March 26, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:48:20
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Five, four, three... | ||
| Whoops, we got an issue? | ||
| Okay, here we go. | ||
| Five, four, three, two... | ||
| Yes, and we're live. | ||
| Hello, Lindsay. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| Not much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| Pleasure to meet you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, good to meet you. | ||
| I'm the girl who tags you in all the disgusting medical history photos, and I'm really looking forward to grossing out your audience today. | ||
| I'm looking forward to you doing that as well. | ||
| You have fascinated me with your Twitter page. | ||
| First of all, you are a doctor, right? | ||
| Well, I'm a PhD. | ||
| I can't save anybody's life. | ||
| I could perform, you know, Victorian surgery amputation or something. | ||
| I think anybody can, right? | ||
| Is that a real one? | ||
| No, this is a prop. | ||
| This was a real fun thing to get through customs when I was coming in from Britain. | ||
| It's a Victorian amputation saw. | ||
| It's called the Clockwork Saw. | ||
| And for people who are just listening, it's a circular saw, and there would have been a crank that you wound it with, and then you'd release it, and it would spin sort of automatically. | ||
| Oh, God! | ||
| Yeah, and the idea was that it would make it faster. | ||
| But the reason why I love this saw so much is that it was a massive failure. | ||
| And I don't think we talk about failure enough in science and medicine. | ||
| You know, all the things that work, there's a lot of things that don't work. | ||
| And so this guy who invented this saw, when he tried it out, it was spinning so fast that he took off his assistant's fingers. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| It was a bit of an oops. | ||
| It never got out of prototype phase. | ||
| So I had to recreate it for my YouTube channel. | ||
| Now, in those old days when they didn't have antibiotics and antiseptic, when they saw someone's leg off or something like that, how many times do those people live? | ||
| Well, you could pull through the operation. | ||
| That was one part of it. | ||
| But then, of course, you could die of post-operative infection. | ||
| So my book, The Butchering Art, really focuses on this one guy named Joseph Lister, who applies germ theory and develops antisepsis, so germ-fighting techniques. | ||
| And most people don't know who he is, but they know the product Listerine. | ||
| So Listerine was named after him. | ||
| But I always tell people that. | ||
| So basically, Lister was a British surgeon and he came to America in 1876 to convince the medical community of germs. | ||
| And there was a guy in the audience and he decided to create this product Listerine. | ||
| But it wasn't even a mouthwash in the 19th century. | ||
| It was used to treat gonorrhea. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| But also, I don't endorse that. | ||
| Don't throw a little Listerine on it. | ||
| Yeah, go to a doctor, man. | ||
| Yeah, I can just see all the comments already on the YouTube. | ||
| She told me to throw a Listerine on it. | ||
| No, I don't endorse that, and I'm sure the Listerine company is not too pleased I'm talking about that either. | ||
| So Listerine now just is for breath, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's all it does. | ||
| Yeah, it's an antiseptic mouthwash. | ||
| Is it even any good for you? | ||
| Is it good to kill all that stuff inside your mouth? | ||
| Right, but you're a medical historian. | ||
| I'm a medical historian. | ||
| I would say that Dennis would say that Listerine is still a good product. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you use it, Jamie? | |
| It kills a lot of bacteria. | ||
| Some form of it, something like that. | ||
| I just use some, I don't know if it's Crest or Listerine. | ||
| Some mouthwash? | ||
| You've got to switch to Listerine now in honor of Joseph Lister. | ||
| So how did he know? | ||
| How did he know that there was germs, that they were real? | ||
| Well, so let me take you back to sort of before he walks on the scene. | ||
| So these operating theaters, they were filled to the rafters with ticketed spectators. | ||
| People actually bought tickets to see someone get their leg hacked off. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| How much did it cost? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| No one's asked me that. | ||
| I don't know how much a ticket would cost for that spectacle. | ||
| Now I really need to look into that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| People would pay to watch that? | ||
| But look what they pay to watch now, right? | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| And when I sent you my book, I signed it and I said I thought that being strapped to the Victorian Operating Theater was the original fear factor because I can't imagine anything worse than being strapped to this table. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so we're talking about before anesthesia. | ||
| So you're fully awake. | ||
| And one of my favorite surgeons is this guy named Robert Liston. | ||
| He's 6'2". | ||
| He's really tall for the 19th century. | ||
| And he could hold you down with his left arm and he could take your leg off in about 30 seconds. | ||
| Oh, Jesus! | ||
| Which is what you'd want. | ||
| That's what you'd want. | ||
| You would, but that's still a long time. | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| I mean, if we just sat here for 30 seconds with dead airtime and you could think about hacking through that leg. | ||
| Or just scream for 30 seconds. | ||
| I wonder how many people would be at the end of this podcast, like five people would be still out there listening. | ||
| So he was incredibly fast. | ||
| He was known as the fastest knife in the West End. | ||
| He would walk in. | ||
| He was a showman. | ||
| So he'd walk in and he'd say, time me, gentlemen. | ||
| And you could just hear the ripple of pocket watches as they came out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There he is. | |
| There he is. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| And he's using a knife in that photo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So actually, the Liston knife that he invented was this long-glaided knife, which they think Jack the Ripper may have also used, which is why those rumors are that Jack the Ripper may have been a medical practitioner. | ||
| That was a really common thought, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we're never going to know who he is. | ||
| It's unknowable. | ||
| We're still kind of obsessed with this. | ||
| I've heard so many different versions of that. | ||
| Yeah, and recently there was some kind of bogus DNA test of a shawl that they said belonged to one of the victims. | ||
| It's impossible to prove the provenance of the object. | ||
| But that was Liston, so he's 6'2", he's really tall. | ||
| One of my favorite stories is he would go so fast, as he was switching instruments, he'd hold these bloody instruments in his mouth, just to illustrate how different this was. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| That's the face I wanted. | ||
| I wanted to be just totally disgusted through this whole segment. | ||
| And as he was switching instruments, he accidentally cut off his assistant's finger. | ||
| And then as he was switching instrument, he slashed the coat of a spectator. | ||
| And the assistant died of gangrene, the patient died of gangrene, and the spectator died of fright. | ||
| So it's jokingly... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Died of fright? | |
| He died of fright. | ||
| Just a little bit of blood? | ||
| Well, he got slashed with the jacket, and I guess he had a heart attack from the stress. | ||
| And so it's jokingly referred to as the only operation with a 300% mortality rate. | ||
| He did a good job that day. | ||
| He killed three people in one. | ||
| When you say slashed, you mean he cut the spectator or just got blood on them? | ||
| No, he just cut their coat as he was kind of switching instruments. | ||
| That's all it took to kill someone? | ||
| I thought people were tougher back then. | ||
| Well, not that guy. | ||
| Now he lives forever in the butchering art is that guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He died of fright. | |
| He had a heart attack? | ||
| He must have had a heart attack. | ||
| It said he died of fright. | ||
| Maybe that wasn't real. | ||
| Maybe it wasn't. | ||
| That seems like horseshit. | ||
| Doesn't it a little bit? | ||
| Are you calling me out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, not you. | |
| I'm just kidding. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The historical record. | |
| No, of course. | ||
| These stories, you know, they get blown out in proportion. | ||
| It just seems like you cut someone's jacket, they're not going to die. | ||
| Well, you know, it's a stressful situation. | ||
| People are getting their limbs hacked off. | ||
| You know, your blood pressure would be really high. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| And these theaters were, I mean, the floor of the operating theater was crowded as well. | ||
| So they'd have to actually clear the floor sometimes. | ||
| So you can imagine, you know, you're strapped to this. | ||
| And the leg wasn't the worst thing. | ||
| So one of the tweets that you shared of mine, which your platform seemed to enjoy quite a lot and sold me a lot of books, by the way. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Was this story about this guy who was suffering from a bladder stone and it got stuck in his urethra. | ||
| And so out of desperation, he stuck a nail down his penis and he hammered it to break it up. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And yeah, people went nuts on your platform for that story. | ||
| So they obviously are ready for this interview. | ||
| How did that work again? | ||
| It didn't work, right? | ||
| It did not work. | ||
| No, he died. | ||
| That guy definitely died. | ||
| But it really illustrates how desperate people were back then and how few options they had. | ||
| There's the image of it. | ||
| I don't think you're allowed to show this on YouTube, Jamie. | ||
| Oh, that was the one I said. | ||
| This is definitely a medical image. | ||
| It is a medical image. | ||
| But I don't think you can show that on YouTube. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's clearly a penis. | ||
| There's penises and breasts on YouTube. | ||
| I sent Jamie a lot of penis photos. | ||
| I think they look at us more carefully. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, it's not on there. | ||
| I'm just... | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| I'll tweet it later for people to see that. | ||
| If people want to see it. | ||
| Well, Twitter is the most open of all platforms. | ||
| I'll let you get away with almost everything. | ||
| You can have porn on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, I don't have any problems with Instagram. | ||
| I put that stuff up, but maybe again. | ||
| Some things get removed from Instagram. | ||
| It seems to be dependent upon how many people complain. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| There's always those people out there looking to be offended. | ||
| I just think they just want to do something. | ||
| They just want to press that button. | ||
| Oh, I'm mad. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| I know. | ||
| At this point, there's so many objects that can cause offense, of course, with medical history. | ||
| There's a lot of dark history, body snatchers and things like that. | ||
| And I'm a firm believer that we should tell these stories openly because they happened and medicine and science grew as a result of it. | ||
| But they're not easy subjects to discuss with an audience, especially when you have so many characters on Twitter and you're trying to get out a complex idea. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And also, there's a lot of Twitter pages that I follow where people are just trying to gross people out. | ||
| You're actually educating people about the history. | ||
| And we also should be really thankful that these people went through all this stuff so that we don't have to. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I always say to my audience, so I've been going around the world sort of demolishing romantic notions about people might think about what it's like to live in the past because it was pretty, pretty bad. | ||
| And I have visuals as well. | ||
| And I've had four men faint so far. | ||
| It's always been men. | ||
| It's just a commentary right now. | ||
| It's always been men. | ||
| Ancestors of that bitch that got his jacket cut and died. | ||
| It was that guy, yeah. | ||
| Those weaklings coming to my lecture. | ||
| I think what it is, though, is people think, I'm going to see something gross, so I'm not going to eat. | ||
| And then their blood sugar plummets. | ||
| So it's not really the grossness, but they're not really prepared. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, and they're standing sometimes. | ||
| I give lectures at this incredible museum called the Old Operating Theater in London. | ||
| It's the second oldest in the world. | ||
| And so you have to stand because it's like a Victorian world. | ||
| Operating theater, and so people lock their knees or whatever. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So you give actual lectures in the real theaters where they used to cut people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I did my book launch there, and if people want to see it, I filmed sort of like a theatrical scene of a young lister attending an operation in that theater, and it's on my YouTube channel called Under the Knife. | ||
| And I really want to get this made into a movie. | ||
| I'm trying to come into Hollywood and convince Hollywood that this Quaker surgeon from the Victorian period deserves the cinema feature. | ||
| But it is an epic story. | ||
| He saved more lives than any other person to ever live. | ||
| Look, it is an epic story. | ||
| And for anybody who's ever gone through operations, and I've gone through several of them, we owe those people a massive debt. | ||
| Yeah, you don't have to be awake, strapped to the table. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, both my knees are reconstructed and wake up and they're fixed. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| And in the past, before anesthesia, a lot of times patients were sat in chairs, so they weren't laid down. | ||
| And they were sat in these very high chairs so that their feet dangled, so they couldn't brace against the knife, if you think about pushing off with your feet. | ||
| There's a story about a guy named Robert Penman, and I know we have images, and I'm sure YouTube won't take those down. | ||
| He comes to Robert Liston, the fastest knife in the West End, in 1828, and he has this huge facial tumor growing. | ||
| I mean, it's been growing for about eight years. | ||
| It's taking up his whole face. | ||
| He can't breathe now. | ||
| And Liston looks at him and says, I can't do this operation, which is tantamount to a death sentence. | ||
| But he goes up to Scotland and he goes, there he is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, it's incredible when you see that painting. | ||
| So Penman goes up to Scotland and he sees a guy named James Syme. | ||
| And Syme agrees to do this operation. | ||
| And Penman is sat for 24 minutes in a chair, restrained, while this thing is cut out of his face and drops in a bucket. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Did he survive? | ||
| Yeah, well, we have a picture of him later in life. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| He looks like he's going, hmm. | ||
| Yeah, he looks kind of like an ugly Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln wasn't really known for his looks. | ||
| I bet he's psyched that he doesn't have that thing on his face, though. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you can see that the jaw is definitely slimmer, but he doesn't look too deformed considering what he went through. | ||
| So it is incredible. | ||
| You get such crazy stories. | ||
| There's a woman who has a mastectomy in 1840 without any anesthetic. | ||
| Now at this time, if you were wealthy or if you were middle class, you'd have this operation in your home. | ||
