The Sleepy History of Medicine

Epizode

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  12. Fever & the Thermometer — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 19m, to fall asleep to) 18.09.2026 2h 19min

  A long, quiet documentary about the oldest number in medicine — the heat of the body — and the two thousand years in which fever was not a symptom but the disease itself, the thing medicine feared more than anything else on Earth. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.This is the story of fever and the thermometer: a Leipzig ward in the 1860s where a methodical physician took a million readings and gave the world a number it learned slightly wrong; a Roman goddess of fever who was not loved; a word written in a shrinking triangle to make the heat dwindle; Galileo's glass egg and Santorio's weighing chair; the Swedish thermometer that started upside down; a Scottish doctor pouring cold water on soldiers; the sentence that retired two thousand years of theory; a parasite lashing its threads in a soldier's blood in Algeria, and found again in a mosquito's stomach on a hot afternoon in India; a parson chewing willow bark; the wrong bottle opened in Strasbourg; the fever that was meant to cure madness; Typhoid Mary; Yellow Jack in Philadelphia in 1793 and the volunteers of Camp Lazear; the chart at the foot of the bed and the nurse who held the glass; and the twentieth century, which turned the terror into a number on a strip — the routine, which is the triumph. Ending, as our evenings do, in the quiet ward, with the door to next time left ajar: anatomy, and the body-snatchers.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practising hospital pharmacist. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (Wunderlich's million readings)0:09:20 Chapter One — The Heat0:22:16 Chapter Two — The Glass0:35:26 Chapter Three — A Million Readings0:47:19 Chapter Four — The Bark, Sorted0:59:53 Chapter Five — The Antipyretics1:12:41 Chapter Six — Fever as Cure1:25:29 Chapter Seven — Two Fevers1:38:36 Chapter Eight — Yellow Jack1:51:27 Chapter Nine — The Chart at the Bed-Foot2:03:21 Chapter Ten — The Number That Made Medicine Count2:15:02 Goodnight—Watch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/OkBGCjihJkYSubscribe for a new sleepy history every week: https://www.youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  11. The Heart — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 34m, to fall asleep to) 11.09.2026 2h 34min

  A long, quiet documentary about the organ that could not be paused — and the very long argument, four thousand years of it, about what the thing even was before anyone dared to touch it. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.This is the story of the heart: a junior surgeon in a small German town in 1929 who fed a tube up his own arm and walked downstairs for the photograph; the Egyptian hall of judgment where the heart was weighed against a feather; the physician of Pergamon whose beautiful furnace nobody checked for fifteen hundred years; a manuscript from Cairo that said the right thing in 1242 and was not read until 1924; the careful man who could not find the pores and the reckless one who was burned with his book; the short-tempered Englishman who tied a band around an arm and counted; the innkeeper's son tapping casks, and the shy Breton who rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and heard a heart for the first time; the Shropshire kitchen where a purple flower became a medicine, and the inventor of dynamite prescribed his own explosive; the heart writing its signature on a strip of paper; three stitches in a beating heart in the very year a textbook called it impossible; a deaf physician who read hearts with her fingertips, and the carpenter's son who built the blue-baby operation and was paid as a janitor; the surgeons of Minneapolis who stopped the heart on purpose, and the engineer who built a pacemaker in four weeks in a garage; a night in Cape Town in 1967; and the twentieth century, which made the whole thing boring — the scheduled morning, the paused heart, the routine — which is the triumph. Ending, as our evenings do, in the quiet ward, with the door to next time left ajar: fever, and the thermometer.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practising hospital pharmacist. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (Eberswalde, 1929)0:09:37 Chapter One — The Seat of the Soul0:22:14 Chapter Two — The Pores That Were Not There0:34:27 Chapter Three — The Man Who Counted0:48:09 Chapter Four — The Pulse, the Ear, and the Cuff1:01:55 Chapter Five — The Foxglove and the Nitro1:18:32 Chapter Six — The Heart on Paper1:31:52 Chapter Seven — The Door Opens a Crack1:46:01 Chapter Eight — The Blue Babies1:58:55 Chapter Nine — The Stopped Heart2:16:11 Chapter Ten — A Heart for Another, and the Quiet Routine2:29:49 GoodnightWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TdPoxkP7ztISubscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  10. Surgery — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 24m, to fall asleep to) 06.09.2026 2h 24min

