Trust Me, I'm Dr Ozzy (37 page)

F
LESH
& B
LOOD

1. b). His brothers did it ’cos they were jealous. They also nicked his coat and threw him down a mineshaft. They didn’t let him play their Xbox, either.
   

2. c). The mother was supposedly a Russian peasant, married to a guy named Feodor Vassilyev (her first name has been lost to history). According to
   Guinness World Records
   , she pumped out sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets between 1725 and 1765. Only two of the babies died in infancy. Feodor—otherwise known as the man with the Golden Balls—went on to re-marry and have another twenty kids.
   

3. a). According to news reports at the time, the victim (who wasn’t named) didn’t realise what had happened until she noticed a wet feeling under her shirt, pulled it up, and her nipple fell on the floor. She put it a bag and took it to hospital. It’s now back where it belongs.
   

4. c). “Marriage should be about losing arguments and winning relationships,” according to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a leading relationship coach.
   

5. c). Lina Medina’s parents took her to hospital, thinking she had a stomach tumor. It turned out she was seven months pregnant. She’s now in her seventies and lives in Peru. The reason Lina was able to have a kid was her very unusual case of “precocious puberty”—her first period came when she was still a toddler—although of course it’s beyond tragic that any man would impregnate her in the first place. The father was never identified, and the baby, a boy, was raised as her brother. He died in 1979 at the age of 40.
   

U
NDER THE
K
NIFE

1. a) and c). The guy with the forked tongue—Erik Sprague—had it done on purpose, ’cos he wanted to look like a lizard. He had his teeth filed into fangs, too. He’s available for babysitting.
   

2. a) and c). The woman who injected lubricant into her face told ABC News: “By the following day [my whole face] was just completely inflamed. [The lubricant] expands, it’s like rubber, and your own collagen forms scar tissue around it… it looked like horrible blisters.” People who do this kind of thing to themselves suffer from a condition called “body dysmorphic disorder”—which means they drive themselves nuts about one particular part of their body, to the point where they’re willing to self-operate.
   

3. b). The
   Annals of General Psychiatry
   says that “severe intentional eye self-injury is uncommon, but not rare” and that it’s usually a result of a drug freak-out psychosis, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and/or depression. Some patients have been found with a copy of the passage in Matthew’s Gospel, which says, “… if the right eye offends thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee.”
   

4. a). They were known as “barber surgeons.” The most common service they provided was “bloodletting”—where you cut a gash in your arm and let your blood run out into a bucket. Personally, I’d have been happy with a short back and sides.
   

5. a). The poor guy, who was 70 years old and mentally ill, died from septicaemia within six days. The others are real cases written about in
   The Psychiatrist
   , although the bright spark with the bicycle changed his mind at the last minute—and ended up fracturing his skull instead.
   

D
OCTOR
! D
OCTOR!

1. a). He was sacked and fined for making out prescriptions to himself, then booked himself into rehab. He wasn’t struck off, though—and he went on to kill over 200 patients, that we know of, at least.
   

2. a). The woman later withdrew her case and the doc was exonerated.
   

3. b). He went to jail. He allegedly told one woman that his magic potion would stop her gums bleeding, but warned it might “taste funny.” He also told her she could swallow it if she wanted to.
   

4. c). “I hope that what I’ve done will reassure men that vasectomies can be relatively pain free,” he told the BBC. He added that he’d been thinking of getting the snip for a while, but wanted someone trustworthy to do it. “Eventually I just thought, ’sod it, I’ll do it myself,” he said.
   

5. c). The Gallup poll came out in 2010 and showed just how much dough gets spent on “defensive medicine”—basically, doctors covering their own arses in case a patient takes ’em to the cleaners.
   

M
UTANT
S
TRAINS

1. a). When the bones of tiny, hobbit-like creatures were found on a remote Indonesian island, Flores, some scientists thought they might have been humans with a crazy genetic disorder who lived 18,000 years ago. Others said they were a different species altogether.
   

2. a) and b). Although it looked like she had four arms and four legs, she was actually
   two
   people. After a mind-blowing 27-hour operation, little Lakshmi—who was worshipped as a Hindu Goddess by some Indians—now goes to school and can walk on her own. The poor kid still needs more surgery, though.
   

3. a) I almost fell out of my fucking chair when my research guy told me about this. It ain’t the antifreeze you put in your car, mind you, but an “antifreeze protein” found in certain Antarctic fish that stops ’em dying from the cold. They’ve even started to use the stuff in some low-fat ice creams—although it’s grown in a lab, not taken directly out of some smelly old flounder.
   

4. c). An Austrian monk called Gregor Mendel had the mega-brainwave that led to modern genetics after growing and studying 29,000 pea plants between 1856 and 1863. He didn’t get any recognition during his lifetime, but at least he never went hungry in the lab.
   

5. b). Said one of the scientists who cloned her: “Dolly is derived from a mammary gland cell, and we couldn’t think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton’s.”
   

P
ERSONAL
S
KILLS

1. c). I’m told the other two greetings work in Oman (nose kiss) and some parts of Niger (“Wooshay!”)—but always double-check before giving a strange foreign bloke a smacker on the conk.
   

2. c). “Don’t put your phone on the dining table, or glance at it longingly mid-conversation,” it says. Other rules: don’t make calls from the shitter; don’t have phone conversations in public about money, sex, or your haemorrhoid attack; and think carefully before choosing “My Humps” as a ringtone.
   

3. a). Not that I’d know—I don’t have the first fucking clue about computers. Experts say the human brain can only handle a maximum number of 150
   real
   friends, so if you’ve got more than that, you might wanna take advantage of National Unfriend Day (November 17).
   

4. b). During the heist—which the boss helped to plan—his employees were held at knifepoint and one teller was punched in the face. The boss pretended to be a hostage until the cops showed up and realised that one of the masked robbers was his girlfriend.
   

5. a). “There were problems with money in the workplace and basically the stress of him being the owner and running a business got to him,” said the cops.
   

G
REY
M
ATTER

1. All of them. a) is also known as “muscle dysmorphia,” ’cos sufferers never think they look “ripped” enough, b) is usually caused by a major brain injury, and c) is described by experts as an “exaggerated startle reflex”—in other words, you pretty much crap your pants when you’re surprised. Weirdly, it was first discovered in French-Canadian lumberjacks living in Maine, USA.
   

2. a). It means you’re turned on by people who commit crimes. It’s also known as “Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome.”
   

3. a). I ain’t exactly a brain surgeon, but I’m told that’s more or less true (apparently headaches come from blood vessels, the membrane around the brain, and other nerves). If you’re ever unlucky enough to have brain surgery, you can even get away with just a local anaesthetic on your scalp. As for the other two answers: your brain could power only a 10-23w bulb; and the biggest emotional memory trigger is thought to be smell.
   

4. b). That’s what the scientist Stephen Juan said in his 1998 book
   The Odd Brain
   . Most thoughts are turned into very short-term memories and then forgotten. Or make that “all thoughts” in my case.
   

5. c). That makes ’em the most commonly prescribed drugs in the country—after high blood pressure medication (according to a 2005 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).