Speaker 1: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 1: is an open book, all of these amazing tales right
Speaker 1: there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the cabinet of curiosities. To paint like da Vinci,
Speaker 1: to sculpt like Rodin. Skills like those take years, often decades,
Speaker 1: to acquire, and they don't just happen. Such talents require
Speaker 1: intense practice before one even comes close to matching the greats.
Speaker 1: For Rosemary Brown, though, who had been born in London
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixteen, her dream was to write music like
Speaker 1: the masters Bach chopin Beethoven. But Rosemary didn't even play
Speaker 1: an instrument until she was in her thirties, when she
Speaker 1: started taking lessons on a secondhand piano. That wasn't her
Speaker 1: first foray into music, though. When she was seven, she
Speaker 1: was visited by a composer who told her that he
Speaker 1: would make her famous, that she would write music heard
Speaker 1: all over the world. His name was France List, and
Speaker 1: he died over thirty years earlier. That would be Rosemary's
Speaker 1: only contact with Liszt or any other ghostly composer for
Speaker 1: twenty five years until her adult piano lessons. Soon after
Speaker 1: she got married and had a child, and then the
Speaker 1: lessons stopped. It seemed her interactions with the spirit world
Speaker 1: had ended too, which was surprising given her family's history
Speaker 1: of paranormal activity. Rosemary's parents and grandparents, among other members
Speaker 1: of the family, were all said to be psychic. In
Speaker 1: interviews later in life, she said that even she had
Speaker 1: the ability to see and hear the dead. By nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty one, she and her husband had two children, But
Speaker 1: then the unthinkable happened. Mr. Brown passed away, leaving Rosemary
Speaker 1: a single mother with a boy and a girl to
Speaker 1: take care of at home. But wouldn't be the only
Speaker 1: life changing moment she would face. Three years after her
Speaker 1: husband's death, Rosemary reconnected with an old friend, France List
Speaker 1: had come to pay her a visit, and this time
Speaker 1: he brought some of his friends with him, including Brahms, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff,
Speaker 1: and Mozart. It started out of the blue. Rosemary had
Speaker 1: been at home recovering from an accident and had grown board.
Speaker 1: With little else for her to do, she sat down
Speaker 1: at her piano and tried to plunk out a little
Speaker 1: song from her childhood, something to occupy her mind and hands.
Speaker 1: While she healed, and that's when she realized her hands
Speaker 1: were no longer her own. They'd become possessed by France List,
Speaker 1: who then used them to compose intricate and beautiful music,
Speaker 1: something too difficult for Rosemary to ever play on her
Speaker 1: own with only a handful of lessons under her belt.
Speaker 1: Through List, other composers would also speak through her, using
Speaker 1: her hands to either play their compositions on the piano
Speaker 1: or record them on paper without any treamant to get
Speaker 1: in the way. When she had completed her transcriptions, she
Speaker 1: would then present them to the ghostly composer to play,
Speaker 1: since she didn't have the skill. Once again, they would
Speaker 1: take over her hands and play what they had written
Speaker 1: to make sure she had recorded it right. When she
Speaker 1: wasn't being used as a human piano player, Rosemary conversed
Speaker 1: with her ghostly guests. She said List was fascinated by
Speaker 1: how much Banana's cost and Chopin hated the idea of television.
Speaker 1: But eventually Rosemary showed her creations to a Scottish music
Speaker 1: teacher named Mary Firth, who helped to fund her work.
Speaker 1: With enough money to get by, she quit her day
Speaker 1: job and devoted all her time to writing what her
Speaker 1: spirited friends told her too. She also started making guest
Speaker 1: appearances on BBC radio programs and television shows in the
Speaker 1: United States, including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Of course,
Speaker 1: with any newfound fame comes both adulation and rejection. The
Speaker 1: public may have been captivated by her music, but the
Speaker 1: greater musical commune he was pretty dismissive. Noted composer Leonard
Speaker 1: Bernstein wasn't convinced her work was that of the dearly departed.
