In this episode, Lindsay and Lindsay talk about the horrors of Victorian operating theaters and the people who worked in them. Lindsay is a PhD and a medical historian, and her work focuses on the history of the operating room and the horrors that went on in them, including the gruesome amputation of a leg and the removal of an entire leg in a single operation. She's also a writer and the author of The Butchering Art, which is a book about the horror of operating rooms and the fear factor of being strapped to a table in one. And Lindsay's favorite surgeon is a guy named Robert Liston, who was 6'2" tall and could hold you down with his left arm for a good portion of the 19th century. Lindsay's book is out now, and it's out in paperback! If you haven't read it yet, you should do so before you listen to this episode of Not Much, because it's a good one! It's a must-listen episode. And if you do, make sure to give it a listen, because you'll be sure to be grossed out of your mind by Lindsay's disgusting medical history photos! And don't forget to subscribe to Not Much on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share, and tell a friend about Not Much! so they can be apart of the Not Much family! Thank you, Not Much Crew! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. We're working on a new podcast called "Not Much" and we'll be giving you our best shot at getting your own ad-free version of the show next week. Please rate, review, review and subscribe so you can be featured in Not Much's next episode! in the next episode, too! Thanks, Lindsay, not much! :) Lindsay, thank you, Lindsay and we're listening to you, too, Lindsay. <3 - Lindsay, Thank you so much, Lindsay & Jamie, Sarah, Sarah, too much . Love you, Kristy, too bad? - Sarah, not too much? - Thank you for listening to this, not enough? . . . , not much, but not enough, but enough, enough, so much love you're enough, bye, bye. - thank you? ? xo, Lindsay?
00:00:28.000I'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.
00:00:35.000I'm looking forward to you doing that as well.
00:00:37.000You have fascinated me with your Twitter page.
00:00:42.000First of all, you are a doctor, right?
00:01:08.000And 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.
00:01:46.000Now, 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?
00:02:00.000Well, you could pull through the operation.
00:02:03.000But then, of course, you could die of post-operative infection.
00:02:06.000So 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.
00:02:15.000And most people don't know who he is, but they know the product Listerine.
00:03:57.000And 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.
00:05:04.000So 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.
00:05:17.000That was a really common thought, right?
00:05:20.000Yeah, I mean, we're never going to know who he is.
00:05:24.000We're still kind of obsessed with this.
00:05:26.000I've heard so many different versions of that.
00:05:28.000Yeah, and recently there was some kind of bogus DNA test of a shawl that they said belonged to one of the victims.
00:05:35.000It's impossible to prove the provenance of the object.
00:05:38.000But that was Liston, so he's 6'2", he's really tall.
00:05:41.000One 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.
00:08:58.000At this point, there's so many objects that can cause offense, of course, with medical history.
00:09:05.000There's a lot of dark history, body snatchers and things like that.
00:09:09.000And 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.
00:09:15.000But 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.
00:09:40.000I 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.
00:10:36.000Yeah, 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.
00:10:50.000And I really want to get this made into a movie.
00:10:54.000I'm trying to come into Hollywood and convince Hollywood that this Quaker surgeon from the Victorian period deserves the cinema feature.
00:11:23.000And in the past, before anesthesia, a lot of times patients were sat in chairs, so they weren't laid down.
00:11:29.000And 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.
00:11:37.000There'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.
00:11:44.000He comes to Robert Liston, the fastest knife in the West End, in 1828, and he has this huge facial tumor growing.
00:11:52.000I mean, it's been growing for about eight years.
00:13:08.000Yeah, because the hospitals were crawling with all kinds of infection.
00:13:12.000So hospitals were places for the poor.
00:13:15.000And 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.
00:13:24.000Because, I mean, that's pretty important, right?
00:13:26.000There's maggots, all kinds of things crawling around in these hospitals.
00:13:29.000So if you were wealthy or middle class, you had your surgeon come to your home.
00:13:33.000And 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.
00:13:44.000He 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?
00:15:03.000They're diagnosing it for centuries and centuries.
00:15:07.000I'm not really an expert in history of cancer, but it is around.
00:15:11.000And 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.
00:15:28.000Yeah, maybe a cyst, and she went through that for that.
00:15:31.000And 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.
00:15:41.000And so Joseph Lister, when he comes up with his antiseptic techniques, he actually performs a mastectomy on his sister on his dining room table.
00:16:15.000But 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?
