34 Outrageous Facts About Interesting Doctors & Their Patients

An early Chinese surgeon named Hua Tuo used Cannabis mixed with wine as an anesthetic. As a result, the Chinese term for "anesthesia" (mázui 麻醉) literally means "cannabis intoxication."

27. In 1906 when Dr. Alois Alzheimer presented his groundbreaking research on the disease which would later be known as Alzheimer's Disease, the audience asked zero questions and made zero comments because they simply wanted to hear the next lecture (which was about compulsive masturbation).

28. A Doctor's tie can transmit sickness between patients because ties hardly ever get washed.

29. A Nepalese ophthalmologist named Dr. Sanduk Ruit has pioneered a surgical technique that restores eyesight without stitches in 5 minutes. Using this procedure, he has removed over 100,000 cataracts on poverty-stricken people over his 30-year career.

30. In 2003, an ER doctor in Idaho saved a patient's life by performing emergency surgery with a cordless drill in a church parking lot to relieve pressure on his brain caused by internal bleeding.

In the 1920s a Russian surgeon named Serge Voronoff would implant thin slices of monkey testicles into the scrotum of human patients in an attempt to improve their sex drive.

32. In 1898, doctors began to suspect that smoking caused lung cancer, despite the fact that there were only 140 published cases of the then rare disease.

33. Charles R. Drew was an African-American surgeon who pioneered methods of storing blood plasma for transfusion and organized the first large-scale blood bank in the United States.

34. Dr. Jerri Nielsen, a doctor stationed at the South Pole diagnosed, biopsied and treated her own breast cancer during the overwinter period when the crew is normally isolated from the outside world. In complete darkness, medical equipment had to be airdropped from military aircraft.