| You just have it on your kitchen table. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Which would have been safer than going into the hospitals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, because the hospitals were crawling with all kinds of infection. | ||
| So hospitals were places for the poor. | ||
| And to give you an idea of how gross it was, the bug catcher who had rid the beds of lice, he was paid more than the doctors and surgeons in this time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Because, I mean, that's pretty important, right? | ||
| There's maggots, all kinds of things crawling around in these hospitals. | ||
| So if you were wealthy or middle class, you had your surgeon come to your home. | ||
| And so she has a surgeon come, and the surgeon determines that, yes, the breast has to come off, and says, I'm going to return, but I'm not going to tell you the day, which would make me more anxious. | ||
| He thought it was going to help her not focus on it, but all you would be thinking about, right, is when is this guy going to show up? | ||
| That's a person without breasts. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He was like, I'll just show up. | ||
| It'll be easy. | ||
| And so he shows up and he goes into her bedroom and he opens his hand and shows her the knife he's going to use. | ||
| And he says to prepare her soul for death. | ||
| This isn't very confidence-inspiring. | ||
| Any doctors listening, don't tell your patients to prepare their soul for death. | ||
| And she does survive. | ||
| And she talks about how it's so vascular that the blood blinds him at one point. | ||
| And so just when you think it can't get worse, you can't see. | ||
| And she is under his hand for an hour and a half when he cuts away. | ||
| And she survives. | ||
| She ends up living a long and somewhat happy life. | ||
| I'm sure she had a lot of nightmares. | ||
| So do they tie this woman down? | ||
| How do they handle this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| They would have definitely had to restrain her. | ||
| I mean, people were probably a little bit stronger or more able to adapt to pain than we are. | ||
| But nonetheless, there would have been some pretty heavy restraining. | ||
| What year was this? | ||
| That was in the 1840s. | ||
| Do we know when cancer became common, or was it always common in humans? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| The oldest archaeological record, I believe, is 2,000 years old of metastatic cancer. | ||
| So it's older than you think. | ||
| They're diagnosing it for centuries and centuries. | ||
| I'm not really an expert in history of cancer, but it is around. | ||
| And so with breast cancer, You know, probably by the time it got to the stage of mastectomy, it probably would have spread, if you think about, like, you know, it being visible to the naked eye. | ||
| But yet she survived. | ||
| She did survive, and so then you have to question whether she had breast cancer or maybe it was some kind of... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cyst? | |
| Yeah, maybe a cyst, and she went through that for that. | ||
| And again, before antiseptics, before Lister comes on and comes up with germ-fighting techniques, this would have been so dangerous because you have this open cavity and wound. | ||
| And so Joseph Lister, when he comes up with his antiseptic techniques, he actually performs a mastectomy on his sister on his dining room table. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, crazy. | |
| Christ. | ||
| And she survives, and that's in the book. | ||
| See, this would be a great movie, don't you think? | ||
| I do think it would be a great movie. | ||
| It's like, it would be a great movie for the Coen brothers. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, because it's so chaos-filled. | ||
| I know, and all that kind of grittiness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They do good period pieces, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Plus, they could make it more entertaining. | ||
| Let's make this happen, Joe. | ||
| I have no pull. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm not a part of that world. | ||
| But this guy with the face, where they cut that tumor out of his face, so for 24 minutes, that's all it took to cut that thing out of his face? | ||
| In that case, yeah. | ||
| And remember, of course, it depended on the skill of your surgeon. | ||
| So he goes to a very good surgeon named James Syme. | ||
| But there's a story, so going back to penises, lithotomy is the removal of the stone, which you saw kind of a demonstration there. | ||
| And it was incredibly painful. | ||
| So they stuck a rod down the penis and they cut through the scrotum. | ||
| They removed the stone and of course there was no pain medication and it was just awful. | ||
| Did they drink? | ||
| You know, it's kind of a myth because, of course, drinking within your blood. | ||
| But someone asked me, they said, I heard that surgeons would punch the patient out. | ||
| And I was like, wow, you'd have to be really good to knock someone out on a first punch. | ||
| And of course, you do more damage. | ||
| You could do a lot of damage to that. | ||
| That definitely didn't happen. | ||
| Unless someone can prove me wrong, maybe there's like a weird example. | ||
| But I've never come across that. | ||
| So it was kind of, it was you and the surgeon. | ||
| And with the lithotomy, a good surgeon took about five minutes. | ||
| Well, there's a guy named Steven Pollard in 1828 who goes in to have this done. | ||
| Now, it's incredibly embarrassing. | ||
| You're naked from the waist down. | ||
| It's an embarrassing operation. | ||
| It's painful. | ||
| He's brought into the theater, and the surgeon ends up taking over an hour. | ||
| Because he's so inapt. | ||
| And the patient is screaming, you know, please just stop, just stop. | ||
| And the surgeon yells back at him for having abnormal anatomy, which, how would you like that? | ||
| You're sitting there on the table and you're being blamed for this going wrong. | ||
| And he pulls through the operation, but he does die of post-operative infection. | ||
| Abnormal anatomy, how so? | ||
| He just said, you have abnormal anatomy. | ||
| And so on the autopsy report, it was revealed that there was nothing abnormal about his anatomy. | ||
| The surgeon just was really inept. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| Yeah, it wasn't good. | ||
| So he was blaming the guy. | ||
| Did you have lunch before this? | ||
| Yeah, I did, but I'm all right. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Well, that's good because then you won't faint. | ||
| Well, I hosted Fear Factor for six years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true, yes. | |
| I've seen everything. | ||
| Almost nothing makes me sick. | ||
| What's like the worst? | ||
| I mean, was there ever a segment on Fear Factor that you thought, I don't know if I can watch that? | ||
| No. | ||
| When they had a drink come, that was rough. | ||
| That was what got the show canceled. | ||
| That was the second version of Fear Factor when it came back for a brief period of time and they were going way too hard. | ||
| They were trying to outdo themselves. | ||
| They were like, Fear Factor's back and it's crazier than ever and they just went way over the top. | ||
| That's what they do with TV, right? | ||
| Always pushing the boundaries. | ||
| They didn't have to. | ||
| They could have just gone with regular Fear Factor and we would have all been fine. | ||
| We could do historical fear factor. | ||
| We could recreate these sort of horrible things. | ||
| It was a blessing in disguise. | ||
| But this surgery as we know it, when did it first start? | ||
| What is the first historical recounting of an actual doctor? | ||
| Oh, or you mean someone saying they're a licensed doctor? | ||
| When did it start? | ||
| Asking really hard questions. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I know so little about history. | ||
| It's like 19th, 18th century. | ||
| We have evidence, again, in the archaeological records of surgical procedures going far back. | ||
| But who did them? | ||
| They would have been, you know, sometimes they call them wise women, cunning women, barber surgeons. | ||
| Barber? | ||
| Yeah, the barbers. | ||
| I guess they're good at razors, right? | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| Actually, barber surgeons used to do things like pull your teeth. | ||
| They used to bloodlet. | ||
| And so the barber pole, which is red and white, is red and white because it was advertising their services as blood letters. | ||
| So what they would do is they would tie these bloody rags around the pole and it would whip around the pole. | ||
| I know, it's one of my favorite stories. | ||
| And the ball at the top represented the bowl that would catch the blood. | ||
| And the stick would have been the stick that you held to kind of get your veins to stick out. | ||
| And people were blood let for all kinds of reasons. | ||
| Like you would do it like a purge or a diet or you would do it because you were ill. | ||
| The idea being that you had produced too much blood and you needed the blood to be let to kind of restore balance in your body. | ||
| What do you think it would be like to go back in time and hear someone say something that stupid? | ||
| Like, you're sick. | ||
| We need to remove some of your blood. | ||
| You have too much blood in your system, Lindsay. | ||
| You're going to send all these crazy academic historians who are like, we can't. | ||
| Barber, surgeon, tonsorial services. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| And you know what else? | ||
| The barbershop quartet comes from the idea that the barber surgeons often had a musical lute in the office that you would play or the patient would play. | ||
| It was like a musical therapy. | ||
| So there's all kinds of hangovers from it. | ||
| And you know the demon barber, Sweeney Todd? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So this is kind of one of these stories that pops up, and they think that it might be that medical practitioners were trying to undermine the legitimacy of the barbers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| So you kind of either get this story that the barber is this sort of demon figure who's chopping you up and selling you and making you into pies, or... | ||
| Is that a legit one? | ||
| Because that seems like nonsense. | ||
| Well, it seems like it's a recreation of an older one. | ||
| Well, it seems like parody. | ||
| Like, look, it says, listen to my troubles, no charge. | ||
| Listen to your troubles, 50 cents. | ||
| They might have had that on their barber thing. | ||
| Yeah, when they're cutting bullets out of you, it says bullets removed, two bucks. | ||
| Maybe, I don't know. | ||
| They're all drunk. | ||
| Pomade, mustache, wax. | ||
| Yeah, people thought that bullets were, that gunpowder was poisonous. | ||
| So a surgeon would often amputate if you were shot. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Until they kind of realized that sometimes it was okay to just keep the bullet in, depending on where it was. | ||
| It could just be like a recreation of something that someone found, maybe, and they're selling that as a piece. | ||
| Right, probably, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and we get the red, blue, and white barber poles now. | ||
| So what happened was the barber surgeons and the surgeons split off professionally at some point in history. | ||
| And so the surgeons start to use blue and white poles, and the barbers use red and white poles. | ||
| And I think now the red, white, and blue is like the patriotic red, white, and blue. | ||
| But the traditional barber pole would have been red and white and it would have signified that you could come in and get your blood lighting because those bloody rags would have been out there on the pole. | ||
| Before they had the pole, they would advertise by putting just bowls of congealed blood in the window. | ||
| Oh, Christ! | ||
| And then in London, they decided, I think it was about the 14th century, they said, no more of that. | ||
| So the barbers started to throw the blood into the river, which was also equally gross. | ||
| So the barber surgeons would have definitely been doing minor surgical procedures, and they would have been more affordable than the surgeons and the physicians themselves. | ||
| But nobody could really do much for you in that period, according to our own sort of 21st century understanding. | ||
| But I always say, to go back to your question about, you know, how would it feel to hear something so dumb? | ||
| Well, what do you think today that, you know, in 100 years we're going to look back at? | ||
| And there's definitely going to be stuff, right, that we're going to look back and go, I can't believe that. | ||
| You know, we used to do that. | ||
| In fact, I think that this is probably going to get people to go, no, that totally works. | ||
| You know that trend of cupping? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now that you see? | ||
| So that was also 17th century. | ||
| So they would have these heated cups and they would create this blister and then they would cut it open with this really sharp instrument and that's how they would bleed you. | ||
| So it's kind of this weird thing that's coming back but for slightly different reasons. | ||
| I don't think there's any evidence that cupping is real. | ||
| No, I don't think so either. | ||
| And I like to point people to the past because if we're going to make fun of, you know, what they were doing in the past, it's kind of making a reappearance, so to speak. | ||
| But people do all kinds of weird things now, too. | ||
| Like they eat the placenta. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's no medical evidence that that has any kind of health benefit. | ||
| Yeah, but it's edible. | ||
| I think that's why you can eat it. | ||
| Well, it's funny because that actually segues into this lovely object, this half skull here. | ||
| My friend Zane Wiley creates these. | ||
| These are actually cereal bowls. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, great. | |
| And the reason why I brought it was because it opens up a conversation about something that I like to talk about, which is corpse medicine. | ||
| So people used to actually eat dead bodies. | ||
| For medicinal purposes. | ||
| What parts? | ||
| So if you had epilepsy in the early modern period, so we're like talking like 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, people would drink the blood of an executed criminal. | ||
| Someone who lost their head. | ||
| Like the idea was that the life cut short. | ||
| That the blood was a very powerful force. | ||
| And so you get these sort of drawings of people gathered at the scaffold. | ||
| You know, this poor bastard is going to lose his head. | ||
| And these people are like holding cups up to catch the blood. | ||
| And it didn't work. | ||
| And epilepsy was so awful because it was so misunderstood. | ||
| And you can imagine, you know, when someone goes into a seizure, it's scary. | ||
| And if you don't understand what's happening, you could think that it's witchcraft or there's all kinds of things that People thought about that disease, so these people were quite desperate, so they were drinking the blood of executed criminals. | ||
| They ground up mummies, ancient mummies, and they would make it into pills and did all kinds of things, right? | ||
| So I always point this out, we eat the placenta today, it's kind of like a form of ingesting bodily... | ||
| So people were just super, super desperate back then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, of course, there was not much that could be done, right? | ||
| But we do some kind of form of corpse medicine and organ donation. | ||
| So we're taking dead body parts. | ||
| We're not eating them, but we're taking them into our body to cure ourselves. | ||
| Yeah, I have a cadaver graft on my right knee. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I have one in my jaw. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your jaw? | |
| What happened? | ||
| Well, I got in a huge fist fight. | ||
| I had some gum disease up here, and then they had to graft a little piece of cadaver bone. | ||
| But they don't call it cadaver bone. | ||
| Did they call it cadaver bone to you? | ||
| Don't they call it freeze-dry bone or something? | ||
| No, it wasn't bone. | ||
| They call it an allograft, but it's a cadaver. | ||
| They use the Achilles tendon for the ACL because the Achilles tendon is much larger than an ACL, so it's stronger. | ||
| Are you familiar with the way it works? | ||
| It's really kind of interesting. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| The way it works, it's not like it takes over... | ||
