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

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

In the second entry in the pirate medicine series, Dr. Sydnee talks about the practice of treating burns aboard a ship. It seems like burns on a ship would not be a problem, but ships are made of wood, and fire + wood = bad.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/

Sal bones 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! Alright, time is about to books! One, two, one, two, a table. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out.

We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves, hot like a rock Some medicines, some medicines that escalate my cop For the mouth. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Saul Bones, a Marlotteur, misguided medicine. I am your co-host, Justin Tyler McElroy. Welcome to Saul Bones. And I'm Sydney McElroy.

And I'm Sydney McElroy. It's fine. It's fine. Sydney is on her first tour since March of 2020. This is the first tour with live sawdons again. It's so great to be doing this again. I just can't tell you. I don't know why it's been since March of 2020. But there's something I forget.

Something happened. So welcome to our show. I know what you're wondering. Why are they dressed like that? Sydney? Why not? Yeah, it's there. No, we're in the midst of a, this is two of a three-part live series, which we've never done before.

This is the second part. It's not a narrative thing. You're not going to be like, lost. It's not going to be like, what's with the smoke monster? It's like an anthology. This is the next installment. The next installment, I like that. Can I call attention to your calves again?

OK, I have to first get my socks. And I'm tired of getting bullied for it by Sydney. But this is the second show in a row that I've forgotten my long-wized socks. So you're just getting the pure business. Just the pure business. You're welcome all these people over here. I believe it was an accident last night.

It was a choice tonight. And I don't disagree with it. We're doing a three-part series on pirate medicine. And also these may have been our Halloween costumes and we didn't get to wear them very much. Because we were too busy. So here we are again. Thank you actually. Mine was made by our friends Alex and Julie Abin. So thank you to them. And mine was made by my sibling Taylor Smirl. So. sibling Taylor Smurl. Okay, Sydney, take me back to the world of high adventure and even higher seas the pirate life. So as you may imagine, on a ship access to medical care to medicines to whatever sort of treatments you might

need was limited because you were out there for months and months at a time. Whatever you had with you is what you had to use. And whoever was a board that was the surgeon or close enough is who was in charge of taking care of you. And there were a lot of different, you know, maladies that you could encounter, things that, you know, are that are common like scurvy and such. But I want to focus this installment on burns. Now I know that seems weird at first like was

at a big part of sailing burns you're on the water. I can understand confusion but you didn't let me say it like usually confusion is my job I wish you wouldn't like anticipate my confusion. Did it confuse you?, because it's the water and why burns? Well, so ships are made of wood. Well, we're going back to brass tax here, okay. They were made of wood and they had like canvas sails and like the lines would often be like tarred and they're just very flammable. Super flammable. The ships were very flammable. And also, you had things on ships, especially for pirates, like gunpowder.

And you just sort of, especially in the midst of a fight, it would be kind of tossed about. Like you're trying to reload and do all the things. They should toss the gunpowder. That's not the intended use. You got to put it in a gun. I keep telling people. Well, but they would spill it, I think.

Oops. Oops. You're fired. And then once it was spilled, all that you needed was a spark. And then, oops. You know, oops. Oops.

Oops, burns. And also, how would you light your cabin at night? Candles. Candles, or lanterns, something flammable and pirates sometimes like to drink alcohol and would fall asleep Without putting them out. They're also they're actually were like rules on ships that at eight o'clock Everybody put the candles out and go drink in the dark Because fires were so frequent in that in that sort of scenario

because fires were so frequent in that sort of scenario. Another reason that Burns happened so much, I thought this isn't really medical, but as I was researching this, I found the mention of a weapon that could be used in a battle called a fire ship. Whoa, cool. Which is exactly what it sounds like. It's just a ship that is specifically

for setting on fire and directing it the other team. Basically, you might say it's a burnership. No, no, no, no, no, don't build, don't build, don't build, you were right, don't build. Your tepid response was exactly right. I knew what I was doing, all right? As you can imagine, that was like high risk, high reward. And so tough to find crew for, honestly. And they would be like specifically loaded up with like things that would explode and then just like go.

Just go guys. That way. Um, who wants, and they had to rebrand it a few times, I bet. Cause they might trick people with fireship once. But after that, I bet it was like, who wants, who's brave enough to be on the dangerous ship? The ship of thrills. There were also accounts like another way you could get burns.

