Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of
Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
Speaker 1: of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: Wash your hands. It's a common refrain, whether you're an
Speaker 1: elementary schooler in a classroom or an adult hard at work.
Speaker 1: When you're a child, you're told to wash your hands
Speaker 1: because the throw up germ lives between your fingers. When
Speaker 1: you're an adult, you're given the less fun version, you
Speaker 1: don't want to spread disease to yourself and others. Abrasive
Speaker 1: though it can be, this hand washing propaganda is actually
Speaker 1: the result of decades of hard won medical none that
Speaker 1: represents a major public health breakthrough on par with vaccinations
Speaker 1: and fluoride. And as it so happens, we owe that
Speaker 1: breakthrough to one man who no one wanted to listen to.
Speaker 1: Ignaz Semmelweis was born in eighteen eighteen to a Jewish
Speaker 1: family in Hungary. By eighteen thirty seven, he was pursuing
Speaker 1: a career in the budding world of medicine. He traveled
Speaker 1: to Vienna, Austria, to work at the hospital Vienna General,
Speaker 1: was one of the premier medical facilities in all of Europe,
Speaker 1: but being that Ignaz was both Jewish and Hungarian, he
Speaker 1: met with a lot of prejudice that limited the areas
Speaker 1: of medicine that he was allowed to work in. However,
Speaker 1: that prejudice set Ignas on a fateful course. He landed
Speaker 1: in obstetrics, the area of medicine dealing with pregnancy and childbirth.
Speaker 1: This wasn't seen as a particularly desirable post back then.
Speaker 1: Childbirth had been the domain of female midwives for centuries,
Speaker 1: but Ignaz was determined to make the best of it.
Speaker 1: Upon his arrival at the maternity division, he soon learned
Speaker 1: of a disturbing trend. There were two wards under his purview,
Speaker 1: one where midwives delivered babies and one where doctors performed
Speaker 1: the deliveries. In the midwives ward, the mortality rate of
Speaker 1: the mothers was relatively low. In the doctor's ward, though,
Speaker 1: the mortality rate was shockingly high, potentially as much as
Speaker 1: one in ten women. The women died of what was
Speaker 1: called child bed fever, a horrible affliction that saw the
Speaker 1: women develop fevers, terrible sores, and other symptoms that are
Speaker 1: just too gruesome to mention here. Needless to say, they
Speaker 1: died in a lot of pain. Ignaz was determined to
Speaker 1: find the cause of this affliction, and he went about
Speaker 1: it in a fairly scientific way for his time. He
Speaker 1: observed the conditions in both wards and tried to come
Speaker 1: up with as many differences as possible, but many of
Speaker 1: these differences were superficial. In the midwives ward, for example,
Speaker 1: women gave birth on their side, while in the doctor's
Speaker 1: ward they gave birth on their backs. And when he
Speaker 1: asked the doctors to start changing the position of the women,
Speaker 1: he didn't notice any change in their mortality rates. He
Speaker 1: noticed that a priest in the doctor's ward would ring
Speaker 1: a bell that sometimes startled the word women. Ignaz had
Speaker 1: the priest get rid of the bell, but he still
Speaker 1: didn't notice any change in the deaths. Finally, a somewhat
Speaker 1: morbid breakthrough came when Ignaz's friend and fellow doctor, Jakub
Speaker 1: Kolechka nicked himself while performing an autopsy. Within days, he
Speaker 1: developed the same symptoms as the women, and he eventually died.
Speaker 1: It was an almost sacrificial death, because it led Ignaz
Speaker 1: to realize that the answer had been in front of
Speaker 1: him all along. The most important difference in the doctor's
Speaker 1: ward was that it had doctors, doctors who performed autopsies
Speaker 1: and then carried particles from those dead corpses and passed
Speaker 1: them on to their pregnant patients. Ignaz immediately ordered the
Speaker 1: doctors in his division to start washing their hands and
Speaker 1: instruments after autopsies. His choice of cleaning solution was less scientific.
Speaker 1: He picked chlorine because that was what the janitors used,
Speaker 1: and that just so happened to be an excellent sterilizer,
Speaker 1: and wouldn't you know it, the mortality rate in the
Speaker 1: doctor's ward plummeted. Ignaz didn't have the word words yet,
Speaker 1: but we know today that his corpse particles were bacteria
Speaker 1: and childbed fever was sepsis a form of infection that
Speaker 1: still affects tens of millions of people each year. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: Ignaza's guidelines didn't stick. His doctors didn't like the idea
Speaker 1: that they were killing their patients, so they ignored his advice.
Speaker 1: Ignaz eventually left the hospital and ultimately ended up in
Speaker 1: an insane asylum, where some believe he died of the
Speaker 1: very infection he had worked to prevent. But in the
Speaker 1: decade following his death, scientists would start to observe and
Speaker 1: identify bacteria as the cause of infection. Ignaz Semmelweis's discoveries
Speaker 1: taught us a very important lesson, wash your hands, but
Speaker 1: his colleagues's reactions taught us another one, don't be afraid
Speaker 1: to admit when you're wrong. On the twenty first of
Speaker 1: May of nineteen fifty two, a large crowd gathered at
Speaker 1: speak Airport in Liverpool, England. They watched as a Dakota
Speaker 1: aircraft climbed into the sky. In the back of the
Speaker 1: plane sat a man. The main attraction for this event
Speaker 1: a man with a pair of wings strapped to his back.
