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January 5 - January 5, 2019
Between 1800 and 1850, there were more than two hundred recorded cases of wife sales in England. Undoubtedly, there were more that went unreported.
There was also the world’s first major installation of public flushing toilets, designed by the Victorian sanitary engineer George Jennings. Some 827,280 people paid one penny to use the facilities during the exhibition, which gave rise to the popular euphemism “spending a penny.”
Sharpey was the first to teach a complete course of lectures on physiology, a subject that had traditionally been treated as an appendage to anatomy. This later earned him the title “the Father of Modern Physiology.”
In 1884, the American physician William Pancoast injected sperm from his “best-looking” student into an anesthetized woman—without her knowledge—whose husband had been deemed infertile. Nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby. Pancoast eventually told her husband what he had done, but the two men decided to spare the woman the truth.
In 1884, the American physician William Pancoast injected sperm from his “best-looking” student into an anesthetized woman—without her knowledge—whose husband had been deemed infertile. Nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby. Pancoast eventually told her husband what he had done, but the two men decided to spare the woman the truth. wtf
Lister objected to issuing bills to those whom he treated and lectured his students that they should “not charge for [their] services as a merchant does for his goods.” Reflecting the ideals of his faith, Lister believed that the greatest reward for a surgeon was the knowledge that he had performed an act of beneficence for the sick. “Shall we charge for the blood which is drawn, or the pain which we cause?” he asked his students.
Pasteur believed that putrefaction, like fermentation, was also caused by the growth of minute microorganisms that were carried through the air by dust. “Life directs the work of death at every stage,” he wrote.
Everything from wine and quinine to iodine and turpentine had been used to treat infected wounds, but none proved consistently effective in stopping putrid suppuration once it had already begun. Corrosive substances like nitric acid, which could effectively combat putrefactive infection, were often diluted too much to be of any real use.
“A new and great scientific discovery is always apt to leave in its trail many casualties among the reputations of those who have been champions of an older method. It is hard for them to forgive the man whose work has rendered their own of no account.”
For most of the nineteenth century, ovariotomy remained extremely controversial. Those who dared to undertake such an invasive procedure were nicknamed “belly-rippers” on account of the long incision they made across the abdomen of their patients, which frequently became a source of sepsis.
In fact, in several American hospitals, Lister’s techniques had been banned; many doctors saw them as unnecessary and overly complicated distractions because they had not yet accepted the germ theory of putrefaction.
