210: No Such Thing As A Sheep's Bedside Table

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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 Leeds.

My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Czaczynski.

My fact this week is that the first hydraulic lift was invented to carry sheep onto a roof.

And it was invented to do that in Leeds, in fact.

You sucker.

I know.

I know.

What can I say?

No, it's this place called Temple Works, and it's in an area called Holbeck.

Do you all know Temple Works?

You must do, right?

There you go.

And yeah, it's this amazing building.

So

it was a flax mill.

It was started in 1836.

It was, at the time it was built, it was the biggest room in the world.

And it was this guy who was designing this flax mill, but he wanted to make it, he was very safety conscious, and so he thought it should all be on one level because he thought if there was a fire, everyone needed to be able to escape quite fast.

So it was one floor, huge room.

And the reason for the sheep on the roof is that, so he planted a lawn on the roof, all this grass, because for the flax mill to work properly, it needed to be quite moist air inside.

And so the grass on the roof kind of sucks moisture out of the air, and then it was siphoned down in pipes into the factory.

And if you've got grass, you need someone to mow it, and that's the herd of sheep.

And so he invented this lift because sheep can't go upstairs.

And that is the story of Temple Works.

It's a long and convoluted reason to invent a lift, but that's what he did.

Yeah, it is the biggest room in the world, isn't it?

I wanted to, oh, it was.

Yeah.

And I wanted to find out what was the biggest room in the world now.

And so I googled it, but whenever you Google it, you just get the phrase, the largest room in the world is the room for improvement.

So true.

We probably don't know this, but how many sheep occupied the roof?

Was it like,

it a lot?

Were they sort of clustered up, or was it just a couple?

I think it will have been enough to eat that much grass.

So not much, I reckon.

I'm going to say six.

Six?

Oh, I'd say more than six.

It was a very big room.

I started counting them, but I fell asleep.

But yeah, it's a really cool building, and it was the vision of this guy called John Marshall, who was an early 19th century industrialist when people were starting to think about worker safety.

And so another thing it had was 25 fire escapes, which for a ro it was like one room, which was a two acre large room, but even so, 25.

I think the whole thing was doors.

But surely none of the sheep would have been able to escape in the event of a fire.

A, they can't go downstairs.

No.

So you've just got a nice barbecue waiting for you when you get back to the building.

I read that since the 90s in Switzerland, the requirement for every new building is that they should have the ability to have a sustainable rooftop with grass on the top.

So if you take visuals of Switzerland via, let's say, Google Earth or whatever, it's just beautifully green.

Yeah.

Like they've hidden the whole country.

Yes.

Imagine trying to bomb Switzerland.

You couldn't.

I know.

And they've got nuclear bunkers for every person in the whole population.

Yeah, where are the nuclear bunkers?

We don't know.

But I think this is amazing, isn't it?

Because at the moment, green architecture is like the main thing that everyone's trying to do, right?

All the new cities are putting grass on top of their buildings, and Leeds was doing it 150 years ago.

Yeah, very cool.

Which is pretty cool.

And green architecture takes 30% less energy to heat your building for just a 2% increase in construction costs.

And the world standards for green architecture are the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Standards, or Leeds.

That's good, isn't it?

That's very good.

Do you want to talk about sheep, Dan?

Yeah, I'd love to talk about sheep.

Well, I did, I did, because

this fact is about sheep on a roof, and I was looking at different places to put sheep.

And

one thing that I found amazing is that Captain Cook, when he was going between Australia and New Zealand, one place that he really wanted to put sheep was New Zealand, which New Zealand is now known for sheep, but in Captain Cook's time, they weren't there.

And his idea was to introduce sheep to New Zealand, and he brought two with him.

And he arrived.

This was his second journey there after sussing it out the first time, being like, oh, no sheep.