| It's not like an organ transplant. | ||
| So you don't have to worry about your body rejecting it in the same way, although sometimes people's bodies don't accept it or it doesn't work. | ||
| But they take this graft, they put this new tendon in place, this new ligament in place rather, and then your body re-proliferates that ligament with cells. | ||
| So it's, even though it'll feel like it's healed up within like a month or two, like your knee will feel a little bit weak from the surgery, but people get a distorted perception of how strong it actually is. | ||
| And fighters... | ||
| In particular, I know several fighters who have wound up re-injuring their knee because they thought it was okay. | ||
| Really, it was very gummy and very weak. | ||
| So how long does it take to heal? | ||
| Like six months. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like six to nine months, they recommend. | ||
| But it's amazing what we can do now. | ||
| I mean, when you think about 150 years ago that I'm talking about, and today, it's just... | ||
| And I always, because I'm a big Joseph Lister fan, I always say that if we hadn't understood germs, there would be no way to go deep into the body, would there? | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| And so he opens up this sort of huge field with medicine, and a lot of advancements are made off the back of it. | ||
| But it was a gritty time and you definitely could die very easily. | ||
| Life was very cheap back then. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I can only imagine. | ||
| Just the idea of that woman getting her breasts removed on her kitchen table. | ||
| Yeah, there was another, there was a little boy, he was 12 years old, his name was Henry Pace, and he was told by the surgeon he had to have his leg removed. | ||
| And he said, as little kids do, would it hurt? | ||
| And the surgeon said, no more than having a tooth pulled. | ||
| So he was very unprepared. | ||
| So they brought him to the operating theater, and he was so awake and so aware, he remembers counting six strokes of the saw before his little leg fell off. | ||
| Why did they have to cut his leg off? | ||
| He broke it. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| It was just a sprain and they just decided to take it off. | ||
| No, I mean, if there was a compound fracture, the chances of it becoming infected was quite high. | ||
| So when Lister comes along and he's trying to figure out what's causing infection, he notices that if it's a clean break and there's no break in the skin, usually it heals okay. | ||
| But if there's a break in the skin, it gets infected and usually it leads to some kind of gangrene or septicemia. | ||
| And that's how he starts to wonder. | ||
| It must be something coming from outside and getting into this wound that is causing the infection. | ||
| But he reads Louis Pasteur's germ theory, and this is how he starts to put it together. | ||
| But when he first comes out with it, there's a lot of pushback. | ||
| Because medicine and science are essentially conservative in the sense that it's like puzzle solving. | ||
| You solve the puzzle within the rules that are already set out. | ||
| If someone comes from sort of the fringe and has this wild idea, usually there's a lot of pushback. | ||
| And so that's exactly what happens with Lister. | ||
| And it's hard for us to imagine because germs, we understand them today. | ||
| It seems obvious to us. | ||
| But back then, a surgeon didn't wash his hands or his instruments because Why would he wash his hands or his instruments if they were going to get dirty with the next patient? | ||
| So you have to get into the mind, the logical mind of a Victorian surgeon. | ||
| They wore aprons. | ||
| I think, Jamie, I'd also sent a picture of a surgeon with his apron on. | ||
| Actually, it's a picture of a butcher. | ||
| But it gives you that kind of idea of what your friendly Victorian surgeon would have been wearing. | ||
| And that apron, the more blood it had on it, it was like a sign of pride almost because that meant that your surgeon was very experienced and had a lot of blood on it. | ||
| That's a butcher though, not a surgeon. | ||
| That is a butcher, yeah. | ||
| But similar tools of the trade. | ||
| Yep, similar tools and certainly that apron would have been on your surgeon. | ||
| I don't know about the hat. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's kind of like gangs of New York, you know, you kind of picture. | ||
| They would have worn those really tall top hats and those crazy plaid colors. | ||
| And it's a very colorful time before Victoria, of course, plunges the nation into mourning later. | ||
| So Lister's coming in along the 1840s. | ||
| It's very sort of colorful and filthy and dirty. | ||
| Victoria plunged the nation into mourning? | ||
| Well, when her husband died, she went into sort of lifetime mourning. | ||
| So she's always wearing black for the rest of her life. | ||
| And everybody follows her example. | ||
| So we think of the Victorians wearing sort of all that black. | ||
| But in Gangs of New York, a lot of people thought that that was sort of an imagined world. | ||
| But actually, that's what they would have looked like. | ||
| They would have been wearing those plaids and those bright colors and those top hats. | ||
| But Lister was a Quaker. | ||
| We think of like Quaker Oats, which is kind of accurate. | ||
| And he would have been wearing sort of black and white and very dull colors. | ||
| So when I think about this movie, because I think about it a lot, I think about sort of this world being very hedonistic and colorful. | ||
| And there's a lot of drugs going on. | ||
| They're discovering ether and all kinds of things that they're experimenting with. | ||
| And then you have this somber Quaker. | ||
| And as the movie sort of progresses, the world catches up and gets a bit cleaner with Lister. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So they were experimenting with all these drugs on themselves? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| It was just a crazy time. | ||
| So my book begins with the first operation under anesthesia. | ||
| And I wanted to start there because I think if anybody has ever thought about the history of surgery, which they might not have until they turned into this podcast, they tend to think of that moment. | ||
| That's the big moment. | ||
| But actually, surgery becomes much more dangerous because the surgeon still doesn't understand germs, but he doesn't have the patient fighting him anymore. | ||
| So he's more willing to pick up the knife and go deeper in the body, and so postoperative infection rises. | ||
| And it opens with the great Robert Liston, and he performs the first operation under ether. | ||
| In 1846 in London. | ||
| And he doesn't think it's going to work. | ||
| It comes from America. | ||
| He calls it the Yankee Dodge. | ||
| And it's a miracle. | ||
| It works. | ||
| And the age of agony is over. | ||
| When ether was discovered, everybody wanted to try it. | ||
| This drug that made you insensible, what was that like? | ||
| And so you get these kinds of stories of medical students sniffing it and drinking it. | ||
| In fact, I believe there's still a place in London you can get an ether cocktail. | ||
| What? | ||
| Again, I don't endorse it. | ||
| It's highly flammable. | ||
| So people also smoked a lot in operating theaters, so you can imagine that there were a lot of accidents. | ||
| But you drop it on a, basically, because it evaporates really quickly, you drop it on a strawberry and then you dunk it into champagne. | ||
| And it's supposed to get you really high very quickly, and then it wears off equally quickly. | ||
| I tried to convince my publisher to have ether cocktails at the book launch, but they were like, hmm. | ||
| Just have a bunch of Ubers ready. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Or carriages, like in the Victorian. | ||
| So people were definitely trying. | ||
| Have you tried it? | ||
| I've not tried it. | ||
| I haven't found that bar yet. | ||
| But yet you were willing to experiment on the people that came to your book launch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hell yeah! | |
| Why not? | ||
| That would be the best thing. | ||
| Great story, you know? | ||
| I would feel like you should probably dip your toe in first. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Maybe try it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe for the next book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, yeah. | ||
| And so you have ether in sort of the mid-19th century. | ||
| And then, of course, later you have cocaine. | ||
| You have opium, which is – well, actually, cocaine comes along and is presented as sort of a cure to the opiate, the morphine addiction. | ||
| So, like, take cocaine instead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| And I had brought – it's in my Mary Poppins bag. | ||
| I'll show it to you later after the show. | ||
| I brought a postcard that shows a dentist and he's pulling a tooth and the person wrote underneath just had a tooth pulled with cocaine. | ||
| So they were using it for all kinds of things and doctors were becoming addicted themselves to these drugs. | ||
| Then heroin comes along. | ||
| Bayer invents heroin. | ||
| Heroin is given to your children. | ||
| It's put in all kinds of things. | ||
| Again, it's positioned as, you know, break your cocaine addiction now with heroin. | ||
| So it was just a crazy period. | ||
| And it was really sort of in the early 20th century when a lot of this stuff started to be regulated finally. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I didn't bring any of that with me. | ||
| I believe there was a mummy that was found in ancient Egypt that tested positive for cocaine. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| But they think that it might be a false positive because apparently there's something else that they would consume back then that would make you test positive for cocaine. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, Jamie will find it. | ||
| But it was some evidence. | ||
| I think what they were trying to connect this to, now I remember, they were trying to connect this to the idea that people from Egypt had the ability to travel to the Americas. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| American drugs and ancient Egyptian mummies. | ||
| Can you make that a little larger, please? | ||
| It says, 1992, | ||
| performed by Svelta Balabanova. | ||
| Well done. | ||
| That's a serious woman. | ||
| And two of her colleagues at the Institute for Anthropology and, well, this is in Munich. | ||
| They're using German words for anthropology, probably in humanities, university in Munich. | ||
| The tests were carried out by nine mummies, on nine mummies, Munich Museum, dating from 1070 to 395 BC. The study focused on hair samples, which were often used to assess drug concentrations in the body. | ||
| The results, what does it say here? | ||
| Well, they discovered all the mummies tested positive for cocaine and hashish, which makes sense. | ||
| The results caused an immediate stir. | ||
| What the, come on, let's cut to the chase here, folks. | ||
| First thing to say, archaeologists are not just being stubborn about this. | ||
| There are many reasons not to think the traces of drugs and nine mummies means... | ||
| What is the conclusion? | ||
| Cut to the chase, you folks. | ||
| This is a real academic article here. | ||
| Yeah, nicotine, cocaine. | ||
| Okay, back up. | ||
| Back up. | ||
| Cocaine. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Cocaine, most of us think of today, was first discovered in early civilizations. | ||
| The Andean region of South America, the chew and the coca leaves. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Instead, the cocaine and possibly the nicotine, too, were actually being introduced to the mummies as part of an embalming process. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| More likely they obtained cocaine from America. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I give up. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| We'll have to read this. | ||
| You did a good, yeah. | ||
| I tried. | ||
| Yeah, you tried. | ||
| It just seems like it's going to take a long time. | ||
| Many resins and spices, hold on a second, were certainly used this day. | ||
| We aren't entirely sure what they all were. | ||
| Rare or exotic materials were almost certainly used, and it is far less of a stretch to suggest this included imports from the Middle East and potentially as far afield as India. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I think they're very skeptical about the idea that people from Egypt were able to travel all the way to the Americas where cocaine was. | ||
| I think part of the conclusion was that there were some other things that would make that you test positive for cocaine. | ||
| Oh, it's interesting. | ||
| It was sort of like poppy seeds make you test positive for heroin. | ||
| Right, right, yeah. | ||
| If you have to go for a drug test for work, they say don't eat poppy seed bagels. | ||
| Yeah, wasn't there like a Seinfeld episode? | ||
| I'm looking at the Wikipedia for it too. | ||
| It might have been part of a thriving tourist scam in Egypt in the Victorian era. | ||
| So they might have said it was there and some people would come look and then... | ||
| Wait a minute, said what was there? | ||
| The cocaine. | ||
| It says, since passing these corpses off, recently deceased as ancient mummies was a thriving tourist scam in Egypt in the Victorian era. | ||
| Like it could have... | ||
| That doesn't make sense because the tests were done in 1992. After the experiments, even assuming the cocaine was actually found on the mummies, it's possible this could have been a contamination that occurred after the discovery. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So a bunch of cokeheads were fondling mummies. | ||
| Well, they wanted those mummies because they wanted to eat them, as I said. | ||
| They ground them up and did all kinds of things. | ||
| Ancient Egyptian mummies, they used that too? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Think about how much was destroyed because people had to eat it. | ||
| Well, I think about it all the time. | ||
| There's a fantastic exhibit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| Cure-all mummy. | ||
| Cure-all mummy powder. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That is nuts. | ||
| Mummy extract. | ||
| It's cure-all. | ||
| Whatever you got. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fix it. | |
| You know it's a quack remedy when it's a cure-all. | ||
| We still have quack remedies. | ||
| You know, take a pill, lose a lot of weight. | ||
| It's like modern-day quack. | ||
| Well, those late-night things that are causing people to lose weight in those late-night infomercials. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Take a bunch of pills. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's our modern-day quackery. | ||
| There's a fantastic exhibit that's right now. | ||
| There's an IMAX exhibit in Los Angeles at one of the museums. | ||
| I saw it about a year ago. | ||
| But they have a King Tut exhibit. | ||
| And then on top of that, they have this gigantic IMAX theater, which is fantastic. | ||
| And they show all these different tombs that they had discovered and how they discovered them. | ||
| But when they've discovered King Tut's tomb... | ||
| We have no idea how many similar tombs there were that were looted over the many, many hundreds and thousands of years. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, what we have in the museums is just sort of a fraction of what we know, and still stuff is coming to light. | ||
| It's just incredible. | ||
| But yeah, the Victorians are responsible for destroying a lot, for taking those mummies and just grounding them up and all kinds of things. | ||
| What gets me is, where was the theory? | ||
| Where did the theory come from? | ||
| When you want to take a mummy and make it a powder? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some of it would have been... | |
| Some of it would have been sort of folk medicine influence. | ||
| You know, there's this idea of sympathetic magic. | ||
| So, for instance, if I stabbed you with a sword, it gets very violent, you could be healed. | ||
| If I put this sort of special sympathetic powder on the sword, it would heal you. | ||
| So it was sort of this healing by distance. | ||
| So all kinds of strange ideas existed. | ||
| And that's why it's important when you're studying the history of medicine to really get into the mindset because it's so wildly different to the way we think. | ||