There were accounts of pirates sometimes, like when somebody was passed out drunk, using some of the plaster from the medicine chest, specifically the ones that were blistering. A lot of things we would put on wounds back then were pretty caustic because we thought that the pus that would come out was part of the process and was a desirable step along the way to healing.

So there were a lot of substances that you would apply to wound specifically to make them red and irritated and bloody. And yeah, well, you know. And so they would put those on people who had passed out to try to wake them up. So then someone had to take care of all these burns. And at the time, the way that we approached burn care was based on the humoral system

of medicine. It was based on the idea that we have four humors in our bodies, that we have to keep in balance at all times in order to maintain health. And you can keep them in balance in a variety of ways by like getting some humors in our bodies that we have to keep in balance at all times in order to maintain health. And you can keep them in balance in a variety of ways by like getting some humors out if you have too much through bleeding or peeing or pooping or vomiting, all the way to get things out, or putting things back in through certain diets

that you would eat, certain foods and stuff. So the idea behind a burn, if somebody was burned, is that whatever has happened, whatever whatever hot thing caused the burn has drawn all the hot humors, so mainly blood but like the hot elements in the humors have come to that area and made it like hard and waxy. And all of the other humors have been driven out of it. And so that was sort of the pathology that they believed was happening at the side of the burn.

So what you needed to do then is draw those hot humors away from the side of the burn and then replace it with good humors. So like a strawberry shortcake bar or, you know, it must have been a hard sell to be like, look at a burn on a pirate and the doctor's like, ooh, I know what this is, you got a, you got a humoral problem. And the pirate said, I'm pretty sure it's from the burn. I just got a hot thing on me and it messed me up really bad. I'm not sure humor is figuring into it really at all. No, that was, because the treatments would really,

so you have too much humor in that area. And so what we need to do then is cut you on the other side of your body, so they'll sort of flow away from there. Yeah, yeah, out the back, makes sense. So that was a common treatment. You could also do cupping where you create a little vacuum and a cup and stick it to the body.

And it's like a giant hikki sort of forms. But you wanted, again, you had to do it somewhere else because you were pulling the heat away. Wait, that must have worked, though, because we still do it someplace, right? No. And so, you know, these are ways that you might get red of the hot humors. You could also do it through giving, you know, an inema.

Those were common and very popular. We have found we have recovered. Now wait, hold on. Common, yes. Popular is interesting. Speak on that because I, popular, I don't know. We have recovered quite a few enemas or inches from the remains of black beard ship. We found a clustered, cladster, cladster.

We found a great, but popular. Do you think there was a lot of people who were like, oh yeah, sign me up. We're all on this ship, bro, wild for animals. I mean, I guess there's not a lot to do. It's pretty dull. And because of this, by the way, this really informs how they approach the burn and why they thought patients got better or worse

or what was happening. Your humoral personality, so like every person would be assigned kind of like a personality type based on what humors they thought you had too much of. And so if your burn was really bad, it was just because you were a really plethora or sanguine person. You had too much blood. So like, well, it's not, you know, my fault as the doctor that I can't make you better, your burn is bad because you're such a bloody person already.

And that's not really on me. And you should have done a lot of like personal work before you got this burn. You have to figure this stuff out early. You have to go see Colonel Corn Admiral Cornelius Buzzfeed, and he'll help you figure out your exact type of humor you just have to answer his quiz. He can tell you what kind of Disney character you are,

what sort of eye hop order you might have. And there it is. International House of Pirates. Nope, nope, nope. No, no. This year I'm earning them folks and don't give me more than I deserve. You gotta keep me hungry. You enticed them with your calves right at the beginning. Right, I'm beginning.

Farnas, that's me, farnas. And this really, it's interesting because all of this understanding of why people got better or weren't getting better, it also is based on so they would blame it on the pain, so burns are painful. We know this. And what they would say is like the pain you're experiencing is really because you're in so much pain, it's making you sicker. The pain is causing the fever and further imbalance.

