Stutter's Casebook: A Junior Hospital Doctor, 1839-1841

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For most of his career W.G. Stutter (1815-77) was a respected general medical practitioner in the village of Wickhambrook, a small Suffolk backwater. As a younger man, however, he spent some time as House Apothecary and House Surgeon to the Suffolk General Hospital in Bury St Edmunds. Though just a record of a junior doctor in a small provincial hospital, this casebook is actually a surprisingly rare document of its kind and as such is a wonderful record of the medicine and medical profession of the period, in a place far removed from the great teaching hospitals. This is a time before X-rays, antibiotics, scanners and blood tests - in fact even the stethoscope was a relatively recent development. Stutter's casebook throws considerable light on the state of medicine in the early Victorian age and shows that while many of the treatments meted out by the medical profession seem illogical or sometimes even dangerous to modern eyes, they must have made perfect sense to the average doctor of the time.