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

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

TikTok has become enthralled with the idea of Thalassotherapy... which is basically going to the ocean to feel better. Dr. Sydnee talks about the history of this "sea cure" and Dr. Richard Russell, the man who popularized it in the second half of the eighteenth century.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/National Immigration Project: https://nipnlg.org/about/who-we-are 

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. All right. This one is about some books. One, two, one, two, three, and welcome to Sawbones, a marital tour of Misguided Medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McElroy.

And I'm Sydney McElroy. And Sid, what's happening this week? What are we doing? I feel like it's been such a chaotic few weeks on Sawbones here with all the travel and the max fun drive and then everything's just been so wild at the Mac warehouse. And I've been, yeah, I've been really busy with my day job. Yeah, your day job and your,

the new overnight shelter that you've been working on that you started talking about last week here in Huntington. That's right, Justin. Got a lot cooking. I know, it's been really busy. And on top of that, our listeners were thoughtful enough to point something out that I missed on our last episode. Yeah, and you promised me you weren't gonna be spicy

about this. I'm not spicy. You're all right. And I missed something and I am fallible. I am merely human. We had a question on our last episode, weird medical questions about how, when you're making pottery, sometimes you score the surfaces and you use slip

and then the surfaces stick and is there anything like that in medicine? And I had talked a little bit about some things that were similar, but I couldn't think of anything exactly like that. And then many of you, I won't name all of you, there were many of you who reached out to talk about pleuridesis,

which I think is a good example. And what that is, so let's say that you have had multiple, either a pneumothorax or a pleural effusion. What those are, or a pneumothorax is when there is air in between the lung and the lining, the outside of the lung, like the lining outside it. You don't want air to get trapped in that space because it'll start to push and collapse the lung, right?

Same thing, you don't want fluid to get trapped in that space, push and collapse the lung, right? Same thing, you don't want fluid to get trapped in that space, push and collapse the lung, cause difficulties breathing, respiratory problems. Anyway, if you have multiple occasions where that happens over and over again, because we fix it and then it goes away, and if it goes away, great, but if it continues to recur over and over,

we might wanna try to make the lung stick to the lining of the lung, the lining out there, and not allow air or fluid to accumulate in that space anymore. And in order to do that, you can do something called pleuridesis, where you go in there with a chest tube into that space in between, and you're actually going to put either like a medical talc, it's like a sterile medical powder in there along the lining, along the outside of the lung and the inside of the chest cavity there.

Or you can use like a surgeon's rasp, like a file kind of thing. Sure, yeah, a rasp. And you make the surfaces rough and you put the talc in there and you stick them together. And you're intentionally trying to abrade these surfaces in such a way that they will Stick together. Perfect. That's pleuridesis and

That is a great example of exactly what our listener asked in the question about pottery So thank you Thank you everybody who emailed about that because it is it is a really good example And I think it's an interesting procedure and it's a cool analogy to this thing you do in pottery and it's a cool analogy to this thing you do in pottery. And it's a good reminder that as healthcare providers, we should be lifelong learners. We should never. Oh, too true. And lifelong rememberers, because there's a lot out there.

And I think sometimes if we've been exposed to something in medicine, like when I read those emails, I thought, oh yeah, I remember learning about pleuridesis. Now I'm not a surgeon, so it's not something I do regularly, but I kind of vaguely remember it. But it's okay to say, oh gosh, I kind of remember that, but I'm gonna have to do some reading to refresh myself. I don't, I'm not an encyclopedia, it's not all up there.

So it's a good reminder to stay humble, admit when you don't remember or know something, and learn from your colleagues and listeners. Thank you all. And yet, when I encourage you to stay humble, it sometimes irritates you. I just don't understand the difference. Yeah.

I don't know. Maybe our listeners will have some input for you on what the difference is. No! That was a joke. Maybe they could email Sawbones at MaximumFun.org and tell you. Email Joe Rogan at Joe Rogan podcast. No, that wasn't our email address, was it? Is it Sawbones Show?

What's our email address? No, I'm not gonna tell you, so you could what? So you could tell people to blast me? No, I just got it wrong. What's our email address? It is Sawbones at MaximumFun.org. Thank you, okay. That's what I said, and then I got,

that's not what we're talking about. No, that is, well, it is, that we have. Yeah, well, we did that, that's done. We have done that. Moving on. Yeah. I like transitions like that. I did that thing, now I'll do the next thing. Yeah, call that in the business segue.

