The Human Body

Useless Body Parts

Fact or Fiction?

North American Indians ate Watercress to dissolve gravel and stones in the bladder.

In Russia, suppositories cut from fresh potatoes were used for quick relief of hemorrhoids.

A salt enema used to be given to children to rid them of threadworms.

Powdered Tea was once used as a snuff to stop bleeding noses.

A concoction of dandelion roots and leaves is an old remedy for dissolving urinary stones and gravel.

Comfrey (herb) baths were popular before the wedding night to attempt to repair the hymen and thereby apparently restore virginity.

The thyroid cartilage is more commonly known as the Adam’s Apple.

Stroking the sole of the foot is used by doctor’s to produce the Babinski effect.

Insulin is produced in the pancreas.

Acute hasopharyngitis is more commonly known as a cold.

Keratitis is an inflammation of the cornea which may lead to blindness.

Oophorectomy is the surgical removal of the ovaries.

Sexually transmitted diseases are the major cause of preventable sterility in American men and women.

Sperm is the smallest single cell in a mans body.

Estragon protects against heart disease.

Hair, prompted by testosterone, grows faster in men in anticipation of sex.

An average, in America, three sex change operations are performed every day.

Artificial forms of birth control are condemned by the catholic church. The ‘Rythem’ [Rhythm] method is recommended by the church, as is abstinence

In 1977, Napoleon’s penis was sold in Paris for about US $3 800 to an American urologist.

The most sensitive cluster of nerves is at the base of the spine.

In 1855, dentist Robert Arthur was the first to use gold to fill cavities.

The fleshy muscular organ joined to the hyoid bone is the tongue.

Quinine is an alkaloid extract of the bark of the Cinchona tree.

By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can’t sink in quicksand.

An Eskimo would be ingesting toxic doses of Vitamin A if he ate a polar bears liver.

Smallpox is also known as variola.

The disease Tuberculosis, is best known as consumption.

Victorian women tried to enlarge their breasts by bathing in strawberries.

The fissure of Rolando, would be found in the human brain.

Iron deficiency causes the most common form of anaemia.

Red blood cells are produced in the bone marrow.

The smallest bone in the body is the stirrup bone.

The Mount of Jupiter and the Girdle of Venus are found on the palm of your hand.

The Auricularis muscles are used to move the ears.

The vaccine for smallpox was developed in 1798.

In the United States, 1982, the painkiller ‘Tylenol’ was spiked with cyanide.

The normal body temperature in 37° Celsius.

In 1982, Englishman William Hall committed suicide by drilling holes into his head with a power drill . . . it took 8 holes.

The leading cause of death in the late 19th century was tuberculosis.

The rate of Quadruplets are 1 (set) in every 490 000 births.

A person suffering from polythelia has 3 nipples.

Clinophobia is a fear of beds.

A human sheds a complete layer of skin every 4 weeks.

The human brain is 80% water.

The brain uses more than 25% of the oxygen used by the human body.

The nose continues to grow throughout your life.

Everyone’s tongue print is different.

15 million blood cells are produced and destroyed in the human body every second.

Blonde beards grow faster than darker beards.

The most prescribed drug in the United Kingdom in 1985 was Valium.

The left side of the brain is usually responsible for the control of speech.

The space between two adjacent neurones is called the ‘synapse’.

The crystalline quartz, Amethyst was once believed to prevent drunkenness.

Sigmund Freud bought his first sample of cocaine for $1.27 per gram.

The septum linguae is found on the tongue.

Stroking the sole of the foot produces the Babinski reflex.

During a orchidectomy, a man has a testicle removed.

The medical term for a black eye is circumorbital haematoma.

Medical experts say you should sleep on your right side to improve digestion.

There are more living organisms on the skin of a single human being that there are human beings on the surface of the earth.

The largest cell in the human body is the female reproductive cell, the ovum. The smallest is the male sperm.

There are over 100 million light sensitive cells in the retina.

The opposite of ‘cross-eyed’ is ‘wall-eyed’.

From the age of thirty, humans gradually begin to shrink in size.

Laudanum, a tincture of opium, was a common sedative in Victorian times.

Dr. W.S. Halstead was the first to use rubber gloves during surgery in 1890.

The human body contains enough iron to make a spike strong enough to hold your weight.

