Speaker 1: P. T. Barnum knew how to spot someone special. Barnum's
Speaker 1: career as a showman taught him that the public wanted
Speaker 1: to be surprised. He knew the general public delighted in
Speaker 1: novelty and horror and tales almost too fantastical to believe.
Speaker 1: In Phineas Gauge, Barnum found all of those things. Barnum
Speaker 1: drew up a contract for Phineas and hired him to
Speaker 1: stand on stage at his Great American Museum alongside bearded
Speaker 1: ladies and giant men. But while Phineas had become a
Speaker 1: traveling celebrity, his origins were unremarkable. He had been a
Speaker 1: foreman on a railroad construction team, responsible for laying tracks
Speaker 1: across Vermont. He was humble and respected. He worked hard
Speaker 1: and had a career ahead of him blasting away pathways
Speaker 1: through the rugged landscape. But all of that changed in
Speaker 1: an instant, or in a flash, if you will. Here's
Speaker 1: what we know. While preparing to clear some rock for
Speaker 1: the rail line, Phineas jammed his iron tab amping rod
Speaker 1: down into a hole filled with gunpowder, just like he
Speaker 1: had done a thousand times before, but this time inexplicably,
Speaker 1: it exploded. The three foot long piece of metal shot
Speaker 1: straight back through his cheek, tore through the top of
Speaker 1: his head, and sailed through the air like a javelin.
Speaker 1: It landed about one hundred feet away, reportedly slickened with
Speaker 1: blood and bits of greasy brain matter. Phineas, if you
Speaker 1: can believe it, never lost consciousness. Even more unbelievably still,
Speaker 1: he was up walking and talking just a few minutes later.
Speaker 1: Even though almost all of the front left side of
Speaker 1: his brain had been obliterated, Phineas seemed to be doing
Speaker 1: just fine, save for the massive hole in his head.
Speaker 1: He told the attending doctors that he'd be back to
Speaker 1: blasting rock in two days. But this didn't quite work
Speaker 1: out the way that Phineas had hoped. You see, he
Speaker 1: bled massively and contracted a fungal infection in his brain.
Speaker 1: He slipped in and out of comas, but after emergency
Speaker 1: surgery and subsequent recovery, Phineas was back home in a
Speaker 1: few weeks. The iron rod now by his side and
Speaker 1: a source of a great story. But Phineas wouldn't return
Speaker 1: to work in the capacity he had hoped. It wasn't
Speaker 1: because he lacked the fine motor skills or cognizance to
Speaker 1: handle dangerous materials. It was because his personality had changed.
Speaker 1: History tells us that he had turned from an affable
Speaker 1: colleague into a rage filled liability. It was after leaving
Speaker 1: his post that he found his way to P. T. Barnum,
Speaker 1: who was more than happy to welcome him in with
Speaker 1: his iron rod and almost unbelievable tale of survival. Doctors,
Speaker 1: of course, were highly interested in his case in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. The brain was a mystery. In some ways.
Speaker 1: It felt like trying to explore the farthest reaches of
Speaker 1: space or the depths of the sea. So beyond the
Speaker 1: sheer fact of his survival, experts were interested in something else.
Speaker 1: How the destruction of this particular part of his brain
Speaker 1: caused his personality to change. It's been pointed out that
Speaker 1: Phineas's story was the first case to suggest that damage
Speaker 1: to specific parts of the brain may include other, correspondingly
Speaker 1: significant changes to the person. He became something of a
Speaker 1: legend in his own right, but what historians have also
Speaker 1: come to discover is that his reputation, as it's been
Speaker 1: understood to be influential in the development of psychosurgery, is
Speaker 1: pretty ahistorical. While He has been credited with inspiring brain
Speaker 1: surgeons around the world and encouraging scientists to find the
Speaker 1: key to altering personalities. It simply can't be proven, but
Speaker 1: it makes for a tidy history and a damn good story.