Real smooth. So, you know how- And I'm the king of them. Luckily you're here casting with the king of smooth transitions. I've got you. I am. Top of my back, I'll carry this whole show.

Notoriously bad at that. So you know how there was a time where if you were sick, you'd go to your doctor and your doctor would tell you to just go to the beach? Yeah. Like in that Coolio video. Like in the Coolio video for Fantastic Voyage. Don't you miss those times? I do.

That used to be, that was, I mean, cause honestly, not bad advice, right? There's been a resurgence of this conversation, specifically on TikTok, probably on other socials as well, about the concept. And I mean, it's mainly aimed at the idea of hysteria. And we've talked about hysteria extensively on the show. Hysteria was a sort of a made up catch-all diagnosis that was largely applied to women extensively on the show. Hysteria was a sort of a made up catch-all diagnosis that was largely applied to women

when they were behaving in ways that society wasn't thrilled about, or if they actually did have some sort of medical ailment that we just didn't understand well or weren't paying enough attention to. These are problems that persist in medicine today. But at the time, you could look at a woman and just say, you're hysterical, that's the problem.

And there's this idea right now on social media that doctors would then say, go to the beach. And they're saying, kind of the idea is, wouldn't it be great if we could all just be labeled hysterical and be sent to the beach right now? And I get that, except a couple problems. One, let's not push for that. They're pushing back against rights for everybody with a uterus enough as it is.

But two, this actually, we didn't use the beach cure, the sea cure for hysteria. Just on a side note. No, no, we didn't. Lots of other things, not that. But we did have a time where you may have been prescribed the sea cure, the taking the sea waters, or thalasotherapy, if you prefer. Are we talking about ingesting the sea?

Well, Justin, that's part of it. Let's talk about when this started. This is way back. Richard Russell is who started this idea. Richard Russell, MD. I feel like Richard Russell, by the way, is a really modern name. I know it's not. I know those are just names people have had for a long time. But the fact that like Dr. Richard Russell, MD was practicing in Sussex back in the early 1700s. I know what you're saying.

You know what I mean? Well, it's one of those that just never stopped me in time. First of all, the alliteration. I think it feels very modern. It does. But also like Richard Russell, Dr. Richard Russell, it does. It does, he was born in 1687, but it feels like. Held up, the name's held up.

Yes. Gotta give it credit. So he was the son of a surgeon, the son of a son of a. Son of a son. Son of a son of a surgeon. And he was bound for medicine himself, as many were back then.

You kinda took on the family business. He had all the sharp stuff already. So just go into it. And I'll be honest, trying to research, first of all, it's a really common name. There's a lot of Richard Russells, and a lot of Richard Russells who have been doctors all throughout time.

Unbelievable. So even to the extent that I found multiple accounts where they were like, now don't confuse this with this other Richard Russell surgeon who was born in a similar time and did other things. They're different ones. I don't know a ton about what he did in his original medical practice.

Like he started his surgery, which at the time a surgery would have been like the place where you go see the doctor. Like I opened the surgery. Like this is my clinic. You could have called your surgery. And I believe that name does persist even to this day. But we here in the US don't normally say like,

come visit my surgery. I opened my surgery. Surgery is the thing you do to someone when you cut on them and stuff. That thing, right? We don't say a surgery. You know, the only thing I would say is like, I think if you said surgery,

I would think like the area of the hospital where that happens. You know what I mean? I would think surge, like he'll be in surgery. I, you know what I mean? Like using in that sense. Okay, he'll be in surgery. Although I think of being surgery

as in the act of having surgery, but I understand what you're saying. Like if I heard he'll be in surgery, I would think of that as the surgery area where that kind of thing happens, I guess, which is maybe more of an aspect of like how the hospital is structured rather than having an independent place

where someone's hung their shingle. We here like to call it the surgical suite. He is in the surgical suite or the operating room. I like when you guys call it the theater. Oh, yeah. The operating theater. Operating theater. You'll hear that drop now and then

from the surgeons trying to get fancy. I see you surgeons. You're just trying to get fancy. I see you surgeons. You're just trying to act fancy. I think you can't call it an operating theater unless they have a circle above you from which Kramer could drop a junior mint into the open wound. Other than that, it's not a phantom.

