Chapter 1
When Medical History Gets Bizarre: A Journey Through Three Centuries of Peculiar Cases
Have you ever wondered what happens when someone swallows a fork? Or what doctors did before anesthesia when they needed to perform surgery? Thomas Morris's "The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth" takes readers on a captivating journey through three centuries of medical oddities that are simultaneously horrifying, hilarious, and enlightening. This collection of bizarre medical cases from the 1600s to 1900 has become a cult favorite among medical professionals and history buffs alike, with many physicians keeping it on their office shelves as a reminder of how far medicine has come. The book's popularity stems not just from its shock value, but from how it illuminates the evolution of medical understanding through cases that range from the stomach-turning to the simply unbelievable. As bestselling author Mary Roach noted, "Morris has an exceptional eye for the wondrous absurdities of medical history," making this collection both educational and wildly entertaining.
Chapter 2
Strange Objects in Stranger Places: The Human Capacity for Misadventure
The emergency room has always been a theater for human folly. While modern medicine has advanced tremendously, the human capacity for getting objects stuck in unfortunate places remains stubbornly resistant to progress. Morris begins his collection with cases that showcase both remarkable human ingenuity in creating regrettable situations and the imaginative medical responses they necessitated.
Consider the case published in 1724 with perhaps the most memorable medical headline ever: "An Account of a Fork put up the Anus, that was afterwards drawn out through the Buttock." James Bishop, a 19-year-old ship-carpenter's apprentice, had been suffering abdominal pains for months before a hard swelling appeared on his left buttock. When the swelling broke open, surgeon Robert Payne was astonished to find fork prongs protruding through the skin. After careful incision, he extracted an entire six-and-a-half-inch pocket fork with ivory handle.
When questioned, the young man confessed that, being constipated, he'd inserted the fork into his rectum hoping to relieve himself. Unfortunately, it "slipped up so far, that he could not recover it again." Even more remarkably, he reported having "no trouble or pain till a month, or more, after it was put up" - a fact that doesn't change the moral: if you're constipated, it's better not to stick a fork up your fundament.
Equally ill-advised was the behavior of John Cummings, an American sailor who swallowed knives for entertainment. In 1799, after watching a French mountebank pretend to swallow clasp-knives, the drunken 23-year-old boasted to shipmates that he could do the same. When challenged, he consumed four knives, passing three of them naturally the next day. Six years later in Boston, he repeated his feat, swallowing fourteen knives over two days. After recovering in hospital, he was press-ganged into the Royal Navy, where his reputation followed him. At Spithead, drunk again, he swallowed fourteen more knives.
This final performance proved fatal. Despite passing some fragments, his health deteriorated until his death in 1809. The autopsy revealed his abdomen stained a dark rusty color, with blades piercing his colon and between thirty and forty knife fragments in his stomach - some corroded, others surprisingly preserved.
The book also introduces us to a French businessman who wore a golden padlock on his foreskin for years (installed by a jealous mistress who kept the key), a young cooper's apprentice who got his penis stuck in a candlestick socket, and a ten-year-old boy who shot himself with a makeshift gun crafted from a toasting fork. Each case demonstrates both the remarkable resilience of the human body and the boundless capacity of humans to create trouble for themselves.
Chapter 3
Mysterious Maladies: When Diagnosis Becomes Detective Work
With an estimated 30,000 distinct diseases now recognized (up from just 161 in 1893), diagnosing rare conditions has always challenged physicians. Historical accounts of mysterious illnesses served both scientific purposes and fed public fascination with the grotesque, with medical journals sometimes publishing sensationalist accounts of bizarre symptoms with limited clinical value but great storytelling potential.
In 1637, physician Edward May performed an autopsy on John Pennant, a 21-year-old aristocrat, and discovered what appeared to be a serpent-like creature in the left ventricle of his heart. The "monster" had a snake-like head, a white shining body, and even what they described as "thighs and branches." Though May initially suspected it might just be a blood clot, the assembled witnesses became convinced it was a genuine creature. Victorian physician Benjamin Ward Richardson later concluded it was indeed an unusually shaped thrombus, possibly resulting from hypereosinophilic syndrome.
