Wendy Moore

Byrne’s body should disappear beneath the waves

John Hunter was a brilliant thinker who pushed forward the boundaries of medicine in all fields. By his own admission, he dissected “some thousands” of bodies, most of them stolen. Yet he did more than any other medical professional of his time to promote the idea of voluntary postmortems and donated bodies …

Extreme measures: the history of breast cancer surgery

The rage for breast surgery attained manic proportions in the late 19th century in the United States and Europe. But the trend was driven by surgeons, not women, and the results were far from aesthetic.⇑ Surgeons in ancient Egypt described breast cancer, but wisely refrained from wielding the knife. The first recorded attempt at mastectomy is attributed to the surgeon Leonides of Alexandria in about the second century AD, but caution remained the watchword. By the 1600s prints in northern Europe show women stoically undergoing breast amputations by surgeons using forceps, knives, and cauterising irons long before the arrival of anaesthesia or antisepsis. In 1748 the German surgeon Lorenz Heister described using a fork, or ropes attached …

Work not welfare

When the spiralling cost of welfare benefits troubled the Victorians, a coalition of two unlikely partners came to the rescue. They hailed from different worlds. But the middle class civil servant Edwin Chadwick, who was a firm advocate of liberal, free market principles, and the Eton and Oxford educated Nassau Senior, who was a hardline economist, found common ground in reforming the welfare system. Under the prevailing Elizabethan poor law the 15 000 parishes in England and Wales were each responsible for providing relief to their own poor people, paid for by local taxes. As well as helping sick and elderly people, parishes dispensed funds to unemployed people, and some even topped up low wages …

Searching for Dr Condom

Although it is one of medicine’s longest surviving, most popular, and most effective advances, we know tantalisingly little about the origins of the condom. Throughout history the likes of Bartolomeo Eustachio, James Parkinson, and Thomas Hodgkin have fallen over each other in the scramble to attach their names to parts of our anatomy or our ailments. Yet the identity of Dr Condom—if indeed such a medic ever existed—has remained, appropriately, sheathed in mystery. Suggested references to early condoms in prehistoric cave paintings, ancient Egyptian tomb art, and Greek mythology probably owe more to researchers’ overly fertile imaginations than to hard evidence. Historians are on firmer ground with …

The saviour of Hunter’s collection

When, during Great Britain’s war with revolutionary France, Prime Minister William Pitt was asked to buy John Hunter’s anatomical collection for the nation, he thundered, “What! Buy preparations! I have not got money enough to buy gunpowder!” That the Hunterian Museum celebrates its bicentenary this year despite Pitt’s apathy is due to the tenacity of William Clift (1775-1849).⇑ Clift was born near Bodmin, the youngest of seven children. Orphaned at 11, he worked in a plant nursery but was sacked for drawing a caricature of the owner. Luckily his artistic skills were spotted …

Bringing chemistry out of the kitchen.

Chemistry was a vital female accomplishment in the Enlightenment—but it usually stayed in the kitchen. The renowned classicist Elizabeth Carter translated works from Latin and Greek but her friend Samuel Johnson was quick to point out that she could also make a pudding. Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier (1758-1836) was almost unique in managing to escape the kitchen for the laboratory. She became her husband’s lifelong collaborator in transforming chemistry into a science, ultimately leading to medical developments in diagnosis and treatment—although friends noted she could still lay on a passable afternoon tea.⇑ Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze was born to wealthy parents in the …

Dark satanic mills

Charles Turner Thackrah (1795-1833) enrolled as a pupil at Guy’s Hospital in London in 1815, two days after John Keats. Like the poet, Thackrah died young—at 38—from tuberculosis. Yet Thackrah’s brief life helped to save and improve the lives of millions through his crusading work on occupational disease. Born in Leeds, Thackrah trained at Leeds Infirmary before “walking the wards” at Guy’s. He returned to his native city in 1817 to set up private practice as a surgeon-apothecary—effectively a general practitioner—and was also appointed as “town surgeon” to treat the city’s poor. The young Thackrah won acclaim and prizes, …

The eccentricities of osteopathy.

The medical world can boast more than its fair share of eccentrics. But few come more eccentric than Andrew Taylor Still (1828-1917), the founder of osteopathy, who made his name riding the Wild West with a sack of bones slung over his shoulder. Born in Virginia, the son of a Methodist minister, Still enjoyed little formal schooling; his classroom was the great outdoors. Like other medical autodidacts, he favoured the “book of nature” over printed works. Growing up in Missouri, he studied anatomy from the animals he hunted and dissected. In his lively autobiography he described frontier …

Remedy for all the inconveniences of life

Poverty was widespread, unemployment rising, and ill health spiralling out of control. But in the face of overwhelming odds and establishment opposition, one man came up with a visionary idea: free medical care for all in need. The time was early 17th century France; the pioneer was a physician named Theophraste Renaudot.⇑ Born in Loudun to Protestant parents, Renaudot (1586-1653) gained his medical degree at Montpellier in 1606. As a physician he was well placed to grow rich by dosing wealthy clients with the customary toxic potions and purges. But Renaudot disdained Galenic theory in favour of the new chemical medicines and supplemented his university education by studying the …

Marie Stopes: botany and birth control

Marie Stopes was born at the end of the 19th century and grew up in the reign of Queen Victoria. Yet her pioneering work in birth control at the beginning of the 20th century marked the start of a sexual revolution that is still unfolding.⇑ Born in Edinburgh in 1880, Stopes was a distinguished botanist who became Britain’s youngest doctor of science in 1905, before she turned her attentions to the sex lives of humans rather than plants. Her own romantic disappointment led her to some startling discoveries. She married a Canadian botanist, Reginald …