Doomed to Fail - Can you recommend a Medical History podcast?

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

The history of medicine is equal parts miracle and nightmare. These episodes prove it.Ep 98 - The Never-ending Story: Henrietta Lacks Her cancer cells were taken without her consent and became the most important cell line in medical research—changing science forever.Ep 135 - Useless Harbinger of Death?: The Appendix A tiny organ with no clear purpose… except when it tries to kill you. We explore its strange history and evolutionary mystery.Ep 141 - Look for The Helpers: Thalidomide Babies A “miracle drug” for morning sickness turns into a global tragedy, leaving thousands of children with severe birth defects.​​Ep 146 - Fatal Insomnia: New Fear Unlocked A rare genetic disorder where you stop sleeping—ever—until it kills you. New fear: unlocked.Ep 158: Frostbite and Forceps - Self Surgery in Antarctica A Soviet doctor gets appendicitis at the South Pole. The only available surgeon? Himself.Ep 162: Sugar Cubes for the Masses - The Polio Vaccine From iron lungs to sugar cubes, how science took on one of the 20th century’s most feared diseases.BONUS: Real Life Stories - Getting the Polio Vaccine with Taylor's Dad, Mark! A first-hand account from someone who was there when the sugar cube arrived.Ep 198: I'll take one of those! - Organ Transplants pt 1 The early days of transplant surgery—full of bold experiments, ethical dilemmas, and plenty of failures.Ep 201: The Living Market - Organ Transplants Pt 2 From black markets to life-saving breakthroughs, the complicated story of organ donation today.🎧 Listen now—just maybe not while eating lunch. Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

Hello and welcome to Dooms to Fail. My name is Taylor and myself and my friend Fars host our show once a week, and we have over 200 episodes about history and disasters and interesting stories and we fly down some rabbit holes and all of that fun stuff. So we have a really good time and we'd love for you to listen. And in order to start framing the frame list to give a little bit more of a tighter story, I'm going to let you know some of our episodes from our archive that sort of fall into the same topic. And this week we're going to talk about medical history. So there's so much

also ancient medical history that I'm sure we'll get to. But here's what we've done so far. And all these links will be in our show notes. Episode 98 is about Henrietta Lax. So this is the immortal life of Henrietta Lax is my main source that I'm sure you've heard of, or if you've heard of it, you read it. About Henrietta Lax was a black woman in the 1940s whose cells were able to reproduce at a rate that was not something that anybody had ever seen. And of course, that means she had incredible amounts of cancer in her body. But her cells could also, they could also reproduce outside of her body, which was something that people hadn't seen before.

And so her cells were used in medical testing. You know, it's still used today, even though she died, you know, 80 years ago. So it's an interesting story about class and race and medical history and medical advancements and, yeah, that's episode 98. Episode 135, I talk about the appendix. Like, what does it do? Why don't we know what it does? What does it look like?

It's kind of weird. Join us on that one. Episode 141, I talk about thalidomide babies, and this one was pretty emotional. It's so interesting. So there was this pill called the thalidomide that in the UK mostly, but in parts of Europe, in the 1950s and 60s, was supposed to be this, like, medical miracle that could take away your symptoms of being pregnant, like your morning sickness. But actually, what it was doing was irreparably harming the babies.

And there's a lot of grownups now in the UK who are missing arms or missing limbs, and you can track it down to the day their mom took thalidomide. And then in the United States, it actually wasn't approved because there was a woman who worked at the FDA who stopped it, which is brave and interesting. So listen to that one. Then, Farras talks in episode 146 about fatal insomnia, which is a disease you can get where you never fall asleep, and it's fatal and sounds terrible. In episode 158, he talks about self-surgery in Antarctica.

So Antarctica is cut off in the world. So there was one time when a man needed an appendicitis, appendectomy, there you go. And another time when a woman had breast cancer and they operated on themselves because they were the doctors. and there was no one else there. So, wild. Then in episode 162, talk about the polio vaccine, why it's important to have vaccines in that one specifically. And then in the episode after that is a bonus where I interviewed my dad, because my dad remembers getting the polio vaccine, just the day you no longer had to worry about it. So it's an interesting story. It's about philanthropy. It's about

medicine. It's about the government. It's about FDR. So listen to that one. And then I got two more from far as they did this year, episodes 198 and 200. and one are both about organ transplants. So there's like the good part where it saves people and the bad part where someone steals your kidneys. So learn about them there. If you have any questions or ideas,

email us. Doomtentafelpod at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. We're on all social media at doomed to fill pod. Thank you. Thank you.