Even more extraordinary was the case of Elizabeth Orvin, a servant who developed an astonishing sleeping disorder in 1738. Initially falling into a four-day sleep, she subsequently slept seventeen hours daily for ten years, from 3 AM until 8 PM. Dr. Terence Brady found her completely unresponsive during these episodes-she didn't react when he thrust pins through her skin, burned her cheek with paper, or even briefly set fire to spirit-soaked linen in her nostril. Local doctors had subjected her to horrific "treatments," including whipping her until she bled, covering her with honey and exposing her to bees, and thrusting pins under her nails-all without success.
The mysterious case of Rachel Hertz, documented in 1825, defies easy explanation. This fair-complexioned teenager began experiencing violent colic at age fourteen, followed by erysipelas, fever, hysterical attacks, fainting spells, and bizarre episodes where she recited literary works with perfect accuracy while her eyes remained closed. When physical symptoms emerged-constipation, urinary difficulties, and blood vomiting-doctors attempted various treatments. Eventually, a large abdominal tumor formed, and when surgically opened, it revealed not pus but a needle. This began an extraordinary sequence: over eighteen months, 295 needles were extracted from various parts of her body, followed by another 105, bringing the total to an astonishing 400 needles.
Perhaps the most intriguing mystery is that of the exploding teeth. In 1859, Pennsylvania dentist W.H. Atkinson reported three bizarre cases where patients' teeth suddenly burst "with a sharp crack, like a pistol shot." More cases emerged in subsequent decades, including one woman whose molar exploded with such force it "well-nigh knocked her over" and left her deaf "for a considerable length of time." Various theories were proposed-from "free caloric" buildup to gases generated by tooth decay-but all have been rejected. Like the Mary Celeste or Jack the Ripper, the mystery of the exploding teeth remains unsolved.
Chapter 4
Dubious Remedies: When the Cure Was Worse Than the Disease
Throughout medical history, doctors prescribed treatments that now seem bizarre or dangerous. Bloodletting ranged from mild leech applications to extreme venesection where blood was removed "by pounds and by pailfuls." Medicines often contained toxic substances like mercury and arsenic, while the 17th century Pharmacopoeia Londinensis listed remedies made from various bodily excretions, animal parts, nail clippings, skulls of violently deceased people, and even "powdered mummy."
Consider the treatment of the Earl of Kent in 1702. After his sudden collapse during a game of bowls, doctors employed increasingly desperate measures: bloodletting from both arms, strong snuff and ammonium chloride in the nostrils, and forcing toxic antimonial wine down his throat. When these failed, they applied blistering plasters to his shaved head and administered buckthorn syrup laxative. Dr. West even suggested applying "a frying pan made red hot" to the Earl's head. Later, they propped the likely-deceased Earl in a coach, took him home, and blew tobacco smoke up his anus - a standard resuscitation technique of the era. As a final measure, they applied freshly killed sheep's bowels to his stomach.
This tobacco-smoke enema was widely endorsed for drowning resuscitation. The method, believed to have originated with Native American tribes, was so valued that special equipment for administering rectal smoke was installed in public places throughout 18th-century Europe. Swiss physician Samuel Tissot recommended vigorous rubbing with coarse linen, bleeding from the jugular vein, and blowing tobacco smoke into both the mouth and rectum - a technique called "Dutch fumigation."
Even more bizarre was the "pigeon's-rump cure" for childhood seizures, described in 1841 by German physician Carl Canstatt. This treatment involved holding a pigeon's rump against the child's anus, supposedly causing the animal to die while immediately stopping the convulsion. Dr. J.F. Weisse from St. Petersburg tried this method twice - once successfully saving a four-month-old (though killing the pigeon) and once unsuccessfully, with the child dying despite sacrificing one pigeon while a second survived. Weisse bizarrely encouraged colleagues to continue this research, even suggesting experiments with "other poultry" where pigeons weren't abundant.
The nineteenth century also saw brief enthusiasm for mercury cigarettes as drug delivery mechanisms. By 1863, the Canada Lancet recommended additional varieties including arsenical cigarettes made from blotting paper soaked in highly toxic arsenous acid, nitre cigarettes containing potassium nitrate (a component of gunpowder), and balsamic cigarettes coated with tincture of benzoin. These were claimed to cure conditions from aphonia to tuberculosis.
Perhaps the most outlandish remedy came from Edinburgh-trained physician Dr. John Hastings, who in 1862 published a book advocating the use of reptile excrement to treat tuberculosis and lung diseases. His experiments included excreta from nine types of snake, five lizard varieties, and two tortoises. One patient, "Miss E.," apparently tried excrement from every serpent in his collection before finding relief with chameleon droppings. When Hastings sued The Lancet for ridiculing his claims, the Lord Chief Justice dismissed the case, noting public skepticism about curing tuberculosis "by the dung of snakes" was entirely reasonable.
