Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: The Cholera Riots

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

Fear that the government and doctors were allied in a grand conspiracy to oppress the populace was at a fever pitch. The people took to the streets to prove that they would not abide by quarantine, that they would defy the powers that be and go on about their daily lives.The year is 1831. The disease is cholera.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

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. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We saw through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Some medicines, some medicines that escalate my cop for the mouth. Wow! Hello everybody and welcome to Saw Bones, a marital tour of misguided medicine. I'm your co-host, Justin McAroy. And I'm Sydney McAroy. And we're a weird period of the whole COVID thing, feeling kind of... What period hasn't been weird, Justin?

True, yes. No, we haven't really gotten to a new normal, have we? It's just kind of a shifting target. It's OK. Life has changed. Some people are still very much on board with the whole reality of the situation

that we find ourselves in. And some people are kind of pushing up against that and trying to find some other ways to maybe think about truth. Which is the way to. Some other ways to think about truth is a very generous way of putting it. I do my best. I think that that man,

that's a perfect lead in to what we are talking about here. Well thanks, because that's what it was designed as. Well, you didn't know, you don't know the whole topic, so. No, I don't. It's funny how spot on you are. Thank you, I guess. You normally are.

I happen, I happen on it by chance, so I can't take too much credit, so. So I think that in times like these, where a lot of people are afraid, a lot of people are stressed out, and you start to see some of like your social systems break down a little bit. A little bit.

A little bit. A little bit, am I anarchy? Yes, well, not full. A pecul. And just some chaos, a little bit of chaos. The biggest wave of chaos. Yes, I think that... I'm like a dog.

It's basically a cuck-up. No, we can't, we're not going there. They wanna know how I... You wanna know why I wear this mask. And I think in times like that, it's really key that you're getting kind of a unified message from your leaders as to how do we deal with this. And I think right now, it is fair to say,

I think everyone could agree that we are not getting a single message from our leaders. We get a lot of them. If I may continue my generosity, a pulparee, different guidance and messages, even from individual people. Yes, who may say one thing and tweet something else, which can be very confusing.

And I think if you're already afraid and not certain of how to deal with a situation, and especially if it's something like a pandemic where unless you're in the medical field, you don't necessarily speak that language. And then on top of that, even those of us in the medical field don't have all the answers, because we're still learning.

I think that that people can react in various unhelpful ways. And obviously many helpful ones, I would say, let's be positive. For sure. Many people have reacted in very helpful, good, human ways. But I think if I can, and maybe the spirit of generosity has just overtaken me, I feel like the lack of certainty creates an environment where finding the right thing or the true thing

is a little bit trickier than it was before, or making judgments. If I was, Sydney knows as much about this as anybody I know in my life, and she and I still have to have long conversations about like what's right, what feels right. Partially that's due to a vacuum of leadership that we're having to fill with our own judgment. But yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's a confusing time. Yes. And so it can be really easy to kind of stay in denial because you might be getting

messages that are telling you what you want to hear. And I think there's also a lot of, it's been highly politicized. What the right thing to do is, as if you're making a statement about your own values, as opposed to trying to do the safest, best thing for yourself and each other. Instead, it's like, I'm taking a stand. I'm taking it right. And so instead of doing really helpful things, we take to the streets and demand haircuts and flood bars as soon as they open and threaten McDonald's employees unless we get to sit in the dining room to eat. Listen, the one on how gray or just remodeled. And if I'm not complaining about sitting

in that beautiful dining room that has like some really lovely water features and what have you, nobody should be complaining. That's fair. I, you know, I, when it is safe to eat in the dining room McDonald's, you're free to go do that by yourself. I don't know that I'll be joining you. I listen, as soon as it's safe, I'm going to be taking the kids to the play place, letting them lick every surface in there. No problem. No, it'll be a long time before that'll be okay in this house.