Speaker 1: Phineas has become a kind of mythical figure cemented in
Speaker 1: popular culture because of what he seems to represent to us,
Speaker 1: a building block in a neat narrative about how we
Speaker 1: have tried to understand and control our brains. We love
Speaker 1: that he went on to live a seemingly normal life,
Speaker 1: continued to work, and died at an older age. We
Speaker 1: love what his story seems to show us is possible
Speaker 1: in actuality, though Phineas's experience was far more complicated than that,
Speaker 1: and the same is true for humans in general. Our
Speaker 1: quest to understand the brain will take us to some
Speaker 1: very complicated places, and sadly, we won't have to go
Speaker 1: back very far in history to find stories that visit
Speaker 1: the darker corners of the mind. I'm Aaron Manke, and
Speaker 1: welcome to Bedside Manners. The audience was speechless. Gottlieb Bookhart
Speaker 1: thought his peers would be excited about his report. Instead,
Speaker 1: they were just stunned. An icy chill settled over the
Speaker 1: room as the attendees of the eighteen ninety Berlin Medical
Speaker 1: Congress considered what Gottlieb had done and what they in
Speaker 1: turn needed to do about it. Gottlieb Bookheart ran a
Speaker 1: small asylum in Switzerland in the moment when the fields
Speaker 1: of psychology and psychoanalysis were in their infancy. Folks in
Speaker 1: his position were poised to help patients overcome what was
Speaker 1: known as mental alien nation, but as an alienists, as
Speaker 1: folks in his profession were called. He wasn't a trained doctor,
Speaker 1: let alone a trained surgeon. That didn't stop him, though,
Speaker 1: from operating on the brains of six of his patients.
Speaker 1: As he told it, he hoped that he could figure
Speaker 1: out a way to turn violent, unmanageable asylum residents into
Speaker 1: manageable ones. He believed that a simple cut between the
Speaker 1: hemispheres of the brain could relieve his patients of their outbursts.
Speaker 1: He targeted the location that he believed to control sensory
Speaker 1: and motor function. These patients were his living experiments, their
Speaker 1: brains the fodder for his trials. Now, humans have been
Speaker 1: cutting into heads since the Late Stone or the early
Speaker 1: Bronze Age. As we learned in our episode about surgery,
Speaker 1: evidence of successful trepanations dates back almost thirty thousand years.
Speaker 1: Scientists believe that even prehistoric humans had been attempting to
Speaker 1: alleviate each other of demons of the mind. This practice
Speaker 1: carried all the way through ancient Greece and Rome, through
Speaker 1: the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Surviving cultural evolutions, as we
Speaker 1: moved away away from blaming gods and spirits for our
Speaker 1: ailments and into blaming other more worldly scapegoats, we have
Speaker 1: long been trying to treat the things that we can't see. Historically,
Speaker 1: people struggling with what we now understand as mental illness
Speaker 1: have suffered mightily in communities and systems that weren't able
Speaker 1: or weren't willing to support them. The earliest asylums can
Speaker 1: be traced back to twelve forty seven in London, a
Speaker 1: place that provided refuge to the sick. While the rich
Speaker 1: could afford to take care of their relatives, the poor
Speaker 1: often were sent to places that operated on a charitable basis.
Speaker 1: These places had no means of diagnosis or treatment for
Speaker 1: the folks in their care and conditions. There were often
Speaker 1: deplorable and the blame for their condition often fell upon
Speaker 1: the patients or their families. As the years went on,
Speaker 1: we began to understand more about the brain. It was
Speaker 1: discovered that our brain is electric, with different parts in
Speaker 1: control of everything that makes us well us. The eighteenth
Speaker 1: century brought with it a more complex understanding of this
Speaker 1: organ and our central nervousness. Them reformers of the Victorian
Speaker 1: era believed that the cure to mental illness could be
Speaker 1: found in a person's physical surroundings. So they erected magnificent buildings,
Speaker 1: built beautiful gardens, hired nurses, and opened asylums that endeavored
Speaker 1: to welcome patients in with care. It was a bright
Speaker 1: moment for some, filled with optimism that a cure was
Speaker 1: at hand. Unfortunately, many of these places were victims of
Speaker 1: their own success. They simply couldn't keep up with the
Speaker 1: demand for services. More patients came, more facilities opened, and
Speaker 1: many collective standards of care were nearly impossible to enforce.
