Michael O'Donnell

Robson Books, £8.99, pp 316 

ISBN 1 86105 563 3

Rating:

This humorous tome by a former doctor, writer, and broadcaster is an enjoyable tour through medical history. It relates sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes barely credible, bizarre, amusing, or mischievous cases and incidents. O'Donnell's source material included his own collection of doctors' letters sent to him when he was editor of World Medicine and later when he was a BMJ columnist. The result is an amusing hotchpotch of 109 anecdotes, starting with Hippocrates (460-377 BC) and ending in California in 1999, but heavily weighted towards the 20th century.

Famous historical figures, such as English country doctor Edward Jenner, intermingle with less well known ones, such as Dorset farmer Benjamin Jesty, "The Man whom History Passed by." Jenner wrongly became famous for performing the first vaccination (for cowpox, inducing immunity to smallpox) because Jesty actually beat him to it, saving his wife and sons by scratching their arms with a stocking needle that he had contaminated by pricking it into an infected cow's udders.

"The Surgical Triple Whammy" tells the story of 19th century Scottish surgeon Robert Liston, who became famous for the great speed at which he amputated limbs. After performing the first amputation under anaesthesia in 1846, when he severed a leg "in his usual two and a half minutes," he commented on the new technique: "This Yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow."

"Striving Inofficiously" describes the death of England's King George V, who received a lethal injection of morphine and cocaine from his doctor, Lord Dawson, who had agreed with the queen not to "strive officiously" to keep the king alive. Dawson then proceeded to oppose a bill enabling euthanasia in the House of Lords, arguing that legislation was unnecessary because "good doctors" already helped their patients to die.

Birte Twisselmann. 

BMJ btwisselmann{at}bmj.com