Anyway, this is not unprecedented. I, humans have done this before. They, they have seen a threat right in front of them and denied that it was real. Usually because they thought political leaders were corrupt, were inflating the crisis for their own purposes, whether it was misdirection, distraction, an expansion of government power and authoritarian goals. For whatever reasons, they have kind of not been able to see the truth and the best actions that they could take

and they've turned on the people who are supposed to be taking care of them, especially like doctors and nurses and other medical professionals whose job it is to try to help manage the crisis. They have turned on those very people and called them murderers and liars and threaten them. So I don't know if it makes you feel better to know this has all happened before. But if it does, this episode might make you feel better. Let's do it. So I want to talk about the cholera riots,

which I had never heard about the cholera riots until we got an email from Shawnee. So thank you, Shawnee, for calling them to my attention. And I think I think they're really interesting, especially they happened many many years ago in the 1830s, but right around this time in the May beginning of June, we're almost we're almost like almost at the exact dates that this occurred, not exact, but pretty darn close. It's that thermometer that mercury starts rising spring is here spring is here life is skittles life is beer and all of a sudden everybody wants to get out there and Shake it. I guess I get just get out there and shake it right. Even if there's cholera. So especially

We did a we did a whole episode about cholera before you may have remembered John Snow and the hand pump and epidemiology and all that. Okay. So I won't I won't get into cholera itself too much. It's a terrible diureal illness which can which spreads through water typically typically, and contaminated drinking water. And it makes people very sick and has a high mortality if you're not treated effectively and appropriately. Nowadays, we're way better at managing diarrheal illness with something as simple as rehydration. I'd be fluids if needed or oral rehydration, however.

They could have figured that one out on their own. In one site. No, no, no, it was, I mean, it didn't have what they did. They didn't have pd like, come on. They didn't have pd like. That's what I just said. Anyway, cholera pandemics play humankind for centuries, because it would spread very quickly. People didn't understand how it was spreading. So they didn't do anything really helpful to prevent it at first. And we didn't

have any good, I mean, the treatments for it were the same treatments for everything else that was bad, which was like, let me put a leach on you, and that's not helpful. The word cholera would actually come to describe a variety of diureal illnesses, which, and this becomes important. So because somebody would get really bad diurea

and we have no idea why back in the 1800s, the doctor might say, well, it's the summer cholera or the fall cholera or the winter cholera, just whatever time of year it is. It's like the sleep regressions, the four month sleep regressions, the six month sleep regressions, it's just the cholera of the season. Right. Whatever month your baby is, there's a sleep regression for that. Yeah. So it's the same idea.

And this was opposed to what would eventually be called the asiatic cholera, cholera morbidus, or nowadays we just call it cholera, which was actual bad can kill you cholera. A lot of these other things were just like, you got diarrhea. And this matters because you can imagine the difference between its summer, a lot of your family and friends are getting the summer cholera, which you

go to the doctor and they're like, yeah, sorry, don't worry, do, do these unhelpful things and you do them and you get better because you were going to get better. Because it was just some diarrhea, right? No big deal. But then all of a sudden, there are some doctors and government officials saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that color, though, that color, you have it's different. That's a terrible color. And you need to go to a special hospital

to get taken care of for that color, which is a little different. Kind of judging. Well, you can see why people would be confused. I think that it's important to understand that as it plays into the rest of the story. Like, wait a second, how come the cholera I had last week was no big deal. But then my brother gets that cholera and he's got to go to a lasaredo. What the heck are you talking about, which is a quarantine hospital. You may remember. Yeah. Remember that.

Yes. So anyway, we're going to start in St. Petersburg. I want to talk about two places. St. Petersburg and Liverpool. We're going to start in St. Petersburg. I wanna talk about two places, St. Petersburg and Liverpool. We're gonna start in St. Petersburg, where probably some of the first cholera riots occurred, although yeah, probably some of the first ones, although these would occur many different places. In the summer of 1831, the cholera epidemic was spreading. A lot of people were getting very sick.

