An Unexpected History of the Body

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Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Inks, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cadaver from the Royal Society in London, because we are doing the great work of, of course, historical scientific institutions.

We will be re-enacting the illegal dissection of a human being from a graveyard that we visited.

But unfortunately,

because this is radio, you won't see any of it.

But you can imagine the scene.

No, today we will be discussing the human body in all its baffling complexity.

Perhaps the most beautiful example of the maxim that natural selection doesn't come up with the best solution, but the least worst.

Robin.

Why did you come back to that?

Right, actually, I do accept it.

I am very much in terms of like, you know, I'm the grey goblin in a cardigan right between the two of us.

And I can say that I do accept, as many readers from the Radio Times do, that Brian is almost perfect.

Except he doesn't have a belly button.

Make of that what you wish, Adam, the angel, Jimmy Carr, and you

just for the listener.

Yeah, I was going to explain that joke to the listeners, but I can't now.

It's only a joke, it's just

like Jimmy Carr's in it.

Yeah, because I think you wouldn't believe that he was like a normal boy like you.

You don't think of him as a human boy, you think of him as an AI experiment gone wild on Channel 4.

But the background you need to understand that joke is that Adam and Eve shouldn't have had a navel.

Well, it's one of the most important questions of science: did Adam and Eve have a navel?

And if so, why?

Because they weren't.

Because they weren't born, yeah.

So that is mainly what we're going to be dealing with.

Didn't they have navels because God poked them to see if they were done?

I'll tell you what, those nuns taught you well, Ed.

Those nuns taught you well.

Is that genuinely what you're taught?

I have heard that one before, but it's just, you know.

I didn't, not as a fact.

No, it's not.

I don't think we've ever had so much science in the first three minutes of the show.

Let's get going.

Today we're discussing some of the more peculiar beliefs concerning the human body over the last 500 years, as documented in the archives of the Royal Society.

Joining us today are two eminent professors, an eminent librarian, and a winner of All-Star Family Fortunes.

And they are.

So I'm Mark Pulput.

I'm a physician by background, and I'm a vice president and joint foreign secretary of the Royal Society.

One of the most ridiculous things that humans believed about the body was that gastric and duodenal peptic ulcers were largely caused by stress.

And that was until the mid-1980s, by which time I was already a consultant, and how wrong they were.

And I'm Helen King, I'm at the Open University, and I'm a historian of medicine and the body, particularly the female body.

But hey, we've all got bodies.

And I suppose one of the weirdest things people have believed about bodies is that if you want to give birth to a boy, the man has to tie up his left testicle and the woman has to lie on her right side so it goes right to right.

If you want to have a girl, but who would ever want to do that, you do it the other way around.

But the other way around you mean the woman ties up her left.

You don't know, you don't know how close you are.

It was believed that women had testicles and that women produced seed for a very long time.

Men's seed, women's seed, mix, have a little bit of a battle.

Whoever wins, that's the bit that you get.

So you get your father's nose if your father's nose seed was having a particularly good day and your mother's nose seed wasn't.

Four minutes in, and we've never had this much great science on the show.

My name's Ed Byrne, a comedian who dropped out of a BSc in horticulture sometime in the mid-90s from Strathclyde University.

And one of the things I'm fascinated about that people used to believe about the human body is that they used to believe right up until well into the 20th century that there was forensic value in preserving the eyes of murder victims and that you could actually by you could remove the eye and put it in alum and it would give you an image of the last thing they saw when it had it did actually lead to a conviction once because they told a German murderer that they'd done it and that they saw the image of his victim so he and he confessed his name was Fritz Angerstein which if you were to make up a name for

a German murderer you couldn't do better than Fritz Angerstein could you

my name is Keith Moore I'm the librarian at the Royal Society and the weirdest thing we all believe about human bodies is that they're never going to wear out and they'll last forever.

Oh no.

As evidenced by Robin.

And this is our bow.

Just before we start, I just want to one thing that you were just David just talking about there, which is we had the guy, Australian scientist, who basically proved, this was years ago, wasn't it?

Who had proved that the duodenal ulcers weren't there?

So, this was Barry Marshall and Robin Warren.

And Robin Warren was a pathologist who saw when he was looking down a microscope at samples, biopsies that were taken from people with dyspepsia, had what looked like bacteria on the surface, and they were there, plain and easy to see, but no one had noticed them before.

