So. Fucked. Up.

Investigation Discovery reran that story about the "toxic lady" who (for a time anyway) became a sort of medical meme that I guess would have been included in Charles Fort's Book of the Damned in the old days.

The Book of the Damned is actually a badly titled book. It's just a compendium of odd incidents that science couldn't explain at the time they occurred, hence "damned" by science--meaning the stories had been impugned or neglected.

I remember reading that book as a child and liking it. Today we have a bazillion shows that focus on the odd and unusual, but when I was growing up all you had were those fun Ripley's Believe It or Not paperbacks with the wild black-and-white illustrations and the occasional book like Fort's.

The show I'm referencing examined the mysterious aftereffects of the death of Gloria Ramirez, a cancer patient who died in a hospital emergency room.

Most of the physicians and medical staff in attendance upon Ramirez at her time of death became immediately severely ill after breathing in unidentified noxious fumes which they said they believed had emanated from the woman's body.

Many of these medical professionals were still struggling to regain their health even years after this incident.

The show I watched today focused on the first theory outlined here.

I don't believe the show mentioned that second theory but I was in and out of the room while it was on, so I might have missed that.

I find the second theory to be rather implausible and certainly it's not something verifiable at this point in time.

But when they tried to reproduce the posited chemical reactions in vitro they could not duplicate the chain of chemical events and reactions that had been advanced as an explanation for what had occurred.

This might just remain a medical mystery.