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Robert Liston, born in Scotland in 1794, stood six foot two with huge hands and a combative temper in an age when surgery without anesthesia was a race against fatal shock. Surgeons operated in frock coats stiff with old blood and pus, washing was seen as fussy, and Florence Nightingale noted that survival tracked how fast the surgeon finished. Liston was dismissed from the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in 1822 for clashing with superiors, yet he operated for free on the poor of the Grassmarket. When he recognized Mary Paterson, a victim of Burke and Hare, preserved in whiskey in Robert Knox's dissection room, he knocked Knox down and took her body for burial.

Passed over in 1833 for a professorship that went to the slower, methodical James Syme, Liston moved to London and in 1835 became the first professor of clinical surgery at University College Hospital, where he worked in a bottle green coat and Wellington boots and could take off a leg in under two and a half minutes. The famous story of an amputation with 300 percent mortality has no contemporary evidence behind it. His real turning point came on December 21, 1846, when he amputated the leg of butler Frederick Churchill under ether, the first public operation in Europe using modern anesthesia, and declared that the Yankee dodge beat mesmerism hollow.

• The legend of the dead patient, the assistant's lost fingers and the spectator who died of fright
• Holding his knife between his teeth to keep his hands free while operating
• How his endorsement of ether influenced students including James Simpson and Joseph Lister
• His death from an aortic aneurysm in December 1847 at 53, mourned by about 400 former pupils at Highgate
• Inventions still in use, including bulldog forceps, a femur splint and a clear isinglass plaster made from fish swim bladders

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Mithridates VI grew up in the Hellenistic kingdom of Pontus on the Black Sea, where his father, Mithridates V, was poisoned by his own attendants. With his mother ruling as regent and favoring his brother, the young prince suffered persistent stomach pains after meals and concluded that she was slowly poisoning his food. He fled into the wilderness and, guided by Scythian shamans known as the Agari, began swallowing small doses of local poisons such as aconite, hemlock and snake venom, hoping to make his body immune to every toxin. He returned to take the throne and became a persistent enemy of Rome, and the practice took his name: mithridatism.

Roman physicians claimed to have his formula, called mithridatium, and spent generations adding ingredients to it. The episode follows the idea to Rasputin's survival of cyanide cakes, a theory the hosts call debated, and to the Mauryan Empire, where the Vishakanyas, or poison maidens, were said to be raised on poison until their bodies became lethal, and where Chanakya's secret dosing of Emperor Chandragupta led to the death of Queen Durdhara and the birth of Bindusara. It then explains, as the transcript states, why the body can build antibodies to complex venoms but only metabolic tolerance, through liver enzymes, to chemicals, and why heavy metals and large cyanide doses defeat the strategy.

• The liver as a nightclub bouncer that learns to eject regular troublemakers but cannot stop a wrecking ball
• Rhodanese, the enzyme that turns small amounts of cyanide into thiocyanate, and the sulfur limit that caps it
• A drop of the dying queen's poisoned blood on the infant's forehead, the blue bindu that named Bindusara
• Mithridatism in The Count of Monte Cristo, Rappaccini's Daughter, Strong Poison and The Princess Bride
• A.E. Housman's use of the legend in A Shropshire Lad to defend reading dark, serious poetry

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Vivien Thomas was born in Louisiana in 1910, grew up in Nashville as the son of a master carpenter, and saved every penny for medical school until the bank failures of 1930 wiped his savings out. He took a job as a laboratory assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt, where he was classified and paid as a janitor, and within weeks he was running complex surgical experiments alone. Together they overturned the idea that traumatic shock came from a mystery toxin: Thomas weighed the fluid leaking from damaged vessels into tissue and showed that lost plasma explained the fall in blood pressure, work that guided plasma treatment for crush injuries in World War II.

In 1941 Blalock took Thomas to Johns Hopkins, where segregation was so rigid that Thomas changed out of his lab coat just to cross the courtyard. When pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig asked whether the pipes of blue babies with tetralogy of Fallot could be reconnected, Thomas spent two years recreating the defect in about 200 dogs and filing sewing needles down by hand to join the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery. On November 29, 1944, he stood on a step stool coaching Blalock through the first human operation on 15 month old Eileen Saxon. The 1945 paper and the name Blalock Taussig shunt left him out entirely.

• Blalock had done the operation only once in the lab, as Thomas's assistant; Thomas had done it hundreds of times
• Thomas moonlighted as a bartender at parties, many held at Blalock's own home, serving surgeons he had trained
• Morgan State refused him any credit for his research in 1947, so he gave up on a medical degree
• He mentored Levi Watkins Jr., Hopkins' first Black cardiac resident, on lab work behind the implantable defibrillator
• A 1968 portrait beside Blalock's, a 1976 honorary doctorate, and his death in 1985 days before his autobiography came out

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The caesarean section is the most common abdominal surgery in the world, with roughly 23 million performed globally in 2012, yet it has nothing to do with Julius Caesar. His mother Aurelia lived for nearly 50 years after his birth, something no woman could have survived in 100 BC. This episode traces the likelier origins of the name, from the Roman Lex Regia, later the Lex Caesarea, which required a baby to be cut from a mother who died before burial, to the Latin verb for cutting. It follows early accounts from India around 320 BC, where the advisor Chanakya cut the future emperor Bindusara from his dying, poisoned mother, and from Switzerland around 1500, where a veterinarian named Jacob Nufer is said to have operated on his own wife, who survived.

