1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,000
Hi, Nick here from Pods with Nick and James. Just a quick one before we get into this podcast.

2
00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:12,000
I want to say a massive thank you for the support that we've received since starting these podcasts.

3
00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:16,000
We thoroughly enjoy it and we look forward to creating more.

4
00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:23,000
If you want to have your say on any topics that we've discussed or suggest future topics,

5
00:00:23,000 --> 00:00:35,000
you can do so at www.reddit.com.com.au. If you want to support us, you can do so from as little as £1 a month.

6
00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:54,000
You can do that at www.patreon.com.au. Anyway, back to the podcast.

7
00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:15,000
Hi, welcome to Pods with Nick and James.

8
00:01:15,000 --> 00:01:28,000
Today's subject is going to be a brief overview of Western medicine with an episode to follow

9
00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:40,000
with some of the modern failings of the medical industrial system, which will be hosted by Nick next time.

10
00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:46,000
Just before we even get going, I've got a bit of a cold here, so if I cough horribly, sorry listeners.

11
00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:50,000
I do not mean to give you that experience. It's just going to be impossible.

12
00:01:50,000 --> 00:02:01,000
I also want to just give a shout out to my sources, the main sources being the videos of Patrick Kelly,

13
00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:06,000
a YouTuber who does a lot of stuff on the history of medicine.

14
00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:16,000
The author of the book, The History of Medicine, a very short introduction by William Bryenesson.

15
00:02:16,000 --> 00:02:29,000
And then a massive shout out to my cousin, Emily, who just through a conversation with her

16
00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:38,000
taught me a lot of points that hadn't been covered in the book, The History of Medicine,

17
00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:44,000
and for just kind of having a conversation with someone makes it so much easier to remember these facts.

18
00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:48,000
So, Emily, thank you very much.

19
00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:57,000
Okay, so I guess we'll jump in.

20
00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:07,000
Medicine is unlike science in that it, although it is scientific,

21
00:03:07,000 --> 00:03:11,000
and we are going to be focusing on the scientific practice of medicine.

22
00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:18,000
Unlike science, it wasn't just a term that was coined in 1836.

23
00:03:18,000 --> 00:03:26,000
There have been doctors, there have been healers since the birth of mankind,

24
00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:38,000
just as there have, I imagine, in all civilizations, always been some form of sickness and infirmity.

25
00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:47,000
I realize, Nick, you're quite a well-versed man, so you may already know this,

26
00:03:47,000 --> 00:03:57,000
but who do historians, do you know who historians see as the father of Western medicine?

27
00:03:57,000 --> 00:04:01,000
I feel like I should know it, but I don't, I'm afraid.

28
00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:07,000
That's absolutely fine. I feel I should be able to quote when the Magna Carta was done.

29
00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:15,000
I couldn't tell you. I should be able to tell you when the Gutenberg printing press was made off the top of my head.

30
00:04:15,000 --> 00:04:21,000
I couldn't tell you. But I can tell you, because I've researched it recently,

31
00:04:21,000 --> 00:04:29,000
that the father of modern medicine was somebody called Hippocrates.

32
00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:31,000
Oh, I did know that.

33
00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:34,000
With, yeah, Hippocrates of Kos.

34
00:04:34,000 --> 00:04:37,000
That's why it's the Hippocratic Oath.

35
00:04:37,000 --> 00:04:44,000
Exactly, exactly, exactly. So, okay, so the Hippocratic Oath also, interesting fact,

36
00:04:44,000 --> 00:04:56,000
Hippocratic Oath has nothing to do with Hippocrates, the person, or Hippocrates' corpus,

37
00:04:56,000 --> 00:05:01,000
which means his body of writings, hence the word corpse.

38
00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:05,000
Well, it's not the cause of the word corpse, I'm just explaining it.

39
00:05:05,000 --> 00:05:07,000
I'm going too far already.

40
00:05:07,000 --> 00:05:21,000
But just as an interesting fact, yeah, Hippocratic is different from Hippocratic or Hippocritical.

41
00:05:21,000 --> 00:05:29,000
Hippocritical comes from the word Hippocritis, which means actor in Greek.

42
00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:34,000
I've probably murdered the pronunciation there.

43
00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:38,000
So it's just unfortunate that this person had a name,

44
00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:43,000
which sounds really, really similar to actor in Greek,

45
00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:49,000
rather than him actually being a Hippocrite or not practicing what he preaches.

46
00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:52,000
Yeah, because the last thing you want to know that your doctor took

47
00:05:52,000 --> 00:05:58,000
before he became a doctor was an oath of hypocrisy, I suppose.

48
00:05:58,000 --> 00:06:08,000
Exactly, it's almost like the traitor's oath from this terrible BBC series,

49
00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:14,000
which has totally, totally just indoctrinated me and it just kind of grabs me every time.

50
00:06:14,000 --> 00:06:19,000
All I can say is it's fantastic garbage. Absolutely love it.

51
00:06:19,000 --> 00:06:23,000
But anyway, moving swiftly on.

52
00:06:23,000 --> 00:06:31,000
Okay, so Hippocrates lived in about 460 BC.

53
00:06:31,000 --> 00:06:38,000
So again, a couple of hundred years after the invention of coins in Lydia.

54
00:06:38,000 --> 00:06:45,000
The island of Kos is just off the coast off of modern-day Turkey

55
00:06:45,000 --> 00:06:49,000
or is part of modern-day Turkey from what I've been told.

56
00:06:49,000 --> 00:06:59,000
He... Yeah, at the time, the ideas of Epiduc... Epidoclus?

57
00:06:59,000 --> 00:07:05,000
Damn it, I've mispronounced that. Epidem... Epidemius? Epid... Damn it.

58
00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:09,000
The person who invented the idea of the four elements,

59
00:07:09,000 --> 00:07:14,000
or at least the Greek Western version of the four elements.

60
00:07:14,000 --> 00:07:19,000
Please note in Indian elementalism, there's five elements

61
00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:27,000
where it is just the four normal ones of fire, earth, water and air,

62
00:07:27,000 --> 00:07:32,000
but they also... the Indians bother to include ether.

63
00:07:32,000 --> 00:07:33,000
Yeah, the spirit.

64
00:07:33,000 --> 00:07:37,000
Which I'll need to... Yeah, the spirit, the void, the unknown,

65
00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:43,000
which I actually think... I just like the fact that it's included, I think.

66
00:07:43,000 --> 00:07:48,000
But anyway, please note also the Chinese had their own elementalism

67
00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:55,000
of fire, water, air, and then they split earth into wood and metal,

68
00:07:55,000 --> 00:07:59,000
which is an interesting take. The two are different.

69
00:07:59,000 --> 00:08:10,000
But moving swiftly on, Hippocrates and his writings had a huge effect

70
00:08:10,000 --> 00:08:22,000
on the origins of medicine in that it stresses the importance of observation

71
00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:30,000
and the importance of looking at the patient as a human being,

72
00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:37,000
as a way of trying to determine what's wrong with them.

73
00:08:37,000 --> 00:08:40,000
We'll go into his oath, and in fact, you know what,

74
00:08:40,000 --> 00:08:44,000
we'll start it off with the oath because I actually read through it,

75
00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:47,000
and it is... you know what, I actually quite like it.

76
00:08:47,000 --> 00:08:50,000
It's quite... I don't know, it's just interesting to read any kind of moral...

77
00:08:50,000 --> 00:08:55,000
There's definitely some points in there which...

78
00:08:55,000 --> 00:08:59,000
Yeah, it's not all that's followed today.

79
00:08:59,000 --> 00:09:01,000
They're very poignant, they're very poignant,

80
00:09:01,000 --> 00:09:04,000
and you can see that it's about the development of knowledge,

81
00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:09,000
the sharing of knowledge, accepting that you don't always know everything

82
00:09:09,000 --> 00:09:15,000
that somebody else will, and using the best knowledge that's available to you,

83
00:09:15,000 --> 00:09:18,000
not necessarily your own, for the betterment of any patient

84
00:09:18,000 --> 00:09:21,000
that comes into your care.

85
00:09:21,000 --> 00:09:33,000
Absolutely. So I guess we'll... I'll talk briefly about...

86
00:09:33,000 --> 00:09:37,000
Okay, so other than the Hippocratic Oath,

87
00:09:37,000 --> 00:09:45,000
which is possibly my favourite part of Hippocrates' legacy,

88
00:09:45,000 --> 00:09:50,000
he also brought humoral medicine.

89
00:09:50,000 --> 00:09:56,000
Humoral medicine is the idea...

90
00:09:56,000 --> 00:10:03,000
It's basically treating disease and deficiencies within the body

91
00:10:03,000 --> 00:10:11,000
through the belief that the body is mostly made up of

92
00:10:11,000 --> 00:10:15,000
a number of liquids or the four humours.

93
00:10:15,000 --> 00:10:19,000
Weirdly enough, this again, humoral medicine,

94
00:10:19,000 --> 00:10:26,000
which also existed in India and China,

95
00:10:26,000 --> 00:10:31,000
and was around in the Islamic world as well,

96
00:10:31,000 --> 00:10:33,000
we'll go into that in a moment though,

97
00:10:33,000 --> 00:10:39,000
as it's not a strict divide between Greek and...

