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Foxglove, also known as dead man's bells and witch's glove, is a tall biennial whose tubular flowers are built for long-tongued bees and whose every part is poisonous. Leonhart Fuchs named the genus Digitalis in 1542 after the German word for thimble, and the English name comes from the Old English for fox's glove, not from the fairy folk later Victorian writers proposed. In 1652 Nicholas Culpeper...

In 1917 stockman Jimmy Darcy was badly injured on a remote station in Western Australia and carried 30 miles over 12 hours to Halls Creek, which had no hospital or doctor. The postmaster, who had only basic first aid training, reached a Dr. Holland in Perth by telegraph and, following Morse code instructions, operated on Darcy's bladder with a pocket knife on the post office counter. The surgery w...

The stapes, or stirrup, is two to three millimeters across and the last of the three middle ear bones, and every sound you hear passes through it. This episode explains how it works as an acoustic transformer. Air is compressible and the fluid of the inner ear is not, so without it more than 99 percent of sound energy would bounce off. The large eardrum funnels force down onto the tiny footplate,...

Clair Patterson was born in 1922 in Iowa, finished high school at 16, studied chemistry at Grinnell, and learned to run a mass spectrometer at Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. After the war he joined Harrison Brown at the University of Chicago and worked with George Tilton on uranium-lead dating of zircon crystals to find the age of the Earth. Tilton's uranium numbers made sense, but Patter...

A crash in the night or a car swerving into your lane can take over your body before you consciously register what happened. This episode breaks down that response, starting with Walter Bradford Cannon, who in 1914 and 1915 described how the sympathetic nervous system prepares animals for fighting or flight. Researchers now speak of the acute stress response and add freeze, fawn and flop to the li...

Edmond Locard, who lived from 1877 to 1966 and was called the Sherlock Holmes of Lyon, set up one of the first police laboratories in 1910 in two attic rooms of the Lyon police department, with little more than a microscope and a basic spectrometer. His central idea, now known as Locard's exchange principle, holds that a criminal cannot enter a scene without leaving something behind and carrying s...

In 1946 Jean Harris heard Put the Blame on Mame at the movies, and the song played in her head for the next 33 years. This episode explores the earworm, a term from the German Ohrwurm, known clinically as involuntary musical imagery. It is a memory loop, not a hallucination, and the hosts separate it from palinacousis, a rare condition tied to temporal lobe damage. About 98 percent of people get e...

In 1916 Dr. Joseph Goldberger, his wife Mary and his assistant injected themselves with the blood of pellagra patients and swallowed their secretions, all to prove they could not catch the disease. This episode follows how he got there. Born in 1874 to a Jewish family in Hungary, he arrived in New York in 1883, grew up on the Lower East Side, started out in engineering at City College, and earned...

Between 1906 and 1940 pellagra struck roughly three million Americans and killed more than 100,000, progressing through the four Ds: dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and death. The episode explains it as a deficiency of niacin, vitamin B3, and of tryptophan, and traces it back to Gaspar Casal's 1735 description of Asturian leprosy in Spain and the outbreaks in northern Italy, where more than 100,000...

Dolly the sheep was born on July 5, 1996, at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, the only surviving lamb from 277 attempts. Frogs had been cloned in 1958, but scientists believed a specialized adult cell was locked for good. The Roslin team, funded by PPL Therapeutics and the Ministry of Agriculture, used somatic cell nuclear transfer: an emptied egg from one ewe, the nucleus of a mammary gland cell...

Colin Pitchfork, born in 1960 and raised in Leicestershire, earned the Chief Scout's Award, represented the UK at the 1975 World Scout Jamboree in Norway, married a social worker and became a skilled wedding cake decorator. He also had convictions for indecent exposure from age 17. In November 1983 15-year-old Lynda Mann was raped and murdered, and the only lab result available, a blood type share...

Polio is ancient, from Egyptian art showing withered limbs to a 4,000-year-old skeleton in the United Arab Emirates, yet its great epidemics came in the 20th century. The episode explains why: for most of history infants met the virus while still protected by maternal antibodies, and modern sanitation delayed that first exposure until children were older and far more likely to be paralyzed. About...

