Behind the Scenes Minis: Arsenic and Arm Prosthetics

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday, Am Holly Frying and that Tracy F.

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Speaker 2: Wilson.

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Speaker 1: We talked about Charles Francis Hall. Yes, his accomplishments actually get overshadowed by all of the weirdness because he did, you know, make.

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Speaker 2: A record in there.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and he did some interesting things, but also he seems like maybe really paranoid to me, right, and I'd like, I do feel like a lot of his accomplishments were really the work of indigenous guides. Oh yeah, not really things he can take soul credit for. You and I had a conversation while you were working on this where you were like to have we talked about this before. I know, I was like halfway done with writing it, and I was like, did I really waste a lot of time here?

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Speaker 2: Did I? I checked before?

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Speaker 1: But I just like had that moment of deep self doubt where I was like, uh, oh, Spaghettio's did I just completely tank my week?

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Speaker 2: What have I done?

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Speaker 1: Well? And I went and searched through my folder and the like, the only reference I found him in all of my stuff is in a footnote of an article about John Cleves Simms, who was the person who thought that the earth was hollow, who he did an episode about.

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Speaker 2: Oh yeah, a couple of years ago.

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Speaker 1: So I was like, it was a thing where like there was just a his name came up in the text somewhere, and his name was in the footnotes, you know, and a source about whatever that one sentence was.

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Speaker 2: And it didn't get into a lot of detail.

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Speaker 1: But I was like, was was he also into this idea that the earth was made of hollow concentric rings? Not to the best of my knowledge, but yeah, I ever knows.

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Speaker 2: I don't know.

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Speaker 1: We talked about the Patrick Coleman incident where he shot a man because he became pair and what really kind of upholds that is that there were some of the whalers that were involved in that that moment who later many years later, like decades later, gave statements where they were like, all those guys were really young, and he could have easily like they were they totally needed somebody to lead them. He could have probably controlled them pretty easily. This doesn't make sense that he thinks that they were secretly conspiring against him, right, There is another theory about it that's kind of interesting, and it also evidences his own obsession with being like this hero and finding the Franklin expedition. Uh huh, because there's another story and I didn't include it here because it gets really off off the path and becomes its own thing. Where while he was away at one point like doing one of his sledge things. And remember this is his second expedition, not his his ultimate one where he passed where he was killed, that while he was away, some of the local indigenous people mentioned that there was a tomb nearby and kind of like the pieces were coming together, that this may have been actually a tomb made for Franklin when he died, that the survivors actually tried to encase him in something like stone and give him, like, you know, the send off that his level.

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Speaker 2: In their group would have merited.

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Speaker 1: And that these younger men got really excited about it because they had been taken up by Hall's excitement and they had tried to get those people to tell another group of locals what they knew so that that could be relayed to Hall when he got back, and that he may have gotten angry that they thought that they were going to be directing how this thing went, like his perception was that that stepped on his toes, uh huh, and that that may have gotten him angry because he was apparently kind of territorial about this whole thing. So like, I really wish I could time travel and talk to Inspector Smith and be like, are you legit and above board or are you one of those dudes who sees yourself in another dude and protects him. I have so many questions about all of these people. But it is interesting that he was like, exhumed the body, there's something up, and then when the body was exhumed there had clearly been something up, definitely arsenic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's pretty interesting to me. You know, having worked on Criminalia for a while now, our whole first season was about poisoning, and arsenic was like we joked that it was the star of the show because it came up so often, and we had even talked to Debora Blum at the end of that season about arsenic and all of I did not include all the gory details of what happens to a person when they have arsenic poisoning it and cute and all of that was happening to Hall, so like anybody who kind of knew, right. But the problem with arsenic historically was that it went unnoticed for a lot of cases because it also mimicsed things like other like a lot of other diseases where it's perfectly like, yes, of course he had a stroke, look at what's happening, and it's like, yeah, no, because it was used medicinally for so many things. I can also imagine a scenario where somebody was trying to treat their own problem, yeah, and not knowing what they were doing. Yeah, you know. I mean this was also a time when patent medicines might have been in those medical kits as like, as though they were perfectly fine things to be administering, and those were not regulated and could have had any amount of anything in it, So it could have been completely accidental or it could have been not. The other thing that I find myself ruminating over in all of this is Mary Anne Hall mm hmmm, because we don't hear much about her. You know, her husband was gone all the time, right. I do know that she got a payout from the government at the conclusion of the Navy Board hearing, like basically his salary that he was supposed to collect for that mission she got. But that's kind of it. We don't know much else about her life. If it's notated somewhere, it may be, but I did not come across it in my research, And of course that may have just been because my research was focused on the expedition.