  A long, quiet documentary about the slowest apprenticeship in medicine — the craft of the hands, which was a trade for four thousand years before it was a science, and which learned almost everything it knows by failing slowly in public. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.This is the story of surgery: a young French army barber outside Turin in 1537, the night the boiling oil ran out, and the morning that changed how wounds were treated; skulls opened seven thousand years ago whose healed edges prove the patient walked away; the gladiators' doctor who learned anatomy through the wounds of the arena; the pole, the basin, and the barbers who cut because the physicians would not; the gentle surgeon who tied arteries instead of burning them and wrote in French so his own trade could read him; the diarist who kept his bladder stone in a case and gave a dinner every year to celebrate its removal; the farm boy who filled thirteen thousand jars and taught surgery to ask the body instead of the book; the two locked doors — pain, and infection — and the strange decade when opening the first one made the second one worse; a pair of rubber gloves ordered from Goodyear that entered history as a valentine; a woman in Kentucky who rode sixty miles in December 1809 to be the first person ever to survive the opening of the belly; a king who kept both his appendix and his crown; and the twentieth century, which made the whole thing boring — the scheduled morning, the checklist, the pause — which is the triumph. Ending, as our evenings do, in the quietest ward in the hospital, with the door to next time left shut: the one organ they swore they would never touch.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practising hospital pharmacist. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (the camp outside Turin)0:08:05 Chapter One — The Oldest Cuts0:21:30 Chapter Two — The Gladiator's Doctor0:34:34 Chapter Three — The Pole and the Basin0:47:56 Chapter Four — The Gentle Surgeon1:01:26 Chapter Five — The Stone1:14:14 Chapter Six — The Man with Thirteen Thousand Jars1:27:03 Chapter Seven — The Two Locked Doors1:39:47 Chapter Eight — Gloves, Gowns, and a Love Story1:53:30 Chapter Nine — Into the Cavities2:06:43 Chapter Ten — The Quiet Routine2:19:54 GoodnightWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hAPcmJPl39wSubscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  9. Antibiotics — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 38m, to fall asleep to) 30.08.2026 2h 38min

  A long, quiet documentary about the forty years in which medicine repealed its oldest sentence — "there is nothing more we can do" — and about the moldy plate, the red dye, and the melon that did it. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.This is the story of the antibiotic age: a President's son dying of a tennis blister in 1924, with the best physicians on Earth helpless at his bedside; a German professor besotted with dyes who reasoned his way to compound 606; the most famous contaminated dish in history, and the ten years everyone ignored it; a father testing a red powder on his own daughter; bedpans and milk churns in wartime Oxford, and a policeman whose story the rose bush stole from the Blitz; a cantaloupe from a Peoria market whose mold descends into every dose of penicillin on Earth; the graduate student who found the cure for tuberculosis and had to sue to keep his name; and the quiet stewards — the counters, the referees, the pharmacists — who spend the miracle slowly so it lasts. Ending, as our evenings do, at the shelf: the middle shelf this time, filed under ordinary.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practising hospital pharmacist. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (the lamp in the window)0:05:35 Chapter One — The World Before0:20:38 Chapter Two — The Magic Bullet0:35:24 Chapter Three — The Mold in the Window0:49:35 Chapter Four — The Sulfa Years1:05:25 Chapter Five — Oxford1:20:07 Chapter Six — The Factory1:35:43 Chapter Seven — The Gold Rush in the Dirt1:50:09 Chapter Eight — The Price of Miracles2:05:19 Chapter Nine — The Stewards2:19:56 Chapter Ten — The Shelf2:33:21 GoodnightWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WQnjXtidam4Subscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  8. Anaesthesia — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 29m, to fall asleep to) 23.08.2026 2h 29min

