Human Body Trivia

The human wrist contains more bones than the ankle.

It requires 30 muscles to raise your eyebrows.

Nutmeg, if injected intravenously, is fatal.

The most common form of cancer is Skin cancer.

A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.

A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.

A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.

A healthy individual releases 3.5 oz. of gas in a single flatulent emission, or about 17 oz. in a day.

A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.

A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks.

A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.

According to German researchers, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week.

According to the Kinsey Institute, the biggest erect penis on record measures 13 inches. The smallest tops off at 1 3/4 inches.

After spending hours working at a computer display, look at a blank piece of white paper. It will probably appear pink.

An average human drinks about 16, 000 gallons of water in a lifetime.

An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.
The length of your foot is the same length of your forearm between your wrist and the inside of your elbow.

The skin is the largest organ in the body.

The heart is the strongest muscle in the body and is about the size of your fist.

If all the blood vessels in your body were laid out from beginning to end, they would measure about 60,000 miles.

North American Indians ate Watercress to dissolve gravel and stones in the bladder.

In Russia, suppositories cut from fresh potatoes were used for quick relief of haemorrhoids.

A salt enema used to be given to children to rid them of threadworms.

Powdered Tea was once used as a snuff to stop bleeding noses.

A decoction of dandelion roots and leaves is an old remedy for dissolving urinary stones and gravel.

Comfrey (herb) baths were popular before the wedding night to attempt to repair the hymen and thereby apparently restore virginity.

The thyroid cartilage is more commonly known as the Adam's Apple.

Stroking the sole of the foot is used by doctor's to produce the Babinski effect.

Insulin is produced in the pancreas.

Acute hasopharyngitis is more commonly known as a cold.

Keratitis is an inflammation of the cornea which may lead to blindness.

Oophorectomy is the surgical removal of the ovaries.

Sexually transmitted diseases are the major cause of preventable sterility in American men and women.

Sperm is the smallest single cell in a mans body.

Estragon protects against heart disease.

Hair, prompted by testosterone, grows faster in men in anticipation of sex.

An average, in America, three sex change operations are performed every day.

Artificial forms of birth control are condemned by the catholic church. The 'Rythem' [Rhythm] method is recommended by the church, as is abstinence

In 1977, Napoleon's penis was sold in Paris for about US $3 800 to an American urologist.

The most sensitive cluster of nerves is at the base of the spine.

In 1855, dentist Robert Arthur was the first to use gold to fill cavities.

The fleshy muscular organ joined to the hyoid bone is the tongue.

Quinine is an alkaloid extract of the bark of the Cinchona tree.

By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand.

An Eskimo would be ingesting toxic doses of Vitamin A if he ate a polar bears liver.

Smallpox is also known as variola.

The disease Tuberculosis, is best known as consumption.

Victorian women tried to enlarge their breasts by bathing in strawberries.

The fissure of Rolando, would be found in the human brain.

Iron deficiency causes the most common form of anaemia.

Red blood cells are produced in the bone marrow.

The smallest bone in the body is the stirrup bone.

An average person uses the bathroom 6 times per day.

An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies.

Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.

Someone who grinds their teeth is a bruxomaniac.

In 1562 a man was dug up six hours after his burial, after he had been seen breathing by someone at the funeral - he lived for another 75 years.

Doctors 'bled' Louis XIII of France forty-seven times in one month in an attempt to cure his illness.

Human hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after death.

Physcrophilia is the sexual arousal by cold.

If 80% of the human liver was removed, it could still function and would eventually restore itself to its original size.

An eighteenth century woman used only lard to 'wash' her face and hands and lived to the age of 116.

The liver is the largest internal organ weighing about 10.5 kilograms.

Human adults breathe about 23 000 time a day.

Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people.

Blood sucking hookworms inhabit 700 million people worldwide.

By age sixty, most people have lost half of their taste buds.

By the time you turn 70, your heart will have beat some two-and-a-half billion times (figuring on an average of 70 beats per minute.)

Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.

Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

Every person has a unique tongue print.

Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.

Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.

Fingernails grow faster than toenails.

Fingerprints serve a function - they provide traction for the fingers to grasp things.

Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.

Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour - about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.


The woman of the Brazilin Apinaly Tribe bite their mates eyebrows during intercourse.

Thomas Wedders, the English circus freak, had a nose which was seven and a half inches long.

The ancient Greeks believed that boys developed in the right hand side of the womb and girls in the left.

Humans shed and re-grow outer skin cells about every 27 days - almost 1,000 new skins in a lifetime.

