For thousands of years, doctors believed urine revealed the hidden workings of the body. By peering at a patient’s wee, they diagnosed everything from epilepsy to death — sometimes without even meeting the patient.

This episode explores the strange history of uroscopy, the rise of the “piss prophets”, and why modern doctors still occasionally ask you for a wee sample today.

If you were feeling sickly 100 years ago, your doctor might have prescribed a loincloth, a bed, and a sun-drenched balcony in the Swiss Alps. No blood tests or scans — your degree of tan would determine your prognosis.

From sun worship to sun-gazing to Coco Chanel accidentally making bronzed skin chic, this episode explores the many ways medicine and mankind have misunderstood the sun.

Your DNA can build a body, grow a tumour, or implicate you in a crime. This episode explores what happens when DNA evidence meets identical twins, and why one of Europe’s most feared serial killers turned out to be much stranger than anyone expected.

If you’ve ever heard a recording of your own voice, you may have wished for a voice transplant. But would it be possible? This episode explores why your voice is more than your voice box — and what it would actually take to sound like Elvis.

Your oesophagus was never designed to handle acid splashes — and yet, sometimes it has to. This episode looks at heartburn — why it happens, the neat trick emergency doctors use to distinguish it from a heart attack, and what spaceflight reveals about reflux.

Over the centuries, doctors have tried everything to cure hiccups — from sugar to shock to what modern medicine would classify as controlled drugs and poisons. This episode looks at what hiccups actually are, why they happen, and which cures have at least some chance of working.

Many animals use chemical signals — pheromones — to find mates, mark territory, and warn of danger. Humans, despite popular belief, can’t detect them. This episode examines these signals — including the anatomical relic of our pheromone-sniffing past, still sitting in the middle of your face.

A strange accident in 1822 left a man with a window through his chest into his stomach. What followed was one of the most unusual series of experiments in medical history — revealing how digestion really works, and why your stomach doesn’t digest itself.