Beef went next. Because I used to write for a health magazine, I had heard about Mad Cow disease back when it was known by its scientific nomenclature, bovine spongebob empopalopathy.
Bacteria don’t have mouths or fingers or Wolf Ranges, but they eat.
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.
To test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved slowly and insecurely and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in whi...
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...
Phalloplasty—crafting a working penis from other parts of a patient’s body—has
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...
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...
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
There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the house, writes the author in all seriousness describing a memorial service for a medical school's cadavers.
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 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 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 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 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...