What you are about to read is information I've compiled over the years. It is only inteded as information for the curious. I do not, nor have I ever claimed to have written any of this information.

Imagine the terror of seeing black spots on your back. Living in a time when there was no knowledge of medicine, bacteria, antibodies and no blood test. This is what it felt like to the victim of the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century ( Read more... )

On August 15, 1951, the Provencal village of Pont Saint Esprit went mad ( Read more... )

About 1 percent of the population dies each year and altogether about 130,000 million humans have lived and died since the first emergence of our species. But most of them have lived in the past century, and it has been calculated that each of us today has no more than about twenty ancestors standing behind us. To hold all their corpses you would ( Read more... )

The Masada (Hebrew = 'rock fortress') is a fortress on an isolated mountain plateau above the west shore of the Dead Sea. It has been inhabited for the past 3,000 years and in the second century BC a castle was built on its flat summit, towering 1,540 feet above the Dead Sea. In AD 73 it was the last stronghold of the Jewish Zealots and the Essenes ( Read more... )

Count Dracula may not have really have been a vampire. He may have had rabies instead ( Read more... )

Many decades ago, members of the Seminole tribe left their home in the Cherokee nation, slowly travelling south until they came upon Lake Wales in south-central Florida. The small group found a high campsite (for Florida) with excellent fishing in the unspoiled waters of the lake. Nearby was Iron Mountain, the highest point in Florida, believed to ( Read more... )

It was an Edinburgh anatomist named Robert Knox who instigated anatomy's fatal PR blunder: the implicit sanctioning of murder for medicine. In 1828, one of Knox's assistants answered the door to find a pair of strangers in the courtyard with a cadaver at their feet. This was business as usual for anatomist of the day, and so Knox invited the men in ( Read more... )

In attempting to cope with the shortage of cadavers legally available for dissection, instructors at British and early American anatomy schools backed themselves into some unsavory corners. They became known as the kind of guys to whom you could take your son's amputated leg and sell it for beer money (37.5 cents, to be exact, it happened in ( Read more... )

To understand the cautious respect for the dead that pervades the modern anatomy lab, it helps to understand the extreme lack of it that pervades the field's history. Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy ( Read more... )