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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. So we've

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Speaker 1: mentioned quite a number of times that we have an

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Speaker 1: extensively long list of two dudes on the podcast. There

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Speaker 1: are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of listeners submitted suggestions,

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Speaker 1: and then we have our own to do lists, and

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Speaker 1: they're both very long and sometimes sort of like when

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Speaker 1: you're uh you have access to hundreds of channels on

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Speaker 1: the television, it just feels like nothing's on. I scrolled

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Speaker 1: through all those things, and there are so many great

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Speaker 1: ideas on there, but none of them are quite catching

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Speaker 1: my attention that day. And you and I both know

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Speaker 1: from experience that the best episodes come from when we're

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Speaker 1: really engaged with what we're talking about. Yeah, if you're

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Speaker 1: just not in the mood for a topic, even if

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Speaker 1: it's an awesome topic, it just won't turn out as

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Speaker 1: well as if you wait a little while all and

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Speaker 1: let it become the thing that catches your mood. Right,

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Speaker 1: And some of the things I was in the mood

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Speaker 1: to talk about, we're on hold until uh Stuff could

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Speaker 1: come in from the library. So I was browsing around

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Speaker 1: the Internet and found a post on Rejected Princesses about

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Speaker 1: Dr Vera Peters, who was one of the foremost oncologists

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Speaker 1: in the world in her time. Not only was she

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Speaker 1: one of the only female oncologists in the world, she

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Speaker 1: completely changed the standard of care for two different types

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Speaker 1: of cancer. And she was one of rejected Princesses modern worthies,

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Speaker 1: and those are usually about a woman who died within

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Speaker 1: the last fifty years. The Rejected Princesses Modern Worthies posts

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Speaker 1: tend to be pretty brief, so this one hits the highlights.

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Speaker 1: Dr Peters helped revolutionize the treatment of both breast cancer

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Speaker 1: and Hodgkins lymphoma, but at the time that she did,

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Speaker 1: her work was largely ignored and dismissed. So naturally immediately

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Speaker 1: I wanted to know a lot more about this person

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Speaker 1: and what she did. Therefore, we're gonna have a whole

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Speaker 1: episode on her today. Hooray, will do the usual set

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Speaker 1: up on early life. Mildred Vera Peters was born in Rexdale, Ontario,

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Speaker 1: on April nineteen eleven. She was one of seven children,

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Speaker 1: and her parents were dairy farmers. Her mother was also

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Speaker 1: a teacher. Vera and her siblings worked on the farm,

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Speaker 1: starting at a very early age, particularly after the sudden

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Speaker 1: death of their father. Her first education was in a

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Speaker 1: one room schoolhouse. She finished high school at sixteen, and

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Speaker 1: she wanted to knew already that she wanted to become

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Speaker 1: a doctor. She was too young to start medical school, though,

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Speaker 1: so she enrolled in the University of Toronto to study

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Speaker 1: math and physics, and then she transferred to the medical

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Speaker 1: program the following year. She worked summer jobs to save

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Speaker 1: up her money, and her brother and her sisters helped

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Speaker 1: pay her way as well. While she was working as

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Speaker 1: a waitress on a tourist ship, she met Ken Lobb,

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Speaker 1: who was the man she would later marry and they

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Speaker 1: would eventually have two daughters together. While she was still

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Speaker 1: in medical school, her mother was treated for breast cancer,

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Speaker 1: and after a recurrence, she was treated by Dr Gordon Richards,

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Speaker 1: who at that point was one of the most respected

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Speaker 1: doctors in the field of radiation oncology, which at that

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Speaker 1: point was pretty early in in its development. Dr Richards

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Speaker 1: was also one of the doctors that there is studied under,

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Speaker 1: and Vera's mother unfortunately did die for cancer, which was

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Speaker 1: one of the things that led Bevera to want to

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Speaker 1: study the disease later in her life. Dr Peters graduated

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Speaker 1: from medical school in nineteen thirty four and went on

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Speaker 1: to a residency in radiology at Toronto General Hospital. At

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Speaker 1: this point in medicine, there was no official training protocol

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Speaker 1: or certification for radiotherapy, so Dr Peters apprenticed with Dr

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Speaker 1: Richards and she started working at the Ontario Institute of

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Speaker 1: Radiotherapy in ninety five, and she continued to work with

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Speaker 1: Dr Richards right up until his death in January of

