Behind the Bastards - Part One: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

This week Robert begins our exploration of Francis Galton, a groundbreaking explorer and statistician who also invented modern racism as we know it by creating Eugenics. (4 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cool Zone Media Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where I started the introduction before recording. But then I started recording because I remembered and Dave gave me some shit on it. Our guest for this week, the great David Christopher Bell. How are you doing, Dave? I'm doing great. I'm living the dream. Living the dream.

What is the dream? Living the dream. Having shirts with the faces of our pets on it. Oh, that is the dream actually, yeah. Is that kitten? Oh, kitten and the new one. Yeah. Yeah, Rue.

And I got this Anderson shirt from my friend Beth Ann. Oh, wow. It's beautiful. I don't have my cat on a shirt, but I do have some old Gulf War themed Simpson shirts that have Saddam Hussein on them. And my cat's named Saddam Hussein. That's close enough. It counts. We also have those shirts with each other's faces on them that we order that one live show and never addressed it.

We should talk about that in reference to pets and stuff. That would be weird. Wear it every episode, right? Wear it every episode. Yeah, that's right. I just wear it to the grocery store, you know. Oh, good. To the fight club.

When I go to my local fight club, I always wear it. Oh, I'm glad it's getting good use. I'm glad it's not just the grocery store. I do have a concern because you and I are both men of more or less a certain age, right? So we grew up the right way, obviously. We're hurtling towards the grave. We are hurtling towards the grave. But we were, you watched Mulan as a kid, right?

Not as much as a lot of people my age. I watched it a lot. I watched it and I think the lesson, whether you saw it once or a dozen times, that Mulan did a really good job of imparting is that you always need to be ready for the Huns to attack, right? And there's some good lessons in there about how to kill a large number of Huns with the minimal amount of ammunition use, right? And my concern, because I was watching this with a kid's friend recently, and I realized, because I've watched a lot of media with this kid, kids today aren't learning about how to defeat the hunts. No one's telling them about the danger of the hunts.

What's going to happen? Well, it's up to us. I know. It's up to us and we're not doing the job right now. We were warned about the Huns, but they're not being warned. It worries me, Dave. Yeah, we have to go school to school, like a program. You know when, like, you have an assembly and, like, someone would come in with puppets and, like, tell you about stuff?

Here's a Tilla. Yeah. Hunts from the movie, not really accurate. Such a good movie, though, guys. Such a good movie. Yeah. A bob. I mean, it is because I think based on historically when it would have been set,

this was roughly contemporaneous to like the height of the Roman Empire when Mulana set. And the Huns really wouldn't have been, certainly not in China. Like I don't know where. No, no, no, no. But I think they didn't want them to be Mongolian. Never count on Disney being historically accurate and not. Yeah, they picked a different kind of racist to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're like always, always at minimum a little racist all the way up to a lot of races. Yeah, it's got to be some kind. And historically inaccurate, 95% of. of the time. As an Italian, I'm okay with bigotry against the Huns because as far as I'm aware from history, we were doing great until the Huns came. No problems in the Roman Empire until the till they showed up. That was when things went wrong. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full,

or come home at all? And will you finish? episode eight before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude. is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission

to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about, in the news. Body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to body bags

with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network. Eyeheart. Open your free iHeart app and search body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening. Speaking of racism, Dave. Have you ever wondered who invented racism?

Oh God. Was it like like James T. racism. Jonathan H. racism, yes. Yeah. Yes. Of the Portland racists. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, human beings have never needed like a scientific justification to be shitty to people who live far away and practice strange customs. Like if you're like the word barbarian literally exists because the ancient Greeks heard some people who lived like today we'd say like 40 minutes away from Greece. And they're like, there's people. just sounds like they're going bar bar bar bar bar all the time that's what like literally where the term came from yeah um i imagine like the first caveman right where it's like a caveman family

this other guy from this other cave over move next to them they're like i don't know i don't know i don't like their customs yeah i think we should kill them all um it is funny how long some of these like if you heard of the burbers and like a lot of north africa like uh Morocco right they're kind of the the indigenous people of Morocco, like their name comes from Barbar, from the barbarian term, right? Like, it's still, and that's not what the Berbers prefer to be called, because that's actually kind of a racial slur for them. They prefer to be called, I think it's the Mizek. And so I bring this up to say that no one, like, had to invent prejudice.

And human beings had been doing slavery and colonialism for a long time prior to the Enlightenment. But it's the enlightenment that gives us racism, right, in its modern terms, sense. You know, like that's the racism where you're not just, because, you. used to be back in the day, all you needed to say is like, well, we're from Rome and those guys aren't. So like, fuck up me. Like, people didn't. Yeah, you're saying that like, when we really leveled up our racism. Yeah. Yeah. Because the upside of the ancient Roman era prejudice is that like, if you're saying, okay, they're not Roman, fuck them. When you conquer them, they kind of become Roman. And then you stop being a dick to them for the most part, right? Right. That's not,

I'm smoothing over for some stuff, but it was a lot less shitty than it was like with racism today, where we're still dealing with the after effects of like slavery, right, and the bigotry. And that's because of scientific racism. And scientific racism is a product of the Enlightenment in that kind of like early modern period where people are starting to put together science and they're doing it kind of the wrong way. And the guy who's most responsible for creating modern racism by sort of marrying these early ideas of science to the prejudice that had always existed is a man named Francis Galton. Francis Galton is the subject of our episodes this week

and one of the most influential people in all of human history. I cannot overstate this. In terms of the impact Galton has had, he's absolutely on the level of a guy like Hitler. But unlike Hitler, he didn't like kill anybody. He was a scientist. He wrote books, you know? And he also...

Right, he didn't... There was no point in his life probably when he was like, man, I'm a real Hitler right now. Yeah, I really got to do some Hitler stuff. No. Yeah, he died probably thinking he led a good life. He absolutely did. But Hitler also was like Francis Galton, that guy had some shit locked down.

Like, we're definitely going to copy some Francis Galton stuff. And it's all the weird thing about Galton, because he was a really brilliant scientist in a lot of ways, he also did a lot of good stuff. Like he's, he is the person who gets credit for being the first like mathematician, I guess, to observe and demonstrate the concept of regression to the mean. And he gets credit for discovering correlation as a statistical concept. So like most of a lot of, I mean, maybe most is too much, but a lot of modern statistics is based on shit Galton was the first guy to figure out, right? And there's, he did a lot more stuff, right? And that's part of why he was such an influential racist because the guy who invented you, he's the guy who invented eugenics. Like literally came up with the name eugenics.

That's Francis Galton. I figured that's where we're getting around the eugenics of it all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. talking about that idea of like racist trying to kind of couch racism in like science. Yeah. So and it and that idea that it's gotten so found, you know, it's stuff like what, uh, BMI being a thing that's like a guy measured like a bunch of soldiers in Ireland or something. It was like, everybody needs to be like this.

