According to the Gospel of John, Roman soldiers broke the legs of the two men executed alongside Jesus to hasten their deaths. But when they came to Jesus, they did not break his legs because they saw he was already dead. This detail has long intrigued historians and doctors because crucifixion victims often survived for many hours, and sometimes days.
After five years in storage, the archive linked to Joseph Merrick - the "Elephant Man" - could finally go back on display as part of plans to reopen the Royal London Hospital Museum in a new larger home. The medical museum, which closed at the start of the pandemic and never reopened, housed some of the most significant artefacts connected to Merrick's final years under the care of Sir Frederick Treves at the Royal London Hospital.
Grant­ed access to a time machine, few of us would pre­sum­ably opt first for the expe­ri­ence of skull surgery by the Incas. Yet our chances of sur­vival would be bet­ter than if we under­went the same pro­ce­dure 400 years lat­er, at least if it took place on a Civ­il War bat­tle­field. In both fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry Peru and the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Unit­ed States, sur­geons were per­form­ing a lot of trepa­na­tion, or removal of a por­tion of the skull.
Hysteria was long attributed to a wandering uterus. The earliest text blaming women's reproduction for illness was the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1900 BC. Women's wombs were blamed for things like choking, cognitive deficits and the inability to speak, and paralysis. Treatments for women were always nonsurgical: swallowing medicine or rubbing it on the body; fumigating the womb with oils or incense.
The stethoscope is a medical instrument used to listen to and amplify the internal sounds produced by the body. Physicians still use the sounds they hear through stethoscopes as initial indicators of heart or lung diseases. For example, a heart murmur or crackling lungs often signify an issue is present. Although there have been significant advances in imaging and monitoring technologies, the stethoscope remains a quick, accessible, and cost-effective tool for assessing a patient's health.
A Wellcome Research Resources Award-funded project of the University of Cambridge Libraries has recently finished conserving, digitizing, and making available online 190 manuscripts containing more than 7,000 pages of medieval medical recipes.