So could you try to stop being in so much pain because it's making you sick? And if you would stop that, I don't have anything for it really. I am going to cut you on the other side of your body real quick. And they're less pain. No, you're saying more pain. OK, oh, gosh, I'm going to add options here. The nicer treatments were really just dietary things. Like, specifically, they would give you

like, grow with currents and spices. Which sounds lovely. Like, here's some barley water and then an enema. And then, I mean, which is better, I think, than the bleeding of the cupping. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So someone in the crowd has a very concrete opinion

on whether they prefer bleeding and cupping versus gruel and the animals. Someone didn't need it no time to think about that one. You keep knocking animals, but have you ever been really constipated? Maybe, no. No, what? I don't want to talk about it.

As a first for me, 12 years of podcasting, I don't want to talk about it. As a first for me, 12 years of podcasting, I don't want to talk about that. I don't want to talk about that. I don't want to talk about that. They did have a concept of different degrees of burn. It wouldn't be exactly what we would call a first or second or third degree burn now. But there was a staging that was similar to the way

we look at burns. With a first degree burn, the thought was that there's a lot of heat in it. It was red. It looked red, and so it's very hot. It's first degree. Can you remind me, it's first degree the worst? It gets worse. It gets worse.

So they would look at a first degree burn and say, well, it's really red. It's really hot. We all know that like here is like, so the most important thing we can do is make it hotter. Yes, yes, yes. This is right. This is right. If we get apply heat to the heat, you'll get better. And they? I mean, a lot of them probably were going to get better.

So maybe they did get, see, this is what would happen, right? Like you put some heat on it. They got better anyway, because maybe it wasn't that severe of a burn. And then you go, it worked. It's a hiccup thing. It's a hiccup thing. It worked.

Whatever you did right before you got hiccups, scared hiccups. With second degree, they knew that bl you did right before you got hiccups, you got hiccups. With second degree, they knew that blisters could form. And blisters, again, they thought that was just humors in there. Like, look at that. It's just a big bubble of humors. And we got to let them out.

So first, you had to pop the blisters. I know. And then you would cover them in things like vinegar and then like oily things to try to code everything and then there was a whole variety. A little basil on there. Delicious. Well, honestly, milk, honey, egg whites. Doug, I'm sorry in so much pain, man, but I am getting hungry. Is that weird? I'm tired of gruel. Um, onions were really, onionsions were really common treatment for burns.

And they would take onions and mash them into a paste and then just like coat you with onions. Which just seems big, because you're already suffering, you're burned, and then nobody wants to hang around you, because you smell like onions. And maybe egg whites. Egg whites were a common. I feel like they were trying to make fancy cocktails,

and then they just dumped them on people. They just made a lot of lemon curd, and they were like, oh, we got so many egg whites. I love the embarrassing. There was a specific treatment. If you got a burn in your eye, there were two options you had. I guess you'll all have opinions on which one's worse. I feel like we're playing which is worse right now.

So you could use breast milk. Now, was that? I have a lot of questions about where they were getting that. Yeah. On a pirate ship. Or Pigeon's blood. Pirateship or pigeons blood.

Are you debating? No, I'm still thinking about the breastmilk. Did they bring it on board? Because TV and movies tell me a lot of times breastmilk wouldn't be super available on partnership. Yeah. There was also, it's interesting there is a little note sometimes for a treatment for burn scars, which my initial thought was like, did they care about that? Like, about the, like as a cosmetic thing, like if you don't like the look of that scar on your arm, here's an ointment you can put on it to make it go away, and I thought, that seems unlikely. And then there was a note at the bottom that was like, you would want to use this if it was like a porridge burn, not like a gunpowder burn.

Like, it's for the burns you're embarrassed of. It's for like, I spilled my hot porridge on me and I don't want anybody to know burns. Not like cool burns. So like, the scar on my knee that's from when we were coming home that one time and I fell on the steps of my own home and dropped my Xbox on the crowd.

I would probably get that one laser or portaged off or whatever, get that in a mud out, I guess. It's such a bad scar. And you threw your Xbox right into the bushes while you fell. It was just... We didn't know it'd been there because it was funnier than anything I'll ever say.