A lot of people were dying. And in response to this, they had done what a lot of people were getting very sick. A lot of people were dying. And in response to this, they had done what a lot of places were doing, which was trying to quarantine those that were sick, take them to special cholera hospitals to keep the disease contained in one place. There was not an understanding of how it was spread yet, right? This is all pre-John snow. We don't know about the water. Probably meas, mathery, permeated most areas. So like, that, which is like bad air, bad air. Bad air is spreading the disease. And they didn't really understand why some people got sick and others didn't at that point. So part of what was happening at this time is that

the lower socioeconomic classes didn't really trust those in power, especially not just the government leaders, but the ruling class in general, the educated elites. We're seen as people who could not be trusted, people with nefarious goals. And a lot of the lower socioeconomic classes felt that the quarantines and like, especially the kind of military response that was taking place in a lot of parts of Russia,

where you had like, you know, armed soldiers at different points in the city to stop you from going places. A lot more intense than what we've seen here, you know, that they were being used as opposed to protecting, you know, people from the disease spreading, they were being used to keep sick poor people in together and not keep disease out. So basically, we're locking you all in together because we're trying to get rid of people we see as undesirable. This belief was very widespread.

And so they didn't see these measures being taken by the government as something for their benefit, but as something directed to harm them. On top of that, a conspiracy theory began to spread that perhaps the government was responsible for this. Really? Now, this would have not been a germ because we didn't really understand that. It was poison. There was a belief that the government was poisoning the wells and that people were getting

sick because they were just, the phrase used a lot was coal the herd. Let's get rid of. And those are usually, the wells typically had five gallon buckets. Their fertile was 5G usually. And the assumption was that the 5G was poisoning people from the government was using 5G to poison people. So the problem with this on several levels is you can see

where if you believe that the government and those who are more educated are behind all this, they're making you sick and it's targeted at you and then they're keeping you all together so that you all get sick, you can see where like anybody who would support the idea of a quarantine would also be viewed with suspicion. So this was very quickly spread to like the doctors and the sanitary inspectors and people who were responsible for trying to enforce

these different regulations were also viewed as part of the conspiracy very quickly. Crowds gathered in the square in St. Petersburg to protest. There were several other places in Russia where this happened, but I wanted to focus on St. Petersburg first. They were initially just like chanting and marching and yelling and things. It expanded to where they actually they would find a sanitary inspector who's job who worked for the public health department, so to speak, and beat them up, you know, as part of the conspiracy. They escalated until they went in like ransacked the closest cholera hospital. They started trying to find doctors.

I couldn't find any evidence of them actually killing doctors, but like the goal was we're going to find the doctors and put them to death because they're murdering the poor They're part of the conspiracy There was a big suspicion that the doctors were actually part of the poisoning because You would go you would be taken to a hospital if you had cholera and then you would die there And so the idea was that you weren't really that sick. You just had the regular old cholera that everybody gets But then the doctors gave you poison, the medicine they were giving you was actually poison.

And that's why you died. Sure. And so the doctors are killing people not the disease. And in addition, you would have like this, these public health officials whose job it was to go like find sick people and take them to a hospital and try to remove them, especially if they're in like a multi-family dwelling or like in a big family, like get the sick person out.

So they're like removing people from their families basically. And they would never return. I mean, it seems sinister. I mean, especially in a time when we don't understand things, you know, as well as we do now, it seems sinister. I mean, especially in a time when we don't understand things, you know, as well as we do now, it seems sinister. And I mean, and I don't, I am not a, I've said this on the show many times, I am not a professional historian,

and I am certainly, I'm not a professional historian when it comes to Russia in this time period. But my understanding is a lot of this was fueled by the tension that already existed between the different classes, between the ruling class that had a lot of the money and power and education and the lower classes who did a lot of hard work and weren't appropriately

rewarded for that. So all of this... Which is a tension that's really as old as time itself, like, exactly. Pretty much society. I was saying that that tension is persistent. I think it's important to recognize that the idea that you wouldn't trust the ruling class is not a wild idea.

