Edward May's Strange Monster

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We are going to talk about a weird old medical text today. In sixteen thirty nine, Edward May, doctor of Philosophy and physic and Professor elect of them in the College of the Academy of Noblemen called the Museum Minerva, physician also extraordinary unto her most Sacred Majesty, Queen of Great Brittany, et cetera, published a forty page treatise. This treatise was called A most Certain and True Relation of a Strange Monster or Serpent found in the left ventricle of the heart of John Pennant, Gentleman of the of twenty one years. If anything about the idea of a strange serpent or monster in the heart of a human being sounds just really unpleasant and awful to you, so we're gonna be talking about this whole time today. I hate when my ventrical monster acts up. As Tracy just said, Edward May was physician to the Queen, and that queen was Henrietta Maria, Queen consort of Charles the First. The Museum Minerva, where May was one of six professors, was an academy for young men from the nobility and gentry. It was established by Sir Francis Kinniston in sixty five and it was funded by Charles the First. This academy did not last very long, though many of England's existing educational institutions, including its universities and the Ends of Court, where people studied law, objected to the very existence of the Museum Mineral of it was probably already closed by the time May's treatise was published. Yeah, I don't have a lot of details about the specifics of their objections. I don't know if it went beyond just cantankerousness and that's not how we have been doing things for hundreds of years, but they didn't like it. It is possible that there is more information on Edward May in libraries and archives in the UK, but at this point what we mostly know here is that Edward and May were both really common names. There were multiple people named Edward May in Britain in the early mid seventeenth century, so Edward May, doctor of philosophy and physic possibly could have also been the Edward May gentleman who published Epigrams Divine and Moral in sixteen thirty three. He almost certainly was not the Edward May who was working as an actor during this period, but he might have been the person who published commentary Verse under the abbreviated name ed May. There were also various people around the same time who were publishing treatises under the initials E M, including medical treatises. So did E M stand for Edward May? And was it this Edward May? If so, who even knows mysteries abound? The Edward May who wrote this treatise does seem to have been regarded as knowledgeable and competent. One of its dedications is to the King's chief physician, Theodore de Mayerne, and in that dedication May notes that Mayerne consulted him unquote, matters concerning occult philosophy and most sacred medicines, and at this point a cult had multiple meetings, including secret, mysterious, and relating to things like magic and alchemy. Occult philosophy usually had more magical connotations, and at this point there was a lot of re lap among medicine, science, magic, and religion. May also wound up involved in the autopsy of the late John Pennant because he was already known to the family, they had asked for his help. Specifically, May had treated John's mother, Dorothy at various points for an ailment that he described as the stone. This was probably gall stones, bladder stones, or kidney stones. This autopsy was conducted on October seventh, sixty seven. That day, May was approached by Lady Elizabeth Harris, wife of Sir Francis Harris, who was John pennance aunt, and told him that John had died the evening before. John had been sick for about three years and the family didn't know what had caused this illness. May noted that Pennant had refused to button his doublet in the mornings, leaving it open no matter the weather, until after he had washed his hands and face. May brought in surgeon John Hayden to actually can ducked the autopsy, which he called a dissection, and so Hayden was doing this autopsy under May's direction. Lady Elizabeth Harris, John's mother, Dorothy, Richard Barry, and a man named George Gentleman and Gentleman's wife were all there for the autopsy. As well. Their names are all listed in the treatise as having seen what was taken out of John's heart. In the treatise, May describe the autopsy as focusing on two regions of the body, the natural region and the vital region. In the natural region were included the organs of digestion and excretion. There they quote found the bladder of the young man full of purulent and ulcerous matter, the upper parts of it broken and all of it rotten. The right kidney quite consumed, the left tumified, as big as any two kidneys, and full of seni as matter, all the inward and carnos parts eaten away, and nothing remaining but exterior skins. Penance spleen and liver both seemed mostly unaffected, although May described the liver as having grown into the costal membranes. That's something that May attributed to penance profession as a writer. May found no sign of stone or gravel in any of these organs, and that is something that penance mother had been wondering about. She was like, I have stoned did stone also kill my son? Then they moved to the vital region, home to the heart and lungs, penance lungs looked okay, but his heart was quote more globose and dilated than long. The right ventricle of an ash color, shriveled and wrinkled, like a leather purse without