Anomalies and curiosities of medicine : being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery, derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origin to the present day / abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed, by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle ; with 295 illustrations in the text, and 12 half-tone and colored plates.

  • Gould, George M. (George Milbry), 1848-1922.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Anomalies and curiosities of medicine : being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery, derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origin to the present day / abstracted, classified, annotated, and indexed, by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle ; with 295 illustrations in the text, and 12 half-tone and colored plates. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of blood from every pore of his body. This was taken as an attempt of na- ture to cure by bleeding according to the theory of the venesectionists. Fabri- cius Hildanus '■^'•^^ mentions a child who, as a rule, never drank anything but water, but once, contrary to her habit, drank freely of white wine, and this was soon followed by hemorrhage from the gums, nose, and skin. There is a case also related of a woman of forty-five who had lost her only son. One day she fancied she'beheld him beseeching her to release his soul from purgatory by prayers and fasting every Friday. The following Friday, which was in the month of August, and for five succeeding Fridays she had a profuse bloody perspiration, the disorder disappearing on Friday, March 8th, of the following year. Pooley says that Maldonato, in his Commentaries of Four Gospels, mentions a healthy and robust man who on hearing of his sentence of death sweated blood, and Zacchias noted a similar phenomenon in a young man condemned to the flames. Allusion may also be made to St. Luke, who said of Christ that in agony He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat wag, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground. ^ Pooley quotes the case of a young woman of indolent habit who in a relig- ious fanatical trance sweated blood. The stigmatists were often imposters who artificially opened their scars, and set the example for the really peculiar cases of bloody sweat, which among ignorant people was considered evidence of sympathy with the agony of the Cross. Probably the best studied case on record is that of Louise Lateau of Bois d'Haine, which, according to Gray, occurred in 1869 in a village of Belgium when the girl was at the age of twenty-three; her previous life had offered nothing remarkable. The account is as follows : One Friday Louise Lateau noticed that blood was flowing from one side of her chest, and this recurred every Friday. On each Thursday morning an oval surface about one inch in length on the back of each hand became pink in color and smooth, wliilst a similar oval surface on the palm of each hand became of the same hue, and on the upper surfajce of each foot a pinkish-white square appeared. Exam- ined under a magnifying glass, the epidermis appeared at first without solution of continuity and delicate. About noon on Thursday a vesicle formed on the pink surfaces containing clear serum. In the night between Thursday and Friday, usually between midnight and one o'clock, the flow of blood began, the vesicle first rupturing. The amount of blood lost during the so-called stigmata varied, and some observers estimated it at about one and three-quarter pints. The blood itself was of a reddish color, inclining to violet, about the hue, therefore, of capillary blood, coagulating in the usual way, and the white and red corpuscles being normal in character and relative proportion. The flow ceased on Saturdays. During the flow of the blood the patient was in a rapt, ecstatic condition. The facial expression was one of absorption and far-off a 638, 1854, 357 et seq. b St. Luke, xxii., 44.