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Medical history podcast

Have you ever wanted to learn about the history of medical practices, like radiation therapy, or the story behind the resurrection men: the dudes who dug up bodies in the 19th century to dissect them? Or how about the story behind newer, "medical" trends like kombucha, or the ketogenic diet?

No? Okay, well, alright. Talk to you later I guess...

So I listen to a fair amount of podcasts in my free time. Most of them are goof-goof-comedy podcasts, which don't necessarily help me become a better person in any way. There are however some that are at least adjacent to intellectual content, like Sawbones, which is a medical history podcast. It's a podcast where dr. Sydnee Mcelroy and her husband Justin Mcelroy talk about "all of the dumb, bad, gross, weird, and wrong ways we've tried to fix people."

I think it's cool to hear about these things from the perspective of an actual doctor. She speaks about the history of the practices as well as talks about how the problems are handled these days. Justin's role in the show is to stand as an audience surrogate and to try to keep things kind of light when Dr. Mcelroy starts talking about the darker things medical practitioners have done.


A lot of the episodes touch on the subject of history's dumbest smart guy, Pliny the elder, who is generally regarded as the father of encyclopedias. He wrote the encyclopedia Naturalis Historia, which lists among other things different diseases and cures for them from the early days of the Roman empire. As you might guess a lot of them are wrong.

You can find translations of Pliny's work online, which is just fascinating to click through in my opinion. It contains things like Book 28, Chapter 27 - Seventy-nine remedies derived from the hyena. It states for example that taking a hyena's teeth and attaching them to the patient will take care of their toothache. Also, a woman's saliva will take care of bloodshot eyes, and there's a whole chapter for cures that involve earwax.



To start I would recommend trying to find an episode that deals with a subject that you maybe have (did you know that tinnitus can be cured by getting a piece of straw and pouring dirt or oil through it down the ear canal? Who knew?) or one that simply fascinates you. There are episodes about space medicine and Detoxing.

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