No. At any point in time, almost anywhere, certainly today here, the idea that your leaders you would question their motivations, I don't think we should criticize people for that because they are often right to question the motivations of the ruling class. All of this apparently ended when, and I found like an engraving of this, Zarniclus came out into the square himself and demanded like everybody stop what you're doing, Neil, and take your hat off. I don't know why the taking the hat off was so important,

but that's definitely part of the story. I kept finding that reference. He said, Neil, and take your hats off. So I guess that's a way of like, it's like, deference. Yeah. Take your hat off to me and that kind of suppress this riot. Wow, bad riot. I think that's got to blame, riot.

But I don't see that working now. And there were other riots in other parts of Russia and throughout Europe. And the common themes were these same things, distressed, or the government, conspiracy theories, that this was aimed at the poor, or that this was a way to limit freedoms. You know, in places where like,

the idea of personal freedom was a newer one, where you were having these like over-throws of these kind of monarchies and things, then this kind of oppressive idea of quarantine really rubbed people the wrong way. The pandemic reached the UK late 1831. The first case was a guy named William Sprote in Sunderland who got really sick. He was given Brandy and Opium, which was the treatment of the day, but he died and then

by... Probably hoping he'd get into the history books for something else, but hey, good job, William. Well, we all remember he was the first in this particular run of cholera. Nobody says like, good at darts, nice guy. We could say that. Yeah. Nice guy.

Nice guy, good at darts, I don't know. So there was an outbreak that followed and it ended the summer of the following year and by that time 21,882 people would have died many more would have been ill and this is just estimates of course Because of the people again the measma theory. That's just bad air that's making us sick Nobody really knew how to prevent it. It wouldn't be until 1849 that John Snow would tell us it's because we're drinking raw sewage guys Maybe we should stop on snow would tell us it's because we're drinking where all sewage guys, maybe we should stop. It's gritty.

This is gross. They tried to do that. You can see local health departments created in response to this throughout the UK. And quarantines were started, but not much helped. And there was a lot of unrest due to the fact that unlike Typhus, which we've talked about on the show, which was mainly restricted to the lower

socioeconomic classes, people who were crowded and like we've talked about poverty as a big risk factor for typhus, cholera doesn't discriminate. So yeah, certainly crowded living conditions can let it spread faster, but once it gets into a house, it doesn't matter how much money you have, cholera spreads. And they were seeing that even healthy upper-class citizens were getting sick. So came the riots to several places they're at the UK by 1832. And like I said, especially Liverpool. So for the, I want to focus on Liverpool for the rest of the show. All right, let's hear it.

But before we do that, let's go to the Billing Department. Let's go to the billing department. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines that ask you to lift my car before the mouth. Sydney. Oh no. We're going to go deliver pool. Oh no. Should have seen this coming. Well, I'm just going to do a bit of that liver buddling in

atmosphere. Yeah. Let's go live a pool. I need us what happened. I mean, live a pool. Okay. Well, you can keep workshopping your liver puddle in accent as we live a pool the color riots. So oh, work on it. The epidemic hit the city on May 17th of 1832. By the time this all ended, it's wild how they know these exact dates, September 13th is the date that it is supposedly ended. It would infect 3% of the population and about 31% of the infected died. I want to focus on over a course of about two weeks in late May and early June of 1832, there were eight separate riots.

Wow, it's Liverpool. Because of cholera. The city tried to respond initially really quickly by establishing two different hospitals for cholera, which are sometimes called lasaredos, but either way, hospitals specifically for cholera, which we shouldn't sound too weird because we've done that now, right?