money, and not anything at all in it. The pericardium and nervous membrane, which containeth that illustrious liquor of the lungs in which the heart doth bathe itself, was quite dried also. But the strange part, of course, involved penance left ventricle. Quote. The left ventricle of the heart, being felt by the surgeon's hand, appeared to him to be as hard as stone, and much greater than the right, which upon the first site gave us some cause of wonder, seeing as you know, the right ventricle is much greater than the left. This is a little confusing because it sounds like he's saying that in a typical heart, the right ventricle is larger than the left. That is not usually the case. The ventricles themselves are about the same size, but the left ventricle has much thicker walls. The right ventricle pumps blood to the lungs, while the left ventricle pumps blood out to the entire body, Thus those thicker walls. May correctly describes the left ventricle as having thicker walls later on, so this description is kind of a huh moment, although he attributed those thick walls to the quote conservation of vital spirits, not the action of the heart. May asked Hayden to make an incision in the left ventricle. So he did, quote upon which issued out a very great quantity of blood, and to speak, the whole verity. All the blood that was in his body left and was gathered in the left ventricle and contained in it. Once the blood had all drained out of the ventricle, May was ready to move on, but Hayden didn't want to. He insisted that the left ventricle was unusually large and hard and needed a closer look. This is when May noted that the left ventricle was supposed to have thicker walls. After some back and forth, May finally gave in and instructed Hayden to enlarge the incision that he had made in the ventricle. That is when they found the monster. Quote. We presently perceived a carnas substance, as it seems to us, wreathed together in folds like a worm or serpent, the self same form expressed in the iconography at which we both much wondered, And I entreated him to separate it from the heart, which he did, and we carried it from the body to the window, and there laid it out. I went down a little rabbit hole trying to figure out exactly what iconography he was talking about here, And like the most well known books that were called by that name, like, didn't really have an illustration that to me syncd up with what he was talking about. So if you're wondering, I don't know either. So May went on to describe their discovery this way quote. The body was white, of the very color of the whitest skin of man's body. But the skin was bright and shining, as if it had been varnished. Over the head all bloody and so like the head of a serpent, that the lady Harris then shivered to see it, and since hath often spoken it that she was inwardly troubled at it, because the head was so truly like the head of a snake. This serpent was bifurcated. It split into two parts that May described as flesh colored thighs, and then those ended in branching filaments that he couldn't identify. He called them quote, fibers, strings, nerves, or whatsoever else they were. The people who had gathered for this autopsy discussed what this thing could be, as May kept examining it Quote, and thereupon I searched all parts of it to find whether it were a pituitous and bloody collection or the like, or a true organical body and conception. I first searched the head and found it of a thick substance, bloody and glandulous about the neck, somewhat broken, as I conceived, by a sudden or violent separation of it from the heart, which yet seemed to me to come from it easily enough. They used a bodkin to probe between the parts that May described his legs. Bodkin is like a thick, blunt needle, and around this time it was used to describe both hairpins and tools that were meant to make holes in cloth or leather. Prodding it with this bodkin, May found that parts of it were solid and parts of it were hollow. The other spectators prodded this thing with the bodkin as well, quote and as not crediting me. Some of them took the bodkin after me, made trial themselves, and remained satisfied that there was a gut, vain or artery, or some such analogical thing that was to serve that monster for uses natural. At this point May had to leave, and he left the body in the care of the surgeon. Hayden wanted to preserve what they had removed from John Pennant's heart, but his mother would not allow it, saying, quote, as it came with him, so it shall go with him. She remained in the room to watch while Hayden sewed her son's body back up. Yeah. Props to Pennant's mother for staying in the room to make sure they did not take this thing without her consent. When May learned that Hayden had not been able to keep the serpent, he wrote down everything he could recall about the autopsy, and he drew diagrams of the heart and what they'd found in it in as much detail as he could remember. All of this later went into the treatise, which he published about two years later. Uh you know when explaining this two year delay, he apparently just did not get around to doing it. He had also wanted to publish this treatise alongside other treatises he was working on, but he had not finished those yet either. Theodore de Mayerne asked him to go ahead and get this report into print, so he did, and we're going to talk more about all of this after we first paused for a little sponsor break. Edward May called what they had pulled out of John Pennant's heart a quote