The Man with an Elephant’s Nose

His physician, at this point, artfully and carefully, ‘conveighed a long pudding’ onto the nose of the desperate man, and then with a Barber’s razor ‘finely cut away’ the offending pudding nose while his patient was drowsy from a sleeping draft. Instead of assuming the man was possessed by a malevolent spirit or demon (a possible diagnosis at this time),[ii] that he was a ‘lunatic’ and beyond treatment, or dismissing his delusion to his face, the sixteenth-century physician in the story entered into the world of the ‘phantasie’ to try and help his patient’s obvious distress. Her PhD study, The Aged Patient in Early Modern England, investigates medical understandings and treatments of disease in old age, and explores the personal experiences and feelings of older patients, and those that cared for them, in England, c.1570-1730.

Source: earlymodernmedicine.com