Lindsey Fitzharris

00:004 3 Whoops, we got an issue? Okay, here we go. 5 4 3 2 Yes, and we're live. Hello Lindsey, what's happening? Not much. Thanks for having me here. Yeah, yeah, good to meet you. I'm 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 I'm looking forward to you doing that as well. You have fascinated me with your Twitter page and you like First of all, how you are a doctor, right? Well, I'm a PhD. I can't save anybody's life. I can perform, you know, Victorian surgery amputation or something. I think anybody can, right? Yeah, yeah, probably. a real one? That saw? No, this is this is a prop. So, this is This was a was a real funny 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,

01:10it's 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. an oops. It never got out of prototype phase, so I had to recreate it for my my YouTube channel. Now, when you in those old days when they didn't have antibiotics and antiseptic and When they saw someone's leg off or something like that, how many times those people live? Well, you could pull through the

02:01operation, that was one part of it. But then of course you could die of post-operative infection. Yeah. 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 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. So, but also I don't endorse that. Don't don't throw a little Listerine on it. to a doctor, man. can just see all the comments already on the YouTube, you know, she told me to

02:50throw Listerine on it. No, I I 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, it's it does. Yeah, it's it's a it's an antiseptic mouthwash. And Is it even any good for you? Like is it good to kill all that stuff inside your mouth? Like I'm not a real doctor. Right, but you're a medical historian. I'm a medical historian. I would say that Dennis would say that that Listerine's still a good product to kill all the bad bacteria. Yeah. Some form of it, something like that. I just used some. I don't know if it's Crest or Listerine or something. got to switch to Listerine now in in honor of of Joseph Lister. So, how did he know? How did he know that there was germs that they were real? so let me let me take you back to sort of before he walks on the scene. So,

03:34these 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? Uh I You know what? No one's asked me that. I don't know how much a ticket would cost for that that spectacle. Now I really need to look into that. Um but people would to watch that? Look at what they paid to watch now, right? You know, we could say You know, and when I sent you my book, I 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

04:23and 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, you know, 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 up there listening. Um so 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. a watch is. Yep, there he is. Um using a knife in that photo. Yeah, so actually the Liston knife that he invented was this long-bladed knife which they think Jack the Ripper may have also used, which is why those

05:13rumors are that Jack the Ripper may have been a medical practitioner. But uh Yeah, that was a really common thought, right? Yeah, I mean, we're never going to know who he is. It's unknowable. We're We're still kind of obsessed with this uh I've heard so many different versions of that. Yeah, and recently there was some kind of bogus DNA test of of a shawl that they said belonged to one of the victims, but it's impossible to prove the provenance of the object. But that was 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 like illustrate how different this was. Jesus. That's the face I wanted. I wanted you to just be just totally disgusted through this whole segment. Um And as he was switching instruments, he accidentally caught cut off his

06:02assistant'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 died of fright? Just a little bit of blood? Well, it's he he got slashed in the 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. Killed three three people in one. say slashed, you mean he cut the spectator or just got blood on them? 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 as that guy. So, he had a He had a heart attack? He must have had a heart attack. It said he

06:47died of fright. Maybe that wasn't real. That seems like horse Doesn't it a little bit? Are you calling me No, not you. No, no, no, no. The historical record. stories, you know, they they get blown out of proportion, yeah. It just seems like cut someone's jacket, they're not going to die. Well, it's you know, it's a stressful situation. People are getting their limbs hacked off, you know, your blood pressure would be really high. Um Maybe. I get it. And the And these theaters were I mean, the 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. Um Awesome. was the story about this guy who was

07:35suffering 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. Yeah, and yeah, people went nuts on your platform for that story. So, they they obviously are ready for this interview. How did that work again? It didn't work, right? not work, no. He died. Yeah, whoops. definitely died. But it's it really illustrates how desperate people were back then and how few options Yeah. they had. Yeah, there there's the image of it. I don't think you're allowed to show this on YouTube, Jamie. You get banned. It's It's definitely a medical Yeah. But I don't think you can show that on YouTube. Really? There's There's penises and breasts on YouTube. 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.

08:27I'll tweet it later for people There you go. People want to see it, we'll tweet. Twitter is the most open of all platforms. They 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 But maybe again Some things get removed from Instagram. It's really kind of interesting. It seems to be dependent upon how many people complain. Yeah, probably. There's 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. I get you know, at this point there's so many objects that that can cause offense, of course, with medical history and it's it's, you know, Yeah. snatchers and things like that. And I'm a firm believer that we should tell these stories openly because they

09:12happened and medicine and science grew as a result of it. But but they're not easy subjects to discuss with an audience, especially when you have so many characters on Twitter and you're you're trying to get out a complex idea, but Right. And also, like you're not just There's a lot of Twitter pages that I follow where people just try to gross people out. Yes. But you're actually educating people about the history and we and we all should 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 I've been going around the world sort of demolishing romantic notions about people what might think about what it's like to live in the past cuz it was pretty pretty bad. Mhm. And I I have visuals as well and I've had four men faint so far. It's always been men. It's just a commentary

09:58right now. It's always been men. ancestors of that that got his jacket cut and died. It was that guy. Yeah, those those weaklings coming to my lecture. And 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, you know. That was interesting. Yeah, and they're standing sometimes. I I give lectures at this incredible museum called the Old Operating Theatre in London. It's the second oldest in the world. And so you have to stand cuz it's like a Victorian operating theatre. 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? Yeah. Yeah, I did my book launch there. And if people want to see it I filmed sort of a like a theatrical

10:44scene 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 at 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 or I had both my knees reconstructed and wake up and they're fixed. Yeah, it's amazing. And 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

11:34against the knife. If you think about it, pushing off with your feet. Of course. There's a 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 He comes to Robert Liston, the fastest knife in the West End in the 1828. And he has this huge facial tumor growing. I mean, it's been growing for about 8 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. Wow. Yeah, it's 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 dropped in a bucket. And And um

12:27Yeah, well we have a picture of him later in life. Oh, wow. You know, and he like he's going, "Hmm." Yeah, he looks kind of like an ugly Abraham Lincoln. And Lincoln wasn't really known for his looks. Um I'm 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. Like there's a woman who has a mastectomy in 1840 without any anesthetic. Now at this time you would have if you were wealthy or if you were middle class you'd have this operation in your home. Okay. Oh, jeez. Which is Which would have been safer than going into the hospitals. 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,

13:17the bug catcher who would rid the beds of lice, he was paid more than the doctors and surgeons in this time. What? Yeah, cuz 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. Yeah, 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

14:02prepare her soul for death. Like this isn't very confidence inspiring. Any doctors listening, don't tell your patients to prepare their soul for death. And And she She does survive. And she talks about how it's so vascular that the blood blinds him at one point. And so like just when you think it can't get worse, he can't see. And he's under She is under his hand for an hour and a half. Oh, my god. And she survives. She She ends up living a long and somewhat happy life. I'm sure she had a lot of nightmares. Yeah, there we see a So do they tie this woman down? Like how do they handle this? they would have definitely had to restrain her. I mean Oh, so 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 restraints. year was this? That was in the 1840s. So Do we know when cancer became common or

14:52was it always common in humans? That's That's a good question. The oldest archaeological record I believe is 2,000 years old of metastatic cancers. So it's older than you think. They're diagnosing it for 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 just like Yeah, maybe a cyst. And she went through that for that. But Yeah. And again, it 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 wounds. And so Joseph Lister

15:43when he comes up with his antiseptic techniques, he actually performs a mastectomy on his sister on his dining room table. Oh, Christ. Which And she survives. And And that's in the book. See, this 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. cuz it's so chaos filled. And all that kind of grittiness and They do good period pieces, too. Yeah. Plus they could make it more entertaining. happen, Joe. I have no pull. 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? 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 There's a story. So going back to penises,

16:34there's 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 would thin your blood. Hmm. 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 the head. That's 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 So it was kind of it was you and the surgeon. And with the lithotomy it takes about A good surgeon it took about 5

17:23minutes. There's a guy named Stephen Pollard in 1828 who goes in to have this done. Now it's incredibly embarrassing. It's your you know, 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 inept. And the patient is screaming, you know, "Please just stop. Just stop." And And the surgeon yells back at him for having abnormal anatomy. Which How would you like that? You're sitting there on the 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. Oh, god. Yeah, it wasn't good.

