Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 2: is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
Speaker 2: right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: There are all kinds of medical practices out there, like dermatology,
Speaker 1: orthopedic surgery, and dentistry. Whether you need a root canal
Speaker 1: or a new kidney, there is someone trained to examine, diagnose,
Speaker 1: and treat your condition. But some of the most debilitating
Speaker 1: types of problems aren't the ones that require anesthesia or
Speaker 1: invasive surgery. All it takes is one wrong move and
Speaker 1: suddenly we can't sit up, turn our heads, or walk.
Speaker 1: Those of us of a certain age have probably slept
Speaker 1: wrong or bent ourselves in a way that caused a
Speaker 1: twinge in our backs, and when we feel it, it's
Speaker 1: some of the most excruciating pain imaginable. Daniel David Palmer
Speaker 1: thought so too. Born in Canada in eighteen forty five,
Speaker 1: Palmer moved to America with his family when he was
Speaker 1: twenty years old. Looking back, at might seem like that
Speaker 1: he didn't have much direction in life. He bounced from
Speaker 1: job to job for many years, like teaching school, beekeeping,
Speaker 1: and owning a grocery store. Or maybe he just had
Speaker 1: a lot of interests and he was out there looking
Speaker 1: for his true calling that whole time, while in eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety five he found it. Palmer had been fascinated by
Speaker 1: spiritualism and alternative medicine for a very long time. He
Speaker 1: even practiced magnetic healing, which involved the placement of magnets
Speaker 1: along the body to improve one's health. Eventually, he began
Speaker 1: to theorize that curing diseases required more than some well
Speaker 1: placed magnets. He needed something bigger, like a complete readjustment
Speaker 1: of the spine. This idea came to him almost by accident.
Speaker 1: He'd been in his office in Davenport, Iowa, when he
Speaker 1: ran into the janitor, a man named Harvey Lillard. Lillard
Speaker 1: had been hard of hearing for seventeen years. He told
Speaker 1: Palmer about how one day something popped in his spine
Speaker 1: and suddenly he couldn't hear as well as he used to.
Speaker 1: The two men continued talking, and that's when Palmer noticed
Speaker 1: something strange. On Lillard's back. It was a lump, and
Speaker 1: in Palmer's eyes, it was the reason his janitor was
Speaker 1: nearly deaf. So he decided to test out the practice
Speaker 1: he'd been studying, called thoracic manipulation. Palmer worked on the
Speaker 1: man's spine, twisting and cracking it in different directions. It
Speaker 1: took a few days, but pretty soon Lillard came back
Speaker 1: to Palmer with an unbelievable claim his hearing had returned.
Speaker 1: This miracle of sorts was the reassurance that Palmer needed
Speaker 1: to continue his work, and it led to the creation
Speaker 1: of one of the most important discoveries in alternative medicine.
Speaker 1: And that's the official story at least. But there is another,
Speaker 1: and it's not nearly as heartwarming. In fact, it's a
Speaker 1: bit so here's take two. It all started when Palmer
Speaker 1: consulted a man named Jim Atkinson, also from Davenport, Iowa.
Speaker 1: Atkinson was a physician and taught Palmer all about the
Speaker 1: different thoracic manipulation techniques that he had learned. In fact,
Speaker 1: they weren't even Atkinson's methods in the first place. In
Speaker 1: a textbook published by Palmer in nineteen ten, he wrote
Speaker 1: doctor Atkinson has frequently informed me that the replacing of
Speaker 1: displaced vertebrae for the relief of human ills has been
Speaker 1: known and practiced by the ancient Egyptians for at least
Speaker 1: three thousand years. Unfortunately, the concepts that have been proposed
Speaker 1: by Atkinson hadn't caught on. According to him, they were
Speaker 1: ahead of the time, or, as Palmer wrote in his book,
Speaker 1: the intellectuality of that time was not ready for this advancement.