  A long, quiet documentary about the only medicine whose entire gift is absence — nothing to feel, nothing to fear, nothing afterwards even to remember — and the four thousand years it took to invent going under. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.This is the story of anaesthesia: the fastest, loudest room medicine ever built, where speed was the only mercy; the old sleeps — wine, ice, the poppy, the screaming root, a medieval sponge that almost worked; a twenty-one-year-old chemist laughing at the ceiling in 1800 and writing the sentence nobody read for forty-six years; the laughing-gas parties and ether frolics where the answer hid in plain sight; a tender-hearted dentist ruined by five bad minutes in front of the wrong audience, and an ambitious one made famous by five good ones under a Boston dome; a Scottish dinner party that ended with the guests under the mahogany; a queen who settled an argument by falling asleep; a fifteen-year-old girl whose death taught medicine that mercy has a dose, and the quiet man with a notebook who turned it into a science of counting; three drops of cocaine in a Viennese eye; arrow poison keeping surgical time; the milk-white drug that made modern sleep gentle, and the night a bedroom proved that the drug was never the safety — the watcher was. Ending, as our evenings do, in the quietest room in the hospital — and then in yours, counting backwards together. No one ever reaches one.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practising hospital pharmacist. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea — tonight more than ever.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (the dome, five minutes early)0:07:29 Chapter One — The Age of Speed0:20:20 Chapter Two — The Old Sleeps0:33:20 Chapter Three — The Laughing Parties0:47:24 Chapter Four — The Dentist's Gamble1:01:27 Chapter Five — Ether Day1:15:12 Chapter Six — The Scottish Argument1:28:55 Chapter Seven — The Price of Sleep1:42:22 Chapter Eight — Numb, Not Asleep1:55:43 Chapter Nine — The Measured Sleep2:10:26 Chapter Ten — Counting Backwards2:23:58 GoodnightWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/j7PJJ33exkgSubscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  7. The Hospital — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 32m, to fall asleep to) 20.08.2026 2h 32min

  A long, quiet documentary about the strangest ordinary building on your street — the house where strangers care for strangers — and the twenty-five centuries it took to invent it. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.This is the story of the hospital: a warm hillside at Epidaurus where the sick slept among sacred snakes and called the dreaming a cure; the proposition, carried out of Judea, that mercy owed a bed to anyone who needed one; the bimaristans of Baghdad and Cairo, where the Mansuri hospital discharged its patients with money, clothes, and a whole chicken; the great wards of God, built like churches because to their builders they were; a frugal bookseller's fortune, and the staircase Hogarth painted for free; the lady who arrived at Scutari with thirty-eight nurses and counted everything; the thirty years in which the wards learned to wash; the white city of the twentieth century, growing district by district like a port; the night shift — the watchers awake in the building, and one lit pharmacy low in its basement, which is where our narrator's colleague spends his own nights; and, at the end of the fire, a thought experiment about every hero this series has ever met, gathered under one roof. Ending, as our evenings do, across the street in the hour before morning, with the building exactly as we left it: lit.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practising hospital pharmacist — Chapter Nine is his own shift. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (the building across the street)0:05:38 Chapter One — The Sleeping Cure0:20:12 Chapter Two — The Invention of Mercy0:34:26 Chapter Three — The House of the Sick0:48:52 Chapter Four — The Great Wards of God1:02:57 Chapter Five — Hogarth's Hospital1:17:08 Chapter Six — The Lady with the Data1:31:16 Chapter Seven — The War on the Wards1:45:17 Chapter Eight — The White City2:00:15 Chapter Nine — The Quietest Shift2:13:57 Chapter Ten — The House of Strangers2:27:11 GoodnightWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xEXFJr5_APISubscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  6. Vaccines — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 45m, to fall asleep to) 11.08.2026 2h 45min

  A long, quiet documentary about the only medicine that works before you're sick — and about the only disease humanity has ever driven extinct. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.This is the story of prevention: the engrafting parties of the Ottoman court and the enslaved man in Boston whose knowledge helped save the town that raged at him; the numbers men of the Royal Society who proved a treatment with arithmetic; a Dorset farmer with a darning needle, twenty-two years ahead of the famous doctor; Blossom the cow, and the milkmaid legend that turns out to be a biographer's invention; the vaccine that circled the world in the arms of orphans; Pasteur's conveniently spoiled flask; a serum relay behind a hundred and fifty sled dogs at fifty below; the largest medical experiment in history, funded by schoolchildren's dimes; and the five-dollar needle, ground from a sewing-machine part, that ended a three-thousand-year war on the eighth of May, 1980. Ending, gently, behind the counter of an ordinary pharmacy, at the refrigerator.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practising hospital pharmacist. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (the cow byre at dusk)0:05:07 Chapter One — The Speckled Monster0:20:10 Chapter Two — The Old Wisdom0:36:10 Chapter Three — The Numbers Men0:52:43 Chapter Four — The Milkmaid and the Doctor1:07:24 Chapter Five — Vaccine Goes Around the World1:21:46 Chapter Six — Pasteur's Chickens1:35:52 Chapter Seven — The Serum Run1:50:32 Chapter Eight — The Summer Plague2:08:48 Chapter Nine — The End of Smallpox2:25:43 Chapter Ten — The Fridge Behind the Counter2:40:11 GoodnightWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GkkAOAmY3iMSubscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  5. Poisons & Poisoners — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 22m, to fall asleep to) 10.08.2026 2h 22min

