The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth

Have you ever wondered how people survived before antibiotics, anesthesia, and modern surgical techniques? In The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine, Thomas Morris invites you to marvel — and sometimes cringe — at the extraordinary misadventures of doctors and patients from centuries past. This is not a conventional history of progress; rather, it's a collection of jaw-dropping, hilarious, and occasionally horrifying case studies that capture humanity's endless experimentation with health, healing, and the body.

Morris, a former BBC producer turned historical researcher, explores medicine’s less glamorous moments through hundreds of reports from old journals, hospitals, and letters. Within these stories you’ll meet people who swallowed knives for fun, surgeons who operated on wide-awake patients without anesthesia, and physicians who tried to revive the dead with tobacco smoke enemas. By weaving humor, historical context, and empathy, Morris showcases both the folly and the ingenuity of early medicine.

Medicine as Experiment—and Entertainment

Morris argues that pre-modern medicine was as much an act of theater as it was science. Physicians of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries mixed equal parts guesswork and bravado, confident in their leeches, syringes, and bloodletting bowls. They worked within the framework of Galen’s humoral theory—that health depended on a balance between blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—and interpreted disease as an imbalance to be drained, purged, or smoked away. Before germ theory, many believed illness was caused by miasmas (bad air) or divine punishment. Yet amid the tragedy and absurdity, Morris uncovers startling breakthroughs made by accident or desperation.

These doctors lived in an age when surgery meant agony and experimentation meant courage—or madness. Each case reveals larger truths about what it meant to be both healer and human when the lines between faith, science, and superstition blurred. The result is an anthology that feels both grotesque and humbling: the story of how medicine stumbled, bled, and smoked its way toward modern understanding.

A Cabaret of Cases: From Forks to Fireworks

Morris organizes his book thematically rather than chronologically, leading readers through seven categories of medical curiosity: Unfortunate Predicaments, Mysterious Illnesses, Dubious Remedies, Horrifying Operations, Remarkable Recoveries, Tall Tales, and Hidden Dangers. This structure mimics the variety found in historical medical journals, where case reports veered from tragedy to miracle to absurdity in a single issue. Each chapter reads like a cabinet of curiosities, balancing humor with horror to show not just what doctors believed—but what they were willing to try.

In “Unfortunate Predicaments,” we meet patients like the man who got his penis trapped in a glass bottle, the boy who swallowed knives, and another whose intestines literally dropped into his scrotum after a cart accident. “Dubious Remedies” explores treatments that defy belief: mercury cigarettes, port-wine enemas, and the infamous “pigeon’s rump cure,” where a child’s convulsions were treated by placing a dove’s anus against its body. “Horrifying Operations” pulls back the curtain on pre-anesthetic surgery, whether it’s reconstructing a chest wall by sawing through ribs or French surgeons extracting enormous tumors while their patients screamed—and sometimes chatted—throughout.

By contrast, in “Remarkable Recoveries,” human resilience takes center stage. We see sailors survive being impaled by masts, soldiers with musket balls lodged in their hearts, and farmers missing half their brains who live to tell the tale. “Tall Tales” reminds us that even in the early scientific age, myth and medicine danced together: patients who spent seven weeks under water supposedly rose again, or women who caught fire through spontaneous human combustion. Finally, “Hidden Dangers” turns the focus on medicine’s obsession with risk—from cycling-induced heart disease to children’s hats that allegedly caused idiocy.

Why These Stories Matter Today

Behind the laughter and shock lies a profound recognition: our modern medical confidence rests on centuries of trial and error, compassion and cruelty. Every blundered amputation and melted tooth filling represents a stepping stone on the path toward evidence-based medicine. By resurrecting these long-forgotten “case histories,” Morris celebrates the curiosity that drives scientific progress while cautioning against arrogance. After all, today’s medical certainties may look just as absurd to future generations.

Reading these tales forces you to question how far we’ve truly come and how fragile the border is between genuine innovation and folly. Much like Mary Roach’s Stiff or Atul Gawande’s Complications, Morris humanizes the bizarre, showing that the same impulses—to experiment, to heal, to understand—link us to our ancestors wielding knives in candlelit operating rooms. In exposing the raw and ridiculous, he rekindles awe for how humans, armed only with curiosity and courage, learned to conquer their own frailty.

