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On a summer day in 1618, a farmer in Epsom, England led his cows to a spring. They refused to drink—too bitter. But when he splashed the water on a rash, it...

Vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol)
Berlin, winter of 1919. A pediatrician wheels a mercury-vapor lamp beside a child with bowed legs; weeks later, the bones harden and straighten....

Garlic
The story begins in two rooms. In one, sunlight slants across limestone as Egyptian workers chew pungent cloves before hauling stones—garlic as fuel for the...

Piperine
You twist a pepper mill and think "flavor." Nineteenth-century chemist Hans Christian Ørsted saw something else: a crystalline alkaloid inside pepper that...

Pomegranate (Punica granatum)
In myth, the pomegranate was both a promise of life and a passport to the underworld. In clinics today, it's turning up in blood-pressure cuffs, dialysis...