This is the ideal body shape. Right. It's the weird idea that. A starving Irishman. Yeah. Like I'm not saying throw out all. science, obviously. But it's weird that, like, we have such dogma from times like this, where it's just filled

with racist and weird, you know, weird tactics. And, yeah. So let's talk about Francis and how he became the king, the guy who invented racism, I guess. Not the king. That's still probably Hitler. So Francis Galton was born on February 16th, 1822 at the Larches near Sparkbrook, Birmingham. That's obviously in England, right? Like, I don't need to specify that.

The Larches Spark Brook. Obviously, Birmingham, right? It could be Alabama, too, I guess. Oh, yeah. So, Galton's family had lived in that area around Birmingham for ages, and they had made their, obviously, the founder of modern racism, his family were like arms merchants. Of course they were war profiteers. Oh, yeah.

That's the most obvious way for them to have gotten rich. Um, his grandfather, Samuel took up work at his father's. So, uh, Galton's great grandfather had had a grandfather had had a gun factory in Birmingham. And I think previously it had just been making muskets for like people to hunt or whatever with, right? Like it was not a, it was not a military arms manufacturer. And then the Napoleonic Wars start going. And he's like, oh, you know how what's a great way to make a shitload of money right now is selling guns to the British Army at the start of the Napoleonic Wars? I think we're going to need a lot of guns for about 20 fucking years. Because this Napoleon guy is going to be a problem.

So this makes them quite rich, right? The family gets loaded off of selling guns to the British Army. But it also causes strife with their extended family because the Galton's were Quakers. And they had been Quakers longer than anyone could remember. And the Quakers, I think, are okay with hunting. But you know what the Quakers aren't okay with? Selling guns to an army. That's not really, no.

Yeah. But once Samuel spun up production to start selling to the military, the Quakers are like, well, you can't keep being a Quaker because that's like one of our main things is that you don't, you're not a war profiteer. So he gets former, and his branch of the family is formally disowned from the Quakers in 1795 for fabricating and selling instruments of war. Although he keeps attending Quaker's services, I think they're too polite to kick him out. But he's no longer like, they're like, well, but you're not one of us, right? We can't kick you out of the house of God, but it's really weird now. Yeah, you made it weird, Samuel. In his own autobiography, Francis Galton notes that his grandfather was also a scientific man and, quote, a statistical man of business.

He was a fellow of the provincially famous Lunar Society, whose members met at one another's houses on the day and the night of the full moon, and which, though small in numbers, was so select as to include, and then he lists a number of famous scientists of the day, including a guy named Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who's the father of the famous Darwin. And the famous Darwin is like the half cousin of Francis Galton. They know each other most of their lives, right? And they're very close, like, friends. Sorry, I petition to bring back the blank society. Yeah.

As like, for me, claim it as something that isn't always filled. Whenever I hear the blank society, I think that's a bunch of racist. Both you're racist? Yeah, but you got to bring it. Or it's something that Sherlock Holmes will bust up or something. Right, right. Yeah, they're doing some sort of scheme. Right, but they were right about the naming idea there.

Like we should have that. The Lunar Society, I would love to be a part of a lunar society. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it's clear to me that Francis Galton came to regard his war profiteer grandfather is the ancestor he took most after. That's why he emphasizes how statistical and scientific he is. in an era in which that's not really as much of a thing.

Like if you're, if in 1800, you're a man who believes in statistics, a lot of people will be like, well, that's nonsense. Math doesn't know things, you fool? Right. Like, it's not, there's controversy among basic elements of science in this period of time. Samuel marries into the famous Barclay family. You've heard of like Barclay Bank, right? Samuel marries into the Barclays and he starts a bank after the war, right? That's how he gets rich after he stops being a war profiteer.

And he was described, one thing that's interesting, at the time he is described as a captain of industry. And like one of his biographies that someone writes in like 18, fucking 12 or something, he's called that. And that's not a term a lot of people are using in the early 1800s, right? That's more of like a later 1800s term. So he's among the very first people to be described as like a captain of industry. He is an early, he's really an early founder of capitalism in a lot of ways.

Capitalism is still getting formed as an ideology. And this guy who's a war profiteer and a banker, but also a man of statistics and science, is a very early, he's, a lot of people see him as an early embodiment of like what a capitalist is supposed to be in the very first, almost the first generation in which they exist. Not quite. Samuel's oldest son, Samuel Tertius Galton, partnered with him, and that's Francis's father, partnered with him to run the bank and married a woman named Violetta Darry. The daughter of his friend Erasmus, right? So that's how the Darwin's become a member or become entwined with the Galton family. Francis's dad marries the daughter of Erasmus.

So Francis is born into a family of four sisters and two brothers and was the youngest member of the family to survive to adulthood. Life was dangerous even then for the very wealthy. His cousin Charles Darwin, not the more famous Charles R. Darwin. This is the Charles Darwin nobody hears about because he dies at age 20 as a medical. student from what is described as a dissection wound. That means he's dissecting a cadaver or performing surgery and he cuts himself and then he dies of infection. That happened to a lot of surgeons and doctors in this period of time. Yeah, this is the air where gravestones could just say stub toe. Stubtoe, got a little cut if things went wrong. Yeah. And it's especially the case if you're like

cutting up a corpse and you get corpse juice in your open wound. Bad to get corpse juice in an open wound. I generally want to avoid that. Don't like that phrase. Corpse Juice, not into it. Thank you so much. Avoid it. Avoid it as much as possible. So because he had a,

the Galton's were a large family and Francis's parents were rich. Most of the raising when he's a little boy is done by not his parents, but by his third sister Adele. She's 12 years older than him and severely disabled with a spinal curvature that left her bedridden much of the time and unable to socialize or go out in public much at all. So instead, she focused all of her attention on her younger brother. as he would later recall.

She hailed my arrival into the world as a fairy gift and begged hard to be allowed to consider me as her sole ward, and in her simple way educated herself as best as she could, in order to be able to teach me. Her idea of education at that time was to teach the Bible as a verbally inspired book to cultivate memory, to make me learn the merest rudiments of Latin, and above all a great deal of English verse.

This she did effectually, and the result was that she believed and succeeded in making others believe that I was a sort of infant prodigy. So what Galton is saying there is that she teaches him to memorize the Bible as a little kid, and that convinces the people around them that he's a genius, right? He's always of the belief that I was not really a childhood genius. My sister convinced other people of that by helping me to learn how to memorize the Bible,

because that's what she thought was what made an educated man. And other people believe this as well. A visitor to their home in 1828 when Francis was six described him as a prodigy, recording that he read Shakespeare for fun, and quote, by reading a page over twice, he repeats it by heart. So he's got this very like idetic memory, you know, where he could just look at something.

Yeah. Yeah, nothing against anybody with a good memory, but this is real like dumb guys, smart guy. Yeah, yeah. I think about, memorize the shit, huh? Right, I had a social studies teacher that made us all memorize the preamble to the Constitution.