18:11the guy. Did you have lunch before this? Yeah, I did, but I'm all right. Good, that's Well, that's good because then you won't faint. Well, I hosted Fear Factor for 6 years. I've seen everything. Almost nothing makes me sick. the worst I mean, was there ever a segment on Fear Factor that you thought, "Ooh, I don't know if I can watch that." No. No. I did When they had to drink that was rough. Oh. Yeah. 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. yeah. Yeah, they were like, "Fear Factor's back and it's crazier than ever." And they just went way over the top. they do with TV, right? Like they're just always pushing the boundaries. Didn't have to. No. They could have just gone with regular Fear Factor and we

18:57would have all been fine. We could do historical Fear Factor. We could like recreate these sort of horrible things that people did. in disguise. But this this surgery as we know it, when did it first start? Like what is the first historical recounting of an actual doctor? Oh, or you mean someone saying they're a licensed doctor? Or when did it start? Like Like really hard questions. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no. I know so little about history. It's like 19th, 18th century. It's It you know, 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 called them wise women, cunning women, barber surgeons. So one of my Yeah, the barbers. part Well, I guess they were good at razors, right? Yes. Yeah, actually barber surgeons used to do things like pull your teeth. They used to bloodlet.

19:56And so, the barber pole, which is red and white, is red and white because it was advertising their services as bloodletters. 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. god. And and the 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 bloodlet for all kinds of reasons. Like you would do it like a purge or a diet or or you would do it because you were ill. Um the idea being that you had produced too much blood and you needed the blood to be let to 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

20:42much blood in your system, Lindsay. You're going to send Joe You're going to send all these like crazy academic historians are like, we can't Yeah, there you go. There you go. got the 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 loot in the office that you would play or the patient would play. It was like a musical therapy. Um so, there's all kinds of hangovers from it. And you know the demon barber, uh Sweeney Todd. Yes. is kind of a one of these stories that pops up and they think that it might be that medical practitioners were trying to um undermine the legitimacy of the barbers. Ah. So, you kind of either get this story that the barber is this like 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

21:32seems like nonsense. It's Well, it seems like it's a recreation of an older one cuz I 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. I don't Yeah, people people thought that bullets were uh 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 on where it was. But It could just be like a recreation of something that someone found maybe and they're selling that as a piece maybe something like that. probably, yeah. Yeah, and we get the we get the red um blue and white barber

22:18poles 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. Whoa. And I think now the red, white, and blue is is like the patriotic red, white, and blue. But but the traditional barber pole would have been red and white and it would have signified that you could come in and get your bloodletting cuz those those bloody rags would have been out there on the pole. Um 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, yeah. So, the barber surgeons would have

23:03definitely um been doing minor surgical procedures and they would have been more affordable than the surgeons and the physicians themselves. Um but nobody could really do much for you in that period according to our own sort of 21st under you know, 21st century understanding. Um but I always say to go back to your question about, you know, um 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 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 I think that this is probably going to get people to go, "No, that totally works." You know that that trend of cupping Yes. now that you see? So, that was also 17th century. So, they would cup They would have these heated cups and they would

23:48create 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 and I like to point people to the past cuz if we're going to make fun of, you know, what they were doing in the past, it's kind of making a a reappearance, so to speak. Um but people do all kinds of uh weird things now too. Like they eat the um placenta. Yeah. There's I There's no medical evidence that that has any kind of health benefit. Yeah, but it's edible. I think that's where the you can eat it. Well, it's funny cuz that actually segues into into this lovely object, this half skull here. Um my friend Zane Wylie creates these. These are actually cereal bowls. Oh, great.

24:33But uh and the reason why I brought it was because it um opens up a conversation about something that I like to talk about, which is corpse medicine. So, people used to actually eat dead bodies. Um for medicinal purposes. Um What parts? So, if you had epilepsy in the early modern period, so we're like talking like 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, um people would drink the blood of an executed criminal. So, someone who lost their head. Like the idea was that the life cut short that the blood was very powerful force. And so, you get these sort of um drawings of people gathered at the scaffold. You know, this poor bastard's going to lose his head and these people are like holding cups up to catch the blood. And 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 it's um

25:22it'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 um people thought about that disease. So, these people were quite desperate. So, they were drinking the blood of executed criminals. Good lord. They ground up um mummies, ancient mummies, and they would make it into pills. And they did all kinds of things, right? So, I So, I always point this out. We eat the placenta today. It's kind of like, you know, a form of um ingesting bodily uh Yeah, see there you go. You got the Yes. So, people were just super super desperate back then. Yeah, people I mean, of course there was not much that could be done, right? But But we do some kind of form of corpse medicine in 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.

26:10Yeah, I have a cadaver graft on my right knee. Oh, yeah. I have one in my jaw. Really? Your jaw? What happened? had a Well, I had a gotten a huge fistfight in a I had a some gum disease up here and then they had to like graft a little like piece of cadaver bone. Whoa. But they don't call it cadaver bone. Did they call it cadaver bone to you? Don't they call it um freeze-dried bone or something? No, it wasn't bone. It was they call it an allograft, but it's it's a cadaver. They used the Achilles tendon for the ACL because the Achilles tendon is much larger than an ACL, so it's stronger. And if you don't if are you familiar with the way it works? It's really interesting. The way it works is not like it takes over. It's not like an organ transplant. So, you don't you don't have to worry about your body rejecting it in the same way. Although some sometimes people's bodies

27:00don't accept it or it doesn't work. But um they take this graft they put this new tendon in place, this new uh ligament in place rather, and then your body re-proliferates Oh, that's amazing. with cells. So, it's even though it'll feel like it's healed up within like a month or two, like your 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 Yeah. in particular, I know several fighters who have wound up re-injuring their knee because they thought it was okay. Real Really, it was very gummy and very weak. So, how long does it take to heal before you can really Yeah, so it's a long time. 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 Yeah. it's just the And And I always

27:52because 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. Um and so, he opens up this sort of huge field with medicine and a lot of advance advancements are made off the back of it. But um but it was it was a gritty time and um it definitely you you definitely could die very easily. Life was very cheap back then. Yeah, I mean, I can only imagine. Just the idea that a woman getting her breast removed on her kitchen table. Yeah, there was another um there was a little boy who 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." Oh, Christ. So, he was very unprepared. So, they brought him into the operating theater

28:39and 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. And if if you had a 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 um 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 um the infection. But he reads Louis Pasteur's germ theory and this is how he starts to put it together. But

29:26when he first comes out with it, you know, there's a lot of pushback because medicine and science are essentially conservative in the sense that it's like puzzle solving. If someone, you know, you 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 like a surgeon with with his apron on. Actually, it's a picture of a

30:12butcher. But it gives you that kind of idea of 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 to have a lot of blood on it. That's a that's a butcher though, not That is a butcher, yeah. But similar tools of the trade. Yep, similar tools and and certainly that apron would have been on your surgeon. know about the hat. Yeah. I know, it's kind of like Gangs of New York, you know, you kind of you kind of picture they would have worn those really tall top hats and those crazy plaid colors and it's 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? What do you mean?

