Speaker 1: Bit by bit, teaspoon by teaspoon, the archaeologists shoveled away
Speaker 1: the dirt. Their work had taken the team to a
Speaker 1: remote region of Indonesia to a cave named Liang Tabou.
Speaker 1: The soft limestone showed evidence of human occupation, including paintings
Speaker 1: that clocked in it over forty thousand years old. The
Speaker 1: spot was a favorite for archaeologists, and they had come
Speaker 1: to look for more prehistoric signs of life, so you
Speaker 1: can imagine their excitement when they came across simple stone
Speaker 1: markers on the ground of the cave's largest chamber. They
Speaker 1: had an idea about what this might be, and slowly, methodically,
Speaker 1: and meticulously began to upturn the earth. At almost five
Speaker 1: feet down, they found it an ancient grave. The skeleton
Speaker 1: appeared to be a young person around twenty years old.
Speaker 1: It was almost fully intact. Almost finding bones in the
Speaker 1: ground isn't, in principle uncommon, but there were many things
Speaker 1: that made this find spectacular. Archaeologist determined that this person
Speaker 1: died over thirty thousand years ago. The age of the
Speaker 1: skeleton and its intentional burial felt astonishing to them. It
Speaker 1: was one of the oldest examples of this ever found.
Speaker 1: The skeleton was missing its foot, but they found no
Speaker 1: evidence of infection nor blunt force trauma on its own.
Speaker 1: This might not seem very spectacular, but the team discovered
Speaker 1: something that made this not just a grape vine but
Speaker 1: a revolutionary one. You see, there was a considerable amount
Speaker 1: of new bone growth evidence of healing. This and the
Speaker 1: meticulous intentional way in which the bones seemed to have
Speaker 1: been removed led archaeologists to conclude that this limb had
Speaker 1: been deliberately surgically amputated, making this the oldest evidence of
Speaker 1: ancient surgery ever discovered. Scholars have long assumed that prehistoric
Speaker 1: societies had very basic surgical skills. We've found evidence of dentistry, suturine,
Speaker 1: and cranial trepination, among other things, but evidence of a
Speaker 1: complete and successful amputation suggests something else. That these people
Speaker 1: had well developed knowledge of anatomy, vascular systems, and remedies
Speaker 1: for infection. They knew how to stave off further harm
Speaker 1: to the body, and continued care in the postoperative time.
Speaker 1: The long standing assumption has been that surgical knowledge and
Speaker 1: technology really only developed after humans began to shift from
Speaker 1: hunting and foraging to farming. A pivot that began around
Speaker 1: ten thousand years ago. The discovery of a successful amputation
Speaker 1: from over thirty thousand years ago, in which the patient
Speaker 1: not only didn't die, but went on to live for
Speaker 1: many years afterwards, completely changes how surgical knowledge and processes
Speaker 1: are thought to have developed and places them in a
Speaker 1: much earlier period. Have we ever originally thought? If you
Speaker 1: think about the past one hundred years, our medical technology
Speaker 1: has evolved at a staggering pace. We hope for the
Speaker 1: best at hospitals and can often trust that we might
Speaker 1: leave there better than when we arrived. We revere doctors
Speaker 1: in white coats and defer to their best judgment and dexterous,
Speaker 1: steady hands. Many of us only have the vaguest idea
Speaker 1: of what goes on inside of our bodies and how
Speaker 1: all of the puzzle pieces are put together. We hope
Speaker 1: that they have a better idea than we do, but
Speaker 1: they haven't always. In fact, surgical amputation only became a
Speaker 1: norm within the last century. At one time, amputation would
Speaker 1: be done as a last ditch effort to save someone's life.
Speaker 1: While it might and often did kill a patient, they
Speaker 1: most certainly would die if the offensive body part was
Speaker 1: left intact. The history of surgery is a long and
Speaker 1: fascinating one, chuck full of curiosity and ham fisted cleaverers.
Speaker 1: It's been misguided at times and totally astonishing in others,
Speaker 1: and with plenty of bloodshed along the way. I'm Aaron Manky,
Speaker 1: and welcome to bedside Manners. You've heard me say this before,
Speaker 1: but I'll say it once again. Archaeology isn't an exact science.
