Medicine's Strangest Cases: The Man Who Kept Getting Pregnant and Other Weird True Stories

From the man who kept getting pregnant to the surgeon who could amputate a leg in under three minutes, a new book looks at some of the most bizarre yet true cases in medical history.




A man who kept getting pregnant is one of the most bizarre cases in medical history

Perplexing pregnancy

In the summer of 1981 William Bennett, of Sheerness, Kent, discovered that he was pregnant. At the age of 79 he found it tiresome but this was his 30th pregnancy and he had learnt to put up with it.

Whenever one of his four daughters became pregnant his belly began to swell and it remained swollen until his grandchild was delivered. Bizarrely it never happened when his wife was pregnant but he never missed out on any of his many grandchildren.

Mr Bennett’s GP, Dr Fitzgerald, said that when three of William’s daughters were pregnant at the same time, his waist measurement increased by more than 30 inches. Phantom pregnancy in men is a recognised but rare medical condition.

It usually occurs in expectant fathers rather than grandfathers and the symptoms are rarely as consistent or indeed as dramatic as Mr Bennett’s. Medical textbooks call the condition “couvade” but that is just a label and misleading.

The word was coined by 19th-century anthropologists to describe the custom in primitive communities of fathers imitating the mother’s condition during childbirth.

Mr Bennett’s strange condition occurred during pregnancy not childbirth. The psychological link is pretty obvious but no one has yet unravelled what was actually going on in his stomach to cause the swelling.





Robert Liston was known as the surgeon who could amputate a leg in under three minutes

A peculiar operation

In the 1840s before the arrival of anaesthetics patients, heavily dosed with rum or opium, had to be held down or strapped to the operating table. So the most useful – and most admired – of a surgeon’s skills was his speed.

London’s outstanding speedster was Robert Liston, whose dramatic operating sessions attracted packed galleries of students and their friends. One of his spectators described how Liston, to increase his speed, would free both hands “by clasping the bloody knife between his teeth”.

Liston’s standard performance was to remove a man’s leg in two-and-a-half minutes. Antiseptics didn’t exist and the surgeon, an impressive six foot two in height, would stride across the gory floor of the operating theatre wearing wellington boots and a bloodstained operating coat.

As he strode, he would call to the students who stood in the galleries, pocket-watches in hand: “Time me, gentlemen, time me.” In the operation that won him his place in medical folklore his knife moved so swiftly that he amputated not only the patient’s leg but the fingers of his assistant.

He also slashed through the coat tails of a distinguished surgical spectator who, “terrified that the knife had pierced his vitals”, dropped dead from fright.

Sadly both the patient and Liston’s assistant died later from surgical gangrene, a common result of surgery at that time. So Liston holds the strange distinction of performing the only operation in surgical history that had a 300 per cent mortality.



In the 1950s an elderly lady vanished from her hospital bed

An odd encounter

In the early hours of one morning in the 1950s a nurse at St Luke’s Hospital in Bradford came down from the wards to the casualty department. She was in a panic because a confused elderly lady had vanished from her bed and was nowhere to be found.

One of the casualty medics, a recently qualified doctor, offered to help. He retrieved his old banger from the car park and he and a colleague set off to search the neighbourhood.

Within minutes he spotted his quarry wandering along the pavement in her nightdress. Though she was highly confused he managed to get her into the back seat and returned to the hospital where he left her locked in the car while he went to look for the nurse.

As he re-entered the hospital the nurse rushed up to him, thanked him for his kindness and explained there was no need to panic because they had found the missing woman on another ward. The young doctor and his fellow casualty officer were now in a fix.

The elderly woman was confused and carried no form of identity. Yet they had only a couple of beds for emergencies and were under strict instructions not to admit nonurgent cases.

After much ringing around they found the woman a bed in a Salvation Army hostel. The following morning the leader of Bradford City Council rang St Luke’s demanding the names of the doctors who had abducted his aunt when she had wandered out for a breath of fresh air.






In the 19th century it was decreed that women should ride a bicycle side saddle

Weird warnings

There have always been doctors whose instinctive reaction to people who are obviously having fun is to look for the dangers. In 1895 when cycling became fashionable and offered women an acceptable form of healthy exercise, an earnest doctor warned readers of the British Medical Journal that the new fad could damage a woman’s pelvis.

He suggested that bicyclists should follow the example of horsewomen and ride the new fangled machine side-saddle. He failed to mention how they might manage the pedals.

Dr Killjoy is still with us and modern hazards revealed in medical journals include breakdancer’s neck, jogger’s nipple, crab-eater’s lung, swim-goggle headache, dog walker’s elbow, Space Invaders’ wrist, unicyclist’s Sciatica, jeans folliculitis, jogger’s kidney, wellie thrower’s finger and urban cowboy’s rhabdomyolosis – painful leg muscles caused by riding mechanical bucking broncos in amusement arcades.

Articles on the hazards of jogging appear more often than those on its benefits. The award for the strangest must go to three Swiss physicians who warned British joggers visiting the country of attacks by the European buzzard.

Apparently during the breeding season it attacks joggers from behind, diving at their “fleshy moving parts”. An irreverent Merseyside GP on reading this advice suggested it would be healthier for jogging Brits to stay at home and suffer traditional but less painful bombings from British seagulls.



For most of the 20th century GPs did their own night calls

Curious adventures after dark

For most of the 20th century GPs did their own night calls and in 1994 the medical newspaper Pulse ran a competition in which GPs nominated their strangest call-outs. One of the winners was a doctor who had been called at 1am by a woman who was suffering an asthma attack and had no inhaler.

The GP visited her home, supplied an inhaler, and waited until the attack was over. Then, as she saw him to the door and thanked him, she explained: “My own inhaler is in my daughter’s bedroom and I didn’t want to wake her.”

The strangest and most imaginative response to a night call must be that of “Dr Jim”, who practised in a Yorkshire village between the wars. In 1938 he told a BMA meeting in Doncaster how the month before, his bedside telephone rang at 3am just as he was settling back in his bed after two hours spent delivering a baby.

“Sorry to bother you, doctor”, said a voice, “but I can’t sleep. Is there anything you can do for me?” “Keep the phone to your ear,” said Dr Jim, “and I’ll sing you a lullaby.”

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