Chapter 5
Heroic Operations: Surgery Before Anesthesia and Antisepsis
Before anesthetics and antisepsis in the mid-nineteenth century, operations were limited primarily to amputations and bladder stone removal. Yet some surgeons attempted extraordinarily ambitious procedures, performed before large audiences with fully conscious patients. While some operations were rashly misguided, others displayed surprising sophistication for the era.
On July 9, 1635, a remarkable operation was performed to remove a knife from Andrew Grunbeide's stomach. After binding the "rustic" patient to a wooden table, the surgeons cut into his left upper abdomen, through skin, tissue layers, and finally the peritoneum. Though the stomach initially slipped away, they caught it with a curved needle and extracted the knife through a small incision. Remarkably, the patient remained conscious throughout and enthusiastically confirmed it was indeed the knife he had swallowed. Following the operation, the wound was stitched with five sutures, dressed with balsam, clay, egg white and alum. The patient recovered rapidly, eating chicken broth the next day and returning to normal health within two weeks-a miraculous outcome for such major surgery performed centuries before modern medicine understood infection.
In rural 1730s Ireland, Sarah McKinna faced a desperate situation when a fetus's elbow protruded through her navel after a failed pregnancy. With no doctor available, she summoned Turlogh O'Neill, a local butcher. After fortifying both patient and himself with "a large draught of sack" (Spanish fortified wine), O'Neill made an incision "as large as his hat" and extracted a dead fetus, followed by skeletal remains of another child. In remote areas where surgeons were scarce and unaffordable, butchers with animal dismembering skills occasionally served as emergency surgeons.
Even more remarkable was Colonel Martin's self-treatment for bladder stones. He devised an ingenious method of injecting warm water into his bladder to push the stone toward the neck where he could reach it with his homemade file. Despite occasional alarming incidents-including a ten-minute urethral spasm that trapped his file and caused bleeding-Martin persisted without fear of inflammation. He successfully broke down the stone into small fragments that he passed naturally, and even recommended his technique to others, claiming "all persons may cure themselves." Martin's self-performed lithotripsy anticipated formal surgical techniques by forty years.
The stoicism of pre-anesthetic patients could be astonishing. One patient underwent double leg amputation after losing his feet to frostbite while drunk. Astonishingly, the man sat upright during the procedure, holding his own thigh and watching without making a sound, merely commenting "By gam! It is sharp" about the saw. Another laborer whose arm was mangled in agricultural machinery held a candle with his remaining hand so the surgeon could see to complete the amputation when the surgeon's assistant couldn't help.
Perhaps most extraordinary was Baron Richerand's 1818 surgery on a patient with a cancerous tumor over his heart region. After removing two diseased ribs and eight square inches of pleura, he punctured the chest cavity, causing the left lung to collapse and exposing the beating heart. After four days, the pericardium and lung had formed adhesions around the wound, creating a "window" through which the heart's action was visible. Richerand even took the opportunity to confirm that the heart's surface truly has no pain receptors by touching the exposed organ.
Chapter 6
Remarkable Recoveries: The Body's Astonishing Resilience
Medical history reveals astonishing examples of human resilience, where patients survived seemingly fatal injuries - sometimes due to skilled medical intervention, sometimes despite minimal treatment. These cases powerfully demonstrate the body's remarkable capacity to heal from devastating trauma.
Robert Fielding, a Royalist soldier wounded at Newbury in 1643, survived a musket ball to the head that entered near his right eye. For thirty years, the bullet migrated through his skull, causing periodic symptoms - cerebrospinal fluid leaking from his nostrils for over a decade, occasional pain and deafness, and eventually facial paralysis when a "hard knob" formed under his ear. Finally, in August 1672, nearly three decades after his injury, the musket ball was discovered and extracted from his throat. Remarkably, he suffered minimal impairment throughout this ordeal and lived long enough to document his experience decades later.
