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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production

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Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy

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Speaker 1: Vie Wilson Molly Fry. This week we kicked off our

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Speaker 1: podcast episodes with some Anatomy and some wax Models. Uh,

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Speaker 1: and somebody that's been on my list not for that long,

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Speaker 1: because a lot of the press about her followed, I

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Speaker 1: think an addition of the book that I referenced at

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Speaker 1: the end coming out, which was called The Lady Anatomist

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Speaker 1: to the life and work of Anna Mirandi Manzolini. But

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Speaker 1: a lot of the articles that have come out on

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Speaker 1: some you know, mainstream popular websites recently have referenced back

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Speaker 1: to that book. And so she hasn't been on my

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Speaker 1: list for that long, but she's been somebody I've been

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Speaker 1: just deeply interested in that whole time, partly because the

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Speaker 1: self portrait of her is so visually striking, because she's

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Speaker 1: really in a gown with pearls on, dressed very beautifully

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Speaker 1: and very aristocratically while preparing to dissect a brain. So

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Speaker 1: I really liked Holly. You and I have both talked

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Speaker 1: about how we'll kind of download to our spouses what

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Speaker 1: we've been working on At this point, my husband has

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Speaker 1: heard me talk about so many topics that are just

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Speaker 1: horrible that I as I was trying to explain kind

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Speaker 1: of the condensed version of on a Mirandi Manzolini, he

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Speaker 1: kept expecting there to be something horrific happening to her,

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Speaker 1: Like was she exiled because of her anatomical interest? Now

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Speaker 1: she just she just got paid a lot less and

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Speaker 1: it wasn't enough to live off of, which is still bad.

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Speaker 1: But like not he was expecting like a he was

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Speaker 1: expecting a trauma. Yeah, yeah, um, yeah. I I am

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Speaker 1: looking at a picture of her, that self portrait in

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Speaker 1: wax as she did, and I'm thinking this is another

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Speaker 1: good idea for a Halloween costume. Oh I hadn't even

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Speaker 1: thought about that, but I agree with you because her

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Speaker 1: dress is beautiful. It's a beautiful, like really um kind

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Speaker 1: of subdued dusty pink rose gown of the era, so

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Speaker 1: that means lots of fun embellishment, there's some pearls, there's

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Speaker 1: good hair. You just need to carry around a brain

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Speaker 1: in a jar um. There are pictures of several of

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Speaker 1: her wax pieces that you can get pretty easily on

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Speaker 1: the internet, and one of them is a series of

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Speaker 1: the eye and it's got just an eye, the skin

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Speaker 1: around the eye, the eyes. Looking in different directions, you're

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Speaker 1: getting a sense of how that musculature all attaches. And

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Speaker 1: then there's one that's just the eye itself, um with

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Speaker 1: the muscular musculature coming off of it. And every time

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Speaker 1: I see it, I have this moment where I think

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Speaker 1: it's a starfish and I understand completely what you're saying.

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Speaker 1: It does look a little um, almost love crafty in

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Speaker 1: because of the way it um. So I've I've studied

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Speaker 1: anatomy and physiology. I've never personally done a cadaver study,

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Speaker 1: but I have watched video of cadaver studies being done.

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Speaker 1: I don't feel particularly squeamish about all of this, but

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Speaker 1: the anatomical venuses creep me out because they're like their

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Speaker 1: facial expressions and their body and the fact that you

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Speaker 1: are like lifting out all of these parts of the

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Speaker 1: person's um, like pelvis and abdomen, and somehow the look

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Speaker 1: on her face is weirdly ecstatic. I'm like, I feel

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Speaker 1: like this is a model of a woman who's enjoying

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Speaker 1: being brutalized, and that creeps me out. I have theories Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I have to wonder if some of it isn't just

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Speaker 1: that women at this point historically, right, we're often objects

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Speaker 1: of like ideally would be something pretty to behold. So

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Speaker 1: they're trying to just make them beautiful and look like

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Speaker 1: women you would see in paintings and art, except of

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Speaker 1: course you could take them apart and look at their insides.

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Speaker 1: But it does create a strange juxtaposition. Yeah, that is

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Speaker 1: very disturbing. There's a really recent book with an I

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Speaker 1: think the last couple of years called The Anatomical Venus

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Speaker 1: that's on just these and I have not read it,

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Speaker 1: but that does exist if people are interested. Uh. Something

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Speaker 1: that we didn't get into the episode that came up

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Speaker 1: in the research though, was how the whole idea of

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Speaker 1: the sexes was really evolving just before and during this time. Um.