And Robin Marshall was a young gastroenterologist in training who became his graduate student and basically associated these bacteria.

But he then came on to something that we may come back to, which is he did a self-experiment.

So people wouldn't believe him.

They were convinced that this was all to do with excess acid secretion.

And there was a nasty operation done, which was called vagotomy and pyloroplasty, where they cut the nerve that was related to the secretion of acid by the stomach and then cut open

the exit of the stomach into the diodenum so that food could get out.

And it was a horrid operation.

And of course, so he swallowed a culture of Helicobacter pylori, which was the bacterium, from two culture plates.

And lo and behold, nine days later, he felt really grotty.

He had stomach ache.

He started vomiting in the morning.

And he had taken the precaution of checking that the bacteria was sensitive to an antibiotic called metronidazole.

And his wife told him he bloody well better take some metronidazole.

And the biopsy did show that he'd got gastric inflammation.

So it was an amazing example of self-experimentation.

And he won the Nobel Prize.

And he won the Nobel Prize.

That's absolutely right.

So there's the advice to anyone who's.

No, it isn't.

Keith, you've been scouring the archive for us.

So if we go back right to the start of the Royal Society, what are the earliest records here that we have that document the human body?

Well, a lot of the early fellows of the Royal Society were physicians, so they were quite interested in medical matters.

But they also collected earlier books on medicine.

And we have a flap book over there, which is

one from 1638 by Johann Remelin.

And this is where you lift up the flaps, paper flaps, and explore the human body as if you were dissecting it bit by bit.

And we have here a man and a woman together, so you can compare the differences.

Helen, you've got that right in front of you.

So do you want to...

Is Helen allowed to look under the flaps?

Well, there's a hazard warning in that you may be ambushed by the devil while you do that.

Yeah.

Thanks for that.

So this is the most beautiful object.

It's a quite large page.

It's got black and white printing on it.

And it's got a man's body and a woman's body facing each other, various organs sort of scattered around the place.

And at the bottom, there's a lower torso of a woman.

And you can lift up all these different flaps.

This book is so flappy.

Sometimes you've got nine levels of flaps.

You just keep going, woo.

And it's that thing about what's happening inside the body.

It's all very secret.

Before MRIs and x-rays and things, how do you know what's going on inside?

You get a flap book.

It's basically like where's spot, but where's spleen?

You've got it.

So, yes, we've got here the devil posed, can you guess?

I think you can, over the female genitalia.

And that heard he spends a lot of time with it.

And so when you lift that up, woo, then you have a little look and you've got a little clothing and then, ooh, naughty bits.

Oh, more naughty bits.

Wombs.

Oh, innards.

Ooh.

And you just keep going.

It's so many exciting layers.

But it's covered initially by the devil.

Yeah.

In terms of anatomical accuracy, putting the devil aside,

but how accurate or otherwise is this?

It's not bad because it's the previous century, the 16th century, where they really get into dissection as a medical technique.

And by this stage, there have been some amazing anatomists who've come out with all sorts of things.

So, I mean, 1559, Rialdo Colombo.

Oh, I've just discovered the clitoris, for example.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

That wasn't anything to do with his research.

And he was about 65 years old, and his wife was furious it had taken that long.

Just because someone had to do that joke, and I do apologise.

Thank you, you shared it beautifully.

So he discovered the clitoris, and he went, there's this funny little rectangle, and if you touch it, even with your little finger, it's a bit personal, isn't it?

The woman goes wild, and seed flows in all directions.

It's back to that female seed that comes out of the female testicles that we don't believe in anymore.

So, big moment.

But it's not just the clitoris, it's everything else.

So, in 1543, Andreas Vesalius, one of the most famous anatomists in the history of anatomy, published a huge book in which he went through the whole human body, found all sorts of things like extra little bits of finger that only very few people have, denied the clitoris existed, just saying, and looked everywhere, couldn't find it, but you know,

it's not an unusual problem, is it?

Historically.

And what he did was he did a different way of exposing the body.

So rather than having flaps, he had a corpse sort of walking through the ombirance of his town in Italy, the Italian countryside, all very beautiful.

And as the corpse walks, each picture has a bit more falling off.

So his muscles sort of fall off and his skin falls off, and he eventually is just a load of bones walking through the countryside.

