Bystander CPR used to be the medical equivalent of blowing into a video game cartridge and hoping it’ll work again. Now, after years of painstaking research, our resuscitation strategy is more like hitting a malfunctioning device until it works. In the medical field, we call this “Hands-Only CPR”. Engineers may refer to the same technique as ‘percussive maintenance’, “impact calibration”, or ‘mechanical agitation’.

Excessive dietary beta-carotene intake can cause abnormal yellow-orange discolouration of the skin called ‘primary carotenaemia’. Beta-carotene rich foods are yellow, orange, and green leafy fruits and vegetables (such as carrots, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, broccoli, cantaloupe, and winter squash); and nutritional supplements. Carotenaemia is usually harmless and resolution of skin discolouration occurs with elimination or marked reduction in the consumption of dietary carotenoids. It may take weeks to months for the abnormal skin colour to fade and resolve.

Despite the common belief that babies are obligate nasal breathers, human infants can drink and breathe simultaneously. Full-term newborns breathe at a rate of 40 to 60 breaths per minute and it takes between 0.35 and 0.7 seconds for them to execute a swallow. This requires absolute precision in coordinating the events of sucking, swallowing and breathing. An adult human cannot do that.

The world’s most dangerous toy, the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, sold for $50 in 1950. Along with its cloud chamber for viewing particle physics, Geiger counter for monitoring radiation levels and radioactive decay; the toy set also contained three radiation sources and four radioactive uranium ores. Gilbert’s educational toy encouraged young scientists to prospect for uranium and set up nuclear laboratories at home. A comic book (“How Dagwood Splits The Atom”) was included to explain the basics of atomic energy.

The world’s ‘smallest surviving baby boy’ was discharged from a Tokyo hospital this week. Born via emergency C-section at 24 weeks, he weighed 9.45 ounces (0.59lbs or 268g); “less than a block of butter and the same as an onion”. The smallest girl to survive birth was born at 25 weeks in Germany in 2015. She weighed 8.8 ounces (0.56lbs or 252g). Credit: REUTERS

Several years ago, while working in the hospital, I was documenting in a patient’s chart. The notes written by another doctor, on the previous day, were dated 31 November. I dated my notes as 32 November. The nurses were mildly amused. When the exact date of birth or death is unknown, gravestones occasionally display February 31st.

 

Syphilis ran rampant in the US in the 1920s. Researchers were interested in studying the effects of the disease in untreated patients so they hatched The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. For 40 years, between 1932 and 1972, the US Public Health Service observed the natural history of untreated syphilis without disclosing the nature of the study to participants. African-American men were enticed with free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance if they took part in a “treatment for bad blood”. By the 1940s, penicillin was the standard treatment and cure for syphilis. Researchers knowingly withheld treatment and information from the subjects. Infected men died and spread the disease to their wives, who passed it on to their children.

Anti-vaxxer propaganda has ignited recent preventable disease outbreaks, but misguided fruits seeding misinformation on the internet is nothing new. The public went bananas in 2000 when an email hoax warned of flesh-eating disease being spread by imported Costa Rican bananas. The ensuing panic even prompted the Centers for Disease Control to set up a special banana hotline to squash low-hanging rumours.

Over a decade later, the internet ripened to another season of ‘attack of the killer bananas’. In 2011, Mozambicans and South Africans received emails urging them to seek medical attention immediately if they were peeling unwell after consuming the yellow, flesh-eating fruit. South Africa’s Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries had to issue a media statement to address the monkey business.

“Flesh-eating disease” is a term for necrotizing fasciitis; a rare bacterial infection capable of destroying skin and soft tissues when bacteria enter a wound. You cannot get a flesh-eating disease from consuming bananas and, anyway, we all know that tomatoes are the real killers.

Peasants in 1726 bred like rabbits, but Mary Toft’s midwife jumped to the wrong conclusion when she pulled a rabbit out of Mary’s … um, hat. Mary Toft was birthing bunnies, so her family called on John Howard (a man-midwife with over 30 years experience). Howard, an hop-timist about Mary’s honesty, set out to investigate. He was unable to explain the phenomenon, so he took a leap of faith, and sent a series of letters to prominent English doctors of the time.

The resulting publicity caught the attention of King George I who deployed royal scientists to investigate. To their amazement, Mary Toft’s body shook with exaggerated ‘birthquakes’ before she popped out the body parts of dead rabbits.

Rabbit parts, taken back to London for study, raised suspicion among sceptics. A piece of newborn rabbit lung floated on water. Dung pellets in one rabbit rectum contained corn, hay, and straw. How could they have developed in Mary? Nathaniel St. André, surgeon to the Royal Household, however, remained convinced. Mary told him that she craved rabbit meat, dreamt of rabbits, and tried to catch them in her garden while pregnant. It all fit neatly into his theory of ‘maternal impression’.

The king was intrigued. He, himself, had a few kids born on the wrong side of the blanket, so to speak. He ordered that Mary Toft be taken to London for further study. She was moved to Lacey’s Bagnio, an inn and bathhouse, in Leicester Fields. Here, the doctors watched her like hawks, waiting to see if she could produce an inn-grown hare.

Under constant supervision, however, Mary failed to deliver bunnies. She had one bad hare day after another. Her receding hare line was giving her believers grey hares. As the investigation went further down the rabbit hole, her hare-brained scheme was uncovered. Toft’s husband, Joshua, had been buying young rabbits. A porter at the bagnio confessed that he had been bribed by Toft’s sister-in-law, Margaret, to sneak a rabbit into Toft’s chamber. Caught like a rabbit in the headlights, Mary Toft eventually confessed to the fraud and implicated her co-conspirators.

In the end, no-one lived hoppily ever after. Mary achieved infamy but did not accumulate a fortune. As for the medical professionals who delivered her rabbit’s foot, they had no luck resurrecting their careers.

Many people in eighteenth-century England believed in the theory of ‘maternal impressions’. This notion suggested that the experiences of a pregnant woman are imprinted on her child. The “Elephant-man” (Joseph Carey Merrick) was told that his condition resulted from his mother being frightened and knocked over by a circus elephant while she was pregnant with Joseph. Giving birth to a blind or deaf baby was explained away by the witnessing of a blind person or being startled by a loud sound during pregnancy. People even believed that strange birthmarks on babies resembled the shapes of things an expectant mother had seen during her pregnancy. Unattractive children could be attributed to the mothers’ over-familiarity with household pets. At the time, fear of maternal impression caused some countries to ban the exhibition of “Siamese Twins”.

Sometimes, patients confuse me with other doctors in town. On occasion, I too, have mixed patients’ names up. I also often mismatch the names of my cats (it remains unclear to me why they have individual names anyway because they respond randomly to instructions).

A fascinating part of the human brain’s memory filing system is how words are stored categorically. Names of family members or loved ones are often lumped together and can be confused during retrieval. Research shows that mothers tend to mix up the names of their children. Oftentimes, your mother may erroneously call you by the name of your sibling (unless you’re an only child like me). This lumping of things in groups explains why family members are misnamed with family members, doctors with doctors, patients with patients, and pets with pets. It becomes even more likely that a conversational gaffe will occur if names are phonetically similar. [Pro Tip: don’t give your kids names that sound alike].

Another curious finding is that dogs are grouped with other family members in the brains of dog-owners. Moms are more likely to call their kids by the dog’s name than that of any other pet. Strikingly, such naming mistakes do not apply to the family cat.