I know in New York, they've had hospitals that were specifically addressing COVID in other places where there were a high number of patients and in China, I know they were doing that. And they also had a fleet of Palinkeens, which were like big carts specifically for taking people to the hospital. And you know Liverpool was set up for getting big outbreaks of cholera for the same reason that actually a lot of cities throughout the UK and other places at the time would have been sewage. They had sewage? Well nobody really knew how to deal with sewage at this point in history and we've talked about this but like

water sanitation was a major issue. Nobody quite understood why it was so important. The idea, again, if your water looks clean, you would assume it was clean because you didn't really understand about germs yet. So there were a lot of places where it would have been gross to drink the water. And Liverpool was one of them. I think if you add into that, that it was booming at the time, it was a big shipping port. There were a lot of people moving in and out of the city

and a huge influx in population growth. So. We're putting four young men, well five can't be best, four young men who had gone to redefine the sound of pop music, the Beatles. In 1832. They were very young.

I don't think. The early years. I don't think you have. Have you lost your concept of time? You called them Beatles babies. You lost, like, the show was about them. Like the way linear time. Oh, is that has that abandoned you?

I'm excited. I'm just excited for John and George and Pete and Paul and Ringo to turn up in the story. They won't be in this story. I'm sorry. Oh, you know what? Actually, I'll let you add them onto the end. When we get to the end, you get to add on the part where the Beatles get together. Do you know what I'm bummed by the way?

I've been deliverpool because I wanted to go there because of the beetles. I think a lot of us like get excited to go there because of the beetles. And I didn't know about the color of riots and I would have been very excited to learn about the color of riots had I known about it when I went there. I bet you would have found those landmarks to be much less crowded. That's probably true. So a lot of these same issues that would lead to these riots in Liverpool that we've already talked about in Russia and other parts of Europe. A lot of those same ideas were part of the problem, but there is a specific issue that I think makes the the color riots and Liverpool very interesting.

There was a specific concern that seemed to motivate how many riots they had and how upset people were. Liverpool had a complicated history when it came to doctors already at this point and it is fair to say that at this point in history going to a doctor was a role of the dice. I'm not saying that people weren't doing their best. I'm just saying that their their best wasn't always that great. Fair enough. As we've already referenced. Anyway, they have invent apples to keep doctors away. That's where we're at right now in history. We're at that point. And the so a reasons, I want to go over a couple instances that might give you

a picture as to if you were living in Liverpool with this point in history, why doctors may not have been your personal heroes. So because your personal heroes were already John Paul, so we're doing. So at this point, in order to get bodies to dissect, if you were a medical student or a, you know, doctor and training, in order to get bodies to dissect, it was very difficult. We've talked about this on the show. Anatomical dissection was very, it was not okay. And there were very narrow avenues to obtain bodies to dissect through legal

means. Right. And so, like resurrection men. Yes. And specifically, this was this happened a lot in Liverpool. In part because it was because of its ports, it was a nice place to ship bodies to and from. There were a lot of bodies imported from Dublin, and in the 1820s, it was not uncommon for them to, for like, port authorities to smell something and then investigate some cargo and find a bunch of bodies there. And what it led to were a lot of like,

a lot of people getting paid for moving bodies around. And a lot of people like, oh, I just stumbled on your bodies, you better pay me too. I'm gonna be part of this operation now. And so a lot of that was going on. And at the same time, doctors in the community were kind of defending some of this,

saying like, we gotta have our bodies. We need, like we don't, obviously we're not making you better most of the time. So we gotta get our bodies. We need, like we don't, we, obviously we're not making you better most of the time. So we need to learn more. Please, this is the only way we're gonna learn. And so it already, there was this kind of, we don't know what side the doctors are on.

