MOMENTS IN HISTORY |
Presented by
Bill 'Mastermind' Fitzgerald®
I thought we might take a short break from the French Revolution and look at something of, perhaps, more immediate importance. I refer to a medical condition that has effected millions of people through the ages, including me, appendicitis. Being such a common problem, appendicitis has, of course, had some historical impact. Today I’ll speak about only one of them, but due to its impact, it is one of the most significant.
Back in 1958 I was a teenager in the United States who had just completed high school and was looking forward to a pleasant summer holiday before starting university. It never occurred to me that I was about to undergo an appendicectomy. When the symptoms began I was certain I had appendicitis because a friend of mine had just had an appendicectomy operation as a result of the exact same symptoms.
I checked myself into a hospital near my home in Boston, Massachusetts, and was operated on by a young resident surgeon, a recent graduate of the Harvard Medical School. It was a routine procedure and within a week I was well and preparing for university. I never realized at the time that the hospital in which I was treated was the same one where Dr. Reginald Heber Fitz had worked in 1886. He was Professor of Anatomical Pathology at the nearby Harvard University. It was he who coined the term, ‘appendicitis’ and suggested that appendicectomy, the surgical removal of the appendix, would cure the problem.
Until that time the condition we know as appendicitis was unknown. It was treated as something else entirely and called ‘typhlitis’ or ‘perityphlitis’.
Three years later, in 1889, Dr. Charles McBurney at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York City was able to describe the symptoms and the anatomical points of tenderness that characterized appendicitis. Dr. Fitz had suggested a surgical method of fixing the problem that Dr. McBurney three years later would provide the diagnostic methods of identifying.
American surgeons quickly picked up on these developments and began diagnosing and treating the problem as Doctors Fitz and McBurney had prescribed. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, however, British surgeons were reluctant to adopt the ideas of McBurney and Fitz. In Victorian Britain the conservative approach to things was apparently the preferred way.
The reigning monarch exemplified the restrained, disciplined approach and set the tone for the British establishment, at least in outward appearance. Queen Victoria reigned for almost sixty-four years (1837-1901). Her reign is remembered with great nostalgia by Anglophiles. Victoria’s various titles included, among others, ‘Empress of India’. It was the apogee of the British Empire. At home the class system and domestic order were viewed as logical consequences of each other and even admired. Progress and domestic tranquility were accepted as the inevitable results. The Queen herself showed the way; she had nine children and an exemplary marriage! She overcame the grief of losing her beloved husband, Prince Albert, to typhoid in 1861, and carried on stoically and gloriously for her people and her empire.
Her eldest son and heir, Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, like the present Prince of Wales, had to be content to wait around for many years for his much admired mother to die before he could step in to the symbolic role for which he had been groomed. Unlike the example set by his mother, however, Edward was a bon vivant, a true hedonist who denied himself very few of life’s pleasures. With plenty of money to support his indulgences, he became well known for his hedonistic lifestyle. As a direct result of that lifestyle he also became extremely well insulated with fat. (Incidentally, you might note that the proper way for a gentleman to wear a waistcoat is with the bottom button undone. This was adopted as fashionable during the Victorian era since the rotund Prince of Wales always had his undone due to his overly generous paunch.)
Edward’s sexual appetites and excesses were well known, along with his propensity for large amounts of fine foods, wines and cigars. It was a normal practice for that Prince of Wales to spend part of every year at the therapeutic baths in Germany to rid himself of the excesses to which he subjected himself throughout the year. The present Prince isn’t known for that even if he does take equally long holidays somewhere or other.
Edward was a prime example of how not to live if one was interested in good health and long life. Perhaps he felt that his life was already too long waiting for his mother to depart and give him a chance to be King!?
Finally, in 1901, Victoria gave Edward his chance. She died. The fat old Prince (He was almost sixty-one years of age when Victoria died.) might have been happy to have his chance to be king, but his body wasn’t at all ready for whatever great tasks were at hand. The new King certainly didn’t appear to be ready for a long reign. So it wasn’t any great surprise to his doctors or to the public when, just before he was to be crowned in a glorious coronation ceremony, he came down with severe stomach pain.
The doctors at first assumed that the cause was directly related to the King’s dissolute lifestyle. Shortly thereafter, however, the King was seriously ill. This was no ordinary case of post-gluttonous tummy ache! The King’s doctor called in Lord Treves, a well-known and respected abdominal surgeon of the day. He was the same doctor who brought the so-called ‘Elephant Man’ to the attention of the medical communities of Britain and the world. (You might like to know that the ‘Elephant Man’ suffered from the neurological condition, Neurofibromatosis.)
Treves recommended immediate surgery. The King was not happy about postponing the coronation. After all, he’d waited sixty-one years for it! Treves is reported to have told him that if he attended the ceremony it would be as a corpse. So the King reluctantly agreed to have the procedure done. Wise move, ‘Bertie’ (That was his nickname). It allowed him to enjoy the royal perks for the last nine years of his life.
The story is told of Treves being so nervous when he was about to cut in to the rotund and bloated, royal belly that his hand shook uncontrollably. The first cut had to be done by an assistant. Lord Treves recovered his composure and carried on the operation to a successful conclusion. The King, of course, recovered and was duly crowned on the ninth of August, 1902.
The King’s successful surgery convinced the British medical establishment that the appendicectomy procedure should be more acceptable than it had been previously. No doubt the operation has saved countless lives, including my own some fifty-seven years after King Edward VII’s life was saved.
And now you know.
This is Bill ‘Mastermind’ Fitzgerald® signing off until next time.