“This
operation proved to be the most complicated and confusing I have ever encountered, with many oddities and unsuspected events conspiring to make it as complex as it is laborious and difficult.”
When Claudius Amyand decides to cut open the belly of young Hanvil Anderson on December 6, 1735 at St. George's Hospital in London, he does not know that he will go down in history.
And to read his account of the operation published a year later in the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society, it is clear that the French-born surgeon entered into it somewhat blindly…
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It's been a month since his patient, an 11-year-old boy, was admitted to hospital.
He suffers from an inguinal hernia and a fistula between the scrotum and the thigh
"which for the past month has spilled a great quantity of unkind matter,"
writes Amyand.
The surgeon soon notices that in the child's abdomen, things are no longer quite as God designed them.
"The abscess...
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