Anyone who hunts, the pair told me, eats organs. Though the Inuit (in Canada, the term is preferred over Eskimo) gave up their nomadic existence in the 1950s, most adult men still supplemented the fam...
A wedding gown entails multilayering of expensive specialty fabrics for an outfit whose useful lifespan may come and go in a single afternoon. Much like a bomb suit.
A Dr. Courtney W. Shropshire, writing in 1912, was impressed to note that by means of a special prostatic applicator, well lubricated, attached to the vibrator, introduced to the rectum he was able to...
What she perhaps didn’t realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body’s erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in...
Watch Marilena gingerly probing the woman’s exposed tissue. What she is doing, basically, is getting her bearings: learning—in a detailed, hands-on manner—what’s what and what’s where in the complicat...
Technologists sometimes exploit the synergy between the two. By adding strawberry or vanilla—aromas we associate with sweetness—it’s possible to fool people into thinking a food is sweeter than it rea...
Short piece headlined Elvis Died of Constipation had run as the site’s lead story (and its middle and last story) under the category Constipation News. Why didn’t the colonic inertia theory come up ea...
Folk ballad about a woman named Daisy who is reincarnated as a medical student whose gross anatomy cadaver turns out to be himself in a former life, i.e., Daisy.
You don't need proof. You just need an inclination
Who’s going to open the gates of heaven to some slob with his entrails all hanging out and dripping on the carpeting? From the sixteenth century up until the passage of the Anatomy Act, in 1836, the o...
What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I’d stay in my deck chair, if I were m...
We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week’s coleslaw. Thus we should...
We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, our loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her.
Verbal facility with smells and flavors doesn’t come naturally. As babies, we learn to talk by naming what we see. Baby points to a lamp, mother says, ‘Yes, a lamp,’ says Johan Lundström, a biological...
Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect.
Under the section heading Experiments with Human Subjects – a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased –
Twenty-five percent of the nurses in one study, writes Larson, had dry, damaged skin. Ironically, the nurses may be exacerbating the very thing that hand-washing seeks to prevent: the spread of infect...
Though I found this information surprising, this being the Father of Medicine we are talking about, I did not question it. You do not question an author who appears on the title page as T.V.N. Persaud...
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 other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, wi...