So it was sort of another way of doing let's go inside the body.

This way, the flat book way, you're actually looking in, and you're doing it.

You, the reader, are lifting the flaps.

It's quite exciting.

So, at this point, when that was done, wasn't there this theory that basically

women would just because as well as the seed theory, I read somewhere that they were basically just considered to be the equivalent of a barn, that it was the man sperm would go inside the lady and then it would grow into a baby.

And really, she had nothing to do with it at all.

That's one of the theories around.

There are lots of theories around because no one really knew.

So, yeah, well, that's one theory.

Women contribute absolutely nothing.

And of course, wombs have always been weird.

So, do wombs wander around the body?

Most of history people have thought they did.

If they wander around the body, but then you find out there are ligaments anchoring them to the pelvis, you go, oh, yeah, but they're special, stretchy ligaments.

So, women wombs can still go whooshing up, but they get pulled back again.

So lots of myths about the female body that lasted from the ancient Greeks into the 17th and 18th centuries.

Where did that come from, though?

Why do people think the womb was moving around the body?

Because women were sort of seen as unstable in so many ways, mentally unstable, but also physically unstable.

Even their wombs wouldn't stay in position.

Was it to do with the menstrual cycle and not understanding of that, or was it something else?

It's partly the menstrual cycle.

I mean, actually, the menstrual cycle has been seen as a really valuable thing in women's history, in the history of women's medicine, medicine, because it's supposed to give women actually a health advantage because you've got an extra orifice which is letting stuff out.

So, in earlier medical systems, where they believed in most diseases being due to stuff being overproduced or getting stuck somewhere, having an extra hole to let it out was actually a great thing.

So, women with a serious fever were considered possibly more likely to get better than men were.

Well, moving on, I think we should move on to an account.

Like a womb and move on.

I think we should move on to an account of a fork put up the anus.

Oh, I think so, too.

Which was

by Robert Payne.

A case study

from 1725.

Now, what can I ask Pete?

Why do you choose this particular case study?

It's the original I Slipped in the Shower and Found Something of Their Story.

Every emergency room has one, you know, but this is an 18th-century version, which I just think is fantastic.

An account,

I I love it, goes straight to the point with it with the heading, an account of a fork put up the anus.

That was afterwards drawn out through the buttock.

James Bishop, an apprentice to a ship carpenter in Great Yarmouth, about 19 years of age, had violent pains in the lower part of the abdomen for six or seven months.

It did not appear to be any species of the colic.

He sometimes made bloody urine, which induced me to believe it might be a stone in the bladder.

He was very little really.

At no point, when he's got all these things wrong with him has he said, well I did once put a fork up my bonnet.

You know,

there's no mention of it.

You would think even a 19-year-old

apprentice to a ship carpenter would still know there might be a connection between his

ship stuff.

I'm thinking a bunch of sailors talking about

and that he didn't realize that when he was asleep, when he was drunk one night, someone stuck a fork up there.

And so he didn't even, he was totally unaware of the foot.

But we are only at the beginning of the story, so this may well may have a revelation.

A tumor appeared in the left buttock on or near the gluteus maximus, two or three inches from the verge of the anus, name of my band at college, and it was sloping upwards.

A short time after he voided pearlent matter by way of the anus every day for some time, that's a very scientific some time.

The tumor broke, I suspected a fistula in anno, but could not get the probe by the orifice of the sore into the rectum shortly after.

The prongs of a fork appeared through the orifice of the sore.

So just poked out through

his buttock.

And they basically

made an incision and pulled it out.

But he said he didn't feel any pain, but the 19-year-old, until it started to come out again.

But you've missed why he did it, which is it was to kill.

He was costive.

In other words, he was constipated.

So this was a bit of self-therapy, allegedly.

And why is this account in the philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society?

What's this scientific value?

So, I mean, I think in the early days, a lot of the reports in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society were case studies of things that were interesting and odd.

And in fact, you know, that's not particularly interesting these days, but you still learn an enormous amount from single rare things happening.

And they tended to be submitted as letters, which, if they were interesting, were then published in the Philosophical Transactions.

And that idea that progress was made by

chance discoveries, things that happened,

that's quite central to the early history of medicine.

Well, and to this day, actually.

So, I'll give you a specific example.

