I loved reading this book and all of the weird and interesting things that it covers, including exploding teeth. Who would have thought that teeth would explode?! I enjoy reading books like this that are non-fiction and based on science things but are easy to read and get through.

Yikes make sure you go to the dentist more often lol. I mean this book is crazy and made want to stop eating my delicious candy. We have come a long way in the dental hygiene field. Never forget how it used to be. Never forget!

I got this book on netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion.

THIS BOOK IS NUTS!
Are you intrigued by gruesome medical history or just disturbing true stories? Well then, boy do I have the book for you! This book was fascinating. I'm not a big nonfiction fan. If I'm reading nonfiction it has to be something that really interest me or something absurd/weird/strange/gross. THIS BOOK WAS ALL OF THAT AND MORE! Plus as an added bonus the author is hilarious. The bits of humor he inserts within each medical story will have you shuddering with laughter and disgust.

This book is a collection of old medical journal entries. Each one more terrifying than the last. If you don't cringe at least 25 times during this book....congratulations! but also, go check yourself into a hospital cause something is wrong with you.

Tales of a woman peeing from every hole in her body, a man that chose his hand and a piece of wood over a woman, a man those swallowed knives as a party trick, and many many more. Oh! Don't forget the port wine enemas...oh no, we could never forget those!

Each chapter tells a tale. They are pretty short but uber creepy/interesting. Just go get the book you'll regret it and love it all at once. You're welcome.

This was a fun and intriguing book that was nice to read when I needed a break for heavier, more involved books. It makes you shake your head in wonderment at how far medicine has come in just 100+ years. Not to mention the ability for people to live through some instances of trauma and medical care. I was hoping to see Phineas Gage in this book, and although he wasn't mentioned, there was at least one story that bore similarities to that case.

I received this book in exchange for a honest review from NetGalley.

I really enjoyed the tone and feel of this book. The stories were well researched and interesting and the author commentary was funny. Overall this was a delightful book filled with interesting, occasionally gruesome but always fascinating anecdotes about the history of medicine. I think the author did a great job of capturing the horror of some of the early medical practices without actively insulting the medical professionals of the time.

I have never seen such a compendium of ridiculous medical knowledge! It is incredible to see how far we have come and how far we have to go when it comes to caring for our patients and how to prepare for the unexpected. It is a dense read with heavy medical jargon, especially taking direct quotes directly from the doctors in these special cases. Nonetheless, it is an enjoyable read that makes a dry subject like medicine more approachable and hilarious!

It’s amazing. Just a little bit gross and very entertaining. I love medical books and the weirder the better. It’s well done and very fun.

I’ve had my nose buried in two somewhat gruesome books recently. The first, Murder Aboard: the Herbert Fuller Tragedy and the Ordeal of Thomas Bram by C. Michael Hiam, tells the story of a lumber ship due to sail from Boston to Argentina that ends up in Nova Scotia after multiple passengers are murdered, including its captain. It takes the reader through the subsequent trial of first mate Thomas Bram, a high-profile murder case at the time, but little-known now.

It sounded like a great yarn and I was hoping for a gripping, meaty tale full of characters in the vein of something Erik Larson would write. In the end, it felt like a story Larson would have considered and then abandoned for lack of material. Hiam gets the majority of his details from the dry court testimony, which he admits fairly far into the book, is incomplete. As a result, the people involved aren’t fully fleshed-out human beings that the reader feels they know, never mind empathize with. I never got enough of a feel for any of the ship’s crew to care about who did it or who may have been falsely accused. In a much shorter version, it might have been an interesting addition to some sort of murder-at-sea anthology. But at 240 pages it wasn’t much more enlightening than flipping through the court testimony yourself.

The other book, however, The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth by Thomas Morris, is an absolute hoot. Morris has combed through old medical journals from around the world and highlighted the most amusingly horrifying medical conditions imaginable (or unimaginable, more accurately). The exploding teeth are the least remarkable of the stories and if you have a fascinated delight for learning about the weird shit that people will put in their bodies, this will become your personal bible. I’m still only halfway through, but have already spent most of my time reading it laughing, while also groaning in disgust.

Medicine is an ever-evolving profession, and its history can be downright weird. Medical historian Thomas Morris has combed through countless vintage medical journals and historical documents showcasing the progress medicine has made in a relatively short time. His work goes beyond bizarre anecdotes, and instead softens the wonky view of health, breaking into sections ranging from Horrifying Operations to Mysterious Illnesses. Collected here are stories not just of fatal mistakes, but also triumphs and impossible medical breakthroughs.

Who knew pain and poor health could be so funny? The assembled trove of research on maladies and operations are entertaining on their own. The documents in the section discussing the death of the 11th Earl of Kent are morbidly hilarious in their deadpan delivery, but Morris’s asides heighten the material. This carries onto the rest of the book as well. He’s reserved in his delivery, letting source materials speak for themselves, but he knows just how to insert a joke to lighten the mood. It’s necessary when reading about forks stuck in orifices or the ever-present tobacco smoke enema. He doesn’t always hit the obvious jokes, but he hits the right ones.

