Doomed to Fail - Ep 135 - Useless Harbinger of Death?: The Appendix

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

While reading the children's classic "Madeline," Taylor's kids asked her what an appendix is, and she had no idea. No longer classified as a vestigial structure (take that, Darwin), the appendix might help with regulating gut bacteria after an illness.We'll talk about Gabriele Falloppio, who was no doubt wrist-deep in a human body when he called the appendix worm-shaped in 1522. Claudius Amyand, who performed the first successful appendectomy in 1735 on an 11-year-old boy, and Charles McBurney, who pointed to a belly and said, 'Name that spot after me!'We're doctors now.#appendix #darwin #medicalhistory #madelineLinks from our listener emails President Biden Announces Release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve As Part of Ongoing Efforts to Lower Prices and Address Lack of Supply Around the World - https://qz.com/the-biden-administration-made-66-million-in-its-first-1850531437The Biden administration made $66 million in its first oil trade - https://qz.com/the-biden-administration-made-66-million-in-its-first-1850531437   Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. And we are up and live and active. Hi, Taylor. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm good. We're both a little bit, a little bit tired. It was a long weekend, I think, for both of us. You just got back from a wedding. Where was your wedding at? It was in Palm Springs. It was just down the hill. as you say um and uh yeah it was fun it was at like a really beautiful venue and um we had a

wonderful time a lot of dancing yeah yeah what'd you do you're gone he just left i thought i didn't know what was chewing on it turns out it was her toy so she was being a good girl um yeah what did i do what did i do oh i went saw beetle juice um what was it yeah it was so I thought it was a little hokey, but overall, I mean, it was just good. I mean, it was good. It was good. But it was just like, you know, the first one is just such a cultural icon that you can't go and expect them to see something as good as that, you know?

So, uh, but no, highly recommended. Go see it. Go check it out. I also found this new show on Netflix called, um, My Crazy X. And it is terrifying. It is insane some of the stories. Is it like a documentary? Yeah,

it's like every episode is like an hour or so long covers like an X and it's just like the craziest stuff I've ever heard. So highly recommend that too. Do you want to go ahead and introduce us? Yes. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Dune to Fail.

Where the podcast that brings you history's most notorious failures and epic disasters twice a week, every week. And I am Taylor joined by ours. Always here? Always happy. um so taylor i think i have a sense of what you're going to cover today um i don't think you do never mind then i know i've been prepping you you mean like are you on my facebook post yes yes no no no absolutely i absolutely want to i'm going to do that next week because um it's going to be

it's so emotional so um i didn't have to finish the book and i was like i'm going to race through it So, like, if I have to risk through it, like, I don't want to do that. So I will do that next week. So I have, like, a kind of short and weird one for you today. Love it. Love weird. Okay. Okay. So have you read this book? Madeline, yeah. So probably not the book. I do remember the movie.

There. So Madeline. It's a little French girl. I just showed you this. I didn't show it to everybody else. We're not video, video medium. But isn't this, I have this pop-up thing.

Our friend Laura gave me this, I'm in a baby shower for flow. But isn't this cool? It's Paris. That is so cool. Did she make that? No, but that's a great question.

It's something that she may. She might have. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't listen to do. No, it comes in this book. So I'm going to read you a little bit.

And I need you to fill in the last word. And you'll get it because it's a rhyming. It's a rhyme. So Madeline lives in this not orphanage in like a boarding school and with a bunch of other little girls and their teacher is named Miss Clavel. So they've been hanging out. In the middle of one night, Miss Clavel turned on her light and said, something is not right. Little Madeline sat in bed, cried and cried, her eyes were red. And soon after Dr. Cohn came, he rushed out to the phone and he dialed Dan, ton, ton, ten, ten.

six nurse he said it's an appendix I'm talking about appendixos oh it's like I have no idea where that one's going I thought you might I thought you may know um um

what it's an appendix what does it do why do we have one all that that's what I'm going to talk about today fun the kids asked me and I was like I have no fucking clue I don't know either I know that when I was in college I had this um university doctor and had this really bad like pain in like my stomach area and he told me to go get it checked

out of the ER for an appendix issue and I didn't and I went back to him like a couple days later and he was like oh my God you got to get on get down right now like he was he was treating my body as though like a grenade was about to go off and so that's my only assumption yeah it's my only well there was no problem so I probably just ate bad tacos um but yeah that's the only thing I know is that they can go off in your body and just kill you out of nowhere. Yeah. Yeah. So your appendix is like a little organ and it like hangs off of your intestines.

