398: No Such Thing As An Upside-Down Upside-Down Bat

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from Peterborough.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that the man known as the father of British midwifery was called Willie Smelly.

So childish.

Childish.

Willie Smelly.

So Willie Smelly, he lived between 1697 and 1763.

He was a Scottish obstetrician, obstetrician, obstetrician.

Sure, I'm sure James can make one of those work in the edit.

He lived in London and he was basically, you know, obviously midwifery was going on for thousands and thousands of years, but he was the first male who was allowed sort of into the game.

And he did quite a lot of things to sort of turn it into somewhere that was a bit more safer for having babies he sort of helped to advance the use of forceps with some designs and he was a very important figure in that world he designed a mannequin didn't he that would let you learn how to to deliver a baby it was known as the mock woman or sometimes this most curious machine

It had legs and feet and that would have shoes and stockings on it, so that made it quite realistic.

Cool.

There was an anatomist called Robert Campbell who said he could scarcely tell the difference between the machine and a real live woman.

Wow.

This machine didn't have a head.

Yeah.

It does.

It sounds terrifying.

It really does.

It had a stomach that was full of leather,

which I think represented the baby.

Well, there's a little wax doll in there as well, also of a baby.

And it had a bladder which you could fill up.

which was helpful with a little cork stopper like the real female bladder.

So you could break the water.

Was that the idea?

Was that for breaking the water?

Yeah, he sometimes used real bones and like real skeletons.

I think he made at least four of these weird robot women.

And for one of them, yeah, he used actual like he made ligaments and muscles and they moved like real people and used an actual skeleton of a mother and baby, I think.

And he used to use real people as well, as in pregnant women.

And he used to have a thing, because he was very good at his job as well.

So a lot of people wanted him to be the midwife for the job.

And so he would say, I'll do it for free.

I'll waive my fee if I can do it in front of all my students and they can observe and I can do a sort of lecture as I'm doing it.

I do wonder though if you want your midwife to be focused mostly on delivering the child not on delivering a good lecture.

If they want to deliver one thing well, you want it to be the child.

Yeah, today's lecture is what not to do during birth.

What?

Stop the birth.

Stop the birth.

Hi, everybody.

Just wanted to let you know today's birth is sponsored by HelloFresh.

This model, we don't have any of them anymore.

They've all disappeared and we don't know where they are.

We have a few others from around the same time.

There's one in France called the Boudin-Pinard model.

That was kind of similar.

It was made of rubber.

It had a vaginal opening with a thumb screw so you could make it bigger and smaller.

Cracking it.

Some of them work like that, actually.

Yeah.

The non-cawk, the cheaper vaginas comes with the screw-talk.

This one also had a rubber rectum.

And the rubber rectum was there because there was something called the Ritgen maneuver.

And one version of doing that is the midwife would put her fingers up the bum of the mother and then they would kind of maneuver the head a little bit if it was in the wrong place and it would stop the perineum from getting in trouble.

This Ritgan maneuver, this Ritgan maneuver evolved from a technique from the ancient Greeks.

It was first proposed by a Greek physician called Sauranus.

No.

Very nice, unbelievable.

Wow.

Sauranus of Ephesus.

Can you have normal determinism when the words won't mean that for another 2,000 years?

Wow.

He was controversial,

William Smelly, because

men weren't allowed into the midwifery game, and male midwives were seen as controversial when they started practicing.

And they had to work by touch because there was a risk they would see something indecent so some of them had to kind of work with a sheet in between them and the delivery

so they had yeah yeah i think even even up until the 19th century any men working on the female body and by the 19th century it was all men women had sort of been edged out of the practice were encouraged not to look directly at a woman's private part so obstetricians were told uh specifically

well they were obstetricians had specific instructions that to reassure a female patient that they're not looking at her private parts, they should gaze into the distance or maintain constant eye contact with her.

What a stressful.

What a stressful session.

Giving birth already, very, very, very stressful.

Imagine seeing your medical team walk in.

They're all in blindfolds.

Some of them are looking at the mountain over there.

One of them just staring you straight in the face.

Doing put the fingers at the bum like it's put the tail on the donkey.

Oh my god.

And it was really controversial for the men to come in, wasn't it?

Because before that, all of the midwifery was done by women.

There was someone called Elizabeth Nehel, who was writing in the 18th century, who really thought that this was a terrible idea.

She thought that basically all the men had come in and they were finding problems that weren't there, and the best way to do it was to be a natural birth.

And, you know, you're getting all these forceps in, but if you just leave it, it'll probably be fine in most cases.

And she said that a lot of the surgeons were coming in and they were being fast-tracked to become a midwife.

And people like William Smelly were trying to teach them really, really really quickly.

And barbers, tailors, and pork butchers were coming in to become midwives in a short period of time.

Gosh, you would ask, wouldn't you?