Speaker 1: Resources quickly dried up. Those who were chronically ill stayed,
Speaker 1: and the buildings were soon filled with folks who needed
Speaker 1: help but just couldn't or wouldn't receive it. Conditions grew
Speaker 1: more dire abuse ran, rampant, bodies piled up, people were forgotten.
Speaker 1: Despite their best efforts, the reformers soured on their movements.
Speaker 1: It appeared to them that mental illness was incurable. If
Speaker 1: mental illness couldn't be cured by the envire, then those
Speaker 1: working on the business of the mind decided that they
Speaker 1: were going to look inward in a very literal sense.
Speaker 1: In his countryside asylum, Gottlieb Bookhart got to work. He
Speaker 1: decided that he was going to be the man to
Speaker 1: investigate and get to the bottom of the brain. He
Speaker 1: knew that operations to remove brain tumors, a revolutionary procedure
Speaker 1: at the time, had proven successful in alleviating the side
Speaker 1: effects that the tumors had caused. Of the six patients
Speaker 1: that he operated on, he deemed three or four, according
Speaker 1: to some sources, as a success. But one of those
Speaker 1: patients died, another drowned a month later, and another began
Speaker 1: having seizures. He hoped to start a psychosurgery revolution to
Speaker 1: provide overcrowded asylums a way to treat their chronically ill patients,
Speaker 1: to cure them once and for all. Instead, our Swiss
Speaker 1: innovator found himself standing in front of his silent, stunned
Speaker 1: audience colleagues whose enthusiasm for his work had cooled in
Speaker 1: a matter of minutes. Gottlieb's professional reputation wasn't one that
Speaker 1: he had hoped for. It didn't even provoke debate. The
Speaker 1: consensus was that it would be best to bury the work,
Speaker 1: and Gottlieb stopped researching. But as it so often happens,
Speaker 1: there were other people waiting in the wings to pick
Speaker 1: up where he left off. Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Was suffering a similar fate to that of
Speaker 1: other hospitals of the early twentieth century. It had opened
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty five under the name Government Hospital for
Speaker 1: the Insane. It was the first federally operated psychiatric hospital
Speaker 1: in the United States and initially promised to intercept those
Speaker 1: coming back from the Civil War, which it did and
Speaker 1: quite well. But by the nineteen twenties the facility's population
Speaker 1: was booming. It's here that a young doctor, Walter Freeman,
Speaker 1: whose grandfather's claim to fame was being the first American
Speaker 1: surgeon to remove a brain tumor, got his start. He
Speaker 1: was twenty nine years old when he was charged with
Speaker 1: heading up the Blackburn Laboratory, stopping place for many of
Speaker 1: Saint Elizabeth's patients. It was at Blackburn that Walter used
Speaker 1: the hospital's cadavers as research fodder. In one study, he
Speaker 1: strung the bodies of schizophrenic patients up by their ears
Speaker 1: in order to take their measurements against the wall. As
Speaker 1: to what he was looking for exactly, we aren't quite sure.
Speaker 1: He deemed that the study produced nothing conclusive. Like his father,
Speaker 1: Walter was interested in brains and had more access to
Speaker 1: them than most. He began teaching at the nearby George
Speaker 1: Washington University and delighted in excavating brains from skulls for
Speaker 1: an audience. He thought that they could potentially tell him
Speaker 1: something about the lived experience of the hospital's residence. But
Speaker 1: he also had designs on practicing on the living where
Speaker 1: he could see the results of his studies manifest in
Speaker 1: real time. And it's important to remember that this impulse
Speaker 1: didn't come out of nowhere. With the rise of asylum care,
Speaker 1: the number of folks institutionalized with serious mental illness was
Speaker 1: reaching record proportions. As a result, the widespread use of
Speaker 1: strait jackets and paddy cells began to come into play,
Speaker 1: a move born out of the exhaustion and desperation of
Speaker 1: workers at those facilities. An effective therapy model hadn't yet
Speaker 1: been found. The suffering was immense. Walter, though, had come
Speaker 1: across an idea which his mind compelled him to further pursue.