98
00:10:39,000 --> 00:10:43,000
Although there is a divide, but there isn't, if that makes sense,

99
00:10:43,000 --> 00:10:46,000
like there is a divide between Greek and Persian cultures,

100
00:10:46,000 --> 00:10:50,000
but a lot of knowledge was obviously shared,

101
00:10:50,000 --> 00:10:56,000
and a lot of smart people, what I love to see,

102
00:10:56,000 --> 00:11:02,000
seem to be able to get over the early difficulties

103
00:11:02,000 --> 00:11:08,000
of language and cultural barriers and still share knowledge,

104
00:11:08,000 --> 00:11:11,000
which is fantastic.

105
00:11:11,000 --> 00:11:15,000
Right, but anyway, humoral...

106
00:11:15,000 --> 00:11:18,000
I'm mispronouncing everything.

107
00:11:18,000 --> 00:11:21,000
Humoral medicine is the idea.

108
00:11:21,000 --> 00:11:23,000
We're going to focus on the four,

109
00:11:23,000 --> 00:11:26,000
because that was the most widely accepted,

110
00:11:26,000 --> 00:11:30,000
although again, there was some people, even in ancient Greece,

111
00:11:30,000 --> 00:11:37,000
or ancient Ionia, would say that there were as many as 11 different humours.

112
00:11:37,000 --> 00:11:43,000
The four different humours are each connected with one of the four elements,

113
00:11:43,000 --> 00:11:48,000
yellow bile being fire, black bile being earth,

114
00:11:48,000 --> 00:11:53,000
phlegm being water, and blood being air,

115
00:11:53,000 --> 00:11:57,000
blood being hot and wet, yellow bile being hot and dry for fire,

116
00:11:57,000 --> 00:12:02,000
black bile being dry and cold for earth,

117
00:12:02,000 --> 00:12:07,000
and phlegm just being cold and wet.

118
00:12:07,000 --> 00:12:10,000
The reason why...

119
00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:14,000
I'll tell you what...

120
00:12:14,000 --> 00:12:20,000
OK, so we now know the body is more than this.

121
00:12:20,000 --> 00:12:24,000
And I don't want to just state the questions of,

122
00:12:24,000 --> 00:12:27,000
oh, why do you think these idiots fell for this,

123
00:12:27,000 --> 00:12:31,000
when they were doing the best they flipping could.

124
00:12:31,000 --> 00:12:33,000
Absolutely.

125
00:12:33,000 --> 00:12:35,000
Why do you think...

126
00:12:35,000 --> 00:12:38,000
I don't actually have an answer to this.

127
00:12:38,000 --> 00:12:43,000
I do and I don't, because I don't think my answer to this actually satisfies it.

128
00:12:43,000 --> 00:12:52,000
But why do you think humoral medicine was as popular as it was?

129
00:12:52,000 --> 00:13:03,000
I think it was based on what was clearly visible in and out of the body,

130
00:13:03,000 --> 00:13:10,000
and then knowing that most life itself is satisfied through fluids,

131
00:13:10,000 --> 00:13:16,000
and therefore if you can keep the fluids in balance,

132
00:13:16,000 --> 00:13:21,000
then I suppose the theory was that if the fluids were in balance,

133
00:13:21,000 --> 00:13:25,000
then the body would be in balance.

134
00:13:25,000 --> 00:13:28,000
Well, that's exactly it, yeah.

135
00:13:28,000 --> 00:13:36,000
A lot of ancient natural philosophers realized the importance of fluid.

136
00:13:36,000 --> 00:13:40,000
They noticed that there was a mixture within the world,

137
00:13:40,000 --> 00:13:43,000
and they also...

138
00:13:43,000 --> 00:13:47,000
Yeah, you know what, you hit the nail on the head there, Nick,

139
00:13:47,000 --> 00:13:51,000
when it came to...

140
00:13:51,000 --> 00:13:58,000
Different illnesses would produce different, I don't know, different excretions from the body.

141
00:13:58,000 --> 00:14:02,000
Yeah, I know one therapy that they quite often,

142
00:14:02,000 --> 00:14:08,000
one of the most famous old-timey therapies was the cleansing of the blood,

143
00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:12,000
either through leaching or through bloodletting.

144
00:14:12,000 --> 00:14:18,000
This is one of those practices that was based around humoric medicine,

145
00:14:18,000 --> 00:14:22,000
where it's just trying to bring balance to one of the fluids.

146
00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:26,000
In this case, if there's a fever, a hot blood,

147
00:14:26,000 --> 00:14:34,000
then they would let the blood in order to try and bring balance to that fluid.

148
00:14:34,000 --> 00:14:38,000
That's exactly it, and that's exactly right.

149
00:14:38,000 --> 00:14:45,000
Yeah, the reason why bloodletting was a thing was with fever.

150
00:14:45,000 --> 00:14:49,000
It would be seen as there was too much blood,

151
00:14:49,000 --> 00:14:55,000
so it was just the hopes of removing that bloodletting,

152
00:14:55,000 --> 00:15:02,000
oh, sorry, through bloodletting, removing that type of humor

153
00:15:02,000 --> 00:15:06,000
in the hopes that it would bring the rest of the body into balance,

154
00:15:06,000 --> 00:15:12,000
rather than robbing the body of a needed resource.

155
00:15:12,000 --> 00:15:22,000
Yeah, absolutely right, once again.

156
00:15:22,000 --> 00:15:27,000
Getting a mixture or relieving pressure within the body

157
00:15:27,000 --> 00:15:31,000
does seem to be a thing in old medicine,

158
00:15:31,000 --> 00:15:34,000
drilling holes in people's heads.

159
00:15:34,000 --> 00:15:36,000
Trapanning.

160
00:15:36,000 --> 00:15:40,000
There you go. I'm glad you remembered the name of it, because I'd forgotten.

161
00:15:40,000 --> 00:15:47,000
I remember it from his Dark Materials, their books by Philip Pullman.

162
00:15:47,000 --> 00:15:59,000
One of the characters in that has Trapanning performed on his skull by some shamans.

163
00:15:59,000 --> 00:16:02,000
Does it help him? Honestly.

164
00:16:02,000 --> 00:16:05,000
They don't really go on about how, whether it helps.

165
00:16:05,000 --> 00:16:11,000
Yeah, Trapanning is based around a theory which is exclusive to the books,

166
00:16:11,000 --> 00:16:16,000
so as much as it's a practice that genuinely took place,

167
00:16:16,000 --> 00:16:20,000
and probably still does take place in certain parts of the world,

168
00:16:20,000 --> 00:16:25,000
it wasn't necessarily based around the practices as to why they would use Trapanning.

169
00:16:25,000 --> 00:16:30,000
It was a fictional adaptation.

170
00:16:30,000 --> 00:16:43,000
Okay, that's interesting. Once again, kind of highlighting the importance of education even in fiction.

171
00:16:43,000 --> 00:16:59,000
Well, one of the things that interested me is that Trapanning was picked up briefly in the 1800s

172
00:16:59,000 --> 00:17:04,000
by a French man whose name I can't remember.

173
00:17:04,000 --> 00:17:14,000
Another source would also be the podcast Sawbones with Justin McElroy and his wife,

174
00:17:14,000 --> 00:17:19,000
who's a doctor and is incredibly intelligent, and the fact that I can't remember her name.

175
00:17:19,000 --> 00:17:23,000
That's really going to annoy me now.

176
00:17:23,000 --> 00:17:26,000
We'll call her Dr. McElroy.

177
00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:29,000
Yep, let's go with that.

178
00:17:29,000 --> 00:17:41,000
She goes into this massive, or gives a really good in-depth explanation of this.

179
00:17:41,000 --> 00:17:44,000
A lot of people thought Trapanning, or not a lot of people,

180
00:17:44,000 --> 00:17:53,000
a couple of people who you could argue come under the term quacks,

181
00:17:53,000 --> 00:18:01,000
who believed that Trapanning could release pressure or allow you to achieve enlightenment.

182
00:18:01,000 --> 00:18:08,000
What I do like is that the one guy who came up with this theory,

183
00:18:08,000 --> 00:18:13,000
he did it to other people, but he didn't just do it to other people.

184
00:18:13,000 --> 00:18:18,000
He did it to himself. He Trapanned himself.

185
00:18:18,000 --> 00:18:26,000
He then got institutionalized as a result, but at least he wasn't like,

186
00:18:26,000 --> 00:18:29,000
I'm going to do this to other people, but then secretly...

187
00:18:29,000 --> 00:18:35,000
My question is, did he do it to himself first?

188
00:18:35,000 --> 00:18:37,000
That bit I can't remember.

189
00:18:37,000 --> 00:18:40,000
The reason being is that, there's a couple of points really,

190
00:18:40,000 --> 00:18:46,000
it would make me feel better if his practice run was on himself, morally,

191
00:18:46,000 --> 00:18:51,000
however, it also makes me question the judgment of others

192
00:18:51,000 --> 00:18:56,000
allowing a bloke with a hole in his head to drill a hole in their head.

193
00:18:56,000 --> 00:19:04,000
Well, to be fair, if the person with a hole in their head seemed to be...

194
00:19:04,000 --> 00:19:09,000
I'm going to be honest with you, if there was a bunch of people with holes in their heads

195
00:19:09,000 --> 00:19:17,000
who seemed happier, more collective, more emotionally resilient and resourceful

196
00:19:17,000 --> 00:19:22,000
and genuinely more intelligent, I'd consider it.

197
00:19:22,000 --> 00:19:27,000
I'm not going to say I'd definitely put my hand up and sign me up to the cult,

198
00:19:27,000 --> 00:19:30,000
but I definitely would...