So, this book, and oops, the cover's come away in my hand, but actually,

just to describe the what is that?

What is that book?

Honestly,

it was like that before.

What is it?

Yeah,

what was it?

So, the cover was already off mark.

You're okay then.

So this is Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice by William Beaumont.

It's an American book from 1834 and has a very curious story about a fur trapper.

Absolutely.

So I'll tell you all about him.

So this chap, William Beaumont, who was a surgeon, encountered a guy called Alexis St.

Martin.

And he was a voyageur.

And the AG in the middle, he wasn't a voyeur, he was a voyageur, and they were the people who worked for licensed fur traders in Canada.

Anyway, he had the misfortune to be shot with a musket in 1822 and was extraordinarily lucky to survive because it basically made a bloody great hole in his stomach.

Initially, whenever he ate, he had a very stormy recovery.

The food will all come out through this opening between the skin and the stomach.

But after a while, the food started to just disappear normally and digested.

And so, this gave William Beaumont the perfect number one experiment where he could have access to this guy's stomach.

And he did an incredible series of experiments.

The ethics of all of this doesn't really bear

consideration, but what he would do is he would put food on silk and put it in the stomach and then investigate what happened to it.

And he did, he used every experimental tool imaginable.

So, on August 1st, 1825, he introduced through the perforation into the stomach the following articles of diet

suspended by a silk string: viz., a piece of high-seasoned a la mode beef, a piece of raw salted fat pork, a piece of raw salted lean beef, a piece of stale bread, and a bunch of raw sliced cabbage.

And then, an hourly interval now,

he pulled all this stuff out to see what had happened to it.

And so, at one o'clock, an hour later, the cabbage and the bread were about half digested, but the meat was unchanged.

He put it back in the stomach.

At two o'clock, he pulled them out again.

He found the cabbage, bread, pork, and boiled beef was all clean and digested and had gone from the string.

At two o'clock, the alamode beef was partly digested, and I could go on, but the smell and taste of the fluids of the stomach was slightly wrenced, and the boy complained of some pain and uneasiness at the breast.

And he returned them again.

And the next day, he said, Well, I'll give him some calomel pills.

That was mercurous chloride.

Mercury is terribly poisoned, used as a purgative.

But I mean, he did some extraordinary things because

he basically

licked the stomach.

So he sampled the Beaumont sampled the stomach with his tongue and found that before he'd had any food, it was all right.

But the second he put any food in the stomach, it became acid.

I mean he really was an extraordinary experimenter.

He sent a pint of this chap's fluid across the Atlantic to Berzelius in Sweden, the great chemist.

And I don't think got a reply, actually.

But

it was an astonishing example of what you can learn from an extraordinary adverse event.

The ability to sew the guy up was we'd had the prize.

It could have been sewn up, he could have been sewn up, that's certainly true.

But um did w did he decide not

was he I mean I know you didn't know the guy but

I suggesting that but w is there any record of w of how voluntarily he you know decided not to go to the market.

I think there were economic grounds which basically meant that the chap you know didn't have any income and so basically he took him into service.

It sounds like the old magician thing, doesn't it?

It's all that silk thread, and now flags of the world are in an old sausage as well.

You know, it's just

that's true about brain injury as well, isn't it?

That a lot of psychiatric study has been done just because of what part of the brain has been damaged in an accident or something.

Or a stroke.

I mean, that's exactly right.

In the 19th century, how the nervous system mapped to different functions in the body could be mapped by either an injury or a tumour sometimes, or a stroke, because you knew exactly where it was in the brain, and then you knew which part of the body didn't work.

I remember reading about a thing, is it Claudius Galen?

Was that his name?

Apparently, it was only when he was basically treating gladiators who'd been injured that he realized that people had always thought the heart was the thinking area.

Is that right?

That's right.

And then he found out, he thought, hang on a minute, I'm not so sure, because it seems that anyone who's had half of their brain eaten by a lion is behaving really erratically.

And that was, and so that again, that's this kind of quite grotesque, but at the same time, going, and I'm just going to make a couple of notes.

So, moving through the history of medicine, so we move through, we've got a series of artefacts which are detailing inoculations initially

for smallpox in what 1724.

Well, that's right.

So, the idea of inoculating against smallpox, which is a major killer, was brought to England by Lady Mary Waterley Montague.

