Tag: Matthew Turner
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Did Louis XVI have phimosis?
Matthew TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United States On May 16, 1770, Louis Auguste, the Dauphin of France and the future Louis XVI, married Marie Antoinette, an Austrian archduchess.1 For the next eight years, the poorly matched couple failed to produce an heir, creating yet another source of political instability in France. It was not until December 19,…
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Sushruta, the father of rhinoplasty
Matthew TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United States From around 1000–800 BC, a golden age of medicine dawned in ancient India, where ayurveda, the “science of life,” flourished.1 At the heart of this revolution was the legendary physician Sushruta, whose writings in the famous Samhita describe surgeries from cataract removal to treatment of bladder stones, diseases including diabetes…
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“A conspicuous place in the annals of murder”: The anatomy murders of Burke and Hare
Matthew TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United States In 1828 Scotland, two men committed a series of crimes that would earn them, as a contemporary newspaper described, “a conspicuous place in the annals of murder.”1 To both contemporaries and modern audiences, the gruesome story of Burke and Hare is “an endless source of morbid fascination.”1 For centuries, Western…
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The Doctors’ Riot of 1788
Matthew TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United States In the wake of the American Revolution, slavery remained a key part of the United States’ economy. Even the northern states were not exempt; in the waning years of the eighteenth century, slaves made up nearly 20% of the population of New York City alone.1 As a 2011 Lancet article…
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Mercury poisoning and the death of John Wilkes Booth
Matthew D. TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United StatesJason SappJoint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, United States Introduction On April 26, 1865, twenty-six soldiers of the 16th New York Cavalry Regiment surrounded a barn on the Garrett farm in Virginia. Hiding within the barn were two refugees, one of them the most wanted man in the United States, and the…
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Preventing the next Mengele
Matthew TurnerMcChord, Washington, United States The icy November wind cut like a knife through his dress uniform, down to his very bones, but the young doctor did not move a muscle. Like a statue, he stared ahead with the other men in the column at the podium before them. There was a speaker up there,…
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Blood and hate: The anti-Semitic origin of the fabled first transfusion
Matthew TurnerMcChord, Washington, United States Introduction It is a story often repeated in medical textbooks: in 1492, Innocent VIII lay dying. His physician attempted the first recorded blood transfusion, transfusing the blood of three children into the deteriorating Pope. The treatment failed, and Innocent’s uneasy reign over Rome ended shortly afterwards. The story, set nearly…
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Healer of the pharaohs: History’s first woman doctor
Matthew TurnerWashington, US Some 4500 years ago, as the great pyramids rose above the desert sands of Egypt, there lived a remarkable woman. Her name was Peseshet, and she is humanity’s first known woman physician. Peseshet was known by the title imy-r swnwt, which roughly translates to “Lady Overseer of the Lady Physicians.”1 She was…
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It always comes down to medicine
Matthew TurnerWashington, United States For six days, the brigands held a knife to the city’s throat. Outside a handful of settlements far to the northeast—which any of the city’s inhabitants would firmly tell you didn’t count—Charleston was the jewel of England’s possessions in the New World. The wealth that the port city generated had fattened…