The development of antibiotics was one of the greatest turning points in the history of medicine. Bacterial infections that were once death sentences were cured within a matter of days after administration of these lifesaving compounds. But the honeymoon didn’t last long, as resistant bacterial strains emerged and spread. Now, antimicrobial resistance poses one of the greatest threats to global health; frankly, we can’t invent new antibiotics faster than resistance develops. Fortunately, there may be a solution, one that has existed even before antibiotics came on the scene: phage therapy, the use of bacteriophages to treat bacterial infections. In The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost—and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail, author Lina Zeldovich takes readers through the incredible and long-forgotten story of phage therapy and the doctors who developed it. Tune in to learn how phage therapy, after almost being relegated to a footnote in the history of medicine, is reemerging as a possible solution to the deadly problem of antimicrobial resistance.

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Some things just go together: peanut butter and jelly, bacon and eggs, milk and cereal, London and smog. Or at least, that’s the way things used to be until the Great Smog of 1952. (Don’t worry, the first three pairings are safe). If you’ve watched The Crown, you may remember an early episode in which a thick, noxious smog surrounded the entire city of London for days on end. People coughing, hacking, collapsing. Traffic ground to a standstill. Authorities in denial. What was actually going on in December 1952 to lead to such conditions? What was in the smog to make it so toxic? And how did this severe pollution event lead to massive changes in air quality regulations around the world? Tune in to find out all this and more (including what The Crown got wrong).

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For most of us, there probably hasn’t been a good reason for you to think about your gallbladder. Ever. Much of the time, it sits there, silently storing, concentrating, and, when needed, churning out bile every day. But occasionally, this unassuming organ will announce itself through waves of unceasing, excruciating pain brought on by a blockage of some sort. Why it does this to us, what we do about it, and how we can live a gallbladder-free life are just some of the things we cover in this episode. We’re also taking this opportunity to deep dive into the substance most closely associated with the gallbladder: bile. Bile plays an outsized role in the history of medicine, mostly through its role as one of the four humors in the humoral theory of disease. Are you of a choleric temperament or is your vibe more sanguine? Maybe melancholic or phlegmatic suits you better. Don’t know what the heck we’re talking about? Tune in to find out.

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