And so he went back, brought some and um he thought this was going to be his big thing he thought this is i'm gonna i'm gonna spread this breed and he let them out and two days later or within a few days they ate a couple poisonous plants and died immediately yeah and he wrote last night the ew and ram i had so much care and trouble brought to this place died we did suppose that they were poisoned by eating some poisonous plants thus all my fine hopes of stocking this country with a breed of sheep were blasted in a moment wow yeah poor captain cook but he wait and that's why there are no sheep in New Zealand today.

No, and then other people were like, Love the sheep idea, Captain.

I'll get some over.

And then they did, and now there's more sheep there than people.

In New Zealand, though, sheep racing is a very popular thing, and in fact, across the world.

And some people take it really seriously.

I didn't quite know this was a thing, but it's kind of like dog racing, so they jump over hurdles and stuff.

And in New Zealand, the big race, I think, they go around a pub and jump over lots of beer barrels.

And sheep get up to 60 miles an hour.

60 miles

when they're race.

60 miles.

Do they, eck?

I mean that's

impossible isn't it?

They push them off a skyscraper at the end.

That's what it is.

No, that's not possible is it?

I've just seen that in my notes and thought that's faster than a cheetah I think.

I mean wouldn't that be amazing if we just found out the sheep are the fastest animals in the world?

Imagine the look on the sheepdog's face.

Well, where are the sheep, boy?

You are not going to believe what happened out there.

Do you know that in New Zealand, they're actually trying, there's a New Zealand Farmers Federation, and they're trying to push for sheep shearing to become an Olympic sport.

Are they?

Yeah, that's our latest push, because, and it's been recognised as a sport.

This is one of the first steps that you need in order to get to the Olympics.

So, sheep shearing, pole dancing.

Yeah, I saw that article.

So, it was last year, wasn't it?

And it's a whole load of new sports are now accepted by the International Sports Association of Associations.

And pole dancing, table football is, sheep shearing is, but rugby league isn't.

Really?

Yeah.

And they reckon that it's because the rugby union people are blocking them.

I know, man.

I knew that'd go down well in Leeds.

Do you know that sheep are happier when they're surrounded by photos of friends and family?

No.

This is true.

I swear to God.

This was published in the Royal Society's newspaper, Biological Sciences.

Basically, the sheep were put in a dark room in an experiment and they were shown various things and their behavior was recorded.

And when they were shown sheep that were familiar to them, they had a lower heart rate and they made fewer bleats than when they were shown triangles or goats.

But to be fair, a triangle is a natural predator of a sheep, is it?

The report of it in the Telegraph said that the discovery could point to the reason that many of us carry pictures of loved ones.

Yeah.

I guess we needed the sheep to tell us that.

The problem is, there's nowhere to put photographs of your loved ones if you're a sheep.

There's no wall to hang them on, and they don't have bedside tables.

Yeah.

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Okay, let's move on to our next fact.

It's time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that pope leo the thirteenth was once the face of a wine and cocaine cocktail

this was a drink that was sold back in the 19 late 1800s and early 1900s called vin mariani and it was the predecessor to actual coca-cola so if you've heard that thing about coca-cola having cocaine in it this is where it comes from and actually the original coca-cola was actually a french wine as well coca-cola started as an alcohol um but originally, this started in France.

It was a guy called Angelo Mariani, and it was so loved that the Pope not only drunk it, he was said to have a flask that he carried around with him of it all the time, and he awarded it the Vatican Gold Medal.

It's extraordinary.

What is cocaine?

What even is a Vatican gold medal?

I cannot find any other example of that medal.

He must have been high at the time.

He was like, give him the gold medal.

So,

one of the adverts for it said that the Pope said that he would fortify himself with Vin Mariani, quotes, when prayer was insufficient.

Imagine that.

But it was really popular, and lots of celebrities loved this drink.

It was a huge deal.

So, Queen Victoria drank it.

Jules Verne drank it, which actually makes a lot of sense if you read Jules Verne.

Thomas Edison drank it.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Ulysses S.

Grant, it was super popular.

And it was one of these things that did well through celebrity endorsement.

