Notes from The Doctor’s Diary: Winter Dressing

Notes from The Doctor’s Diary: Winter Dressing

Anecdote, appendicitis, cat-gut, clothing, corset, diary, doctor, goitre, GP, health, medicine, medieval England, medieval health, medieval population, patient, physician, psychiatrist, psychiatric medicine, “Punch”, silkworm-gut, stitches, winter

In this Western Mail column, a GP provides anecdotes from his consultations with patients. These include a man concerned about winter chills, a man whose father was either poisoned or died from appendicitis, a woman concerned about goitres and a patient to whom the doctor explained the difference between cat-gut and silkworm-gut stitches. At the end of the article is a section titled “Medieval Health, from this week’s reading”. Following two notes about the injurious historical practice of binding women’s waists and eighteenth-century corsets, this section contains the following curious comment about the perceived absence of psychiatric medicine in medieval England: “As ‘Punch’ points out, ‘The reason that there were no psychiatrists in medieval England is that the country was only sparsely inhabited’”.

Anon.

National Library of Australia

7 July 1949, pp. 30-31.

Newspaper Article

English

Newspaper Article:

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article39094610