Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from house works
Speaker 1: dot com. Maybe, why, my good fellow, you look a
Speaker 1: bit mad? Why I have a bit mad? You know?
Speaker 1: Are you a physician? Well, of course, didn't you notice
Speaker 1: my physician's cap. You mean that beautiful tin funnel? Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: of course. Now if you would, can you point to
Speaker 1: the part of your body that feels insane right here
Speaker 1: in the skull, Doc, Right right here, then that's where
Speaker 1: the stone of madness awaits us? Can you can you
Speaker 1: remove it? Dot y? Certainly? Just have a seat and
Speaker 1: allow me to trepen your cranium just large enough to
Speaker 1: remove the stone. Better make it a big hole, Doc,
Speaker 1: I'm about as mad if they come mad, Mary to
Speaker 1: ratscure bowlepord a chest today. Sometimes I wake up in
Speaker 1: a field and I think I'm a dog. I start
Speaker 1: chasing the local clergy around it. Yes, yes, it's going
Speaker 1: to be all right now. Just let me reach inside
Speaker 1: and ah, there it is the stone of madness and folly,
Speaker 1: the source of your mental maladies. Surgically removed. That'll be
Speaker 1: five children here you go. But can I can I
Speaker 1: keep the stone? Of course you can. Hey, Welcome to
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick. I hope to enjoyed our little
Speaker 1: skip that is, our attempt to audibly capture the spirit
Speaker 1: of a particular painting, namely, uh, the cutting of the
Speaker 1: stone or the extraction of the stone of madness or
Speaker 1: the cure of folly, whatever you want to call it,
Speaker 1: by Hieronymous Bosh. Um this is a painting from around
Speaker 1: fourteen and it depicts uh, this sort of crazy but
Speaker 1: highly allegorical uh surgery taking place. Yeah, if you have
Speaker 1: never seen this painting, you should look it up. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do my thing and tell you to google an image,
Speaker 1: but you really should see it to go with this episode.
Speaker 1: It will be on the landing package of of the
Speaker 1: web version of this episode. But yeah, it's a painting
Speaker 1: by Hieronymous Bosh. It's usually dated to around fifteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we read one source that said it had to
Speaker 1: be after fifteen o two other people dated to the
Speaker 1: fourteen nineties UMU. As we mentioned in the past when
Speaker 1: we dealt with the some of Bosh's work, there's there's
Speaker 1: so little known about him that it's there's a certain
Speaker 1: amount of mystery involved in all of this, and one
Speaker 1: of the great things about it is the mystery of
Speaker 1: what motivated this painting, because because what's happening in the painting,
Speaker 1: the cutting of the stone of badness. You have a
Speaker 1: patient in the the sort of the center left of
Speaker 1: the frame, who's seated in a chair in the middle
Speaker 1: of a field, and he looks quite distressed, and he's
Speaker 1: reclining back in the chair as a man in a
Speaker 1: pink robe with a tin funnel on his head cuts
Speaker 1: into the patient's scalp. And the man, the man with
Speaker 1: the tin funnel on his head, who's doing the cutting,
Speaker 1: he looks fairly serene, wouldn't you say, Yes, he's he's
Speaker 1: he seems dedicated to the task at hand here, which
Speaker 1: you could interpret as concentration and and you know, knowing
Speaker 1: what he's doing, or you could interpret as a kind
Speaker 1: of callousness and insensitivity to this man's apparent grunting. He
Speaker 1: looks like he's in the middle of a really good grunt. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then to the right of the guy reclining in the chair,
Speaker 1: he's having his head cut open. You have what appears
Speaker 1: to be you think this is a monk. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: looks very much like a monk. Yeah, he's got a
Speaker 1: shaved top of his head and he's in some black garments.
Speaker 1: And then to the right of the monk there is
Speaker 1: a woman with her head covered by a cloth, in
Speaker 1: a dress draped over her, with a book sitting on
Speaker 1: top of her head that's clasped with a clasp. So
Speaker 1: what on earth do we make of this painting? I
Speaker 1: should also note that there is text with this painting,
Speaker 1: right if you have an appropriate zoomed out version, and
Speaker 1: it says this translation, of course, master cut away the stone.
Speaker 1: My name is Lubert Duss Lubert Dass. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: is apparently a fool in Dutch literature of the time.
Speaker 1: And then the the observer that the viewer of this
Speaker 1: particular piece would have known that. Yeah, I think at
Speaker 1: the time, calling calling a character Lubbert is kind of
Speaker 1: like us calling a character Cletus or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's like a it's like a joke and a Dutch Cletus,
Speaker 1: if you will. Yeah. So that's the the one of
Speaker 1: the key paintings that we're gonna keep referring back to.
Speaker 1: But but we've see an overall trend uh in medieval art. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: medieval and early modern art in Europe seems to be
Speaker 1: following this theme set up by Bosh, or at least
Speaker 1: first interpreted by Bosh as far as we know, this
Speaker 1: theme of cutting out the stone of madness. So in
Speaker 1: the previous painting we had the guy with the tin
Speaker 1: funnel hat cutting the guy's head. He seems to be
Speaker 1: in the process of removing this titular stone stone of madness,
Speaker 1: whatever that is. But there are other paintings. There's of course,
Speaker 1: a cutting of the stone of madness by Brugal. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: Peter Brugal the Elder lived a fifteen fifteen to fifteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, responsible for a number of fabulous pieces that
Speaker 1: I'm sure everyone's familiar with it and they've even had
Speaker 1: on your dorm room wall in college. I know I did, uh,
Speaker 1: And this one shows this one has a number of
Speaker 1: individuals and several different neurosurgical procedures going on in very
Speaker 1: crude and horrific fashion. Now we can point out that
Speaker 1: this painting. You should also look this one up so
Speaker 1: you can see it for yourself. But it's much more
Speaker 1: chaotic than the last one. The last one is a
Speaker 1: sort of a concentrated scene of a single cutting taking place.
Speaker 1: Is it's a madhouse there. There are people all over
Speaker 1: having their heads examined and cut, and the multiple people
Speaker 1: doing the cutting. There's just general chaos. People are squatting
Speaker 1: and squirming in the background and trying to peek in
Speaker 1: and see what's going on. It's it looks like a
Speaker 1: bad scene. Yeah, and and definitely remember the madhouse of it,
Speaker 1: because we'll come back to that. The third painting we
Speaker 1: want a reference here is is won by Quentin Massy's
Speaker 1: Uh he lived fourteen six to twenty nine, and this
Speaker 1: one is called an Allegory of Folly. And this one
Speaker 1: is probably it's probably my favorite of the three, just
Speaker 1: because it's so monstrous and weird. Yeah. Now it doesn't
Speaker 1: depict a surgery, but it does depict it follows the
Speaker 1: same theme of the Stone of Madness. There seems to
Speaker 1: be so you see a guy here, he looks like
Speaker 1: he is perhaps mentally unsound in some way, and he
Speaker 1: is clutching a staff. That what is going on at
Speaker 1: the top of this staff, Robert, Well, they're there are
Speaker 1: evidently a number of different symbols going on in this piece.