They have that on Grey's Anatomy where they're looking through a window overlooking the OR. So I assume those must exist where you can watch surgeries for learning purposes still. I mean, maybe, but it's also just like, that's a good thing to have on your TV show. You know what I mean? It's kind of like the house hospital

where all the doors are glass so you can do every possible angle. That's true. There's absolutely no HIPAA in that hospital. No, we don't have those in our surgical suite. Anyway, I don't really know what he did in his medical practice in Luz prior to Brighton, his visits to Brighton.

That was really where his career took off and everything we know about him. So I'm guessing he was just sort of like your average surgeon of the time. And history does not remember those years because history didn't need to know about those years. So anyway, he started visiting Brighton and he started to become convinced that there was something know about those years. So anyway, he started visiting Brighton and he started to become convinced

that there was something medicinal about the sea. That these visits to the shore were not just, oh, I feel so good because it's relaxing and I'm not working and it's pleasant, aesthetically it's pleasant. It was more than that. And he began to visit frequently to study, to do experiments on the seawater,

to understand the properties of the ocean and what could it do to the human body, whether it's by bathing in it or ingesting it. And eventually he would move his surgery there so that he could fully engage himself with this and kind of make that his niche. That became his niche in medicine. So in 1750, he published a book called a dissertation

on the use of seawater in the diseases of the glands, particularly the scurvy, jaundice, king's evil, leprosy and the glandular consumption. It's a very long dissertation in which he enumerates all of the experiments he's done on seawater, all of the properties of seawater, all of the different diseases that can be cured by seawater and how and why, and then a number of case reports,

his personal cases that demonstrate how useful seawater is medicinally. So this is gonna take off, but before we get into that, let's talk about what he found. So he breaks down the properties of seawater. I find this kind of fascinating. Like in the very beginning, he's like, let's talk about the ocean.

And he's like, it's all over the earth, right? There's so much of it. That has to- We don't actually know how much, because we're like, we can't figure that out right now, but there's like a lot, we can all tell. There's a lot, there's a lot of ocean. And there's all throughout it,

I love medical writings from this time period, because all throughout it are these sort of assertions that like certainly our creator intended for this to be useful because there's so much of it. And that's just like in a medical dissertation. You wouldn't really find that today. I think that's a, I don't know. I just, I like that kind of writing.

I don't know that it's useful scientifically. One may argue that it's absolutely not, but I think it makes for interesting reading. So he breaks down the properties of seawater, and there are four, saltiness, bitterness, nitrosity, and oiliness. That's like at the Guinness Museum, those are the four components.

That's what I kept thinking, like, this is how you make Guinness, or when you read about the balance of flavors in different kinds of cuisine. Or in the humors or the humors Yeah, so the saltiness. What is the benefit of the salting? Well, first of all, he's like the salting is you know about right like you can tell you you all know I don't need to tell you that sea water salty

He like that's in there and he's like so obviously salt preserve stuff So this is why it would be good in the human body because you can salt meat, it preserves the meat. So putting salt in your body. Okay. Yeah. Like, no, that doesn't make sense because that is assuming that you are, do not understand the difference

between something becoming preserved so it's safe to consume and functioning well, right? Like you don't keep the, you don't salt meat to keep it flippy and wet, you know what I mean? No, ugh. But that's his basis why saltiness is helpful. The bitterness in seawater, which I don't think of,

now, okay, I don't drink seawater, but like I've been in the ocean and I have gotten seawater in my mouth. I don't think of it as bitter. The bragging every episode, you gotta cut back. Do you think seawater in my mouth. I don't think of it as bitter. I'm bragging every episode. You've got to cut back. Do you think seawater is bitter? Inherently bitter? I mean, I feel like it's one of those things

where like if you were to tamp down that salty note, I might be able to tell. But I feel like the salt is so powerful. Maybe this is just in Brighton. If you live in Brighton, could you tell me is the seawater bitter there? I mean, it's probably, I assume that mineral makeup actually does have a pretty big part of the flavor of water.

