In 1593 reports began to spread of a young boy in Silesia, seven-year-old Christoph Müller, who had grown a golden tooth. Jakob Horst, a professor of medicine at Julius University in Helmstedt, decided to investigate. He found the boy did indeed have a gold tooth set firmly in his jaw. Tests with a touchstone (a small tablet of dark stone on which soft metals such as gold leave a visible trace) confirmed the gold was real, though not as high quality, Horst noted, as Hungarian gold. More→

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Mary Toft, a peasant woman from the town of Godalming, England, claimed she was giving birth to rabbits. She even managed to perform this feat in the presence of the King's personal surgeon, who traveled to Godalming to witness the phenomenon. She was transported to London, where she continued to give birth to rabbits. But when the physician Sir Richard Manningham threatened to operate on her to examine her miraculous uterus, she confessed it had all been a hoax. She had been hoping to gain a pension from the King on account of her strange ability. More→

In 1750 the British Royal Society received a curious report titled Lucina Sine Concubita, which translated means "Pregnancy without Intercourse".

In the letter the writer argued that women could become pregnant without having engaged in any sexual activity, due to the presence of microscopic "floating animalcula" present in the air. The author claimed to have isolated some of these animalcula using "a wonderful, cylindrical, catoptrical, rotundo-concavo-convex machine." When he examined these animalcula under a microscope he found them to be shaped like miniature men and women. This discovery, he suggested, would go a long way toward restoring the honor of women who could not otherwise explain their pregnancies. An engraving accompanying the letter showed a "floating animalcula" approaching a sleeping woman.

The author concluded by proposing that, for the purpose of experimentation, a royal edict should ban copulation for one year.

The letter was signed by Abraham Johnson, but this was a pseudonym of Sir John Hill. His intent was apparently to satirize the "spermist" theory, which held that sperm were actually little men (homunculi) that, when placed inside women, grew into children.

The letter proved very popular and was printed and distributed widely throughout Europe.

It is also said that Hill wrote the letter to revenge himself for having been denied membership to the Royal Society. (Needs confirmation)

James Graham was one of the more notorious medical quacks that worked in London during the eighteenth century. He called himself a doctor, even though he had never completed his medical studies. He promised customers he could cure them of a variety of ills (but in particular sterility and impotence) if they slept in his "celestial bed," for which he charged £50 a night.

The Celestial Bed was twelve-feet long by nine-feet wide, could be tilted so that it lay at various angles, and had a mattress filled with "sweet new wheat or oat straw, mingled with balm, rose leaves, and lavender flowers."

As lovers lay in the bed, they could stare up into the large mirror suspended above them on the ceiling. Behind them, electricity crackled across the headboard of the bed, filling the air with a magnetic fluid "calculated to give the necessary degree of strength and exertion to the nerves." The phrase "Be fruitful. Multiply and Replenish the Earth" was inscribed on the headboard. Hidden musicians played soft music.

In other words, a night in the bed probably was an unusual romantic experience. However, it had no curative powers.

In 1784 Graham moved to Edinburgh, where he took up the cause of mud baths, claiming that they were the secret to immortality. He died in 1794. More→

The December 1845 edition of the American Whig Review contained an account of an unusual experiment designed to test whether hypnotism could delay the arrival of death. According to the article, a terminally ill patient, M. Ernest Valdemar, who only had hours left to live, was placed in a trance by a hypnotist. The effect was quite remarkable. Valdemar appeared to go into a state of suspended animation, moving only in response to the hypnotist's commands. He remained in this state for over a day, much to the surprise of his doctors who hadn't given him that long to live. Then Valdemar's pulse stopped and his breathing ceased. He was dead, but his brain remained alive, bound to the will of the hypnotist. Valdemar could gurgle out brief responses to questions.

For seven months Valdemar remained in this condition, halfway between death and life, until finally the doctors agreed the trial had gone on long enough. The hypnotist gave the command for the patient to wake from the trance. As he did so the man's body immediately collapsed inwards, disintegrating into a puddle of "detestable putridity."

The account of this experiment was widely reprinted both in America and in Europe. A prominent Boston hypnotist, Robert Collyer, declared that he had no doubt of the truth of the case, since he himself had once brought a man back to life who had died from overdrinking.

However, the article was actually a piece of fiction written by Edgar Allan Poe. When a Scottish correspondent wrote to Poe inquiring about the veracity of the experiment, Poe replied bluntly, "Hoax is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar's case."

