Status Updates From The Mystery of the Explodin...

Footnote p. 291: "His works include 'A parody from Hamlet, wrote when indisposed and in doubt about bleeding,' which begins: 'To bleed, or not to bleed? - That is the question.' It is hard to disagree with the literary contemporary who wrote of [Dr.] Perfect that 'his verses cannot be said to tower very highly above mediocrity.'"

Ouch.

A man hammered a ten-inch dagger straight down through his head. The doctors tried to pull it out, one grasping the dagger, the other his feet. It wouldn't budge. They ended up having to use a steam engine to accomplish the dagger's removal.

Thrown from a stagecoach, a doctor injured his head and neck. Forty-five days later he coughed up part of his spine. Then he lived another forty-four years.

A man was shot in the head and survived. Bone fragments periodically showing up in his mouth, thirty years later, the lead shot appeared in his throat and was cut out.

A pregnant Irishwoman ended up with her dead baby's arm piercing through her abdomen. Midwives gave her up. After a few days she cut off the arm herself and called in the town butcher.

He fainted, they had a stiff drink and he removed the baby, plus the bones of a second from a "phantom pregnancy" seven years before.

The hole he cut was "as big as a hat." I'm not sure I want to know what that means. Poor woman.

An 1860s doctor claimed to have found the cure for tuberculosis: reptile poop. Boa constrictor, chameleon, and others, depending on the patient - in lotion or ingested.

The idea was, naturally, rejected by his peers. He sued one medical journal for libel, but the judge wouldn't award him any money, saying the truth would be proved in time.

And it was.

This was that doctor's fourth or fifth tuberculosis "cure."

One man was observed cataloguing his personal library, catching up on his correspondence, and practicing a speech in Latin all while sleepwalking. Getting your most tedious chores done literally in your sleep? Excellent.