In 1879 the medical missionary Robert William Felkin watched indigenous surgeons in Uganda perform a successful caesarean using banana wine to sedate the mother and clean hands and skin, then sealing the wound with a paste of chewed roots. The episode moves to the modern operation, the low transverse incision and the Misgav Ladach method from Jerusalem, where surgeons stretch tissue apart with their fingers instead of cutting. It then lays out the trade offs the transcript describes: wet lung in babies who skip labor's hormone surge, higher maternal mortality in low risk pregnancies, the rising risk of placenta accreta with each scar, and the gap between countries under 7.5 percent and the United States at about 32 percent.

• How labor's surge of cortisol and epinephrine reverses the pumps that fill a baby's lungs with fluid
• Newborn mortality at 37 weeks by elective caesarean is triple the rate at 40 weeks
• Placenta accreta risk climbs from about 0.13 percent after two caesareans to 6.74 percent after six or more
• VBAC succeeds for 60 to 80 percent of women who try it, with uterine rupture in about 5 of 1,000 cases
• Hospital scheduling, lawsuit fears and false alarms from continuous fetal monitoring as drivers of high rates

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Walt Disney is not frozen under a theme park; early cryonics figure Robert Nelson said he saw Disney's ashes. But as of 2024 roughly 600 people are suspended in liquid nitrogen, and the first, psychology professor James Bedford, frozen in 1967, is the only early patient still preserved. Preservation can start only after legal death, and most jurisdictions treat cryonics as a form of disposing of human remains, not medicine; France does not recognize it at all. Teams replace the body's water with cryoprotectants to vitrify tissue at minus 196 degrees Celsius instead of forming ice.

Critics in the scientific community call the practice pseudoscience. The chemicals are toxic and cause osmotic shock, large organs crack under thermal stress, and biochemist Ken Storey notes the brain's many regions would each need their own protocol. Then there is money: US fees run from $28,000 to $200,000, often paid by life insurance, and funds must last centuries. Nelson, a former TV repairman who ran the Cryonics Society of California, was sued in 1981 after nine bodies in his care thawed, and nearly all bodies frozen before 1973 were lost to bankruptcies.

• Neuropreservation and KrioRus storing bodies together in Dewar flasks
• The 2018 startup Nectome's fatal chemical brain preservation aimed at mind uploading
• Why the movement draws technologists such as Peter Thiel and Hal Finney, and spouses' hostility
• The 2016 UK High Court case of a terminally ill 14 year old who won the right to be preserved
• David Shaw's cryonics version of Pascal's wager and Sean Pattinson's evil reviver objection

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In 1885, nine year old Joseph Meister was mauled by a rabid dog, which at the time meant near certain death once symptoms such as hydrophobia appeared. Louis Pasteur had developed a treatment from rabbit spinal cords infected with rabies and dried for days to weaken the virus, and it had worked in dogs. But Pasteur was a chemist, not a licensed physician, and a death could have brought charges. He consulted physicians Alfred Vulpian and Jacques-Joseph Grancher, who agreed the boy needed intervention and that the treatment was the only option. Over 11 days Meister received a series of injections, each less weakened than the last, and he never developed rabies.

Authorities chose not to pursue Pasteur, and Meister spent his working life as a caretaker at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. German troops occupied the city on June 14, 1940, and on June 24 Meister, 64, took his own life. A long-repeated story says he did it rather than open Pasteur's crypt to German soldiers. A 1940 veterinary journal and his granddaughter's testimony tell a different account: he had sent his family away, lost contact, and came to believe they had been captured. They returned safely hours after his death.

• How drying infected nerve tissue attenuated the virus while still training the immune system
• The legal line Pasteur crossed by treating a patient without a medical license
• Meister's decades guarding the institute built in part on his recovery
• Child actor Dickie Moore playing him in the 1936 film The Story of Louis Pasteur
• His story in the 1974 BBC series Microbes and Men and in Dark Matters: Twisted but True

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Frederick Banting was born in 1891 on a farm near Alliston, Ontario, the youngest of five. Shy and bullied, he failed English and French, then failed his first year of general arts at the University of Toronto before switching to medicine. Rejected twice by the army for poor eyesight, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, graduated early, and in 1918 served as a frontline surgeon at the Battle of Cambrai, where a sergeant who had just lost a limb shot a German soldier who burst into the aid post. Wounded by shrapnel, Banting kept operating until ordered to stop and earned the Military Cross.