And then you had like a case in 1824, where there were people found specifically digging up bodies for one of the local doctors for a very respected doctor in society William Rathbone. They knew he was attached to these grave robbers and he kind of came out and said like, you know, I, I, this, we just need to change the law. This is okay. I think this is it. We need these bodies and I'm sorry that we have to do it illegally

But it's because it should be legal and again, that's just added to this idea of the mistrust of doctors In 1826 there was this huge incident where they found 33 bodies on the docs being prepared to be shipped to Scotland for dissection So we can pay to ship in the Scotland and then in 1828, there was a huge well publicized trial of a local surgeon, William Gill, who, like, is known as one of the fathers of, like, anatomical dissection in Liverpool, who, like, trained a lot of, you know, students and doctors, who was found guilty of a whole grave robbering operation. Do you think you missed your calling doing this podcast and not a podcast about

grave robbing? You love grave robbing more than anybody. I know. I don't love grave robbing. I do not endorse grave robbing. No, but no, I don't. What's the butt after that? I don't have a butt.

I mean, you have a butt. You're wearing me on these. What's the butt of that? Because you love to talk about grave robbing. No, I just, I think it is one of those, I like, you wish you could be a grave robber now. No, I'm doing it for science. No, I like moral gray areas.

I think that grave robbing is reprehensible. But I do think that doctors needed bodies for dissection and so It's it's but I don't think they should have done it that way, but there was no other way I like you would have been scarlet said the terror of the cemetery You would have been digger the lady grave robber have you heard? Scarlet ced the terror of the cemetery. I would never have or would. I would call for a robber. Scarlet seed will come for you.

It was not the right thing to do, but I understand the situation that it is. Love Grave Robin. I don't. When you talk about Grave Robin, it was a side tangent. You could have just said, Dr. Rick trusted,

no, you're gonna park the car and get out at Grave Robin bluff and show the kids the sight. I'm painting a picture. Sure. You're just using a lot of the color label grave robbing. I'm just saying, if in 1828, this, this well-known surgeon, Stan's trial is found guilty of grave robbing, of running a whole operation. And do you know what his punishment was? Mm-hmm. 30 pounds. He paid 30 pounds. Which is, I mean, I'm sure that was a lot of money, but I still... You were writing a note to me, it says far too much,

they should have been paying him. No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not, I'm not. But not only that, do you know how he probably paid it? What? With all the money he made from selling body. Profitable and moral.

You love gray robbing No, but the point is if you can imagine being a citizen there and you just saw like everybody knew about this guy the surgeon who stood trial He did a terrible thing you rob graves. He had to pay 30 pounds. Why are you winking when you see and he's still working? He's still working and then on top of that that same year what was happening in Edinburgh? The He's still working. And then on top of that, that same year, what was happening in Edinburgh? The French festival? The Berken Hair Murders. That same year, we're hearing that up in Scotland, there are these two guys who not only are the grave robbing

for doctors, they're killing people for doctors. That's a fun story. You should dig into that one. I thought we've done that. We did. I'm saying the listener at home. You should find that episode and enjoy it. So it was in this context.

Turn our book to the kids in this all months. Yeah, we have a whole diagram of how to rob a grave. Hmm, interesting. That sounded really bad. No, no, it was just how to be like a joke. I know it's a joke anyway. So it was in this context that the epidemic of cholera hits Liverpool. They have these cholera hospitals. They're carting people off to the cholera hospitals when they get sick. And the people of Liverpool don't trust the doctors.

They don't trust the government officials. They don't understand why this is all happening because nobody understood disease back then. And they don't trust what the doctors are doing with their family and friends when they get them to the hospital. So on May 29th, 1832, two. Doc worker and his wife go see a doctor and they're both sick. The husband had been sick first. The wife got sick next. The wife was much sicker. And so the doctor had her put on a palanquin and hauled off to the hospital. By then, a mob of women and boys largely had gathered outside the building, outside the doctor's office to try to find out like, what's this doctor, this crook going to do? So they gathered outside and they took first the wife to the hospital.

