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92 illustrations
In the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, British sprinter Derek Redmond lined up for the 400-meter semi-final carrying years of injury and comeback. He had already overcome...
On February 2, 1949, Ben Hogan's car collided head-on with a Greyhound bus on a foggy Texas highway. He shattered his pelvis, fractured his collarbone,...
On February 2, 1949, Ben Hogan's car collided head-on with a Greyhound bus on a foggy Texas highway. He fractured his pelvis in two places,...
It was a chilly autumn morning when Sarah found herself standing outside the hospital, clutching a crumpled piece of paper that held her father's diagnosis. Cancer. Those words echoed in her mind, drowning out the world around her. She felt...
Margaret sat in her dimly lit living room, the weight of the past few months pressing heavily on her shoulders. Diagnosed with a chronic illness, she felt a storm of anxiety swirling within her—a tempest of uncertainty and fear. One...
For most of the twentieth century, doctors believed the human heart was incapable of healing itself. Heart muscle cells — cardiomyocytes — were thought to...
In November of 1873, Horatio Spafford stood on the deck of a ship crossing the Atlantic, staring at the cold water passing beneath him. Two...
In 1516, the German painter Matthias Grünewald completed a massive altarpiece for a monastery hospital in Isenheim, Alsace. The patients there suffered from ergotism —...
In the spring of 1741, George Frideric Handel was a broken man. The once-celebrated composer had suffered a debilitating stroke four years earlier that paralyzed...
In 1844, a young Irishman named Joseph Scriven stood at the edge of the water where his fiancee had drowned — the evening before their...
When German orthopedic surgeon Julius Wolff published his landmark findings in 1892, he described something that seems almost impossible: bone that breaks and heals often...
In 1941, Henri Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer. The surgery saved his life but left him largely confined to a wheelchair, unable to stand...
In 1892, German anatomist Julius Wolff published a discovery that still shapes orthopedic medicine today. Known as Wolff's Law, it describes how bone tissue remodels...
In C.S. Lewis's *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader*, the boy Eustace Scrubb becomes a dragon — transformed by his own greed when he falls...
In 2015, Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a breathtaking discovery: your body is repairing itself right...
In November 1873, Horatio Spafford received a telegram from his wife Anna that read simply: "Saved alone." Their four daughters — Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and...
In June 2022, a micrometeorite struck one of the eighteen gold-plated mirror segments on the James Webb Space Telescope — a ten-billion-dollar instrument orbiting nearly...
In J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Return of the King*, after the catastrophic Battle of the Pelennor Fields, three beloved characters lie dying in the Houses of...
In Frances Hodgson Burnett's *The Secret Garden*, young Colin Craven has spent his entire childhood confined to a darkened bedroom, convinced he is dying. Servants...
In C.S. Lewis's *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader*, the selfish boy Eustace Scrubb falls asleep on a dragon's hoard and wakes to find he...