Ultimately, The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth asks you to laugh at medicine’s madness—but also to respect its madness as the birthplace of progress. From exploding molars to self-surgery in the Antarctic, Morris transforms grotesque misadventures into testaments of resilience and discovery. You emerge entertained, humbled, and strangely grateful that your next doctor’s tool is a stethoscope, not a toasting fork.

The first section, “Unfortunate Predicaments,” reads like a carnival of misfortune—a vivid gallery of self-inflicted disasters, bizarre accidents, and medical mysteries that reveal both human folly and early doctors’ improvisational genius. Through anecdotes spanning from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, Morris shows that embarrassment was often a greater motivator than pain when deciding whether to see a physician.

Bodies in Peril, Pride Intact

The theme begins with the unforgettable headline “A Fork up the Anus,” a real eighteenth-century case reported by one Mr. Robert Payne. A young carpenter in Great Yarmouth, suffering from constipation, decided to insert a table fork into his rectum “to assist nature.” To his horror, it slipped deeper than intended and had to be surgically extracted days later through an incision in the buttock. His mortified explanation (“I only wanted to help myself”) captures the recurring tension between privacy and desperation that runs through these cases.

Another memorable calamity is documented in “Penis in a Bottle,” a case from 1849 that manages to be both hilarious and horrifying. A young man attempted to urinate into a bottle that had once stored potassium preserved in naphtha. When his urine hit the remaining metal, the potassium exploded, triggering a vacuum that sucked his swollen member into the narrow neck. The attending surgeon, Dr. Azariah Shipman, recounts with alarm and amusement how he had to smash the bottle with a knife handle to free the patient. What sounds like bawdy slapstick also demonstrates the era’s fascination with chemical curiosity—the unfortunate patient, a keen amateur chemist, had fallen victim to the very spirit of Enlightenment experimentation that would propel medicine forward.

The Human Urge to Prove, Test, and Touch

Many “predicaments” stem from the human impulse to test limits. Consider John Cummings, the American sailor who swallowed thirty-five clasp knives over several years to impress his shipmates. The final binge led to his agonizing death, his intestines lacerated with rusted blades. His case, taken seriously by early surgeons as proof of male fortitude, now reads as tragic self-sabotage tinged with incredulity. Then there’s the Irish prisoner who inserted an entire carpentry kit—disguised in an iron étui—into his colon to prepare for a jailbreak, only for the contraption to get lodged in his large intestine. These stories, absurd as they appear, illuminate an age when curiosity, ignorance, and shame danced together in the lonely theatre of the body.

Doctors as Improvisers and Voyeurs

The doctors in these accounts range from compassionate improvisers to gleeful chroniclers. Antoine Portal, physician to Louis XVIII, treated a young man who ate glass for a drunken bet by having him gorge on boiled cabbage to soften the shards before inducing vomiting. It worked—and inspired future physicians to use similar “edible cushions” for digestive mishaps. Others, like Guillaume Dupuytren, boldly teased miracles from calamity: when a French apprentice got his penis stuck in a brass candlestick, Dupuytren delicately sawed the metal apart, freeing the boy (and getting soaked with urine in the process). His stoic reaction made him a national hero, proof that even in absurdity, surgical mastery could shine.

By spotlighting these humiliating injuries, Morris underscores that early physicians were not just scientists but storytellers. Their compassion, humor, and unflappability transformed private shame into public case study. You laugh at the antics yet glimpse the fragile dignity of patients who trusted strangers with their darkest mistakes. “Unfortunate Predicaments” invites you to see the weird and wounded body as a mirror—of human vulnerability, of our reckless inventiveness, and of medicine’s first awkward steps toward understanding itself.

In “Mysterious Illnesses,” Morris turns from physical predicaments to bizarre diseases and haunting unexplained phenomena that confounded the medical world. Here we meet patients who bled from their ears, vomited worms or fetuses, and suffered spontaneous combustion. While some cases reflect modern diagnoses like infection or mental illness, others skirt myth, superstition, and exaggeration—reminding us that science often begins where storytelling ends.

