pplpod

Mad as a hatter has a grim source: erethism, a neurological disorder caused by chronic mercury exposure in the felt hat trade. Hatters brushed animal fur with orange mercuric nitrate, a process called carroting, then shaped and shrank it over boiling vats in steamy, poorly ventilated rooms that released mercury vapor. Inhaled, the vapor slips past the blood-brain barrier. Victims grew pathological...

Henry Heimlich was born in 1920 in Wilmington, Delaware, led the Cornell marching band as drum major and earned his medical degree at 23. Sent by the US Navy to the Gobi Desert in World War II, he treated a trachoma epidemic by grinding sulfadiazine powder into shaving cream so it would stay on patients' eyelids. In 1962 he developed the chest drainage flutter valve, patented in 1969, a rubber sle...

John Hunter's house on Leicester Square had two faces: aristocrats came through the front door to consult him, while body snatchers delivered corpses through the back, a setup said to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Born in Scotland in 1728, the youngest of 10, Hunter dropped out of school and worked as a cabinet maker before joining his brother William's London ana...

In the 18th and 19th centuries, fear of premature burial, known as taphophobia, gripped Europe and America. Cholera epidemics pushed authorities to bury victims within hours, blurring the line between deep coma and death in an era before reliable tools to confirm it. Wealthier people responded with safeguards: in 1791 Robert Robinson of Manchester ordered a glass pane over his face and a watchman...

Henry Dunant was born in 1828 in Calvinist Geneva, helped found the local YMCA, left college over poor grades and drifted into banking. In 1856 he launched a corn milling business in French Algeria but could not get water rights. Desperate, he set out to pitch Napoleon III in person and on the evening of June 24, 1859 reached Solferino in northern Italy, where roughly 40,000 soldiers lay dead or w...

Leonid Rogozov was born in 1934 in Dauria, a remote Siberian village near the borders of Mongolia and China, and lost his father in World War II in 1943. He trained in medicine in Leningrad, graduated in 1959, and at 26 paused his surgical training to join the Sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition in September 1960. At the new Novolazarevskaya Station he was the only doctor among 13 men. On April 29,...

For nearly 2,000 years the most prized medicine in the world was theriac, a dark red paste of 64 ingredients including dried scorpion, Dead Sea bitumen and roasted viper flesh, still sold in some Italian pharmacies into the 1930s and the origin of the English word treacle. It began with Mithridates VI of Pontus, who feared poison so much that he reportedly tested poisons and remedies on prisoners...

Ask most people about February 5, 1980 and they draw a blank. Jill Price can relive it. Known in the research literature as AJ, she contacted scientists in the early 2000s pleading for help, and her 2006 case introduced hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), a condition with fewer than 100 documented cases. She recalls every day of her life since she was 14 with no effor...

Before the couch, there were eels. In 1876 a young Sigmund Freud spent four weeks in an Italian lab dissecting hundreds of eels in search of their male reproductive organs. Born in 1856 in Moravia with a caul his mother took as an omen of greatness, he saw his family uprooted to Vienna after his uncle Josef was arrested for dealing counterfeit rubles. At the University of Vienna he studied philoso...

Porphyria is a group of metabolic disorders rooted in heme, the iron-containing molecule in hemoglobin, which the body builds on an assembly line of eight enzymes split between the mitochondria and the cytosol. When a genetic flaw breaks one enzyme, half-finished porphyrins pile up and poison tissue. Acute hepatic porphyrias bring agonizing abdominal pain, racing heart, hallucinations and paralysi...

In 1970s Thailand a woman sentenced to death survived a firing squad aimed at the left side of her chest because her heart was on the right. This episode explains situs inversus, found in about 1 in 10,000 people, in which the internal organs are mirrored. In the total form the heart sits on the right, the liver and gallbladder on the left, the stomach and spleen on the right, and even the lungs s...

Picture a red apple and rate it from one, photo vivid, to five, nothing at all. Those who see nothing may have aphantasia, the absence of a mind's eye. In 1880 Francis Galton asked distinguished scientists to picture their breakfast table, and many insisted mental imagery did not exist. In 1897 Théodule Ribot described a physiologist who saw the printed word dog instead of a dog. Interest returned...

