The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off. The job was immoral, and ugly to be sure, but probably less unpleasant...
The human liver is a boss-looking organ.
The ducks of Mackinac Island are apparently not easily taken down. Found a portion of the Lungs as large as a turkey’s egg protruding through the external wound, lacerated and burnt, and below this an...
The anonymity of body parts facilitates the necessary dissociations of cadaveric research: This is not a person. This is just tissue. It has no feelings, and no one has feelings for it. It's okay to d...
THE GREAT IRONY is that in the beginning, the gut was all there was. We’re basically a highly evolved earthworm surrounding the intestinal tract, Khoruts commented as we drove away from his clinic the...
Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a
Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a culture of conformity, that’s braver than it sounds.
Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Comi...
Rawson has a colleague who studies crayfish and lobsters, which taste with their antennae. I was always jealous of people who study lobsters. They examine the antennae, and then they have a lobster di...
Pus can be distinguished from mucus, wrote Dr. Samuel Cooper in his 1823 Dictionary of Practical Surgery, by its sweetish mawkish taste and a smell peculiar to itself. To the doctor who is still strug...
People pooh-pooh Bud. It’s an extremely well-made beer. It’s clean, it’s refreshing. If you’re mowing the lawn and you come in and you want something refreshing and thirst-quenching, you wouldn’t drin...
I’m short, I’m thin, I’m not rich. I would say my career choice is in fourth place in limiting my effectiveness as a single adult. (It’s possible that it helped. Within a year, he would be married.)
It’s one thing to get enough evidence to convince yourself, but it’s a whole other matter to produce a demonstration that would be acceptable to a community of scientists,
It’s no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty a...
In Working Ethics: William Beaumont, Alexis St. Martin, and Medical Research in Antebellum America, historian Alexa Green explains the men’s relationship as clearly one of master and servant. If the m...
I had heard that Presley died on the toilet, but I’d assumed the location was happenstance, as it was with Judy Garland and Lenny Bruce: an embarrassing setting for a standard celebrity overdose. But...
Hydrogen sulfide is so swiftly lethal that farm- and workplace-safety organizations urge anyone who enters a manure pit or attempts to clear a blocked sewage pipe to wear a self-contained breathing ap...
Here is what William Beaumont had to say about saliva: Its legitimate and only use, in my opinion, is to lubricate the food to facilitate the passage of the bolus through the [esophagus]. Beaumont was...
During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. But the men wanted something they could chew, something into...
Analogies drawn from the inspection of hen’s eggs foundered on the objection that man was not a chicken.