Serpents in the Heart: From Metaphor to Medicine

One of the most striking tales is Dr. Edward May’s 1639 autopsy of a young nobleman whose heart contained what appeared to be a white “serpent.” Court witnesses swore it had eyes and a digestive tract. Centuries later, Victorian physician Benjamin Ward Richardson reinterpreted it as a monstrous blood clot—evidence that superstition slowly gave way to scientific reasoning. Yet the symbolism lingers: the snake as evil, knowledge, or contamination mirrored fears about sin and sickness in a moral universe.

When The Body Turned Against Itself

Another haunting case, titled “The Dreadful Mortification,” describes an entire English family whose limbs blackened and fell off over days. Modern readers recognize ergot poisoning—caused by moldy rye that produces LSD-like toxins—but in 1762 doctors blamed witchcraft or divine intervention. From a surgeon’s perspective, amputating rotting limbs of living patients without understanding the cause was both terrifying and routine. These cases reunite terror and tenderness: medical horror stories that double as ethnographies of belief.

Then there’s “The Woman Who Peed Through Her Nose,” an 1825 report from Rhode Island doctor Salmon Arnold, who claimed his female patient excreted urine from every orifice imaginable. Today, Morris points out, it was probably an elaborate case of Munchausen syndrome or a urinary fistula—but in Arnold’s time, it launched speculation about “wandering urine,” bridging physiology and miracle. The lines between diagnosis and performance blurred constantly, giving rise to both science and spectacle.

When Fiction Masquerades as Fact

Perhaps most intriguing are the hoaxes that fooled even esteemed physicians: a boy who “vomited his own twin,” a man whose teeth exploded without warning, and a child who swallowed hundreds of sewing needles that emerged through her skin years later. These stories circulated in respected journals like the Philosophical Transactions, illustrating how early medicine relied on anecdote and wonder as much as observation. Truth mattered, but so did amazement. The result was a kind of medical folklore—half pathology, half parable.

Morris approaches these tales not to mock their authors but to marvel at their openness to mystery. In an era before X-rays or laboratories, doctors relied on imagination to fill gaps in knowledge. That same imagination, he suggests, seeded the creativity that still drives scientific progress. If today’s medicine prizes data, yesterday’s prized wonder. And perhaps we need both.

Few sections capture the ingenuity—and insanity—of pre-modern medicine like “Dubious Remedies.” Here, Morris documents treatments so bizarre they seem invented by satire: blowing tobacco smoke up patients’ rectums, rubbing infants with dead pigeons, or smoking arsenic to cure tuberculosis. Yet beneath the absurdity lies logic shaped by its time: when the body was a system of humors and vapors, doctors sought to balance it by any means, however noxious.

The Man Who Smoked Mercury

In mid-nineteenth-century London, physicians prescribed “mercury cigarettes” for throat ulcers and syphilitic sores. Patients inhaled vaporized mercury oxide, literally coating their lungs in poison. Others puffed on arsenical cigars or medicinal “nitre cigarettes” dipped in saltpeter. Doctors defended these treatments as elegant alternatives to pills—proto versions of the nicotine patch. It was the age of alchemy meeting marketing, centuries before Big Pharma.

Equally surreal was Dr. John Hastings’s 1862 monograph advocating the use of reptile excrement—yes, snake dung—as a cure for consumption. Hastings argued that “boa constrictor feces dissolved in water” soothed the lungs and uplifted the soul. When professional journals ridiculed him, he sued for libel and lost, his faith in fecal medicine unshaken. Morris resurrects him as both punchline and prophet—a warning against the hubris that disguises quackery as discovery.

Resuscitation by Smoke and Wine

Equally curious are eighteenth-century revival methods for the drowned. In The Tobacco-Smoke Enema, doctors literally inserted bellows into the rectum of those pulled from the river and blew tobacco smoke upward, believing its heat and stimulation would rekindle life. In another “innovation,” physicians replaced transfusions with port-wine enemas, pouring fortified alcohol into women hemorrhaging after childbirth (to rejuvenate their “vital spirits”). Both illustrate how medical optimism thrived despite universal ignorance of anatomy. If faith could revive the dead, perhaps burgundy could replace blood.

