Medical Oddities

Have you ever heard the news about a patient who underwent an operation and later found out that the forceps his surgeon used was accidentally left inside his body? How about a quadruplet with four faces but only one body? Have you heard about a woman who gave birth to a catfish? The transvestite man who was reported to be pregnant? A baby girl born 2 inches small? A woman who can eject out her eyes from their sockets?

Medical oddities, taken from the term itself, are bizarre phenomena or events that made a big news in the field of medicine. These oddities are usually undiscovered illnesses or physical deformations that medical professionals never imagined can happen, weird medical procedures that succeed albeit anticipated impossibility, extraordinarily oversized or undersized organs, peculiar births and other eccentric medical realities.

What makes medical oddities odd is the rarity of its possibility, if not the certain impossibility of its possibility. Tuberculosis, for instance, is generally a disease that attacks the lungs, but in 1930s, a man was diagnosed having tuberculosis in the joints. Medical oddities exist because of the field's ignorance about it, and therefore they stop from being so if the field begins to articulate its very occurrence. Polio, for example, is a disease that shocked the world in the dawn of the 20th century, scaring people out of their wits. But today, Polio is something rarely being talked about, as vaccines guaranteed to prevent it are available in all corners.

Medical oddities give us the sense of what can happen, and what may still happen to the human body as time goes, technology evolves, and different products for the body are invented to replace old ones. Medical oddities most of the time are problems that call for solution, problems that subsequently enhance the skill and knowledge of the whole medical field, which in turn enables it to cure even persons with the most unusual case.