Dominating the headlines, currently all I see is Coronavirus this and Wuhan that. It’s easy to get fatigued from the non-stop barrage of media. Regardless of whether you’re laughing it off as an over-hyped flu or living in an underground bomb shelter packed with M.R.E.s, guns and six years of toilet paper, it’s easy to get over-saturated with something like this. In that spirit, here’s an overview of some historically notable medical problems. Some are absolutely true and some turned out to be...less so. Despite that, they’re all funnier than drowning in your own fluids.
In 1518, the town of Strasbourg had a very strange summer. Sometime in July, a woman named Frau Troffea began to dance maniacally through the streets. She kept dancing frantically, seemingly unable to stop, until she finally collapsed. After a brief reprieve, she resumed her hysterical gyrations. It was at this point that other people started joining in, dancing without cease. Baffled officials got the bright idea to transform guildhalls into dance halls—complete with musicians to accompany the afflicted dancers, hoping this would soothe them. Amazingly, it did nothing of the sort and up to 400 people were eventually swept up in the Boogie Of Lunacy. Several people died of exhaustion or related ills, but by September, it began to fade. Interestingly, this is by no means the only dancing plague in history, and theories range from ergot-infected grain, to hysteria, to the deadly (but overlooked) Saturni Nocti Febricitanem or "Saturday Night Fever."
In this (questionably enviable) condition, a sizable level of ethanol is produced in the gut when you eat carbs. A type of yeast that generally sticks to bread and beermaking can occasionally take up residence in the human body and go on a bender that renders its host utterly FUBAR. It’s vanishingly rare and curable, so most of the times this condition has been used as a D.U.I.I. defense, they’ve been scoffed at. Believe me—I’ve tried.
Colloquially known as "Fish Malodor Syndrome," this is an inherited disease that prevents the breakdown of trimethylamine—the thing that makes rotting fish smell so delightful. There’s no cure and treatments only "kinda" work. The only potential benefit I can imagine to this condition would be that you’d probably be an anti-scarecrow—attracting hoards of carrion birds that you could train to peck out your enemies’ eyes—that is, of course, if you could convince them not to tear you apart first.
In 1726, a woman from England named Mary Toft became pregnant. She was described as a short, stocky woman of "sullen temper" (charming, I’m sure). However, after seeing a rabbit one day, she craved eating them—to the point of obsession—and she indulged to the extreme. In her second trimester, she tragically miscarried. What she gave birth to following this was not the remains of a human fetus, but, rather, what appeared to be a pig’s bladder, a cat’s head and paw, and some common European rabbit. After that, she proceeded to deliver more rabbits (all in grotesque, fleshy chunks). King George The II heard of her and ordered an anatomist to examine her—because, that shit be crazy.
Nathaniel St. André was quickly convinced Mary was the real dealio, as she was clearly in labor pains and expelling rabbit parts from her hoo-ha, so it must be true. The idea of monstrous births wasn’t new, but was largely discounted by science. Daring St. André took this chance to go down in the pages of history (which he has, but, sadly for him, it’s as a gullible, fame-hungry moron). He took her back to London and published a grandiose paper on this singular medical curiosity, self-aggrandizing all the way. After a brief dance with what one might generously call "fame" for the both of them, more rigorous (stick-in-the-mud) scientists clamped down on things like "I’d like a big bowl of rabbit chunks and a plunger please." Mystifyingly, as soon as her environment was controlled, the "births" stopped. Then, the mocking started.
Mary was eventually imprisoned (and, later released) to general derision. St. André died penniless at the age of 96, having refused to eat rabbit for the previous 50 years.
While the title of this segment certainly sounds hyperbolic, the story itself is arguably no less so. In 1817, W.H. Atkinson, a reverend and early contributor to the first major scientific journal for American dentists, wrote an article about a harrowing experience he’d had encountering a patient who had what was initially an aching tooth, that by degrees, turned into a virtual mania. Atkinson described the patient as:
"...at one time boring his head on the ground like an enraged animal, at another poking it under the corner of the fence and again going to the spring, and plunging his head to the bottom in the cold water."
While this all sounds dramatic enough on its own, he eventually heard what he described as a loud pistol crack, as the offending tooth exploded into fragments—scattering in every which way. Following this, a total cessation of all pain. A similar occurrence happened again in 1830 and then in 1855. Imagine the bacteria the shrapnel from all those diseased fragments must have carried along with them (hand sanitizer bath interlude). All this might well be discounted as urban legend, but, in 1871, another dentist reported a similar experience with a patient, describing her agonizing experience ending when her tooth "...bursted with a concussion and report, that well-nigh knocked her over."
Though some Arctic explorers have reported teeth shattering in the cold and some dentists have recorded teeth splitting due to decay since then, there have been no such spectacular reports of "exploding" teeth since the 1920s. Several theories have been speculated on that address these dramatic events, but I personally like to chalk it up to alien transmissions...because, if you don’t know the answer, always go with the extraterrestrial one.
Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle is a card-carrying member of the Lone Gunman, holed up for the next few years in her bomb shelter filled with guns and ammo, M.R.E.s and a decade’s worth of hand sanitizer and TP. If you want to contact her, you’re out of luck, because the tinfoil blocks all the radiation (including your text messages, Don, so don’t even try).