| And actually, do you know what this is that I brought? | ||
| If people are just listening, it's a long-beaked mask. | ||
| Like a bird mask. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I do not know what that is. | ||
| Okay, so a lot of people think this is a Venetian mask. | ||
| This is actually a particular example from Venice. | ||
| It is what doctors would have worn during the bubonic plague. | ||
| So it's called the plague doctor mask. | ||
| And so it was invented in the 17th century by a French doctor. | ||
| And the idea behind it was, so people thought that disease was spread by this thing called miasma, which are like... | ||
| Little particles in the air. | ||
| They're sort of associated with bad smells. | ||
| So if something smells bad, it's probably not good for you, is what they thought. | ||
| And it kind of makes sense, because if you're in a slummy area of the Victorian period, it probably has a lot of disease. | ||
| It probably doesn't smell good. | ||
| So that was sort of the thinking behind it. | ||
| So what you would do is you would put sweet-smelling herbs into the beak. | ||
| And so you would be smelling this, and it would protect you from those evil miasma. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know... | ||
| Is that a real one? | ||
| No, we don't actually have, I don't believe there's an example of a real one from the 17th century, but there's a lot of illustrations of the plague doctor, and he would have been wearing a hat, he would have been wearing a cape, leather gloves, like sort of just protecting himself. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| That's a real one. | ||
| Authentic 16th century plague Dr. Mask preserved and on display at the, there you go, another one, Dösten Medik- Yeah, that- German Museum of Medical History. | ||
| But I question that because it was invented in the 17th century. | ||
| So if it's real, it's going to be a little bit later. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| But we don't know how much they were worn because they would have been expensive. | ||
| A lot of doctors weren't very noble, so if the plague broke out, they got the hell out of there. | ||
| There was sort of a phrase, go far and go long. | ||
| You know, get out and don't come back for a while. | ||
| There wasn't much they could do for you. | ||
| They had a stick as well that they... | ||
| We'd sort of poke the patient with, so they wouldn't have to touch the patient and kind of have them turn over and they can, you know, yes, you have the plague. | ||
| There wasn't much they could do for you. | ||
| We can cure the plague. | ||
| They did not know what germs were, so they really didn't understand what the plague was. | ||
| They had sort of a concept of contagion. | ||
| If you broke out with the plague, they would probably quarantine you in your house. | ||
| And they put a big cross on the door. | ||
| And so people would bring food and you'd put a basket outside of your window with a rope. | ||
| And so they'd do that until everybody was dead in the house or that the plague had passed and they felt that you were... | ||
| Safe to come out into the general population. | ||
| So there was an idea that these things were contagious, but not again in the way that we kind of understand diseases being spread today. | ||
| God, it's so strange that they would... | ||
| You would not know what was going on. | ||
| People would just start dying and you'd be like, what is this a curse? | ||
| Yeah, it could be God's curse. | ||
| And people say, you know, oh, the plague mask is so terrifying. | ||
| It is pretty creepy. | ||
| Can I put it on? | ||
| It's super creepy. | ||
| But I always say that it's good luck. | ||
| This is why I brought this across the Atlantic so Joe Rogan could wear the plague doctor mask. | ||
| How many people would know what that is? | ||
| Like if you went to a party? | ||
| You know, if you go to Venice, they say plague Dr. Mask. | ||
| It's funny because I was just in Venice recently and they were saying that, you know, the big carnival that they have every year, it's becoming harder to do because of security reasons. | ||
| So you have like a huge population of a city wearing masks and covering their identities. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| So they have to cut back, which kind of sucks because, you know, that's like the fun of the carnival. | ||
| So now they're cutting back where you can wear them in public places and things like that. | ||
| What a weird world we live in. | ||
| Yeah, it is unfortunate. | ||
| Can't even wear a plague mask. | ||
| Can't wear a plague mask. | ||
| I'm going to bring it back, though. | ||
| I'm just going to be walking around in downtown LA. How would that attach to your face? | ||
| Was it like straps or something? | ||
| Yeah, there would have been straps. | ||
| Or in that other example he was showing, it looked like it was sort of a full-on... | ||
| Oh, there it goes. | ||
| I mean, that looks so creepy. | ||
| It's so creepy, but... | ||
| Deaf. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Deaf. | |
| Today we have the modern plague doctor. | ||
| What do you think that would be? | ||
| Yeah, the... | ||
| The hazmat, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And so you think about the hazmat going into hot zones. | ||
| That would be pretty scary if you didn't know what was going on. | ||
| And certainly sort of ominous, you know, when you see the hazmat. | ||
| So it's a weird thing that exists because in a strange kind of way, it probably did protect the plague doctor because he was covering himself up, but it protected him for the wrong reasons. | ||
| He still didn't understand how disease was spread. | ||
| Are you aware of the theory of alien abduction being a distant memory of childbirth? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, there's a theory that is actually being tossed about that these people that have this ancient, well, they have this memory of childbirth, right? | ||
| So all of a sudden you're being born, there's bright lights above you, there's a man or a woman who's the surgeon with a mask that covers their face, so all you see is their eyes, and everything looks bright, and it's terrifying and clinical, and you're on this table and everything's cold. | ||
| Most of these alien abduction experiences that people recount, they take place in some sort of a medical facility. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And everything is bright and strange and cold. | ||
| and they think that what this is is they're saying that we had this idea that children don't have memories, that babies don't have memories. | ||
| And so they're saying, well, why wouldn't they have memories? | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| Of course they have memories. | ||
| They have brains. | ||
| They grab your finger. | ||
| They look you in the eye. | ||
| They would have a memory of every second that they were born. | ||
| And it's probably one of the most profound and disturbing memories because before that, everything is incredibly peaceful. | ||
| You're inside the mother's womb. | ||
| and then you're just like taken out and And then you're pulled out, and then there's this bright light above you. | ||
| You never experience any light. | ||
| And your visual perception, your field of view is all distorted, right? | ||
| This is the first time you're using your eyes. | ||
| That's why people have the same... | ||
| So it's like tapping into this memory, this early memory. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| This is a theory. | ||
| It makes sense to me, because if you think about, like... | ||
| Well, it does because people don't really go anywhere. | ||
| See, the thing about the abduction thing is they put cameras in people's rooms and they say they have these alien abduction experiences, but they don't go anywhere. | ||
| So what they're doing is they're dreaming, which is normal. | ||
| The mind is amazing and it's so powerful. | ||
| And we know so little still. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So also, like, all these, I mean, it's kind of duh, because they all happen while you're sleeping. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, 90 plus percent. | ||
| They tend to be medical. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very medical in nature, right? | ||
| You're being examined. | ||
| And then there's also, going back to childbirth, there's also a lot of people that have these experiences that they are being told that either they're... | ||
| Taking their baby away from them, or they're studying their baby, or that they had a baby inside of them that they didn't know about, and that the aliens have put it there, and they're taking it out. | ||
| That's right, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it even goes back to the virgin birth, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's all very weird. | ||
| But this memory that people have from childhood is most likely, you know, probably a pretty intense memory. | ||
| Powerful memory that's always there. | ||
| Your first memory. | ||
| Yeah, and some people can tap into it and some people can't. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| It's also a theory while natural childbirth is supposed to be less traumatic. | ||
| Like women having natural childbirth in a bathtub. | ||
| We're kind of like moving back to, you know, men start to get involved in childbirth around the 17th century, 18th century. | ||
| What happened before then? | ||
| It was mostly women. | ||
| So women in the village would come. | ||
| And actually, the term gossip comes from the idea that the women who would spread the word in the village that someone was going into labor, they were called the gossips. | ||
| So they spread the word. | ||
| It became sort of a negative thing later. | ||
| So the gossips would spread the word, the women would come in. | ||
| This was a female-only chamber, and men were not really allowed in. | ||
| A man might be brought in if the mother was dying or if the child was dying. | ||
| And then in that case, instruments were brought into the birthing chamber. | ||
| So the doctor might come in and he might take these sort of forceps and pick the baby apart and take the baby out. | ||
| The baby would die. | ||
| But in those cases, it was like really extreme. | ||
| Like this was going to happen. | ||
| Like either the mother was going to die, the baby was going to die. | ||
| Both of them were going to die. | ||
| Or if the baby was coming out feet first. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, a capable midwife could handle that. | ||
| But this, you know, the Caesarian section, people think that it comes from the term, the idea that Julius Caesar was ripped from the womb of his mother. | ||
| But it's unlikely that that story is true because his mother lives into old age. | ||
| So probably the term cesarean comes from the Latin term meaning to cut. | ||
| And the first sort of record we have of this happening, I think, is in the 16th century. | ||
| And it's a farmer. | ||
| And he takes the instruments that he uses to castrate his pigs to cut this baby out of his wife. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, and we don't have any records of whether this, it probably didn't work again, no idea of germs, all this kind of stuff. | ||
| We don't know if she lived? | ||
| Yeah, I don't have, there's no sort of, it doesn't follow, the records don't follow the story. | ||
| But she probably died, and the baby probably died as well. | ||
| And for people who don't know, they castrate pigs to make them more edible. | ||
| They oftentimes castrate them and then let them loose, because then they concentrate on grass and not ass. | ||
| That is an actual farmer's term. | ||
| You know, talking about cesarean sections and castrating pigs, who knew those two things would... | ||
| Well, that's what they do with steers as well. | ||
| The difference between a steer and a bull is a steer is castrated. | ||
| They castrate them because they make better steaks. | ||
| Yeah, you don't want a muscular jacked bull. | ||
| No, probably not be very chewy. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That buffalo above, my friend Adam Greentree shot that in Australia, and my friend Cam was chewing on a piece of his for one piece for half an hour. | ||
| Oh my gosh, it was that muscular. | ||
| I guess that makes sense. | ||
| 2,000 pound sack of steel. | ||
| So it was not good. | ||
| No. | ||
| Not the thing you want to sit down and have a meal. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, they say they vary. | ||
| Sometimes, some of them you can eat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you can eat them. | ||
| Depending on how they're raised. | ||
| It's all buffalo meat. | ||
| But they're just insanely dense. | ||
| It's crazy how big... | ||
| I mean, when you see the skull, it's just... | ||
| The size of it is incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's also an invasive species, so they have no natural predators. | ||
| There's just thousands and thousands of them destroying the countryside. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| People travel up to the northern lands. | ||
| I forget the name of the place where they go when they hunt these things. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, they're huge. | ||
| Yeah, they are huge. | ||
| Australia is a trip. | ||
| I mean, it is really a wildlife experiment because they brought in so many animals. | ||
| Right, that's right. | ||
| And New Zealand as well. | ||
| Yeah, and they're not indigenous and they're just doing a lot of damage. | ||
| So when you think about the history of surgery and you concentrate on this one very particular time... | ||
| In this book, yes. | ||
| In this book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But as a medical historian, first of all, what led you to that? | ||
| You seem so normal. | ||
| It's a real thing. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I'm super normal. | ||
| Look at all these skulls and stuff in front of me. | ||
| I'm like that kid who never grew out of the obsession with Tales from the Crypt. | ||
| Oh, me too. | ||
| Yeah, Ripley's Believe It or Not, the shrunken heads. | ||
| I actually did a segment for a documentary on the shrunken heads, and I had to go out to Poland. | ||
| I actually got to hold these things that I was always fascinated with growing up. | ||
| Well, people don't know that they think the skull's in there. | ||
| That's why they don't understand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, that's right. | |
| How do you shrink your head? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's amazing because what they do is, obviously, they take the skull out and it's a process. | ||
| And this documentary was looking at, they were DNA testing them because the tribe that makes these skulls, they were done for a specific purpose to trap the soul of the warrior that they killed so that there was a spiritual reason behind it. | ||
| But what they were finding was that some of these shrunken heads were female. | ||
| Which probably means that as Westerners came into these areas, they wanted to collect these shrunken heads as curiosities, of course. | ||
| And so they traded guns for heads. | ||
| And so it kind of drove up the demand for these shrunken heads. | ||
| So they started killing women. | ||
| Well, it wasn't just anybody. | ||
| And it might not have been killing them. | ||
| It might have just been taking bodies of people who had already died. | ||
| But they definitely aren't all authentic in the sense that they were killed in battle. | ||
| And so it's just kind of interesting. | ||
| But I got to interact and see these shrunken heads. | ||
| So I was that weird, creepy kid that no one really wanted to talk to. | ||
| I joke that I also looked like Barb from Stranger Things for a long time. | ||
| And my brother pointed this out, and we were watching Stranger Things, and then Barb dies, and nobody gives a shit. | ||
| Spoiler alert. | ||
| Yeah, sorry. | ||
| Sorry, everybody. | ||
| And I was just devastated. | ||
| I'm like, nobody noticed for, you know, like a whole season. | ||
| Yeah, they barely cared. | ||
| They're like, well, she's missing. | ||
| Yeah, I guess she's missing. | ||
| No one cared about Barb. | ||
| Last time we saw her by the pool. | ||
| I was really awkward. | ||
| I was 5'7 by the age of 10, and I was just like that weird kid with tales from the crypt. | ||
| So I went on to study history in college, and then I went to Oxford and I did a master's and PhD in it. | ||