Speaker 1: He was inspired by a report out of Portugal in
Speaker 1: which two surgeons developed something called the frontal leucotomy, which
Speaker 1: severed the connection between the brain's prefrontal cortex and the thalamus.
Speaker 1: After recruiting a surgical student by the name of James
Speaker 1: Watts and a patient by the name of Alice hood Hammett,
Speaker 1: Walter would improve and I'm using massive air quotes there
Speaker 1: upon the leucotomy, taking the surgery a step further. Alice
Speaker 1: had long struggled with postpartum depression and suicidal thoughts. To Walter,
Speaker 1: she seemed like the perfect candidate, which he noted in
Speaker 1: his cruelly unchartable notes about her case. She was, he wrote,
Speaker 1: a master of bitching and really led her husband a
Speaker 1: dog's life. She was a typical insecure, rigid, emotional, claustrophobic
Speaker 1: individual throughout her mature existence. The men decided that they
Speaker 1: would completely sever the white frontal lobe of the thalamus
Speaker 1: where Walter thought human emotion resided. It was the same
Speaker 1: spot where he thought he could locate the cause of
Speaker 1: mental illness. It would be dubbed the Freeman Watts procedure,
Speaker 1: but would infamously become known as the prefrontal lobotomy. Basically,
Speaker 1: he thought that he could carve the sickness right out,
Speaker 1: So Walter drilled two holes into Alice's skull that coincided
Speaker 1: with her left and right frontal lobes. Then he inserted
Speaker 1: a narrow blade through the hole and into the exposed brain.
Speaker 1: Alice awoke four hours after the procedure and went on
Speaker 1: to live another five years. According to her husband, she
Speaker 1: felt like her old self again. What isn't surprising given
Speaker 1: this moment in history is that her voice is largely
Speaker 1: missing from the historical record. But it does make you wonder.
Speaker 1: Walter deaned the operation a success and pushed to make
Speaker 1: said success well known. He was met with mixed reviews,
Speaker 1: some outrage but some outright embrace. In the following months,
Speaker 1: the team found twenty more lobotomy candidates and operated. They
Speaker 1: became so confident in their work. In fact, that they
Speaker 1: would sometimes conduct these operations in tandem the patients side
Speaker 1: by side. Doctors across the world wondered if Walter had
Speaker 1: unlocked the secret for solving mental illness. Some tried their
Speaker 1: own hand of the operation. It's important to note here
Speaker 1: that the majority of lobotomy patients for many years were women.
Speaker 1: It's clear who had the power to deem a person
Speaker 1: fodder for this experiment. As time went on, though, lobotomies
Speaker 1: moved beyond experiments fraught with injustice and eventually came to
Speaker 1: be considered a cutting edge science, one that was fit
Speaker 1: for royalty, or at the very least America's own equivalent.
Speaker 1: Rose Marie had gotten off to an unfortunate start. The
Speaker 1: doctor that was supposed to attend her birth was running late.
Speaker 1: The nurses encouraged the girl's mother to do everything she
Speaker 1: could to delay delivery, and by the time the doctor
Speaker 1: finally arrived, the baby had been forced to wait for
Speaker 1: two hours in the birth canal. This was a mistake that,
Speaker 1: although not uncommon at the time, would cause ripples through
Speaker 1: the family for generations to come. In the meantime, baby
Speaker 1: Rose had become critically deprived of oxygen. Her brain was
Speaker 1: irrevocably shaped by her first breath or lack thereof. However,
Speaker 1: her early days passed without alarm. It was only when
Speaker 1: her younger siblings began to pass her developmentally that her
Speaker 1: parents realized that something was amiss. They took her to
Speaker 1: all of the best doctors and talked with her teachers,
Speaker 1: and they all agreed that she just wasn't like her
Speaker 1: other siblings. The feeling was that there was something amiss
Speaker 1: with their daughter, and it cast a dark pall over
Speaker 1: the family. It was something only to be whispered about
Speaker 1: and spoken of only in private. In the early twentieth century,
Speaker 1: many intellectuals were taken with the eugenics movement, an ideology
Speaker 1: that suggests that certain kinds of people had di effective
Speaker 1: genes and shouldn't be allowed to procreate. This was an
Speaker 1: idea that ultimately caused millions of people to lose their lives.
