SciShow Tangents - Plagues with John Green!

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Would it really be a conversation about plagues if noted plague-hater and tuberculosis-fighter John Green wasn't a part of it? In this episode John makes his Tangents debut at last, and we dig deep into whether we could fight an old, fat beaver and win, among other things.SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! A big thank you to Patreon subscriber Garth Riley for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Truth or Fail Express]Hunter-gatherer from 5000 years ago infected with plaguehttps://www.livescience.com/5000-year-old-man-had-plague.htmlhttps://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/oldest-strain-of-black-death-bacteria-found-in-5000-year-old-human-remains#Less-deadly-and-less-contagiousIsaac Newton plague cure https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sir-isaac-newtons-plague-prescription-toad-vomit-lozenges-180975039/https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/isaac-newton-plagueSewer pipes in Hanoi let plague-bearing rats breedhttps://feralatlas.supdigital.org/poster/colonial-sewers-led-to-more-ratshttps://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902[The Scientific Definition]Four thieves vinegarhttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7485289/https://nutritionalgeography.faculty.ucdavis.edu/clove/https://www.si.edu/es/object/die-mondsuchtigen:nmah_994026The Vicary method / The live chicken treatmenthttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1472106/https://muse.jhu.edu/article/665487https://libguides.umn.edu/healthmisinformationZenexton https://www.jstor.org/stable/44444207https://archive.org/details/b30341681/page/n7/mode/2up[Ask the Science Couch]HIV resistance through genetic mutation and selective pressure (possibly from plagues)https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1377146/https://jmg.bmj.com/content/42/3/205https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050307/full/news050307-15.htmlhttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.htmhttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC299980/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16880184/ Plague doctors probably didn’t look like birds (until later / after theater) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_F%C3%BCrst,_Der_Doctor_Schnabel_von_Rom_(Holl%C3%A4nder_version).pnghttps://deathscent.com/2020/05/15/the-redolent-plague-doctor/https://www.livescience.com/plague-doctors.html[Butt One More Thing]Using pastes made with human feces to treat bubonic plaguehttps://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2021/04/medieval-pandemic-cures-that-were-medieval/https://hosted.lib.uiowa.edu/histmed/plague/

You're listening to a Complexly Podcast. Hello and welcome to Dear Han- wait, oh sorry, no, SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green and joining me this week as always is science expert in Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary, Sari Riley. I'm your brother now. And our resident everyman, the inimitable Sam Schultz. And I'm also your brother. And also we have some guy guest hosting here, our dear Hank and SciShow Tangents, at long

last making his Tangents guest debut. It's the number one bestselling author of the Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global health care reform and also the author of his new book, Everything is Tuberculosis, which comes out March 18th and is available for pre-order now. Every copy is signed. He's suffered injuries because of it. It's my actual brother, John Green. Hello. Hello. Greetings. That was a long intro. He's done other stuff too. I don't know if you guys know that. Yeah. Well, you don't need to read my Wikipedia page. It's just great to be with you all.

He's like a pretty big YouTuber. He's prolific. I'm mostly just the tail to Hank Green's comet, which is a full-time job. That is on TikTok, that's for sure. Yes. He's really sort of a middling TikTokker. I'm not a very good TikTokker, it's true.

I take some pride actually in the lack of the quality of my TikToks. I guess the question has to be, if you could be big on any social media platform, which would you be big on? Oh, come on. Oh, God, Hank. Hank.

This is a question that nobody asks themselves except for Hank Green. If you had to be big on- You don't have to. You don't have to. It's like asking a billionaire, like what's the best and worst part of being a billionaire? And they're like, oh, the worst part is,

and I'm like, you can solve that problem. Yeah. It is so easy when you are a billionaire to become a millionaire. It's the literally the easiest thing in the world. I could just rescind into obscurity is what you're saying. I'm saying rescind into obscurity, reclaim your attention, Hank Green, and do not be beholden to algorithms any longer. We need him to be a little bit beholden to algorithms.

Okay. You can't go too far away, please. Oh yeah. He can live his own life. You don't care. Yeah. I'm here. One of the guests in the room though is like,

do not rescind. Yeah, that'll make him feel a little scared. I would like to be big on social media, any, but not for being just good at social media. I would like to be big on social media because people really like my podcast or something. And I would like to just not have to do very much on it, but still have like 2 million followers and be able to open it and say, look at how many followers I have and then

close it. That's what I really want. I believe that's known as the Bo Burnham approach. Yeah. Oh, okay. I'm a bit of a Bo Burnham, I suppose. And you make one good piece of art every couple of years. Yeah, and then recede into the nether.

I do crave recession. That would be nice, wouldn't it? Yeah, just to be clear, the kind where you recede, not the kind where the economy as a whole recedes. Just out of my own. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Or your hairline also.

Oh, that would be bad for me. My hair is kind of one of the only things I got going. Sarah, what would you, what, what, I feel like me and you have a bit of an unspoken social media rivalry where you're always like a couple thousand more people ahead of me, but now I'm blue sky. I'm ahead of you. And that feels pretty nice. Well, I think it's because I'm not, I'm going to say a thing and then it's going to be me. I'm not, I'm gonna say a thing and then it's gonna be me. I'm not trying, Sam. Okay, I'm trying a little bit, but not too much. I'm trying zero.