Speaker 1: There's so much uh, there's so much symbology uh at
Speaker 1: play and in these these paintings, and we we don't
Speaker 1: have time to to to tease it all apart. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he has a staff that has like a small individual
Speaker 1: that is with their with exposed buttocks emerging from the staff.
Speaker 1: He has a rooster on his head. Uh, and he's
Speaker 1: see he doesn't seem in pain by his madness. He
Speaker 1: seems a little uh mischievous, the mused. Uh. No, he
Speaker 1: seems to be contemplating the act of marrying two rats
Speaker 1: to a bowl of four yes. And on his forehead
Speaker 1: there is a lump that you can see. It's a
Speaker 1: visible lump bulging from his forehead that appears to be
Speaker 1: this stone. It's the stone of madness. Yeah, it looks
Speaker 1: very much in a way. It also looks kind of
Speaker 1: like a third eye, which is I think something that's
Speaker 1: kind of neat about this piece that if you look
Speaker 1: at it with other artistic traditions uh loaded into your head,
Speaker 1: it kind of makes you wonder about, you know, the
Speaker 1: whole difference betwe lean enlightenment and madness, which which will
Speaker 1: be a thing we come back to. But yeah, it
Speaker 1: looks like the stone of madness is not only in
Speaker 1: this individual's head, but it's poking through. Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: these are just a few examples, but this seems to
Speaker 1: be a general theme emerging in in medieval and early
Speaker 1: modern European art of of the stone of madness being
Speaker 1: a stone in the head associated with madness as they
Speaker 1: would understand it, and the the act of cutting for
Speaker 1: the stone to get it out. But does this refer
Speaker 1: to a real physical thing in any way, and does
Speaker 1: the act of cutting for it represent a surgical procedure
Speaker 1: that really took place. Yeah, It's an interesting, uh mystery
Speaker 1: to consider because ultimately have like three possibilities here. One
Speaker 1: is that yes, there's something going on here to some
Speaker 1: physical malady in the head that is being removed. Okay.
Speaker 1: Another possibility is that this is all a charlatan's game, right,
Speaker 1: It that that a quack is coming along and saying, oh,
Speaker 1: you have a problem, Well, I can take care of that.
Speaker 1: I can remove the source of it. It's like cranial
Speaker 1: psychic surgery, you know. The psychic surgeon would kind of
Speaker 1: scoop on your stomach for a minute and then sneak
Speaker 1: some chicken guts into his hand and pretend to be
Speaker 1: pulling things out of your body. Exactly. In this case,
Speaker 1: you'd have somebody cutting at your head and then by
Speaker 1: sleight of hands, sneaking a stone into the hand and saying, well,
Speaker 1: look what I pulled out of your brain. You know,
Speaker 1: here's the problem. Yeah, it would be Yeah, in this case,
Speaker 1: it would be precisely psychic surgery. Imagine a lot of
Speaker 1: people have seen this depicted in the movie Man in
Speaker 1: the Moon of the movie about Andy Kaufman, where he
Speaker 1: goes and this is performed for him and yeah, and
Speaker 1: they would often sometimes it would be chicken ups, but
Speaker 1: other times it would be inorganic objects. And so you're
Speaker 1: throw in a little you're throw in a little magic,
Speaker 1: little superstition, and you can easily imagine this scenario in
Speaker 1: which this essentially a medieval witch doctor of Swords of
Speaker 1: Charlottan comes in, Ah, here's the stone. I've removed it,
Speaker 1: and now you're well. Yeah. Another option would be that
Speaker 1: there wasn't actually a stone in the head, so there
Speaker 1: wasn't a real problem that was being addressed here, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't quackery, but it was just somebody who was
Speaker 1: well meaning thought that there was some kind of thing
Speaker 1: that could be done to the head or something removed
Speaker 1: from the head to actually cure people, and it just
Speaker 1: didn't work. You know, they were wrong, but they were
Speaker 1: well meaning. So that's what we're gonna explore in today's episode.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be talking a little bit about the medieval surgery.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be talking about trep nation. Uh. We're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about, oh, the removal of actual stones from
Speaker 1: the body, uh, particularly in the Middle Ages. And we'll
Speaker 1: get back around to what what experts think this painting
Speaker 1: uh and and this really, this this artistic tradition is
Speaker 1: really saying. Well, I think first we should take a
Speaker 1: look at the general atmosphere of surgery in the Middle
Speaker 1: Ages and then bridging into the early Modern period. Here.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I think about about when
Speaker 1: we think back on medieval medicine is that it easy
Speaker 1: for us to look back and make fun of people
Speaker 1: in the Middle Ages for believing and ridiculous cures. You know, like, oh,
Speaker 1: you've got migraines, you need to look at an ugly
Speaker 1: baby for thirteen minutes and then sprinkle some ground up
Speaker 1: bore tusk in your eye. I mean, we all know
Speaker 1: that's not gonna work. It seems ridiculous to us, like,
Speaker 1: how did people fall for that? They must have been
Speaker 1: so stupid. But I'm not sure that's the case, because
Speaker 1: considering the known alternatives at the time, this superstitious kind
Speaker 1: of try anything approach starts to make more sense. In
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, if you were smart, the known alternatives,
Speaker 1: especially surgery, were often a last resort, and especially surgery, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to open up the body, particularly the body, Kennedy was
Speaker 1: what was a very dangerous proposition. Yeah, so you may
Speaker 1: have heard about this term barber surgeon, right, you've probably
Speaker 1: heard the story that you know, why why did barber
Speaker 1: poles have this spinning it and white kind of twirl
Speaker 1: on them? Is it because they love candy canes and Christmas?