Speaker 1: By nineteen thirty eight, Rose was coming into her own.
Speaker 1: By then, her father had accepted a job in Great Britain,
Speaker 1: and Rose found the space to thrive. She was beautiful
Speaker 1: and sweet, dazzling everyone she met. She busied herself training
Speaker 1: to be a teacher's aide and took great pride in
Speaker 1: her work. Her teachers loved her. They unequivocally sang her
Speaker 1: praises and spoke of how much she was blossoming. Rose
Speaker 1: was finally happy, but this warm moment wasn't meant to last.
Speaker 1: With the outbreak of World War II, the family retreated
Speaker 1: home to the United States. They took up residence in
Speaker 1: New York, a move that would prove disastrous for Rose.
Speaker 1: It was a complete disruption to the life that she
Speaker 1: knew and loved. Her seizures returned, as did her patterns
Speaker 1: of erratic behavior. She became more and more disregulated with
Speaker 1: each passing week, and those around her were known to
Speaker 1: bear the physical toll of her violent outbursts. Although she
Speaker 1: was out of sight at boarding school in Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: She wasn't out of mind. Her family worried about her
Speaker 1: near constantly, about her escape attempts and her safety, and
Speaker 1: how they believed that she compromised their reputation. Her family
Speaker 1: was a high profile one and the stakes were high.
Speaker 1: She refused to play by their rules, and her father
Speaker 1: had just about t had enough. In nineteen forty one,
Speaker 1: the doctors shared a potential solution with him. They pitched
Speaker 1: a lobotomy as a way to quell her erratic behavior. So,
Speaker 1: without the consent of his wife or twenty three year
Speaker 1: old Rose herself, he took his daughter to none other
Speaker 1: than Walter Freeman and James Watts for the procedure, one
Speaker 1: that the men had been performing regularly now for several years.
Speaker 1: They brought Rose into the operating room and gave her
Speaker 1: a mild tranquilizer. They made two small incisions in her skull,
Speaker 1: and James inserted his instrument, a slender domestic ice pick,
Speaker 1: and then he began sign Meanwhile, Walter started talking with
Speaker 1: their patient and asking her a series of questions. It
Speaker 1: was a seemingly mild mannered and polite conversation, and they
Speaker 1: made estimates on how much to cut depending on how
Speaker 1: she responded, and cut they did until she became incoherent.
Speaker 1: As to whether or not the doctors knew in that
Speaker 1: moment that they had made a grave error, we don't know.
Speaker 1: But what was immediately evident is that her coherence regressed
Speaker 1: to that of a toddler. She lost her ability to
Speaker 1: walk and to speak. The doctors told her father that
Speaker 1: she suffered from depression, but not anything else. He would
Speaker 1: go on to speak of his daughter as mentally retarded
Speaker 1: and not mentally ill, for fear that the latter would
Speaker 1: implicate him and the rest of his family in her condition.
Speaker 1: To make sure that she couldn't, Joe sent his daughter away.
Speaker 1: He first sent her to a psychiatric facility in New
Speaker 1: York and then to an institution in Wisconsin. Joe didn't
Speaker 1: tell the rest of his children where she went, and
Speaker 1: he refused to visit her. He suggested to his wife
Speaker 1: that she should do the same in order for Rose
Speaker 1: to get properly accustomed to her new life. There, she
Speaker 1: effectively disappeared from her family's story in an act so
Speaker 1: cold and cruel that it still sends shivers through the
Speaker 1: Kennedy family and the American public to this day. The
Speaker 1: illustrious Kennedys had a reputation as a prominent family to
Speaker 1: maintain and huge aspirations to protect. Their political star was
Speaker 1: on the rise, and that hunger motivated every move they made.
