General Shrapnel and the "unfortunate" Dr. H. J. Shrapnell.

Abstract

Several aspects of Shrapnell's career are still little known or erroneously typed. 1. Some historians of Medicine profess that Dr. Shrapnell was the inventor of a shell which bears his name. 2. Others neglect the negative points of Shrapnell's paper published in 1832 on the pars flaccida. To be able to comment on these different aspects of Shrapnell's life and work we compared the biographies of the anatomist and of the artillery officer. We noticed the positive and also the negative points of his paper. We conclude that: 1. Dr. Shrapnell was not an artillery officer, but the two men were present in the British Army; their surnames, their names and the period when they lived were about the same. 2. Errors in Shrapnell's paper were due to the philosophy and lack of anatomical and pathological knowledge of the time. 3. Otologists' reception was better than that of the Anatomists because for the Otologists, Shrapnell's membrane was recognized as an important original area of cholesteatoma, whereas for the Anatomists it was just a detail.