Speaker 1: The rivers were rumored to be shimmering and spectacular. Archaeologists
Speaker 1: doubted it, though, because water ways of Mercury seemed to
Speaker 1: be more fiction than fact, but still they were curious
Speaker 1: to see if these silvery rivers and other stories about
Speaker 1: Emperor shinshi Huan's tomb were true. Shinshi Huan became China's
Speaker 1: first emperor in two b C after six other Chinese
Speaker 1: states fell to him in bloody battles. While it's true
Speaker 1: that he was responsible for the deaths of untold thousands
Speaker 1: during his tumultuous reign, he was also credited with stimulating
Speaker 1: significant cultural and intellectual advancement. He was passionate about infrastructure too.
Speaker 1: Among other things, he ordered the construction of a canal
Speaker 1: that linked the yang z and the Pearl river systems,
Speaker 1: and extensive network of roadways, and the creation of provinces
Speaker 1: as well as China's Great Wall. It shouldn't surprise you
Speaker 1: to know, then, that he also began constructing his enormous
Speaker 1: underground mausoleum thirty six years before his death. And when
Speaker 1: I say enormous, I really mean it. He built something
Speaker 1: more than a grave. He created a sprawling underground compound
Speaker 1: the size of an American football field. Tradition tells us
Speaker 1: that his inner burial chamber, which has yet to be
Speaker 1: excavated to this day, by the way, contains a scale
Speaker 1: replica of his empire. It was something like a giant
Speaker 1: dall house, a country in miniature that Shinshi Huan planned
Speaker 1: to preside over in death. Legend tells us that he
Speaker 1: included facsimiles of animals, laborers, stables, offices, and statues of
Speaker 1: government officials. He ordered the creation of palaces and towers
Speaker 1: and scenic vistas, and as I mentioned a moment ago,
Speaker 1: it was also said that he wanted mercury rivers. For years,
Speaker 1: scholars weren't sure if this latter wish was executed, but
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties researchers found that the levels of
Speaker 1: mercury in the burial mound above the tomb were exceptionally high,
Speaker 1: potentially giving credence to the seemingly fantastical idea that man
Speaker 1: made rivers of mercury were buried below the surface. And
Speaker 1: when we look at the emperor and his contemporaries, they
Speaker 1: were quite familiar with the substance mercury you see was
Speaker 1: used in several ways. In ancient China, mercury sulfide, often
Speaker 1: called cinnabar, is bright red in color and was often
Speaker 1: used in artwork and decorations. Mercury was also used to
Speaker 1: cure many common ills, from infected sores to insomnia. Because
Speaker 1: it's the only metal that's liquid at room temperature, perhaps
Speaker 1: it was natural that inquisitive minds also felt like it
Speaker 1: might contain some sort of magical property. And that brings
Speaker 1: us to another use for mercury that was long a
Speaker 1: part of Chinese tradition, alchemy. Alchemists used mercury to dissolve
Speaker 1: other metals and create amalgams that were used in things
Speaker 1: like guilt plating, but we're also thought to have other
Speaker 1: broader applications. Using the Taoist concept of yin and yang,
Speaker 1: it was suggested that cold, watery mercury and bright, fiery
Speaker 1: gold could be blended in ideal proportions to sustain life.
Speaker 1: One legend tells of a man who extended his life
Speaker 1: by ten thousand and years after consuming wine spiked with it.
Speaker 1: But the first person that we understand to have definitively
Speaker 1: pursued the specific goal of immortality was none other than
Speaker 1: shinshi Huan. Indeed, among the many famous legacies of the
Speaker 1: first Emperor of China was his own quest for immortality
Speaker 1: and the so called elixir of life, a much fabled
Speaker 1: and deeply sought after means of living forever. He sent
Speaker 1: search parties out to the far reaches of his empire,
Speaker 1: and as part of this quest, he worked a little
Speaker 1: closer to home too. The emperor tasked court doctors with
Speaker 1: cooking up a number of mercurial concoctions in the hopes
Speaker 1: of figuring out how to engineer immortality in a cauldron.
Speaker 1: He hoped, and searched and plotted for immortality. But it's
Speaker 1: good that he planned so lavishly for the afterlife. Not
Speaker 1: only did his mercury laced potions not grant him eternal life,
Speaker 1: but they probably contributed to his early death. We know
Speaker 1: now that the element is highly toxic to humans. Today,
Speaker 1: the medical industry is indeed in the business of prolonging life.