Speaker 1: If their larger social circles knew the truth about Rose
Speaker 1: Marie's condition, their fitness for public office might have been
Speaker 1: called into question. It's a tragic story that was sadly
Speaker 1: not unique. Many folks of the time period were hidden before, during,
Speaker 1: and after mental illness struggles, but few individuals were robbed
Speaker 1: of so much potential for good or of such a
Speaker 1: position of influence as Rose Kennedy. It would be years
Speaker 1: before Rose Marie's grown siblings, include voting America's thirty fifth President,
Speaker 1: John F. Kennedy, along with her nieces and nephews, would
Speaker 1: finally learn about what happened to her. But when they
Speaker 1: did find out the truth, they embraced her with open
Speaker 1: arms and worked toward rectifying that grievous wrong in both
Speaker 1: the private and public spaces. From this dark mark on
Speaker 1: the Kennedy family came the inception of the Special Olympics,
Speaker 1: Best Buddies International and the sponsoring of the Americans with
Speaker 1: Disabilities Act. The case of Rose Marie Kennedy came at
Speaker 1: a time when psychosurgery was thought to be the solution
Speaker 1: to mental illness. It would be a few more years
Speaker 1: before pharmaceutical therapies would be used on the brain. For
Speaker 1: the folks who were taking care of the chronically institutionalized,
Speaker 1: it seemed like a reasonable last resort. Walter Freeman would
Speaker 1: go on to perform over seven thousand lobotomies over the
Speaker 1: course of his career, charging roughly twenty five dollars for
Speaker 1: each one. It's thought that during its peak of popularity,
Speaker 1: the lobotomy was performed on more than forty thousand people
Speaker 1: across the United States, far higher than any other nation
Speaker 1: in the world. By the nineteen fifties, the procedure had
Speaker 1: dramatically fallen out of favor. The terrible side effects that
Speaker 1: came with the surgery, including sometimes death, were becoming increasingly
Speaker 1: obvious as more people were so dramatically affected. To most,
Speaker 1: the outcome of a lobotomy was far worse than the
Speaker 1: diseases that the surgery purported to cure. Germany, Japan, and
Speaker 1: even the Soviet Union banned the practice on the basis
Speaker 1: of its inhumanity, but it might surprise you to hear
Speaker 1: that they were still performing it in many European countries
Speaker 1: and the United States well into the nineteen eighties. As
Speaker 1: for Rose Marie, she lived out the rest of her
Speaker 1: days in a private cottage built just for her at
Speaker 1: her Wisconsin institution. She loved to swim and joyride, play
Speaker 1: with her pets, and passed the time with her caregivers.
Speaker 1: When she passed away at the age of eighty six,
Speaker 1: She was surrounded by her sisters and her brother, one
Speaker 1: last act of love directed towards a woman who had
Speaker 1: been made to feel so deeply unlovable and invisible for
Speaker 1: far too many years. The inner workings of the mind
Speaker 1: have long been a mystery to us, and that great
Speaker 1: unknown has led to far too many tragic misunderstandings. Our
Speaker 1: journey through the history of lobotomy today is just one
Speaker 1: of the many failures along the road to progress. But
Speaker 1: even without the sharp instruments and invasive surgical procedures, there
Speaker 1: is still a lot of room for error. And if
Speaker 1: you stick around through this brief sponsor break, my teammate
Speaker 1: Robin Miniter will share one more example with you.
Speaker 2: Albert Hofmann was something of an architect. In truth, he
Speaker 2: was a chemist, responsible for breaking things apart and finding
Speaker 2: new ways to put them back together. This is exactly
Speaker 2: what he was doing when he was assigned to a
Speaker 2: program that worked with medicinal plans in nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 2: We've talked in the series about the importance of dose
Speaker 2: and frequency when deploying therapeutics. A little bit of something
Speaker 2: might be really good for you, and it might make
Speaker 2: you better. A lot of this seemed something though, might
Speaker 2: kill you. This was certainly true for ergot, a fungus
Speaker 2: found and tainted rye. It had been used in folk
Speaker 2: medicine for a really long time. In small doses, it
Speaker 2: could quicken childbirth, and it could stop bleeding. It was
Speaker 2: otherwise responsible, scholars believe for the deaths of hundreds of
Speaker 2: thousands of people across the ages. Albert essentially wanted to
Speaker 2: isolate the good properties of the substance and strip away
Speaker 2: the bad, something like alchemy, if you remember from earlier
Speaker 2: in our season. He was able to determine the biologically
Speaker 2: active compounds of the ergot and figured out his chemical
Speaker 2: starting point, something called lycurgic acid. Over forty percent of
Speaker 2: our Western pharmaceutical drugs are derived from plant medicines and
Speaker 2: indigenous traditions. For thousands of years, cultures across the world
Speaker 2: had been working with their land to heal their bodies
Speaker 2: and their spirits. It's true that with the invention of
Speaker 2: globalization and pharmacology, this has all become a little more complicated.
