pplpod

People take aspirin somewhere between 50 and 120 billion times a year, yet for most of its commercial life no one knew how it worked. This episode traces it from willow bark and meadowsweet, recorded on Sumerian clay tablets and in the Ebers Papyrus and prescribed as a tea by Hippocrates, to the Reverend Edward Stone, who in 1763 tasted bitter willow bark, dried it for feverish parishioners, and r...

Before the 1840s, surgery meant being strapped to a table and feeling every cut, and many doctors believed pain kept a patient's vital force alive. Horace Wells, born in 1815 to a wealthy New England family, opened a successful dental practice in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1836 and wrote a booklet at 23 urging less sugar, daily brushing, and saving children's baby teeth. In December 1844 he watched...

In alien hand syndrome, one hand, most often the left, carries out purposeful actions its owner never chose: snatching a cigarette from the mouth, or unbuttoning a shirt as fast as the other hand buttons it. This episode separates the condition, also called Dr. Strangelove syndrome, from twitches and reflexes and explains intermanual conflict, where the hands work against each other. Patients stil...

Alice in Wonderland syndrome makes a person's own hands look like a toddler's, stretches a nearby wall into the distance, and turns the hum of a refrigerator deafening, all while the person knows none of it is real. This episode walks through the distortions: micropsia and macropsia, objects looming close or receding far away, the feeling of body parts growing or shrinking, depersonalization, dere...

As a boy in Luton, Alec Jeffreys dissected a dead cat from his paper route on the family dining table, made explosions with a modified chemistry set, and was left with a sulfuric acid scar on his chin that he still hides under his beard. Born in Oxford in 1950, he earned first class honors in biochemistry at Merton College, Oxford, and moved to the University of Leicester in 1977. On September 10,...

Adrenaline is the hormone behind the parent who lifts a car off a trapped person and the skydiver chasing a rush. This episode explains where it comes from: more than 90 percent of circulating adrenaline is made in the adrenal medulla on top of the kidneys, with a small amount produced by neurons in the medulla oblongata. As a non-selective agonist, it acts like a master key on alpha-1, alpha-2, b...

The psychologist who proved that affection is a biological need said he never loved the monkeys he studied. Born Harry Israel in Fairfield, Iowa, in 1905, Harlow switched from English to psychology at Stanford and took the name Harlow on the advice of mentor Lewis Terman. Denied lab space at the University of Wisconsin, he and his students renovated a vacant building into a primate lab. At a time...

In 1863 Charles Sherwood Stratton, two feet eleven inches tall, stood on a grand piano at New York's Metropolitan Hotel greeting about 10,000 wedding guests before visiting Abraham Lincoln at the White House. This episode follows Stratton, born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1838, a healthy baby who stopped growing at six months, a condition now attributed to pituitary dwarfism. P.T. Barnum signed...

Joseph Priestley first made nitrous oxide in 1772 and called it dephlogisticated nitrous air. In 1794 Thomas Beddoes and James Watt built a machine to produce it, and in 1800 Humphry Davy found it dulled the pain of an erupting wisdom tooth, suggested it for surgery, and named it laughing gas. Fashionable laughing gas parties followed, and more than 40 years passed before dentist Horace Wells used...

In 1824 Scottish merchant Robert Hunter saw what he took for a strange creature in a river in Siam and found two teenage boys joined at the chest. Chang and Eng, born in 1811 to a family of Chinese descent, were brought to the United States in 1829 by Hunter and sea captain Abel Coffin, under a contract the twins later said paid only $500. This episode follows their early tours in costume, invasiv...

After walking on the moon in 1969, the Apollo 11 crew spent 21 days sealed in a modified Airstream trailer in case they had carried back a lunar microbe. This episode traces quarantine from that trailer back through history, starting with the difference between isolating the sick and restricting people who might have been exposed. It covers seven day isolation rules in Leviticus, Ibn Sina's Canon...

In February 2025 doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia used gene editing to treat a child with carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, a disorder that lets ammonia build up in the blood. This episode traces the tool back to 1987, when Yoshizumi Ishino's team in Japan found strange repeating palindromic DNA in E. coli. In 1993 Dick van Soolingen used the repeats to tell tuberculos...