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Speaker 1: ninety nine. Before we get into more of the specifics

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Speaker 1: of her medical work, here's a caveat dot Or. Peters

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Speaker 1: did really groundbreaking work and the treatment of two different cancers,

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Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about them enough to give

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Speaker 1: a sense of why her work was so important. But

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Speaker 1: this is absolutely not meant to be a thorough exploration

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Speaker 1: of either cancer, uh even or even of the human

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Speaker 1: body systems that they involved. This is also definitely not

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Speaker 1: a thorough examination of how these cancers are treated today,

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Speaker 1: because the whole field of oncology has evolved tremendously since

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Speaker 1: Dr Peters retired in nineteen seventy six. So this is

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Speaker 1: much more about how the developments that Dr Peters helped

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Speaker 1: launched changed the way medicine was working at time than

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Speaker 1: about the diseases specifically or how they're treated today. So

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Speaker 1: Dr peters first groundbreaking work was in the treatment of

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Speaker 1: Hodgkin's disease, which was before that point considered to be incurable.

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Speaker 1: Now more commonly known as Hodgkins lymphoma, this is a

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Speaker 1: cancer that affects the lymphatic system. It's name for Dr

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Speaker 1: Thomas Hodgkin, who described it in eighteen thirty two, whom

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Speaker 1: The major difference between Hodgkins lymphoma and the more common

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Speaker 1: non Hodgkins lymphoma is that Hodgkins lymphoma involves large, abnormal

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Speaker 1: cells called read Sternberg cells, while these cells are not

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Speaker 1: present in non Hodgkins lymphoma. Between its first description in

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Speaker 1: eighteen thirty two and nineteen o two, no doctors reported

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Speaker 1: any successful treatment of Hodgkins lymphoma at all. The first

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Speaker 1: somewhat successful treatment was, which was described in nineteen o two,

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Speaker 1: was the use of X rays on the involved lymph nodes,

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Speaker 1: and while this did shrink the affected nodes somewhat, it

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Speaker 1: didn't cure the disease, it maybe bought people a little time.

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Speaker 1: There were a few advances between nineteen o two and

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine, when Dr rhinegel Bare of Geneva, Switzerland

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Speaker 1: described treating the affected lymph nodes with radiation. He treated

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Speaker 1: both the affected lymph nodes and other parts of the

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Speaker 1: body that were not apparently affected, and while some of

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Speaker 1: his patients did improve, many relapsed, and he didn't think

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Speaker 1: of any of them as having been cured. Dr Peter's mentor,

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Speaker 1: Doctor Richards, who we mentioned earlier, installed a four hundred

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Speaker 1: kilt radiation machine at the Ontario Radiotherapy Institute in ninety seven,

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Speaker 1: just a couple of years before doctor Jilbert's description of

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Speaker 1: his method. This was a higher voltage machine than what

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Speaker 1: doctor Gilbert was using, and Dr Richard used this machine

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Speaker 1: to treat his patients for a variety of cancers. Dr

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Speaker 1: Richard's method with Hodgkins lymphoma was to use extended field

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Speaker 1: radiation on the affected lymph nodes and adjacent nodes. Although

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Speaker 1: some accounts described this a radiation of nearby nodes as prophylactic,

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Speaker 1: it wasn't really to prevent disease. It was to kill

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Speaker 1: cancerous cells that had already spread to adjacent nodes but

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Speaker 1: weren't yet detectable. At first, Dr Peters primarily worked under

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Speaker 1: Dr Richard's supervision. She was kind of apprenticing to him,

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Speaker 1: but as she became more experienced as a doctor, she

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Speaker 1: began to treat patients on her own as well. In

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Speaker 1: after ten years of treating lymphoma patients with the four

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Speaker 1: Kabot machine, Dr Richards made an observation to Dr Peters.