It does. Water, water. It does, depending on where you are, it is gonna taste different, right? We talked about this with like the Celtic salt. There's different mineral makeup in different parts of the ocean. So the bitterness he thinks comes from like sulfur

and coal and bitumen, like those sorts of things getting into the water, which that makes sense. And this has a medical property in that it dissolves tumors. Whoa. Probably. Is that escalation? That's probably what we think is happening, this bitterness.

The nitrosity is also related to the coal and sulfur and stuff. And it's also probably why seawater doesn't put out fires well. I don't know what that has to do with medicine, but he does kind of digress this little like side note. Like, have you ever noticed that if you toss a bucket of seawater on a fire, it really won't go out.

But if you toss a bucket of regular fresh water on a fire, it does. And I think seawater will put out a fire. So this felt weird to me. I've never tried that, but I wasn't alive in these times. I don't know how things were working back then, but I feel like it would still work. And I don't think I can,

because the next time we're at the beach, if I set a fire, you're not supposed to set fires on the beach. If I set a fire on the beach in order to attempt to put it out with seawater, I'm gonna get asked to leave. And then the oiliness. He does not say why the oiliness, he does not say

why the oiliness is helpful. He just talks about how isn't the sea oily? Don't you think it's oily? And then he references like ancient writings about how oily the sea is. So I don't know, again, oily sea. So he goes through a lot of diseases and the causes and why either drinking or bathing in the seawater

will help, and he's very clear on that. Drinking seawater is very much part of Richard Russell MD's cure. He definitely is suggesting that whether it is in a child and then he'll recommend like a teaspoon a day. So a very, I would say a very innocent amount of seawater. I don't know the advantage, but if you give a 10 year old a teaspoon of seawater,

I don't, I mean, that's not probably not gonna do anything. anything right you're gonna swallow that much if you're playing out in the ocean So whatever but he he does go on to suggest as much of a as a pint a day of seawater So oh feels like a lot of seawater and then also bathing in seawater specifically cold waters That is that is pushed a lot. It's not just about getting in the ocean, it's about getting in a cold ocean. Again, I don't know if this is a function of where he lives, because I imagine the beaches he's visiting are often not super hot.

Like they're not super warm water. We here in West Virginia, we like to go down to the Carolina coast. Yeah, that's where it's, yeah, they got all the best crab legs down there. That water gets warmer, we like to go down to the Carolina coast. Yeah, that's where it's, yeah, they got all the best crab legs down there. That water gets warmer, and then you go down to Florida, and the water's even warmer, and then of course if you live in a tropical region,

the water's pretty warm. I'm guessing the beaches at Brighton are cold. So I don't know if the cold water was intentional or just like, it's what we got. I looked up, because I was curious about it, apparently the oiliness, like the oily nature might have been the high concentration of minerals in the water. Like if you think about minerals being sold as oils that are like highly refined,

that it's the sense of like those the minerals in the water that give it like a oily or greasy feeling because of the high concentration of salts in there. greasy feeling because of the high concentration of salts in there. He doesn't specifically say, so see, that's why it's healthy, but he does assert that oiliness equates to healthy water. That's why he would have thought maybe that it feels oily maybe.

Yeah, that's interesting. If you find out that seawater doesn't put out fire, let me know. Okay, well there. So anyway, he goes on with all these diseases and he starts out strong with consumption, tuberculosis. And I think the idea that seawater could cure tuberculosis, I mean, I don't remember us

even discussing that on the RTB episode. But here is his case for why. So first of all, why in, and this is the, this would be 1750 we're talking, why does TB happen? Why does TB happen? Yeah, why, this is the crux of his argument. We have to understand. Oh, why does he think TB happens? Why does he think tuberculosis happens?

Not close enough to the C? It's your parents' fault. Oh, okay, I took a shot. Yeah, so he very quickly asserts that we all kind of know, we all agree that getting tuberculosis is probably the fault of either your parents or if you were taken care of by a nurse. He talks a lot about the nurse who cared for you.

The baby is kept too warm in the cradle. He thinks that's a problem in modern, as in mid-70s, 1900s society, is that babies are swaddled and kept warm and put in cradles with blankets and that being kept warm too much is the root of a lot of disease processes. And then he said, what compounds that is that we breastfeed them too long.