In the early Twentieth century, rattlesnake venom was used to treat epilepsy.

The human body contains about sixthy thousand miles of blood vessels.

Narcolepsy is the uncontrollable need to sleep.

The surface area of a human lung is equal to a tennis court.

The human body transmits nerve impulses at about 90 metres a second

Spread out, the walls of the human intestines would cover an area of about one hundred square feet.

The hydrochloric acid in the human stomach is strong enough to dissolve a nail.

There are 14 phalanges (finger bones) in a human hand.

In 1979 Dr. Christian Barnard was offered $250 000 by the American National Enquirer to perform a human head transplant.

Most people have lost fifty per cent of their taste buds by the time they reach the age of sixty.

The amount of carbon in the human body is enough to fill about 9 000 ‘lead’ pencils.

Cancer claims forty victims an hour in America.

In the English hospitals of the seventeenth century, children were entitled to two gallons of beer as part of their weekly diet.

Podobromhidrosis is more commonly known as ‘smelly feet’.

If a surgeon in Ancient Egypt lost a patient while performing an operation, his hands were cut off.

Opium was used widely as a painkiller during the American Civil War. As a result, over one hundred thousand soldiers had become drug addicts by the end of the war.

Men have on average 10% more red blood cells than women

New Zealand’s first hospital was opened in 1843.

One square inch of human skin contains 625 sweat glands.

The symptoms of haemophilia are never displayed by women, but can only pass it on. With men is the opposite.

If your mouth was completely dry, you would not be able to distinguish the taste of anything.

When you blush, your stomach lining also reddens.

The largest muscle in the human body is the buttock muscle.

The Islands of Langerhans won’t be found on a map, they’re a group of cells located in the pancreas.

Every time you step forward, you use fifty four muscles.

A Rhinologist specialises in the human nose.

If you could remove all the space from the atoms that make up your body, you could walk through the eye of a needle.

A chromosome is larger than a gene.

The average human brain weighs 1.3 kg

During the fifteenth century, sick people were often dressed in red and surrounded by red objects because it was though to help them get better.

Eighty per cent of all body heat escapes through the head.

The Black Death claimed roughly forty million lives in the thirteenth century.

The human wrist contains more bones than the ankle.

Someone who grinds their teeth is a bruxomaniac.

In 1562 a man was dug up six hours after his burial, after he had been seen breathing by someone at the funeral – he lived for another 75 years.

Doctors ‘bled’ Louis XIII of France forty-seven times in one month in an attempt to cure his illness.

Human hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after death.

Physcrophilia is the sexual arousal by cold.

If 80% of the human liver was removed, it could still function and would eventually restore itself to its original size.

There is more pigment in brown eyes than blue.

Nearly a quarter of all human bones can be found in the feet.

The ‘ funny bone’ is not a bone but a nerve.

Most people blink about 25 000 times a day.

The human body has enough fat to produce 7 bars of soap.

The human head is a quarter of our total length at birth, but only an eighth of our total length by the time we reach adulthood.

There is no single word given to describe the back of the knee.

From fertilisation to birth, a baby’s weigh increase 5 000 million times.

The woman of the Brazilin Apinaly Tribe bite their mates eyebrows during intercourse.

Thomas Wedders, the English circus freak, had a nose which was seven and a half inches long.

The ancient Greeks believed that boys developed in the right hand side of the womb and girls in the left.

The average height of a man in the Middle Ages was five feet six inches.

The human body has fewer muscles in it than a caterpillar.

Medieval recipe for the cure of acne ‘the rout of dragon’s made clean and cut into thin roundels and steeped for nine days in white wine and applied ‘.

Men are ten times more likely to be colour-blind than women.

An eighteenth century woman used only lard to ‘wash’ her face and hands and lived to the age of 116.

The liver is the largest internal organ weighing about 10.5 kilograms.

Human adults breathe about 23 000 time a day.

It requires 30 muscles to raise your eyebrows.

Nutmeg, if injected intravenously, is fatal.

The most common form of cancer is Skin cancer.

The Middle ear and the Pharynx are joined with the Eustachian tube.

The Extensor digiti minimi manus is used to extend the little finger.

If you are a universal donor your blood group is type O.

When recognising someone’s face, you use the right side of your brain.

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