pplpod

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...

Henry Heimlich was born in 1920 in Wilmington, Delaware, led the Cornell marching band as drum major and earned his medical degree at 23. Sent by the US Navy to the Gobi Desert in World War II, he treated a trachoma epidemic by grinding sulfadiazine powder into shaving cream so it would stay on patients' eyelids. In 1962 he developed the chest drainage flutter valve, patented in 1969, a rubber sle...

John Hunter's house on Leicester Square had two faces: aristocrats came through the front door to consult him, while body snatchers delivered corpses through the back, a setup said to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Born in Scotland in 1728, the youngest of 10, Hunter dropped out of school and worked as a cabinet maker before joining his brother William's London ana...

In the 18th and 19th centuries, fear of premature burial, known as taphophobia, gripped Europe and America. Cholera epidemics pushed authorities to bury victims within hours, blurring the line between deep coma and death in an era before reliable tools to confirm it. Wealthier people responded with safeguards: in 1791 Robert Robinson of Manchester ordered a glass pane over his face and a watchman...

Henry Dunant was born in 1828 in Calvinist Geneva, helped found the local YMCA, left college over poor grades and drifted into banking. In 1856 he launched a corn milling business in French Algeria but could not get water rights. Desperate, he set out to pitch Napoleon III in person and on the evening of June 24, 1859 reached Solferino in northern Italy, where roughly 40,000 soldiers lay dead or w...

Leonid Rogozov was born in 1934 in Dauria, a remote Siberian village near the borders of Mongolia and China, and lost his father in World War II in 1943. He trained in medicine in Leningrad, graduated in 1959, and at 26 paused his surgical training to join the Sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition in September 1960. At the new Novolazarevskaya Station he was the only doctor among 13 men. On April 29,...

For nearly 2,000 years the most prized medicine in the world was theriac, a dark red paste of 64 ingredients including dried scorpion, Dead Sea bitumen and roasted viper flesh, still sold in some Italian pharmacies into the 1930s and the origin of the English word treacle. It began with Mithridates VI of Pontus, who feared poison so much that he reportedly tested poisons and remedies on prisoners...

Ask most people about February 5, 1980 and they draw a blank. Jill Price can relive it. Known in the research literature as AJ, she contacted scientists in the early 2000s pleading for help, and her 2006 case introduced hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), a condition with fewer than 100 documented cases. She recalls every day of her life since she was 14 with no effor...

Before the couch, there were eels. In 1876 a young Sigmund Freud spent four weeks in an Italian lab dissecting hundreds of eels in search of their male reproductive organs. Born in 1856 in Moravia with a caul his mother took as an omen of greatness, he saw his family uprooted to Vienna after his uncle Josef was arrested for dealing counterfeit rubles. At the University of Vienna he studied philoso...

Porphyria is a group of metabolic disorders rooted in heme, the iron-containing molecule in hemoglobin, which the body builds on an assembly line of eight enzymes split between the mitochondria and the cytosol. When a genetic flaw breaks one enzyme, half-finished porphyrins pile up and poison tissue. Acute hepatic porphyrias bring agonizing abdominal pain, racing heart, hallucinations and paralysi...

In 1970s Thailand a woman sentenced to death survived a firing squad aimed at the left side of her chest because her heart was on the right. This episode explains situs inversus, found in about 1 in 10,000 people, in which the internal organs are mirrored. In the total form the heart sits on the right, the liver and gallbladder on the left, the stomach and spleen on the right, and even the lungs s...

Picture a red apple and rate it from one, photo vivid, to five, nothing at all. Those who see nothing may have aphantasia, the absence of a mind's eye. In 1880 Francis Galton asked distinguished scientists to picture their breakfast table, and many insisted mental imagery did not exist. In 1897 Théodule Ribot described a physiologist who saw the printed word dog instead of a dog. Interest returned...

When Karen Keegan needed a kidney transplant, DNA tests on her sons showed she was not their biological mother. She was a tetragametic chimera: two fertilized eggs had fused in her mother's womb, so her blood carried one genome and her reproductive organs another. This episode explains whole body chimerism, clues such as Blaschko's lines that appear under certain UV light, and microchimerism, the...

Forty-five years before Helen Keller, Laura Bridgman became the first deafblind person famous for learning English. Born in 1829 in Hanover, New Hampshire, she lost her sight, hearing, smell and taste to scarlet fever at age two, the same illness that killed her two older sisters. A hired hand named Asa Tenney gave her her first tactile signs. In October 1837 she went to Samuel Gridley Howe's Perk...

Born Jerri Lin Cahill near Salem, Ohio, Jerri Nielsen became an emergency physician and mother of three, then after a divorce signed on in 1998 as the doctor at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. During the 1999 winter, with temperatures around minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit and no flights until spring, she found a lump in her breast. Guided by doctors in the United States over slow satellite ema...

Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, is not acting out a dream. This episode explains it as state dissociation: the motor and navigation systems wake while the prefrontal cortex, which handles memory and judgment, stays in deep N3 slow wave sleep. Freud tied it to unconscious wishes in 1907 and a 1954 study blamed repressed hostility, but sleep recordings showed it happens in non-REM sleep, unlike REM b...