Due to social convention, 19th-century doctors, who were considered gentlemen, were not exempt from the bloody and sometimes fatal practice of the gentlemen’s duel. Society pressured them to entertain an attack on their honour with a duel, even though it went against their oath to heal, lest they be cast out of high society. Some doctors, like Peter Hennis, reconciled these duelling ideologies by deliberately missing or refusing to pull the trigger; in a cruel twist of fate, Hennis eventually died from injuries induced in a duel. Read full article here
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