I think I am kind of a big on the social media of Be Real, which is just my friends. I love Be Real. And by that I mean, I only accept requests from people who are my real life friends. Yeah. And I feel like quite a few of them regularly react to my living room. Yeah. And that's pretty great.

That's the best feeling of all, which is this slight update just to people I know in real life. Yeah, sometimes I get like eight reactions on my Be Real and I'm like, I'm maybe one of the most famous people on B-Rail. Yeah, that's how I feel. It's like I have more than fits underneath the picture. I've never had more than four reactions on B-Rail. I'm always there for you though, aren't I, Hank? A little thumbs up from me. We got a thumbs up from my Lego sets.

John, if you could be big anywhere, where would you be big? Probably in my family. I feel like if I could be like the preferred parent, that would be a huge group for me. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, there's only two. I'm pretty far away from it

right now. Yeah, but I'm in a distant second. That's funny because it seems like it would be, you'd be like, it's easier to be in the top 50% of social media accounts than the top 50% of parents. Yeah, it's really hard. You only have a 50-50 chance, and that's assuming that you do everything right,

and I don't. Work harder! Yeah, I am. Grind! I'm gonna pick Alice up from volleyball today in a vain attempt to make her think that I'm a great parent. See if she gives you a thumbs up.

A little harder. Yeah, exactly. Thanks, cops. Get one of those thumbs up. If I could gives you a thumbs up. A little hug. Yeah, exactly. Get one of those thumbs up. Yeah. If I could just get a thumbs up. Sometimes I feel like they just think you're part of the scenery. Oh yeah. Yeah, they don't think about you

because that's appropriate. They're not supposed to. I almost never thought about my parents when I was a child. I guess that's true. And indeed I don't think about them that much now. I'm sorry if they're listening. I don't think our parents listen,

unlike these two. I think about my parents all freaking time. I would say mine's closer to none. Sorry, Dad. I do think about you when I record the podcast because you're a patron. You know you're in the audience. I know you're in the audience. I'm being perceived when I walk around my life.

Unlike on Be Real, Dad's not following you on Be Real. Dad's not on Be Real. Dad did follow me on Twitter, so I always had a little bug around my life. Dad's not following you on Be Real. That's not on Be Real. Dad did follow me on Twitter. So I always had a little bug in my brain. Will dad be proud of this tweet? That's what Twitter should pop up right before you tweet. Would dad be proud of this tweet? Every week here on SciShow Tejit,

we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank bucks. And somebody in this room at the end is gonna be crowned the winner. For any of our listeners who have not yet heard this news, SciShow Tangents is sadly ending this year

after so much time existing. Our final show is gonna be on March 18th, between then and now. We're gonna celebrate all things tangents with some dream topics and dream guests. John, did you know you were a dream guest? I didn't, but I'm delighted. And as always, we will have poems and butt facts and all of our regular shenanigans.

We're also excited to announce that at long last, we'll be publishing an ebook of over 200 of our traditional science poems. That's a lot, you guys. That's a lot. As a special memento to remember the show by all of our parody song lyrics, horrible slant rhymes, and basically children's books will live on. The ebook is available for preorder at Complexly.store. The final version will be delivered on March 21st.

It's a delight and it's a great sendoff. We're really happy to be able to make a thing. So without further ado, let's introduce this week's topic with a poem. Not our usual traditional science poem, though. It's an existing poem, recited by John. This is written by Henry Gilbert, and it is inside of a medical textbook about tuberculosis that was published in 1842. Imagine if your medical textbooks occasionally broke out into song. That is what is happening here when Henry Gilbert in 1842 in the midst of his medical treatise

Pulmonary Consumption wrote, with step as noiseless as the summer air, who comes in beautiful decay, her eyes dissolving with a feverish glow of light, and on her cheeks a rosy tint, as if the tip of Beauty's finger faintly pressed it there. Alas, consumption is her name. What got into him? Well, they just, they loved the beauty of consumption so much in the 18th and 19th century. They were so utterly convinced that consumption was this beautifying, ennobling disease that made you a genius and also made you super hot

that he couldn't help but include a poem about beauty kissing upon its beautiful lips. The rosy cheeked consumptive, alas, consumption is her name. Alas, well, I mean, at least the alas makes me think at least that he didn't like it. No, he understood that consumption was bad news. But it was seen as a very flattering malady as Charlotte Bronte wrote someone as her sister was dying of consumption.

She said consumption I am aware is a flattering malady. Oh, do we have any flattering malades these days? Well, I would argue that you look pretty good after the cancer. You got a whole new haircut. You got cool hair. You got a new hair. Yeah, those chemo girls, they're gonna be a big deal now.

That's gonna, it's coming back for everybody. You never know what's gonna happen though, I have to say with the cancer hair. I love this about it. Sometimes people hair come back different colors, sometimes it comes back straight when it was curly, sometimes it's curly when it was straight. I think yours came back a different color and curly.