So like you have all that junk and new. And in your intestines it like kind of hangs off the end. Like a little hangy thing. It looks like a worm. I'll tell you why I'll tell a little bit more about that. So that's what it is. It's an average about three and a half inches long for like most people. It's in your lower body near your right hip.

so like under your belly button near your right hip and then it kind of like hangs into your pelvis potentially or is like squished around other animals have them as well as like rabbits have them and like other ones do too um the darwin Charles Darwin thought it might be a vestigial structure which is something that is you know out evolution like we don't need it anymore but our bodies still have it like a tailbone right yeah makes sense um I'm super excited about because I don't have a tail but I broke my tailbone, so good for me. I think I broke my tailbone when I was a kid, too. They always tried to maybe, like, climb the rope in gym class.

I was always, like, a fat, chubby little boy, and I was like, dude, I can't climb the rope, and I kept falling back and, like, break my tailbone. Oh, my God, Fars. If you were, like, Taylor, I will murder you literally right now. If you don't climb this rope, I would be, you would murder me. I couldn't do it. Like, I can't, I cannot climb a rope. We invented ladders.

We solved this problem. It's like, yeah. Anyways. No. No, you're totally right. We don't need to know how to do that. But they actually think that the appendix might do something these days. They think that it might help with gut bacteria, especially if you have diarrhea.

It'll, like, hold the good bacteria and have it waiting for when you are, like, replenishing your body after you've been sick. So they see, they're seeing that people are like, it's something that they're discovering in developing countries because diarrhea is the fourth cause of death. in developing countries, the fourth leading cause, because you just, like, are sick all the time. It's wild. It's terrible. So they're, like, studying it down there in developing countries. But, you know, we did, I didn't do anything for a while. When it gets inflamed, probably because it's blocked, either by, like, you know, like,

an object that, like, got into it somehow, like, that you ate, like, that bad taco, like, got stuck in your, in your, like, in the appendix, like, through your, like, through your, or what's it called, through your intestines. So, like, maybe it's that. And it'll start to feel a little bit of pain. And then you'll feel more and more, like, where it actually is. Like, you'll feel it, like, throbbing. And at that point, it has to be removed or it will rupture.

If it ruptures, you can get paratitis, which is, like, an inflamed abdominal lining, and that can lead to shock and lead to death. so you don't you don't want to ignore it if it really is your appendix and I think you would know like I feel like I know people I know who have had their appendix like rupture or almost rupture like it's not like you have a stomach ache you know like you can't move it hurts so bad that was going to be my question was like because that's the part of it was always scared to me is you could just happen and you wouldn't know but it sounds like you would know you would know it's not like a brain aneurysm or you just like topple over you know it's like you feel

be you know you feel it and it gets like worse and worse and then um you have to have an appendectomy um if you have yours taken out usually you're fine like you don't need it and other parts of your body can do whatever it is doing but it can be something that you um that you live without if you just have to get it taken out for whatever reason um so I'm sure that like the ancient Romans and like ancient people knew a lot more about anatomy that we know that they knew you know what i mean like i'm sure there's ancient cultures who study this and like knew about it and we don't know that they knew um but in like our recorded western history um the first person to like talk about an appendix was named gabriel palopipio in 1522 in it all done well done with the hands i did a little

I did a little Italian thing. Gabrilyle Palucipio. So he was a humanist like Poggiolini who talked about before but who's during the Renaissance so they're like trying to study things that like they haven't studied in a long time. Like we're coming out of the European dark ages.

He studied in he lectured on anatomy and botany. He went to the best medical school in Italy, which sounds like hilarious and probably like just a horror show called best well they called it wasn't called the best but like it was like the one of the best schools it was called i lost it uh the university of ferrara but i mean it was like a great school but i'm sure it was just like people then walk around bloody and being like oh i just found this thing yeah it was it was like serial killer training academy yeah yeah

like they're just like taking bodies apart like all the things and um so he lectured on On anatomy and botany, he was the first person to write down, this one's dumb, that it takes muscles to lift your eyelids. I'm like, well, what the fuck else would be doing it? I mean, it was old days. But I'm not a doctor, so whatever. He also didn't believe in fossils. He just, like, didn't think that they were really fossils, which was fun. And he, like, wrote a paper about how, like, he didn't believe in them.

