The New York Medical Journal‘s “Pith of Current Literature” section contained summaries of the most important findings in other journals. Most importantly, it summarized foreign-language articles – since nobody was translating entire issues of Riforma Medica or Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie, this was unique information. In the October 1, 1904 issue we learned about the findings of […]
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“This unholy war against oleaginous applications”, 1898
The 1898 meeting of the American Medical Association was held in Denver, Colorado in early June. One major address was on the topic of “Wet Dressings In Surgery“, delivered by Dr. Thomas Osmond Summers Jr. of St. Louis, son of the theologian and Confederate States almanac editor. Dr. Summers reached such heights of eloquence, in his […]
More atropia than ever before!
One day in Victorian England, Dr. John Milner Fothergill (above), who was indeed an eminent physician with many other achievements (and whose weight was as immense as his medical knowledge), accomplished something that merited an item in the March 1878 North Carolina Medical Journal [vol. 1(3): p. 177] all by itself. “Atropia”, now called atropine, […]
The dangers of delicious dynamite
* * * Gelignite, or blasting gelatin, is a mixture of nitroglycerin, gun cotton, and a combustible substance like wood pulp. It resembles dynamite (also invented by Alfred Nobel) but can be conveniently molded into shape with the bare hands. The October 6, 1904 issue of Roussky Vratch (Русский врач , or “Russian Doctor”, a […]
Kisch of Prague, on kissing problems
Between 1897 and 1899, many medical journals (e.g. the Canadian Medical Review, shown here) carried this blurb, about a recent advance by Dr. Enoch Heinrich Kisch. Never before had anyone realized that the withdrawal method of birth control leads to female dissatisfaction… which leads to occasional heart palpitations… which lead to irregular heartbeat, constipation, vertigo, […]
Instant beer: The birth of a notion
Along with jetpacks and hose-down-able houses, food in pill form has been perennially one of those futuristic advances that is just around the corner. 65 years before Willy Wonka’s three-course-meal chewing gum, German scientists brought us desiccated beer — according to the Indian Medical Gazette, summarized here in the New York Medical Journal [July 22, […]
The wound-healing ape and the hydrotherapy pig
The Denver Medical Times [August 1899 vol. XIX, no. 2, pp. 65-71] was the venue for James Weir Jr.’s compendium of observations on how animals treat themselves when afflicted by diseases. Among the highlights: Several safari travelers report that elephants shot by hunters may plug their wounds with moistened clay. “In 1882 there was on […]
How much does the Air Force annoy livestock?
After years of defending legal claims from farmers and others who believed their animals had been adversely affected by sonic booms and other aircraft noises, the United States Air Force sought to find out whether the scientific evidence might be starting to go against them. Bioacoustic experts at the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, though their expertise […]
The giant Peruvian’s hat (1909)
Along with its usual fare — ethnography and anthropology about the peoples of the Western Hemisphere — Paris’s Journal de la Société des Américanistes devoted part of its 1909 issue(*) to a sort of review article summarizing all known extremely tall people of the Americas. These were mostly modern cases of acromegaly who died before […]
Trading typhoid with your towels
* * * We’ve probably all wondered, when drying our hands… this is supposedly a net transfer of germs from us to the towel, but at what point does the towel become so filth-riddled that we are now transferring germs from the towel to us? An early investigation of this was done in the American […]