31:01Well, when 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. Oh. 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 is kind of accurate. And he would have been wearing sort of black and white and very dull colors. Mhm. So when I think about this movie cuz 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.

31:43And then you have this somber Quaker. And as the movie sort of progresses, the world catches up and gets a bit cleaner with Lister. So they were experimenting with all these drugs on themselves? Oh, yeah. It was like it was just a crazy time. So ether is 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. Mhm. So he's more willing to pick up the knife and go deeper in the body. And so post-operative infection rises. And it and it opens with the great Robert Liston and he performs the first

32:32operation under ether in 1846 in London. And 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 I don't endorse it. It's highly flammable. So people also smoked a lot in operating theaters. You can imagine that there were a lot of Oh, crap. were a lot of accidents. But but you drop it on a basically cuz 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

33:21wears off equally quickly. I tried to convince my publisher to have ether cocktails at the book launch, but they were like Just have a bunch of Ubers ready and by. Exactly. Just yeah. Or carriages like in the Victorian So so people were yeah, definitely trying. And then of course Have you tried it? I've not tried it. I haven't found that bar yet. you were willing to experiment on the people that came to your book launch. Oh, 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 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 a cure to the opiate the morphine addiction. So like

34:10take cocaine instead. And I brought it's in my Mary Poppins bag. I'll show it to you later after the show. I brought a 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 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 it's positioned as, you know, break your cocaine addiction now with heroin. So it just it was just a crazy period and it was really in 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

35:03might 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 there was it was some 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. And that someone from Here it goes. American drugs in ancient Egyptian mummies. Can you make that a little larger, please? It says it seems safe to say that blah blah blah blah blah. In 1992, a new study of nine mummies from ancient Egypt created quite a stir when it was announced the discovery of traces of nicotine and cocaine in their hair. Both of these chemicals came from plants found only in South America. And this research has since been touted as

35:51evidence of pre-Columbian contact between America and Africa, something thought to be impossible based on the rest of the archaeological record. So what's going on? Let's start by looking at the evidence. Uh blah blah blah blah blah. 1992, the performed by Svetlana 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 of the 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? What 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

36:52cut 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 in nine mummies means What is it What is the conclusion? Cut to the chase here, 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, they chew on 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. did a good, yeah. I tried. It seems like it's going to take a long time. Many

37:40resins and spices. Hold on a second. We're certainly used this day. We're 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. I don't know. I think they They're they're they're very skeptical about the idea that people from Egypt were able to travel all the way to the Americas where the cocaine was, but I think 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. to go for a drug test for work, they say don't eat poppy seeds. Don't eat that pop Yeah, wasn't there like a Seinfeld episode? I'm looking at the Wikipedia for it,

38:24too. It might have been part of a thriving tourist scam in Egypt in the Victorian era. So they might have like said it was there and some people would come look and then Oh. You know. Wait a minute. Said what was there? The cocaine. It says since passing this corpses off recently deceased as ancient mummies was a thriving tourist scam in Egypt during the Victorian era. Like it could have I'm going to I'm going to put That doesn't make sense cuz the tests were done in 1992. 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 or whatever. Okay. So a bunch of cokeheads were fondling mummies. Well, they wanted those mummies cuz they wanted to eat them as I said. You know, they ground them up and Did you say that the ancient Egyptian mummies they used that, too?

39:04Yeah. Yeah. Think about how much was destroyed cuz people wanted to eat it, you know. about it all the time. There's a fantastic exhibit. powder? Wow. Look at that. That is nuts. Mummy extract. It's cure-all. Whatever you got. Yeah. That's You know it's a 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. Well, those late night things that are causing people to lose weight in those late night infomercials. Take a bunch of pills. Yeah. That's 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 but they have a King Tut exhibit and then um on top of that they have this gigantic IMAX theater, which is fantastic. And they show like all these different uh tombs that they had

39:55discovered and how they discovered them and but it make makes you really When they discovered King Tut's tomb, we have no idea how many similar tombs there were that were looted over the, you know, Yeah, think about how much was lost. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we have, you know, in the museums, it's just sort of a fraction of Yeah. What we know and and still stuff is coming to light. It's just incredible. Yeah. But yeah, they they the Victorians are responsible for destroying a lot for taking those mummies and and just grounding them up and all kinds of things. Yeah. it's what what gets me is what was the mode like where was the theory? Like where did the theory come from? Like when you want to take a mummy and make it into a powder? Some of it would have been sort of folk medicine influence. Um you know, there's there's this idea of sympathetic magic. So um for instance, if uh

40:46you if I stabbed you with a sword, let's get very violent. Um 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 um healing by distance. So all kinds of strange ideas existed. But and that's why it's important when you're studying the history of medicine to really get into the mindset cuz it it's so wildly different to the way we think. Right. Um and and you know, actually, do you know what this is that I brought? This um If people are just listening, it's it's a long-beaked mask. I don't know if you saw Yeah. No, I do not know what that is. Okay. So this a lot of people think this is a Venetian mask. This is actually particularly um a particular example from Venice. It is um what people would have doctors would have worn during the bubonic plague. So it's called the plague doctor mask.

41:37And so um it was invented in the 17th century um 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 if something smells bad, it's probably not good for you is what they thought. And it kind of makes sense cuz if like, you know, you're in a really um if you're in a slummy area of the Victorian period, it's 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 in it would protect you from those evil miasma. Whoa. Yeah. It's and you know, Is that a real one? No, we don't actually have um I don't believe there's an example of a real one

42:23from the 17th century, but there's a lot of illustrations of the plague doctor. And he would have been wearing um a hat, he would have been wearing a cape, um leather gloves, like sort of just protecting himself. Oh, there you go. That's a real one? Authentic 16th century plague doctor mask preserved and on display at the Whoa, there you go. Another one. Deutschen Medizinhistorisches 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. Um 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. Um there was sort of a phrase go far and go long, you know, get out and don't come back for a while. It wasn't much they could do for you.

43:09They had a a stick as well that they would 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. Um we can cure the plague is they did not know what what what germs were. So they really didn't understand what the plague was. They they had sort of a concept of of contagion. So if you broke out with the plague, they would probably quarantine you in your house. Um and they put a big cross on the door. And so people would bring food and um you you um you know, put a basket outside of your window with a rope and you take. And so they do that until everybody was dead in the house or that the plague had passed and they felt that you were uh safe to come out into the general population. So there was an idea that these things were contagious.