But it comes from the Ottoman Empire.

That's right, from Constantinople.

So, the women women there would have effectively smallpox parties where they would have smallpox matter taken from survivors.

They'd put it in nutshells, cut your arm, bind the nutshell to that, they'd introduce smallpox matter to the arm.

And this began to take off in England.

Lady Mary promoted the idea, including to the aristocracy.

And we have some of the records here.

She inoculated her own daughter, first of all, quite a brave thing to do.

And after a few Newgate prisoners, began on the English royal family, which is rather amazing, you know.

The children of the Royal Family.

I love that very casual after a few Newgate prisoners.

It was only six, only six.

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And was there any understanding understanding of

the process by which this was offering protection against the disease at that time?

Not really, but I mean, they did the challenge studies.

So, I mean, they knew it was specific.

And they did challenge people with smallpox afterwards and found that it wasn't, they were protected.

But I mean, Jurin was astounding because he really was the first rigorous, quantitative medical scientist.

And so he answered three questions.

Firstly, the thing you quite like to know is what's the risk of dying of those who'd been inoculated?

Because this was not completely safe.

And so in 845 inoculations, 17 people died.

That was 2%.

This would not pass the test for a modern vaccine.

But then

he wanted to know what was the risk of an uninoculated person dying of natural smallpox, which is a really critical question.

And actually, and they used bills of mortality for that, they found that just over eight percent, so one in twelve of all deaths at the time were attributable to smallpox, so this was a really important cause of death.

And then, finally, he asked the question: what's the risk of someone who contracts smallpox dying as a result?

And that was over 16%.

So, I mean, this really did reduce your risk of dying.

But, nevertheless, if you were one of the unfortunate ones that did, this wasn't much consolation to you or your family.

It's interesting that the Royal Family were

with those kind of odds, because we have a predisposition as humans, don't we, to not really understand statistics in that sense.

The reduction of risk, it feels like the best thing to do is just try and

it's a risky thing to be inoculated with

less risky.

But I mean, at the time they were inoculated, they had no idea that it was 2%.

You know, they are on about the first two pages of that volume.

You find Princess Amelia and Princess Caroline, who were two of the daughters of George II, I think.

I think also we kind of underestimate the fear of smallpox.

I mean, Lady Mary Walden Montague lost a brother to smallpox.

She was a society beauty.

Her complexion was completely ruined by it.

It was a dangerous, dangerous thing, a big killer.

And people would take treatments if they thought it was going to make the difference for them.

And they were especially concerned about their children.

Yeah, and that individual thing has to be important because, as Keith says, you know, Lady Mary's brother died of it.

That personal thing.

is enough to make you think, okay, I'll take this risk.

Is there something as well, looking at these, you know, it feels to to me that sometimes there's a very short memory that we can go back.

There are people alive today who saw their friends sometimes die of diseases that have either been eradicated or almost eradicated.

And now, in the 21st century, during COVID, etc., we've seen a lot of kind of an anti-vax movement.

It feels to me there is a real pragmatic thing behind knowing these stories, of knowing what life was like.

I think that's absolutely right.

I mean, scarlet fever was something that people thought had gone away.

This was a major killer up until the middle of the 20th century when penicillin was discovered.

But scarlet fever is beginning to come back.

As antibiotic resistance rises, then we're seeing infections that people had forgotten about.

Now, Helen, you mentioned early X-rays.

We've got quite a few

remarkable sort of records of early X-rays.

I should say it was discovered in 1895.

We had a discussion about how to pronounce it.

I say

Röntgen, I would say, but you

so so 1895, one of the seminal discoveries in the history of particle physics actually led to the revolution in atomic physics not long.

But actually, there's a wonderful photograph here which was taken, I think, at a party here at the Royal, well, at the Royal Society, a Royal Society Soiree, not long after the discovery, 1896, where there's this beautiful X-ray of a hand, which again is this

cavalier sort of, you know, X-rays now are rather carefully controlled things because we understand them, but this is only a few months after the discovery of these things, and there they are a party taking x-rays of each other.

Is that why a lot of the paintings around here from that period, everyone seems to have a hook?

So, could you describe some of these

history of x-rays, which is relatively recent?

We're coming into the turn of the 20th century now.

These photographs were taken by Alan Archibald Campbell Swinton, who's a very interesting electrical engineer.