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Speaker 2: But it's one of those.

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Speaker 1: Things where I'm like, man, there's a whole other story here that I would love to hear. And that's like, Mary Anne, what are your thoughts on your husband going like I'm gonna be I'm gonna run an engraving business. Nope, I'm gonna be a publisher. Nope, I'm gonna go to the Arctic like seeya. I just I'm like, is this borderline abandonment? Because he didn't stay home long ever. When he would come back, the longest was like that two year stretch and then it was like I'm out, yeah, yeah, I don't. It's it's hard to know in some ways because like I mean, there are still people who like are in the military and are deployed. We know a couple of people that are in lengthy times apart because of jobs, you know, in today's world, and like the nineteenth century had more things like that in a lot of ways. Yeah, yeah, it's wild to consider. I also that you will laugh at me. Are you ready, yeah, geography laughing. Okay, well, I mean I had some embarrassed, embarrassing geography laughing that I told you earlier, say go ahead. Well, as I was trying to like look at maps and like really get my handle on, okay, where exactly was he on the northwest side of the Greenland Shore, et cetera, I literally was like, wow, is is right there? And I know this sounds silly, but in my head, Iceland is just always a little farther, far farther east than I think it is. Oh yeah, that's all, which is a nice way to say, Hey, we're going to Iceland. We are going to Iceland. Still very excited about this. Yeah, we're gonna go to Iceland. It's November. If you are interested, it's November second to the eighth. You can learn more at Defined Destinations dot com. If you want to go with us. It's going to be great. I love Iceland. We've said it many times. Tracy and I have each been on separate trips, and I think we're both very excited to go back there's a lot of fun stuff planned and then I'm hoping it's it's an interesting trip because we don't have as much downtime in the schedule as we have on some other trips.

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Speaker 2: But you better believe.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm gonna go find my favorite hot dogs because Iceland has some great hot dogs, right and I have you know some. I'm gonna drink some Brenovan. In some places there's a Lebowski bar. Yes, that is amazing, and I'm going there again. I'm just gonna make it happen.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: You and I had a conversation when we first looked at the itinerary about how there was a bit less downtime than we've had on other trips. But it's partly because unlike other trips where we have always been in a city, part of this trip is farther away from and so they're like, it's it's not like when you're in Barcelona and you could just say, oh, there's this historic house right here that I'm going to go to for the whole morning. A lot more of the things where we will be outside of Reykievic like you would need conveyance to get there.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, which will.

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Speaker 1: Be our bus Reykievic is very walkable, but once we're outside of that that area, it gets a little bit trickier. Yeah, which I'm still very excited to go there for reasons. Yes, I have a lot of excitement for a lot of reason. Its very excited. And uh, you know, none of us are gonna hopefully have any horrible incidents we get poisoned by artsnake, yes, and you know, hopefully if there's any volcano happening, it will be a volcano that is not threatening anyone or disrupting things at that time.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I you.

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Speaker 1: Know, have have acquaintances at this point in Iceland, and I have reached out to them whenever there's been news and it's all kind of like, no, no, everything's safe. All the animals got evacuated. We're good, We're good, We're used to this. We have plans in place now. I really felt like when we were in Iceland back in twenty sixteen, it did feel like people were very pragmatic about the idea of volcanic activity. Yes, one hundred percent, I would thinker anyway, that's Charles Francis Hall. One of our episodes this week was on goods vun relition Engen, which I have not pronounced exactly like German speakers say. It also called Goods of the Iron Hand. And here's the story of the journey of research into this. So a lot of the time when I am sort of doing a gut check of is there enough information on somebody to do a podcast on them, do a basic Google search. A lot of times when it's somebody lesser known, A lot of the results will be websites that I would not necessarily use as like a source for the episode, but I've at least heard of, So for someone like Goods vun relition gen, that might be something like the website Badass of the Week, Right, I at least know what this podcast is.