00:20:55.000The 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.
00:21:11.000So 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.
00:21:21.000So 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...
00:22:14.000Yeah, and we get the red, blue, and white barber poles now.
00:22:19.000So what happened was the barber surgeons and the surgeons split off professionally at some point in history.
00:22:25.000And so the surgeons start to use blue and white poles, and the barbers use red and white poles.
00:22:30.000And I think now the red, white, and blue is like the patriotic red, white, and blue.
00:22:35.000But 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.
00:22:45.000Before they had the pole, they would advertise by putting just bowls of congealed blood in the window.
00:22:51.000And then in London, they decided, I think it was about the 14th century, they said, no more of that.
00:22:56.000So the barbers started to throw the blood into the river, which was also equally gross.
00:23:01.000So 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.
00:23:09.000But nobody could really do much for you in that period, according to our own sort of 21st century understanding.
00:23:18.000But I always say, to go back to your question about, you know, how would it feel to hear something so dumb?
00:23:25.000Well, what do you think today that, you know, in 100 years we're going to look back at?
00:23:29.000And there's definitely going to be stuff, right, that we're going to look back and go, I can't believe that.
00:23:46.000So 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.
00:23:54.000So it's kind of this weird thing that's coming back but for slightly different reasons.
00:23:58.000I don't think there's any evidence that cupping is real.
00:24:02.000And 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.
00:24:10.000But people do all kinds of weird things now, too.
00:24:33.000And 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.
00:24:40.000So people used to actually eat dead bodies.
00:24:47.000So 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.
00:25:14.000And epilepsy was so awful because it was so misunderstood.
00:25:17.000And you can imagine, you know, when someone goes into a seizure, it's scary.
00:25:23.000And 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.
00:25:35.000They ground up mummies, ancient mummies, and they would make it into pills and did all kinds of things, right?
00:25:42.000So I always point this out, we eat the placenta today, it's kind of like a form of ingesting bodily...
00:25:50.000So people were just super, super desperate back then.
00:26:55.000So 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.
00:27:44.000I mean, when you think about 150 years ago that I'm talking about, and today, it's just...
00:27:50.000And 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?
00:28:18.000Just the idea of that woman getting her breasts removed on her kitchen table.
00:28:22.000Yeah, 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.
00:28:30.000And he said, as little kids do, would it hurt?
00:28:33.000And the surgeon said, no more than having a tooth pulled.
00:28:38.000So 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.
00:28:50.000It was just a sprain and they just decided to take it off.
00:28:53.000No, I mean, if there was a compound fracture, the chances of it becoming infected was quite high.
00:28:59.000So 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.
00:29:08.000But if there's a break in the skin, it gets infected and usually it leads to some kind of gangrene or septicemia.
00:29:53.000But 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?
00:30:01.000So you have to get into the mind, the logical mind of a Victorian surgeon.
00:30:08.000I think, Jamie, I'd also sent a picture of a surgeon with his apron on.
00:30:11.000Actually, it's a picture of a butcher.
00:30:13.000But it gives you that kind of idea of what your friendly Victorian surgeon would have been wearing.
00:30:19.000And 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.
00:30:29.000That's a butcher though, not a surgeon.
00:31:57.000So my book begins with the first operation under anesthesia.
00:32:04.000And 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.
00:32:14.000But actually, surgery becomes much more dangerous because the surgeon still doesn't understand germs, but he doesn't have the patient fighting him anymore.
00:32:23.000So he's more willing to pick up the knife and go deeper in the body, and so postoperative infection rises.
00:32:28.000And it opens with the great Robert Liston, and he performs the first operation under ether.
00:35:17.000I 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.
00:36:12.000And two of her colleagues at the Institute for Anthropology and, well, this is in Munich.
00:36:19.000They're using German words for anthropology, probably in humanities, university in Munich.
00:36:25.000The 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.
00:37:38.000It just seems like it's going to take a long time.
00:37:40.000Many resins and spices, hold on a second, were certainly used this day.
00:37:43.000We aren't entirely sure what they all were.
00:37:46.000Rare 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.
00:38:44.000That 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.
00:40:17.000But yeah, the Victorians are responsible for destroying a lot, for taking those mummies and just grounding them up and all kinds of things.
00:40:27.000What gets me is, where was the theory?
00:40:57.000So it was sort of this healing by distance.
00:41:01.000So all kinds of strange ideas existed.
