Old Scrotum

A bit of a balls-up, but they’ve been stringing them along... A World Service interview that amused me, revealing that the medical condition of “cello scrotum” was a hoax all along, invented to counter another condition reported in the BMJ that the hoaxers felt sure was surely also a joke.
The bit that most amused me, however, was the incidental fact that the Musicians’ Union has been lobbying to have “cello scrotum” recognised as an “industrial injury” and that even cellists in the then-USSR claimed to suffer from it. Now that we can rest assured it is (a) fictitious and (b) impossible anyway, Jerome K Jerome’s belief that anyone reading a medical text-book will convince themselves they suffer from every ailment in it (save Housemaid’s Knee) survives the passage of time.