Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
Speaker 1: and I'm Holly Frye. This week we talked about Carlos
Speaker 1: Swan Finlay and yellow fever, and we talked a lot
Speaker 1: about mosquitoes. Yeah. When I was doing the research on this,
Speaker 1: a statement was made in one of the papers that
Speaker 1: I just did a double take about. And I don't
Speaker 1: I don't want to throw this author under a bus.
Speaker 1: So I'm just gonna say what the sentence was, and
Speaker 1: not more detail about the paper. The sentence was, historians
Speaker 1: have only recently acknowledged the role of disease in history. What?
Speaker 1: And I was like, right, that was my response. What?
Speaker 1: And the context of this was a military history paper,
Speaker 1: and so I was like, do you mean maybe only
Speaker 1: military historians specifically? Right, I'm like, hello, sir, have you
Speaker 1: met Samuel Peeps? Right? So, even then, like I remember
Speaker 1: in elementary school learning what a problem smallpox was during
Speaker 1: the Revolutionary War, Like I remember multiple mentions of diseases
Speaker 1: being deadlier than combat in a lot of yes wartime engagements,
Speaker 1: Like I remember learning about how devastating disease was during
Speaker 1: the Civil War. So I read this statement and I
Speaker 1: was like, what are you talking about? Well, and even
Speaker 1: before that, like I think about the discussions of the
Speaker 1: diseases that were introduced by European colonists into Norse Ryanica
Speaker 1: that really really devastated a lot of indigenous communities. We
Speaker 1: knew this isn't really yeah, none of this is new stuff,
Speaker 1: and so this sort of made me wonder, like, is
Speaker 1: this person writing is what they are trying to express
Speaker 1: that there has not been as much really really deep
Speaker 1: detailed analysis of diseases role in wars right from medical
Speaker 1: history or from military historians specifically, Like is this a
Speaker 1: statement that if it were being read by military historians
Speaker 1: would go Okay, I get it, I get what you're saying.
Speaker 1: But since I more of a generalist, AM reading it
Speaker 1: and I'm like, what are you talking about? It is?
Speaker 1: Am I just coming from a totally different context than
Speaker 1: the person who wrote that sentence, because the rest of
Speaker 1: the article did not seem like they did not know
Speaker 1: what they were talking about. Right, Listen, We're gonna blame
Speaker 1: an editor there, Yeah, I say that, having you know,
Speaker 1: been a copy editor, Sure, I'll take the blame whenever
Speaker 1: I don't. But the thing is even that, right, Like
Speaker 1: there have been discussions of like this military force was
Speaker 1: significantly weakened by disease and that's why they were not
Speaker 1: effective in this conflict. Right, So that seems weird unless
Speaker 1: they're talking about a very specific like no one has
Speaker 1: been able to run the hard numbers quantify like what
Speaker 1: percentage of disadvantage or problem was created by these specifics.
Speaker 1: Like that's the only thing I can think of. But
Speaker 1: that seems like such a general sentence. It's not talking
Speaker 1: about that. Yeah, there there was a like footnote reference
Speaker 1: to another paper that made it sound like military historians
Speaker 1: specifically did not want to focus so much on disease
Speaker 1: because focusing on the role of disease in war took
Speaker 1: a lot of the human agency about it. So if
Speaker 1: what you wanted to be writing about was battles and
Speaker 1: weaponry and tactics, and really the major driver of the
Speaker 1: course of the war was diseases, it's like the diseases
Speaker 1: are stealing your thunder if your interest is on the
Speaker 1: battles and the weapons and the maneuvers, well, I have
Speaker 1: feelings they're not charitable. I definitely said what out loud
Speaker 1: very much the way you said. What when I read
Speaker 1: that sentence, Yeah, yeah, that's so odd. It was very
Speaker 1: very weird. I'm not parsing this file. I'm like, yeah.
Speaker 1: Something that was much more on the delightful end of
Speaker 1: the spectrum to me anyway, is that some of Finlay's
Speaker 1: papers about yellow fever had these illustrations of mosquito mouthparts.
