Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Pirate Medicine Chapter One

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

To celebrate the first new live Sawbones shows since 2020, we're releasing the first in a three-part series exploring the vast array that pirates—in an extremely resource and knowledge-limited setting—tried to keep one another alive through the years.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/

Hello, hello welcome, I am Mary Smirl and... And that is Cooper McElroy and this... And I am Charlie McElroy, the daughter of City Adjusted, and this is... And this is... And this is... Sobo. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, they're off. I'm not sure if I'm gonna see, but the door and that's what's going to happen. You must all do the broken glass and have yourself a look around.

Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones, a metal tour of Miss Guy in Medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McElroy. And I'm Sydney McElroy. Reemerging like the Chaland Miners for her first live show since February March of 2020, the first live show ever since that time, it's Sydney McElroy. This is so surreal. Would you say, is it fair to say it's been a weird week? It has been, well, it's been a weird, however long it's been since I've done one of these

shows. Yeah, yeah, but it's been a weird week and I know what you're thinking. Are you dressed as pirates? Yes, we are. And I know what you're thinking. Why? Why not? We, the theme of the show, and we're doing a whole series this tour. Yes. Is there first time three three part live series? Mm-hmm. About pirate medicine.

And obviously Justin is fancy this tour. What's fancier than Steve Bonnet? Yeah, I don't know. That's fancy. So wearing pirates, so we're pirates. So we're pirates, yes. I forgot my long white socks. So you're getting the ultimate cash show. It's like a-

But did you check out his calves though? Thank you, Sydney. Yeah, it's like a regular 4-H camp with all the calves, the beautiful calves. He's got this stage. The man has good calves. Thanks, that's marching band for you. Heeled a toe, baby. Heeled a toe.

So I want to talk about medicine during the golden age of piracy. And as I was reading about the golden age of piracy, one of the notes was, and this was of course before, we figured out how to treat scurvy, which makes you wonder why it was the golden age of piracy. But that's what I was thinking. It does also raise the question of who decided that was the golden Age of Piracy. But that's what I was looking at. If that's also raised a question of who decided that was the Golden Age of Piracy Pirates? Because it certainly wasn't people

that were getting their goods perloined, right? They didn't look at each other like, this really is the Golden Age. That was amazing. They really robbed the heck out of us. So during the Golden Age of Piracy, it's all downhill from here. These are really great parts right now.

During the golden age of piracy, if you, if you were lucky, you had someone on board your ship who was a surgeon, a barber surgeon, had some sort of medical training. Maybe you didn't, maybe the best you could hope for is somebody who knew a little Latin because a lot of the medicines, the labels would have been written in Latin and if you didn't know that, too bad, often there would be a medicine chest. So that's sort of the main stage. As we look at pirate medicine, the field of pirate medicine.

Let's start with the medicine chest. So if you were lucky, you had one or two, if you were really lucky. And each one would contain different things. You had two, and one would be your liquid medicines, and there would be like 100 to 150 little slots all labeled. And a clever thing that you would do is you would have multiples of each medicine, and you would put them in different places throughout the chest and I know that doesn't sound clever. No, it sounds confusing.

It sounds very confusing and I'm sure it was confusing especially again if you didn't read Latin but the reason for that is that if something got like broken or like shot at or cannon stuff or the cannon stuff. Like with pirate fighting. Then you would only break like one bottle of that tincture and the other bottle was safe. Oh, smart. Yeah.

And you would have another chest so you had your chest full of like liquid medicines and you accepted that like you're at sea, there are storms, stuff is gonna break. So you want another chest with your dried stuff, with your powders and your herbal dried preparations and with all your instruments. Those would sit over there.

Usually I was looking through an extensive article about what containers were made up on ships that held medicine. Riveting stuff. I know. Like. That had to be subscriber, right? You had to pay a subscription to get to that kind of info.

Like, were they glass? Were they pewter? That explains why I so frequently. Were they personally. I've heard you this week just going, Ooh! Ha! So, they often were glass, which seems like a bad idea.

A lot of substances were caustic, and so it was necessary something that could hold up to the substance. But a lot of them were glass, which so it was constantly a problem. With breaking, if you wanted to, if you could, you could get an animal bladder. And so there were actually a lot of medicines that would be stored and like literally literally the bladder of an animal, and then just put it in there. They did have paper for like,

lozenges and trotches, little things like that. But they also had these, I was looking at pictures of them. They're like makeup palettes full of some sort of, SAV or ointment or something like that. And it really did. It looked like these extensive makeup palettes that you could just pull out and be like, none of this is going to work.