Ask a witness how fast two cars were going when they smashed rather than hit, and their estimate climbs by nearly 10 miles per hour. That 1974 finding came from Elizabeth Loftus, born Elizabeth Fishman in California in 1944, who lost her mother to drowning at 14, studied math and psychology at UCLA and Stanford, and grew bored calibrating word problems before car crash research at the University o...

Some patients who take dopamine drugs to steady their movements suddenly develop compulsive gambling, a condition called dopamine dysregulation syndrome. This episode uses that puzzle to take apart the idea that dopamine is the pleasure chemical. It explains motivational salience, which marks an outcome as worth chasing or avoiding, how the D1 and D2 receptor families can excite or inhibit a neuro...

In the late 1990s expectant mothers pressed headphones playing Mozart to their bellies, convinced it would raise a genius. This episode traces the idea back to a 1993 study in Nature by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky, which tested 36 college students on a paper folding and cutting task after hearing Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448, relaxation instructions, or sil...

In the early 1970s Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan told a psychiatric hospital he heard a voice saying thud. Inspired by a lecture from R.D. Laing, he described eight healthy pseudopatients who claimed to hear words like empty, hollow, and thud at 12 hospitals in five states. All were admitted, seven with schizophrenia, then held for 7 to 52 days despite acting normally. Staff logged note tak...

Charles Darwin called the human appendix a shrunken, useless leftover, and medicine largely agreed for over a century. This episode maps the organ, a worm shaped tube about nine millimeters long anchored near McBurney's point, and explains why its position varies: it sits behind the cecum in about 67 percent of people in Ghana, appears on the left side in situs inversus, and is missing entirely in...

In July 1893 James Cornish arrived at Chicago's Provident Hospital with a knife wound over his heart, and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams opened his chest with no antibiotics, no blood transfusions, and no breathing machine. This episode traces how Williams got there: born in 1856 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, he lost his father to tuberculosis at nine, ran away from a shoemaker's apprenticeship in Bal...

Christiaan Barnard told dying grocer Louis Washkansky he had an 80 percent chance of surviving a procedure that had never succeeded in a human. This episode follows the South African surgeon from Beaufort West, where a brother died at age three of a heart defect, to his early work in Cape Town proving that intestinal atresia in infants was a blood supply problem. A detour across a hallway at the U...

In 1951 Palle Hardrup shot two people during a bank robbery in Copenhagen, then claimed his former cellmate Bjorn Schouw Nielsen had hypnotized him into doing it. The Danish court treated the man who planted the suggestion as the true murderer. This episode uses that case to ask what hypnosis really is, starting with James Braid, who popularized the word around 1841 to pull the practice away from...

Smallpox killed an estimated 300 to 500 million people in the 20th century alone, and it remains the only human disease ever eradicated. This episode explains how the variola virus worked: a large, brick shaped DNA virus that copied itself in the cell's cytoplasm, followed by fever, mouth lesions, and pustules buried deep in the skin. Variola major killed about 30 percent of patients, the confluen...

William Burke and William Hare are remembered as grave robbers, yet they never robbed a single grave. This episode traces how 1820s Edinburgh, a world center for medical study, ran short of legal cadavers just as anatomists like Robert Knox drew hundreds of students to daily dissection lectures. Families guarded graves with watchtowers, armed patrols, and iron mortsafes, and a corpse could fetch 8...

William Clark charted the American West despite little formal schooling and famously inconsistent spelling. This deep dive builds a fuller biography of Clark, from his violent youth on the Kentucky frontier during the Northwest Indian War and his habit of meticulous journaling to his role as the practical, logistical engine of the Lewis and Clark expedition. We examine the vital role of York, the...

That flat-topped pyramid and floating eye on the back of the one dollar bill have fueled endless conspiracy theories, but the documented history is far more interesting. This deep dive decodes the Great Seal of the United States, from the bald eagle, olive branch, arrows, and E Pluribus Unum on the front to the unfinished pyramid, Eye of Providence, and Latin mottos on the reverse. We explore the...

In the spring of 1781, Nathanael Greene's roughly 1,000 Patriots besieged about 550 Loyalists under Lieutenant Colonel John Harris Cruger at the backcountry village of Ninety Six, South Carolina. This deep dive explores the grueling 28-day siege, from the eight-pointed Star Fort and its abatis to the earthen walls that absorbed cannon fire and frustrated a conventional bombardment. We follow engin...