strange and monstrous embryon, And the word monster has come up a few times during this episode and in his descriptions elsewhere in the treatise. In the seventeenth century, people used the word monster in the sense that we might use it today to mean a scary or ferocious creature, although most of the things that we would call a monster today are way too big to fit inside the ventricle of a heart. Monsters are not usually tiny. They could be, but not usually. In the late medieval and early modern period, though the word monster had some other meetings as well, a monster could also be something that was considered amazing or extraordinary. In addition to that, medical texts used the word monster to describe plants that were misshapen or we're growing in a bizarre way, as well as people or other animals that had some kind of congenital disability or limb difference, or other trait that made them seem particularly unusual, like a calf born with extra legs might be described as a monster, or a stillborn baby who had physically developed in a way that was incompatible with life. Conjoined twins were described as monsters as well. Past podcast subject and was Parrey included a chapter titled on Monsters and Marvels in his fifty complete Works, in which he listed out a series of possible causes for these so called monsters. Those causes included the wrath of God, the glory of God, too much and too little sperm, the size of the womb, heredity, accident quote, the artifice of wicked beggars, and demons and devils. These other definitions of the word monster are obsolete as at this point, but that last sense persisted for centuries well in the development of teratology, or the study of congenital malformations as a medical field. The Oxford English Dictionary, how an example of the word monster being used in a medical journal to describe a baby that was born without a heart or a brain, in which is horrifyingly recent. Yes, that was the year I got married. Uh May's use of the word monster here may have drawn from all of these meanings, and he wrote this treatise during a period in which people were really fascinated with that last sense of the word monster. In particular, this was a trend that had started to develop in the late fifteenth century and was sort of a precursor to freak shows. People in Europe became enamored with things like illustrated medical texts and preserved specimens showing these kinds of traits. Some of this fixation was just rooted in morbid curiosity, but it was also connected to layers of religious thought, fears about illness and disability and the many many risks that surrounded pregnancy and birth, as well as just a general lack of understanding of fetal development. Baby is born with These kinds of developmental issues could be seen as portents or omens, and sometimes books on this subject included illustrations of real children and animals, as well as illustrations of things that were clearly mythical or imaginary, like there would be a baby whose limb development sort of resembled a mermaid alongside like actual mermaids. Something else that we haven't gotten into yet is that Edward May wrote this treatise as European medical science was developing a more thorough understanding of blood circulation. In our recent episode on hypertension, we talked about William Harvey's descriptions of blood circulation through the body, including circulating through the lungs and out to the body in a closed loop. Harvey also described the heart as a pump, pushing blood with each beat. Harvey's on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, which detailed all of this, was published in Latin in six so Harvey was building on the work of earlier physicians. He wasn't the first person to ever suggest that blood followed different paths through the lungs and out to the rest of the body, but this was still a major revision to European understanding of circulation and of the heart, and it was really controversial and Harvey's critics included Edward May May's discussion of John Pennant's left ventricle being full of blood includes a footnote in which he goes on at length, although without naming Harvey specifically about these ideas. This footnote set in part quote Here those men may be handsomely questioned who say that the pulse is nothing else but the impulse of the blood into the arteries or the sisterly of the heart. What has become of the pulse in this man, all the while that the whole blood betwok itself into the heart. Here was either a living man without pulse, or pulse without the sistily of the heart. For what could the arteries receive when nothing was to be received? Or how could there be pulse when there was no impulse into the arteries. The pulse, then, doubtless, is from another cause. And this is a far other matter than most men conceive. So May seems to have thought that this discovery of a serpent in a man's heart in a ventricle that was filled with blood proved his assertion that Harvey was wrong. Hey it did not. May was also totally off base about Penance left ventricle containing all the blood in his body. That would be more than a gallon of blood, which is far too much to fit inside a chamber of the human heart. In a pamphlet called The Rise of Physiology in England, the Harvey and Oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians are or eight. Physician William Selby Church relegated Edward May to his own footnote, describing people who disparaged Harvey's work in this way as quote too ignorant and too bigoted to appreciate him. At