Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And today we're going to be exploring a topic in
Speaker 1: the history of epidemiology and medicine and uh and a
Speaker 1: precursor to modern germ theory. Yes, we're talking about me
Speaker 1: asthma theory, which this is. This is something that has
Speaker 1: has long fascinated me just as a if nothing else,
Speaker 1: just as an idea that I'm just struck by this
Speaker 1: vision of bad air rising up out of some Gothic
Speaker 1: cemetery and uh, and in fearful humans running for their
Speaker 1: lives to avoid that air touching them and turning them
Speaker 1: into Google's or something. You know. Yeah, So, if you're
Speaker 1: not familiar with this, uh, this long running hypothesis in
Speaker 1: human history, I think we should set the scene for
Speaker 1: you at the time of the Black Death in Europe.
Speaker 1: All right, let's go there, Okay, bring bring them out.
Speaker 1: So in the late thirteen forties, the first outbreak of
Speaker 1: the Black Death fell on Europe, and it was I
Speaker 1: think we can say, without a doubt the greatest human
Speaker 1: disaster that had ever come to the continent, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: Somewhere between a third and two thirds of the entire
Speaker 1: population died. Communities and entire towns were depopulated. People didn't
Speaker 1: know what to do with all of the dead and
Speaker 1: dying people around them, And perhaps the worst part was
Speaker 1: nobody knew what caused it. Now, when we have a
Speaker 1: you know, a pandemic, at least we can we feel
Speaker 1: like we have some sense of control, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: just many people can still die from pandemics, but you
Speaker 1: can understand, Okay, there there is an organism causing this disease.
Speaker 1: Maybe medical science can do something about it. We're working
Speaker 1: on the problem. But at the time, you just you
Speaker 1: had a limited understanding of how us a disease work,
Speaker 1: and beyond that you would have to term to supernatural
Speaker 1: explanations or perhaps the appearance of of knotted rats in
Speaker 1: the ruins of the house, that sort of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, Actually, what might be worse than people not
Speaker 1: knowing what caused the plague was that many people thought
Speaker 1: they knew, and almost all of them were wrong. A
Speaker 1: little knowledge is a dangerous thing, right, Yeah, So, as
Speaker 1: you might expect, some people simply chalk the disease up
Speaker 1: to magical punishments sent by God. So in thirteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: Archbishop Zusch of York wrote an open letter to his
Speaker 1: diocese that read as follows quote, there can be no
Speaker 1: one who does not know, since it is now public knowledge,
Speaker 1: how great mortality, pestilence, and infection of the air are
Speaker 1: now threatening various parts of the world, and especially England.
Speaker 1: And this is surely caused by the sins of men who,
Speaker 1: while enjoying good times, forget that such things are the
Speaker 1: gifts of the most high giver. Now, one could be
Speaker 1: optimistic and say, well, we don't think that anymore, but
Speaker 1: I still see frequent eclips from television shows of of
Speaker 1: of individuals speaking to their congregation, for instance, and saying, oh, well,
Speaker 1: clearly this is because of our sin, either this disease
Speaker 1: outbreak or this natural disaster. Clearly this is the reason
Speaker 1: that we are suffering. But that's kind of a side tension. Now.
Speaker 1: I think you're going to have two persistent facts throughout
Speaker 1: history and continuing into the future. One is the fact
Speaker 1: that you know, great calamities befall humankind, and the other
Speaker 1: is the fact that people are always doing something that
Speaker 1: other people don't like, and so anytime people can connect
Speaker 1: the two, they're gonna try, right. And then also this
Speaker 1: this comment, this this confusion of teleological explanations and causitive explanations, right,
Speaker 1: trying to explain why this happened, why this, uh, this,
Speaker 1: this calamity occurred based on a cause and effect scenario,
Speaker 1: and then also trying to work it into your worldview
Speaker 1: in which there is some sort of divine infrastructure in place. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But then, of course, even at the time you had
Speaker 1: some people who tried to come in with their idea
Speaker 1: of a scientific explanation. They wanted to get to the
Speaker 1: root cause, right. So in thirteen forty eight, King Philip
Speaker 1: the sixth of France wanted to get to the bottom
Speaker 1: of what was causing the terrible disaster. So he gathered
Speaker 1: the most learned scholars of the medical faculty of the
Speaker 1: University of Paris, and he charged them with explaining the
Speaker 1: origins of the great death and coming up with solutions
Speaker 1: to fight it. They came back to him with an answer.
Speaker 1: On March twenty five, at about one o'clock in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: something crucial and devastating had happened Mars Jupiter and Saturn
Speaker 1: all lined up in conjunction within the House of Aquarius,
Speaker 1: and this event heralded exactly what France was undergoing at
Speaker 1: the time, because the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was
Speaker 1: known to cause death and calamity. The conjunction of Jupiter
Speaker 1: and Mars was known to bring a pestilence on the wind,
Speaker 1: and here you were getting both conjunctions at the same time.
Speaker 1: In the words of the historian Old Age Jurgen Benedicto
Speaker 1: in his book The Black Death thirteen to thirteen fifty
Speaker 1: three quote. In this astrological theory of epidemiology, Jupiter was
Speaker 1: assumed to be warm and humid and to draw malignant
Speaker 1: vapors both from the ground and from water, while Mars
Speaker 1: was assumed to be hot and dry and therefore had
Speaker 1: the capacity to kindle such malignant vapors into infective fire.
Speaker 1: So they're postulating a cause and effect. The planets lined up,
Speaker 1: and that did something to the Earth that caused these
Speaker 1: infective vapors to appear, and this was what was causing
Speaker 1: the plague. Uh so so so basically situations were astrologically
Speaker 1: just right to draw some sort of disease causing vapor
Speaker 1: out of the bowels the Earth. Right, So notice how
Speaker 1: under this theory there's really not much you can do
Speaker 1: to stop the spread of the disease. Yeah, you can't
Speaker 1: change the the movement of the spheres. That can't eradicate
Speaker 1: the sickness living in the earth. You just left to
Speaker 1: suffer whatever occurs. Yeah, this is even worse than like
Speaker 1: the theological judgment, right, because at least in that case
Speaker 1: you'd think, well, maybe we can pray and petition God
Speaker 1: to not do this to us anymore. Right, you can
Speaker 1: appeal to God, you can't appeal to the clockwork movements
Speaker 1: of the of the solar system. Right. It is a
Speaker 1: is a pitiless astrological verdict. But but also despite being
Speaker 1: a death by pure active fate, Benedictive notes that since
Speaker 1: this theory entailed the more proximate cause of the disease
Speaker 1: to be something more in the form of malignant vapors
Speaker 1: rather than just straight up curse from God, some thought
Speaker 1: that they could help avoid the disease by avoiding those
Speaker 1: malignant vapors. So, like the planets cause the Earth to
Speaker 1: release malignant vapors, or release malignant vapors on the Earth,
Speaker 1: So if you can just avoid breathing this stuff in
Speaker 1: or being exposed to it, then you can avoid the plague.
Speaker 1: So just don't go to places where they're bad smells,
Speaker 1: and therefore you might avoid the particular bad smells that
Speaker 1: cause disease. Yes, and so this was a thing that
Speaker 1: you see throughout history, the linking of disease with foul
Speaker 1: smelling objects and things like filth and rotting organic matter,
Speaker 1: which in itself, this kind of avoidance behavior may have
Speaker 1: sometimes helped people avoid infection, though not necessarily for the
Speaker 1: reasons they believed. Now, of course, we know today that
Speaker 1: the Black Death was caused by infectious disease caused by germs.
