Featured articles

Scour Dr. Pembroke’s journals and essays for more true tales of the brutal, depraved and twisted examples of medical history…

18Aug 20203 Dec 2025

Eyes and Needles – Part 2

(If you’d like to catch up, ‘Medicine Macabre – Eyes and Needles – Part 1’ can be found here) Alas. If the readership…

Eyes and Needles – Part 1

Let me pose a question: how much do you value the sight of your loved ones? How much stock do you place…

The General’s Leg

The American Civil War, like any conflict, produced a cast of both famous and infamous characters and personalities throughout its brutal…

Testimonials

“Never before have I witnessed a more ghastly aberration of medical science than what I experienced here today… with such flagrant disregard for protocol, safety or even basic standards of cleanliness… it is unknown if upon his slab a single life has been saved within this travesty he calls a practice… This doctor, if he can even be provided this title, is a brutal figure of barbarism and grotesque morbidity, the likes of which I have never seen in all my years of surgical enterprise…. He should be run from the establishment with all haste and prosecuted to the full extent of the law…”

-Sir Astley Cooper, 1832

“Do not book for children’s parties…”

-Anon

“Anyone who wishes to trephine, should they themselves be trephined in turn… why therefore Dr. Pembroke felt it important to drill three times in a row on a perfectly healthy patient is simply beyond me…”

Medical History

The Music of Surgery

Who can choose when or where the Muses descend and sow their creative seeds, and significantly, who can decide what form that creativity takes? For example: to some, my work is…

Medical History

Torment and Teeth

17 Aug 20203 Dec 2025

There's no sound you enjoy more, I know, than the resounding crack as a tooth puller, expert or otherwise, yanks free a partially decayed tooth from your sweet mouth. Now consider such a procedure sans those delightful…

Pembroke's Remedies

Dr. Pembroke’s Remedies – Beer Medicine!

17 Aug 20203 Dec 2025

Ladies and Gentlemen! Do you need an excuse to drink? Do you suffer from all manner of ailments, imaginary or otherwise? Do your children complain too much? Of course, all…

Medical History

The Manchester Mummy

17 Aug 20203 Dec 2025

One of my favorite topics to explore is the terrifying phenomenon of being buried alive (also delightfully known as vivisepulture). It remains one of our supreme dreads, and while for some premature…

Medical History

The Utica Crib

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe It has often been…

Medical History

The Man With A Hole In His Stomach

16 Aug 202017 Aug 2020

Major discoveries in medicine can occur for different reasons. Some, the result of slow, careful work; aggregate studies and experiments done over time with methodical precision. Some advances however are made…

Medical History

Genius & Insanity

Genius can often come at the cost of deep rooted psychological disorders, and one such man, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), prophet of both theological revelation and neurological study, is such an example.…

Medical History

Empire Of The Dead

13 Aug 202013 Aug 2020

What do you do when you have millions of bodies, some only partially decomposed, overflowing in a space no bigger than a few city blocks? The answer lies beneath the streets…

Medical History

Two Million Corpses

I often hear about young people who enjoy taking romantic sojourns to a nearby cemetery, proving the eternal and inextricable bond between fervent sexual ardor and the grim inevitability of death.…

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