Medical Mysteries Across History

By: Roy Benaroch MD, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Roy Benaroch MD

In medical school, every patient is a teaching case - and every patient can be your teacher. For hundreds of years, medical students around the world have learned the secrets of medicine by looking at real cases, involving real people and featuring real symptoms.

But what happens when those medical cases are a mystery? How do doctors diagnose illnesses and save lives using the best knowledge they have about health and disease? What differences (and similarities) are there between the ways doctors work today and the ways they worked thousands of years ago?

In these 10 eye-opening lectures by a practicing doctor and medical educator, you’ll walk through a series of medical mystery cases ripped from history and involving well-known historical figures whose identities are nevertheless hidden from you. Every one of these cases (featuring presidents, scientists, singers, kings, and queens) requires you to use your detective skills to identify and diagnose the mystery patient just like the doctors that attended them. In the process, you’ll learn fascinating insights into medicine: both the medicine that was practiced thousands of years ago and the medicine doctors practice today.

What are the historic and modern consequences of fever? How do doctors diagnose and treat cardiovascular disease and alcoholism? How does radiation and heavy metal poisoning affect the human body? What so-called “modern” diseases were actually documented in the ancient past? Solving these mystery cases will give you a new perspective on how the human body works - and on some world-changing figures whom you’ve never viewed from a doctor’s point of view.

©2019 Audible Originals, LLC (P)2020 Audible Originals, LLC.

Great short stories

This book consists of 10 short medical mysteries, perfect for my relatively short drives. Narration was excellent, very engaging.

Nice take on a lecture

This is an interesting take on a lecture. The author presents a famous historical figure as a medical case. He describes the person in vague detail, gradually adding more information about the person as he talks about the presenting symptoms (some of which are red herrings). He seemed to expect that people could guess the disease. I think that's unlikely for anyone except actual doctors, but it is fun to try to see how quickly you can guess who he is talking about.

Great Listen

Thoroughly enjoyed this audiobook. Author made good points and shared common sense with his audience. I ignored the input coming from the "anti-woke" crowd. Enough said.

Great!

My mother was a nurse for 40 years and when I started looking for summer jobs I turned to hospital work. I worked as an Aide, a Desk Clerk and the assistant to the Director of Nursing. I also learned what I didn’t want to be when I got out of school - a nurse. But I was fascinated by Medicine and diagnosis. I didn’t want to go through the many years of schooling to become a doctor. If I had it to do over again today I would probably become a Physician’s Assistant. My work experience through the years has been in clinics and hospitals as an Educator and I then moved on and finished my working life as a Cardiovascular Pharmaceutical Representative. I know a lot about Medicine and I still find the art of diagnosis fascinating. That’s why I chose this book. I named the historical figures 9 out of 10 (I don’t do sports) and I got 8 out of 10 on the diagnoses. The book is very good and the narrator is excellent.

We owe our lives to those who came before us!

Truly fascinating accounts of historical figures and their medical conditions, with a simplified explanation of medical conditions. Fabulous narrator.