The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  The tribunal ruled that Bauer did not qualify for compensation.

  “I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and he seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed.”

  Mohandas “Mahatma” K. Gandhi, 1940

  ___________________

  1 638, according to Fabian Escalante, Castro’s former head of personal security.

  2 The CIA also considered impregnating a TV studio with LSD to make Castro look “deranged” during an interview.

  7

  Quacking Up: Medical Losers

  In which a man resurrects dead chickens; a queen’s bowels are mortified; a criminologist’s head is pickled; an anaesthetist dies painlessly; and King Charles II enjoys a rock-salt enema.

  The Forgotten Man of Medicine

  The first great Renaissance physician was a little Swiss man called Philip Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, otherwise known as Paracelsus.

  Much of his extraordinary life is hidden in the fog of legend and myth. He was rumoured to have made a pact with the devil, to travel on a magical white horse and to have a phial containing the elixir of life in the pommel of his sword. He wrote hugely influential books on medicine and surgery while living the life of a tramp. Unfortunately, it was quite hard to tell what Paracelsus thought about anything, because he was drunk most of the time and a lot of his writings were wilfully obscure and occasionally obscene.

  Paracelsus was born in Switzerland in the village of Einsiede in 1493. His mother died while he was still a boy, possibly a suicide as a result of mental illness. His father taught alchemy at the local college. At the age of fourteen, he set off on foot to seek an education at the universities of Europe, living for several years the life of a footloose, wandering scholar.

  In 1517, he gained a doctorate in medicine at the university of Ferrera in Italy. After getting his degree, he hit the road again, supporting himself along the way as a doctor and occasionally as an army surgeon, treating everyone from gypsies to wealthy noblemen. Sometimes his efforts were well paid, but he was often reduced to peddling his home-made medicines by the roadside.

  His bedside manner left much to be desired: obese, foulmouthed and weather-beaten, it was said “he lived like a pig and looked like a sheep drover”. Everywhere he went, he took his large broadsword with him, even to bed. He spent a large part of his life in taverns, challenging the locals to drinking contests and usually winning. On his travels, however, he picked up an amazing amount of expertise in the practical treatment of illnesses – a mixture of local remedies, common sense and old wives’ tales.

  In Constantinople, Paracelsus risked being thrown into the notorious Yedikule dungeons, the traditional last resting place for infidels, to learn from the local peasant women. They practised a primitive form of medicine, which protected them from a variety of diseases, including the dreaded smallpox, by cutting open a vein and inserting an infected needle. Paracelsus noted: “What makes a man ill also cures him.” It was a basic understanding of inoculation 200 years ahead of its time.

  Unfortunately, this good work was offset by teachings that were completely barking mad. He believed that Alpine cattle drew moisture from the air and that a man could survive without food if he planted his feet in the Earth. Many of his contributions to toxicology were based on astrological readings. He subscribed to the doctrine of signatures, that is, a plant could cure the body part it vaguely resembled. He published instructions for resurrecting a dead chicken.

  Paracelsus’ most bizarre claim was that he could breed homunculi – small humans who stood about a foot high – from a mixture of human sperm, hair and horseshit. According to his writings, the way to create one of these little men was to take some semen, put it in a bottle then submerge it in dung for forty days. Then, when the little man starts to form and wriggle around in the bottle, you have to feed it blood for forty more days. His homunculi apparently ran off after turning on their creator.

  One of his more profitable discoveries, probably picked up on his visits to Constantinople, was raw opium. He gave it the name “Laudanum”, presumably from the Latin “laus”, to praise. Although usually found in liquid form, Paracelsus dispensed it in small tablets looking like mouse droppings. Laudanum had miraculous soothing qualities and was highly addictive. He made a fortune from wealthy patients who inevitably came back for more; he told them that it contained gold leaf and pearls. When he wasn’t dispensing dangerous narcotics, he also liberally dosed his patients with mercury and antimony, although he knew that both were highly toxic.

  Paracelsus did, however, challenge many of the pseudo-scientific ideas of the day, especially the age-old belief in bloodletting to get bid of “bad humours”. It was believed that all diseases were caused by an imbalance in the body’s four “humours” – black bile, choler, phlegm and blood. Treatment consisted of restoring the balance, an unpleasant process of repeated bleedings, purges and inducing vomiting. In reality, bleeding weakened the patient by sapping the body of strength and much needed oxygen, ruining any chance they might have had of a normal recovery.

  Paracelsus offered another solution – illnesses arose from conditions outside the body and could be treated with chemicals. He also recognized that the body was often capable of healing itself. While the rest of the medical profession was still rubbing snail excrement into open wounds, Paracelsus recommended keeping the wound clean and generally leaving it alone. Compared to snail shit, it was groundbreaking stuff.

  In another novel innovation, he actually began to examine his patients. Until then, physicians relied on urine samples for diagnosis. Paracelsus was scornful of his colleagues’ methods, saying, “All they can do is to gaze at piss.” If people knew how they were being deceived, he said, “doctors would be stoned in the street”. The medical profession hit back by calling him a drunk, not unreasonably, as it turns out, because Paracelsus always preferred bars to lecture theatres. He spent his entire adult life in a running battle against doctors who had learned their medicine from ancient books rather than practical experience. “All the universities and all the ancient writings put together,” he wrote, “have less talent than my arse.”