Speaker 1: Or is it is it just an accident? Well, no,
Speaker 1: you know that the fact you probably heard about that
Speaker 1: is that that came from you know, blood letting, essentially
Speaker 1: saying this is a place where you can get your
Speaker 1: blood let So what While the scientific ignorance of people
Speaker 1: in in medieval Europe is sometimes I think a little
Speaker 1: bit overstated, like sometimes we underestimate just how smart people
Speaker 1: in the past were about things, Medieval surgery was still
Speaker 1: probably about as scary as you're imagining. One of the
Speaker 1: things about the time is that academic physicians, the people
Speaker 1: who really studied the body, the closest equivalent to what
Speaker 1: we would think of as doctors today. These would be
Speaker 1: the learned individuals who had some degree of access to
Speaker 1: medical texts. Yeah, they studied in universities, they knew what
Speaker 1: was up. They may have done dissections and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: but much of the actual cutting in surgery was not
Speaker 1: done by these people. So you had your experts who
Speaker 1: were of the physicians, and then separately you had these
Speaker 1: barber surgeons or these traveling surgeons who were more just
Speaker 1: kind of like uh, skilled people who you know, they
Speaker 1: have a skill they can apply So I can cut hair,
Speaker 1: I can cut stones out, I can hear cataracts. In
Speaker 1: many cases, the authors who wrote surgical treatises of the
Speaker 1: time admitted that they had never performed the operations they
Speaker 1: were describing. And in a way it kind of makes
Speaker 1: sense because you know, old barber cuts your hair or
Speaker 1: shaves your head if you're a monk and they shave
Speaker 1: your beard, so they've got the razor. Why not apply
Speaker 1: the razor to other things that need cutting, Like maybe
Speaker 1: if they need to extract some bone fragments from a
Speaker 1: club strike, crush wound, or if they need to do
Speaker 1: some blood letting, which truly was very common at the time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And plus I would imagine their status is always is
Speaker 1: already one in which they have close contact to the
Speaker 1: bodies of others. Uh, whereas I could I could imagine
Speaker 1: at being less the case for you know, learned individual. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there's even a line in the Hippocratic oath, you know,
Speaker 1: the Hippocratic oaths from Hippocrates, the Greek physician. Um, he
Speaker 1: has a part of the Hippocratic Oath that says, and
Speaker 1: this is for doctors, I will not use the knife,
Speaker 1: not even on sufferers from the stone, but will withdraw
Speaker 1: in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.
Speaker 1: So this is you know, doctor saying I'm not going
Speaker 1: to do any surgery. Uh. Kind of strange attitude for
Speaker 1: us to consider, but that was the thought of the time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine the medieval barber surgeon TV show.
Speaker 1: You know, you would have the medical dramas playing out,
Speaker 1: but the the individual who has all the theories and
Speaker 1: all the the learning. Uh, they're not actually going to
Speaker 1: do any of the cutting that goes to the secondary character.
Speaker 1: Now this does still sort of apply today because of
Speaker 1: course we still have medical specializations. You have somebody who
Speaker 1: is you know, they they focus on maybe family medicine
Speaker 1: versus somebody who's a neurosurgeon. Obviously they wouldn't try to
Speaker 1: do each other's job, you know that they have medical specialization.
Speaker 1: So that still carries through to today to some extent,
Speaker 1: but we're not in this case letting barbers do the neurosurgery. Now,
Speaker 1: why was surgery so dangerous in the Middle Ages and
Speaker 1: so just so generally awful. Well, one of the things
Speaker 1: that medieval surgeons did not have is sterile equipment or
Speaker 1: even knowledge of the need for antiseptic surgical methods uh like.
Speaker 1: For example, there was a common belief at the time
Speaker 1: that pus was just an important part of the healing process,
Speaker 1: and that there were a few medieval surgeons who who
Speaker 1: tried things like washing wounds with wine. But it really
Speaker 1: wasn't until following Joseph Lister in the eighteen sixties that
Speaker 1: antiseptic surgery started to catch on everywhere and become the
Speaker 1: new norm. So you might have had a few people
Speaker 1: who got the right idea early on, but it was
Speaker 1: not widespread practice to practice antiseptic surgery. So then this
Speaker 1: is one of the reasons. There's the primary reason why
Speaker 1: any opening of the body, any surgical opening, is almost
Speaker 1: invariably going to become infected because of the lack of sterility. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: putting dirty things deep inside your body, it's not good
Speaker 1: for you, like a like a grubby hand reaching in
Speaker 1: to pull a stone if you're lower active. Who may
Speaker 1: have just been handling chicken guts while you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: who knows, or collecting dead rats for the town's local
Speaker 1: bounty anyway, So there's that they also did not have
Speaker 1: effective anesthesia and pain control. And this, I mean, you
Speaker 1: can imagine in your head exactly what the problem is,
Speaker 1: but maybe you're not imagining the extent to which this
Speaker 1: is a problem. It's not just that it hurts for
Speaker 1: the patient. It's difficult to perform internal surgery, even on
Speaker 1: a very willing participant if they're awake. Yeah, if any
Speaker 1: of you have ever, um, it's even difficult I think
Speaker 1: for a lot of us to understand because there's a
Speaker 1: level of pain we're talking about here that a lot
Speaker 1: of people have not experienced. And even if you undergo
Speaker 1: surgical procedures thanks to anesthesia, you don't have to experience them.
Speaker 1: But I remember the one time I tried to perform
Speaker 1: a self surgery of a sort. Um. I had a
Speaker 1: tonenail issue which I which I tried to um, uh
Speaker 1: like an ingrown issue stemming from a injury. Uh. I
Speaker 1: tried to correct it myself. Uh, and it was just
Speaker 1: like a butter knife and some hemp rope no, you
Speaker 1: know I had. And it wasn't, you know, quite surgery
Speaker 1: by any means. But um, I tried to to take
Speaker 1: care of the situation using tweezers, you know, and clippers,
Speaker 1: and the pain was just like blinding like that where
Speaker 1: there were flashes of my eyes. And then I was, okay,
Speaker 1: I need to actually go to professional about this. But
Speaker 1: but imagine that extrapolated to not even self surgery, but
Speaker 1: yet surgery on on on any individual where high levels
Speaker 1: of pain are just going to be the norm. You're
Speaker 1: gonna have to strap the individual down or have to
Speaker 1: ruffians bring them to a wall or to a bed.
