Medical Mythology and Folklore

In the mid-1990s, a British psychologist named Adrian Raine did something that got him laughed out of funding meetings back home. He put murderers into a PET scanner. Raine had trained under Richard Dawkins and come away convinced that criminal behavior had a biological component worth studying seriously. In Britain, that idea landed somewhere between…

The word “adaptogen” shows up on tea boxes, supplement bottles, and wellness influencer captions constantly, and it feels like exactly the kind of term a modern marketing team invented last decade. It wasn’t. The word came out of a Soviet research program studying how to make soldiers and factory workers more resistant to stress. What…

Pain sounds like something worth escaping. Nobody enjoys it. But pain also does something essential: it tells you, immediately and unmistakably, when something is damaging your body. Pull your hand off a hot stove. Stop walking on a broken ankle. Notice a wound before it gets infected. A small number of people are born without…

A person could wake up feeling completely healthy and be dead before dinner. That was the defining horror of the sweating sickness. This disease terrorized England on and off for 66 years, killed with genuinely alarming speed, and then, in 1551, simply stopped happening. Nobody ever figured out what it actually was. Born Alongside a…

At around 4:30 in the afternoon on September 13, 1848, a 25-year-old railroad foreman named Phineas Gage was packing gunpowder into a hole drilled through solid rock outside Cavendish, Vermont. His job was to tamp the charge down with an iron rod before it detonated. Something went wrong. The powder ignited early. The rod, over…

Before 1846, surgery meant staying fully conscious through it. Assistants held patients down. Speed was the surgeon’s greatest virtue, since a faster amputation meant less time screaming and less blood lost. Patients got, at most, a swig of alcohol or a dose of opium beforehand. Then, within about seventy years, the entire experience flipped completely.…

Say the word plague, and most people picture the same scene. Filthy medieval cities. Rats scurrying through crowded streets. Corpses piled up faster than anyone could bury them. New DNA evidence just pushed that picture back thousands of years, to a setting that couldn’t look more different. Small, mobile hunter-gatherer families in the Siberian wilderness,…

Within the first 48 hours of his life, something was clearly wrong with KJ Muldoon. Doctors noticed lethargy and trouble breathing. A blood test came back with numbers nobody wanted to see. Ammonia levels over 1,000 micromoles per liter, when a normal reading sits somewhere between 9 and 33. Within days, doctors had a diagnosis.…

In 1820, a French orphan named Martin Fugate arrived at Troublesome Creek in eastern Kentucky and claimed a land grant on its banks. He married a local woman named Elizabeth Smith. She had red hair and skin described as pale as the mountain laurel that blooms around the creek hollows each spring. He had blue…

You are probably going to yawn while reading this. Not because you are tired or bored, but because I have now planted the idea of yawning in your brain and your brain, annoyingly, does not fully distinguish between seeing something, reading about something, and doing it. The fact that you might yawn while reading an…

On a Tuesday morning in July 1984, a 32-year-old doctor at Fremantle Hospital in Australia asked his lab technician to prepare him a drink. The technician scraped the contents of two petri dishes full of bacteria into a beaker of beef broth. Marshall swallowed the murky brown liquid quickly, like a shot. He did not…

Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled parasite that infects warm-blooded mammals worldwide. Estimates vary by region, but roughly 30 percent of the global human population carries a latent infection, with some regions running significantly higher. In the US it sits around 10 to 30 percent. In Brazil the seroprevalence reaches 92 percent. In France it runs…

Here is a thing I genuinely did not know until I fell into reading about it: mirages are not illusions. Your eyes are not playing tricks on you. A mirage is real light, traveling from a real object, arriving at your eyes through a real physical process you can measure, predict, and photograph. What you…

This is one of those medical stories that makes me genuinely uncomfortable, and not for the reason you might expect. The discomfort is not about the disease itself. Instead, it is about what happens when sick people encounter a medical establishment that has already decided what is wrong with them. This often happens before examining…

I want to be upfront with you on this one: the title contains the word “probably” for a reason. The ergot theory is one of the most widely repeated explanations for the Salem witch trials, and it is also one of the most contested. Historians who specialize in Salem have serious objections to it. I…

Close your eyes right now and touch your nose with your finger. You did it without looking, without thinking, without any conscious effort at all. Your finger knew exactly where to go. It found your nose in the dark with what feels like zero effort, because an entire sense you’ve never thought about handled the…

I think most people understand the placebo effect in the vague, hand-wavy way that gets taught in high school biology. You give someone a sugar pill, they think it’s medicine, they feel better because of the belief rather than the pill. Simple. What most people don’t know is that the placebo effect is genuinely one…

I feel like I spent most of my early twenties actively fighting my body clock and wondering why I felt terrible all the time. I stayed up until 2am and ate dinner at 10pm. I slept through my alarm three times and survived on caffeine until about 3pm. It turns out there’s an entire field…

In May 1851, a physician named Samuel A. Cartwright published a paper in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal claiming to have discovered a new disease. He called it drapetomania, drawing from the Greek words for “runaway slave” and “madness.” The Louisiana Medical Association heard the paper. A respected scholarly journal published it. Editors…

Imagine being completely convinced you’re dead. Not metaphorically, but genuinely, unshakeably certain that you are a corpse. You’re walking around, breathing, talking to people, and yet your brain has decided, with total confidence, that you no longer exist. This is Cotard’s syndrome. It’s real, it’s documented, and it’s one of the strangest things the human…

Imagine photocopying a document. Then photocopying the copy. Then copying that copy. Each generation introduces tiny artifacts — a smudge, a slightly faded line, a character that blurs just enough to misread. None of these errors correct themselves. They accumulate. By the hundredth copy, the original text is degraded in ways that only compound with…

In the 19th century, something as small and ordinary as a matchstick carried a level of risk most people never saw. Lighting a candle or starting a fire didn’t seem dangerous. The problem wasn’t the match itself… it was how it was made, and who had to make it. At the center of it was…

Somewhere between science, obsession, and outright controversy sits one of the strangest ideas to come out of the 20th century: a box that could supposedly collect life energy and, depending on who you asked, improve your health, your mood, and even your sex life. It was called the “orgone accumulator,” though it later picked up…

It sounds like something pulled from science fiction: a clump of brain cells, sitting in a lab dish, learning how to play a video game. But in 2022, a group of researchers working on a system called DishBrain did exactly that—using living neurons to interact with a simplified version of the classic game Doom. Not…

The Victorian era was a wild time to be alive, mostly because people finally figured out how to harness the fundamental forces of the universe. Immediately, they decided to use them for spa treatments. If you think our current obsession with LED face masks and vibrating lymphatic drainage tools is peak “tech-pseudo-science,” let me introduce…