Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Renaissance Medicine

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

Sawbones brings you a studio version of the show at the ye olde Harmony House Renaissance Faire. Justin and Dr. Sydnee talk about how medicine evolved in the Renaissance beyond what passed for scientific theories during the middle ages including the four humours, alchemy, and the real cause of syphilis (insulting the sun god).Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/Center for Reproductive Rights: https://reproductiverights.org/

Sawbones 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, this one is about some books. One, two, one, two, three, four. Hello everybody and welcome to Sawbone. For the mouth. Oh, he's been there.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Sawbone. Hello, everybody. Hear ye, hear ye. Hear ye, hear ye. Welcome to Sawbone's marital tour of ye old misguided medicine. I am thine co-host, Master Justin McElroy, his liege, duke of science.

And I'm Sydney McElroy, his liege, duke of science. And I'm Sydney McElroy. Wow, wow. You absolutely left me to dangle. I did, I did, I'm sorry. You left me to absolutely spin in the wind. Well, I'm not in my costume, so I just, I wasn't feeling it.

Wow, wow. Justin, we were at a Ren Faire over the weekend. Not just any Ren Faire, Sydney, the Harmony House Ren Faire, which was at a Wren Fair over the weekend. Not just any Wren Fair, Sydney, the Harmony House Wren Fair, which was such a wonderful event. My brothers and my dad came down and we did pictures and signings. We did live saw bones there.

We did saw bones signings and photos. It was just a blast. And it was a wonderful fair. There was so much to do and see. There were horses and donkeys and crafting and sword fighting. Mary put in a Herculean effort and basically soloed this Renaissance fair for no pay.

So she's a hero. I think they sold every giant turkey leg, I think that they brought, I believe. Next year, come early if you want a giant turkey leg, apparently, they're going fast. But we did do a live Sawbones there, and it was a Sawbones that was about Renaissance medicine. Right.

And obviously the conditions were not ideal for recording that episode, but we didn't want you to miss out on all that great stuff. We were in like an outdoor amphitheater at a Ren fair and it was raining. Yeah, and it was a big tent. Just to clarify.

It was a giant tent. It was still great. I mean, it was still a wonderful thing. But it would have been harder to record. Yeah, as an environment to watch a live podcast, it was a hoot. Excellent. It was a hoot.

That was our first, is that our first outdoor? Have we done Sawbones ever before? I don't think we've ever done Sawbones. I don't think I've podcasted outdoors before. Yeah, that was, well anyway. Well, this is probably the first ever outdoor podcast, actually, so that's huge. Well, we are making history.

There is no way, there's no way it's the first outdoor podcast, I guarantee. I'm the first. Justin, everybody has podcasts. Sorry, honey, history has its eyes on me right now, and I'm staggered. Everybody has a podcast. I'm sure there are has podcasts. Sorry, honey, history has its eyes on me right now, and I'm staggered a little bit. Everybody has a podcast. I'm sure there are outdoor podcasts.

The fact that you are quoting the title of my flop of a podcasting. It was not a flop. You signed a copy of it this weekend. Yes, that's true, that's true. I sold a copy of that book to everyone that would want me to personally sign my name in it. So I think I got my key demo locked down.

That's not true. So Renaissance Medicine. I think it's really fun to think about this specific era of medicine. And we'll cover some topics that we've sort of talked about before on the show, but I wanted to put it all together in kind of like what did this time in medical history look like? Because prior to this,

and we talk about like the medieval period a lot on the show, that like, we didn't forget everything we knew, but we thought about other things, I guess, for some years. We put other priorities in front of logic and science. Well, we found Excalibur, and we all got very excited about Excalibur for many years. And then eventually we were like, listen, we love Excalibur.

I think we lost it. We got to get back to science. It's really interesting because the dominant medical theory that persisted prior to the Renaissance is the humoral theory of medicine. Meaning that we believe there are four humors in the body and that all health and wellness or illness, either way, is based on how well balanced those four humors are.