Speaker 1: Conductor Andre Prevan was so put off by the pieces
Speaker 1: that he said that if they were real, Rosemary should
Speaker 1: have left them on the shelf. But some composers look
Speaker 1: beyond the process and did see genuine talent. British composer
Speaker 1: Richard Rodney Bennett couldn't believe his ears. He said that
Speaker 1: even though some of what she wrote wasn't very good,
Speaker 1: there's no way he could have faked writing Beethoven like Rosemary.
Speaker 1: In the end, though Rosemary's talents weren't as supernatural as
Speaker 1: she'd claimed. Psychologists and musicologists concluded that what she was
Speaker 1: really doing was called unconscious composition, that the composers were
Speaker 1: almost like separate personalities inside of her, each one taking
Speaker 1: over at a different time and using the untapped musical
Speaker 1: talent that Rosemary already possessed. Over the course of her career,
Speaker 1: Rosemary Brown composed hundreds of pieces, many of which have
Speaker 1: been performed and recorded by orchestras all over the world.
Speaker 1: She might not have been visited by the spirits of
Speaker 1: the greatest composers who had ever lived, but she certainly
Speaker 1: unlocked the gift for music that she was finally able
Speaker 1: to share with the world, and, judging by how far
Speaker 1: it's reached, it certainly struck a chord. Knowledge can be
Speaker 1: a dangerous thing to both the person wielding it and
Speaker 1: to anyone on the other end. A little, well timed
Speaker 1: knowledge can shatter beliefs and friendships and alter one's entire
Speaker 1: view of the world. But can it make a person sick?
Speaker 1: In America, in a little knowledge went a long way
Speaker 1: in killing a lot of people. It all started when
Speaker 1: a Nebraska woman died suddenly from something called consumption. We
Speaker 1: know it today as tuberculosis, but at the time it
Speaker 1: was a misunderstood disease. Thousands of people who contracted it
Speaker 1: died simply because they didn't know where it came from,
Speaker 1: or how to fight it. They fled to sanatoriums, where
Speaker 1: fresh air, therapies and strict diet promised to cure them
Speaker 1: of what ailed them. But nothing worked because tuberculosis wasn't
Speaker 1: like the common cold. It wasn't a virus to be
Speaker 1: sweated out in a sauna or a hike in the woods.
Speaker 1: It was a disease caused by bacteria. But people back
Speaker 1: then didn't know that. When faced with a pandemic and
Speaker 1: limited information at their disposal, it was only natural for
Speaker 1: panic to set in. You see, the woman who had
Speaker 1: died in Nebraska, it wasn't just anyone. Her name was
Speaker 1: Jesse Allen, and she had a very special job. She
Speaker 1: was a librarian. She was also one of the many
Speaker 1: librarians who died battling tuberculosis. After a while, the public
Speaker 1: started looking around at the victims and noticed some similarities.
Speaker 1: It seems that many of the other women who had
Speaker 1: died were also librarians, and Jesse and the other victims
Speaker 1: had been librarians at a time when public libraries were
Speaker 1: gaining support across the country. Meanwhile, private subscription libraries were
Speaker 1: going out of fashion. The wealthier classes, though didn't want
Speaker 1: the public in their spaces, particularly the poor public. The
Speaker 1: public library was open to everyone. It welcomed people from
Speaker 1: all walks of life, and with those people came dirt
Speaker 1: and germs and the possibility of tuberculosis. Jesse Allen's death,
Speaker 1: along with the deaths of countless other librarians and patrons,
Speaker 1: had led to what was known as the Great Book Scare.
Speaker 1: During the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, there
Speaker 1: was a belief that tuberculosis was spread by library books.
Speaker 1: When a book changed owners, it would carry the germs
Speaker 1: from one barrower to the next. Like I said, they
Speaker 1: didn't know any better, so this was the best they
Speaker 1: could do, and so Jesse Allen became the unwitting face
Speaker 1: of the scare. Her death was used to warn off
Speaker 1: potential patrons just when public libraries needed their support the most.