He pretty much predicted how television was going to work before anybody had invented a television.

He'd been a photographer since he was a schoolboy and he was interested in new photographic techniques.

So, when x-ray photography came along, he was the first in England to make x-ray photographs.

And at a Royal Society Soiree,

he took photographs of great figures, the great scientists of the day.

And they also took pictures of hidden items.

So, for example, they'd take an X-ray photograph of a purse, so you could see the coins inside without opening the purse.

So they're a party trick, yeah, yeah.

Haven't you brought Mark a particularly personal?

I have, yes,

I have.

I'll pass it round.

If you hold it up to light, you might be able to guess what it is.

But for the audience, it's so this is this is an x-ray of me.

And as a medical student, I was sort of desperate to get involved in research and publications.

And in fact, so I volunteered for this study, which was a study done at Central Middlesex Hospital measuring gut transit time.

In other words, the length of time that food took to get from your mouth out the other end.

I can see there's no fork up here.

But what you can see is it's got lots of little radio-opaque plastic markers.

And so what they gave us was you would swallow with your breakfast a little packet of plastic markers and basically collect everything that came out the other end for days afterwards.

And then they would x-ray the stools.

So, these are x-rays of my stools.

And it was actually a rather hairy time because this was in 1976 when the IRA were bombing London.

And you had to sort of take these things to Central Middlesex Hospital on the tube in a bloody great thermos flask full of dry ice, which looked extremely sinister.

It didn't smell too bad because it was frozen.

And

I found the paper when I was looking at it, and I got my name on the paper.

So what did you find out?

Because now we've looked at your stools.

You know what?

It is the first time that's really happened on this show.

So with all the plastic markers, was it always breakfast, first of all?

Yes, it was breakfast.

And actually, you should worry about recovery.

And what they didn't tell me at the time is they didn't get them quite all back.

So I suspect there may still be one hiding in my appendix.

But

I'm just worried about that.

You said it's like a thermos flask.

I was thinking of someone suddenly going, Mark, I tried some of your soup yesterday.

Well, I've never said this before, but some of them ended up in my mother's freezer for a while.

She was pretty unkeen.

She was like,

I'm having some of this black pudding with me breakfast.

Helen, have you ever found yourself involved in an experiment and then thinking, do you know what?

Sometimes people look at me askew when I'm at parties, but I'm just doing research.

No, but I have to say, I did break the all-comers' record in bowel transit time

at a clinic.

So I'm just going to say, you know, you may think you've got it, but I broke a record.

So, bowel transit time.

Yes.

Okay, so this was with barium meal.

So it's very specific.

It's the point at which your barium meal goes from your tummy to the point where it's whizzing into your gut.

And I wouldn't like to say how fast it was, but they did say afterwards, I've broken the record.

Do you know what I mean?

Just a rough idea, minutes, hours, what are we talking about?

It was not very many minutes, actually.

It was pretty quick.

You know, you have this thing where barium meals and barium enemas.

Sorry, it's such a great topic.

So, you know, one lot goes in the top, one lot goes in the bottom, and then they extra the bit in the middle that they can't get the barium to.

So they're busy working out at what point they have to do that.

It's the only record I've ever broken.

In America, when someone would say on a show, I've got the fastest bowel transit time.

People would have gone crazy for that.

They would have recorded.

But here we are in London, going, Yeah, whatever.

Yeah, I know.

I'm very impressed.

I'm very impressed.

I have a small certificate for swimming, which is sort of.

Was that at the same time?

Just so you know, your bowel it while you were swimming, it was slightly slower, but we've had to close the pool down.

Given that you brought up enemas, and I don't know if that's the right thing to do.

I'll go on to it anyway.

But given that you brought them up,

you have a story about tobacco enemas.

Yes, tobacco enemas.

It's a thing.

So nicotine in tobacco was only discovered to be a poison in, I think, 1811 or something like that.

It's late.

And so, until then, tobacco had an exciting session in

the 18th century where it was considered to be the answer to pretty well everything.

So, actually, that guy with the fork and the constipation could have been done with a tobacco enema.

It was used for gynecological conditions, it was used for headaches.

The idea was that tobacco up your bum would warm your insides and sort of make everything feel a lot better.

Was this tobacco lit?

It was blown

and just remember

exactly.