What was your previous career?

The men were called, when they started becoming midwives, they were called either man midwife or he midwife

and the masters of the universe.

Exactly.

But

it kind of doesn't work because midwife,

the actual term itself, itself, it literally means with wife.

So you are the mid to the wife.

Oh, really?

So, yeah, so that was just an extra bit of word you didn't need.

It was, yeah, everyone is a midwife if you're helping give birth.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

You know, you said that Willie Smalley, he developed the forceps, which was sort of one of his main contributions.

So he didn't invent it.

He made it better.

And I guess you can all picture what a forceps is, right, in birth.

It's sort of like a pair of scissors, but instead of the scissor bits, you have like a clamp.

It's more like a pair of asparagus tongs.

It's like that.

Man of the people, Andrew Hunter-Marin.

Or like two eyelash curlers clamped together.

More like that, but gigantic ones for a giant.

Yeah, to clamp onto a child's head.

Anyway,

he developed forceps, which were only used in 2% of childbirth even then.

So it's weird that it was thought it was so revolutionary.

But forceps before that, the design was a complete secret for more than 100 years.

So there was this one family that invented them, the Chamberlain family, and from the mid-16th to the mid-17th century, over five generations, they had to keep it completely secret.

So they had this elaborate ceremony.

When they arrived at the house of a woman in labor, they'd arrive in this big carriage.

They'd have this massive wooden box that had all like carvings all over it.

It would take two people to carry the forceps in.

No one was allowed to see inside.

It looked like it was some gigantic instrument.

No one else is allowed in the room when the woman's giving birth.

And then, you know, they'd make weird noises, like ringing bells and making weird sounds, so that the people outside the door thought what is this amazing instrument wow no one knew i read that i read that sometimes they blindfolded the woman giving birth was anyone could anyone see no one could see in the room no

blind man's muff was what they called it oh my god wow

wow

they were two brothers weren't they the chamberlains both called peter Yes.

So weird.

So weird.

We should say there's another controversial thing about Willie Smelly,

which is that it turns out he might have been a serial killer.

And the four of us discovered this very late in our research.

It really feels like his name has buried the headline throughout history.

I don't think it's even worth mentioning.

You know, you do one dodgy thing.

Yeah, but no, it turns out...

Apparently quite a few dodgy, a serial number of dodgy things.

You do a series of dodgy things.

Yeah.

And the idea was that he and another guy called John Hunter, I I think, wanted to be the best midwives and wanted to kind of become famous for their new techniques.

And so they needed people to test it out on.

And in the kind of Birken Hare kind of style, they knocked people off so that they could get their cadavers.

Called Birking, in fact.

I don't know.

Which seems like, where's Hare gone in that verb?

All the papers talk about it as, you know, he was part of a bit of Birking.

I think Hare's like, it's cool, Lee.

I'm very happy.

Is it definitive?

It seems like there's a lot.

I guess, I mean, he wasn't tried, so it's never been

hard to kind of know for certain, certain, but it does seem like there's lots of circumstantial evidence of people not asking, you know, like even not asking questions about where the bodies are coming from, that kind of thing.

I think it's quite...

There was someone at the time who raised it during his lifetime, and he almost stopped practicing for a while just because he thought, you know, either the rumor is becoming too prevalent amongst people, or it was true, and I better stop.

We don't know which, but it's come up more recently that someone has gone through all of the

lists of women that he had access to and how did he get that many women.

And it kind of seems like all the academics who love him, because he was so influential, there were hospitals named after him that have since closed.

But up until 1992.

Why wouldn't you go to the Willy Smelly Hospital?

But so it seems that someone has written this paper and a lot of academics have looked at it and gone, yeah, it's very compelling.

Damn it.

Because Because they love him so much and they almost don't want to look at it, but it looks like it could be true.

So on midwives who aren't serial killers,

there were some.

The job of a midwife sometimes entailed giving women orgasms.

This was, so there was this belief from basically from ancient Greece until the early 19th century that, you know, in the 19th century, everything got very buttoned up and no one was supposed to enjoy anything anymore.

But before that, everyone thought that it was damaging for women if they didn't have orgasms frequently enough.

And Galen, you know, the ancient physician, said that women would suffer from limb aches and things like that due to the build-up of female generative fluids within.

And so, in the 16th century, a doctor called Forrestus, a Dutch doctor, said that women should employ midwives to manually stimulate them on a regular basis if they weren't getting enough sex.

Fair enough.

Absolutely fair enough.

Gosh.

Yeah, the idea.

The midwife's coming around again, darling.

Are you sure?

I didn't even know you were expecting a baby.

I will be soon.

Yeah, the idea with Galen was that he thought that a woman would have exactly the same genitals as a man, but just inside out.

And so that was why the man needed to orgasm in order to create the seeds, so the women would have to do the same.

That was the idea.