199
00:19:30,000 --> 00:19:35,000
There's definitely something that makes me feel a little bit queasy about it.

200
00:19:35,000 --> 00:19:44,000
It's like the practices that were undertaken by mental health institutions in the US,

201
00:19:44,000 --> 00:19:51,000
like the ice picking, where they aimed an ice pick up the inside of the eye

202
00:19:51,000 --> 00:19:56,000
to try and disconnect a specific part of the brain, I can't remember which part now.

203
00:19:56,000 --> 00:19:59,000
The famous ice pick lobotomy.

204
00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:05,000
Yeah, the frontal lobe, isn't it? They're trying to disconnect the frontal lobe.

205
00:20:05,000 --> 00:20:12,000
Just the thought of that practice makes me close my eyes on the spot.

206
00:20:12,000 --> 00:20:21,000
Sometimes if I'm having one of those lucid moments, I even find myself drilling my hands into my eyes.

207
00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:25,000
It makes me twitch, it makes me cringe, it's horrible.

208
00:20:25,000 --> 00:20:32,000
I worked in a neurological rehab once as a care worker,

209
00:20:32,000 --> 00:20:41,000
and there was a chap that I looked after, no name is named obviously, who was bottled on a train.

210
00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:48,000
Part of his treatment was that he had to have part of his skull cut away by the doctors

211
00:20:48,000 --> 00:20:52,000
to relieve pressure on his brain because his brain swelled up.

212
00:20:52,000 --> 00:21:01,000
So it is still, it's not necessarily trepanning, but it's definitely the release of pressure on the vital organ of the brain.

213
00:21:01,000 --> 00:21:04,000
But obviously it was for a different practice.

214
00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:08,000
So in this case it was to, as I said, relieve pressure on the brain.

215
00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:19,000
Previously it was to allow the demons out and the Holy Spirit in, as it were.

216
00:21:19,000 --> 00:21:23,000
You know, that's, yeah.

217
00:21:23,000 --> 00:21:31,000
Well, that's, it's interesting that it's still done at all.

218
00:21:31,000 --> 00:21:37,000
Bringing back to, I shouldn't have gone into that,

219
00:21:37,000 --> 00:21:43,000
but it's surprising that with medical history it's not just a straight line,

220
00:21:43,000 --> 00:21:51,000
and it's also really surprising that after Hippocrates there's one figure who then brings things forward a little bit,

221
00:21:51,000 --> 00:21:57,000
and then for a long, a huge amount of time just things don't progress.

222
00:21:57,000 --> 00:22:01,000
And I'm going to talk about that in a little bit,

223
00:22:01,000 --> 00:22:09,000
but for now let's take a look at the modern version of the Hippocratic Oath.

224
00:22:09,000 --> 00:22:15,000
I'm going with the modern version because the old one speaks,

225
00:22:15,000 --> 00:22:22,000
well you know what, I'm going to be honest with you, it's very very Greek.

226
00:22:22,000 --> 00:22:35,000
I think anybody who's not of ancient Greece would struggle with it simply because it starts by praising Apollo the physician.

227
00:22:35,000 --> 00:22:41,000
And it mentions a number of the other gods from the Greek pantheon.

228
00:22:41,000 --> 00:22:51,000
The version we're looking at would be the revised version, which was revised, believe it or not, as late as the 1960s.

229
00:22:51,000 --> 00:22:57,000
And there's still debate about whether this document or this oath is relevant,

230
00:22:57,000 --> 00:23:01,000
but a number of physicians still see it as a rite of passage.

231
00:23:01,000 --> 00:23:09,000
And as you've said it's got a number of poignant points in it, so we're going to go through it.

232
00:23:09,000 --> 00:23:15,000
Just so it's not... I'm going to be honest with you mate, how would you feel,

233
00:23:15,000 --> 00:23:18,000
because I sent this to you and it's on the chat that we're sharing,

234
00:23:18,000 --> 00:23:24,000
and I've spent too much time speaking already, how would you feel about reading it out?

235
00:23:24,000 --> 00:23:26,000
Would you be okay with that?

236
00:23:26,000 --> 00:23:27,000
Yeah, absolutely.

237
00:23:27,000 --> 00:23:31,000
Great. So I'll read it out now.

238
00:23:31,000 --> 00:23:38,000
It says, I swear to fulfill to the best of my ability and judgment this covenant.

239
00:23:38,000 --> 00:23:44,000
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk,

240
00:23:44,000 --> 00:23:50,000
and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

241
00:23:50,000 --> 00:23:55,000
I will apply for the benefit of the sick all measures that are required,

242
00:23:55,000 --> 00:24:01,000
avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

243
00:24:01,000 --> 00:24:06,000
I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science,

244
00:24:06,000 --> 00:24:13,000
and that warmth, sympathy and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

245
00:24:13,000 --> 00:24:20,000
I will not be ashamed to say I know not, nor will I fail to call in my colleagues

246
00:24:20,000 --> 00:24:24,000
when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

247
00:24:24,000 --> 00:24:32,000
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world might know.

248
00:24:32,000 --> 00:24:37,000
Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death,

249
00:24:37,000 --> 00:24:45,000
if it is given me to save a life, all thanks, but it may also be within my power to take a life.

250
00:24:45,000 --> 00:24:52,000
This awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty.

251
00:24:52,000 --> 00:24:56,000
Above all, I must not play at God.

252
00:24:56,000 --> 00:25:01,000
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth,

253
00:25:01,000 --> 00:25:08,000
but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability.

254
00:25:08,000 --> 00:25:15,000
My responsibility includes these related problems if I am to care adequately for the sick.

255
00:25:15,000 --> 00:25:20,000
I will prevent disease wherever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

256
00:25:20,000 --> 00:25:27,000
I will remember that I remain a member of society with special obligations to all my fellow human beings,

257
00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:32,000
those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

258
00:25:32,000 --> 00:25:41,000
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live, and remembered with affection thereafter.

259
00:25:41,000 --> 00:25:47,000
May I also act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling,

260
00:25:47,000 --> 00:25:54,000
and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

261
00:25:54,000 --> 00:26:06,000
Okay. All right, so ladies and gentlemen, that is the revised and slightly altered Hippocratic Oath.

262
00:26:06,000 --> 00:26:15,000
Please note that although the first bit of the praising Apollo has been removed,

263
00:26:15,000 --> 00:26:22,000
the main body of the text is still, for the most part, the same,

264
00:26:22,000 --> 00:26:30,000
and a number of the points that are made, although they sound incredibly modern,

265
00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:40,000
are just translations. Translations of things that were said even at the time.

266
00:26:40,000 --> 00:26:46,000
Yeah, one thing that blows me away is just, again,

267
00:26:46,000 --> 00:26:55,000
like holistic medicine quite often sounds almost like alternative medicine,

268
00:26:55,000 --> 00:27:06,000
but it's about looking at the whole person, and the Hippocratic Oath really, in my mind, seems to stress that,

269
00:27:06,000 --> 00:27:14,000
and I'm sure there are problems in there, and I'm sure if I looked at it with a fine-toothed chrome,

270
00:27:14,000 --> 00:27:18,000
I could find a couple of bits to debate on, but for the most part,

271
00:27:18,000 --> 00:27:30,000
I find it very difficult to disagree with what seems to be a wholeheartedly best attempt at,

272
00:27:30,000 --> 00:27:38,000
I will do my best to be humble, to cure people, to consider all the outcomes, and not to be a dick.

273
00:27:38,000 --> 00:27:43,000
It's really hard to disagree with that stuff. What are your feelings on it?

274
00:27:43,000 --> 00:27:50,000
I think there's a lot of responsibility throughout that oath.

275
00:27:50,000 --> 00:28:05,000
I think it's strange to think that every doctor is expected to take the Hippocratic Oath,

276
00:28:05,000 --> 00:28:16,000
and yet I have had doctors which, this isn't exclusive to all doctors, please note,

277
00:28:16,000 --> 00:28:23,000
but there are doctors out there that are almost arrogant in their demeanor,

278
00:28:23,000 --> 00:28:31,000
which is almost contradictory to the oath in its own entirety.

279
00:28:31,000 --> 00:28:37,000
It clearly says you are a member of society, yes, you have special obligations,

280
00:28:37,000 --> 00:28:44,000
but you are still a human being, you are just one with knowledge that can help others,

281
00:28:44,000 --> 00:28:48,000
and as such have responsibility to do so.

282
00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:57,000
It doesn't say in there you are better than other people because you have the ability to save lives,

283
00:28:57,000 --> 00:29:04,000
but I like the points about obviously respecting privacy of patients,

284
00:29:04,000 --> 00:29:10,000
that's something that has obviously been in there since the day dot.

285
00:29:10,000 --> 00:29:20,000
I thought it was quite a new thing with the Confidentiality Act and what not else,

286
00:29:20,000 --> 00:29:25,000
but it's obviously been in there a lot longer for doctors.

287
00:29:25,000 --> 00:29:33,000
The looking for knowledge in other people, as I said earlier in the podcast,

288
00:29:33,000 --> 00:29:38,000
when you don't necessarily know something yourself, accepting that and saying,

289
00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:44,000
you know what, I don't know, I will ask somebody for help.

290
00:29:44,000 --> 00:29:49,000
I think everybody can take a little bit from the Hippocratic oath in their own right.