00:41:04.000And 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.
00:41:12.000And actually, do you know what this is that I brought?
00:41:16.000If people are just listening, it's a long-beaked mask.
00:42:19.000No, 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.
00:43:12.000We'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.
00:43:20.000There wasn't much they could do for you.
00:44:33.000You know, if you go to Venice, they say plague Dr. Mask.
00:44:36.000It'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.
00:44:46.000So you have like a huge population of a city wearing masks and covering their identities.
00:45:29.000And so you think about the hazmat going into hot zones.
00:45:32.000That would be pretty scary if you didn't know what was going on.
00:45:35.000And certainly sort of ominous, you know, when you see the hazmat.
00:45:39.000So 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.
00:45:49.000He still didn't understand how disease was spread.
00:45:52.000Are you aware of the theory of alien abduction being a distant memory of childbirth?
00:46:00.000Yeah, 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?
00:46:12.000So 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.
00:46:29.000Most of these alien abduction experiences that people recount, they take place in some sort of a medical facility.
00:47:29.000It makes sense to me, because if you think about, like...
00:47:34.000Well, it does because people don't really go anywhere.
00:47:37.000See, 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.
00:47:47.000So what they're doing is they're dreaming, which is normal.
00:47:50.000The mind is amazing and it's so powerful.
00:48:09.000And 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...
00:48:20.000Taking 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.
00:49:15.000And 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.
00:49:59.000Or if the baby was coming out feet first.
00:50:01.000Yeah, I mean, a capable midwife could handle that.
00:50:05.000But 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.
00:50:15.000But it's unlikely that that story is true because his mother lives into old age.
00:50:20.000So probably the term cesarean comes from the Latin term meaning to cut.
00:50:24.000And the first sort of record we have of this happening, I think, is in the 16th century.
00:51:31.000That 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.
00:53:23.000And it's amazing because what they do is, obviously, they take the skull out and it's a process.
00:53:28.000And 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.
00:53:43.000But what they were finding was that some of these shrunken heads were female.
00:53:47.000Which probably means that as Westerners came into these areas, they wanted to collect these shrunken heads as curiosities, of course.
00:54:50.000I was 5'7 by the age of 10, and I was just like that weird kid with tales from the crypt.
00:54:55.000So I went on to study history in college, and then I went to Oxford and I did a master's and PhD in it.
00:55:02.000But academia doesn't allow me to be as creative and weird as I'd like to be.
00:55:08.000So 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.
00:56:01.000And then they want it, you know, like I did this thread on Twitter called your Victorian doctors trying to kill you.
00:56:08.000And 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.
00:56:16.000And then at the end of the thread, I said, but what is it about today that people will look back?
00:56:20.000But you know, this one academic was like, this is really, you know, bad history, and you're making it fun.
00:57:30.000And, you know, with your knee surgery, it was an injury from activity, right?
00:57:36.000And 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.
00:57:48.000There's a story of a cab driver in the 18th century, and he got this aneurysm behind his knee.
00:57:56.000So 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.
00:59:01.000Yeah, and if he had lost his leg, it would have been...
00:59:04.000And 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.
00:59:49.000And 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?
01:00:02.000Well, 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.
01:00:12.000And of course, if you're also going into sort of poor areas and asking people to hand over their bodies, is it really consent?
01:00:18.000Because sometimes these families don't have money for funerals.
01:00:26.000You know, it's given under the guise of science that we can only view dead bodies through the lens of science today.
01:00:33.000That's the only acceptable way, but it really is art.
01:00:36.000And 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.
01:00:50.000So, 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?
01:00:58.000So I think that, you know, it would be better if we just called it for what it was.
01:01:01.000It's art and it's supposed to be provocative and shocking.
01:01:27.000It was one of the more recent werewolf movies, but he becomes a werewolf in the operating theater.
01:01:34.000So 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.
01:01:44.000And what's the period that it's supposed to be?
01:01:53.000You 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.
01:02:03.000And they were also interested in how long do you live or your conscience after you're beheaded.
01:02:10.000So there's these experiments during the French Revolution where they're like shouting at the heads to see if the heads will blink.
01:03:01.000Because 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.
01:03:11.000But 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.
01:03:21.000And that's exactly what those theaters would have looked like as well.
01:04:06.000Yeah, 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.
01:04:37.000And this guy was like, fuck it, I'm not going to do it.
01:04:40.000He 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.