And all of that acidic milk curdles in their very warm tummies. And then they have a lot of green bowel movements. This guy was on some stuff, huh? He was kind of on some, he's doing a lot of like, a lot of outside the box thinking with this dude. Because of all those green bowel movements, your nurse is gonna give you opiates,

which would have happened. He got a white syrup of white poppies, I think is what he says in his treatise. But they're gonna give you some opium and then that's not good because then you're gonna sleep too much, which that was a problem, this was a problem. And this is basically causing a permanent damage

to your humors. And so over time, they're gonna clog your glands and this was thought to be what develops into tuberculosis. Now in some people, the reason they're able to avoid it, because he basically said like, everybody is screwing this up in kids. Everybody's getting this wrong.

But for people who have, people who menstruate, they're gonna get rid of some of this damage through regular menstruation, okay? Balancing the humors, right? That was one way that they thought, you know, people who menstruate balance their humors is they got rid of blood, one of the humors, right? That was one way that they thought, you know, people who menstruate balance their humors is they got rid of blood, one of the humors. And then he references sort of sideways,

like, and men can get rid of some of their humors through other means. Wink. We'll let you figure that out, men. But not everybody is able to balance out their humors and undo the terrible damage that their parents and nursemaids inflicted upon them. And so they get tuberculosis.

Yep. And the only cure? The sea. Justin, I'm gonna tell you how to cure tuberculosis with seawater, but first we gotta go to the billing department. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines that escalate my cough for the mouth.

First things first, Sydney. I'd like to tell you that seawater can be used to fight fires, but we very rarely do it due to equipment damage, due to corrosion, and environmental damage due to dumping a bunch of salt on the place, like, cause there's still gonna be a bunch of salt after the water evaporates and it sucks for all the stuff around. That makes total sense why we would not choose seawater,

but I think it's good to know. In a pinch. In a pinch. If you have an open flame and you're standing near the ocean, do not try to like sprint and find some. Fresh water. Like don't go running. Just go ahead and try that old ocean water. Isn't it wild that you could just,

like I mean I know that water and fire still work the same back in the 1600s as it worked now. And so when you read an old timey assertion like seawater doesn't put out fire, it's like, what? What are we talking, it makes me think we're talking about two different things here. Anyway, so the way that Dr. Richard Russell MD

felt you could cure consumption is through drinking a lot of seawater. Drinking a lot of seawater. Yeah, drinking a lot, and I mean, when we talked about things like the King's Evil, which was scrofula, which was another infection, a tuberculosis-like infection of the glands, we're just talking about tuberculosis in different,

whether it's in the lungs or in the glands, there are various TBs. And then other things that he treated. A lot of it was drinking massive amounts for these really serious conditions of seawater. So like 25, 30 gallons of seawater before you're gonna flush out your glands. And he thought that kind of like,

there's a bunch of salt in there. It's going to almost like abrade the gland, like break stuff up in there, you know, because it's salty. And then all of that bad stuff will flush out of your system and then you won't have tuberculosis or scrofula or whatever anymore, right?

Yeah. That was the thought process. He also thought it would do the same, like if these are tumors, if you got lumps everywhere and we think they're tumors. And at this point we were using the term tumor to mean like a swelling, an enlargement, not necessarily whether it was cancerous or not.

If you drink enough seawater, it'll just sort of break this thing up, dissolve it, and flush it out of your system. Yeah, God, it sounds very, it sounds dangerous. It sounds like unpleasant to me. Well, and you can see why as we're moving forward, first you drink the seawater, and then once you start to heal,

the swimming in the ocean, go to the beach, stay at the beach for a while. Don't engage in your other activities. Just swim in the water and relax. You can see why only half of this persisted with us through time. Get your base tan, get it a daiquiri. So he goes through a lot of disease processes.

