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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...

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...