by Gareth Rubin
On the bright side, had opium, taken in the form of laudanum (a cocktail of opium and alcohol), not been the doctors’ pain reliever of choice, Thomas de Quincey wouldn’t have taken it to ward off toothache while a 19-year-old student at Oxford in 1804, and Britain would have missed out on his gripping memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which describes how his life spiralled downwards as addiction took hold. In the book, his days become minutes counted until the next drop of laudanum. It’s not all bad news, though: while his work purports to warn of the dangers of opium, it also makes it sound quite good fun – after all, it led to De Quincey knocking up a prostitute in Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage in the Lake District.*
But opium wasn’t just for poets – the little scamps in the nursery also had a taste for it. Dalby’s Carminative medicine, for instance, was sold especially for ‘infants afflicted with wind, watery gripes, fluxes and other disorders of the stomach and bowels’. Its list of ingredients included not just opium, but also ‘Rectified spirits of wine’ and ‘Oil of peppermint’ to give it that child-friendly taste.
HEALING HANDS – BYRON’S DOCTORS KILL HIM, 1824
Bleeding patients was once the most popular treatment for the sick, with the doctors of the day rarely stopping to ponder why their patients tended to end up white and dead rather than up and playing tennis.
In July 1823 Lord Byron headed off to fight for Greek independence from the Turkish occupation fully expecting the Greeks to be toga-clad citizen-philosophers sitting about quoting Plato and enjoying orgies, rather than the group of slack-jawed goatherds he actually found. And worse was to come – he developed malaria as a side effect of the unpleasant conditions.
The doctors who attended him were certain that the way forward lay in opening up one of his major veins and literally watching the life drain out of him. ‘Trust us,’ they told him. ‘It’s sure to help.’
History records the club-footed romantic maniac as replying: ‘Come. You are, I see, a darned set of butchers. Take away as much blood as you will, but have done with it.’
Surprising all, the first session of bloodletting seemed to make him worse. So they tried again. Twice. Contrary to all medical expectations, Byron died three days later, aged 36.*
WELL, IT’S SORT OF MY FAULT – THE FIRST OPERATION PERFORMED WITH ANAESTHETIC, 1846
The first operation in Europe under general anaesthetic (ether, to be precise) took place on 21 December 1846 at the University College London Hospital when Robert Liston amputated a man’s infected leg. Of course, amputation with or without anaesthetic wouldn’t have been necessary, had Liston not caused the infection in the first place.
The man, a butler, had come to him with the broken limb. There was a minor infection but pus was draining from it and it would probably have healed soon enough. Liston, however, had other ideas. He made an incision in the leg, into which he pushed his fingers to have a bit of a feel around. Afterwards, he closed the wound, but soon the whole leg was infected: the only thing to do was cut it off.
At least Liston was just the man for an amputation. He was famous for his speed – holding what was probably a world record for having taken off a leg in under two and a half minutes. Unfortunately, that occasion hadn’t gone entirely to plan: the patient died of gangrene; also, his young assistant lost three fingers when Liston accidentally hacked them off (he too died of gangrene); and a distinguished surgeon who was observing the operation died of a heart attack when Liston unintentionally slashed through his clothes. It was an exceptional operation, both for setting a world record and registering a mortality rate of 300 per cent.
POOR WORKMANSHIP – THE DEATH OF PRINCE ALBERT, 1861
It’s not often that a plumber’s slapdash workmanship kills his employer, but Queen Victoria’s husband was one of those rare victims.
Prince Albert just loved engineering. He enjoyed seeing things built, knocked down, set sail or burrowed underground. It’s ironic, then, that it was the poor installation of the sewers at Windsor Castle that killed him. According to the Lord Chamberlain at the time, the drainage pipes from the toilets and baths had been a bodge job, resulting in bad smells: ‘The noxious effluvia which escapes from the old drains and the numerous cesspools still remaining is frequently so exceedingly offensive as to render many parts of the castle almost uninhabitable,’ he wrote.
It certainly was for Albert, who, in 1861, contracted typhus from it and died.
