The Poor Historians: Medical History Misadventures

He conquered many lands, sailed many seas, and was finally awarded his own Netflix miniseries, but at the age of 32, the ruler of Macedonia known throughout the ages as Alexander the Great, died in the palace of a Babylonian king shortly after a night of partying. There have been numerous potential explanations as to what happened.  In this episode we'll review the case and the leading though...

This is a fascinating dive into the world of genetics, set against a backdrop of a curious dermatology finding, and ending with one of the most interesting and convoluted paternity cases you may ever hear about.  The Maury show has nothing on this one, trust us. Mike suggested this episode be titled "This is Chimerica!" or "Have you Heard About the Lady Whose DNA was a Chimera? No,...

This episode of the Curious Case Vault has an admittedly grim premise--a patient who suffered two gunshot wounds to the head.  In this discussion, Alba leads us through a case of a young Brooklyn, NY man who, in the spring of 1888, sustained what could have been a devastating injury in any time in history.  In his case, we'll see how the neurosurgeon of the time treated this patient leading t...

Rabies is a fascinating and frightening infectious disease.  It has a long history in the natural world and stories involving a case of it rarely end on a happy note.   It just so happens there is at least one such story.  In this episode we'll talk about one of the only documented cases of survival from this viral infection.  We'll discuss the disease itself, how it works, how it's...

The 1920's was a time in the U.S. when anybody with a clever sales pitch and a willingness to pull a patent could devise a concoction and call it a "medication."  Unfortunately, the heyday of the "patent medicine" era coincided with the discovery of radium before the downstream consequences of radioactivity were known.  The wealthy industrialist, Eben Byers found himself u...

A 30 year old woman in 1842 comes down with an awful gastrointestinal illness and a physician is called.  He recounts the case in this article and asks if this might have been something called "Cholera Morbus."  We'll go through the case, talk about causes for this sort of thing, and do our best to guess the diagnosis.  The approach to treating the disease in the 1840's was int...

This unusual, recurrent epidemic illness has popped its head in and out of the annals of history.  It goes by many names: the English Sweats, coma somnolentum, Schlafkrankheit ("sleep sickness"), and the Nona, to name a few.  The last time it was widespread was during the influenza pandemic of 1915-1926, but medical case studies and reports of recurrent epidemcis date back to the 16th ce...

Let's do a neurologic case featuring  an American music legend who sought help after developing unusual headaches and a distorted sense of smell.  We'll figure out what happened and who it is in this installment!   Avoid clicking through the references if you wish to keep the mystery intact.  References https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2817%2931623-9 Lancet Letter...

CPR (aka cardiopulmonary resuscitation) is a simple way to save a life.  When a heart stops, the modern teaching is to "get on the chest" and start giving compressions.  But it may surprise nobody that there were early forms of CPR.  There were whole committees devoted to this topic.  Some of the first ideas were definitely a rough draft.  Others were downright comically bad, though well...

We decided to throw out a little bit of a bonus episode.  In what we're calling the Curious Case Vault for now, we'll go into the archives of a well-established medical journal and read a real case report from long ago--1841, to be exact. In this case, with our help as physicians, Alba will puzzle through the case of a 53 year old patient who, unfortunately, developed a sore throat in th...

He was dubbed "The 8th Wonder of the World" in the wrestling universe.  The career of Andre the Giant was legendary and interesting on it's own, but on this episode we'll dive into the history of the discovery of gigantism and acromegaly, the condition that gave Andre his astounding stature.  We'll talk about other notable cases in history and how physicians of the 19th ce...

Who do you picture when someone says the word "surgeon?"  There are many common depictions of surgeons in popular media--from TV shows and other avenues of fiction.  What makes up the persona of a surgeon?  In her book, Cold Hard Steel, author Agnes Arnold-Forster draws upon the historical building blocks of the profession to examine our ideas of who the modern surgeon is.  Tune in here...