Speaker 1: But how could that be, after all, these techniques were
Speaker 1: already thousands of years old. Maybe these Iowans just couldn't
Speaker 1: handle the idea that a few twists and turns could
Speaker 1: cure what ailed them, Or maybe there was something about
Speaker 1: doctor Atkinson that rubbed them the wrong way. Whatever the case,
Speaker 1: it was a long time before people understood the ideas
Speaker 1: being presented, and it took Palmer to show them. But
Speaker 1: it was a funny thing about Atkinson and Palmer. The
Speaker 1: two men actually never met, and they didn't exchange letters
Speaker 1: or chat over the phone either. Their paths had never
Speaker 1: crossed because doctor Atkinson had died fifty years earlier. Palmer, ever,
Speaker 1: the devoted spiritualist, had spoken to him through a seance
Speaker 1: or other similar event. In other words, Daniel David Palmer,
Speaker 1: the founder of chiropractic medicine, had been introduced to it
Speaker 1: by a ghost. There are some parts of history that
Speaker 1: form the very foundation of our understanding of the world.
Speaker 1: Many of our beliefs are cemented in what we know
Speaker 1: about the past. Sometimes, though, the bridge between past and
Speaker 1: present isn't as that's wrong as we might think. In
Speaker 1: early two thousand and six, a woman named Dun Barya
Speaker 1: made her way down the bustling streets of Mumbai. She
Speaker 1: journeyed toward the lush green forest on the city's outskirts.
Speaker 1: Once under the cover of the canopies, the noise faded,
Speaker 1: but the change in scenery didn't give done the sense
Speaker 1: of peace that she had come for. Still, she continued
Speaker 1: down the path and hoped for a good sign. Finally,
Speaker 1: she approached her destination, a clearing in the woods with
Speaker 1: a stone tower at its center. It was an isolated,
Speaker 1: sacred space. Dun hoped to find the answers there. She
Speaker 1: hoped to find closure. Once at the base of the tower,
Speaker 1: she said a prayer, but even this didn't settle her unease.
Speaker 1: There were a few men there as well, not many
Speaker 1: people were allowed to enter the area, but it was
Speaker 1: the men's job to be there, and she knew that
Speaker 1: they might have the answers that she was looking for.
Speaker 1: So she asked them, is my mother gone? And the
Speaker 1: men laughed no, they said, your mother will be here
Speaker 1: for years to come. Done stood in horror. She thought
Speaker 1: to herself, could it be? Are the rumors true? Panicton confused,
Speaker 1: she returned home and devised a plan. She needed to
Speaker 1: know the truth, so she hired a photographer to sneak
Speaker 1: back into the clearing in the woods, but this time
Speaker 1: the photographer would climb the tower, something few people were
Speaker 1: allowed to do. The photographer's job was to capture images
Speaker 1: of whatever he found there without getting cut, and that's
Speaker 1: what he did. Soon these photographs and even video footage
Speaker 1: made their way around the city. Done plastered the images
Speaker 1: around town. They were so shocking that they even ended
Speaker 1: up on CNN, and by that point the whole world
Speaker 1: knew what Done had discovered. Dozens of dead bodies were
Speaker 1: decaying atop the tower in the forest. The people of
Speaker 1: Mumbai were in an uproar. The city's governing body insisted
Speaker 1: that they had everything under control, but it was too late.
Speaker 1: Everyone had seen the pictures. Now, I know that this
Speaker 1: might sound like an unsolved murder case, but it's a
Speaker 1: little more complicated than that, and it all circles back
Speaker 1: to the question Done had set out to answer in
Speaker 1: the first place, and as it turned turned out, scientists
Speaker 1: from another part of the world with an entirely different
Speaker 1: question would find that answer. In the late nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: a Kenyan biologist named Munir Vuani traveled to a tiger
Speaker 1: reserve in India. But Munir wasn't there to study tigers.