01:04:59.000I guarantee you someone is listening that can make that happen.
01:05:02.000Listen, 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.
01:05:12.000So a couple years ago, I went through a really bad divorce and I was facing deportation as a result from the UK. Oh,
01:05:34.000I want to kind of see how the sausage is made, so to speak.
01:05:36.000You know, if you're a writer and you just saw off the rights, you don't really have much creative input at all.
01:05:42.000But 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?
01:05:50.000Because 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.
01:07:40.000So 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.
01:07:51.000You 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.
01:07:57.000And Harold Gillies really designs or starts plastic surgery as we know it.
01:08:03.000And it was a time when losing a limb made you a hero, but losing your face made you a monster.
01:08:41.000And what people put themselves through, right?
01:08:43.000I 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.
01:08:55.000And I'm telling you, I'm 37. I'm feeling bad about my body.
01:08:58.000I 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.
01:09:07.000Well, 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.
01:09:21.000There's higher instances of suicide, cutting, depression, much higher instances of depression.
01:09:53.000And 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.
01:10:09.000I mean for 19 – that's probably 1917 right there.
01:10:12.000That's like better than a lot of the people on Botch.
01:10:29.000So my book is starting with this guy named Percy Clare who shot through both cheeks and his face is just blowing off.
01:10:36.000And 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.
01:11:53.000And the last one, National Geographic, did a spread on it.
01:11:58.000I think it was an 18-year-old girl who shot herself in the face.
01:12:03.000And in a moment of rage, and anyway, she ended up having this face transplant about three years later.
01:12:11.000And the donor face, I think, was someone who was in their 30s.
01:12:14.000This person had died, I think, of an overdose.
01:12:16.000And then the family decided to give this face over.
01:12:20.000So 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.
01:12:29.000And it's just going to get better and better.
01:12:32.000Yeah, I'm sure it is going to get better and better.
01:12:34.000And for people with disfiguring injuries and things, it's fantastic.
01:12:39.000What freaks me out about Botched is the psychological aspect of people constantly tinkering with their looks.
01:12:44.000Yeah, and now they have apps where you can upload your face and you can change things about your face.
01:12:50.000We're all becoming more and more insecure, I think, with social media.
01:13:08.000Someone walks into the studio and you're like, wait, that's not what I thought that person was going to look like.
01:13:14.000This 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.
01:13:50.000I 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.
01:13:55.000I think we're preparing ourselves for a time where we live inside some sort of a simulation.
01:13:59.000Yeah, 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.
01:14:07.000Like something that you didn't have to think about.
01:14:09.000So there was a commercial with Audrey Hepburn in Britain, and it's a galaxy chocolate commercial.
01:14:16.000And she's there and it looks like she's eating a chocolate bar.
01:14:20.000And so the ways that they can manipulate images.
01:14:22.000And 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.
01:14:33.000It's just like when you look at medical history in the past, you don't own your body.
01:14:37.000And so a lot of these surgeons get hold of these bodies to dissect.
01:14:41.000And they're digging them up from graveyards.
01:14:58.000Because there was no concept of the body being sort of property.
01:15:02.000So they would throw the clothes back into the grave.
01:15:05.000And they were really clever in the ways they did it.
01:15:07.000They usually sent a woman in the daytime to masquerade as a mourner.
01:15:11.000And 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.
01:15:18.000And 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.
01:15:24.000It 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.
01:15:36.000Of people who had murdered other people, so specifically murderers.
01:15:40.000So 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?
01:15:46.000Well, they would cover it up, but you do get these stories of people finding out that a body...
01:15:54.0001785, this person goes to this graveyard and discovers that a body is missing, that a body has been snatched.
01:16:00.000And 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.
01:16:25.000And 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.
01:16:33.000So, you know, it wasn't exactly a safe way to protect the bodies, but they also had Watchmen.
01:16:53.000I mean, you'd have to be quite wealthy as well to set something like that up at the foot of your relative's grave.
01:16:58.000They 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.
01:17:06.000So what a body snatcher would typically do is just open the foot of the grave.
01:18:45.000And 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.
01:18:59.000And so he jumps out the window and he runs off.
01:19:03.000But later he becomes accustomed to it as we all become accustomed to horrible things at some point.
01:19:08.000And he actually starts taking pieces of the corpse and throwing it to the poor little starving creatures that are in the dead house.
01:19:15.000Yeah, 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.
