• Medicine Phineas Gage A single iron rod blasted straight through this railroad foreman's skull and out the other side — and within minutes… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Typhoid Mary She infected dozens of people with a deadly disease, yet never felt sick a single day in her life — and when doctors… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Placebo The sugar pill that sometimes works anyway — the fake treatment so powerful that every real medicine on Earth must… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Medicine Vaccine An idea traced back a thousand years to China ended up wiping one of history's deadliest diseases off the face of the… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Medicine Aspirin Humanity's favorite pill began as tree bark brewed by ancient healers. Today we swallow up to 120 billion of them… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Medicine Anesthesia Queen Victoria called it 'delightful beyond measure', and one in five patients dreams through it. The strange science… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Medicine Insulin It is named after tiny islands hidden inside your pancreas, it was the first protein humans ever fully read, and… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine X-ray The first person to see her own skeleton looked at the image and said "I have seen my death." Within months, shoe… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Thalidomide It was sold over the counter for morning sickness, and one single dose was enough. The disaster it caused rewrote drug… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Hypothermia In the final stage, freezing people tear off their own clothes — and one two-year-old boy survived a body temperature… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Hiccup One man hiccupped for 68 years straight — an estimated 430 million of them. And the leading theory is that hiccups are… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Blood Transfusion In 1667 a French physician pumped sheep's blood into a teenager and he lived. It took another 234 years to find out… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Organ Transplantation The first organ removal for transplant happened in 1954. The United States passed one million cumulative transplants… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Semaglutide It was made for type 2 diabetes. It became one of the most prescribed drugs in America — more than 25 million… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Heart It is about the size of your closed fist, beats around 72 times a minute without being told to, and its failure kills… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Human Brain It holds more than 86 billion nerve cells, floats in fluid so it does not crush under its own weight, and is walled… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Vaccines: How a Milkmaid's Hand Changed Medicine It started with cowpox, a country doctor, and an eight-year-old boy. The idea that followed wiped smallpox off the… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Medicine HeLa Cells taken from a 31-year-old woman in 1951, without her knowledge, are still dividing in laboratories today. There… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Fever A fever is not the illness attacking you. It is your own brain deliberately turning up the thermostat, and the… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Antibiotic People in ancient Sudan were dosing themselves with a real antibiotic 1,500 years before Fleming, brewed into their… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Immune system Your body keeps a written record of every enemy it has ever met, and consults it for the rest of your life. That… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Blood type Give someone the wrong blood and their body attacks it, sometimes fatally. The doctor who worked out why first… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Smallpox Smallpox killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century alone. Then it became the only human disease ever wiped… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Common cold The common cold is the most common illness in humans, and adults catch two or three every year. There is still no cure… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Stethoscope The stethoscope exists because a French doctor in 1816 did not want to press his ear against a woman's chest. He… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Malaria Named after bad air, actually spread by mosquitoes, and treated for centuries with tree bark from Peru. It has shaped… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Rabies Once symptoms begin, survival is almost unknown. Before them, a course of shots prevents it almost entirely. The gap… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Cancer The disease is named after a crab, because ancient physicians thought the swollen veins around a tumour looked like… 4 min read · 9 facts
• Medicine Diabetes About 1,500 years ago, physicians in India spotted diabetes by noticing that ants swarmed to a patient's urine. Today… 4 min read · 9 facts
• Medicine Hand washing Twenty seconds with soap and water can save more lives than any single vaccine, according to UNICEF. And that hot… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Human eye Each of your eyes has a blind spot, and your eyes never truly stop moving, even when you stare. Without those tiny… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Penicillin In 1928 a mould got into a bacterial culture and seemed to kill the bacteria. It took a team in Oxford, a mouldy melon… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Human skeleton You were born with around 270 bones, yet an adult has only about 206. Where do the missing ones go, and what else is… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Human microbiome You carry about 38 trillion bacterial cells, roughly as many as your own body cells. Meet the hidden crowd that… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Adrenaline Stories tell of parents lifting part of a car to free a trapped child, and this hormone is linked to such feats. It… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Synesthesia For some people, the word basketball tastes like waffles and the letter A is always red. Meet synesthesia, where the… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Sleepwalking In movies, sleepwalkers shuffle along with eyes shut and arms stretched out. In real life their eyes are wide open… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Phantom limb Most people who lose an arm or leg still feel it there, itching, moving, even reaching for things. And one scientist… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Hypertension It affects a third of everyone alive, it is a leading cause of early death, and about half the people who have it feel… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Medicine Allergy Nine out of ten people who think they are allergic to penicillin are not. Meet the immune system's famous false alarm… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Laughter Try laughing "ha-ho-ha-ho": your body physically cannot do it. Yet ten minutes of real belly laughter once bought one… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Blood donation In the US, someone needs blood every two seconds, yet after big disasters so many people rush to donate that the extra… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Sneeze Up to 35% of people sneeze when they step into bright sunlight, an inherited quirk with the perfect name: ACHOO… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Jet lag A 10-hour flight from Europe to southern Africa gives you no jet lag at all, yet a 4-hour hop from Miami to Phoenix… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Color blindness Some color blind people can tell apart 15 shades of khaki that look exactly the same to everyone else. 5 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Scurvy For decades the British Navy fought scurvy with lime juice, and a 1918 test later found that juice had almost no power… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Insomnia Some people swear they lay awake all night, yet sleep tests show they slept for hours. And one treatment for insomnia… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Motion sickness Your brain may treat carsickness like poisoning: when your eyes and inner ear disagree, it guesses you swallowed a… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Snoring When you snore, the soft tissue in your throat flaps about 50 times a second, and in one study, treating snorers gave… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Handedness Only about 10% of people are left-handed, yet about half of all fencers are. And kangaroos? They mostly favor their… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Vitamin D In 1899, sick lion cubs at the London Zoo were cured with cod liver oil, decades before vitamin D even had a name… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Medicine Tooth decay In one Nigerian community that ate about 2 grams of sugar a day, only two percent of people had ever had a cavity… 4 min read · 10 facts