Later that day, the husband was getting sicker, so the doctor decided he should be taken to the hospital as well. The mob got bigger. They followed the patients, the poor sick patients to the hospital gathered outside, first yelling, then throwing rocks. And the thing that they yelled was Berker. The primary reason for the Liverpool riots is that they thought because of this history, the doctors were using these people for experimentation and anatomical dissection. That this was all intentional.

And there were even doctors were chased through the streets because of this there. They began to have to have police details to follow them around because they were so often chased through the streets called burkers and attacked. There was a patient who at one point was discharged from the hospital. And as she left, she was mistaken for somebody

who was helping the doctors who was, you know, an assistant nurse, something, another burger and she was chased out of the hospital. People throwing rocks at her, accused of being a burger. And, you know, it didn't help that the doctors weren't great at treating cholera. Because they didn't understand it. They were using the treatments of the day, bleeding and opium and brandy, things that would

make you puke. None of that was helpful. There was an observation in the press that I think is really interesting in context of today where they said, you know, the people who go into the hospital are more likely to die of cholera than the people who stay at home with the cholera. And so they begin to, again, suspect that perhaps it was because the doctors were killing people with cholera or the things they were doing or whatever so that they could use their bodies

for dissection, which I think is very interesting because I've seen a lot of people say like, you know, people who are put on ventilators are way more likely to die than people who aren't. And there's been this misconception that ventilators are killing people. When in fact, it's the sicker you are, the more likely you are to go on a ventilator. Right. And same thing, the patients that were being sent to the cholera hospitals were the sicker you are, the more likely you are to go on a ventilator. Right, right. And the same thing, the patients that were being sent to the collar hospitals were the sick as patients. The patients that stayed home were not as sick as the patients who went to the hospital.

So you know, you see all of this, the reason I bring all this up is that because of all this, when the citizens were faced with a crisis, with something they didn't understand and they felt disconnected from their leaders. They felt like they were treated less than they didn't trust the doctors and the medical establishment because the doctors, you know, at that point, a lot of the medical attitude towards people when it came to dissection was kind of like a sneering kind of like these uneducated fools don't understand that what we're doing will help them in the long run.

When we dissect bodies, we learn, we become better at being doctors and then we provide better care for them and they're too stupid to get that. And that kind of arrogance created this huge divide. And then when they were faced with needing to work together and trust the medical professionals in the community to help them through this crisis, people in trust them. And there were multiple riots throughout the next couple of weeks. Eventually it would end when the government had to step in and take off everybody's

hats one at a time. No, I don't think there were any, there were any, there was no czar to step in and stop everything. Maybe that's why West Virginia has a COVID czar, so at some point someone can tell everybody to take off their hats. Oh my gosh, I didn't think about that. We do have a COVID czar. Yeah. But anyway, so eventually the riots would stop as...

I mean, the big thing that happened is that the outbreak subsided. Color are kind of burned through different areas quickly. And then would end. And, you know, that would be the end of it. The police were a big feature in these riots ending in Liverpool. and then would end, and that would be the end of it. The police were a big feature in these riots ending in Liverpool, and that's always one tough thing is when the only way to end something is to

like a strong military or police or kind of authoritarian presence, it doesn't necessarily ally the people with you. And doesn't kill the idea either. No. It kind of reinforces it. So the writing may have stopped, but the distrust persisted. Now, the Anatomy Act, as we've talked about on the show before, which allowed pathways for doctors to legally obtain bodies for dissection, would follow this.

