Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Ben Franklin

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

Ben Franklin may not have have been a doctor, but he still had a massive impact on the medical field in his time. What were his contributions? And was he ever actually president? You'll have to listen to find out! Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. I'm not a sense the I still in my car for the mouth Wow Hello everybody and welcome to saw bones very nervous guy to medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McElroy

And I'm Sydney McElroy Listen went to your, um, your, uh, redding terminal market today. Gorgeous. It was a great second time there. Uh-huh. Uh, not to brag, but we've been twice. So it's not a big deal. It was great.

We ate way too much food. Yeah. Because there are like lots of, I was like, well, there's got to be like a list of what are the best things we should eat. Well, I mean, there's like hundreds of lists of this. Yes. Turns out it's all.

So we tried them all. We tried them all. And while I was there, this is a non-exaggeration. I saw no fewer than three frame photos of owners of stores with Ben Franklin. And it's like, you guys know, right? I mean, I don't want to cast judgment. Like, you know, it got around, right? It's not the real one, right?

You know that, right? That's not that, Ben Franklin. But it was very inspiring because Ben Franklin, among many things that he dabbled in and was an expert on, was medicine. Franklin dabbled a lot in the medical sciences. And so I thought that could be, this is actually Justin's idea. I don't want to take a credit.

I'm pretty good. This could be a really good show topic in connection to the area, because even though Franklin was not from Philadelphia, he was from Boston. Philadelphia became like his. I'm sorry. Sorry. I did not blame like, when your time, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I mean, he was born there. I can't stop. I can't control that. But he came here by choice. Right. And stayed. And he liked, I mean, it was like his adopted home.

So that's more meaningful, really. Yes, he chose. The life he chose, the home he chose, right? Right. So I didn't know there was the same homosity. I wasn't prepared for that. It was very possessive of there been Franklin. So he was not a doctor of medicine, although he was given an honorary doctorate

later in life, but that was for like electricity stuff, not medicine stuff. So he was not a doctor. He actually had very little like actual formal education. He was originally sent to school by his family to become a minister, but he wasn't really feeling that, and then he went back to school a little bit later, but he had to stop so he could work and help support his family, and so he went into printing instead. So he actually, a lot of the stuff he learned, it's really impressive, you know, learned on his own. And medicine was just, it was kind of one of the things if you were like, you know, a son or daughter or child of the Enlightenment, then you would want to learn about everything. You'd want to learn about science and music and art and culture

and medicine and politics and society and so it was just kind of part of everything that he learned about. Kind of like me. A Renaissance Justin. And he was very cool. Master of no trades, but Jack of many, including it would seem idioms. Like Ben Franklin. Like Ben Franklin. A modern day Ben Franklin.

Will he too become one of our great presidents? Ha ha. History, history, you will tell. You know. How long was that? You know. I'm gonna assume you know. I know he's from Boston.

Yes, but it feels like Philadelphia is his real home right? Yeah, they're with me. So, one of the things I love is that even though he dabbled in medicine, and usually as a physician myself when I hear that, that somebody's like, well, I mean, I'm not a doctor, but I read a lot about it. And I think I know something. I usually get a little nervous like, oh, do you? OK. She does.

Yes. This is going to be an unpleasant visit. He was not. It didn't appear. He was like that. He actually, in letters that he wrote to his family, he'd give them extensive medical advice. But then say, now, I am not a doctor.

So if your doctor says anything other than this, do that. Don't do what I said. Do what your doctor said. In fact, I don't know why I wasted all of this ink. I should have put that stuff first. No, but in this, they would write letters about like, anything. Here's some medical stuff you should do unless your doctor says not there. And I mean that would have been, for the time period, everybody was just kind of guessing and sort of making stuff up, so I mean it fit in pretty well. But I wanted to go through some of the areas in which he sort of practiced somewhat medicine and contributed to what we know about medicine. First of all, the most obvious is electricity and electotherapy.

So with the understanding of electricity, there became a lot of interest, not from Ben Franklin, but from like the public in general, as to what could this do to our bodies. If we applied it to it a lot in different ways, in different areas, at different voltages, what could we do? We've discovered one, kill ourselves. That's that one happened on accident. Not a good one. Not a fan. But maybe hear me out. Less.

