Doctor asks his patient the wrong question which enrages his patient's wife. Here's what Professor Jared Diamond reports:*
"The links connecting livestock and crops to germs were unforgetably illustrated for me by a hospital case about which I learned through a physician friend. When my friend was an inexperienced young doctor, he was called into a hospital room to deal with a married couple stressed-out by a mysterious illness. My friend was also stressed-out from a long week of hospital work, and from trying to figure out what unusual risk factors might have brought on the strange illness. The stress caused my friend to forget everything he had been taught about patient confidentiality: he committed the awful blunder of requesting the woman to ask her husband whether he'd had any sexual experiences that could have caused the infection. As the doctor watched, the husband turned red, pulled himself together so that he seemed even smaller, tried to disappear under his bedsheet, and stammered out words in a barely audible voice. His wife suddenly screamed in rage and drew herself up to tower over him. Before the doctor could stop her, she grabbed a heavy metal bottle, slammed it with full force onto her husband's head, and stormed out of the room. It took a while for the doctor to revive her husband and even longer to elicit, through the man's broken english, what he'd said that so enraged his wife. The answer slowly emerged: he had confessed to repeated intercourse with sheep on a recent visit to the family farm; perhaps that was how he had contracted the mysterious microbe."
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*Source: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, pp. 195-196
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