  Paracelsus never stayed in one place for long. His routine was generally to arrive in a new town, earn accolades, enjoy accolades . . . and then self-destruct. In 1527, he pitched up at Basel, where a local luminary called Johan Frobenius was resigned to amputation of his right leg. The local barber-surgeon was on the verge of removing it when, out of desperation, Frobenius invited Paracelsus to take a look. To everyone’s astonishment, Paracelsus cured him and the leg was saved. It was an amazing stroke of good fortune for Paracelsus, too, because Frobenius would become a very important and influential ally. He was a personal friend of the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, no less, who was at the time staying with him as a houseguest. Erasmus asked Paracelsus if he could treat him for gout and a painful kidney condition; Paracelsus found a cure. Erasmus was so impressed that he secured for him, at the age of thirty-three, the post of lecturer at the University of Basel.

  Paracelsus had it made, or so it seemed. To begin with, he impressed everyone with his medical skills. One day, he offered to give the faculty a lecture, promising to uncover the “greatest of medical secrets”. The event was widely advertised and attracted not just members of the faculty but also local barber-surgeons and civic dignitaries from all over Basel. The “secret” turned out to be the workings of the digestive system, which Paracelsus illustrated by holding aloft a pan full of steaming human excrement. As the audience retreated from the hall in disgust, he shouted obscenities after them; they were not fit to call themselves physicians. After a few more run-ins with the authorities, he had to flee Basel. It wasn’t the first or the last town he had had to leave in a hurry. In Salzburg, he almost got himself hanged.

  After several similar career-limiting moves, Paracelsus resumed his life as a wanderer, lodging at public inns, getting dru
nk, but still performing amazing cures. In 1530, while staying at Nuremberg, the local faculty denounced him as an impostor, but he won round his critics by apparently restoring to full health, in just a few days, several people with “incurable” elephantiasis.

  Paracelsus died prematurely after years of endless travelling and alcohol abuse after a brief illness at the age of forty-eight, in the back room of a public inn. His death was hastened, it was said, after a scuffle with some hired thugs in the pay of the local medical faculty. His written works, mostly published posthumously, although full of insults and bluster, were full of genuine insights. Giordano Bruno marvelled years later: “Just think what he might have discovered had he been sober.”

  Least Successful Amputation of a Limb

  In the pre-anaesthetic era, the key qualification for a good surgeon was quick hands. Operations had to be finished quickly so the patient didn’t bleed to death or die from the pain or the shock of a prolonged procedure. Queen Caroline’s personal surgeon William Chiselden armed his assistant with a watch to try to keep his operations down to less than three minutes; Napoleon’s famous chief surgeon Dominique Lorrey could amputate a leg in less than fifteen seconds.

  The nineteenth-century Scottish surgeon Robert Liston was described as the finest surgeon in Europe and “the fastest knife in the West End”. Liston had a personal best for a leg amputation at twenty-eight seconds, although while achieving this record he accidentally cut off his patient’s left testicle and two of his assistant’s fingers. Both patient and assistant died afterwards in the ward from gangrene, making it the only amputation in history with a 200 per cent mortality rate.

  “The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of many rumours to that effect.”

  Harper’s Weekly, 1902

  Worst Contribution to Medical Science

  The third-century Greek anatomist Galen, personal physician to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, was for several centuries recognized by the Catholic Church as the world’s only authority on human anatomy. Galen’s word on the inner workings of the human body was absolute; even to question his word was an act of heresy punishable by death. The Church was not in the least concerned by the minor fact that the Imperial doctor had never actually seen the inside of the human body and that his one hundred or so medical text books were wild guesswork based on his observations of dead pigs and dogs.

  Although Galen managed to get a few things right, his mistakes had terrible consequences for centuries to come. Thanks to Galen, generations of medical students learned that the brain was a large clot of phlegm; that the best way to cure a headache was to cut holes in the skull; that the quickest way to cure a cough was to amputate the uvula at the back of the patient’s palate; and that post-operative wounds should be dressed with pigeon’s excrement.

  The ban on human anatomical dissection remained long after Galen’s death; only a Pope could grant permission for the odd criminal to be exhumed and cut open, albeit under the severest of restrictions. The dissection had to be performed by a servant, while a doctor stood and solemnly read from the works of Galen and pointed to the parts described. When it became obvious, as it nearly always did, that Galen was a fraud, his errors were always excused by the official line that the corpse was a criminal and therefore abnormal.

  “The only thing different is the hair, as far as I can see. I give them a year.”

  Musical director of The Ed Sullivan Show, predicting the death of the Beatles, 1964

  Least Credible ’Ology

  In 1796, a Viennese doctor specializing in mental illness, Franz-Josef Gall, had a peculiar insight. Patients with big eyes tended also to have very good memories. Excited by his “discovery”, Gall spent the next four years dissecting the heads of mental patients to see if there was a link between skull shape and personality.

