Behind the Scenes Minis: Psychics and Serpents

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This week on the show, we talked about Helen Duncan is somebody I had found when intentionally trying to find some October e seeming topics, And what I had written in my little list of topics was just something like Helen Duncan witchcraft act like in some way that like noted that she was based on what I had seen at that point. The last person tried into that, I would have imagined that it was a good hundred years earlier than the story we wound up talking about. Nope, not at all. Uh, I went down the weirdest rabbit hole, the best kind um, so almost across the board every single thing I read about Helen Duncan said with absolute authoritative confidence that Germany didn't know that the bar Um had been sunk um just one like just so clearly like in Germany didn't know. And I was like, that seems maybe a little unlikely, because at this point, when a submarine fired torpedoes at a ship that like they might not know whether they had hit it. Or not. It's it would like there's just a lot of noise associated with the with the torpedoes, and so that like they would sort of try to be listening for the particular sounds that would come from, like a collapsing bulk head on the ship or something like that, and it's like it's not always clear, so I wouldn't necessarily know for sure. But this explosion of this ship was so enormous and so dramatic, and so soon after the torpedoes haven't I was just like, it seems like they would have at least suspected that probably they hit something, And so I just was like, am I missing something here? It just seems really likely to me that the crew on the submarine would have thought they would have number one known they fired at a convoy. They would have probably at least thought that they had something, and then they would have reported back in. So like this absolutely confidence that the Germans didn't know. I was like really, And so I went upstairs to where my spouse was doing stuff on his computer, and I was like, how much do you know about World War two submarine warfare? And his face lit up and he was like, what are you researching? Is it a battle? I have books I can tell you about, And I was like, you gotta slow your role. I'm researching a medium, but I have a question. And we talked through it, and it's like similarly, he was like, yeah, it seems like they must have at least suspected, And from what I can figure out, yes, Germany did suspect that, like they had at least hit and seriously damaged a major vessel in this convoy. Maybe they did not know it had actually exploded and sunk. Uh. So I just found the confidence with which everybody that has written about this that I found was like, and the Germans didn't know. I think they knew a little bit more than they had an inkles some of this may have been just an attempt to justify not telling families for so long, and if there really were efforts to deceive them by sending fake holiday letters home, which I like, I found a source that said that, but then trying to like confirm that, I ran into just brick Well, so I don't actually know if that for sure happened, which is why we qualified it so much an episode, But like could definitely and justify that a lot better if you were conclusively presenting it as absolute established fact that Germany had no idea this battleship had been sunk by one of its you boats. Yeah, it's so tricky because I feel like this comes up. I mean, we talked about it in the context of most of our episodes, particularly to deal with anything supernatural, Like, there are so many instances where people consciously or not have a bias that they support in historical reporting, and that ends up making very murky water. There were two things about her story that reminded me very much of other mediums we have talked about. I mean, they're obvious like through lines, but the one that jumped out at me first was her childhood of being allegedly intuitive in some psychic way. And it reminded me of Madame Blavatsky, who had like a whole backstory about how she saw spirits in her house and communicating with things. And I'm always like, I really wish this this is a good use for the time machine, right, Yeah, could we go back and see what, in fact was like a pretty benign, boring, normal ish with none of this probably true for either of them. Yeah, And I mean one of the things that I it reminds me a little bit of the episode that we just had on Johann George Trip for We're were like, we don't know for sure whether he really thought that he was getting some supernatural knowledge. I really don't know whether Helen Duncan really thought that she could talk to spirits and that you know, it's clear that she was using puppets and and knitted undervests and like whatever too to make these manifestations, But like, I don't know if that's something that she was doing as part of something that was a scheme from the beginning, or if it was more like window dressing on a sincerely held belief about right right, I don't I don't really know. Right that is something that's very much in common with the Shrepford story the other thing, and it relates to those props and people working to disprove her. That reminded me of another episode was the I thought about our episode on Charles Colchester, who to jog Anyone's memories was the alleged medium that was favored by Mary Todd Lincoln, and how at one point someone who was worried about the Lincoln's and about Mrs Lincoln being involved in this had like reached out and grabbed ahold of somebody's hand during a seance that he obviously should not have and that causing an uproar. And I was like, there's always this moment, right, this moment we're just one person goes no, you're not and manages to physically touch something that is obvious proof. And as we talked about, that doesn't matter to people who really want to believe it. Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, so yeah, I uh, I enjoyed reading a lot of old a lot of old laws, the text of them. I found the idea of being declared rogan vagabond kind of delightful and yeah, yeah, just in general. I did not, however, read all of the hundreds and hundreds of pages of trial transcript because I I thought those were going to be fun. They were not fun, uh, because sometimes reading that kind of stuff can be a little a little cookie and fun. And this was just person after person talking about uh stuff that was It wound up being incredibly dry, more dry than you would maybe think about people being questioned about spirit manifestations that a medium had done. Um, So I read all the introductory material of the trial transcripts and then kind of skimmed the transcripts themselves. They're very long. You didn't want to hear somebody fervently recounting how they talked to their and One of our episodes this week was on Edward May and his medical treatise that he wrote about when he thought he found a serpent or monster inside someone's heart during an autopsy way back in the seventeenth century. I'm just to start blaming my heart monster for every time I'm less than an ideal person. That seems fine. Yeah, Yeah, this was a tricky one to get resources for. It was something that had been on my list for about a year because I had stumbled across the treatise itself and thought, wow, what a weird kind of creepy story. I don't know if there's a whole episode there, but I'll like put it on the October list as something sort of October e in subject matter um and then find finding any resources beyond the text itself was a little bit of a challenge. And so some of the information that's in here is like footnotes from other sources that are not about this at all, but that like mentioned May in some way or mentioned this heart idea in some way or make reference to the Museum Minerva. UM. Most of the information that I found about that was in footnotes about people who were involved with it in some way UM. And there were only a couple of papers that had been written about it in more modern years, and one of them I had access to. In the other one I did not. So I did what I do sometimes, and I sent a little note some a spouse who's a librarian, just to say, hey, is this a paper that you have access to? We have a clean show. So I can't replicate exactly what he said, but I heard the exclamations start upstairs in the room where he works, and then he came down the steps and was like is this Halloween? What kind of horrifying situation is this? But like with a lot of profanities inserted around the words that I said, UM, he doesn't necessarily like read whatever I asked him if he has as access to, but in this particular one he did, and he was like, I wish I had not looked at this picture of the of the heart with a snake in it, And I was like, I didn't. I did not expect you to find it as troubling as you clearly have. I love it. Yeah, I want a Museum Minerva T shirt. Yeah yeah, like um as though it's are the school we attended, but that seems great. Yeah yeah. Um. As a total random coincidence, I made a trip to Philadelphia back before COVID ever happened, which is how long ago this was, and I went to the Mooder Museum, and by total coincidence, they happens to have an exhibition going at that time called Imperfecta, which was about this whole idea of quote monsters in the medieval and early modern period UM and how people were thinking about embryology and tara apology that we would think of as fields today, and like all of the religious and supernatural and superstitious layers of meaning that people put on these kinds of um, like disabilities and congenital issues and all of this kind of stuff. And I at the time was like, I wonder if there is some kind of episode in this, and I did not find an episode in it at that time, but now now years later, it has circled back around through this episode on Edward May's medical treatise and whether somebody had a serpent and his heart. I love it. I like that the um. The drawing, which apparently horrified poor Patrick, is one of the closest illustrations of a heart where you actually kind of see the connection to how the quicken and simple way that we would normally draw a heart like on a valid time. It looks the closest to that of most I've seen. Yeah. Yeah, the heart as it's drawn with the snake, and it doesn't really have a suggestion that there are also atria in the right. It looks like the heart is just