291
00:29:49,000 --> 00:30:03,000
Absolutely, I love the balance of I will apply for the benefit of the sick all measures that are required,

292
00:30:03,000 --> 00:30:08,000
avoiding the twin traps of over treatment and therapeutic nihilism.

293
00:30:08,000 --> 00:30:15,000
I'm not going to treat for the sake of treating.

294
00:30:15,000 --> 00:30:24,000
Also just the really basic thing, I will not be ashamed to say I don't know, I know not,

295
00:30:24,000 --> 00:30:31,000
nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when it's needed for a patient's recovery.

296
00:30:31,000 --> 00:30:41,000
I think I see a lot of the development of knowledge and the acceptance that knowledge is going to change over time

297
00:30:41,000 --> 00:30:50,000
and accepting that knowledge is going to change over time and develop over time is part and parcel of being a doctor.

298
00:30:50,000 --> 00:30:55,000
The way you treat today may well change in 10, 15 years.

299
00:30:55,000 --> 00:31:08,000
Don't get stuck on old ways if there are better methods and more holistic methods that are implemented as time goes by.

300
00:31:08,000 --> 00:31:11,000
That's it.

301
00:31:11,000 --> 00:31:21,000
Okay, so unfortunately, I think this is a certain thing that I could go through for a while, but I am just going to get moving on.

302
00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:29,000
Okay, so this is the oath that Hippocrates, his corpus or his body of work put down.

303
00:31:29,000 --> 00:31:44,000
There is a lot of problems with the textual criticism of Hippocrates because the dates on all of the documents within the corpus

304
00:31:44,000 --> 00:31:49,000
spread over a time scale, which seems unrealistic for a person to have lived.

305
00:31:49,000 --> 00:32:06,000
There's some, yeah, some people, yeah, some people say that a number of documents in the corpus were added or altered by members of the Hippocratic movement

306
00:32:06,000 --> 00:32:14,000
who weren't Hippocrates himself, but were the students of the people who took stuff from his writing.

307
00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:22,000
And then they've just applied his name to their stuff as their stuff was inspired by his stuff.

308
00:32:22,000 --> 00:32:25,000
See, I find that quite frustrating.

309
00:32:25,000 --> 00:32:45,000
It's quite subjective to implement that as a negative point on his works based on hypothetical knowledge of, there's no way that he could have existed for that long or at that time or whatever.

310
00:32:45,000 --> 00:32:55,000
This was two and a half thousand years ago. You don't know, and I use the proverbial you, of course.

311
00:32:55,000 --> 00:33:03,000
And one thing that it reminds me of quite heavily is the King's List in ancient Egypt.

312
00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:16,000
Pre dynastic kings listed to have lived for thousands of years and people now are like, oh, it's just it's mythological. It's it's completely hypothetical. I'm not saying it existed.

313
00:33:16,000 --> 00:33:24,000
What I am saying is that you have no place to say it didn't because this is thousands and thousands of years ago.

314
00:33:24,000 --> 00:33:47,000
There's no way that you can know how things have changed and how time is maybe maybe perceived differently or or there's any hypothetical scenario that could change the way that they were recording Kings on the King's List or even what enabled may or may have enabled Hippocrates to

315
00:33:47,000 --> 00:33:55,000
live beyond his his fellow peers years, you know.

316
00:33:55,000 --> 00:33:59,000
Yeah, that's absolutely that's absolutely fair.

317
00:33:59,000 --> 00:34:08,000
Although you can prop up a lot of bad theories with that argument that argument that you've made in and of itself is entirely true.

318
00:34:08,000 --> 00:34:19,000
I think we don't know when it comes to second and information. It's it's very difficult to judge at all.

319
00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:24,000
Perhaps I shouldn't have said anything but I was just going you're right.

320
00:34:24,000 --> 00:34:29,000
You're right. You're right to

321
00:34:29,000 --> 00:34:47,000
go both sides. All I was doing was offering my my perspective on that. I think it's quite important to hear both sides but not necessarily to offer an objective opinion for or against.

322
00:34:47,000 --> 00:34:52,000
I think it's important to listen.

323
00:34:52,000 --> 00:35:14,000
The important part, I think that the people seem to miss because of X and Y hypothetical fact is is actually the writings and the teachings which is more than anything, the bit that we should be listening to not the hows and whys and whens.

324
00:35:14,000 --> 00:35:28,000
Look at what was written. That's the bit that was was. That's the bit that's primary like the how the hows and whens is secondary and can perhaps give you further insight.

325
00:35:28,000 --> 00:35:36,000
But in order to have a further insight you first must have basic understanding. Yeah, is that what you're saying. Yeah.

326
00:35:36,000 --> 00:35:46,000
Okay, cool. All right. Well, moving forward about 500 years or so.

327
00:35:46,000 --> 00:35:50,000
We come to a person who is.

328
00:35:50,000 --> 00:35:55,000
Yeah, although Hippocrates is like the

329
00:35:55,000 --> 00:36:06,000
father of medicine. This individual had a huge influence on all scientific.

330
00:36:06,000 --> 00:36:14,000
Well, I say all scientific scientific humorous or humoral medicine, at least.

331
00:36:14,000 --> 00:36:23,000
This guy's name was weird enough he was a Roman and he seems to be one of the

332
00:36:23,000 --> 00:36:26,000
most famous people in the world.

333
00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:47,000
You know what I've poo pooed Rome, a little bit in the past because it turns out a lot of the pre Socrates came up with a lot of their stuff, and then, yeah Socrates Plato and Aristotle were all from the Greek city states, rather than, rather than Roman.

334
00:36:47,000 --> 00:37:05,000
It's a whole empire, but you're going to assimilate knowledge, and then try to take the trotter they claim to it, wherever possible, just to validate your existence and your reign as a global empire.

335
00:37:05,000 --> 00:37:18,000
But I don't think it's a reason to to disregard or go against Romans in general.

336
00:37:18,000 --> 00:37:40,000
I will say though that this is what kind of like this is what really surprised me, because although Rome assimilated knowledge and took several parts of several other cultures, like although they're the administrative and

337
00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:52,000
the unconquerable achievements are incredible. When it comes to what what stuff they made, they didn't really invent or make much.

338
00:37:52,000 --> 00:38:03,000
They reproduced I guess is what I was going, whereas what's really surprising is that with Claudius Galen, he was a Roman.

339
00:38:03,000 --> 00:38:15,000
He made a shit ton of stuff. Like he was a he was a physician. He, I don't know how he lived, but he never charged a fee.

340
00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:22,000
He healed people from all walks of life.

341
00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:42,000
He was both a physician and and a surgeon and an apothecary, which is weirdly enough where you get the term general practitioner from, because those three professions up until recent times were seen as entirely separate.

342
00:38:42,000 --> 00:38:57,000
Well, no, you suppose even now you still I know you get GPs, which are your general doctors, but you get specialists and they tend to specialize in those three areas. You get chemists and you get you get surgeons and you get like physicists.

343
00:38:57,000 --> 00:39:06,000
I can't even think of the right word. Physicians. Physicians. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Physicians were seen as kind of like the high and mighty doctors.

344
00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:13,000
Surgeons were seen almost as butchers and apothecaries were quite often seen as mystics. Yeah.

345
00:39:13,000 --> 00:39:37,000
But it's interesting that you do. This guy was all of those. He healed lots and lots of people. But the thing that sets him apart is that he wrote over 600 treatises over the course of his life. And unlike Hippocrates, Galen's writings.

346
00:39:37,000 --> 00:40:00,000
You know what I can't even quote the numbers. I don't know the numbers. I just know all of the subtext from what I've read seems to be that they are all more clearly directly associated with him and are believed or are believed with less dispute or discernment.

347
00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:29,000
Like they all just people go. Yeah, this is this. This is all him. He wrote he so he wrote 600 treatises. The the amount that he wrote was over double the Harry Potter franchise, which although that doesn't necessarily sound particularly impressive nowadays at a time when

348
00:40:29,000 --> 00:40:47,000
every single page costs you money. Ink was expensive. And all of this was scientific observation of different types of disease and different types of human medicine. It's an incredible achievement.

349
00:40:47,000 --> 00:40:51,000
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

350
00:40:51,000 --> 00:41:11,000
The reason why, though, and this is something which this is something which bothered me, and it's I feel I've got to be honest about it, but it's something that I don't don't necessarily like is that what we have of ancient history and ancient science and ancient

351
00:41:11,000 --> 00:41:22,000
everything is solely what's been preserved and what's been preserved has been it's been very selective.

352
00:41:22,000 --> 00:41:32,000
Like I don't know if there were better philosophers than the seven sages of ancient Greece and I don't know if there were better doctors than Galen.

353
00:41:32,000 --> 00:41:41,000
What I don't know is that this is what has survived. The reason why Galen.

354
00:41:41,000 --> 00:41:53,000
The reason why Galen's knowledge was kind of unchallenged and was adopted for well over 1000 years.

355
00:41:53,000 --> 00:42:13,000
It lasted for 1000 years. And, and people didn't advanced further for a couple of different reasons. But unfortunately part of it is the fact that his writings were very popular in amongst the Catholic Church.

356
00:42:13,000 --> 00:42:37,000
His, because he, because Galen when looking at the human body, realizing how all the systems work together. He was a humorous humoral doctor but he also dissected animals, because human dissection was seen as a parent to the Greeks and to later the to

357
00:42:37,000 --> 00:43:05,000
appoint the Roman and then to the to Christendom with dissection only being legalized in 1480s by Pope at the time can't remember which, which one it was though but until 1480s in most Christian Roman Greek countries dissection in and of itself was illegal so if

358
00:43:05,000 --> 00:43:11,000
somebody caught you doing an autopsy, autopsy, they'd almost treat you.

