The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: And Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine

This wryly humorous collection of stories about bizarre medical treatments and cases offers a unique portrait of a bygone era in all its grisly weirdness.

A puzzling series of dental explosions beginning in the nineteenth century is just one of many strange tales that have long lain undiscovered in the pages of old medical journals. Award-winning medical historian Thomas Morris has assembled the stories thematically, so readers will witness Mysterious Illnesses (such as the Rhode Island woman who peed through her nose), Horrifying Operations (1635: A hungover Dutchman swallows a knife, which is then surgically removed from his stomach), Dubious Treatments (like the 1799 painkiller made of a ＂foul-smelling morphine/crow’s vomit concoction＂), Unfortunate Predicaments (such as that of the boy who honked like a goose after inhaling a bird’s larynx), and many other marvels.

These painfully amusing stories amount to far more than a series of anecdotes. They tell us a great deal about the evolution of modern medicine. Some show the medical profession hopeless in the face of ailments that today would be quickly banished by modern drugs; but others are heartening tales of recovery against the odds, patients saved from death by the devotion or ingenuity of a conscientious doctor.

However embarrassing the ailment or ludicrous the treatment, every case tells us something about the knowledge (and ignorance) of an earlier age, along with the sheer resilience of human life.