And maybe less and maybe like more directly applied. And that was one of the big areas of interest was in people who had suffered some sort of paralysis. Could we use electricity to like bring movement back to fix whatever, because we didn't have an understanding at that point why the paralysis had occurred. So like, can we fix it with electricity? And Franklin himself was very skeptical of this. With all of his understanding of electricity,

he was like, I don't really think that's gonna work, but people sought him out anyway, because he was known as an expert in that field. So people would come to him with their family members and say like, can you put the electricity on my family please. However, our brother who's been outside with a kite tied to his leg for many hours and nothing. We don't really know how it works, but could you do it?

And Franklin was like, well, okay. Why not? So he did. So he tried on multiple people. And again, and this wasn't something he sought to do. It was just people came to him. And he was like, well, I mean, I know how to, I know. I got the equipment.

I got the stuff. I have the kites. I'm not busy. So he had like an electrostatic generator, and he had these laden jars, these jars, to collect the energy that he generated. And he would basically get all the collect all this energy and then direct a shock at the patient's leg or arm

or the whole side of their body, whatever had suffered paralysis. And he would do this multiple times a day, usually for about five days was aw, that was usually about all the patients wanted to go through. And he wrote that, he was like, usually after five days, they were like, thank you.

My leg really hurts, but if I have to endure one more day of Ben Franklin guessing where to shock me. And Franklin, for his part, and it was like, I mean, I told you. I said this probably wouldn't work. I was just willing to give it a shot. And he wrote that.

He said, you know, that initially there was like some subjective, I think I feel stronger response. And he noted that the arm or the leg or whatever that you shocked definitely seemed warmer. More succulent. But he said, I don't see a lot of real objective improvement. So it was something, it was at least willing to try, but didn't, wasn't able to really make a lot of advancement in that way. Now, another area in which he did kind of solve a medical puzzle was there was a problem during Franklin's time,

a very common melody that was usually called the dry gripes. And this was like, basically you would have a lot of stomach pain and you'd feel really weak and you might look very pale and lose a lot of weight. And it was really common and nobody was completely sure what caused it. Franklin noticed that he saw it a lot in his career in printing. And he started to connect it.

He started to put the pieces together that there were certain professions among which the dry gripes were a lot more common. And he eventually figured out that they were all being exposed to lead. And so he was the one who solved the puzzle that lead poisoning is like a problem. And that we should limit led exposure.

And he was able to use this, I guess you might consider, depending on your perclivities, one of his greatest achievements. He was able to use this to figure out that we were using lead in a lot of stils and like the coils and stils. And so all of our gin was, and rum was like lead laden. And so he solved that.

So you could drink all the rum you wanted, and not get lead poisoning, but roll it. And there was a doctor in Devonshire, who like wrote to him, this Dr. George Baker and said, hey, I think maybe we've got something called the Devonshire Colleck, which is the dry gripes. But I think it might be this thing only. We don't drink that rommelau.

What do you think it is? And so like, he felt like letter writing, he helped him solve that it was their cider press. So it was their cider. So anyway, everybody in Devonshire got to drink cider and not get lead poisoning. They've done better if they stop going with like cool high school nicknames for all these diseases.

So Devonshire failings is like the dry gripes, but with just a little bit of like our own local twist on it's like it's called lead poisoning. You's called lead poisoning. You'll have a lead poisoning. Get rid of the lead. He also was one of the first people. And this is funny because Ben Franklin was one of the first to write down that,

you know how we all think that getting wet and cold, like being out in the rain and getting, having wet hair and going out when it's cold, that was always what I was told, don't go outside with your hair wet, you're gonna get sick, right? You still hear that today. Ben Franklin was one of the first people to write down

like, this is not real. I know that everyone thinks this is a problem, but it's not. The reason he pieced this together is that from a young age, Franklin had actually initially wanted to be a sailor. He'd really, that was his plan, and he didn't end up doing it, but he had a lot of contact with sailors. He's like a sailor fan, I don't know. He liked to think about boats and sailors, I guess.

I mean, he rode on them periodically. So he was a fan of sailors, and he observed that they would get cold and wet all the time and they weren't getting sick. And he was like, this doesn't make any sense. And so he actually was one of the first people to write down. You know, what I think it is is when people are like closed up in close conditions, that something is happening when we shut people up and they're all like breathing in each other's faces and like getting their spit in each other's faces and all that.

