I ask Nichopoulos to talk about precisely, medically, what caused Presley’s death. The night he died he was bigger than usual, he begins. Depending on how long it had been since Presley had managed to...
He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I’ve been to frat parties like that.
Frequent bowel movements were associated with an increased risk of rectal cancer in men, and constipation was associated with a decreased risk. Mike Jones wasn’t surprised. The medical community was n...
Brave and anal: the ideal space explorer. Though you don’t find anal on any of those lists of recommended astronaut attributes. NASA doesn’t really use words like anal. Unless they have to.
And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you’re not forgotten.
A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, The possibi...
Most of these seemingly collected by Keith’s mother: Some of the pleasantest recollections of my boyhood are of fried jackrabbit, baked jackrabbit, jackrabbit stew, and jackrabbit pie.)
The National Research Council (NRC) hired a team of anthropologists, led by the venerable Margaret Mead, to study American food habits. How do people decide what’s good to eat, and how do you go about...
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...
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
They think of it as lubricating, and that’s it! She went back to her hotel room and called her boyfriend in tears.
There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared...
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 shot is an extreme close-up, making it impossible to tell, without already knowing, what kind of flesh it is. It could be Julia Child skinning poultry before a studio audience. The seminar
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 other mode of defecation-associated sudden death is pulmonary embolism. The surge of blood when the person relaxes can dislodge a clot in a large blood vessel
The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken.
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 bacteria species in your colon today are more or less the same ones you had when you were six months old. About 80 percent of a person’s gut microflora transmit from his or her mother during birth...