Michael O’Donnell - Medicine’s Strangest Cases

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First published in the United Kingdom in 2002

This edition published in 2009 by Portico
10 Southcombe Street
London
W14 0RA
@AnovaBooks

Reprinted in 2009

An imprint of Anova Books Company Ltd.

Copyright Michael ODonnell, 2002

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

First eBook publication 2014
ISBN 9781849941730

Also available as paperback
ISBN 9781906032906

This book can be ordered direct from the publisher at
www.anovabooks.com, or try your local bookshop.

A paediatrician once described in the Lancet how, when travelling by train, he had tried to diagnose what was the matter with a tiny girl sitting on the lap of the woman opposite him. Only after twenty minutes careful observation did he realise that the child had a condition that rarely came his way: she was perfectly normal.

Thats one problem with defining strange cases in medicine. To those who live relatively normal lives, everything that doctors do is strange. Doctors also work in a pretty strange environment in which people they may have met only minutes before will, if asked, remove their clothes and then allow the doctors hands to explore their bodies in ways that haunt the dreams of fantasists.

If that werent enough, Ill confess to a personal difficulty in diagnosing strangeness, or what the cover of this book calls extraordinary incidents. Not only was any sense that I may have had of the ordinary knocked out of me by my twelve years as a doctor, but my working life since has done little to diminish my tolerance of quirkiness and odd behaviour.

Nine years working with Frank Muir and Denis Norden on Radio Fours My Word and sixteen sharing the company of Robert Robertson and his other guests on Stop the Week none of them chosen for their sedateness or conformity of view ensured that, for a good chunk of my life, strangeness was the normal currency of conversation. I even wrote a radio series, Relative Values, based on my belief that you dont have to dig too deep beneath the surface of what may seem the most ordinary of families to find extraordinary goings-on.

When I started this book, I found I was having to make arbitrary decisions. Was a Yorkshire GP, for instance, describing a strange case when he told me what happened in the 1950s after hed had a difficult time delivering a baby in a Yorkshire farmhouse?

When the baby was safe in the mothers arms and she was lying comfortable and content in a freshly made bed, the doctor broached a subject that had long intrigued him: This is the sixth child you and Harry have had. Why dont you marry him?

I could never do that, doctor.

Dont you think it might be better for the children?

Maybe. But I could never marry him, doctor.

Why not?

Because Ive never really liked him.

A strange case or a mundane strand from the warp and woof of general practice?

And how about the consultant physician who, in the seventies, had to visit a member of a large family in a tower block in Liverpool? As he was leaving, the family matriarch thanked him profusely for his kindness and, as a token of her gratitude, handed him a box of eggs. Nice and fresh, she said. And wed like you to have them.

A glance out the window confirmed he was in a concrete ghetto with not a blade of grass in sight. Dont tell me you keep chickens here, he said.

Oh no, doctor, but my daughter works in the hospital canteen.

That sounds less strange than warp and woof to me, but these distinctions are never clear. In the end, I decided to award the accolade of strangeness to cases that tickled the tiny clutch of cells in my brain that some call their fancy, even though I realised that strangeness, like eccentricity, is a condition we recognise in others but rarely in ourselves.

Looking at the final text, I realise that my fancy has been tickled not just by bizarre, amusing or mischievous incidents, but by a handful of anger-provoking happenings where doctors given to moralising or playing political games, or motivated by self-aggrandisement, sought to distort history, to mis-award honour, or to do down those of whom they didnt approve.

In assembling this collection, my main source has been the commonplace book that I have kept for the half-century that has passed since I qualified as a doctor. That book went through two expansionist phases, the first when I was editor of World Medicine, the second when I wrote a weekly column for the British Medical Journal and a couple of other medical publications. Ive just totted up that, during those two spells, I received letters from over three thousand doctors who wanted to pass on accounts of their struggles to survive in the unpredictable, sometimes bizarre, but often endearing world of clinical medicine. I remain grateful to all of them and, when writing this book, have tried to echo their voices. Im particularly grateful to two GPs, John Oldroyd and Bev Daily, who kept me in touch with the realities of general practice during the 1970s and 1980s.

Im also grateful to many friends who have fed my appetite for anecdotal evidence, especially Paul Vaughan, Bernard Dixon, Geoff Watts, Colin Tudge, Richard Leech, Robin Steel, Phil Hammond, Richard Gordon, and the late John Rowan Wilson. I have a particular indebtedness to Albert Hoffman, who became a pen friend after I visited Basle in 1989 to make a television programme about his life and work, and who sent me excerpts from his research diaries, some of which I quote on pages 1202.

Finally, I would like to offer this book as a token of gratitude to another troupe of old friends with whom I occasionally lunch or dine at a London club of ambiguous reputation and whose tolerance of my loquacity means they have to put up with a lot of this sort of thing.