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Speaker 1: It seemed to him that some of their patients were

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Speaker 1: surviving a long time with no relapse, even though Hodgkins

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Speaker 1: lymphoma was supposedly incurable, and he asked her how she

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Speaker 1: wanted to evaluate their work on the matter. So there

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Speaker 1: are some people who interpret this as meaning that Dr

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Speaker 1: Richards should get credit for what happened next. After all,

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Speaker 1: especially at the beginning, he was the one who was

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Speaker 1: successfully treating the patients for their cancer. But what he

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Speaker 1: really did was give Dr Peters a question to answer,

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Speaker 1: and the work she did to answer that question eventually

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Speaker 1: changed the perception of Hodgkins lymphoma for being an incurable

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Speaker 1: disease to a curable one. Dr Peter spent two years

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Speaker 1: studying one hundred and thirteen patients who had been conclusively

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Speaker 1: diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma and treated with radiation at the

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Speaker 1: hospital to where she worked. She largely did this by

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Speaker 1: hand at her dining room table. She was ready to

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Speaker 1: present her findings to her colleagues in ninety nine, which was,

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Speaker 1: unfortunately after Dr Richards had already died. Her findings revealed, though,

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Speaker 1: that his theory was right. Their patients were living longer

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Speaker 1: than limphoma patients at other hospitals. Their five year survival

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Speaker 1: rate had doubled and their ten year survival rate had tripled.

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Speaker 1: Patients in Stage one, which was the least advanced stage,

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Speaker 1: lived a median of eleven point six years, and she

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Speaker 1: didn't describe any of the patients as cured, but their

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Speaker 1: prognosis was really a lot better, and her tone was

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Speaker 1: a lot more optimistic than any of the medical wisdom

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Speaker 1: on Hodgkin's lymphoma at the time. The idea of approaching

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Speaker 1: Hodgkins lymphoma with the goal of curing it was revolutionary,

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Speaker 1: and even though Dr Peters had clear, compelling data to

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Speaker 1: back up what she was saying, it took about ten

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Speaker 1: years for the medical establishment to start taking this concept seriously.

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Speaker 1: Dr Peters presented a follow up paper in nineteen fifty

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Speaker 1: six that included two Hodgkins lymphoma cases with all of

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Speaker 1: the data just as solidly pointing to the idea that

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Speaker 1: Hodgkins disease could be cured, especially in the early stages.

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Speaker 1: But perceptions in the medical field didn't really start to

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Speaker 1: change until Eric C. Easton and Marian H. Russell, using

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Speaker 1: Dr Peters data confirmed her work in their paper Cure

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Speaker 1: of Hodgkins Disease that was in nineteen sixty three. Uh,

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Speaker 1: it took even longer than that for the idea that

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Speaker 1: Hodgkins disease could be approached as something that can be

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Speaker 1: cured in a medical textbook. Treatments have continued to advance today,

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Speaker 1: especially if it's caught in the early stages. Hodgkins disease

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Speaker 1: is considered to be one of the most curable adult cancers.

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Speaker 1: Having made these kinds of strides and Hodgkins disease, Dr

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Speaker 1: Peters turned her focus to breast cancer, which was personally

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Speaker 1: important to her because of her mother, And we'll talk

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Speaker 1: about that work after a brief ad break. So to

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Speaker 1: get back to Dr peters work with breast cancer in

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Speaker 1: the Ontario Cancer Institute at Princess Margaret Hospital opened and

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Speaker 1: patients and staff from Toronto General, including Dr Peters and

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Speaker 1: her patients, were transferred there. As a side note, we're

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Speaker 1: about to talk about breast cancer for a while, and

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Speaker 1: while men can and do get breast cancer, we're really

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Speaker 1: going to be talking about women here because that's the

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Speaker 1: work that Dr Peters was doing. All of her focus

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Speaker 1: was on breast cancer treatment in women, not in men's,

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Speaker 1: so we're not excluding men for some other reason. That's

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Speaker 1: just the work that she was focused on. So at

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Speaker 1: this point, the overwhelming majority of patients who were diagnosed

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Speaker 1: with breast cancer were treated with a radical mastectomy also

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Speaker 1: called the Halstead procedure for the doctor who popularized it.

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Speaker 1: Almost as soon as they were diagnosed, they would go

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Speaker 1: in for a biopsy, which was done under general anesthesia,

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Speaker 1: and if the lump was cancers, they'd have them stectomy

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Speaker 1: before they regained consciousness. This made the possibility of breast

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Speaker 1: cancer particularly terrifying. Women got onto an operating table not

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Speaker 1: knowing if they had cancer or not, and not knowing

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Speaker 1: if they would wake up without a breast or not.

