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From the 1920s into the 1970s, shoe stores invited children to step onto a polished wooden cabinet, slide their feet into a slot, and watch their own toe bones wiggle in glowing green through one of three viewing portholes, one each for the child, the parent, and the salesperson. This episode tells the story of the shoe fitting fluoroscope, also sold as the pedoscope, and the patent squabble behin...

Taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive, was never just Victorian paranoia. This episode explains what actually kills someone trapped in a coffin: carbon dioxide builds up as panic speeds the breathing, and hypercapnia sets in before the oxygen runs out, though a trickle of air through loose soil can stretch survival terrifyingly long. It weighs the legend of the fifth century Emperor Zeno, sa...

In December 1963 and January 1964 in San Diego, 17 year old Point Loma High student Randy Gardner set out to beat the 260 hour sleeplessness record of Tom Rounds of Honolulu, starting with classmates Bruce McAllister and Joe Marciano Jr. keeping him awake. Stanford sleep researcher William Dement flew in, and Lieutenant Commander John J. Ross of the U.S. Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit...

Albert Sabin was born Abram Saperstein in 1906 in Bialystok, came to the United States in 1921, and quit dentistry at NYU for medical research, earning his medical degree in 1931. In World War II he served as a major on the Neurotropic Virus Commission, studying dengue and sandfly fever and winning the Legion of Merit. His autopsies had shown that poliovirus enters through the mouth and multiplies...

For about 40 years, one of America's most advanced neonatal clinics sat on carnival midways. Incubators began when French obstetrician Stéphane Tarnier saw poultry incubators at the Paris Zoo and had a human version built, but the medical establishment dismissed the idea. Martin Couney, born Michael Cohen in Prussia in 1869, claimed medical degrees from Leipzig and Berlin and training under Pierre...

Launched in 1990 by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health with partners in the UK, Japan, France, Germany and China, the Human Genome Project set out over an expected 15 years to read 3.1 billion base pairs of the gene rich human genome. Its hierarchical shotgun method mapped the genome in ordered chunks of about 150,000 base pairs, copied inside bacterial artificial...

Exploding head syndrome is a parasomnia in which a person drifting off or waking up hears a deafening internal noise, a gunshot, thunderclap, scream or explosion, that no one else hears and that causes no pain. The jolt can bring a racing heart, muscle jerks, sweating and a terrifying sense of having stopped breathing, and about 10 percent of sufferers also see flashes of light, while some feel he...

Trace every living person's mother's mother's line far enough and all eight billion threads meet in one woman who lived in East Africa during the Pleistocene, somewhere between 100,000 and 230,000 years ago, with 2013 sequencing studies pointing to around 160,000 years or a window of 99,000 to 148,000. She was not the only woman alive. The population never fell below the tens of thousands, and her...

In the winter of 1924 to 1925, Dr. Curtis Welch in Nome, Alaska, recognized the gray throat coating of diphtheria in sick children and found his antitoxin had expired, with the port frozen in and the next shipment stranded. Aging biplanes with water cooled engines could not fly in 50 below, so about 300,000 units found in Anchorage went by train to Nenana and then by a relay of 20 mushers and abou...

Narcolepsy, from Greek words meaning numbness and attack, is often played for laughs on screen, but this episode lays out its clinical reality. The classic tetrad is excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexy, sleep paralysis and hallucinations at the edges of sleep, though only about 20 to 25 percent of patients have all four. Cataplexy is a sudden loss of muscle tone, from a drooping jaw to a full...

In November 1944, with famine looming across a war torn Europe and Asia and no one sure how to safely feed the starving, physiologist Ancel Keys, creator of the K ration, launched a study at the University of Minnesota's Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. From more than 400 applicants he picked 36 healthy young conscientious objectors from the Civilian Public Service, almost half from peace chur...

The famous marshmallow test began at Stanford's Bing Nursery School in the early 1970s with no marshmallows at all: Walter Mischel and Ebbe Ebbesen offered 32 four year olds pretzel sticks or animal cookies, with a second treat for waiting 15 minutes. The researchers expected that seeing the reward would help children wait, and found the opposite. In 1972 follow ups with Antonette Zeiss, when mars...