43:56Um but not again in the way that we kind of understand disease diseases being spread today. God, it's so strange that they would You would not know what was going on. Like people would just start dying and you'd like, what is is this People would think that it was Yeah, it could be God's curse. Um uh and and people say, you know, oh, the plague mask is so terrifying. Um 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 that Joe Rogan could wear the plague doctor mask. Yeah, how many people would know what that is? Like if you went You know, if you go to Venice, they they say plague doctor mask. It's funny because I was just in Venice recently and they were saying that, you know, the big carnival um that they have every year, it's becoming harder to do because of

44:45security reasons. So you have like a huge population of a city wearing masks and covering their identities. Oh. they have to cut back, which is kind of sucks cuz you know, that's like the fun of the carnival. Um so now they're they're um cutting back where you can wear them in public places and things like that. What a weird world we live in. Yeah, it is it is unfortunate. 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 with How would that attach to your face? Was it like straps or something? would have been straps or um 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 Death. Today we have the modern plague doctor. What What do you think that would be? Yeah, the the The hazmat, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so

45:30you think about the hazmat going into hot zones. That would be pretty scary if you didn't know what was going on. Um and certainly sort of ominous, you know, when you see the hazmat. So it it's a weird thing that exists be because in a strange kind of way it probably did protect the plague doctor cuz he was covering himself up, but it protected him for the wrong reasons. He 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 there's a theory that is actually being um 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 a man or a woman who's the surgeon with a mask that covers their face. So all you see is their eyes. Okay. And everything looks

46:23bright and 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. Yeah. And everything is bright and strange and cold. And they think that what this is is they're 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 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. They're inside the mother's womb. And then you're just like taken out and out and then you there's this bright

47:14light above you. You've never experienced any light. So every and your visual perception, your field of view is all distorted, right? It's the first time you're using your eyes. That's why people have the same into this memory, this early memory. That's interesting. This is a theory. It makes sense to me because if you think about like sense than the abduction. So well, it does because people don't really go anywhere. See, the thing about the abduction thing is they put like cameras in people's rooms and uh and they say they have these alien abduction experiences, but they don't go anywhere. So what they're doing is they're dreaming. I mean, which is normal. amazing and and it's so powerful. And we know so little still. Yeah. So also like these all these I mean, it's it's kind of duh because they all happen while you're sleeping. Like 90 plus percent. to be medical.

48:05Yeah. 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. yeah. Yeah, I mean, it even goes back to the virgin birth, right? I mean, it's all it's all very weird. But this uh this memory that people have from childhood is uh most likely uh you know, probably a pretty intense powerful memory that's always there. Yeah. And in fact, yeah, and some people can tap into it and some people can't. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it's also a theory while natural childbirth is supposed to be less traumatic. Like women having

49:00natural childbirth in a bathtub, you know, like that that is actually of like moving back to, you know, it's um men start to get involved in childbirth around the 17th century, 18th century. What happened before then is Um it was mostly women. Um so women in the village would come. And actually, the term um gossip comes from the idea of the women who would spread the word in the village that someone was going into labor, they were called the gossips. So they would spread the word. It became sort of a negative thing later. So the the gossips would spread the word, the women would come in. This was a female-only chamber. Um and men were not really allowed in. A man might be brought in if uh the mother was dying or if the child was dying and then in that case instruments were brought into the birth the birthing chamber. So the doctor might come in and he might take

49:47these sort of forceps and 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's coming out feet first. Yeah, I mean but a midwife a capable midwife could could handle that. Um but this you know the cesarean section people think that it comes from the term the idea that Julius Caesar was ripped from the womb of his mother. Right. But um it's unlikely that that story's true because his mother lives into old age. So probably the the term cesarean comes from the Latin term meaning to cut. And the first sort of uh 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.

50:38Um yeah and and we don't have any records of whether this this probably didn't work again no idea of germs all this kind of stuff. Um we don't know if she lived. We yeah I don't have there's no sort of it doesn't follow the records don't follow the story. Um but she probably died and the baby probably died as well. And for people don't know they castrate pigs to make them more edible. They they often times castrate them and then let them loose because then they they concentrate on grass and not ass. That is a actual farmer's term. I I have 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. Oh things I learn on this. Yeah you don't want a muscular jacked bull.

51:28No probably not be very chewy and You want yeah. That that buffalo above my friend Adam Greentree shot that in Australia and they my friend Cam was chewing on a piece of his for one piece for half an hour. Oh my gosh it was that muscular and Yeah I mean I guess that makes sense. 2000 lb sack of steel. So it was not good. No. Not not the thing you want to sit down and have a meal. No. I mean they say they vary like sometimes some of them you can eat. Yeah. You know I mean you can eat them. They're all it's all buffalo meat. But they're just insanely dense. how big I mean when you see the skull it's just Yeah. the size of it is incredible. Yeah. It's it's also an invasive species so they have no natural predators so there's just thousands and thousands of them destroying the countryside and so people travel up to the northern lands Ordaland I forget the the name of the

52:24place where they go and they hunt these things. Wow. Yeah they're huge. Yeah they yeah they are huge. Australia's a trip. I mean it is a really a wildlife experiment because they brought in so many animals. Right they're invasive as well. Yeah and they're not indigenous and they're just doing a lot of damage. Yeah. Um so when you think about the history of surgery and you you concentrate on this one very particular time in this book yes. in this book. But as a medical historian like when what first of all what led you to that? Like why you seem so normal. Oh yeah I'm super normal. Look at all these skulls and stuff in front of me. I you know I'm like that kid who never grew out of the obsession with Tales from the Crypt and yeah Ripley's Believe It or Not you know the shrunken heads. I actually did a a segment for a documentary on the shrunken heads and I had to go out to

53:14Poland 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 like how do you shrink a head? Yeah and it's it's amazing because what they do is they 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. Um 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 the demand for these these shrunken heads.

54:02So they started killing women. Well it it wasn't just just anybody and it might not have been killing them it might have just been taking bodies of people who had already died. Right. But they definitely aren't all authentic in the sense that they were killed in battle. Yeah killed in battle and so it's just kind of an interesting but I got to interact and and see the shrunken heads. So I was that weird creepy kid that you know no one really wanted to talk to. I joke that I was 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 and I'm like Spoiler alert. I'm sorry yeah sorry sorry everybody. And I was just devastated I'm like nobody noticed for you know like a whole season but Yeah they barely cared. They're like well she's missing. Yeah I guess she's

54:45missing. Oh when was the last time we saw her by the pool? I was I was really awkward I was 5'7" by the age of 10 and I was just I was just like that weird kid with Tales from the Crypt and so I kind of 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 is not it's isn't 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. Well there's 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 that. You know it's funny because there is this sort of tension between what they call popular history and academic

55:33history and I will get at 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? true. You have a PhD. Hey stupid. Yeah I should have just said that you know. Yeah. Like what does that mean you're just an entertainer? Yeah just it's like it's like I'm bastardizing the subject in some kind of you know way that they don't like. Well it's because of people like me. I'm like gross and then I retweeted. I know exactly and then It makes it I mean it's sort of want it you know Like I did this thread on Twitter called Your Victorian Doctor's 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

56:17thread I said but what is it about today that people will will look back. But you know this one academic was like this is really you know bad history and you're you're making it fun how dare you you know it's like that kind of yeah offensive that but but for the most part people enjoy it and and that's nice. Well that is like the the big complaint that people have about academia is that it's so stuffy. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to get like so many weird academic trolls. I know it's just it's one of those things like I've had to make peace with because I I am a storyteller and if you look at my profile I call myself a storyteller first rather than historian. Well they're great stories though. This is this for us in 2019 are so incredibly fortunate to have you know actual real doctors with real modern medicine to fix us and you know talking to a guy who's

57:04had probably five surgeries. You know I mean it's God it's so I know I had an appendectomy and it was it was amazing they use little tiny robotic instruments now and they they barely make you know I think the incision's like an inch long or something. Yeah a buddy of mine had shoulder surgery and the 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 a an injury from activity right? You know and you think about people in the past they weren't necessary well I mean there was there were sports and and competitions but mostly people were getting injuries from repetitive strenuous labor that they were doing. Sure. Um there's a story of a 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

58:00it would rub at the back of the knee and it created this huge aneurysm. Ooh. Um 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 right? 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. aneurysm you like people think of aneurysm they think of a brain. Right. It's like a what's the what's the term? It's um It's a specific kind of aneurysm it's almost like a balloon that appears on the out sort of on the outside of the of blood. Big sack of blood. Why didn't they think they could just drain it? That's what I would think.

