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This article focuses on the medical activities conducted by major hospitals in downtown Seoul during the April Revolution in 1960, examining their experiential context and significance. The influx of guns and bullets into Korean society following the liberation in 1945 intertwined with the political and social conflicts of the period, resulting in numerous assassinations, crimes, and terrorism. Gunshot wounds were traumas that became a part of the everyday life of Koreans, as well as scars which reflected their historical contexts. At the same time, the frequent occurrence of gunshot wounds led to the development of medical capacities to treat them. The Korean surgical academia expanded its technical foundation with experiences during and after the Korean War. This progress was particularly noticeable in areas closely related to gunshot wounds, such as craniotomy, thoracotomy, vascular anastomosis, debridement, anesthesia, and blood transfusion. Major hospitals in downtown Seoul served as medical spaces where these experimental and technical foundations were concentrated, allowing them to minimize the death toll despite the massive gunfire by the National Police in April 1960. Thus, the aftermath of the epidemic of gunshots resulted in a rather paradoxical outcome. This development became a resource for doctors and nurses, who added their revolutionary implications in reconstructing the experience of April 1960 in their various memoirs and reports. While memoirs reorganized general medical activities, portraying injured patients as participants in the revolution, reports provided forensic descriptions and interpretations of the deaths, giving authority to the main narrative of the revolution. As the interpretations and significance based on historical contexts gained prominence, major hospitals in downtown Seoul also developed a sense of place closely associated with the revolution.

In 1995, Dr Martin Dalton published a recounting of his involvement with the first human lung transplant in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. As recalled in that account, the first lung transplant took place in the summer of 1963 in the context of another historical event, the assassination of Medgar Evers. This article is written in follow-up to Dalton's report in hopes of providing more insight into the events surrounding the assassination. This review will discuss the details of the assassination, attempted resuscitation, and the medical evidence presented in the trial of his assassin., (Copyright © 2022 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Vincent van Gogh died on July 29, 1890, from an apparent gunshot wound to the belly sustained approximately 30 hours earlier on July 27. Although little is known how Vincent sustained his mortal wound, art historians have long believed that the death was the result of a suicide, a widely accepted "truth" for the mysterious death of the then unknown and now iconic artist. The basis and validity of this suicide narrative is still very hotly debated among van Gogh scholars to this day. We dug deeper into all the circumstantial evidence and testimonies to arrive at a comprehensive overview of the probability that it was likely impossible for Vincent to self-inflict his mortal wound.We used all the available circumstantial evidence related to the day Vincent van Gogh was wounded to present the information and conclusions as if we were before a judge as expert witnesses to answer the question: suicide or murder? If Vincent did not shoot himself in the belly (a red flag in and of itself), whoever inflicted that penetrating wound into his abdomen murdered him. In our study, results from firing the same model revolver that allegedly killed Vincent from various ranges (direct contact, intermediate, and distant) demonstrated within a reasonable degree of medical probability (greater than 50%) that it was not probable for Vincent van Gogh to shoot himself without a described powder burn.With little forensic evidence to rely on 130 years after the suspicious event, many have suggested a respectful exhumation and graveside autopsy utilizing 21 century techniques to bring resolve to this 19 century cold case. This crime, whether suicide or murder, has generated renewed interest and numerous questions surrounding the suspicious death of the most iconic artist of the 19th century. These missing forensic facts will remain buried with all the secrets Vincent took with him to his grave, unless a definitive autopsy is performed. What an autopsy could add to our forensic fact basis and understanding of this intriguing cold case is enormous and further delineated as the next step to answer these difficult, otherwise unanswerable questions and allow us to finally sign off on his death certificate with certainty.It is clearly impossible to definitively prove suicide or murder, but it is also impossible to disprove murder given the data and arguments offered in this analysis. A physician's opinion is based on the material available to him, and in this case, "our opinion as to the cause and manner of death is based on the limited amount of forensic information available. It is, therefore, our opinion, based on that limited information that in all medical probability, the cause of death is not a self-inflicted wound by Vincent van Gogh, and, thus, in all medical probability, a homicide."

