History and science, checked against the sources.
How healers, patients and institutions understood the body, and where they went wrong.
A popular story says Hippocrates described lint-wrapped wooden tampons. Classicist Helen King traced it to modern marketing and a misread Greek word. Here is what the evidence supports.
· 15 sources
From powdered Egyptian mummy to the skull tincture given to a dying Charles II, how European physicians made the human body into medicine, and why the practice faded.
· 18 sources
Walter Freeman really did travel the country promoting lobotomy. The van he supposedly called the "lobotomobile" is another matter. Here is where the word came from.
· 12 sources