He thought also if a woman got too hot, that her genitals would fall outside of her body and she'd turn into a man.

So

it's not true.

That's not true.

Just busting another myth.

Did you know that some midwives are hamsters?

What's this?

It's a person called a hamster or a hundred.

No, it's not.

It's not a bad thing.

If this is what the NHS has resorted to, then it does need more funding.

There's a specific kind of hamster called a jungarian hamster.

The paternal hamster, the dad, will mechanically assist the delivery.

Actually will help the mother give birth to the litter of baby hamsters and it does it does a proper job.

Like, will consume the amniotic fluid, tick,

proper good service here,

eat the placenta, tick.

They'll even open the baby's airways by licking its nostrils.

Okay.

So that is.

They're not the only animals that do it.

So we know that some monkeys do it as well.

They like to perform that.

And in some cases, bats have been observed doing it as well.

So there's a biologist called Thomas Kuntz, and he lives in Florida.

And hey, listen.

Come on.

Just because we've had sore in his willy-smelly, Kuntz doesn't need to be lumped in there.

And he saw, so basically, he was in the lab.

Why is it so hard for a bat to give birth?

Because you're upside down.

No.

You're like, push, push.

Exactly.

You're meant to flip the other way.

So he was in his lab, and suddenly there was all this drama because a bat was in distress, and another bat kind of flew over and was like, hey, come on, we've got to help the bat out.

And so she flies back and they go and observe it.

And this other bat who's not related by blood gets next to this bat.

So bats actually do flip upside down to give birth.

So they're on their feet.

But this bat was upside down, still hanging.

So this other bat flipped upside down and started going

to show this other bat.

You know, you've used upside down to mean both the right way up and upside down

on multiple occasions and no one has any idea.

Okay, so the non-pregnant bat has flipped onto its legs the wrong way around and is going

and straining and showing the upside down bat how it should be done.

And then the upside bat goes, oh, okay, flips over.

And then the bat not pregnant starts licking the genitals of the bat to sort of help lubricate it.

It's so awkward.

There's a kid in the front row.

I'm really

trying to work out how to say what I needed to say here.

I think what happened there was about five minutes ago, you worked out what you were going to have to say.

You're like, I'm just going to keep saying upside down until it stops.

Look, we need to move on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that there is a town in Mexico where one person in 10 is a dentist.

I know what you're thinking.

That sounds about normal.

You know, it sounds like a roughly normal ratio.

It's not.

It's not at all.

It's called Los Algodones, and it is the dentistry capital, maybe of the world, certainly of Mexico.

It's got 350 dentists in it, but that is one person in 10 there.

So, who are they?

Well, surely, if there's not many people, who are they actually dentistry?

Each other.

Each other.

It's got no teeth left.

No, no, no.

It's not that.

So it's a huge place for health tourism.

So people who don't have dental insurance in the USA will travel because it's very near the border with the United States.

But just to give you an idea of how weird this proportion is, one person in 10.

So

they have to look after after 320 teeth each, right?

Because, you know, one person is I know I'm I'm sort of assuming there's no health tourism now, but that would be 320 teeth each.

In the UK, each dentist has to look after about 53,000 teeth.

Right.

Wow, that's a lot of teeth.

It's less than one tooth a day, isn't it?

That's, you know, absolutely.

They can spend a day and a bit on every single tooth.

Yeah, yeah.

They've got 200 times as many dentists per head of population in the town.

Los Algodones is only four square blocks in size, and the population is about 40 times smaller than just take a random city, Peterborough.

Wow.

You kiss us.

It's also extremely sunny, sunniest place on earth.

So great dental care.

And

on Earth, well, the sunniest place on Earth is Yuma, which is just on the other side of the border.

I mean, literally a 20-minute drive away, less.

So I think it can also be called the sunniest place on Earth.

That's amazing.

Yeah, it gets 305 sunny blue sky days a year.

Wow.

Interestingly, the best way to get there from the sunniest place is through a place called the Gap.

So, for if you've got teeth problems, I love it.

But the gap is just what they call a huge hole in Donald Trump's wall.

Oh, really?

Who'd have thought if anyone can fill in a gap, it's the talent dentist next to it?

I was reading a bit about dental tourism generally, and dental holiday package deals are just abound if anyone's interested.

I didn't realise this, but you like you you go online to dentalholiday.co.uk and for £3,200, you can get a trip to Slovakia, which includes a pampada at Hot Springs Spa Island, a return boat trip down the Danube, and eight crowns or veneers.

Wow.

Isn't that bizarre?

Sounds great.

And it was actually, it was a weird thing in COVID earlier on this year in Ireland.

I saw Ireland had specific travel bans which allowed for health tourism, but you couldn't go just on holiday.

And suddenly, people going to Tenerife rocketed, and it turns out they also have quite a lot of dentists in Tenerife.