If it were removed from the body, the small intestine would stretch to a length of 22 feet.

If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning first before you will die of oxygen deprivation.

If you go blind in one eye, you'll only lose about one-fifth of your vision (but all your depth perception.)

In a lifetime the average US resident eats more than 50 tons of food and drinks more than 13,000 gallons of liquid.

In the late 19th century, millions of human mummies were used as fuel for locomotives in Egypt where wood and coal was scarce, but mummies were plentiful.

It takes 17 muscles to smile --- 43 to frown.

Jaw muscles can provide about 200 pounds of force to bring the back teeth together for chewing.

The brain uses more than 25% of the oxygen used by the human body.

The nose continues to grow throughout your life.

Everyone's tongue print is different.

Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day.

Most men have erections every hour to hour and a half during sleep.

On average women say 7,000 words per day. Men manage just over 2000.

One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.


The Auricularis muscles are used to move the ears.

The vaccine for smallpox was developed in 1798.

In the United States, 1982, the painkiller 'Tylenol' was spiked with cyanide.

The normal body temperature in 37° Celsius.

Three-hundred-million cells die in the human body every minute.

Women burn fat more slowly than men, by a rate of about 50 calories a day.

Women's hearts beat faster than men's.

The Mount of Jupiter and the Girdle of Venus are found on the palm of your hand.

The hydrochloric acid in the human stomach is strong enough to dissolve a nail.

There are 14 phalanges (finger bones) in a human hand.

In 1979 Dr. Christian Barnard was offered $250 000 by the American National Enquirer to perform a human head transplant.

Most people have lost fifty per cent of their taste buds by the time they reach the age of sixty.

The amount of carbon in the human body is enough to fill about 9 000 'lead' pencils.

Cancer claims forty victims an hour in America.

In the English hospitals of the seventeenth century, children were entitled to two gallons of beer as part of their weekly diet.

Podobromhidrosis is more commonly known as 'smelly feet'.

If a surgeon in Ancient Egypt lost a patient while performing an operation, his hands were cut off.

Opium was used widely as a painkiller during the American Civil War. As a result, over one hundred thousand soldiers had become drug addicts by the end of the war.

Men have on average 10% more red blood cells than women

New Zealand's first hospital was opened in 1843.

One square inch of human skin contains 625 sweat glands.

The symptoms of haemophilia are never displayed by women, but can only pass it on. With men is the opposite.

If your mouth was completely dry, you would not be able to distinguish the taste of anything.

When you blush, your stomach lining also reddens.

Sigmund Freud bought his first sample of cocaine for $1.27 per gram.

The septum linguae is found on the tongue.

Stroking the sole of the foot produces the Babinski reflex.

During a orchidectomy, a man has a testicle removed.

The medical term for a black eye is circumorbital haematoma.

Medical experts say you should sleep on your right side to improve digestion.

There are more living organisms on the skin of a single human being that there are human beings on the surface of the earth.

The largest cell in the human body is the female reproductive cell, the ovum. The smallest is the male sperm.

There are over 100 million light sensitive cells in the retina.

The opposite of 'cross-eyed' is 'wall-eyed'.

From the age of thirty, humans gradually begin to shrink in size.

Laudanum, a tincture of opium, was a common sedative in Victorian times.

Dr. W.S. Halstead was the first to use rubber gloves during surgery in 1890.

The human body contains enough iron to make a spike strong enough to hold your weight.

In the early Twentieth century, rattlesnake venom was used to treat epilepsy.

The human body contains about sixthy thousand miles of blood vessels.

Narcolepsy is the uncontrollable need to sleep.

The surface area of a human lung is equal to a tennis court.

The human body transmits nerve impulses at about 90 metres a second

Spread out, the walls of the human intestines would cover an area of about one hundred square feet.

Pregnancy in humans lasts on average about 270 days (from conception to birth).

The ashes of the average cremated person weigh nine pounds.

The average duration of sexual intercourse for humans is 2 minutes.

The average human body contains enough: iron to make a 3 inch nail, sulfur to kill all fleas on an average dog, carbon to make 900 pencils, potassium to fire a toy cannon, fat to make 7 bars of soap, phosphorous to make 2,200 match heads, and water to fill a ten-gallon tank.

The average human produces 25,000 quarts of spit in a lifetime, enough to fill two swimming pools.

The average person releases nearly a pint of intestinal gas by flatulence every day. Most is due to swallowed air. The rest is from fermentation of undigested food.

The body's largest internal organ is the small intestine at an average length of 20 feet

The feet account for one quarter of all the human bodies bones.