| But academia doesn't allow me to be as creative and weird as I'd like to be. | ||
| So now I'm just a storyteller, I'm a freelance writer, and I do this YouTube channel, and I'm sure Oxford's going to be like, give us the PhD back at some point. | ||
| Can they do that? | ||
| No. | ||
| There's a real value in that in terms of education because what you do is very interesting and entertaining. | ||
| I mean, that's why I started following you and retweeting your stuff. | ||
| It's really... | ||
| No, I appreciate that. | ||
| You know, it's funny because there is this sort of tension between what they call popular history and academic history. | ||
| And I will get, like, academic historians will come at me on Twitter and stuff. | ||
| And this one guy said to me, well, you're just an entertainer. | ||
| And I was like, well, that's not an insult to me. | ||
| Like, that's... | ||
| Why is that an insult? | ||
| Well, that's not true. | ||
| You have a PhD. | ||
| Like, hey, stupid. | ||
| I went to school. | ||
| I should have just said that, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, what does that mean? | |
| You're just an entertainer. | ||
| Yeah, it's like I'm bastardizing the subject in some kind of way that they don't like. | ||
| Well, it's because of people like me. | ||
| I'm like, ew, gross! | ||
| And then I retweeted it. | ||
| I know, exactly. | ||
| And then they want it, you know, like I did this thread on Twitter called your Victorian doctors trying to kill you. | ||
| And every tweet was like, coca rats, cocaine laced cigarettes, which you had also shared at one point, and just all the kinds of crazy things. | ||
| And then at the end of the thread, I said, but what is it about today that people will look back? | ||
| But you know, this one academic was like, this is really, you know, bad history, and you're making it fun. | ||
| Oh, that's so crazy! | ||
| But for the most part, people enjoy it, and that's nice. | ||
| Well, that is the big complaint that people have about academia, is that it's so stuffy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going to get so many weird academic trolls. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's one of those things I've had to make peace with. | ||
| Because I'm a storyteller, and if you look at my profile, I call myself a storyteller first rather than a historian. | ||
| Well, they're great stories, though. | ||
| They're great stories. | ||
| For us, in 2019, we were so incredibly fortunate to have actual real doctors with real modern medicine to fix us. | ||
| Real credentials. | ||
| Talking to a guy who's had... | ||
| Probably five surgeries. | ||
| God, it's so... | ||
| I know. | ||
| I had an appendectomy, and it was amazing. | ||
| They use little tiny robotic instruments now, and they barely make... | ||
| I think the incision's like an inch long or something. | ||
| A body of mine had shoulder surgery, and the actual cuts are like millimeters. | ||
| Tiny little cuts. | ||
| You barely can see the scars. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And, you know, with your knee surgery, it was an injury from activity, right? | ||
| And you think about people in the past, they weren't necessarily, well, I mean, there were sports and competitions, but mostly people were getting injuries from repetitive, strenuous labor that they were doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| There's a story of a cab driver in the 18th century, and he got this aneurysm behind his knee. | ||
| So the cab drivers in the 18th century wore these high boots, like riding boots, and it would rub at the back of the knee and it created this huge aneurysm. | ||
| And there was a surgeon named John Hunter in London who said, "Well, normally what you do is you would hack the leg off because if it pops, you're going to bleed out." But he said, "I have an idea. | ||
| I want to cut into the leg and I want to tie off the blood supply to the aneurysm. | ||
| I want to see if that works." And it did. | ||
| And he saved this guy's leg. | ||
| And that's really important because, remember, these people had no options if they couldn't work. | ||
| A lot of these people did. | ||
| When you say aneurysm, people think of aneurysm, they think of a brain. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like a, what's the term? | ||
| It's a specific kind of aneurysm. | ||
| It's almost like a balloon that appears on the outside. | ||
| So it's just a big sack of blood. | ||
| Big sack of blood. | ||
| Why didn't they think they could just drain it? | ||
| That's what I would think. | ||
| Like a hematoma. | ||
| I think if you severed it... | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I'd be like, slow down, doc! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't hack that leg off. | ||
| I gotta drive this taxi, bitch. | ||
| Yeah, and if he had lost his leg, it would have been... | ||
| And what's incredible about that story, actually, is that Hunter saves the leg, and then when the man dies, right before he dies, he knows he's going to die. | ||
| This is many years later. | ||
| He writes a letter, and he wills his body to Hunter. | ||
| So this is one of the first early examples to take the leg and to open it up and dissect it and to see what happened. | ||
| And so that leg is on display at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. | ||
| So they embalmed it? | ||
| Well, he would have preserved it probably with wax, injections, almost like plastination. | ||
| Oh, like they did with that body exhibit? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that weird guy, Body Worlds. | |
| What do you think about that? | ||
| I was very torn when I was walking around this. | ||
| Because a part of me was saying, this is really fascinating. | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| And the other part of me was saying, what is the difference between this and, like, fucking Ed Gaines' house, where he made lampshades out of people? | ||
| Well... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, one would hope the difference is consent. | ||
| One would hope, though. | ||
| Yeah, one would hope. | ||
| Well, there has been controversies with certain exhibitions, maybe not Body Worlds, but there's been some spinoffs where there's been a question of where they got those bodies. | ||
| And of course, if you're also going into sort of poor areas and asking people to hand over their bodies, is it really consent? | ||
| Because sometimes these families don't have money for funerals. | ||
| So there's other incentives. | ||
| But I think my view is... | ||
| You know, it's given under the guise of science that we can only view dead bodies through the lens of science today. | ||
| That's the only acceptable way, but it really is art. | ||
| And I wish that it would just be more openly recognized as just art, whether it's your kind of thing or not, because some of it is posed in really shocking ways that are unnecessary to teach anatomy. | ||
| So, you know, if you're going to say it's an anatomical lesson, Why does the person have to be posed in this sort of dramatic way? | ||
| So I think that, you know, it would be better if we just called it for what it was. | ||
| It's art and it's supposed to be provocative and shocking. | ||
| And that's why people come to see it. | ||
| And we're morbidly curious. | ||
| It is absolutely interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, and people say, oh my gosh. | ||
| The Victorians bought tickets to the operating theater. | ||
| Well, people come to my Instagram account, you know? | ||
| I mean, we're still morbidly curious. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| It's really interesting that it's called a theater as well. | ||
| Did you ever see that movie with Benicio Del Toro? | ||
| I think it was just The Wolfman. | ||
| It was one of the more recent werewolf movies, but he becomes a werewolf in the operating theater. | ||
| So the doctor is convinced that he's a madman, there's something wrong with him, so they give him electric shock therapy and all these different things. | ||
| And what's the period that it's supposed to be? | ||
| It's supposed to be in this period. | ||
| Oh, in the 19th century, okay. | ||
| Yeah, it's in London. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Yeah, see if we can find it. | ||
| It's kind of a crazy scene. | ||
| You know, the doctors were experimenting with electricity a lot and galvanism and things like kind of reanimating the corpses, which is when we get the story of Frankenstein. | ||
| And they were also interested in how long do you live or your conscience after you're beheaded. | ||
| So there's these experiments during the French Revolution where they're like shouting at the heads to see if the heads will blink. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| So I'm sure we can't air this on YouTube, so this will only be us watching this, because if we air it on YouTube, they'll do a... | ||
| See, that's exactly what the theaters look like. | ||
| Yeah, he's like saying that he's going to kill all of them. | ||
| Like, you need to get out of here. | ||
| And they... | ||
| This doctor is very arrogant and they're dealing with him and the moon turns full and he starts freaking out. | ||
| It's really interesting because if this was actually how they had patients strapped in, is that accurate? | ||
| Like the way that chair is set up? | ||
| Yeah, they would have. | ||
| I mean, so his feet, it looked like his feet were on the ground. | ||
| So the chair would have been higher. | ||
| So his feet would have sort of dangled. | ||
| It's one of the best ever... | ||
| I'm a giant werewolf fan. | ||
| This is one of the best ever... | ||
| Because this was actually done by Rick Baker, who's the same guy who did An American Werewolf in London, which is the werewolf that's out in the hall. | ||
| Oh yeah, I took pictures of that. | ||
| I met him earlier. | ||
| But this is the modern version of it that they decided to make, and the thing is that these guys are watching this, and the doctor is arrogant, and he has his back to the patient while he's discussing everything that's wrong with the patient. | ||
| And that's exactly what those theaters would have looked like as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But they would have been just so crowded. | ||
| That is so strange, though, that this was entertainment. | ||
| This was something that people wanted to see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, you know, it wasn't just sort of the morbid curiosity. | ||
| It was also that the Victorians were obsessed with scientific progress. | ||
| So they wanted to come in and see. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I see that. | ||
| They want to see what the latest was. | ||
| They're all getting the hell out of there now in this clip. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're trying. | |
| For people who are listening. | ||
| Yeah, it's not a good movie, but it's a great scene. | ||
| There's a bunch of great scenes in this movie. | ||
| I enjoy it just because I love werewolf movies. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It would have been fun to shoot. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's also, they decided in this movie to make it with minimal use of CGI. What they decided to do is do it all with actual rubber masks and things like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pretty ridiculous movie, honestly. | |
| It actually, it's funny because it sort of reminds me of, again, Liston, the 6'2 giant. | ||
| He got a patient on the table who had to have a bladder stone removed. | ||
| Remember how awful that was? | ||
| And this guy was like, fuck it, I'm not going to do it. | ||
| He jumps off the table, he runs across the room, locks himself in a closet, and Liston, Liston, all 6'2 of them, chases this guy, rips the door off, and just drags him back. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So, you know, and that really happened. | ||
| Again, be a great movie, anybody listening. | ||
| Yeah, you're really pushing this movie hard. | ||
| Are you trying to sell that while you're out here? | ||
| No, I mean... | ||
| I guarantee you someone is listening that can make that happen. | ||
| Listen, I could sell the rights to the book, but I've held on to them and I'm developing them with my producing partner because this book was born out of a lot of trauma. | ||
| So a couple years ago, I went through a really bad divorce and I was facing deportation as a result from the UK. Oh, wow. | ||
| I'm fascinated with movies. | ||
| I want to kind of see how the sausage is made, so to speak. | ||
| You know, if you're a writer and you just saw off the rights, you don't really have much creative input at all. | ||
| But yeah, I just think that, you know, it's a great story because it sort of crosses with people who are interested in the horror genre, right? | ||
| Because you get the surgery, the Victorian surgery, but it's an uplifting story about something that changed the world in the way we fundamentally understand it. | ||
| Who do you envision playing Lister? | ||
| I see Bradley Cooper. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| You like it? | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Jamie's like, whatever. | ||
| He's a perfect movie star. | ||
| I was quickly trying to think of someone else, but yeah. | ||
| He could basically do every movie. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He's like a quintessential movie star, right? | ||
| He is, he is. | ||
| Yeah, I was thinking Eddie Redmayne, the British actor, who's like, he's so sweet and Lister's a very sort of likeable. | ||
| Who's that guy? | ||
| He's in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the Harry Potter. | ||
| He's really big in Britain or Benedict Cumberbatch. | ||
| That guy's awesome. | ||
| Dr. Strange. | ||
| I think Benedict Cumberbatch would like to play Liston, the 6'2 guy, because it's a real theatrical role. | ||
| Well, Cumberbatch, he's another guy who's awesome and everything. | ||
| Amazing, yeah. | ||
| So if you're listening, Benedict. | ||
| He's killer. | ||
| Dr. Strange is another movie that's not the best movie in the world, but he's killer in it. | ||
| Yeah, and he's tall. | ||
| He could play Liston. | ||
| We could bulk him out a bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Aha! | |
| There we go. | ||
| Does he have to get bulked out? | ||
| Would you like a role in this? | ||
| No, I'm not into it. | ||
| Maybe the patient? | ||
| No, I'm good. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| The guy who jumps off. | ||
| Yeah, I'll be the guy who gets his dick hammered with a nail. | ||
| No, thank you. | ||
| You don't want to be the guy that dies when his coat is slashed. | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| Yeah, I'll be that guy. | ||
| I'll be the guy who faints. | ||
| Oh, good heavens! | ||
| And just fall down and passes out from fright. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good role. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this book, sort of, you were in quite a bit of personal anguish yourself when you created this book. | ||
| I was, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So you have this deep attachment to it. | ||
| I can completely understand that. | ||
| It's my first book, and I'm working on a new book on the history of plastic surgery. | ||
| I do, yeah. | ||
| Aha! | ||
| I'm fascinated with that as well. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| So I'm looking at a guy named Harold Gillies, who was rebuilding soldiers' faces during World War I. And if you've ever seen these guys' photos, I mean, we have no problems. | ||
| You think, we have no problems in the 21st century, and you look at these guys because they've been shot through the face and their jaws are missing. | ||
| And Harold Gillies really designs or starts plastic surgery as we know it. | ||
| And it was a time when losing a limb made you a hero, but losing your face made you a monster. | ||
| So these guys are really isolated. | ||
| And so what Gillies does is he gives them their identity back. | ||
| So it starts on the battlefields of World War I, and it's going to kind of follow Gillies throughout. | ||
| I like to do character-driven stories. | ||
| Even though they're 100% true, I like to sort of follow medical history through the eyes of one particular person. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, the history of plastic surgery is fascinating to me, and I'm hooked on that show, Botched. | ||
| Oh yeah, people always mention that. | ||
| That show is so crazy. | ||
| This is me watching Botched. | ||
| This is me all the time, like, Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Jesus Christ, what are you doing, man? | ||