Speaker 1: It's a discipline of best guesses. A field filled with
Speaker 1: detectives covered in dirt figuratively a field, but also sometimes
Speaker 1: literally in a field. Before the twenty twenty two discovery
Speaker 1: in Indonesia, some of the oldest surgical discoveries were believed
Speaker 1: to have come from about ten thousand years ago. The
Speaker 1: Neolithic period, as it was known, was the time period
Speaker 1: in which humans began to take up farming. When people
Speaker 1: did this, they also started to store their dead and
Speaker 1: shared locations. Burying our dead is one of the oldest
Speaker 1: expressions of our humanity, and we've been at it for
Speaker 1: over one hundred thirty thousand years. As ancient people created communities,
Speaker 1: they created burial sites too, and it's in these burial
Speaker 1: sites across the globe that archaeologists have found over fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred skulls that bear evidence of trefination, the act of
Speaker 1: drilling a hole into the skull of a living person
Speaker 1: in the hopes of curing sickness. There is a chance
Speaker 1: that this practice existed far before these people lived, but
Speaker 1: we can imagine that the intentional placement and preservation of
Speaker 1: these bodies had something to do with our ability to
Speaker 1: make this discovery. The question, though, is why, and the
Speaker 1: truth is will probably never know, but one guess is that,
Speaker 1: like a lot of medicine up until the past few
Speaker 1: hundred years, healing and spirituality were deeply intertwined. Were these
Speaker 1: ancient neurosurgeons trying to relieve patients of physical symptoms such
Speaker 1: as headaches or seizures, or to provide an escape hatch
Speaker 1: for voices and demons that may have affected the person.
Speaker 1: What we do know is that these people went on
Speaker 1: to live hopefully healed, as evidenced by bone regrowth. And
Speaker 1: we know too that Neolithic surgeons were operating on head
Speaker 1: injuries and seemingly successfully at times. As civilizations developed thousands
Speaker 1: of years later, Babylon, Egypt, China, and Greece among them,
Speaker 1: the great thinkers across the ancient world tried their hands
Speaker 1: at understanding what it meant to be a healer and
Speaker 1: how that's squared with cutting into the body. Different social
Speaker 1: mores across cultures dictated what was allowable For thousands of years.
Speaker 1: Health and healing were directly tied to these supernatural in
Speaker 1: some ways, and in some places it still is. Before
Speaker 1: the advent of modern science and medicine, humans believe that
Speaker 1: sickness was caused by unseen forces, and they were kind
Speaker 1: of right. But it wasn't the invisible spirits they had
Speaker 1: to fear, but microscopic germs invisible to the naked eye.
Speaker 1: It was the ancient Egyptians who first peered into the
Speaker 1: human skull with the idea that it was the brain
Speaker 1: that was the command center of the body. They were
Speaker 1: right far before anyone else was. But not everyone was
Speaker 1: so gung ho as they were about internal investigations. In
Speaker 1: ancient China and Greece, religious and spiritual beliefs dictated that
Speaker 1: the body was sacred, and as you learned in our
Speaker 1: previous episodes, human dissection was outlawed for a very long time.
Speaker 1: In fact, the original Hippocratic oath, which is still taken
Speaker 1: by doctors today, specifically forbade them from cutting. It said,
Speaker 1: and I quote, I will not use a knife, not
Speaker 1: even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor
Speaker 1: of such men as are engaged in this work. The Oath,
Speaker 1: of course, also set out to create two distinct classes
Speaker 1: of healers, sally physicians and tradesman surgeons. Following the rise
Speaker 1: of the Roman Empire, Greek healers and their knowledge were
Speaker 1: absorbed into the social fabric. Hippocratic beliefs spread throughout the territory,
Speaker 1: and the demand for care often outpaced supply. Interestingly, it's
Speaker 1: here that we saw more and more enslaved people and
Speaker 1: servants take on more surgical responsibilities for their households and communities.
