How far would you go to find the answers to a medical mystery?
Would you go as far as Stubbins Ffirth, a 19th century doctor who smeared himself with vomit and other bodily fluids from yellow-fever suffers to prove it wasn’t a contagious disease?
Or tape a sample of radium salts to your arm for 10 hours as Pierre Cuire did in his desire to find out how radiation might help in the treatment of cancer?
Probably not.
Read more about these and other extraordinary scientists who put their lives on the line for the sake of knowledge at New Scientist’s fascinating (and somewhat …read more

Sometimes I think that there is too much of what I think here at Healthbolt and so, occasionally, I’m more than happy to open up the floor to someone else’s opinion.
Hence the Healthbolt Op-Ed – a place where readers can express their thoughts and opinions on interesting and entertaining health related topics.
Today, we’ve got Holly McCarthy ruminating on an interesting and, to most westerners, a somewhat bizarre form of treatment - urine therapy.
Since early times, healers have believed that urine has many curative and preventative properties. The Romans thought it helped whiten teeth, the Chinese thought that wiping babies faces with it helped protect …read more

Did you know that this year marks the 100th year of America’s reliance on chlorine to disinfect drinking water?
Jersey City, NJ was the first US city to routinely chlorinate it’s municipal drinking water, followed by Chicago’s union stockyards and many, many more cities around the country. Today, pretty much all U.S. public water systems rely on chlorine in some form for safe drinking water
As a result, waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid are virtually eliminated.
But as this guest post by the Chairman of Water Quality & Health Council highlights, there are always cracks in the system…
The Waterborne Outbreak in …read more

Ready for some more interesting, fascinating, unusual, strange, and even bizarre news…
Pay patients to go to the doctor? – in England, Health Service Managers are looking at ways to get people in unhealthy people in the lower social economic rankings to visit the doctor. The thinking is that if you can get people to the doctor earlier, before chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease set in, the government health system would save money. It makes sort of makes sense. But the idea is getting flack from politicans and medical experts alike who say that the government shouldn’t be …read more

From stomach sized hairballs to a giant hamster wheel for energetic patients, medical museums offer a chance to explore medicines colorful history and discover the bizarre, the offbeat, and the extreme treatments of days gone by.
So if you’re on the road this summer and don’t mind a little ’shock and gore’, stop by a medical museum or two. You’ll be amazed (and relieved) by how far the practice of medicine has come.
Here’s four medical museums definitely worth visiting:
The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia was orginally established as a place for trainee doctors to go and learn about anatomy and human anomalies. …read more

Wait. I’m Not Dead!
This guy in France has created renewed debate about when is a person really dead. Seems that his heart stopped for an hour and a half, giving doctors cause to believe he was dead. But just before they started the prep to remove his organs for transplants, his breathing and heartbeat resumed and he began regaining consciousness.
Going Bald for Charity Can Cause Loss of Job
A kind hearted waitress recently discovered that doing a good deed doesn’t always pay. Wanting to raise money for a cancer research charity, Stacey Fearnall donated her hair. But her boss isn’t keen …read more

If you think drugs are scary now, take a look at what was on offer in the 1800’s and 1900’s…

Source: Dr. Bonkers presents
The Nearly Genuine and Truly Marvelous
Psychoneuropharmacological Mental Medicine Show

It must have been some hit to force a paintbrush, bristles first, into a man’s head. Stranger still, the victim didn’t even realise it was there. Seems he turned up at the emergency room some 6 hours after the assault complaining of a headache and left cheek and eye soreness.
Even the medics couldn’t see the paintbrush. All that was evident at the time was a 5 cm cut below his left eye. But a CT scan painted a fuller picture, showing a cylindrical foreign body positioned from the left orbit to the right thalamus. Everyone assumed it was a piece …read more

There are only two things that are guaranteed in this world – you are born and you will die. Just how long you have between the two events depends on a multitude of factors. Longevity is possible, and for most of us highly probable (so says the Vitality Compass).
Death and dealing with the dead might seem like a morbid topic but apparently it’s also a very popular one. After all, how many of you were hooked on Six Feet Under?
Top 10 Weird Ways We Deal with the Dead.
This is a fascinating list of what happened to the dead throughout history. …read more

Some people photograph landscapes. Others like cityscapes. And still others like to photograph wildlife. But New York based photographer Joanna Ebenstein likes to photograph medical artifacts. She took a month long pilgrimage to famed medical museums of the Western World, photographing everything from real human remains to wax, ivory, and paper mâché models.
According to Ebenstein, the “…artifacts were created to teach medical and surgical students in a time when cadavers were difficult or illegal to come by. These preserved objects—be they skeletal, actual human remains, or depictions of the body in various forms of media—were invaluable teaching aids—portable, durable and …read more