359
00:43:11,000 --> 00:43:18,000
You know, like a murderer like you were doing a crime. So because of that everybody had very limited knowledge.

360
00:43:18,000 --> 00:43:20,000
They missed a trick.

361
00:43:20,000 --> 00:43:24,000
You think of the, the conquest of the Roman Empire.

362
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:34,000
How many wars they must have had the physicians should have just been with the generals up on the, up on the hill, waiting for the end of the battle and they just go down and see what was left.

363
00:43:34,000 --> 00:43:44,000
It's interesting that you say that you know what I'm going to, you know, I'm going to do this all in the wrong order but you, the fact that you've said that brings up a really interesting fact.

364
00:43:44,000 --> 00:44:05,000
Right. You're absolutely right. It wasn't until the hospital, the large number of hospitals in France opened that this use of observation and large numbers of dead was used as a form of scientific

365
00:44:05,000 --> 00:44:15,000
way of mass gathering of knowledge and of autopsies through the, through the hospitals in Paris.

366
00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:28,000
In the 1800s, medical professionals would do their best to treat patients with whatever they had at the time which was very very limited.

367
00:44:28,000 --> 00:44:37,000
If they died, they'd cut them open and find out what was wrong afterwards. But you're right, they could have done it so much earlier.

368
00:44:37,000 --> 00:44:43,000
Like so much earlier considering the huge amount of death that the, the Romans dealt out.

369
00:44:43,000 --> 00:44:48,000
Well not just the Romans, the Greeks were guilty of it too.

370
00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:59,000
Well they were warring against each other. Exactly. There was, there was the opportunities there for accidental observations of the internals of the human body.

371
00:44:59,000 --> 00:45:05,000
No, you're absolutely right. I wonder if soldiers knew more about the inside of the human body than surgeons did.

372
00:45:05,000 --> 00:45:18,000
Well surgeons cut, did cut people open. So but I would argue that surgeons would know more about the internals of a body than a physician or a apothecary for sure.

373
00:45:18,000 --> 00:45:20,000
You know.

374
00:45:20,000 --> 00:45:36,000
Just another interesting fact which kind of got me. Plato figured out that the brain is where thoughts and feelings happened.

375
00:45:36,000 --> 00:45:53,000
Aristotle debunked him by, because he was a bit of a, well this is possibly unfair, a bit of a sensationalist and he pointed out that when you're truly frightened or when you're truly in love, it's the heart which changes.

376
00:45:53,000 --> 00:46:00,000
Like the beating of the heart physically changes. So he thought that feelings must come from the heart which is why he got that.

377
00:46:00,000 --> 00:46:18,000
But it was, it goes back to Galen who then, through dissection and a few weird, few more of his weirder experiments, proved that, I can't remember how, but he proved that it was the brain again.

378
00:46:18,000 --> 00:46:34,000
And yet, probably through the discovery of the nervous system if I'm honest, you see that interconnection of like cables running from the brain to everything else in the body.

379
00:46:34,000 --> 00:46:43,000
You kind of left with at least a hypothesis that it's the computer of the body as it were.

380
00:46:43,000 --> 00:46:55,000
Well you can understand both as well really, if you think like the physiological reaction to like the adrenal gland kicking in.

381
00:46:55,000 --> 00:47:22,000
Like that, and the flutter in of the heart when you see something that you fancy. You can understand the idea that it came from that end, but likewise you see, think, taste and smell all from the top of your body.

382
00:47:22,000 --> 00:47:35,000
And maybe you can also understand Plato's mentality of like the brain being the hub, the central hub.

383
00:47:35,000 --> 00:47:40,000
Yeah, no that's, yeah, that's fair enough isn't it.

384
00:47:40,000 --> 00:47:55,000
Weirdly enough, just to once again kind of, okay so you had Galen in, Galen died in about 216 AD.

385
00:47:55,000 --> 00:48:17,000
Things got a little bit more chaotic, the Roman Empire broke down, it went massively into decline and the Byzantine Empire was also kind of almost, there were a couple of times when it was reclaimed and stuff but it was mostly declined, things became chaotic.

386
00:48:17,000 --> 00:48:43,000
And then, based on our other discussions and our other discussions throughout like history and stuff. Can you guess where a lot of the, a lot of Hippocrates' and Galen's writings where they ended up going when they became more, when they became rare during the dark ages.

387
00:48:43,000 --> 00:48:52,000
When the old books started just falling apart, the knowledge was lost, the money wasn't there to make new books. Where do you think they went?

388
00:48:52,000 --> 00:49:01,000
I would assume that it went to the Vatican City.

389
00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:06,000
Okay, there was some stuff in the Vatican for sure, for sure.

390
00:49:06,000 --> 00:49:27,000
But funny enough, you're along the right lines, but think about what other monotheistic religion or, in this case, both religion and government kind of rivaled that of Catholicism.

391
00:49:27,000 --> 00:49:34,000
So like, Mecca, that kind of, I can't think of the right place.

392
00:49:34,000 --> 00:49:36,000
You're thinking along the right lines, it's Islam, man.

393
00:49:36,000 --> 00:49:38,000
Islam, yeah.

394
00:49:38,000 --> 00:49:44,000
Yeah, like Islam and once again, like it's really weird when you think about it today.

395
00:49:44,000 --> 00:50:06,000
When you think about Baghdad, you just think of, well, this is really bad, but I'll just say what I think of. I think of war, I think of Saddam Hussein, I think of just kind of, I know this is really bad, but the only images I've seen of it are during wartime.

396
00:50:06,000 --> 00:50:33,000
Yeah, you see the propaganda that is portrayed to give that feeling of desolation and destruction, but Baghdad is probably one of the fewest nations of the old human history that still exists.

397
00:50:33,000 --> 00:50:37,000
Absolutely.

398
00:50:37,000 --> 00:51:04,000
The archaeological sites have been destroyed over the years and their history itself has been destroyed. So all that is left is the sandy desolation that you see portrayed on the news now, but yeah, it's absolutely amazing, or it would have been pre-wartime.

399
00:51:04,000 --> 00:51:23,000
Well, this is it. Like Medina and Baghdad were the places where Islamic scholars who had their own medical traditions and their own ways of doing things.

400
00:51:23,000 --> 00:51:49,000
Like in Western medicine, you have the laboratory and you've got the hospital and the two are often separate. There were a number of hospitals which also acted as centers of learning all throughout the Islamic Golden Age.

401
00:51:49,000 --> 00:51:58,000
Additionally, in Baghdad there was one place, I'm not even going to, I know this is really bad, I'm not going to try, no I'll try.

402
00:51:58,000 --> 00:52:26,000
The House Al-Halmaka, which translates as House of Wisdom, was a library in Baghdad which had just had, it was weird that they translated, they got hold of books from their own conquests, they translated them into Arabic, and then several hundred years later they translated them back into

403
00:52:26,000 --> 00:52:35,000
Latin and yeah, and like it's so it's kind of really interesting that

404
00:52:35,000 --> 00:52:41,000
yeah, the Islamic nation

405
00:52:41,000 --> 00:52:47,000
kind of safe safeguarded a lot of scientific knowledge when it was just kind of being lost.

406
00:52:47,000 --> 00:53:00,000
The Dark Ages were exactly that, they were dark, so much was burned and destroyed. I think one of the safest places it possibly could be is within the Islamic faiths.

407
00:53:00,000 --> 00:53:02,000
Absolutely.

408
00:53:02,000 --> 00:53:31,000
Okay, well moving quickly on. Okay, so one thing I will say is Galen's work was challenged by a number of both Western and Islamic physicians, but nothing ever changed simply because of his popularity, and because of, you know, his work didn't always

409
00:53:31,000 --> 00:53:51,000
his cures didn't always work, but they were the best they had at the time and it was difficult to go against it, there was a kind of it. His work was good but it also had snowballed into popularity and that popularity had almost become a fanaticism within,

410
00:53:51,000 --> 00:53:56,000
yeah, within even intellectual people.

411
00:53:56,000 --> 00:54:05,000
So it's weird that it was the person who disproved

412
00:54:05,000 --> 00:54:12,000
humoral medicine was a gentleman called William Harvey.

413
00:54:12,000 --> 00:54:18,000
You may recognize that name as the hospital in our local area.

414
00:54:18,000 --> 00:54:30,000
Being named after him. Yeah, he was a gentleman who he dissected a lot of animals.

415
00:54:30,000 --> 00:54:42,000
I'm not sure what he, what he did for humans but he dissected a lot of animals looked at the different organs and then actually started doing mathematical equations.

416
00:54:42,000 --> 00:54:57,000
I was believed in humoral medicine that the way digestion worked is that food was transferred into a particular chemical which was then turned directly into blood.

417
00:54:57,000 --> 00:55:20,000
So William Harvey did the maths for it and he found out that our blood vessel would literally rupture, if that was the case. And it's really interesting that he used maths in order to kind of, in order to prove his point, which is why he was able, well, that's one of the small things he did.

418
00:55:20,000 --> 00:55:28,000
He also discovered the circulatory system and did a number of things to do with the heart.

419
00:55:28,000 --> 00:55:37,000
Moving quickly on, after William Harvey, things started to,

420
00:55:37,000 --> 00:55:42,000
yeah, things started to progress in medicine.

