Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine | Page 3

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ANOMALIES and CURIOSITIES of MEDICINE
Being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and
of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of
medicine and surgery, derived from an exhaustive research of medical
literature 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 beyond
his own self-preservation and the satisfaction of his bodily appetites,
the anomalous and curious have been of exceptional and persistent
fascination to him; and especially is this true of the construction and
functions of the human body. Possibly, indeed, it was the anomalous
that was largely instrumental in arousing in the savage the attention,
thought, and investigation that were finally to develop into the body of
organized truth which we now call Science. As by the aid of collected
experience and careful inference we to-day endeavor to pass our vision
into the dim twilight whence has emerged our civilization, we find
abundant hint and even evidence of this truth. To the highest type of
philosophic minds it is the usual and the ordinary that demand
investigation and explanation. But even to such, no less than to the
most naive-minded, the strange and exceptional is of absorbing interest,
and it is often through the extraordinary that the philosopher gets the
most searching glimpses into the heart of the mystery of the ordinary.
Truly it has been said, facts are stranger than fiction. In monstrosities
and dermoid cysts, for example, we seem to catch forbidden sight of
the secret work-room of Nature, and drag out into the light the
evidences of her clumsiness, and proofs of her lapses of
skill,--evidences and proofs, moreover, that tell us much of the methods
and means used by the vital artisan of Life,--the loom, and even the
silent weaver at work upon the mysterious garment of corporeality.
"La premiere chose qui s'offre a l' Homme quand il se regarde, c'est son
corps," says Pascal, and looking at the matter more closely we find that
it was the strange and mysterious things of his body that occupied
man's earliest as well as much of his later attention. In the beginning,

the organs and functions of generation, the mysteries of sex, not the
routine of digestion or of locomotion, stimulated his curiosity, and in
them he recognized, as it were, an unseen hand reaching down into the
world of matter and the workings of bodily organization, and reining
them to impersonal service and far-off ends. All ethnologists and
students of primitive religion well know the role that has been played in
primitive society by the genetic instincts. Among the older naturalists,
such as Pliny and Aristotle, and even in the older historians, whose
scope included natural as well as civil and political history, the atypic
and bizarre, and especially the aberrations of form or function of the
generative organs, caught the eye most quickly. Judging from the
records of early writers, when Medicine began to struggle toward
self-consciousness, it was again the same order of facts that was singled
out by the attention. The very names applied by the early anatomists to
many structures so widely separated from the organs of generation as
were those of the brain, give testimony of the state of mind that led to
and dominated the practice of dissection.
In the literature of the past centuries the predominance of the interest in
the curious is exemplified in the almost ludicrously monotonous