Yeah, and they gave all of their endorsements.

So Pope Leo literally appeared with a drawing of his face in a newspaper endorsing this drink.

H.G.

Wells loved it so much, he personally drew two cartoon drawings of himself to allow for it to be used as an endorsement.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you were supposed to have three glasses of it a day, this wine and cocaine cocktail, taken after your meals and half for children.

Yeah.

Because you know what they're like when they've had too much cocaine.

Although Pope Leo XIII was not that fun a guy, which is weird since he was the only known drug addict Pope, but I was looking into so much.

I was going through the British newspaper archive looking for articles about him, and there was just loads of profiles on him, and they all talk about how solitary and serious and grave he was.

One newspaper said, He is a silent, solitary spirit, addicted to study and grave conversation, seldom laughing, a hater of vain twaddle.

One other thing about Leo XIII,

he put fig leaves on the statues at the Vatican, on the naked ones.

See, he was such a killjoy.

You would have thought, if you're high on drugs,

does that description of yours, you know, that he was sludgy and addicted to study, does it ever say, except for certain afternoons when he would only dance and talk about himself?

Yeah, it sounds like he made decisions on the come down.

You're right.

But the thing with the fig leaves, in fairness for him, he was trying to protect them from future iconoclasts because his previous, the previous pope before him, who was Pius IX, he was even worse than this guy, and he used to destroy the nude statues.

He would just completely trash them.

And so

Leo XIII thought, well, maybe if I put fig leaves on, then no one will trash them.

They'll never think to look behind these fig leaves.

But the problem is that a lot of the statues that he's put fig leaves on, he stuck them on so hard that now, if you try and remove the fig leaves, you're going to take the cock off.

Weird.

Some stuff on Coca-Cola?

Yeah.

So what happened was a guy called Pemberton in America found this Vin Mariani.

He also called it a most wonderful invigorator of the sexual organs.

So he sold this stuff which had wine and cocaine in, but then due to prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan actually demanded that all alcohol be banned from Atlanta.

And so they banned all alcohol from Atlanta.

And so he had to get rid of all the alcohol from the drink.

He got rid of most of the cocaine as well.

And then he vented Coca-Cola.

Yeah.

Is there a little bit of cocaine left.

Not now.

Yeah, it was.

Isn't that extraordinary that the only reason we have Coca-Cola as a soft drink was the prohibition?

It goes that far back, and the syrup had to be replaced.

You never hear that in the origin story.

What I love about it is

Pemberton's representatives used to hang out coupons for free Coca-Cola.

And so he would give you this stuff with cocaine in and say, You can have this one for free.

And then they'd come back later and go, Where was that Coca-Cola?

Coca-Cola imports hundreds of millions of dollars worth of coca leaves, which could be turned into cocaine each year, but they don't turn it into cocaine.

They just extract the coca.

But then there is one other company which makes cocaine out of it.

So I think it was in 2003, they imported 175,000 kilos of coca, from which you can get quite a lot of cocaine.

And what are they doing with it?

It's being used medicinally.

Yeah.

But it is the only, the Coca-Cola company.

You know when people say, oh, what's the secret ingredient in Coca-Cola?

it's coca leaves because they're the only company that are allowed to use stuff with coca leaves they've got a grant an exception from the government like tens and tens of years ago that said they could import it and so they're the only ones who are allowed it and they do basically make cocaine out of it but then they just give it to medicine

do you know i we happen i was looking up kind of weird 19th century drinks and cocktails and stuff like that and i ended up looking through a bunch of old victorian books for cocktail recipes and there is one thing that comes up over and over again.

Well, in fact, there are two things I thought were interesting.

One is that mould wine was made with raw eggs.

So if you made mould wine in the 19th century, you had to crack some raw eggs into it.

And then it was drunk through a straw.

So for a lot of these cocktails, they would say drink this through a straw.

But in all the recipes, they say drink through a straw stick, macaroni, or vermicelli.