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Speaker 2: And so I had bookmarked a bunch of articles.

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Speaker 1: I was going back to them for sort of round two of actually reading them, and there was one that was one of the longer articles that I had bookmarked, and I was like, this, this article just at a glance, looks legit. What is this website? Though I've never heard of this website? And something about I forgot the name of the little icon that shows up in the browser bar. I was like, something about this icon is wrong to me. So I go up to like, you know, I just delete the part of the URL that is the article to get like to the main site, and I was like, this looks suspicious.

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Speaker 2: It was just the entry page.

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Speaker 1: I clicked into the entry page, and I was like, oh, this is Holocaust denial, not like not not Holocaust denial, as in the Holocaust didn't happen, which it absolutely did. The Holocaust happened. It was more like the real victims were the Germans who were ethnically cleansed. And I was just like, oh, this is not No, I'm not using this as a source. And the vibe that I got from this is that this was somebody's personal project that that person had then sold to someone else. The person who bought it is described in various news reporting as a far right extremist who was convicted of child sexual exploitation in twenty twenty two. And I was like, every no, absolutely not. Not only that, I'm going through my browser history and deleting all of that because I do not want programmatic ads targeting me based on all of this. So I went back to doing research, and fairly late in the process, I was like, it is weird to me that I can't find an English language version of this. It seems like something somebody would have translated into English. I found a number of different like German language editions. I don't read German though, and I went to WorldCat put in you know, goods Von Relationship autobiography and set the language to English. And this book came up that was just published within the last few years, that wasn't in almost any libraries. And I was like, something is weird to me. Something's weird here, right, So I googled the name of the publisher and it is a publisher that publishes just straight up white nationalism, works by Hitler, works by other Nazis. And that's when I said, Holly, I have a weird thing to talk through in this episode, because I there have been people we've talked about before who are people that were kind of appropriated by white nationalists. So people like Emily Hobhouse, her work in South Africa got kind of co opted by white nationalists, white South African nationalists to sort of like build a story of like white people being the real victims in South Africa. If we were going to never talk about things that were appropriated by white nationalists. We could just never talk about the entire Viking era or medieval Britain because that's also been like co opted by white nationalists to kind of tell a completely false story about like a totally white society, neither of which those were. So you and I talked about it a little bit, and I was like, Okay, I think what I'm gonna do is we're going to do the episode and we're going to talk about all this. But if I find anything in the research that raises any other suspicions for me, I'm out on this because it my sense of this, having tried to look into it, is that he is somebody that was sort of co opted by white nationalists because of this sort of like German freedom fighter fictionalized version of him and the fact that there was an s s Panzer Grenadier unit named after him in World War Two, also like the idea of the iron hand that sure does lend itself to some Nazi imagery, but reasons that I wanted to continue to talk about him one where like we haven't talked that much about the transition from medieval to Renaissance Europe. He had a lot of interesting things that happened in his life. That were things we had never really talked about on Like we never talked about the Swabian League. We don't have that much about the Holy Roman Empire, and we don't have a lot that's about disability that far back in history. Most of our disability history is a lot more recent, and a lot of that has to do with like what the expectations that his societies have put on to say people, and a lot of times disabled people just being written out of history. Yeah, they are historically not considered worthy of being part of the historical record, right, which right, And you know, a lot of times in the time they were living sort of forced into the background by societies that were like we don't even want to see disabled people. So being able to talk about somebody who had a disability and was living in the sixteenth century, I felt like was important.

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Speaker 2: And so all of that landed on meeting.

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Speaker 1: Like here, we're going to do this episode and also acknowledged all of that. One other thing I did want to say is a lot of the development of prosthetics, especially like limb prosthetics in the US and Europe, has followed war and battlefield injuries that soldiers have sustained right, so a lot of prosthetics development basically follows warfare. Vast majority of prosthetics users in the US and Europe are not military veterans. Like there's a whole sort of stereot not stereotype isn't exactly right. There are proportionately, you know, significant numbers of disabled veterans who have had some kind of an amputation. But in terms of like the whole of people who have had a limb amputated and may or may not now want a prosthesis like way out numbered by people who like this amputation did not happen in any kind of combat. So I just want to say that, yeah, I have I have a peppy thing that we can I'm so happy, which will be unsurprising when I say what I'm going to say because it's very hotlycentric. There are a lot of really really interesting things going on in the ven diagram overlap of people often themselves wear prosthetic pieces, and the art world, okay, and there are a lot of very cool things being made. And one of my favorites I totally want to give a shout out it is this guy Trace who he is on both TikTok and Instagram. His TikTok handle is eat Prey Nub and he designs in three D prints these incredibly cool pros theses, many of which are for cosplay, but a lot of which are just for fun. And they're very, very beautifully designed, and he's amazing, Like he did one that turned his arm into a candy cane. He does a lot of pieces that work for cosplay, things like Iron Man arms and stuff like that. But what I really love the most is that he printed himself a pros thesis that has a Lego hand on the end of it, and then printed lego accessories that he can put in it. Fun the smartest and most charming engineering going on.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I love it.

