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The sixth in the Spring 2002 series of lunchtime semiars sponsored by the Francis C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine (College of Physicians of Philadelphia) and the Center for the Study of the History of Nursing (University of Pennsylvania). Edward C. Leonard, Jr., M.D., a psychiatrist at the Friends Hospital will present. Dr. Leonard has provided the following abstract of his paper:
Early 19th-century physicians applied cantharides (the crushed carapace of the Spanish fly) to raise skin blisters. Patients and doctors hoped that this local irritation would diminish the inflammation of internal organs thought to cause disease. When improvement in the symptoms of mental disorders occurred, it was attributed to reduction in inflammation of the brain or its blood
vessels. Thomas Kirkbride and Pliny Earle, resident physicians at Philadelphia’s Friends Hospital in two early 19th-century decades, often used blisters and other anti-inflammatory treatments. Their case notes from the 1830s and 1840s document a decline in mortality among patients blistered with cantharides. Mortality appears to have been associated with application of cantharides to the scalp. These cantharides cases are discussed in the context of 19th-century and
current medical knowledge.
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