The Queen, however, refused to accept this medical diagnosis of her husband’s death. She put it down to the fact that her idiot eldest son, Bertie, had recently lost his virginity. This had happened unexpectedly when he had visited an army barracks and some of the officers had arranged for an actress, Nellie Clifton, to join him in his bed. Nellie, a popular girl, then blabbed all about it to the papers. When Bertie’s father read the reports he lost all sense of proportion, accusing his son of treason and apparently suffering sleepless nights at the very idea of Nellie falling pregnant (as if a royal bastard was something unusual). He wrote a letter to Bertie suggesting that, even if Nellie became pregnant by another man, she would claim the child was the Prince’s and drag his name ‘before the greedy multitude’, forcing him to reveal ‘the disgusting details’ of their night-long affair.
‘O, horrible prospect … and to break your poor parents’ hearts,’ he wailed. A few weeks later, he died. According to his hysterical wife, although the doctors pointed to the fairly obvious symptoms of typhus, the Queen knew it was really from a broken heart.
THE MODERN ICARUS – PERCY PILCHER INVENTS POWERED FLIGHT, 1899
Percy Pilcher … It’s a name on everyone’s tongue. Well, it might have been had Percy not flown his hang glider straight into the ground on 30 September 1899. Because if he hadn’t done that, he could instead have shown off his latest invention: an aeroplane.
Although his name sounds more like a music hall act, Percy Pilcher was actually a pioneer of flight. Having created and flown a number of hang gliders (which he dubbed ‘the Bat’, ‘the Beetle’ and ‘the Gull’), in 1896 he registered a patent for what is unmistakably a design for a powered flying machine. By the summer of 1899, he had designed an engine that would have worked and produced four-horse power of thrust. At the time in the American Colonies, the Wright Brothers were only just thinking about gliders, but Pilcher – the People’s Prince of Planes – was building the engine that would make Britain the home of powered flight.
On 30 September his triplane was complete and ready to take off. The first ever powered flight was to be in a muddy field in Leicestershire in front of a gathering of garrulous guests. And then: disaster! A problem with the crankshaft meant there would be no demonstration of the fabulous flying machine. What could they do? The afternoon would be a wash-out.
But Percy was nothing if not a showman. So he offered to demonstrate his hang glider, the Hawk, instead. Sadly for the aviation industry, he ploughed straight into the ground and died two days later from his injuries. His plane never made it off the ground.
In 2003 a group of researchers from Cranfield University with a lot of time on their hands built a replica of Pilcher’s flying machine. It worked, and flew for more than a minute.
THE WRONG QUEUE – JAMES CHADWICK BECOMES A PHYSICIST, 1907
Sixteen-year-old James Chadwick enrolled at Manchester University in 1907 (not an unusual age to matriculate in those days). He joined the queue to study mathematics, but soon discovered he was in the wrong one – it was the line for physics. But he liked the tutor who interviewed him and so on a whim decided to give physics a go instead. He went on to win the Nobel Prize for discovering neutrons and was a lead scientist in the design of America’s nuclear bomb.
‘HOW ARE YOU FEELING?’ ‘RUFF’ – THE BROWN DOG RIOTS, 1907
Experimenting on animals generates some strong feelings, and results in the occasional nutter breaking into a laboratory – but that’s nothing compared to what happened in London in the summer of 1907.
It all began with a lecture and a couple of Swedes. Since 1876, use of animals in scientific experimentation had been regulated, and in 1903 Swedish anti-vivisectionists Louise ‘Lizzy’ Lind-af-Hageby and Leisa Schartau enrolled in the London School of Medicine for Women in order to record what was happening during lectures.
One of the demonstrations they attended was being taken by Dr William Bayliss.* The lesson was to demonstrate that salivary pressure was independent of blood pressure, and this would be shown by electrically stimulating the exposed nerve of a live dog’s salivary gland. Doing so was perfectly legal. However, there was an aspect to this particular demonstration that was definitely illegal, the women later claimed. The brown terrier brought into the demonstration room had not been anaesthetised. Furthermore, the dog showed an operation scar from a previous demonstration, when the law said animals could only be used once. They added, in their diary, that the dog tried to get away and the other students around them laughed at its attempts. This wasn’t actually illegal, but it certainly wasn’t very nice.
