Medical Detectives - Radio Drama Documentary torrent

It is a while since I heard these – they’re on my “listen to again” pile – but each is (are?) absolutely fascinating true stories of medical detective work. I’ve set out what I can of the individual episodes below. I don’t have full cast lists to hand:

1) Death In The Parish
Dr John Snow was a doctor working in the Soho area of London, now a rather bohemian area, but then a centre of slum housing. When cholera struck, Dr Snow was called in to identify the cause in what I believe was the first use of epidemiology to trace the source of a disease. He famously identified the cause, but not everybody agreed with him.
Stars Bil Nighy as Dr Snow.

2) The Last Infirmity
For centuries, Yellow Fever had been the scourge of the West Indies and Central America. It played havoc among the workforce building the Panama Canal. Working in Cuba in 1898 for the US Army – the USA had just beaten the Spanish American War – two young doctors strove to find the cause of the disease, long put down to ”bad air”.

3) The Epping Jaundice
Epping is a small town north east of London. In the mid 1960s, it became clear that somebody was poisoning the inhabitants – but only the more affluent, middle class residents. The solution to the mystery was even more bizarre than anything Agatha Christie could have dreamt up!
Stars Bernard Hepton.

4) The Stranded Eagle
In 1898, the Swede August Andre Salomon led an exhibition to travel by balloon from Svalbard in the Norwegian Artic to the Bering Strait. The Exhibition failed when the balloon crashed on to the ice and the bodies were not recovered until decades later. The precise cause of their death remains a mystery, but the most accepted solution is posited here.