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He is, however, remembered for a completely different reason. In 1854, he described an outbreak of cholera in London, identifying a single public water pump as the
He was the first to show how a disease can be contagious, and the founding father of epidemiology, the study of how diseases spread. Victoria insisted that Snow be present, with his anaesthetic, at the birth of her next child on 14 April 1857. It was a girl, Princess Beatrice. And, much to everyone’s surprise, this time the queen did not suffer from post-natal depression. Beatrice was her ninth – and last – child.
Today, the island – incidentally not called Monday but Saint Martin, as the day on which Columbus sighted it (11 November) is St Martin’s Day – is loved for its thirty-four excellent beaches. Peter Stuyvesant could therefore have chosen thirty-three other beaches
The state of the wound bed is crucial to what follows.
Tens of thousands of legs must have been removed in this way in the history of warfare. The record is held by Dominique Jean Larrey, a surgeon in the French army, who is alleged to have performed 700 amputations in four days during the Battle of the Sierra Negra in 1794 in Spain. That amounted
On 12 August 1865, rather than cutting off the leg, he sprayed the wound with a corrosive liquid, carbolic acid. This experimental treatment proved successful, James’s life and his leg were saved, Lister was made a lord, and antisepsis – the use of antiseptics to treat wounds – was born. No one asked whether the manner of this discovery was justifiable. It was apparently quite normal to experiment on children. Peter Stuyvesant’s defeat was a fiasco. The Spaniards
Peter Stuyvesant returned to the Netherlands. With one leg, he was no longer fit for the life of a seagoing merchant, so the company gave him a desk job on shore. He was made director-general of the colony of New Netherland, where he became the first mayor of New Amsterdam, a settlement on the island of Manhattan. An amputation clearly did not always mean the end of a career. However,
In 1664, the village of New Amsterdam was captured by the English, who would rename it New York. Stuyvesant went back to the Netherlands, but returned to New York later to live as a normal citizen. He died there in 1672, at the age of sixty-one, and is entombed in St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.
But one thing will never change. Once a surgeon is standing at the operating table, scalpel at the ready, he is completely alone and everything that he does from that moment, everything that happens to his patient, remains his own, personal responsibility. Then you want to be sure of what you are doing, and you do not help your conscience by working on the basis of probabilities.
In her eyes, there was only one man good enough to be permitted to work his magic on her world-famous pins: Michael DeBakey.
man, French surgeon Alexis Carrel. Carrel’s contribution was considered so important to the advance of general surgery that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912. The conditions under
DeBakey was known as the maestro. He acquired worldwide renown (and his nickname) thanks to his most famous patient, former King Edward VIII of Great Britain, who went to America unannounced in 1964 to be operated on by DeBakey. Like Dietrich, Edward was a heavy smoker – as indeed most of a vascular
When Russian president Boris Yeltsin needed a quintuple bypass operation thirty-two years later, in 1996, he clearly did not entirely trust his Russian cardiac surgeons and had the now eighty-seven-year-old maestro flown over from America to assist them. Boris called DeBakey ‘the magician’. All of the other celebrities who were DeBakey’s patients – King Leopold
So when Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah of Iran, had to undergo a splenectomy (surgical removal of the spleen) in 1980, in his eyes there was only one surgeon on the planet who could do it. The fact that, as a cardiovascular surgeon, DeBakey actually had nothing to do with the spleen, was apparently not relevant, either for himself or for his esteemed
iatrogenic,
Our thermostat is buried deep in the brain, in the hypothalamus. It can be disrupted by a protein called interleukine-6, which is released by an inflammation. That causes fever, by raising the setting
Jean-Baptiste Lully, court composer to the French King Louis XIV in Versailles, also used a long staff when conducting. On Saturday 4 January 1687, while banging his staff on the floor in time to the beat, he suffered an unpleasant industrial accident which, seventy-seven days later, was to cost him his life.
A good example of barriers being maintained in our body is the pancreas, which can digest meat but – thanks to its own barrier – does not digest itself. The
charlatan
The stages of cancer are classified at local, regional and systemic level, on the basis of the TNM staging system. T stands for tumour. T1 is the earliest stage of the tumour, T3 is a tumour that is growing through the barrier of the organ, T4 means it is penetrating the barrier of an adjacent organ. In most cases, a total surgical resection is possible. The surgeon must then
It is perhaps significant that the Romans invented the hamburger. At the start of the first century AD, Rome was flooded with luxuries
In 1982, French surgeon Yves-Gerard Illouz presented a new trick for removing subcutaneous fat using a steel tube and a powerful vacuum. This method, liposuction, involves making a small incision
But Nissen had a much greater impact as a general surgeon. In 1931, he performed the first successful resection of a whole lung; he developed the frozen section procedure – a method of performing rapid microscopic analysis of a specimen
In 1855, French surgeon Antonin Jean Desormeaux called his improved version an endoscope, which gave the name to the discipline: endoscopy, ‘looking inside’.
On 23 September 1901, Kelling repeated the experiment in front of an audience at the 73rd Congress of the Naturalist Scientist’s Medical Conference in Hamburg, but now without rupturing the liver. He inflated the abdominal cavity of a healthy dog with air, inserted a cystoscope through the abdominal wall and keyhole surgery was born. It is
The three largest planets in our solar system are named after these three great gods: Uranus, Saturn (the Roman equivalent of Cronos) and Jupiter (the Roman equivalent of Zeus).
The navel is a scar left over after the umbilical cord is discarded. The second scar is the perineal raphe, a vertical line exactly in the middle of the scrotum and the base of the penis, which is a remnant of the embryonic development of the male urethra.
With hindsight, graphs show very clearly that the increase in lung cancer ran completely parallel to the rise in cigarette consumption, with a delay of around twenty years.