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. John B. Connally, the Governor of Texas, simultaneously was injured in the shooting. Both Kennedy and Connally were transported to and cared for at the Parkland Memorial Hospital. Within 3 hours, the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested and taken to the Dallas City Jail in the Downtown Municipal Building. When the authorities were transferring Oswald from the City to the County Jail at midday on November 24, Jack Ruby shot him as the event was televised and broadcast live to the nation. Oswald was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital where he was operated on by the same surgeons who had attended Kennedy and Connally 2 days previously. This article reviews the operative treatment that Oswald received before discussing the state of abdominal vascular trauma in the 1960s.

Sir Martin Frobisher (ca 1535-1594), the famous Elizabethan explorer and privateer, sustained a bullet to the outer plate of his ilium from a low-velocity bullet wound fired at close range from an arquebus, an early form of musket. The bullet was removed, but he subsequently died from gas gangrene. This paper looks at the management of this injury in Tudor times and compares it to current practice. The arrival of gunpowder and the seriousness of the resulting injuries spurred innovation in surgical practice, such that at the time of Frobisher's death, the Tudor military surgeon had considerable expertise and skill. The wound, treated properly, was not serious, but his first surgeon failed to remove the wadding that the bullet took with it. This was recognised as an error at the time. A Tudor surgeon today would note that the surgical management has not really changed since their time, even though they did not understand infection and bacterial contamination. Guidelines on managing gunshot wounds, and most research, is focussed on high-velocity injuries where removal of foreign material (clothing) is mentioned. Low-velocity injuries are treated as "outpatients" and the importance of removing foreign material, especially when the bullet is left in situ, is not mentioned. The inexperienced surgeon of today risks making the same error as Frobisher's surgeon., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

As many have studied in the past, the real question of a presidential assassination failure or completion of the attempt should focus on the medical outlook, albeit sometimes surgical in nature. In this article, injuries sustained by various assassination attempts will be examined thoroughly to ensure they received the most appropriate medical care possible at that time and, then in turn, evaluate the medical outcomes in light of contemporary medical knowledge. The five presidents include Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Although the advent of Advanced Trauma Life Support has dramatically altered the care of the critically ill patient, it was rehabilitated in response to the orthopedic surgeon listed in the following paragraph.

Born in Norfolk, England, on September 29, 1758, Horatio Nelson was the sixth of eleven children in a working-class family. With the help of his uncle, Maurice Suckling, a captain in the Royal Navy, Nelson began his naval career as a 13-year-old midshipman on the British battleship Raisonnable. His courage and leadership in the battle marked him for promotion, and he rose quickly from midshipman to admiral, serving in the West Indies, East Indies, North America, Europe, and even the Arctic. As his rank ascended, Nelson's consistent strategy was close engagement, an approach that led to success in combat but placed him in direct danger. Thus, Britain's greatest warrior was also her most famous patient: Nelson suffered more injuries and underwent more operations than any other flag officer in Royal Navy history. His career reached a climax off Cape Trafalgar, where he not only led the Royal Navy to victory over the combined French and Spanish fleets but also met his own death.

Martin Luther King Jr was the most prominent civil rights leader in the United States in the 1960s. He was shot by an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. After the shooting he was taken to a local hospital where he had an unsuccessful resuscitation for a right subclavian artery transection. Despite the fact that the circumstances around the assassination have been frequently reported and reviewed in the past 50 years, the specific vascular care of the traumatic injury has not been analyzed. This paper reviews the medical aspects of the King assassination and the management of his subclavian injury., (Copyright © 2019 Society for Vascular Surgery. All rights reserved.)

President James A. Garfield suffered two gunshots on July 2, 1881, but did not die until 80 days later of complications from sepsis. He might have survived had his injuries not been contaminated, either by the gunshots themselves or the interventions that followed. "Yes, I shot the president," said Charles Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, "but his physicians killed him." The drama of Garfield's struggle to survive his injuries evoked enormous national interest, a harbinger of the medical dramas and documentaries of today. D. Willard Bliss, a former Civil War surgeon, and his handpicked consultants underwent daily scrutiny by the professional community and lay press. As the President died because of his injuries, the surgeons' reputations suffered. A primary criticism was the supposed lack of antiseptic interventions in Garfield's care, especially when probing the wound with unwashed hands. Inserting a finger into the wound, however, was a basic part of examination of a gunshot wound at the time. Many American surgeons had not accepted Listerian antisepsis at the time of the event, and aseptic techniques, such as scrupulous handwashing and surgical gloves, had not yet been developed. In the context of surgical practice of the era, his surgeons followed the standards of care of the time.