And then he was the first person to describe the appendix as, like, little worm-shaped. He called it a vermaform appendix, which means worm-shaped, and, like, that's what that means. But the other thing that he discovered and, like, wrote down and people know about, so his name, again, is Gabriel Fulopeepio. Guess what he discovered. Poopi. No, fallopian tubes. Which is ridiculous. So I'm named after this man who put his bloody hand in a woman's body and said, look at these.

I'm going to name it after himself. I guess the first to discover gets that privilege, but yeah. I guess, yeah. No, it's wild. So he's the first person to, like, you know, write some things down. And then, you know, they were, because I guess they were in the naming of body parts time. Right. So you could be like, oh, I'm going to like, you know, close my eyes and like, stick my head in this body, pull something out and be like, that's a far's, you know.

It would be fun to be the first. Yeah. Like, you can just do whatever you want, right? like it's like we've all known the body exists but you just happen to be the one that just pulled it out and said now it's this thing i know 500 years later we're here talking about him so yeah so they knew what existed but they didn't know what it what it did um the first person to do an apidectomy is um a man a doctor named claudius amyand a my and d in um 1735 so a couple hundred years later um people knew that obviously like your um appendix could kill you

but they didn't know like what it did it they didn't know what to do they didn't have a cure for it you know what 17 what 35 okay so this time they hadn't discovered that you should like wash your hands oh no no no no one putting in the body and there's no general anesthesia so you're just like screaming i don't get like surgery back then like how is keeping whatever the ailment is not better than having the surgery it sounds that the surgery is rapidly accelerates whatever problem you already have did you watch um the hbo show on john adams no it's great it's with um paul giametti right um um jimati but it's so good and but in it that john adams's daughter gets breast cancer and they like she like knows

that something's wrong they don't like know exactly what it is she can like feel it like obviously she feels a lump and doesn't go away so they have to do a mastectomy in her and oh my god bars they just like cut off her boob and they have a like a hot iron to like solder it or whatever ponderize it and it's like put it on her boot on her like boobhole where it used to be and she's screaming it's so awful yeah but then also okay so that's that's awful but also she probably died of infection anyways like she didn't but then she said that she felt it in her other breast and she was like, I would like to die. She was like, I'm doing that again.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, you would kill someone faster than breast cancer would. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're lucky to be able to surgery in your hospital. Yeah, no kidding.

So it's, uh, Quadius Amid was, uh, French. She was born in 1680, but he moved to England and he died in 1740. But while he was in England, he was the sergeant, surgeon to the king. king george the second so he was like the king's like the king's a doctor you know probably just like hung out with him all of the time um and so he was like the court doctor you know like yeah like it was him in the employee lounge with the court jester you're just hanging uh exactly exactly um and so in 1722 he enoculated three of the royal children for smallpox which is fun because They're doing those, like, they're doing the, they also did that in a John Adams movie where they would have people come around who had smallpox and then they would cut you and you, like, put the wound, not the goop into yourself.

And that would, just like a vaccine, gives you a little bit of it. So, like, your body can fight it. I didn't know. That's how they did it. Mm-hmm. It is gross. So gross. And John, yeah, the John Adams, I don't go, why is running up with that?

But they, like, bring a wheelbarrow with a dying person. You have to, like, get their smallpox. We just a little bit. So, okay, so this is, we're talking still like the late 1700s. Yeah. Okay, okay. Mid-700s. This is 17-22.

And then he does the first ependectomy in 1735. So he did it on a young boy who was 11 named Handville, Handville Anderson. And during surgery, he, he was able to successfully remove it and the boy survived and he was fine so it's really like you said a miracle they did not get an infection yeah yeah good for that kid yeah um so he also did you know other um hernia surgeries and things um at that time um he was 150 years later other people would say that they were doing the first appendectomies but then like someone found his papers and and like saw that he had done it um his biographer said Claudius Amon was not a man of genius, but one of solid worth, who merits a not a recognition from medical history, too long denied him.