58:51I think it's if you severed it yeah I don't know. Um I'd be like slow down doc. Yeah. Don't don't hack that leg off. to drive this taxi Yeah and if he had lost his leg it would have been and what's incredible about that story actually is that he that Hunter saves the leg and then when the man dies right before he dies he 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 uh to 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 surgeons sorry at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. So they embalmed it? Uh yeah well he would have preserved it probably with um wax injections, almost like plastination. Oh, like they did in that body the What is that body exhibit? Body Worlds. Yeah, what do you think about that? Gunther von

59:43I was very torn when I was walking around this because what a part of me was saying this is really fascinating and the other part of me was saying what is the difference between this and like Ed Gein's house where he made lamp shades out of people? Well, yeah, I mean one would hope that the difference is consent. Um, but One would hope though. That's it. Yeah, one would hope Well, there there has been controversies with certain exhibitions. Maybe not Body Worlds, but there's been some spin-offs where there's been a question of where they got those bodies. Yes. And of course if 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 and Right. Yes. So there's other incentives, but I I think my view is what you know, it's it's given under the

60:28guise 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. Um, 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 Right. that are unnecessary to teach anatomy. Right, right, right. So so you know, if you're going to say it's an anatomical lesson why does the person have to be posed in the 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. is absolutely interesting. Yeah, I mean and and people say oh my gosh, the Victorians bought tickets to operating theater. Well, people come to my Instagram account, you know, I mean

61:16we're still morbidly curious. for sure. It's really interesting that it's called a theater as well. Did you ever see that movie with Benicio Del Toro? Uh, 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. Oh, wow. doctor is convinced the doctor is convinced that he's a madman or 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 to be in this period. Oh, in the 19th century. Okay. Yeah, it's in London. So yeah, see if you can find it. It's kind of a crazy scene. You know, the the doctors were experimenting with um, uh, electricity a lot and galvanism and things like kind of reanimating the corpses which is we get the story Frankenstein. Um, and they were also interested in how long do you live or

62:07your conscience after um, you're beheaded? Right. So there's these exper- these experiments during the French Revolution where they're like shouting at the heads to see if the heads will blink. Oh god. So I'm sure we can't uh, air this on YouTube. So this will only be us watching this cuz if we air it on YouTube they'll they'll do a See, that's exactly what the theaters looked like. like saying that he's going to kill all of them. Like you you need to get out of here and uh, they this doctor is very arrogant and they're dealing with him and the moon turns full and he starts freaking out and it's 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

62:55dangled. It's one of the best ever and I'm a giant werewolf fan. This is one of the best ever cuz this was actually done by Rick Baker who's the same guy who did American Werewolf in London which is the werewolf that's out in the hall. Okay. Oh, yeah, I took pictures of that. Yeah. I met him earlier. But this is uh, the modern version of it that they decided to make and you know, the thing is that these guys are watching this and the doctor is arrogant. He has his back to the patient while he's discussing And that's exactly what those theaters would have looked like as well. Yeah. Um, but they would have been just so crowded. That is so strange though that this was like this was entertainment. This was something that people wanted to see. Well, you know, it wasn't just sort of the morbid curiosity. It was also that the Victorians were obsessed with uh, scientific progress. So they wanted

63:41to come in and see Right. I see that. They want to see what their latest was. out of there now in this clip. For people who are listening Yeah, this is a it's not a good movie, but it's a a 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 um, it's also they decided in this movie to make it with a minimal use of CGI. That's Yeah. yeah, what they decided to do was do it all with um, actual yeah, rubber masks and things like that. Yeah. And actually it's funny because um, it sort of reminds me of of again Liston the the 6'2 giant. He got a a patient on the table who had to have a bladder stone removed. Remember how awful that was? And this guy was like, it. I'm not going to do it. He jumps off the table. He runs across the room, locks

64:42himself 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 happens. Again, be a great movie anybody listening. Yeah, you're really pushing this movie hard. Are you you trying to sell that while you're out here? No, I mean I I guarantee you someone is listening that can make that happen. I I I you know, I could sell the rights to the book, but I've held on to them and I'm developing them with um, 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. And so I had no money. I they took my passport, everything. Like I couldn't do anything. So I wrote this book. And so I always say that Joseph Lister saved a lot of lives not least my own because it's kind

65:27of lifted me and it's been a rebirth. Oh, wow. Um, so I really want to be involved in the process. I've always been 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're not you don't really have much creative input at all. Right. Um, but yeah, I just think that you know, it's it's a great story because it's it's sort of crosses with the with people who are interested in the horror genre, right? Cuz you get the the 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. Oh. What do you think? Like it? There you go. Jamie's like whatever. perfect movie star. trying to think of someone else, but yeah, that's a good choice.

66:11Yeah. Yeah. He's like a quintessential movie star, right? He is. Yeah, I was thinking um, Eddie Redmayne the British actor who's like he's so sweet and Lister's a very sort of likable He's in um, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them the the Harry Potter. He's a he's a he's really big in Britain Mm. or Benedict Cumberbatch. That guy's awesome. Yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch. I think Benedict Cumberbatch would like to play Liston the 6'2 guy because it's it's a real theatrical role. Well, Cumberbatch is he's another guy who's awesome in everything. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're listening Benedict He's he's killer in Doc- Doctor Strange is another movie that's not the best movie in the world, but he's killer in it. Yeah. And he's tall, you know, he could play Liston. You could he's you know, we could bulk him out a bit and there we go. Does he have to get bulked up?

66:58a role in this? Is it is it the patient? I'm good. Thanks. The guy who gets the bladder stone guy. 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. Ooh, good heavens. And just fall down and passes out from fright. Yeah, yeah, that's a good role. Yeah. Um, So this book sort of you were in quite a bit of personal anguish yourself when you created this book. So you have this deep attachment to it. I can completely understand that. my first book and I'm I'm working on an a new book on the history of plastic surgery. Aha. Um, and it's I'm fascinated with that as well. Yeah, it's it's interesting. So I'm I'm looking at a guy named Harold Gillies who was rebuilding soldiers' faces during World War I. And if you've ever

67:46seen these guys' photos, I mean it's we have no problems. You know, you 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 um, really um, designs uh, 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 the one particular person. Wow. Yeah, the the history of plastic surgery is fascinating to me and I'm hooked on that show Botched. Oh, yeah. People always mention that.

68:33so crazy. This is me watching Botched. This is me all the time like, Jesus. Yeah, yeah. Christ, what are you doing, man? Stop doing that. people put themselves through, right? I started following some plastic surgeons on Instagram just to kind of know what what, you know, they're doing today and and thinking about the ethics of how they target people on social media um, 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 and you and you have access to these accounts and the effect it has on on young people on Instagram and everything. Well, I had Jonathan Haidt on the podcast who wrote uh, this book The Coddling of the American Mind and uh, one of the big things that he discusses is people comparing themselves to others through social media and children

69:20particularly girls Yeah. this higher instances of suicide, cutting, depression, much higher instances of depression. I believe it. Yeah. Yeah, I believe it, too. It's It's crazy. And then you see someone like Kylie Jenner who transforms herself literally from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan. Yeah. Yeah. And it's all done through the knife, and it's It's crazy. that's the whole thing. Like that that kind of beauty is unattainable really so naturally. Oh, yeah, this is This is Harold Gillies um one of his patients um and Wow, that's the end? Yeah, and what he did was um he invented this thing called the tubed pedicle where he would take skin and he would it would he basically create 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 the guy did an incredible job on that face. Incredible.

