Episodes

He was a physician. He held the rank of general. And for over a decade, he ran one of the most horrifying human experimentation programs in modern history — and walked away from it a free man. This week, we head to Manchuria to unpack the story of Unit 731, the covert biological and chemical warfare research unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, and the doctor who built it. We're talking vivisection without anesthesia, deliberate frostbite experiments, and weaponized plague fleas — all conducted ...

A machine that was supposed to heal became one of the deadliest medical devices of the twentieth century, and nobody could figure out why. This week, we dig into the Therac-25, a radiation therapy machine whose software errors delivered massive, lethal overdoses to patients across the US and Canada in the mid-1980s. We walk through the race condition bugs that let operators override safety checks in a matter of keystrokes, the manufacturer that dismissed early reports as impossible, and the inve...

At a crowded state institution on Staten Island, hepatitis wasn't just common. It was almost guaranteed. Instead of treating it, one doctor decided to use it. This week, Andrea walks through the hepatitis studies conducted at Willowbrook State School, where children with intellectual disabilities were deliberately infected in the name of vaccine research. We cover how the study was framed to parents, why it went on for over a decade, and how it became one of the defining scandals in the history ...

"Two Women Sue Church When Christ Fails to Appear" In a small Utah town, a self-proclaimed prophet convinced dozens of followers that the Second Coming had a date on the calendar. When it didn't happen the way he said, he didn't lose his followers. He just adjusted the story. This week, Crystal and Andrea head to Manti, Utah, to unpack the rise of a charismatic leader who claimed direct communication with God, built a following through seances and secret plural marriages, and somehow talked his...

Imagine your hand picking up a glass, unbuttoning your shirt, or reaching for someone else's plate, and you had nothing to do with it. You didn't decide. You didn't even feel it coming. You just watched your own hand act like it belongs to someone else. This week, Crystal and Andrea dig into Alien Hand Syndrome, the rare neurological condition where one hand moves with purpose but without permission. We cover where it comes from, including stroke, traumatic brain injury, brain tumors, and certa...

For forty years, the U.S. government promised free healthcare to a group of men who needed it most. What they delivered instead was decades of deliberate, documented deception. This week, Andrea and Crystal break down the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee: how it started, why it kept going long after a cure existed, and the nurse caught in the middle of it all. We trace the men behind the headlines, the whistleblower who finally ended it, and the bioethics rules that exist to...

On January 15, 1919, a massive steel tank in Boston's North End ruptured without warning, releasing 2.3 million gallons of molasses in a wave that reached 25 feet high and moved at 35 miles per hour. It crushed buildings, snapped elevated train tracks, and killed 21 people. The cleanup took weeks. The myths have lasted a century. In this episode, Andrea takes us through one of the strangest industrial disasters in American history. Why was that much molasses sitting in a residential neighborhoo...

In the 1910s and 1920s, thousands of young women sat at factory benches painting radium onto watch dials, pressing their brushes to their lips to form a fine point with every single stroke. They were told it was safe. Some were told it would put roses in their cheeks. The scientists who handled the same material wore lead-lined gloves. This week, Crystal walks through the full story of the Radium Girls — the dial painters of New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois, who were poisoned by their employers,...

Some people are born with a blueprint that's slightly off. The structure looks right at first glance, but the details are wrong in ways that matter: joints that stretch too far, a heart that works too hard, a frame that grows faster than it should. Marfan Syndrome is a genetic connective tissue disorder that hides in plain sight, and for decades, it hid in some of the most recognizable bodies in history. This week, we're breaking down the science behind the mutation that affects fibrillin-1, wh...

The Clinic That Burned: The Cleveland Clinic Fire of 1929 One hundred and twenty-three people went to the doctor. They didn't come home. On May 15, 1929, a fire broke out in the basement of the Cleveland Clinic, one of the most respected medical facilities in the country. But it wasn't the flames that killed most of the victims. It was the gas, a toxic cloud released when nitrocellulose X-ray film ignited, that moved through the building faster than anyone could run. In minutes, a place built t...

Sleeping Sickness: The Epidemic That Vanished and the Patients Left Behind It put millions to sleep. Some of them never woke up. Others woke up wrong. Between 1917 and 1928, a mysterious illness swept the globe, leaving its victims in states of suspended animation, rigid and unreachable, trapped somewhere between sleep and death. Doctors called it encephalitis lethargica. The world called it the sleeping sickness. And then, almost as quickly as it appeared, it was gone, leaving behind no clear ...

Not every case ends in darkness. This week, Crystal and Andrea bring you something a little different: stories of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and the sheer, stubborn will it took to make it out alive. We're covering Juliane Koepcke, the 17-year-old who fell two miles from a lightning-struck plane on Christmas Eve and walked out of the Peruvian Amazon eleven days later. Then there's Harrison Okene, a cook on a Nigerian tugboat who survived sixty hours at the bottom o...