421
00:55:42,000 --> 00:55:52,000
Weirdly enough, it wasn't England where a lot, although, no, okay, I'm actually skipping ahead. Okay.

422
00:55:52,000 --> 00:56:02,000
Right, can you, can you tell me when was the first

423
00:56:02,000 --> 00:56:05,000
vaccine?

424
00:56:05,000 --> 00:56:10,000
Oh God.

425
00:56:10,000 --> 00:56:16,000
I thought that the first vaccination would have taken place

426
00:56:16,000 --> 00:56:22,000
18th century.

427
00:56:22,000 --> 00:56:24,000
You're close, is that 1800s or 1700s?

428
00:56:24,000 --> 00:56:26,000
1700s.

429
00:56:26,000 --> 00:56:29,000
18th century is the 1700s.

430
00:56:29,000 --> 00:56:30,000
Yeah.

431
00:56:30,000 --> 00:56:33,000
Okay, you're actually right, you got the right century.

432
00:56:33,000 --> 00:56:41,000
I think it was towards the end of that century though. It's 1796 was the first vaccine.

433
00:56:41,000 --> 00:56:53,000
Was it the same, do you know if it was the same like structure of vaccine now where they obviously vaccinate you with essentially a dead part of the virus?

434
00:56:53,000 --> 00:56:54,000
Similar.

435
00:56:54,000 --> 00:56:55,000
Yeah.

436
00:56:55,000 --> 00:57:20,000
Okay, so this is the weird thing and this is where I'm going to get into it because although I'm going to be honest with you, it was a rivalry between two doctors, two medical, well, two amazing scientists and doctors, one from France, one from Germany who brought about germ theory and brought about

437
00:57:20,000 --> 00:57:34,000
the mainstead of vaccines but the first one was done by an English gentleman called, I think, have I written Edward? So many of my notes are badly written here.

438
00:57:34,000 --> 00:57:45,000
Edward Jenner, who noticed, so at the time, smallpox was the most deadly disease,

439
00:57:45,000 --> 00:57:52,000
ravaging Europe. In Europe alone it was killing 400,000 people a year.

440
00:57:52,000 --> 00:58:08,000
This disease reached even the nobility with five notable monarchs, I haven't remembered their names, succumbing to it over the course of 100 years.

441
00:58:08,000 --> 00:58:11,000
It was just ravaging everywhere.

442
00:58:11,000 --> 00:58:28,000
And then there was a set of people who, and so this is the thing, this was just basic observation, the one set of people who never seem to die from smallpox and never seem to get smallpox, was the milkmaids.

443
00:58:28,000 --> 00:58:30,000
Such a weird observation.

444
00:58:30,000 --> 00:58:31,000
Yeah.

445
00:58:31,000 --> 00:58:34,000
But that's what was going on.

446
00:58:34,000 --> 00:58:57,000
And then, and then Jenner noticed, although the milkmaids didn't ever seem to die of smallpox or ever seem to get smallpox, a number of them did have blisters on their hands with sores which looked slightly similar to smallpox.

447
00:58:57,000 --> 00:59:10,000
And from that, from that one observation, he started thinking that, okay, well, the things they've got on their hands are cowpox.

448
00:59:10,000 --> 00:59:32,000
So if everyone who gets cowpox doesn't seem to die from smallpox, what, you know, what is the worst thing to get? And if I, if I inject somebody with cowpox, will that make them immune to smallpox?

449
00:59:32,000 --> 00:59:54,000
Now the bloke, he didn't have, he had some resources, but he didn't have all the resources in the world. And it was a fairly solid theory because he'd seen, he'd noticed this for a number of years and it had been noticed by the mainstead of society, although, you know, it wasn't a conclusion.

450
00:59:54,000 --> 01:00:00,000
It was just, yeah, yeah, just, you know, it was an oddity.

451
01:00:00,000 --> 01:00:04,000
It was a, huh, that's weird. Move on.

452
01:00:04,000 --> 01:00:15,000
So he did something which has produced incredibly good results, but in and of itself, if it had have gone badly, would have been an evil act.

453
01:00:15,000 --> 01:00:18,000
But there's, there's, there's risk everywhere.

454
01:00:18,000 --> 01:00:29,000
What he did is he took the child of his gardener and injected them with cowpox.

455
01:00:29,000 --> 01:00:32,000
Geez.

456
01:00:32,000 --> 01:00:37,000
Yeah, and this is not like the lot take the bull by the horns.

457
01:00:37,000 --> 01:00:48,000
Yeah, well he took the bull by the horns. It's also annoying. I know this is really bad. But just like just like yourself when we were talking about trepanning.

458
01:00:48,000 --> 01:01:01,000
He didn't do it to himself. He didn't do it to a member of his family. He did it to an indebted servant of his family, which is just a little bit of a right. But you know what?

459
01:01:01,000 --> 01:01:04,000
One more. I don't have time to go into the more immorality of that.

460
01:01:04,000 --> 01:01:09,000
Yeah, I'll test it on somebody who's expendable kind of mentality.

461
01:01:09,000 --> 01:01:18,000
Exactly. Exactly. That's the bit that I really struggle with. But I can't. This is the thing that I can't deny.

462
01:01:18,000 --> 01:01:22,000
I can't deny the results of it. I can't deny that.

463
01:01:22,000 --> 01:01:25,000
You can't justify the end by the means.

464
01:01:25,000 --> 01:01:31,000
Yeah, no. Okay, you know what? That in itself is another podcast.

465
01:01:31,000 --> 01:01:33,000
Yeah, yeah.

466
01:01:33,000 --> 01:01:44,000
Right. Okay, so just really quickly. The kid's name was James fibs. And he.

467
01:01:44,000 --> 01:01:54,000
So this is when he was injected with cowpox. So he's already injected the kid with a disease once several months later.

468
01:01:54,000 --> 01:01:57,000
He injects him with smallpox.

469
01:01:57,000 --> 01:02:06,000
The disease, which is ravaging just to test whether or not he was right or not, just to test whether he was right or not.

470
01:02:06,000 --> 01:02:12,000
Yeah, not not ideal, not very. You know what?

471
01:02:12,000 --> 01:02:15,000
If it wasn't for the result, I would call it a dick move.

472
01:02:15,000 --> 01:02:25,000
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart or a cancerous growth, but a sick human being.

473
01:02:25,000 --> 01:02:29,000
Exactly. It goes against the Hippocratic Oath massively.

474
01:02:29,000 --> 01:02:33,000
This is the this is the thing, though. It worked.

475
01:02:33,000 --> 01:02:41,000
By injecting people with a small amount of cowpox, it made them immune to smallpox.

476
01:02:41,000 --> 01:02:44,000
And so he did. And so and so he did it with other people.

477
01:02:44,000 --> 01:02:51,000
And he did it with people who weren't children. And he did it with people who weren't this, weren't that, weren't that.

478
01:02:51,000 --> 01:02:59,000
And then my question is, my question is, did the kid get autism?

479
01:02:59,000 --> 01:03:03,000
That's not recorded. Maybe, maybe.

480
01:03:03,000 --> 01:03:07,000
I don't know. I don't think so.

481
01:03:07,000 --> 01:03:13,000
It's it's you know, it's not recorded and he probably would have been apprenticed and been a gardener.

482
01:03:13,000 --> 01:03:15,000
I reckon he would have been fine.

483
01:03:15,000 --> 01:03:18,000
Just to clarify for anybody that was offended there, I'm also autistic.

484
01:03:18,000 --> 01:03:22,000
So don't think for a minute that I actually believe that.

485
01:03:22,000 --> 01:03:25,000
Yeah. But that was the first one.

486
01:03:25,000 --> 01:03:36,000
And that was the first vaccine or the first successful vaccine in 1796.

487
01:03:36,000 --> 01:03:43,000
Yeah, I do find it somewhat hypocritical that

488
01:03:43,000 --> 01:03:55,000
Jenner knowingly injected a child with two diseases and locked out and, you know, is acclaimed with awards.

489
01:03:55,000 --> 01:04:05,000
Yet Typhoid Mary just went around her business working as working as a servant.

490
01:04:05,000 --> 01:04:10,000
And yet, because she was a carrier of a disease, was sentenced to prison.

491
01:04:10,000 --> 01:04:13,000
You know, I just but anyway, that's again, that's another thing.

492
01:04:13,000 --> 01:04:18,000
Right. But did you did you know that although that became a vaccine,

493
01:04:18,000 --> 01:04:24,000
can you guess the amount of time it took for another vaccine to be discovered?

494
01:04:24,000 --> 01:04:29,000
Oh, at least 100 years.

495
01:04:29,000 --> 01:04:32,000
Mate, you are on it today. Well done.

496
01:04:32,000 --> 01:04:35,000
All right. Yeah, not quite, but pretty flipping close.

497
01:04:35,000 --> 01:04:38,000
I would have expected like five years.

498
01:04:38,000 --> 01:04:42,000
You know, I've been spoiled by them by the speed of modern progression.

499
01:04:42,000 --> 01:04:45,000
Eighty nine years. Yeah.

500
01:04:45,000 --> 01:04:51,000
Eighty nine years of we've got a cure for we've got a cure for smallpox.

501
01:04:51,000 --> 01:04:54,000
We inject you with a bit of cowpox.

502
01:04:54,000 --> 01:05:01,000
All right. Can you guess the can you guess the disease that was was next cured by vaccination?