Speaker 1: A link between modern medicine and the quest for immortality
Speaker 1: is inextricable, but maybe not in the way you might
Speaker 1: have expected. This is a story of magic and medicine.
Speaker 1: It's a story of our ever present quest to find,
Speaker 1: distill or create elixirs that put off death, even if
Speaker 1: just for a while. I'm Aaron Manky and welcome to
Speaker 1: bedside manners. Diseases come in all shapes and sizes. These days,
Speaker 1: an average person with access to Google might be able
Speaker 1: to do a quick search and figure out what that
Speaker 1: strange rashes or what's wrong with their tonsils. Internet access
Speaker 1: has made armchair experts out of many of us mere mortals,
Speaker 1: But at one time, sickness was the realm of the gods.
Speaker 1: The word that we translate to the English disease finds
Speaker 1: its ancient origins in the idea that something is without
Speaker 1: well being or divine favor. For thousands of years, humans
Speaker 1: believe that gods were integral to sickness and to healing,
Speaker 1: both in terms of affliction and its treatments. How to
Speaker 1: treat illness and disease has evolved over the course of
Speaker 1: human history. Since time immemorial, humans have used a wide
Speaker 1: range of natural materials like plants, minerals, and other substances
Speaker 1: to treat sickness. Medicine and medicinal practitioners have existed for
Speaker 1: far longer than we have records for. However, in the
Speaker 1: mid sixth century, BC, people began to think about the world,
Speaker 1: human life, and health and wellness in a very different way.
Speaker 1: On Nature, a work of prose published by Anaximander of
Speaker 1: my Leaders, proposed that the world wasn't simply created as
Speaker 1: a playground by the gods for the gods, but rather
Speaker 1: it was a natural entity with its own processes which
Speaker 1: were able to be studied and explained on its own terms,
Speaker 1: apart from any reference to the god's activities. People started
Speaker 1: thinking more about the natural causes of sickness, if the
Speaker 1: gods weren't to blame, than who or what us. People
Speaker 1: began thinking about their bodies, inner workings. Disease came to
Speaker 1: be seen as natural in origin rather than supernatural. This
Speaker 1: would lead to a lot of speculation about how natural
Speaker 1: medicines could be used internally. The fifth century BC brought
Speaker 1: a major seismic shift. During this time, the Greeks devised
Speaker 1: and committed to paper the idea that medicine might be
Speaker 1: formally defined as a craft, and thus it could be
Speaker 1: systematized and practiced by formally studied crafts people. One of
Speaker 1: the most influential figures in this invention of medicine, as
Speaker 1: scholars call it, was a fellow named Hippocrates, who you'll
Speaker 1: get to know a little bit more over the course
Speaker 1: of this series. Hippocrates was highly influential, and his school
Speaker 1: of thought created the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of Greek
Speaker 1: medical works. In general, Hippocratic medicine understood disease as an
Speaker 1: internal imbalance of one of four key fluids known as
Speaker 1: the humors, and healing was concerned with restoring the balance
Speaker 1: of them, largely through diets and exercise. The physician gay
Speaker 1: And would later appear on the scene. Building upon ideas
Speaker 1: of those who came before him, he worked on developing
Speaker 1: a significant catalog of natural cures, most of which were
Speaker 1: plant extracts. His recipes would be systematized as they traveled
Speaker 1: around the world during the next several centuries. While these
Speaker 1: Greek ideas faded out in the West, they were picked
Speaker 1: up by Arabic writers. These natural solutions gained momentum in
Speaker 1: the East, where they were further built upon and developed,
Speaker 1: before being brought back to the West around eight hundred
Speaker 1: years ago in the twelfth and thirteen centuries. In the
Speaker 1: eleventh century, for example, a Persian scholar named Albi Rooney
Speaker 1: cataloged an extensive collection of medicines from Central Asia and
Speaker 1: with it, he suggested that pharmacy, a term derived from
Speaker 1: the Greek word pharmacon or poison, should be considered a
Speaker 1: distinctly separate branch of the healing arts. He thought it
Speaker 1: required its own line of study. By twelve thirty one,
Speaker 1: the Holy Roman Emperor signed the Constitutions of Malfi into law,
Speaker 1: creating official legal codes around healing that extended across his empire.