Speaker 1: You've got to hire some thugs to help you with
Speaker 1: your surgery. Yeah, And so there there were some potions
Speaker 1: and stuff at the time. I mean, obviously people were
Speaker 1: aware of some types of drugs, but the point was
Speaker 1: that they didn't have controllable anesthesia, so they could maybe
Speaker 1: give you some hemlock or you know, these these crazy
Speaker 1: potions that were just as likely to kill you as
Speaker 1: they were to put you under. So so they might
Speaker 1: have had that in some scenarios, or they might have
Speaker 1: just tried to do it with you awake because they knew,
Speaker 1: you know, it looks like people die a lot of
Speaker 1: times when we and that's the ties them. So this
Speaker 1: was a problem. Medieval surgery just generally bad. Common procedures
Speaker 1: that were aracticed by medieval surgeons. Blood letting that that's
Speaker 1: a big one. At the time, they believed in the
Speaker 1: you know, humorism, like the idea that there were these
Speaker 1: four humors in the body that could get out of
Speaker 1: balance and you could fix some things by letting extra
Speaker 1: blood out. A big thing at the time was the
Speaker 1: treatment of battlefield wounds, such as the removal of arrows,
Speaker 1: and so at the time, surgery was much much more
Speaker 1: often external. From what we know at least, there's actually
Speaker 1: sort of a dearth of information about what surgeons in
Speaker 1: in medieval Europe we're doing. We don't have quite as
Speaker 1: much information on this as we would like to have,
Speaker 1: but from the records we do have, it seems surgery
Speaker 1: was very often externals, such as the treatment of a
Speaker 1: surface wound or other problems near the outside of the body,
Speaker 1: and for all the reasons we've already stated, internal surgery,
Speaker 1: going deep inside the body for anything was dangerous and rare,
Speaker 1: though it did happen for some extremely problematic things such
Speaker 1: as bladder stones. And we will definitely get back to stones,
Speaker 1: the bodies, the bodies lithos in uh in a bit here,
Speaker 1: but I think we should first turn our attention back
Speaker 1: thinking back on on the Bosch painting and the ones
Speaker 1: that followed it to the head. That's right, yeah, because
Speaker 1: essentially what's going on here appears to be going on
Speaker 1: here is that they are uh, they're performing what we
Speaker 1: now call craniotomy, but what has been historically known as
Speaker 1: trep nation or trepanning, in which and this is just
Speaker 1: basically the opening of the skull and creating of a
Speaker 1: of a hole in the skull. Now we find evidence
Speaker 1: of trepinnation going back to well well before the Middle
Speaker 1: Ages in Europe. I mean it goes back to prehistoric times,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, thousands of years. You see accounts of it
Speaker 1: among the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Romans,
Speaker 1: the Greeks, early meso American civilizations. Uh there there, that's there.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of a lot of interesting work
Speaker 1: has come out of South America and I believe also
Speaker 1: in and Papua New Guinea as well. But we've even
Speaker 1: found neolithic remains, human remains that had skulls that it
Speaker 1: had clearly had the operation performed on them and survived. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a hole in the skull and it has been
Speaker 1: smoothed over where the person didn't die from this surgery,
Speaker 1: at least not at least not for a long time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so it's it's often been an archaeological uh mystery
Speaker 1: that individuals have have looked into. You know what, what's
Speaker 1: going on with this skull? Is this the wounded? Did
Speaker 1: this was this didal just you know, clugged with something
Speaker 1: or was there some sort of a surgical procedure And
Speaker 1: if there was a surgical surgical procedure, why did they
Speaker 1: carry it out? Was it both? Was it just purely magical?
Speaker 1: Were they trying to let a demon or spirit out
Speaker 1: of the head, or were they trying to deal with
Speaker 1: a cranial and brain injuries. Because today clinical trepidation remains
Speaker 1: a treatment for epidural and subdural hematomas. But and plus
Speaker 1: it gives us a base surgical entry point to the
Speaker 1: brain itself. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you've heard about
Speaker 1: trepidation before, you think about, Okay, that's just a crazy
Speaker 1: you know, why would somebody drill a hole in the skull.
Speaker 1: It's just because they thought there were demons, you know,
Speaker 1: But there are real medical reasons, as you're saying. And
Speaker 1: I guess we don't know what the ancients knew, you know,
Speaker 1: it's hard to say whether in some cases they may
Speaker 1: have been doing it just for superstitious reasons or they
Speaker 1: had some kind of medical prompting that was legitimate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you get into, uh, you know, an argument back
Speaker 1: and forth over that too, because to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: um archaeologists in the past have looked at some of
Speaker 1: these examples and they've they've said, well, there's no way
Speaker 1: that these individuals were carrying this out for legitimate medical purposes.
Speaker 1: These are savages, these are ancient people. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of events to suggest that they were actually dealing
Speaker 1: with They were actually performing medical procedures to deal with
Speaker 1: with head wounds, to deal with swelling of the brain
Speaker 1: um due to you know, blunt force trauma to the skull,
Speaker 1: trying to relieve that pressure by creating uh, this hole
Speaker 1: in the skull itself. Yeah, but of course trepination doesn't
Speaker 1: have necessarily a very good record in terms of the
Speaker 1: survivability of the procedure. Oh no, Yeah. Even by the
Speaker 1: late nineteenth century, only ten percent of patients survived a
Speaker 1: Western trepination due to infection. And I want to stress
Speaker 1: Western because when you do look to some of the
Speaker 1: so called primitive cultures out there, uh, it seems that
Speaker 1: they actually may have had a lower mortality rate with
Speaker 1: their trestinations. Um. But eventually we're able to bring that up, obviously,
Speaker 1: because neurosurgery is not the uh, you know, a nine
Speaker 1: mortality rate andever that it used to be. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're just generally better at at fighting off infection post surgery. Now.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of reasons now that surgery in
Speaker 1: general is safer. Yeah, And a lot of people point
Speaker 1: to American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing uh lived eighteen sixty nine
Speaker 1: through nineteen thirty nine as as one of the key
Speaker 1: individuals who was able to bring that neurosurgery mortality right
Speaker 1: down to less than ten percent um and and ultimately
Speaker 1: ushering in the modern age of neurosurgery in which some
Speaker 1: people do neurosurgery just for fun. Yeah, well for fun
Speaker 1: or for enlightenment, m consciousness extension. Yeah. I don't want to.
Speaker 1: I don't want to go too far off the beaten
Speaker 1: path here. But we did see the rise of often
Speaker 1: self trepanned psychonauts in the nineteen sixties and seventies. You
Speaker 1: had this individual who was Dutch, interestingly enough, tying into
Speaker 1: the origins of our paintings here bosh. Yeah. Former medical
Speaker 1: student Bart Hughes lived n through two thousand and four. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he stands as voluntary trepidations pioneering visionary and so so.