And it turns out people just use like macaroni pasta or vermicelli pasta as straws.

I looked into this and that's which you obviously should do.

That is amazing.

Yeah, it's sensible, isn't it?

Yeah.

I mean, I'll stick with straws for now.

Okay.

It would go so far.

Well, maybe, because we want to get rid of all the plastic straws, don't we?

Absolutely.

That's actually big Vermicelli over there.

Another fact about advertising, because this is about, you know, advertising this wine and cocaine.

The first ever TV advert in Britain was in 1955.

It was on the 22nd of September 1955.

That was when ITV launched.

So that was the first ever televised advertising.

And on the day that that happened, the BBC killed off Grace Archer, who was one of the main characters on The Archer's, the radio show.

And it was so that they would dominate the newspaper headlines the next day.

And so that they would get a bit more coverage than ITV's adverts.

Bastards.

So Grace Archer died to combat advertising?

Yes.

No, no.

She laid down her life.

For a good cause.

For a good cause.

And the following morning, Bernard Levin, he wrote in the Guardian newspaper about, he kind of reviewed the experience of seeing adverts, and he said, I feel neither depraved nor uplifted by what I have seen.

I have already forgotten the name of the toothpaste.

Wow.

Because I think that was the most listened-to radio program ever, that episode when Grace Archer died.

It's very famous.

They absolutely nailed it.

Did anyone in here listen to it?

No, they're all too young.

Yeah.

Wait, there was one whoop.

I was looking on the internet.

It says that the earliest kind of product placement was by gladiators in Rome who would have to be.

Oh, not on ITV.

They had the massive cotton bud contract.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, apparently they were selling olive oil and stuff like that.

But I couldn't find anything else about it.

So I messaged our friend Greg Jenner, who's a historian who's been on the podcast.

And he spoke to Professor Sarah Bond, who's an expert in this field.

And she thinks that it's not exactly the same thing.

What it was is gladiators were slaves of people.

And so if your boss was an olive oil salesman, then you would sell it because he was an olive oil salesman.

So it definitely happened that they were kind of the product placement thing, but it wasn't their choice.

But did they have to cover themselves in olive oil before they went out for a fight?

I think that would be amazing.

Actually, there is a thing about them covering themselves in stuff, but I'll come to that later.

Well, we should move on in a second.

Anything before we do?

My favorite product placement of all time is the NBC's first daily news programme, one of the first TV news programmes in the world.

It's called the Camel News Caravan, and it was entirely sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, and it's the most amazing thing you could ever watch.

You should look it up.

So basically, the entire channel was about promoting Camel cigarettes, but it's ostensibly not that.

So for instance, there's a moment where Rex Marshall, the presenter, is doing a sports programme, and he interviews this baseball team, really famous baseball team, and he's talking to them about how the game's gone, the last game they played, and how they're feeling about the next game.

And he asks one of them, he's got like five in the room.

First of all, they're all smoking camel cigarettes the whole time.

And he says, How are you feeling about the next game?

And the first player says, I feel great, Rex, the same way I feel about camels.

They taste good and they're mild.

Which isn't a description of a game of baseball.

And also, if you don't know it's about cigarettes, just say, just tuning in to that channel at that moment, the same way I feel about camels, they taste good.

It's so weird, though.

He goes around all five.

Like the next one is like, Are you going to live up to your reputation?

And the guy goes, Sure, gonna try, Rex.

The series is something special, just like camels.

And it's again very poor on the pivot, but that was the whole point of the show.

Yeah.

All right, should we move on to our next facts?

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that tunnels tea cakes aren't allowed in RAF planes in case they explode.

Amazing.

What?

Okay, so first of all, does anyone not know what a tunnel's tea cake is?

I didn't really, I have to say.

So, for non-British listeners especially, a tonnock's tea cake is like a confectionery, it's got a biscuit base, then a dome of marshmallow, and then it's all covered in chocolate.

It's fantastic.

They're really good.

They are.