When Karen Keegan needed a kidney transplant, DNA tests on her sons showed she was not their biological mother. She was a tetragametic chimera: two fertilized eggs had fused in her mother's womb, so her blood carried one genome and her reproductive organs another. This episode explains whole body chimerism, clues such as Blaschko's lines that appear under certain UV light, and microchimerism, the...

Forty-five years before Helen Keller, Laura Bridgman became the first deafblind person famous for learning English. Born in 1829 in Hanover, New Hampshire, she lost her sight, hearing, smell and taste to scarlet fever at age two, the same illness that killed her two older sisters. A hired hand named Asa Tenney gave her her first tactile signs. In October 1837 she went to Samuel Gridley Howe's Perk...

Born Jerri Lin Cahill near Salem, Ohio, Jerri Nielsen became an emergency physician and mother of three, then after a divorce signed on in 1998 as the doctor at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. During the 1999 winter, with temperatures around minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit and no flights until spring, she found a lump in her breast. Guided by doctors in the United States over slow satellite ema...

Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, is not acting out a dream. This episode explains it as state dissociation: the motor and navigation systems wake while the prefrontal cortex, which handles memory and judgment, stays in deep N3 slow wave sleep. Freud tied it to unconscious wishes in 1907 and a 1954 study blamed repressed hostility, but sleep recordings showed it happens in non-REM sleep, unlike REM b...

For roughly two thousand years, mainstream medicine taught that a woman's womb could roam her body. This episode traces the idea to Greek gynecological texts credited to Hippocrates and to Plato's Timaeus, which described an unfruitful womb growing angry and blocking the breath. In the second century CE Aretaeus of Cappadocia called it an animal within an animal, and doctors tried to herd it home...

In 1961 physician Walter Kennedy coined the word nocebo, Latin for I shall harm, to describe harm that comes from a patient's expectations of an inert treatment rather than from any drug. This episode explains how anticipating pain triggers the release of cholecystokinin, which amplifies pain signals, and why there is no evidence of a gullible personality type. The numbers are striking: a 2022 met...

Every air breathing vertebrate studied has some version of the mammalian diving reflex, and infants up to about six months can often survive underwater longer than adults. This episode explains the trigger: cold water on the face around the nose and eyes while holding the breath. The trigeminal nerve signals the brainstem, the vagus nerve slows the heart, and rising carbon dioxide, which turns to...

Some blind people play basketball, mountain bike and skateboard with no technology at all, using sharp tongue clicks and the echoes that come back. This episode explains active human echolocation: why a palatal click works better than a hum, and how the returning echo tells the brain an object's location, size and density, so that a wooden fence sounds duller than a metal one. In 1749 Denis Didero...

In December 1706 the congregation of Boston's North Church bought a young West African man, likely of the Akan or Coromantee people, and gave him to their minister, Cotton Mather, who named him Onesimus, meaning useful. Mather taught him to read and write. Around 1716, asked whether he had ever had smallpox, Onesimus answered yes and no, described variolation as practiced across Sub-Saharan Africa...

In 1920 Earle Dickson, a cotton buyer for Johnson & Johnson in Highland Park, New Jersey, watched his wife Josephine cut and burn her hands in the kitchen and wait for him to come home to dress the wounds, since gauze and surgical tape took two hands. He laid gauze down the middle of a strip of tape and covered it with crinoline so it could be rolled up and peeled open later. Johnson & Joh...

In 1989 a Pfizer team led by Simon Campbell in Sandwich, Kent synthesized compound UK92480, hoping to treat high blood pressure and angina. Trials at Morriston Hospital in Wales showed almost no effect on chest pain, but researchers led by Ian Osterloh noticed men reporting erections. Pfizer repositioned the drug, patented it in 1996 and won FDA approval in 1998, the same year three scientists won...

In Greek myth an eagle ate Prometheus's liver every day and it grew back every night. The ancient Greeks got the biology right: the liver is the only internal organ that genuinely regenerates, and it can regrow from as little as 25 percent of its mass. This episode tours the roughly 3.3 pound organ that performs about 500 vital functions, from its surgical dividing line, Cantlie's line, to the fac...

Imagine blowing a dangerously high number on a breathalyzer without having had a drink in weeks. This episode explains auto-brewery syndrome, also called gut fermentation syndrome, in which yeasts such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the same species used by bakers and brewers, along with strains of Candida and some bacteria, colonize the gut and ferment carbohydrates into ethanol. Normally the liver...