01:19:26.000So the dead house is particularly – it would have smelled – dissection would have been a winter sport because the bodies wouldn't decompose as quickly.
01:19:35.000You, of course, wouldn't want to be dissecting in the heat of the summer.
01:20:50.000It was very feared as well because it was so disfiguring.
01:20:53.000And 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.
01:21:01.000So, you know, it was one of those diseases that left its mark on you, literally.
01:21:06.000And it also had a high mortality rate as well.
01:21:31.000And actually, the biggest anti-vaxxer movement or protest happened in the 19th century.
01:21:37.000100,000 people turned out to march in Britain against Jenner.
01:21:41.000People thought that their children would turn into cows because he used cowpox, the virus cowpox, to bestow immunity onto people.
01:21:49.000And so there was this huge fear that, you know, it was dirty to kind of insert this animal virus into people.
01:21:56.000And so there was this big protest, 100,000 people, to protest the fact that six parents had been jailed for not vaccinating their children.
01:22:24.000I mean, I had Dr. Peter Hotez on recently to talk about vaccines and the misconceptions that people have.
01:22:30.000And 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.
01:23:02.000My new husband is a cartoonist, and so it's like this powerful way of kind of conveying images and fears and stuff.
01:23:09.000So 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.
01:23:19.000It's so amazing that the problem is still around today, even with all the information that we have available.
01:23:28.000Yeah, 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.
01:23:53.000And 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.
01:24:01.000And trust me, I have this really weird instrument called a microscope and I can see them.
01:24:07.000He 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.
01:24:14.000So they probably fought against it as well.
01:24:31.000And 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.
01:25:15.000The guy in the middle, it is gross as well, but the guy in the middle is Samuel Gross.
01:25:19.000And 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.
01:25:25.000Mr. Lister's germs can't get in anymore.
01:25:27.000And you can see in this that he's wearing his street clothes.
01:25:30.000He's sticking his dirty fingers into this wound.
01:25:33.000And there's a woman in the background, and she's covering her face, and she's the mother of the patient.
01:25:39.000And she's wearing black because she expects her son to die.
01:25:43.000So 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.
01:25:51.000It'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.
01:26:04.000So that kind of before and after shot in such a short period that Lister is able to change the world.
01:26:08.000What made you choose different covers for the UK and the US version?
01:26:16.000So 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.
01:26:22.000And actually, you have women appearing in the operating theater professionally as nurses, so this is after the Florence Nightingale revolution as well.
01:26:31.000So it still looks different to the way we operate, but you can definitely see a difference between those two paintings.
01:26:37.000Can you refresh my memory on the Florence Nightingale revolution?
01:26:40.000So Florence Nightingale is in this book a little bit.
01:26:44.000People always wonder why I didn't speak about her as much, but actually she didn't believe in germs at first.
01:26:49.000She thought Lister was quite hysterical with his idea of germs, but she was working towards sanitation in hospitals.
01:26:56.000So they're working towards the same goal, but just with different...
01:27:00.000So she revolutionizes nursing to make it a more respectable profession.
01:27:05.000Before 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.
01:27:14.000So you wouldn't want her interacting with male patients.
01:27:18.000So 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.
01:27:28.000So the revolution is not just about the profession, though, but it's about the sanitation reforms that she brings about in hospitals.
01:28:43.000But equally, I always tell people that Semmelweis 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.
01:28:56.000So until you understand that germs exist, it doesn't make sense.
01:30:55.000Well, it's funny in a ha-ha kind of horrifying way.
01:30:59.000Kellogg was obsessed with masturbation.
01:31:02.000He thought that a lot of his patients were suffering from all kinds of mental ailments and physical ailments because they were masturbating too much.
01:31:07.000And he thought that a diet bland and high in fiber would kind of kill the fire in the belly.
01:31:15.000And so he invented what became Kellogg's Corn Flakes.
01:34:01.000I 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?
01:35:53.000So this is like a little bit out of my expertise.
01:35:55.000I think that's been proven to be false, actually.
01:35:58.000But 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.
01:41:31.000Yeah, 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.
01:42:50.000So 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.
01:42:55.000It's like, people Well, syphilis is also responsible for powdered wigs.
01:43:48.000As 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.
01:45:06.000So 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.
01:45:17.000So 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.
01:47:09.000Hopefully tomorrow is better than, you know, hopefully we're advancing and learning more and everything.
01:47:15.000I 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.