| Stop doing that! | ||
| And what people put themselves through, right? | ||
| I started following some plastic surgeons on Instagram just to kind of know what they're doing today and thinking about the ethics of how they target people on social media and how do we feel about that. | ||
| And I'm telling you, I'm 37. I'm feeling bad about my body. | ||
| I can't imagine if you're like 14 and awkward and you're Barb, you know, and you have access to these accounts and the effect it has on young people on Instagram and everything. | ||
| Well, I had Jonathan Haidt on the podcast who wrote this book, The Coddling of the American Mind, and one of the big things that he discusses is people comparing themselves to others through social media and children, particularly girls. | ||
| There's higher instances of suicide, cutting, depression, much higher instances of depression. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| Yeah, I believe it too. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And then you see someone like Kylie Jenner Who transforms herself literally from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan. | ||
| And it's all done through the knife. | ||
| And it's crazy. | ||
| And that's the whole thing. | ||
| Like that kind of beauty is unattainable really. | ||
| Oh yeah, this is Harold Gilley's, one of his patients. | ||
| Wow, that's the end? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what he did was he invented this thing called the tubed pedicle where he would take skin and he would – he basically created a tube and he could place it somewhere on the face where the defect was and the blood supply would make it attach and – That guy did an incredible job on that guy's nose. | ||
| I mean for 19 – that's probably 1917 right there. | ||
| That's like better than a lot of the people on Botch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| It really is. | ||
| I'm not joking. | ||
| Particularly the final product. | ||
| And that's Gilly's down there. | ||
| Yeah, that's another... | ||
| Man. | ||
| No, he was incredible. | ||
| And really, when you think about what these guys went through, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So my book is starting with this guy named Percy Clare who shot through both cheeks and his face is just blowing off. | ||
| And to get off the battlefield was half the struggle because if your face is blown off, most of the time the stretcher bears will just pass you up. | ||
|
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Oh, Jesus. | |
| Because they think you're going to die. | ||
| But it was a survivable wound. | ||
| And so just getting off the battlefield, you know, so you sit there for 12 hours. | ||
|
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Oh, my God. | |
| Maybe you die in the process. | ||
| And you have no food and you can't eat. | ||
| No food. | ||
| And that was the other thing. | ||
| So a lot of these guys died because well-intending nurses would lay them down. | ||
| And if you don't have a jaw, your tongue slips back into your throat and you choke or you suffocate. | ||
| So just getting to Harold Gilley's hospital. | ||
| So he starts this incredible facial and jaw unit in Britain during the war just to get there was amazing. | ||
| A battle. | ||
| And then you have to go through all these painful operations. | ||
| And so I want to look at that. | ||
| And then, of course, how does that become what we do today? | ||
| But equally, I always tell people that botched is one form of plastic surgery. | ||
| But of course, there's a lot of important surgeons doing reconstructive work. | ||
| And now we have face transplants, which are incredible. | ||
| I don't know, Jamie, if you can find someone who's had a face transplant. | ||
| Yeah, there's been quite a few. | ||
| Yeah, I think the hardest part is finding the donor. | ||
| It's hard to get people to donate their organs as it is, but think about a face. | ||
| It's so personal. | ||
| And the last one, National Geographic, did a spread on it. | ||
| I think it was an 18-year-old girl who shot herself in the face. | ||
| And in a moment of rage, and anyway, she ended up having this face transplant about three years later. | ||
| And the donor face, I think, was someone who was in their 30s. | ||
| This person had died, I think, of an overdose. | ||
| And then the family decided to give this face over. | ||
| So it's actually incredible what we can do when you think about, you know, from the battlefields of World War I to what Gilly's doing to where we are today with facial reconstruction. | ||
| And it's just going to get better and better. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure it is going to get better and better. | ||
| And for people with disfiguring injuries and things, it's fantastic. | ||
| What freaks me out about Botched is the psychological aspect of people constantly tinkering with their looks. | ||
| Yeah, and now they have apps where you can upload your face and you can change things about your face. | ||
| We're all becoming more and more insecure, I think, with social media. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's part of this world where nothing is real. | ||
| That's the other part of it. | ||
| A lot of these pictures aren't real. | ||
| People are doctoring their photos to make themselves look different than they actually do look. | ||
|
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I know. | |
| Someone walks into the studio and you're like, wait, that's not what I thought that person was going to look like. | ||
| This woman who's friends with my wife, her neighbor is a model, and she takes all of her photos with no makeup on, and then they put the makeup on her. | ||
| Oh my gosh! | ||
| I didn't know they could do that. | ||
| Yeah, that's how they do it. | ||
| They do it all through Photoshop. | ||
| Wait, Jamie, can you do that for me? | ||
| Can you edit this video? | ||
| He can do whatever. | ||
| He can turn you into an avatar lady. | ||
| He can do anything. | ||
| But it's kind of crazy that they take photos with no makeup and then they add the blush and the eyeshadow and all that stuff. | ||
| That's wild, yeah. | ||
| Nothing's real. | ||
| Nothing's real anymore. | ||
| We kind of just... | ||
| I don't want to go down this road in this conversation, but I think we're preparing ourselves for a time where nothing is real. | ||
| I think we're preparing ourselves for a time where we live inside some sort of a simulation. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's interesting because celebrities like yourself have to really think about how your image is used after you're gone as well now. | ||
| Like something that you didn't have to think about. | ||
| So there was a commercial with Audrey Hepburn in Britain, and it's a galaxy chocolate commercial. | ||
| And she's there and it looks like she's eating a chocolate bar. | ||
| And so the ways that they can manipulate images. | ||
| And I think for the first time, a lot of celebrities need to really think carefully about whether they're okay with their images being used in certain kinds of ways after their death, like who owns your image. | ||
| It's just like when you look at medical history in the past, you don't own your body. | ||
| And so a lot of these surgeons get hold of these bodies to dissect. | ||
| And they're digging them up from graveyards. | ||
| There were body snatchers. | ||
| They called themselves resurrection men. | ||
| And they would go into these cemeteries and they would dig up these bodies. | ||
| And they would oftentimes strip the body naked because it was illegal to steal possessions from the corpse but not the body itself. | ||
|
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What? | |
| Because there was no concept of the body being sort of property. | ||
| So they would throw the clothes back into the grave. | ||
| And they were really clever in the ways they did it. | ||
| They usually sent a woman in the daytime to masquerade as a mourner. | ||
| And she would kind of go through the graveyard and she would see where the fresh graves were because of course you'd want the body to be as fresh as possible. | ||
| And then at nighttime they would go in there and they would dig up these bodies and they could take as many as 12 bodies in a night. | ||
| It was like hard labor and it was very lucrative because the only legal bodies to dissect in Britain in the early 19th century were bodies of executed criminals. | ||
| Of people who had murdered other people, so specifically murderers. | ||
| So if you went to say goodbye to your nana and drop some flowers on her grave and there's just a big hole in the ground? | ||
| Well, they would cover it up, but you do get these stories of people finding out that a body... | ||
| 1785, this person goes to this graveyard and discovers that a body is missing, that a body has been snatched. | ||
| And everybody in the village goes to this graveyard and digs up their relatives and drags these coffins back to their home until they can make the cemetery safer. | ||
|
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Oh my God. | |
| Which is insane because people were really feared this. | ||
| And so yesterday on Twitter, I put up a picture of something called a cemetery gun. | ||
| So they had these devices that they would put at the foot of the grave and it had like a trip wire. | ||
| And so you could set up the gun to shoot anybody you would. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| And there's actually a really awful story of a grieving father who this was set up at the grave and he accidentally trips it and he gets shot. | ||
| So, you know, it wasn't exactly a safe way to protect the bodies, but they also had Watchmen. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| That's from your Instagram or your Twitter feed. | ||
| That's Twitter, yeah. | ||
| Everybody went nuts on that yesterday. | ||
| Cemetery gun. | ||
| 19th century use to protect against body snatchers. | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| It's a musket. | ||
| Yeah, it was hardcore. | ||
| I mean, you'd have to be quite wealthy as well to set something like that up at the foot of your relative's grave. | ||
| They also used coffin collars, so that was sort of like an iron, well, it was a collar, and they would nail it to the bottom of the coffin. | ||
| So what a body snatcher would typically do is just open the foot of the grave. | ||
| He wouldn't dig up the whole grave. | ||
| He'd smash open the lid, and he'd have instruments to kind of drag the body out. | ||
| Well, if the corpse is nailed to the bottom of the coffin, you're going to have a lot of trouble. | ||
| Dragging that body out. | ||
| So people, you know, they did all kinds of things. | ||
| They put these cages over the graves to protect them. | ||
| So people, the internet, God bless it, will say, to protect against vampires or to keep vampires from coming out. | ||
| It had nothing to do with that. | ||
| Or zombies. | ||
| It was to prevent body snatchers from getting a hold of those corpses. | ||
| But, you know, those bodies... | ||
| Yeah, there they are. | ||
| Mort safes, they were called. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And you'll see them a lot in Britain. | ||
| And people were very paranoid about this. | ||
| I mean, you can find a lot of examples of this. | ||
| And bodies were stolen a lot. | ||
| And thank God they were on some level, right? | ||
| because think about how much we learn from these bodies. | ||
| Bodies were needed to be dissected to teach medical students. | ||
| And one of the scenes in the book, I talk about the dead house. | ||
| They called it the dead house. | ||
| And everybody had a different experience in the dead house. | ||
| There's probably people listening who've been in a dissection room, and you have a really vivid memory of that. | ||
| It's probably bright and white and clinical. | ||
| Well, these places, the bodies would have been bloated and partly decomposed, Dissecting bodies was dangerous because you could cut yourself and you can infect yourself with bacteria. | ||
| They weren't wearing gloves. | ||
| And so you get examples of people cutting themselves and dying within 48 hours. | ||
| So going into medicine was dangerous. | ||
| And there's a story in this book about a guy who goes into the dead house for the first time and he freaks out and he sees all these like mice and rats and things like that eating the bodies. | ||
| And so he jumps out the window and he runs off. | ||
| But later he becomes accustomed to it as we all become accustomed to horrible things at some point. | ||
| And he actually starts taking pieces of the corpse and throwing it to the poor little starving creatures that are in the dead house. | ||
| Jesus! | ||
| Yeah, so it's kind of like, you know, that horror that we all experience possibly when we're confronted with death to accepting it as you have to as a medical student if you want to go on. | ||
| So the dead house is particularly – it would have smelled – dissection would have been a winter sport because the bodies wouldn't decompose as quickly. | ||
| You, of course, wouldn't want to be dissecting in the heat of the summer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So did they literally have seasons for dissecting? | ||
| Yeah, they would tend to teach students in the winter. | ||
| And did they wear like winter jackets? | ||
| Yeah, they would have probably because, well, they had a fireplace at the end of the room as well. | ||
| Make it really stuffy and smelly. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And you couldn't really predict what a person had died from as well. | ||
| So remember, people are dying from things like smallpox, which is awful. | ||
| And this is before mass vaccinations. | ||
| This is certainly before antibiotics. | ||
| And so a lot of doctors or medical students die as a result of going into the profession. | ||
|
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|
Oh, wow. | |
| So are they getting it from these corpses, people that died? | ||
| They can get bacterial infections, certainly, and just being with patients. | ||
| If a patient comes in with smallpox, and in smallpox, a lot of people, I don't know if I, did I send you a picture of smallpox, Jamie? | ||
| A lot of people think, oh, it's like chickenpox. | ||
| Like, it's not like chickenpox. | ||
| It's a really awful disease. | ||
| And it's the only disease that we have eradicated ever in human history. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is incredible. | ||
| So it's one of those ones. | ||
| Yeah, it's unbelievably bad. | ||
| It makes me itch when I look at it as well. | ||
| It's horrific. | ||
| Very disfiguring. | ||
| You see children with it. | ||
| And it was so common. | ||
| It was very common. | ||
| It was very feared as well because it was so disfiguring. | ||
| And so if you were, for instance, a wealthy woman and you got smallpox and you were scarred, your family might worry that they couldn't marry you off. | ||
| So, you know, it was one of those diseases that left its mark on you, literally. | ||
| And it also had a high mortality rate as well. | ||
| But it wasn't like chickenpox. | ||
| No. | ||
| There's my PSA. It's not like chickenpox. | ||
| Well, it's one of those things that we're so thankful that people have figured out how to get rid of something. | ||
| Yeah, and smallpox vaccine was invented in the 18th century. | ||
| Most people don't know it's that old. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah, Edward Jenner invented it. | ||
| And actually, the biggest anti-vaxxer movement or protest happened in the 19th century. | ||
| 100,000 people turned out to march in Britain against Jenner. | ||
| People thought that their children would turn into cows because he used cowpox, the virus cowpox, to bestow immunity onto people. | ||
| And so there was this huge fear that, you know, it was dirty to kind of insert this animal virus into people. | ||
| And so there was this big protest, 100,000 people, to protest the fact that six parents had been jailed for not vaccinating their children. | ||
| And so this story is fascinating. | ||
| Much older than we think. | ||
| And the fears that we have about vaccines are not that dissimilar to what people worried about in the past as well. | ||
| But Jenner is an incredible figure. | ||
| That is incredible when you stop and think about the fact that this is still going on today with the internet. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you can find out. | ||
| I mean, I had Dr. Peter Hotez on recently to talk about vaccines and the misconceptions that people have. | ||
