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"Don't get yourself in a stew"
"Doctor, doctor, I've just swallowed a roll of film"
"Come back tomorrow and we'll see what develops"
"Doctor, doctor, what can you give me for wind?"
"Try this kite"
"Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I'm a sheep"
"Oh dear, that's very baaaaaaaad"
Believe it or not, some medical complaints are even funnier (and possibly equally as implausible) as those terrible jokes listed above. Though, some others are pretty horrible. Before commencing his talk, Diagnosis:Unexplained, for the London Fortean Society at The Miller in Southwark last night, the speaker Thomas Morris (a former radio producer - he worked on Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time and Night Waves - and journalist for The Financial Times, The Lancet, and The Cricketer) asked if anybody present was squeamish. Nobody put their hands up!
Which meant at least one person there, yes - me, was lying. I have to hide behind my hands if they're showing an operation, one of those Your Life in Their Hands things, on television and I even have to look away when being inoculated. I'm a wimp, basically.
But there was nothing I needed to worry about during Thomas's interesting, insightful, and amusing one hour talk. Mainly because there were no photographs and definitely no films of operations being performed (this was not a Butthole Surfers gig) but also because the stories were so fantastical they bordered on the unreal. They weren't things that you can easily imagine happening to you or people you know.
About the worst, most embarrassing, medical things I've undergone are shoving a toy lifeboat up my bum in the bath when I was a kid and losing it for a couple of days (until it came out during a 'movement', the lifeboat now loaded with a putrid brown cargo) and getting my ballbag caught in my zip when I was having a pee round the back of the garage near my gran and grandad's house a few years later.
Worse things happen to ballbags! Thomas' first book was about the history of heart surgery and when he was researching that he came across a headline that, it's fair to say, stopped him in his tracks. It read "SUDDEN PROTRUSION OF THE INTESTINES INTO THE SCROTUM" and, of course, he immediately forgot all about researching heart surgery and decided to investigate this story further.
The unfortunate protagonist turned out to be a fifty year old Bristol labourer who'd been run over by a car laden with bricks in 1829 causing the rather painful sounding 'protrusion'. Amazingly, they could treat him using a team of 'strong' doctors to hold him down and push things back to where they used to be. He went on to live a normal life, the only minor inconvenience being having to wear a truss.
This was the incident that sent Thomas down a rabbit hole of research and eventually inspired his second book, The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine, as well as the bulk of his Fortean talk.
These days medical journals, before being published, have normally been peer reviewed and edited many times. In the late eighteenth century, as you might imagine, this was not the case so all sorts of weird and wonderful cases were reported with, often, only one person being witness to the events in question.
Take the twenty-year old man who was found with a serpent living inside the ventricle of his heart. Over a century later it was discovered that the most likely explanation was that it was probably a serpentine shaped blood clot but it did lead Thomas on to another astonishing headline - "CAN THE GARDEN SLUG LIVE IN THE HUMAN STOMACH"?
A headline that demands retreat to Betteridge's Law. Betteridge's Law states that any newspaper headline that ends with a question mark can be answered with a simple 'no'. Something that applies equally to the Daily Mail's claims of various things that might give you cancer (broccoli, aspirin, bubblebaths, dildos, peanut butter, potatoes, sex, sex with sparrows (!), and even water) as it does to the idea that a family of slugs could live and thrive in a person's tummy.
So how to explain the case of the young girl who, over a period of a week or so, vomited up eight living slugs? Admittedly, the doctor looking into, and reporting, the case had not witnessed any of the octet of slug vomiting incidents but his patient told him she could feel a slug slithering around inside her so he prescribed her a course of ammonia and camphor, to be taken four times a day, which would kill the slugs. Which it did. Well, they certainly never appeared again.
The theory of how the slugs got inside her was put down to her love of eating unwashed lettuce and that one of her dirty salads had a family of slugs on it that went on to grow inside her body. Similar incidents were reported involving other creepy-crawlies. Snails and insects were said to be living happy lives inside their human hosts and there was even a case of woman in Ireland who'd fallen asleep in a graveyard and ended up with live beetles crawling out of her anus.
Years later experiments proved that human stomach acid would kill a slug in about two hours. If animals couldn't survive inside our bodies perhaps we could be born part-animal. In Chicago, in 1865, the headline "FISH, FROG, OR HUMAN?" appeared and was followed by a feature that included a sentence that not only confirmed Betteridge's Law but may be one of the most baffling ever printed. "Have we all the elements of a gudgeon in our several anatomies?".
The man who'd drawn attention to the case was a certain Dr Schulz and despite his title he wasn't a real doctor (see also Dr Fox and Dr Alban). He was a Prussian butcher and ex-military man who'd emigrated to the US and his great claim was that he'd discovered how to make the human body amphibious.