The Pigeon’s Posterior and Other Cures

In what may be the most infamous of all, German doctor Karl Canstatt swore that pressing the anus of a live pigeon against a seizing child’s own would halt convulsions—the bird would die, but the baby would be cured. Subsequent experiments confirmed only the dove’s demise. Yet this story, absurd as it sounds, gestures toward medical empathy: even monstrous remedies were born of desperation to soothe suffering where no alternatives existed.

Morris uses these vignettes to remind you that progress often means learning what not to do. Each failed experiment reveals humanity’s restless determination to heal itself with whatever tools or creatures were at hand. As in Rohmer’s Mad Science of the Victorians or Catherine Rider’s studies of medieval healing, we witness the fine line between devotion and delusion—the crucible in which modern medicine was painfully forged.

Before anesthesia and antisepsis, surgery was a spectacle of agony and audacity. In “Horrifying Operations,” Morris digs into case reports where surgeons acted as mechanics of the living machine, cutting, sawing, and sutureing with astonishing calm. These stories are not gore for gore’s sake—they reveal the courage (and cruelty) that defined early medical heroism.

When the Surgeon Was the Patient

One chapter recounts Colonel Claude Martin, a French officer in India who performed surgery on himself to remove a bladder stone using a homemade “urethral file.” For six months he filed away his stone three times a day through his penis until it disintegrated—a real-life echo of Leonid Rogozov’s Antarctic self-appendectomy centuries later. His ordeal reads not as madness but mastery: a man trusting skill over fate.

Anesthesia Awaits, But Not Yet

Morris revisits Elias Samuel Cooper’s 1857 chest surgery “under the heart,” performed on a fully conscious patient. Cooper and his assistant extracted a metal slug that had sat beneath the man’s beating heart for months. Without ether to dull sensation, the patient endured hours of probing—it would take forty more years before cardiac surgery became routine. Another surgeon, Richerand of Paris, literally opened a man’s chest so the heart pulsed visibly through a “window,” sealing itself shut over weeks. Both men miraculously survived, teaching future generations that anatomy was only learned by daring to look inside.

Navigation Without Maps

Every operation in this era was exploratory. Lacking X-rays, Cooper found bullets by sound; French surgeons extracted bayonets from living heads; rural Irish butchers performed C-sections on dying women. In each, the body became a labyrinth mapped by touch. The success rate was low, but every incision expanded medicine’s cartography—the literal cutting edge of science.

This section reminds us that bravery often borders on recklessness. These surgeons risked lives to prove what was anatomically possible. Yet their failures seeded triumphs: today’s minimally invasive surgeries descend from these blind ventures into flesh. You leave “Horrifying Operations” stunned by the pain humans endured and the faith they placed in steel and skill alone.

After the carnage, Morris offers redemption in “Remarkable Recoveries.” These are medical miracles that seem to mock biology itself—patients impaled, decapitated, or shot through the brain who walked away grinning. Such accounts, drawn from Royal Society papers and military journals, celebrate the body’s astonishing capacity to heal when logic insists it cannot.

The Walking Wounded

Dr. Robert Fielding’s seventeenth-century account of surviving a musket ball to the skull that lodged for thirty years epitomizes this theme. The bullet migrated from his orbit to his throat, finally emerging decades later. In another, Samuel Wood, a British miller, lost his entire arm and shoulder blade when caught in machinery—yet not only survived without bleeding to death but walked himself to help. Surgeons were astonished to find his wound had naturally clotted, foreshadowing discoveries about vascular spasm and coagulation centuries ahead.

A Pirate’s Luck and a Peasant’s Liability

Among the most cinematic cases is “A Bayonet Through the Head,” where soldier Urbain Fardeau witnessed a comrade impaled from temple to cheek by a flying bayonet—and surviving. Another, “The Lucky Prussian,” recounts a sailor skewered by a mast’s metal spike, whose chest was crushed to four inches deep yet somehow avoided the heart and great vessels. He healed and returned to sea, twice shipwrecked but immortalized by his own surgeon’s wonder. In “Give That Man a Medal,” a soldier wounded eleven times—burned, stabbed, shot—still sought new wars. Each recovery reads like a parable of resilience, part physiology, part willpower.