Oh, I still haven't memorized. Yeah. Yeah, I can still recite it. I don't know what any of it means, really. Like, I, he never told. taught us like what it, why it was important. Or maybe it did, and I don't remember anymore. It just lost to me.

Remember. Yeah. This is a, this is a very old-timey 1800s way of like, this boy can, has memorized all the works of Shakespeare. And it's like, well, that is impressive. But does that mean he's like smart or doesn't mean he has a lot of Shakespeare memorized?

I would classify it under neat. Neat. It's neat. Yeah. It's potentially impressive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And this is he would also, he develops an early habit of performances in which he'd recite some work of literature or poetry to his family. I've run into this in five or six biographies from this time, at least. It seems to have been a common method of entertainment for families with bright children, usually wealthy families, where they're like, have the smart kids recite things for us, you know? It fucking sucked back then. It sucked so bad. I think Brotherhood of the Wolf I was watching. There's a scene in that where the guy is like, they're having dinner and he's like, I would like to. recite a poem for everybody.

Fuck me. It's like, oh my God, get a TV. Yeah, fucking invent Netflix, you dipshits. Yeah, those idiots. Figure out of Hulu assholes. My God. They didn't even know it a torrent. Yeah, bullshit.

So Francis recalled performing Milton's Paradise Lost and Pope's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey for his family. In his autobiography, perhaps sensing that bragging about his tendency for spouting versus a child made him seem arrogant. Francis included this passage. In middle life, I feared I had been an intolerable prig and cross-questioned many old family

friends about it, but was invariably assured that I was not at all a prig, but seemed to spout for pure enjoyment and without any affectation that I often quoted very aptly on the spur of the moment, and that I was a nice little child. It says a lot that he's like, as an adult, I worried I was an asshole as a kid. But I was assured, no, I wasn't. No, I wasn't. I was very smart and good. It's literally that Skinner meme.

Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong. You know, I'm a insufferable prig. No. It's my memory that's wrong. Yeah. For my part, I kind of suspect he was an intolerable prig as a kid. But maybe that's unfair.

It is true that he grew into one as an adult. One thing I find interesting about his prig status is that after he invented eugenics, he came to believe the disabled people should be prevented from breeding. Even so, he wrote this of his big sister. And this is after his official take is that we need. need to sterilize people who are born with any sort of genetic disability, with any sort of like inherited disability, right? He writes this of his big sister. Though she was compelled to pass the greater part of her life lying on her back, she was so energetic in other ways and so capable

of endurance that she overcame difficulties that would have been insurmountable to most women who were equally handicapped. She was active in setting up schools and teaching the poor. She had a considerable correspondence and exerted a wide influence among all classes during many years. Her natural capacity was of an unusually high order, and many who knew her well and whose opinions deserve respect, thought that a slight betterment of opportunity and circumstances might have caused her name to be as widely loved and known as those of any of our English saints or heroines. What he's saying is, she was really smart. She wasn't educated because she was a disabled girl in 1800.

He's like, this person really contributed to society. Too bad they were disabled, and they obviously can't contribute to society. Yeah, obviously. Should be stopped from breeding. I really owe everything, don't. her. My entire career is a scientist and a researcher to her educating me as a child, but clearly disabled people have nothing of value to contribute to society. Like, he, the way he squares that is being like, well, she was my sister. So she must have been like a special kind of disabled.

Right. She is my special blood. Yeah, exactly. So from an early age, Francis steered his, Francis's parents steered him toward the sciences. Unfortunately, this is the early 1800s, well, mid-1800s by the time he's like a teenager, which means he's. spent a good deal of time being exposed to absolute cranks, and I fear they rubbed off on him. Here's one recollection, and this is from when he would have been like five or six years old. Father discovered a needy foreign chemist who agreed to take me in hand, at a rather high charge. All I clearly recollect of him now was that he seemed obsessed with the idea of making some wonderful compound out of succinic acid, which is derived from amber, and that he spent

all his spare shillings and buying bits of amber and burning them. I learned nothing from his tuition. So he's just like this madman who thinks he's going to make some compound out of amber That's got probably an alchemy sort of deal where it's gonna be an immortality elixir and make gold or some shit This is what I envy about people back then Way easier is you can look at the moon and say it's made of ghosts Yeah, and like they'll get enough people to go like yeah that's probably right That seems right well it's a writer too just the if you're just the first guy to figure out I don't know

what if a dude was dead but not? And then you invent fucking Dracula, right? Yeah. Like, it was a lot easier back then to be like a groundbreaking writer. I mean, all the way into freaking 70s, I would argue. Like, listen, I love Spielberg, but it doesn't take a genius to go like, what if a shark attacked people? Yeah, what if a shark was scary?

Yeah. Yeah. So by age five or so, Francis is already out of the house attending boarding schools, which started for him when he was like five. And over the next several years, he bounced around several, including a boarding school in France, which he hated because of the strict and abuse of discipline. Kids were punished there by receiving a little metal mark that they had to carry around with them whenever they spoke English. And they could transfer these marks to other kids who screwed up. Sorry, I said a boarding school in France. It's a French boarding school in England, right?

And when you speak English because you're supposed to be learning French, they give you this little metal token that's like a token of shame and you lose privileges. when you have it, but you can get rid of this mark of shame by transferring it to another kid who screws up. So it becomes common for children who have a mark and when they get rid of it to trick gullible kids into speaking English. And Francis is the most gullible kid in the school. So he gets, he gets tricked a lot. Amazing. It sounds like they're like actually created this weird economy in this school. Yeah, they did. The shame economy? Yeah. Yeah. And it's teaching the kids to, like, abuse their fellow kids and trick them in order to, like,

transfer the punishments onto them. Francis never gets over this. He's pissed about this for the rest of his life, and he lives a long-ass life. He writes decades later in, like, 1900-something, as an elderly man, I rebelled with my whole heart against the treachery encouraged by this system. And I get it. I was about to say, yes, this would be something I would take to my grave. Yeah, I would probably take this to my grave.

Yes, I would be finding the people Yeah, hunt them down When I was an adult, yes Those are who I'd be sterilizing as an adult Were I a sterilizer, you know? He had similar complaints When he was sent to King's Edward School In Birmingham as a teenager

This is kind of his high school Quote, I learned nothing Nothing and chafed at my limitations He hates school Anytime he's like, has to learn around other kids In part because he says that he craved Topics that were denied to him at this fan because this rich kid school just focuses on the classics right it's the kind of school

a lot of conservatives want all of education to be where you just learn like the iliad and shit right and galton's like no i wanted to learn first off they would they wouldn't let me do any good english reading you're doing everything in fucking latin and i didn't want to read in latin i wanted to read in english and also i wanted to learn math and science and they didn't care about math and science because it had barely existed at that point in time and i didn't want to fucking memorize the goddamn Aeneid in Latin, which bro, I had to translate the Aeneid from Latin and it sucked ass, so I get it, Francis. Like, I hear you, man.