Yes, it's essential to keep those in place. There are phlegm, poo, pee, and snot. No. Exactly. Black bile. Black bile. We've talked about them so many times. Black bile. Yellow bile. Yellow bile.

Phlegm. Phlegm. And? Blood. Good. Yes. Very good. I'm glad that you have mastered a theory of medicine that has been debunked fully. But that's the only way, Sid, that's the only way that you could spot a phony.

You gotta know him, right? So he tries to pot it off on you. It's like, hey, wait a minute, that's the humoral system of medicine, nice try. And they didn't come up with that in the middle ages, but it just, like we didn't grow from it. We kinda like, I mean, that goes back to Hippocrates, right? We just didn't change anything.

We were like, yep, four humors and treatment is usually like either getting rid of a humor or putting more of a humor in there and then eating or drinking certain things to balance those out. And then there was a lot of sort of spiritual and religious understanding of disease during those intervening years.

You know, you're sick because you upset the gods. This is a punishment in some way. And the gods or God as we're moving because you upset the gods. This is a punishment in some way. The gods or God as we're moving, in a lot of these traditions, we're thinking of more like a- Whoever's up there, they're mad at you. Yeah, yeah. Like a monotheistic kind of,

God is mad at you until you're sick or God is pleased with you so you got better or you're possessed by demons perhaps and maybe the ways that we treat you have more to do with our spiritual beliefs and praying for you and that sort of thing than any kind of medicine. And certainly as we moved into the Renaissance period,

it's not that all of this went away. We didn't abandon all of those ideas all at once and go, nevermind, science is back. But we started- Science is back. We started to lay the groundwork for a better, more reason-based understanding of these things during the Renaissance.

You still see all of these other ideas persist, but great thinkers are beginning to question them. And as is typical, as we've learned on Sawbones, just because a really smart person does a lot of really hard work to introduce a new idea and say, hey, I think this new idea might be right, doesn't mean that anyone listens to them. In fact, most people won't listen to them

and many people will get angry and throw things at them and maybe like run them out of town. So, but the seeds are being planted. So I wanna talk about some of the thinkers of the Renaissance that started to change our idea of medicine and science and our understanding. As our ideas of everything were changing, hence the Renaissance.

It's a very exciting time, just like they cover in the hit song, Welcome to the Renaissance, from the hit musical, Something Rotten. Now, on the way to the Renaissance Festival, I tried to liven up the car with a few bars of Welcome to the Renaissance via the music app. And it did not go over well in the car. There was a lot of tension there.

Well, okay, to be fair, we were running late. I was very stressed. We were running late and we go on tour and do shows all over the place. And we're not late for those shows. And we might be traveling hundreds of miles and we're not late for those. We had to drive 10 minutes from our house to this Ren Fair

and we were running late. Yes, now to be fair, to get to those shows, we don't have to get our kids out of their bedrooms. And that usually takes four hours. And into costumes. And you have to find them too. They hide, they hide like mice and then you have to track them down.

So anyway, let's talk about Fra Castoro. Okay. It's a good name. Science from the Renaissance era, scientist, not science, he's not science. He is not the concept of science, he is a scientist. 1546, he proposed an idea. So as I said, up until now, our primary understanding of disease

is based on the four humors. The idea that you catch an illness, that you get sick from someone else or from something else was not, that was not really understood or appreciated. So he proposed a really radical idea that maybe there is something that could pass an illness from me to you. And he called this thing, this particle a spore, which isn't what we would necessarily call that today, but it's the beginning of the germ theory of disease

being introduced in the 1500s. It's like how you would explain it to a kid, right? It's very rudimentary. The basic structure is there, but we just hadn't zoomed in enough. Well, and he didn't know, when he said spore, he didn't necessarily know if this was some sort of living organism that went from,

so like a bacteria or viruses, as we've discussed, there's some living, nonliving, dead, undead, you know what I mean. Or if it was maybe some sort of chemical thing that got transmitted from me to you, a toxin or something like that. He really didn't know that, but he knew that, or he believed that it was possible

that that's why people got sick, is that there are tiny things that we can't see that we pass between each other and make us sick. Forgive my ignorance, but what kind of like magnification are we working with at this time period? Is he working a lot in theory, or is he able to like use a magnifying glass and like look at stuff? So he is primarily working in theory because this is before we think of the Dutch scientist