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Speaker 1: The mostectomy itself, which was the standard treatment regardless of

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Speaker 1: whether the cancer had spread beyond one tumor, was a

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Speaker 1: lot more involved than messtectomys typically are today. A radical

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Speaker 1: mastectomy removes more than just the breast. It also removes

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Speaker 1: the pectoral muscles under the breast, along with the lymph

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Speaker 1: nodes under the arm on the same side as the

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Speaker 1: affected breast. This idea was that the cancer was less

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Speaker 1: likely to spread if you literally removed all of the

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Speaker 1: things adjacent to it where it was most likely to spread.

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Speaker 1: And you know, while these are the places that cancer

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Speaker 1: is most likely to go after appearing in the breast,

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Speaker 1: this court was the course of action regardless of whether

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Speaker 1: cancer had been detected in any of these other places.

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Speaker 1: Less to say, a radical mass ectomy permanently and significantly

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Speaker 1: altered the body. Even after the reconstruction, a woman's chest

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Speaker 1: itself would look a lot different. It would basically be

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Speaker 1: concave because of the loss of the pectoral muscle wall

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Speaker 1: Over and over again. Modern medical papers described radical mass

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Speaker 1: ectomies of the past as and this is quote disfiguring

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Speaker 1: such a huge change to such a personal part of

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Speaker 1: the body was psychologically and emotionally damaging. For many patients

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Speaker 1: for the rest of their lives. Can also be physically disabling,

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Speaker 1: since it removed some of the muscles used to control

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Speaker 1: a person's arm, and the loss of lymph nodes can

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Speaker 1: lead to permanent swelling and an increased likelihood of infections

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Speaker 1: in the arm. Nerve damage was also a really frequent complication,

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Speaker 1: and this is why today radical mess ectomy is extremely

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Speaker 1: rare and it's only performed when there really is cancer

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Speaker 1: in those adjacent tissues. When people have mass ectomies today,

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Speaker 1: they're usually what's considered a full mastectomy, which removes the

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Speaker 1: breast but leaves at least some of the lymph nodes,

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Speaker 1: or a modified radical mast ectomy, which removes the breast

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Speaker 1: and lymph nodes but only gets into the pectoral muscles

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Speaker 1: if the cancer has actually spread there. Even though a

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Speaker 1: radical mastectomy was a standard of care for breast cancer

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Speaker 1: patients at this point, there were a few people who

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Speaker 1: didn't have them because of other medical conditions, or, in

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Speaker 1: a very limited number of cases, the patients who just

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Speaker 1: put their foot down and refused to have more aggressive surgery.

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Speaker 1: These patients had surgeries that conserved more of their breast.

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Speaker 1: It was either a simple mastectomy or a lump ectomy.

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Speaker 1: Unless there was some medical reason why a woman could

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Speaker 1: not have a radical mastectomy, these options were pretty much

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Speaker 1: always against medical advice. Dr Peter's previous work with lymphoma

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Speaker 1: meant she was particularly insightful when it came to how

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Speaker 1: cancer spread through the lymphatic system. Patients were often referred

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Speaker 1: to her for follow up radiation treatment after their surgery,

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Speaker 1: and she also had personal experience with how traumatic breast

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Speaker 1: cancer treatment could be after she had lost her mother

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Speaker 1: to the disease in nineteen thirty three, so she wanted

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Speaker 1: to see if less drastic treatments could prove to be

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Speaker 1: as effective as a mastectomy while still preserving as much

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Speaker 1: of the breast as possible. She published her first work

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Speaker 1: on the subject in nineteen sixty seven, and it was

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Speaker 1: based on comparing the survival rates for women who had

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Speaker 1: been treated for their cancer with different forms of treatment.

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Speaker 1: She studied the record of seven thousand patients who had

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Speaker 1: been treated between nineteen thirty five and nineteen sixty eight.

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Speaker 1: Hundred and fifty two of these patients had had their

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Speaker 1: lump removed during their biopsy. A hundred and twenty four

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Speaker 1: of those had radiation as their only follow up treatment,

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Speaker 1: while the others had some combination of a masstectomy and radiation.

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Speaker 1: What she found was that there was absolutely no difference

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Speaker 1: in the survival time between the women who had just

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Speaker 1: had a lambectomy when the women who had had a

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Speaker 1: mastectomy when it came to women with stage one and

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Speaker 1: stage two breast cancer, in her opinion, the more conservative

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Speaker 1: surgery which preserved the woman's breast was just as viable

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Speaker 1: a medical option as a mestectomy. And this was a

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Speaker 1: completely controversial stance at the time. In her words, quote,

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Speaker 1: I was refuted and shunned by most of the outstanding

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Speaker 1: surgeons in the States, except for Dr George Cryle of Cleveland.