They took their case to a leading anti-vivisectionist lawyer, Stephen Coleridge,** and he made a public speech about the affair without mincing his words and making the full allegations put to him by the women. The speech was reported in the newspapers, angering Bayliss, who demanded a full retraction of Coleridge’s allegations. Coleridge declined, and Bayliss sued for libel.
The trial took place on 11 November 1903 and hit the headlines. One of the witnesses, Professor Ernest Starling of University College London,*** admitted that he had previously performed a demonstration on the dog and had allowed a second – illegal – demonstration in order to avoid a second animal having to die. But he stated that the dog was anaesthetised during the demonstration, his accusers just hadn’t seen the pipe under the table delivering the anaesthetic. It would have been impossible to perform such a delicate procedure had the dog not been asleep, he argued.
The court also learned that the experiment with the salivary glands was, in fact, a failure, with Bayliss giving up halfway through. The dog was later killed, it was admitted, by a student named Henry Dale, who was not licensed to euthanise animals.**** Bayliss’s case was conducted by Rufus Isaacs.*****
Isaacs successfully argued that Bayliss had done nothing illegal and the jury awarded him libel damages and costs in the region of £400,000 in modern currency. Most people thought it was going to end there but they were very much mistaken.
Coleridge established a public appeal for the money, and received it in double-quick time. Bayliss gave it all to the university for medical research – perhaps including just the sort of experiment Coleridge objected to. Then Coleridge’s brothers-in-struggle demanded there be a memorial to the brown dog. They decided it should be a fountain with a statue of the unfortunate mutt, carrying an inscription:
In memory of the Brown Terrier Dog done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February 1903, after having endured Vivisection extending over more than two months and having been handed from one Vivisecteur to another till Death came to his Release. Also in Memory of the 232 dogs vivisected at the same place during the year 1902. Men and Women of England, how long shall these things be?
It was a canine cri de coeur but it proved difficult to find a sympathetic local council willing to accept the monument. In the end, in 1906, Battersea, famous for its dogs’ home, agreed to play host to one of the odder memorials in London. George Bernard Shaw was a guest at the unveiling.
Controversy continued to reign, though, and a guerrilla war broke out between groups of medical students who would creep through the hours of darkness to attempt to destroy the statue, opposed by a standing police guard presumably made up of Battersea’s least-precocious officers and backed by a motley alliance of trade unionists and suffragettes, who identified with the ground-down and disenfranchised dog. The ‘anti-dogger’ gangs thought it a dangerous insult to medical research, whereas their opposition saw it as a monument to Spartacus-like defiance of despotism.
Things escalated. Soon there were public marches in support of, and opposed to, the statue. On 10 December 1907 an anti-dogger march sported more than 1,000 participants and ended in the Brown Dog Riots – running battles around Trafalgar Square between them, the pro-doggers and 400 police.
Battersea Council eventually announced that it had had enough of paying for round-the-clock protection for a statue of a dog, and in 1910 it had the memorial broken up by four workmen and a police guard 120-strong – despite a petition signed by 20,000 pro-doggers.
Accurately, all that is now left of the old statue is a hump in the pavement and a sign that reads ‘no dogs’.
MONKEY BUSINESS – PILTDOWN MAN, 1911
In 1911 a skull was unearthed on Piltdown Common in Sussex that had the bone-loving community climbing museum walls in excitement. It seemed that Charles Dawson, a solicitor and amateur palaeontologist, had discovered the Missing Link. His finding would quieten the religious freaks who refused to believe man and monkeys had a common ancestor.
Dawson was quite well known, having previously found a number of important relics, including no fewer than three new species of iguanodon (as everyone knows, the iguanodon was the second dinosaur formally named, after megalosaurus, and, together with megalosaurus and hylaeosaurus, it was one of the three genera originally used to define dinosauria) and had a good reputation among his fellow scientists. He had also briefed the local quarrymen that, if they found any bones in the ground, they should let him know.
