Behind the Scenes Minis: Sophia Stories

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Sofia Jex Blake all week long, the whole week. This was one of those accidental two parters, and it's because I just fell in love with her. She's great. Yeah, there's so much to talk about him behind the scenes. One was I mentioned at the top of the first episode that I have this sense of identification with her growing up experience of just being like the outlier of her family and her parents not understanding her and being like, but why can you not just chill the heck out? Can you be quiet? Her being like that, I don't know how to do that, And I'm like, girl, did your mom send her letters to my mom? And then my mom just read them aloud but in a gruffer, slightly angry or voice. Maybe I felt it in my heart. However, I will say that Mariah in particular, as much as she could say things that sounded sort of cruel, she also wrote deeply lovingly about her children, Like at one point I was reading a thing that she wrote where she said, I have learned more from my children than they have ever learned from me, And she talks about how proud she is of them, and it's one of those instances where you just see that, like the relationship that kids have with their parents is not always fully reflective of the way parents feel about those kids. I don't think that's uncommon today, right, certainly not at this point in time. I also just want to send a thanks to Safia Jex Blake for being a literal, lifelong diarist. We have so much information about her and how she felt about things and what she went through that we don't often have a historical figures. Yeah, a lot of times we know somebody's like outward public documented things and zero about their inner world. Yeah, that's why it was. It's so moving that when her mom died, she wrote almost nothing about it, like she could not deal with that loss at all. I have a really cute story, okay, from her school years when she was kind of branded a problem student because of her behavior. There is an instance I love this story where she and the rest of her classmates were on like what sounds like a field trip where they were walking in like a nature preserve or something, and Sophia got tired, and so she sat down on a rock and her teacher was like, you cannot sit down. She's like, but I'm really tired. I can't keep going. I need to rest. She's like, you have to keep going, and her teacher, flippantly, I'm presuming, made the threat that if she did not get up, she would send for a policeman to physically get her up. Oh my goodness, Oh you're about to be so in love, because Sofia's response was, could you send two policemen? Wow? I love it. I love it. I love it. She also, in her writing about traveling in the US is very interesting because her take on what women in the United States are like versus what they're like back in England is really interesting because she wrote at one point women in the US have quote much higher level of learning, much lower level of outward signs of refinement, all right then, which her thoughts along those lines actually got used against her later in some of those arguments about education and her trying to get access to it, where they're like, but you say that women that are more educated are essentially just pigs like that, and she's like, I did not say that, right, but you're misquoting me, and she would always defend and like dig in and be like, I will quote you exactly what I said, which is not what you're paraphrasing. Pretty great. How did you arrive at Sefaia as the pronunciation, Well, it is because because I watched a lot of like there are many, many, many, like short little leg history clips of people talking about her, and a lot of them say Sophia, which listen as a lifelong Golden Girls fan. That's how I tend to say it. But when they did that twenty nineteen ceremony where they actually it's quite beautiful, they had current students stand in as each of the women, Oh nice, and it was really really lovely, but they all said Sofia, yeah, every one of them. And I was like, Okay, this is an official event. I'm going to prioritize this rather than and like, you know, just people who are randomly talking about her. Yeah. So that was my There were others that used Safaia versus Sophia, right, but that was like the decider for me. Well, I my gut is that a century earlier there would have been less of a question about it because Mariah was like the more common pronunciation then, but by this point there was some more variety, and I would say now for people living in the United States specifically, Maria is by far, like Maria and Sophia are way more common pronunciations than Mariah and Sophia. Yeah, to the point that, like, I know for sure, we've had folks that we've talked about that were like eighteenth century figures who probably said it Mariah, but we said Maria, or we're probably Sofia and said Sophia. To the point that when we did that episode about the SS Princess Sefaia shipwreck, we got a couple people who were really ugly and calling us idiots for pronouncing it Safaia. They were like, don't you know how to pronounce this name? It's so common, And I was like, this is not how it was pronounced. In this case, we do, in fact know how to pronounce it, and it is not what you name. It was not that one. Yeah, that was my decider for her. Yeah, this is a very random thing. But you know, anytime I'm doing research on someone and it mentions an address that they moved into, you know, I look up that address in modern day and see what's up. So her cute little room that she rented, I mean it wasn't really I think it was bigger than a room. It was rooms her apartment she rented essentially in New York at two twenty two East tenth Street. She mentioned I think she was paying fifty five dollars a month to rent it, which was a significant amount. I mean, she had she had an income because she had an allowance because her family was pretty well off. But even she was like oooh after that and paying for food, it's tight. Okay, Today, that same setup at two twenty two East tenth Street, with two bedrooms, two rooms essentially in one bath is one point five million dollars. Oh my goodness. Just FYI Yeah. I mean again, we all know New York is an expensive city, but I was just like she would bulk at this. We discussed before we started recording how odd it is that there is no mention of New England Female Medical College. Yeah. So, had I not just done the episode on Rebecca Lee Crumpler, I would not have even really known an about it for that to have registered. But like as I remember, there was a lot of overlap between the hospital and the college, Like there were members of the board at the hospital that had graduated from the college, just a lot of connections. I saw some sources that described the hospital as a teaching facility for the college, and I was not able to confirm whether there was that much of an official relationship between them, like in the time that I was spending on that podcast. Yeah, So I was like, as I was reading over your outline, I was like, you are working really hard to try to get into Harvard. Is I can imagine a number of reasons that a person might be, like I would rather go to Harvard than the New England Women's Medical College or whatever it was called at the time, right, because it did change its name a couple of times. But to just not have it mentioned at all, I'm like, what the only thing I could think of, Well, there were two things I could think