Mental Floss
Mental Floss

MEDICINE

Tis the season to be getting the cold and flu. But is it possible for the bacteria and viruses that infect us so easily to get sick themselves?In 1917, a microbiologist working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered what he described as an invisible

Matt Soniak
Getty Images

The holidays are here again. That means family, and family means listening to insane, ill-informed debates over every subject imaginable. But just because your relatives are old and probably a little crazy doesn’t mean everything they say is nonsense. Whe

M Asher Cantrell
Getty Images

Imagine lying on a table in a old-school operating room. Faces stare down on you from the viewing galleries above and your leg throbs with pain from a broken bone and an infection just starting to set in. The door opens and three men in blood-stiffened a

Matt Soniak
Getty Images

The act of scraping nails down a chalkboard creates a sound so awful that most people have an instantaneous reaction: A shiver runs up the spine, and they slap their hands over their ears. Anything to block out that noise! But why do unpleasant sounds af

Erin McCarthy
Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0

The legendary monsters series continues with some scary stories from Africa. There are so many nations and discrete communities in Africa that the problem here was not finding the legendary stories, but whittling down the list to a manageable number.1.

Miss Cellania

It's hard to understand just how far medical science has progressed over the last hundred years ... until you look at what passed for standard, advisable treatment back then. Here are 19 doctor-approved ideas from Mother's Remedies: Over One Thousand Trie

Adrienne Crezo
Gout can cause a most hellish pain.

Humanity spent the last hundred years virtually eradicating some of the planet’s most unpleasant diseases. But some of them have started showing up again.

Kathy Benjamin

While the author of the Book of Proverbs remains uncertain (most likely, King Solomon wrote it), its intent is not. The book was written to share insight, and much conventional wisdom originates in its pages. Proverbs 17:22, "a merrie heart doth good like

Meghan Holohan
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The Flintstones has been off the air and in syndication since 1966. But Flintstones Vitamins remain on the shelves and in homes, despite the fact that this generation of children probably has no clue who Fred, Wilma, Barney, Betty and Dino are.

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie
iStock

First, we need to make a distinction between the two main classes of painkillers, which are used for different situations and function via different mechanisms. The first class is the narcotic opioid drugs. These are the heavy-duty drugs, like morphine a

Matt Soniak
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