courtesy of Wakefield Council
This object is in the collection of Wakefield museum.
What is it ?
How does it relate to the history of medicine?
submitted by Ann Ferguson and John Whitaker
Mystery Object – Wakefield
Category Archives: medical history
Edinburgh Mystery Object
(from Surgeons’ Hall Museum, Edinburgh)
One of the earliest published descriptions of this instrument (possibly the earliest), was by a famous Scottish surgeon-anatomist who collected examples from other surgeons and made modifications.
What is the instrument called, what was it used for and who was the surgeon ?
Clue – his portrait hangs in Surgeons’ Hall, Edinburgh, venue of the BSHM September Congress
submitted by Iain Macintyre
Mystery Plant in the Apothecaries’ Garden
Photo taken at Chelsea Physic Garden 23/5/2017
by Chris Derrett
What is the link between this plant and an essay publishes 200 years ago by a surgeon apothecary in East London?
The answer will appear here in the middle of June.
The Mesmerist: John Elliotson (1791-1868)
In 1837, when 19-year-old Queen Victoria ascended the British throne, medicine was a bleak and brutal business. Operations were performed without pain relief while the standard medical therapies were bloodletting, purging and dosing with toxic potions. But that summer a promising medical innovation crossed the Channel from Paris: mesmerism. Most of the British medical establishment scorned this new-fangled French idea but one doctor, the highly esteemed physician John Elliotson, embraced mesmerism with zeal. For 18 months in 1837 and 1838 Elliotson staged dramatic demonstrations on his patients at University College Hospital which drew fascinated audiences, provoked sensational headlines and – ultimately – split the medical profession.
The Mesmerist: John Elliotson (1791-1868) is an exhibition at the Library of the Royal Society of Medicine.
1 Wimpole Street, LONDON W1G 0AE
This exhibition tells the story of John Elliotson and his battle to promote mesmerism – hypnotism as it was later renamed – in the face of furious opposition from the medical establishment and medical press. Elliotson was President of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London in 1833, and it was during his term of office that the Society was granted a Royal Charter to become, in 1834, the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society.
Robert Greenwood, Heritage Officer, The Royal Society of Medicine Library
Robert Fludd MD. FRCP. (1574-1673)
Robert Fludd. Line engraving by T. de Bry, 1645, after Matthäus Merianafter
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
A respected physician, Censor four times of the Royal College of Physicians, Robert Fludd was also an anatomist, a friend of William Harvey whose experiments he witnessed, and well-respected by both James I, and by Charles I who awarded him the income from Crown land in Suffolk. All this was perhaps nothing unusual among those who stood well in the senior world of that hierarchical society, a society to which he belonged by birth and by his own medical reputation, and his father’s reputation as an honest and well-rewarded public servant of the redoubtable Queen Elizabeth I.
It was less usual that he was also a distinguished and well known neo-platonist, hermetic philosopher and alchemist, who summed up in himself and in his numerous and large-scale publications the pre-scientific synthesis of cosmic harmony; that is, the intimate and harmonic relationship of the sentient platonic universe with the sentient human being. This was the world before the Cartesian ‘cogito, ergo sum’, which divides the observing ego from its observed subject, a definitive change in perception which has revolutionised human culture since the mid-17th century.
Fludd’s philosophy is epitomised in his magnificent if uncompleted Utriusque Cosmi … Historia 1617-1626 (‘The History of the Macrocosm and Microcosm’), and in his Medicina Catholica 1629-1631 (‘Universal Medicine’) whose lavish, graphic and cogent illustrations illuminate for us the rich world-picture of the Renaissance multi-layered mind, of the prescientific magus, which perceived by metaphor and symbol rather than by our logic. It is not surprising that his illustrations are increasingly used in works on Renaissance literature, philosophy, art and culture. His images speak louder than words. And they are some of the finest and most detailed illustrations, published during that period.
Caught between the old world of symbol and metaphor and the new world of rigorous investigation and scientific experiment (which he also exercised in practical demonstrations of anatomy), Fludd provides for us a passage back to an integrated and sentient universe. Though few of us could support the analogical base on which his system is founded, his symbolism may still speak validly to us today. It is no bad thing to understand the past from within. Our forebears deserve respect, understanding, and even empathy. In history, as in anthropology (of which history is a part) it is possible to maintain participant / observer status. History then ceases to be entirely an account of the past.
Further reading: Godwin J. Robert Fludd: hermetic philosopher and surveyor of two worlds. London: Thomas & Hudson, 1979.
Robin Price – British Society for the History of Medicine