I mean, it's a very, it's a complete, he's got everything in there. You know? You got it all figured out. You got it all figured out. Dropsy, scurvy, tumors, leprosy. And you can either drink the seawater straight up, or you can like, if you're already taking other tinctures

and compounds, medicines, if people, if you've already seen doctors who have told you like, take this herb or whatever, you can put that in the seawater and ingest it that way So like as a way of instead of using regular water as a solvent or alcohol as a solvent which would have been Common at the time. I'm gonna give you a powder dissolve it in this thing and drink it use seawater as your solvent instead of these other things and then cap it all off with a

plunge in the cold water. And then you're gonna balance your humors. He does make some exceptions. I do think this gives it a little bit of like scientific validity. I mean, he's not right. He's not right. But as a scientist, when I see someone saying, now listen, it doesn't fix everything.

Here's some things you absolutely shouldn't use seawater for. It actually makes me a little more likely to read more. Like, well, okay. I mean, he's not saying it's a cure-all. Yeah, that's true. He says that if your lungs are full of pus and you're coughing up pus, you shouldn't drink seawater.

You are not gonna be able to handle it. It's too, basically this medicine is too strong for you if you are in this specific condition. He calls a phlegmon, which is a collection of pus, but I don't know. We're not really talking about why you're coughing up pus. The why is not important. The important thing is this is where you have arrived.

Please don't drink seawater. Instead, we're going to bleed you. Yeah, right. I mean, you gotta be rational. Instead, we're going to bleed you. Yeah, right. I mean, you gotta be rational. Yeah, and those were usually like, those could be used in conjunction with the C-Cure. You would also do some bloodletting and give them purgatives,

meaning like something to make you vomit or something to make you have diarrhea, or perhaps both. Why not have it coming out both ends? Why not? And then abstaining from alcohol. That was like, there's a lot, as you read read into as the C-Cure became popularized first by Richard Russell, MD, and then by other physicians, there were all kinds of other rules that they would put with it.

Like before you bathe, don't eat any, like you must fast before you bathe, or you can only eat vegetables, or you can't eat, or you can't drink any sort of strong liquors. Although there were others who would say, absolutely, you should drink wine as part of the C-Cure. Wine only enhances your experience of the ocean, which many would probably agree with. But anyway, so he put this out there and it took off so quickly.

People were very excited about the C-Cure. Well, you just can't get cheaper or more available than the C. I mean, in terms of medicine, just go get some of the C. Well, and some of it made a total sense. He was like, sailors who get scurvy, we can stop that, just drink a pint of sea water every day. And that feels so easy.

They're right there. All this time, we've been telling them not to drink the sea and we should have been telling them to drink the sea. The answer was right there this whole time. You can also wash your eyes with it. You can also, by the way, there was one mention I found where you can mix salt from the sea. So like take seawater, evaporate it

till you just have the salt, mix it with honey and you can feed it to your cow to clear an intestinal blockage in your cow. So it's good for the whole family. Yeah, it's great for everybody. And this was interesting because this was a time where the idea of taking the waters, we've talked about that on the show before,

the concept of taking the waters, meant like a spa, a natural bath. Like you would go to bath, perhaps, the natural springs from the earth and bathe or drink or whatever, those waters for a variety of medicinal purposes. This was new because the sea was not part of that. These were special waters.

The ocean's just like everywhere. So like you can get, anybody can get to that. It's much more accessible. Well it did, it made it a lot more accessible. Open source baths. Well and it led to physicians even starting to come up with like ways to make your own sea water at home because it's like, well, now this does make

the water cure available to a lot more people because anybody who lives near an ocean can have it. But also what if you are trapped inland and you are nowhere near a natural spring and you're not near the ocean. Here are some ways you can make your own beach. See, that's anti-capitalist. I think that's when you gotta see

a small business opportunity and say, I will be the one bringing in truckloads of seawater for you. I come to my food stand. And I'm certain there were. I have no doubt that there were whole, I mean, cause this was such a big, it took off so quickly.

So many, especially like people with means, people who could easily travel, right? People with means. Means. Thank you. Because for a lot of people, the idea that like, I'm just gonna take off work for two weeks and head to the beach,

which is kind of what they would, like your doctor would write you a prescription for go to the ocean, which it's also hard. You can also see why people would believe it because what benefit does the doctor get from telling you to go to the ocean? Yeah, I mean, he's putting himself out of business. Right.