Speaker 1: In fact, there is actually still an interesting debate. Almost
Speaker 1: all scientists, I think, agree that the Black Death was
Speaker 1: caused by bubonic plague or your Cinea pestis, but there
Speaker 1: have been some rival hypotheses in the past few decades
Speaker 1: that it was something else, like maybe some kind of
Speaker 1: viral hemorrhagic fever. Uh, and that topic might be worth
Speaker 1: a look on its own for a different episodes. And yeah,
Speaker 1: well there's always room to discuss more death. But the
Speaker 1: confusion over the cause of the outbreak contu it really
Speaker 1: it caused this sense of horror and despair, and many
Speaker 1: writers of the time, like Petrarch has all this great
Speaker 1: plague poetry is just about like, oh, how much worse
Speaker 1: can things get? Is just going on and on lamenting.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I sound like that, Like I'm
Speaker 1: like calling him out for lamenting the plague. I mean
Speaker 1: the plague was really awful. Uh, there there was sometimes
Speaker 1: there were more bodies than anybody could figure out where
Speaker 1: to put them, and so like to bring out your
Speaker 1: dead scenario is literally mirroring things that happened in the past.
Speaker 1: But I want to take you to another setting during
Speaker 1: the Black Death of the forties, that of Catholic Pope
Speaker 1: Clement the Six, who was living in Avignon at the time.
Speaker 1: Now you might wonder, wait a minute, why is the
Speaker 1: Pope living in Avignon. Shouldn't he be, you know, at
Speaker 1: the Vatican. Shouldn't be at Rome For some complicated political
Speaker 1: reasons having to do with the French monarchy. There were
Speaker 1: several popes in the fourteenth century who lived in Avignon,
Speaker 1: and so he so Pope Clement the Six was pope
Speaker 1: from thirteen forty two until his death in thirteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: which means he was pope when the first large outbreak
Speaker 1: of black death hit hit Europe in thirteen forty eight,
Speaker 1: and he was notable for granting remission of sins to
Speaker 1: those who died of the plague. But he himself survived
Speaker 1: the plague. So what did he do? Well? Clement consulted
Speaker 1: his surgeons and he wanted to know what's what's what's
Speaker 1: the plan? Okay, give me a strategy. And because many
Speaker 1: experts believed the bad air was to blame, they recommended,
Speaker 1: for example, fleeing to the mountains or somewhere else with
Speaker 1: pure air. But if you're pope, you can't just run
Speaker 1: off in the wilderness, can you. So instead, on the
Speaker 1: advice of his surgeons, Clement barricaded himself inside his palace
Speaker 1: in Avignon and sat surrounded by torches and fires, constantly
Speaker 1: burning fires under the belief that fire would somehow clear
Speaker 1: en or purify the air. It would get these bad
Speaker 1: vapors out of it. And whether or not the method
Speaker 1: had anything to do with it, Clement survived the plague. Huh.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of ironic to given that the first
Speaker 1: bit of advice go into the middle of nowhere. It's
Speaker 1: probably pretty good advice as well, assuming that this was
Speaker 1: was definitely a case of ubonic plague, that it was
Speaker 1: the fleas on rats that are living in a cramped
Speaker 1: urban environment. Yeah, it would make sense to become a
Speaker 1: hermit pope in the woods. But I love this idea
Speaker 1: that this is an amazing image the Pope of Fire,
Speaker 1: the hermit Pope of fire, barricaded in his castle, surrounded
Speaker 1: by fire at all times, sitting locked in this flaming
Speaker 1: court because he's essentially making his court mars right, his
Speaker 1: his his his environment is the mars that is burning
Speaker 1: away the vapors that would otherwise invade his, his abode,
Speaker 1: and his body. Yeah, So for the rest of the
Speaker 1: episode today, we're going to be exploring this idea of
Speaker 1: the mi asthma hypothesis, or as it's often called, me
Speaker 1: asthma theory. We just recently had some discussions online about
Speaker 1: use of the word theory and hypothesis, so I'm sure
Speaker 1: it's not possible to to do it always right here,
Speaker 1: but but it's often called me asthma theory, even though
Speaker 1: it's not a very well evidence theory. All right, well,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's jump into the ne asthma. Let us
Speaker 1: allow the mi asthma to roll over us and and
Speaker 1: hopefully it won't turn us inside out or anything. Okay,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, that fog. Just one sniff of that fog
Speaker 1: and your inside out. You know, I could, I couldn't help,
Speaker 1: but think of our various fictions about fogs that turn
Speaker 1: you inside out, or or fogs that contain either space
Speaker 1: monsters or pirate zombies. Uh. We have a lot of
Speaker 1: interesting cultural ideas about the dangers of of strange gaseous
Speaker 1: bodies moving into our habitats. Well, there are good reasons
Speaker 1: to be afraid of fog, well, some types of fog.
Speaker 1: I mean, there was like the Great smog that killed
Speaker 1: so many people in London. That's just through you know,
Speaker 1: breathing bad particulates and stuff. But also of course it's
Speaker 1: a driving hazard and all that. I guess these are
Speaker 1: features of the modern world, not that's the medieval world.
Speaker 1: And if we're talking about the modern world, you also
Speaker 1: have to consider the Great War, World War One, in
Speaker 1: which we weaponized various gaseous agents, mastering this chemistry of death, uh,
Speaker 1: to to create a very real sort of miasma that
Speaker 1: would roll in and just feel you're dead in horrific ways.
Speaker 1: It's almost like, right after miasthma theory became obsolete, we
Speaker 1: started actually creating real miasmas. But we're getting ahead of
Speaker 1: ourselves here. So going back to history, throughout much of history,
Speaker 1: especially in the medieval period through like the mid nineteenth
Speaker 1: century in Europe, many supposed experts were absolutely convinced that
Speaker 1: the cause of the spread of disease was not tiny organisms,
Speaker 1: not germs, but the inhalation of something called night air
Speaker 1: or just bad air. There are million different names for it,
Speaker 1: the miasma containing the MIAs mata, so it was known
Speaker 1: as the miasma theory of disease, miasma coming from a
Speaker 1: Greek word that means to soil, corrupt, or pollute. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this was this was a cornerstone. This is this
Speaker 1: wasn't just like popular idea of the time. This was
Speaker 1: the cornerstone upon which a lot of additional understanding of
Speaker 1: the natural world was based. Yeah, this is what many
Speaker 1: experts believed. And the idea was so influential in the
Speaker 1: history of epidemiology and study of disease that it still
Speaker 1: lingers in some of our modern terminology. Like think about
Speaker 1: the roots of the word malaria, mal meaning bad area,
Speaker 1: meaning air. The word malaria is made right out of
Speaker 1: the concept that the disease was caused by being exposed
Speaker 1: to certain types of air. Now, of course, we know
Speaker 1: today that malaria is a protozoan parasite. It's spread by
Speaker 1: mosquito bites, it gets in the blood. In fact, Charles
Speaker 1: Louis Alphonse lave Iran, the French physician who discovered the
Speaker 1: fact that malaria was caused by a parasitic organism in
Speaker 1: the blood, hated the word malaria, which in light of
Speaker 1: his discoveries, he considered to be totally an unscientific word
Speaker 1: that you shouldn't use. Instead, he liked the term palludism,
Speaker 1: meaning that's from Latin palace meaning swamp or marsh, making
Speaker 1: it something means something more like marsh disease or swamp syndrome.
Speaker 1: And in fact paludisma is still the French word for
Speaker 1: the disease. It's at least a local victory for him
Speaker 1: on that front. Yeah, but here we are still like
Speaker 1: propagating mi asthma theory every time we say malaria. But
Speaker 1: some scholars believe the bad air, So like, where did
Speaker 1: the bad air come from? We've heard the idea that
Speaker 1: it was astrological forces in the heavens, but there was
Speaker 1: also this idea that the bad air lay inside the earth,
Speaker 1: or in the soil or in the water, and they
Speaker 1: thought it could be released by volcanic eruptions or earthquakes
Speaker 1: or other types of things. In fact, there's a great
Speaker 1: passage where Shakespeare writes about the astrological version of the
Speaker 1: of the Miasma and troy Less and Cressida, where he says,
Speaker 1: quote a planetary plague, when Jove, meaning the planet Jupiter,
Speaker 1: will or some high vised city hang his poison in
Speaker 1: the sick air, when the planets an evil mixture to disorder?