He provided an anecdote from his time in grade school that I do feel honor bound to share with you. One of our schoolfellows, a gaunt, dyspeptic-looking boy, performed the following feet to our terror and admiration as we crowded around him to see it. He took a frog by its hind feet, opened his wide mouth, and dropped the frogs four feet on his tongue. The frog struggled to get free, and at the critical moment his hind legs were let go, down went the frog head foremost into his gullet.

He was our hero for the time. None other dared to attempt the same feat. He said that he felt the frog all the way as it went down into his stomach and in it. That's nuts. There was nothing to do. I mean, I love how that is a story that could be from any era about a dude. Like you could have told me that's from like. It was crazy.

Yeah, George Bush in college. that she's the same, I believe it, right? If some kid had done that when I was in middle school, I would remember that the rest of my life. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. He'd be a king. He'd be a king, yeah. Not like a king you respect or follow, but a king.

But like, like, a king nonetheless. The fact that he's like, yeah, he was the hero for the day. I'm like, yeah, no, you would be. Like, he absolutely would be. Francis's mother seems to have decided at some point during his adolescence that her genius son was destined for a career in medicine, and his father seems to have done the same. One presumes that his mom was influenced by the fact that her dad was Dr. Erasmus Darwin,

a prominent physician and scientist. Now, Dr. Erasmus Darwin was an early and major proponent of the idea of biological evolution that all life descended from a single microscopic ancestor. That had existed as a theory before Charles Darwin. He's not, the fact that Darwin writes out the origin of species doesn't mean no one was thinking about ideas that are related to evolution. And like, we shouldn't. take from this that Dr. Erasmus Darwin had the whole idea of like natural selection down because

he certainly didn't. But he is one of a number of scientists that's like, well, there's probably a common origin to all life rather than God have just making a bunch of different animals and people and stuff. And this is very controversial at the time. Arasmus is attacked as a radical godless atheist as much as he's praised for being an icon of the Enlightenment. And you know who else is a godless atheist who seeks to destroy all of religion and faith, you know, by force if necessary. Oh, man. The sponsors of this podcast. No, that's, yeah, that's right.

That's going to say. We don't support that. They're radical, you know, but they are advertising on our podcast. So please buy their product and support their destruction of all faith. Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all?

And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life. exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.

They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus. or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself

because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here.

It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome

home. This is Pro's Sussex. The weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story.

I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages.

And we're back. Wow. That was, I mean, again, I don't stand by what our advertisers says. said. Oh, that was very offensive stream. Yeah. Yeah, honestly, upsetting. But what can you do with advertisements? You know, you just take their money and let them say whatever. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Cash the check. That's right. That's right. So, at age 16, Francis was pulled out of King Edward's school. His high school, his formal education ends when he's 16 because his dad's like, it's time for you to learn to be a doctor. And the way learning to be a doctor went, You don't like, got a, I mean, they had medical schools, but it was not the same as medical school as now. You pretty much get tossed directly into an internship by working as a doctor's assistant under another doctor.

So he gets pulled out of school at 16 and immediately starts interning at Birmingham General Hospital. There were so many fewer rules at that point in time. That's horrifying. Imagine going to the hospital. Oh, my God. There's a fucking 16 year old. You've got like a fucking knife in your belly or something. Oh, man, that would suck.

Oh, man. After he'd left high school, but before he started work at the hospital, his dad decided reasonably enough that Francis should get an example of what to expect at the hospital first, that like he's going to pay him to like follow a different doctor around first so that he can at least get prepared for like being in an ER. And here's the description of that. This is his first like experience with medicine. My father asked our medical attendant, Mr. P, to show me an example of the medical

work I should be engaged in before I was. was plunged wholly into it. A servant brought a note from Mr. P. awaiting an answer. It was to the effect that a housemate had suddenly died at Lord Blank's house, and that he, Mr. P., was about to make a post-mortem examination. Would I like to come? Oh, the mixture of revulsion, wonder and interest, and excitement. I changed clothes and went, entering the house by a back door as directed, and treading softly up the back staircase to the cold garret where the poor girl lay. She was the first dead person I had seen, handsome and feature but greatly swollen. She had been apparently in perfect health a few hours before,

then she was suddenly seized with intense pain in the stomach, followed rapidly by perientitis. And that's inflammation, often infection of the outer lining of the inner abdomen caused usually by a puncture wound, right? So you've got your guts are bleeding into your other guts, right? Is what he describes here. And then she dies as a result of massive infection. Mr. P. pricked his finger while sewing up the air.

abdomen. A dissection wound when death has followed perianitis is proverbially dangerous. It was so in this case for Mr. P. nearly died of it. So his first experience with medicine is he takes this doctor takes him to see the bloated corpse of this girl around his age and pricks his finger sewing her body up and nearly dies himself of infection. That's his first experience with medicine. There's a lot. There's a lot to take away from that. There's a lot to take away from that. Number one, I don't need to know how good looking the corpses. Yeah, that was weird. Weird of you to note.

Yeah. I don't need to know. Also, he's making up names. I don't know. Mr. Blank and Mr. P. Come on, man.

Do better. Man. It's just death is such a constant in this period that you're like, yeah, you could cut your finger at any time, kid, and that's it. That's it. Normal day at the office.

Cut your finger. It's over. So days later, Galton would consider this the moment that ended his childhood. And like, yeah, that would pretty much be it. You're not really a kid after you go through that.

No. You're done. You're done. Yeah, you're done. You're an adult man now. Still, he took to work at the hospital gamely enough and was soon sewing up wounds and risking his own young life to do so. This is where he first encountered the mentally ill.

In his autobiography, he describes accompanying a researcher named William Bowman to an asylum in Vienna. So during like a break in like the hospital work calendar or whatever, he accompanies these two other doctors to Europe. This is his first time over to Europe and they go to an insane asylum. And this is, he's, they're doing some work and he's just sort of following them to get, like, experience in the broader medical field. And he writes this of the insane asylum. In those days, I was particularly shy and sensitive and a consciousness of even the least unconventionality may be blush to an absurd degree. In one of the female wards, a young buxom, an uncommonly good-looking

female lunatic dashed forward with a joyful scream. She clasped me tightly to her bosom with both hands, calling me her long lost fritz, tableau, amusement of the others, myself pink to the ears. So this is like really embarrassing to him because this good-looking girl who's mentally ill hugs him and is like putting her breasts up to him. And this is like one of the life moments he remembers most from his child. Got to be honest, great, great statement. Uncommonly good-looking female lunatic. Uncommonly good-looking female lunatic.

I know a lot of those. How old was he? He could have, 17 maybe This is why Teenager This is why they should be just fucking Going to the prom and shit, right? Exactly, exactly

He's like 16, 17 And he just can't help But to talk about how hot The corpses and the insane asylum patients He met on In a better world He would have met this uncommonly good looking female lunatic at a party And eventually she would have given him a mixtape

And then he would have given her like a really shitty mix tape That he made Like, because these days, we call the manic pixie dream girls. Turn back then, what is it again? Uncommonly good-looking female lunatic. Yeah, that's the first manic pixie dream girl. Yeah. I'm having a great time.