It is a little bit of a different color and it also came back initially though, it seems to maybe be filling in with a fair bit more recession as we were discussing earlier. Oh. I've been experiencing some recession in addition to a significant amount of grayness. I recently had somebody come up to me and say,

do you think that your hair has turned gray in the last year because of your brother's cancer? And I said, yeah, let's blame him. It's all Hank's fault. Hank, Hank, Hank. The topic of this week's episode is plagues. And before we dive in to define that with Sari, we're gonna take a short break and then we'll be back.

["Serenade in Ceri"] Welcome back everybody, Ceri. What's a plague? Welcome back, everybody. Sari, what's a plague? They make me nervous. That was my nervous noise. I see. I have not heard that noise.

You have so much fun during tangents that you don't make that noise very much. So plague specifically refers to a disease that's caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. So there is a specific disease called- Right. Not a friend of the show, I think it's safe to say. Mm-hmm. We can kick its ass now though, right? Yeah. Yeah.

We can. We can treat it. We can treat it with antibiotics that can be given promptly by lots of medical institutions. It is still around, so people can still become infected by the Yersinia pestis bacterium, usually in more rural areas. There's like sections of the Western United States where prairie dogs still carry fleas with this bacterium.

Certain regions of other continents as well, Asian continent, African continent. Worldwide, people can still get the plague in small doses, but we can treat it. This is why you never take a prairie dog to bed, into your bed. A lot of rodents just don't take wild animals, even if they look cute.

Don't pick them up, leave them there. Don't pick them up, don't cuddle them. If they're dead, still don't touch. Even more, maybe. So, plague still exists. It is known for being... killing millions of people, especially in Europe, especially in the Middle Ages, as the Black Death,

and then in subsequent centuries, other epidemics of the plague. But somewhere around that time, when it killed so many people, then it became synonymous with kind of epidemic, pandemic. I thought it would be the other way, where like plague was a thing, like people, there were plagues and then they were like, let's just call this one, because this one's the plague.

We're gonna name this one after the institution. And they talk about plagues in the Bible or something? Is that not right? Well, you know, that's all translations. Okay. Yeah, the Latin word plaga or plaga, because I don't know exactly how to pronounce Latin, meant stroke or wound, and then eventually like an affliction or illness, especially related to divine punishment. And then that got absorbed into Middle English, Middle French and whatnot. But specifically meaning an epidemic that causes

many deaths is from like the 1500s, 1600s after the initial plague. So the plague as the bubonic plague was called the plague as a specific disease. And then we got more specific words. So epidemic is usually like a smaller contained region means among or upon the people. And then pandemic pan is the prefix that means all like panoply panopticon. So all people is like a pandemic is bigger.

But then now we use plague colloquially too to say like, oh, you're stopping a plague on me. I don't know. People won't say that. You know, people say that all the time. I'm often saying that. Stop being a plague on me. So my granddad always used to say. So is there, is there, is the bubonic plague

and the black plague two separate plagues? Nope, same plague. Same plague. And they call it the black plague because? They plague and the black plague two separate plagues? Nope, same plague. Same plague. And they called it the black plague because? They called it the black death because you would get these buboes. Tell me if I'm mispronouncing that word, Sari. I love a bubo.

I like the bubo-tea. I think it's bubo or bubo. You would get these big swellings around your lymph nodes, which Hank, you're familiar with from having had lymphoma. Thanks. And they would turn black and purple. And so it would be pretty nasty before you went. And then you would die a few days later generally.

This wasn't the one they thought was sexy. No, this one wasn't usually conceived of as hot. Okay. I searched for bubo and I just got a bunch of owls. Yeah, it's a robotic owl from Clash of the Titans. So there's also that. Is he sexy, Sam? No, he's a little guy.

It's also the genus name and the Latin name for owl, Bubo. Oh, that explains why he's an owl in that movie then. And so specifically, plague can manifest in different forms and I think it's transmitted in slightly different forms. I don't know exactly the pathology, but bubonic plague is specifically linked to these swollen lymph nodes. But then there's also pneumonic plague,

which is a lung infection caused by the same bacteria. And then septicemic plague, which I believe is a blood infection from the same bacteria. So it can manifest in all those different ways. But then the bubonic plague was so visually obvious what people were sick with that you had those visual signs of disease and locations for treatment, not just someone hacking and coughing with symptoms, which could be any number of maladies in the poorly sanitized areas of our past. You know sometimes when you get hurt,

your mom says, you got a boo boo. Is that from boo boos? Boo boos? Oh, I don't think so. That'd be amazing if it were though. Yeah. Well, I was just trying to go down the rabbit hole to see if boo boo for owl and boo boo for a swelling

were related to each other because owls were an ilomen. Oh. Well, they look swollen, don't they? Yeah. One of the things I learned while researching tuberculosis is that tubercle, the word that describes the granulomas that surround the bacteria, that's like a shape. So like potatoes are tubercular. Oh. Oh. They're potatoes are tubercular. Oh.

They're tuber shaped, if you will. And owls are vaguely tubercular as well. Like they're vaguely bubonic. You know, they look like swellings. They're larger than seems necessary, width-wise. Are you still researching, Hank? That's your researching face. I am reading about buboes.