This is not to suggest that Morris only provides comedic relief. While he does poke gentle fun at some of the more ludicrous ideas, he’s careful not to mock everything outright. He gives praise for some fairly ingenious ideas— and some successes, like a successful 18th century self-performed lithotripsy. However, it’s his explorations of the potential justifications for some ideas that sets this book apart. He has no problem digging deep into research in order to uncover why doctors and medical practitioners assumed outrageous (by today’s standards) remedies would work. Sure, placing a dove on the anus as a treatment seems absurd, but there was some bit of reasoning behind it.

Most books that present anecdote after anecdote begin losing steam around the halfway point. However, Morris has found a workaround here— and it’s not just because the stories shared are cringe-inducing or groan-worthy. Rather, he’s crafted a well-thought-out text that’s tightly packed and clips along nicely. It’s almost like he’s telling the stories directly to the reader, taunting, “You’ll never believe this next part.”

Perhaps most interestingly, Morris challenges readers to not be so sure of our methods today. If we consider the the typical processes of the previous century outlandish now, what will future professionals think of our performance today?

If nothing else, we should be thankful we live in a time of anesthesia and antibiotics.

Historian Thomas Morris gathers together some of the weirdest medical stories from history in his new book The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth.  If you want to read about teeth shooting out of someone's head, a woman who urinated through her nose, or a kid who swallowed a goose larynx and ended up honking, this is the book for you. The stories are amusing, but sometimes painful. For example, surgery was not always a procedure you were unconscious for. There was even a surgeon who cut off his assistant's fingers trying to go for a speed record during a surgery and ended up with 300% death rate. 

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth is highly enjoyable, while also being a touch disturbing. Look for it today from Dutton Publishing.

I am interested in weird things like this, so I really enjoyed it, but the flow of the book seemed a little off. It definitely makes learning about medical history interesting, but can be a little disturbing in subject matter.

Such a fascinating read. Thankful I was born now and not in the past. Some of the “remedies” are unbelievable.

This is the kind of collection that will make you wince, turn away at times, but will also keep you hooked with amazement, astonishment, along with a good dose of shock and horror. Simply put, it's a fantastic array of some of the most bizarre moments in the history of medicine that will fascinate readers and probably also make them a little more thankful for the science of this day and age.

If there is a strange medical tale, it is recorded in the Mystery of the Exploding Teeth.

With section titles like Unfortunate Predicaments, Mysterious Illnesses, and Horrifying Operations, how could this book be anything but a rollicking ride through the pages of bad choices. In Unfortunate Predicaments, we meet young men who did many ill-conceived things to their nether regions. We also meet a man who ate four knives on a dare and didn’t go to a doctor when only three came out his other end. A lifetime of doing this trick eventually killed him. In Mysterious Illnesses, a woman makes herself a human pin cushion and a boy vomits up his own twin. Horrifying Operations makes the reader impressed by the fortitude of his or her forebears. Before anesthesia, a man held up a candle for the surgeon while his other arm was being amputated at the shoulder. Another used a knitting needle and a tiny file three times daily for weeks to break up his bladder stone.

Okay, you either like weird stuff like this or you don’t. As someone who used to gobble Ripley’s Believe It or Not books in my youth, I love it. If you do too, you’re in for a treat with the Mystery of the Exploding Teeth. 4 stars!

Thanks to Dutton Books and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Man, do I love medical oddities.

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth is a fun look at the weirder side of medicine and history. From the port wine enemas to the sailor with his penis in the bottle, Thomas Morris has collected the fun and weird parts of pre-modern medicine. It's weird, it's funny, it's why we now love things like Dr. Pimple Popper. Sometimes you can't look away.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

There are many reasons that I am thankful that I was born when I was. My sex can vote. The FDA and the EPA exist. (For now.) Mostly, I am thankful for all the medical advances of the last century. I am thankful for antibiotics, antisepsis, and anesthetic. After reading Thomas Morris’ The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine, I am unspeakably thankful that I was born decades after doctors prescribed enemas for everything, bleed everyone even if they were already bleeding, and never, ever washed their hands.

Thomas Morris has been entertaining ghouls like me for a long time with his medical history blog. The blog, and this book, share remarkable and appalling stories from three hundred years of medical history from journals in English, French, and German. The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth—which of course contains the eponymous story—is much like Morris’ blog. The stories are repeated with minimal commentary and helpful definitions from Morris.

Some of the stories will test readers’ stomachs. So many of them involve horrendous injuries, including one about a soldier who was wounded so many times in battle that the only explanation I can think of for his survival is that he was Wolverine actually popping up in the historical record. A lot of the stories had me laughing uproariously. My diagnosis is that I suffer from an overdeveloped sense of schadenfreude, but then, how can you not laugh when a man tries to stifle a noxious burp while lighting up only to blow fire out of his nose.

At times, I wished there was a little more background for the stories in this book. The historical record offers plenty of opportunities to talk about the strange logic of some of the cures doctors used to attempt or about physicians’ aversion to cleanliness. Morris does include some background about the cures and gives a few more details about some of the surgeons mentioned in these stories. But this book is a great read even without that extra bit of history. It is tailor made for readers like me, who delight in awful and hilarious stories from medical history.