The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth

Author: Thomas Morris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524743704
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
"Delightfully horrifying."--Popular Science This wryly humorous collection of stories about bizarre medical treatments and cases offers a unique portrait of a bygone era in all its jaw-dropping weirdness. A puzzling series of dental explosions beginning in the nineteenth century is just one of many strange tales that have long lain undiscovered in the pages of old medical journals. Award-winning medical historian Thomas Morris delivers one of the most remarkable, cringe-inducing collections of stories ever assembled. Witness Mysterious Illnesses (such as the Rhode Island woman who peed through her nose), Horrifying Operations (1781: A French soldier in India operates on his own bladder stone), Tall Tales (like the "amphibious infant" of Chicago, a baby that could apparently swim underwater for half an hour), Unfortunate Predicaments (such as that of the boy who honked like a goose after inhaling a bird's larynx), and a plethora of other marvels. Beyond a series of anecdotes, these painfully amusing stories reveal a great deal about the evolution of modern medicine. Some show the medical profession hopeless in the face of ailments that today would be quickly banished by modern drugs; but others are heartening tales of recovery against the odds, patients saved from death by the devotion or ingenuity of a conscientious doctor. However embarrassing the ailment or ludicrous the treatment, every case in The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth tells us something about the knowledge (and ignorance) of an earlier age, along with the sheer resilience of human life.

Dr Dredd and the Exploding Teeth

Author: James Lee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789814193269
Category : Horror tales
Languages : en
Pages : 125

Book Description
Turn off your lights, get ready for frights! When the clock strikes midnight and the moon's full and bright, it's time for dread and fear. For Mr. Midnight is here with two stories, double the danger and twice the terror! STORY ONE: The demon dentist is back in DR DREDD AND THE EXPLODING TEETH. Thirsting for revenge, he kidnaps Lee Yi Shuo to London for the most daring robbery ever! STORY TWO: Boey Rui Yu starts a club at school so his friends can write their twisted horror stories. But things get dangerous when fiction turns into fact and their stories become real-life nightmares in DEAD WRITE.

The Dublin Railway Murder

Author: Thomas Morris
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 147357837X
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
A thrilling and perplexing investigation of a true Victorian crime at Dublin railway station. Dublin, November 1856: George Little, the chief cashier of the Broadstone railway terminus, is found dead, lying in a pool of blood beneath his desk. He has been savagely beaten, his head almost severed; there is no sign of a murder weapon, and the office door is locked, apparently from the inside. Thousands of pounds in gold and silver are left untouched at the scene of the crime. Augustus Guy, Ireland's most experienced detective, teams up with Dublin's leading lawyer to investigate the murder. But the mystery defies all explanation, and two celebrated sleuths sent by Scotland Yard soon return to London, baffled. Five suspects are arrested then released, with every step of the salacious case followed by the press, clamouring for answers. But then a local woman comes forward, claiming to know the murderer... 'The Dublin Railway Murder is a true-crime masterclass' Philip Gray, author of Two Storm Wood

Strange Medicine

Author: Nathan Belofsky
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399159959
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Discover the astonishing and peculiar history of medicine with this perfect gift for history buffs, doctors, and anyone looking to be amazed by the brilliant and bizarre ideas that shaped the world of medicine as we know it. From the use of electric eels in ancient Egypt to medieval dentists burning candles to combat invisible worms, this book uncovers the weirdest medical practices throughout history, highlighting the most dubious ideas, strangest treatments, and biggest blunders. Entertaining, shocking, and sometimes stomach-turning, Strange Medicine presents strange but true facts and an honor roll of doctors, scientists, and dreamers who inadvertently turned the clock of medicine backward. Did you know: • Renaissance physicians timed surgical procedures according to the position of the stars? • Blood from beheadings was believed to cure epilepsy? • Dr. Walter Freeman, the world’s foremost practitioner of lobotomies, practiced his craft while traveling on family camping trips, hammering ice picks into the eye sockets of his patients in between hikes in the woods? Strange Medicine is an illuminating panorama of medical history as you’ve never seen it before.

Holy Sh*t

Author: Melissa Mohr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199742677
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
A humorous, trenchant and fascinating examination of how Western culture's taboo words have evolved over the millennia

Evolution Gone Wrong

Author: Alex Bezzerides
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 1488075859
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
“An unforgettable journey through this twisted miracle of evolution we call ‘our body.’” —Spike Carlsen, author of A Walk Around the Block From blurry vision to crooked teeth, ACLs that tear at alarming rates and spines that seem to spend a lifetime falling apart, it’s a curious thing that human beings have beaten the odds as a species. After all, we’re the only survivors on our branch of the tree of life. The flaws in our makeup raise more than a few questions, and this detailed foray into the many twists and turns of our ancestral past includes no shortage of curiosity and humor to find the answers. Why is it that human mothers have such a life-endangering experience giving birth? Why are there entire medical specialties for teeth and feet? And why is it that human babies can’t even hold their heads up, but horses are trotting around minutes after they’re born? In this funny, wide-ranging and often surprising book, biologist Alex Bezzerides tells us just where we inherited our adaptable, achy, brilliant bodies in the process of evolution.