All right. Hank, that's your researching face. I am reading about buboes. All right, I think we have well and truly defined what we're talking about here today, and so now we must play our first game. We're going to play a game of Truth or Fail Express. Bacteria are always shaping our lives, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. In the case of the bacteria Yersinia pestis, which we have just discussed, the results are pretty awful. So today we're going to take a journey through the history of the bubonic plague with a truth or fail express. I'm going to tell you a story of how the plague has plagued us, and it's up to you to decide whether it is true or not. Are you ready? Yep. Okay. Round number one. researchers studying the remains

of a human from around 5,000 years ago, determined that not only had the man died of plague, he had likely contracted it by eating a ferret that also had been infected with the plague. Is that true or false? That seems false to me. Why? Well, because for a few reasons.

First off, you get it from the fleas, not from the ferret. So like ferret meat itself wouldn't necessarily lead to the plague unless you ate some fleas along with it. Secondly, it seems false to me because looking in their stomach and saying there's ferret meat in there doesn't mean

the person died of yourcinea pestis infection because of that ferret. They could have, it could have been that they ate the ferret later as their last meal. They were like, you know, I'm dying of the plague. I better eat my favorite thing. And that is of course ferret. Someone get poor Jeremy a ferret. He's about to go.

He's requested a ferret and a Diet Coke as his last meal. Although they're pretty dang convincing reasons. That's the most logic. I don't know that I would have shared that much if I was trying to win the game. The most logic I've ever exhibited on our show. No, John's a team player, please. Yeah, I mean, I guess he could have eaten the ferret own,

like a cat on a cartoon needs a fish and pull the bones out. Then I guess the flea could have gotten him, but. Yeah. I'm gonna have to go with false. No, it's not impossible. It's not impossible. I'm gonna have to go with false. I was also suspecting false because of the eating thing.

Sure you were. I was. Uh-huh. Just knowing that how other rodents transmit disease. Yeah. All right, Hank, what's the answer? Well, the answer is that it is false. Everybody was correct,

and also your rationalizations were correct. But researchers did study remains from a hunter-gatherer from around 5,000 years ago who was found near the Baltic Sea. And in samples from the man's teeth and bones, they were able to find evidence that this person had been infected with the plague. And they were also able to reconstruct

the plague bacteria's genome and find that it was part of a lineage that had emerged around 7,000 years ago, which would have been shortly after Yersinia pestis first split from its relative, which is called Yersi pseudotuberculosis, which is not tuberculosis, but it does have it in the name.

It's a pseudo tuberculosis. They also found that the strain didn't have the gene that makes it possible for fleas to carry the disease. And that led researchers to hypothesize that the man had contracted it from a rodent bite. So not from biting a rodent, but from a rodent biting him. No. While he was trying to eat it. It might've, and also you guys, it might've been a beaver

because a lot of beaver remains were found at the site and it was a common carrier of your pseudo tuberculosis. So. Wow. That's a big bite too. No, I wanna be bit by a beaver! I feel like that would be as likely to be fatal as the resulting infection. Oh yeah. Yeah.

You'd think that it would be like the localized infection that would get you. Yeah, back in the day, getting bit by a beaver would have been a real crisis. That's the first line in John's new hip hop song. I mean, it might be a crisis now. I can't imagine. I think it would be. I do also think if you're at the point

where you're getting bit by a beaver, you've made a couple mistakes leading up to that moment. Well, maybe you're trying to eat it. You're trying to like get the beaver so you can eat it and you're having a beaver fight. Are they fast though? Yeah. Well, maybe it turned to fight, you know?

It decided like not today. I don't doubt that they're strong, but I don't know. They're huge. I don't know. They are massive. They have so much bigger than you're expecting to get. I think I'd have a decent shot against a beaver, honestly. It also depends, land beaver or water beaver.

I feel like land, maybe they're kind of slow and stumbled, but if you were trying to go after a beaver in the water, you'd be at a supreme disadvantage. Absolutely. Well Sam's also discounting the fact that beavers are probably like a biggest beaver weighs like twice as much as Sam. You don't know how much that weighs.

I mean, they're not that big. I'm dense. There have been really big beavers prehistorically, but these days a beaver caps out at around three or four feet long. Sure, sure. Prehistoric beaver. Yeah. I'm taking that thing on, no problem. Put your butts down.

40 to 70 pounds, though. Very old fat beavers. This is from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. So they're saying that very old fat beavers can weigh as much as 100 pounds. Why does that have to be old? It's good to know that beavers also gain weight as they age. Yeah.

That's normal. Just a natural phenomenon. Huh? That's so mean. Yeah. Like, if it isn't enough that you're like stealing the beaver away from its natural habitat and weighing it, then you've got to also insult it.

Very old. Very old. Why do they say very old? Why can't they just say old? Very old fat beavers. Look, when I read it, I was like, is this an AI summary of something? But no, I was.

All right, get me another question. Round number two, Isaac Newton was responsible for many important discoveries, but perhaps his most accurately appreciated discovery was the cure he devised for bubonic plague, which involved boiling a rat's tail, grinding it into powder, and then mixing it with mead. Is that true or false?