Speaker 1: Formally trained physicians were deemed to be of a scholarly class,
Speaker 1: while apothecaries, those who mixed their medicines, consisted of tradesmen.
Speaker 1: But they continued to work closely together, dispensing cures under
Speaker 1: a strict legal code that governed their activities. But of
Speaker 1: course there are ways to get around the rules. You see,
Speaker 1: these laws were hard to enforce through both the Ancient
Speaker 1: and Renaissance worlds. From East to west, most big cities
Speaker 1: had their own apothecaries, and many of them to boot.
Speaker 1: They were small businesses, after all, they needed to make
Speaker 1: their ends meet. Sometimes they would take advantage of their clients,
Speaker 1: selling them mislabeled products and jacking up the prices. They
Speaker 1: might sell old or spoiled things, and sometimes they would
Speaker 1: knowingly sell cures that were known to be deadly in
Speaker 1: order to turn a profit. We'll get to more of
Speaker 1: that later in the season. But alongside the often creative apothecaries,
Speaker 1: up sprouted another possible answer to the many ailments of
Speaker 1: the early modern world, a particular kind of craftsperson with
Speaker 1: sometimes equally dubious concoctions. By the thirteen than fourteen centuries,
Speaker 1: another group was already beginning to make small waves in
Speaker 1: medical practice and theory, a group born of magic and
Speaker 1: mysticism that brought us to medicine as we know it today.
Speaker 1: The Alchemists. The apocalyptic visions kept him awake at night.
Speaker 1: John Franciscan Friar believed that the Antichrist's arrival was imminent,
Speaker 1: But though his brow was sweaty and his pulse was quick,
Speaker 1: he knew that he was ready. John believed that he
Speaker 1: was in on the secret of how to defeat the
Speaker 1: devil and his demonic army. He believed that the key
Speaker 1: lay in his knowledge of alchemy and its ability to
Speaker 1: restore health and wealth to the virtuous. So John tinkered
Speaker 1: in his workshop, preparing his potions and talking of divine revelations.
Speaker 1: He was eventually thrown in jail by the pope for
Speaker 1: his blasphemy, but John was onto something. Exactly what he
Speaker 1: was onto was less about the devil, though, and more
Speaker 1: about what John had boiling over the flame. To us today,
Speaker 1: medicine can sometimes feel like nothing short of magic. It
Speaker 1: has allowed the deaf to hear and the blind to see.
Speaker 1: It's made infection disappear and pain vanish. It's brought innumerable
Speaker 1: people back from the brink of death. And maybe we've
Speaker 1: all felt it in smaller ways, maybe when the doctor
Speaker 1: gives us the right antibiotics, or when our sinus is
Speaker 1: finally clear. At least it always feels that way to me.
Speaker 1: The origins of the chemical based medicines which we are
Speaker 1: prescribed today are very much intertwined with the philosophy and
Speaker 1: experiments of alchemy. Now, when you hear the word alchemy,
Speaker 1: you probably think about mad scientists in secret medieval labs
Speaker 1: filled with fire and smoke and glass, all cooking up
Speaker 1: optimistic experiments and the hopes of turning lead into gold.
Speaker 1: That's the picture that movies and books tell us about, anyway,
Speaker 1: But there's so much more to it than that. The
Speaker 1: history and the goals of alchemy are much broader than
Speaker 1: I could tell you about today in this one single episode.
Speaker 1: But throughout much of history there's been one common thread
Speaker 1: that I'd love to tell you about, one very precious
Speaker 1: item which you might have heard of, the Philosopher's Stone.
Speaker 1: Now I should point out that the Philosopher's Stone is
Speaker 1: kind of a misleading name. The stone was rumored not
Speaker 1: to be a stone at all, but a fine powder.
Speaker 1: It was thought to be read or maybe white, or
Speaker 1: sometimes even purple. But whatever it looked like, alchemists believed
Speaker 1: that it was the secrets ingredient of transmutation, the ability
Speaker 1: to transform one substance into another, to shapeshift and renew.
Speaker 1: The ability of transmutation was considered all powerful, but no
Speaker 1: one had gotten close enough to prove it. Some claimed
Speaker 1: that this mythical substance had been given by God to Adam.