Leeuwenhoek as really the like the father of microbiology and the person who like took microscopy to a point where we could look at small things. So this is more a theoretical understanding than anything he's visualized, but it's impressive, right? Because the might, like, Leibniz didn't come around until the late 1600s, early 1700s, so, you know, we are easily a hundred years, over a hundred years before we're gonna be able to see these things.

We're basically Swinsey at this point. Yes. Comparatively. There's a lot of science that happens with us not being able to see something, but we do a series of experiments that prove that it's there. Mm-hmm.

And I think that's really cool. Yeah. So there's my pitch for science. I'm gonna tell that, I think I have to talk to Charlie's class about STEM. I think I'm gonna say that and see if that gets anybody excited. So anyway, he also proposed the idea of a fomite,

which if you work in healthcare, you know that a fomite is anything that can carry disease. We talk about that a lot. It's why, for instance, the classic white coat, especially with like, you know, your classic physician white coat has long sleeves, is not great, because if those long physician sleeves are touching the patient when you're

examining them, if they're like rubbing against their clothes or the bed sheet or whatever, then they can get germs on them. And then you go touch another patient and now you're wearing a fomite, something that can carry disease from place to place. Um, and he was the one who coined that term and talked about that concept of a fomite, something that I could touch and it would make me sick because it touched someone that was sick. Again, we can't see what the thing is,

but we're beginning to understand that it might be there. Now, none of these ideas really caused a big stir in the science world. They were interesting and certainly, I'm sure there were people who also believe that way, but they didn't really shift public opinion. What Fra Castoro did that I think he was most famous for among like the general public

was writing an epic poem about syphilis in 1530. It was in three books. It was called Syphilis or the French Disease. And it's excellent. It is about a shepherd boy. You'll never guess what his name is. Well, this is cheating, but syphilis. Syphilis. It is about a shepherd boy. You'll never guess what his name is. Well, this is cheating, but Syphilis. Syphilis.

It is about a shepherd boy who is named Syphilis, who his job is to tend the flocks of the king. And he accidentally insults the God of the sun, which you don't wanna do. And you don't wanna do, especially if your name's Syphilis. No. And he is punished for insulting the God of the sun with Syphilis.

Syphilis. I mean, it couldn't be more predictable. It got him right there. I mean, it's absolutely, it's Syphilis that got him. He gets Syphilis. And so I think, again, this is like a really great little kind of all-in-one description of this era of medicine. So here we have someone who is using, who is gonna describe the disease and like coins, like now we call it syphilis, named for the shepherd syphilis and we understand what the disease does. He has developed the early beginnings

of the germ theory of disease, but in the poem he writes about it, it's a punishment for insulting the sun god. And also he does it in the form of a poem. You gotta add a little drama, right? You gotta add a little bit of pizazz to it, because otherwise it's not gonna stick in the public consciousness.

You can prattle on forever, but unless you got a little bit of a story. That's true. I mean, that's sawbones. That's sawbones. Right, that's sawbones. You gotta have a little bit of a story. That's true.

And I will say that doing it in the form of an epic poem led to Syphilis always being called Syphilis. That is why we call Syphilis Syphilis. I don't think it's kind of locked it in. You don't wanna mess with the meter at that point, right? The poem already rhymes. You gotta find a name that rhymes with Syphilis? No way.

