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1,016 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 2 of 17.

61. Doctors grade dangerous blood loss using the scoring of a tennis matchLose under 15 percent of your blood volume, then 15 to 30, then 30 to 40, then more than 40: those four bands of hypovolemic shock echo tennis scores of 15, 30 and 40. Hypovolemia…
62. Removing the uterus can bring menopause years early, even when ovaries stayHysterectomy, surgical removal of the uterus, is usually reserved for severe problems like fibroids, endometriosis or cancer once other options fail. Its effects ripple outward: m…
63. For almost four thousand years doctors blamed a wandering wombAn Egyptian papyrus from 1900 BCE attributed women's odd behaviour to a uterus roaming the body, and physicians tried to coax it home with smells. The idea gave us the word hyster…
64. Hashish was a Victorian painkiller before it became a smuggler's commodityDoctors in late 19th century Europe and America prescribed hashish for migraine, period pain, whooping cough and insomnia, and Germany tried it as an anaesthetic in 1869. Paris wr…
65. The Nashville hospital chain behind history's biggest buyout and a record fraud caseHCA started with one Nashville hospital in 1968 and within thirteen years ran 349. It has since gone private three times, including a roughly $33 billion buyout in 2006 that was t…
66. Water on the brain looks different in a baby, a teenager and a grandparentHydrocephalus means cerebrospinal fluid is piling up in or around the brain. In a newborn, whose skull plates have not fused, the head visibly swells. In an older child it shows u…
67. Is 'sex addiction' a disorder? Psychiatry's two big manuals disagreeThe American Psychiatric Association rejected sexual addiction as a diagnosis in 2010 and still does not list it. The World Health Organization went the other way in 2018, adding …
68. A heart muscle that grows too thick can hide for years, then strikeUp to one in 500 people have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a mostly inherited thickening of the heart's walls. Many feel nothing at all. Others get breathlessness, chest pain or fa…
69. Repeated sugar crashes can switch off the body's own alarmMost people feel low blood sugar around 55 mg/dL: sweating, a racing heart, sudden hunger. Yet people with diabetes who suffer frequent lows can lose those warning signs entirely,…
70. One flu subtype, H1N1, lies behind three pandemics across a centuryThe label H1N1 simply names the two surface proteins a flu virus carries. Yet strains of this one subtype caused the 1918 pandemic, the 1977 Russian flu and the 2009 swine flu, ea…
71. Some insomniacs sleep for hours yet swear they were awake all nightAt any given moment, somewhere from 10% to 30% of adults are living with insomnia, and up to half of people have it at some point in a year. Yet about 5% of sufferers have a stran…
72. Insulin resistance lets blood sugar look normal while the pancreas works overtimeInsulin resistance means the body's cells stop answering insulin's signal to pull sugar out of the blood. For a while the pancreas compensates by pumping out more, keeping glucose…
73. Who opened the first intensive care unit depends on whom you askIntensive care is often credited to Copenhagen in 1953, when Bjørn Aage Ibsen set up constant breathing support for polio patients. Yet in the United States, Dwight Harken is said…
74. Ibuprofen was born in a Boots lab in Nottingham in 1961One of the world's most familiar painkillers came out of a Boots research lab in Nottingham, where Stewart Adams and John Nicholson discovered it in 1961. First sold as Brufen, ib…
75. Medicine's master code list includes a code for being struck by a cowICD-10, the World Health Organization's catalogue of diseases, symptoms and injuries, took effect in 1993 with more than 14,000 codes. America's version ballooned to over 69,000 d…
76. ICD-11 bans the letters I and O so nobody mistakes them for digitsThe WHO's newest disease classification, ICD-11, took effect on 1 January 2022 after more than a decade of work by over 300 specialists from 55 countries. It holds about 85,000 en…
77. Pressure builds around the brain in this disorder, yet no cause is foundIdiopathic intracranial hypertension raises the pressure around the brain with no tumour or other detectable reason; its older name was pseudotumor cerebri. Nearly everyone affect…
78. Japan's modern navy rose from two centuries of banned ocean-going shipsFor more than 200 years from the 1640s, building an ocean-going ship in Japan was punishable by death. When American warships forced the country open in 1854, its fleet was badly …
79. Impetigo, the school-sores infection, touched about 140 million people in 2010Impetigo is a surface skin infection best known for honey-coloured crusts around a child's nose and mouth. It affected about 140 million people worldwide in 2010, most often child…
80. In situ: the Latin phrase used in more than 910,000 scientific papersIn situ simply means in the place, but the phrase does heavy lifting across science. It describes a probe sampling the Sun's atmosphere, concrete poured where the wall will stand,…