Something is happening that's making everybody sick. So he was like describing a communicable disease before it really... What a cool period. A history of like, something's going on anyway. I'm gonna die now. Bye. Gonna love what this in 100 years. But. Make sure you grip your head in for it.

How disappointed would he be every time you go to like, leave the house and like your parent is like, don't leave with wet hair. You're gonna be cool. You're gonna be cool. One one fun medical story, so we're medically adjacent story, that Franklin was involved in. We've actually talked about this some on the show,

but it's been a while, and it's one of my favorite stories from pseudo medical history. Ben Franklin was part, he was actually in charge of a task force at one point, that was set up by Louis XVI because at the time in France, mesmerism was really popular. And Franz mesmer had spread this idea that there was something called

animal magnetism that was like this force that we all have and that all objects can have and we can like manipulate and it flows through us and if we have like a clear passage for the animal magnetism then we have good health. Well, always in your time, you heard about it in the health class, you remember this real thing that exists, animal magnetism. If you have blockages to that flow, then you'll get sick. And he had all these elaborate ways that he could help you open up these blockages

to the flow of your magnetism. It was everything from just sitting in a room with you and holding hands for an hour to these huge ceremonies, like a bunch of people would hold hands around a giant tank of water, and they would like, hum and sing and sway, and like get real wild. And sex stuff probably. No, I'm not saying. I'm not saying either.

I'm not saying either, but like I would probably tell, like if anybody writes a history book about this, do leave out the sex stuff. Just say that we did like got like kind of wild around a tank and some of you'll be like, that's gonna sound really weird without the sex stuff. Actually, you may have made it weird or by exercising the sex stuff that was definitely part of it.

Well, King Louis was not convinced and this was becoming very popular throughout France, and he was kind of upset about it, and he wanted to like nip it in the bud. And so he had this task force of like doctors and scientists and really smart people put together. And Ben Franklin was in charge of it. And the idea was, can you disprove this, please?

Can you, or prove it, but he didn't really think it was real. So disprove it so people will stop paying to go to these people because there are people popping up all over France to like get your money so that you'd come let them clear your blockages. So anyway, at Franklin's house, they set up an experiment and they did a bunch of different things, but my favorite part, my favorite test,

is that they had one of the practitioners that came to demonstrate their powers, go magnetize a tree. He said he could do that. I can magnetize things. I have the ability to move energy into them, and then you can feel the magnetic pull. So I'll be able to magnetize a tree in this yard, and we can send anybody out, and they will be drawn to the tree. After I do this, so they chose a local 12 year old boy and they blindfolded him and they

said now go find the tree. The... Ben Franklin's account of this is that he wandered around for like an hour. And then he passed out. He was okay. The boy was fine. You could read all about it in the Griffin McElroy story. So... Anyway, the task force published other findings in it when a huge way to discredit mesmerism

and to stop a lot of these kind of fake medical practitioners who were popping up all over France. When you load a living in an era where disproving stuff made people less likely to do it than to have you charming. The medicines, the medicines, the estimate my God for the mouth. Speaking of that, another thing that Ben Franklin was an early believer in was inoculation. So, in Franklin's time, smallpox inoculation. Now, at the time, this was not what we think

about as like a modern vaccine, but this was on the pathway to creating modern vaccines. They were still doing like, if you had smallpox, I might take like some of one of your sores, I'm scraping it, that's what I'm doing with your arm right now. Like scrape off some of that, like scab or whatever. That's the neat love language. You have to respect it. We're all into something different.

And then I might like, if I want to do a innocuous somebody, like take some of that and then like blow it up their nose or you know stab in the arm with it or something. And there were different processes. But it usually worked where you might get like a mild form of the disease but then you'd get better as opposed to getting smallpox and dying, which is worse. And it was at this point it was just being introduced and accepted and there was still a lot of resistance because it seemed very strange and Ben Franklin was one of the first ones to

observe like use his brain and observe and say this works and this is great and He was a huge proponent and published pamphlets about it and was one of the first like ones to like spread the word hey This is we're on something here. This could prevent disease and we should all you know get our smallpox inoculation. So you're wearing that t-shirt tonight to celebrate different ones. Yes, I'm wearing our vaccine t-shirts. We don't normally sell our own stuff during shows but since the prince eats get a charity vaccine awareness charities with phones okay. That would be okay yeah. Yeah you got a macrory merch. It's with the pose, okay. And that would be okay, yeah.