Morris doesn’t romanticize these survivors; he treats them as evidence of medicine’s humbling unpredictability. Their recoveries questioned what doctors knew about pain, consciousness, and the limits of repair. Reading them, you realize that miracles often mask patterns—the body’s natural genius to adapt, reroute, and regenerate. In celebrating their endurance, Morris honors the mystery that still sits at the heart of healing.

In the penultimate section, “Tall Tales,” Morris explores the porous boundary between science and storytelling. Medicine, he suggests, has always flirted with myth. The journals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brimmed not only with experiments but with fictions—a mirror of an era when the line between credible and curious was still thin.

From Amphibious Infants to Fireproof Countesses

Readers encounter impossibilities like the “Amphibious Infant,” a Chicago baby supposedly trained by his deranged father to breathe underwater; or the “Combustible Countess,” a noblewoman said to have spontaneously ignited after bathing in alcohol. Newspapers and journals printed these claims earnestly, illustrating what Morris calls “the age of credulity.” Some stories were moral warnings (“drink and you’ll burn like the countess”), others proto-scientific musings on physiology.

Belief as a Form of Inquiry

For Morris, these hoaxes reveal not gullibility but imagination at work. Doctors sought meaning where data were absent, designing theories almost poetic in reach. Take “Half Man, Half Snake,” about a farmer born with convulsive limb disorders whose mother had once been frightened by a serpent during pregnancy. Absurd though it sounds, this “maternal impression” theory persisted well into the nineteenth century, shaping ideas of heredity and prenatal influence (echoed later in Freud’s speculation on infantile impressions).

Similarly wild is “Death of a 152-Year-Old,” William Harvey’s autopsy of Thomas Parr, allegedly England’s oldest man, who lived through multiple monarchs and died from rich London air. Whether hoax or exaggeration, Morris reads it as emblematic of science’s seduction by outliers—our obsession with extremes that might redefine the possible.

Ultimately, “Tall Tales” reframes these absurdities as expressions of curiosity rather than deceit. They reflect medicine’s narrative hunger—the urge to explain, control, and marvel. In an age before peer review solidified truth, storytelling kept science alive. As Morris puts it, belief was the first experiment.

In his final section, Morris widens the lens to show that health hysteria is nothing new. “Hidden Dangers” exposes how nineteenth-century physicians saw mortal threats in daily life—penned like long-form public service announcements that mirror modern media’s obsession with wellness and risk.

Diseases of Progress

Dr. George Herschell’s 1894 paper “On Cycling as a Cause of Heart Disease” warns that excessive hill climbing could fatally enlarge the heart—proof, Morris notes, that every new technology inspires medical panic (today’s equivalent might be smartphone syndrome). Other hazards included children’s hats, which supposedly “breeded stupidity” by overheating the brain, and cast-iron stoves, believed to emit deadly miasmas until the great physiologist Claude Bernard debunked it. In each case, expert overconfidence parodied itself; but so did sincere caution in a century grappling with industrialization’s unseen costs.

Writers, Clergy, and the Pathologies of Thought

Swiss physician Samuel Tissot blamed writing itself for moral and physical decay. In An Essay on Diseases Incident to Literary and Sedentary Persons, he warned that scholars risked baldness, madness, and even believing themselves made of butter (his case study jumped into a well to avoid melting). The prescription? Walk outdoors, rest, and don’t overthink—advice still relevant in the age of email fatigue. That same mixture of moralism and empiricism animates all nineteenth-century “self-care” tracts, making Tissot a proto–wellness influencer armed with Latin.

With wry sympathy, Morris concludes that fear has always been medicine’s twin. Just as Victorians feared bicycles and books, we fear screens and sugar. The search for health, he suggests, will forever produce its own pathologies—anxiety, obsession, and the illusion of control. The real hidden danger, perhaps, is certainty itself.