Why does waking at 3 a.m. feel so different from waking at 7, even after the same amount of sleep? This episode explains what makes a rhythm truly circadian. In 1918 J.S. Szymanski kept animals in constant darkness and found they still held a 24-hour cycle, and in 1954 Colin Pittendrigh showed that the clock timing fruit fly hatching kept pace even in the cold. From those experiments come the rule...

A hemispherectomy removes or disconnects one entire half of the brain, and this episode traces how that radical idea became a standard treatment for children with severe drug-resistant epilepsy. Walter Dandy performed the first one in 1928 to remove a glioma, Kenneth McKenzie used it for intractable epilepsy in 1938, and in 1950 R.A. Krynauw in South Africa reported striking improvements in childr...

Charles R. Drew was born in 1904 in Washington, D.C., grew up in Foggy Bottom, and as a boy delivered more than a thousand newspapers a day. After Dunbar High School and an athletic scholarship to Amherst, he spent two years at Morgan College in Baltimore as a chemistry and biology professor, athletic director and head football coach to pay for medical school. Rejected by Howard and deferred by Ha...

At 12, Carl Jung was knocked down by a classmate and began fainting whenever he tried to study, staying home for six months until he overheard his father worrying about money and forced himself through a Latin grammar until the spells stopped. Born in 1875 to a Swiss Reformed pastor he saw as spiritually hollow and a mother who said spirits visited her at night, Jung felt split into personality nu...

On television, CPR revives patients about 75 percent of the time. In reality, survival after an adult cardiac arrest outside a hospital is closer to 10 percent. This episode explains what happens when the heart stops: brain damage begins in about four minutes and becomes irreversible after about seven. Chest compressions rarely restart the heart. Their purpose is to keep some oxygenated blood movi...

Some people wake from a head injury able to do things they never learned, a condition called acquired savant syndrome. This episode explains savant syndrome as extraordinary skill in one narrow area alongside a neurological, developmental, or intellectual impairment. Estimates put it at about one in a million people, with males diagnosed roughly six times as often as females, and fewer than 100 li...

Body snatchers did not steal watches or rings. They stole the corpse and tossed the burial clothes back into the grave, because under common law a body was not property and taking one was only a misdemeanor, while stealing a shroud was a felony. This episode explains how the UK's Murder Act of 1752 allowed dissection only of executed murderers while London medical schools may have needed up to 500...

Until the early 1980s, investigators had little hard data on how a human body decays outdoors, so time of death in a shallow grave was often guesswork. In 1981 William Bass, head of anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and the state's forensic consultant, fenced off a wooded plot behind the medical center and began placing donated bodies in car trunks, water, plastic, and open...

The spinning red and white pole outside a barbershop began as a medical advertisement. After the Council of Tours in 1163 barred clergy from surgery, barbers took over bloodletting, tooth pulling, and amputations. Patients gripped a wooden staff to make their veins bulge, early poles carried brass basins for leeches and blood, and bloody bandages hung to dry twisted around the pole in the wind. Pa...

For centuries the person who cut your hair also pulled teeth, applied leeches, and amputated limbs. This episode explains how that happened. Medieval university physicians considered touching blood beneath them, while monasteries needed resident barbers to maintain the monks' tonsures. When monks fell ill, humoral theory called for draining excess blood, and the barber with the razor took on blood...

During World War II, B.F. Skinner trained pigeons to peck at images of enemy ships so their pecks would steer a missile's fins. This episode follows Skinner from his 1904 birth in Pennsylvania, where he built an elderberry sorting machine as a boy, through his failed attempt to become a novelist after Hamilton College, a period he called his dark years. Reading John B. Watson led him to Harvard ps...

More than 2,000 years ago, texts from the Indian subcontinent described rebuilding a nose with a flap of skin from the cheek or forehead, along with removing kidney stones and cataracts. This episode explains the system behind them, Ayurveda, whose Sanskrit name means knowledge of life and longevity and which up to 80 percent of people in India and Nepal still use. It holds that the body and unive...

The word autopsy comes from the Greek autopsia, to see for oneself. This episode follows that idea from ancient Egypt, where embalmers removed organs through small slits to protect the body for the afterlife, to 44 BCE, when the physician Antistius found that only the second of Julius Caesar's 23 stab wounds was fatal. Pope Boniface VIII's decree against boiling the bodies of crusaders, a practice...