Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine

Before modern medicine could explain them, there were only anomalies. George M. Gould's 1896 encyclopedic catalog collects the most baffling, horrifying, and wondrous cases from centuries of medical literature: the man who sweated blood, the child born with teeth, the woman who menstruated for years straight, infants fused together, bodies grown impossibly large or small. This is Victorian medicine at its most ravenous, documenting every deviation from the supposed norm with the same clinical precision used for the ordinary. The book captures a pivotal moment when science was replacing superstition but hadn't yet drained the body of its mysteries. Here be giants and dwarfs, hermaphrodites and hairy men, cases that confounded physicians and titillated the public. It's a time capsule of what terrified and fascinated doctors a century ago, and a reminder that our categories of "normal" and "abnormal" have always been more fragile than we admit. For readers who loved "The Butchering Art" or Victorian oddities, this is the original compendium of bodies that refused to fit.