Speaker 1: The physician Galen, who wrote a great deal about anatomy
Speaker 1: and surgical procedures, likely never performed or even witnessed the
Speaker 1: dissection of a human because of the Roman outlaw of
Speaker 1: the practice. However, he had been a surgeon to gladiators,
Speaker 1: where spilled blood and guts were all in a day's work.
Speaker 1: Most of his surgical knowledge, though, was just based on
Speaker 1: animal dissection, which could only help so much when it
Speaker 1: came to understanding the human body, he became the leading
Speaker 1: authority on the matter. But what he didn't understand he
Speaker 1: made up, If you'll pardon the pun, he took a
Speaker 1: stab at it with best guesses as to how the
Speaker 1: human body worked. And yet his word was taken as
Speaker 1: fact for a very long time, until sensibility shifted into
Speaker 1: a place where intentional slicing was not only acceptable but
Speaker 1: absolutely necessary in moving knowledge forward. King Louis the fourteenth
Speaker 1: would meet a bad end, but November eighteenth of sixteen
Speaker 1: eighty six wasn't going to be that day. That said,
Speaker 1: he was certainly in for a bit of suffering due
Speaker 1: to his well his other bad end. By early morning
Speaker 1: of that day, our king was flanked by his closest advisers,
Speaker 1: faced down, prostrate and pantless in bed. His people held
Speaker 1: his legs apart and firmly to the bed. As Charles
Speaker 1: Francois Felix began, the king was suffering from an anal fistula.
Speaker 1: For months. He had tried lansings and laxatives, leeches and irons,
Speaker 1: but no physician could relieve the king's suffering, and by
Speaker 1: the spring of that year he was growing desperate. So
Speaker 1: he called for a surgeon. Louis summoned Charles Francois and
Speaker 1: pleaded for help. But knowing that one wrong step or
Speaker 1: slice could mean the end of Charles Francois's career and
Speaker 1: possibly the end of him, the surgeon implored the king
Speaker 1: to give him a few more months of time to
Speaker 1: study and figure out a way to help his condition. So,
Speaker 1: with a deep breath and probably a few prayers, Charles
Speaker 1: Francois took his special made metal protractor, his knife shaped
Speaker 1: like a scythe, and got to work in the candlelight,
Speaker 1: without any antiseptic and without any pain relief. The king
Speaker 1: soldiered on through the morning. By lunchtime, the operation was over,
Speaker 1: and you know what, it was a success. And with
Speaker 1: that the new year of sixteen eighty six was deemed
Speaker 1: the year of the Fistula by the crown. He filled
Speaker 1: fountains with wine and saying his own praises of bravery
Speaker 1: in the face of adversity. The king rewarded Charles Francois
Speaker 1: with a heavy sum of francs and a large estate,
Speaker 1: making him a celebrity in his own right. In a
Speaker 1: strange twist, the surgery became somew fashionable, with folks clamoring
Speaker 1: for a cure when there was no problem to begin with.
Speaker 1: This moment helped to change the public's view of surgeons.
Speaker 1: In the collective imaginations, they evolved from simple tradesmen to
Speaker 1: skillful healers. As you've heard by now, barber surgeons were
Speaker 1: long considered to be well barbarous, knife wielders and blood letters.
Speaker 1: They occupied a distinctly different social space than the refined
Speaker 1: minds of the academy. Their job meant getting down and dirty,
Speaker 1: while the physicians preferred to look but not touch. In
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, there were various attempts to unify physicians
Speaker 1: and surgeons and have them work together rather than in opposition,
Speaker 1: but as you can imagine, this was sometimes a fraud endeavor.
Speaker 1: With the Renaissance came a turn in the story for surgeons,
Speaker 1: as they finally moved into positions of respectability within the
Speaker 1: healing business. They were starting to be viewed as innovators,
Speaker 1: not quacks or buffoons. They held sharp clinical skills and
Speaker 1: an understanding of the body's interior geography based on hands
Speaker 1: on experience and observation rather than just old theories. By
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds, London and Paris had become the epicenters
Speaker 1: of surgical development, serving both the needs of science and entertainments.