Speaker 1: So he added the idea that trepidation is good for
Speaker 1: your mind, right, yeah, he um so. And this was
Speaker 1: apparently he had been a mescal and induced revelation that
Speaker 1: his whole thing is that when we became bipeds, when
Speaker 1: we rose up on two legs, it altered the way
Speaker 1: um uh. The fluids move through our brain. It altered
Speaker 1: blood flow. It also altered the movement of cerebral spinal fluid,
Speaker 1: and and and so he thought that this would be
Speaker 1: He was trying to figure out, how can I, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, get healthy flow of blood to the brain. Uh.
Speaker 1: So he considered, um, he considered making a hole uh
Speaker 1: in his the base of his spinal column to drain
Speaker 1: out some of the fluid. But he eventually decided, Okay,
Speaker 1: what I'll do is I'll just I'll trepan myself. I'll
Speaker 1: make this hole in my skull. And it's important to
Speaker 1: note here we're talking about just a hole in the skull.
Speaker 1: He's not drilling all the way into brain. It's but
Speaker 1: that the premise here is that if you were to
Speaker 1: just remove a little bit of skull there, it would
Speaker 1: allow the pressure inside the brain to be relieved and
Speaker 1: therefore allow increased blood flow through the brain, allow a
Speaker 1: better removal of toxins. That there's there's actually some interesting
Speaker 1: research going on and going into this even today. Uh
Speaker 1: and they make some kind of compelling arguments for it.
Speaker 1: But then the experts also argue that brain function is
Speaker 1: not limited by normal blood flow, and then increased brain
Speaker 1: metabolism might actually stress the system. So it's not it's
Speaker 1: not a cut and dry situation, but you have individual
Speaker 1: cut and wet situation. Yeah, but you have individuals out
Speaker 1: there who are very strong proponents all of trefinnation as
Speaker 1: a means of achieving up a higher state of consciousness. Okay,
Speaker 1: And so this informs our interpretation of the painting. How like,
Speaker 1: are we thinking that maybe what we're seeing in this
Speaker 1: painting is we're misunderstanding it and it's a form of
Speaker 1: trefination or it's really just sort of related to the
Speaker 1: general concept. Essentially, it means that if there's any kind
Speaker 1: of stone removal going on, if removing a stone from
Speaker 1: the brain, either in fact or merely allegorically, then they're
Speaker 1: there and they're dealing with repination. And certainly tremination predated
Speaker 1: these paintings. It was practiced to some degree at the time.
Speaker 1: And uh and and it would have been known to
Speaker 1: the artists. There were woodcuts, there were you know, instruction manuals,
Speaker 1: and as many of the medical text showing how this
Speaker 1: was this procedure was carried out. So, as you probably
Speaker 1: well know, kidney stones and bladder stones are very much
Speaker 1: a reality yes they are, and as Joe will shortly
Speaker 1: relate to us, their surgical removal is is also very
Speaker 1: much reality and one that dates back to antiquity. But
Speaker 1: is there actually such a thing as a cranial stone?
Speaker 1: I mean, we know there there are mineral formations that
Speaker 1: can happen in the body. Can that happen in your brain? Well?
Speaker 1: Can it happen? Is is a question we'll get to.
Speaker 1: Was it happening at the time? Did individuals think that
Speaker 1: this was happening? Uh? In the Middle Ages and in
Speaker 1: the centuries to follow well, As related by Mathis Kerschel,
Speaker 1: Frederick Mall and Philip van Karen Brook in the paper
Speaker 1: A Stone Never Cut for a New Interpretation of the
Speaker 1: Cure of Folly by Hieronymous Bosh published in the Journal
Speaker 1: International Urology. UH, there's no evidence to suggest this was
Speaker 1: ever carried out in real life. There are no historical
Speaker 1: sources from the period that mentioned genuine or fraudulent stone operations.
Speaker 1: And I also want to add that apparently there were
Speaker 1: existing accounts of quackery that was going on in the
Speaker 1: Netherlands here in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. They don't
Speaker 1: mention any kind of fake stone removals or or fake
Speaker 1: trepid nations going on. But it was presented theatrically in
Speaker 1: performances for the masses, because clearly the painting makes us
Speaker 1: think the painting has a lot to say, and you
Speaker 1: can imagine that extrapolated to street performances for the common individuals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the idea was that there there were plays that had
Speaker 1: scenes of the the extraction of the stone of madness, right,
Speaker 1: cutting for the stone in the head, not unlike our
Speaker 1: little drama at the beginning of this episode. It makes
Speaker 1: you wonder because what other types of fiction that we
Speaker 1: have today depict things going on that are plausible in
Speaker 1: the same way that cutting for the stone is a
Speaker 1: plausible thing that could have happened. You can imagine quacks
Speaker 1: cutting into people's heads pretending to remove a stone. Uh,
Speaker 1: without researching it any I would be tempted to say, um,
Speaker 1: nefarious kidney removal while on vacation place. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly if if historians of the future look back at
Speaker 1: our fiction as a as a judge to see what's
Speaker 1: happening in our culture today, and they're not, they can
Speaker 1: tell the difference between fantasy and realistic fiction. You know,
Speaker 1: they don't think that Star Wars is happening in our
Speaker 1: culture today. But you know, they look at some kind
Speaker 1: of realistic drama where somebody has a kidney stolen in
Speaker 1: Las Vegas, they wake up in a bathtub full of ice. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean they could conclude, oh, this must have been
Speaker 1: something that happened a lot in the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: because clearly it's depicted in their art and these are
Speaker 1: not these films are not just complete works with fantasy.
Speaker 1: So therefore maybe it happened. Yeah, and that brings us
Speaker 1: back to actual stone removal, the sort of stone removals
Speaker 1: we know. Um, we're carried out or attempted, uh in
Speaker 1: many cases at the time. Yeah. So I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: how in the Middle Ages coming into the early modern period,
Speaker 1: surgery really was a last resort, especially any significantly invasive surgery,
Speaker 1: deep internal surgery, that was really really a last resort
Speaker 1: at the time. Surgeons just didn't have safe, reliable ways
Speaker 1: of putting a patient to sleep. So, as we said earlier,
Speaker 1: you have to imagine internal surgery with knives going deep
Speaker 1: inside you while you're awake, or taking a drug that
Speaker 1: might kill you. And that's that's an interesting that the
Speaker 1: real Sophie's choice there. Yeah, so you remember that line
Speaker 1: from the Hippocratic Oath, I said where I will not cut,
Speaker 1: not even for the stone. That's sort of an indicator
Speaker 1: that of all the things people would come to an
Speaker 1: ancient or medieval doctor begging to be cut open for
Speaker 1: at the time when this was painful and dangerous, stones
Speaker 1: in the urinary tract have got to be some of
Speaker 1: the worst things to merrit a mention like this, you know, Like,
Speaker 1: so the doctor is saying, you know, of all the
Speaker 1: things that I may be tempted to do for a
Speaker 1: person that I shouldn't do, cutting for a stone has
Speaker 1: got to be near the top to merrit a mention
Speaker 1: like this. Yeah. I mean, I I've never suffered the
Speaker 1: experience of having a stone in my body, but I
Speaker 1: know we have listeners who surely have, and I would
Speaker 1: love to hear from you and your account and how
Speaker 1: that ties into your appreciation of our episode today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to read a little selection from a paper
Speaker 1: called the History of Urinary Stones in Parallel with Civilization
Speaker 1: by a met Te Feckley and Fatine says I yearly.