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Speaker 1: Back when we did the episode about the Lieutenant Nunn,

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Speaker 1: we talked about how in that particular era, the idea

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Speaker 1: of the sexes was very different from how we think

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Speaker 1: of it now, because it was everybody thought that like,

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Speaker 1: there was one sex and it was male, and women

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Speaker 1: were just kind of broken men and so Anna Mirandi

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Speaker 1: Manzolini was relatively early and uh, and the sort of

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Speaker 1: more conceptualizing it as two distinct sexes, although there were

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Speaker 1: still people arguing about it in one way or the other.

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Speaker 1: And now, of course today we're living at a time

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Speaker 1: not many centuries past that point where more and more

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Speaker 1: UH physicians and UM genesists and all kinds of other

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Speaker 1: UH specialists are saying, hey, this whole binary of two

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Speaker 1: sexes is like not actually indicative of the diversity of

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Speaker 1: the way people's bodies present. So it's like, to me

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Speaker 1: an interesting progression and how that understanding has shifted over

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Speaker 1: like five years. I have a confession to make just

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Speaker 1: that I am not emotionally tall enough to ride the

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Speaker 1: ride of dissected bodies. I can watch surgery for days,

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Speaker 1: but like once you see things like this, or those

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Speaker 1: instances of installations that have toured periodically in the last

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Speaker 1: several years, of like a human body that's kind of

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Speaker 1: like taken apart for people to I cannot handles. I

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Speaker 1: cannot handle it. So for me being able to look up,

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Speaker 1: for exacample, at a beautified face that I can pretend

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Speaker 1: as a painting is working a little better, but it is.

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Speaker 1: It's a tricky thing. The way men and women were

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Speaker 1: treated I also feel like in some ways we look

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Speaker 1: at this period specifically um when she was doing her work,

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Speaker 1: there is this strange juxtaposition we talked about of like,

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Speaker 1: in some ways so much more progressive in terms of

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Speaker 1: available roots for women, but in other ways, as evidenced

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Speaker 1: by the fact that these anatomical studies had to shortly

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Speaker 1: after she was gone, then be very pretty also like

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Speaker 1: they're weird multiple societal standards and ideologies at play all

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Speaker 1: at the same time, right, which is always what makes

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Speaker 1: history specifically related to sex and gender very tricky to

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Speaker 1: pick apart. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she definitely um or women

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Speaker 1: in Bologna when she was living, especially if they were wealthy,

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Speaker 1: not as much as they if they weren't wealthy, Like

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Speaker 1: they had more access to education than in lots of

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Speaker 1: other parts of Europe, but they still faced a lot

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Speaker 1: of sexism, and we're sort of held up as like

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Speaker 1: token lady scholars. Behold our lady scholar instead of just

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Speaker 1: a smart person. Yep, yep. I was annoyed at all

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Speaker 1: the times that I found her referenced as the lady ananomous,

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Speaker 1: until I realized, like that's really how they were sort

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Speaker 1: of marketing her in Bologna in the eighteenth century. Uh.

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Speaker 1: Continuing our week of of slightly graphic things. That's the

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Speaker 1: other one was about anatomy. Uh. We also talked about

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Speaker 1: William Kemmler this week and Alfred Southwick the invention of

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Speaker 1: the electric chair in its first use, which is a

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Speaker 1: weird and difficult thing to talk about because it also involves,

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Speaker 1: as we mentioned at the top of that episode, UH,

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Speaker 1: some animal torture, which we glossed over as much as possible,

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Speaker 1: and domestic abuse. There were two things that really, really,

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Speaker 1: really really made me spitting nails angry while I was

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Speaker 1: researching this. One is the fact that Kemler's defense in

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Speaker 1: his initial trial focused so much on the fact that

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Speaker 1: Tilly was so pretty. Of course she was having an affair. Gross. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: I didn't include it in the episode itself because it

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Speaker 1: does get a little bit graphic. But they even asked

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Speaker 1: the surgeons that worked on her brain if they thought

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Speaker 1: she was pretty. And one of the surgeons who was

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Speaker 1: considered like an expert in that field, like an early

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Speaker 1: brain surgeon, so to speak, and had been the man

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Speaker 1: that described trying to pull fragments of bone out of

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Speaker 1: her brain tissue in the hopes that they could somehow

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Speaker 1: save that brain tissue, which of course ultimately didn't work.