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Speaker 1: She was determined, though, and so she decided to do

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Speaker 1: a case a case control study of the records from

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Speaker 1: Princess Margaret Hospital. So while she had previously combed through

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Speaker 1: all of the records and looked at them as a whole,

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Speaker 1: this time she controlled for the age of the patients,

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Speaker 1: there are other health factors, whether they also had other cancers.

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Speaker 1: She narrowed it down to only patients with stage one

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Speaker 1: breast cancer, and then she meticulously matched up the ones

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Speaker 1: who had a lump ectomy and radiation with the ones

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Speaker 1: who had a mess spectomy and radiation, and to match

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Speaker 1: them up she looked at their ages, how large the

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Speaker 1: tumor was, and the year that the treatment took place.

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Speaker 1: This gave her a hundred and forty five pairs in

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Speaker 1: which the lampectomy group had no statistically significant difference than

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Speaker 1: the massed ectomy group. In fact, the lumpectomy group had

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Speaker 1: slightly better survival than the mast ectomy group. In other words,

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Speaker 1: for women with stage one cancer, a more conservative treatment

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Speaker 1: that preserved their breasts did not harm their chances of survival.

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Speaker 1: Radical mass ectomy was not necessary when the disease had

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Speaker 1: not started to spread. In nineteen seventy five, she presented

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Speaker 1: these findings at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons

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Speaker 1: of Canada meeting in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Their response was really

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Speaker 1: skeptical at best. Two years later, Dr Peters published an

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Speaker 1: updated version of the paper and an international journal which

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Speaker 1: gave it more exposure and also came to the exact

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Speaker 1: same conclusions. In that paper, she was really direct in

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Speaker 1: her opinion, she said, quote as more and more conservative

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Speaker 1: studies ripen, as more and more concerned physicians observed the

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Speaker 1: adverse effect of excessive treatment. As more and more women

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Speaker 1: become armed with knowledge, mastectomy and early breast cancer may

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Speaker 1: become as old fashioned as bloodletting. Dr Peters retired from

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Speaker 1: the hospital the year before that revised paper was published,

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Speaker 1: although she maintained a part time practice and she continued

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Speaker 1: to teach. But gradually oncologists did start taking a more

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Speaker 1: conservative approach to early stage breast cancers. Today, women with

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Speaker 1: early stage breast cancer generally have a mestectomy if there's

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Speaker 1: some medical reason to do so. Dr peters impact on

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Speaker 1: the medical field also went beyond just the specific treatment

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Speaker 1: of these two cancers, and we'll talk about how after

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Speaker 1: a brief ad break so to return to Dr Peters.

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Speaker 1: A lot of people take the idea of patient centered

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Speaker 1: care to for granted today, even if they've never heard

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Speaker 1: that term specifically. I know that lots of people have

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Speaker 1: lots of different access to medical care, depending on all

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Speaker 1: kinds of factors, including their income, love on their age,

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Speaker 1: and their race, and lots lots of different issues. But

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Speaker 1: for the most part, when people go to the doctor,

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Speaker 1: they kind of expect their doctor to treat them like

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Speaker 1: a human being and to listen to them and to

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Speaker 1: explain what's going on. And uh, this was not really

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Speaker 1: how things worked. When Dr Peters started practicing medicine, she

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Speaker 1: was really a forerunner in the idea of listening to

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Speaker 1: a patient's wishes and explaining to them and helping them

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Speaker 1: make decisions about their own treatment. Uh, this whole idea

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Speaker 1: was really far from standard at when she was practicing medicine. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: she actually got to know her patients and she helped

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Speaker 1: them make decisions about their own health care, rather than

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Speaker 1: just seeing them as a condition to treat and telling

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Speaker 1: them what to do. Another common attitude today is that

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Speaker 1: when you go to the doctor, you should get a

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Speaker 1: treatment that's going to be the right amount to solve

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Speaker 1: the problem, not something that's just going to be so

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Speaker 1: completely aggressive that it's going to blast the problem away

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Speaker 1: but then also leave you with potentially lots of scars,

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Speaker 1: are huge side effects, or you know, lots of adverse

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Speaker 1: effects to taking care of the problem. This was also

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Speaker 1: core to Dr Peter's philosophy as a doctor. She wanted

