ANOMALIES and CURIOSITIES of MEDICINE
Being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, andof the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches ofmedicine and surgery, derived from an exhaustive research of medicalliterature from its origin to the present day, abstracted, classified,annotated, and indexed.
by
GEORGE M. GOULD, A.M., M.D. and
WALTER L. PYLE, A.M., M.D.
PREFATORY AND INTRODUCTORY.
Since the time when man's mind first busied itself with subjects beyondhis own self-preservation and the satisfaction of his bodily appetites,the anomalous and curious have been of exceptional and persistentfascination to him; and especially is this true of the construction andfunctions of the human body. Possibly, indeed, it was the anomalousthat was largely instrumental in arousing in the savage the attention,thought, and investigation that were finally to develop into the bodyof organized truth which we now call Science. As by the aid ofcollected experience and careful inference we to-day endeavor to passour vision into the dim twilight whence has emerged our civilization,we find abundant hint and even evidence of this truth. To the highesttype of philosophic minds it is the usual and the ordinary that demandinvestigation and explanation. But even to such, no less than to themost naive-minded, the strange and exceptional is of absorbinginterest, and it is often through the extraordinary that thephilosopher gets the most searching glimpses into the heart of themystery of the ordinary. Truly it has been said, facts are strangerthan fiction. In monstrosities and dermoid cysts, for example, we seemto catch forbidden sight of the secret work-room of Nature, and dragout into the light the evidences of her clumsiness, and proofs of herlapses of skill,—evidences and proofs, moreover, that tell us much ofthe methods and means used by the vital artisan of Life,—the loom, andeven the silent weaver at work upon the mysterious garment ofcorporeality.
"La premiere chose qui s'offre a l' Homme quand il se regarde, c'estson corps," says Pascal, and looking at the matter more closely we findthat it was the strange and mysterious things of his body that occupiedman's earliest as well as much of his later attention. In thebeginning, the organs and functions of generation, the mysteries ofsex, not the routine of digestion or of locomotion, stimulated hiscuriosity, and in them he recognized, as it were, an unseen handreaching down into the world of matter and the workings of bodilyorganization, and reining them to impersonal service and far-off ends.All ethnologists and students of primitive religion well know the rolethat has been played in primitive society by the genetic instincts.Among the older naturalists, such as Pliny and Aristotle, and even inthe older historians, whose scope included natural as well as civil andpolitical history, the atypic and bizarre, and especially theaberrations of form or function of the generative organs, caught theeye most quickly. Judging from the records of early writers, whenMedicine began to struggle toward self-consciousness, it was again thesame order of facts that was singled out by the attention. The verynames applied by the early anatomists to many structures so widelyseparated from the organs of generation as were those of the brain,give testimony of the state of mind that led to and dominated thepractice of dissection.
In the literature of the past centuries the pred