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.

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth

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

Strange Medicine

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

Book Description
Strange Medicine casts a gimlet eye on the practice of medicine through the ages that highlights the most dubious ideas, bizarre treatments, and biggest blunders. From bad science and oafish behavior to stomach-turning procedures that hurt more than helped, Strange Medicine presents strange but true facts and an honor roll of doctors, scientists, and dreamers who inadvertently turned the clock of medicine backward: • The ancient Egyptians applied electric eels to cure gout. • Medieval dentists burned candles in patients’ mouths to kill invisible worms gnawing at their teeth. • Renaissance physicians timed surgical procedures according to the position of the stars, and instructed epileptics to collect fresh blood from the newly beheaded. • Dr. Walter Freeman, the world’s foremost practitioner of lobotomies, practiced his craft while traveling on family camping trips, cramming the back of the station wagon with kids—and surgical tools—then 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.

Sound and Light

Author: David Glover
Publisher: Kingfisher
ISBN: 9781856979351
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
Uses activities and experiments to introduce the properties of light and sound.

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.

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.

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

Quackery

Author: Lydia Kang
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
ISBN: 1523501855
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
What won’t we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted as immortality in a glass. And when strychnine—yes, that strychnine, the one used in rat poison—was dosed like Viagra. Looking back with fascination, horror, and not a little dash of dark, knowing humor, Quackery recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices. Ranging from the merely weird to the outright dangerous, here are dozens of outlandish, morbidly hilarious “treatments”—conceived by doctors and scientists, by spiritualists and snake oil salesmen (yes, they literally tried to sell snake oil)—that were predicated on a range of cluelessness, trial and error, and straight-up scams. With vintage illustrations, photographs, and advertisements throughout, Quackery seamlessly combines macabre humor with science and storytelling to reveal an important and disturbing side of the ever-evolving field of 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"--

Poisoner in Chief

Author: Stephen Kinzer
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250140447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
The bestselling author of All the Shah’s Men and The Brothers tells the astonishing story of the man who oversaw the CIA’s secret drug and mind-control experiments of the 1950s and ’60s. The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer—the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace—including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture. For years he was the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world. Stephen Kinzer, author of groundbreaking books about U.S. clandestine operations, draws on new documentary research and original interviews to bring to life one of the most powerful unknown Americans of the twentieth century. Gottlieb’s reckless experiments on “expendable” human subjects destroyed many lives, yet he considered himself deeply spiritual. He lived in a remote cabin without running water, meditated, and rose before dawn to milk his goats. During his twenty-two years at the CIA, Gottlieb worked in the deepest secrecy. Only since his death has it become possible to piece together his astonishing career at the intersection of extreme science and covert action. Poisoner in Chief reveals him as a clandestine conjurer on an epic scale.