Halloween may be approaching, but this is no ghost story. This episode's unusual case takes us back in time to Paris, 1882.   It is based on a patient known as Mademoiselle X, who was brought in for evaluation by a French neuropsychologist, Dr. Jules Cotard to discover the reasons for her seemingly strange behavior.  What follows in this episode is an exploration of a rare condition in the an...

When you hear the story of how syphilis research was carried out in the United States in the 20th century, you'll probably start to understand why there is a history of mistrust of the medical establishment, especially among the African American community.  This episode details one of the bleakest and most shameful chapters in U.S. medical history, a time when ethics were cast aside at the ex...

You've heard the sayings about how hard life was back in the 18th and 19th centuries, but have you ever considered the life of a chimney sweep in London during those times? Far from the cheery character in Mary Poppins, the actual chimney sweeps of the time were children, hired into a very dangerous job.  One surgeon made the association between that occupation and a certain medical condition...

In the 1990's a curious thing happened.  When a patient arrived very ill to the emergency department, doctors and nurses were astonished to find crystals in her blood with a foul odor.  Why were they smelling the blood?  Who knows, it was the 90's? Soon thereafter, multiple people in the hospital room with her started to fall ill.  What might have caused these things to happen?  We'...

This is a historic episode.  We'd like to welcome the newest addition to the Poor Historians Podcast crew, the exceptionally talented and enthusiastic new medical history intern, Alba!  This is her first episode on the show and we're stoked to have her along on our misadventures.    Here we have another mystery case.  Aaron will take us through a harrowing recount of the mysterious malad...

Esteemed retinal surgeon and accomplished author, Dr. Andrew Lam joined us on the show to discuss multiple foundational stories to explain how modern cardiology came to be.  This comes from a chapter out of his most recent book, The Masters of Medicine which also contains other stories about the most important innovations and discoveries from a variety of medical specialties.  We'll talk abou...

This episode has a fun twist.  Aaron and Mike will go through the case of the famous American author and mastery of mystery and suspense, Edgar Allen Poe's.  They'll be presented with his final moments and hospital course, initially not knowing who we're talking about.  This is a bit of a look at how physicians brainstorm medical cases to come up with the most likely explanations. ...

You've probably heard her name before but do you know the real story behind this infamous moniker?  The story of Typhoid Mary is a complicated one having to do with public health, an infectious disease, and impressively human stubbornness.  We'll talk about Typhoid fever, the bacteria that causes it, and how a healthy person ended up exiled to an island thanks to a winding set of circums...

New episode this week with special guest @janeyjonesliteraryprincess who joined us to talk about her new book, "The Edinburgh Seven." It's the tale of seven women, led by the inimitable Sophia Jex-Blake who sought to become, along with her colleagues, the first women to be trained in medicine at the #universityofedinburgh . This is the story as well of the intimidation they faced du...

These two titans of medical history were contemporaries whose scientific sparring was as interesting as it was helpful.  By butting heads over topics in microbiology,  Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, used a rivalry to further our understanding of infectious disease and both contributed greatly to mitigating the impact that so many different microbes have on humankind.  This week's episode was...

Tuberculosis is an infectious disease of historic proportions.  Not only is it still around, infecting an estimated 10+million people in 2021 alone, but in a prior era, in Victorian England, having tuberculosis became something of a fashion achievement, believe it or not.  In this episode, we'll explore how having this awful and deadly disease--especially in a time before antibiotics--became...

This episode will be a deviation from our normal format.  Unfortunately, the entire episode we'd recorded for release this week was lost to the cyberspace aether.  A whole episode just gone from existence.  Discovering this with no time to re-record, we decided to release something previously unheard: a Poor Historians Podcast pilot episode. We had played with several formats for the show and...

As the resident Doctor of Osteopathy (D.O.) on this podcast, Max will lead his MD colleagues through an examination of the roots of osteopathic medicine from its founding by Andrew Taylor Still, its quest to re-define medicine, and its eventual growth into the medical profession it is today.  If you've ever wondered why some doctors have D.O. after their name, this episode will hopefully expl...