Now, I thought you were gonna say Isaac Newton made the discovery of gravity. I guess he didn't discover gravity. It was already around. But whatever, you know what I mean. During his plague year, that like he had to go away to the countryside because there was plague.

And so when he went away to the countryside, he made all these important discoveries. And that's true. That is true. In fact, it is the follow-up fact that I was going to tell you. Oh, dang. Just based on what I know about Isaac Newton,

having only read one book about him, it seems, it seems like a long shot to me. I also feel like if you liked astronomy, would you be out there grinding up rat tails and eating them? Or would you just be like, I'm gonna run away. I'm gonna leave the biologists the biology to the biologists. Also, what a bad cure for the plague

to be playing with rats. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that doesn't seem smart. I'm gonna say false. I'm also gonna say false, but there were a lot of weird things out there. Was he like a weird kind of guy? Yeah, he was a weird dude.

Yeah, he was a weird guy. All scientists I got famous. Weird dude, he also a weird dude. Yeah, he was a weird dude. All scientists that got famous. Weird dude. He also did some outright theft. Idea theft or like- Some old fashioned ideological, idea theft. Okay, he wasn't like lifting silverware at the places he went to dinner or something.

No, I don't think so. Though he could have without being caught. Yeah. The question is phrased oddly in a way that is like, I don't know. I'm gonna say true just to see what happens. I'm a bit of a scientist myself. Well, the situation is, in fact, that is like, I don't know. I'm gonna say true just to see what happens. I'm a bit of a scientist myself. Well, the situation is, in fact, it is false.

John is right that he did go off during the plague, which killed around 100,000 people. And when he was quarantined at his family estate, he did a lot of his most famous thinking. But when he went back to school, there is a real remedy in this story. In 1667, he read up on a bunch of medical texts and came up with his own plague remedy,

which was to hang a toad upside down in a chimney for three days, wait for it to vomit and die. But then, wait, collect the vomit, grind the toad into a powder, and mix the vomit to create little lozenges and put the lozenges on the affected area. And you have your cure. I'm not.

What the hell? That's stupider than the rat tail thing. Yeah, if you'd just said that, I would have been like absolutely false. There's no way hanging a toad upside down for three days, making it vomit and die as part of curing the plague. You tried too hard to Bokeh, come on. All right, round number three. At the turn of the 20th century, sewage pipes were laid

underneath the city of Hanoi in Vietnam by the French colonial government. While the pipes were meant to help the city become cleaner, they instead provided a place for rats to breed and potentially contributed to incidents of plague in that city. Is that true or false? Well, were people like going down there? Oh, I guess it doesn't matter

because the rats can come up, huh? That's such a distressing fact that like the, I live in fear of a rat emerging out of my toilet or something. Like when we were kids in Florida, they would always talk about alligators in the sewer system and how those alligators could maybe get out. And I would, every time I would sit down on the toilet,

I would be like, this could be it for me. I'm gonna say it's true. We're due for a true one. So I think it's gotta be true as well. I'm gonna go with the flow. I think it's true also just because it would be an ostensibly helpful thing gone wrong. Classic colonialism. Classic colonialism.

Classic colonialism. And humanity. Well, usually there's some falses and some true in a truth or fail express, and that is also the case this time. It's true. So at the end of the 19th century, the French governor general of Indochina, Poul Dumé arrived in Hanoi,

I probably messed that up, I'm sorry, and was determined to bring what he considered the French rationality to the country. And that involved installing sewers, though he did so through colonial taxation system and with infrastructure that benefited the European heavy areas of the city, as you might imagine. This eventually became more concerning when it became apparent that the sewers had become a breeding ground for rats which

scientists had recently discovered could act as vectors for the plague. When the plague showed up in the city it was thought to be connected to the rats so the French government hired rat hunters to kill rats in the sewers so that's a job that you could have. And when that didn't work, the government began to offer a bounty for dead rats. But since all you had to do to collect the bounty was submit a rat tail,

people just started like cutting the tails off rats. And even at one point smuggling rats into the city, kill them and cut off their tails. Oh, people. People. We are who we are. All right, that means Ceri and Jon are in the lead with three, Sam has two.

Next up, we're gonna take another short break. Then it will be time for our second game. Welcome back, everybody. It's time for game number two. Sari, what do we have? We've got a game of the scientific definition. So I am going to give you all a word or a phrase that was somehow related to plague treatment in Europe during around the 14th through 17th centuries. Peak Black Death.

And then you are going to try and explain what this thing is through the powers of deduction or guessing. And whoever gets closer by my subjective judgment will win that round. And then because I know all the answers, I will explain what these weird things actually are. Cool. Yeah.

So round one, your phrase is the four thieves vinegar. The four thieves vinegar. Well, that's where you hang a thief upside down in a chimney, wait for him to vomit. Wait three days until it vomits. He's got a puke and die. Then you grind up the thief in the vomit and make a lozenge out of it and place it on your boo-boo.

I'm going to guess that the Four Thieves Vinegar is a plague remedy that you have to choke down that involves some kind of garlic and onion and vinegar. That's pretty close to what I was gonna say. Like it's, the Four Thieves is like some old timey name for some kind of plant or something. Right, yeah, yeah. It's like clover, parsley, sage, rosemary.