Speaker 1: So this is what they write during the medieval period
Speaker 1: in Europe ten to fourteen thirty eight. There was little
Speaker 1: activity in the management of stone disease in this era.
Speaker 1: Lithotomists and that's you know, a person who would remove stones,
Speaker 1: the lithos and stone for a living. Lithotomus who were
Speaker 1: essentially commercial travelers, moving from town to town looking for
Speaker 1: business and cutting all who came their way, often uneducated
Speaker 1: and occasionally dishonest, some were great showmen. The procedure was
Speaker 1: generally performed in the public without anesthesia and generally lasted
Speaker 1: a few minutes. However, lithotomus were held responsible for their
Speaker 1: bad results and find accordingly. So as we've said this surgery, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that sounds cute, right, the surgery is dangerous. Uh. Didn't
Speaker 1: you have some stats on the mortality rates? Yes, and
Speaker 1: these are from that a stone never cut paper. Their
Speaker 1: referenced earlier and all clue to link to that at
Speaker 1: landing paper. This episode about around the fifteenth century, you
Speaker 1: saw about fifty percent, but our sources on that are
Speaker 1: a little I have to image approximate. Yeah, from the
Speaker 1: seventeenth century up to the mid eighteenth century, you see
Speaker 1: variable um statue. You see it as low as two
Speaker 1: point five but also as high as sixty seven point eight.
Speaker 1: It sounds like it matters who's doing your your stone cutting, yes,
Speaker 1: as well as who is undergoing the surgery. Apparently the
Speaker 1: best outcomes occurred when you had a boy suffering a
Speaker 1: small stone. The older the individual, the larger the stone. Uh.
Speaker 1: And also if the individual is female, these would all
Speaker 1: really um tip the scales in the in favor of death. Okay,
Speaker 1: So do we have an actual account of what like?
Speaker 1: Did anybody make records of what this was like on
Speaker 1: the ground? Yes, they did, because this these tended to
Speaker 1: be very memorable, uh for surgeries. Uh. And the one
Speaker 1: that we have here today, this one actually ties in
Speaker 1: do a painting is not a lot an engineering a second,
Speaker 1: but it concerns Jen did Dute, a Dutch blacksmith, and
Speaker 1: uh a do it yourself lithotomist did Dute yonda Dutey
Speaker 1: And so that's that's just the best name for a
Speaker 1: do it yourself a little and there and there's a
Speaker 1: painting of the painting of this individual called a Portrait
Speaker 1: of Jan d Dute by Carol uh the Establiene, and
Speaker 1: this was painted in sixteen fifty five. I'll try to
Speaker 1: include a link to this painting so you can see it. Oh,
Speaker 1: he looks real satisfied with himself. Yeah. Explain described his
Speaker 1: painting for the listeners. Well, he's posed as if for
Speaker 1: a camera, and he's in his left hand holding up
Speaker 1: what looks like an egg, but I guess it's supposed
Speaker 1: to be a huge stone. And in his other hand
Speaker 1: he's just just kind of near the bottom of the painting,
Speaker 1: posed on the table. He's got what looks like a razor.
Speaker 1: So and and he's he he's not exactly smiling, but
Speaker 1: he's got pride in his eyes. Yeah. And Uh, as
Speaker 1: the painting might suggest, he apparently survived at least for
Speaker 1: five years. But we know of of his case from
Speaker 1: an account written by Nicholas Tulp's seventy two text um
Speaker 1: Observationes Medicae and uh, and this is this is just
Speaker 1: a sample translated obviously from that book. Only letting his
Speaker 1: brother help him, He instructed him to pull aside his
Speaker 1: scrotum while he grabbed the stone in his left hand
Speaker 1: and cut bravely in the perennium with a knife he
Speaker 1: had secretly prepared. I don't know why it was secretly prepared. Uh,
Speaker 1: and by standing again and again, I managed to make
Speaker 1: the wound long enough to allow the stone to pass.
Speaker 1: To get the stone out was more difficult, and he
Speaker 1: had to stick two fingers into the wound on either
Speaker 1: side to remove it with leveraged force, and it finally
Speaker 1: popped out of hiding with an explosive noise and tearing
Speaker 1: of a bladder. Now the more courageous than careful operation
Speaker 1: was completed, and the enemy that had declared war on
Speaker 1: him was safely on the ground. He sent for a
Speaker 1: healer who sewed up the two sides of the wound together.
Speaker 1: That's just troubling I And I will note that in
Speaker 1: the painting here portrait of Jan didot Uh, we don't
Speaker 1: see Uh. We only see Hi from the waist up.
Speaker 1: So god knows what the Finnished states of fans were
Speaker 1: just soaked in blood. Yeah, and there are other accounts
Speaker 1: out there as well. There was one in particular that
Speaker 1: I ran across years years ago, and I was trying
Speaker 1: to find it. But in involved, I want to say,
Speaker 1: a royal individual or an astronomer, someone of you know,
Speaker 1: of means and importance, who had to undergo a stone
Speaker 1: removal surgery and it was just a bloody disaster and
Speaker 1: they ended up dying on the table. But after the
Speaker 1: life me I can't remember who it was. Okay, So
Speaker 1: we've seen that sometimes the body grows some stones inside it.
Speaker 1: You you've got these, uh, these formations of inneral deposits
Speaker 1: that can be very problematic, especially depending on where they occur.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they're so problematic medieval surgeons would go in for them,
Speaker 1: despite how dangerous surgery was at the time. And how
Speaker 1: exactly does this affect the head, because like we've said,
Speaker 1: we're not really aware from the public record that people
Speaker 1: ever cut into people's skulls for stones at the time.
