Category
Health
6 articles
When Lead Was in Gasoline, Paint and Almost Everything
For centuries lead was in wine, paint, gasoline and even makeup. The story of the toxic metal it took humanity millennia to finally give up on.
Vaccine: the word that hides a cow
The word «vaccine» comes from the Latin vacca, «cow». Edward Jenner coined it after finding that cowpox protected people against the deadly smallpox.
Wolbachia: the bacterium that bends sex and kills males
Wolbachia infects half the world's insects and hijacks their reproduction: it feminizes males, kills them off, and is now used to stop dengue.
Nostalgia: The Word That Was a Medical Diagnosis
Nostalgia was born in 1688 as a deadly disease: a Swiss student invented it to name the illness suffered by soldiers who longed for their homeland.
Stockholm Syndrome Was Born to Silence a Hostage
The famous syndrome didn't come from a study: the police's own psychiatrist coined it to discredit a hostage who criticized him. It isn't in the DSM.
The Doctor Who Toasted With Bacteria and Won a Nobel
Nobody believed a bacterium caused ulcers. Fed up, Barry Marshall drank a culture of it, made himself sick on purpose, and changed medicine.