Speaker 1: Although she was one of the most famous victims of
Speaker 1: the disease, she was by no means the first. In fact,
Speaker 1: the Great Book Scare had really gotten going during the
Speaker 1: late eighteen seventies. About fifteen years before Alan's death, W F. Pool,
Speaker 1: a librarian from Chicago, had consulted several doctors about the
Speaker 1: potential of books carrying disease. It wasn't just tuberculosis he
Speaker 1: was worried about either. Smallpox and scarlet fever were also
Speaker 1: on the top of everyone's mind, both in the United
Speaker 1: States and in Great Britain. The information he received from
Speaker 1: medical professionals led to legislation being passed here and overseas.
Speaker 1: In England, the Public Health Act of eighteen seventy five
Speaker 1: prohibited the lending of betting and clothes. After Alan's death
Speaker 1: and presumably others, books were added to the list of
Speaker 1: unlendable items in nineteen o seven. If you were believed
Speaker 1: to have tuberculosis while borrowing a book from the library,
Speaker 1: you were better off holding onto the book rather than
Speaker 1: returning it, not unless you wanted to pay the he
Speaker 1: define of forty shillings about two dollars in modern American currency.
Speaker 1: Back in the US, though, the prohibition of book lending
Speaker 1: was a matter of states rights, and librarians were considered
Speaker 1: enemies for allowing such diseases to spread. They cleaned the
Speaker 1: books every day using formalde hyde, steam and other solutions.
Speaker 1: Of course, studies were conducted in labs. Forty guinea pigs
Speaker 1: had contaminated pages placed in their cages, and all forty died.
Speaker 1: In another experiment, monkeys were given a glass of milk
Speaker 1: served atop a book carrying some kind of contagion. But honestly,
Speaker 1: it didn't matter what made the animals sick. If they
Speaker 1: had gotten ill in the presence of an affected book,
Speaker 1: it was common to assume that the book had something
Speaker 1: to do with it. Eventually, libraries stopped lending books out
Speaker 1: If titles were thought to be contaminated, they were actually burned.
Speaker 1: The public had developed a mass phobia of borrowing books,
Speaker 1: that is, until something changed. Perhaps it was due to
Speaker 1: the lack of other entertainment in many small towns, or
Speaker 1: maybe someone had taken a look around and thought everyone
Speaker 1: was getting upset about nothing, that their fears were being
Speaker 1: stoked by an increasingly sensationalist media. New studies were coming
Speaker 1: out claiming that books couldn't get a person sick, no
Speaker 1: matter how often that book was lended or to whom,
Speaker 1: whatever it was, People started to trust books again, and
Speaker 1: those brave librarians led the charge. After all, the public
Speaker 1: library was at risk of disappearing entirely, which had kind
Speaker 1: of been the point. Much of the books scare had
Speaker 1: been started by people and institutions who were afraid of
Speaker 1: what the public library represented. Access to information, to subversive materials,
Speaker 1: to content not meant for everyone to see. As much
Speaker 1: as the book scare had been about stopping the spread
Speaker 1: of disease, it had also been about controlling access to knowledge.
Speaker 1: To those in power, knowledge was a disease, and the
Speaker 1: more it spread, the more it would contaminate the public.
Speaker 1: It could lead to protests and impure thoughts. But the
Speaker 1: people wanted their books, and they wanted to broaden their
Speaker 1: horizons with the help of the public library. Thankfully, despite
Speaker 1: what the newspapers had reported about consumption, the public saw
Speaker 1: through the bogus reports, and amazingly, the American people knew
Speaker 1: better than to believe everything they read. I hope you've
Speaker 1: enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
Speaker 1: for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
Speaker 1: show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
Speaker 1: created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
Speaker 1: a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
Speaker 1: learn all about it over at a World of Lore.
Speaker 1: Dot come, and until next time, stay curious.