503
01:05:01,000 --> 01:05:06,000
I'm going to go with the flu.

504
01:05:06,000 --> 01:05:10,000
It's not quite. No, not quite.

505
01:05:10,000 --> 01:05:14,000
It was rabies. Oh, oh, yeah.

506
01:05:14,000 --> 01:05:17,000
They came out with a vaccination for rabies.

507
01:05:17,000 --> 01:05:19,000
Next on the list, it was then and it's weird.

508
01:05:19,000 --> 01:05:24,000
You had you had smallpox and then it was eighty nine years.

509
01:05:24,000 --> 01:05:32,000
And then you've got the two the two medical giants, which is Louis Pasteur

510
01:05:32,000 --> 01:05:42,000
and Robert Kroc and their their rivalry produced germ theory

511
01:05:42,000 --> 01:05:51,000
and produced a number of vaccines and a number of just and pasteurized milk,

512
01:05:51,000 --> 01:05:55,000
which Louis Pasteur milk in the world.

513
01:05:55,000 --> 01:05:59,000
Well, you can make it you can make or just kind of showed that

514
01:05:59,000 --> 01:06:02,000
because of microbes, things go wrong.

515
01:06:02,000 --> 01:06:08,000
So if you pasteurize, if you eat something and pasteurize it, then it lasts longer,

516
01:06:08,000 --> 01:06:12,000
which apparently saved the French economy at the time.

517
01:06:12,000 --> 01:06:19,000
But anyway, it was those two who then started

518
01:06:19,000 --> 01:06:24,000
working kind of again, working not side by side, but as rivals against each other,

519
01:06:24,000 --> 01:06:32,000
making all kinds of discoveries, discoveries, the Tesla and Edison of medicine.

520
01:06:32,000 --> 01:06:36,000
That's exactly it. Yeah, they didn't like each other,

521
01:06:36,000 --> 01:06:40,000
but they their work was at the same time they did address each other.

522
01:06:40,000 --> 01:06:46,000
It was cordial and awkward at times.

523
01:06:46,000 --> 01:06:50,000
Yeah, it was it's just interesting that you had you had smallpox,

524
01:06:50,000 --> 01:06:55,000
then nothing happened, then you had rabies, followed by cholera,

525
01:06:55,000 --> 01:06:59,000
followed by

526
01:06:59,000 --> 01:07:02,000
hyphoid.

527
01:07:02,000 --> 01:07:09,000
And then they then they then they then they created a vaccine for the plague.

528
01:07:09,000 --> 01:07:13,000
So those were the first five things to be cured.

529
01:07:13,000 --> 01:07:18,000
Those were the first things which were or the first vaccines that were invented.

530
01:07:18,000 --> 01:07:26,000
But there was an 89 years gap between the first and the second.

531
01:07:26,000 --> 01:07:29,000
Oh, dear. Right. OK.

532
01:07:29,000 --> 01:07:33,000
Running out of time now, but we'll just go through

533
01:07:33,000 --> 01:07:35,000
those. Yeah, those two things.

534
01:07:35,000 --> 01:07:41,000
So I also found it interesting that you had Louis Pasteur and Robert

535
01:07:41,000 --> 01:07:45,000
Koch literally

536
01:07:45,000 --> 01:07:50,000
researching going against each other. You had a number of other

537
01:07:50,000 --> 01:07:55,000
theories, whereas people thought that diseases created microbes

538
01:07:55,000 --> 01:07:59,000
and germs rather than germs causing diseases.

539
01:07:59,000 --> 01:08:05,000
People had loads of ideas for, you know, like it was known that if somebody's

540
01:08:05,000 --> 01:08:09,000
sick, isolation sometimes is a good idea,

541
01:08:09,000 --> 01:08:12,000
which you get from

542
01:08:12,000 --> 01:08:16,000
just a number like things like leprosy, where people would be ostracized from the

543
01:08:16,000 --> 01:08:24,000
community simply to stop the disease spreading.

544
01:08:24,000 --> 01:08:31,000
Yeah, Louis Pasteur was an amazing scientist

545
01:08:31,000 --> 01:08:38,000
and did a lot of did a lot of good things.

546
01:08:38,000 --> 01:08:44,000
But his methods, he would ignore evidence

547
01:08:44,000 --> 01:08:48,000
which didn't support his theories,

548
01:08:48,000 --> 01:08:56,000
which isn't great. Whereas Robert, Robert Koch,

549
01:08:56,000 --> 01:09:00,000
his scientific theories and the way that he did things

550
01:09:00,000 --> 01:09:05,000
was better, but the experiments that he did

551
01:09:05,000 --> 01:09:09,000
were also somewhat, well, you know what, like maybe it's wrong to just look at things

552
01:09:09,000 --> 01:09:16,000
through this way, but he literally took Amfrax and injected it into rats.

553
01:09:16,000 --> 01:09:20,000
Yeah, I mean, there's a means. Yeah.

554
01:09:20,000 --> 01:09:23,000
There's a way of doing things, I suppose.

555
01:09:23,000 --> 01:09:30,000
Yeah, like that's it. It pays the rats back for the black death, doesn't it?

556
01:09:30,000 --> 01:09:33,000
You know, you know what? I hadn't thought about it that way.

557
01:09:33,000 --> 01:09:37,000
Maybe, maybe. OK, but you had.

558
01:09:37,000 --> 01:09:46,000
So with Jenner, the first vaccine being 1796, then you had germ theory kind of really being worked on.

559
01:09:46,000 --> 01:09:56,000
But you had it being created in 1880 or you had it really being cemented in 1885.

560
01:09:56,000 --> 01:10:08,000
You had carbolic disinfectant or carbolic soap being mass produced in 1859.

561
01:10:08,000 --> 01:10:12,000
This might not seem like a massive thing, but before that time,

562
01:10:12,000 --> 01:10:16,000
a lot of surgeons wouldn't bother washing their hands.

563
01:10:16,000 --> 01:10:21,000
In fact, if anything, they wouldn't bother washing their tools because they thought that the more blood

564
01:10:21,000 --> 01:10:27,000
that was stained on their things, it showed to the uninitiated that they knew what they were doing

565
01:10:27,000 --> 01:10:30,000
because they'd cut people open before.

566
01:10:30,000 --> 01:10:33,000
Oh, the naivety of arrogance.

567
01:10:33,000 --> 01:10:40,000
Yeah. Yeah. So like, you know, oh, well, look, you can see that surgeon over there with the rusty saw.

568
01:10:40,000 --> 01:10:43,000
He's far more experienced and knows what he's doing so much more.

569
01:10:43,000 --> 01:10:46,000
I mean, much safer, better hands.

570
01:10:46,000 --> 01:10:50,000
Yeah, he knows exactly how to pass tetanus on to the next person.

571
01:10:50,000 --> 01:11:00,000
Exactly. Exactly. So you had carbolic soap and just a hygiene revolution in the 1800s

572
01:11:00,000 --> 01:11:06,000
or 19th century that saved a huge number of lives.

573
01:11:06,000 --> 01:11:11,000
Yeah, just going quickly through a couple of other dates here.

574
01:11:11,000 --> 01:11:17,000
The first X-ray was in 1897.

575
01:11:17,000 --> 01:11:24,000
Weirdly enough, that wasn't by Mary Curie, who I thought was the first person to use X-rays,

576
01:11:24,000 --> 01:11:33,000
but she was the first person to organize and distribute X-rays to the French troops during the First World War.

577
01:11:33,000 --> 01:11:36,000
And she also discovered palladium, which was later.

578
01:11:36,000 --> 01:11:40,000
You know what? I'm not even going to go into how it was used because it's disgusting how it was used,

579
01:11:40,000 --> 01:11:48,000
but she did a lot of stuff, but it wasn't her who originally did the first X-ray.

580
01:11:48,000 --> 01:11:59,000
After that, during this time, things started to move far more drastically as modern medicine was kind of really came into its fruition.

581
01:11:59,000 --> 01:12:09,000
The first insulin shot was in 1922 and a kid who had type 1 diabetes, who normally only would live for months,

582
01:12:09,000 --> 01:12:14,000
lived an additional 13 years as a result of that.

583
01:12:14,000 --> 01:12:24,000
I think they covered that, didn't they? In Call the Midwife. My partner, my wife watches Call the Midwife,

584
01:12:24,000 --> 01:12:31,000
and I believe they covered the first insulin shot in Call the Midwife.

585
01:12:31,000 --> 01:12:33,000
That's interesting because I thought it was set in the sixth.

586
01:12:33,000 --> 01:12:41,000
You know what? Call the Midwife has actually stretched over generations at this point, so that is quite possible.

587
01:12:41,000 --> 01:12:51,000
Penicillin was discovered and made in 1942.

588
01:12:51,000 --> 01:12:59,000
Yeah, he locked himself in a room for I think it was a month until he made a discovery, the bloke that came up with Penicillin,

589
01:12:59,000 --> 01:13:08,000
by which time mould had started to grow on his plates and food and he started to investigate that.

590
01:13:08,000 --> 01:13:12,000
I mean, you know what? Dedication, I guess.

591
01:13:12,000 --> 01:13:21,000
He was like, I am going to make a discovery. I don't care how long it takes. I will be in this room until I make a discovery.

592
01:13:21,000 --> 01:13:24,000
Well, what can I say? He did it.

593
01:13:24,000 --> 01:13:26,000
He did it. That's fair enough.