So, yeah, just be very careful with that.

Once they got into this in the 18th century, they then developed the bellows to actually get it up there.

So, you didn't have to do it yourself,

which obviously is a lot less risky.

But the Royal Humane.

Sounds romantic.

It is.

So, the Royal Humane Society, which was very keen on the risks of people drowning,

the Royal Humane Society really supported the tobacco enema in the case of people who seemed to have drowned, to bring them back to life.

It's all that warming thing.

So, they even put put up along the Thames little what to do if you find someone drowning kits, which included tobacco enemas.

Mouth to mouth is a considerable improvement, I think, for many lifeguards.

Yeah, I think you're right, there's progress there.

One of the other artifacts we've got, which we haven't talked about, is microscope slides of goat tissue from 1905.

That's right, I'll have them here.

So this is.

This is actual goat tissue, not greatest of all time.

No,

this is goat tissue, so these are little microscope slides

with pieces of goat on them.

These are part of the experiments run by John Scott Haldane, who's a fellow of the Royal Society.

And he was very interested in atmospheric gases and the effect on the human body.

He did some very interesting work on miners' diseases and how gases affect miners.

He did some work on

bad smells in Parliament.

Make up your own jokes about that.

But why I like him is because he applied this kind of scientific research on behalf of the Royal Navy.

And unfortunately, he did have a knack of experimenting on goats, hence the slide there, the bits of goats tissue.

So he'd put them in barometric chambers and expose them to different pressures.

But he also did this with his son, JBS Haldane.

If a scientist wants to run an experiment, he usually just reaches for the nearest small child in those days.

So JBS Haldane was at 13 years old put into a Royal Navy diving suit and chucked overboard, amongst other things, in order to

research the effects of different pressures at different depths on the human body.

And didn't he end up with a perforated eardrum?

What JBS did later, he continued the researches during the Second World War, again on behalf of the Royal Navy, continuing his father's research.

And yeah, he managed to perforate eardrums and all kinds of things in pressure chambers.

And he could blow smoke out of his eardrums, apparently.

Yes, his party trick.

He couldn't combine that with the enema, could he?

Yeah.

Did he?

Perforate his eardrum, or did his son just pretend not to hear him when he called him?

Son, come here, I need you.

Let's do another experiment.

I don't hear a word to say.

But I think it's worth, you know, we've got coming to the end, but it's worth reflexing.

We've heard some remarkable stories, but this is ultimately how we acquired knowledge.

Knowledge about physiology, knowledge about medicine.

We feel guilty about it better.

So it's uncovering the secrets of nature by looking at really informative

individuals in the case of medicine who can tell you something that you wouldn't discover by any other route.

And frankly, that happens to this day.

And one of the powers of modern genetics is that

often very unfortunate people who've got mutations in particular genes,

studying them tells you, and not only good for them because it establishes what's wrong, but it tells you what the function of the genes are.

So, this is still an absolutely fundamental principle of medical research.

When we look back, so we've heard some very unusual stuff, and it's easy, isn't it, to set it in a historical context and say, oh, these people didn't know anything, it was kind of barbaric.

And now

we know everything.

But as you said, Mark, the 1980s,

we're doing rather strange things with ulcers and getting it completely wrong.

So, the question would be, I suppose, do you think it's still possible that we're looking at some medical conditions and doing things now, which in fifty years' time people will be, we'll probably still be here on Radio 4 having this discussion.

You don't grow old.

No belly buttons.

People say, What were they doing that for in 2024?

I think it's pretty certain that that's going to be the case.

I mean, there's so much we still don't know, and particularly when it actually comes to the mind.

You know, we're treating people who have quite severe mental illness without any really good understanding of how cognition works.

So I think there's going to be lots of examples like that where people will look back and say, what did they think they were doing?

Because one thing that always gets me as people say now, you get a lot of, oh, in my day, we didn't have food allergies or intolerances.

No, you just had sickly children who didn't, who just never put on weight and never made it past the age of 15.

You know what I mean?

But it was like, just because we didn't identify allergies and intolerances doesn't mean we've just invented them or made them up now.

It's great because in my day we never had these things because we were all dead.

Yeah.

But it's also the case that diseases change over time as well, particularly infectious diseases.

And so, you know, each generation lives in the context of the diseases of their time.

I mean, we haven't talked much about the environment causing disease.

