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 Monkey Mutiny of 1890

Dear readers, I hope you'll forgive a lack of medically related anecdotes this week, in exchange for an absolute gem I found whilst perusing the Saturday 29th March, 1890 copy of the…

Medical History

Morphine With Friends

12 Aug 20203 Dec 2025

The companionship of humans has always been of great interest to me in my studies, yet I have never really had need of it. That said, there is something to be…

Pembroke's Remedies

Dr. Pembroke’s Remedies – Cure Baldness and Colds!

12 Aug 20203 Dec 2025

In all fairness, this installation of Remedies shouldn't be attributed to me at all, but moreso to the great and evangelical John Wesley, whose solutions to everyday maladies of the…

Pembroke's Remedies

Dr. Pembroke’s Remedies – Morphine and Babies!

12 Aug 202012 Aug 2020

It’s Halloween, and ’tis the time of year when we celebrate and immerse ourselves in the dark and diabolical, styling ourselves in the fabulous guises of demons and satanic forms,…

Medical History

True Love and Cannibalism on the High Seas

From Dr. Pembroke's Journal - 17th February 1872 Location: Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean Cannibalism; the eating of your own kind. Known technically as anthropophagy, human history is littered with examples of cannibalistic…

Medical History

Buried Alive – Three Times!

Onyxfeld, Early winter - 1878 The cloying dark The choking dirt The air too thin to breathe. When buried deep Below the soil There'll be no swift relief... -Dr Pembroke There…

Medical History

Leeches and Lightning – The Tempest Prognosticator

One of the most peculiar and fascinating devices of the nineteenth century was to be found at the Great Exhibition of Nations in Crystal Garden in 1851, a device that…

Medical History

The Tyburn Tree Gallows, Part 2

7 Feb 20203 Dec 2025

Hanging day was a riotous affair in the eighteenth century – convicted criminals and notorious ne'er do wells were held accountable for their vicious and heinous crimes (such as stealing…

Medical History

The Tyburn Tree Gallows, Part 1

3 Feb 20203 Dec 2025

The year is 1756, it’s a lovely warm autumn day… and it’s almost time for the hanging. In the center of the square, a giant mass of people cluster around…

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