pplpod

When Médecins Sans Frontières accepted the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, its representative told the room that silence can kill. The organization was born from that conviction. During the 1967 to 1970 blockade of Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War, young French doctors working with the Red Cross watched civilians being deliberately starved and came to see the Red Cross policy of silent neutrality as compl...

In 1799 George Washington woke with a severe throat infection, and over the next 10 hours his doctors drained more than 124 ounces of his blood. He died shortly after. This episode explains how deliberate bleeding stayed the standard of care for over 2,000 years. The Ebers Papyrus records scarification in Egypt, possibly inspired by hippos whose red skin secretion looked like self bleeding. Hippoc...

The face on the standard CPR training mannequin comes from a plaster cast of an unidentified girl, believed to be about 16, who drowned in the Seine in the 1880s. This episode traces the long history behind that cast. Egyptian burial masks like Tutankhamun's were stylized spiritual armor rather than casts of the face. In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann found gold masks over skulls at Mycenae and claimed...

In 1923, French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras and his colleague Jean Reboul-Lachaux described a 53-year-old woman convinced that her husband, her children, and even local shopkeepers had been murdered and replaced by identical doubles. She sought a divorce from the man who looked exactly like her husband. They called it the illusion of doubles, and for decades psychiatry treated the condition throug...

Foreign accent syndrome makes a person sound as if they suddenly speak their native language with a foreign accent, but patients never gain a new accent or a new language. The episode explains it as a breakdown in articulatory planning: vowels shift, diphthongs flatten into single sounds, and English speakers drift from stress timed rhythm toward the syllable timed rhythm of French or Spanish. Pro...

Acupuncture was a market worth over $24 billion in 2017, yet the scientific consensus described in this episode treats it as theatrical placebo. A modern session uses five to 20 stainless steel needles between 0.16 and 0.46 millimeters wide, manipulated until the patient feels de qi and the practitioner feels needle grasp. To test it, researchers built sham needles that retract into their handles...

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, the static-like tingle that starts at the crown of the scalp and travels down the neck, had no name until the internet gave its sufferers a place to compare notes. On October 19, 2007, a 21-year-old user posted on a health forum called SteadyHealth about a sensation triggered by things like puppet shows or being read a story, and replies poured in from people...

In late 1983 an Italian man known as Silvano arrived at a sleep institute at the University of Bologna, unable to sleep and aware that two of his sisters had died the same way. Under neurologist Ignazio Roiter he let doctors record his decline and arranged to donate his brain. Roiter, sleep expert Elio Lugaresi, and neuropathologist Pierluigi Gambetti found none of the spongy damage of Creutzfeldt...

Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, leaves eyesight, intelligence, and memory intact but strips away the ability to know who a face belongs to. John Hughlings Jackson noted cases in the 19th century, and in 1947 German neurologist Joachim Bodamer named it after treating a 24 year old with a bullet wound to the head who could recognize family only by voice, gait, or touch. This episode explains the r...

In 1880 French neurologist Jules Cotard described the delusion of negation, now called Cotard syndrome or walking corpse syndrome, in which a person becomes convinced they are dead, rotting, bloodless, or missing organs. His case of Mademoiselle X denied parts of her body and any need to eat, believed she was eternally damned and therefore could not die a natural death, and died of starvation. Thi...

Phrenology began with two ideas that neuroscience still accepts: the brain is the organ of the mind, and different areas do different jobs. The leap came next. This episode follows the idea from Johann Caspar Lavater's physiognomy to German physician Franz Josef Gall, who in 1796 claimed 27 mental organs, including one for murder and one for loving children, that grew like muscles and pushed out t...

Calling someone sanguine, melancholy, or in a bad humor borrows from a medical theory that ruled for over two thousand years. This episode explains humorism, with roots in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Ayurvedic medicine, systemized by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Galen around four fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Each was tied to one of Empedocles' elements, a season, and a tempera...

First, do no harm does not appear in the Hippocratic Oath. This episode examines what the oath actually says and where it came from: part of the Hippocratic Corpus written between the fifth and third centuries BC, likely not by Hippocrates, surviving in third century AD papyrus fragments and a complete 10th or 11th century manuscript in the Vatican Library. It opens with an oath to Apollo, Asclepi...

The Hawthorne effect says people change their behavior when they know they are being watched, and it is taught as gospel in management and psychology classes. This episode returns to the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, where illumination experiments from 1924 to 1927 found output rising in both the brighter test room and the unchanged control room, and still rising as lights...

The Neander Valley was named after hymn writer Joachim Neander, whose family had changed its name from Neumann, meaning new man. In 1856 quarry workers there found bones they took for a cave bear's, and schoolteacher Johann Carl Fuhlrott recognized them as an ancient human, three years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This episode traces how the caveman stereotype took hold: Rudolf Vircho...

Around 30 BCE a Chinese text warned Silk Road travelers about the Big Headache Mountains of the Karakoram, and in the late 1500s the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta, crossing the Pariacaca pass in the Andes, blamed his nausea and blinding headache on air too thin for human needs. This episode explains why: the air stays about 21 percent oxygen at any height, but falling barometric pressure spreads t...

In 1961, at the Stanford University Nursery School, psychologist Albert Bandura tested whether children learn aggression simply by watching. Seventy two children aged roughly three to five and a half were split into groups that saw an adult attack an inflatable Bobo doll, saw an adult play quietly with Tinker toys, or saw no model at all. The aggressive adults punched the doll, sat on it, hit it w...

The cold stimulus headache, better known as ice cream headache or brain freeze, starts on the roof of the mouth. This episode explains how freezing food on the richly vascular palate makes blood vessels constrict and then rapidly swell again, a rebound vasodilation that sets off dense pain receptors. The signal travels along the trigeminal nerve, which also serves the forehead, and the brain refer...

Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden coined the term lucid dream in 1913, borrowing from the psychiatric idea of a lucid interval: the moment a patient regains insight. This episode traces the experience from Aristotle, Galen, and Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga to Samuel Pepys, who wrote in 1665 that he knew a dream about Lady Castlemaine was a dream before he woke. It separates awareness from contr...

Henry Gray, born in 1827, was already lecturing on anatomy at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London by 1853, after award winning research on the endocrine glands and the spleen. In 1855 he asked illustrator Henry Vandyke Carter to help him make an anatomy textbook that students could afford and surgeons could use. For 18 months the two dissected unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospit...

Before October 16, 1846, surgery meant being strapped to a table fully awake. This episode follows William T.G. Morton, born in Charlton, Massachusetts in 1819, a former clerk and salesman who left the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery without a degree and built a business soldering false teeth to gold plates. To win over the prominent Whitman family of Farmington, Connecticut, he promised to be...

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...