Speaker 1: Leo Valentine was a birdman, not a superhero, perhaps, but
Speaker 1: one whose sense of showmanship would not be out of
Speaker 1: place in a comic book. Between the years nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: and nineteen sixty, there were seventy five daredevils who earned
Speaker 1: the title Birdman for their attempts to fly. Seventy two
Speaker 1: of the seventy five died while attempting their stunts, so
Speaker 1: it was not a pastime for the faint of heart.
Speaker 1: Born in nineteen nineteen, Leo Valentin had been obsessed with
Speaker 1: flights ever since he was a child. But young Leo
Speaker 1: couldn't just get on a plane and see what it
Speaker 1: was like because commercial aircraft wasn't available yet to the public.
Speaker 1: The Wright Brothers first flew in nineteen o three, and
Speaker 1: aviation had a long way to go before the average
Speaker 1: person could board a plane. Leo, however, was undaunted. Driven
Speaker 1: by his passion for flight, he would join a regiment
Speaker 1: of French paratroopers at the outbreak of World War II.
Speaker 1: He would survive the war with his passion for flight intact.
Speaker 1: His greatest injury was a shattered arm during the invasion
Speaker 1: of occupied France. After he was discharged from military service,
Speaker 1: Leo resumed his intense study of aerodynamics. He would, not, however,
Speaker 1: follow in the footsteps of Orville and Wilbur write. His
Speaker 1: goal was not to design an aircraft, but to become
Speaker 1: one himself, flying as free as a bird. He experimented
Speaker 1: with delayed release parachutes, attempting his first free fall in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight. This test was in his mind a success,
Speaker 1: as he was able to freefall for about eighteen hundred
Speaker 1: feet before opening his chute and making a safe landing.
Speaker 1: He designed a pair of canvas wings in nineteen fifty,
Speaker 1: getting a step closer to achieving bird like flight. However,
Speaker 1: trial and error can be a risky thing when you're
Speaker 1: defying gravity. His first attempts to flight with these wings
Speaker 1: was a near disaster. He jumped from a plane over
Speaker 1: a French village, only to realize that the canvas wings
Speaker 1: did not fully support his weight. Luckily, he had his
Speaker 1: parachute to fall back on should his wings fail. And
Speaker 1: fail they did over and over again. He would abandon
Speaker 1: his early canvas designs for wings made of balsa wood
Speaker 1: supported with an alloy frame. He flew this design successfully
Speaker 1: a number of times, drawing crowds of greater and greater size,
Speaker 1: and his reputation grew as a performer. He was called Valentine,
Speaker 1: the most daring man in the world, and whether he
Speaker 1: flew successfully or not, viewers would be in for a
Speaker 1: great show. So by the time he boarded that Dakota
Speaker 1: on May twenty first, Valentine had his routine down to
Speaker 1: a science. The plane would fly nine thousand feet over
Speaker 1: the crowd, and he would jump off, gliding majestically through
Speaker 1: the air, deploying his parachute at the last minute to
Speaker 1: land safely. A crowd of over one hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: watched eagerly as the aircraft climbed higher and higher. Leo
Speaker 1: stealed himself and prepared to jump backwards out of the plane,
Speaker 1: much like a scuba diver entering the water. But things
Speaker 1: went wrong almost immediately. One of his wings caught the
Speaker 1: airplane's door and splintered. When Leo exited the plane, he
Speaker 1: was in a tailspin, unable to stabilize himself or extend
Speaker 1: his wings to slow his fall. His parachute deployed and
Speaker 1: immediately caught in the shattered frame of his wingsuit. The
Speaker 1: most daring man in the world crashed into a nearby field,
Speaker 1: dying on impact, a gruesome end to Valentin's career and
Speaker 1: his life. While this may seem like no more than
Speaker 1: a tragic, inevitable downfall, Leo Valentin's death is not the
Speaker 1: end of his story. Today, skydiving is a safe and
Speaker 1: popular activity for thrill seekers, and the position you assume
Speaker 1: to control a free fall is known as the Valentin position.
Speaker 1: A fitting legacy, you might say, for a man who
Speaker 1: skydived into Brittany to fight the Nazis. Oh and by
Speaker 1: the way, among the crowd at his final air show
Speaker 1: were some of the most famous people from living Paul
Speaker 1: McCartney and George Harrison were there, years before they would
Speaker 1: become world famous as members of the Beatles. Also nearby
Speaker 1: was a three year old boy who would remember the
Speaker 1: day for the rest of his life. In fact, his
Speaker 1: shock would eventually transform into a series of influential horror stories.
Speaker 1: His name was Clive Barker, the future author of the
Speaker 1: Books of Blood and director of Hell Raiser, a man
Speaker 1: who Stephen King dubbed the future of horror back in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties. It seems that in the attempt to
Speaker 1: live his dream, Leo Valentin became part of some of
Speaker 1: the world's most infamous nightmares. I hope you've enjoyed today's
Speaker 1: guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
Speaker 1: visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by
Speaker 1: me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I
Speaker 1: make another award winning show called Lore which is a podcast,
Speaker 1: book series and tele vision show and you can learn
Speaker 1: all about it over at theworldoflore dot com. And until
Speaker 1: next time, stay curious.