Thus, in late 1911, a group of workmen digging out gravel to use on roads showed him a piece of skullbone. It intrigued him and he looked for the rest of the structure in a shallow gravel pit. Over the next six months, accompanied by a strange Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he found the rest of the skull, half a lower jaw and a human tooth. Buried with them were the bones of prehistoric animals and some flint tools.
The skull was of a new species. It appeared to be essentially human, but with some characteristics of a young chimpanzee. This suggested that the long-term evolution of the human skull had reflected the changes that take place within a chimp’s skull as the animal goes from infant to adult. It was very exciting.
The find and its implications were announced to the London Geological Society, which could barely contain itself. The skull was deemed to be a female from a hitherto unknown species of human that represented the common ancestor of cave people and modern humans. In tribute to its discoverer (not the quarryman), it was named Eoanthropus dawsoni – Dawson’s man of the dawn. Dr Arthur Smith Woodward of the Geological Society declared: ‘The most significant thing about this discovery lies in the fact, proved by the shape of the jaw, that the creature, when alive, had not the power of speech. Therefore in the evolution of the human species the brain came first and speech was a growth of a later age.’
Dawson died in 1916, and in 1924 Woodward was knighted for his work analysing the bones. Piltdown Man was even cited in the famous Monkey Trial of 1925 that held the American State of Tennessee up to ridicule for prosecuting a biology teacher who had taught his class evolutionary theory.
In 1926, however, things began to unravel. A detailed survey of the land showed that the gravel pits were much younger than thought – younger, in fact, than the apparent age of the relics. Then, over the coming decades, archaeological finds in other countries established a timeline in evolution that left Piltdown Man with nowhere to hide – he just couldn’t have existed. People took another look at the bones. Material testing showed that the cranium was human, but only about 500,000 years old – a mere whippersnapper in evolutionary terms. The jaw, it turned out, was from an orang-utan and the tooth came from a chimp. It was as if a fight had broken out in a zoo. The animal bones found beside the skull weren’t even British. But what exposed the skull as a deliberate hoax was chemical testing that showed it had been stained with chromium compounds and the teeth artificially rubbed down to imitate a pattern close to normal
human wear.
No one is sure who created the hoax, but in 1953 The Sussex Express ran an article which read: ‘Mrs Florence Padgham, now of Cross-In-Hand, remembers that in 1906, aged thirteen, her father gave Charles Dawson a skull, brown with age, no lower jaw bone. Dawson is supposed to have said, “You’ll hear more about this, Mr Burley.”’
The lasting importance of Piltdown Man is the precise opposite of its original importance. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was cited by Darwinian evolutionists as evidence that Creationism was based on a myth. Now it is cited by Creationists as evidence that Darwinian Evolution is a hoax.
MAKING IT HARD ON HIMSELF – SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC DIES, 1912
In 2000 a letter was discovered that showed that brave, heroic Scott of the Antarctic was really a fool, largely responsible for his own fate. It was written by one Lieutenant Edward Evans, a navigator who was part of Scott’s attempt to reach the South Pole. He reveals that part of the reason for Scott’s failure was that he insisted on dragging scientific and geological specimens and records with him to the Pole and back. Evans and the others had quietly suggested perhaps he would like to leave them at the base camp and collect them on the way back, especially since they were already short on food and things were looking pretty bleak, but they were rebuffed.
Evans had accompanied Robert Scott to within 150 miles of the Pole, at which point Evans and two others turned back. In his letter, he described what happened: ‘I had a narrow squeak, thank God I was not included in the advance party. It seems to me extraordinary that they stuck to all their records & specimens. We dumped ours at the first check. I must say I considered the safety of my party before the value of the records and extra stores, not eatable. Apparently Scott did not. His sledge contained 150lbs of trash, he ought to have left it, pushed on and recovered the specimens and records this year.’