Speaker 1: According to some legends, it was used by Noah to
Speaker 1: create the arc, and by Moses to build the Tabernacle
Speaker 1: and its vessels, by Solomon to build a temple. The alchemists, however,
Speaker 1: sought not just to find the stone, but to make
Speaker 1: the stone. You see, it was thought that the stone
Speaker 1: could remove impurities and turned base things into precious things.
Speaker 1: It was believed that by rearranging base properties of any element,
Speaker 1: say in lead, it can morph into something else gold.
Speaker 1: But over time the goal of alchemists evolved. It led
Speaker 1: to a fairly systemized understanding of medicine, which was chemical
Speaker 1: at its heart. The desire to remove impurities from metal
Speaker 1: was expanded, and it was thought that disease, understood as
Speaker 1: impurity of the body, could potentially be transmuted into health
Speaker 1: and perhaps in perpetuity following along. Okay, so far, basically
Speaker 1: alchemy was trying to take not so great things and
Speaker 1: turn them into better things. Now, one of the most
Speaker 1: important alchemical methods, as it would come to bear on medicine,
Speaker 1: was the use of distillation. This was a central tool
Speaker 1: of alchemy of any kind and one of the ways
Speaker 1: the alchemists hoped to extract what they called quintessence, or
Speaker 1: the fifth essence, out of simple substances like plants or minerals.
Speaker 1: Extracting this quintessence was not exactly like reducing a substance
Speaker 1: to active ingredients, since this fifth essence was understood to
Speaker 1: be a celestial party that was dormant in earthly materials.
Speaker 1: It was thought to be incorruptible and capable of making
Speaker 1: powerful medicines which could remove any form of corruption from
Speaker 1: the body. Importantly, for the medical world, this rather esoteric
Speaker 1: process led to the very real discovery of alcohol, which
Speaker 1: was understood to be the quintessence of wine. Recipes from
Speaker 1: making alcohol started to appear in the twelfth century, and
Speaker 1: by the next it became known as Aqua vitae the
Speaker 1: water of life. Now our Franciscan friar John of Rupeskosa
Speaker 1: was rumored to have been a gold making alchemist from
Speaker 1: his jail cell it seems that he was the first
Speaker 1: to propose that a kind of total panacea was attainable
Speaker 1: by distilling not just wine, but things like herbs, animal products,
Speaker 1: and especially minerals like gold, antimony, and mercury, and then
Speaker 1: mixing medicines from them by way of a chemical process.
Speaker 1: A proto chemistry, he proposed that an elixir of life
Speaker 1: could be attained by a careful hand and a watchful eye.
Speaker 1: He was far ahead of his time, and he was
Speaker 1: hunished for it. But he wasn't the first, and he
Speaker 1: certainly wasn't going to be the last. The journey had
Speaker 1: been a long one, but the doctor was no stranger
Speaker 1: to life on the road. What followed him were stories
Speaker 1: and legend, a heady blend of fact and fiction that
Speaker 1: is hard to parse out. He was something of a
Speaker 1: myth of his own making. But what we do know
Speaker 1: to be true is that he was a genius and
Speaker 1: a provocateur. But whether the story you're about to hear
Speaker 1: is fact or fiction, well, I'll let you decide for yourself.
Speaker 1: As the story goes in our traveling healer was about
Speaker 1: one miles from his Austrian home of English dot Germany.
Speaker 1: His studies had taken him far and wide, so this
Speaker 1: short trip seemed easy by comparison. He made his way
Speaker 1: to an end to rest for the night. His reputation
Speaker 1: preceded him, it seems, because not long after arriving, the
Speaker 1: inn's owner asked him to examine his twenty three year
Speaker 1: old daughter. She had been paralyzed since birth. The doctor
Speaker 1: prepared a cure for her of something he called as
Speaker 1: off the Red Lion. It was a fancy name he
Speaker 1: had given to his recipe, his own medical concoction of
Speaker 1: alchemical mercury. He considered this to be universal medicine. He
Speaker 1: told her to take a pinch of the remedy with
Speaker 1: some wine after each meal. She will sweat profusely, he
Speaker 1: told her, But that's just evidence that it's working. Soon after,
Speaker 1: the innkeepers got the shock of their life when their
Speaker 1: daughter walked into the room, having been bedridden her whole life.