Yeah, and they're made in Scotland, and they're kind of a famous Scottish delicacy.

What did you say?

Yeah.

Delicacy is a bit strong, maybe.

So, and this fact came from a recent interview in a number of newspapers by squadron leader Tony Cunnane and he said that he and his colleagues were flying with tea cakes and they realized that they'd expand when the pressure changed and so they'd be able to tell the altitude they were at depending on how big their tea cakes were.

About 15,000 feet the tea cake would expand sufficiently to crack the cop chocolate shell.

Is that useful in a life or death situation where you're against the Luftwaffe?

Where's the tea cake?

Well, the problem was one day they were at 40,000 feet and they were doing a special kind of test and there was a massive change in pressure and it just exploded.

And he said chocolate and shredded marshmallows splattered all over the windscreens, the flight instruments and the pilots' flying suits.

This rather distracted the pilots from the immediate emergency actions they were supposed to take.

Thereafter, marshmallows were banned.

All right.

So you can't take them up anymore?

No.

I like that the pilots had it with with them.

Like, that suggests that it was a snack waiting for them to eat as well.

Why would you keep it in the cockpit?

Why not do the experiment in the back?

Yeah, these weren't experiments.

It just so happened that that would...

You know, they just like tea cakes.

Yeah.

Right.

And they just realized that this was happening and thought, oh yeah, let's, you know, let's keep taking them up.

That's kind of fun.

It's really sweet.

And it's basically because there's air inside them.

The marshmallow has got loads and loads of air in it, and the change in pressure just makes it expand.

Tunnels actually responded to this.

After the interview happened, a Tunnocks spokesman said, I'm quoting exactly here, it never ceases to amaze us what people get up to with our products.

But they said, it never ceases to amaze us what people get up to with our products.

We find this example highly amusing.

Which does imply there are a lot of other examples.

We find this example disgusting.

I like the sound of Tunnocks, the current owner, Boyd Tunnock, he's called.

Weird coincidence, actually, isn't it?

No, he's the great grandson of the Tonnux inventor, isn't he?

He is, yeah, but he also has invented new tunnel products, hasn't he?

But what I like about him is he has this notebook that he carries around.

He's so invested in his company.

So he carries a notebook around.

He keeps all the sales.

But he also is said, it's not been confirmed, but it's said that he has a circle inside the notebook, which should be what the size of a tonics tea cake is.

So whenever he sees one, he goes, is that?

Yep, very nice?

It fits the circle.

He measures them on his notebook.

Yeah, just out of habit, he just wants to make sure they're all the right size.

Wow.

And actually, they were good on advertising.

They were one of the early kind of billboard makers.

And this is a guy called John Tunnock in the 1850s, who was a coffin maker.

And he used to put big adverts up all over the road saying,

why live a miserable life when for 30 bob you can be buried comfortably?

Which is so weird, because I don't understand how being buried comfortably is going to make you not live a miserable life.

Something to look forward to, isn't it?

Marshmallows.

Guess what?

Gladiators used to cover themselves in.

Olive oil?

Olive oil.

Marshmallows, guys.

No, they did.

They would rub themselves in marshmallows with the sap of the marshmallow plant, and they thought it would reduce inflammation and irritation of the skin, and also it would give them a sheen and maybe make them more hard to grab hold of.

That's very funny.

It's very sweet, sweet, the idea that you need to reduce inflammation and irritation of the skin.

If you've got a spear inside you,

don't you worry.

I've got something that'll help that.

So, the stuff that we get now is kind of fake marshmallow, isn't it?

It's made out of sugar and stuff like that.

But you used to have sweets made out of actual marshmallow, the plant, which grows, I think, in swamps and marshes and stuff like that.

And in Egypt, it was reserved for gods and royalty.

They were the only ones who are allowed to eat marshmallows.

That's good, isn't it?

Hey, I was looking into other other things that have been banned by RAF planes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, so you've got Tonix tea cakes banned by RAF planes.