It was also so sad. I think the Xbox was okay though. If I were to farm it with it. No, it was Xbox 360. It was already not long for this world. I'd wrap that bad boy in a talent of times. He was ready for Valhalla. Not Assassin's Creed Valhalla that would have melted it from the inside out. I'm saying

it was ready for green investors. I don't know the video game jokes. I'm sorry. That's fine. That's fine. They liked it. I want to tell you about one famous burned pirate. But first we have to go to the billion part. No. The medicines, the medicines that I skill in my cards for the mouth. Manolo, guys what? Manolo, guys what? What? What? What? What? After Game Chos made it to 100 episodes on maximum fun. My Nolo, guys what? Nolo, guys what? What? What? After GameChoice made it to 100 episodes on Maximum Fun!

Oh that's true, I knew that. Well to celebrate we are releasing our entire year of old archives to match fun members, as anyone who gives $5 more monthly to support podcasts like After GameChoice. That's 63 episodes within studio, comedian, guests like Jason Manzukas, Boeing, Young and Matt Rogers, Joe Perra, Todd Barry, and Jeanine Garoflo, Conor O'Malley, Chris Gether, and more. Plus three bonus episodes that include two pilot episodes. Wow, two pilots must be good. Find the feed at maximumfun.org slashboco.

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Head to maxfunstore.com now. That's maxfunstore.com. When that been a while, if somebody come out be like, eat Wheaties. And they left. Man, if we could out and be like, eat weed, he's like, they lived. I'm sorry. Man, if we could get that weed, he's sponsored shit, though. I'm really thinking, man, any serious sponsored shit. No, I just think it's funny because as I was researching,

like, treating burns on pirate ships, there comes up a story of like, you know, one pirate that got burned so much that that's how he's known. And history is like that pirate that got burned that time. His name was Lionel Waffer. Nice. He grew up in the Scottish Highlands. He initially, he wanted to be a barber surgeon.

So he started like a practice after he went through his apprenticeship, which would have been like, you start at like 12 or 13, and you just hang out with a barber surgeon for like six or seven years, and then you're a barber surgeon. Wow. Yes. That barber surgeon. Wow. Yes. That's cool.

Yeah, I mean, it's a long, it's a long training process, but start, you like, you start out as doogie and then. But so he started his own place like a surgery on land, and he, I don't know, got bored or didn't want to do it. So he decided to go to see. And they're at the time, there were, we're in the golden age of piracy. And there were a lot of like ships that needed surgeons on board. That was a rule you had to have one, and then pirates would try to steal them.

So then you had to get a new one when the pirates took your surgeon. So there was a lot of work to, you could get a lot of work out there if you wanted to. And he was, he was, he joined up with pirates eventually, and kind of like rolled with it, like that life, and was sort of passed on with different crews and went pirating on raids along with pirates and then also was their surgeon and took care of them. At one point, he was on land with a band of pirates. They were traveling across Panama.

This was like pre-Canal. So he's walking. And the story, and there's an account from him and an account from somebody else who was there, one way or another, he is sitting there drying out gunpowder. And while he's in the midst of doing this, someone nearby, like lit up a pipe or something, and somebody had fire nearby, the way that he tells the story, he doesn't blame this other dude. He's like, it was nobody's fault, man.

I don't know. Stuff happens, it's rough out here. And then there's an account from another person, like a third party who's like, no, it was totally this dude's fault. He just like, he stood right over his gun powder. And was like, what you in and let it hide them? He should have answered the question more quickly. So he said, oh, me, me, me, me, me.

Oh, I seriously have a little work. Please get some way, Doug. So because of that, like, so there was fire immediately and he was burned really badly. Like, it burned his knee all the way down to the bone. It burned up his thigh. Yes. So it was a very bad burn, which was bad for a couple of reasons.

One, how are we going to treat this? And two, they're traveling. They're on the move. And obviously, at that point, it became very difficult for him to keep moving. So he tried. He had some medical supplies with him. He had some ointments and some bandages.

And he tried to cover it up as best he could and keep on moving along across the land. But he wasn't being able to keep up very well. They really did. And this kind of speaks to how important if you had a barber surgeon or a sea surgeon who was working with you, you tried to keep them alive because they served the purpose.

