That’s what killed Elvis, said Adrianne Noe. Noe is the director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, which has its own megacolon, from an unknown party. As we were about to get off the phon...
That was the mindset that propelled one of the AMRL’s least popular liquid diets into a long and lucrative career as Carnation Instant Breakfast.
Presley was given laxatives and enemas on an almost daily basis. I carried around three or four boxes of Fleets, Nichopoulos says, referring to the enema brand and recalling his days on tour with Pres...
Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fis...
One of the seminar organizers joins me. Is Yvonne giving you a hard time? My nemesis is none other than the cadaver beheader. As if turns out, she's also the lab manager, the person responsible when...
Not long ago, a whale biologist named Phillip Clapham sent me a photograph that illustrates the consequences of life without a doorman. Like most creatures that swallow their food whole, sperm whales...
No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.
My bias is that it does exist. But I would never say that I know that. Until I prove it.
Most of them students from the nearby University of Dayton...
Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of sp...
Medical journals from 1905 to 1915 are rife with articles on vibratory massage and the many things it cures. Weakened hearts and floating kidneys. Hysterical cramp of the esophagus and catarrh of the...
It's hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point
It is assumed that a man will fit one of the three sizes available in the condom-style urine collection device hose attachment inside the EVA suit. To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts op...
In a 1995 Journal of Trauma article entitled Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention, Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of...
I like the term decedent. It's as though the man weren't dead, but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute. For evident reasons, mortuary science is awash with euphemisms. Don't say s...
Here is the secret to surviving one of these crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical Institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survi...
He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants’ hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. A whole new evolution of bone structure takes...
For those who must deal with human corpses regularly, it is easier (and, I suppose, more accurate) to think of them as objects, not people. For most physicians, objectification is mastered their first...
For the more you know about how dead bodies decay—the biological and chemical phases they go through, how long each phase lasts, how the environment affects these phases—the better equipped you are to...
Fletcher was the instigator of a fad for extremely thorough chewing. We are not talking about British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s thirty-two chews per bite. We are talking about this: One-fifth...