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What were medical students doing 100 years ago?

Medical Educator has been donated a copy of the 1910 (second edition) of the Students Handbook of Operative Surgery. The second edition comes complete with hand written medical student notes and diagrams of common surgical procedures from back in the day. The edition, written by William Ireland Wheeler was designed to help students understanding of operative surgery.

Its interesting to find many of the images and descriptions are still relevant today, although some of the descriptions are a little ‘brutal’. To the right you can see handwritten notes by a student along with an image describing the excision of a portion of a rib.

We have concluded 3 things.

1. Medical students revision notes were as illegible 00 years ago as they are today. We can’t decipher much of the revision notes shown here (answers on a postcard). There was one bit that we could read that started with Oh-Oh Oh To Touch And… We haven’t printed the rest out of common decency.
2. Writing in flowing fountain pen certainly adds to the drama of revision notes.
3. Although the 1910 book is of exceptional quality and detail, we reccomend using some of the more up to date texts available. Some of our colleagues have even suggested searching the internet, but we’re not too sure about this and prefer to stick to books!

Thanks to Ms K for the donation of the text, we hope to publish some other relevant diagrams in coming months. William Wheeler died in 1943. A telling comment from his obituary in the BMJ from the same year follows:

He was not only a brilliant operating surgeon, a clinician of much wisdom, and an authoritative writer on surgery, but
a man with a great capacity for friendship.