The Vegetarian Who Ate a Sausage with Curry Sauce

A report called The Vegetarian Who Ate a Sausage with Curry Sauce can provide cheer both for meat-eaters – because it tells how a hunk of processed meat served as a helpful warning beacon, possibly lengthening a person’s life – and for vegetarians – because that meat was the stark symbol of someone’s health going very wrong.

Despite its children’s-bookish title, this report was published in the January 2003 issue of The Lancet Neurology, along with the less child-friendly sounding Principles of Frontal Lobe Function and Should I Medicate My Child?

The authors, Josef Heckmann, Christoph Lang, Hermann Stefan and Bernhard Neundörfer, of the department of neurology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in Germany, tell the story of a 61-year-old woman who visited her work canteen for lunch with a male colleague….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.