Charles Andrew Osborne, born around 1893 or 1894 in Missouri, was a farmer working fields across Nebraska and Iowa when, in 1922 near Union, Nebraska, a 350 pound hog he was preparing to slaughter collapsed on top of him. He began hiccuping and did not stop for 68 years, an estimated 430 million hiccups. The episode walks through what a hiccup is, the vagus nerve, the phrenic nerve, the diaphragm'...

Wilhelm Röntgen was born in Prussia in 1845, moved to the Netherlands as a toddler, and spent 40 years stateless after losing one citizenship without gaining another. As a teenager in Utrecht he was expelled for a mocking caricature of a teacher drawn by another student he refused to name, which cost him the diploma Dutch universities required. He found a back door at the Federal Polytechnic Schoo...

Robert Liston, born in Scotland in 1794, stood six foot two with huge hands and a combative temper in an age when surgery without anesthesia was a race against fatal shock. Surgeons operated in frock coats stiff with old blood and pus, washing was seen as fussy, and Florence Nightingale noted that survival tracked how fast the surgeon finished. Liston was dismissed from the Royal Infirmary of Edin...

Mithridates VI grew up in the Hellenistic kingdom of Pontus on the Black Sea, where his father, Mithridates V, was poisoned by his own attendants. With his mother ruling as regent and favoring his brother, the young prince suffered persistent stomach pains after meals and concluded that she was slowly poisoning his food. He fled into the wilderness and, guided by Scythian shamans known as the Agar...

Vivien Thomas was born in Louisiana in 1910, grew up in Nashville as the son of a master carpenter, and saved every penny for medical school until the bank failures of 1930 wiped his savings out. He took a job as a laboratory assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt, where he was classified and paid as a janitor, and within weeks he was running complex surgical experiments alone. Together the...

The caesarean section is the most common abdominal surgery in the world, with roughly 23 million performed globally in 2012, yet it has nothing to do with Julius Caesar. His mother Aurelia lived for nearly 50 years after his birth, something no woman could have survived in 100 BC. This episode traces the likelier origins of the name, from the Roman Lex Regia, later the Lex Caesarea, which required...

Walt Disney is not frozen under a theme park; early cryonics figure Robert Nelson said he saw Disney's ashes. But as of 2024 roughly 600 people are suspended in liquid nitrogen, and the first, psychology professor James Bedford, frozen in 1967, is the only early patient still preserved. Preservation can start only after legal death, and most jurisdictions treat cryonics as a form of disposing of h...

In 1885, nine year old Joseph Meister was mauled by a rabid dog, which at the time meant near certain death once symptoms such as hydrophobia appeared. Louis Pasteur had developed a treatment from rabbit spinal cords infected with rabies and dried for days to weaken the virus, and it had worked in dogs. But Pasteur was a chemist, not a licensed physician, and a death could have brought charges. He...

Frederick Banting was born in 1891 on a farm near Alliston, Ontario, the youngest of five. Shy and bullied, he failed English and French, then failed his first year of general arts at the University of Toronto before switching to medicine. Rejected twice by the army for poor eyesight, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, graduated early, and in 1918 served as a frontline surgeon at the...

The most kissed face in history belongs to a woman no one could name. In the late 1880s an unidentified young woman was pulled from the Seine in Paris, and a death mask cast from her face showed a serene, faint smile. Known as L'Inconnue de la Seine, she became a blank canvas for bohemian artists and writers, and plaster copies of her mask hung in drawing rooms and studios across Europe. In the la...

Coca-Cola, 7 Up and Luden's cough drops all descend from the patent medicine era. The term comes from royal letters patent in late 17th century England, an endorsement rather than a disclosed formula; secrecy was the business model, since most nostrums were water, alcohol and common herbs. Benjamin Okell's promoters invented a Dr. Bateman to sell Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops. In the 1860s William...

At a 7th century feast, Persian king Khosrow II tossed a stained napkin into the fire and pulled it out clean. It was woven from asbestos, a silicate mineral that forms flexible fibers. People in what is now eastern Finland used it to strengthen pottery about 4,500 years ago, Greek temples burned asbestos lamp wicks, and Charlemagne repeated the tablecloth trick. Pliny the Elder misapplied a Greek...

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...