On 20th January 1894, a Blantyre boy made the news owing to a particular emergency surgery.
The boy named Robert Paterson, residing at High Blantyre was playing amongst his mother’s things, when he accidentally swallowed a hairpin. It got stuck in his throat, a frightening experience not just for him, but his alarmed family too!
He was taken to the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow and placed under chloroform to make him unconscious. He was then operated on with incision on his throat and the pin carefully removed. The newspaper report ends there, but I can’t help but feel this being 1894, the surgery probably had a lasting effect on this boy, perhaps making it painful to eat or drink. Not to mention what it did to his voice in later years. Still, it could have been much worse had it ended up in his digestive system.
A minor incidental snippet, but included here for becoming such a talking point around Blantyre at the time.