Yeah, you got to macroemerge.com, and you can buy them. Yes, if you want to spread the good word, like Ben Franklin. And give some back to your friends. Just like not you, unless you know that. Unless you find some. Within your, no.

Maybe if you find some, you don't get my way, that's just greedy. If you find some needles that look like they might have vaccines in them, it is your responsibility. Please don't get my way, that's just greedy. If you find some needles that look like they might have vaccines in them, it is your responsibility. Please don't do this. Put them in your friends. Only if it is within your job description. Just like your vaccines.

Otherwise, especially your vehemently anti-vax friends, because they're going to be the least likely to get them. So just any needles you find. No. OK, that's assault. Civic duty. Assault Civic duty. It's like a line. It's so blurry. Is there a line even? Yes. Wend upon well.

Interesting. What do you think about? MaccoRemerge.com. One of Franklin's inventions, there are many, there are many inventions that he had, but one that was medically relevant was the first flexible catheter. He actually... He fans in the audience? The catheter was? They're great, if you need them. His brother, and he did as well, Franklin

had problems with bladder stones, and his brother, John, had a lot of problems with them, and they created a lot of difficulty urinating. And so he came up with this idea that he actually like he had a local silversmith help him make, and then he like mailed it to him. He was like, here you go, John. Silversmith is like the last kind of Smith I would want.

It was like a rubber Smith maybe. It was like this flexible, like silver coiled thing and then and jointed and then it was wrapped in like gut and like intestine. But it worked. I mean, I think. It helped him pee. It helped him pee.

It helped him pee. We gotta go. Obviously we've improved upon those since then. But it was a great idea. And of course, we have to mention Bifocals, which I didn't realize, Ben Franklin, so he made Bifocals because as he got older, he needed both reading glasses for reading

and then glasses to see far away when he wasn't reading. And so he was constantly switching between two pairs of glasses and that got annoying. And so he literally just had his lenses like cut in half and then put back together, which I didn't know that was how he did it. Anyway, we all knew that. I think most of us know that.

That's like the thing you remember in school, right? He wasn't president, even though I keep wanting to think he was. And he made bifocals. He didn't. And I think what school is all among these and all of his inventions, he didn't patent them. That was a big thing with Ben Franklin was not to patent him. He said, his quote on this is, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of

an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously. In addition to inventions, he also is responsible for helping found some great institutions. Notably, very close to here, Pennsylvania Hospital was the first public hospital founded in 1751 with Thomas Bond. And basically, Thomas Bond was a doctor, a surgeon there, and he went to Ben Franklin because he was trying to get like the political weight on his side to start a public hospital.

We would like to use public funds to create a hospital to serve members of our city who are poor or the mentally ill, people who can't take care of themselves. We need better resources. And it doesn't make any sense to be sending doctors out into the country to make house calls and see these patients out there. We should have like a local place. And he didn't know Franklin would go for the idea, but he went and he asked him, and he was all, he was totally on board, and for a lot of very pragmatic reasons that I just

mentioned, as well as like, that was a good thing and we should do it. So he he went initially to the assembly and he said, Hey, we would like to do this and we'd like you to basically use taxpayer money to to make this hospital and they were like, no, no way. The people never go for it. If you want to get a bunch of rich people to donate some money and make a hospital, that's awesome. we'll tell people to go to it, but we're not helping with this. And so Franklin said, okay, how about this? If I can raise X dollars privately, you'll match it. And we've told you before, X dollars aren't real.

You made them up as your own secret dollars and we do not honor them. It's like a lot of money. And the assembly was like, yeah, sure. You're never going to raise that much money. Go for it, whatever it been. Go get your money. And yeah, we'll match that. Well, Franklin was very popular and had a lot of pull.

And he raised every penny he said he was going to and then some. And then we'd back to the assembly and was like, too bad. Sorry. And that was the founding to the assembly and was like, too bad. Sorry. And that was the founding of the first public hospital in America. So that was really cool. On a note on Franklin's personal health,

I always had this image of been Franklin as like older and informed, which I think might come from 1776, the musical, which was largely about his gout, right? It was his gout as like the third tear character, it's like above the credits. I mean that was like my image is like well I mean he was he always had gout, right? Like it was always in that chair and he always had gout. And it was early years, that was not true. He was very healthy, he was very active.