the same time, even though he was being very cantankerous about the latest developments and and British medical thought. May thought whatever had affected John Pennant's heart might have been affecting other people's hearts as well, so it was important to figure out exactly what it was and what it meant, and how this might be treated or prevented. Quote. It is most requisite that something be said of this or any such like matters generated in man's heart, both for the manner of their generation and the way of their cure, and by what means such rare and incredible causes of death may be found out in time and taken away. So while the first three sections of May's treatise covered up preface, including dedications to Diador Den Mayern and to Edward Earl of Dorset who was the Queen's Lord Chamberlain, and details on John Pennant's case in the autopsy itself. The remaining seven sections put this autopsy into context, and he draws a lot of conclusions about what this might mean for medicine. First, he quoted both Hippocrates and even Sina Hippocrates as saying that quote the heart laborers of no disease, and even Sina that quote the heart is far remote from dangers. From there, May noted that many physicians, since those two great figures from ancient medicine, had documented all kinds of diseases and dangers that could affect the heart, including syncope, cardiac passion, tremors, palpitations, etcetera. And now he had found what he thought was a worm or serpent in the left ventricle. Because Pennant had been ill for three years, including complaints of palpitations, May thought that the serpent had been growing in his heart that whole time. Next, May speculated on how that serpent might have gotten in their quote. But this then begets a greater question, how this monster or such as this should be begotten or bread in the heart. So defended as hath been said more than all the body, and in the most defended part of the heart, the left ventricle three times thicker of flesh and substance than the right, and also of what matter, seeing that cell is possessed and replenished with the best, purest and most illustrious liquor in the body, the blood arterial, and the vital spirits. And he offered some ideas that there were passages that could allow very small worms to enter the heart, or that it had come from quote ill distributions and transmissions, or that worms had been living in the pair cardium. He also referenced a work called Heaven Stripes Book of the Plague, which included the story of a prince who had a white worm cleaving to his heart with a sharp nose like a horn. May also mentioned heartworm and horses, which have been described in Stow's Chronicle at an um In, but May ultimately concluded that the cause of the serpent and John Pennance's heart was more metaphysical. We will get to that after a sponsor break. In the end, Edward May blamed John pennance temperament for the appearance of a serpent in his heart. Quote. But that which I have to say is this, that these strange and extraordinary generations are caused from the temperament individual. For you well know that there is a double temperament, the one specifical the other individual. The one is fixed them and unalterable, and the other is temperamentum fluxum and accidental shore clears to absolutely. He also drew in a little bit of astrology. Quote. We also see every day that such men are more hot and vivacious who are born either in the stars of Leo or the sun oriental. They also to be of more succulent habit who are born within the second quadrate of the moon, and such to be least vital who are born in the silence of the moon. Herbs also gathered moon decreasing have less force, and the very soil often doth either so augment or dwarf plants and herbs, and give them such strange conditions that they are found degenerate and scarcely the same herbs. He toss in a bit of humoral medicine as well. Quote, and from this diatheses and ill dispositions may many a strange sickness in after ages spring as time diet and other accidents do alter or intend the heat, cold, or acrimony of the humor and blood, or some other quality. And he made reference to the doctrine of signatures. That's the idea that plants can be used to make a medicine to treat a particular part of the body that looked like that part of the body. He connected this to Muslim philosopher al Kindi's work on optics, quoting him in Latin as saying, quote, the elementary world is an example of the world, so that everything contained in it contains its species. It is evidence that everything in this world, whether it be a substance or an accident, produces rays in its own way, in the likeness of the stars. Otherwise it would not have the full form of a starry world. May concluded that these rays allowed a penance body to give outward evidence of the serpent that was troubling his heart in the manner of the doctrine of signatures, because over the last few years his eye had become increasingly like that of a serpent. Something may have noticed and commented on more than once. One of the big examples that comes up a lot of the doctrine of signatures. Is the idea that a walnut looks like a brain, so you can make brain medicine out of walnuts. Sure very popular in medical and herbology texts. I feel like there's a geometry angle to this, where you're doing proofs of things that look like Yeah, I find it really interesting that he can find he combined this idea with optics and made it into like a unified claris discipline theory. There So, May concluded his treatise