They live like rice, too, pressed together: a moist, solid entity. If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse (and this I truly don’t recommend), you can hear them feeding. A...
The two first met in June 1822, at a company store on Mackinac Island, part of a trading post owned by the American Fur Company. St. Martin was a French Canadian voyageur—an indentured trapper—hauling...
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 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 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.
Taste is a sort of chemical touch. Taste cells are specialized skin cells. If you have hands for picking up foods and putting them into your mouth, it makes sense for taste cells to be on your tongue....
Sugar contributes to tooth decay only indirectly. Like humans, bacteria are fond of it. Bacteria get all crazy—party, party—they metabolize the sugar, break it down, and they release their metabolites...
Squatting upon the floor of the room, without any perceptible effort he passed into the hollow of his hand the contents of the rectum . . . , wrote the anonymous writer’s physician in a letter printed...
People who saw the Graceland master bathroom would remark on its extravagance—a TV set! Telephones! A cushioned seat!—but the décor was in equal part a reflection of how much time was spent there. He...
One French clergyman recommended thrusting a red-hot poker up what Bondeson genteelly refers to as the rear passage. A French physician invented a set of nipple pincers specifically for the purpose of...
Not a single one was shipped to the field. Why? Because the National Defense Research Committee had been working on a far more lasting and penetrative weapon for use against the Japanese. Seventeen da...
No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.
Kinsey wanted Dellenback to film his own staff. There are three ways to read that sentence, all of them true.
If you insist on driving around in vintage cars with no seat belt on, try to time your crashes for the systole—blood-squeezed-out—portion of your heartbeat.
If you don’t have a pair of cadaver shoes, you’re not doing enough research.
I've had kids object to their dad's wishes (to donate), says Ronn Wade, director of the Anatomical Services Division of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. I tell them, 'Do what's best for...
I'd called [Stanley Garn] because he wrote an 's paper on the topic of human flesh and its nutritional value. Your cows, he said, are much more efficient. But I am not so much interested in cultures e...
I remember watching Morin walk away from me, the endearing gait and the butt that got lubed for science, and thinking, 'Oh my god, they're just people.
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...
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.