I'm gonna say they're putting some thieves' toes in some kind of goo and making some kind of sauce. I would just carry you out of that. Yeah. Four different thieves. Give me your toe. Go on in there. Well, John is closest.

In fact, this is an early ramp on. This is a mixture of herbs mixed in distilled vinegar. But instead of drinking it, you supposedly rub it on your body to protect you from getting infected. That definitely won't work. Block it out. Well, it makes sense. I definitely won't work. Block it out, yeah. Well, it makes sense. I mean, neither will drinking it, to be fair.

And it's at least more pleasant to rub it on your body. Yeah, I bet you might be a little stinky. Maybe that'll keep the fleas away. It might keep the fleas away. That might actually be an effective strat. Yeah, and that is what people have researched. So it contains several different herbs and the ones vary including

clove, lavender, marjoram, rosemary, garlic, wormwood, sage, brewing it in vinegar and then you rub it all over your body. And some of these plants are known flea repellents. So it worked for some people to repel a little bit. But there are versions of it nowadays used by herbalists when you don't need to deter it from the plague that have, I don't know, it has been latched on to by pseudoscience also, of being like, chug this vinegar, your health is going to be so fortified and good. What, they're drinking it? They're drinking it now? I don't know. They're drinking it, they're rubbing vinegar, your health is gonna be so fortified and good. What, they're drinking it?

They're drinking it now? I don't know. They're drinking it, they're rubbing it, they're doing whatever people do. Put it on a salad. Cleaning their tea kettles with it. Hank, you would've got, you would've got plagued big time. You'd have turned your nose up at the Four Thieves vinegar.

I would've been like, there's no evidence. Show me the evidence. And people would be like, peer review doesn't exist, Hank. Just rub the vinegar on you. And the reason why it was called the Four Thieves was not the ingredients, but a legend that stated that thieves would use this mixture to rob the people who were dead or sick of the plague.

Oh, god. Rub it all over themselves. And then sneak in and then steal. Who's the four, why four? You don't know. I don't know, just a crew of thieves. It sounds cool. What a bad gig. You're trying to have your beloved last meal of ferrets

and then in comes the... Give me that ferret! The vinegar coated thief. The vinegar coated thief to steal what remains of your meager life. Jesus, those four thieves stink almost as bad as I do. Yeah. The next phrase is the vicarie method. That's some kind of church guy, isn't it? Meager life. Jesus, those four thieves stink almost as bad as I do. The next phrase is the Vickery Method.

That's some kind of church guy, isn't it? Maybe it is. Well, I think that the Vickery Method is similar in that it's a way for the clergy to do last rites on dying people while staying not sick. And they do that by walking on their hands. And they thought if they could be upside down, then they couldn't get plague. I don't really know what a vicar is, but it sounds like they'd have some kind of fun underwear. So maybe it's like really wrapping yourself up tight so the bugs can't get you. You're all bound up underneath your clothes.

I think the vicarie method is probably where you get visited by a minister and he gives you a special prayer or potion that protects you against the plague. You just gotta like eat a ground up. Yeah, cross or something. Bible verse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just eat a Bible verse.

They cut it out for you and then you swallow it and that makes it better. People used to do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People did that. Listen, we're having fun here and everything. Just so we're clear, in a four-year period in Afro-Eurasia, about half of all humans died.

That was probably very stressful. And if that were happening here, So we're clear in a four year period in Afro Eurasia, about half of all humans died. That was probably very stressful. And if that were happening here, like we would go bonkers. I think we've shown our true colors when it comes to responding to pandemics and we would go absolutely bonkers. So no judgment here. Yeah. Week one, the celebrities saying imagine, week 50% of the population dies,

who knows what's gonna happen? Grinding up whatever. So Sam, I'm gonna say is closest. This one was a little bit, this one was very hard to guess in true transients fashion. So this was also known, if anyone had asked for a hint, is the live chicken treatment. Oh boy.

Where young roosters or chickens got their butt feathers plucked and then they get strapped to the patient's swollen lymph nodes. Oh. The feathers, not the chickens. No, the chickens, the bare butt of the chicken. The bare butt of the chicken.

Oh. Yeah. Of course. But then what does the bare butt of the chicken then do? So theoretically. Because I know what chicken butts do. I know one thing that they do. Yeah, those cloacas, they poop.

They poop an egg. Yeah, they poop an egg. Apparently, I was reading, there's a very good paper about the live chicken treatment for boobos. Oh, hell yeah. I read the whole thing. Domesticated chickens had been a part of a lot of early medical traditions.

So like chicken broth was supposed to be good for balancing your humors during the humoral theory of medicine. And these views seem to come from the fact that chickens could eat all kinds of crap from the ground. They could eat insects and worms and weeds and kitchen waste and all these things that humans were like, they must be poisoned, and then the chickens could eat them and still remain pure and good. And then there is also perhaps a secondary idea that chicken cloacas could specific, like they breathe through their butts or something, and so they could absorb stuff through it. So by strapping a bare chicken butt cloaca to your buboes, then that would leach out whatever poisons were inside your body...