with a note that medical science could make many more new and important discoveries if more people's bodies could be dissected after their deaths. I'd say this was a fair point, But then he went on to blame grieving families for not providing those opportunities, saying that that would be more possible quote if it were not for a babyish or a kind of cockney disposition in our common people who think that their children or friends murdered after they are dead, if a surgeon should but pierce any part of their skins with a knife. I mean there are lots of cultures who have thought that, Yeah, it's it. Yeah. He seems particularly uh, not compassionate in this moment. Of being like, we could learn so much more if people's grieving families were not you know, big silly babies about everything right. I think he was still feeling salty about not getting to keep the servant. The servants maze treatis stayed in print until at least the eighteen twenties as part of an anthology called a Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, and other people commented on it during those centuries where it was in print. In sixteen fifty two, Scottish writer Alexander Ross published Arcana Microcosmi, or the hid Secrets of Man's Body Discovered in Anatomical Duel between Aristotle and Galen, with a refutation of Thomas Brown's vulgar error from Bacon's Natural History and Hervey's book Degeneration. Shan Ross wrote, quote, nor is it incredible what is recorded by diverse of worms found in the heart, which caused consumptions and strange distempers in our bodies, which often deceived physicians. For the heart is no more privileged from worms than other members, save only that its substance is hard and solid, and by reason of its spirits and heat, it is not so much subject to putrefaction as parts more soft and loose, and consequently not so infested with worms and impostumes as other members are. Yet it is not altogether exempted, for I have read of one whose heart being opened, there was found in it a white worm with a sharp beak, which, being placed on a table, and a circle of the juice of garlic made about it, died, being overcome with that strong smell, by which it is plain that the use of garlic is wholesome and needful, for such as are subject to worms as being their just drawyer. So they didn't say anything about surrounding the worm with garlic, but this has been cited as a reference to his treatise about John Pennett. Ross's work also includes various other accounts of worms being found in the brain and in the digestive system, and in general knowledge of parasites like tape worm and roundworm that goes back to the ancient world. This was not new knowledge at this point. Puritan clergyman Cotton Mother also referenced May's tract in his Magnalia Christie Americana, and it's possible that Mather's work went on to inspire Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story Egotism or the Bosom Serpent, which he published in eighteen forty three. As that name suggests, this story is about a man with a snake living in his chest. Hawthorne was also probably familiar with various news reports that were circulating in the nineteenth century about people who believe they had snakes growing in their bodies, most of them thinking they had swam allowed a small snake or snake egg while drinking from a brook or other body of water, which had then grown inside of them. There was also Puritan religious writing that made allegorical use of a snake in a person's chest as a representation of sin. So it's totally possible that Hawthorne was inspired by something else, or that he just made this up out of his own imagination. So what was this thing? And John Pennon's heart may clearly thought it was an actual worm or serpent, and earlier commentators generally agreed. Some of them concluded that it was an example of a human infected with the kind of heartworm that was already known to infect other animals like horses. Heartworms don't really have the kind of bifurcated structure separating out into filaments that may described, but a mass of entangled heartworms might kind of look like that. Heartworms are spread by mosquitoes, and while they can infect people, that is really rare, and it's incredibly unlikely that this could have happened to someone living in England in the seventeenth century. The first reports of animals contracting heartworm in England didn't happen until ninety five, and it's still relatively uncommon there because in most years the climate is just not hot enough for the parasite to breed in the mosquitoes that carry them. That may be shifting though, due to global warming. While it's possible that Pennant could have traveled abroad and contracted heartworms somewhere else, still very unlikely. Yeah, he would have had to go somewhere where there was a lot of heartworm and then also contracted it there when it doesn't usually infect humans. People who have examined this question in one centuries have come to a more mundane conclusion than monsters or even rare infections of heartworm and humans. All the various findings in John Pennant's autopsy suggests that he did have some kind of a serious infection other disease process going on that involved most of his urinary tract. He might have had some kind of a heart disease as well, and if his left ventricle really was a lot harder and bigger than his right, which is a little unclear to me from the actual text of the treatise, he might have had left ventricular hypertrophy, which can be caused by things like uncontrolled