Medical history’s wrong turns: treatments that harmed, poisons sold as cures, and experiments that should never have happened. What doctors believed, what they did, and what the records show.
Each episode is a Short of about a minute on our YouTube channel @MacabreChronicle. Its companion article on this site holds what a minute cannot: the sources, a timeline and a “Documented / Disputed” box.
What this series covers
- Historic treatments and the theories behind them
- Poisonings at work and in the home, from mercury to radium
- The trade in bodies for anatomy and the laws it produced
- Medical experiments, told with the people they were done to at the centre
Episodes and articles
Oldest first. This list updates automatically as new episodes and articles are published. You can also browse the Dark Medicine archive, newest first.
- Body Snatchers and the Cadaver Trade: How Anatomy Schools Got Their Bodies
- Buried Alive: How a Medical Debate Became a Panic
Case pages
Case pages collect everything we have on one event or person: key facts, every related episode and article, and further reading.
- Burke and Hare, Edinburgh 1828: Sixteen murders to supply an anatomy school, and the law that followed.
All case pages: Case pages index.
How we work
Every claim in this series is tied to a cited source. Read our Editorial Standards, and see the Corrections page for anything we have fixed.
More series in Dark History, Documented: Death Customs · Disaster Minute · Desperate Measures · Strange Justice.