And that would somewhat calm this, except at the same time, there was still this belief like the doctors have just found a way to legalize murder. Right. And so it didn't really fix all these problems. And I think all of this is interesting to look at today because when we see, I mean, I think for a lot of us,

especially in the medical community, when you see footage of like protesters yelling at, like the, I think they were a group of nurses standing in front of one hospital and like yelling in their faces and accusing them of being part of this conspiracy, of wanting to hurt people. I think they were caught, somebody yelled like, you're the virus, you're the problem. It's so disheartening and it's so upsetting and it can feel like I have no idea why this would happen. But I think if you step back and kind of look at the whole situation, then maybe we can understand why these beliefs flourish, why people are so misled. And then if we

can address those root reasons, that's better than just forcing people, you know? Or writing people off as, as robes or dummies or. Right. Yeah. And I think, I think the number one thing is, is leadership that speaks with one voice that is backed by science and backed by evidence and backed by compassion is the best way

to get that message across. Well, we ain't gonna do that. So what else you got? Well, I will say this. For me, this is how it's manifested very personally. I saw someone post some misinformation on the internet. Some very angry against doctors to the extent that, like, if you believe these things about doctors could incite violence against doctors, type misinformation.

And instead of responding, as like, you're such an idiot, this is so stupid, I can't believe you would believe this. This is, here are all the reasons this is so clearly a lie. I responded by saying I understand that you know the medical system we have in this country has created at times a very contentious relationship between doctors and patients. It's very unfortunate but because we put so many things in between doctors and patients insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and hospital administration and

all these other things, that relationship is not all it could be for a lot of people. I understand that and because of that, you may have a natural like distrust of what our motivations are and I get that that could exist. But if you'd ever like to talk, I would love to talk through that with you because I'm part of that system and I understand all of its problems and flaws and downfalls. And we probably agree on a lot of the things

that could be done to fix it if we could talk about it. Now, I don't know who this friend was that posted this initially. So I'm taking a shot in the dark here, but was your diplomacy in this situation in any part motivated by the fact that you might have to see this person say around Thanksgiving time. I refuse to answer that question. I'm just saying that sometimes it can be really hard and and right now I think there are a lot of people who are sources of misinformation, who stand in positions of authority

that make it really hard for people to see that it's misinformation. Like if it's coming from there, it can't all just be lies. And so I think that, and these people are afraid, and they want positive answers. They want to believe that it's not that bad

or that the vaccine's coming out tomorrow. They want to believe that it's not that bad, or that the vaccine's coming out tomorrow. They want to believe this stuff. And so it's hard to just say, well, it's not true because the truth is a lot more comfortable, which is a lot of, we're not sure we don't know. Maybe possibly you should still say inside, you should still wear a mask, you should, you know, things that we don't wanna hear.

And so maybe if we can kind of understand all this and meet people where they are, I mean, ultimately, that's my goal. And it's frustrating, and it's hard. And like, maybe privately, I need to go to my bedroom and punch a pillow a few times. But if I can do that, and in this case, the person responded very positively to me. And if I can do that over and over again, or at least every once in a while when I have the energy, we can change things. And that's the way we affect change, is not by othering, is not by separating further, is by connecting on things we agree on, which is that the American healthcare system is horribly broken and does not serve everyone or a lot of us and needs to be completely overhauled. It's a call, a lovely call for peace and love

that I know would be shared by four young men on the streets of Liverpool that are here to wrap up the show, John Paul George and Ringo, who would go on to form the Beatles. That's right, that's what ended the riots really. The really, the realization that listen, we might accidentally kill one of the Beatles

great-grandpas and we have to be more careful. Thank you so much for listening to our program. We hope you enjoyed yourself. We are certainly thrilled that you are here. Thank you so much to the taxpayers for youth, through the Zong Medicines as the intro and outro of our program and Justin I want to thank somebody Yvette sent us a bunch of masks

Much of homemade cloth masks and I wanted to thank you that for sending us those masks War one today. That's right. I want to encourage everybody there every time you go out in public You should still be wearing masks. Yes, make sure that that is still important. Anybody again, we talked about it last time. Anybody who's saying that that doesn't matter. It's not helpful or dangerous. No, you should still be wearing masks. Please wear masks.

Please social distance. Please wash your hands. Hang in there. Hang in there. Hang in there. We're going to get through this. We just have to work together. That is going to do it first for this week. So until next time my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always don't draw a hole in your head. Alright!

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