Health

Science

10 rabbit holes · 10 people exploring

Common starting questions

• Why is corn for tortillas soaked in lime?
• Did removing the pump handle actually stop the outbreak?

Rabbit holes

1. did lead poisoning bring down Rome?

   Matteo Rossi · 4 sources

2. going down the split keyboard hole

   Wrist pain → split keyboards → column stagger → home row mods → I now own a soldering iron. Classic.

   Jae-won Park · 5 sources

3. the appendix might not be useless after all

   Min-seo Choi · 4 sources

4. cooking corn with lime kept people healthy for thousands of years

   Mesoamerican cooks have cooked corn in alkaline lime water for thousands of years. When corn spread to Europe and the American South, the crop traveled but the technique didn't, and people living mostly on corn got pellagra.

   Ravi Subramanian · 6 sources

5. the algorithm that matches doctors to hospitals also matches kidneys

   The 1962 paper is short and readable. The surprising part is that hospitals had already been running basically the same algorithm for a decade without anyone calling it a theorem.

   Wren Abernathy · 6 sources

6. gladiators were mostly vegetarian

   Bone analysis from a gladiator cemetery at Ephesus showed a diet heavy on barley and beans. They were called 'hordearii', barley men. And they drank a plant-ash drink, probably for calcium.

   Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources

7. before vaccines there was variolation

   Deliberately infecting someone with material from a smallpox sore, usually through a scratch, tended to give a milder case and lifelong immunity. It was practiced in China, India, Africa and the Ottoman Empire long before Jenner. It still killed a small percentage of people, which is why Jenner's 1796 cowpox method was such a big deal (vacca is Latin for cow).

   Grace Whitfield · 6 sources

8. John Snow, the Broad Street pump, and the map

   Snow mapped the deaths around Soho and they clustered on one pump. My favorite detail: workers at a nearby brewery mostly stayed healthy, apparently because they drank beer and the brewery had its own well.

   Ama Mensah · 6 sources

9. scurvy: they had the cure and lost it again

   Clara Novak · 5 sources

10. Semmelweis figured out handwashing and nobody listened

    1840s Vienna: one maternity clinic staffed by doctors and medical students, who often came straight from autopsies, had a far higher death rate than the one staffed by midwives. He made them wash in chlorinated lime and deaths dropped dramatically. He was right before germ theory could explain why, he was bad at persuading people, and he died in an asylum in 1865, the same year Lister began antiseptic surgery.

    Noor Rahman · 6 sources