Hi, my name is Dyphilis and I should have insulted the Sun God. Another big thinker from the Renaissance period that changed the way we started to look at the human body was Vesalius. So as we've talked about on the show before, there was a long time where there was really no like ethics or morality around the idea of doing

an anatomical dissection after someone has died. Like this was something that doctors and thinkers did and we didn't worry so much about it because we understood we're trying to learn things. There wasn't some sort of like religious connotation to that. And then we went through a long period where absolutely not. That would be defiling a corpse and it would be very disrespectful

and we wouldn't do that. And it took a long time. Now even in the Renaissance, everybody wasn't necessarily on board with it. It would be a very long time. We had doctors' riots as we've talked about. We're talking about basically a cultural change, right? Yes.

This is not a legal shift. This is a cultural shift in how we think about, at least in this culture, right? Because it's always very around the planet. Is it okay to do an autopsy? Or certainly beyond an autopsy to do something just purely to learn about the human body, to do anatomical dissection? Is it okay, morally, socially, ethically? During the Renaissance, it was more common again,

that people would do this as a way of understanding anatomy. And Vesalius specifically wanted to look at all of the, everything Galen had written down about the human body to see, okay, well, let's check it out. Let's actually look and see if this is accurate. That, you know, we can't just take your word for it. And this again, we're questioning. That's important, right?

We're looking at the four humans and saying, well, let's look inside and see if they're in there. It's true that we could find them all. It's so like when the first time I got the internet set up and we're like, well, what website? Like we should try these websites we've been hearing about. We should look at all the websites. We should see if Nintendo.com really works.

That was the first website we went to, Nintendo.com. Just a big picture of Mario's face that took 20 minutes to load. I just remember AOL all the time. I was just so excited to be in chat rooms and instant messaging. Yeah, we used to instant message back in the day. So anyway, he discovered over 300 mistakes

that Galen had made. My favorite of all, and I mean again, this advanced our understanding of anatomy, my favorite mistake is that men indeed do not have one less set of ribs than women. That's a very controversial mistake to point out. Just because he's contradicting the Bible. Yeah. I mean, sorry the Bible.

You guys could have checked that one. You did have skeletons. Sorry. Sorry. You could have double checked that. You have skeletons. Another doctor, William Harvey, was one of the first to start to describe the idea of a circulatory system.

Prior to this, we didn't really understand how blood moved in the body. There was a concept for a long time that we were just kind of bags of blood. Squish, sloshing around. Slushing around. Slushing around. You know, which like, I mean,

we've talked about other animals with different sort of circulatory systems and like open circulatory systems, like the horseshoe crab. So like that does happen. Like it just kind of sloshes around. Ours doesn't work that way. sort of circulatory systems and like open circulatory systems like the horseshoe crab. So like that does happen. It just kind of sloshes around. Ours doesn't work that way.

And Harvey was the first one to talk about that and like start to describe, like build on the work that Avicenna had done, you know, centuries before, but build on that to talk about the heart, pumps, blood through a circulatory system through the human body were not bags of blood. And then we also see Paracelsus, who we've done a whole episode on before, but Paracelsus was a really important figure during this time period,

because we see the concept of alchemy, where we're trying to turn stuff into gold, or whatever precious thing we're trying to turn things into, start to turn into chemistry, where we actually could make something in a lab. We could make a substance that would benefit us. And this doesn't sound like a revolutionary concept, because that's medicine, the vast majority of medicines.

But at the time, the idea that you would put this new substance that you synthesize, that you've created in your body instead of some sort of herb or natural remedy or just like eating or drinking certain things, this concept of a chemical that would make you better was brand new. It sounds kind of like you can have,

like we had ingredients before and this is like a recipe, right? So we used to have carrots and hummus and that would be what you would have. But then later we were like, wait a minute, if we mix the carrots and hummus together and put it in a bottle, sell it for $100, that is medicine.