In 1955, the United States had 558,000 people living in state psychiatric hospitals. By 2000, that number had dropped to under 55,000. Not because mental illness got better. Not because we found a cure. Because we closed the doors. What came next was supposed to be a revolution: community mental health centers, wraparound care, dignity over warehousing. What actually came next was the Los Angeles County Jail becoming the largest psychiatric facility in its county. Rikers Island. Cook County. St...

You're alone. The odds are against you. And then, somehow, you're not alone anymore. Third Man Syndrome is one of the most haunting and hotly debated phenomena in survival psychology — the experience of an unseen presence appearing at the moment of greatest crisis, offering calm, guidance, and sometimes a voice that keeps you moving when every instinct says to stop. Explorers stranded in Antarctica. Climbers fighting for oxygen near Everest's summit. Shipwreck survivors adrift in open water. Ac...

They called it non-addictive. They were lying. In this episode, Crystal takes Andrea through the opioid epidemic, one of the deadliest public health crises in American history. From the origins of opioid use in medicine to the moment Purdue Pharma unleashed OxyContin on an unsuspecting public, we trace how a single drug company's greed, backed by manipulated research and a relentless sales machine, helped hook a nation. We dig into the doctors who prescribed, the regulators who looked the other...

He was a nurse. He was trusted with the most vulnerable patients in intensive care. And somewhere along the way, the line between saving lives and ending them disappeared entirely. Niels Högel worked the cardiac wards of two hospitals in northern Germany, where deaths under his watch climbed to alarming rates -- rates that colleagues noticed, whispered about, and ultimately failed to stop. For years, he induced cardiac arrests in his patients just to step in and play the hero. Some survived. Ma...

In late 2019, a mysterious respiratory illness began spreading through Wuhan, China. Within months, it had a name — COVID-19 — and within months after that, it had the entire world in its grip. In this episode of Medicine, Mystery, Mayhem & Murder, Crystal walks Andrea through the full story of COVID-19, from the long history of coronaviruses and how scientists had been watching this viral family for decades, to the emergence of a novel pathogen that no one was prepared for. They explore what t...

You've heard of paralysis. But what if it came and went, triggered by rest, a meal, or exercise, and left no trace by morning? This week, Andrea walks Crystal through Periodic Paralysis, a rare and frequently misdiagnosed group of channelopathies that can leave patients unable to move for hours at a time. We break down how ion channels gone wrong can bring an otherwise healthy person to a complete standstill, why it often takes years to get a correct diagnosis, and what living with this conditio...

A wealthy Utah industrialist is found shot dead in his own warehouse. The scene looks like a robbery. It isn't. What follows is a years-long unraveling of a family held together by money, manipulation, and secrets — stretching from Salt Lake City to Manhattan's Upper East Side. This week, Crystal and Andrea dig into the 1978 murder of Franklin Bradshaw, a case so twisted it inspired two books and two TV movies — and somehow, the most unbelievable parts are all true.

Sleep is something we all take for granted until it’s gone. In this episode of Medicine, Mystery, Mayhem & Murder, Andrea and Crystal explore one of the rarest and most terrifying conditions known to medicine: Fatal Familial Insomnia. Imagine a disease where your body simply forgets how to sleep, and no amount of medication, exhaustion, or intervention can bring it back. This is a story about more than just sleep. It is about what happens when one of the most basic human functions is stripped ...

In October 1987, the world held its breath when 18-month-old toddler Jessica McClure, known to millions as Baby Jessica, fell 22 feet down a narrow well in a backyard in Midland, Texas. What followed was a tense 58-hour rescue that captured the attention of the entire country. Television crews gathered outside the site while engineers, oil field workers, and rescuers worked around the clock. Across the nation, people watched and waited, hoping the small voice coming from deep underground would b...

Before ventilators, before modern ICUs, and before vaccines nearly erased one of the most feared diseases in history, there was the iron lung. In this episode of Medicine, Mystery, Mayhem & Murder, Andrea and Crystal explore the strange, fascinating, and sometimes heartbreaking story of the machine that helped people breathe when their own bodies couldn’t. During the height of the polio epidemics, hospital wards filled with massive metal cylinders that kept patients alive. Sometimes for weeks, ...

In 1999, Dr. Jerri Nielsen was the only physician stationed at the South Pole when she discovered a lump in her breast — after the last plane had already left. With evacuation impossible, she diagnosed, biopsied, and began treating her own cancer while trapped in one of the most isolated places on Earth. This episode explores her story alongside other moments when medicine had to happen without rescue: self-surgery in Antarctica, healthcare in disaster zones, and the realities of telemedicine w...

In Part Two of our deep dive into Michael Swango, we follow the trail all the way to the end — the arrests, the lies, the international flight, and the staggering body count that may never be fully known. How did he continue practicing medicine after convictions? How did hospitals miss — or ignore — the warnings? And how many patients paid the price for institutional silence and fragmented reporting systems? We walk through the criminal charges, the federal case, and the ultimate sentence that...