So once they figured out that he was one who did it, they were like, he should get the thing for that. Good for him. Why did why do they call it an appendix? Oh, good question. An appendix just means like an extra thing. So

the Gabriel Flopio called it the vera form appendix which means like a worm shaped extra thing interesting yeah do you have an appendix do i yeah yeah i mean no one took it out but i assume it's there i haven't seen it yeah because you because you know people who like get like um uh like breast removal whatever it's called um because like to prevent things i assume people do append a appendix appendix appendix appendix appendix week removals that's a good question elective appendectomy yeah yeah oh it's performed actually sometimes it'll happen if you're I'm just this is what Google's telling

me so you know it looks like you can have it after you've had like a little bit of an infection they can take it out for you so you won't have it again so there's like the emergency Appendectomy is one that it mostly is. But you can, if you're like, it's something that continues to get inflamed, you can get it taken out. All right. Fun. Yeah. I never, you know, I have not had this thought since that moment in college and now I have

another fear I can live with. Totally. No, no, no, absolutely. There's some of the stuff in your body that can kill you. Absolutely. So the last person that we will talk about is Charles, Bernie. He was born in 1845. He lived in New York City, or he lived in New York, but I assume in New York City. So he was the one who could, he improved the way that you could diagnose it.

So if you do ever go to the doctor and you're like, I have this pain in my right side, he's going to say, okay, I'm going to go from your belly button to your pelvic bone and like measure the, like one third. It's one third of the way between the navel and the front part of your hip bones. It's going to measure there and like another one third to the other side of the right.

And anyway, that point, that little, that part of your belly that is where your appendix is, is called the McBurney's Point. So it's named after this guy. So he's the person who's like, right there on your belly is where your appendix is going to be. And if it hurts exactly right there, then it's

the appendix. It's the appendix. dude i feel like you would have been so much easier to become like famous in the old days i feel like everything's already been named it's already been done like he's just telling you roughly where it's like maybe like hey you know what this thing right here i'm pointing my head that's where your brain is if it if this hurts it could be your brain it's like what a genius this guy like name name a school after this guy um the incision that you that you get to get your panics removed is called the mcburny incision makes sense

not you said that maybe laugh as well because it's like you're just cutting you in your belly and like reaching in finding your aeretics but it you know it should be able to it's like a pretty thing

easy thing to like you know get it get it to get it out these days and then a couple other things that you know happen now we didn't use like antiseptics and anesthesia until like the late

1800s so people were more it was more common to get your appendix removed because otherwise you were just like like you said like live through the pain or die because you're like I'm not going to risk you putting your dirty hands inside my anesthesia first like do that first then come up with the rest of you can imagine that Taylor you imagine someone cutting your guts open because I'm sure they have to cut your muscle open on your abdomen to get to it so bad horrible horrible like I feel like when I was having my babies and like I didn't realize like

what a big surgery a C-section is you know I was like oh you just like cut it in the baby you're like oh no no the baby's not like behind one layer of skin the baby's behind like a whole bunch of stuff yeah just like cut through and like figure out how to like repair and like it's crazy um I think now um it's something that um that can do can be done with like a a um a um a it's a laparoscopic technique so like it's something that can be done like kind of like a little like a robot you know um just like a little tiny hole to get in there yeah but that wasn't the case when they had no anesthesia and they were cutting you open in half you do that now three years ago now they can just like put like a little hole in you put a camera in like pull it out you know

I'm sure that this this kid in um was this was his name handful I'm sure that poor hand Ville Anderson in 1735 had a insane scar on his belly for the rest of his life. Rough time. But he lived. Yeah. So I don't know. They haven't really 100% figured out what it does, but it does something and potentially helps people who are in places with like poor sanitation.

And that may be like where it's mostly needed as if you are sick or recovering from being sick, it'll like help with your bacteria. The guy is the fourth thing. Mm-hmm. So is the first, like, malaria or something? I don't know. Let's see. Leading.

I think. Oh, here you go. There's heart disease. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where I got that fact. I'm looking at, oh, in the United States, heart disease is the number one. Preventable injury is number three.

Makes sense. Speaking of painful things, I'm shocked that we don't have an answer to. What's up with kidney stones? How have we not figured out how to get those out of us or dissolve them? Oh, totally. I have no idea. Because it sounds really painful. Yeah, yeah.