made up of ventricles and a snake. Yes, you know, it's a cutie pie. I know what's true, Cedric. I really like the idea that, um, garlic killed the snake and this is good for your heart. Yeah. I mean there are lots of suggestions that eating garlic is good for your body in a variety of place, but I like that it may have started with the concept of like it'll kill your heartworms. Yeah. Yeah. Um. My first encounter with the doctrine of signatures, which we talked about in this episode was I think I'm pretty sure during massage school, because we had a one day lesson in like herbal medicine, and it kept coming up, and I kept thinking, Okay, I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. I don't know if this necessarily holds up right, Um, because like the the the most to me visually evocative answer is the one that our example is the thing that we said in the show about like a walnut looks like a brain. I think it's jin sing root that looks kind of like a man or a person when you pull it out of the which sort of feeds into the idea that like jin sing root is good for the whole body. So anyway, I was another thing that was like not expecting that to come up in this particular treatise, but there it is combined with optics. So yeah, eat garlic is the lesson. I eat garlic. I'm in favor of that, me too. I have I have some friends who cannot eat garlic anymore because of some like dietary issues and restrictions. Um, just the garlic is not good for their bodies, and that is very sad. It's very I do not know anyone who has had to cut garlic out of their diets and is happy about it. No, no, well, I mean, I'm sure, I know there are people out there who don't like garlic. I love it. I don't know that. I don't. I don't know what to do with that. I mean, I'm like that person that you know triples the recipe at every opportunity. So mm hmm, I don't. I don't know what to tell those people, but it will prevent your heartwork. Yeah. I went to have a little rabbit hole of trying to figure out exactly when people figured out what about her worm, and a very longer rabbit hole to try to figure out, like, okay, is their heartworm in the UK? And at first I found very like some contradictory stuff about that, because there were people who were conclusively like there is no heartworm in the UK, and animals in the UK that developed heartworm contracted it somewhere else, right and then came to the UK for whatever reason. But like then, there have been in the last few decades reports of actual heartworm transmission in the UK. And that does seem to be tied to the climate, like how whether the parasites can survive long enough in the mosquitoes to infect anything, right, you know, that's one of those things that when we started having pets, we've suddenly had to think about a lot. Although our cats never ever go out right, right, so we don't tend to do heartworm preventative with them because, like my understanding is that it doesn't transmit to cats for hal and to begin with, and normally, like a mosquito would have had to have bitten an infected dog and then a cat. Our cats aren't around dogs and they don't ever go out, So yeah, they just lived their spoiled, spoiled lives on our laps. That is what our cats do. Also, it's the best um And yeah, I remember, I guess it was when I was living in North Carolina and I got cats of my own that I was responsible for caring for for the first time, and I did start out doing heartworm prevention with them, but that then got into the same thing of like what is the risk of heartworm versus the risk of this medication is it actually necessary for the cats? And now living in Massachusetts, like the prevalence of heartworm here is in general less because of climate differences, but again that that's also shifting because of because of climate becoming warmer. Yeah, I remember having a long discussion about it with my veterinarian uh, and her initial reaction, and this is some years ago, was like, well, you know, in case an animal gets out. But then as we progress through having cats and she realized that I'm essentially the equivalent of a helicopter mom to my cat, she was like, Oh, that's not going to happen. You don't really need to be doing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, kitties and puppies but not humans. Yeah, otherwise we would all be on heartworm prevention. Yeah. And I will say I'm not I'm not offering advice about what to do with your own pets about heartworm prevention. Discussed that with your vet because I am not one, uh, nor nor am I a heart surgeon. What I thought you were doing that as like a correspondence. So anyway, I'm glad I got to spend a little time we're getting a weird old medical treatise for this show, because I do enjoy doing that and hearing reading the things that are very confidently wrong, in this case cut many confidently wrong things. So again, it's Friday. Happy Friday everyone. We hope whatever is happening on your weekend is great. If you are not off this weekend. If it's not your weekend's I hope your work or whatever else is going on in your life, it's going okay. We will be back with a classic episode tomorrow and then something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.