70:0919 That's probably 1917 right there. That's like better than a lot of the people on Botched. It really is. I'm not joking. Particularly the final product. And that's Gillies down down there that um yeah, that's another Man, now he was incredible. And really when you think about what these guys went through, too. Yeah. Um so the so my book is starting um with this guy named Percy Clare who's shot through both cheeks and and his face is just blown off. And to get off the battlefield was half the struggle because it if your face is blown off, most of the time the stretcher bearers will just pass you off. Oh jeez. Because they think you're going to die. Um but it was a survivable wound. And so just getting off the battlefield, you know, so you sit there for 12 hours, maybe you die in the process. had no food and you can't eat. No food. And that was the other thing. So a lot

70:57of 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 Mhm. and you choke. Yeah. Or you suffocate. Um so so just getting to Harold Gillies' hospital. So he starts this incredible facial um and jaw unit in Britain during the war. Just to get there was a battle. Um and then you have to go through all these painful operations. And so I want to look at that and then of course like 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. Yes. Um you know, 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, but there There's been quite a few. Yeah, there's there's you know, the I think the

71:45hardest part is finding the donor. It's hard to get people to donate their organs as it is, but think about a face is so personal. Yeah. Um and the last one National Geographic did a a spread on it. It was um a 18 I think it was an 18-year-old girl who shot herself in the face. And um in a moment of rage and um and and anyway, she ended up having this face transplant about 3 years later. And the the donor face I think was someone who was in their 30s. Um this person had died I think of an overdose and then the family decided to give this face over. So it's it's actually incredible what we can do when you think about, you know, from the battlefields of World War I to what Gillies is doing to where we are today with facial reconstruction. And it's just going to get better and better. Yeah, I'm I'm sure it is going to get better and better. And for people with

72:35disfiguring injuries and things, it's fantastic. My What what freaks me out about Botched is the psychological aspect of people constantly tinkering with their looks. It's just Yeah, and and now they have apps where you can upload your face and you can change things about your face. And it's just we're we're all becoming more and more insecure I think with social media. Um and and yeah, it's part of this world where we where nothing is real. Um and the other part of it. It's a lot of these pictures aren't real. Like people are doctoring their photos to make themselves look different than they actually do look and then people see those I know someone walks into the studio and you're like, wait, that's not the That's not what I thought that person was going to look like. Uh this uh woman who's friends with my wife, her neighbor is a model and she takes all of her photos with no makeup

73:20on and then they put the makeup on her. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I didn't know they could do that. Yeah, that's how they do it. They do it all through Photoshop. So she Wait, Jamie, can you do that for Can you Can you edit this video? You can do whatever You can turn you into an avatar lady. Do anything. But it's kind of crazy that they they take photos with no makeup and then Yeah, I have no idea. It's wild. Yeah. We Nothing's real. Nothing's real anymore. We kind of just make this stuff up. we're I mean 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 mean I think we're preparing ourselves for a time where we live inside some sort of a simulation. Yeah, and I think um it's interesting because celebrities like yourself have to really think about how your image is used after you're gone as

74:07well now. Like something that you didn't have to think about. So um there was a a commercial with Audrey Hepburn in Britain and um she's it's 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 um 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. Mhm. Um and they're digging them up from 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 often times

74:51strip the body naked because it was it was illegal to steal possessions from the corpse, but not the body itself. What? Cuz there was no There was no concept of the body being sort of property. So they would throw the clothes back into the grave. And and they were really clever in the ways they did it. They usually sent a woman in the daytime to 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. Um because the only legal bodies to dissect in Britain um in the early 19th century were bodies of executed criminals. Of people who had um murdered other

75:38people. So specifically murderers. went to the like 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 um you do get these stories of uh people finding out that a body. So for instance, I think it was in 1785 um this person goes to this graveyard and discovers that a body is missing that a body has um been snatched. And everybody in the village goes to this graveyard and digs up their relatives and and drags these coffins back to their home until they could make the cemeteries safer. Oh my god. Which is insane cuz people were really feared this. And um 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 um had like a tripwire. And so you could set up the gun to shoot anybody who would

76:25And there's there's actually a really awful story of a grieving father who they This was set up at the grave and he accidentally trips it and he gets shot. So, you know, it wasn't it wasn't exactly a safe way to to protect the bodies, but they also had watchmen. Look at that. There it is. That's from yesterday. On your Twitter feed. That's Twitter. Yeah, everybody went nuts on that yesterday. Cemetery gun, 19th century used 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 to set something like that up at the at the foot of your relative's grave. They also used coffin collars. So that was sort of a like an iron um well, it was it was a collar and they would nail it to the bottom of the coffin. So that way So what what a body snatcher would typically do is just open the foot of

77:10the 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 over the graves um to protect them. So people uh the internet God bless it uh will say to protect against vampire or to to keep vampires from coming out. They had nothing to do with that or zombies. It was to um prevent body snatchers from getting a hold of those corpses. But you know, those bodies Yeah, there they are. Mortsafes they were called. Oh my god. And you'll see them a lot in Britain. And they're they were People were very paranoid about this. I mean you can find a lot exa- examples of this. And bodies were stolen a lot and

78:02thank God they were on some level, right? Because think about how much we learned from these bodies. Bodies were needed to be dissected to teach medical students. Yeah. And um 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 who've been in a dissection room and you have a really uh vivid memory of that. It's probably bright and white and clinical. Well, these places, the bodies would have been bloated and partly decomposed. Uh dissecting bodies was dangerous because you could cut yourself and you could infect yourself with bacteria. They weren't wearing gloves. Um and so you get uh examples of people cutting themselves and dying within 48 hours. So going into medicine was dangerous. And um there's a story in this book

78:47about a a guy who goes into the 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 And so he jumps out the window and he 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. And Jesus. Yeah, so he's kind of like, you know, that that horror that we all experience possibly when we when we're confronted with death to accepting it as you have to as a medical student if you want to go on. Um so the dead house is is particularly it would have smelled um dissection would have would have been a winter sport because the bodies wouldn't decompose as quickly. You course wouldn't want to be dissecting in the

79:36heat of the summer. Right. Um and literally have seasons for dissecting? Yeah, they would they would tend to teach students in the winter so it was colder. winter jackets and do it in the cold? they would have probably cuz well they had a fireplace at the end of the room as well make it really stuffy and smelly. 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. Yeah. Um 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. Oh wow. So there are they getting it from these corpses people that died? They they can get a bacterial infections certainly and just being with patients. If a patient comes in with smallpox um And in smallpox a lot of people I don't

80:22know if I did I send you a picture of smallpox Jamie? Um a lot of people think oh it's it's like chickenpox like it's not like chickenpox. It's it's a really awful disease um and it's the only disease that we have eradicated ever in human history. Yeah. Um which is incredible. So it's it's one of those ones yeah they're Yeah, it's it's unbelievably bad. me itch when I look at it as well. Um Um you see children with it. It's just and it was so common. It was very common and it was 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. Mhm. So you know it was one of those diseases that left its mark on you literally. Um and and it also had a high mortality rate as well but it wasn't like chickenpox. No. There's my my PSA. Yeah.