Speaker 1: And I do not love mosquitoes. I do not like
Speaker 1: being bitten by mosquitoes. I don't like mosquito bites. I
Speaker 1: don't like the number of diseases that people can get
Speaker 1: from mosquitoes, many of which don't have treatments or cures
Speaker 1: that are very effective. Right now, I do like their
Speaker 1: mouths are cool. Oh yeah, they have parts of their
Speaker 1: mouths that turn into a straw basically. Yeah. They don't
Speaker 1: fly around with it like a straw all the time.
Speaker 1: It's like a little velcrow thing, right with the proboscis unfurled. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so when I saw that he had drawn these
Speaker 1: little mosquito mouthparts, I was extremely excited about it. It
Speaker 1: reminds me of when we talked about years ago Maria
Speaker 1: Sibilia Media and her drawings of insects uh huh. Similarly,
Speaker 1: like in that case it was about not biting people,
Speaker 1: but about collecting and whatnot. Yeah, but often same you
Speaker 1: would see the fully unfurled straw apparatus and it was
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Back when I used to write
Speaker 1: for a website called how Stuff Works, I really enjoyed
Speaker 1: all of the insect and iraqnid articles that I read
Speaker 1: because they always had such interesting and cool anatomical features.
Speaker 1: Beautiful like bees having all of these structures on their
Speaker 1: bodies to hold pollen, including like sort of little pockets,
Speaker 1: little pockets to fill up with their pollen as they
Speaker 1: fly around. I love it. I love it. Get pollen pocket,
Speaker 1: not to be an use of polypocket, no, no, yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a My general fear of mosquitoes is more
Speaker 1: about the cats, since they're a heartworm vector. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I will confess that I am not always amazing up
Speaker 1: with the cats preventatives right right, because listen, we got
Speaker 1: sassy girls at our house. Yeah yeah. We had a
Speaker 1: discussion about this on the show at one point a
Speaker 1: long time ago, and I don't even remember how it
Speaker 1: came up. That was about heartworm prevention and cats. And
Speaker 1: when I was living in like North Carolina and Georgia.
Speaker 1: I had they were on heartworm prevention and a lot
Speaker 1: of the places that I lived, But then I moved.
Speaker 1: One of the places that I moved, I had a
Speaker 1: conversation with the vet that was about the risk of
Speaker 1: heartworm in that area, yeah, versus the risk of the
Speaker 1: preventive for the heartworm, right, which in that particular case,
Speaker 1: it was like, there's there's not really a reason to
Speaker 1: do this. There's there's not a major risk of heartworm here.
Speaker 1: There would be more risk from the thing. And we
Speaker 1: got an email from someone who was really upset because
Speaker 1: I think they thought I had just decided based on vibes,
Speaker 1: not that I'd had a thoughtful conversation with the veterinarian
Speaker 1: about whether that was what they needed. Yeah. Yeah. Our
Speaker 1: other thing, right, our ladies are always inside. They have
Speaker 1: no exposure to dogs. We don't even have friends who
Speaker 1: are dog people that are ever at the house. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I can't think of any of our friends that has
Speaker 1: a dog right now that would be over on the regular.
Speaker 1: So the risk is pretty low if we're a little slacky.
