Showing posts with the label Medicine

Antimony Pill: The Everlasting Pill

Feb 29, 2024

Antimony—the soft, lustrous gray metal—has many industrial uses such as in the preparation of flame-retarding compounds and in the manufactu...

Optography: Preserving a Dead Person’s Last Sight

Sep 15, 2023

In 1924, Germany was rocked by a sensational case of multiple homicide. Fritz Heinrich Angerstein, a resident of Limberg, Germany, had bruta...

The Tragedy of Ignaz Semmelweis: The Doctor Who Pioneered Hand-Washing

Jul 10, 2023

Nearly 150 years have passed since the groundbreaking contributions of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch helped lay the foundation of the germ t...

Martin van Butchell: The Dentist Who Put His Dead Wife on Display

May 25, 2023

Quackery in dentistry has existed as far back as the earliest days when sufferers from dental problems sought treatment at the hands of some...

Girolamo Segato’s Mysterious Petrified Mummies

May 9, 2023

For thousands of years, different cultures across continents have successfully preserved bodies of their ancestors. For the Egyptians, mummi...

The Case of The Exploding Teeth

Feb 21, 2023

In the January 1861 issue of The Dental Cosmos , the first major journal of American dentistry, a Pennsylvania dentist named WH Atkinson doc...

Serge Voronoff: The Doctor Who Transplanted Monkey Testicles Into Men to Rejuvenate Them

Jan 7, 2023

One of the most sensational presentations at the 1923 International Congress of Surgeons in London was made by the Russia-born French surgeo...

Painless Parker: The Showman Dentist

Jul 27, 2022

At the Temple University's dental museum in Philadelphia, there is a small section dedicated to one of the most notorious dentist of Ame...

The Two-Headed Boy of Bengal

Jun 29, 2022

In May 1783, in a small village named Mundul Gaut, in Bengal, India, a strange child was born. He had two heads. The midwife assisting the...

What is Galvanism, And How Did it Inspire Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?

Jun 16, 2022

On 18 January 1803, George Foster was hanged by the neck. The jury had found him guilty of murdering his wife and child by drowning them in ...

How a German Air Raid in Bari Helped Discover a Cure For Cancer

Apr 28, 2022

On December 2, 1943, the Germans launched a surprise attack on a key Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking more than 20 Allied merchant ships ...

Scribonius Longus, The Roman Physician Who Used Electricity as a Treatment

Mar 30, 2022

Scribonius Longus (Latin Scribonius Largus ) was a 1st century AD Roman physician who served at the court of Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD) an...

The Miraculous Survival of Phineas Gage

Mar 24, 2022

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Except in the case of Phineas Gage, who became a lot of things but strong after an accident that o...

Tarrare: The Man Who Ate Too Much

Mar 1, 2022

If gluttony is a sin, then perhaps the worst offender was a man named Tarrare who lived in 18th century France. He had such an insatiable ap...

21 Grams: The Weight of The Soul

Jan 3, 2022

What is a soul? Can it be touched? Does it have mass? These questions tormented Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts...

John Brinkley: The Doctor Who Transplanted Goat Testicles Into Humans

Nov 11, 2021

The morning of September 15, 1930, was undeniably warm in Kansas. That summer had been the hottest ever recorded in the state. The heat had ...

Typhoid Mary: The Most Infamous Typhoid Carrier Who Ever Lived

Sep 16, 2021

We have been hearing about “asymptomatic carrier” quite a lot in the past few months. It scares us to death that there are people carrying c...

Anatomical Theaters

Apr 16, 2021

Since ancient times, the primary way to teach and learn anatomy have been to dissect human cadavers. Generations of surgeons have learned an...

The Disease That Turns Muscles Into Bones

Mar 18, 2021

Behind a glass enclosure at the Mutter Museum of The College of Physicians in Philadelphia is a terrifying exhibit—two human skeletons. Thei...

Balmis Expedition: How Orphans Took The Smallpox Vaccine Around The World

Dec 29, 2020

The biggest hurdle to mass vaccination in the 19th century was keeping the virus alive out of the human body as the precious pus was being t...