| And he explained that they've isolated a bunch of different environmental factors and genes that contribute to autism, but that it all takes place in the womb. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But people don't want to hear that. | ||
| No, I mean, and that is the danger of the way information is now spread, of course. | ||
| Echo chambers. | ||
| It is, you know. | ||
| Confirmation bias is the real danger. | ||
| In the past, it was actually harder to get that message out. | ||
| But a lot of, you know, you get famous sort of cartoons of... | ||
| of people sort of turning to cows. | ||
| My new husband is a cartoonist, and so it's like this powerful way of kind of conveying images and fears and stuff. | ||
| So yeah, people had that fear of vaccines for a long time, but Edward Jenner coming up with his vaccine undoubtedly saved millions of people's lives. | ||
| It's so amazing that the problem is still around today, even with all the information that we have available. | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, there was a Fox News newscaster who recently said that he doesn't wash his hands because he can't see germs. | ||
| I don't know who it was. | ||
| I think he was joking. | ||
| Hopefully he was joking. | ||
| Because he said the next day he actually washes his hands. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| So people were sending that to me because, again, like Lister. | ||
|
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Yes, right. | |
| And I always tell people, you know, it is that idea of what you can't see. | ||
| It's hard to convince people. | ||
| And with Lister, you know, if you think about it, here's this young guy and he's coming along and he's saying there's these invisible little creatures and they're killing your patients. | ||
| And trust me, I have this really weird instrument called a microscope and I can see them. | ||
| And it was a leap of faith. | ||
| He was also accusing the older surgeons of inadvertently killing their patients because if they weren't washing their hands, they were leading to higher mortality rates. | ||
| So they probably fought against it as well. | ||
| Yeah, so there was huge pushback. | ||
| So what Lister ultimately does is he turns to the younger generation and he changes their minds. | ||
| And so it's a slow burn. | ||
| It's not like, you know, the movie moment, unfortunately, where it just happens all at once. | ||
| And it takes quite a long time. | ||
| And it's weird that it takes so long, because if you think about him coming in 1876 to America, it's after the Civil War, people were dying, soldiers were dying of high infection rates. | ||
| They were packing wounds with mud. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, it couldn't get worse than that, right? | ||
| And so people were dying of all these kinds of infections. | ||
| He comes to Philadelphia to convince the medical community and speaker after speaker just denounces him on the first day. | ||
| And then he gets up and he does his demonstrations and he starts to slowly change people's minds. | ||
| But it takes a long time. | ||
| The cover of the American book is... | ||
| The American version, I should say, is a famous painting by, I don't know if people can see that, by Samuel Gross. | ||
| It's called The Gross Clinic. | ||
| The guy in the middle, it is gross as well, but the guy in the middle is Samuel Gross. | ||
| And he so didn't believe in Lister that he would walk into the room and he'd slam the door and he'd say, there. | ||
| Mr. Lister's germs can't get in anymore. | ||
| And you can see in this that he's wearing his street clothes. | ||
| He's sticking his dirty fingers into this wound. | ||
| And there's a woman in the background, and she's covering her face, and she's the mother of the patient. | ||
| And she's wearing black because she expects her son to die. | ||
| So this is the US cover and for the UK cover, I think I sent that to you Jamie, I sent you a picture of both covers side by side. | ||
| It's another painting by Eakins and it was done within 10 years and it's called the Agnew Clinic and it's totally different because the doctors are wearing white, there's a sense that they understand germs, there's a sense that antisepsis is being used there. | ||
| So that kind of before and after shot in such a short period that Lister is able to change the world. | ||
| What made you choose different covers for the UK and the US version? | ||
| Well, so that's... | ||
| Actually, writers don't... | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| So you can see... | ||
| So Penguin published it in the UK, so they've stylized the original painting, but you kind of get a sense of what it would have looked like. | ||
| And actually, you have women appearing in the operating theater professionally as nurses, so this is after the Florence Nightingale revolution as well. | ||
| So it still looks different to the way we operate, but you can definitely see a difference between those two paintings. | ||
| Can you refresh my memory on the Florence Nightingale revolution? | ||
| So Florence Nightingale is in this book a little bit. | ||
| People always wonder why I didn't speak about her as much, but actually she didn't believe in germs at first. | ||
| She thought Lister was quite hysterical with his idea of germs, but she was working towards sanitation in hospitals. | ||
| So they're working towards the same goal, but just with different... | ||
| Slightly different tactics. | ||
| So she revolutionizes nursing to make it a more respectable profession. | ||
| Before then, nurses, you wouldn't want your daughter becoming a nurse if you were from a well-respected family because she would be privy to the male body. | ||
| So you wouldn't want her interacting with male patients. | ||
| So really kind of lowly, poor women went into nursing and And it wasn't really a respected profession until Florence Nightingale comes along and there's this sort of revolution. | ||
| So the revolution is not just about the profession, though, but it's about the sanitation reforms that she brings about in hospitals. | ||
| So you see that on the cover as well. | ||
| But there's also another guy. | ||
| I'm sure there's like... | ||
| I always sort of predict comments. | ||
| I shouldn't think about what people are going to say, but... | ||
| People tend to get mad when I give lectures because I don't talk about this guy. | ||
| There's groupies out there that love this physician named Semmelweis. | ||
| And I do talk about him in the book a little bit. | ||
| So Semmelweis was this... | ||
| Groupies? | ||
| I call them groupies. | ||
| Semmelweis groupies. | ||
| Because every time I give a talk, there's always one person who asks this question. | ||
| And I have to smile to myself and I'm like, here it is. | ||
| And they say, well, I think you'll find you haven't talked about Semmelweis. | ||
| Kamelweiss was practicing in Austria, and he was putting this idea together that if you wash your hands and you go onto the hospital wards, infection rates went down. | ||
| And he was ridiculed heavily. | ||
| They called him the hand washer. | ||
| And he ends up being put in an insane asylum. | ||
| And it's this really kind of sad, weird death that he has. | ||
| And he's really sort of persecuted for these ideas of hand washing and infection rates. | ||
| He's doing it a little bit before Lister comes onto the scene. | ||
| Lister's not aware of Semmelweiss' work. | ||
| But equally, I always tell people that Semmelweiss doesn't really do it first if we're going to play that game. | ||
| Because, again, there's a difference between the basic sanitation and then understanding why you're implementing it. | ||
| So until you understand that germs exist, it doesn't make sense. | ||
| You can't really convince people. | ||
| And that's where Lister comes in. | ||
| He takes Louis Pasteur's germ theory and he's able to convince people in the medical community that germs exist. | ||
| So until we understand, again, why wash your hands if they're just going to get dirty? | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| So again, why did you have two different covers? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| So the publisher just picks whatever covers they want, basically. | ||
| So my U.S. publisher had come up with this. | ||
| My U.K. publisher came up with a cover I didn't like that much. | ||
| And so I said, well, why don't we use the second Eakins painting so that they're I like the font better on the U.S. cover. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I love this Victorian font. | ||
| And I think the image of that guy wearing street clothes is just more emblematic. | ||
| It's so evocative. | ||
| This book, this cover actually, so it's been translated I think into about 15 languages now. | ||
| So most of them kind of take this image. | ||
| I was wondering if you knew what this... | ||
| Might be. | ||
| So it's a circular metal contraption with teeth on the inside for people who are just listening. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| So this is called a jugum penis. | ||
| This is a Victorian anti-masturbation device. | ||
|
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|
What? | |
| Yay! | ||
| There's the real one. | ||
| This is a prop that I use for under the knife. | ||
| That's the real one. | ||
| So what would happen is if the person got an erection, it would clamp down and obviously kill the erection pretty quickly. | ||
| Can I see that? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| That's one we made for the show. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's basically similar to what? | ||
| It's similar. | ||
| If you see the one on the screen, it has a spring device. | ||
|
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|
Thank God it's adjustable. | |
| So why were they trying to get people to stop masturbating? | ||
| So the Victorians were obsessed with masturbation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's probably a lot of people out there who know that Kellogg's Corn Flakes came out of this sort of obsession with masturbation. | ||
| Please tell people that story. | ||
| We heard it from Dr. Chris Ryan. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, it's so funny. | ||
| Well, it's funny in a ha-ha kind of horrifying way. | ||
| Kellogg was obsessed with masturbation. | ||
| He thought that a lot of his patients were suffering from all kinds of mental ailments and physical ailments because they were masturbating too much. | ||
| And he thought that a diet bland and high in fiber would kind of kill the fire in the belly. | ||
| And so he invented what became Kellogg's Corn Flakes. | ||
| How strange. | ||
| But his brother was the one who commercialized it. | ||
| His brother's like, we should add sugar. | ||
| And Dr. Kellogg was like, no, people, we're masturbating all the time. | ||
| We can't add sugar. | ||
| And they had this split, and Kellogg's Corn Flakes became the commercial version with the delicious sugar added in. | ||
| So that was the brother's idea? | ||
| It was the brother's idea to add the sugar and make it sort of delicious. | ||
| Oh yeah, that was illustrated by my husband. | ||
| We do all kinds of- He did that? | ||
| Yeah, for the YouTube. | ||
| Oh, so that's not an original- No, no. | ||
| Worried your son and heir is becoming a dirty little self-abuser. | ||
| Stop all contemptible. | ||
| Is this an actual text from... | ||
| Yeah, you know, I have... | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| 13 cock lane. | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| There is a cock lane in London, though. | ||
| I bet there is. | ||
| Stop all contemptible onanism? | ||
| What is onanism? | ||
| Nasturbating and... | ||
| Onanism? | ||
| Have you ever heard that? | ||
|
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|
I don't know. | |
| With the infallible and modestly priced jugum penis. | ||
| So, was that a common thing during the Victorian era? | ||
| So, yeah, you get... | ||
| I mean, the idea that masturbating is bad for your health goes to the 18th century. | ||
| We kind of tend to think about it as a Victorian obsession because it becomes... | ||
| It's a more and more accepted idea in medical terms. | ||
| That it's bad for you. | ||
| That it's bad for you. | ||
| And you get these, like, sort of drawings of men, like, languishing on the couch because they masturbated too much or whatever. | ||
| There's a lot of dudes out there right now that can relate. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| They're probably in the throes of it. | ||
| They just need the jug and penis. | ||
| And also, there's another one I sent you, Jamie. | ||
| I think the sort of, like, looks like a flaccid penis. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| There's another one? | ||
| This is really high. | ||
| Yeah, they came in all shapes and sizes. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, now it would probably just be... | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Are you supposed to pee out of that? | ||
| Yeah, maybe you could, actually. | ||
| Seems like there's holes at the end of it. | ||
| Like, you have to just... | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Imagine what that thing smelled like. | ||
| Oh, Christ. | ||
| And look at that ball at the bottom with the hook. | ||
| That seems super uncomfortable. | ||
| That thing sits in between your legs? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So it must be like a hook where you could strap it in. | ||
| Strap it in, yeah. | ||
| That's like a Thai steel cup. | ||
| I don't know who's coming on the show afterwards, but they got a lot of... | ||
| Ron Funches. | ||
|
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|
Okay. | |
| The good news is Ron is a hilarious comedian, so we're all good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| We might have to redo the entire show just with Ron and get his take on all this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, just show him. | ||
| I'll just leave these objects behind. | ||
| God, the cup is so gross. | ||
| It is gross. | ||
| And the fact he had to pee out of those, it looked like a spaghetti strainer at the end of it. | ||
| I knew. | ||
| I thought, you know, when I was going on the show, I'm like, what can I bring Joe Rogan that's going to, you know, stimulate the conversation and anti-masturbation device? | ||
| It's always a crowd pleaser. | ||
| Well, with men, it's always an issue. | ||
| It's always a fascination, yeah. | ||
| So they thought that it was causing all these ailments. | ||
| They thought it was causing all these different problems. | ||
| Yeah, and graham crackers as well come out of that. | ||
| So Reverend Graham was also obsessed with masturbation, just like Kellogg. | ||
| And so he created this sort of dry, tasteless biscuit. | ||
| So everybody, you know, crumbling them into their... | ||
| Meanwhile, little did he know that someone would invent s'mores. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And make it pretty fucking awesome. | ||
| You know, you add marshmallows and chocolate. | ||
| Or the graham cracker pie crust, right? | ||
| So we're just like, now, you know, I don't know if it works, if people feel like that that's helping them with their masturbation problems. | ||
| But hey, leave a comment. | ||
| Well, it's just crazy that most people have no idea that that was the origin of this stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| That's what's so funny. | ||
| There's so many, like Listerine, graham crackers, Kellogg, cornflakes, all this kind of stuff that has sort of a medical background to it. | ||
| And wasn't there a medical background in the term hysterical? | ||
| That hysterical was related to women? | ||
| Yeah, the idea that the womb wanders. | ||
| So people thought that the female womb was like an animal. | ||
| In and of itself, which, you know, and it would move around the body. | ||
| And so they would even do things like they would smoke it back into place. | ||
| Smoke? | ||
| They would put like incense and all kinds of things to kind of like get it, like coax it back into place. | ||
| I can't even imagine that people were going to start following me after this based off of these weird stories. | ||
| Come to my platform. | ||
| I have tons of different stories like this. | ||
| But there was a time where women would go to the doctor to get stimulated as well, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that true? | |
| So this is like a little bit out of my expertise. | ||
| I think that's been proven to be false, actually. | ||
| But there was, I believe, and I could be wrong on this, that there was a Victorian idea that a woman had to orgasm in order to become pregnant. | ||
