David Haviland

3.5
David Haviland's How to Remove a Brain and Other Bizarre Medical Practices is an entertaining read of wide-ranging trivia of the sort that I recall enjoying in junior high. Amusing as it reads, there is real information here that will engage all age groups.

For instance, Haviland addresses the mystery of Queen Victoria's undiagnosed hernia. The queen was rather obsessed over her state of health (and bowels) was very dependent on her personal physician, keeping him at her beck and call. She trusted Sir James Reid so deeply she requested that he secretly slip a lock of hair from her trusted friend John Brown into her hand before burial. Reid was never allowed to touch the queen, and until he inspected her corpse never knew she had a hernia, and from her nine pregnancies, a badly prolapsed uterus.

Something that Victorian writers didn't tell us about was those child chimney sweepers usually worked in the buff! The boys spent days around soot with no protection, resulting in 'soot warts', a form of cancer, but which was thought to be a sexually transmitted disease. Sadly, treatment meant the removal of the boy's scrotum. So when we now read about the boys who cleaned the chimneys, we have another understanding of the cruelness of child labor driven by poverty

The book has been nominated for the People's Book Prize.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.… (meer)

How to Remove a Brain is a net-full of weird, wonderful and deeply yucky things that someone with a long career in medicine has heard about, noted down and presented in a single but not quite unified or connected collection. It is enough to make you change your mind about a career in medicine or, perhaps, entice you into training for one, if you like getting your hands sticky.

It’s difficult to talk about this publication without mentioning Horrible Histories, as a lot of the unusual and bizarre medical treatments occurred in the mid to distant past or in far flung places. Sensationalism is to the fore, with the tribe that ate the brains of their dead and diseased their own prions, treatments for various plagues, Wild West quackery and occasionally weird things that work (St John’s Wort). Caesarean probably wasn’t born by caesarean section, apparently, and I thought he was because it sounded likely. Then again, Horrible Histories claimed that Richard III did not have a humped back and that the “defamation” we know from Shakespeare was all Tudor propaganda, then a year later archaeologists dug up his skeleton from a car park in Leicester and it was quite clear that he did have massive curvature of the spine. This book is an education but at least a quarter of the information will be stuff you’ve heard of before and fair share of the rest will make your skin crawl. The good thing is, there’s quite a lot of information you will be reading here for the first time.

The book did throw up one scandal. William Farr, 1807 – 1883, was (it says in Wikipedia, which apparently you should never quote from but I’m being lazy) “a British epidemiologist, regarded as one of the founders of medical statistics” and University College London’s Farr Institute in Bloomsbury is named after him. He is the great example that generations of statisticians now look up to. However, epidemiologists also greatly respect John Snow, who made the classic analysis of a cholera outbreak in 1854 at Broad Street, Soho, London. Snow analysed the spatial pattern of where victims fell sick, then identified the source of the infection as a single water pump; therefore, cholera was transmitted by waterborne germs (Correct – a brilliant and competent scientific deduction. The discipline changed forever). The interesting thing is, Snow’s main opponent, who said that his analysis was rubbish, was William Farr. Farr claimed that cholera was transmitted by bad air (miasma) and the chance of you contracting cholera was related to your height above sea level. That’s the thing about science. Some people get it wrong, then the world laughs, the light of knowledge edges an inch forward against the darkness and over a hundred years later we commemorate people as brilliant when they probably weren’t all of the time. Being a statistical epidemiologist and opposing the most famous correct experiment in statistical epidemiology sounds a bit duff, in hindsight. What a tit.

I liked this book and learned a lot but it is fact, not fiction, so I’ll be passing it on. Possibly in Bloomsbury.… (meer)

How to Remove a Brain And Other Bizarre Medical Practices and Procedures by David Haviland is a fun and crazy book with things in there I would have never thought of. I requested this book from NetGalley and the review is voluntary. Let me first say, I have two degrees, I am a nurse (that helps when reading some of this gross stuff), so I am not an illiterate person. I like trivia and I can't help it if this trivia is a little on the... strange side. I don't want to call it odd, lets call it obscure. Let's just say if you are looking for something different, you got it! I loved it, different, strange, you won't find this anywhere else! LOL… (meer)