The soldier who removed his own bladder stone, and other medical history marvels

Enlarge / A patient receiving dental treatment, circa 1892. There were several cases of 'exploding teeth' in the 19th century that remain unexplained to this day. (credit: Oxford Science Archive/Getty Images)
While researching his 2017 book on the history of heart surgery, medical journalist Thomas Morris perused hundreds of journals from the 19th century. One day, a headline on the page opposite the one he was reading caught his eye: 'sudden protrusion of the whole of the intestines into the scrotum.' It was a bizarre case from the 1820s, involving a laborer run over by a brick-laden cart. The resulting hernia forced his intestines into his scrotum, and yet the laborer made a full recovery.
Once he got over his initial amused revulsion, Morris was struck by the sheer ingenuity displayed by doctors in treating the man's condition. And he found plenty of other similar bizarre cases as he continued his research, with people surviving truly horrifying injuries—a testament to the resiliency of the human body. 'Doctors, even when they had less than a tenth of the knowledge we do today in terms of treating major trauma, could still come up with innovative and ingenious solutions to acute problems,' he said.
Many of the most interesting medical cases Morris uncovered are featured in his hugely entertaining compendium of medical oddities, The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth, and Other Curiosities From the History of Medicine. Regular readers of his blog (tagline: 'making you grateful for modern medicine') will revel in stories about a sword-swallowing sailor, a soldier who removed his own bladder stone, a man with combustible belches, a woman who peed through her nose, and a boy who inhaled a bird's larynx and started honking like a goose. All are delivered in elegant prose, punctuated with the author's distinctive dry wit. Morris has collected 500 or so of these frequently jaw-dropping cases thus far, and only included 70 or so in the book. So a sequel (or two) isn't out of the question.
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