I'm pretty sure I had an ovarian cyst first because I had like the worst pain I've ever felt in my like ovary area yeah I've heard those are really bad too yeah and I was like I think like it just happened like once it was like birth then I felt better but it like it I like thought I didn't go to the hospital but I was like I'm about to get the hospital it hurts so bad geez yeah and you've had kids and that also is terrible but but you survive you survive you survive yeah sweet cool that's it short a short one but now we know a little bit more about the appendix and someday we might know even more i think yeah it's kind of weird that just like hangs out in there it's funny as we're going through like discovering the format of the show and people like maybe people want like 15 minute shows who knows yeah who knows i mean the podcast i listen to the most these days or all in like the 15 20 minute range it's like the day and that box version of the daily and so um wait i have an important question for you i was listening to one of our episodes do you send a podcast in the shower do i yeah yeah how do you do that so i have

these jabra um had uh earbuds they're bluetooth and they're made for working out so you can sweating them and so they're waterproof anyways and I tweak those in and yeah, hop in the shower. Huh. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I can't go with silence for very long. I don't know why

it's probably not healthy or good for me, but I can't do it. But also, like, it's like the one place where, like, Luna's not barking or annoying me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Checking slack or, you know, whatever. So. I know. Well, whenever, yeah, like, whenever I go to the bathroom, my daughter,

they're always like, How come it takes you, like, so long to the bathroom? But when I'm in here with you, it doesn't think you that long. And I'm like, oh, my God, Florence, because I'm just sitting in here on my phone not talking to you. Like, that's why I can do that for 20 minutes. Like when you're here, I'm not busy ignoring you. So I just finish.

It's so true. It's like the one place at our age where it's like just pure peace and quiet. Leave me alone. Sometimes I'll go on there and Florence will be hiding in the shower. I'll be like, Lawrence, get out of the shower. just want to pee by myself in other news Taylor what did you think about

Darth Vader endorsing Kamala Harris oh yeah we did see that I um I see the thing where it was like Dick Cheney makes one last bid to get into heaven I mean I think it'd be nice to have like an

I don't know like we were saying last week like it'd be nice to have a contested primary it'd be nice to have a like a more than one ballot at the convention and it'd be nice to like don't Trump doesn't know anything about like conservative politics you know it's just like this person it's not like you know I think I think Republicans need to do over yeah yeah so I mean so not so none of the living vice presidents are voting for him of the Republican ones and like so many people on his cabinet are not voting for him. him. It's just wild.

Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was really interesting because Dick Cheney is like, he literally hasn't said anything about politics and the 20-someodd years he's been out of politics and he just comes out of the blue. It says that. It was like, wow, that's shocking, especially given his horrible, horrible reputation. Yeah. But anyways, do you have anything to read off for us? I do. I do. I do. I have a couple of things. Oh, so my friend Morgan, was also part of the Learner League for a while doing trivia and she was telling me that the person that invited her

is like a person who's like been on Jeopardy and been on Carmen San Diego and been on World of Fortune so people are really smart so I'm not the worst in my league but it's really fucking hard. How can you be on Carmen San Diego? It used to be like a game show in like the 80s. No shit? Mm-hmm.

Like for kids. Oh, I don't know that. Yeah, it was like a trivia show. So like this guys would do trivia like his whole life, you know. I had a crush on her, the cartoon one. Fair. Yeah. And I have one more thing too.

Listener friend Ben said that he doesn't want you to give Trump any credit for releasing any of the oil in our oil reserves in the U.S. oil reserves. So we shared two articles, one from the White House, where in November 2021, Biden released, how many, like, so several, 50 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices and help with the lack of supply. And then again, in June, 2023, the Biden administration made $66 million in its first oil trade. So they sold 3 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for $95 and then repurchase that at 73. so hey that's shorting yeah

oh yeah there you go um wait so so trump didn't really say is remember that wrong yeah oh okay well ben thanks for correct to me yeah um yeah and that's it

and if you want to correct us please send us an email doomed to feel pod at gmail.com there we go um awesome okay cool we'll go ahead and shut this off and join you all again in a few days Cool. Thanks. Follow us on socials. Follow us on socials. I do with the film.

Okay, bye. Bye.