Speaker 1: Although I had a funny thing recently, gosh, it was
Speaker 1: probably a month ago. We had everybody in for their
Speaker 1: annual and they always asked like, are you keeping up
Speaker 1: with And I'm like, I'm sorry, and they the vetech
Speaker 1: that I talked to was like, you know what, probably
Speaker 1: eighty five percent of our clients are really up to
Speaker 1: date on it. I was like, well, that's a high number. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We also have that problem of one of our cats
Speaker 1: being extra robust and needing like the higher dose than Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we do a flee in tick prevention on hours even
Speaker 1: though they never go outside because I go outside a lot.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you're out in the woods having yeah, and
Speaker 1: nature experiences. You know. If I can take a tick
Speaker 1: prevention for myself, I would do that. Just put the
Speaker 1: cat stuff on the back of your neck. And then
Speaker 1: also because we live in a very old house in
Speaker 1: an area that has woods and whatnot around it, occasionally
Speaker 1: we do get mice inside and they can also bring
Speaker 1: in yeah. Yeah, yeah, oh, I had not thought about
Speaker 1: that for you. Yeah, it's a whole other, yeah, whole
Speaker 1: other potential concern. Yeah. So, especially since Opal in particular
Speaker 1: is she likes to find a mouse. We haven't seen
Speaker 1: one in the house in quite a while, but she
Speaker 1: likes she thinks they should be toys, and I try
Speaker 1: to get them away from her anyway. To return to
Speaker 1: Yellow to Yellow Few and Carlo Swan Finlay, we talked
Speaker 1: about how a man named Juan Santos Fernandez had established
Speaker 1: this institute, this research institute. He really wanted to find
Speaker 1: the cause of yellow fever. And I think the impression
Speaker 1: I get is that after Walter Reid came down and
Speaker 1: confirmed what Finlay had been saying the whole time, Juan
Speaker 1: Santos Fernandez was like really kicking himself. He was like,
Speaker 1: I could have had this discovery on my list of achievements,
Speaker 1: and I don't because I totally dismissed this guy and
Speaker 1: called him the mosquito Man, which launched my brain when
Speaker 1: we were talking about it onto a whole different, like yeah,
Speaker 1: cryptid trajectory of what a mosquito man would look like,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, how would it compare to moth man?
Speaker 1: Would people also think it was a sand hill cret?
Speaker 1: Like I was literally down the road so far, I
Speaker 1: was realing back here now I'm thinking about a human
Speaker 1: sized person with the mosquito mouthparts. Yeah, honestly, is really cool.
Speaker 1: And his name is Captain Proboscis the brain is busy.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I'm glad I finally got to this episode
Speaker 1: because it's been more than a decade since I've said
Speaker 1: I want to talk about the Skuy some more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's wild the way time passes. How dare it really does?
Speaker 1: It really does? And we talked about Samuel Hartlib in
Speaker 1: the Heart Lib Circle this week. Uh huh. I find
Speaker 1: this whole concept fascinating. Yeah, that there are I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a thing that always fascinates me. In everything
Speaker 1: that we talk about, there are just, in a manner
Speaker 1: of pattern recognition, people that pop up over and over
Speaker 1: that get that are obviously next to points in history
Speaker 1: where they knew a lot of people, influenced a lot
Speaker 1: of people, et cetera. He's unique because he's that, but
Speaker 1: there's not a whole lot of knowledge about him in
Speaker 1: like you know, general history. You kind of have to
Speaker 1: find the HEARTLB scholars to learn about him, and I
Speaker 1: just think that's interesting. Yeah. One of the things that
Speaker 1: I am always tickled by, but especially in this instance,
Speaker 1: is how you know when there's not a lot of
Speaker 1: ready documented information about somebody. Sometimes you can see the
Speaker 1: vibe of when people are kind of filling in the
Speaker 1: blanks or making some positions, or even kind of putting
Speaker 1: their own opinion in the mix. Sure, which is I'm
Speaker 1: not dogging any of those people, like you're trying to
Speaker 1: make the narrative work. It's fine. But one of the
Speaker 1: things that was interesting was that any of the times
Speaker 1: when Heartlib was excluded from something, why the office of
Speaker 1: a dres never happened, or why he was left out
Speaker 1: of the Royal Society, and one especially with the Royal Society.
Speaker 1: I saw one paper about it that kind of hinted like, well,
Speaker 1: he was so tied to like, you know, the hyper
Speaker 1: sort of almost puritan thing and so religious that the
Speaker 1: Royal Society was like, yeah, I mean, we're Christians, but
Speaker 1: you're you're a lot. But that doesn't seem to have
Speaker 1: really been the thing, right when you look at it.