Speaker 1: But maybe, just maybe there's one sort of cranial phenomenon
Speaker 1: we could look at as a as a possible candidate
Speaker 1: for what what's going on here? If this is intended
Speaker 1: to depict a real scene, if you're just saying, is
Speaker 1: it remotely possible that that bo just could happen? That
Speaker 1: bosh is depicting something that could have really happened. And
Speaker 1: here we want to talk about the meningioma. So, a
Speaker 1: meningioma is a name for like a class of tumors
Speaker 1: that affect the brain and the spinal cord. Though they
Speaker 1: actually don't grow from brain or spinal cord tissue itself,
Speaker 1: but from Meninji's or the man ninjas, which are thin
Speaker 1: layers of tissue that wrap around the outside of these organs.
Speaker 1: So around the outside of your brain you've got a
Speaker 1: thin layer of this tissue, and this is where this
Speaker 1: meningioma can occur. It's it's like a tumor um and
Speaker 1: because they appear on this outer tissue, they typically happen
Speaker 1: at the top or the outer curve of the brain.
Speaker 1: Also sometimes at the base of the skull. But this
Speaker 1: would make sense in the picture right at the top
Speaker 1: or the outer curve of the brain, that's where we
Speaker 1: see Bosch's tin funnel hat wearing. Doctor might be the
Speaker 1: generous word hutting here. So these these tumors are typically
Speaker 1: non cancerous. They're containing cysts or calcifications. Interestingly, so that
Speaker 1: would be collections of minerals, you know, stone formations, just
Speaker 1: like you might have in your bladder or something, so
Speaker 1: a mineral collection or cyst. But of course, since they grow,
Speaker 1: they press against the brain. Even though they're non cancerous,
Speaker 1: it still need to be removed. So this could be
Speaker 1: what we're seeing in the painting. I don't know what
Speaker 1: you think about that. Yeah, I think in terms of
Speaker 1: just I don't think it it is what we're saying.
Speaker 1: But in terms of of making an argument, what is
Speaker 1: it possible? Is it? Is it realistically possible that that
Speaker 1: that there could be a stone of madness? Like this
Speaker 1: is the closest real world possibility. Um And and in
Speaker 1: what case would it be a stone of madness? Well,
Speaker 1: there's a paper that referred to This is a two
Speaker 1: thousand two letter to Neurology India by Prasada Krishnan uh
Speaker 1: and uh a few other co authors as well, and
Speaker 1: they they were looking at a particular individual that that
Speaker 1: had one of these uh meningioma's growing inside the skull,
Speaker 1: and they found that it can result in irrelevant speech, forgetfulness,
Speaker 1: behavioral abnormalities such as disinhibition, emotional liability, and just excessive
Speaker 1: talking huh. So specifically they will get a sixty five
Speaker 1: year old patient uh and they they actually performed craniotomy
Speaker 1: and gross total excision of the legion, cutting her curing
Speaker 1: her of all the symptoms in the process. So, in
Speaker 1: other words, this is one case in two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: with of course modern surgical um tools and procedures. UM
Speaker 1: at hand, the surgeons were able to remove a stone
Speaker 1: like growth from a human skull and uh, and in
Speaker 1: doing so cure the individual of their abnormal mental state. Uh. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: while we have no evidence that operations like this took
Speaker 1: place in the Middle Ages or Bosh's time, it is
Speaker 1: at least possible that this could be the kind of
Speaker 1: thing going on here. Yeah, so it would sort of
Speaker 1: match the scene described. Yeah, so it might be a
Speaker 1: case where we're accidentally art in up giving us a
Speaker 1: glimpse of what an actual surgeon's blade with one day
Speaker 1: and cover. Okay, Well, I've got another question though. One
Speaker 1: of the things that when I was researching medieval surgery
Speaker 1: I came across is that one one of the most
Speaker 1: common surgical procedures in medieval Europe would have been uh,
Speaker 1: treatment of battlefield wounds. Yeah, so what if what we're
Speaker 1: actually seeing is something that is that has not just
Speaker 1: grown inside the head, not a stone of madness, but
Speaker 1: a missile of madness, something that has come from the
Speaker 1: outside and is being treated or removed. Yeah, I mean, indeed, uh,
Speaker 1: contemporary and ancient use of trefornation. Uh, it was often
Speaker 1: employed to deal with head trauma, either to you know,
Speaker 1: mitigate brain swelling due to blow a blow to the skull,
Speaker 1: or to remove a bone fragment or even a missile
Speaker 1: of some sort from uh, from underneath the skull or
Speaker 1: in the skull, or possibly in the brain. Uh. So
Speaker 1: I think you could make a granted weak case for
Speaker 1: the stone of folly having some relation to battle injury. Um,
Speaker 1: only in this case you've not been hit by a
Speaker 1: stone from the enemy sling, but rather a dose of
Speaker 1: folly from the fate. Yeah. When I was preparing for
Speaker 1: this episode, one of the things I did was I
Speaker 1: watched part of a short documentary that had a scene
Speaker 1: about an injury that the young Henry the Fifth actually
Speaker 1: suffered on the battlefield when he was a teenager, where
Speaker 1: he got an arrow lodged in his head. And they
Speaker 1: were talking about what happened when it was a non
Speaker 1: fatal wound, but you know at the time, of course,
Speaker 1: if they leave the arrow head in your wound, it's
Speaker 1: gonna get infected and you're gonna die. Uh. And they
Speaker 1: talked about the procedures that the surgeons of the day
Speaker 1: went through to try to remove this arrow head from
Speaker 1: his head and eventually he lived. He survived the procedure.
Speaker 1: But this does kind of show how, even at a
Speaker 1: time when surgery is known to be very dangerous, if
Speaker 1: you've got a major head wound, you really don't have
Speaker 1: any other choice. Yeah, it's either do it and possibly
Speaker 1: die or just die. Alright. So this this brings us
Speaker 1: back though, to to the painting itself. So we've already
Speaker 1: established that cutting for a urinary stones was complicated and
Speaker 1: dangerous treatment mortality rate. Furthermore, trepidation was an even risk
Speaker 1: your proposal at the time perhaticized mortality rate maybe maybe
Speaker 1: even more depending on who's trying to carry it out.
Speaker 1: So whether cutting into the brain or bowel, surgical practices
Speaker 1: of the time we're just not up to snuff. And
Speaker 1: as far as treatment of madness goes, this was an
Speaker 1: age before psychiatry was even a word. We didn't get
Speaker 1: back to eighteen o eight. The four humor still helps
Speaker 1: way over our understanding of human experience. Uh, they were
Speaker 1: and there were very few treatments for uh mental illness. Uh.