And a study found that 40% of people traveling from Dublin airport on flights had a letter from a dentist in Tenerife saying, yeah, yeah, this person definitely deserves dental treatment.

They need to come here.

That's amazing.

Have you guys heard of

the Big Thomas?

The Big Thomas?

Yeah.

That sounds like a euphemism for something.

It does, doesn't it?

Well, he was a French man, and his name name actually was, his name was Jean-Tomas, which is a euphemism for something, but that's not what, that joke wasn't known at the time, so he would have been fine.

He was an either was Sorenus, but it's still funny.

He was a dentist in Paris in the 18th century, and he was...

for 50 years a massive fixture on the Pont Neuf Bridge, and he was the most famous dentist in Paris.

He was this huge guy, and if he couldn't get your tooth out, he would lift the patient in the air by the tooth to try and get it out.

he was incredible um his motto was dentem sinon maxilam the tooth and if not the tooth the jaw i

i'm getting something

incredible incredible guy um he was in an opera as a comic character he um he was called the honor of the universe and the terror of the human jaw um he was quite quite the man he was once pranked by a group of medical students who attached four rockets to the underside of his cart because he had a sort of travel, you know, wheeled surgery, basically.

And then when he was in the middle of extracting a tooth, they let off the rockets and the cart blew up and he fell over on the patient.

And that was...

And what about the patient?

It doesn't say what happened to the patient.

That was the equivalent of, you know, Beatles About or whatever.

19th century Paris.

I reckon there were a lot of people with only half a draw in that town who were very much behind the medical students during that prank.

But was that 1700s, you say?

Because that was when becoming a tooth puller became such a lucrative industry suddenly because sugar consumption quadrupled, I think, in that century.

And so suddenly people's teeth are rotten all over the place.

And they used a thing called a pelican, which was like shaped like a pelican beak and it clamped onto your tooth and gum and then you levered it out.

You kind of twisted a tooth out and it came out.

I saw a pelican in the park the other day.

Great story, Andy.

No, but

they are surprisingly huge.

They are.

Have you seen a pelican in the flesh?

I have seen them.

They're massive.

These were smaller than they were not a size match

yeah as you were yeah

nonetheless guys check it out if you google pelican length you're gonna you're gonna be surprised thank god you didn't let james cut you off from the rest of that story

sorry do you know that your dentist can tell if you're scared of them because you tell you say

they're kind of fronting up they can tell oh really and it's bad news as well because it make can make them fuck up

so there was this study um and what they did was they gave students some t-shirts and they kind of either gave them a really stressful exam or they gave them a really calm lecture.

I don't know what a calm lecture is, but they gave them one anyway.

And then they put the t-shirts on mannequins and they got the dentist to do some dental work on them.

And they found that the dentists who were doing work on the ones with sweaty, scared T-shirts did a much worse job.

They sometimes would like damage the neighbouring teeth when they were trying to get one out.

They'd pull another one out.

Oh, really?

So

they can smell fear?

They can smell fear.

That makes me more scared of them.

Yeah.

And then that's going to make them even worse, which makes you even more scared.

Well, this is why I haven't been for 10 years, James.

Gosh.

You don't need to go as often as they say.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

I mean, I turn more once a decade, once every couple of decades, kind of gal, and that's probably not often enough.

But, like, how often do most dentists recommend you?

Every six months.

Every six months.

That's 75% of dentists in America say every six months.

That has no no basis in scientific fact.

That's been around since the 18th century.

And actually, the NHS recommends that for children, it should be kind of once a year.

And for adults, you should be okay going every two years.

Oh,

there you go.

Nice.

That's really encouraging.

The first woman who was a member of the British Dental Association was this really cool girl called Lillian Lindsay.

I was reading about her.

It was...

I think it was sort of towards the end of the 19th century.

And she did it because she sort of made a throwaway rebellious mark to her headmistress.

And she became one of the leading dentists in the country.

She was head of the British Dental Journal, president of the British Dental Association.

She was like Britain's leading dentist by the 1930s, 1940s.

The reason she became a dentist was because she was at school and her headmistress called her into her office and said, Look, Lillian, I think you're destined to be a teacher of deaf and dumb people.

And Lillian said, I absolutely refuse to be a teacher.

And the headmistress said, then I will prevent you from doing anything else.

Very interesting teaching style back in the Victorian age.

And so Lillian replied straight away in her words.

She said, like a flash, I replied, you cannot prevent me from being a dentist.

And then she immediately realized, knowing nothing of dentistry, having stated that boldly, she would have to become a dentist.

And she did.

And she kept on not being allowed.

Like when she applied to the National Dental Hospital, she had to do her interview outside on the pavement because the dean who was interviewing her said that she would distract all the men in there too much if she came inside.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Rough.

It was a a bit easier to become a dentist in Mexico back in the day.