Speaker 1: Wander what plagues? What portents? What mutiny? What raging of
Speaker 1: the sea? Shaking of earth? Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors, diverting, crack,
Speaker 1: rend and derascinate the unity and married calm of states
Speaker 1: quite from their fixture. It's a total unity of destructive
Speaker 1: forces here, right, So he's combining this kind of like
Speaker 1: political chaos and disruption with the idea that the planet
Speaker 1: Jupiter will do something to the air to put vapors
Speaker 1: in it and poison people and bring plagues. But the
Speaker 1: most common version we see throughout his story is not
Speaker 1: so much the idea that it's something deep in the
Speaker 1: earth that gets released or something that gets you know,
Speaker 1: poorted down from the sky from Jupiter or Mars, or
Speaker 1: Jupiter Mars interacting, but it's the idea that the particles
Speaker 1: in the air, the miasma, are caused by decay, it's decomposition.
Speaker 1: Any rotting or decomposing organic matter was believed by miasma
Speaker 1: theorist to release these tiny particles of pollution or miasmata,
Speaker 1: which could be identified by the presence of a foul smell.
Speaker 1: In fact, this idea was so influential that there were
Speaker 1: places where there was this miasthma that informed things like
Speaker 1: where you would put cities like the first century BC
Speaker 1: Roman architect Vitruvius wrote a treatise on architecture, including a
Speaker 1: section on how to site the founding of a new town,
Speaker 1: and he took miasma theory into consideration as a public
Speaker 1: health concern when thinking about where you should put your towns.
Speaker 1: He wrote, quote in setting out the walls of a city,
Speaker 1: the choice of a healthy situation is of the first importance.
Speaker 1: It should be on high ground, neither subject to fogs
Speaker 1: nor rains. Its aspects should be neither violently hot nor
Speaker 1: intensely cold, but temperate. In both respects. The neighborhood of
Speaker 1: a marshy place must be avoided, for in such a sight,
Speaker 1: the morning air uniting with the fogs that rise in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood will reach the city with the rising sun,
Speaker 1: and these fogs and mists, charged with the exhalation of
Speaker 1: the finny animals, will diffuse and unwholesome effluvia over the
Speaker 1: bodies of the inhabitants and render the place pestilent. Well
Speaker 1: that's just common sense. But again we given the idea
Speaker 1: that this was a kind of a corner stone understanding
Speaker 1: of the world, and you can definitely see. I mean,
Speaker 1: even even Lavaron wanted it to be called wanted malaria
Speaker 1: to be called something like marsh sickness or swamp disease,
Speaker 1: not because he thought it was caused by bad air
Speaker 1: coming off the swamps, but knew that it was. You
Speaker 1: know where these mosquitoes that delivered the disease dwell that
Speaker 1: it is most likely to infect you. So there they
Speaker 1: were identifying some kind of relevant factors there. It is
Speaker 1: probably good if you are taking public health into consideration,
Speaker 1: not to build your city in a swamp or next
Speaker 1: to a marsh where it's going to be having all
Speaker 1: these mosquitoes come in to give you the marsh fever,
Speaker 1: but they didn't have the mechanism correctly identified. All right,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and
Speaker 1: when we come back, we're going to continue to discuss
Speaker 1: the history of my asthma theory. Thank alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: So I wonder if mi asthma beliefs might be older
Speaker 1: than history itself, because you find me asthma type writings
Speaker 1: when you go way back into history, it seemed like
Speaker 1: it was already established this idea that certain types of
Speaker 1: air and vapors caused diseases. Like around four b C.
Speaker 1: The Greek physician Hippocrates was writing about malaria, which was,
Speaker 1: as we've said, was already you know, named after bad
Speaker 1: air uh, and it was known by many different names
Speaker 1: back then, such as like the marsh fevers or the
Speaker 1: agg use. And in a text called on Airs, Waters
Speaker 1: and Places, Hippocrates wrote about how certain environments and seasons
Speaker 1: carried air that could communicate different diseases. Well, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I think I think something worth driving home is
Speaker 1: that the truthiness of the theory does seem to closely
Speaker 1: align with our basic instincts to feel discussed and avoid
Speaker 1: certain odors, at least until the source of those odors
Speaker 1: are better understood. I mean, don't hang around the latrine
Speaker 1: fields is solid advice? Were repelled? Uh, And that repulsion
Speaker 1: serves as a sort of physiological safety net. But the
Speaker 1: bad air that communicates to us the potential dangers of
Speaker 1: such a place are not necessarily the cause of the dangers.
Speaker 1: Sort of like blaming your phone for all the robo
Speaker 1: calls you're getting. Science, you know, often challenges us to
Speaker 1: think in a way that goes beyond the evolved reactions
Speaker 1: of the biological human. Yeah, exactly. Blaming the air is
Speaker 1: kind of a shooting the messenger thing, Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: But of course, as we've been discussing here, this was
Speaker 1: an idea that not only gained traction but remained in
Speaker 1: play for a very long period of time. I was
Speaker 1: reading from a book titled The Scented Ape, The Biology
Speaker 1: and Culture of Human Odor by David Michael Stoddart and
Speaker 1: the author in this point uh to the the idea
Speaker 1: that bad odors, you know, causing disease. That this goes back,
Speaker 1: he says, through two key physicians. There's the Arabian physician
Speaker 1: have A Sina who lived nine eight through ten thirty seven,
Speaker 1: who noted that the odor of urine changed during sickness
Speaker 1: and could be used to diagnose the illness. And of
Speaker 1: course this is sound, but the observation caused others of
Speaker 1: the time to develop the idea that these odors were
Speaker 1: the cause of the disease and their expulsion was the
Speaker 1: illness leaving the body. So the strange smell in the
Speaker 1: urine that was the sickness leaving the patient. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can find parallels to this type of thinking and all
Speaker 1: kinds of things, like what about the idea that sometimes
Speaker 1: illnesses cause diarrhea and vomiting. That you could look at
Speaker 1: that and say, oh, okay, so and so is sick.
Speaker 1: What we need to do is give them enemas and
Speaker 1: induced vomiting to purge all that stuff out that's making
Speaker 1: them sick. But in fact that doesn't always help somebody
Speaker 1: who's sick. Most of the time, you don't want to
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah, you're you're taking Yeah, you're you're, you're
Speaker 1: you're recognizing like an actual bodily function and the purpose
Speaker 1: behind that bodily function. But then you're you're taking it
Speaker 1: too far, your misunderstanding the cause now. Startard also points
Speaker 1: to the Greek physician Galen several hundred years earlier, who
Speaker 1: correctly judged that odors were perceived in the brain, but
Speaker 1: he also incorrectly judged that they gained direct accents access
Speaker 1: to the center of the brain via hollow olfactory nerves,
Speaker 1: despite Aristotle's previous argument that scent receptors were in the
Speaker 1: lining of the nose. Galen's theory survived for more than
Speaker 1: a millennium, and Studdard also points out that English judges
Speaker 1: as late as the nineteenth century would still take bunches
Speaker 1: of sweet smelling flowers with them on jail visits to
Speaker 1: ward off jail fever, which was what they called typhus.
Speaker 1: But typhus incidentally is caused by a bacterium spread by
Speaker 1: body lice, fleas, or chiggers to the plague. Yeah so,
Speaker 1: but it's another example of people, even in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century still having a miasmic understanding, or at least on
Speaker 1: a superficial level um of disease. No, miasma theory was
Speaker 1: still absolutely in full swing in Europe in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't untill late in the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: that we really we really got a beat down on it. Now.
