TITLE

Jan Bondeson

IB Tauris, £12.95

ISBN 1 86064 228 4

Rating: *****

Ever since the clash of medicine and science, around the beginning of the last century, things have not been quite the same. How do I know? Because this excellent little book describes the far more exciting world of our medical ancestors, where protogastroenterologists were troubled by swallowed snakes and bellies full of frogs. Nascent orthopods argued over the exact previous owner of the latest giant's bones to be dug up, while your future obstetricians were likely to be bothered not by unpleasant looking tocographs but by a woman delivering her seventh rabbit.

On a similar theme, congenital defects were blamed on the mother's actions or desires during pregnancy. Though there were usually negative connotations, this could occasionally work in the woman's favour: a mother (successfully) blamed a painting in her bedchamber for her baby being a different colour to her husband.

At the other end of life, the Victorians' fear of being buried alive bordered on hysteria. Coffins were produced, quite literally, with whistles and bells, and such was the uncertainty over whether a patient was dead or not that corpses were often subjected to “stimulating” (read mutilating and humiliating) procedures to ensure they were not simply in a deep faint.

Bondeson's A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities is much more, however, than a tabloid-like reportage of freak stories from previous centuries. What distinguishes this book is the author's extremely thorough research of the topics, providing background and follow up to cases, allowing us to see why the explanations were plausible at a time when the human body was uncharted territory. He describes the similarities in different cultures and how developments in biology and medicine exposed most phenomena as “old wives tales,” or quite often, as outright fraud.