Another thing banned, Philip Hammond.

Because he expands, doesn't he, when he gets MCLT?

Are we talking

about it?

Yeah,

this may have been resolved, but I couldn't find information to say it has been.

But only a few years ago, he had taken so many flights and not paid for them that they've now said, you're not getting on any more flights.

You've not paid for a single ticket.

Prime Minister has done it and anyone else who has done it they've paid their bills but he owes them a huge amount of money because he takes he uses their services so the MOD have said you tonics cakes get out wow yeah if only he had access to a massive amount of money that he could pay the bills

I was looking up other things that expand in planes and I mean everything expands in a plane but specifically you expand in a plane specifically even more so all the gas in your gut it gets a third bigger than normal so if you have ever found yourself farting lots on a plane, that's the reason.

Yeah.

There was another

plane that got grounded quite recently because someone wouldn't stop farting.

I think there was.

There was, wasn't there?

It was creating such a terrific smell for all the other passengers.

Look, I apologized to the captain.

It's just physics, guys.

There was also a plane that had to turn around and go back to where it took off from because the toilets were broken.

But what was amazing about it was on board were 80 plumbers who were on their way to a convention.

but they were unable to do anything.

They all looked at it and went,

oh no.

I'll have to go back and get some tools for this one.

Just very quickly, another thing that's banned on airplanes, smoking, obviously banned.

Interestingly, do you know what is essential for every airplane when it goes up?

An engine.

Oh, a plane.

Sorry, let's all...

Those little moist towels that you get.

Let me hone this list in a bit.

Smoking is banned, but ashtrays are essential.

Oh, why?

The reason is, is because even though they've told people don't smoke,

please don't smoke, you'll be in trouble, you'll be arrested, or so on, they still think people are going to have a cheeky smoke.

That's their theory.

So, toilets in airplanes still need to have an ashtray because if someone gets caught and puts it out, it's better than them not having somewhere to put it out.

And so, as a result, it's an essential.

British airlines have had planes that have not been allowed to take off because their new planes have not had ashtrays in them and they've had to be fitted.

America have it, England have it.

Yeah, it's an essential thing.

Which is insane because you can put out a cigarette on anything.

It doesn't make any sense.

You can just drop it in your beer that you've ordered for £20 on your Warana flight.

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okay it's time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy my fact is that when Louis XIV, the French king, needed an operation, his doctor was so nervous that he practiced it on 75 people beforehand,

many of whom did not have the condition the operation was meant to cure.

So, so Louis XIV ruled until 1715, I think that's when he died, and he had a very painful medical condition called a fistula, an anal fistula, which is kind of a gap that opens up in the body and it's quite painful, it's quite embarrassing.

And the king had one, so his surgeon, Charles-François Félix, he was incredibly nervous because at this time being a surgeon was a part-time job with being a barber and being a wigmaker.

So

surgery wasn't very advanced.

No.

It's like the people who make keys and fix your shoes.

Exactly.

Yes.

In 300 years, we won't believe that those two were ever combined.

Because the art of key making will have been so improved.

But just like key making, surgery was in its infancy.

And the surgeon, he he borrowed 75 people we only know because he wrote a long account of it the king's official doctors who would prescribe you medicine were very sniffy about surgery as everyone was in that century they thought it was like basically bloodletting and nothing else and so he borrowed 75 people he said you need this operation but give me six months and 75 people to practice on and he practiced and practiced and practiced until he got it right yeah actually he didn't really want to go through with it right because it's a really painful procedure.

A lot of people died having it.

yeah and he really wanted to try and find a different way of doing it so before he even practiced on these 75 people he found another load of people and tried loads of different cures on them just like giving them drinks and you know giving them poultices and stuff like that and just saying does that work no does that work but then a lot of them didn't have it so i don't know how he could tell yeah yeah yeah he wanted louis himself wanted to bathe in special mineral water didn't he rather than have the anal surgery which you can totally understand that being your preference yeah

probably said no to that because famously Louis XIV never bathed.