Speaker 1: In researching this, I also looked back to Virginia Smith's
Speaker 1: excellent book clean A History of Personal Hygiene Impurity, which
Speaker 1: is a faculous read. She'd basically throughout the book charts
Speaker 1: how humans have always had this this understanding of what
Speaker 1: is personal hygiene and then what is sort of moral
Speaker 1: or spiritual hygiene, uh, and and how these become just
Speaker 1: entertangled throughout history. Cleanliness is Godliness, yeah, exactly, And it's
Speaker 1: it's a delightful book along those lines. But she talks
Speaker 1: a little bit about miasthma. The idea that it's was
Speaker 1: seen by the Greeks is this this dirt that caused disease,
Speaker 1: the dirt of destruction. Uh. And it could be supposedly
Speaker 1: generated in any place at any time, for any divine reason,
Speaker 1: but was generally associated with like a foul setting, you know,
Speaker 1: be at a place of the dead or a place
Speaker 1: of of decay, and the Greeks believe that these seeds
Speaker 1: of disease or miasmin quote, wafted down from the outer
Speaker 1: universe in billowing clouds of people, of polluted air, and
Speaker 1: whatever it touched its stained, and the staining of a
Speaker 1: fabric was a key example of the process. And I
Speaker 1: believe we We've already mentioned that the Greek word uh
Speaker 1: me anno is even defined as uh as you know,
Speaker 1: to die with another color, to stain uh, as well
Speaker 1: as to defile, pollute, sully, contaminate, to soil, but also
Speaker 1: to defile with sins. Again coming back to that idea
Speaker 1: that humans cannot help but complicate their understanding of bodily, physical,
Speaker 1: or even biological cleanliness with some sort of a moral
Speaker 1: or spiritual component. Yeah, we've always got this metaphor in
Speaker 1: our language, don't we. I mean I am soiled with sin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get clean. I'm going to cleanse myself. It's
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to separate the two and with I
Speaker 1: mean putting a third thing in there, with health, get
Speaker 1: a clean bill of health, or like or if you
Speaker 1: have an addiction or something, people might say, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: get clean. Yeah. Interesting, this trifecta of of health, of hygiene,
Speaker 1: and of moral rectitude. Yeah, think clean thoughts, but you know,
Speaker 1: without realizing, yeah, you can, you can have very dirty
Speaker 1: thoughts that are extremely hygienic. It's it's entirely possible now.
Speaker 1: As we've been exploring, and we'll continue to explore. European
Speaker 1: thinkers really went whole hog on mi asthma theory. But
Speaker 1: it's not confined to Europe. This is a thinking this
Speaker 1: common throughout the world. There was mi asthma thinking in
Speaker 1: ancient China, there's mi asthma thinking in India. It's something
Speaker 1: that's very natural, I think for people to conclude, and
Speaker 1: thus I think is almost maybe a cultural universal Well,
Speaker 1: it really begins to feel like a necessary step. You know,
Speaker 1: if this were a civilization video game or or say,
Speaker 1: you know, science fiction novel like something for me and
Speaker 1: in banks, it would seem like that would be a
Speaker 1: necessary stage of development that a culture would have to
Speaker 1: go through before they got to the germ theory of disease.
Speaker 1: And I think we should point out that, um, it
Speaker 1: wasn't always throughout history that you had this misguided me
Speaker 1: asthma hypothe the system against a clear and correct germ
Speaker 1: theory contagion hypothesis. Sometimes the options seemed to be you
Speaker 1: had a miasma theory of disease, in which epidemics were
Speaker 1: spread ambiently through the air, and a contagion theory of disease,
Speaker 1: where epidemics were spread by physical contact. Most of the time,
Speaker 1: neither of these is exactly correct, but each one has
Speaker 1: got a part of the truth right, right, And and
Speaker 1: it's realizing that something is happening in the physical world,
Speaker 1: be it with you know, physical touch, or it's conveyed
Speaker 1: through the vapors and the gases around us. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: by the seventeenth century, is pointed out by by Smith,
Speaker 1: miasma theory was quote held to be true beyond doubt. Again,
Speaker 1: it was a cornerstone of science, um though the actual
Speaker 1: arcana and mechanisms had yet to be found. But but
Speaker 1: she adds that there were there were at least a
Speaker 1: three things you can point to that show how the
Speaker 1: how miasma theory is remaining alive. She says that Venetian
Speaker 1: physician Sentorio Sentaorio, he's a Josh and Chuck favorite. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: is he? Yeah? Got there into him. I can't remember
Speaker 1: which one called him the guy so nicely named him twice. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: Sentario Sentario through sixteen thirty six. So he'd proven that
Speaker 1: the body breathed out a miasma of perspiration. Uh. Then
Speaker 1: you also had chemist discovering gases even though they had
Speaker 1: not yet discovered oxygen, and scientists were in the process
Speaker 1: of discovering that plants breathed as well. But of course
Speaker 1: this wasn't just about figuring out how the world worked.
Speaker 1: It was also about combating the plague. And if you've
Speaker 1: ever seen a plague doctor mask, which I'll make sure
Speaker 1: to at least include an image of an illustration of
Speaker 1: this on the landing page for this episode of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Buy Your Mind dot com. If you look at
Speaker 1: one of these masks, you can see the emphasis put
Speaker 1: on air circulation. Man, no sketchy website is complete without
Speaker 1: some clip art of a plague doctor mask, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. It's like, that's like the stock photo
Speaker 1: that's like in every creep corner of the Internet as
Speaker 1: the plague doctor mask, I know, And there are only
Speaker 1: so many like widely distributed illustrations of it that on
Speaker 1: one level they begin to feel less special. And yet
Speaker 1: every time I look at one at one, I still
Speaker 1: get wrapped up in the excitement of everything that's going
Speaker 1: on with it. Well, it is really interesting to plumb
Speaker 1: the frame of mind that designed it, right, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's essentially a hazmat suit for the play gears
Speaker 1: to avoid bad smells. So, as a Stoddard points out
Speaker 1: in the center date, Uh, these were doctors who wore
Speaker 1: long leather coats rubbed with bees wax. They wore gloves
Speaker 1: and long bird like masks, and the mask themselves, the
Speaker 1: snout of it was filled with with herbs and dried petals.
Speaker 1: And then they used a cane to probe the patient's
Speaker 1: armpits and growing for signs of infection. And they used
Speaker 1: a sounding stick so they could listen to the patient's
Speaker 1: pulse without actually coming into physical contact. Now my understanding though,
Speaker 1: this would this would differ depending on who were examining.
Speaker 1: Maybe we're examining a peasant versus examining royalty, so you
Speaker 1: wouldn't necessarily, you know, poke the keen with the stick,
Speaker 1: but you would definitely poke the peasant. So like if
Speaker 1: Pope Clement the sixth were too, maybe wonder if he
Speaker 1: had the plague and had a physician come in and
Speaker 1: look with look at him. He wouldn't have put up
Speaker 1: with the stick, right, Yeah, you would get a stick
Speaker 1: free evaluation. Sometimes there were scented substances in the tip
Speaker 1: of that dust stick or cane and uh. I've also
Speaker 1: read that the bird like appearance of the plague doctor
Speaker 1: maybe why we sometimes call a bad doctor a quack
Speaker 1: because they look like a duck um. But at Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all about distancing the know who's uh from the
Speaker 1: smell uh. And another controversial treatment method of the day,
Speaker 1: if we can call it a treatment, was quote aerial quarantine.
Speaker 1: So you don't want your home to catch plague, simply
Speaker 1: box it up, shutting out all the plague gear, like
Speaker 1: it's a night of the living dead and you just
Speaker 1: want to keep the evil out. Then you can just
Speaker 1: purify it with good odors within. It's kind of basically
Speaker 1: what what we were talking about earlier with the with
Speaker 1: the Pope of Fire. Yeah, and some some of the
Speaker 1: things you read about where people went to I don't
Speaker 1: know why I was about to say great links, not
Speaker 1: actually great links, kind of normal lengths to avoid the
Speaker 1: night air was like they close all the windows at night,
Speaker 1: you know, because you didn't want that bad night air
Speaker 1: getting in. Yeah, But at the same time, it was
Speaker 1: still obvious to many people of the day that ceiling
Speaker 1: up a body of air didn't necessarily seem to help matters.