The first female dentist in Mexico was Margarita Chorne y Salazar.

And she's actually the first woman in Latin America to get a university diploma in anything.

It was in dentistry.

But to get her degree in dentistry, she needed a letter from her dentist saying that she knew how to be a dentist.

That's so good.

But the truth is that she had been practicing, I think someone else in her family had been a dentist.

And when they couldn't do it, she would do the work.

And then she was like, well, I should get a degree for this because I do know how to do it.

And they said, well, where's your evidence?

Here's a letter.

Right.

It's weird because, yeah, I don't think that my dentist would be a good judge of how good a dentist I would be.

I'd show mild curiosity about the procedures, but, you know, it's not enough.

You know, when you're training to be a dentist, you have to work on something called a phantom head.

And it's just, it's literally, it's just the name they provide for the yeah, like that mannequin, that birthing birthing

device mannequin was also a phantom, wasn't it?

It wasn't.

I think phantom just meant something that was not real.

But didn't we say the mannequin was missing a head?

Yeah, I think this sounds like it was the head in Willie Smelly's body.

I think that's it.

Yeah, yeah.

You used to have to provide your own teeth.

Not your own teeth.

You had to provide teeth

for the phantom head.

Where did you get those from?

I don't know.

Imagine if your first dental suite you went into the room and said, okay, we're going to extract all of your teeth, of course, because

put them in this mannequin.

What?

yeah but i spoke to a dentist about this and she confirmed that since the passing of the tissues act you no longer have to bring your own teeth which is good but she said the phantom tit the phantom heads sometimes leak on you in the room so that's a bit stressful

leak on you lovely leak on they leak on you yeah okay what do they leak

I don't ask follow-up questions.

That's what I've learned.

How much do you reckon is the most expensive electric toothbrush on the market today?

So something available to all of us in like boots.

Well, to all of us who have enough money for it, which might not be any of us.

£1,000.

Really nice one.

£1,000.

£5,000.

£3,000.

Wow, you've all gotten.

This is really unusual for these guessing games.

Not only Dan goes for $10 billion,

Andy goes for 25p and Anna goes for I don't care.

But in this case, you've all gone round about the right amount.

It's $4,200.

So not far off £3,000, really.

That's incredible.

Bargain.

And it's

the design, durability, it's got an antibacterial coating.

I mean, it is that much, but the bristle heads, they give you a free one every six months.

Oh, so you're saving money, really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Actually, that only works for the first three years.

After that, it's £400.

Wow.

But if you use the offer code fish,

we do need to move on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that in the Yazidi religion, Adam left paradise when a peacock pecked an anus in him so he could defecate, and you're not allowed to poo in the Garden of Eden.

So he left to have a poo is he had to

go outside to take a poo.

And then there was the doors didn't let him back in.

Not allowed back in once he left the Garden of Eden.

You can't just pop out and in, willy-nilly.

So

really smelly.

So was he, so sorry, he didn't need to go to the loo until this peacock pecked him at a bottom?

Well, first of all, the peacock tricked him.

So basically the peacock is this uh a guy called Tawusi Melek.

So uh in Yazidi religion there's God and then God has a bunch of sort of messengers, angels on earth.

The most important one is this peacock messenger, angel, Tawusi Melek.

And Melek had to lure Adam out of paradise and he did so by feeding him a grain of wheat.

And then as soon as Adam had eaten this grain of wheat, because he hasn't eaten for eternity, so that immediately goes straight through him, and he's desperate for the loo.

And at that point, Toezi Malek says, Okay, I'll peck you in Anus.

But now I've done that, you are going to have to go outside to poo.

And then he's out and he can't get back in.

And in this, in this creation story, you're thinking, Where is Eve?

And she's not really a part of this, right?

No,

she's not instrumental to the birth of.

She's there, but she isn't, she doesn't create the human race.

Yeah, in fact, it sounds like he.

Oh, geez, this little boy in the front row.

So he's upside down.

So he spends a bit of time with himself and

what he harvests in in the process gets put into a jar.

Have you ever considered setting cryptic crosswords today?

But from the jar that's contained, that is where the birth of humanity came from, right?

Yeah, Yazidi people anyway.

The Yazidi people are descended from Adam's divine essence, I think was what you were trying to say.

But then Eve's divine essence was put in another jar and that became all the worms and scorpions on earth according to the story.

Wow.

Where's her PR?

This sounds like a much more fun and strange Garden of Eden myth, doesn't it?

Maybe we're just so used to.

We're so used to it.

It's all nuts, isn't it?

Yeah, it's just a new version.

It's just got detail of pecking an anus.

That's the only thing.

Well, I mean, that's more fun.

And it's a peacock.

Peacocks are they're fun.

They're more fun than a snake.

Bird is, yeah.

I would say.

There are some versions where a dove pecks his anus, and some where a raven pecks his anus, but everyone can agree that some kind of bird pecks his anus.