He bathed only two times in his life, as far as he could remember.

Obviously, childhood is out, but as an adult, he bathed two times and he stunk really, really badly.

A

Russian ambassador to France said that he stunk like a wild animal.

And he was clearly so aware of how much he stunk that when he was in a room, he would open the windows and be like, sorry about this.

However, with the procedure, he might have been up for it because he was very into enemas.

He loved loved an enema.

He had about 2,000 enemas in his lifetime.

2,000's a lot.

That's too many.

I think one's too many, I'll be honest.

But when the king had this operation, um, it was really secret that it was happening.

So

the only people who knew about it were the king, the surgeon, his doctors, his war minister, Kerbal,

his confessor, and his new secret wife, who he never acknowledged at court because she was a commoner, so he he didn't want anyone to know about her.

It's a good way to test the relationship early on I think.

You know if you get through that and still fancy them I think you can probably survive anything.

That's true.

And it was a success.

It was a success.

All the four doctors arrived for the procedure through different doors to keep it a secret.

The king's

how does that keep it a secret?

Well, I guess you think, oh, I've just seen one doctor come in today and not four doctors arrived at the same time.

The king must be in big trouble.

And then the war minister held the king's hand throughout the procedure, which took hours.

Not the wife, interestingly.

Imagine having, you know, Gavin Williamson MP holding your hand,

etc.

And then when it was a success, everyone was very happy because

they told everyone about it, didn't they?

And then suddenly all the French people decided that they wanted to have the same operation.

And it became extremely fashionable to have your anus lanced.

Yeah.

And doctors used to get really annoyed because people would come and say, I'm pretty sure I've got an anal fistula when they had just like a blister on their face or something.

And there's a doctor, you'd say, no, you don't.

And they'd say, no, I'm pretty sure it's an anal fistula.

Can I have the king thing?

And yeah.

And also, he had bandages around his backside because he had this done.

It became really fashionable for people to walk around with bandages around their bum

to pretend that they'd had the operation.

Yeah, that's extraordinary, isn't it?

It's kind of.

It makes a little more sense in the context of the life of the French king because, for example, all the king's poos were documented.

What?

All the king's horses, all the king's wounds, all the king's poos.

Yeah, not just the notable ones.

Well, you know,

one of the things is, right, basically, Louis XIV, we talked about this before, he wanted his whole life to be on display, right?

And it was not just his life, it was everyone in his court.

Everyone's life had to be completely open.

And one of the reasons they think is because if everyone knew what everyone else was doing all the time, it would be impossible for people to go behind his back and plot against him.

Yeah.

That's one thing.

But he had, and he did.

He really wanted to be be able to control all his courtiers and his nobles because everyone was always rebelling against the king in those days.

But he had really strict rules in Versailles about how everyone else there was supposed to act.

So he literally had rules about where certain nobles could stand in a room, and everyone had their own chair, and they were allowed to sit in another chair.

And they had to enter or leave in a certain way.

And he also had this rule that you had to move between wings of Versailles, which was this huge palace.

You'd move between the wings in a sedan chair.

And only the royal family, like his siblings or his children, had their own sedan chair.

And then the other people in the palace, the nobles, would have to hail one down.

So you just, you had people walking around with sedan chairs, and you just have to put your thumb out and be like, I've got to get to the west wing now.

And

you had to flag them down.

And like, you had to pay a fare.

So Versailles was so huge that you got to the gate, but the cost of getting on sedan chair from the gate to the palace door was six sous, which was the currency at the time.

So you had to.

Is this and this is inside the palace?

Inside the palace, yeah.

That's incredible.

Flag down the side of the.

You should have invented a new system where you could, you know, just have one come to you by pressing a little thing on the wall.

He says he's five minutes away, but I can't see him.

One of the most famous.

Suba.

That's what it should have been called.

Sorry.

Suba.

One of the most famous facts that I think we all know, and if you watch QI, you would know this, is to do with this anal fistula thing.