Speaker 1: Uh and and since seventeen century, riders had observed that
Speaker 1: a change of air was helpful. Um. You know, I
Speaker 1: think we've we've all encountered situations where we are boxed
Speaker 1: in somewhere with a bad smell, be it a smelly
Speaker 1: dog in a car, or a you know, a very
Speaker 1: small child with a soiled diaper in a closed room
Speaker 1: and changing the air a change podcast studio, or some
Speaker 1: some sweaty hosts of been in there for a few
Speaker 1: hours before you exactly, yeah, some a circulation of the
Speaker 1: air is u is sometimes desirable And and they were
Speaker 1: not blind to this, you know, they they too had
Speaker 1: experienced sweaty rooms and uh and and soiled infants before.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine how rough it would be for a
Speaker 1: mi asthma theorist at like a festival or concert outdoors
Speaker 1: where you gotta go use the porta John's but you know,
Speaker 1: like you gotta hold your breath the entire time you're
Speaker 1: in there. You'll get the plague. I don't know. That
Speaker 1: is an interesting question. What would a denizen of the
Speaker 1: seventeenth century make of a modern porta potty? I feel
Speaker 1: depending on who you're asked. In some cases they might
Speaker 1: think this is amazing, this is this is a vision
Speaker 1: of the future I didn't even dare hope for whereas
Speaker 1: other porta potties they might say, yeah, this is this
Speaker 1: is horrible. Why would you use the restroom here and
Speaker 1: not behind that tree over there? All right, so I
Speaker 1: guess we need to discuss what happened to miasthma theory,
Speaker 1: Like how did it go away? Yeah? Like I mean
Speaker 1: is generally what seems to be the case is that
Speaker 1: you have new signs that comes along and knocks a
Speaker 1: previous theory out of contingent. Yes, Now, there was no
Speaker 1: single cause for the demise of miasthma theory. As we said,
Speaker 1: it was sort of um one side of a long
Speaker 1: running and confusing debate where the different sides would sort
Speaker 1: of bleed into each other. But it got chipped away
Speaker 1: at by many lines of evidence over the centuries. One
Speaker 1: of the greatest and most important final blows to me
Speaker 1: asthma theory came from the work of an English doctor,
Speaker 1: an epidemiologist named John Snow, not to be confused with
Speaker 1: Game of Thrones John Snow right spelled differently John with
Speaker 1: an H, but still a hero very much. So John
Speaker 1: Snow is a cool guy from history. He So, I've
Speaker 1: got a couple of sources I'm going to be referring
Speaker 1: to for the story of John Snow. One is an
Speaker 1: article called John Snow, m d. And Anesthetist to the
Speaker 1: Queen of England and Pioneer Epidemiologists by Michael A. Ramsey,
Speaker 1: and the other is an article by Stephen Halliday from
Speaker 1: two thousand one from the British Medical Journal. So these
Speaker 1: are about the life of John Snow. So. John Snow
Speaker 1: was born in March eighteen thirteen in the city of
Speaker 1: York in northern England, and he was the oldest of
Speaker 1: nine children. His father was a manual laborer and his
Speaker 1: family lived in Micklegate, which was one of the poorest
Speaker 1: and most unsanitary parts of York at the time. People
Speaker 1: who lived there got their water from natural sources like wells,
Speaker 1: or from the two nearby rivers, which were the Swale
Speaker 1: and the Ooze. Well, that doesn't that doesn't sound good,
Speaker 1: not like T M and T use but so U
Speaker 1: s e oh okay, but it's it sounds like secret.
Speaker 1: But have you ever seen a turtle get down? I
Speaker 1: have at the zoo, but not not in the way
Speaker 1: that you mean it. Okay. Anyway, Unfortunately, this water that
Speaker 1: the people of Michelegate were getting at the time was
Speaker 1: often just filthy. It contained way ston runoff from quote
Speaker 1: and as as Ramsey says, quote market squares, cesspools, cemeteries,
Speaker 1: and dung hills. So just imagine your water goes through
Speaker 1: all that before you get it to drink. Ah, the
Speaker 1: delicious necro water. Yeah. So Snow became apprentice to a
Speaker 1: surgeon apothecary in eighty seven and he enrolled in the
Speaker 1: hunter Rion School of Medicine in London. While he was there,
Speaker 1: he also got experience working at Westminster Hospital, which had
Speaker 1: a problem. Actually, the hospital had what's known as a
Speaker 1: dead room, where students could perform post mortem dissections of
Speaker 1: patients who died in the wards. Unfortunately, a lot of
Speaker 1: the students who performed these dissections would get sick. Eventually,
Speaker 1: Snow was able to figure out through experiments what was
Speaker 1: going on, what was making the medical students sick was
Speaker 1: not the bodies themselves, but a preservative used to keep
Speaker 1: them from decaying arsenic. The bodies were embalmed with arsenic,
Speaker 1: then the students performed the dissections, they inhaled arsenic vapor,
Speaker 1: and then they got sick. So Snow's research led to
Speaker 1: different preservation practices for cadavers, but it also was the
Speaker 1: end of It also led to the end of the
Speaker 1: manufacture of candles made with arsenic, which apparently burned very
Speaker 1: brightly but put off toxic arsenic fumes. Other claims to fame.
Speaker 1: After Snow completed his medical education in London in the
Speaker 1: eighteen thirties and forties, he became an expert in respiration
Speaker 1: and asphyxiation, and he also became one of the world's
Speaker 1: leading anesthetists, studying the medical use of ether and chloroform
Speaker 1: to anesthetize people for surgery. Uh Snow played a very
Speaker 1: important role leading to the acceptance of anesthetics for pain
Speaker 1: relief and childbirth. Like at the time, a lot of
Speaker 1: people thought that it was for some reason immoral for
Speaker 1: women to have pain relief while giving birth. That's because
Speaker 1: of the whole biblical description right of the punishment. It
Speaker 1: seems like there was a link there, like leaders of
Speaker 1: the Anglican Church preached against pain relief for for women
Speaker 1: in childbirth from the pulpit. But then Ramsey writes quote. However,
Speaker 1: on April seventh, eighteen fifty three, Queen Victoria asked John
Speaker 1: Snow to administer chloroform analgesia for the delivery of her
Speaker 1: eighth child, Prince Leopold. This was such a success that
Speaker 1: it was repeated for the delivery of Princess Beatrice three
Speaker 1: years later. Obstetrical anesthesia now had the royal blessing, and
Speaker 1: medical and religious acceptance soon followed. But John Snow's real
Speaker 1: claim on history came the interaction between miasthma theory, germ
Speaker 1: theory and cholera. So the first pandemic of Asian cholera
Speaker 1: in England occurred in Newcastle in eighteen thirty one while
Speaker 1: John Snow was working as a surgeon's apprentice, and the
Speaker 1: second pandemic of Asian cholera hit London in the fall
Speaker 1: of eighteen forty eight. Now, the prevailing theory about the
Speaker 1: spread of cholera at the time was sort of a
Speaker 1: mixture of a dash of contagion theory with a huge
Speaker 1: helping of me asthma theory. Basically, most people at the
Speaker 1: time believe that cholera was an infection that spread through
Speaker 1: particles disseminated ambiently in the air, which would then settle
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere in low lying areas, and proponents of
Speaker 1: miasma theory laid blame for the disease on workers in
Speaker 1: industries that produced nasty odors, including slaughter houses, rendering plants,
Speaker 1: and as as Ramsey notes, quote bone merchants and the
Speaker 1: miasma theory of disease was not the only odd idea
Speaker 1: about the power of smells in Victorian Britain. For example,
Speaker 1: Professor H. Booth, writing and builder in eighteen forty four wrote,
Speaker 1: quote from inhaling the odor of beef, the butcher's wife
Speaker 1: obtains her obesity that that seems quite a stretch, but
Speaker 1: Holiday actually notes a lot of interesting beliefs about miasma
Speaker 1: theory at the time, and especially about bad smells. So
Speaker 1: Sir Francis Head, he notes, was a colonial governor who
Speaker 1: served in Canada, and in eighteen forty two had argued
Speaker 1: that quote some settlements in the America's had been rendered
Speaker 1: dangerous by the plowing of virgin soil, which had exposed
Speaker 1: decaying vegetable matter and the miasms that rose from it.
Speaker 1: Also in eighteen forty two, the English social and public
Speaker 1: health reformer Edwin Chadwick, who lived from eighteen hundred eighteen ninety.