Gosh.

We can all agree.

Zanus was a bad thing.

It's the people's front of Judea, isn't it?

Yeah.

There are so many of these Garden of Eden stories, and there was a big rash in the 19th century of people going looking for it or claiming that they'd found it.

So

one

Victorian historian, the first president of Boston University, claimed it was at the North Pole because he said it's definitely there, it's got to be there.

That he had lots and lots of evidence, published a book which is about 500 pages long saying it's definitely at the North Pole.

Evidence is a strong word, right?

For Warren Warren.

Really, a very strong word.

William Fairfield Warren.

Yeah, that was his name.

Yeah, yeah.

His evidence.

Well, I think his evidence was that we've never found the Garden of Eden and no one's ever been to the North Pole.

That's pretty much it.

It was circumstantial.

It feels like

it must be that.

Wasn't there a bishop who said it was on Mars as well?

To really?

Yeah, ages ago.

No, we've never been to Mars.

And we'd never been to Mars and still haven't.

Very good point, James.

See, that was more sensible because, you know, longer-term thinking, the whole North Pole thing, we were going to get there in the very near future, at which point we were going to discover it's not the Garden of Eden, unless they've all lied to us.

There was another person who had a theory about where the Garden of Eden was, and that was the first female presidential candidate for the United States.

So, Victoria Woodhull, who we must have mentioned before, ran for president in 1872.

And she also wrote a big speech called The Garden of Eden in the 1870s about what she thought it was.

And she basically was ridiculing all of these people who thought the Garden of Eden was at the North Pole or on Mars or whatever.

And she said that

any schoolboy of 12 years of age who should read the description of this garden and not discover it has no geographical significance ought to be reprimanded for stupidity.

And then she went on to argue that it's all a metaphor for the female body and the female reproductive system.

So, you know, in the Garden of Eden, there are four rivers that meet.

And she said they are the four fluids of the body.

So one river is the blood, one is the bowels, one is the urinary, and one is the reproductive system.

So the Euphrates is the reproductive system up which the sperm flows in the biblical metaphor, and that was what the Bible intended us to think in order to inseminate the Garden of Eden.

Okay.

We've got more than four, though, right?

Well, they didn't know about bile ducts and things at the time, I guess.

We had like tears.

That's one that's not been mentioned.

That's true.

Yeah, maybe she should have done tears instead of bowels.

Maybe bowels and urine could have gone together.

Snot?

If you have various very snotty.

Yeah, these are more streams, I think, streams and tributaries.

Gaul.

Gaul is another one.

Gaul, yeah.

Take it up.

Maybe this is why she didn't become president.

It was certainly a pretty weird stump speech, yeah.

I was looking at some other myths about birds and anuses and all that kind of stuff.

Oh my goodness.

The Taulipang people of North America, of South America, sorry, they have a story where all animals used to have no anus and they would always defecate through their mouths.

But the anus was actually a separate animal called Puitu.

And Puitu, the anus, would wander around slowly, but he would always annoy people by farting in their faces.

What?

And then running away.

What is this story?

Yeah, give us a bit more.

What does this mean?

What happened next?

Well, it's a great story, isn't it?

Well, you need to know what happens next.

Sorry.

I'll keep going.

So the two parrots decided that they'd had enough of him farting in their faces, so they went to try and capture the anus.

And eventually they did, and they tied him up.

And and then they decided to cut up the anus and spread it out to all of the animals in the world the tapir was really eager to get a piece and they cut out a huge piece and that's why the tapir has a larger anus than other animals

who's who sorry whose creation story is this this is the taulipang right right i don't know it's a good animal story i think i prefer andy's pelican story

it just had so much to it.

Okay, there is an Inuit folktale.

The title character of it was Him Whose Penis Stretches Down to His Knees.

And in the middle of the story, he's attacked by a raven while he's sleeping.

And by the end of the story, he's known as Him Whose Whole Penis Barely Peeps From Its Cave.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the first woman to motorcycle from from coast to coast in the United States did so with her mother in the sidecar.

Knowingly.

Oh, no.

Okay.

Oh, wow.

No, this is the mother and daughter team of Effie and Avis Hotchkiss.

And in 1915, they decided to go from New York to the World's Fair at San Francisco.

But just to show it could be done, really.

We're not exactly sure why they did it.

Effie told one reporter that it was to demonstrate that motorcycling is perfectly good as a girl's sport.

And other people thought that she was just sick as she was working in Wall Street and she was sick of her clerical job and she wanted to see the world.

Other people thought she just wanted to go to San Francisco and wasn't trying to break any records.

She was just trying to do it.

And what about her mum?

What do you think about why her mum went?

Well, we're not sure why her mum went.