In November 1874 an unusual article appeared in the introductory volume of The American Medical Weekly, a Louisville medical journal. It was written by Dr. LeGrand G. Capers and was titled, "Attention Gynaecologists!—Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon, C.S.A." In the article Dr. Capers recounted an unusual case of artificial insemination he had witnessed on a Civil War battlefield in Mississippi, in which a bullet had passed through a soldier's testicles, and then traveled on before hitting a woman and impregnating her. The event was said to have occurred on May 12, 1863 at around 3 p.m. at the "battle of R." (battle of Raymond), where "Gen. G's brigade" (Brigadier General John Gregg) of the Confederate forces fought Grant's army led by "Gen. L." (Major General John A. Logan). More→

The December 13, 1884 issue of Medical News included a letter from a correspondent who identified himself as Dr. Egerton Yorrick Davis. The letter described "an uncommon form of vaginismus" that the doctor had been summoned to treat. Apparently a maid had experienced a severe vaginal spasm while engaged in sexual intercourse. Consequently her lover, the coachman, became unable to remove himself from inside of her. Dr. Davis wrote that he relaxed the woman with chloroform and managed to separate the unhappy couple.

In reality, this medical case never occurred, nor was its author, Dr. Egerton Yorrick Davis, a real person. He was the pseudonym of William Osler (1849-1919), who is regarded as one of the most highly respected figures in modern medical history. Dr. Osler served for many years as Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and was instrumental in founding the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. But throughout his illustrious career he submitted letters to medical journals under the pseudonym of Dr. Egerton Yorrick Davis.

These letters often dealt with sexual subjects, such as his 1903 letter to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal titled "Peyronie's Disease—Strabisme du Penis" describing "an old codger" who experienced "a most remarkable change in his yard." Apparently these bizarre (and fictitious) sexual case histories were an expression of the mischievous sense of humor lurking behind the respectable façade of the famous doctor.

On December 28, 1917, H.L. Mencken published an article in the New York Evening Mail titled "A Neglected Anniversary." It described the history of the bathtub in America, noting that people were slow to accept tubs, believing they were dangerous to health. This attitude, Mencken said, changed when President Millard Fillmore became the first president to install a tub in the White House. Mencken's history of the bathtub was not true. He intended it as a joke, "some harmless fun in war days". However, few people recognized it as such. Details from Mencken's article began to appear in other papers. One scholar included the tale in a history of hygiene. After eight years, hoping to put a stop to the continued widespread acceptance of his invented tale as true history, Mencken confessed to his hoax in a front-page article in the Chicago Tribune. But his confession did little to stop the tale's spread. If anything, his fake history spread even further. President Truman was known to repeat the story of Millard Fillmore and the bathtub when showing visitors around the White House. To this day, many people still believe that Mencken's fake history of the bathtub is true. More→

In August 1951, 59-year-old science reporter Hugh Stewart approached his editors at the Chicago Herald-American with a hot tip. He had learned that a Chicago mother was about to give birth to sextuplets. It would be the first time a confirmed birth of sextuplets had occurred in America.

Stewart offered no verifiable sources for the news. He insisted that "if I break my informants' confidence it will ruin me." Nor could he disclose the mother's name because "critical medical and psychological problems necessitate such protection." Nevertheless, the Herald-American decided to run his story on its front page. It appeared on August 21 under the headline, "Mother Here Expects 5 or 6 Babies." The article disclosed that "Obstetricians, using stethoscopes, have detected the heartbeats of six babies." More→

The Coudé Catheter is a catheter with a curved tip, used in urology to facilitate insertion of the catheter tube through the urethra into the bladder. The Winter 1957 edition of The Leech, the journal of the students' society of the Welsh National School of Medicine at Cardiff, contained a brief biography of the Coudé Catheter's alleged inventor, Emile Coudé.

According to the article, Coudé (1800-1870) was born the son of a French country doctor in the town of Villeneuve-la-Comtesse. In 1832 he accepted a post of assistant surgeon at Niort, and it was here he invented the catheter that bore his name... More→

In 1970, scientists researching the link between diet and heart disease visited the small town of Vilcabamba, located high in the Ecuadorian Andes. The scientists included Dr. Alexander Leaf of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Harold Elrick of the University of California at San Diego, and a group from the University of Quito.

The scientists found that the residents of Vilcabamba, who were principally of European descent, had very low cholesterol levels and very few of them ever suffered from heart disease. But more remarkable was the longevity of the Vilcabambans. Many of the town residents claimed to be over 100 years old. A few of them stated their age as being over 140 years old. These ages appeared to be confirmed by birth and baptismal records. More→

The website MalePregnancy.com, which first appeared online in 1999, claimed to document the case of Mr. Lee Mingwei, who was supposedly the first human male to become pregnant. Visitors to the site could inspect a variety of documentary evidence about Mr. Mingwei's pregnancy. There were news reports, pictures, video clips, Mr. Mingwei's EKG, ultrasound images, and blood-pressure measurements. The site stated that the delivery date of Mr. Mingwei's child had not yet been determined. The site has now stated this for nine years (as of 2009).

The site was a hoax created by artist/filmmaker Virgil Wong, who described it as an "art installation." Wong's work, especially his art projects on the internet, often explores themes arising from contemporary medicine. The site received extensive media attention in 2000. Wong has claimed that it fooled thousands of people, and that he was contacted by numerous men seeking to become the next pregnant man. More→