He meets his in an asylum. That should be a shirt, right? I know, it should. It should. I tell you what, there's a good road trip movie in this. Oh, yeah. So this trip to the continent is Francis's first experience abroad. He writes his older sister best during the visit

I have duly kept your precepts in mind about the immeasurable superiority of Englishmen. So he's a bigot and his family are bigoted. But this is a pre-scientific racist. They're just like, but we're better than everyone else that you meet because we're English. Never forget that we're better. Like as you travel the world, we're the best that everyone else is worse than us. Remember that, Francis. This is how you may.

I am surprised this didn't make a Hitler. It kind of did. I know it kind of did. But I'm more overt like a guy walking around going like, yeah, I'm Hitler. Because there's like telling a child. Yeah, telling like a teenager, you're better than everybody else. You're the best by birth. And then come with me to go see people at their worst and most vulnerable moments.

Yeah. Well, reminding you that you're better than all these people. Yeah, of course that made him into the man who invented eugenics. Yeah, that's a Hitler stew. That's the least surprising thing in the world. Yeah, that's all the pieces of a tasty Hitler stew, right? Yeah. They're all together.

I'm going to guess a lot of cumin in a Hitler stew. I'm not sure why. Anyway, during the same trip, he wrote this in a letter back home to his whole family. With his GI issues, that motherfucker's not seasoning his food. Yeah, you're probably right, Sophie. You guys have, you've covered this Hitler fellow on this show? We have. We've talked a little bit about Hitler.

Is that like your Thanos? The only H-bomb? Yeah, that's our Thanos. During the same trip, you wrote this in a letter back home to his entire family. There is nothing more useful than traveling. The more you see, the more you are convinced of the superiority of England. However, nothing could be so admirable as a German or Frenchman. who loves this country, it must be a great and genuine patriotism to be able thus to prefer

it. But like, wow, these must really be admirable patriots if they love their shitty-ass fucking countries that suck so much worse than England. Oh, my God. This man really is such a funny bigot. He's for his country in an unhinged way. I've already quoted from two major sources in these episodes, Polmer's biography of Francis Galton and Galton's own autobiography.

But I found these quotes, the ones that I just read. about him talking about how much better England is than everywhere. In a dissertation, Susan Schumacher wrote for the University of Canterbury, and Susan analyzed the growth and development of Galton's chauvinistic views during his world travel. So we'll be hearing from her several more times in these episodes. Most of the scientific training Galton received as a doctor was in boiling various natural compounds to make tinctures and extracts. There's a lot of boiling, there's a lot of simmering, there's a lot of reducing things to vapors

and then turning them into liquids again. That's most of medical science. And there's also a lot of making pills. You're mashing up different compounds to like make pills. It's all we could do, right? It's all we do. You have fire and a pot. What do we do?

Yeah. What do we do here? We got a rock and we got some like... Maybe this plant does something. Maybe it's medical. Maybe just poisons people in a way we think is beneficial. There's no way to know. Like, we're still very new with this science thing.

To give you an idea of how primitive shit was, this is something that Galton wrote later about his medical schooling. The stethoscope was considered generally to be newfangled. The older and naturally somewhat deaf practitioners pooed and never used it. So like the most respected doctors like a stethoscope, everyone's deaf. Why would that be useful? You probably scream it a lot louder. It's really funny to feel like why would we need to listen more or observe closer? That's not doctoring. These people are poor. You don't need to listen to them.

Again, not long after this, a man is going to be hounded to his death in the United States for being like, surgeons should wash their hands. And the reason why he's hounded to his death is that surgeons are like, but doctors can't give poor people illnesses. We're rich, right? That's literally the justification. We're a better class of person. Why would we have to wash our hands? That means we're the same kind of thing as a poor person if we could get them sick. It's very funny, except for all the deaths.

So working in their equivalent, his day's equivalent of an ER, which is what his early medical school is in. He's like basically working in an emergency room. Galton got a feeling for the common sorts of injuries of the day. Most nighttime emergencies were caused by burns because everyone's heating everything with like fire and oil. So if you get injured at night, it's probably because you like poured a fucking burning lamp on yourself or something, right? It was a horrible time to be alive. Oh yeah. I do this nightly to myself.

Yeah. It would be awful. The next most common injury. were broken heads from brawls. That's how he described them at night time, right? Because people are drunk at a bar and they get into a fight, which he had to clean and stitch up. As a wealthy child of a wealthy family in the Victorian era, he had grown up extremely conservative, and this colored his interpretations of all he saw. His biographer Michael Bollmer describes him as having little sympathy for liberal causes like chartism. The Chartist movement was a working-class attempt to

reform UK politics that was active from 1838 to the late 1840s. It was a kind of proto-socialist e, right? It's not perfectly accurate to view it that way, but it's certainly on like the progressive side of things. And they supported some radical policies, like a vote for every free man of sound mind over the age of 21. They also supported an end to property qualifications for ministers of parliament. So you didn't have to like own land to be in parliament.

And annual parliamentary elections so that rich people couldn't just like buy office. as easily because you'd have to do it more often, right? So woke shit. Woke shit, the Chartists. Britain would ultimately adopt nearly every chartist reform. The only one they still haven't adopted to the present day is annual elections to parliament, because, again, it would make rich people less powerful. But only after the movement died, right?

The Chartists don't get anything until after they've been bashed into, like, fucking prison and stuff, right? And there are a lot of brutal riots and mob, like police riots and stuff, where these charters are bashed half to death or to death in order to stop them from advocating for slightly better conditions. The height of the movement was in 1839, which is like one of the first years that Francis is working as a doctor. There were mass protests that the police cracked down on with standard brutality.

All Francis noted at the time was, many people were hurt. It was curious to observe the apparent cleanness of the cuts that were made through the scout by the blow of a policeman's round truncheon. That like, wow, when police beat people half to death, it's really clean. I love police violence. It's so much better than bar violence. It's like they're blessing them somehow. Yeah.

What a clean, nice wound of the police left this dying man. Orderly wounds. He's now brain damaged forever. Yeah. I love how orderly police caused wounds are. That's Francis's conclusion. Bulmer analyzed this statement in his biography of Francis Galton and concluded, This comment reveals a detached intellectual interest, a tendency to see people as cases to be studied, or examples to be counted, rather than as fellow humans to be sympathized with, which remained part of his character.