The past medical history (PMH) of Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) reflects one of the emblematic nicknames in Americana, "Old Hickory." As a 14-year-old Rebel volunteer in the Revolutionary War, he survived a blow from a British saber and smallpox that he contacted in a prison camp epidemic. In 1806, Jackson challenged a rival who had made the mistake of maligning his beloved wife Rachel. He deliberately allowed his opponent to shoot him in the chest, and then killed him when he took his turn. A gunshot shattered his arm in an 1813 street fight that involved Thomas Hart Benton, who later became his ally in the United States Senate during his presidency. His PMH would not include a duel in 1787, where both parties shot and somehow missed; an escape from a party of Indians in 1791; a shootout in 1796 with the future governor of Tennessee; and in 1833 and 1835, the first two assassination attempts on a United States President. Wracked from a lifetime of maladies and wounds, he sought relief through heavy doses of nostrums laced with heavy metals and self-phlebotomy. He likely hastened his own death. The PMH gives perspective on a patient's present condition. In Jackson's case, it reveals traits that allowed him to survive and thrive in a dangerous age. His belligerence, fiery temper, and intransigence were qualities that led to success in war against the British and the Native American tribes of the southern United States, and in a political career that climaxed as the seventh United States President.

Little is known regarding the time trend of mass shootings and associated risk factors. In the current study, we intended to explore the time trend and relevant risk factors for mass shootings in the U.S. We attempted to identify factors associated with incidence rates of mass shootings at the population level. We evaluated if state-level gun ownership rate, serious mental illness rate, poverty percentage, and gun law permissiveness could predict the state-level mass shooting rate, using the Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model. We also tested if the nationwide incidence rate of mass shootings increased over the past three decades using the non-homogenous Poisson regression model. We further examined if the frequency of online media coverage and online search interest levels correlated with the interval between two consecutive incidents. The results suggest an increasing trend of mass shooting incidences over time (p < 0.001). However, none of the state-level variables could predict the mass shooting rate. Interestingly, we have found inverse correlations between the interval between consecutive shootings and the frequency of on-line related reports as well as on-line search interests, respectively (p < 0.001). Therefore, our findings suggest that online media might correlate with the increasing incidence rate of mass shootings. Future research is warranted to continue monitoring if the incidence rates of mass shootings change with any population-level factors in order to inform us of possible prevention strategies., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

On the 21 st -22 nd of May1809 Napoleon Bonaparte saw his first major defeat on land at the Battle of Aspern, just north-east of Vienna. Of the 167,000 soldiers who fought for the French and Austrian armies, a total of 55,000 died on the battlefield. Salvage excavations prior to the construction of large urban development project (2008-2016) have revealed several burial sites related to the Battle of Aspern. The skeletal remains of 30 soldiers were excavated and underwent a detailed bioarchaeological study to elucidate both the impact of 19th-century military conditions on soldiers in life, as well as how they died on the battlefield. This paper presents the analysis of peri-mortem trauma observed in 21 of the 30 skeletons (70.0%) excavated from the battlefield of Aspern. Following standard criteria in forensic and palaeopathological trauma studies, this study revealed a predominance of ballistic trauma (20 cases in 17 individuals), while only nine individuals (eleven cases) displayed evidence of blunt force trauma. By contrast, no evidence of sharp force trauma was identified in the skeletal remains. These results are discussed within the historic context of the Napoleonic Wars to reconstruct causes of injury and circumstances of death., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: The demand for neurosurgical procedures increased drastically in the late 19th century owing to advances in ballistics during the American Civil War and Crimean War., Methods and Results: Surgical care for a gunshot wound to the spine relied on skilled identification and removal of the fractured bone. Hemorrhage control and infection prevention were also imperative for improving survival rates., Conclusions: Although new techniques were implemented, the mortality rate from spinal injuries during this period was staggering. Nevertheless, those 19th century procedural methods provided the basis for present-day treatment for spinal injury patients., (Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Ben Hall was a nineteenth-century Australian bushranger (outlaw) who was shot and killed by colonial police on May 5 1865. Popular belief is that Hall was shot while sleeping in his camp bedding. This contrasts with the official police version of Hall being shot while attempting to escape by running away. To evaluate this divergence of opinion a study of the gun belt allegedly worn by Hall at the time of his fatal shooting was undertaken. This revealed a nineteenth-century belt with a defect corresponding to an oblique bullet hole. The shelving was in keeping with the shooter being located to the rear and left of the decedent, in a position corresponding to police reports. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed the presence of lead, in addition to mercury, silver and sulfur, materials used as primers in nineteenth century ammunition. Thus, contemporary examination of the belt provides support for the police version of events.

