Honest Truth

Award-winning author Thomas Morris, former producer of Radio 4’s In Our Time, tells Sally Mcdonald the Honest Truth about how he stumbled on some of the most wince-inducing and hilarious anecdotes from medical history and why he decided to write about them How did your book come about?

A couple of years ago I was sitting in a library reading a rather tedious article in a 19th Century medical journal. My eye strayed on to the opposite page and I found myself reading a story about a man who had been run over by a cart laden with bricks.

I won’t go into the details, but it was simultaneously horrifying, hilarious and absolutely fascinating; and even though this happened in 1826, when emergency medicine was rudimentary, he made a full recovery. I soon discovered that early medical publications were full of similarly compelling and bizarre anecdotes just waiting to be found.

From where did you unearth these weird stories?

At first I just stumbled across them by accident, read them for my own amusement and then forgot about them. But after a while I realised they were too good to waste, so I started deliberately looking for them and publishing them on my blog.

Where was the research conducted and how long did it take?

Anywhere with an internet connection! Most of these old journals and books have now been digitised and are available online, so you can waste an entire