Eye cap is a simple ten-cent piece of plastic. It is slightly larger than a contact lens, less flexible, and considerably less comfortable. The plastic is repeatedly lanced through, so that small, sha...
Comparing traditional bouillon with gelatin-based broth. The latter was more distasteful, more putrescible, less digestible, less nutritious, and . . . moreover, it often brought on diarrhea.
By letter in Morse code. Kittinger says it was a joke, but Simons didn’t take it that way. (Morse code has always been a tough medium for humor.) In his memoir Man High, Simons recalls thinking that t...
YOU NEVER THINK about the weight of your organs inside you. Your heart is a half-pound clapper hanging off the end of your aorta. Your arms burden your shoulders like buckets on a yoke. The colon uses...
With charm comes charm’s sidekick, dilapidation.
What can be done for these men? A lot. The art of phalloplasty—crafting a working penis from other parts of a patient’s body—has come a long way (thanks in no small part to the transgender community).
This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best....
This book is a salute to the scientists and the surgeons, running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping. Building safer tanks, waging war on filth flies. Understanding turkey vultures. T
The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. suggests 'a sailor in space.' suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.
The study animal of choice for taste researchers is the catfish,* simply because it has so many receptors. They are all over its skin. Catfish are basically swimming tongues, says Rawson. It is a usef...
The question then becomes, was it necessary, once the likes of Vesalius had pretty much figured out the basics, for every student of anatomy to get right in there and figure them out all over again? W...
The prevailing mood of the painting is stoicism: one man enduring for the sake of science, the other for subsistence. Given the painting’s intent—the glorification of medicine (and Beaumont and Wyeth...
The organism is driven toward nature’s singular goal—conception, the passing on of one’s genes—and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background.
The one image I eventually found of Alexis St. Martin as a whole young man is in a painting by Dean Cornwell entitled Beaumont and St. Martin—part of the Pioneers of American Medicine series commissio...
The moral of the story is this: It takes an ill-advised mix of ignorance, arrogance, and profit motive to dismiss the wisdom of the human body in favor of some random notion you’ve hatched or heard an...
The body’s response to this wild, Valsalvic seesawing of the vital signs can throw off the electrical rhythm of the heart. The resulting arrhythmia can be fatal. This is especially likely to happen in...
The British investigators know what butchers have long known: If you want people to feel comfortable about dead bodies, cut them into pieces. A cow carcass is upsetting; a brisket is dinner. A human l...
Taste, like smell, is a doorman for the digestive tract, a chemical scan for possibly dangerous (bitter, sour) elements and desirable (salty, sweet) nutrients.
So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery.
Rodents, on the other hand, are slaves to sweetness. They have been known to die of malnutrition rather than step away from a sugar-water drip. In an obesity study from the 1970s, rats fed an all-you-...