London, June 18th, 1867. Tiie Medical Parliament, after a session of ten days' duration, has at last come to a close. The proceedings of the Medical Council this year have been as wordy, but not as improgressive as those of 18GG. The Drs. Wood and Sir Dominic Corrigan have been as noisy and controversial as ever, the latter indulging his oratorical shilelagh as freely as usual; but for all that...

T he first general anesthesia for human surgery was administered at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1846. The patient was put to sleep by breathing diethyl ether from a glass vesicle. and the surgeon quickly dissected a tumor located under the jaw. After completing the operation the surgeon remarked to his audience, “Gentlemen, this is no humbug. ” Since this first successful de...

worker or indoor man or woman is to pump the blood through the tired brain and little-used muscles, wash out their fatigue poisons, burn up clean the wastes of the food necessary to supply working power, and get rid of all these through the lungs, the skin, and the kidneys. This process takes hours every day instead of minutes, and you can 110 more accomplish it in two or three ten-minute perio...

‘Bah! Humbug!’ It’s the most famous line in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but is it the most important? Surely not, for this Christmas classic is not centrally about Christmas, but about a man, the holiday being the convenient setting for his transformation. What kind of transformation? Why a moral transformation of course, because the man, Ebenezer Scrooge, through multiple encounters wi...

The idea that somemedical procedures are unnecessary and can do more harm than good is as old as medicine itself. In Mesopotamia 38 centuries ago, Hammurabi proclaimed a law threatening overzealous surgeons with the loss of a hand or an eye. In 1915, at the height of a surgical vogue for prophylactic appendicectomy, Ernest Codman offended his Boston colleagues with a cartoon (figure⇓) mocking t...

admiration for a man whose natural inclination was towards the scholar's life, yet who was drawn into the practice of medicine and the mitigation of suffering by his pity for and desire to help poor suffering England. Maybe destiny decided that his unique relation to the sovereign as personal medical attendant and instructor of the royal children, along with an unusual gift for diplomacy and th...