  A long, quiet documentary about the other half of the shelf: the poisons, the poisoners, and the four-thousand-year detective story of how medicine learned to catch them. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.The philosopher's calm last afternoon in Athens. The king who armored his own body and the antidote that became theriac. The empresses convicted by gossip, the family convicted by legend, and the committee in Venice that kept poisoning in its minutes. The Burning Chamber of Paris. Penny arsenic dyed black by law, the poison book where every buyer signed, and the irritable chemist whose little glass apparatus finally made the grave a witness stand. Ending, gently, with ridged green bottles that speak to fingers in the dark, a green face sticking out its tongue, and the humble childproof cap — the quietest mass-lifesaver ever molded in plastic. This is not a horror story. It is a detective story, and the poisoners lose.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practicing hospital pharmacist. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (the guarded shelf)0:04:13 Chapter One — The Other Half of the Word0:17:07 Chapter Two — The King's Taster0:30:35 Chapter Three — Locusta's Rome0:44:06 Chapter Four — The Italian Art0:57:42 Chapter Five — The Affair of the Poisons1:11:25 Chapter Six — The Arsenic Century1:24:44 Chapter Seven — The Chemist Catches Up1:38:34 Chapter Eight — The Doctor Will See You Now1:51:37 Chapter Nine — Skulls, Bells & Green Bottles2:04:25 Chapter Ten — The Antidote Age2:17:44 GoodnightWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FjcLOp5G5F8Subscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  4. Plague — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 24m, to fall asleep to) 05.08.2026 2h 24min

  A long, quiet documentary about the disease that killed more human beings than any other — and about the thing humanity built to stop it. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.This is not a horror story. It is the story of how frightened officials in harbour towns, six hundred years ago, invented public health: a bacterium living quietly in burrowing rodents; the grain ships of Justinian's Constantinople; the galleys at Messina in 1347; a Paris medical faculty blaming a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars; the beaked mask that turns out to be three centuries too late; a single page of law passed in Ragusa in 1377 that gave every language on earth the word quarantine; Venice's two islands, one for the sick and one for the merely exposed; the weekly London bills of mortality, and the haberdasher who read seventy years of them and accidentally invented epidemiology; a Swiss doctor in a straw hut in Hong Kong finally seeing the thing itself. Ending, gently, with the disease still out there in the world's grasslands — and entirely curable, from an ordinary bottle on a pharmacy shelf.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practising hospital pharmacist. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (the ship at anchor)0:05:21 Chapter One — The Flea, the Rat & the Bacillus0:18:36 Chapter Two — Justinian's Fever0:32:15 Chapter Three — The Great Mortality0:45:13 Chapter Four — What They Thought It Was0:59:03 Chapter Five — The Beak1:12:33 Chapter Six — The Republic of Records1:26:06 Chapter Seven — The Bills of Mortality1:38:52 Chapter Eight — The Race in Hong Kong1:52:36 Chapter Nine — The Cost of Blame2:06:47 Chapter Ten — The Disease That Never Left2:20:07 GoodnightWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/wUTMQUwdIpQSubscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  3. Opium — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 22m, to fall asleep to) 31.07.2026 2h 22min