A gunfight between police and a gang of men led by the self-styled "Captain Moonlite", a.k.a. George Scott, occurred on 16th November 1879 at a farmhouse near Wantabadgery Station in the colony of New South Wales. The skirmish resulted in the deaths of two bushrangers and one police officer. As a result, Captain Moonlite and Thomas Rogan were hung in Sydney's Darlinghurst Gaol on 20 January 1880 for the murder of Constable Edward Webb-Bowen. Culpability for firing the fatal shot, however, has remained a source of controversy. Information obtained from an analysis of historical records was used to guide an archeological excavation at the scene of the shooting in which Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) technology was employed to produce a digital (3D) terrain model of the siege location. Utilizing the terrain model, the relative positions of Moonlite, Webb-Bowen, and the other gang members were established with possible projectile trajectories plotted. This, in combination with inquest evidence from a gun maker and the medical practitioner who examined Constable Webb-Bowen's wound, indicates that the most likely shooter was Gus Warnicke, aged 15 years, the youngest member of the gang, who was also killed in the exchange of fire.

Rampage shootings is a relatively new term to describe a phenomenon that has a long history. Rampage shootings are mass shootings (generally defined as involving four or more victims), taking place in a public location, with victims chosen randomly or for symbolic purposes. These shootings are isolated events, meaning they are not connected to another criminal act (such as robbery or terrorism). Research suggests that rampage shootings are not a new phenomenon, but have occurred throughout the US since the early 1900s. There is some evidence of an increase in recent years, but definitional differences across studies and data sources make interpreting trends somewhat tenuous. Theories regarding the perpetration of rampage shootings center on masculinity, mental illness, and contagion effects. Policies aimed at preventing rampage shootings remain somewhat controversial and not well-tested in the literature., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

James Brady, the White House press secretary during President Ronald Reagan's first term in office, was 1 of 4 people (including the President) wounded during an attempted assassination attempt on President Reagan's life on March 30, 1981. John Hinckley, Jr. was found not guilty of this attempt by reason of insanity. The assassination attempt was a ploy by Hinckley, Jr. to impress the actress Jodie Foster. Brady was the most seriously injured of the 4 who were wounded. He suffered a gunshot wound to the left forehead that traveled through the left frontal lobe, corpus callosum, and then into the right frontal and temporal lobes. He initially required a bifrontal craniotomy for evacuation of a right frontotemporal intraparenchymal hemorrhage and debridement of tract. His postoperative course was complicated by seizures, cerebrospinal fluid leakage (necessitating multiple reparative procedures), aspiration pneumonia, and pulmonary emboli. Despite the severity of his injury and perioperative morbidities, Mr. Brady made good recovery. Although permanently left with residual weakness on the left side of his body, making a wheelchair necessary, Brady maintained cognitive and personality traits that were very close to his preinjury baseline. As a result, James Brady and his wife, Sarah, led a call to create legislative reform subsequently known as the "Brady Bill." This bill controversially made mandatory background checks for the purchase of firearms from licensed dealers. Our work aims to describe the assassination attempt, the neurosurgical injury and management of Mr. Brady's case, and the brief historical sequel that followed., (Copyright © 2017 by the Congress of Neurological Surgeons.)

