Saint Roch Chapel is situated in the middle of a cemetery in New Orleans. At the Shrine of St. Roch, believers leave prosthetics and artificial body parts behind to thank the saint for their recovery or to implore him to help with healing. A local parish priest honoured St. Roch with the shrine when his congregation survived a yellow fever outbreak in the 1800s. Born circa 1348, Saint Roch–the patron saint of dogs–was believed to have cured plague victims in Italy. When he contracted the plague himself, he was nursed back to health by a dog that brought him food and licked his wounds. The shrine offers more than an emotional crutch. False prophets can improve enunciation with a set of false teeth, and those that are blind because they will not see can find an artificial eyeball or two.

In January 2019, the Irish Medical Journal published a case report of a man who injected his own semen into his arm in order to treat chronic low back pain. For 18 consecutive months, he used a hypodermic needle to inject a monthly “dose” of semen into his right arm. His unusual method of treatment caused a skin infection and abscess that required intravenous antibiotics. During the course of his hospital stay, his back pain improved so he decided to discharge himself against medical advice and without getting the abscess drained.

A 48-year-old Vietnamese man, Nguyen Van Nhat, had a blood methanol level 1,119 times higher than normal. Methanol (a cooking fuel and cleaning solvent) is a cheap alcohol substitute for alcoholics. To save the unconscious man’s life, his doctors pumped 15 cans of beer into his stomach.

Methanol is metabolized to formaldehyde by the liver via an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase. Formaldehyde is then metabolized into formic acid (via aldehyde dehydrogenase) which can cause blindness and death. Doctors can stop the formation of this deadly toxin by blocking alcohol dehydrogenase. Usually, this is done with fomepizole or ethanol because the human liver prioritises ethanol processing over methanol, thereby slowing the conversion of methanol.

Presumably, the Vietnamese docs did not have any other form of ethanol/alcohol lying around, and immediate treatment is critical. Fortunately, it seems as though they had quick access to beer. They transfused three cans (one litre) of beer to slow down the processing of methanol by Mr Nguyen’s liver. After that, Mr Nguyen received one can of beer every hour. Mr Nguyen recovered, but it is unclear whether he replenished the beer stock raided from the bar fridge in the doctor’s lounge.

Jerome Irving Rodale had a lifelong passion for healthy living. He promoted organic food in the 1940s when most people didn’t even know what the term “organic farming” meant. He published the Organic Farming and Gardening magazine and, in 1950, he founded Prevention magazine which focused on preventing disease through a healthy lifestyle. (Rodale’s health and wellness publications also included Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Runner’s World, and Bicycling).

In 1971, Jerome Rodale appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show”. In front of the cameras, the godfather of natural health boasted, “I never felt better in my life! I’ve decided to live to be a hundred”. He went on, “I’m going to live to be 100, unless I’m run down by some sugar-crazed taxi driver.” After a commercial break, Cavett interviewed his other guest. During the interview, the talk show host and his second guest realised that “Mr Organic” had become unresponsive. At the age of 72 years, minutes after extolling the benefits of his dietary beliefs and predicting his longevity, Rodale had suffered a fatal heart attack on the show.

Dr Jack Kevorkian, also known as “Dr Death”, was a fascinating character. He earned his nickname long before his role in physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia hit the headlines.

Early in his career, Dr Death would attend the terminally ill to photograph their eyes. He received his famous moniker when he published a journal article called “The Fundus Oculi and the Determination of Death”.

As strange as it sounds, his fascination with the exact moment of death is not unique among medical men. After all, Dr Duncan MacDougall had sought to weigh and photograph the human soul as it leaves a body.

Dr Kevorkian, however, did not limit his experiments or interests to the moment of death. Until his own demise, Dr Kevorkian’s head had probably never seen the inside of a box. His creative thinking hatched experiments like transfusing blood from cadavers into live patients; A procedure that he believed could be applied successfully on the battlefield to save wounded soldiers. It was during these experiments that he contracted hepatitis C which later contributed to his own death. He also supported increasing the number of organs for transplant by harvesting them from inmates after they had received the death penalty.

Dr Death’s most famous inventions were his assisted-suicide machines, the Thanatron and the Mercitron. The Thanatron aimed to provide a quick and painless death in three steps by allowed terminally-ill patients to administer lethal injections. Obtaining the necessary drugs was difficult because Kevorkian’s medical license was suspended, so he devised the Mercitron which delivered death by carbon monoxide inhalation via gas mask.

Dr Jack Kevorkian was also a jazz musician, composer, and oil painter. He played the organ and flute on his limited-release CD, ‘The Kevorkian Suite: A Very Still Life’, and his paintings have been exhibited and sold in art galleries.

Dr Death claimed to have assisted in the suicides of around 130 patients over a period of nearly 20 years. His career ended when he euthanized a patient and videotaped the mercy killing. He sent the tape to the television show ’60 Minutes’ because he strongly believed he was doing the right thing. Dr Jack Kevorkian was subsequently sentenced to 10-25 years on second-degree murder charges.

Dr Death is remembered as a philosopher, researcher, musician, and artist. But it was his failure as a filmmaker that intrigues. In the late 1970s, he quit his career as a pathologist and lost his life savings directing and producing a feature movie based on Handel’s “Messiah.” The movie flopped and was never shown. Decades later, when his production of euthanasia was shown to the world, the airtime ended in jail time.

Vaccines to treat drug addiction have been proposed since the 1970s, and proof of concept exists in animal and human experiments. A cocaine vaccine would stimulate the production of antibodies to bind the drug’s molecules, neutralising them, and preventing them from reaching the brain’s reward system. It’s like each antibody is a Pac-Man chomping up a ghost (cocaine molecule). The final result is that a user will not get high and thus stop abusing the drug. Unfortunately, human trials have struggled to achieve sufficiently high antibody levels and to maintain those high levels in the body.

Bonus fact: Risk of heart attack increases nearly 24 times in the first hour after cocaine use, earning cocaine a reputation as “the perfect heart attack drug”.

Restricted to lying around, babies get flat spots on their heads. We treat this ‘deformational plagiocephaly’ with sleep positioning, tummy time while awake (three times per day for 10 min to 15 min ), physiotherapy, and moulding helmets.

Amazingly, our preoccupation with head shape pre-exists written language and is geographically widespread. Every continent in the world has images of exaggerated ‘cone-heads’, not as a result of the pressure of the birth canal or sleeping position, but because of head binding.

Sumerians, Egyptians, Huns, Incans, and Mayans practised head binding. Indeed, several diverse cultures gravitated towards a preference for an elongated head. Huns were known for binding the flexible and malleable skull bones of an infant into a cone shape. For Mayans, life and death was strongly associated with the Maize God. The Maya deformed their infants’ heads to resemble an elongated ear of maize with the hair being the silk hanging from the cob. By tying two boards front and back against the infant’s head, they would achieve the desired body modification.