MAGAZINE AND NEWSPAPER ARTICLES

Medical History

Medical history is fascinating. The ideas that doctors had a hundred or more years ago now seem strange and irrational to the modern eye. Extracts from old medical books can make fascinating reading. They can be used as column fillers, teasers, collections or combined into a longer article.

An interest in medical history and a large collection of historical medical textbooks led to one of Dr. Carter’s hobbies turning into a profitable column. Extracts from old texts are quoted individually or combined into an amusing article have been published in medical journals in Australia and 47 other countries.

Medwords has hundreds of these intriguing extracts in its database.

Examples of medical history extracts and an article follow:-

If tobacco fumes are injected into the rectum, the patient shortly becomes comatose from the narcotic principle of the herb, and relief (of the strangulated hernia) will ensue.

I have succeeded in relieving him of a malady that commenced when by accident he swallowed a tadpole as a small boy. Since then his stomach has been filled with frogs, which had been successively spawning ever since, and whose croaking is quite audible. (Letter to editor of medical journal, 1833).

The brain is not the region where pain and happiness is felt, but it is the counting house of the stomach which is the region where happiness or misery is felt.

Sydenham maintains that the antidote to excess body heat is cold, and the present practice of nursing a feverish patient in a room from which every breath of fresh air has been excluded and an open fire is maintained, is to be abhorred.

THE WAY WE WERE

"Hysteria generally occurs in females between the ages of 12 and 45"

So says a medical text book of 150 years ago. It goes on to say that  "the present cruel method of bringing up young ladies favours the development of the disease by rendering the whole system delicate and nervous. They are deprived of sunlight, pure air, active labour and exercise. Hot rooms, crowding the intellect to the neglect of the body, solitary vice and novel reading are among the many causes of this disease".

Given the same circumstances today, most of us would probably be hysterical, and one's mind can barely grasp what solitary vices these young ladies nurtured!

100 years ago there were no antibiotics, no vaccinations against childhood diseases, no blood pressure treatments, no effective treatments of heart disease, cancer, peptic ulcers or even hysteria. Most medications were herbal concoctions,and certainly there were no synthetic medications. The doctors of this time often had little to offer except their time and compassion, and this they offered with the assistance of the knowledge available to them.

Sciagraphs (now known as X-rays) were just coming into regular use, although they were more a sideshow trick than a useful diagnostic tool.

Medical treatment was also expensive at 5 shillings (50 cents) a consultation when the average wage was £3 a week. By modern day standards that’s about $60 a visit.

There were few specialists in those days. Most doctors were "Jacks of all trades", and performed their own surgery and obstetrics. Private hospitals were the norm, and some church run institutions were very good, but other privately run hospitals were little more than a few converted bedrooms at the back of an old house.

Treatments and attitudes have certainly changed over the years. It was considered proper that  "married couples should adopt more generally the rule of sleeping in separate rooms. In this way, troublesome temptations are escaped, and a rational temperance would be practised without inconvenience".

Little was known about ........................