According to some of the interviews at the time, one of the reasons might have been that she wanted to inflate the weight of the motorcycle because she's quite a big lady because then that would stop Effie from going too fast.

Yeah, she was really concerned with her speed, wasn't she?

Yeah.

Effie had been sort of booked a few times.

She was quite famous for kind of zipping around the town.

She was getting booked, yeah.

So there's an idea that she did that.

It could be just, again, that she wanted to see the world because she kind of talked her into going to the Grand Canyon and to, I don't know, you know, Niagara Falls and places like that.

It sounds amazing as a trip because there weren't many...

I mean, roads were really pretty bad at the time.

And they had to do a lot of mending the motorbike as they went.

They had to have a gun.

They had to shoot at rattlesnakes and coyotes at various times.

I really like this detail of the journey.

They took with them a jar of water from the Atlantic Ocean.

so that they could pour it into the Pacific Ocean when they got to California.

Imagine if that had ruined everything.

Suddenly, the ocean just exploded.

All the animals die, flow to the surface.

Fuck.

This is why we don't let women on motorbikes.

At one stage, they had a puncture and they ran out of inner tube spares.

And so, what they did was they just got blankets and stuffed it into the wheels so they would keep going.

So, and that was kind of how it was in those days.

Once you got to the Midwest, it was, like you say, no roads.

It was pretty hard to get anywhere.

I like that.

It does sound like the mother, like she was there just to slow them down and keep on top of speed.

But also, it sounds like whenever they stopped and had to do stuff, she just remained in the sidecar.

She just wasn't interested in getting out.

And at one point, she was taught tatting, which is, it's kind of like lace.

It's like weaving lace together.

And so she just tatted the whole way across America, just making these beautiful little pieces of

fabric.

Yeah.

I mean, maybe she couldn't get out.

She was a larger lady and an older lady, presumably, and the sidecar is quite low.

And maybe she was just too embarrassed to say all the way across, I really can't stand up.

Well, they really struggled to find a sidecar that fit, not just because of her, but also they had all of the gear as well, right?

They had absolutely tons of stuff.

And eventually what they called it was the bathtub, which explains the size and shape of it.

It was a real big bathtub.

Because it had a jar of water in it.

She brought a gun with her as well.

Which

was par for the course.

It wasn't completely standard equipment for just being, like, traveling across America.

at the time.

I think it's path of the course now.

Are you?

To be honest, guys.

Yeah, I say that like it's a weird thing.

Yeah, of course.

The following year, there were sisters, the Van Buren sisters, who did the same thing, but did it together, biked across together, I think with no one in the sidecar.

And they did it to prove that women could be dispatched riders so that they could free up men to fight in World War I.

So, you know, trying to help.

And not only were they arrested multiple times on the way for wearing men's clothes, they were then not accepted into the army.

For wearing, they were arrested, not for doing

parts of America.

You weren't allowed to wear trousers if you were a woman.

Yeah,

that's what they did them for.

Yeah.

But you can't wear a skirt because it blows up on a bike if one sees your pants.

So it's a rock and a hard place.

Yeah.

And they did not get accepted into the army at the end.

So a complete waste of time.

And there was Alice Hewler Ramsey, who drove from, who drove a car.

This was not a motorbike.

She was the first woman to drive a car from coast to coast.

She did so with two of her sisters-in-law and a friend.

They went from one to the other.

And the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle the next day was, Pretty women motorists arrive after a trip across the continent.

And one of them is called Margaret Atwood.

No.

Yeah.

Not the,

but, you know, still cool.

She had a good trip, Alice Ramsey.

She had various obstacles along the way, but she wasn't really allowed to say so because the reason she was doing it was because she was driving in a Maxwell Briscoe company car, a Maxwell car.

and the company's, it was the company's idea for them to do it, to say, look, our car can drive even a woman across America.

So, even though it broke down various times along the way, and she had to fix it herself, had to wait for mechanics to come out.

In fact, she said there was an awkward moment where they had to replace a coil and they had to wait for a while for

when you say coil, you mean part of the car.

The coil in the car, yeah.

Reproductive technology wasn't that advanced back then.

But yeah, the crowd surrounded her and chanted, get a horse, which is embarrassing.

Get a horse.

Get a horse, love.

And the horse lobby was a big one back then.

So another problem they found was they used guidebooks, which would just be lists of landmarks to follow.

So they'd say things like, you know, take the big oak tree, get to the oak tree, turn right along the white fence, etc.

And the problem was the landmarks used to change.

And specifically, there was a yellow house and barn in their instructions, but the owner of it was a horse loyalist, hated this new motor thing, and so he repainted his barn red, deliberately.

What a

send them off the trail.

That's so funny.

Wow.

Amazingly, they would have to do that.

When they got lost, what they would do is there were telephone lines there, weren't there?

And they would just follow whatever the telephone wires had the most wires on them.

