2009-2010
100 years ago: Physic in Shakespeare’s time
20 Dec 2010
"If people sick, they come to me,
I purges, bleeds and sweats 'em;
If after that they likes to die,
What's that to me? I lets 'em"
100 years ago:Constipation
19 Dec 2010
100 years ago: Traumatic neurasthenia
16 Dec 2010
100 years ago: Treatment of heart failure
24 Nov 2010
Tonsillectomy in general practice
20 Oct 2010
To the general practitioner the operation for removal of tonsils and adenoids must always constitute a large proportion of his minor surgery. Few operations are more commonly performed, and few, perhaps, are done worse. This state of affairs is due to a non-observance of certain general rules... Haemorrhage is really the only complication of any importance; it usually corrects itself, ceasing when the patient loses sufficient blood to make him feel faint.
A hundred years ago: Treatment of ringworm by x-rays
20 Sep 2010
'I have no doubt that the risks to which I have alluded are being daily diminished by skilled operators; but now that practically every County Council school is ordering, or trying to order, X-rays for every case of ringworm, and seeing that skilled radiographers and dermatologists are limited in number and are not to be found everywhere, I shall not be surprised if we do hear of children whose scalps have been permanently injured by X-rays.'
A hundred years ago: The teaching of insanity to the medical practitioner
21 Jul 2010
'Hitherto there has been no separate recognition of mental diseases as a subject worthy of diploma by the examining bodies, although the London University may be quoted as conferring the title, Doctor of Medicine, upon those of its medical graduates who specialise and pass an examination in this and other subjects. The Medical-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland, consisting of both medical men and women in this country and abroad, who are especially interested in mental diseases, and numbering over 700 members, grants a certificate to qualified men for proficiency in the subject of psychiatry, and it has recently approached the Royal College of Physicians of London and several of the degree-granting authorities for the purpose of promoting further interest, and, if possible, to inaugurate a diploma similar in the scope to those granted for Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and those which the University of Oxford propose to grant in Business or Journalism. It is also considering the establishment of special post-graduate courses for those who make mental disease their life-work. '
100 years ago: Concerning the preservation of health in the tropics
24 Jun 2010
100 years ago: State prevention of tuberculosis
23 Jun 2010
We want to attack tuberculosis before it attacks us. The key is that about the period of adolescence, when business life succeeds that of childhood every youth and maid ought to be taught in a sanatorium, how to live as part of the State education. An education also at this period involving an elementary knowledge of human physiology would reap great benefits, for did the man in the street but know, for instance, the actual amount of waste products that he casts off in twenty-four hours by means of perspiration, then, I submit, that he would become more careful than he is now of personal ablutions, changes of underclothing, and perhaps of linen; with untold advantages to our national matters and morals.... Women, too, might be taught the true principles of house-cleaning, which, they might be astonished to learn, they by no means know.
Chronic gonorrhoea in the female
15 Apr 2010
There is probably no disease affecting the female urinary genital organs which presents itself so often to the practitioner as the chronic variety of gonococcal infection. The successful treatment of the condition is invariably difficult, calling for considerable exercise of patience and discretion on the part of the medical attendant. Injudicious treatment, especially in the way of systematic curettings, etc., is not infrequently followed by extension of the disease.
Painless labour
15 Mar 2010
I have no sympathy with the man (or woman) who holds the opinion that labour pains are “natural” and therefore not to be interfered with. Patients in labour will cry out bitterly that they are too weak to endure the increasing pains of the latter half of the first stage; chloroform here is contraindicated we know in the large majority of cases. Is there nothing more we can do then, certain in action, and absolutely safe for mother and child?
Leprosy in 1910
15 Feb 2010
100 years ago: Evils of the modern British diet
21 Jan 2010
Pasteur, science and medicine
15 Dec 2009
'The death of his children, the loss of the many brave young heroes in the ambulance tents during the war, the epidemics he had witnessed, all this human suffering weighed upon him and determined him to do his utmost to solve the problems which medical men, working alone, seemed unable to fathom.'
Female inebriety
15 Dec 2009
'Many... have been launched upon their course of inebriety by putting too liberal an interpretation upon loose medical advice'
On being tired
15 Dec 2009
'...in this kneeling position, he wrote all his works, the blood having thus to travel to his brain in a horizontal line, instead of upwards against the force of gravity as it would have had to do in the sitting position.'
Causes of diabetes
21 May 2009
The decay of bloodletting
25 Apr 2009
Embolism after laparotomy
29 Mar 2009
The power of bedside diagnosis
01 Feb 2009
Industrial diseases
01 Jan 2009