Speaker 1: He wasn't. I mean, as we mentioned in the show,
Speaker 1: he wasn't that he wasn't in the mix talking out
Speaker 1: like any of these scientific concepts with a lot of people.
Speaker 1: He wasn't trying to be part of their their meetings
Speaker 1: or their little circle. He was just trying to like
Speaker 1: be a steward of that information. Yeah, So I just
Speaker 1: find that interesting he was more like a librarian than
Speaker 1: a scientific researcher, and a lot of the other people
Speaker 1: that were part of the founding of the Royal Society
Speaker 1: were like doing hands on research of some sort. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's at least from the quoted material in the episode,
Speaker 1: it seems like he not only was he not doing
Speaker 1: some kind of hands on research, he also seems like
Speaker 1: he wasn't really super in depth reading anybody else's stuff.
Speaker 1: He was more passing it around, like circulating it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was like a catalog librarian. Yeah. Yeah, he and
Speaker 1: was like, oh, would you do you have a request
Speaker 1: for that paper that so and so wrote? I have,
Speaker 1: I'm making you a copy, that's my problem, and was
Speaker 1: like making sure that people got those And because he
Speaker 1: was publishing things, he clearly had access to, you know,
Speaker 1: print materials and could could make duplicates of things in
Speaker 1: whatever way he was doing it. So, I mean, I
Speaker 1: I feel like it just was like a It would
Speaker 1: have been almost weird for him to have been, yeah,
Speaker 1: a member when you view it through that lens, like, no,
Speaker 1: you're you're yeah, you're cataloging things. Okay, we have to
Speaker 1: talk about the pact because I'm obsessed with it. It's
Speaker 1: so funny. It's sort of cute, sort of sweet. I
Speaker 1: feel like they had a treehouse and they would go
Speaker 1: up there and they would pull the ladder up after them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but what I find so what just I had fits
Speaker 1: of giggles when I was reading about it because this
Speaker 1: idea of like and it's our secret. I'm like, my, dudes,
Speaker 1: everybody knows this is your life work, and this isn't
Speaker 1: a secret, Like why did you put that clause in there?
Speaker 1: Like is there some aspect of this I'm not grasping,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, and we won't tell anyone. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: you tell everybody all the time. I guess they're just
Speaker 1: not saying. And we signed a document about it. I don't, right.
Speaker 1: And that's the other thing. If it's supposed to be
Speaker 1: a secret, you documented it. You kept that document forever. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love it so much. It's so silly. Yeah, Tracy,
Speaker 1: we're gonna make a podcast, but it's our secret. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be a secret. This feels like like this feels
Speaker 1: like something that would have happened between like me and
Speaker 1: two other girls standing at the end of the hallway
Speaker 1: in high school. We're gonna decide we're gonna form this
Speaker 1: secret pact. Yeah, my mental picture of how this would
Speaker 1: enact for me went even farther back than this. I'm like,
Speaker 1: this happened on the four square core in second grade. Okay,
Speaker 1: we couldn't write in Latin then, so now or ever.
Speaker 1: It made me laugh so hard. It made me laugh
Speaker 1: so hard. I love the whole like there will be
Speaker 1: no secrets, it's gracious. I don't mean to mock. There's
Speaker 1: an earnestness to it that is actually so charming. But
Speaker 1: the part that like we're going to keep it secret
Speaker 1: just I was like, but you're not. You write other
Speaker 1: pamphlets about how important this work. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 1: I love it, and I'm glad of it because you know,
Speaker 1: he distributed a lot of information, listen do I I
Speaker 1: don't agree with his concepts that like if we all
Speaker 1: read the Bible more, we would be a better nation.