You get the idea. It's like a different, like a recipe, if a recipe that had hummus and carrots in it. So that wasn't a good example. No, because carrots and hummus are kind of fine the way they are. If you have a plate with carrots and peas and corn on it, and you're like, aw, I like all these things,

but then medicine is like succotash. It's like, wait a minute, why don't you cut it all up and mix it all up and think, and now it's a thing. Yeah, well, and also- And succotash can cure your records, in this example. Well, the idea of putting a chemical in your body at all. Right. Instead of, oh, you're sick, eat more potatoes,

or eat less potatoes, or something. However many potatoes you're eating is the wrong amount. Or, or you're sick, I've made this tincture out of things that I found naturally in the earth. The idea that we make things to put in our bodies, not just pick things. Right. You know, this is where we start to see that.

So Justin, those are some of the ideas that were permeating. What were some of the illnesses that we were trying to treat with these ideas? Well, I don't know. Oh, I'm gonna tell you after we go to the Belly New Government. Okay, well then let's go. The medicines, the medicines,

that escalate my cough for the mouth. All right, Sydney, I have a cure in search of a disease. You're telling me what we're what we're fixing up with this stuff. So the the hard part as they started to employ these new ideas is that we we had some illnesses that were pretty rampant that I mean even to this day can be very challenging. For instance, smallpox. We don't have smallpox around anymore, thank goodness. But if we did, that would be bad.

Smallpox was very deadly. And so even as we are starting to understand anatomy in the circulatory system, that doesn't really help us fight smallpox. Leprosy, the plague. We didn't have antibiotics. so these were big deals. It's a huge deal. Yeah, we don't really have a lot of options to deal with stuff.

The plague in particular. So during, if you were at our live show about Renaissance medicine, you would have seen, I was dressed as a plague doctor. I should go ahead, and I could lie about this. You should lie about it. No, I'm not going to. I don't do that with our listeners.

I could lie to you and say I was fully costumed as a plague doctor, but the truth is, and this is part of why we were late, I have lost my plague doctor mask. I have the rest of the costume, because I had a moment where I thought, do I not own this? I know I own this. I know I've worn it.

And I have the rest of the costume in a pile in my office. Where is the mask? I don't know. So I lost it. But you had a good backup plan. So I thought you looked really cool still. Well, thank you. So, and I will explain what my backup plan was.

So the plague was one of the biggest problems throughout a lot of history, but certainly during the Renaissance period. And there were a lot of treatments that still relied on the humors as the theory, you know, how we were treating it. But a new idea that arose during the Renaissance was called miasma theory, which is where-

It's in the air. It's in the air. It's just something in the air. Yeah, it's like a bad, and it might be represented by by a bad smell or something, like it could be associated with that, or it's just in the air and it's around you. And so plague doctors in particular

would be outfitted in a way to protect them from the miasma that is the plague. So the plague mask, and I think we've talked about some of this on the show before, but just to reiterate, the plague mask, as we've talked, and I think we've talked about some of this on the show before, but just to reiterate, the plague mask, you would have a, usually a bundle of herbs or incense, something that smelled nice called a pomander that would sit inside that big long beak part.

And that would help you not breathe in the miasma. Your long wax coat would protect you from any sort of like fluids or substances. And then there were red gems usually, or some sort of red color over the eyes in the mask, because red could ward off illness. Now, okay, the red, I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. I will say this.

I can understand if you're an old- timey person that doesn't have all of my incredible knowledge of science that I've gotten from Google, that you might think, well, the stinky air around here is making people sick. And the only way to know if it's bad air, it's going to make you sick. It's like a filter, right? They're filtering with good smells with the assumption assumption that the smell is a good indicator. Somehow the smell is mixed up in it, right? I mean, some of these things are, again, you're right.