The article reports on the exhumation and identification of unknown soldiers from the Second World War. With the help of medicolegal investigation and reconstruction methods an American pilot presumably murdered by a shot to the head (lynch law) and an interned Italian soldier could be identified after about 70 years and brought back home.

: On November 22, 1963, the Governor of Texas, John Connally, was injured during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Multiple authors have documented President Kennedy's injuries, the attempted resuscitation, and the controversies surrounding these events. However, the injuries sustained by Governor Connally have been overlooked by historians predominantly because of the extraordinary importance of the presidential assassination and its impact on the national consciousness. This review discusses the governor's political life, the mechanism of injury, his medical care, and the role the injuries had on his subsequent public life.

The increasing prevalence and gloomy socioeconomic consequence of spine injury remain a concern in modern medicine. In this article, we highlight the infamous gunshot spinal injuries of a few eminent personalities across multiple centuries and their sociopolitical impact in context with the evolution of modern medicine. The role of available medicine in these victims was not more than a mere watcher, thus substantiating an infamous quote from ancient literature that describes spine injury as "an ailment not to be treated.", (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

As his fellow soldiers ran past him, Joseph Warren stood bravely on Bunker Hill. It was June 17, 1775, and British troops were fighting the colonists in one of the early battles of the American Revolution. The British had already attempted two major assaults that day, and the third would end with Warren's death. He was a medical doctor, public figure, and general who spent his life and last living moments fighting for freedom for the American colonists. After the battle, there was much confusion about what had happened to Joseph Warren. Some thought he had survived the battle; other accounts differed on how exactly he had died. The details of the events on Bunker Hill remained a mystery until the following year, when Paul Revere helped identify Warren's body by the false teeth that had been implanted years earlier. Warren's remains showed that his head had been struck by a bullet. Analysis of the skull helped to sift through the differing tales of Warren's death and thus unveil the truth about what occurred that day. The smaller bullet wound in the left maxilla suggests that he was not shot while retreating with the rest of the soldiers. The larger exit wound in the right occiput illustrates that the bullet's trajectory crossed the midline of the brain and most likely injured the brainstem. Therefore, contrary to rumors that circulated at the time, Joseph Warren most likely was killed instantly at the Battle of Bunker Hill while heroically facing his enemy.

In the spring of 1944, Kurt von Gottberg, the SS police chief in Minsk, was shot and injured by 2 Soviet agents. Although he was only slightly injured, he died 6 hours later. The bullets were hollow and contained a crystalline white powder. They were 4-g bullets, semi-jacketed in cupronickel, containing 28 mg of aconitine. They were later known as akonitinnitratgeschosse. The Sipo (the Nazi security police) then ordered a trial with a 9-mm Parabellum cartridge containing Ditran, an anticholinergic drug with hallucinogenic properties causing intense mental confusion. In later years, QNB was used and given the NATO code BZ (3-quinuclidinyl-benzylate). It was proven that Saddam Hussein had this weapon (agent 15) manufactured and used it against the Kurds. Serbian forces used the same type of weapon in the Bosnian conflict, particularly in Srebrenica.The authors go on to list the Cold War toxic weapons developed by the KGB and the Warsaw pact countries for the discreet elimination of dissidents and proindependence leaders who had taken refuge in the West. These weapons include PSZh-13 launchers, the Troika electronic sequential pistol, and the ingenious 4-S110T captive piston system designed by the engineer Stechkin. Disguised as a cigarette case, it could fire a silent charge of potassium cyanide. This rogues gallery also includes the umbrella rigged to inject a pellet of ricin (or another phytalbumin of similar toxicity, such as abrin or crotin) that was used to assassinate the Bulgarian writer and journalist Georgi Markov on September 7, 1978, in London.During the autopsy, the discovery of a bullet burst into 4 or 5 parts has to make at once suspecting the use of a toxic substance. Toxicological analysis has to look for first and foremost aconitine, cyanide, suxamethonium, Ditran, BZ, or one of the toxic phytalbumins. The use of such complex weapons has to make suspect a powerful organization: army, secret service, terrorism. The existence of the Russian UDAR spray gun in the present day, however, shows that these weapons are still present. The possibility that one might be used to spray a charge of cyanide is still very real, especially as it would not be very difficult for an informed amateur to produce homemade toxic ammunition by adapting existing civil or military cartridges.