Speaker 1: I've been at this for a good number of years,
Speaker 1: and I've read my fair share about the Victorian culture.
Speaker 1: But one of the most striking discoveries that one makes
Speaker 1: when reading into their history is their love of the macabre.
Speaker 1: For example, this was the time when crime scenes, the
Speaker 1: ghastlier the better, became tourist attractions. True crime stories became
Speaker 1: all the rage. People wanted to look but not touch.
Speaker 1: They wanted to step close to danger and be able
Speaker 1: to walk away. It's not that different from the way
Speaker 1: that we still experience true horror podcasts and scary movies.
Speaker 1: It's voyeurism. It's safe, and to them, these surgical procedures,
Speaker 1: often bloody and grotesque, didn't look much different than crime scenes.
Speaker 1: Public operations and dissections became not just the means by
Speaker 1: which a budding surgeon could learn new skills, but they
Speaker 1: also doubled as entertainment for folks who headed out for
Speaker 1: a night on the public operating theaters where bodies were
Speaker 1: center stage were happy to take their money. Even into
Speaker 1: the mid nineteenth century, invasive surgeries were very rare and
Speaker 1: very risky. They were generally avoided except as an absolute
Speaker 1: last resort, So people came to catch a glimpse of
Speaker 1: these rare events when they could, sort of like when
Speaker 1: the circus might come to town, a once in a
Speaker 1: while event, a spectacle ripe for public consumption. But hey,
Speaker 1: if that isn't morbid enough, let me remind you that
Speaker 1: hospitals were known as houses of death. Think mushrooms and
Speaker 1: maggots in the bedsheets, wailing in the hallways, and rodents
Speaker 1: nibbling on discarded limbs. They were fetid and squalid places,
Speaker 1: filled with the lingering stench of blood, custs, and the
Speaker 1: undigested food and fecal matter that still slashed around inside
Speaker 1: the stomachs of dissected cadavers, and those corpses were often
Speaker 1: less strewn about, dripping blood onto the floors where it
Speaker 1: congealed and dried. Students and practitioners wore aprons that had
Speaker 1: been passed down to them by professor and former staff,
Speaker 1: which had never been washed. In fact, they were worn
Speaker 1: as badges of honor. And hey, if I've captivated you
Speaker 1: thus far, and maybe even ruined your breakfast, then there's
Speaker 1: one more surgeon you just have to meet, because he
Speaker 1: so very infamously cemented himself into the history books for
Speaker 1: reasons you might find hard to believe. Robert Liston walked
Speaker 1: into the operating room, flanked by his assistance. He was
Speaker 1: an imposing fellow, his apron starched with blood and tissue.
Speaker 1: He was a vision, part angel and part butcher, with
Speaker 1: the skills of both. Pulling up next to the operating table,
Speaker 1: he looked at his audience. Time me, gentlemen, he said,
Speaker 1: time me. Then he made a cut. Screams filled the theater,
Speaker 1: and everyone looked on in wrapped fascination. If history remembers
Speaker 1: the fastest gun in the West, it could certainly remember
Speaker 1: the fastest knife. With a custom made amputation fourteen inches
Speaker 1: long and one and a quarter inches wide, Robert's amputation
Speaker 1: knife was also one of the sharpest. While his emphasis
Speaker 1: on speed may strike you was a bit reckless, it
Speaker 1: was an appreciated skill. His work, which also happened to
Speaker 1: be highly accurate, gave patients peace of mind at a
Speaker 1: time when anesthesia didn't exist. The shorter, the suffering, the better.
Speaker 1: Standing At an imposing six foot two inches tall, Robert
Speaker 1: was a full eight inches taller than the average Brits
Speaker 1: of his day. He was brutish and abrasive, vain and bombastic,
Speaker 1: but he was always charitable to the poor and warm
Speaker 1: to his sick patients. He was one of the very
Speaker 1: best surgeons of his time, with only about one in
Speaker 1: ten patients dying on his table. Nearby hospitals weren't as lucky,
Speaker 1: with a mortality rate of about one in four cases.