They're true. We're getting there, right? We're getting in the neighborhood. It's like a can 95 for old-timey cats. It's like we've talked about, why is it important that we experience, this gets into the movie Inside Out, why is it important that we experience, this gets into the movie Inside Out, why is it important that we experience disgust? Because it protects us.

It protects us. And so if something grosses you out, if a bad smell grosses you out, on some level, it may be you're, we're trying to, your body's trying to get you to move away from something that could harm you. Let's also just acknowledge the fact that these are human beings,

not biologically and evolutionary so far removed from us. If they're like, listen, I don't know if it's making me healthy or not, but I'm loving not smelling all of the sewage in the street. I'm wild about it. Let's just roll with it. Let's leave it up in the beak and just, cause I love it. It's, yeah.

I want to make this an all the time thing. So because I did not have the plague, Dr. Mask, I did. I wore red sunglasses to this event. Yeah, the glass, the red glasses, I can't get them, I can't give them any old timey points on, unfortunately. No, but I did, I felt like it was a good combo because we're in the Renaissance, so we're starting to move away from these ideas,

but we're still, and I think that this is a good lesson about humanity. We were starting to understand that like a spiritual basis, like the idea that disease was punishment, the idea that these red glasses ward off evil, so I'll wear them to protect me from the plague. We're starting to know that that's not true, but when faced with something really scary,

we revert back to those things because we're desperate for anything. And I think we have seen echoes of that in real world situations today, all through the pandemic. We have seen people revert back to things that perhaps we know logically aren't very helpful because we are so afraid.

Fear makes us do that kind of thing. I'm feeling helpless. So anyway, and the thing about plague doctors too, is that they generally would carry a big stick to examine you with. A medical stick. A medical stick. I like to call it an examinant stick.

And that we'll just examine you with this stick and then we don't have to worry about touching you. Which again, we're like, we know something's going on with being around people with the plague and you get the plague because the fleas are biting you. But anyway, but anyway, we didn't understand all that yet. And you know, because obviously this isn't the best way to examine people and we really didn't understand the plague very well.

And we didn't understand disease very well, we were still sort of throwing out a lot of the same ideas of like bloodletting, puking, peeing, pooping, things to make you purge, that kind of thing. There was a whole field of pestilence medicine that arose that was like, I mean, very akin to, I think some of the, it almost sounds like some of the wellness stuff that you hear today. Like I have become a specialist in like alkalinity.

I'm gonna tell you how to alkalinize yourself. And I have a variety of products you can purchase to help you out. I'm a hydration specialist. Yeah. I mean, I think you see this again, echoed today and like in the field of pestilence medicine, you would get, I mean, basically a bunch of sort of folk

or herbal or just straight up fake stuff we put together to try to make money off of people. Like egg shells crushed up into a powder with like some marigolds and then you put them in some ale and sugar. And these are a few of my favorite things. I mean, really, it feels that way. It feels that way.

And so like there was still all of that around the plague, even as we were also creating pest houses, which were quarantine facilities. So we did, again, we were starting to do things that probably would impact the spread of plague. At the same time, we were doing a lot of stuff that didn't. During the Renaissance, we also see the English Hippocrates, Thomas Sydenham, introduced the idea of diagnosis.

Maybe we would make people better if we diagnosed them before we tried to treat them. Worth a shot. Instead of just saying like, you are sick, there are 10 things for sick, try one. Did you try tea? We also have oranges and honey. Wine?

Wine's always there. What about eggs? And if nothing else, we'll bleed you. Oh wait, did you, wait, come back, what about owl vomit? Wait, what about owl vomit? Wait, what about owl vomit? So, Sidenham said, I think we should start trying to tailor a treatment

to what's wrong with you. And you see that using that sort of concept, we start doing things like treating pain. Well, you're hurting. Well, we know that we have laudanum, we have opium, that helps with pain. Why don't we treat your pain? He proposed that malaria could be treated with cinchona bark.