594
01:13:26,000 --> 01:13:43,000
The NHS was also founded in 1948, which is where I am going to stop the kind of just veil of successes.

595
01:13:43,000 --> 01:13:56,000
But the NHS was produced mostly out, well, before, OK, so before the NHS, there was the National Insurance Act,

596
01:13:56,000 --> 01:14:03,000
which covered working men for their health care.

597
01:14:03,000 --> 01:14:11,000
If you were a man, if you worked and if you were providing for a family, you would get free health care.

598
01:14:11,000 --> 01:14:17,000
If you were a woman, you wouldn't. If you were a child, you wouldn't.

599
01:14:17,000 --> 01:14:24,000
If you were elderly and no longer working, you wouldn't. You might see the problem with that.

600
01:14:24,000 --> 01:14:28,000
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

601
01:14:28,000 --> 01:14:49,000
I mean, it's not quite Inuit. When the elderly are deemed beyond their use in the old Inuit ways, they would just move them outside.

602
01:14:49,000 --> 01:14:55,000
Yeah. Terrible to. Yeah, it's terrible to think, isn't it?

603
01:14:55,000 --> 01:15:06,000
But like with, yeah, well, the National Insurance Act was incomplete.

604
01:15:06,000 --> 01:15:18,000
So the NHS was founded as troops returned from the Second World War, who they felt they had a sense of entitlement,

605
01:15:18,000 --> 01:15:26,000
which to be fair, they should have. They fought for a country and for a government.

606
01:15:26,000 --> 01:15:41,000
They fought. They fought hard. They saw a lot of horrible things and they came back and they expected to be looked after by the England that they had fought for.

607
01:15:41,000 --> 01:15:50,000
Likewise, a lot of people who, well, sorry, a lot of women who had fought or who had like worked in the munitions factories

608
01:15:50,000 --> 01:15:55,000
and done a lot of the jobs that needed to be done whilst the blokes were away at war,

609
01:15:55,000 --> 01:16:04,000
likewise had contributed to the war effort and therefore felt there was this growing sense of entitlement

610
01:16:04,000 --> 01:16:11,000
in amongst the people of England that health care should be covered by the government.

611
01:16:11,000 --> 01:16:17,000
And so even within a Conservative government, there was a scheme that was produced.

612
01:16:17,000 --> 01:16:24,000
And then within a coalition government, the NHS was put forward.

613
01:16:24,000 --> 01:16:37,000
Unfortunately, the NHS covered England and Wales and not yet Scotland, but later kind of rose to do this.

614
01:16:37,000 --> 01:16:48,000
I'm, yeah, before we get into the problems with the modern pharmaceutical companies and with the NHS in its present time,

615
01:16:48,000 --> 01:16:54,000
I am at least for all its problems, I am at least glad that the NHS exists.

616
01:16:54,000 --> 01:16:57,000
Yeah, yeah, I'm definitely with you on that.

617
01:16:57,000 --> 01:17:06,000
Yeah, just the fact that it doesn't, although with the forms, you know what, I won't even go down that one.

618
01:17:06,000 --> 01:17:13,000
No matter who you are, you can seek medical aid and advice.

619
01:17:13,000 --> 01:17:20,000
Like there's a really good video that I started watching, didn't get to the end to before this.

620
01:17:20,000 --> 01:17:29,000
And it was an address from the Conservative Health Minister laying out what the NHS would be.

621
01:17:29,000 --> 01:17:37,000
And I'm going to be honest with you, it was a huge promise.

622
01:17:37,000 --> 01:17:47,000
It was a massive promise. And I also was surprised by, despite the fact that the film was from the 1940s and it was a Conservative Health Minister,

623
01:17:47,000 --> 01:17:52,000
it was completely legible and completely down to earth and frank.

624
01:17:52,000 --> 01:17:58,000
It was a, this will be available. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

625
01:17:58,000 --> 01:18:03,000
No one's going to force you to, but this is available now.

626
01:18:03,000 --> 01:18:13,000
You will be able to see a doctor for care. There will be no charge for any of this, any consultations.

627
01:18:13,000 --> 01:18:20,000
There will be, and it was just, it was actually kind of really inspiring to see.

628
01:18:20,000 --> 01:18:24,000
Yeah, it was a good speech is all I can say on that.

629
01:18:24,000 --> 01:18:34,000
All right, finally, before we stop, do you have any favourite stories of medical mishaps or medical breakthroughs?

630
01:18:34,000 --> 01:18:45,000
No, I think my favourite story, as I said earlier in the podcast, is how Panacillin was found in, like stumbled across.

631
01:18:45,000 --> 01:18:51,000
And it was the determination of the chap, I can't even remember his name now, who?

632
01:18:51,000 --> 01:18:59,000
Alexander Fleming. Yeah, Fleming, who, it was his grim determination he set out to make a discovery.

633
01:18:59,000 --> 01:19:03,000
He wasn't even sure what discovery he would make.

634
01:19:03,000 --> 01:19:14,000
And yet he locked himself away until he found Panacillin, which I thought was incredible and hilarious at the same time.

635
01:19:14,000 --> 01:19:18,000
Could you imagine somebody going, I'm going to make a discovery and then locking themselves away?

636
01:19:18,000 --> 01:19:23,000
Like a thought is preposterous.

637
01:19:23,000 --> 01:19:29,000
It is, but like the annoying thing is geniuses often are preposterous, you know.

638
01:19:29,000 --> 01:19:38,000
But the problem is the only difference between someone who's, well, often the only difference between someone who's recognised as a genius

639
01:19:38,000 --> 01:19:49,000
and somebody who looks like a crazy person is just that proven usefulness or that proven, markable achievement.

640
01:19:49,000 --> 01:19:58,000
Up until they have that, every genius is just passed aside as weird.

641
01:19:58,000 --> 01:20:11,000
So I don't know, maybe. Yeah, but it is. I definitely I don't think I would discover anything quite as useful as Panacillin if I locked myself in a room.

642
01:20:11,000 --> 01:20:15,000
I, yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'm not.

643
01:20:15,000 --> 01:20:18,000
Yeah, I just I don't think I just don't think I could do it.

644
01:20:18,000 --> 01:20:29,000
No, and I think the fact that he had the belief in himself to to do it and then executed it, it's just incredible.

645
01:20:29,000 --> 01:20:37,000
I one of my favourite medical things is that

646
01:20:37,000 --> 01:20:51,000
as although although although modern medicine was moving forwards, there were several magazine zines out there which would warn people against

647
01:20:51,000 --> 01:20:58,000
because you had a lot of fake medicine mixed in with the real and it wasn't just fake medicine as in

648
01:20:58,000 --> 01:21:09,000
shamanistic rituals or faith healing or anything like necessary along those lines, although I do believe there are I do believe there are

649
01:21:09,000 --> 01:21:14,000
documentations where faith healing has worked, but that is another conversation for another time.

650
01:21:14,000 --> 01:21:23,000
Like there were lots of fake medicines out there. Yeah, but there were placeboic tablets that were distributed under the guises.

651
01:21:23,000 --> 01:21:30,000
Yes, yes, that's exactly it. And charms and things like that that were sold that were supposed to ward off.

652
01:21:30,000 --> 01:21:35,000
The placebo tablets are the ones that I'm going after here.

653
01:21:35,000 --> 01:21:42,000
The first emperor of China took

654
01:21:42,000 --> 01:21:49,000
it was either zinc or lead tablets in order to try and gain immortality.

655
01:21:49,000 --> 01:21:56,000
And die. Yeah, well, it died of lead poisoning.

656
01:21:56,000 --> 01:22:10,000
It was it was either lead or zinc poisoning. The thing that really surprised me is that as late as the 1800s, there were tablets for

657
01:22:10,000 --> 01:22:24,000
Yeah, there were tablets which were these. I can't even remember the exact name of it. There were these there were these blue tech tablets which were being sold as

658
01:22:24,000 --> 01:22:30,000
both an amphrodisiac sorry, aphrodisiac and as a contraceptive.

659
01:22:30,000 --> 01:22:38,000
And as you know, these things were like an all in one thing and these were being sold in England.

660
01:22:38,000 --> 01:22:45,000
And they were lead and zinc tablets. Is that why Viagra is blue?

661
01:22:45,000 --> 01:22:54,000
You know what? I hadn't thought of that. I had not thought of that. But you know what? That would be interesting.

662
01:22:54,000 --> 01:23:01,000
But it just surprises me that like as late as the 1800s,

663
01:23:01,000 --> 01:23:09,000
poison was legitimately being sold on a mass produced scale as medicine.

664
01:23:09,000 --> 01:23:17,000
Yeah, it doesn't surprise me so much. But no, I get I get the I mean everybody wants their own piece, don't they?

665
01:23:17,000 --> 01:23:20,000
Their own bit of the puzzle.

666
01:23:20,000 --> 01:23:22,000
That's it.

667
01:23:22,000 --> 01:23:31,000
Well, on that depressing note, looking forward to the next podcast listeners, if you're still listening, well done for getting through that.

668
01:23:31,000 --> 01:23:40,000
I hope you've learned a thing or two. Hope you've learned a couple of interesting facts from this and had some fun listening along.

669
01:23:40,000 --> 01:23:47,000
Yeah, thanks again to my cousin Emily for a lot of this information.

670
01:23:47,000 --> 01:23:57,000
And yeah, have have good weeks, everybody. Speak to you all again soon. Goodbye from me and goodbye from me.

671
01:24:17,000 --> 01:24:27,000
Thank you.