Speaker 1: His specialty was in birds. He worked for the Peregrine Fund,
Speaker 1: an organization that protects birds of prey. When he arrived,
Speaker 1: Munir walked through the reserve to a large ficus tree.
Speaker 1: Under the tree, over a dozen vultures lay dead. Munir
Speaker 1: took a closer look. He was puzzled. The birds showed
Speaker 1: no signs of harm. They weren't even that old. The
Speaker 1: biologists couldn't understand why young, healthy birds would suddenly drop dead.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just these birds that Munir was concerned about.
Speaker 1: By this point, the vulture population in India had declined
Speaker 1: by about ninety five percent, and this was a big issue.
Speaker 1: You see, vultures are known for eating dead things. For
Speaker 1: that reason, they sometimes give people the hebgbis. But vultures
Speaker 1: eating habits are actually great for the health of the
Speaker 1: environment and even for humans. Disease and bacteria thrive inside
Speaker 1: dead bodies, but vulture's stomach acid is highly acidic, so
Speaker 1: they killed deadly bacteria, including rabies and anthrax before it
Speaker 1: spreads to the living. I'm sure you can imagine the
Speaker 1: level of harmful decay a country is left with when
Speaker 1: ninety five percent of vultures just disappear. Suffice to say,
Speaker 1: Munir had quite the undertaking. He and his colleagues dissected
Speaker 1: some of the dead vultures and discovered that a white,
Speaker 1: chalky paste covered their insides. It was uric acid, the
Speaker 1: very same acid that allows vultures to digest deadly things.
Speaker 1: The build up of the acid meant that the vulture's
Speaker 1: kidneys had shut down, but why. By the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: Manir and his team formed a hypothesis whatever was causing
Speaker 1: the vulture's kidney failure had come from something they were eating,
Speaker 1: and at some point the researchers asked cattle farmers what
Speaker 1: their cows ate, and that's how they found the answer.
Speaker 1: It was a painkiller called Diclopenic. India had approved it
Speaker 1: for use in cattle farming in you guessed it's the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, and this brings us back to dun Barriya's
Speaker 1: initial investigation. Dunn observes Zoroastrianism, a small religion that was
Speaker 1: formed over three thousand years ago, and the tower where
Speaker 1: she went to prey at the beginning of our story
Speaker 1: is a big part of this religion. It's known as
Speaker 1: the Tower of Silence. There are many like it, but
Speaker 1: this one has been there since sixteen seventy three, and
Speaker 1: Zoroastrians practiced something known as sky burials, which involve bringing
Speaker 1: the bodies of the departed to the top of the
Speaker 1: towers for vultures defeat on. They believe that bodily decay
Speaker 1: is caused by a demon, so by eating the bodies
Speaker 1: before the decaying process can begin, the vultures help people
Speaker 1: gain entry into heaven. After her mother died, Dunn had
Speaker 1: a gut feeling that her body was still on top
Speaker 1: of the Tower Decayne on that day in two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, when she journeyed to the tower, she spoke
Speaker 1: with the men who were responsible for carrying the bodies
Speaker 1: up the tower and eventually disposing of the bones. These
Speaker 1: were the only people who were allowed to venture to
Speaker 1: the top. My reaction to Dunn's question about her mother
Speaker 1: all but confirmed her suspicions when the photographer she hired
Speaker 1: return with proof. The rest was history. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, following munir Varani's discovery, India banned the use
Speaker 1: of diclofenic and cattle. While the country works to recover
Speaker 1: its vulture population, it's also trying to find new ways
Speaker 1: to manage sky burials. We don't know what will happen
Speaker 1: in the future, but this story is a reminder to
Speaker 1: not take for granted the parts of our world that
Speaker 1: connect us to our history and maybe even to our afterlives.
Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
Speaker 1: with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television
Speaker 1: show and You can learn all about it over at
Speaker 1: theworldoflore dot com, and until next time, stay curious.
Speaker 2: H