Losing a patient there is gonna get cured with the ocean waters. I think that if you tell people there's a natural cure out there that was always intended, people are more likely to believe it because that feels like something. I think if the doctor doesn't really get any sort of financial benefit, it doesn't mean like,

if I'm saying I need you to come back and see me every day for a week, even if that's legitimate, I feel like I get an eyebrow raise. Like, what do you want, doc? You just wanna bill me? Well, I mean, obviously these doctors weren't trying to make bank, except the few who were,

because there were some who said, now listen, the sea is really powerful. And if you- Take too much of it. If you do it wrong, right? If you take too much of it, if you drink too much, or if you just swim in it too much, you could actually go the other way

and make yourself sicker. So there are tonics that you have to take before you bathe in the ocean to make sure you're, you know, to like for your- Got a profit off of it somehow. Yeah, to make sure that you can handle it. And so I, luckily I sell the tonics that you need. So I am prescribing the CQR,

but before you go do the CQR here Please buy this tonic because you could die you could die if you don't do this. Hmm. Now, let me just say Dr. Russell Dr. Richard Russell did just fine for himself. He he became so popular that he like I said He moved his his practice to Brighton. He bought some land. he built what is now the Royal Albion Hotel, and he had this huge, basically it was his house, but also he would have patients come stay there at his giant house and take the waters, take the ocean. You can have the sea cure right there with the doctor on hand to tend to you as needed, right? And it really led to what they began to call

the seaside mania that developed, where everybody was flocking to the oceans to engage in the sea cure, to make themselves healthy if they were sick or to maintain wellness. I mean, this is really, we're starting as we, into the late 1700s,

but really when we get into the 1800s, to get into these sort of ideas sort of ideas of like wellness and Like the ways to maintain health as opposed to I'm sick. I need cure You know what I mean, which is very that sounds very commonplace today. There's tons of wellness stuff out there now You're not sick. You just want to be right, right weller. Yeah, you're yeah, you're looking for that last extra 5% Yes, so so he did very well for himself, and you can actually go visit, like there's a plaque and it's like, hey, this is where the guy who created, Dr. Richard Russell, who created the idea of the C-Cure,

this is where he lived and all his patients stayed there. But the industry did not die when he did. At a lot of these seaside towns, and by the way, they began to publish lists of like, here are all the different places where you can go get the sea cure. It was just all the different beaches. And the different like diseases that might be better.

Like if you have this, had to brighten if you have this. Yeah. Like the different beaches that would have different healing properties. We'd find some profit in here somewhere. Good job, everybody. I love the idea.

Like, if I think about beaches we've been to, like, what do you think is it, like, between Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head, which one, what diseases, you know what, I could say, I can make a lot of jokes here that only people who go to these beaches would get. Anyway, so. They would be good, though.

These seaside towns began to really grow as a result of this. Like people, I mean, obviously everybody has liked the ocean for a long time, but with this whole new industry, like, oh, not only is it fun, but it's also good for you. A lot of like spas and wellness centers and obviously doctor's offices and stuff popped up. And then how can we facilitate these,

especially fine ladies bathing in a way that is also demure and modest and appropriate for the times, I mean, and certainly the bathing costumes they would wear would have been such, but maybe they need a measure more. So they began to create bathing machines, which you can look up pictures of these bathing machines from the late 1700s.

And they're like horse-drawn carts with like a little kind of like, like those little changing huts that they had on beaches, you know what I'm talking about, sort of attached to the back. And you would kind of pull it right up to the ocean. So you could like climb out of the back of it right into the ocean.

Like you're completely covered in the back of this thing. And then you climb out of the back of it and you the ocean. Like you're completely covered in the back of this thing and then you climb out of the back of it and you're in the ocean. And you could even, there was one inventor who was a Quaker who invented like a curtain that would go around the outside so that you could be completely encased in sort of like a shower curtain situation

when you were in the ocean so that no one could like peep on you. And like you weren't naked. I'm not saying like this was not like a nude situation. You were fully, maybe fully clothed or in a bathing costume. You might've been fully clothed depending on who was recommending it and where you were and what your situation was.

But this way you could have some privacy and you could also hire a dipper. A what? A dipper was a person who would get in with you and dunk you. Oh, what? Why? Why do you need that? To make sure that you go all the way in.