In 1737, Samuel Wood, a 26-year-old mill worker on the Isle of Dogs, suffered an extraordinary accident when his arm was caught in machinery. After carelessly putting a slipknot rope around his wrist, the cogs of a large wheel caught it, pulling him upward until his body was stopped by a beam - completely tearing off his arm with the shoulder blade. Remarkably, Wood felt no pain, only "tingling," and didn't realize his arm was gone until seeing it in the wheel. Despite this catastrophic injury, he managed to walk nearly a hundred yards before collapsing. The wound was initially treated with powdered sugar to stop bleeding, and surprisingly, when surgeons examined him, they found no hemorrhaging from the severed subclavian artery. Wood made a complete recovery within two months.
Even more improbable was the case of a Hessian grenadier wounded during the Battle of Trenton in 1776. The soldier was struck by grape shot that entered his skull at the outer corner of his eye and exited behind the opposite ear. Despite this horrific injury, the man retained consciousness and memory of events except for briefly after falling. After cleaning the wounds and removing bone fragments, the soldier was treated with bloodletting, opium tincture, and regular enemas. Within ten weeks, the wounds had healed, and the soldier was deemed fit to return to duty.
In the 1830s, Dr. James P. White suffered a stagecoach accident that led to one of medicine's most extraordinary cases. Forty-five days after injuring his head and neck, White coughed up a large fragment of his own atlas vertebra (C1) through his mouth. Despite this horrific injury, White recovered and continued his distinguished career as a gynecologist for over thirty years, though he could no longer turn his head.
Perhaps most remarkable was the case of a French man who in 1881 attempted suicide by hammering a 10-centimeter dagger into the top of his skull. Remarkably, he felt nothing and retained all cognitive functions. When doctors couldn't remove the blade manually-even attempting to extract it by pulling together or suspending the patient in midair-they took him to a workshop where mechanical pincers finally extracted it. Despite the blade penetrating his brain deeply enough to bend against the opposite side of his skull, the patient walked away, thanked his doctor, and left hospital eight days later without any inflammation or paralysis.
Chapter 7
Medical Myths and Tall Tales: When Fiction Infiltrated Medical Journals
Until the late nineteenth century, medical journals relied heavily on anecdote rather than data, and physicians often accepted patients' stories at face value without witnessing events firsthand. Unable to distinguish between the impossible and unlikely, medics gave both equal weight, allowing folk myths and fabrications to appear in print.
In the 18th century, physician Rowland Jackson's work on drowning resuscitation included implausible survival stories: a Swedish gardener who supposedly survived sixteen hours underwater, a painter who remained submerged for eight days, and most implausibly, a teenager who allegedly survived seven weeks underwater before returning to good health.
William Harvey, famous for discovering blood circulation, conducted a postmortem on Thomas Parr, who allegedly died in 1635 at age 152. Harvey's examination revealed a muscular body with healthy organs, suggesting Parr might have lived longer had his circumstances not changed. Most tellingly, Harvey observed that Parr's memory was "greatly impaired," as he couldn't recall anything from his younger years-public events, kings, nobles, wars-suggesting skepticism about Parr's claimed age.
Spontaneous human combustion became a fashionable topic in the early nineteenth century, with one famous case being that of Countess Cornelia di Bandi, who reportedly burned to death in 1731. According to Giuseppe Bianchini's account, the 62-year-old countess was found reduced to ashes, with only her legs, head, and three blackened fingers remaining. Mysteriously, the furniture was barely damaged, though covered in greasy soot. However, Bianchini casually mentioned that the countess regularly bathed in highly flammable camphorated spirits before bed-likely the actual cause of the fire rather than any mysterious internal combustion.
The ancient belief that maternal experiences during pregnancy could affect unborn children persisted into modern times. A famous American case from 1837 described Robert H. Copeland, the "snake man," whose deformities were attributed to his mother's frightening encounter with a rattlesnake during pregnancy. Though he lived to 79 and fathered thirteen children, medical science now rejects the notion that maternal frights cause such congenital abnormalities.
Perhaps most outlandish was the 1873 story about "Dr." Louis Schultz of Chicago who repeatedly immersed his infant son in water to make him "amphibious." Despite his wife's horror, Schultz continued dunking the baby five times daily for periods up to 25 minutes. A journalist claimed to witness the child retrieving objects underwater and staying submerged for three minutes. Given the absence of any corroborating evidence and the prevalence of newspaper hoaxes in the 1870s, this tale was likely an inspired piece of fake news.
