Collection of Insane and Fun Facts
In 1901, a doctor was told mid-surgery that he was needed urgently elsewhere, to which he responded that he could not leave “even for the President of the United States”. He was then told he needed to operate on William McKinley, the President of the United States. The doctor maintained his claim and actually didn’t leave.
The US Navy sends medics to the high-volume emergency rooms of LA and Chicago to prep them to be deployed. “It’s a shame that Los Angeles has so much violence,” surgeon John Newman told the Los Angeles Times in 2003, “but from a training standpoint — fantastic.”
Wounded Viking warriors were given strong onion soup. After a few minutes someone would smell the wounds and if onions could be detected it meant that there were serious abdominal injuries and that death was inevitable.
A monkey, residing in San Diego Zoo had a diabetes. He was trained to welcome multiple blood sampling and insulin injections daily. Soon, he became a role model for children with diabetes, who were unenthusiastic about injections.
Research of the placebo effect shows that yellow colored pills are more effective for depression, red pills are more stimulating, and green colored pills reduces anxiety.
A robot recently performed the world’s first autonomous soft-tissue surgery without any assistance from doctors, and did so while outperforming human doctors by every metric except for speed.
The inventor of Vaseline was such a firm believer in its medicinal properties that he claimed to have eaten a spoonful of it a day; During a bout of pleurisy in his 50s, he ordered his nurse to cover him from head to toe in the substance, and soon recovered. He lived to be 94.
In New York, a woman saved a little boy’s life giving him CPR after being hit in the chest with a baseball bat. About 7 years later, in 2006 that very same boy saved her from choking to death giving her the Heimlich maneuver in the restaurant that he worked.
The origin of the phrase ‘a taste of your own medicine’ comes from Aesop’s famous story about a swindler who sells fake medicine, claiming that it can cure anything. When he falls ill, people give him his own medicine, which he knows will not work.
Despite the loss of her legs, Li Juhong has been a doctor in her Chinese village since 2001. She uses wooden stools to travel around, has treated over 6,000 people and has a stay-at-home husband who carries her on his back so she can reach patients who live in isolated areas.