Speaker 1: It was said that she threw herself at the doctor's
Speaker 1: feet and gratitude. This, of course, was no ordinary doctor,
Speaker 1: no peddler of ancient theories about humors and diets. This
Speaker 1: was Theophrastus Philippus Aurelius Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known to
Speaker 1: us as Paracelsus, and he was famous, and too many
Speaker 1: he was infamous. Medicine during the Renaissance period was taught
Speaker 1: through a theory based bookish recitation of the ancient writers
Speaker 1: like Galen, rather than establishing theories through practice. Galenic doctors
Speaker 1: would diagnose and prescribe treatments to patients, sometimes without ever
Speaker 1: having seen them. This time, during which Theophrastus was born,
Speaker 1: was one of great general upheaval. The Renaissance birth new
Speaker 1: ideas and changed all areas of life, from economics, arts,
Speaker 1: and religion to medicine. His mother had died early in
Speaker 1: his life, so he was cared for by his father,
Speaker 1: who was a physician and a teacher. As a young man,
Speaker 1: Theophrastus worked briefly in Austrian silver mines, where he received
Speaker 1: a basic understanding about medals and their properties. According to
Speaker 1: some scholars, Theophrastis wrote under the name Paracelsus for the
Speaker 1: first time while in medical school around fifteen fifteen. Taking
Speaker 1: on a Greek or Latin pseudonym was customary for the
Speaker 1: scholarly class at the time as a way to show
Speaker 1: affinity with ancient minds. But what we know is that
Speaker 1: whatever affinity he once had for his predecessors quickly grew
Speaker 1: into disdain. In fact, Paracelsus spent the rest of his
Speaker 1: life working in response to them and what he saw
Speaker 1: as their deadly, misguided and classist shortcomings. The problem with
Speaker 1: his education, Paracelsus pointed out, was that nothing should ever
Speaker 1: be so firmly established that it could not be questioned.
Speaker 1: But indeed he found the backbone of his education to
Speaker 1: be rigid on critical and silencing. Doctoring as it was
Speaker 1: taught in universities to the elite classes, was stuck in
Speaker 1: the far past. He considered Galen's humorl medicine to be
Speaker 1: nothing but charlatanism, and the folks who practiced it more
Speaker 1: eager to take money from the sick and the naive
Speaker 1: than to actually help them. He worried that anyone with
Speaker 1: the doctor's title could basically get away with murder. Times
Speaker 1: had changed, civilizations had come and gone, so had diseases
Speaker 1: and epidemics too. Wouldn't it make sense that thinking about
Speaker 1: how to heal the body had evolved as well, and
Speaker 1: he could see how stuck in their thinking they were.
Speaker 1: But he wasn't content to just read old and obsolete
Speaker 1: writers of ancient Greece and then try to apply tired
Speaker 1: ideas to modern times. So he took to the road,
Speaker 1: covering thousands of miles, searching for better methods of healing.
Speaker 1: He was a true student of the world, absorbing lessons
Speaker 1: and insights as he made his way. If a cure
Speaker 1: was known to local surgeons and folk healers, as well
Speaker 1: as monks, midwives and magicians, he sought it out. What
Speaker 1: mattered to him was finding a deep understanding of nature
Speaker 1: and how it worked, based on experience and practice, not
Speaker 1: just ideas. Through that line of questioning. He believed that
Speaker 1: he would be able to understand the body. Heaven is
Speaker 1: man and man is heaven, he proclaimed, asserting that our
Speaker 1: bodies and the cosmos are more or less the same.
Speaker 1: Everything is made of sulfur, salt, and mercury, which he
Speaker 1: called the triaprima. He believed that alchemy was everywhere. He
Speaker 1: believed that each body was a natural alchemist and was
Speaker 1: the job of the body's processes. One internal alchemist to
Speaker 1: separate what was healthy from what was harmful. And then,
Speaker 1: of course there's the external alchemist, which is to say,
Speaker 1: the alchemist himself, who applied their knowledge and skills to
Speaker 1: help the inner alchemist with that process. To Paracelsis, each
Speaker 1: disease had a specific cause and required a specific remedy.
Speaker 1: He believed natural cures were incomplete without an alchemist's intervention.