The Knife Man

Author: Wendy Moore
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307419452
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
The vivid, often gruesome portrait of the 18th-century pioneering surgeon and father of modern medicine, John Hunter. When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his gothic horror story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he based the house of the genial doctor-turned-fiend on the home of John Hunter. The choice was understandable, for Hunter was both widely acclaimed and greatly feared. From humble origins, John Hunter rose to become the most famous anatomist and surgeon of the eighteenth century. In an age when operations were crude, extremely painful, and often fatal, he rejected medieval traditions to forge a revolution in surgery founded on pioneering scientific experiments. Using the knowledge he gained from countless human dissections, Hunter worked to improve medical care for both the poorest and the best-known figures of the era—including Sir Joshua Reynolds and the young Lord Byron. An insatiable student of all life-forms, Hunter was also an expert naturalist. He kept exotic creatures in his country menagerie and dissected the first animals brought back by Captain Cook from Australia. Ultimately his research led him to expound highly controversial views on the age of the earth, as well as equally heretical beliefs on the origins of life more than sixty years before Darwin published his famous theory. Although a central figure of the Enlightenment, Hunter’s tireless quest for human corpses immersed him deep in the sinister world of body snatching. He paid exorbitant sums for stolen cadavers and even plotted successfully to steal the body of Charles Byrne, famous in his day as the “Irish giant.” In The Knife Man, Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter’s murky and macabre world—a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine.

Gory Details

Author: Erika Engelhaupt
Publisher: National Geographic
ISBN: 1426220979
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
"Erika Engelhaupt, founding editor of National Geographic's Gory Details blog, explores oft-ignored but alluring facets of biology, anatomy, space exploration, nature, and more. Featuring reporting and interviews with leading researchers in the field, Gory Details illuminates the world's most intriguing real-world applications of science"--

A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Author: Mohammed Hanif
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0307373363
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Teasing, provocative, and very funny, Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel takes one of the subcontinent’s enduring mysteries and out if it spins a tale as rich and colourful as a beggar’s dream. Why did a Hercules C130, the world’s sturdiest plane, carrying Pakistan’s military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988? Was it because of: 1. Mechanical failure 2. Human error 3. The CIA’s impatience 4. A blind woman’s curse 5. Generals not happy with their pension plans 6. The mango season Or could it be your narrator, Ali Shigri? Here are the facts: • A military dictator reads the Quran every morning as if it was his daily horoscope. • Under Officer Ali Shigri carries a deadly message on the tip of his sword. • His friend Obaid answers all life’s questions with a splash of eau de cologne and a quote from Rilke. • A crow has crossed the Pakistani border illegally. As young Shigri moves from a mosque hall to his military barracks before ending up in a Mughal dungeon, there are questions that haunt him: What does it mean to betray someone and still love them? How many names does Allah really have? Who killed his father, Colonel Shigri? Who will kill his killers? And where the hell has Obaid disappeared to?

Don't Look, Don't Touch

Author: Valerie Curtis
Publisher: Academic
ISBN: 0199579482
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
"Every flu season, sneezing, coughing, and graphic throat-clearing become the day-to-day background noise in the workplace. And coworkers tend to move as far--and as quickly--away from the source of these bodily eruptions as possible. Instinctively, humans recoil from objects that they view as dirty and even struggle to overcome feelings of discomfort once the offending item has been cleaned. These reactions are universal, and although there are cultural and individual variations, by and large we are all disgusted by the same things. In Don't Look, Don't Touch, Don't Eat, Valerie Curtis builds a strong case for disgust as a 'shadow emotion'--less familiar than love or sadness, it nevertheless affects our everyday lives. In disgust, biological and sociocultural factors meet in dynamic ways to shape human and animal behavior. Curtis traces the evolutionary role of disgust in disease prevention and hygiene, but also shows that it is much more than a biological mechanism. Human social norms, from good manners to moral behavior, are deeply rooted in our sense of disgust. The disgust reaction informs both our political opinions and our darkest tendencies, such as misogyny and racism. Through a deeper understanding of disgust, Curtis argues, we can take this ubiquitous human emotion and direct it toward useful ends, from combating prejudice to reducing disease in the poorest parts of the world by raising standards of hygiene. Don't Look, Don't Touch, Don't Eat reveals disgust to be a vital part of what it means to be human and explores how this deep-seated response can be harnessed to improve the world."--Jacket.