of, But the only thing I could think of that's supported by actual information is that I think the college didn't have like a true established home base facility like regularly, like they were kind of working in various buildings they could use until just a little after she would have been in Boston. So that's my only thinking. If it was in a period of transition where it wasn't didn't feel quite as solid and stable, she may have veered away from it. Yeah, it's also possible that it may have still because it originally started out as a midwiffery program and then it expanded into like a full medical program, and it could be that it still had associations with midwiffery and like women's health and children, and maybe that was not really what where she wanted her focus to be as much this is all speculation. Well, it's such an odd thing. And like that biography by Margaret Todd is more than seven hundred pages long. It is detailed, it is in depth. I read it and really enjoyed it and used a lot of pieces from it for this episode, and like for it to never even men shit. Yeah, it's almost as weird as the fact that Margaret Todd is never mentioned in the biog was their drama? Yeah, so I don't know what was going on there. I would like to talk briefly about dissecting okay, which is something that I'm admittedly a bit squeamish about, as many people are. I think two things. One, it is fascinating to me that she was down with dissecting. She did not have a problem with it. She wrote about in some of her diaries, like, no, you just have to focus and remember that, like it's what you're doing is so delicate and important, and you don't have time, if you're serious about medicine to let yourself be squeamish because you really have to preserve the integrity of the sample. That you just get focused and it stops being an issue. And she mentions that like in her dissecting classes at the University of Edinburgh when they were allowed to do them, that like those are the classes where other students didn't tend to mess with them at all. Everybody was pretty quiet because they were all super focused. I'd love this, and I'm fascinated by it, and I have deep admiration for it. I do have never wanted a career in medicine, so I couldn't handle it. But there is another story this she tells that is the cutest thing on earth, where she is talking about while she's at the medical school, receiving a letter from her I think it was from her mother, and it got delivered to her while she was in the dissecting room, and she read it right there on the spot, and she makes a note in her diary that is the cutest I think it was in her diary and not in a letter that to me was just the cutest thing where she just wrote quote. It is quaint sometimes to think of the different scenes in which letters are written and read, like just knowing that her mom would probably freak out at the thought of her reading a letter while she stood in this dissecting room with a half dissected situation going on. Yeah, I love it so much. I love it so much. I get a little perturbed at her parents sometimes. I love it so much. I also I'm backtracking a little. The reports she would have sent home from schools were a little flashbacky for me. Mm hmmm, because I can tell you just about every single year of elementary school, the report was Holly is a very bright child who lacks self control every year. So when like, literally it's like Sufia, it's very smart, but she lacks self control. I was like, are y'all using the same script? What's going on in here? And it made me love her all the more. As I said, she's pretty cool. I love that she was like, I'm gonna be a farmer now, and people were like, girl, no, and she's like, watch me, and she did. She apparently did very very well in that endeavor and had a lot of success with her crops and her dairy and living this marvelous, idyllic farmer's life. Late in life, she according to Margaret Todd, she also fell into that behavior that allegedly I don't know that many doctors personally, but you always hear this stereotype that doctors are the worst about acknowledging their own health issues. Oh yeah. So we mentioned that she retired in eighteen ninety nine because she had issues with her heart. She had had a heart attack, oh wow, and recovered from it and kind of downplayed it and then had several more, and Margaret Todd wrote about like there were times where she, you know, would awaken. Presumably Margaret was the one who found her the way it's written, but it never says like I found her in the kitchen blacked out, But she will say like she came to in the kitchen blacked out. I'm like, who would know this? But you if you lived with her, and she would just be like, well that was weird and go on with her day like nothing had ever happened, and it would be like people were constantly like sofaia, and she'd be like, no, let's go check on those apricot trees. Like she just was like this is just what it is. Wow. But that she did stay very youthful, and she carried on that way for you know, quite a number of years. Don't do that. By the way, we're not saying that's a good thing. If you're having medical issues, please see a doctor. And then there is one issue that is very unclear to me. I kept rereading the passage that thinking, am I missing something? Am I skipping a vital sentence where she's describing that something happened pretty late in her life, like in the last few years of her life, where she needed a surgery, but for what I never could surmise. And the course of action that Safia Jex Blake took was to call two of the students from the medical school from her medical school and say, come come to my estate. Can you do this surgery on me? And they were like no. So she called another doctor that she knew, and I think it was a man. He came and did it. But it was like what, yeah, just like what I mean it speaks to her faith in their ability and their education at that point, but also like what are you doing? And she apparently recovered and had several more great years after that where she was very youthful until like just the last couple of months of her life. But woof, she's made a strong stuff. Yeah. Anyway, I have great admiration obviously, Yeah, great admiration. And we got to talk about Bob's Burger's in the the letters the listener mail segment, which made me cry yet again. That's a very moving episode. Clearly, if it makes us all cry just to type or speak anything about it, it's a good one. And I think it's very much in line with the ideology of Sophia Jex Blake actually right. So for anyone who has not watched that yet, that episode is real good. If this is your weekend coming up, First of all, I feel like I should shout out to all medical students and medical practitioners. That's a hard field. I appreciate you, even if sometimes I argue with you. That's a personal shout out to my doctor. And but if you have some time off this weekend, one, if you have any medical issues and you are able to please get them checked out. Two. If you have time off, I hope you get some very good relaxation in chill time, that you can hang out and eat something delicious and be with people you love and not be stressed. That's the dream. Really. If you don't have time off, I still hope that you can sneak away for a little bit of time like that, if it's at all possible, And I hope that everybody's cool to you. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we will have something brand new. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.