Chapter 8
Hidden Dangers: When Everyday Objects Turn Deadly
The world teems with unexpected threats in unlikely places. While modern sportspeople suffer bizarre injuries (like a goalkeeper dropping salad cream on his toe), nineteenth-century doctors were particularly adept at finding mortal dangers everywhere. Understanding risk has always been medicine's most difficult challenge - like the Victorian cardiologist who linked heart disease to cycling simply because several patients enjoyed the new hobby.
In 1762, Dr. William Perfect reported an extraordinary death from cucumber consumption. His female patient suffered "bilious colic" for three days after eating cucumbers before dying. The autopsy revealed a stomach "dilated and swelled to the size of a child's head" containing "an amazing quantity of sliced cucumbers" and air-filled vesicles. This appears to be a unique case, as no other deaths from cucumber surfeit exist in medical literature.
In the eighteenth century, Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Andre David Tissot warned that scholarly pursuits could lead to serious health problems. He believed both physical inactivity and mental overexertion damaged health, as the exhausted brain affected the entire nervous system. As evidence, he cited cases like Chevalier D'Epernay, who lost all his body hair after four months of intense study, and Gaspar Barloeus, who became convinced his body was made of butter and drowned himself fearing he would melt.
William Guest Carpenter, a prison surgeon, encountered a remarkable case in 1842. His patient had died from respiratory problems, and during the autopsy, Carpenter discovered five pints of foul-smelling pus in the right lung cavity. To his astonishment, he found a set of four artificial ivory teeth with a silver attachment lodged there. The patient's father revealed his son had accidentally swallowed these teeth thirteen years earlier during a coughing fit. Incredibly, the denture had apparently been inhaled into the lung, gradually worked through the lung wall, and remained in the pleural cavity for over a decade before causing the fatal infection.
In 1864, surgeon Robert Brudenell Carter reported the case of a 73-year-old drunk who fell down stairs. The man sought medical attention for an eye injury, where the doctor discovered and removed a cast iron hat-peg measuring over three inches long and weighing twenty-five scruples. Astonishingly, the peg had broken off from a row mounted near the staircase and completely embedded itself in the man's eye socket. Despite the foreign object remaining lodged between ten and twenty days, the patient recovered without complications.
In 1886, renowned cancer surgeon Sir George Beatson documented a bizarre case of a man whose belches caught fire. The patient had been suffering from foul-smelling eructations when one morning, after lighting a match to check the time, his breath ignited with a pistol-like crack, burning his lips. Beatson attributed this to "carburetted hydrogen" (methane) produced by imperfect digestion. One particularly memorable case involved a bridge player who, attempting to belch discreetly through his nose, "produced two fan-shaped flames from his nostrils."
Chapter 9
Medicine's Marvelous Journey: From Barbaric to Brilliant
Thomas Morris's collection of bizarre medical cases does more than simply entertain with the grotesque and unusual-it charts the remarkable evolution of medical understanding across three centuries. From the early 1600s when physicians still believed in balancing bodily humors through bloodletting and purgatives, to the late 1800s when germ theory revolutionized our understanding of disease, we witness medicine's gradual transformation from art to science.
What makes these cases so fascinating is not just their oddity but how they illuminate the medical beliefs and knowledge of earlier eras. Despite lingering superstitions, practitioners sometimes demonstrated remarkable sophistication. The successful removal of a knife from Andrew Grunbeide's stomach in 1635-performed without anesthesia or antisepsis-shows extraordinary surgical skill that would be challenging even today. Similarly, Colonel Martin's self-performed lithotripsy anticipated formal surgical techniques by forty years.
These historical practitioners were no less intelligent or determined than modern doctors. Their admirable tenacity in helping patients, even with limited tools, led them to explore many dead ends before finding effective treatments. Their methods aligned with contemporary understanding of human physiology. As chloroform pioneer James Young Simpson wisely noted in 1851, future generations would likely view our current medical practices with similar wonderment.
Indeed, reading these accounts makes one wonder which of our current medical practices will seem barbaric or absurd to future generations. Will chemotherapy be viewed as we now view bloodletting? Will some of our surgical techniques seem as crude as amputations without anesthesia? The history of medicine is not a simple march of progress but a complex journey of discovery, error, and occasional brilliance.
Morris's collection reminds us that medicine has always been fundamentally human-driven by curiosity, compassion, and the desire to alleviate suffering, even when the methods were misguided. The exploding teeth may remain a mystery, but the human drive to understand and heal remains constant across centuries.
