While GPs and hospital consultants spend much of their time dealing with life’s mundanities, medical scientists continue their unremitting exploration of the great unknown. Many of their finest achievements lie buried in medical journals and never achieve the publicity they deserve. Here are a few of the stranger cases buried in medical archives:
• Investigators at the Hospital del Salvador, Santiago, Chile, reported in the British Medical Journal in 1980 that when 54 normal, healthy people had one hand immersed in warm water, the skin wrinkled in 38 subjects but did not in the other 16. After due consideration, they concluded that this was ‘probably within the bounds of normal biological variation’.
• In 1989, three psychologists at the University of Wisconsin – Dennis Middlemist, Eric Knowles and Charles Mather – investigated events at a men’s public lavatory equipped with three urinals, to each of which they had attached a flowmeter. Keeping secret watch through a periscope, they discovered that micturition varied in speed, volume and length of time according to whether one, two or all three urinals were occupied.
• In 1995, Dr James A Heathcote reported a study that addressed the question of why old men have big ears. He studied 206 patients aged from 30 to 93 years and reported in the British Medical Journal that the mean ear length was 675mm. [For those interested in this sort of thing, he added that ‘the linear regression equation was: ear length = 55.9 + (0.22 x patient’s age) (95% confidence intervals for B coefficient 0.17 to 0.27)] His paper included a ‘scatter plot’ of the relationship between ear length and age which suggested that, as men get older, their ears get bigger by an average of 0.22mm each year. Sadly, after this intense and rigorous study, he had to conclude: ‘Why ears get bigger when the rest of the body stops growing is not answered by this research.’
• In May 1980 the Lancet published a paper entitled ‘Ability to lie on bed of nails not due to endogenous opioids.’ The author acknowledged the help received from Esther Rantzen.
• After their seminal 1994 investigation ‘Handedness and longevity: archival study of cricketers’, J P Aggleton et al. were able to report in the British Medical Journal that ‘left- handedness is not, in general, associated with an increase in mortality’.
• A research report in the Practitioner in May 1964 concluded with the sentence: ‘Surprisingly, 36 per cent were stated to be alive up to one hour before death.’
Other dramatic breaches of the frontiers of science – also known as ‘breakthroughs’ – include:
• Effect of ale, garlic and soured cream on the appetite of leeches. AB, HS, British Medical Journal, 1994
• Masturbation using metal washers for the treatment of impotence: painful consequences. AR, NS, British Journal of Urology, June 1994
• Copulation as a possible mechanism to maintain monogamy in porcupines. ZS, HM, Animal Behaviour, No. 5, 1988