You can then see the lung in the chest cavity and, on the left, the pericardium, the sac holding the beating heart. Breathing exposes our lungs permanently
The lungs are unique organs in the body that have their own circulatory system. They are supplied with blood from the right half of the heart, rather than the left and the blood pressure in the arteries in the lungs is five times lower than in the rest of the body. That is necessary because the delicate alveoli in the lungs could not withstand the high blood pressure. The arteries of the lung consequently have much thinner walls, making them more fragile and meaning that surgical sutures can easily rip.
IN THE MIDDLE Ages, anyone who wanted to add a little lustre to their funeral could hire a group of monks to come and sing Psalm 114. The final sentence in particular gave extra drama to the final farewell: ‘I shall please the Lord in the land of the living’.
nothing is certain, everything changes, all the time. In the sixth
Queen Caroline called him a ‘blockhead’. John Ranby had been a member of the Company of Barber-Surgeons in London and, when a separate Company of Surgeons was set up in 1745, he became its first Master. This was the first association of real surgeons and would later become the prestigious Royal College of Surgeons. Ranby was an inelegant, oafish man who, despite being well respected by
He promised to always stay faithful to his beloved wife, even after her death, despite her exhortations to marry again. Sobbing and snivelling, George II uttered the historic words ‘Non, j’aurai des maîtresses’ (‘No, I shall have mistresses), to which Caroline replied, sighing, ‘Ah! Mon Dieu! Cela n’empêche pas’ (‘My God, that won’t make any difference!’).
Despite this debacle at the beginning of his career, John Ranby had a very high opinion of himself. He described his most glorious moments as a sergeant-surgeon in the English army in the years that followed in his book The Method of Treating Gunshot Wounds, published in 1744. One of his heroic deeds was the treatment of Prince William, the youngest son of King George II and the late Queen Caroline, also known as ‘The Butcher’. William fought alongside his father against the French at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743, during the War of the Austrian Succession. It was the last time in English
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started cutting into corpses to find out the truth for himself. In his renowned book De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), published in 1543, Van Wezel – better known
Two hundred years later, at the same university in the same city, Giovanni Battista Morgagni did the same thing again, but now focusing on the diseased human body.
The country of Italy as we know it today has only been in existence since 1870.
Before that, it was a collection of individual kingdoms and republics. The south was part of the French empire. In the middle was the Papal State, under the rule of the pope. The north was divided into a number of small states under the influence of yet other states. The unification of all these separate parts was partly due to the efforts of bandit and guerrilla fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi.
There, in 1887, he presented his fundamental solution to a problem that had not been solved in more than 3,000 years of surgery: how to treat a groin hernia.
groin hernia is one of the most common conditions affecting humans. The mummy of Pharaoh Rameses V, who died in 1157
van. The viewers saw a thin young man, handcuffed and led by two policemen in large cowboy hats. Suddenly, a man emerged from the throng of reporters. He approached the thin man, shoved a pistol into his ribs and shot him. It was the first murder in history to be seen live on television. The gun had been aimed at the man’s heart, but he had warded off the shot and it had caught him lower in the body. With so many reporters on the spot with television and photographic cameras, the shot was recorded from several angles. Some of them can be seen on
So a surgeon has much more control during an operation than afterwards. Therefore something must go terribly wrong for a patient to die on the operating table. That is a surgeon’s worst nightmare, mors in tabula, ‘death on the table’.
Péan’s shoulder prosthesis is one of the many wondrous French inventions of the belle époque, on a par with the highest artificial construction in the world (Gustave Eiffel’s iron tower), cinematography (the Lumière brothers’ film), and the velocipede (Pierre Michaux’s bicycle). Amazingly, the artificial shoulder lasted for two years.
He was, however, not the first surgeon to replace a joint. In 1890 the German Themistocles Glück already had no less than fourteen total joint replacements to his name, including knees, wrists and elbows, all made of ivory. He had even had the various parts of the joints made in different sizes so that he could find the right fit for both sides of the joint during the operation and assemble the two ivory components together on the spot. But Glück, too, had no luck.
Péan did leave us with another useful invention. He is responsible for the basic design of nearly all modern surgical clamps and needle holders. It comprises two opposing metal handles for the thumb and index finger, each with a toothed projection.
Fanya Kaplan was executed on 4 September after a short interrogation. The incident inspired Lenin and the Bolsheviks to unleash the ‘Red Terror’, a purging operation during which tens of thousands of ‘reactionaries’ were tortured and murdered by the Cheka, the secret police. In the years
If all the official data and reports are correct, neither the bullet nor the operation caused Lenin’s death. It is not too late to examine Lenin’s left carotid artery and discover whether Lenin underwent an operation deeper in the neck in search of the second bullet. The dictator’s embalmed body, ninety years after his death, is on public display in his mausoleum in Red Square and, thanks to a monthly bath in chemicals to combat a persistent fungal infection, is still in reasonable condition. And, all being well, Fanya Kaplan’s bullet should still be in there too.
Péan’s patient survived the operation in April 1879, but not the difficult post-operative phase, despite the surgeon’s efforts. This was because Péan was unable to administer the man sufficient fluid, and direct injection of fluid into a vein – what we now call an intravenous drip – was yet to be invented. Péan
Billroth’s patient was at death’s door. Thérèse Heller was forty-three years old. She had been unable to keep any food down for weeks and had been living on sips of soured milk. The tumour could be clearly felt in the emaciated woman’s upper abdomen, and was about the size of an apple. Before the operation, Billroth rinsed her stomach with 14(!) litres of lukewarm water and on 29 January 1881 he performed the historic procedure. He became a hero overnight and surgeons still write and speak about him with awe and reverence. His historic distal gastrectomy was a genuine turning point, but not
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