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Speaker 1: to do the most conservative treatment to get the job done,

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Speaker 1: and it was really different from a lot of what

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Speaker 1: was going on at the time. Obviously, doctors were putting

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Speaker 1: women to sleep to do a biopsy, and then taking

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Speaker 1: their entire breast, even in the case of really small

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Speaker 1: tumors that hadn't progressed anywhere. Um, she really wanted to

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Speaker 1: avoid the risks that came of side effects and other

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Speaker 1: complications by doing a more minimal treatment but still treading

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Speaker 1: the actual problem. And she was also a role model

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Speaker 1: for young women who were interested in becoming doctors, not

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Speaker 1: just because of her success as a doctor, but also

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Speaker 1: because she proved that a woman could be a doctor

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Speaker 1: while also being a wife and mother, and that was

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Speaker 1: something that really needed proving at this point in history.

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Speaker 1: She did a lot of her research at home, so

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Speaker 1: she was compilingly her work by hand. She wouldn't have

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Speaker 1: been able to make the breakthroughs that she did otherwise,

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Speaker 1: but outside the of the medical world old she was

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Speaker 1: Mrs lob mother of two. I think a lot of

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Speaker 1: the other like female forerunners in the world of medicine

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Speaker 1: we've talked about, have been women who eschewed the more traditional,

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Speaker 1: stereotypical feminine side. And so it actually was a big

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Speaker 1: deal that in addition to being a doctor, she got

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Speaker 1: married and had children. Uh, all of this work was

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Speaker 1: additionally incredible because at this point there were hardly any

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Speaker 1: women doctors at all, let alone women doctors who were

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Speaker 1: on the cutting edge of their field, revolutionizing the treatment

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Speaker 1: of multiple diseases. And Dr Vera Peters became an Officer

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Speaker 1: of the Order of Canada in nineteen seventy eight. She

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Speaker 1: was awarded the Gold Medal from the American Society of

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Speaker 1: Therapeutic Radiology in nineteen seventy nine and the Woman of

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Speaker 1: Distinction Award from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation in Sadly,

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Speaker 1: she died of cancer on October one, nine at the

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Speaker 1: age of eighty two. She died at Princess Margaret Hospital

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Speaker 1: in Toronto, where she had worked for most of her career,

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Speaker 1: and she was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

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Speaker 1: In It's kind of a side note, there was a

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Speaker 1: play about her called Radical, which was written by Charles Hayter,

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Speaker 1: who was also an oncologist, that actually premiered to just

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Speaker 1: sell out standing room only crowd at the Toronto French

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Speaker 1: Festival in July. Thank you, Dr Vera Peters. I know

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Speaker 1: you and I both have family experience with breast cancer.

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Speaker 1: And the fact that somebody said, okay, we we have

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Speaker 1: got to just stop treating women as a thing to

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Speaker 1: put on a table and remove part of their body

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Speaker 1: without actually talking to them about it. Like that's a

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Speaker 1: big deal. The idea of um not being asked questions

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Speaker 1: about treatment is so alien to me that it's shocking. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: uh and you I said this to you off Mike,

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Speaker 1: and now I'm just gonna say it on Like, as

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Speaker 1: I was researching this, I found a citation of that

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Speaker 1: cure for Hodgkins disease paper. It was like a citation

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Speaker 1: of the paper that was in another, uh, another journal

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Speaker 1: and incited the male doctor is doctor and the female

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Speaker 1: author of the paper is miss. And I could not

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Speaker 1: figure out whether she was actually a doctor when that

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Speaker 1: notation was published or not, because it is possible that

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Speaker 1: she was credited on the paper but was not yet

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Speaker 1: a medical doctor. But I sincerely wonder, based on all

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Speaker 1: of the other things that were going on at the time,

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Speaker 1: whether she was discredited as miss instead of doctor because

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Speaker 1: she was a woman. Yeah, So that's a mystery that

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Speaker 1: remains to be solved. In the meantime, I think you

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Speaker 1: might have listener mail for us. I do have listener mail.

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Speaker 1: This is another listener mail from our Brown Versus Board series, uh,

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Speaker 1: and it is from Gia. Gia says, I recently listened

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Speaker 1: to Your Brown Versus Board of Education and found the

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Speaker 1: aftermath episode fascinating. I grew up in downtown Boston, and

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Speaker 1: even though I was born in the early eighties, people

401
00:23:07,119 --> 00:23:10,320
Speaker 1: were still talking about bussing in the nineties and early

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Speaker 1: two thousands. In Horror, Boston is set up in a

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Speaker 1: series of small neighborhoods which were once full of families

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Speaker 1: and children. Was very common for people, especially children and

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Speaker 1: their mothers, to live their lives wholly in their neighborhood.