They thought, well, that must be going towards a big town, and they kind of navigated through the towns.

that way.

That's clever.

The motorcyclists as well used to go on the railroad tracks, didn't they?

When they were just like, well, this will definitely just lead me to where, yeah.

And it's, you know, I'll just move when there's a train, but otherwise...

I'll skimmy.

Yeah.

So were you reading about George Wyman?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was the first person to take a motorbike across America.

1903 this was.

And it was basically a bike as well.

It wasn't really a motorbike.

It was a bike which had a motor on it.

Kind of like an e-bike, basically.

Yeah, yeah.

And he had a camera, he had a change of clothes and a gun, obviously.

And it was so broken down by the end of the journey.

His motor worked so badly that he had to cycle the last 150 miles just pedaling his motorbike.

But he cycled on railroad tracks, but across the west.

So, you know, the sleepers.

He was just cycling over the sleepers, bump, bump, bump, bump.

Miles and miles and miles.

And it's created a thing you can do today, which I really like, which is called the Iron Butt Association.

And it's if you cycle,

sorry, if you motorcycle a thousand miles in 24 hours of riding, yeah, not if you,

no one has ever cycled 1,000 miles in 24 hours.

But if you motorbike that, you join the Iron Butt Association.

Did you guys hear the first person to walk across America?

No.

No.

This is great.

In fact, it's someone we've mentioned on this podcast.

Friend of the podcast, I would say.

He's called Edward Payson Weston, known as the Wiley Wobbler.

I don't remember him.

He was the founder of pedestrianism.

And he did all these walking challenges.

He would walk, you know, 500 500 miles in five days or whatever.

500 miles.

And then he would walk.

Yeah, and he was the man who walked a thousand miles to turn up in California, it turns out, walking across.

Sorry, when you say he was a founder of pedestrianism,

it's not like everyone else was driving a car.

No, it was in much the same way that William Smelly was the father of midwifery.

People had walked before.

Right, okay.

But he perfected it.

I see.

He perfected the form.

So yeah, he walked across America for the first time, aged 70.

And then he did it again, aged 71.

And 500,000 people supposedly turned up to see him arrive in New York.

Big deal.

He was world famous just for walking.

Well, he walked across America when he was 70, which presumably would take about a year.

And then he walked it at 71.

It took him 100 days.

100 days only.

Yeah.

To walk America.

I know.

He was the Wily Wobbler today.

He was the Wily Wobbler.

And then he came to Britain and he walked all around Britain and people went nuts.

He must have found that piss easy.

He absolutely did.

Piece of cake.

He walked 5,000 miles around Britain in 1884.

Get this.

I love this line.

The Royal Society, very eminent body, announced that his feet is the greatest recorded labor that any human being has ever undertaken without injury.

Right.

Imagine getting that accolade.

The feet were his feet.

His feet.

I'm surprised you can even get 5,000 miles around.

He must have gone right on the coast.

You've got a wibble.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You do the I remember when I used to live by the coast, I used to go for a run in the morning, and I would run for 30 minutes along the coast.

But because of fractal geometry, that meant that I'd gone an infinite distance.

All right, sure.

Just one of the mathematicians there.

Guys, we need to wrap up very soon.

Oh, really?

The cannonball run, do you know this?

The

cannonball run is the speed record across America for driving.

The current record is 25 hours and 55 minutes to drive from one side to the other.

What?

The record was beaten only four times between 2006 and 2019, and then it was beaten five times in 2020.

Pretty quiet year for everybody.

Basically, no police on the roads, no cars on the roads.

They could just go as fast as they wanted.

Yeah, it's very illegal, isn't it?

The average speed for that guy, Fred Ashmore, I think it's called it's 108 miles an hour.

Average speed.

It's insane.

The amount of sort of logistics it takes to organise it, because they all have kind of spot cars going ahead to say if they see any police, don't they?

And, you know.

Exactly.

And he had to, he removed all the seats in the car and he got an extra special kind of gasoline tank so he could get more in.

And this was a rental car.

So afterwards he had to put it all back together again.

I love to be the guy at the rental place who's just recording the mileage on the car.

Oh, that's funny.

You rented this yesterday and it's got 3,000 miles more.

The first all-female motorcycling stunt group in the UK was called the Moto Birds.

They were formed in Leicester in the 70s.

And every year they would try and jump over a river.

in Leicester and they always failed.

They could never quite get it working.

And then one time, the final time they tried it, they really souped up their motorbike.

They jumped over, landed on the other side of the river in the net, bounced out of the net, and back into the river.

Look, guys, we need to wrap up.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email our podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no suchthingasoffish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Links to the rest of our nerd immunity tour is up there as well, and some merchandise.

But that's it for now.

Peterborough, thank you so much.

That was so much fun.

We really appreciate you coming out.

And for the rest of you listening at home, we'll be back again next week with another podcast.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.