He noticed this specific cyclical- Is that the root of quinine? Yep, yep, it has quinine in it. So he noticed these cyclical fevers, responded really well to this specific bark. So he would diagnose the malaria before prescribing the bark, which again, doesn't sound like you say that

and you're like, well, yeah, that's what doctors do. Well, that wasn't what doctors did before, you know? I mean, that's the thing, this idea of what is medicine, what is healing, what is the profession of physician, what do you do, was really starting to change in a way that, I mean, echoes what we do now. But this is the beginning of that. You're really talking about,

it seems like a lot of this is interesting because what you're talking about is cultural shifts, which is not as much of a sawbones thing, I think because eras are rarely the purview. We're normally talking about a large chronological span of time, but it seems like what we're really looking at is a reordering of priorities,

a reordering of the culture that enabled the progress, rather than individual discoveries from the time period. It's like reordering how we think about it. Exactly. You have to shift everybody's thinking first, and then you can start building on that with actual practices and stuff that people accept. And obviously, during this time period, we also have the development of like the printing

press and so like you have people who are like, like instead of every book having to be hand copied, you have ways to distribute information in a brand new way. You know, I mean, like where more people can access it too. But it takes a long time. Even now in the age of the internet, it takes a long time to change a misinformed position or idea if it has been held for centuries prior to that. Obviously, we still, with all of this information, even with Sydenham making these advancements, we still really didn't have great cures for things just because we hadn't made a lot of

them yet. Even as we were starting to figure out like that herbal thing seems to work well for that, it would be decades and decades before we would start synthesizing the actual compound. There's a reason we don't give people tree bark for malaria because now we can make the thing, the active compound that makes you better, we can make that in the lab.

And it's just the thing you need and not all the bark. It's like they'll sell you a cinnamon toast crunch dust now in a jar and you just buy the dust. So that you don't actually need the cereal because you have the dust concentrated. That's actually a decent analogy, yes. It's why- Oh, thanks, wow, the astonishment in your voice

is wonderful. Well, no, it's really good because I mean, people will say like, why do we need digoxin? We've got foxglove. And it's like, yes, that chemical in digoxin was originally synthesized from plant foxglove, but now we just make you digoxin, like the thing you need, and you don't have to eat a plant.

And that's better, it's better, because then the leaves probably taste gross, whatever. Anyway, but we still didn't have great ways to cure things, so we were still doing some things that didn't make sense. For scrofula, which is also called the king's evil. The reason it was called the king's evil, and we've talked about this extensively on the show, it's because you would cure it by being touched by a king.

It was like a tuberculosis-like illness. And the way that you got it better is you had to have someone in the monarchy touch you or touch something that you touched. Transference was still a popular theory of disease, meaning that one treatment for the plague, for instance, would be to take a live chicken and strap it to one of your boobos,

your big and large lymph nodes, so that you could give the chicken the plague and then you'd be better. Poor chicken. I know, poor chicken. There was also the idea of color theory, so you treat things with things that are the same color. This isn't too far from the doctrine of signatures, really, right?

The idea that light cures light, this would have been similar, so we could cure your jaundice with turmeric or your smallpox with wine, similar colors. But I think the big thing to take away is that as we're starting to understand diagnosis, the beginnings of germ theory, the idea of what is inside the human body, anatomy, all of these ideas are really flourishing. We're understanding how to make chemicals that might impact the way we feel. As all of this changes, it leads us to sort of the end of the Renaissance period where I think we have the greatest contribution. After all this.

After all that, even with all of that. All that, which is truly great. The greatest contribution comes at the very end of the Renaissance when Edward Jenner, an English doctor and scientist said, you know, I've noticed that milkmaids who get cowpox don't get smallpox. And cowpox doesn't kill you, but smallpox does.

