The Disappearing Spoon podcast

How a bloody gun duel between two doctors in Transylvania sparked a frenzy of outrage—and helped create the American Medical Association.

In a building full of dead bodies, how can you tell a murder victim from an unlucky stiff?

What a bizarre psychological disorder can teach us about memory, human nature, and our sense of who we are.

The life of chimney sweeps was nasty, poor, brutish, filthy dirty, and usually short, thanks to a rare cancer of the genitals.

How early anatomists provoked some of the strangest riots in history by stealing the dead bodies of the poor.

How an early 20th-century doctor pitted one scourge (malaria) against another (syphilis).

How a weird “scientific” diet fad conquered America in the early 1900s.

Scientists created an effective male birth control pill in the 1950s, but it had one undesirable side effect.

When the global vaccine supply chain depended on children.