He was a huge believer in exercise. He was a big swimmer. He was later, long after he died, he was inducted into the international swimming hall of fame. He was also, by the way, in the US chess hall of fame. He was inducted in 1999, which is like a cool dude, right? Like you hear that, you're like, whoa, cool dude.

Swimming in jazz. Got it here and here. You know. But he also believed strongly in exercise and fresh air, so much so in fresh air that it was noted that he would spend a lot of time with all of his like windows and doors open in his house naked, just being naked. I love this stuff. Like when you're reading about some famous people, you'll find the strangest like,

by the way, he was naked in his house all the time. Multiple people wanted to note that, like for historical record. Yeah. I'm gonna go visit Ben Franklin today. Are you excited? Sort of. I guess kind of, but there's just one problem.

The other thing that was notable that I kept finding mentioned about him, this is not medical, but I thought it was interesting, is that he was a terrible secret keeper, which I mainly found as an argument against him being in the Illuminati. Like, listen, if he was in a secret society, we all would have known. Okay, two points. One, that's what they would say. Two. Two, do you know how bad you have to be at keeping secrets for it to be in history books? If we're going to be writing a history book and come up behind and be like, hey, make sure you put in there in the book.

Make sure you put in how bad Ben Franklin was at keeping secrets. I told him when I was getting my wife for Christmas and he sucks and put it in the book. And he was bad at keeping secrets. I know you have a lot of other facts in there about Ben Franklin, but this one in your history book. Franklin, but this one in your history, what? This became particularly relevant in the 90s when, and this was one of those things I read, and it kind of rang a bell like, I think I may remember this.

In 1998, they were renovating Franklin's home in London, the Franklin House, which was the last still standing like home of Benjamin Franklin. No booing for London, interesting. But they were renovating it, and during the renovations, they started digging up in the basement a lot of human bones. Like, and like, eventually they found 1200 pieces of human bones. That's so many more than I thought you would say.

A lot. That's like so many more than I have. Well, not 1,200 individual bones, pieces of bone. There were probably like 15 different people. And so there were all these like headlines. Like 15 people. 15 people into 1,200 pieces. And I'm supposed all these like headlines. Like 15 people into 1200 pieces, and I'm supposed to feel comforted.

No, it's not what you think, Justin. He's freaking anatomized. These people, he burned them to their very essence. He pulverized them into dust. It's fine. But there were all these headlines. They were like, Ben Franklin, murderer. Was he a serial killer?

Was it the Illuminati? Was this all part of the conspiracy? No, he was not. And you'll still find stories like that, but what the most likely, I would say, what I would bank on explanation for this, is that at Franklin House, he had set up his protege when he wasn't there, because obviously he didn't live there all the

time. He let his protege and a young man William Hussin who like studying under him and was also a doctor, was an actual medical doctor. He set up an anatomy school in the house. And so at the time, it was illegal to dissect corpses except under very specific situations. And so that provided very few opportunities for young physicians and students to learn how, you know, the human body was put together. So a lot of the dissections were kind of done, you know, off the record.

So he had like this secret anatomy lab where he would either like, probably either go Rob Graves himself or he would get some resurrection men to go Rob Graves for him. He'd pay for bodies, bring them there, like secret teach all of his students and then just bury them in the basement.

Sure. So he didn't get caught. Sure, sure. So maybe the most important lesson we can all learn from him Franklin. If you think you're about to die, make sure you get someone and tell them about the perfectly normal bones that you have in your basement. Like oh one last thing I made up the stuff with the kite and they're perfectly normal legal bus. And I want to tell you why.

You got to cover that before you beef it. So important. He didn't murder anybody though. Thank you Ben. Did you make it? Did he make you? He's not here tonight, but thank you to Ben for all these great contributions. Thank you to the rises and everyone having us here in this beautiful place.

Thank you to you, Phil these great contributions. Thank you to the rising center for having us here in this beautiful place. Thank you to you, Phil. Thank you. Thank you. You're having us. Thank you. We're going to be back with my brother, my brother, my brother, and here in a couple of minutes.

Make sure you take advantage of the facilities if you need to or my poster or whatever. And thank you to Paul Suboren for the mustard on the mic gag hilarious. Thank you Paul. Thank you Paul. And thank you to the taxpayers for the use of our medicines as the intro and outro of our program. And thank you to you for being here and listening in the future. It's the Austin. That's it.

That's it. So that is going to do it for us for this week. So until next week, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Yeah. Alright!