That's so gross. ... into the chicken. And then you could just, like, keep swapping out the chickens until they don't die, or until you die first. Because they didn't actually do anything along those lines. I feel like I would have been so good at being a scientist back when everybody was really stupid. I don't know. Isaac D have been so good at being a scientist back when everybody was really stupid. I don't know.

Isaac Newton was pretty good at being a scientist and he was trapping up dead frogs. Well I know. I mean, I would have stumbled into one or two right things just like him, but along the way. You would have. I'm sure you would have stumbled into the exact same number of right things as Isaac Newton. Oh, and it was named after Thomas Vickery, who was a doctor barber, as many people were.

A doctor barber! Yeah. Yes. And lived in the 1500s. We've got knives already, might as well start doing other stuff with them. Yeah, people are so opposed to specialization and they talk about how, you know,

everybody can do their own research on everything, but then suddenly it turns out we don't want our barbers to be doctors or our doctors to be barbers. Hypocritical. Okay. So the last one also very little to go off of here. Um, it is the Zenexton spelled Z-E-N-E-X-T-O-M. Ooh.

This is nothing. We can't do this. This isn't fair. The Zenexton. Can I get a hint? This is not fair in a game of Scrabble. Yes, this is nothing. We can't do this. This isn't fair. This is next on. Can I get a hint? This is not fair in a game of Scrabble. Yes, this is not.

So, it was suggested, it was first created by a, or was theorized by a Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher named Theophrastus von Hohenheim. Oh, yeah. Paracelsus. Cool. Parac. Oh, yeah. Paracelsus. Cool. Paracelsus, yeah. We got a wizard. We got a wizard creating a thing,

and he was like, I'm gonna call it the Zenexton. All right, I'm gonna guess that it's metallic based, that it's somehow some kind of alchemy is involved, and they mix mercury and lead, and you just ingest that, which of course is great for you. I mean, what else could it be, except maybe I'll say it involved human hair somehow. Oh, I love that.

Mm, adding, okay, can you give me the word again? Zenexton. Zenexton? Z-E-N-E-X-T-O-N. That's absolutely the kind of shit Paracelsus got up to. Uh... Yeah. Like, I bet that has nothing to do with the thing.

He just thought it sounded cool. It sounds really cool. It does sound extremely cool. I'm going to say that Zenex Don involves whole body submersion in something. That's all I got. I'm going to give it to John. It is an amulet of worn to protect people from the plague,

but specifically it was a cylindrical steel case into which you place what are known as plague cakes, concocted of various ingredients, not including human hair, mostly made of dried up toad. What the heck? Dried up toad. Man, they love toad. They love the toad.

They had so many toads on hand. They had to deal with all of them. They're weird. I mean, bad day for toads. Do you think that there was a bunch of articles in the BuzzFeed of the day that were like, nature is returning as everyone dies? No, I think that there were though,

definitely among in Toad newspapers, there was like, man, this black death is terrible for us. We've got to do something about the black death. I'm like 90% sure that we can't get this disease, but we sure are suffering. Somehow we are really being held accountable for something that we had nothing to do with. Yeah. I really thought you almost were gonna say toes

when you said toed inside of the amulet. And I was like, oh man, that was, we had toes earlier. I mean, it's partly toed toes. It is, there are toes in there. It's true. Yeah. So specifically Paracelsus wrote, he was like, I came up with this thing, the Zenexdaun.

It's an amulet and I won't tell you how to make it. It is going to cure you and protect you of the plague. And then he left other people to try and come up with what it was. So Oswald Krull was one of the first people who tried to make it and then use the hints that Paracelsus left in his text to identify that it's mostly dried out and smashed up toads. And then all kinds of weird stuff, like some arsenic in there, roots, emeralds,

the first menstrual blood of young maidens, all kinds of things that you just make a paste, form it into a cake, stick it in a necklace, and then you're protected. Wow. The cakes were sometimes imprinted with serpents or scorpions. And so I think there's some sort of symbolism there that I'm not entirely sure of, but I assume it's similar to the way chickens were used in medicine. If these creatures can survive many things that we seem to be poisonous,

then they will protect us against the poisons around us, the bad air, the other things that are coming to attack us, or they will absorb it in some way out of your body. Yeah, I think that's a toad thing. They saw toads as like sponges for some reason. But this is what was fundamentally wrong with medicine, right? Is that it was all based on, well, wouldn't it make sense if, rather than a testable hypothesis.

A lot of strong vibes. And also that the sort of wouldn't it make sense if was based on the four humors a lot of the time. It was like, oh, this would make a lot of sense given the situation read the four humors. For sure. And it turned out there weren't even four. And there were elsewhere, it should be noted,

there were other theories of medicine that were somewhat more associated with longevity, right? So we have somebody like Ibn Sina or traditional Chinese medicine that did have more efficacy than Galenic medicine. It's a real miracle that we held onto that medicine for so long in Europe when it was so utterly ineffective. I don't know if I use the word miracle.

A bad miracle. It's remarkable. I would remark on it. Yeah, no, Hank, trust me, man, most miracles are bad. Oh, yeah, that's not how I think of them. Like think about things that happen once out of every million times. Like most of those are bad.