  A long, quiet documentary about a single flower and the four thousand years it has spent in the medicine cabinet: the opium poppy. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.Poppy seeds in the mud of prehistoric lake villages. The drug named, with perfect flatness, "juice." The one ingredient in the emperor's sixty-four-ingredient theriac that actually worked. Baghdad's careful doses, the alchemist's stones of immortality, laudanum in sherry with saffron and cloves. The penny bottle on every kitchen shelf, the poets who confessed too beautifully, the twenty thousand chests dissolved into the sea by a man who apologized to the fish — and the young pharmacist's assistant whose white crystals, named for the god of dreams, changed everything. Ending, gently, at the locked cabinet and the counter where this story is still being held, carefully, tonight.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practicing hospital pharmacist. A heavy story told lightly, at a distance, with respect. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (the garden at dusk)0:04:22 Chapter One — The Joy Plant0:17:35 Chapter Two — The Juice0:31:58 Chapter Three — The Physicians of Baghdad0:44:54 Chapter Four — The Stone of Immortality0:57:58 Chapter Five — The People's Drug1:10:38 Chapter Six — The Confessions1:23:57 Chapter Seven — The Two Wars1:37:22 Chapter Eight — Smoke and Mirrors1:50:25 Chapter Nine — The Alkaloid Age2:03:54 Chapter Ten — The Book of Poisons2:17:15 GoodnightWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/CfcHno-j3-USubscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  2. The Apothecary — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 00m, to fall asleep to) 29.07.2026 2h

  A long, quiet documentary about a single room and the four thousand years it has been open: the pharmacy. Told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.The oldest prescriptions on Earth, pressed into clay with no doses and no diseases. Incense blended by lamplight to a recipe carved in temple stone. The wonder-drug an empire harvested to extinction. Baghdad's licensed pharmacists, London's painted jars and ceiling alligators, the monastery gardens that became liqueurs, the bitter bark that actually worked, the butcher's bill that invented the family doctor, the glow of the show globe — and the pharmacy apprentice, twenty-one years old, who found the exact crystal where four millennia of sleep had been hiding.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practicing hospital pharmacist — whose own profession this episode happens to be. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (the shop is open)0:03:37 Chapter One — The First Druggists0:13:54 Chapter Two — The Price of Spice0:25:24 Chapter Three — Galen's Kitchen0:36:14 Chapter Four — The Golden Age of Baghdad0:45:51 Chapter Five — Guilds, Grocers & Apothecaries0:58:22 Chapter Six — The Monastery Garden1:10:13 Chapter Seven — New World, New Drugs1:21:38 Chapter Eight — The Apothecary's Revolt1:29:58 Chapter Nine — The Corner Drugstore1:39:42 Chapter Ten — From Shop Bench to Laboratory1:50:43 GoodnightWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/IhQe8KLfBq0Subscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.
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  1. Quack Cures & Miracle Medicines — A Sleepy History of Medicine (2h 00m, to fall asleep to) 28.07.2026 2h

  A long, quiet documentary about five thousand years of cures that didn't work — told slowly, at low volume, to help you fall asleep.Powdered mummy sold by apothecaries. A universal antidote made of vipers and aged like wine. Radioactive water for vigor. George Washington's final bloodletting, the tobacco-smoke rescue squads of the Thames, snake oil that contained no snake, and the twelve government clerks who ate poison for science. They were wrong, most of them, about most of it. But they were wrong carefully — and this is their story, told at the pace of a fireside.Researched, written, and fact-checked with a practicing hospital pharmacist. You're welcome to drift off at any point. That's the whole idea.Chapters:0:00:00 Welcome (put the lights out)0:03:59 Chapter One — The Oldest Medicines0:15:03 Chapter Two — Theriac, the Universal Cure0:24:46 Chapter Three — Corpse Medicine0:34:34 Chapter Four — The Four Humors & Bloodletting0:44:43 Chapter Five — Mercury, the Beautiful Poison0:55:47 Chapter Six — The Strangest Rescues1:06:38 Chapter Seven — The Golden Age of Patent Medicine1:18:03 Chapter Eight — The Radium Craze1:28:45 Chapter Nine — Animal Magnetism & the Electric Cure1:40:29 Chapter Ten — Taming the Quacks1:51:58 OutroWatch the full video version, with the paintings and engravings, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/wnrdZGVF3LcSubscribe for a new sleepy history every week: youtube.com/@SleepyhistoryofMedicineImage and source credits are in the YouTube pinned comment.