The human body has enough fat to produce 7 bars of soap.

The human body has over 600 muscles, 40% of the body's weight.

The human brain is about 85% water.


There is more pigment in brown eyes than blue.

Nearly a quarter of all human bones can be found in the feet.

The ' funny bone' is not a bone but a nerve.

Most people blink about 25 000 times a day.

The human body has enough fat to produce 7 bars of soap.

The human head is a quarter of our total length at birth, but only an eighth of our total length by the time we reach adulthood.

There is no single word given to describe the back of the knee.

From fertilisation to birth, a baby's weigh increase 5 000 million times.

The largest cell in the human body is the female ovum, or egg cell. It is about 1/180 inch in diameter. The smallest cell in the human body is the male sperm. It takes about 175,000 sperm cells to weigh as much as a single egg cell.

The largest cell in the human body is the female reproductive cell, the ovum. The smallest is the male sperm.

The largest human organ is the skin, with a surface area of about 25 square feet.

The left lung is smaller than the right lung to make room for the heart.

The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.

The longest muscle in the human body is the sartorius. This narrow muscle of the thigh passes obliquely across the front of the thigh and helps rotate the leg to the position assumed in sitting cross-legged. Its name is a derivation of the adjective "sartorial," a reference to what was the traditional cross-legged position of tailors (or "sartors") at work.

The most common blood type in the world is Type O. The rarest, Type A-H, has been found in less than a dozen people since the type was discovered.

The Neanderthal's brain was bigger than yours is.

The only bone in the human body not connected to another is the hyoid, a V-shaped bone located at the base of the tongue between the mandible and the voice box. Its function is to support the tongue and its muscles.

The only time the human population declined was in the years following 1347, the start of the epidemic of the plague 'Black Death' in Europe.

The permanent teeth that erupt to replace their primary predecessors (baby teeth) are called succedaneous teeth.

The sound of a snore (up to 69 decibels) can be almost as loud as the noise of a pneumatic drill.

The tips of fingers and the soles of feet are covered by a thick, tough layer of skin called the stratum corneum.

There are 45 miles of nerves in the skin of a human being.

There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.

There are four main Blood types: A, B, AB and O and each Blood type is either Rh positive or negative. Blood types in the US - Type O positive 38.4%, O negative 7.7%, A positive 32.3%, A negative 6.5%, B positive 9.4%, B negative 1.7%, AB positive 3.2%, AB negative 0.7%
The average height of a man in the Middle Ages was five feet six inches.

The human body has fewer muscles in it than a caterpillar.

Medieval recipe for the cure of acne 'the rout of dragon's made clean and cut into thin roundels and steeped for nine days in white wine and applied '.

Men are ten times more likely to be colour-blind than women.



The largest muscle in the human body is the buttock muscle.

The Islands of Langerhans won't be found on a map, they're a group of cells located in the pancreas.

Every time you step forward, you use fifty four muscles.

A Rhinologist specialises in the human nose.

If you could remove all the space from the atoms that make up your body, you could walk through the eye of a needle.

A chromosome is larger than a gene.

The average human brain weighs 1.3 kg

During the fifteenth century, sick people were often dressed in red and surrounded by red objects because it was though to help them get better.

Eighty per cent of all body heat escapes through the head.

The Black Death claimed roughly forty million lives in the thirteenth century.

The Middle ear and the Pharynx are joined with the Eustachian tube.

The Extensor digiti minimi manus is used to extend the little finger.

If you are a universal donor your blood group is type O.

When recognising someone's face, you use the right side of your brain.

The human body has over 600 muscles.

The feet account for one quarter of all the bones in the body.

15 million blood cells are produced and destroyed in the human body every second.

Blonde beards grow faster than darker beards.

The most prescribed drug in the United Kingdom in 1985 was Valium.

The left side of the brain is usually responsible for the control of speech.

The space between two adjacent neurones is called the 'synapse'.

The crystalline quartz, Amethyst was once believed to prevent drunkenness.

Lab tests can detect traces of alcohol in urine six to 12 hours after a person has stopped drinking.

It takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile.

In 1982, Englishman William Hall committed suicide by drilling holes into his head with a power drill . . . it took 8 holes.

The leading cause of death in the late 19th century was tuberculosis.

The rate of Quadruplets are 1 (set) in every 490 000 births.

A person suffering from polythelia has 3 nipples.

Clinophobia is a fear of beds.

A human sheds a complete layer of skin every 4 weeks.

The human brain is 80% water.
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