high blood pressure and aortic valves stenosis and other issues. In terms of the serpent specifically, D. A. Denham published a letter in Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine in nineteen seventy seven, and then Ruth Richardson published a short piece in The Lancet in two thousand and one, and both of those conclude that this was just clotted plasma, and that it may have been a clock that formed after he died and had nothing to do with his illness or cause of death. I will confess that was kind of my first thought when I was first licking this over, that oh, this is just stuff that formed in the shape of all of the little blood vessels of his body and then congealed in some way because we don't know how he died the night before, right, Yeah, I think he had been dead less than twenty four hours, or maybe slightly more than twenty. It was like the day before that he had died. And for the way the way it's described in the treatise, Pennett had died the night before, and he makes it sound like he came to the house with a surgeon the day he was informed of that writing happened, so not immediate, um. But it wasn't like it's sat there for a long time congealing or hardening. Um. So As a side note, Tracy stumbled over another kind of horrifying medical curiosity while she was doing the research on this, and Harvey described that in his uh the Anatomical Exercises of Dr William Harvey, Professor of Physic and Physician to the King's Majesty concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood, and that was written in sixteen fifty three. Hugh Montgomery, son of Hugh Montgomery, second Viscount Montgomery, had an injury on the left side of his chest that had left him with a hole through which the heart could be palpated, which he protected with a metal plate. The Court of Charles the First became aware of this in sixteen forty, and it was consequently investigated by William Harvey, who realized that it pulsed at the same rate as a pulse elsewhere in his body. So this was known by Harvey by sixteen forty or sixteen forty one, although not published until later. Yeah, this is just such a weird There are lots of people living in the world today who have like some kind of whole or stoma in their body that serves some kind of medical purpose or not. But the idea that this person in the seventeenth century had managed to like have this serious injury and recover from it, Like there's a whole gross description of their being like an abscess in all of this, but like with a place that people could just palpate his heart through a membrane and that he had to wear a metal plate to cover it up, Like it's just a whole. That is a different When I think of like just disease vectors, my brain goes like, yeah, So anyway, I I could not find a great place for that to actually fit inside the body of the the story we were telling itself. But I didn't want to just not talk about it because that's such a secondary, weird medical story happening at the exact same time that had like a little overlap, but wasn't directly about this heart serpent. Anyway, we'll talk about some more stuff uh on Friday in the behind scenes. So okay, I have listener mail. It's from Elizabeth Um. Elizabeth wrote after our two parter on Eugene Jacques Bullard, and Elizabeth wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I'm a longtime fan of the show, and I always loved getting the two of you to teach me about yet another event or historical figure that I definitely didn't learn about in history class. Most of the time their stories I've never even heard of before. But when you started the Eugene Bullard episodes, my ears perked up immediately. While I certainly didn't learn about him in history class, I was already familiar with at least part of his story. I'm a freelance editor, and one of the projects I had earlier this year was a proof read on a graphic biography about Eugene Bullard titled Now Let Me Fly by Ronald Wimberley. Illustrations by Bram Revell McMillan is publishing it in January. While the book mostly just covers his life through World War One, it was fascinating to learn about this utterly unsung hero. The Texas deeply moving, and the art is striking and very beautiful. I thought your reader might like to know that this is coming soon, and I will include the warning. The text is frank about the racism he faced, including showing the scene where the men come to lynch his father, so it might need some parental screening before being shared with really young readers. Thanks so much for filling in the rest of the story for me. The World War two stuff is fascinating, and of course thanks for all your great work keeping all of us educated and engaged. The show is one of my favorites. Best wishes, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for this email. Elizabeth. I did not stumble across this forthcoming book while doing research, which honestly is kind of surprising because you know there's advanced publicity and stuff already going on for it. Um So again, that's titled Now Let Me Fly, and it's due out in January three. I will absolutely take a look at it once it's available, because I I really like historical graphic novels, a lot of them that I have encounter. It has been really, really good, So thank you again for that note. If you would like to send us an email or at history podcast that I heart radio dot com and we're all over social media and missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeart radio app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.