His London, Ontario practice drew almost no patients, so he took part-time teaching work. Prepping a lecture in late October 1920, he read a Moses Barron article and conceived of tying off the pancreatic duct to spare insulin from digestive enzymes. John Macleod gave him an attic lab, dogs and student Charles Best. In January 1922, 14 year old Leonard Thompson became the first human treated. The 1923 Nobel Prize went to Banting, at 32, and Macleod; Banting split his money with Best, and Macleod split his with James Collip.

• The switch to fetal calf pancreases, which make insulin before digestive enzymes
• His 1927 Arctic trip with painter A.Y. Jackson and his clash with the Hudson's Bay Company
• The water-filled G-suit he developed with Wilbur Franks for fighter pilots
• Testing mustard gas on his own skin and his death after a February 1941 bomber crash in Newfoundland
• World Diabetes Day on his November 14 birthday and the Flame of Hope lit in 1989

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The most kissed face in history belongs to a woman no one could name. In the late 1880s an unidentified young woman was pulled from the Seine in Paris, and a death mask cast from her face showed a serene, faint smile. Known as L'Inconnue de la Seine, she became a blank canvas for bohemian artists and writers, and plaster copies of her mask hung in drawing rooms and studios across Europe. In the late 1950s, physicians Peter Safar and James Elam were standardizing CPR, combining mouth to mouth breathing with chest compressions that press the sternum at least two inches, and they needed a way to train people without breaking volunteers' ribs.

They turned to Norwegian toy maker Asmund S. Laerdal, an expert in soft plastics like PVC that could mimic ribs and flesh. Laerdal had sculptor Emma Matthiessen model the manikin's face on the Seine death mask, choosing a female face partly so male trainees of the era would not balk at practicing mouth to mouth. Resusci Anne debuted in 1960 at the first international resuscitation symposium in Stavanger, Norway, and later versions added a pneumatic pulse, reactive pupils and a paper tape that recorded compression depth and breath volume.

• How the Paris morgue displayed unclaimed bodies and cast death masks
• The paper tape system that worked like a seismograph inside the torso
• The training script, Annie, are you OK?, that became the hook of Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal
• Frank Turner's song about her on his 2019 album No Man's Land
• Stanford professor Lochlann Jain's work placing her in the history of drowning

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Coca-Cola, 7 Up and Luden's cough drops all descend from the patent medicine era. The term comes from royal letters patent in late 17th century England, an endorsement rather than a disclosed formula; secrecy was the business model, since most nostrums were water, alcohol and common herbs. Benjamin Okell's promoters invented a Dr. Bateman to sell Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops. In the 1860s William H. Gannett sold Oxien, supposedly made from the African baobab, and founded the newspaper Comfort to carry its ads. Traveling medicine shows used banjo players, strongmen and planted shills, and the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company put Modoc War scout Donald McKay onstage to sell Sagwa.

Inside the bottles were opium in infant soothers, cocaine in catarrh remedies and heavy alcohol, like 18 percent Peruna, a way around local prohibition. Jamaica ginger tainted with an organophosphate paralyzed thousands with jake leg. Eben Byers drank nearly 1,400 bottles of Radithor, radium in water sold by William J.A. Bailey, and his jaw crumbled. Samuel Hopkins Adams's 1905 Collier's series The Great American Fraud led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and its labeling rules.

• The doctrine of signatures, which prescribed walnuts for the brain and liverwort for the liver
• Why opium and alcohol masked symptoms so well that buyers believed the testimonials
• Acetanilide's cyanosis, and the late 1940s discovery that the body turns it into acetaminophen
• Coca-Cola's coca leaf extract and 7 Up's original lithium citrate
• The modern supplement disclaimer and Enzyte's invented Latin name

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At a 7th century feast, Persian king Khosrow II tossed a stained napkin into the fire and pulled it out clean. It was woven from asbestos, a silicate mineral that forms flexible fibers. People in what is now eastern Finland used it to strengthen pottery about 4,500 years ago, Greek temples burned asbestos lamp wicks, and Charlemagne repeated the tablecloth trick. Pliny the Elder misapplied a Greek word for quicklime, and the name stuck, while the episode finds no ancient evidence for the claim that Romans knew it was deadly. From the 1870s, mines in Quebec, the Ural Mountains, Italy and South Africa fed more than 3,000 products, from Wizard of Oz snow to gas mask filters.

Between 1952 and 1956 Kent cigarettes used crocidolite asbestos in their Micronite filter. Stiff amphibole fibers defeat the macrophages sent to clear them, driving inflammation, scarring and mesothelioma decades later. In 1924 Rochdale mill worker Nellie Kershaw died at 33, and pathologist William Edmund Cooke named asbestosis. A 1930 UK report found 66 percent of 20 year workers affected. World War II shipyards spread exposure, and court documents later showed manufacturers knew the dangers in the 1930s.

• Chrysotile, about 95 percent of US building asbestos, versus amosite and crocidolite
• Hampton Roads, Virginia, where mesothelioma runs about seven times the national rate
• The roughly 1,000 tons of asbestos released when the World Trade Center collapsed
• The 1991 court ruling that struck down the EPA's 1989 ban and the final 2024 rule
• Russia's 790,000 tons mined in 2020 and research on mine tailings capturing carbon