Speaker 2: In the fifteen hundreds, European bioprospectors knew that indigenous communities
Speaker 2: were treasure troves of knowledge. They pillaged these peoples and
Speaker 2: took from them their ethnomedical traditions. It might surprise you
Speaker 2: to know that exports of tropical medicinal plants in the
Speaker 2: sixteenth century were only slightly less valuable than another colonial favorite, sugar.
Speaker 2: With the invention of pharmacology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
Speaker 2: scientists began applying chemical analysis to all these different plants.
Speaker 2: Think the poppy seed from which we derive morphine, or
Speaker 2: the sanchona tree from which we get quinine. So while
Speaker 2: the academic mines in the West were trying to wrest
Speaker 2: control of these plants and extract from them their healing essence,
Speaker 2: the propaganda machine got to work. Marginalized communities bore the
Speaker 2: brunt of the ensuing criminalization of these plants, which turned
Speaker 2: into a longtime war. This peaked with the official declaration
Speaker 2: of America's War on drugs in the nineteen seventies. A
Speaker 2: federally funded moral panic ensued. Over a short arc of time,
Speaker 2: we had managed to take something so revered plant medicine,
Speaker 2: and on a federal level, turn it into something so reviled.
Speaker 2: To this day, perhaps some two billion people are largely
Speaker 2: reliant on medicinal plants, and in the past ten years
Speaker 2: or so we have seen them creeping back into our
Speaker 2: embrace at a policy level. In twenty thirteen, Uruguay became
Speaker 2: the first country in the world to legally regulate cannabis,
Speaker 2: while Canada legalized it in twenty eighteen. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: organ voters passed the nation's first all drug decriminalization measure,
Speaker 2: and today some say that we are even at the
Speaker 2: beginnings of a psychedelic renaissance, as Western therapeutic practices begin
Speaker 2: to welcome hallucinogenic plant medicines back into mainstream use. These
Speaker 2: consciousness altering plants have been known to treat a variety
Speaker 2: of physical and psychological illnesses and had previously been used
Speaker 2: peacefully for centuries. Without knowing it at the time, Albert
Speaker 2: Hofmann's ingestion of two hundred and fifty millions of a
Speaker 2: gramophysurgic acid compound derived from ergot would change the world.
Speaker 2: It sent him on the world first LSD trip and
Speaker 2: blew open the possibilities for treating the mind. It soon
Speaker 2: became popular to use in conjunction with psychoanalysis, until it's
Speaker 2: alignment with a counterculture scented underground. Today, the mainstream is
Speaker 2: beginning to look more kindly upon the use of these
Speaker 2: therapeutic ethogens, and the clinical research tells us that these
Speaker 2: substances seem to be massively effective for treating debilitating issues
Speaker 2: of the mind. It looks like a promising lead, but
Speaker 2: of course, only time will tell exactly what kind of
Speaker 2: trip this will take us on.
Speaker 1: Grimm and Mild Presents Bedside Manners was executive produced by
Speaker 1: Aaron Manke and narrated by Aaron Mankey and Robin Miniter.
Speaker 1: Writing for this season was provided by Robin Miniter, with
Speaker 1: research by Sam Alberty, Taylor, Haggridorn and Robin Miniter. Production
Speaker 1: assistance was provided by Josh Thain, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams,
Speaker 1: and Matt Frederick. Learn more about this show, the Grim
Speaker 1: and Mild team, and all the other podcasts that we
Speaker 1: make over at Grimandmild dot com, and, as always, thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.