And so the pattern of disease does actually change over time.

Telling?

I suppose, in my experience, I'm that generation where we all had our adenoids and tonsils out because you did.

We all did, and now we don't.

So there's a simple change.

And I think there's a whole area that we haven't discovered at all much about, which is menstruation.

I mean, it's kind of everyone here who's a woman has done it.

But we don't really know much about what you can do with menstrual blood.

So there's only recently there's been some work on testing menstrual blood for diabetes.

So rather than having to have a blood test, you can just test a woman's menstrual blood.

Wow.

That's suggesting something completely different from the history of menstrual blood, which was seeing it as some

weird phenomenal stuff that was just disgusting and had all sorts of impurities in it.

Actually, it could be the future of medicine for many people.

Ed, for you, what do you think is the thing that we'll look back at in 50 years' time and go, oh my goodness, we believe that.

I think the idea that a male body with a larger degree of muscle mass and a low amount of body fat was somehow ever aesthetically pleasing.

I think we should return to the idea of the pale, slight person with just a little bit of a pot as being the ideal.

And apparently, if you tie up your left testicle, that doesn't please the chance

of that habit.

And with that advice,

thank you to our panel.

Sir Mark Walpert, Professor Helen King, Ed Byrne, and and Keith Moore.

Right, we always ask the audience a question.

In today's audience of the Royal Society, we ask them, What is the most unexpected thing you found out about your body?

What have you got there, Brian?

I swallowed a two-pence piece by accident at university, and it might still be there.

What are the chances?

Could it still be there?

Should it not have come out?

I think it would be largely corroded away, but

human metallurgy is not one of my topics.

Tobacco might help.

I cannot visit the islets of Langarans.

The eyelets of Langathans.

Langahans.

Yeah, they're structures in the brain.

No, no, they're not.

Well,

they're in the pancreas.

Oh, sorry.

Oh, no, but Brian's.

Brian's wonder a lot, like his womb.

He's either the

either shot.

It's where your incident comes from.

One of the ones, there's some weird names like that in the brain, aren't there?

What are you doing?

Yes, there is something.

I'm not sure it's going to come to me.

But anyway, yeah, no, Langerhans is where insulin comes from.

Ed?

Somebody called David Hastings has simply said, in answer to the question, what is the most unexpected thing you found out about your body, they've just answered, Prince Andrew's sweat glands.

This is lovely.

This is from Callum, who says, Despite my worst efforts, it can still work.

And that is, and Callum says, it'll be 80 next July.

It's very literal.

Also says the bow transit.

Oh, sorry, yeah.

What else you got?

Very literal from Paul.

What's the most unexpected thing you found about your body?

My keys and my wallet.

Ed.

Somebody has said that they found out that they were a clone of Brian Cox.

And then they've deliberately put a dot, dot, dot, and then the Scottish actor exclamation.

Things, oh, yes, right.

I'm not going to read that one because that is, anyway, anyway ends with wetter.

Anyway, so that's the end of this series and we always like to give you a bit of homework for everyone listening and everyone in the room here.

So because we were away for a couple of months, we would like you to go away and see if you can discover a new star

or

if you can effectively use a smoke enema.

And if you do both at the same time, there'll be a special treat.

You'll win dinner with Brian Cox.

Just to cover ourselves, the BBC takes no responsibility for any damage incurred as a result of not understanding that that's a joke.

In fact, it then continues, it just says the BBC takes no responsibility.

Full stop.

So there we are.

So we will be back in the new year.

So you'll be listening to this very close to Christmas, so we should say happy Christmas.

But if you listen to this when they all go out in one fell swoop rather than on Radio 4, remember there's only 90 more shopping days till Christmas.

So we've covered both areas there.

Bye-bye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

I'm Hannah Frye.

And I'm Darl Breen.

And in the all-new series of Curious Cases, things things are getting curiouser and curiouser.

We'll be looking the universe squarely in the eye and demanding an answer to your everyday mysteries.

Including, can you actually die of boredom?

Why do some people taste music?

And how many lemons would it take to power a spaceship?

We will shine a light on the world's most captivating oddities.

Brought to us by you, you delightful bunch of weirdos.

I don't think you're allowed to call them that.

But I love them really.

Curious Cases.

On Radio 4.

And available now on BBC Sounds.

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