81:13It's not like chickenpox. Well it's uh it you know it's one of those things that we're so thankful the people have figured out how to get rid of something. Yeah and and um and smallpox vaccine was invented in the 18th century most people don't know it's it's that old. Um Dr. Yeah, Edward Jenner invented it and actually the biggest anti-vaxxer movement or uh protest happened in the 19th century. 100,000 people turned out to march in Britain against Jenner. People thought that um 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 um 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 the story is is much

82:05older than we think. And the fears that we have about vaccines are are not that dissimilar to what people worried about in the past as well. But Jenner's an incredible figure. That is incredible when you stop and think about the fact that this is still going on today Yeah. with the internet. Yeah, yeah. All all the I mean you can find out I mean I had Dr. Peter Hotez on recently to talk about vaccines and and the misconceptions that people have and he explained that they've isolated a bunch of different environmental factors that and genes that contribute to autism but that it all takes place in the womb. Right. don't want to hear that. No, I mean it and that is the danger of the way information is now spread of course. Echo chambers. It is you know. That's confirmation bias is the real danger that people get around it. it was actually harder to get that message out but a lot of

82:56you know you get famous sort of cartoons of of people sort of turning into cows. So the cartoonist my new husband is cartoonist and so it's like this this way of this powerful way of kind of conveying images and fears and stuff and um so yeah people 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. Undoubtedly. Yeah, it's just so it's so amazing that that's the problem is still around today even with all the information that we have available. Yeah, I think you know there was um a Fox News uh newscaster who recently said that he doesn't wash his hands because he can't see germs. I don't know who it was. joking. Hopefully he was joking. day he actually washed his hands. I hope so. So people were sending that to me because again like Lister. Yeah. Right. And um and I I always tell

83:49people 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 are 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 there was huge pushback. So what Lister ultimately does is he turns 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

84:30long time. Um and it's 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. I mean it it couldn't get worse than that right? And so people were dying of all the 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 he does his demonstrations and he starts to slowly change people's minds but it takes a long time. The the cover of the um of the American book is um the American version I should say is um a famous painting by I don't know if people can see that by Samuel Gross. It's called the Gross Clinic. Um the guy in the middle it is gross as well but the guy in the middle is Samuel Gross and he so

85:20didn'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 sticking he's wearing his street clothes he's sticking his dirty fingers into this wound um and there's a woman in the background and she's um covering her face and she's the mother of the patient and she's wearing black because she expects her son to die. Oh. So so this is the US cover and for the UK cover I think I sent that to you Jamie. Um it's 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

86:07Lister's 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 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 Night and Florence Nightingale is a 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 uh hysterical with his

86:52idea 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 it was she would be privy to the male body. So you wouldn't want her interacting with male patients. So really kind of lowly um poorer women went into nursing um 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 the hospitals. So you see that on the cover as well. But there's there's also another guy. I'm sure there's like I can I always

87:40like sort of predict comments. I shouldn't think about you know what people are going to say but people tend to get mad um like when I give lectures cuz I don't talk about this guy. There's there's groupies out there um 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 myself and I'm like here it is. And they say why I think you'll find you haven't talked about Semmelweis. Semmelweis was 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. Um and they called he was ridiculed heavily they called him the hand washer and he ends up being put in an insane

88:26asylum and it's this really kind of sad weird death that he has and um and he's really sort of persecuted for these ideas of hand washing and and infection rates. He's doing it a little bit before Lister comes onto the scene. Lister's not aware of Semmelweis's work but equally I always tell people that Semmelweis doesn't really do it first if we're 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 um in the medical community that germs exist. Mhm. So until we understand you know again why wash your hands if they're just going to get dirty. That's amazing. So again why did you have two different

89:17covers? Oh, yeah, sorry. Um So, the publisher just picks whatever covers they want, basically. So, my US publisher had come up with this. My UK publisher came up with the 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 in conversation with one another?" So, I like that. They kind of compliment one another. I like the font better on the US cover. I know. I love this Victorian font and the image of that guy wearing street clothes is just more It is It's so evocative. You know, it's just This book This cover actually, so it's been translated I think it's about 15 languages now. So, most of them kind of take this this image. I was wondering if you knew what this might be. This is So, it's a circular metal metal contraption with teeth on the inside for people who are just listening. What is that?

90:08is called a jugum penis. This is an a Victorian anti-masturbation device. What? Yes. So, yeah, there's the real one. This is 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? Yeah. That's one we made for the show. Yeah. it's basically similar to what So, these they were trying Why were they trying to get people to stop masturbating? So, the Victorians were obsessed with with masturbation. 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. tell people that story. We heard it from Dr. Chris Ryan. Oh, it's so funny. Well, it's funny in a haha kind of horrifying way. Kellogg was was obsessed with with masturbation. He thought that a lot of

91:03his 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 in bland and high in fiber would kind of kill the fire in the belly. And so he invented what became Kellogg's Corn Flakes. But, his brother was the one who commercialized and his brother's like, "We should add sugar." And Dr. Kellogg was like, "No, people will be masturbating all the time. We can't add sugar, you know?" And they had this like split and Kellogg's Corn Flakes became the commercial version with the delicious sugar added in. And 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. Oh, yeah, that's That was illustrated by my husband. He did that? Yeah, for the YouTube. Oh, so that's not original. No, no. Worried your son and heir is becoming a

91:50dirty little self-abuser? Stop all contemptible Is this an actual text from Uh yeah, you know, I have I doubt it. 13 Lane. I doubt it. There is a Lane in London, though. I bet there is. Stop all contemptible onanism. What is onanism? Masturbating and Onanism? Have you ever heard that? 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 cuz it it becomes more and more accepted idea in medical terms, but for you. That it's bad for you. And you get these like sort of drawings of men like languishing on the couch cuz they masturbated too much or whatever. of dudes out there right now that can relate. Probably in the closet. They just need the jugum penis.

92:54And and also there's another one I sent you, Jamie. I think the the sort of like looks like a flaccid penis. Is another one? This is really high. Yeah, they came in all shapes and sizes and Oh, boy. Yeah. Like now it would probably just be Yeah, there it is. And you're supposed to pee out of that? Yeah, maybe you could actually. the end of it. Like you have to just There is There are There are things it smelled like Oh, Christ. And look at that ball at the bottom with the hook. How that seems super uncomfortable. Like where does that That thing sits in between your legs? The hook? So, it must be like a hook where you could strap it in. Strap it in, yeah. That's like a a tie steel cup. I don't know who's coming on the show afterwards, but they got a lot of They got to Okay. Good Good news is Ron is a hilarious comedian, so we're we're all good. We might have to do redo the entire show

93:47just with Ron and get get his take on all this stuff. Yeah, just show him the I'll just leave these objects behind and you know, do a little God, the cup is so It's so out of those It looks like a 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 It's always an issue. a fascination, yeah. 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

94:35someone would invent s'mores. Yeah, exactly. Now everybody's You know, you add marshmallows and chocolate. 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. What's just crazy that people didn't most people have no idea that that was the origin of this stuff. That's what's so funny, you know? There's There's so many like Listerine, graham crackers, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, all this kind of stuff that that has sort of a medical background And wasn't there a medical background in the term hysterical? That hysterical was related to women the idea that the womb wanders. Like people thought that the that the female womb was like an animal of in and of itself, which I don't you know, and it would move around the body and so you they would even do things like they

95:25would smoke it back into place. They'd put like 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 the people who are going to start following me after this They're going to come. Don't worry about it. They're Come to my platform. I have tons of different stories like this. But, there was there was a time where women would go to the doctor to get stimulated as well, right? Is that true or is that is like a little bit out of my expertise. I think that's been proven to be false, actually. But, 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. Yes. So, that was That was an important part of it. That wasn't just a Victorian thing. I'm pretty sure they taught me that in high school. What? Are you serious? What