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Speaker 1: My grandmother raised four children, worked, shopped, and socialized in

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Speaker 1: a one square mile piece of Boston, and back then

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Speaker 1: that was completely normal. The people of these neighborhoods had

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Speaker 1: neighborhood pride, and until pretty recently, residents were incredibly territorial.

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Speaker 1: Black people were chased out of white neighborhoods for not belonging,

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Speaker 1: but so too were white people chased out of black neighborhoods.

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Speaker 1: In four I was chased out of an Irish neighborhood

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Speaker 1: two blocks from my Italian neighborhood because I didn't belong there.

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Speaker 1: Boston was not immune to racial tensions. But the thing

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Speaker 1: I was still hearing about in nineteen ninety six was

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Speaker 1: the horror of having to take a bus with strangers

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Speaker 1: to a neighborhood far from home, to sit in a

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Speaker 1: strange school with more strange kids who were from a

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Speaker 1: completely different culture. My family lived in the Italian section

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Speaker 1: of Boston, and my mother didn't meet someone who wasn't Italian,

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Speaker 1: maybe Irish and Catholic until she was fifteen years old.

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Speaker 1: The prospect of having to go on a bus full

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Speaker 1: of strangers to a neighborhood where she was not welcome

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Speaker 1: to be one of the few white kids in a

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Speaker 1: predominantly back black school. This idea was daunting. Not to mention,

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Speaker 1: immigrants in my neighborhood didn't want their daughters so far

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Speaker 1: from home. A cultural thing. Many of my mother's schoolmates

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00:24:31,640 --> 00:24:33,720
Speaker 1: were sent to Catholic school to avoid the need to

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Speaker 1: move or the need to bus. The Catholic schools were overrun.

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Speaker 1: She goes on to talk about a more personal story

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Speaker 1: about integration at her own school, which I'm not going

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Speaker 1: to go into detail about because I feel like that's

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Speaker 1: a little bit too much identifying information to go on here.

434
00:24:47,280 --> 00:24:50,800
Speaker 1: But um, She ends by saying that now when she

435
00:24:50,800 --> 00:24:53,080
Speaker 1: goes back to alma mater, to her alma mater, the

436
00:24:53,119 --> 00:24:55,199
Speaker 1: halls seemed more and more colorful, which I thought was

437
00:24:55,200 --> 00:24:58,320
Speaker 1: a good note to end on. Uh. I spent a

438
00:24:58,320 --> 00:25:01,479
Speaker 1: lot of time in Boston. If you walk around Boston,

439
00:25:01,520 --> 00:25:05,600
Speaker 1: you can still still see, uh, really clear hallmarks of

440
00:25:06,040 --> 00:25:09,359
Speaker 1: the different cultures that settled different parts of Boston. Like

441
00:25:09,400 --> 00:25:12,679
Speaker 1: they're very clear. This this used to be an entirely

442
00:25:12,720 --> 00:25:15,080
Speaker 1: Italian neighborhood, and in a lot of cases it's still

443
00:25:15,119 --> 00:25:21,480
Speaker 1: predominantly in an Italian neighborhood. But I had not realized

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00:25:21,840 --> 00:25:25,760
Speaker 1: how deeply those community ties ran. And then it was

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00:25:25,800 --> 00:25:29,600
Speaker 1: to the extent that like this little insular, insular neighborhood

446
00:25:30,119 --> 00:25:33,879
Speaker 1: was its own little thing that people were very protective

447
00:25:33,880 --> 00:25:37,160
Speaker 1: of without seeing it in the greater context of Boston

448
00:25:37,680 --> 00:25:40,479
Speaker 1: as a whole, which I think probably most people not

449
00:25:40,600 --> 00:25:47,040
Speaker 1: from Boston think of Boston and also probably Cambridge as

450
00:25:47,160 --> 00:25:51,199
Speaker 1: a thing, uh, even though there are lots of different

451
00:25:51,240 --> 00:25:54,919
Speaker 1: insular communities all around the area. So thank you for

452
00:25:54,960 --> 00:25:57,120
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