Speaker 1: But although his patients came willingly, it doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: they stayed happily. The unlucky or lucky, depending on how
Speaker 1: you think about it, were often strapped to blood encrusted
Speaker 1: operating tables, held down by attendance, and over with agony.
Speaker 1: He could amputate limbs in just a few strokes in
Speaker 1: less than a minute. The hope was that the pain
Speaker 1: he caused his patients would only be a temporary state,
Speaker 1: and that they would go on to live functional lives.
Speaker 1: Until the eighteen forties, surgical practice remained a superficial art.
Speaker 1: Little could be done deep inside the body's cavities. As
Speaker 1: we've seen, surgery carried a lot of risks, even as
Speaker 1: it became a relatively more commonplace part of medicine. Robert Liston, though,
Speaker 1: would prove to be a cut above the rest. As
Speaker 1: a young man, he had come to London to study
Speaker 1: surgery and anatomy, before bouncing between the city and Edinburgh, Scotland.
Speaker 1: He was brilliant and provocative, prone to disagreements that severed
Speaker 1: professional relationships and made him rather insufferable to work with.
Speaker 1: Even so, he was ahead of his time. He found
Speaker 1: hospital conditions to be deplorable, and in a time before
Speaker 1: germ theory worked toward cleanliness, he was adamant about clean
Speaker 1: simple bandage, dressings and washing sponges and surgical tools. He
Speaker 1: had returned to London in eighteen thirty for as an
Speaker 1: instructor at one of the new teaching hospitals, playing a
Speaker 1: major role in the transformation of surgery into a modern specialty.
Speaker 1: His staff was small and money was thin, but here
Speaker 1: he saw the opportunity before him. Because medical specialties didn't
Speaker 1: exist yet, Robert did it all. He set fractures and
Speaker 1: did facial reconstructions, performed amputations and removed tumors. He could
Speaker 1: use his bare hands as a tourniquet. He invented tools
Speaker 1: that we still use today, and he carried his knife
Speaker 1: up his sleeve to always keep it warm. His trademark speed, though,
Speaker 1: sometimes came at a price. As the legend goes, there
Speaker 1: was one surgery that, for all of his successes, Robert's
Speaker 1: celebrity hasn't been able to live down. Whether it's true
Speaker 1: or not depends on the sources you consult and the
Speaker 1: people you ask as primary source. Documents couldn't be turned up,
Speaker 1: but it's a good story, so I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: it to you anyway. Like any other day in the office,
Speaker 1: Robert don his starched and sticky surgical garb and set
Speaker 1: out to conduct a leg amputation. Famously, he once amputated
Speaker 1: a young boy's leg with an easy six strokes, so
Speaker 1: this shouldn't have proven to be a difficult case. But somewhere, somehow,
Speaker 1: things went fatally wrong. In the midst of the surgical spectacle,
Speaker 1: someone moved carelessly with his blade. He sliced off the
Speaker 1: fingers of his surgical assistant and then went on to
Speaker 1: cut off a spectator's coattails. It said that neither the
Speaker 1: patient nor the assistant fared well, and both soon died
Speaker 1: from infection. And while coattails being cut isn't a fatal injury,
Speaker 1: the spectator is said to have died from shock from
Speaker 1: the whole incident, earning list in the ignoble achievement of
Speaker 1: performing a single surgical procedure with a three hundred percent
Speaker 1: mortality rate. Now, of course, why someone would make up
Speaker 1: this story, if it indeed isn't true, is something to
Speaker 1: wonder about. His professional peers simultaneously loathed and admired him,
Speaker 1: and his students adored him. But in many ways he
Speaker 1: seemed larger than life in both his stature and his
Speaker 1: contributions to his community. So I guess it would make
Speaker 1: sense that a bit of mythology was bound to take
Speaker 1: roots about him. One thing that I think we can
Speaker 1: all agree on, though, is that we're all pretty fortunate
Speaker 1: that we'll never have to meet him in the operating
Speaker 1: theater and find out if it's true for ourselves. Robert
Speaker 1: Liston brought speed to the surgical tables at a time
Speaker 1: when that skill was paramount, But soon there would be
Speaker 1: something else that would usurp its, rendering his trademark clip unnecessary.