Yeah. I'm about to put all of it on you. Yeah, I was thinking back to the fighting. Like they would be like, oh no, they shot our nothing. Luckily we have some nothing over here. They works exactly as well as the other nothing. And these these chests were vitally important. So important that if there wasn't one on board at times pirates would refuse to sail. At one point, especially refused to fight. If there was any sort of

you know encounter with rival pirates, whoever you would encounter, if there was any sort of encounter with rival pirates, whoever you would encounter. If there was any sort of fight about to happen, if there wasn't a medicine chest on board, there was one case where they just abandoned ship. Everybody just like, forget it. No, mine. If we don't have that big chest of saves. That worked out.

We're about to. I'm out. Actually, Blackbeard, that's who I'm dressed as. Yep. Once, took hostages in Charlestown Harbor, this is in 1718. And what he said was, I'm going to keep these people hostage until you give me a medicine chest. That was it.

Sure. Right. But, I mean, it was sort of like, it was... Sorry, it's smart to take hostages. No. You're endorsing that? No. I'm not endorsing that. What I'm saying is that it was kind of an employer

sponsored health care plan. LAUGHTER Of sorts. Of sorts. Edward Teach was really invested in the health of his crew and And was willing to take costages for I will say the because I was thinking like wow that's an expensive adventure That medicine chest in today's money would probably be worth like $50,000

Now that being said I also think a lot of it wouldn't work. So I don't know how we're measuring the worth. Now, if you didn't have a surgeon, again, once again, referencing Blackbeard, you could always steal one. That was popular. If you went and plundered a ship and took everything you could, you could also take their surgeon. That was just a common thing to do. Initially, when Blackbeard took command of the Queen Anne's Revenge in 1717, he made the three surgeons stay.

Everyone else, I don't want to know what happened. Everyone else leave peacefully. You're fine. I wonder if your ship is getting taken over by pirates. How, if you decide how kidnapable you want to look, depending on your job satisfaction. Like, yeah, you know what? I'm wrapped.

There's nowhere else for me to send up the ladder here. I'm going to just look super kidnapable and let him take me over. Now, the problem with that practice is that if you're going to steal surgeons from other boats, you have to make sure that they know what they're doing, and you can't really quality control, right? You're not interviewing people. You're not like interviewing people.

You're not necessarily getting the best ones. And at that time, the Navy had really loosened restrictions on who could be. A naval surgeon. Prior to that, you would really do an apprenticeship. That was what medical training was. It would start at like 12 or 13 years old. You would do a six or seven year apprenticeship with somebody who was already practicing, and then you would take a big exam, and it was pretty much the

same, whether you're going to practice on the sea or on the land. Well at some point, especially the British Navy, we need to make sure everybody, every ship has a surgeon, and they're one enough to go around, so they really sort of like loosen those restrictions, and we're like, if you can sit for this 15 minute exam, you probably can do this. And that that exam would involve like, are you a grown-up? Do you know what surgery is? I mean, and if you pass, then you could go be on a ship. And then if, you know, a pirate stole you,

then that's what you get. Yeah. There was one passage that I enjoyed. Edward Barlow talked about this in 1672, the kinds of surgeons that you might get that might be a board of ship. The surgeons and doctors of physics and ships, many times, are very careless of a poor man in his sickness.

Their common phrase being to come to him and take him by the hand when they hear that he has been sick two or three days, thinking that this is soon enough, feel his pulses. And when he is half dead, asking when he was at stool, when did he poop? That's some things never changed. That's what we want to know, right?

You're half dead, we're checking your pulse and saying, when did you last poop? How do you feel? How he has slept and then giving him some of their medicines upon the point of a knife, which do it as much good to him as a blow upon the head with a stick. That's a remarkable amount of self-awareness. One captain once referred to the surgeon as someone to kill a man, secundum, artum, which means according to science. Now to be fair, and there was a hierarchy with this too, the onboard the surgeon on the ship answered

to the captain. So, which is an interesting sort of medical hierarchy, because at any point the captain could come and be like, okay, actually you have no idea what you're doing and you have to run the patients by me, the captain of the ship, the pirate before you do any medicine because it is very clear to me that you don't know what you're doing. Pirates tended to like their surgeons more than other sailors. They were more appreciative of whatever they could offer. They would like keep them in a place in the ship. You would store your surgeon in a safer place and where they were less likely to get killed.

