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Teeth that exploded on exhalations that caught fire.
The history of medicine can be strange and fascinating
The former BBC journalist, Thomas Morris, knows it very well
In his book The Mystery of the Explosion Of the teeth and other curiosities of the history of medicine (Penguin, 2018, unpublished in Brazil), it reveals seven of the strangest cases in medical records.
See Abstract:
1
Two hundred years ago, a member of the Pennsylvania clergy in the United States (identified as "Rev. DA") began to feel unbearable.
He went to great lengths to relieve
Unfortunately, all these attempts were in vain.
The next morning, the clergyman paced. from his desk, holding his jaw, when suddenly "a sharp blow, like a pistol shot, broke his tooth to pieces, immediately relieving the pain."
Strangely, the priest's tooth explosion was the beginning of an epidemic of explosive teeth that would eventually be described in a specialized magazine titled: "Explosion of teeth with an audio report".
The pain of a young woman ends dramatically when her molar bursts such a viol that almost knocked her out, deafening her for several weeks
What's up what could have caused these dramatic explosions? Experts have proposed several theories ranging from abrupt changes in temperature to the chemicals used in early decay procedures.
None of these arguments, however, were particularly convincing, and the mystery of the explosion of teeth remains unexplained. to this day
2. The sailor swallows his knives
In 1799, a 23-year-old American sailor, John Cummings, arrives in the French port of Le Havre to spend the night with his companions.
They see a magician entertaining a group pretending to swallow.
Later that night, Cummings, who was very drunk, became convinced that he could swallow knives "like the French." Encouraged by his friends, the sailor put his knife in his mouth and swallowed it.
When a spectator asked him how much he could put in his mouth at the same time, Cummings replied, "All who are on board" and put three more
C & # 39; was a impressive feat, but not very smart. Cummings did not try to eat more knives for a few years, but at a party in 1805 he wanted to show up at a party and repeated his performance in front of another group of sailors.
But it was not long before he suffered the negative effects of his
Finally, he died in 1809 after a long illness.
His doctors, who did not believe in the history of the knives, were confused when they dissected his body and clashed when he discovered the corroded remains of more than 30 knives in his stomach and his intestines. One of them has pierced his colon.
3. The healing of the pigeon's leg
Nineteenth century doctors used a range of strange remedies, but few were as strange as the one recommended by the German physician Karl Friedrich Canstatt
The eminent disease specialist Infantile gave the following recipe to treat the convulsions of the children: "If you hold the leg of a pigeon against the anus of the child during the attack, the animal dies soon and the attack with the same speed. "
It was an eccentric idea and curiously, Dr. Canstatt did not do it. was the only doctor to believe in it
When the director of the Children's Hospital of St. Petersburg, JF Weisse, was summoned to look after a seriously ill boy the night of August 1850, he had little of success with conventional drugs.
Desperate, he asks his parents to get a dove. "After the bird was applied to the boy's anus," he says, "the dove had trouble breathing, closed her eyes a few times, her feet contracted spasms and finally, the Bird throws up. "
The boy miraculously recovers. , but the same can not be said of the dove: after he stopped eating, he died a few hours later
When news of "the healing of the leg of the dove" reached the London medical journals there were a lot of laughs. 19659003] But Weisse ignored the jokes and said further research was needed: "Experiments with other birds are needed," he wrote, apparently speaking seriously
. The soldier who withdrew his own bladder calculation
Colonel Claude Martin was an eighteenth-century soldier who spent much of his life working for the British East India Company.
In addition to his successful military career. , worked as a cartographer, architect and administrator. He became the richest European of India and built (and put in air) the first balloon of the country.
But what we know less about Martin, is that he was the first to occur and to submit to a
When he felt the Symptoms of a bladder calculation in 1782, Martin decided not to consult a doctor because he thought that an operation would be very painful.
The French decided to solve the problem. he himself has the situation.
Martin has developed a special instrument consisting of a weaving needle and a whalebone cord.
The Colonel repeats this horrible procedure up to twelve times a day for six months.
Surprisingly, it works: at the end of this period, Fifty years later, a technique very similar to the Martin technique became a standard method for the treatment of bladder stones, thanks to the pioneering research of Parisian surgeons, who were apparently unaware of the colonel's exploit.
] Martin was not only the first to engage in this procedure, which later became known as lithotripsy; was also the first patient to undergo this operation.
5. The Miller's Tale
On August 15, 1737, a young man, Samuel Wood, was working in one of the windmills of the Isle of Dogs in London.
Walking distractedly looking for a bag of corn, he noticed that a rope was hanging from his body.
As he pbaded one of the big wooden wheels, the rope got stuck in gear and, before he knew what was going on, Wood flew into the tunes and fell into the ground. ground.
While standing up, Wood feels no pain, just a tingling in the right shoulder. He looked up and saw an object hanging on the steering wheel: an amputated arm.
Showing admirable sang-froid, he was able to walk to the nearest house for help.
Losing an edge is not trivial. The injury was so severe that the doctors who treated it were fearing a tragic end. But they were surprised to find that the arm was torn so clean that the patient was not likely to die.
Wood recovered in a few weeks and became a kind of celebrity: the bars were selling pictures of the man who had survived after.
In November 1737, three months after the accident, Samuel was taken among the scientists out of curiosity. His amputated arm, now preserved in alcohol, was also presented to scientists.
] 6. A slug in the stomach
In the summer of 1859, a 12-year-old London girl, Sarah Ann, complained of seasickness. Her symptoms were not serious and her parents did not care until one afternoon, she vomited a large garden slug, described as "alive and very active". Sarah Ann soon vomited seven other slugs of different sizes, all alive, and her parents decided that it was time to take her to the doctor.
When asked if she had eaten something unusual, she said that she liked to eat lettuce from the garden.
She also noticed that Sarah Ann had only one hand, which he attributed to the fact that her mother had a sore throat
The doctor had concluded that without knowing it she had ingested a family of slugs that had developed in her stomach. "A fork that scares during pregnancy"
The story of slugs seemed unlikely and some experts suggested that the girl claimed: "Can a slug live in a human stomach?" Asked an editorial of the scientific journal Le Lancet .
JC Dalton, professor of physiology in New York, decided to investigate the case. He did a series of experiments involving dipping live slugs into stomach acid to see what had happened.
All creatures died in minutes and were digested a few hours later. The professor concluded that no, slugs can not live in a human stomach.
So, what happened? It seemed that his illness was more mental than physical.
But whatever it was, it was certainly not a family of slugs that lived in his stomach.
In 1886, a man from Glasgow, whose name is unknown, suffered from bad breath.
Halitosis, also called bad breath, is an uncomfortable and embarrbading condition, but rarely dangerous. A month ago, a new symptom appeared.
When he woke up in the middle of the night, he lit a match to watch his watch.
His wife woke up and saw him spitting fire like a dragon
His doctor had never heard of it.
But soon another Scottish doctor, James McNaught, was visited by a patient so touched by the burning that he had to quit for fear of setting the house on fire. 19659003] The doctor put a tube in the patient's stomach and badyzed the contents. He discovered that an intestinal obstruction was fermenting the contents of the stomach, producing large amounts of flammable methane.
Although potentially dangerous, he also has his fun side.
In the 1930s, a patient tried to light a cigarette
As reported in a medical journal, "as he was in public, he quietly tried to do it by the nose." He left his friends behind. the shock by producing two flames to the nostrils. " 19659003] What's more discreet than that?
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