Speaker 1: For thousands of years, up until this point, we had
Speaker 1: been working through gradual stages to arrive at a place
Speaker 1: where surgery could be both safe and painless. First we
Speaker 1: had to understand the body's anatomy. Then we had to
Speaker 1: learn to control bleeding. A third point arrived around eighteen
Speaker 1: forty six, when we learned to control consciousness. Anesthesia had
Speaker 1: arrived in Europe under Robert's watch. As history tells us,
Speaker 1: the winter of eighteen forty six brought with it a
Speaker 1: patient by the name of Frederick Churchill. After many years
Speaker 1: of bouncing from physician to physician looking for cure after cure,
Speaker 1: it became obvious to all that the only thing to
Speaker 1: do for his knee pain was to remove the limb entirely.
Speaker 1: He lay in Robert's candlelit operating room, surely aware of
Speaker 1: the spectacle that was about to befall the audience, then
Speaker 1: the starring role that he had at center stage. But
Speaker 1: when Robert walked in, he brandished only an empty looking
Speaker 1: jar and a whole lot of bravado. He held it
Speaker 1: up to the audience and announced that he was going
Speaker 1: to use ether to make his patient insensible. The idea
Speaker 1: came to him after hearing stories about dentists in America
Speaker 1: using it, and he was going to give it a
Speaker 1: try here. And with that, Robert had the patient Frederick
Speaker 1: stick a rubber tube attached to the jar into his
Speaker 1: mouth and inhale. It took all of twenty eight seconds
Speaker 1: for Robert to slice off his leg, full minutes before
Speaker 1: Frederick would stir again. Both the ether and the surgery
Speaker 1: had been successful with time to spare, so successful, in fact,
Speaker 1: that when Frederick woke up he asked when the surgery
Speaker 1: would begin. The audience, without a doubt, was astounded. They
Speaker 1: had witnessed something new that in time would become commonplace
Speaker 1: surgery as we had once known it had pivoted indefinitely,
Speaker 1: all under the watchful knife of Robert Liston. It's easy
Speaker 1: to believe, after listening to the grizzly history of surgery,
Speaker 1: that the procedures performed often ended or severely ruined lives. Certainly,
Speaker 1: the stories about speed surgeons like Robert Liston do a
Speaker 1: good job of making us wonder if those wielding the
Speaker 1: knife truly had their patient's best interest in mind. But
Speaker 1: some procedures have done more than saved lives. In fact,
Speaker 1: one saved a man's career and in the process set
Speaker 1: him on a course to change history. And if you
Speaker 1: stick around through this brief sponsor break my teammate Robin
Speaker 1: Miniter will tell you all about it. Alan Shephard thought
Speaker 1: his career was over. He was mad, he was grieving,
Speaker 1: and he was said by some to be the most
Speaker 1: disgruntled employee working at NASA. It hadn't always been this way, though,
Speaker 1: you see. Alan had been the first American in space.
Speaker 1: He had been a hero, a national icon, and he
Speaker 1: was now what a paper pusher. Sitting at his desk
Speaker 1: as the new chief of the Astronaut Office, Alan couldn't
Speaker 1: help but feel like he was now just riding the bench.
Speaker 1: He had been one of the original seven astronauts in
Speaker 1: Project Mercury before he fell out of ranks. Alan had
Speaker 1: been reassigned after was determined that he was no longer
Speaker 1: fit for flight. The problem, you see, was that Alan
Speaker 1: was found to be suffering from something called Meniere's disease,
Speaker 1: an inner ear problem that causes dysregulation and balance. It's
Speaker 1: known to trigger spontaneous bouts of vertigo into nitis attacks,
Speaker 1: which left Alan dizzy and vomiting. You can imagine how
Speaker 1: catastrophic this might be for somebody piloting a rocket. But
Speaker 1: he had heard of a new procedure that might be
Speaker 1: able to cure him, and he found a doctor. In
Speaker 1: early nineteen sixty he had decided to go to Los
Speaker 1: Angeles and Chances of Surgery in the hopes of salvaging
Speaker 1: everything that he had worked for. Scientific testing to determine
Speaker 1: if a procedure is going to be effective is a
Speaker 1: pretty murky business. There's conflict between the ethics of research
Speaker 1: and the ethics of clinical practice. The former balances benefit
Speaker 1: and harm an individual level and the hopes of serving
Speaker 1: the broader good. Medicine's hippocratic oath fundamentally does not condone
Speaker 1: causing harm, however minimal it may be. The problem, then,
Speaker 1: is that medical practitioners can't know if something is going
Speaker 1: to be effective until it's been subjected to scientific testing.