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Speaker 1: Kind of had a great comeback, but I'm sure it

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Speaker 1: was because he was astonished to even be asked that

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Speaker 1: where he said something along the lines of not the

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Speaker 1: way I saw her, Like why he would even be

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Speaker 1: questioned as to whether he thought this woman he was

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Speaker 1: trying to save, who was obviously a mess, was pretty

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Speaker 1: just horrified him. Well, And it reminds me of like

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Speaker 1: when when women are assaulted and what they were wearing

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Speaker 1: is used as part of the trial, very similar. The

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Speaker 1: whole thing did become very victim blamey in in Kemmler's defense,

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Speaker 1: and I understand, of course this was, you know, a

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Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years ago, but it really is like

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Speaker 1: startling to me that that was their take, was that

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Speaker 1: they asked everybody how pretty she was? And I'm like,

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Speaker 1: that is monstrous. The second thing that really horrified and

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Speaker 1: the research is that once that electrocution took place and

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Speaker 1: of course went horribly badly, the way that Kemmler was

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Speaker 1: talked about in the press became much more sympathetic and

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Speaker 1: they referred to him as that poor wretch and like

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Speaker 1: that poor man. And and I understand that that was

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Speaker 1: also framing it to kind of maximize the sensationalism of

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Speaker 1: it and make it seem like this had really been

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Speaker 1: a terrible, terrible planned from the start. But as a consequence,

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Speaker 1: like the fact that he had so violently killed his

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Speaker 1: at that point what's often called his common law wife,

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Speaker 1: even though he was married to someone else. Um, kind

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Speaker 1: of falls off of the story and it does not

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Speaker 1: become about how he brutalized someone, and he becomes this

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Speaker 1: poor victim that nobody is giving the same benefit of

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Speaker 1: the doubt. You know, how pretty was that electric chair?

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Speaker 1: Like there's no um, it's a very weird thing. And

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Speaker 1: those two things together just had me fuming that. Yeah, one,

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Speaker 1: I like that phenomenon is also something that still exists

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Speaker 1: where you know, if if if someone is convicted of

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Speaker 1: a crime and their punishment is regarded as being excessive somehow,

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Speaker 1: like that will earn sympathy, whereas the person who was

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Speaker 1: the victim of the crime is sort of written out

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Speaker 1: of the story. Yeah, I mean I I you know,

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Speaker 1: where anybody stands on the death penalty is is in

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Speaker 1: whatever they make peace within their own heart, certainly do

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Speaker 1: not want anyone uh to be treated inhumanly or cruelly.

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Speaker 1: But it really does bother me, particularly in a situation

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Speaker 1: of such horrifying domestic abuse, that the thing that got

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Speaker 1: him there kind of gets written out and that victim

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Speaker 1: never got the same kind treatment. Uh. It's it's definitely

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Speaker 1: unbalanced in that regard. Um. The other thing is that

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Speaker 1: I feel like people don't talk about Southwick at all

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Speaker 1: when you hear about the War of Currents, Like they

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Speaker 1: talk about him as as sending Edison letters, but you

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Speaker 1: really don't know his whole background. There isn't a whole

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Speaker 1: lot of discussion in you know, any of the various

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Speaker 1: films or whatever that have been made around it. You

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Speaker 1: don't find out like his whole weird thing where he

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Speaker 1: and his friends were electrocuting stray dogs to try to

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Speaker 1: figure out their scientific method. That all. I mean, it's

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Speaker 1: difficult to talk about to think about, but it's an

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Speaker 1: important part of the story that gets kind of whipped

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Speaker 1: past usually because those two figures Kemler and Southwick both

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Speaker 1: are so eclipsed by the Edison Tesla Westinghouse portion of it,

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Speaker 1: which I understand, like you can't tell the whole story

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Speaker 1: all the time in the amount of time given. Um.

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Speaker 1: But it just that's why I wanted to do this one.

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Speaker 1: As unpleasant as it is in many regards. Yeah, yeah uh.

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Speaker 1: If you would like to write us some pleasant email,

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Speaker 1: we would love that. It's one of the reasons I

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Speaker 1: put a very pleasant one at the end of that episode.

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Speaker 1: You can do that at History Podcast at i heeart

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Speaker 1: is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts

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Speaker 1: from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,

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Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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