Medicine, Before It Was Sure

An iron rod through a skull, chloroform at a dinner party, a shoe-store X-ray, a frog in the basement, and a cure you rubbed on the sword.

Before the dose was settled, medicine tried things. A man lived with an iron rod through his brain, and the case rewrote what a personality was allowed to be. Three doctors sniffed chloroform at dinner and woke up under the table. A frog in a hospital basement was the pregnancy test. The cure for a wound was rubbed on the sword that made it, because the thinking of the time put the injury in the weapon. The strange part is how often the guess was the whole treatment.

The iron rod went through a skull, and the man walked away from it. The dinner party was chloroform, sniffed on purpose. The shoe-store X-ray was a machine children asked to stand in. The basement frog was how a hospital answered a question it could not yet ask a blood sample. The sword cure went on the blade, not the patient.

This page is the shelf those chapters share. Start here for the rod, the frog, and the sword, and for the longer record of medicine while it was still guessing in public.

• The Box of Light Bulbs the Corn Flakes Doctor Said Cured a King
• The Dinner Party Where Three Doctors Sniffed Chloroform and Woke Up Under the Table
• The 'Life Energy' Box Einstein Tested for Ten Days — and the Warm Ceiling That Explained It
• The Mechanical Horse That Trotted So You Didn't Have To — and the Doctor Who Invented the Gym Machine
• The Roman Doctor Who Prescribed a Live Electric Fish for Your Headache
• The 3,000-Year-Old Wooden Toe Scientists Test-Drove in Replica Egyptian Sandals
• The Coffin That Waved a Flag If You Woke Up Buried — and Flunked Its Own Demonstration
• The Wound Cure You Rubbed on the Sword Instead of the Patient
• The Peasants Who Ate Arsenic in Front of a Room Full of Scientists — and Came Back the Next Day
• The Tomato Pills That Cured Everything — and Contained No Tomato
• The Ancient Egyptian Pregnancy Test That Asked Women to Pee on Grain — and Sort of Worked
• The Blindfolded Boy Who Fainted at the Wrong Apricot Tree
• The Rooster Diagnosed by Mail With Malaria, Diabetes, Cancer, and Syphilis
• The Senator Who Went to Space and Came Back as a Unit of Nausea
• The Airstream Trailer That Was Supposed to Save Earth From Moon Germs
• The Frog in the Hospital Basement That Told You If You Were Pregnant
• The Beef and Cabbage Lowered Into a Man's Stomach on a Silk String
• The Goat-Gland Surgery That Ended Up Rewriting American Radio Law
• The Family That Rang Bells and Blindfolded Mothers to Hide a Pair of Tongs
• The Woman Who Convinced the King's Surgeon She Gave Birth to Rabbits
• The Surgeon So Fast He Supposedly Killed Three People With One Amputation
• The 5,300-Year-Old Iceman Whose Tattoos May Have Been Medicine
• The Fake Metal Rods That Accidentally Invented the Placebo-Controlled Trial
• The Man Who Took an Iron Rod Through His Brain and Lived
• The Shoe-Store X-Ray Machine That Kids Begged to Use
• The Stone Age Skull Surgery With a Higher Survival Rate Than the Civil War's
• The Summer 400 People Couldn't Stop Dancing
• The Year in Space That Turned Twin Astronauts Into a Living Experiment

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