They should put the medicine there. Well, that would go there, too. Okay. The surgeon and the medicine. Is it a better place for it that doesn't get shot as much? Like, let's go and put it there. And then if there was some sort of mutiny, the surgeon was unlikely to be murdered in the mutiny

or thrown overboard with the captain. That's comforting. You'd keep them. You would just, they would just get passed along to whoever the new crew was in charge of things. We have done on-saw bones an entire episode about scurvy, but it's been a long time. So I thought it was at least worth referencing. I mean, if we're going to talk about pirates, things that plague pirates, obviously scurvy

was one of the biggest issues. Now we know now that this is a lack of vitamin C. We didn't know that at the time. It was a long time and a lot of bleeding gums before we figured this out. And like I said, for some reason, we considered the golden age of piracy the time before we figured it out.

Yeah. So because we didn't understand why people got it, there were some really weird ideas about how to fix it. Multibarly was a really common treatment, and the thought was that humans are held together by a kind of fixed air. And... Are you trying not to say fart or...?

LAUGHTER No, but it doesn't sound that way. It does, it's a little bit sound like you're trying not to say farts. No, it's just that we're held together by... If fire ants thought we were just flesh held together by farts, I can see why they were so cavalier. Life was cheap to the sort. Just sees this as a bunch of bags of farts. It's twists in, man.

But it in a whole new light, doesn't it? You know, Justin, it has been a long week. And are we just flesh-held together by force? I hope not. I don't know. But because of that, the thought was that fermented foods, like Maltid Barley, might help replace some of the fixed air.

That you're losing when you have scurvy, which is a lack of fixed air. That's all I'm not sure. This is before beans were commonly. Beans were a treatment. That isn't treatment. Sorry, beans were a treatment. Are you sure you're not talking about people

together by far? People, there must have been a lot. There was a lot of gastrointestinal distress on a ship you may imagine. So yeah, you don't want to let your, your glue out. Come on. Hold it all in. I need that body glue. Obviously, obviously the old favorites. That's what I have on a peg like people. They let out too many farts and their foot fell off because they didn't have enough farts. And they had to get a stick. Hey, listen, that's in parts to care being four. If you didn't see it, that's your fault.

Okay? Yeah, I almost fell off the 32. I heard about that scene. I got it at a red box. It's even better. These are spoilers for our flag needs, that's easy. Yeah, these are spoilers for season flag means death season two.

Yeah, these are spoilers for season two where everybody's made a fart. Obviously, bloodletting was popular for everything. So you would try that drinking seawater was a popular treatment that didn't work. Bad. One of the treatments, this feels like something that is always going to be true. The captain would be like, well, it's just that you're not working hard enough. You need to work harder in this ship. Yeah, time to have gas roll in a testicle to stress.

You got time to clean the posts. Yeah, you need to clean the ship better with your gums necrocene and your brain hemorrhaging. There were a lot of other things that obviously would make pirates sick other than scurvy. You had inadequate nutrition. You were getting sunburns all the time, just the heat, lack of clean water. There were, of course, a lot of illnesses like plague and typhus and cholera. And the theory behind a lot of those sorts of things, something that would strike multiple people on a ship at once,

at the time, it was thought that it was because of bad air. It was a measum of theory of disease. You're inhaling something in the air. And it was tied directly to something like you could smell. So the thought was like, if you're around something stinky, you get sick. And that's why everybody's getting sick.

So you don't want to be around garbage or corpses. That would be, those would be things that- –privileent, both prevalent on ships. –Well, could be. –Yeah. –And also, because that was the theory of like, why disease was happening, a way to combat that, is to burn something that smelled.

I was gonna say better, but as I read about the different things, you could smell, I wouldn't say better, I would say different. Something that smells other than what you're smelling as a treatment. So like, because you could burn some tarred rope, I don't think that would be nice. I haven't seen that one a bath and body works. Or like gunpowder was listed, but that seems bad.

Like the shit's made of wood. And you need the gunpowder. Like what if the captain came in and found Jerry like burning all the gunpowder. And I was like, what are you doing? He's like, well, it's stung in here. So I lit all that gunpowder. I'm sorry, okay? You don't want me to smell the bed. Thank you. It'll make us sick. And there were specific things. Like, you could burn some frankincense, and you would do this like the way it was described was like a chafing dish of hot coals. And you could burn some frankincense on there and then hold it under your butt if you were constipated.

Oh, OK. But you had to be careful with this because. I would imagine. For many reasons. But you can imagine if you fall asleep and you've got a chafing dish of hot coals there. And again, you are on a ship made of wood. Yeah, not their favorite tree when I was in.