Speaker 1: He wrote an eighteen forty two report on the sanitary
Speaker 1: condition of the laboring population of Great Britain. So Chadwick
Speaker 1: wanted to make people's lives better. He was a social reformer,
Speaker 1: but he argued that what we should do is improve
Speaker 1: sewage and drainage systems in housing to remove dangerous foul smells.
Speaker 1: He later told a parliamentary committee in eighteen forty six quote,
Speaker 1: all smell is if it be intense, immediate acute disease,
Speaker 1: And eventually we may say that by depressing the system
Speaker 1: and rendering it susceptible to the action of other causes,
Speaker 1: all smell is disease. Oh wow again shooting the messenger here. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in eighteen ninety, at a Royal Society of the
Speaker 1: Arts meeting on sewage and waste disposal, Chadwick gave a
Speaker 1: talk and The Builder the same magazine again reported quote
Speaker 1: Sir Edwin concluded his somewhat prolox communication by by advocating
Speaker 1: the bringing down of a fresh air from a height
Speaker 1: by means of such structures as the Eiffel Tower and
Speaker 1: distributing it warmed and fresh in our buildings. Now, wouldn't
Speaker 1: that be a great addition to our public health infrastructure.
Speaker 1: I would towers to suck the sky are down. I'm
Speaker 1: surprised I haven't seen Maybe I have seen this and
Speaker 1: just haven't zeroed in on the detail. But you see
Speaker 1: these sort of these, these these older visions of an
Speaker 1: advanced future with archaic flying machines and towers. I wonder
Speaker 1: if this uh works its way into any of those visions,
Speaker 1: you know, the use of towers to grab clean air
Speaker 1: and bring it back down for the masses. Yeah, would
Speaker 1: that show up in like H. G. Wells or something.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm gonna to look at particularly some
Speaker 1: of the French illustrations again, it might show up there. Well.
Speaker 1: At least here you can see a departure from the
Speaker 1: ideas that we talked about earlier, like during the plague,
Speaker 1: where they thought that maybe bad noxious air would come
Speaker 1: down from outer space or from the planets or something.
Speaker 1: I hear the ideas that the bad air is low lying,
Speaker 1: and it settles in low lying areas, what you need
Speaker 1: to do is bring down fresh, clean air from up
Speaker 1: above to sort of air it out. But one of
Speaker 1: the unfortunate side effects of Chadwick's proposal, I mean, obviously,
Speaker 1: nobody's going to really protest the idea of removing sewage
Speaker 1: from the houses and stuff. That seems like a good idea.
Speaker 1: But Chadwick's proposal, uh led to the idea that foul
Speaker 1: smelling ways should be efficiently funneled away from houses and
Speaker 1: neighborhoods and down to the river from which many people
Speaker 1: were still drawing their water. So this in they're trying
Speaker 1: to prevent color exactly. Yeah, So we'll get to that
Speaker 1: in a minute. Uh. In eighteen forty four, the physicis
Speaker 1: shan Neil Arnott, who lived eighteen seventy four told a
Speaker 1: Royal Commission quote, the immediate and chief cause of many
Speaker 1: of the diseases which impair the bodily and mental health
Speaker 1: of the people and bring a considerable proportion prematurely to
Speaker 1: the grave is the poison of atmospheric impurity, arising from
Speaker 1: the accumulation in in and around their dwellings of the
Speaker 1: decomposing remnants of the substances used for food and from
Speaker 1: the impurities given out of their own bodies. So he's
Speaker 1: saying human excrement and rotting food waste release particles into
Speaker 1: the air that wind breathed in are the cause of disease.
Speaker 1: And crazily enough, Florence Nightingale was even convinced of the miasmata.
Speaker 1: She believed that scarlet fever, measles, and smallpox could all
Speaker 1: be caused by bad odors, especially those emanating up from
Speaker 1: the drains underneath housing, and she tried to encourage good
Speaker 1: health by making hospitals sweet smelling. I think sweet smelling
Speaker 1: medical facilities are kind of disturbing. Actually, you don't want
Speaker 1: to smell a sweet smell. I think medical facility should
Speaker 1: smell like cucumbers. It's like when you encounter, you know,
Speaker 1: a really obnoxious air freshener. You know it's um It
Speaker 1: can be almost like a chemical assault on your senses.
Speaker 1: And then also there is the question what is this
Speaker 1: covering up? This was deployed for some reason and it's
Speaker 1: probably horrible, but anyway, so all this stuff was in
Speaker 1: the air, right, all in the air, so to speak.
Speaker 1: The idea of me as mata was everywhere all the
Speaker 1: pretty much all the experts believed in it, but John
Speaker 1: Snow was not convinced. Because he'd done a lot of
Speaker 1: work with inhaled things, right, so he'd work closely on
Speaker 1: cases where people were subject to toxic inhalence. He even
Speaker 1: worked on a case where a young woman died from
Speaker 1: an overdose of chloroform from a rag because it hadn't
Speaker 1: been administered properly. And from his experience with arsenic vapors
Speaker 1: and all that, he knew that the potency of airborne
Speaker 1: toxins was directly linked to their concentration in the immediate
Speaker 1: vicinity of the victim. If slaughter houses and bone merchants
Speaker 1: and all the other sources of waste and food waste
Speaker 1: and animal parts and stuff like that, if that was
Speaker 1: what was producing the miasma that caused the disease, shouldn't
Speaker 1: the people closest to these places and the people who
Speaker 1: worked in them be the most affected by the disease? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that the bone merchants would be the ones that
Speaker 1: were like essentially wiped out by cholera. Yeah, And yet
Speaker 1: Snow noticed this was not the case. So to prove
Speaker 1: his case, he gathered evidence showing that cholera could only
Speaker 1: infect someone if they swallowed quote morbid matter from an
Speaker 1: infected person, often meaning particles of their excrement particles of
Speaker 1: their poop. So essentially he showed that the disease was
Speaker 1: at least partially waterborne. And and what did this evidence
Speaker 1: consist of? Well Snow put together a geographical model of
Speaker 1: cholera infection in London by determining how many people had
Speaker 1: died from the disease in thirty two different subdistricts of
Speaker 1: the city, and he found in the first instance that
Speaker 1: families who drew their water from sources supplied by parts
Speaker 1: of the Thames River above London higher upstream had very
Speaker 1: few infections of cholera, whereas people who drew their water
Speaker 1: from sources supplied by the lower Thames lower down in
Speaker 1: the in the river where more things had been entering
Speaker 1: the river above the water source, they had lots of
Speaker 1: cases of cholera. And the cause for this was that
Speaker 1: cholera has spread by oral ingestion of fecal matter from
Speaker 1: other people infected by the disease, so as the sewage
Speaker 1: produced by cholera patients in London was disposed of. It
Speaker 1: generally made its way down into the Thames, and then
Speaker 1: water companies drew the water back from sections of the
Speaker 1: river directly below that and redistributed the filthy water contaminated
Speaker 1: with fecal matter to families for drinking and home use. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I've got this great illustration here. In the year
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty, the magazine Punch published a cartoon of what
Speaker 1: they thought a drop of the water from Thames must
Speaker 1: from the Tims must look like up close? You know
Speaker 1: what do we see here, Robert? Oh, Well, it just
Speaker 1: looks like it's loaded with sort of a hybrid of
Speaker 1: cartoon characters and microscopic organisms. Just like it's almost like
Speaker 1: a like a Bosch painting exactly. That's what I was
Speaker 1: thinking of. Yeah, it's hieronymous bosh and a drop of water.
Speaker 1: I'll try to include this image on the landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode of Stuff to Bulive dot Com so
Speaker 1: that everyone else can see it as well. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: what was John Snow's recommendation for avoiding the cholera outbreaks?
Speaker 1: It was, can you guess clean water exactly? Draw your
Speaker 1: water from distant sources from clean sources far away rather
Speaker 1: than polluted parts of the river nearby, and Snow's ideas
Speaker 1: were not initially accepted by everyone. Snow was criticized by
Speaker 1: miasma theorists the Lancet Ran an article of viscerating his
Speaker 1: waterborne infection theory, and most experts still favored some version
Speaker 1: of the explanation from bad air particles in the air.