Using techniques that were both scientifically erroneous and morally dubious. He'd started off by forcing puppies underwater but had graduated to doing the same to his own infant son and visiting journalists reported witnessing the eighteen month year old boy swimming underwater for up to twenty minutes solid. Schulz was so convinced he'd made a genuine medical breakthrough, this would save countless people from drowning, that forced conversion to an amphibious state should be made compulsory by law.
It's a wonderful story but with one, rather major, snag. Not only is it not true but Dr Schulz almost certainly never even existed. This was the golden age of the American newspaper hoax where stories could be printed as sensational as you could think of and nobody saw anything wrong with that. Mark Twain wrote one about the man eating plants of Madagascar and one periodical even ran a completely fictitious piece about an entire theatre burning down and killing every single person inside. An amphibious toddler was, comparatively, small beer.
A man with the utterly fantastic name of Salmon A.Arnold (who, presumably, did exist) was another to come forward with a fairly tall tale. Arnold claimed he'd identified a 'wandering disorder of urination' and gave it a fancy Latin name to make it sound like a proper, real thing that actually happens to people.
Maria Burton, a woman in her twenties, had been coughing up blood. She was diagnosed with a prolapsed uterus and had a catheter inserted but, soon, urine started coming out of her ear (something which is not actually possible). To check to see if this was urine or something that resembled urine the doctors carried out a test that is surely as thorough as any in medical history.
They lobbed a pot of it on a heated shovel and when it steamed up and let off an odour that strongly resembled urine they decided that, yes that's piss alright. Later, she began to wee from her eyes (which virtually blinded her), her stomach, and, eventually, her bellybutton. The last one, apparently, was announced by a sound that resembled a champagne cork popping before the golden showers spurted luxuriantly and proudly from her navel. Water sports anyone?
Then, as if for an encore, she started pissing out of her nose. Doctors, astounded, told her to stay in bed (!) and, over the years, the symptoms improved. The most likely explanation for all of this is, sadly, that it never actually happened and that the doctors had been deceived by someone with an extreme case of Munchausen's syndrome. Although an alternative theory is possible. Sufferers of prolapsed bladders can end up with crystallised, and pissy smelling, chemicals in the blood that, eventually, are sweated out through the head. Nice, and I thought gout was bad!
Urine through the eyes, ears, and navel sounds unpleasant but at least it's not lethal. Spontaneous combustion rarely ends well. A character in Bleak House (a rag'n'bone man probably, it's Dickens, it's bound to be a rag'n'bone man) met his end this way. Charles Dickens believed spontaneous combustion to be a genuine but unexplained phenomenon and one that particularly took elderly alcoholics who live on their own. So I'm fucked, then!
The aftermath of one of these deadly conflagrations took on a familiar pattern. Usually, furniture and even the victim's limbs were untouched whilst the torso was reduced to cinders. A visiting Italian priest investigated one such case and claimed the unfortunate lady had perished in flames of her own accidental making because she'd eaten too big a meal before going to bed!
A more likely reason for the fatal inferno is that the lady in question was a heavy drinker who'd regularly take a bath in a tub full of highly flammable camphorated spirits before passing out in bed, drunk, in a room lit only by candles. I was never much good at Cluedo but I think I've fingered the culprit in this case.
It's more difficult to explain a story that appeared in the totally wonderfully titled Dental Cosmos journal in the 1850s. A dentist from Pennsylvania had as a patient a priest with terrible toothache that was causing him excruciating pain. When, however, the priest's troublesome tooth exploded the pain immediately ceased.
Similar cases followed. In some reports the teeth exploded so loudly they caused temporary deafness to their former owners. Others claimed the explosions to be so powerful that their entire bodies were felled by them.
That's a case they've yet to solve as is the final one that Thomas presented us with (there was a disappointingly sparsely attended Q&A afterwards that touched on such niche concerns as the gastric juice of corvids and how the saliva of crows can ease muscle pain) on an evening that was as bizarre as it was brilliant.
'ABORTION EXTRAORDINARY:FOETUS VOMITED BY A BOY' was the eye catching headline that told the story of a Greek boy who puked up an actual foetus. The Athenian doctors who examined his body could find no reason for how, or why, this could have happened and it seems the most likely scenario, and this is something that is so rare it's only believed to have happened a couple of hundred times in the entire history of the human race, is that before what should be the birth of twins there were some complications (to put it mildly) and one foetus somehow gets inside the other. This only coming to light when the healthy child expels the then dead one from their body - and you thought the film Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito was odd.
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