When Britain went to war in 1914, the British Expeditionary Force was deployed without a single dentist. Initially considered combatants, the only dental professionals who could serve at the Front were medically qualified dental surgeons in the Royal Army Medical Corps. In treating the traumatic facial and jaw injuries caused by trench warfare, the dental surgeons of this era earned their place on specialist surgical teams and established the principles of oral and maxillofacial surgery. This article will examine the contribution of specialist dental surgeons to the management of facial and jaw wounds in the First World War along the chain of evacuation from the battlefield to the home front, using illustrative examples from the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

Medical care provided to P.I. Bagration wounded in the battle of Borodino is described on the day-to-day basis.

In the fall of 1922, the Freud family was involved in a criminal case: The son of Mathilde Freud's nursing sister, Ernst Haberl, had shot at his father. With the help of August Aichhorn the Viennese Juvenile Court's social assistance department was engaged on behalf of the young man. Freud commissioned the lawyer Valentin Teirich to defend him in court. The Viennese dailies reported the deed and the trial extensively (Haberl was acquitted). That a comment published in the Neue Freie Presse was written by Freud himself, as Teirich believed, is, according to Anna Freud, highly improbable.

Mutism of cerebellar origin is a well-described clinical entity that complicates operations for posterior fossa tumors, especially in children. This review focuses on the current understanding of principal pathophysiological aspects and risk factors, epidemiology, clinical characteristics, treatment strategies, and outcome considerations. The PubMed database was searched using the term cerebellar mutism and relevant definitions to identify publications in the English-language literature. Pertinent publications were selected from the reference lists of the previously identified articles. Over the last few years an increasing number of prospective studies and reviews have provided valuable information regarding the cerebellar mutism syndrome. Importantly, the clarification of principal terminology that surrounds the wide clinical spectrum of the syndrome results in more focused research and more effective identification of this entity. In children who undergo surgery for medulloblastoma the incidence of cerebellar mutism syndrome was reported to be 24%, and significant risk factors so far are brainstem involvement and midline location of the tumor. The dentate-thalamo-cortical tracts and lesions that affect their integrity are considered significant pathophysiological issues, especially the tract that originates in the right cerebellar hemisphere. Moderate and severe forms of the cerebellar mutism syndrome are the most frequent types during the initial presentation, and the overall neurocognitive outcome is not as favorable as thought in the earlier publications. Advanced neuroimaging techniques could contribute to identification of high-risk patients preoperatively and allow for more effective surgical planning that should focus on maximal tumor resection with minimal risk to important neural structures. Properly designed multicenter trials are needed to provide stronger evidence regarding effective prevention of cerebellar mutism and the best therapeutic approaches for such patients with a combination of pharmacological agents and multidisciplinary speech and behavior augmentation.

Doubt continues to surround the assassination of President Kennedy to this day. Unfortunately, the controversy was not diminished by the multiple commissions and panels that were convened to investigate it. This was in large part because these various panels continued to propagate much of the confusion and lack of precision that plagued the initial medical reports, and introduced some new confusion of their own. Much of this controversy was driven by incomplete information, poor documentation and analysis, and the puzzling decision to withhold key medical evidence both from investigators and the public. However, the preponderance of evidence does show that the single-shooter, three-bullet theory is plausible both medically and scientifically.

The hero of Italian Unification, Guiseppe Garibaldi, sustained a bullet wound to the ankle that caused an international sensation at the time as various surgeons from Italy, France, Russia and Great Britain vied to manage the injury. In particular the question was whether the bullet was still present. Eventually Nélaton from France won the race by the use of a porcelain-tipped probe which stained with the presence of lead. The actual extraction of the bullet was with the use of an expandable tent. It seems probable that Dr. James Marion Sims, the well-known American gynaecologist, supplied tents of the seaweed Laminaria digitata through Nélaton, to open up the wound and allow easy extraction of the bullet. Thus an unknown gynaecological connection seems to be part of an historical cause célèbre., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)