Welcome to the internet's most extensive collection of weird and wonderful medical curiosities.
I began writing this blog while researching my first book The Matter of the Heart. It didn’t take long to discover that early medical journals are full of extraordinary and often scarcely believable stories. In my spare time I collected some of the most quirky, bizarre or surprising cases I encountered and published them online for others to enjoy.
The blog quickly picked up a following, and its stories were featured on other websites including Listverse and BBC Future. Eventually a selection of my favourite cases became the basis for my second book The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth.
I am no longer adding new stories to the more than five hundred already published – but they are collected here for you to enjoy. A complete list can be found here.
The first issue of Medical Observations and Enquiries, a medical journal founded in London in 1757, contains this sad little tale: […]
George II is the only British monarch known to have died while defecating. At about seven o’clock on the morning