96:16high school is this or like Exactly. If you want to get a woman pregnant, make sure she Well, it was part of the idea was that part of the male orgasming inside the woman was what led to her having an orgasm, which would lead to her getting pregnant. That is weird. Well, there was there was I think there was like a might have completely remembered this incorrectly. Again, I was probably 15 at the time. Oh, well, there you go. But, there was there was someone I think it was like a senator or congress I I live in the UK now, so I'm not as up to date with with all the crazy stuff going on over here. But, I think there was like a senator who said this again, this idea that a woman had to like orgasm it meaning undermining the idea that you couldn't be raped unless you had an orgasm, which was a Victorian belief. Yeah. think that was really recently. Yeah, I

97:04think it was like in the last year. I I hate to say Like that's a nice story. I should just be like in the background popping up and like I could have like a sign that says 18th century or 19th century. You know, like let's Where did that idea come from originally? And that's I do have this weird weird vague memory that that was the way that That you were taught? Yeah, I don't know. It's It's too weird cuz I don't remember I don't It's It's too vague, you know? It does sound too weird. Like I now I picture you went to like 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 other than, you know, other than your sex ed. I'm not sure if that was And did they pass out the jugum penis as well after? They did smack our hands, though. They caught us masturbating. Good. Yeah. Now,

97:52so but why were people so obsessed with that? Why were they self self-pleasuring? Yeah, and I think that again, you know, you look at that sort of buttoned-up Victorian mentality Didn't they put like dresses over the legs of pianos and chairs and stuff like that? Oh, I don't know about that. they did. Because because it would have been provocative or would they make you There might be more than I remember, but I I really do remember something. I think we fact-checked this before. I just did it against It says it's not Okay. But, it is Oh, okay. You know what? I remember where I heard it from. I heard it from Terence McKenna. It was one of the things he talked about during one of his his speeches. That's right. We did We did fact-check that. I mean, we like to think that that the past is really different from us, which it is in some ways, but you know, again,

98:39like we still share some similar fears and the masturbation thing actually believe Last thing I I want to show you that I brought is this. Uh-huh. So, this is that? This is a urine wheel that would have dated to the medieval period. Oh, my god. And so, the 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. robbed, though. Yeah, and they didn't just Yeah, they didn't just um look at the color, they tasted the urine as well. So. So and and they could diagnose diabetes because someone with diabetes their urine tastes sweet. So they were actually diagnosing diabetes. Yeah, that's the one we based it off. Yep. But my favorite part of of the urine in the medieval period and doctors with urine they some some practitioners would take the urine and put it into a divination

99:35bowl and they could tell your future. And I think they should bring that back. Like you know at the end of your checkup not to be covered by insurance but you know out of pocket. Test your urine and then you're totally dehydrated and there's blood in there. Like yeah bro you ain't going to make it. 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 the the the whole circle the the center circle like that this a guy is the doctor holding the flask? Yes. Is that the doctor? Yep, that would be the doctor holding the flask and actually. 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 we cut through images in that image of the doctor holding the flask was sort of the predominant image of a physician up until a certain period. Now it's sort of like the stethoscope is the

100:28is the object now that we associate with doctors. The urine flask used to be it. And they were called The urine flask and a doctor's pole. And the and the plague mask. But they used to call them piss prophets cuz they they'd tell your fortune using your urine. So. We should 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? At least piss prophets are basing it on something. Throw your urine into that divination bowl. I know there's so many images of the doctor holding the flask. And you know obviously like the color of your urine could be an indicator of health. It still is today. And look at the guy he's like what do you think? Doc. How am I doing? He looks like he's hurting. There's got to be some piss prophets in LA somewhere. Most likely yeah. They're going to open

101:18up a a store right now. Look at the 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. 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 that sometimes they would have a drum in the shop and it would get louder as they got closer to pulling the tooth which would make me more anxious. And the barber shop was was a male domain because you'd also get advice on sexual diseases cuz of course everybody had like syphilis. Oh. So this is a fake nose. So everybody sort of lost their noses. What? How did they lose their noses? 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 of syphilis that I I sent. Um. Poor Jamie I told your booking manager

102:10Matt Staggs I said send these images to Jamie and don't tell him any context. You know he'd be like the hell is this podcast going to be on? Um but They lost their noses? They lost their noses. So syphilis attacks sort of the soft tissue and the image that I I sent through which he'll show in a minute the the guy has holes in his scalp as well. Oh wow. So that's a photograph. That is a photograph from the 19th century. So he actually he held onto his nose though so you could just cover that with a hat. Oh I guess. But but it was it was incredibly painful and you 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 be like wow I didn't know syphilis was so bad. It's like people died from it all the time. Well syphilis is also responsible for

102:59powdered wigs. You know that story right? No. Oh you don't? No. Oh I got something for you. Yeah you got something. When it was I forget some noble person got syphilis and started wearing wig 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. No this is real. This is legitimate. And the more wealthy you were like cuz syphilis makes your hair fall out as well. Yeah. Yeah I mean your hair falls your teeth fall out. And so the more wealthy you were the bigger and taller your wig would be. That where 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 as the 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

103:50the newspaper moves on the women would have to sit at the bottom of the carriage because their wigs were so high in some cases. Um. But what if the women had syphilis? Oh my gosh yeah absolutely cuz 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 yeah we lost our nose we have syphilis. 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. And so when you talk about the losses no nose club? Writers in London. I don't know that's the no nose club but They might have STDs yeah. They were they were just standing there with top

104:39hats and underwear. Um pull up the thing though about big wigs so I can show her. Oh yeah that's that's the mine. If you go up wait up Jamie and go yes so that man didn't lose his nose to syphilis but that's an early form of rhinoplasty that they 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 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 stay in this position while his the trunk 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. Oh my god. It's like the Knick if people have watched that show the Knick they have a scene with this. So yeah it was been so uncomfortable. He might be

105:36better off with no nose. Yeah you might be better off. And mercury of course you would lose your teeth and it it just really awful kinds of things they did with mercury. No and they had 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 copying you know. I mean what are we basing this on? Yeah okay syphilis hidden between powdered wigs. Syphilis epidemic in late 1500s year of left people with patchy hair loss. Go go to the actual who who is it what what yeah so these noblemen they were all gross. Disgusting people with STDs. What is but what is the name of the guy? Hold on don't scroll. Go back up. Here it. Yeah okay there it is. Louis the 14th only 17 his mom started thing worried baldness might hurt his reputation. Louis hired 48 wigmakers to

106:25save his image. 5 years later king of so but if you scroll down they Both men likely had syphilis. Both men likely had syphilis. So this is what started it all out. Oh that's interesting. They were hideous too like I mean to our modern sensibilities like that just looks so bizarre. Well not only yeah I mean everything's gross right? No one's washing themselves. 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 past. No it would not. People were such with that. That drives me crazy when people want to pretend that yeah. 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 the is better than you know hopefully we're

107:12we're advancing and and learning more and everything. I mean I think that you know we shouldn't look at science and medicine is totally linear like that we're progressing towards something but that you know obviously we're we're learning from what doesn't work and like that's why I said failure is a huge part of what I love to talk about on 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 Lindsey thank you thank you for writing this awesome book and thank you for your amazing Twitter feed. I'm I've been spending many many many moments freaking the 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 for having me on the show. Tell people how to get a hold of you on

108:00Instagram how they can check out your feed. Okay I'm Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris on Instagram and Dr. Lindsey Fitz on 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. Joe Rogan said buy it. It's really good. It'll freak you out. Thank you so much Lindsey. Thank you. Bye everybody.