81. A Nobel-winning parasite drug started out protecting dogs from heartwormIvermectin was discovered in 1975 and first used by vets against heartworm and mites. Approved for people in 1987, it became a weapon against river blindness and other parasitic d…
82. Yellow eyes in jaundice are not really the whites of the eyesAbout 80 percent of newborns turn slightly yellow in their first week, yet jaundice in adults is rare and usually signals trouble with blood breakdown, the liver or the bile ducts…
83. John Adams defended the British soldiers of the Boston MassacreBefore he led a revolution, John Adams took the most unpopular case in Boston: defending British soldiers charged with murder after the Boston Massacre, and winning. He believed e…
84. The man who named Saturn's moons also invented the blueprintJohn Herschel gave seven of Saturn's moons the names astronomers still use, from Mimas to Iapetus. He also invented the cyanotype, the process behind blueprints, made a photograph…
85. Kambo rituals rub frog secretions into small burns, and Australia bans itKambo comes from the waxy skin secretion of the giant leaf frog, an Amazonian tree frog. In ceremonies, practitioners burn small spots on the arm or leg and dab the dried substanc…
86. Ketamine keeps patients breathing under anaesthesia, which made it a battlefield drugMost anaesthetics slow breathing and drop blood pressure. Ketamine does the opposite: patients keep their airway reflexes and their hearts are stimulated. That odd profile made it…
87. An internist is not an intern, and not quite a family doctor eitherInternists are fully trained specialists in adult disease, the doctors called when symptoms such as fatigue, confusion or weight loss refuse to point at a single organ. The name c…
88. Doctors first split strokes into leaks and plugs back in 1823A stroke is either a plug, where blood flow is blocked, or a leak, where a vessel bursts inside the brain. That distinction dates to 1823. The leaks, called intracerebral haemorrh…
89. Most burst brain aneurysms are smaller than a centimetre acrossA brain aneurysm is a weak spot where an artery balloons outward. Many stay silent for life. When one tears, blood floods the space around the brain and brings on a thunderclap he…
90. An early plastic IUD was moulded on cookie sheets in a kitchen ovenIn the late 1950s, Dr Jack Lippes and plastics developer Paul Bronnenkant heated and shaped plastic on cookie sheets in Bronnenkant's kitchen. The result, the Lippes Loop, became …
91. Doctors use lorazepam partly because it stops you remembering the procedureMost drugs list memory loss as a drawback. With lorazepam, sold as Ativan, it is sometimes the point: given before endoscopies or dental work, it calms patients and blocks memorie…
92. A dose of LSD can weigh one two-hundredth of a sand grainLSD is among the most potent mind-altering substances known: 20 micrograms, about a two-hundredth of a grain of sand, is enough to notice. Discovered by accident in 1943, banned w…
93. Lupus is named after a wolf because of its facial rashMedieval physicians thought the facial rash of this disease looked like a wolf's bite, so in the 13th century they called it lupus. Today it is known as a great imitator: an autoi…
94. Kuru kept killing decades after its cause had already stoppedThe Fore people of Papua New Guinea had largely abandoned funerary cannibalism by around 1960, before anyone linked it to the trembling disease killing their women and children. Y…
95. Kwashiorkor's name means the illness a child gets when a sibling arrivesA starving child with kwashiorkor can look plump, because the disease swells the feet, belly and face with fluid. One family feeding their child cassava took the swelling for good…
96. Neuroscientists still argue over which parts make up the limbic systemIn 1954 rats with electrodes in two small brain regions kept pressing a lever to stimulate them, over and over. Those regions belong to the limbic system, the brain's emotional an…
97. Limerick once ran its own soviet, printing money for twelve daysIn April 1919 striking workers in Limerick printed their own currency, fixed food prices and published newspapers, declaring a soviet against British military rule. It was one cha…
98. Fat removed by liposuction tends to come back, often around the organsLiposuction removes fat cells for good, yet within a few months total body fat usually drifts back to where it started, even with diet and exercise unchanged. Much of the regained…
99. Vyvanse does nothing until your blood chops off an amino acidLisdexamfetamine, sold as Vyvanse or Elvanse, is inert when swallowed. It is dextroamphetamine chemically bolted to the amino acid lysine, and enzymes in the blood must snip that …
100. The Master of Science began in Michigan in 1858 and now means different things everywhereThe University of Michigan awarded the first Master of Science in 1858. Today the degree can take one year or seven, may be earned by coursework, research or both, and in some cou…