Speaker 1: So then, cholera struck London yet again in eighteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: and Snow went back to work on it. He conducted
Speaker 1: more epidemiological research linking rates of cholera infection directly to
Speaker 1: sources of water, and most famously, he isolated a single
Speaker 1: water pump on Broad Street as the source of a
Speaker 1: huge number of cases of cholera and subsequent deaths. Like
Speaker 1: locals had been complaining that the water coming out of
Speaker 1: the pump smelled bad, and Snow followed up by collecting
Speaker 1: information about who had died from cholera in the Soho
Speaker 1: area where the pump was. There were a staggering number
Speaker 1: of cholera deaths centered just around this one water pump,
Speaker 1: and Snow was able to convince the local board of
Speaker 1: governors of his theory, and they removed the handle from
Speaker 1: the Broad Street pump. The local outbreaks seemed to go
Speaker 1: away after this, but Snow's critics argued, well, maybe it
Speaker 1: had been on the wane anyway, and then the handle
Speaker 1: was replaced. Holliday writes, quote Snow's conclusions were dismissed by
Speaker 1: the members of the Committee of Inquiry appointed by Parliament
Speaker 1: to inquire into the eighteen fifty four cholera epidemic. Commenting
Speaker 1: on Snow's hypothesis that deaths had resulted from the consumption
Speaker 1: of contaminated water drawn from the Broad Street pump, the
Speaker 1: committee concluded, quote, after careful inquiry, we see no reason
Speaker 1: to adopt this belief. The committee came down firmly in
Speaker 1: favor of the supposition that the coloradic confection multiplies rather
Speaker 1: in air than in water. You know, I'm reminded again
Speaker 1: of Game of Thrones John Snow, because it's somewhere scenario,
Speaker 1: you know that John Snow and Game of Thrones is saying, look,
Speaker 1: the White Walkers are a threat. You've gotta you've gotta
Speaker 1: realize this. You gotta do something about it. You know, like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's ridiculous. We know how the world works. Right, and
Speaker 1: this is it, and he's coming up against similar opposition
Speaker 1: is saying no, no, no, don't try and rewrite me
Speaker 1: asma theory. This is the way disease works exactly. But unfortunately,
Speaker 1: and now we know that ultimately Snow was proved right
Speaker 1: or at least partially right, that that colera is definitely
Speaker 1: spread through water, can also be spread through food and
Speaker 1: other things. But unfortunately Snow never lived to see his
Speaker 1: theories gain wide acceptance, since he died of a stroke
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty eight at the young age of forty five.
Speaker 1: But we now know that Snow's theory was mostly correct.
Speaker 1: Cholera is caused by a bacterium Vibrio colorae. Colorae infects
Speaker 1: the body by being ingested, as we've said, where it
Speaker 1: reproduces and creates toxins that attack the gut and cause
Speaker 1: watery diarrhea, and then this diarrheal discharges prolific and of
Speaker 1: course it can easily kill a person infected with the
Speaker 1: disease through dehydration within hours if they're not treated. Lots
Speaker 1: people die of cholera uh and the cycle of infection
Speaker 1: occurs when the infected person's fecal matter gets back into
Speaker 1: water sources that people drink from, or ends up on
Speaker 1: food that people eat. And fortunately, cholera has been mostly
Speaker 1: eliminated in wealthier nations through sanitation, sewage disposal, and water treatment,
Speaker 1: but it still affects a lot of the world today.
Speaker 1: There's still a lot of work to do on cholera. Uh.
Speaker 1: The w h O sites research from indicating that there
Speaker 1: are somewhere between one point three to four million cases
Speaker 1: of cholera infection worldwide every year and between twenty one
Speaker 1: thousand and a hundred and forty three thousand deaths. So
Speaker 1: this is like a major world disease. Yeah, it's so
Speaker 1: easy to take it for granted, especially in in countries
Speaker 1: like the United States where generally you're using a If
Speaker 1: you use bathroom facilities, you are you have drinking water
Speaker 1: coming out of the saint drinking water coming out of
Speaker 1: the showerhead, drinking water filling the toilet into which you
Speaker 1: are going to urinat or defecate. Yeah, and that's actually
Speaker 1: one of the things that led to the understanding that
Speaker 1: snows theories were correct. Other people began to accept Snow's
Speaker 1: theory after he died, once they saw what a difference
Speaker 1: it made to keep drinking water separate from sewage disposal.
Speaker 1: So in the second half of the nineteenth century, uh
Speaker 1: Snow's theory of cholera and German theory in general started
Speaker 1: to get this wide acceptance, and it was due to
Speaker 1: multiple factors in Great Britain, specifically Snow's former critics, including
Speaker 1: the Registrar General William Farr, who had been a miasma
Speaker 1: theory guy. He he later became convinced to the role
Speaker 1: that water and drainage played in the cholera outbreaks after
Speaker 1: a subsequent epidemic in eighteen sixty six, because in the
Speaker 1: years just before this epidemic, the engineer Sir Joseph Basil
Speaker 1: gets plans for a contained sewer and drainage system had
Speaker 1: been put in place in a lot of parts of London.
Speaker 1: Construction was still going on until eighteen seventy five. But
Speaker 1: like we were just saying, the main benefit of the
Speaker 1: sewer system was that it would keep sewage separate from
Speaker 1: the water supply, and the eighteen sixty six epidemics shows
Speaker 1: the areas that were well drained did not suffer cholera outbreaks,
Speaker 1: but neighborhoods with lingering defective drainage were still hit yet
Speaker 1: again with cholera, and then also in eighteen two, Hamburg
Speaker 1: was struck with cholera, but the now well drained London
Speaker 1: was not. In London, of course stank at the time
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety two, if you were still thinking maybe
Speaker 1: it's the stinks that call as cholera, London smell bad.
Speaker 1: Holiday attributes the lingering sting mainly to horse maneuver and
Speaker 1: stuff like that in the streets. But yeah, it's still
Speaker 1: smelled bad. But people weren't getting colera anymore because they
Speaker 1: were keeping their water clean. The incoming water was clean
Speaker 1: and the disposed of water was separately removed. Of course,
Speaker 1: a bigger part of the puzzle was the increasing isolation
Speaker 1: and identification of specific microbial life forms with their corresponding diseases,
Speaker 1: like Fibrio colorade, identified by Felippo Paccini and later by
Speaker 1: Robert Coke is the cause of cholera, uh the identification
Speaker 1: of Bacillus and Thracis by Robert Coke in the eighteen
Speaker 1: seventies is the cause of anthrax, and so on. Once
Speaker 1: you could link these individual germs to the diseases, they
Speaker 1: caused miasma theory didn't have much of a place anymore.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we will continue our discussion of miasma theory.
Speaker 1: Than alright, we're back. Okay, so we've discussed how miasma
Speaker 1: theory got finally knocked out. But you know, I think
Speaker 1: about how miasthma theory was wrong, but it might have
Speaker 1: done us a lot of good. Right, Yeah, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you can certainly make a case for for it
Speaker 1: being a perhaps a necessary step in our understanding of
Speaker 1: the world. Yeah, because, specifically, as we've pointed out, versions
Speaker 1: of the theory that linked disease to foul smelling air
Speaker 1: would be somewhat useful because air, the matter that causes
Speaker 1: air to smell foul, can itself also carry and allow
Speaker 1: the growth of harmful bacteria, sewage, dead bodies, spoiled food. Um.