There was a case where that happened where somebody was trying to treat constipation something with a nice smell to combat a bad smell, to create a bad smell. I guess if it was constipation. But they fell asleep, the ship caught on fire, and it was very tragic, and the captain rightly blamed it on the woman on board.

She didn't do it just that she was, you know, she was there. Although I mean, if you want to get the balsamovans seeing the ship you're on burn around you is one sure way to do it. If that didn't scare the crap out of you, nothing will. When they recovered the the queen and revenge back in the 90s They found some medical equipment specifically that like blackbeard's pirates would have used Among them were pewter syringes. Don't do you have any idea where these syringes were used or what for or in what manner?

Why why would I have any I mean injecting drugs that we had? Well, where? What in your vein? Sort of. So these would have been used to treat syphilis more than likely, which was a common problem. And you would use you would put mercury in these. Oh, please hammer it. I don't hurt them. Oh, don't be. I know. You're rethral administration. In these Please hammered on her to no Don't be a your rethral administration You know that your rethra you understand what I'm referencing Yes, and I understand 42 years old. I do know what that is and that what's interesting is that there was a treatment regimen For syphilis that was like just eat mercury and somebody was like

Not good enough Not for me. Oh, you get right to the source. Mm-hmm Now that's that would be a problem of course because mercury mercury also is toxic and so People would have syphilis because we weren't actually curing it They would have syphilis for a very long time and so you would see like the surgeon on board a ship over and over and over and get those syphilis treatments with mercury in your urethra over and over which could kill you with mercury over time. Okay.

Grim. They also found... If I were going to say something funny. No, it's just... And in turn blue. Oh, you get kidney failure. Oh, yeah, man. Sorry. Yeah, whoo There were also anima syringes. Is that funnier? No? You could so you could give animals or just to like administer meds directly To the source more quickly that you can see that was a big theme.

Like there's something wrong with my down there. I want to put the medicine down there. That makes sense. That makes sense. You know, I get that. But they found those. They also found porngers, which look like these little cups with like a tiny fancy handle on them.

Almost like a really fancy measuring cup if you think about it, but like they were used for collecting blood for bleeding. So they found like a whole collection of those. So you could have, so as you blood somebody, you could have nice little cups of blood. Paul Revere made these frequently. So now you know that. That has nothing to do with pirates, but now you know that. And they'd say, Paul, what are these for?

And he'd say, I don't know. They're to catch blood. Why, Paul? I don't know, honestly. But people buy them as long as I keep printin' inspirational things on them. They keep flying out the shelves. I got some Grogu ones over there if you look.

Those are hot. What's wild is that you could indeed, they're called porringers, and some people did use them to eat porridge out of. So it's like a dual use. It's sort of like you know how, and you all do. You know how you have that bowl in your house that you use for popcorn, but also you use it to pukin. Yeah, I see you. Some people are looking at their neighbors like they are strangers. There are some couples right now that are like, huh? You have that

bowl. We all have that bowl. My bigger fear have that bowl, we all have that bowl. My bigger fear is that we don't all have that bowl and we've just ripped the social fabric a thunder. It's the big one, you know the big one. Hey folks, take it from me, the J-Mam, keep it non-porous, okay? You want glass or metal? That's it, glass or metal.

That's it. Only acceptable materials. Now, obviously, there was a lot of fighting that could have occurred in those days. A lot of what a surgeon would do on board would have to do with treating those sorts of injuries. The main way, if you have a knife wound, you're going to clean that. Well, you're going to dump some alcohol on it. So it's cleaning it. If you have something, some sort of projectile that's

lodged in there, there was a lot of digging things out. At the time, we really didn't have a good understanding, of course, of infection. If something became filled with pus and then oozing pus, that was usually seen as a good sign. That was part of the process. This is how healing occurs. If something wasn't oozing pus, you may intentionally try to like blister it or put something caustic on it or something to make it ooze pus because

that was part of the process. And then if at some point it was clear to you that things were going the wrong direction, bleeding was usually the treatment at that point. So you get a bullet wound, it gets infected, you're getting fevers, you're really sick, so then we will bleed you. At times this was overused, there was one captain at one point who, the surgeon, and again, this probably caused the fact that some surgeons weren't properly trained, was just bleeding everybody on the ship until they died. And finally, the captain had to stop him and say,

I don't know anything about medicine, but this seems. This seems to work. This seems to work. A lot of the times, surgeons would be quick to amputate because it was something that they could do. There's so much of medical history that is why did we do that? It was something we could do. And so at that time, of course, an amputation, there would be no anesthesia, things were not done in a sanitized fashion. You would try to be quick,

try to stop the bleeding as quickly as possible with some sort of hot iron to cauterize the wound, and then, of course, again, if they became infected afterwards, you just bleed them some more. I thought it was interesting, there was a note as I was reading about, obviously people would die at sea, that would happen. And if the surgeon couldn't figure it out, and we've talked about a lot on sobans

that through the years, the ability to do an autopsy or to do like anatomical dissections to learn about the human body has been morally ambiguous, depending on where and when you are in history. There have been riots over whether or not we should be able to do that. At sea, it happened sometimes just because someone was really curious. It seems like the restrictions were a lot looser.

