10 Gripping Nonfiction Books on History’s Biggest Medical Mysteries

Without a doubt, current medical treatments are more effective and less painful than ever before. But it’s been a long and sometimes unusual road to get where we are now. From strange illnesses and their equally bizarre treatments to extraordinary doctors and the sometimes too-far lengths they’ve gone to for their craft, these books delve into some of the wildest moments in medical history.

For hundreds of years, the dancing plague remained a mystery. For two scorching summer months in Strasbourg, France, beginning in 1518, people couldn’t escape the compulsion to dance, succumbing one by one to exhaustion and other physical ailments induced by nonstop exertion. At its peak, upwards of 400 people were believed to have been affected, and Waller’s The Dancing Plague dives into new evidence explaining what may have caused the plague and how it ultimately ended.

A great read for history and science lovers alike, this book is an immersive exploration of not only the dancing plague itself but also the medieval world that engendered it. From the townspeople’s fervent supernaturalism to their frequent encounters with disease and the modern psychology of mass hysteria, The Dancing Plague approaches this bizarre event from a variety of fascinating angles.

For those who weren’t aware, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain was also an acclaimed writer, and not just of cookbooks and memoirs. In Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical, Bourdain traces the story of Mary Mallon, better known to history as Typhoid Mary, the first identified asymptomatic carrier of Salmonella typhi.

This biographical tale traces Mary’s years of unwittingly spreading the typhoid virus throughout New York City and the frantic efforts of detectives to track her down. Working as a cook for eight different families, Mary infected those she fed again and again, always disappearing when family members started showing signs of illness. In 1907, detectives finally tracked her down. They took her into custody and institutionalized her in a hospital for three years, after which they made her promise to never work as a cook again. But after her release, she went back to cooking, this time moving around frequently under various aliases until her eventual rearrest and institutionalization for the rest of her life.

Typhoid Mary gives an intimate look into working-class New York life in the early 1900s, and especially into the terrible kitchen conditions that led to hundreds of preventable typhoid deaths during this era. It’s also an infamous tale for those who like their true crime with a side of medical mystery.

There’s a good reason why World War I was considered “the war to end all wars” at the time. It was a brutal affair that brought destructive new technologies to warfare, including poison gas and upgraded machine guns and grenades. Of course, these new weapons increased casualties; they also meant more gruesome injuries. For many soldiers, coming home meant returning unrecognizable.

The Facemaker focuses on the efforts of Dr. Harold Gillies, a pioneering surgeon moved by the plight of these wounded soldiers. He stepped up to the plate to help reconstruct their faces, radically improving early surgical methods and founding the world’s first hospital dedicated entirely to treating facial injuries. Gillies’s efforts shaped the early days of plastic surgery and for veterans, these procedures were truly life-changing after the war. The Facemaker tells tales of hope, perseverance, and courage in the wake of unimaginable horrors, just going to show the enormous effect medicine and committed practitioners can have on people.

Until relatively recently, alcohol was considered a treatment for a variety of ailments. Doctors and Distillers travels through time to show how people across the globe have used it in remedies, from uses for wine in ancient Greece to “alchemical” concoctions in China and India. In fact, many classic cocktails were originally invented for healing or stimulating purposes: the Negroni, the Old-Fashioned, and the Gin and Tonic are just a few examples. This well-researched gem covers enormous ground, including significant historical moments like the Prohibition Era and the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Those interested in a bit of real-life horror need look no further than the work of neurosurgeon Dr. Robert White. As a two-time Nobel Prize nominee, Dr. White was famous for his groundbreaking research into treating head trauma and spinal cord injuries. His brain research was considered cutting-edge, life-saving work.

But Dr. White was researching during the early days of the Cold War, when nearly every scientific advance was considered a race against time. Surgeons across the globe were competing to be the first to transplant vital organs like kidneys and hearts in a rivalry reminiscent of the Space Race. On the other hand, Dr. White dreamed bigger: he wanted to transplant the human brain.

In 1970, he conducted his most infamous experiment: a nine-day, monkey-to-monkey head transplant in a Cleveland hospital lab. Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher reveals the eerie story of Dr. White’s Frankenstein-like research, all the while grappling with the same question that tormented him: where in the body is the human soul?

Award-winning medical historian Thomas Morris has spent years poring over old medical journals so you don’t have to. In this amusing collection, physicians throughout the ages wrangle with mystifying medical cases like a supposedly amphibious infant and a Rhode Island woman who peed through her nose.

To better orient readers, the cases are organized by how bizarre they are: Mysterious Illnesses, Horrifying Operations, Tall Tales, and Unfortunate Predicaments are just a few categories. The unique appeal of The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth lies in its excellent use of archival research spanning the 17th to the 20th centuries. Morris pulls from medical journals where doctors recorded notable cases for other physicians to learn from to bring you wild tales from the intimate perspective of the doctors themselves, creating a distinct and entertaining method for learning about medicine’s evolution.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is one of the most famous scientific history books today, and for a good reason: It tells the moving story of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cancer cells (named “HeLa” cells) were and continue to be integral to many significant medical breakthroughs, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping, and more.

As the source of the first immortal human cell line, Lacks is often referred to as the “mother of modern medicine.” Lacks’s story is, however, one of injustice, as her cells were taken from her in 1951 without her knowledge or consent. For years, neither she nor her family had been compensated for her invaluable donation. She was buried in an unmarked grave, and her family only found out about the use of her cells more than 20 years later. At that point, one of Lacks’s sons couldn’t help but ask with bitter irony why the family couldn’t afford health insurance despite Henrietta being so important to medicine.

Marrying the science of “HeLa” cells with personal stories from the Lacks family, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks provides moving insight into how much of contemporary medicine was founded on the exploitation of underserved populations. Countless outlets have praised the work, which was adapted into a film starring Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne in 2017. The Lacks family finally settled with biotech firm Thermo Fisher Scientific in late 2023, making it the perfect time to read up on the whole story from the beginning.

From doctors using astrology to plan surgical procedures to instructing patients to kiss a human skull to cure teeth grinding, Belofsky traces some of the biggest mess-ups in medical history in this gripping read. Some were the repeated bad practices of a specific physician, like the horrifying transorbital lobotomies done by Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman. But others were ingrained in the medical cultures of the time, such as medieval doctors burning candles in patients’ mouths to kill off the invisible worms supposedly eating people’s teeth. Between using eels to cure gout, too much bloodletting killing George Washington, and the liberal use of mercury to “cure” all kinds of diseases, Strange Medicine is designed to make your jaw drop.

Visual learners will appreciate Medical Anomalies, a captivating compendium of medical illustrations from the 15th to the 18th century. The undeniably eerie collection features representations of—you guessed it—medical anomalies, including conjoined twins, deformities of various limbs, diseases like leprosy, and more.

The best thing about this particular book is that it comes with a download code, so you can access all 240 high-resolution images featured. Tattoo artists, illustrators, graphic designers, and other creatives can take inspiration from and use these images to elevate their own works, making it an excellent gift for artists.

As they say, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. In The Icepick Surgeon, readers can uncover what happens when the quest for knowledge goes too far. Featuring over 2000 years of history and controversial moments from figures like Cleopatra and Thomas Edison, this gripping compilation showcases what happens when science goes wrong and how ambition pushes some to cross lines. It’s a thrilling read that balances history with a true-crime feel and offers meditations on the ethics of science and medicine.

Source: Sourcebooks, Bloomsbury Publishing, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Penguin Books, Simon and Schuster, Dutton, Crown, TarcherPerigee, Vault Editions Ltd, Back Bay Books