Speaker 1: And if you think about specific cases, you think about
Speaker 1: the Pope of Fire, Clement the sixth. He didn't become
Speaker 1: infected with the plague. Now we don't know whether the
Speaker 1: fire actually saved him. It's possible, it's impossible to know
Speaker 1: for sure. But one thing that we would later discover
Speaker 1: is that you can sterilize your environments with heat. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And also, as Virginia Smith points out in her book,
Speaker 1: we do kind of go from obsession with the asthma
Speaker 1: and filth diseases too, obsessions with something called autointoxication, which
Speaker 1: I'll get into in a bit, and uh, an obsession
Speaker 1: with bacteria living in our bowels, and from their interest
Speaker 1: in bacterial fermentation, which quote proves to be a fruitful
Speaker 1: lead towards GM germ theory. And of course greatly improved
Speaker 1: microscopes also helped. But again I'm stuck with this idea
Speaker 1: that this is maybe just a necessary step in the
Speaker 1: technology tree, uh, that the humanity used to get to
Speaker 1: our modern understanding of illness. Yeah, well wait a minute,
Speaker 1: but I want to know more about the auto intoxication.
Speaker 1: So this is this was really interesting. I was reading
Speaker 1: up on this, Uh, auto intoxication. Uh, this peaked as
Speaker 1: a health buzzword in the nineteen hundreds. And as Mary
Speaker 1: Roach pointed out in her Salon article Passing Gas and
Speaker 1: in her excellent book Gulp, which is all about, um,
Speaker 1: the science of human digestion and the quest for an
Speaker 1: understanding of how digestion works, Uh, it was a it
Speaker 1: was just a natural offshoot of myasthma theory. Roach says, quote,
Speaker 1: if one bought into the dangers of miasthma's, it wasn't
Speaker 1: much of a leap to buy into the dangers of
Speaker 1: one's own internal sewage. Purveyors of laxatives and intimate devices
Speaker 1: played up the connection, referring to the colon as quote,
Speaker 1: the human privy an obstructed sewer, and this cesspool of
Speaker 1: death and contagion. Yeah. So, like the idea is that
Speaker 1: if bad smelling stuff comes out of you, there's bad
Speaker 1: stuff inside of you, and you need to get rid
Speaker 1: of it as much as possible. Yeah, the poisonous gas
Speaker 1: was coming from inside the colon, for instance, as a
Speaker 1: Dr Walter C. Alvarez wrote in the nineteen nineteen essay
Speaker 1: in the Journal of the American Medical Association. UH. He
Speaker 1: wrote that this intuitive sense in this theory really resonated
Speaker 1: with folks. Quote they reasoned that if feces are foul,
Speaker 1: then the body must be in the best condition when
Speaker 1: freest from such material. And this essay, by the way,
Speaker 1: he was this played a big role in turning the
Speaker 1: tide against um this idea of auto intoxication. UH. The
Speaker 1: whole essay is pretty great, but I want to read
Speaker 1: just this bit from the intro. The caveman of the
Speaker 1: glacial period and the savage of today would doubtless agree
Speaker 1: that practically all diseases due to the malevolence of evil spirits.
Speaker 1: The idea constituted the first system of medicine. The next
Speaker 1: one appeared with the dawn of civilization, when men awoke
Speaker 1: to the possibility that some diseases might arise from spontaneous
Speaker 1: derangements of the bodily functions, particularly those concerned in excretion.
Speaker 1: They reason that if feces are foul, then the body
Speaker 1: must be in the best condition when free is from
Speaker 1: such material. The idea, which is based on what appears
Speaker 1: to be an obvious truism, has always been an attractive one,
Speaker 1: particularly to the lay mind. The ancient Egyptians purge themselves
Speaker 1: at certain times in the moon's cycle, just as many
Speaker 1: people now take caluml in the spring. For thousands of years,
Speaker 1: physicians have been in the habit of purging their patients
Speaker 1: when they have not known what to do. We see
Speaker 1: then that the present day dread of stasis and autointoxication
Speaker 1: is nothing new. In the eighteenth century, the high priest
Speaker 1: of the cult was Joe was Johann comp who believed
Speaker 1: that all disease was due to impacted feces. Under his teaching,
Speaker 1: the use of large medicated enemies became immensely popular and
Speaker 1: the apothecaries fattened off the hypochondriacs. Then, just as the
Speaker 1: quote internal bath specialists do today internal bath. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: is the worst term ever, internal bath. So you had this, uh,
Speaker 1: this one company that the Tyrrell Hygienic Institute Tyre, the
Speaker 1: Tyrell Corps has nothing to do with with replicants, but
Speaker 1: this was This was the organization created by Charles Alfred
Speaker 1: Tyrell Um. He was essentially the Colon Klin's expert of
Speaker 1: the day, and the chief produ was the JB. L.
Speaker 1: Cascade Colonic Irrigator. J B L, by the way, stood
Speaker 1: for Joy Beauty Life. Wait, isn't that also a brand
Speaker 1: of speaker it Maybe I don't know if that stands
Speaker 1: for Joy Beauty Life as well, but uh, it might
Speaker 1: have a slightly different connotation. Yes it is. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a brand of speakers. All right. Well, I'll leave
Speaker 1: our our listeners to explore what that stands for. Unless
Speaker 1: you have a quick answer for us, Well, I don't know,
Speaker 1: Joy Beauty Life. Maybe one product was developed from another,
Speaker 1: like we're listening to our favorite music through colonic irrigators. Well,
Speaker 1: in addition to create putting out this product, they also
Speaker 1: put out thousands of promotional pamphlets for doctors to give
Speaker 1: their patients. And not everyone was won over by this
Speaker 1: fake disease and it's fake treatments. And you might well
Speaker 1: be thinking, hey, isn't this a problem worth sewing a
Speaker 1: few dog anuses shut over? What? No, I'm not thinking that.
Speaker 1: So it was indeed, because it's Mary Roach points out
Speaker 1: in nine quote physician and otto intoxication doubter Arthur Donaldson
Speaker 1: artificially and incontrovertibly constipated three dogs by temporarily sewing shut
Speaker 1: their anus. That is horrible. And in this experiment he
Speaker 1: observed quote no physical symptoms beyond a mild loss of
Speaker 1: appetite occurred and there was no internal poisoning. He also
Speaker 1: checked their blood and so this provided uh some additional
Speaker 1: ammo against this idea of auto intoxication, which itself was
Speaker 1: a child of mi asthma. And I might add that
Speaker 1: this is a child of miasma, that is that still
Speaker 1: lives in our world. You will still see plenty of
Speaker 1: of of of agents of Tyrrell at work in the world.
Speaker 1: You mean, all the like the pseudoscience and the clan's culture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and filth building up in the colon and become This
Speaker 1: is the kind of thing that I find that I
Speaker 1: encounter in an uh little clickbait images at the bottom
Speaker 1: of various blog posts, was like this famous actress removed
Speaker 1: this from her colon and now she will live to
Speaker 1: be a hundred and fifty. That's sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's some sort of grotesque picture that you still
Speaker 1: feel obligated to click on just to figure out what
Speaker 1: you're looking at, and then you find no answers in
Speaker 1: the in the clickbait content, of course. Cleanse your toxins. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's auto intoxication in a nutshell. If you want
Speaker 1: to know more about that, again, I highly recommend Mary
Speaker 1: roaches salon article or her book Gulp, It's it's miasma
Speaker 1: theory on the inside. Yeah, so there you have at
Speaker 1: miasma theory in a nutshell. I would say one thing
Speaker 1: you should take away from this episode is if you
Speaker 1: are lucky enough to have access to clean water that
Speaker 1: is separate from your sewage disposal system. You should recognize
Speaker 1: that this is a thing that you're very fortunate to experience.
Speaker 1: You should be thankful for it. It's something we take
Speaker 1: for granted in our lives, but it's a huge part
Speaker 1: of what makes like city life livable. Indeed, all right,
Speaker 1: if you want more episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind,
Speaker 1: you know where to go. I don't know to Stuff
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Speaker 1: That's where you'll find all our episodes going back to
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Speaker 1: and Instagram. On Facebook, you will also find that discussion group,
Speaker 1: the discussion module where you can engage with with Joe
Speaker 1: and myself as well as various other listeners who have
Speaker 1: lots of intriguing thoughts on topics we are discussing, topics
Speaker 1: we should discuss, et cetera. Oh yes, so big, thanks
Speaker 1: as always to our audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison.
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