The rule of thumb, I would think think for most of your crew, probably. So, so they tried for a while, one of, that wasn't always true though. Oh yeah, some guy, some people are pretty useless, some, you're happy with them. They snored weird maybe. He would have been less expendable. So, so anyway, so they tried to take them along for a while and he just couldn't keep up and the wound was getting worse And then like one of the crew made off with the medical supplies he had with them and took off with them And so he was really in a in a in a bad way and he said, you know what? I'm just gonna stay behind at that point

They had met up with people who were indigenous to the area the Guna people and he was there with them And he was like, I'm just gonna hang here Bye I don't know I did my best area, the Guna people, and he was there with them, and he was like, I'm just going to hang here. Bye. I don't know. I did my best. This guy gets bored easily. I like that. So the people that he, the people indigenous to the area had their own treatments that they

applied. They had some herbal preparations, and he describes it in his writings, because he wrote about all this, like they would choose certain herbs and apply these in poltices and cover with plantain leaves. And whatever it all was, according to Waifer, 20 days later, it was healed. Whoa. And he said other than like it was forever numb,

he couldn't feel his knee ever again. But he kept his knee. That's nice. So like a great story. So he decided. I mean, are there some days would be pretty choice not to feel my knees. I'm way too old.

I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying.

I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying.

I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm saying. I'm it here please let me say I mean who knows if they were like open to that like well I mean we did you a favor do you want to go find your friends or are you just gonna chill here we actually had a whole thing plan it's like it'd be cool if you let but he found a way to like, garner their favor, because at the same time, one of the chief's wives had fallen ill, and the way bleeding was common across different times and places throughout history,

all different cultures would engage in like, bloodletting as a way of treating somebody. And it was common to have different ways, like methods that people preferred of bloodletting, different areas of the body that were thought to be the best. His description of the way blood letting was done in this region was very different than what he did. What he wrote is that basically when someone needed to be blood, you would have them sit

on a rock in the river because then the blood just goes right there. Less mess. I'm into it so far. And then shoot teeny arrows at them. What? Which of course is a very painful way of doing this. But a very fun way in a time where again, was established, there wasn't a lot to do. That's an afternoon right there. So, let's go shoot Aaron's a Kyle.

And help him. And you're helping him. You're helping him. You're helping him. But the thing is, he can. Hey Kyle, I left my wallet on the blood rock. Will you please get it when you go out? Thank you.

So he witnesses this and he's like, I have a better way. Let me show you why we do it. Impossible. We've refined this. We just sort of like strap your arm to a piece of tree bark, something to like keep it in place, and then we cut you with a lance it. It's how we do it. Now, the problem with that is that the little arrow method, while more painful, it doesn't result in a lot of bleeding. We're talking like very shallow little cuts. And so just drops of blood is all you would really see from that.

Now when you cut somebody, of course, there's a lot more bleeding. So when the chief witness this, he was like, okay, we're all freaked out, that's terrible. This does not look like it's gonna work. So if she's not better tomorrow, you're dead. We're gonna take you out to the bleeding rock and use the big arrows. And this is one of those weird moments where there is no reason.

So the documented medical condition where fits and fevers, so probably fevers and a seizure is probably what would happen. There is no reason that bleeding somebody would do anything for that, but she got better. And so he was allowed to like hang out and chill. Sorry, Dr. Sidney McRoy, it seems like maybe miracles sometimes do happen.

Maybe you need to open your eyes and your heart a little bit to the incredible power of cutting someone and waiting. Well, you don't just wait, you catch it in a little cup. Ah, yes. That's key. That's true. Like a little, and a fancy cup. But he may have had to make do.

Well, who knows? So, so because of this whole adventure he lived and he eventually wrote a book about it, this became like his whole thing. This is also why he's famous. He got burned and then he wrote a book about his adventures and really made a living off of like telling people about all these adventures that he had until, of course, eventually, he decided he wanted to go to Jamestown, Virginia, check out what was happening there, and as soon as he got there, he was arrested because the pirate stuff.

But what an adventure until, Johnny! Johnny! Because he did do the pirating before all of his adventures. He forgot about that. Well, they saw bones that doesn't end in a death. He went to prison. That's not bad, right?

That's all right. And he's still there today. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast, Saw Bones. Thank you to the Taxpayers for these of our song Medicines. It's the intro and outro program. Thanks to Paul Subborn and Clint McRoy, Amanda, and Rachel,

and everybody helps make the show possible. Thanks to you for being here. Yeah. Thank you. That is going to do it for us for this week. So until next time, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Cindy McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your hand.

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