And that is very important. He does not see people as people. He sees people as data points on a graph, right? He would have been an effective altruism guy if he came out today, where he's like, well, this means that we have to support. thousand millions of people dying and starving, but it will be better for people who don't exist yet maybe in the future. Based on these things I've decided in my own head that don't necessarily correspond to reality, that would have been him today. In 1840, Francis traveled overseas on his own for the first time. His father had agreed to pay for him to study medicine in Germany over

the summer. Showing what it seems to be a have been rare defiance, he instead decided to, quote, make a dash and go as far as his dad's money would take him. So he's like, I'm not got to study in Germany. I'm fucking bouncing. I'm going to take my dad's money. I'm going to go to the Balkans. I'm going to go to Constantinople. And honestly, if I was a rich kid,

I would definitely prefer rolling around the Balkans in Constantinople to go to the ER. Yeah, DJ for a while. Yeah, he took it a residency of an Ibiza. Yeah. This means that for the first time, Francis was confronted with large numbers of non-white people once he winds up in Turkey, right? Schumacher's dissertation provides Francis's reaction to being in this environment. In a letter to his father, he begins, here I am at Constantinople among Turks, Armenians, Greeks,

Jews, and Franks, and further on in the same letter, then there are the Greeks. I never saw such black eyes in all my life. I should like to put one of them in a rage. They must look splendid then. Oh my goodness. That's a crazy state. man? This is going as good as you assume it would, right?

This guy around anybody who isn't white, he's going to be like, I don't know why. I don't like this that much. I don't know why. And he's around a bunch of Greeks for the first time after just like reading the Iliad as a kid. He's like, I bet they look great angry. I wish I could really piss off this Greek so I could see them in their natural condition, which I assume the Iliad describes.

What a weird out. He continues in that letter. And here's where things get really dark. I saw the woman's slave market today. If I had 50 pounds in currency at my disposal, I could have invested in an excessively beautiful one, a Georgian. Some of the slaves had their nails dyed in Hina. Most of the black ones were fettered, but they seemed very happy dancing and singing and looking on complacently, whilst a couple of the Turks were wrangling about their prices. So, sir.

There's, okay. This guy, everything he writes, it makes me want to put him in a cage. Yeah. Like I want to contain him. Yeah, he should have been locked up. Yeah, interacting with society. No, no. A cave would have been the right thing.

Plato's the cave is a great example of what we should have done to people like this fucking kid. You know, lock him in a cave, let him look at some fucking projections and a fire on the wall. And just let him live and die there. Either that or I want to give him access to Twitter. It's one or the other because he'd be like a real Chet Hanks or something on Twitter. He'd be Richard Henanio fucking, like, like, just. Jesus. So it is kind of noteworthy to his casual willingness to discuss buying a sex slave, right?

Because Britain ended slavery in its possessions in 1833. Slavery's been over for like almost a decade in Britain when he's saying this. So that means, among other things, he doesn't care about that. He doesn't think that it's immoral to own a person as long as they're not a white person, right? Especially if you want to have sex with them. That's a perfectly good reason to want to own somebody. You know, if he'd had more currency, he would have bought a sex slave. Later during his vacation in 1841, he wrote to his father about a very entertaining fellow traveler.

He had a hooked nose, gold spectacles, and was a member of the Reform Club and a nay plus ultra radical. We had a red-hot argument on politics, which I firmly believe neither of us knew anything about. Lall. Based on how he describes Jewish people. Elsewise, I'm guessing that this was like a Jewish socialist that he meets, right? That's why he... Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, great. Also the assumption that like, well, this guy's talking about politics I don't believe in. We must, neither of us must know anything about politics. And it's like maybe it was just you, Francis. I was about to say that sounds like he lost the debate. It sounds like he lost the argument. Sounds like this guy said some reasonable stuff. Maybe we shouldn't own people.

Yeah, what do we know? What do we know? Yeah. Galton attended college in Cambridge as a break from his medical education to study mathematics. His half-cousin, Charles Darwin, helped convince his father this was a good idea. Boomer calls his academic record here undistinguished. Despite his later success in statistics, Francis was a mediocre math student by his own account. He's like, I wish I was better at maths.

And he suffered a mental breakdown in his third year. This caused him to settle for a past degree rather than attempting to earn an honors distinction. So he gives up on being like a great student and just is focusing on just doing well enough to pass because he can't really do much better. his weakness is always going to be analytical mathematics. That's what math people say. I'm not fit to judge him as a mathematician or anybody, right? I'm no math learner. I'm no math learner.

I went to a performance arts charter school. I barely know how to do math. I dropped out of fucking college. I certainly don't know how to do math. But math people are like, he wasn't very good at the analytical side of mathematics. That was his big weakness, right? He chose to take a past degree during his final year at Cambridge, too, because he been drawn to extracurriculars and didn't want to take away from them. And these extracurriculars

are the humanities, right? Galton helps find, found the historical society, which is a debating group, formed to propose a different debating group, the Cambridge Union, right? So he gets really into like arguing with kids about history other than, as opposed to like learning how to be a better mathematician. Oh, good. He likes to debate. He gets into the Ben Shapiro sciences. Everybody cool loves debate. Everybody cool loves as a kid who loved debate, I was not cool in school. But you know who is cool in school?

That's right, Sophie. Dave and the sponsors of this podcast. Who are willing to argue with you, honestly, don't listen to the things they want to argue about. It's not great. Probably raises. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches there's a lot of suspense. Will they

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Bell, connection is everything. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offered. me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting

people and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about. it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pros Society, the weekly podcast that's part bookbook Club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride

and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. So I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

See you between the pages. And we're back. So, talking Francis Galton. he was a you know he seems to have been a pretty popular guy at school he makes a lot of friends he's very social he's going to make a lot of influential contacts during this period with other wealthy kids which is really what college is all about right like that's the actual benefit of college even today there's not as much of a benefit if you're not making connections and friends with other rich people like that's definitely why a lot of kids go to you know like harvard or Cambridge today. Several of his friends were budding historians, and this is where we can document

him first experiencing his earliest feelings of race science. Quote, the subject of prehistoric civilization was novel even so late as the early 50s and was discussed independently from two different sides. The line of approach that one of his friends followed was to investigate the customs of the so-called Aryan races. The other line was by studying, was by the study of living savage races and of such inferences regarding the past as might be drawn from implements and bones preserved in prehistoric graves and caverns. So one of the issues with this, and this is an issue that persists the modern day. They're looking at so-called savage people, which are in reality the indigenous people of the places they're colonizing. And these are the indigenous

people of the places they're colonizing after they've generally been through apocalyptic changes, right, especially the Americas. Everything they're noting about the behavior of indigenous people is usually after like 90% of them died of disease and a bunch of the rest get enslaved. And they're like, ah, the natural habitats of this group of people. It would be like if the nukes go off and then some aliens came down here like four years after all electricity is gone and were reduced to starving tribes. And like, in their natural society, human beings seem to huddle and search for cans, fighting each other for like depots of cans.