| So that was an important part of it. | ||
| It wasn't just a Victorian thing. | ||
| I'm pretty sure they taught me that in high school. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Are you serious? | ||
| What high school is this? | ||
| They're like, if you want to get a woman pregnant, make sure she orgasms. | ||
| The idea was that part of the male orgasming inside the woman was what led to her having an orgasm, which led to her getting pregnant. | ||
| That is weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there was – I think there was like a – I might have completely remembered this incorrectly. | |
| Again, I was probably 15 at the time. | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| But there was someone – I think it was like a senator or congress. | ||
| I live in the UK now, so I'm not as up to date with all the crazy stuff going on over here. | ||
| But I think there was a senator who said this again, this idea that a woman had to orgasm. | ||
| Meaning undermining the idea that you couldn't be raped unless you had an orgasm, which was a Victorian belief. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| I think that was really recently. | ||
| Yeah, I think it was in the last year. | ||
| I hate to say it! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ! | |
| I really do remember... | ||
| I should just be in the background popping up and I could have a sign that says 18th century or 19th century. | ||
| Where did that idea come from originally? | ||
| I do have this weird, vague memory that that was the way that... | ||
| That you were taught? | ||
| It's too weird. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| It's too vague. | ||
| It does sound too weird. | ||
| Now I picture you went to a really Victorian school. | ||
| No, I went to a place called Newton South in a suburb of Boston. | ||
| Really nice school. | ||
| Nothing wrong with it. | ||
| Other than your sex ed. | ||
| I'm not sure if that was... | ||
| And did they pass out the jug and penis as well after? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, they didn't. | |
| They did smack our hands, though. | ||
| They caught us masturbating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But why were people so obsessed with that? | ||
| Why were they so self-pleasuring? | ||
| Yeah, and I think that, again, you look at that sort of buttoned-up Victorian mentality. | ||
| Didn't they put dresses over the legs of pianos and chairs and stuff like that? | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| I think they did. | ||
| Because it would have been provocative? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There might be more bullshit that I remember. | ||
| But I really do remember something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everybody fact-check that one, yeah. | |
| I think we fact-checked this before. | ||
| It's horseshit, right? | ||
| It says it's not real. | ||
| Okay, you know what? | ||
| I remember where I heard it from. | ||
| I heard it from Terrence McKenna. | ||
| It was one of the things he talked about during one of his speeches. | ||
| That's right, we did fact-check that. | ||
| I mean, we like to think that the past is really different from us, which it is in some ways. | ||
| But, you know, again, like, we still share some similar fears. | ||
| And the masturbation thing, actually, the last thing I want to show you that I brought is this. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| This is a urine wheel that would have dated to the medieval period. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And so the idea was that the doctor could diagnose you according to the color of your urine. | ||
| Spoiler alert, if your urine's black, you're probably in big trouble. | ||
| Yeah, Rob Doe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they didn't just look at the color. | ||
| They tasted the urine as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hilarious. | |
| And they could diagnose diabetes because someone with diabetes, their urine tastes sweet. | ||
| So they were actually diagnosing diabetes. | ||
| Oh, Christ. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| That's the one we based it off. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| But my favorite part of the urine in the medieval period and doctors with urine... | ||
| Some practitioners would take the urine and put it into a divination bowl and they could tell your future. | ||
| And I think they should bring that back. | ||
| At the end of your checkup, not to be covered by insurance, but out of pocket. | ||
| If they test your urine and you're totally dehydrated and there's blood in there, like, yeah, bro, you ain't going to make it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You don't even have to do the divination bowl. | ||
| You don't have to do that. | ||
| Well, it's weird that image in the whole circle, the center circle, that a guy is the doctor holding the flask? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Is that the doctor? | ||
| Yep, that would be the doctor holding the flask and actually... | ||
| It's like a wine taster. | ||
| He is like a wine taster. | ||
| I did a whole, again, a YouTube video on this, which is why I have this stupid prop. | ||
| And we cut through images. | ||
| And that image of the doctor holding the flask was sort of the predominant image of a physician up into a certain period. | ||
| Now it's sort of like the stethoscope is the object now that we associate with doctors. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The flask used to be. | ||
| The urine flask used to be it. | ||
| That was it? | ||
| Yeah, they were called it. | ||
| The urine flask and a doctor's pole. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the plague mask. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| But they used to call them piss prophets because they tell your fortune using your urine. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I think that is something we should bring back. | ||
| I think you have the power to bring that back. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| If there's tarot card readers, why not piss prophets? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At least piss prophets are basing it on something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Throw your urine into that divination bowl. | ||
| I know there's so many images of the doctor holding the flask. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| Obviously, the color of your urine could be an indicator of health. | ||
| It still is today. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And look at the guy. | ||
| He's like, what do you think, doc? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How am I doing? | |
| I know. | ||
| He looks like he's hurting. | ||
| Very, very worried. | ||
| There's got to be some piss prophets in L.A. Yeah. | ||
| Los Feliz. | ||
| They're gonna open up a store right now. | ||
| Look at the band-aid around the guy's head. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, he's hurting. | ||
| The guy's got a head injury and the doctor's checking his piss. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nothing good, yeah. | |
| What's the next image? | ||
| What's going on there? | ||
| I think he's pulling a tooth, yeah. | ||
| Oh, Christ. | ||
| Yeah, actually, the barbers, when they pulled teeth, sometimes they would have a drum in the shop and it would get louder as they got closer to pulling the teeth, which would make me more anxious. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| And the barber shop was a male domain because you'd also get advice on sexual diseases because, of course, everybody had syphilis. | ||
| Oh, so this is a fake nose. | ||
| So everybody sort of lost their noses. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| How'd they lose their nose? | ||
| Okay, so something you probably don't... | ||
| Something you probably don't know about syphilis. | ||
| I don't know if we have that image of syphilis that I sent. | ||
| Poor Jamie. | ||
| I told your bookie manager, Matt Staggs, I said, send these images to Jamie and don't tell them any context. | ||
| You know, and be like, what the hell is this podcast going to be on? | ||
| They lost their noses to the syphilis? | ||
| Yeah, they lost their noses. | ||
| So syphilis attacks sort of the soft tissue. | ||
| And the image that I sent through, which you'll show in a minute, The guy has holes in his scalp as well. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So that's a photograph. | ||
| That is a photograph from the 19th century. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| It ate right through his head. | ||
| He held onto his nose, though, so you could just cover that with a hat. | ||
| Oh, I guess. | ||
| But it was incredibly painful, and Al Capone had syphilis, and so you lost your mind. | ||
| It attacked the soft tissues, attacked the brain. | ||
| It was really... | ||
| So people today, you know, I'll show these images on my Instagram or Twitter, and people will be like, wow, I didn't know syphilis was so bad. | ||
| It's like, people Well, syphilis is also responsible for powdered wigs. | ||
| You know that story, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, you don't? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, I got something for you then. | ||
| Yeah, you got something. | ||
| When it was, I forget, some noble person got syphilis and started wearing a wig. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when they started wearing wigs, other people started emulating them because they were the celebrities of the kingdom. | ||
| I feel like this is a drunk history. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| No, this is real. | ||
| This is legitimate. | ||
| And the more wealthy you were, because syphilis makes your hair fall out as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, your teeth fall out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so the more wealthy you were, the bigger and taller your wig would be. | ||
| That is where the term big wigs comes from. | ||
| Oh, that's interesting. | ||
| I mean, I knew that in the 18th century that the wigs were getting bigger, like the fashions. | ||
| In fact, my husband illustrated a book called The Gin Lane Gazette. | ||
| And as it's sort of like an 18th century newspaper. | ||
| And as the newspaper moves on, the women would have to sit at the bottom of the carriage because their wigs were so high in some cases. | ||
| I wonder if the women had syphilis. | ||
| Oh my gosh, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Because it would be passed on or... | ||
| So that's probably why they had wigs as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And with syphilis, you know, your nose fell off and it was so prevalent in the 19th century that they had no nose clubs. | ||
| So people would get together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they would, in London, they would cheer the fact that, you know, we lost our nose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We lost our nose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have syphilis. | |
| So they couldn't smell anything either. | ||
| No, I mean, it was awful. | ||
| And actually, one of the ways that they treated syphilis was through mercury, which is very poisonous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, terrific. | |
| And so when you talk about the loss of- Is this a no-nose club? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Writers in London- I don't know if that's the no-nose club, but- Yeah, they might have STDs, though, it says. | |
| Yeah, they're all just standing there with top hats and underwear. | ||
| Pull up the thing, though, about bigwigs, so I can show her- Oh, do you see that one right up there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, sorry. | |
| Oh yeah, that's from mine. | ||
| If you go up, wait, up Jamie. | ||
| So that man didn't lose his nose to syphilis, but that's an early form of rhinoplasty that dates back to the Renaissance. | ||
| And you'd have to stay in that position for weeks while that grafted. | ||
| I believe this man was injured. | ||
| So this guy had a cut of his, for people just listening, there's a slice off of his arm that's connected to his nose, and they have taped and strapped his arm to the top of his head. | ||
| So he's to stay in this position while the chunk of his arm grows into his face, and then they're going to cut it and remove it when it develops its own blood supply. | ||
| It's like The Nick. | ||
| If people have watched that show, The Nick, they have a scene with this. | ||
| So, yeah, it was so uncomfortable. | ||
| You might be better off with no-no's. | ||
| Yeah, you might be better off. | ||
| And Mercury, of course, you would lose your teeth in it. | ||
| Just really awful kinds of things they did with Mercury. | ||
| Well, it just didn't work. | ||
| No. | ||
| How long did that last for, the Mercury thing? | ||
| All the way into the 19th century. | ||
| And so there's a phrase... | ||
| After a bunch of people died, when they go, hey, guys, this mercury... | ||
| People are still cupping, you know? | ||
| What are we basing this on? | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Syphilis hidden between powder waste. | ||
| Syphilis epidemic in the late 1500s. | ||
| Europe left people with patchy hair loss. | ||
| Go to the actual... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who was it? | |
| Yeah, so these noblemen. | ||
| They were all gross, disgusting people with STDs. | ||
| But what is the name of the guy? | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Don't scroll. | ||
| Go back up. | ||
| Here. | ||
| Yeah, okay, there it is. | ||
| Oh, Louis XIV. Louis XIV, only 17, his mom started thinking, worried that baldness might hurt his reputation. | ||
| Louis hired 48 wig makers to save his image. | ||
| Five years later, King of... | ||
| So, but if you scroll down... | ||
| Both men likely had syphilis. | ||
| Yes, both men likely had syphilis. | ||
| So this is what started it all out. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| They're hideous, too. | ||
| I mean, to our modern sensibilities, that just looks so bizarre. | ||
| Well, not only... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, everything's gross, right? | ||
| No one's washing themselves. | ||
| Yeah, this is what I mean. | ||
| They don't know what germs are. | ||
| People think it was great. | ||
| They watch a Hollywood movie, they're like, oh, it'd be so beautiful to live in the pen. | ||
| No, it would have smelled. | ||
| People are such assholes with that. | ||
| That drives me crazy when people want to pretend... | ||
| Romanticize that it was so lovely. | ||
| There are terrible things about life today. | ||
| There absolutely are. | ||
| But this is the best time to be alive ever, by far. | ||
| Yeah, people say, is this the best time medically? | ||
| And it's like, well, hopefully that's always true, right? | ||
| Hopefully tomorrow is better than, you know, hopefully we're advancing and learning more and everything. | ||
| I mean, I think that, you know, we shouldn't look at science and medicine as totally linear, like that we're progressing towards something, but that, you know, obviously we're learning from what doesn't work and That's why I said failure is a huge part of what I love to talk about on YouTube and stuff because we just don't talk about it enough in life and science and medicine and all the things that fail and help us get to where we are today. | ||
| Well, Lindsay, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And thank you for writing this awesome book and thank you for your amazing Twitter feed. | ||
| I've been spending many, many, many moments freaking the fuck out reading your stuff and watching your images. | ||
| I'm really happy you could come down here and share all this stuff with us. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me on the show. | ||
| Tell people how to get a hold of you on Instagram, how they can check out your feed. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris on Instagram and Dr. Lindsey Fitz on Twitter and Under the Knife on YouTube and the book is The Butchering Art. | ||
| You can get it on Amazon. | ||
| I'd really love it if you bought it. | ||
| They're going to buy it. | ||
| I guarantee you. | ||
| Joe Rogan said buy it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's really good. | |
| It's really good. | ||
| It'll freak you out. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Thank you so much, Lindsey. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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