Speaker 1: He thought that the healing properties of plants, herbs, and
Speaker 1: minerals had to be unlocked in a sense, and the
Speaker 1: keys to this unlocking required great knowledge, care, and most
Speaker 1: of all, hands on experience. Depending on the dose, He
Speaker 1: believed anything could be poison through processes the alchemists used,
Speaker 1: like fermentation, digestion, distillation, and cooking. They separated harmful or
Speaker 1: useless parts of natural substances. Doing so enabled and allowed
Speaker 1: them to isolate the healing properties that could then be
Speaker 1: used to treat specific illnesses. Suffice to say, he wasn't
Speaker 1: a popular guy with the establishment, and his pompous personality
Speaker 1: and snark that he leveled at the Galinist physicians probably
Speaker 1: didn't help. The powers that be lampooned him. They mocked him,
Speaker 1: They found him blasphemous. They saw him as a radical
Speaker 1: and an outsider. They retaliated against him after he was
Speaker 1: posted as the city's physician in Basil, Switzerland, in fifty seven.
Speaker 1: It didn't help that during a citywide Midsummer bonfire in
Speaker 1: that same year, he decided he would cast out his
Speaker 1: own demons, So into the fire went The Encyclopedic Canon
Speaker 1: of Medicine, a medical text book based on the teachings
Speaker 1: of Galen. Paracelsus, left the next year. In the years
Speaker 1: that followed, he continued to travel around Europe, studying diseases,
Speaker 1: practicing medicine, and writing several books. But no matter where
Speaker 1: he went, he still courted great controversy from traditional physicians.
Speaker 1: In his later years, while remaining optimistic about his skills
Speaker 1: as a physician. He did gain some humility, it seems,
Speaker 1: acknowledging that he could not cure everything, and that some
Speaker 1: diseases were indeed impossible to cure. Paracelsus died in Salzburg
Speaker 1: in September of fifteen forty one. How well, we can
Speaker 1: never be certain, but there are some ideas. It was
Speaker 1: found that he had ten times the amount of mercury
Speaker 1: and his bones, something that can happen due to long
Speaker 1: exposure to the substance and occupational hazard for any alchemist,
Speaker 1: especially a medicinal one. Was Paracelsus poisoned while creating medicine
Speaker 1: or was he trying and failing to heal himself from
Speaker 1: ailments acquired by his craft. His bones share this detail,
Speaker 1: but as far as the how and the why, they
Speaker 1: are silent, and Paracelsus left us no other clues. In time,
Speaker 1: many Paracelsian ideas would, like those of Galen, be later rejected. However,
Speaker 1: he and his followers were still an important link in
Speaker 1: the chain that got us from Galen to modern pharmacology.
Speaker 1: It's undeniable that without the ideas and pursuits of alchemy
Speaker 1: and their applications to healing, we would not have the
Speaker 1: kind of chemical based pharmaceutical medicine that we have today.
Speaker 1: Paracelsus helped to transform the craft of pharmacy from a
Speaker 1: botanic science into a chemical science. It can be said
Speaker 1: that his methods and his personality redirected the course of medicine.
Speaker 1: He wasn't the first person to think this way, but
Speaker 1: he was one of the most influential. Today, one could
Speaker 1: study alchemy at the Paracelsis College in Australia and even
Speaker 1: purchase alchemical elixirs online. The roots of science are magical.
Speaker 1: They are full of fantasy and mysticism, which seems like
Speaker 1: a strange dichotomy today, but if you think about it,
Speaker 1: these ideas were cutting edge for their time. The folks
Speaker 1: at the Helm were not too different from the innovators
Speaker 1: and industry disruptors of today. The world mocked them, but
Speaker 1: they quietly embraced them. Their ideas and personalities, often bombastic, polarizing,
Speaker 1: and arrogant, brought attention to the causes they stood for,
Speaker 1: and thankfully, with time, their ideas were built upon in
Speaker 1: ways that allowed progress to march forward, for an untold
Speaker 1: number of lives to be saved, Even if we're still
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to live forever. We've certainly
Speaker 1: come a long way since the days of blaming gods
Speaker 1: for everything that ails us, although I have to admit
Speaker 1: replacing burnt offerings with experimental elixirs laced with mercury and
Speaker 1: other mysterious substances sounds just as frightening to me. And
Speaker 1: yet experimenting is how we learn. But, as one last
Speaker 1: story will show us, no progress as possible without risk.