And that's their natural human. They're naturally traumatized and terrified of us. Yeah, not quite, actually. Maybe that's not a fair way to document and to try to draw inferences of the past, right? This is partly where the idea that like life was nasty, brutus, and short, and ancient peoples had no technology and no knowledge of anything and no art. That's a lot of like prehistory gets written about like people didn't know how to do war in the ancient era because they weren't really sophisticated enough. I mean, we do this shit with like Native Americans, too, which is like, yeah, you go in, you brutalize and devastate a group of people, and then you conclude, based off the brutalization and devastation you did, oh, they were pretty primitive, actually. I mean, look at them all with these burning huts.

Like, they couldn't even keep a hut not burning. Yeah, yeah. All we did was light them on fire. And look, the natural state of their homes is burning down. Yeah. I mean, it is what people, some people do about, like, the Middle East today, right? where they're like, wow, we've been at war with this place for forever, and they're naturally pissed at us for reasons that we have nothing to do with. Yeah, cool stuff. I love how Cobb an inference that is.

He goes on to explain that at the time, most historians believe that the entire history of the ancient world was contained in the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Old Testament. It was also practically supposed that nothing more of importance could be learned from the origins of civilization during classical times than was to be found definitely stated in classical. authors. So he's saying that, like, at his time, the idea of prehistory is that, like, there's nothing really to learn. It's all in the Bible. So the fact that his friends are talking about prehistory in any way are trying to glean anything more than in these classical works is actually part of like a revolution in historiography. Even as bad and as, as incomplete as it is,

to like look at these people and tribes that you've been fucking with for years and try to determine ancient civilization, that's still an improvement over just being like, well, whatever is in the Bible and the Iliot is probably all we need to know about ancient peoples. Like, actually, no. It's an incredible time when you're talking about like that hip new thing called mass and science and prehistory. Yeah, yeah. Trying to barely understand the world.

Yeah. So through his young adulthood, Galton is going to see Western antiquarians and archaeologists trying to grapple with the disconnect between evidence of ancient great civilization. of non-white people and their beliefs about white supremacy. This is like a major thing that early history is dealing with. Giving his waning interest in math education and his clear disinterest in practicing medicine, I don't know what Francis Galton would have done after graduation if he'd been a normal kid, but he wasn't.

And the period of time in which he has to think about doing something for a living is about to end. Because his dad dies in 1844 and his dad is fucking loaded. He's so loaded that even though there's a bunch of, of brothers and sisters, the resulting inheritance that Francis gets makes him instantly so wealthy that he never has to work again, right? As long as he doesn't develop like a fashionable gambling problem, he's never going to have to do anything. And so as soon as he gets his inheritance, Francis is like, well, I'm not going to do anything practical anymore. Like, that part of my life is over. It's time to fuck off and party for a while. Um, Bomer writes that Galton, quote,

immediately abandoned the idea of practicing medicine, and in 1845, he set up for the Near East to satisfy his desire to travel, and sow his wild oats. Now, there's a, actually, I like to think back to a very good Rudyard Kipling line from the poem, the poem, or Mandalay Bay, I think is the name of the poem, and he's talking about, like, the British colonial possessions in a period of time a little bit after Galton's youth, and he's talking about, like, what psychologically goes

on in the men who travel over to the far east into Asia as part of the empire. Take me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, where there ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst. Galton is going over to the Middle East and North Africa to raise a thirst. He's not just going to fulfill his intellectual interest. He is going there to have sex with a lot of enslaved people. He's going to become collegula. Yeah, he's going to do a lot of horrible sins.

That's why he's going. How old is he? He's like 18 or 19. Yeah, when I was that age, the moment I left home. Horrible things. I was snorting drugs in a squat house. Yeah, exactly. In London.

Immediately to nose drugs in a foreign country. Yeah. I was looking black tar heroin off of a guy's finger in rural India. Yeah, exactly. It's a miracle we're alive. If it'd been around, we might not be. Right. Honestly, it's an injustice that we're alive.

It's like, yeah. Yeah, that's an affront to nature. Oh, God. So this first meant that Galton goes on what Bullwer describes as a shooting trip up the Nile. And shooting trips are popular gatherings for the upper class and their stocked estates. And they would sometimes go on vacation for the same purpose. A bunch of wealthy armed white guys are going to like roam around on a boat and shoot every living creature we see on the Nile for a couple of weeks. It's just starting blasting.

Yeah, it's a shooting trip. We're going to blast everything we can. It's one of those things like nowadays, if I told someone I was going on a shooting trip, you know, it wouldn't go over well. Yeah. Going on a shooting trip to where? Yeah.

The Nile? Unfortunately, Francis was unable to convince any of his friends to go with him, perhaps because they had to finish school or work, and he didn't have to do that anymore. But on the steamer over, he meets two of his rich former classmates, who are all in the same condition as he is. They're traveling with a butler and a cook to the Nile, right? And so they decide to all hang out together,

and Galton finds the group an Arab translator and an Arab boy to be their coffee bearer. His name was Ali, but they nicknamed him Bob, because again, they're not going to call this boy by his fucking name, right? Ali or Bob, it's the same amount of letter. It's just the same amount of letters. What does he care? Yeah.

Just call him by his name. By his fucking name. It's not a hard one to pronounce, guys. No. Early in the trip, they met a man that they first mistook for a poor Arab traveling in a small and dirty boat. Upon meeting, Galton describes how, quote, like arrogant Britishers, he and his friends discussed loudly in English together, whether we should not pitch him into the river. So they start like joking, he doesn't speak English. Let's talk about throwing this strange Arab man that we just meet on the Nile into the river for no reason.

But before they could, quote, he shortly astonished us by. speaking perfect French and after a while we discovered he was a much more interesting person than we had dreamed of. Now, first off, he's interesting because he's white. They find out he's a French guy. This person, this is another one of Galton's early connections to like a leftist, right? This French person who they realize is actually really smart and interesting is an exiled Saint Simonian. And the Saint Simonians are a kind of proto-socialist sect in France. And they get sort of cracked down on and made illegal and he flees the country and he winds up working for a local Arab leader. And this French guy, Armand, explains to Galton that, quote, though he spoke

English badly, he quite understood what we had said among ourselves when we first met him and made me feel very small indeed. And the fact that he says that like, oh, I felt like such an asshole for like assuming something about this foreign man that turned out to be wrong based on his appearance. And for some people, this would have led to introspection and even change, right? Galton keeps getting confronted with these opportunities to be a better person. He will never take them. Absolutely not. He's telling this story like someone like getting a waiter's name wrong.

Like, oh, can you believe it? But he was going to throw a man in the Nile. Yeah, he was going to throw him in the Nile for looking different. He's such a brick. And in no point does he become a better person. He never grows because he's rich. He doesn't have to. I think that's a big part of it.