Speaker 1: The asylum was really one of the few options for
Speaker 1: individuals who really had severe mental illness, which wasn't really
Speaker 1: a treatment, right, And that's actually one of the arguments
Speaker 1: for Peter Brugal the Elder's painting cutting out of the
Speaker 1: Stone of Madness, which you said, it looks like a madhouse.
Speaker 1: One argument is is that he was depicting the brutal
Speaker 1: treatment of afflicted individuals within the madhouse, not that they
Speaker 1: were actually carved upon and had stones pulled out of
Speaker 1: their heads, but that the treatment they received was was
Speaker 1: comparable to that level of brutality and ineffectiveness. Okay, so yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's sort of just like an extreme example that's
Speaker 1: fictional to communicate the reality of the total, the total
Speaker 1: picture of the conditions, much like you might say, use
Speaker 1: this not really very plausible scenario of waking up in
Speaker 1: a bathtub missing kidney to depict the general sort of
Speaker 1: lawlessness of of a society something like that, you know,
Speaker 1: the predatory nature of wherever you are Las Vegas or something. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: in terms of actual trepidation, it was certainly on the
Speaker 1: table for head trauma and psycho surgery was proposed in
Speaker 1: Europe as early of the twelfth century, but there are
Speaker 1: actually very few reports of it being effectively employed before,
Speaker 1: so it seems like the predominant theory here is that
Speaker 1: this painting is there. There are a number of things
Speaker 1: going on, but one possibility here is that it's less
Speaker 1: about an actual surgery and more about a symbol for
Speaker 1: the the the the the ineffectiveness of surgery as a whole. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's not just about our cruelty but also about
Speaker 1: our our ignorance and fumbling. Yeah, like, we we have
Speaker 1: such a disastrous record removing these stones that are occurring
Speaker 1: in the body. Let's just push it into a more
Speaker 1: comedic and symbolic area by having the quack surgeon or
Speaker 1: perhaps just surgeon with the you know, a boundering and
Speaker 1: incomplete understanding of human physiology, and imagine than him operating
Speaker 1: on an even more dangerous part of the human anatomy,
Speaker 1: the brain itself, and then trying to remove some stone
Speaker 1: from from that part of the body as well. So
Speaker 1: in Bosch's painting, Uh, it seems that it's less about
Speaker 1: any about this being an actual procedure that was attempted,
Speaker 1: but more all right, let's take the stone removal surgeries
Speaker 1: that we know were occurring and that we know had
Speaker 1: such a disastrous record. Let's extrapolate that and then and
Speaker 1: take our fictional doctor who's either a quack or just
Speaker 1: a you know, a blundering but well meaning individual who's
Speaker 1: dealing with just a limited understanding of human physiology and
Speaker 1: and uh and and and and disease and infection. And
Speaker 1: let's have him not operate on on this already dangerous
Speaker 1: part of the human body, but let's have him operate
Speaker 1: on an even more dangerous area for surgery, the human
Speaker 1: brain itself. Let's have him pull a stone out of there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's sort of a fictional symbol of not only
Speaker 1: not just like Brugal's vision of our the cruelty and
Speaker 1: chaos of the madhouse, but also of our just lack
Speaker 1: of knowledge and the way we fumble through medicine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they're they're additional interpretations that are sometimes thrown in
Speaker 1: as well, the quack uh interpretation that we mentioned already,
Speaker 1: that it's essentially psychic surgery. Yeah, there's also the idea
Speaker 1: that the folly here is the patients for wishing the swift,
Speaker 1: easy removal of a thing which must be one either
Speaker 1: spiritually or you know, a few of the mysteries of alchemy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fool and his money are easily parted. Yeah. Another one
Speaker 1: of the interpretations that I'm I'm not sure I can
Speaker 1: agree with, but I at least found very interesting and
Speaker 1: liked came from that that paper reference to Stone never
Speaker 1: cut four, which it was good, it was interesting to read. Uh.
Speaker 1: They pointed out the three people in the painting, so
Speaker 1: that the patient is laying in this chair suffering, as
Speaker 1: you said, reclining seeming to groan get it out. You've
Speaker 1: got the doctor cut him, and then you've got the monk,
Speaker 1: and then you've got the ladies sitting there with the
Speaker 1: book on her head. And the way they interpreted the
Speaker 1: painting was that he's surrounded by symbolic characters embodying medicine, religion,
Speaker 1: and philosophy, and that that none of them really offer
Speaker 1: him a solution, the philosopher being the what looks like
Speaker 1: a nun with the closed book, the sealed book resting
Speaker 1: atop her head. Yeah. I'm not sure if I buy
Speaker 1: that interpretation, but I like it. Yeah, I like it too.
Speaker 1: And and him Yeah, I mean, she still looks more
Speaker 1: like a nun than a philosopher to me. But that's
Speaker 1: the that's the rough thing about interpreting these older pieces
Speaker 1: of art is they were not meant to speak to
Speaker 1: me or you. They were they were meant to speak
Speaker 1: to an individual living in the time. So they're they're
Speaker 1: kind of speaking across the time and space here and
Speaker 1: we can just do our best to try and interpret them.
Speaker 1: But but I do like that interpretation because it takes it,
Speaker 1: it extrapolates it beyond uh, mere medical science, and it
Speaker 1: just shows this it's is comical take, but also one
Speaker 1: that that kind of just pokes fun at at our
Speaker 1: attempts to master anything. Here are the three learned individuals
Speaker 1: and what are they accomplishing with against this individual's pain,
Speaker 1: discomfort or madness boredom? Yeah, all right, so there you
Speaker 1: have it. Uh. I'm going to make sure that the
Speaker 1: landing page for this episode links to examples of all
Speaker 1: the works of art that we referenced here, so you
Speaker 1: can pull them up, look at them, draw your own conclusions,
Speaker 1: make your own interpretations about what's going on. Um. And
Speaker 1: I will also link to that to some of the
Speaker 1: papers that we reference here as well. But I'd say,
Speaker 1: if you are feeling not quite well in your in
Speaker 1: your mind or in your mental state, uh, let us
Speaker 1: advise you don't cut for the stone, or pay anyone
Speaker 1: else to cut for the stone. Go go see a
Speaker 1: modern medical doctor, and if that doctor has a tin
Speaker 1: funnel on his or her head, payack strap. He pay
Speaker 1: x ray. All right, hey. In the meantime, I'll be
Speaker 1: sure to visit stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: If we will find all the podcast episodes, who find videos,
Speaker 1: who find blog posts? We find links out for our
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Speaker 1: get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
Speaker 1: or to let us know your favorite mystery from an
Speaker 1: ancient or medieval painting, you can email us at blow
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