Health Matters: 45 Amazing Facts About Doctors and Their Patients

A surgeon named Alexis Carrel was able to keep a chicken's heart tissue alive for over 20 years without it being attached to a body, deeming the cells, "immortal."

27. After receiving a local anesthetic and root-canal treatment at his dentist, a 38-year old man has been experiencing a real 'Groundhog Day' type of memory loss. For the better part of a decade, he has woken up every morning thinking it is the day of his original dentist's appointment.

28. Surgeons wear green or blue-colored scrubs because they're complementary to red (blood), thus allowing the surgeon to better visualize the patient's inside and avoiding eye strain, loss of concentration and the 'after effect' illusion.

29. A doctor named Duncan MacDougall once attempted to prove that the human soul had weight by placing dying patients on a giant scale at the moment of death.

30. A female American surgeon named Dr. Mary Edwards Walker during the Civil War, stood on the Union front lines for nearly two years, including the wake of the bloody Battle of Chickamauga. She is the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor.

A Nazi doctor named Josef Mengele sewed two twins together back to back in an attempt to create conjoined twins. The children died of gangrene after several days of suffering.

32. A dentist named Edgar Parker legally changed his first name to "Painless", when he was accused of breaking a false advertisement law by claiming that his dentistry was truly painless.

33. Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually in the United States.

34. In 2009, a transplant surgeon named Tomoaki Kato performed a 23-hour operation termed 'ex vivo surgery', where all of the patient's abdominal organs were removed and then reimplanted in order to excise a tumor.

35. 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."

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).

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

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.

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.

42. 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.

43. 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.

44. Plastic surgeons use decapitated cadaver heads to learn and refresh their surgical skills. Somewhere out there, there a person who beheads cadavers for a living.

45. To treat bladder cancer, doctors inject cow tuberculosis bacteria up your urethra. The subsequent immune reaction destroys cancer cells, and the treatment has been shown to be more effective than chemotherapy.