101. The CIA once bought an entire supply of LSD to hunt for mind controlIn the early 1950s the CIA's chemist Sidney Gottlieb arranged to buy the whole available supply of LSD for $240,000. It fuelled MKUltra, a secret programme that ran from 1953 to 1…
102. One fraudulent paper about twelve children dented a vaccine given 575 million timesBy 2012 the MMR jab had been given some 575 million times, and measles deaths had fallen from about 2.6 million a year to 122,000. Then a single 1998 paper, later ruled dishonest …
103. A patch covering about 2 per cent of the retina commands half the visual cortexThe macula takes up only about 2.1 per cent of the retina, yet almost half of the brain's visual cortex handles what it sees. When age-related macular degeneration damages that ti…
104. Mammals are literally named after the gland that feeds their youngThe word mammal comes from the Latin mamma, meaning breast. Every mammal has mammary glands, but they vary wildly: platypus-like monotremes ooze milk from modified skin glands wit…
105. Why tuberculosis is never fought with a single drugA patient with extensive lung tuberculosis may carry around a trillion bacteria, enough that a few will already resist any one antibiotic. Hit them with several drugs at once and …
106. Your jawbone is the only bone in the skull you can actually moveLeave aside the tiny vibrating bones of the middle ear, and the mandible is the one part of the human skull that moves at will. It swings open and shut, slides sideways and pushes…
107. Mania is not simply depression flipped upside downMania is often pictured as the cheerful opposite of depression, but the elevated mood can just as easily be irritable and miserable. Some people even feel depressive symptoms in t…
108. Swedish massage was named by a Dutchman, not invented by a SwedePehr Henrik Ling is often hailed as the father of massage and the inventor of the Swedish style. He wasn't. The phrase Swedish massage system was coined in 1868 by a Dutch practit…
109. The most drastic breast cancer operation turned out to save no extra livesThe first radical mastectomy, performed in 1882, stripped away the breast, the armpit lymph nodes and the chest muscles beneath. Later outcome studies found that for most tumours …
110. Naloxone can restart breathing after an opioid overdose within minutesPatented in 1961, naloxone knocks opioids off their receptors and can bring back breathing in two minutes when injected into a vein. Once a hospital drug, it now comes as a pocket…
111. Modafinil keeps pilots and astronauts awake, but does it make anyone smarter?Developed in France in the 1970s, modafinil is a first-line treatment for narcolepsy, flown aboard the International Space Station and used by several militaries instead of amphet…
112. The fuzz spoiling your bread also gave us penicillin, soy sauce and BrieMould is not a single kind of organism but a growth habit shared by thousands of fungal species. The same threads that rot fruit also ferment soy sauce, ripen blue cheese, protect…
113. A pox virus behind 'water warts' usually leaves without any treatment at allAround 122 million people had molluscum contagiosum in 2010, most of them children. The pearly, dimpled bumps come from a relative of the poxviruses, spread by touch and shared to…
114. Why mouth blisters turn into ulcers so quickly, and when one is worryingThe lining of your mouth sits at the border between gut and skin, and it is thinner than either, so the slightest scrape from a broken filling can open a sore. Most mouth ulcers a…
115. Moxibustion burns mugwort on the skin, and the evidence mostly goes up in smokeFor centuries healers across China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia have smouldered aged mugwort over chosen points on the body, aiming to warm the flow of qi. Portuguese missi…
116. Mpox was named after lab monkeys, though monkeys probably are not its sourceScientists first identified the virus in 1958 after pox-like outbreaks in research monkey colonies, so it was called monkeypox. Yet the likeliest natural hosts are small African m…
117. In myasthenia gravis, the body's antibodies jam the switch between nerve and muscleImagine eyelids that droop by evening and a smile that turns into a snarl. In myasthenia gravis the immune system blocks the receptors that let nerves tell muscles to contract, so…
118. Worldwide, the top cause of heart muscle inflammation is a parasite, not a virusIn Europe and North America, myocarditis usually follows a viral infection. Across the whole planet, though, the leading cause is Chagas disease, spread by a single-celled parasit…
119. Myrrh, the bitter tree resin once worth an Egyptian royal expeditionMyrrh starts as a wound. Slash the bark of certain thorny Commiphora trees and they bleed a waxy gum that hardens into glossy yellow lumps. Egyptian kings sent ships for it, Nabat…
120. Eclampsia needs a placenta, and ends when the placenta is goneEclampsia, the seizures that can strike pregnant women with pre-eclampsia, has a puzzling requirement: a placenta. Remove the placenta and the condition resolves. Its forerunner, …

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