Maybe if we gave people cowpox, they won't get and die of smallpox. And obviously that's not, that wasn't the final salute, that wasn't what we arrived at at the end, but that was the beginning of the vaccine. So we made the first vaccine against smallpox. And not really like, if you think about kind of the apex of the Renaissance moving into the next period

of scientific understanding and medicine, what greater thing could you point to than vaccines? Than the beginning of, hey, instead of waiting till people get sick and scrambling to point to than vaccines, than the beginning of, hey, instead of waiting till people get sick and scrambling to try to save them, let's stop them from ever getting sick in the first place. Thank you. That's beautiful.

Thanks again, vaccines. Yeah, thank you, vaccines. Anything you wanna mention about vaccines, Ulster Hirsted? I did wanna mention something. I feel like that as RFK Jr. continues to just like throw a lot of misinformation and uninformed scientific, I don't even want to say scientific opinions, they're just uninformed opinions about science. At the general public, it can be helpful for us to sort of debunk some of them. First of all, I will say that a lot of the statistics that he's throwing around about like diabetes for instance are completely wrong. I don't

know like none of these numbers make any like half of half of people in China don't have diabetes. He said that 50% of people in China have diabetes. That's not true. I think you probably knew that but that's not true. Anyway, but one thing in particular that he said is that he wants to reintroduce placebo trials of vaccines. And I know if you listen to our show or if you're somebody who is science-minded, you may have a moment where you think like, well, a placebo trial is not a problem, but it is.

It's a giant problem that he's throwing out there. And I just wanted to highlight why. So right now, let's talk about the measles vaccine, because that's the one he seems to have the most difficulty coping with. Understanding. The measles vaccine prevents measles, okay? We have a ton of data

that the measles vaccine prevents measles. If we were going to try to use something else to prevent measles, we would not test that against a placebo because we have an excellent thing that prevents measles already. It's the measles vaccine. That's how we do research when it comes to especially like deadly life threatening or even just diseases that where people are already sick. We don't say, hey, we have a treatment for what you've got

and we could give it to you because we know it works pretty well, but we have something over here in the lab that may work better. So we're gonna test placebo versus this thing in the lab. We're not gonna do that. We're gonna see if the new thing works better than the old thing.

Right, because we have a, we're not starting from zero. We're not starting from zero and we have something that already works. And to start from zero, well, one, it wouldn't be very scientifically helpful because we really want to compare it to what we already have, right? We don't want to compare it to zero,

we want to compare it to what already exists. So it doesn't make sense. But two, it is wildly unethical. It is, I mean, it will absolutely endanger the lives of children to start from placebo with vaccines. So what he is proposing is putting our children's lives in danger with absolutely unethical, irresponsible, pseudo-scientific studies. That, and that really, that's just to really highlight. We would not do placebo testing

because we have something that works. And human lives matter. And you are not experimental subjects, you are people. So tell everybody you know about that. Okay, thanks. That's gonna do it for this week on Sawbones. Thanks again for being here, for hanging out with us. That's gonna, oh, thanks to the taxpayers

for using their song, Medicines, as the intro and outro of our program. We are gonna have, I think, some extra shirts for like the- From the Renaissance Fair. From the Renaissance Fair. If you would like to get one of those, we'll let you know when you can, because we don't, I don't know yet. or like the- From the Renaissance Fair. From the Renaissance Fair. Yeah. If you would like to get one of those,

we'll let you know when you can, because we don't, I don't know yet, but they will be, I believe we're gonna put them in the merch store, so, macronomerge.com. Go check right now to see if they're there, because even if they're not, you can get some Sawbone stuff.

Yeah, and we'll put up pictures, they're really cute, they're red and purple, and got all the Ren Faire stuff on them. You're gonna love them. Yeah. And buying them will support Harmony House, so thanks. And thanks again if you came out. It was so nice.

That was such a good turnout. And I hope that if you didn't make it this year and it happens again next year, that you'll come out next year. That's gonna do it for us for this week on Sob Mones. My name is Justin McElroy. I'm Sydney McElroy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Music Alright!

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