I’m reading two great books.
One is Triceratops from the Melbourne Museum, the other is Medicine’s Strangest Cases by Michael O’Donnell. The Triceratops book covers everything you would want to know about Triceratops, and can be read easily in a day or two.

Medicine’s Strangest Cases is a book that is so full of amusing facts that on reading it for a month, I’m still barely scratching the surface.

It is actually a comprehensive history of medicine, from 400BC (Hippocrates) to 2015.

A main theme behind the book is de-deifyng famous and unknown doctors by painting them warts and all, even caricaturing them by emphasizing the warts, without in any way straying from the truth.

Famous doctors that he de-deifies include:
Hippocrates
Galen
Edward Jenner
Robert Liston
John Snow
Alexander Fleming
William McBride
Christian Barnard

From the book we find that every famous anaesthetic began life as a party drug:
Hard liquor, Nitrous Oxide, Ether, Chloroform, etc.

We learn that Woodrow Wilson was both mentally and physically completely unfit for office for two years 1919 to 1921 when he was president.

We see all the highs and lows of the medical profession, from wealthy charlatans to uncelebrated heroes.

I need to check, but there are hints throughout the book that it was made into a radio or TV series.

mollwollfumble said:

A main theme behind the book is de-deifyng famous and unknown doctors by painting them warts and all, even caricaturing them by emphasizing the warts, without in any way straying from the truth.

Should be a book that does that for scientists too.

You might also like (from my shelves here, mostly read a couple of times through)

“Doctors and Distillers. The remarkable medicinal history of beer, wine, spirits and cocktails”
by Camper English

“A short history of Disease. Plagues, poxes and civilisations”
by Sean Martin

“Snowball in a Blizzard. A physician’s notes on uncertainty in medicine”
by Steven Hatch.

I presume Phineas Gage popped up in the book you are reading. He shows up in almost all books about medical curiosities.

buffy said:

You might also like (from my shelves here, mostly read a couple of times through)

“Doctors and Distillers. The remarkable medicinal history of beer, wine, spirits and cocktails”
by Camper English

“A short history of Disease. Plagues, poxes and civilisations”
by Sean Martin

“Snowball in a Blizzard. A physician’s notes on uncertainty in medicine”
by Steven Hatch.

I presume Phineas Gage popped up in the book you are reading. He shows up in almost all books about medical curiosities.

I am so over Phineas Gage I could stab him in the eye myself

Arts said:

buffy said:

You might also like (from my shelves here, mostly read a couple of times through)

“Doctors and Distillers. The remarkable medicinal history of beer, wine, spirits and cocktails”
by Camper English

“A short history of Disease. Plagues, poxes and civilisations”
by Sean Martin

“Snowball in a Blizzard. A physician’s notes on uncertainty in medicine”
by Steven Hatch.

I presume Phineas Gage popped up in the book you are reading. He shows up in almost all books about medical curiosities.

I am so over Phineas Gage I could stab him in the eye myself

It’s easy to skip those bits once you’ve read his story a couple of times. You know it by then. In a recent reread of Sam Kean’s “The Tale of the Duelling Neurosurgeons” I did read the details again. I suppose it was some years since I’d done so.

mollwollfumble said:

Famous doctors that he de-deifies include:

John Snow

He knows nothing.

Thanks Buffy, I’ll keep a lookout for those.

> Phineas Gage

Not in this book.

esselte said:

mollwollfumble said:

Famous doctors that he de-deifies include:
John Snow

He knows nothing.

“It you read the version that Snow wrote, when the pump handle was removed, the epidemic was virtually over. … The evidence that incriminated the pump came later when Snow mapped the houses occupied by cholera victims. His investigation was a retrospective study.”

A note on this from mollwollfumble. I have always noticed a slight problem with the conventional story. How come Snow found that nearly everyone he door-knocked in the study was at home? Wouldn’t they have fled? The answer, they had fled, and Snow had to wait until they came back home after the epidemic to make the map.

On Hippocrates
“Everything we know about Hippocrates is legend … some scholars claim that none of the texts of the Hippocratic corpus, many of which are contradictory, were written by the man … has been modified relentlessly down the centuries … most British doctors have never seen it.”

On Galen
“Some 350 texts survived and their mixture of erudite philosophising, astute observation, dogmatic assertion and irritating polemic … Galen was an arrogant man and a frightful snob.”

On Syphilus, I was shocked to read that its origins are still unknown.
“once taught … from the New World to the Old, conveyed to Europe by Columbus’s returning sailors … Native Americans claim Haiti, Spaniards that the disease came from West Africa … the French called it the Neapolitan disease, but the Italians called it the French disease.”

“The fee for putting you to sleep was only five guineas; the other 45 were for waking you up”, Francois Rabelais

Benjamin Jestry was inoculating people with cowpox 22 years before Jenner. “Jenner must have heard what Jestry did”.

Occasionally, quack medicines aren’t quack medicines. “Dr J. Collis Browne’s chlorodyne, the great specific for cholera, diarrhoea, dysentry … a true palliative in neuralgia, gout, cancer, toothache, rhumatism”. As it happened, chlorodyne was just about the only medicine at that time that actually worked, it “contained morphine, ether, cannabis and treacle”.

“If strangeness was endowed by eccentricity, there have been few stranger medical cases than that of Dr William Price, who, in 1884, stood in the dock in Cardiff … God had appointed him to be all-powerful among the Druids and thus he had greater authority than any newcomer like the Christian Church” and that, dear friends, is the origin of cremation.

mollwollfumble said:

A note on this from mollwollfumble. I have always noticed a slight problem with the conventional story. How come Snow found that nearly everyone he door-knocked in the study was at home? Wouldn’t they have fled? The answer, they had fled, and Snow had to wait until they came back home after the epidemic to make the map.

Will you ever stop making shit up? Why would they flee if they didn’t know it was their home that was the problem and where could slum-dwelling working-class people go even if they could?