Speaker 1: You gotta have got to let people do their thing,
Speaker 1: whatever religion they choose or don't choose. It's fine. I
Speaker 1: also found the very funny the idea of like uniting
Speaker 1: all of the Protestants into one like this is sort
Speaker 1: of running a foul of the concept of the Protestant movement,
Speaker 1: the Protestant Reformation. Yeah, I mean, I do love the
Speaker 1: idea of like, if everyone has universal education, we will
Speaker 1: all understand each other better. Yeah, it will be a
Speaker 1: more egalitarian and utopian community because everybody will get it.
Speaker 1: But at this point in our lives that we're living
Speaker 1: right now, it seems like even if you give people
Speaker 1: the information, they may not digest it. They might willfully
Speaker 1: misuse it to hurt other people. Yes, the worst, But
Speaker 1: I love the idea. I love the hippie part of it,
Speaker 1: where it's like, you, guys, we would all be cool
Speaker 1: to each other if we all spoke Latin, if we
Speaker 1: could all mean ancient Latin texts. Do you know what
Speaker 1: was one of the hardest parts of this episode for me?
Speaker 1: It's very silly John Durry, because you know, I want
Speaker 1: to call him John Drury all the time for no reason.
Speaker 1: I'm afraid I did at some point and neither of
Speaker 1: us caught it. I don't think you did, because I
Speaker 1: was listening for it because I knew I was so
Speaker 1: predisposed to do so, So I don't think you did.
Speaker 1: But I feel like he lives on very lane right
Speaker 1: in the theater where all the ghosts are. I really
Speaker 1: Samuel Hartlib is kind of a precursor to me wanting
Speaker 1: to talk about boil in his chemistry. So oh yeah coming, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure when, but it is coming. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: again I do love the idea of like a little
Speaker 1: you know, intellectual correspondence group, but like that's not exclusive,
Speaker 1: and like anybody who wrote to him and was like, hey,
Speaker 1: I heard you have this thing like a broker of
Speaker 1: great information. Terrific. Yeah, yeah, I have it right from
Speaker 1: the source. Do you want to read that guy's paper.
Speaker 1: I'll make you a copy. Absolutely terrific. I love your
Speaker 1: noble efforts, even if I don't agree with all of it,
Speaker 1: the concept is real good. I wonder what he would
Speaker 1: make of the end. He might feel like he's been
Speaker 1: put out of a job. He'd either be really into
Speaker 1: it or really heartbroken. Well, or maybe it would be
Speaker 1: his job. I think he would find things like Wikipedia
Speaker 1: just spectacular. I was thinking more archive dot org and
Speaker 1: probably but remember and he was in the contemporary thing,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't all about archives for him as much
Speaker 1: as about sharing newly developing ideas. Like now his stuff
Speaker 1: is in dot org, and I do love that the
Speaker 1: University of Sheffield makes all of his papers available. Nice.
Speaker 1: I had some tricky times with search, but I think
Speaker 1: that's a user error thing and not of them thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: but you can if you just want to kill a weekend.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's thousands and thousands and thousands of documents.
Speaker 1: You could not read them all unless you put aside time,
Speaker 1: like a large chunk of your life to just become
Speaker 1: a heart lip scholar. But it's it's very interesting if
Speaker 1: you can get through the very clunky linguistic style, right. Sorry, Samuel,
Speaker 1: and I don't mean to criticize, it's just hard to
Speaker 1: speaking of chunks of time in your life. If you
Speaker 1: have days off coming up, I hope they're stupendous. I
Speaker 1: hope that you hang out and relax and do whatever
Speaker 1: hippie or non hippie thing you want to do that
Speaker 1: makes you feel rejuvenated and good about the world, and
Speaker 1: that we are all kind to one another. If you
Speaker 1: have to work or you are saddled with a lot
Speaker 1: of obligations this weekend, I hope that those go super
Speaker 1: duper smoothly and that they all wrap up a little
Speaker 1: faster than you're expecting, so you get some time back
Speaker 1: to do whatever you want. Eat a cupcake sounds great.
Speaker 1: We will be right back here on Monday with a
Speaker 1: new episode. We will also be here tomorrow with a
Speaker 1: classic Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart
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