  By the time he had finished, he had mapped out a total thirty-five human attributes – including emotions such as wonder and veneration, and actions such as murder and larceny – which, he believed, caused corresponding bulges on the surface of the skull. He worked that out by using a chart of the human skull and, by examining the bumps and crevices on the head of the subject, he claimed he could “read” the subject’s personality. He called it “craniology”, although it soon became known as phrenology – the study of the shape and size of the cranium. More popularly, it was known as “having your bumps felt”.

  It is now widely recognized that, if anyone needed their head examining, it was Gall himself. To begin with, brain tissue is far too soft to produce changes as significant as a bulge in the bone of a human skull. If brain tissue was dense enough to change the shape of your skull, your head would be too heavy for you ever to get out of bed.

  However, at the time, his ideas really took off and in some very unexpected directions. His supporters, including Johann Spurzheim in America and George Combe in Britain, sold hundreds of thousands of books, claiming to have identified more “bumps” such as those for wit, colouring and weight. Two New York farmer brothers, Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, made a business out of phrenology, examining millions of Americans’ heads and building such a booming business empire that it continued well into the twentieth century. Gall’s phrenological theories were particularly popular in England, where the ruling class used it to justify the “inferiority” of its colonial subjects. At the other end of the scale. thousands of charlatans offered to “read” heads for money and offered to massage away unwanted bumps.

  Another sinister legacy was the work of an Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, who thought he could identify potentially dangerous villains by the shape of their skull (unless, of course, they wore a hat) so that they could be “treated” before they transgressed. Common characteristics of “the criminal type”, according to Lombroso, were “facial asymmetry, enormous jaws, developed frontal sinus and protruding ears”.

  Although his ludicrous theory died with him, Lombroso’s own pickled head is still preserved for all to see in the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin.

  “If your eyes are set wide apart, you should be a vegetarian, because you inherit the digestive characteristics of bovine or equine ancestry.”

  Dr Linard Williams, Medical Officer to the Insurance Institute of London, 1932

  Least Successful Attempt to Find a Cure for VD

  The thirst for medical knowledge inspired the great eighteenth-century Scottish surgeon and anatomist John Hunter to follow a line of research with life-changing results. To find out how venereal disease was transmitted, Hunter injected pus from the weeping sores of a gonorrhoea-infected prostitute into the glans of his own penis. Unfortunately for Hunter, the prostitute he chose to take his sample from also suffered from syphilis. It was a rare combination and a mistake that delayed Hunter’s marriage for three years and from which he never completely recovered.

  It was also bad news for venereology, because Hunter mistakenly concluded that syphilis and gonorrhoea were stages of the same infection, setting back the study of both diseases for many years. Hunter’s heroism inspired several medical students to follow his example and inject their own penises with pus, but it was another fifty years before proof of venereal transmission was finally discovered when a German bacteriologist, Ernst von Bumm, injected a perfectly healthy woman with gonorrhoea.

  “Approximately 80 per cent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards for man-made sources.”

  US president Ronald Reagan, 1980

  Worst Royal Doctor

  On Monday, 2 February 1685, while King Charles II was being prepared for his morning shave, he suffered a stroke and fell to the floor, crying out in pain. Six royal physicians rushed to his aid. Over the next few days they bled him, purged him, shaved his head and applied blister-raising cantharides plasters to his scalp. They pressed red-hot irons against his skin, administered twice-hourly enemas of r
ock salt and syrup of buckthorn, and orange infusion of metals in white wine.

  Having shown no sign of improvement, he was then made to swallow therapeutic potions of oriental bezoar stone from the stomach of a goat and boiled spirits from a human skull. On 7 February, after five days of being tortured, as the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay put it, “like a red Indian at the stake”, his body red raw with burns and blisters, the king succumbed and lapsed into a merciful coma, dying the following day. The cause – death by injuries caused by a doctor.

  King Charles was not the first or the last monarch to have “died of the doctor”. This was a subject that King Louis XIII of France knew a thing or two about. His physician Boulevard, an enthusiastic “bleeder” even by the standards of the day, ordered his royal patient 47 bleedings, 215 emetics or purgatives and 312 clysters (enemas) during the period of one year alone. When he was lying on his deathbed in 1643, the forty-one-year-old king told Bouvard, with a touch of bitter understatement, you might think, “I would have lived much longer if not for you.”1

  Dr Fagon, the eighteenth-century resident French court physician at Versailles, was known as “the killer of princes”. Within a fortnight, in 1715 he wiped out almost the entire French royal family while treating a measles epidemic with a tough regime of purges, emetics and prolonged bleedings. The infant Louis XV only escaped the ministrations of the deadly physician because his nurse hid him. Sixty years later, the Russian Empress Catherine “the Great” observed that anyone delivered into the hands of her Scottish physician Dr John Rogerson was “as good as dead”. When the Empress fell off her toilet seat with a fatal stroke, the able Dr Rogerson responded by applying plasters of Spanish fly to her feet.