So a lot was actually learned by surgeons at sea who would be able to do these autopsies because they were like, I have no idea what just happened. And they would, and there was like, you find multiple accounts of pirates actually saying, listen, I don't know what's going on, you don't know what's going on. So after I'm gone, like just open me up, buddy, and figure it out, and tell somebody. And you find a lot of accounts of that, which I thought was really interesting,

because these are periods of time where autopsies on land were not being done or talked about openly. And then their buddy next to him was like, and also Doc, when that happens, you've got to call me, because it's wicked boring on this ship. And I would love to see you just dig around and shake scuts.

And I, so if you just call me up, I'm happy to get down here, no problem. Who you're talking about at that point, if you need somebody to help you out, you're probably talking about a surgeon's mate. And this is a position on board that we haven't talked about. So you've got your surgeon, but you need an assistant, right? You need somebody to help them out,

because they've got a lot to do. They've got a lot of people to take care of. They've got a lot of wounds to bandage. They should be, especially all of the people who are ill or injured, they're supposed to be checking on every single day. Like you did rounds. Like surgeons would do their rounds on a ship, go around and check on everybody who was sick or unwell.

And in one, there is one great. It was a fictionalized account, but it was based on, it was autobiographical. The author really had these experiences and then kind of wrote fiction about it. But the author was named Tobias Smollett. And in 1748, he published the Adventures of Roderick Random. Roderick Rory Random.

And... R-R-R. Yes. And... Okay. Oh, that sounds like... That sounds like a pirate joke here. Are you making a pirate joke?

Yeah. And also talking about my favorite movie, R-R-R. So, this is an entire count. So Tobias actually did work as a surgeon's mate. He actually witnessed a lot of these things, and then he sort of made up this random who went through these things, and then he could use him to tell the story of everything he experienced.

It's like not me for the family circus, right? You just make up a character that... Is that a character on family circus? You guys don't realize a lot of family I didn't say anything Rachel edit that out Rachel edit that out on a reference family circus. Thank you. That's the one where they call him meat bulbs You guys aren't laughing you heard that right Meat bulbs are you kidding me with this stuff? Rachel edit that out

Meat bulbs Rachel, I'll edit that out. Meet bulbs. So he wrote, and this is one thing that could happen on board. This would be a duty of one of the surgeons' mates. Sorry. So, from one account, at a certain hour in the morning, the boy of the mess, okay, the boy of the mess, you're going to need to know who that is first. So the boy of the mess would generally be someone who would also like hand people's stuff in the dining room.

So like, you know, the captain's dining and he would like hand them whatever they need, refill their glass or hand them, you know, silverware, whatever. So the boy of the mess. But also the boy of the mess had this duty. So at a certain hour in the morning, the boy of the mess went round all the decks, ringing his small handbell and in rhymes composed

for the occasion, invited all those who had sores to repair before the mass, were one of the doctors' mates attended with applications to dress them. So that's right, he would go around and ring a bell and recite poems about coming to get your wounds dressed. And he was a mess boy. And he was a mess boy. And I was a mess boy and he was a mess boy and I was thinking Justin right now I feel like you would be the one to walk around ringing a bell and reciting poems about getting your wounds dressed. Do you have any ideas? You want you guys to be the mess. Yeah, you think I would be a mess boy on a show I thought you give me some wound poems. Is there, I don't, okay.

What, is this the end of the show? This is the end of the show. I want you to give me a mess poem. You've got like a minute to give me a mess poem. And then we gotta go. Go it. Mass, mass, boy, mass, boy. Here he's sacred call.

Mass, boy, mass, boy boy he's here to help you all if your wound is dirty and you don't feel too flirty bring it to me the mess boy thank you very much thank you so much for coming Thank you to the taxpayers for using their strong medicines as the intro and outro of our program. Thank you to the tap theater, thank you to Cincinnati. Thanks so much to you for listening. Until next time, my name is Justin McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. And it's always don't in your head. Thank you.