallel is not entirely fanciful: Melville’s masterpiece was already written but not yet published, and in a contemporary letter, the author commented that the sinking was “really & truly a surprising coincidence . . . I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster.”
* Probe
* Wiped clean
* Decayed
* Adhesions between adjacent structures, caused by scar tissue
* Healed
* Given that he was bleeding internally, this was the exact opposite of what should have happened.
* One of the bones of the skull
* A gust or puff of wind
* Most likely cranial nerve VII, also known as the facial nerve
* Adam’s apple
* An area known ever since as Millwall
* Opposite
* An ointment intended to promote wound healing
* i.e., raising his musket to fire it
* The frontal bone, which makes up the forehead and the upper part of the eye sockets
* The corner of the eye nearest the temple
* This scheme didn’t last long, as everybody involved soon realized it was a deeply silly idea.
* About seventy miles
* Created in 1898 as the Pathological Laboratory of the University of Buffalo, it is now known as Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.
* Named after the British neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson, who described the injury in an article published in 1919. The first case he encountered was that of an RAF pilot who had flown through a bank of telegraph wires at 120 miles per hour and somehow survived with little more than a sore neck.
* When he died in 1849, The Lancet’s obituary said of Mr. Andrews that he had “not contributed anything to the advancement of medical or surgical knowledge, but was a great patron of the fine arts.” Which seems a bit harsh.
* Wad
* Scar
* Its founder, Archibald Hall, was terrible at coming up with snappy titles: In a later incarnation, the journal became known as The British American Journal Devoted to the Advancement of Medical and Physical Sciences in the British-American Provinces.
* An irritating know-it-all
* A theory that gave rise to the pseudoscience of phrenology, whose adherents believed that the shape of an individual’s skull accurately predicted their character
* A large blood vessel in the back of the scalp
* Scars
* The knob at the end of the bone, part of the joint
* So called to distinguish him from his son Alexander Monro (secundus) and grandson Alexander Monro (
tertius). All three were medics who held the same Edinburgh professorship in succession.
* It still exists today as the Royal Humane Society.
* Born in Ireland, studied in France, practiced in London and died in Calcutta, Dr. Jackson is a reminder that eighteenth-century medics were often every bit as cosmopolitan as their modern counterparts.
* As far as I can establish, the place names Boness (the town) and Pithovia (the parish) appear nowhere but in retellings of this story. They either disappeared or never existed.
* Spongy, abnormal
* Inner lining
* A state of persistent erection
* Dominique Sernin was a professor of obstetrics, chief of surgery for all the hospitals of Narbonne in southern France, and an associate of the national surgical society. He seems unlikely to have made any of this up.
* At least according to the sixteenth-century historian Guillaume Paradin, who was not always regarded as a reliable source
* Castle or Castile soap, made from olive oil and originally manufactured in Castile in Spain
* I made none of these up.
* Or pretty much anything else.
* Eight months after its launch, Medical Notes and Queries abruptly changed its name to The Night Bell, presumably after receiving a nasty letter from the older publication’s lawyers.
* Tea, apparently. That said, “for those who can afford it there is no more refreshing mixture than champagne and soda-water. Lemonade and claret too is an efficacious drink, and really good ginger beer by itself is not to be despised.”
* Open
* The other being the ductus arteriosus
* Or rather the editor of The Medical Times and Gazette, from which the paragraph was copied without acknowledgment.
* His works include “A parody from Hamlet, wrote when indisposed and in doubt about bleeding,” which begins: “To bleed, or not to bleed?—That is the question.” It is hard to disagree with the literary contemporary who wrote of Perfect that “his verses cannot be said to tower very highly above mediocrity.”
* Bladder
* One of the Wisdom books of the Catholic Bible, but not part of the canon in the Jewish or Protestant traditions. Sirach is included in the Apocrypha of the King James Version, which calls it Ecclesiasticus. This is Chapter 30, verse 5: “Health and good estate of body are above all gold, and a strong body above infinite wealth.”
* Fainting
* Anomalous
* Laxative
* Ooze out
* Yes, I stole it. Deal with it.
* Despite his rather daringly progressive conclusion, Dr. Léon-Petit was not above a bit of good old-fashioned Victorian sexism. Before sitting down, he opined: “One need only to have witnessed the repulsive spectacle called a women’s race to understand what can become of the cyclist who has exceeded her capabilities and thereby exposed herself to accidents.”
* The most celebrated “preparation of kola and coca” was Coca-Cola, which first went on sale in 1886. However, the drink was barely known in Europe until a bottling plant opened in France in 1919, so Dr. Herschell was probably unaware of its existence.
* I’ll be honest, there’s a lot of blood in this book. If that’s what you’re after, you can hardly miss it.