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Speaker 1: And he's very funny. So if you want to see some really cool art that is also kind of tongue in cheek in many ways, Like there's a lightsaber one that's really cool, check out his stuff. He's really incredible. There's, oh my gosh, the triton arm, like the the Aquaman style, you know, not quite a trident, but he has that hooky thing from like some of the Aquaman stuff is gorgeous, Like he just makes beautiful things, and I love, Yeah, people are making beautiful art and sharing it, so Trace, I kind of love love your work a lot, and he's very, like I said, very very funny. So I just love that there is this whole We talked specifically about a lot of people and engineers who mean very well creating prosthetic pieces that aren't the people that would be wearing them, and there's not input necessarily from those people. So I really like that this is like homegrown a person who actually understands how these implements work and need to fit and need to be comfortable for him just making his own on his three D printer. I think it's the coolest thing on earth. Somebody that I follow on TikTok who I haven't seen as much content from lately, and I don't know if it's because of the algorithm or just she hasn't been as active lately. Her name is Alexis and her account is called stump Kitchen. Yes, and she yeah, she was born with a limb difference, and so she's done some videos that are sort of how she does various things like various household or grooming things or whatever, using either one of a couple of different processes that she has or her stump, and she also does this stump cosplay where she makes up her stump. She looks like different. I haven't seen those. I've seen some of her kitchen stuff, but I have not seen those. Yeah, So like just looking at what's on her profile right now, she's got one that is the Grinch. There's one that is Arthur. I feel like I saw like maybe a Pikachu one one time. She will just she'll make up her whole, her whole limb. She calls it her stump. I don't know if that word is comfortable for everyone. She has a limb difference, but like that's what she calls it. And she tells stories about like when she was a child and her sister, who did not have a limb difference, like sort of made a personality for her arm.

00:22:39
Speaker 2: It's I don't I.

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Speaker 1: Really I love her content, and you're what you just described reminded me of it a little bit. I also just realized that I left out one of the wilder moments in my research thing that was not about white nationalism at all, which is that I had found a reference to a book that was described in the catalog as in English. That was goods fun relish Jin's autobiography, and they had it in the university library where my spouse works, and so I said, can you please get this book for me? He said yes and was like something. He was like, something's weird about this catalog entry. I was like, I know, I don't know what to tell you. It's I just it's my only option forgetting this. So he goes to the shelf described in the catalog as being in English, but it turned out only the intro to the book was in English. This book is from back in the nineteen fifties. And it turned out the reason that the catalog entry seemed a little bit off is that there was no barcode to check it out. It wasn't in the system at all. So when he took it up to the circulation dusk check it out, they were like, oh, wow, this is a whole we have a process for this. Yeah, I need to get someone who knows what knows how to do it. And so now I have this book still, which he brought home in a plastic bag because it is so fragile, along with a piece of paper with the numbers for the barcode written out in longhand so that when it is returned to the library, the barcode can be affixed to it. Right. I bet they're also going to do an update on the record, so somebody will pop out their AACR two manual for my library.

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Speaker 2: People.

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Speaker 1: You just perked up, I know, and then have to do a new version of the mark record. I'm sure yeah, And there might be a little repair worked into it if that's feasible, because there are. It's a very delicate book. Anyway, That is the whole saga of the story for this week's podcast research from me Happy Happy Friday. I was like, what day? That was a whole journey, and then I forgot would day? It is Happy Friday. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will have a brand new episode on Monday. And whatever's coming up this next couple of days for you, I hope it's all great 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.