Like, he never has to be afraid of anyone, really. He should. But he never has to because of his money. Galton spent years in North Africa in the Middle East, sowing his wild oats in his own words. There is evidence that during this period he did things that later ashamed him. His biographers will note that almost none of his letters survive from the years right after his dad died. His first biographer, Carl Pearson, calls this period.

of his life the fallow years of his life because there's we don't have anything to know about them right because he you're kind of led to believe he destroyed the letters he sent home yeah he he did some stuff but he was like oh no i don't want history to know about this this was his live journal years where it's like you know we're all kind of thankful live journal isn't around anymore yeah thank god they took that down yeah now i am not i've had some fallow years of my own so i'm not surprised that his great niece and future housekeeper told his biographer Pearson that she thought it, quote, best not to take any notice of those blank years. I expect his mother tore up any letters of that date.

Pearson merely notes that the letters perished. Right? Yeah. Now that is enticing. His more recent biographer Bulwer cites one rare surviving letter from this period. That's a letter to Galton from his friend Montague Bolton. And Montague is one of the guys he's exploring Egypt in the North. in North Africa and the Middle East with during this time, right?

Montague's a traveling buddy and later sends a letter to Galton referencing their adventures together and writes, what an unfortunate fellow you are to get laid up in such a serious manner for, as you say, a few moments enjoyment. That means he caught VD, right? Yeah. And based on other things he wrote, we know that this is, maybe this is from a prostitute who was technically free. It's probably from an enslaved person.

And so it's probably right by any just, like that's most of the sexies have. It's horrifying, right? One reason for us to guess this is that at a later point in the same letter, Galton's friend Montague describes negotiating for a pretty enslaved girl from Abysinia or Ethiopia. He told Galton, the Han Huris are looking lovelier than ever. The divorced one has been critically examined and pronounced a virgin. Now, I don't know what the Han Hurries are, but the Hurries are, the infamous heavenly virgins in the Islamic afterlife.

Now, there's a lot of debate as to what that actually means. I don't know why he would put Han there, but my guess is that that was a term he and Montague came up with for some local enslaved women who worked at a brothel that they both knew. And this guy's saying, one of them got inspected and pronounced it, right, a virgin. Right. His friend is talking about the prostitutes that they hung out with. Yeah.

The enslaved with, right? The cage I'm picturing putting him in. keeps getting smaller. Yeah, smaller and smaller. He has some spikes in there now. Yeah. We can kind of infer from this information that Francis Galton spent a fair amount of his recreational time during this period having non-consensual sex with enslaved people.

There were hints of this reprobate period, even in Galton's autobiography. In a chapter about his visit to Khartoum, Egypt, he writes this. The saying was that when a man was such a reprobate that he could not live in Europe, he went to Constantinople. If too bad to be tolerated in Constantinople, he went to Cairo and thence forward under similar compulsion to Khartoum. Now he's saying like when someone was so shitty they couldn't exist in Europe, they go from Constantinople and then to Cairo and then the cartoon.

That's the exact route he took. He's talking about himself, right? He's just getting booted out of countries basically. Because he's fucking doing all the drugs and having sex with all the enslaved people he can. He's on a crime spree. He's on a crime spree, but he's rich. So he doesn't get arrested. He just gets kicked off. off to the next city.

And it's also worth noting that pretty much the only thing he writes about doing in Khartoum is meeting a bunch of slave traders. He's introduced to these slave traders by another Englishman, a Cambridge scholar, another Cambridge scholar. All of these guys hoaring

their way through the Middle East are Cambridge Cambridge Scholars. And this dude introduces, this is what he writes about the guy who introduces them to the slave traders. He easily held his own under difficulties, won hearts by his sympathy, and could touch any amount of pitch without himself being defiled. He was consequently an admirable guide and then that sink of iniquity,

Khartoum, right? He never got defiled by the fact that he was hanging out with the absolute worst people on the planet, right? The most degenerate and vile slavers. But he never got colored by it, just like me. You don't think too much about what I did in my free time as a kid. He had this to say about the people he met through these slave traders. party of inward girls who had been captured on the borders of Abyssinia. These girls were delighted to talk to us of places known to them as well as ourselves. They seem merry as possible the prospect of being sold and soon finding each of them a master in a home.

He writes a lot about how happy specifically black enslaved people are at the idea of being enslaved. Whenever he writes about black people, it's to say they wanted to be enslaved. That's like the only time they come up in his biography, his autobiography. I should note that too. I mean, fucking people still try to say that today. It's like this real incredible coping, right? It's like they loved it.

Otherwise, I mean, I would be like when a history is getting of greatest monsters, and I can't be that, right? Yeah. They must have loved it. It'd have been that bad. Otherwise, I'm completely damned. Yeah. Yeah, I am a sinner beyond the ability to forgive.

Yeah. Which you were, Francis. And you know who else is beyond forgiveness? forgiveness. All of us. All of us. Yes. Yes, that's right. Unless we accept Jesus Christ into our hearts. Yes, sure, you're going with this, right? But I was, but not like the religious Jesus, but like the Jesus you say when like something fucked up happens and you're like, Jesus Christ. Right. You have to accept that, that like sense of resignation into your heart. I got to say, that's the only thing that'll save you. I really admire that Jesus Christ is you, is a, is a person and like an expletive. Like,

You can, it's hard to be that. Yeah. Yeah, we should do that. Yeah, you want David Bell. God, David Christopher Bell. Yeah, that actually does work a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, the next time you stub your toes, listeners, save David's name, you know?

Please. Oh, Dave, you got anything to plug? Uh, is it, is there ever a good time to mention that my ancestors was Alexander Graham Bell, a famous eugenicist? Yeah, that is a good time to mention. I was wondering he's going to make a cameo in this. I should do the Alexander Graham Bell episodes with you, David. Yeah, I'll plug, so I have a podcast network. You do.

Gamefully unemployed, I do with Tom Ryman. We don't talk about eugenics, mostly. We're mostly about, like, movies, like, movies like Best of the Best with Eric Roberts. That's right. The Best of the Best, too, with Eric Roberts, which I've been thinking about often. I have the box set coming. I want to plug the best of the best box set. But also, yeah, go to Patreon or just Google,

Unemployed, G-A-M-E-F-E-E-L-O-I, Unemployed. And I'm the headwriter at Some More News. That's right. At movie hooligan, I'm Blue Sky. Why not? Yeah, check them out. Check them out there. Check out Dave and Tom's podcast.

Fox Mulder is a maniac, too. If you're missing the X-Files and you want to think a lot about Molder's behavior. Right. Run behind the bastards, basically, for Fox Mulder. To be honest, if Fox Mulder had written an autobiography, there would be a period in his early 20s where he's bumming around the Middle East and North Africa committing crimes against humanity. Easily.

Easily, no question. We also, oh, we also have a new podcast about Supernatural. It's our sequel to that. It's about those beautiful Winchester boys. It's called Hymboos. Yeah. And it's a spiritual sequel to Fox Mulder's a maniac, it turns out, because they are also maniac.

It turns out. Beautiful stuff. All right, everybody. Well, that's going to be it for us from Behind the Bastards. And it should be it for all of you, you know, all of you listening to this podcast. Go and listen to the next podcast, which will happen at some point. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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