Speaker 1: Stick around through this brief sponsor break, and my teammates
Speaker 1: Robin Miniter will tell you all about it. Right, Isaac
Speaker 1: just didn't feel right. He felt it in his bones,
Speaker 1: and those around him noticed it. Two. He had grown irritable, unbalanced.
Speaker 1: It was true that he was a temperamental guy to
Speaker 1: begin with, but it was clear that there was something
Speaker 1: else afoot. Something was troubling him deeply. Isaac lay awake
Speaker 1: at night, haunted by the restless hours as the morning
Speaker 1: came closer. He had been having trouble with his memory recently,
Speaker 1: a problem that became more pronounced as he spent more
Speaker 1: hours working in the summer of his published had become
Speaker 1: somewhat unhinged. He was publicly picking fights. People couldn't help
Speaker 1: but notice and whispers about his erratic behavior spread. Isaac
Speaker 1: was many things, a math professor, a physicist, and an astronomer,
Speaker 1: but among his scientific interests were some that were a
Speaker 1: little bit more, shall we say, esoteric. Isaac was, after all,
Speaker 1: an Avid alchemist. Papers discovered as recently as nineteen forty
Speaker 1: revealed that he had tried to make gold on many occasions.
Speaker 1: Isaac was convinced that ancient alchemists had indeed discovered the
Speaker 1: secret to making it, but their secrets had been lost.
Speaker 1: He wanted to find them. A key to this investigation
Speaker 1: was mercury. Mercurial compounds were used to treat everything from
Speaker 1: the flu to parasites well into the twentieth century. Though
Speaker 1: it's fallen out of style in day to day use,
Speaker 1: it's still all around us. The element is unavoidable. It
Speaker 1: comes from the food we eat, the water we swim in,
Speaker 1: and the air we breathe. We find it in our
Speaker 1: glass thermometers, are light bulbs, are batteries, and our household disinfectants.
Speaker 1: A person's reaction to the substance is unpredictable. For some people,
Speaker 1: it might appear to cure them. For others it could kill. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: we still see it being used in the cosmetic industry,
Speaker 1: namely in skin whitening products. The skin whitening industry is
Speaker 1: worth eight billion dollars a year and profits are continuing
Speaker 1: to climb. In two thousand, twenty two zero Mercury Working
Speaker 1: Group found unsafe amounts of mercury and over a hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty of these products. And these aren't fringe items
Speaker 1: found on the back shells of apothecaries. They are widely
Speaker 1: available on global e commerce sites like eBay and Amazon.
Speaker 1: As for our friend Isaac, he died in his sleep
Speaker 1: one cold night in March. He had lived the old
Speaker 1: age of eighty four, having become one of the greatest
Speaker 1: scientists of all time. Before he died, Isaac Newton gave
Speaker 1: us the theory of gravity and taught us how the
Speaker 1: solar system worked. He sketched out the building blocks for
Speaker 1: calculus and invented an early form of physics. In the
Speaker 1: late nineteen seventies, strands of his hair were tested. It
Speaker 1: was revealed that they contained more than fifteen times the
Speaker 1: normal amount of mercury that the body should have. While
Speaker 1: we can't say for certain that his death was caused
Speaker 1: by a slow poisoning. It can help to explain the
Speaker 1: potential causes of strange behaviors later in life. It's possible
Speaker 1: that he was using mercury for more than his alchemical
Speaker 1: experiments like Paracelsis. It was possible that he was trying
Speaker 1: to use the very thing to cure himself that ailed
Speaker 1: him and died as a result. Grim and Mild Presents
Speaker 1: Bedside Manners was executive produced by Aaron Manky and narrated
Speaker 1: by Aaron Manky and Robin Miniter. Writing for this season
Speaker 1: was provided by Robin Miniter, with research by Sam Alberty,
Speaker 1: Taylor haggerd Orn and Robin Miniter. Production assistance was provided
Speaker 1: by Josh Thane, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
Speaker 1: You can learn more about this show, the Grim and
Speaker 1: Mild team, and all the other podcasts that we make
Speaker 1: over at Grim and Mild dot com, and, as always,
Speaker 1: thanks for listening.