Speaker 1: And if a treatment becomes commonplace and people believe it
Speaker 1: to be effective, the medical professionals are sometimes worried that
Speaker 1: conducting tests to see whether or not something might indeed
Speaker 1: be effective will deny patient's potential help should it be shelved.
Speaker 1: The important thing to note here is a necessity of
Speaker 1: belief on the part of the patient that something might
Speaker 1: be effective. Time and time again, those in medicine have
Speaker 1: run to what's known as the placebo effect. For whatever reason,
Speaker 1: It's been found in double blind trials that even the
Speaker 1: theater of pills and procedures seemed to alleviate chronic ailments.
Speaker 1: There's a perceived effectiveness, either on the part of the
Speaker 1: patient or their doctor that is undeniable, though it's all subjective.
Speaker 1: Alan arrived in Los Angeles ready to be operated on.
Speaker 1: His surgeon placed a tiny silicone tube with his ear,
Speaker 1: allowing excess fluids to drain if need be. The surgeon's
Speaker 1: handiwork appeared to have been just the ticket. Following the procedure,
Speaker 1: Alan reported a full recovery and a total cure from
Speaker 1: the mysterious Maniaire's disease that had taken him out of commission.
Speaker 1: So he was put back on the flight team and
Speaker 1: as the commander of the Apollo fourteen mission, he got
Speaker 1: his flight to the Moon, but his story doesn't end there.
Speaker 1: Years later, this procedure went to testing. It was found
Speaker 1: not to have any kind of therapeutic benefit, but it
Speaker 1: was still found to cure Manierre's disease. Patience. In what
Speaker 1: is called a double blind, random placebo controlled test, a
Speaker 1: group of patients were all operated on externally. You couldn't
Speaker 1: discern them from one another. But over the course of
Speaker 1: three years it was found that over two thirds of
Speaker 1: the patients had made a complete recovery, both of those
Speaker 1: who have the real procedure and a placebo one healed,
Speaker 1: suggesting that the procedure is essentially meaningless. It's possible that
Speaker 1: Alan's chair was in the belief that he would be cured.
Speaker 1: But this is indeed a slippery slope of logic, as
Speaker 1: one can quickly come to blame someone for being sick.
Speaker 1: But the mind is a powerful tool, and we can
Speaker 1: all wonder if believing is the key to healing. Perhaps
Speaker 1: just as much as the salves and the knives, as
Speaker 1: we've seen in prior episodes, think that we know to
Speaker 1: be somewhat harmful, such as bloodletting, were believed to be
Speaker 1: therapeutic by practitioners and their patients, and in the century
Speaker 1: since leeching bellad of fashion, we've seen placebo remedies come
Speaker 1: and go. One scholar made a great suggestion that with
Speaker 1: every operation, the surgeon should ponder whether the patient has
Speaker 1: been healed because of the surgery or in spite of it.
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild Presents Bedside Manners was executive produced by
Speaker 1: Aaron Manky and narrated by Aaron Manky and Robin Minater.
Speaker 1: Writing for this season was provided by Robin Minater, with
Speaker 1: research by Sam Alberty, Taylor Haggerdorn, and Robin Minater. Production
Speaker 1: assistance was provided by Josh Thayne, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams,
Speaker 1: and Matt Frederick. You can learn more about this show,
Speaker 1: the Grim and Mild team, and all the other podcasts
Speaker 1: that we make over at Grimm and miild dot com and,
Speaker 1: as always, thanks for listening