This is not new, but I just happened to run across it and I am morbidly amused by it. From Retraction Watch:
We have a new record for the longest time from publication to retraction: 80 years. It’s for a case report about a 24-year-old man who died after coughing up more than four cups of what apparently looked — and smelled — like pee.
According to the case report titled “Een geval van uroptoë” published in 1923, an autopsy revealed that the man had a kidney that was strangely located in his chest cavity. A case of pneumonia caused the kidney to leak urine into the space around his lungs, leading to the perplexing cough.
If that sounds too crazy to be true, you’re right: This man never existed. The case was retracted in 2003. (Yes, we are a little late to this one — it recently popped up in one of our Google alerts.)
In case you thought those pictures of grave men in old fashioned clothing showed they took their lives seriously, here’s the editors of the journal publishing part of the letter admitting to, not fraud, but hoax:
The editors found the definitive answer about the truth of the case in the autobiography of someone named Prof. Dr. A. Querido (1901-1983), emeritus professor of social medicine at the University of Amsterdam, who was a medical student in 1923. He and some of the students had some down time after they had finished studying for an exam, and so turned to hypothetical medical conditions:
Taking it easy at the start, but growing more enthusiastic as time went on, we started to make up diseases and forms of illnesses: “If one was suffering from this disease, what would be the symptoms?”
“If kidney growth (Mesonephros) continued to exist due to an embryological error”, said one of them, “you would see a working kidney across the spine, into the thorax.”
“Indeed”, said another, “that side would then have to lack a testis, because the mesonephros forms the efferent ductules of the testis.”
“That’s right”, said a third, “and if that half-man suffers from a lung infection, the infection spread into the primitive renal pelvis, resulting in the patient suffering from…”
“Piss cough.”
The students decided to try to get this made-up case published: …
Troublemakers!