Maybe you're too buoyant. Maybe you keep floating back up to make sure you dunk, to dunk you back down. I'm a pretty buoyant guy as guys go, and I've never had any problems getting my whole self under the water. So you could hire a dipper. And there were fine ladies who would go

to these experiences at the seaside where you would be taken out in a bathing machine. You would be tossed in, not tossed, you know, gently dropped into the ocean. Gotcha, okay. Into the very cold ocean, maybe fully closed depending on the situation.

Dunked repeatedly, because part of it was this shock to the system. Like it's cold, I'm in the water, ah, was part of it. Dunked repeatedly, and then hoisted back out, wrapped in blankets, you get a foot massage, you get a cup of tea, and your humors are balanced, and we fixed your scurvy or your tuberculosis or your dropsy or whatever we have diagnosed you with.

That does not sound quite as pleasant. And you can imagine why over time, some of these things, the bathing machines and the dippers and the cold plunge, although certainly cold plunge still exists today. But the idea that that was all necessary for everybody started to fade. Certainly drinking seawater,

that fell out of fashion fairly quickly. People were drinking seawater for a short period of time. People were going to the beach for their health for even today. I think we could say that idea persists today. The idea that seawater is healthy for you, not to drink, but to be in. Or sea air.

Sea air is healthy for you to be in. The idea that the beach, beyond the obvious, I like being at the beach, provides a special kind of mental health addition. You know what I mean? I think we still have that connotation with the sea, and this is where it started. Where I think TikTok got it wrong is for hysteria,

the rest cure would often be recommended. And this is like, if you're thinking like yellow wallpaper situation, the rest cure was like, go lay in a room and don't get up for weeks to months. That's way less pleasant, right? Yeah, there's no beach. No, there's no beach. There's no beach.

And eventually the C cure just turned into like, I think regular vacations. I will say there've been studies done to see like, is the beach healthy? People do look into that. And there definitely are some indications to get in saltwater, like sea water specifically, if you have like psoriasis or other skin conditions.

Sometimes, and I'm not saying this is a cure all certainly, but sometimes it has benefited certain kinds of dermatological skin conditions sometimes, and I'm not saying this is a cure all certainly, but sometimes it has benefited certain kinds of dermatological skin conditions, right? So there are certain cases where your doctor probably would never prescribe go get in the ocean but would say, hey, the ocean probably helped out your skin a little bit here, that sort of thing. And there was, I will say, a 2019 study that showed that people who live on coasts experience less stress than people who don't.

I think there's probably a lot of confounders. Confounders there. I was gonna say, maybe people who can afford to live on coasts afford to have proper medical care. I'd say there's a lot of confounders. I think that the beach is, I enjoy the beach. I think if it brings you joy, I think that's great Please don't drink seawater

And please don't use seawater to cure your I mentioned the skin conditions just for completeness Please don't use the sea to cure your skin conditions If you have some sort of issue with your skin Please visit a health care provider who can inform you about what it is and properly treat it for your safety and health. Thank you so much, Sydney. That's gonna do it for us this week on Sawbones. I wanted to mention we are going to be at the Harmony House Renaissance Fair on May 3rd.

That's gonna be from 10 to seven. We're gonna be doing a live Sawbones there. We're not sure of the exact time of that yet. So that's TBD, but make your plans to come on down. We're going to Travis and Griffin and Clinton, McElroy, McElroy, am I saying that right? They're going to come down to, we're going to do photos and signings. This can be a fun time. So mark your calendars.

I need to West Virginia May 3rd. You can get tickets right now, by the way, bit.ly forward slash harmony house. Ren fair is bit.ly forward slash Harmony House Ren Fair. It is bit.ly forward slash Harmony House Ren Fair. And that's fair with an eight. I was gonna say, okay, you did the appropriate fair. Yeah, and it's for great cause. The proceeds go to Harmony House,

which is the day shelter for people experiencing homelessness in Huntington where I work. We help connect people with necessary things for day-to-day living, food, shelter, clothes, hygiene supplies and whatnot. And we also help people get housed and I provide medical care there. Come on out and see us, it's gonna do it for this week.

Oh, thanks to the taxpayers for using their song, Medicine, since the intro and outro of our program. And thanks to you for listening. It's gonna do it for us. Until next time, my name is Justin McElroy. I'm Sydney McElroy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. ["Dreamin'"]

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