Health
Discover facts about health. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Health
The man who turned a corpse into his bride
Dr. Carl Tanzler took 'till death do us part' entirely too literally. Obsessed with a young tuberculosis patient, he dug up her corpse, wired her decaying…
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A penguin study was written in Greek to hide its findings
George Murray Levick went to Antarctica in 1910 and witnessed Adélie penguins engaging in necrophilia, gang dynamics, and general hooliganism. He was so…
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The doctor who removed teeth to treat mental illness
In the 1920s, Dr. Henry Cotton convinced the psychiatric world that insanity was merely a side effect of hidden bacterial infections. His brilliant, deeply…
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An FDA reviewer blocked Thalidomide from the US market
While European doctors were handing out Thalidomide like candy, one incredibly persistent FDA reviewer refused to rubber-stamp the paperwork. Dr. Frances…
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How the Ice Bucket Challenge helped find a gene
For once, a wildly annoying internet trend actually achieved something monumental. The 2014 ALS Ice Bucket Challenge looked like peak social media narcissism,…
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Why some people sleep for weeks at a time
Imagine the moody, exhausted teenager stereotype dialed up to pathological levels. Kleine-Levin syndrome is an incredibly rare neurological disorder where…
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The artificial heart that needed a 400-pound compressor
The Jarvik-7 was pitched as a futuristic, life-saving cyborg heart, but the reality was closer to a steampunk torture device. Implanted permanently in 1982…
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The doctor who mapped the brain with awake patients
To figure out exactly which fold of grey matter controls your left thumb, Dr. Wilder Penfield took a terrifyingly direct approach: electrocuting the exposed…
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The TB vaccine that killed 72 German babies
The BCG vaccine is supposed to protect infants from tuberculosis, but in 1930s Germany, it did the exact opposite. Laboratory workers in Lübeck managed to…
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The fake doctor who implanted goat testicles
In the 1920s, John R. Brinkley built a massive empire convincing desperate, aging men that he could restore their lost virility. His groundbreaking medical…
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The study that withheld a cure from its patients
Modern medicine has some seriously blood-soaked skeletons in its closet. In the Tuskegee syphilis study, the US government explicitly lied to hundreds of…
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The epidemic that left people trapped in their bodies
Imagine waking up but remaining entirely frozen in your own body for decades. Constantin von Economo isolated the cause of the terrifying 1920s encephalitis…
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The dangerous cancer treatment that used coffee enemas
For those who think drinking a morning latte isn't quite invasive enough, Max Gerson pioneered the absolute nadir of alternative medicine. In a desperate and…
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The camera pill that photographs your intestines
For everyone rightfully traumatized by the idea of a giant tube snaking through their digestive tract, the invention of the capsule endoscope was a godsend.…
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When doctors hammered an ice pick through the eye
Psychiatry used to be a wildly barbaric guessing game, peaking with the invention of the leukotome. This terrifying little instrument was designed to be…
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The medical student who discovered heparin by accident
You can thank a sleep-deprived second-year medical student for the fact that your blood doesn't instantly clot into a solid brick during open-heart surgery.…
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Saline baths helped WWII pilots recover from severe burns
When British fighter pilots crashed and burned during WWII, Archibald McIndoe boldly ignored the agonizing standard burn treatments of the era that simply…
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The doctor who injected sheep thyroid into patients
Before Big Pharma had a pill for absolutely everything, George Redmayne Murray decided the best way to treat hypothyroidism was to juice a sheep’s thyroid and…
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The metal machine that breathed for polio patients
Welcome to the 1920s, where surviving a viral infection meant getting shoved into a claustrophobic metal coffin that breathed for you. The Drinker respirator,…
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When a stethoscope could deafen the doctor
Pushing boundaries in clinical acoustics usually means someone gets hurt, and early electronic auscultation was absolutely no exception. The stethophone was a…
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The mystery of the colored fibers people find on their skin
Morgellons disease is a modern medical mystery that perfectly bridges the gap between dermatology and internet-fueled paranoia. Patients genuinely suffer from…
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Why gummy vitamins may leave out key nutrients
Those delicious little gummy bears claiming to boost your daily stats are largely useless. In order to make them survive being squeezed into sugary gelatin,…
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The lobotomy's inventor won a Nobel Prize
The inventor of the lobotomy was awarded a remarkably high global honor for his brutal technique. Doctors would randomly sever frontal lobe connections with…
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What refined sugar sets off inside your body
Refined sugar tastes magnificent for precisely three seconds before unleashing pure metabolic havoc. We willingly trade long-term organ health for a tiny…
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