Medical history is a treasure trove of strange and marvellous stories of mysterious diseases and remedies.
1. The guy who swallowed "the entire knives on the boat"
In 1808 an American sailor, who complained about persistent abdominal pain, was admitted to Guy's Hospital in London. Doctors could not understand his cause, refusing to believe his account of swallowing' dozens' of knives. His explanation was not clear.
He died a couple of months later, and doctors found out that his sailor was telling the truth. The corroded remnants of more than thirty clasp knives were swallowed into his stomach and lungs as part of an appallingly misdirected party trick.
He had swallowed up to 14 in a single session on a memorable occasion-but it was a few years before he paid the ultimate price.
2. A boy who honked like a goose
The German physician Karl August von Burow was called in 1848 to deal with one of the strangest cases of his life, or anybody else's. A boy from a nearby village tried to breathe, and he honked like a goose every time he exhaled.
Dr. von Burow learned that the local kids liked to blow through a recently killed goose's throat to imitate the cry of the bird. The young man had played this unusual game when a coughing fit overwhelmed him and unintentionally inhaled the larynx of the goose.
The surgeon performed a tracheotomy and eventually managed to remove the throat of the goose from the boy's inside. The patient recovered well.
3. The tapeworm trap
In 1854, an American doctor named Alphonsus Myers patented one of the more unusual medical devices ever sold. His invention was described as a' tapeworm trap': it consisted of a hollow gold tube baited with a piece of cheese and attached to a string length.
The patient had to swallow this machine and wait for a hungry tapeworm to grab the cheese. At this point, Dr Myers said, 'the trap and worm will be withdrawn with ease and perfect safety by a gentle pulling at the cord.'
Implausibly, the inventor said he had used it to trap a giant tapeworm longer than fifty inches. In reality, the machine was both ludicrous and pointless, and it was no more than a historical curiosity within a few years.
4. A human dragon
A 24-year-old Manchester factory worker woke up earlier than usual in 1889 and struck a match to watch the clock next to his bed. There was a sudden explosion like a pistol shot as he tried to blow out the flame: his breath had so suddenly ignited that his head was burnt and his moustache caught fire.
He was forced to give up cigarettes after several such accidents and did his best to stop exposed flames. In order to analyze what he found in it, his doctor had the bright idea of passing a tube into the man's stomach.
He found that an obstruction in the patient's intestine caused fermentation of his stomach contents, producing large amounts of flammable methane. The doctor successfully identified the cause and used trial and error to find a drug that prevented his patient from breathing fire like a dyspeptic dragon.
[Photo: Shamia Casiano/Pexels]
5. The pigeon’s rump cure
In the 19th century, physicians employed countless strange treatments, but few were as bizarre as Dr J F Weisse, a St. Petersburg doctor.
He had little experience with traditional drugs when he was called to treat a seriously ill child one night in August 1850. And he chose in desperation to seek a folk remedy that he had heard good things about.
He asked parents to get him a pigeon and put his bottom next to his young patient's head. "After the bird was applied to the anus of the boy," he reported in a medical journal, "it gasped several times for air, occasionally closed his eyes, then twitched his feet in spasm and eventually vomited."
The child made a miraculous recovery, although the pigeon couldn't say the same thing: it died a few hours later after refusing its food. Once news of the' pigeon's rump remedy' hit the medical journals in London, it gave rise to general hilarity.
Yet Dr Weisse rose above the mockery and encouraged more research:' There is a need for experimentation with other poultry,' he wrote.
6. Killed by his fake teeth
When in the spring of 1842, Mr H., a London pharmacist's assistant, fell ill, no one suspected the real cause. The 35-year-old had always suffered from asthma, so his family naturally assumed that this was the reason he was struggling to breathe.
But this time, the usual remedies–enemas, bleeding, laxatives–did not have any effect. He died a few days later, and when his doctors performed an autopsy, they were astonished to find a partial set of dentures in the chest cavity of the patient.
The father of the man told the dead man to unintentionally ' swallow ' them thirteen years ago; the doctors believed that he inhaled the false teeth in his airway about a dozen years later, before triggering this tragic event.
7. Slugs in her stomach
Sarah Ann, a 12-year old girl from London, started complaining about nausea in the summer of 1859. Her parents were unconcerned until she vomited a large, "alive and very active" garden slug one afternoon.
Sarah Ann then threw up seven more slugs, all of them alive in different sizes. The girl told the family doctor if she had eaten anything special, that she enjoyed snacking on the garden salads.
The doctor found that over the course of several weeks she had inadvertently swallowed a family of young slugs that had developed to maturity inside her belly. The case prompted the best title in a medical journal you'd ever see:' Should the garden slug live in the human bowel?
The answer, unexpectedly, is no, they can't. Anything that fell wrong with Sarah Ann wasn't a mollusc family that was happily stuffed with her belly vegetables.
8. The self-inflicted bladder stone operation
One of the eighteenth century's most commonly known medical conditions were bladder stones. The procedure known as lithotomy was the only effective treatment. It was appallingly painful, performed without anaesthetic, and patients often died from an infection.
In 1782, an ingenious alternative emerged from a French expatriate living in India. Claude Martin invented a file made from a knitting needle, a new type of instrument. He inserted this implement three or four times a day into his own urethra and used it bit by bit to file away the stone.
This was an uncomfortable experience, but apparently better than a painful surgery. And, remarkably, six months later he declared himself cured – becoming one of the few people not only to invent a new operation but also to perform it on their own bodies.
Do you want to know more like these strange histories? Buy The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine by Thomas Morris.
Comments
Post a Comment