Unusual facts about the history of medicine, medical milestones, cures and treatments.

Take a tour of one of the most complex, diverse and downright unusual places on the entire planet - the human body! Find out all about what makes YOU tick, from the wonders of the human brain to the tingling in your ticklish toes. From crazy bodily functions to bizarre real-life medical cases, this is the ultimate guide to getting to know yourself, inside and out! Operation Ouch! is a BAFTA-winning CBBC series, from the makers of Embarrassing Bodies and 10 Years Younger. It's presented by real-life doctors (and twin brothers) Chris and Xand van Tulleken.

Weird Cures is a catalog of very strange, sometimes hilarious, often horrifying cures that were actually used by physicians, and then discredited. Some of these so-called cures are beyond belief! For instance: Mercury, now known to be highly toxic, was once thought to draw poison from the body. It was even administered for routine ills like constipation and toothaches! Strappado, a technique in which patients are strapped to ladders and dropped from significant heights, was used to correct spinal misalignments. It is now considered torture. Weird Cures is a compendium of these bizarre and sometimes fatal treatments. This fun look at medical history will fascinate and astonish, and make you laugh and gasp at the same time.

Discover the astonishing and peculiar history of medicine with this perfect gift for history buffs, doctors, and anyone looking to be amazed by the brilliant and bizarre ideas that shaped the world of medicine as we know it. From the use of electric eels in ancient Egypt to medieval dentists burning candles to combat invisible worms, this book uncovers the weirdest medical practices throughout history, highlighting the most dubious ideas, strangest treatments, and biggest blunders. Entertaining, shocking, and sometimes stomach-turning, Strange Medicine presents strange but true facts and an honor roll of doctors, scientists, and dreamers who inadvertently turned the clock of medicine backward. Did you know: • Renaissance physicians timed surgical procedures according to the position of the stars? • Blood from beheadings was believed to cure epilepsy? • Dr. Walter Freeman, the world’s foremost practitioner of lobotomies, practiced his craft while traveling on family camping trips, hammering ice picks into the eye sockets of his patients in between hikes in the woods? Strange Medicine is an illuminating panorama of medical history as you’ve never seen it before.

A bestselling history of medicine, enriched with a new foreword, concluding essay, and bibliographic essay. Erwin H. Ackerknecht’s A Short History of Medicine is a concise narrative, long appreciated by students in the history of medicine, medical students, historians, and medical professionals as well as all those seeking to understand the history of medicine. Covering the broad sweep of discoveries from parasitic worms to bacilli and x-rays, and highlighting physicians and scientists from Hippocrates and Galen to Pasteur, Koch, and Roentgen, Ackerknecht narrates Western and Eastern civilization’s work at identifying and curing disease. He follows these discoveries from the library to the bedside, hospital, and laboratory, illuminating how basic biological sciences interacted with clinical practice over time. But his story is more than one of laudable scientific and therapeutic achievement. Ackerknecht also points toward the social, ecological, economic, and political conditions that shape the incidence of disease. Improvements in health, Ackerknecht argues, depend on more than laboratory knowledge: they also require that we improve the lives of ordinary men and women by altering social conditions such as poverty and hunger. This revised and expanded edition includes a new foreword and concluding biographical essay by Charles E. Rosenberg, Ackerknecht’s former student and a distinguished historian of medicine. A new bibliographic essay by Lisa Haushofer explores recent scholarship in the history of medicine.

Kill or Cure, a lavishly illustrated new history from DK, recounts the quest of doctors and scientists through the ages to tame and conquer mankind's ever-enduring enemies: disease, injury, and death. Sometimes misguided, sometimes inspired, always doggedly determined, the great scientific minds of every generation have battled the unknown within our bodies, developing potions, drugs, and therapies in a quest to heal and cure. Beginning with early healers, chance discoveries, technological advancement, and "wonder" drugs, and using panels, timelines, and thematic spreads, Kill or Cure highlights information about human anatomy, surgical instruments, and medical breakthroughs while telling the dramatic tale of medical progress. Diaries, notebooks, and other first-person accounts tell the fascinating stories from the perspective of people who witnessed medical history firsthand. Packed with photographs, diagrams, and visual explanations, Kill or Cure tells the extraordinary tale of medicine through the ages.

Fifty crucial milestones, treatments, and technologies in the history of health, each explained in a minute. Did you know that technology now allows reconstructive surgery to use customized 3D-printed body parts? This is just one of the incredible feats that modern medicine has brought to us. Find out even more about the direction of medical technology and more in Know It All: Medicine! Grab some scrubs and prepare yourself for an intriguing visit to the world of illness and those who treat it. Know It All: Medicine takes you on an engrossing journey that starts with history's very first "medicines" and moves on to today's keyhole surgery, bionic limbs, and breakthrough drug treatments. It's an essential and engaging read for anyone who wants to know more about the contemporary state of medicine, and what the future may hold for medicine and its practitioners. Excellent for those curious about technology, and those in the medical field alike!

Medicine’s Strangest Cases is a choice prescription of weird and wonderful tales from the history of medicine, featuring the German doctor who fought a duel with a sausage, the Harley Street physician-turned-novelist who invented a disease – and its remedy – to keep his clients happy, and the quiet and cautious Swiss scientist who inadvertently unleashed LSD on the world. The stories in this book are bizarre, fascinating, hilarious, and, most importantly, true. Revised, redesigned and updated for 2016, this book is the perfect gift for medical students, clinicians, hypochondriacs and history fans. Laugh out loud and wince with sympathy with this rundown of the most bizarre medical cases ever. Word count: 45,000

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book. "[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times From the era of slavery to the present day, starting with the earliest encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, Medical Apartheid details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how Blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of Blacks. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused Black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust.

What does the Hippocratic oath actually say? Who originally discovered antibiotics? And is it true that technology now allows reconstructive surgery to use customized 3D-printed body parts? Find out the answers to these questions and many others in 30-Second Medicine, an intriguing visit to the world of illness and those who treat it. It takes the reader on an engrossing journey from the first "medicines", drawn direct from the natural world , to today's keyhole surgery, bionic limbs, and breakthrough drug treatments. It's an essential and engaging read for anyone who wants to know more about the contemporary state of medicine, and where it may go next.