Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let's not use the word maggot. Let's use a pretty word. Let's use hacienda.
During World War II, the U.S. military was shipping so much meat overseas to feed troops and allies that a domestic shortage loomed. According to a 1943 Breeder’s Gazette article, the American soldier...
Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male.
But gross anatomy lab is not just about learning anatomy. It is about confronting death.
Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother’s foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they’ve sampled while in the womb and while br...
Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection
Beaumont had been trying to determine whether the gastric juice would work outside of the stomach, removed from the body’s vital force. (It does.) He filled vial after vial with St. Martin’s secretion...
Bad enough that some ham-handed fop in a waistcoat and bowtie was up to his wrists in your urinary tract, but on top of that you had an audience
Bacteria don’t have mouths or fingers or Wolf Ranges, but they eat.
At an Italian deli counter, a whiff of butyric acid reads as parmesan cheese; elsewhere, vomit.
As one former anatomy instructor said to me, No one’s taking heads home in buckets anymore.
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...
According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime...
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 patient on the way to surgery travels at twice the speed of a patient on the way to the morgue. Gurneys that ferry the living through hospital corridors move forward in an aura of purpose and push,...
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...
Kissing is a less aggressive form of bacterial transplant. Studies of three different gingivitis-causing bacteria have documented migration from spouse to spouse. Periodontically speaking, an affair m...
Tried to reenliven mealtimes by hiring a quartette to sing The Chewing Song,† an original Kellogg composition,
There is a photograph of zugibe and one of his volunteers in the aforementioned sindon article. zugibe is dressed in a knee-length white lab coat and is shown adjusting one of the vital sign leads aff...
The act of vomiting deserves your respect. It's an orchestral event of the gut.