And that is that once

the operation was a success, everyone was celebrating.

And Jean-Baptiste Lully, who is a French court composer, had a big sort of opera.

But during the performance, he stabbed himself in the foot with his baton and it went gangrenous and he died.

And it's famous as one of those stupid deaths, you know, where the composer whacks himself in the foot.

What a way to go.

At least it was an incredibly important epochal piece of music, but oh no, sorry.

No, it was the fistula performance.

Hey, just speaking of music very quickly, there was a book that was published in 1938 called The Oxford Companion to Music.

It was by Percy Scholz.

In it, he discusses God Save the Queen, God Save the King, and the British National Anthem.

He puts forward the ideas of how it came about, because no one's completely sure for certain who wrote it, when it was written.

They think there was origin stories of how it sort of was taken from Handel music and so on.

There was a lot of story going on.

In this book, he puts forward the theory as well that it was actually and this is a french theory that the song was composed in gratitude for the survival of louis xi's anal fistula isn't that amazing yeah so in possibly when we stand up to sing the national anthem it's because of his anus

that's why we stand up

do you want to know my favorite fistula

we've all got one in history i think so there's a long list but i think top spot is official from 1822.

And this is a really important thing in medical history.

So a guy called Alexis Saint-Martin was shot in Michigan through the stomach.

It was an accidental hunting accident, but he was shot incredibly badly.

So his sort of whole insides exploded.

His lungs were hanging out of his body.

Someone reported that when he ate, food fell straight out of his stomach again.

Like he was really in a bad way.

Everyone thought he was going to die.

He didn't.

But what did happen that was quite weird, he'd been shot in the kind of stomach area.

His stomach healed by like healing itself onto his external skin.

So, this is what a fistula is: it's a kind of unnatural and painful connection between two organs that shouldn't be connected, isn't it?

And so, he had a permanent window to his stomach.

He would walk around and you could just see his stomach completely exposed.

And a doctor called William Beaumont thought, well, this is ideal for me to experiment on.

And he made enormous leaps in our understanding of digestion and how foods are processed in our body by adopting this guy basically and testing out his stomach.

But he did some really weird stuff.

So, for instance, his stomach was literally on display, and he did things like

he would lick this guy's empty stomach to taste if there was any acid in it, to see if you produced acid when you weren't eating.

He did that.

He would put food, he would put food on a spoon and then insert it just into this guy's stomach.

And then he'd leave it there for a bit, and then he'd monitor how long it took to break down and then he'd tie a string to it and then he'd pull it out at certain intervals.

Did he have permissions to do this?

Did he?

I think the guy came to resent him.

They fell out in the end.

Really?

Oh, he didn't resent him, did he?

That'd be terrible.

Imagine people could see what you had eaten.

Like your mum gives you some biscuits, says, oh, eat these biscuits, I made them.

And then she asks you later, Did you eat those biscuits?

And you say, yeah, of course I ate the biscuits.

And mum.

And then she says, you liar, I can see your stomach.

It's

probably a rare problem to have.

What a weird window into your life we just had.

It was more upsetting than the window into this guy's stomach.

All right, let's wrap up.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd 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 Czechinsky.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

We have everything from our tour dates through to our book.

There's a lot of stuff on there, all of our previous episodes.

And we're going to quickly give away one of the tapes that we've brought with us.

We asked you guys to send in your favorite fact to us.

We found a winner.

Anna?

Yeah, so this person should come and find us afterwards to claim your prize, but it's Hannah Watson.

Is Hannah Watson here?

Hannah?

Hannah.

Right, this is the facts.

In 2004, a boat capsized in Texas because all people on board ran to one side to get a glimpse of a nudist beach they were passing.

All 60 passengers ended up in the water.

That's amazing.

Yeah, come to the back.

We'll have the cassette there.

As I said earlier, we're going to be there out the back.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for being here tonight.

We'll see you again.

Goodbye.

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