You really want the normal stuff to happen. You do, especially now. You didn't want the normal stuff to happen in 1349. And it must suck to get all that stuff because it all seems so magical. You're like, I grind up a dough and I got this period blood. I did all this magic. And then it doesn't do shit.

And you have to pretend like it does, that sucks. I think the weirdest thing about the plague is that we don't really know why it stopped happening. Like it stopped being such a big deal after the 16th and 17th centuries and we don't really know why. That's really interesting. Is it an immunity thing?

Well, some of it may be an immunity thing. Some of it may be that there were fewer fleas, but we don't really have, we don't have great info on that. That's right. And we don't know why the plague stopped like at half of people. It could have killed more.

It had an extremely high death rate and it was extremely infectious. And so my favorite fact about the plague is that there was an Irish monk who wrote in his, during the Black Death, wrote in his diary, "'Here I leave extra space in case anyone is left alive "'to finish telling the story of this plague.'" And then he died.

That was the problem with him. There's that noise again, sorry. Yeah. Let's just not do that. Let's not do it again. Let's not do it again. Let's support Public health interventions.

Institutions of healthcare. Yeah, that sounds great. Be aware. Have some surveillance systems in place. Continue developing new antibiotics. I think that sounds good. We just did not have a Marburg pandemic. We never noticed the pandemics we don't have,

but we just avoided a Marburg pandemic, thanks to hard work by Rwanda's healthcare system and really good monitoring. And so what could have been catastrophic instead was relatively controlled. This is what I spend all my time thinking about, Hank. I appreciate you having me on the show to talk about my favorite thing.

Well, that's the good miracle we don't notice. We don't see those ones. That's right, we don't notice the good miracles. That's a great point, Sam. That's your new book, John, The Good Miracles. No, I mean, it would sell like hotcakes. People wanna hear about good miracles. Yeah.

And we also have our final score. I got nothing, zero. You didn't get a point the whole time. I didn't get a point the whole time. Brutal. Next is Sam and Sari tied with three and John is our winner with five. Five Hank bucks.

Congratulations, John. I'm gonna spend them wisely. Yeah. Each one buys you bothering me when I would prefer to not be bothered. Oh wow, I can do that so often. No only for, only for jobs.

It's only for brothers. It only applies to brothers. But they're both my brothers. We established this at the beginning. For us Hank Bucks, for us Hank Bucks, we can buy like food and stuff at the company store. That's what they're doing. Yeah. Toothpaste. I've can buy like food and stuff at the company store. That's what they're doing.

Toothpaste. I've been saving up for some toothpaste for a long time. Pays toward your rent at the company housing. We got a lot of those like electrolyte packets for some reason. Those are real cheap. Those little salt things. Yeah. Now, it is time to ask the Science Cuts where we ask a listener question to our finely honed couch of scientific minds.

That's not the right words, but that's okay. Sam, what do we got? Europa Ista-Brook on Patreon asked, why are the descendants of survivors of the Black Death resistant to HIV if HIV isn't considered a plague? Well, HIV could be considered a plague. We've talked about how it's used colloquially, but it is not related to the plague at all. HIV is a retrovirus, plague is a bacteria. So not even close to each other.

This is a true fact? Yeah, I've heard this. My guess is that there is like a thing that offered some immunity or ability to survive the plague also offers some protection from HIV. But I don't know, I should stop talking. Sarie probably knows. Well, I think it is a helpful preamble because it is a lot of, I don't know,

when it is really, there seems to be a gene that confers HIV resistance that increased in the population, in certain populations around the same time as the plague was spreading across the world. And so what they're specifically talking about with this, and I think there are a bunch of papers around 2005, 2006, like 90s, early 2000s about this. And then I don't know if there's been much recently. But like Hank said, HIV is a retrovirus and it is devastating to your immune system because it enters white blood cells and then takes over and uses those cells to replicate itself and destroys them

in the process. So it compromises your immune system and makes a bunch more of itself. And the mutation, which is called CCR5 delta 32, it's a deletion mutation for any geneticists. It affects a receptor on the outside of white blood cells. It basically prevents HIV from getting inside those blood cells, we think. So it closes that door. It makes it much harder and slower for HIV to infect people's bodies. This specific point mutation, or this deletion mutation that we found in a 2005 study after doing some amount of surveying, they estimated that the average frequency of this mutation is 10% in European population. So one in 10 people in, especially Scandinavia of Europe,

have this mutation, which is a lot of people. And they hypothesize in this paper, what might it have come from? Why did this mutation spread so much around these people? And we think that the mutation arose sometime around the 1300s, so right in the early plague, right before the Black Death. And there are papers from 1998, this 2005 study that suggests that it might be related to the bubonic plague. There might confer some sort of resistance, even though Yersinia pestis is a bacteria, not a virus. There could be something else going on.

They might suggest that there were other diseases going through, like a viral fever that used that CCR5, as an entry point into white blood cells. And so in fighting the bubonic plague, people were also fighting off fever. And so, some of their – they conferred some sort of disease resistance. They evolved some sort of disease resistance just by a random mutation. Another study thinks it might have been smallpox, which is viral. Also not a friend to the show. Also not a friend. Yeah. And it is caused by the variola virus. And so,

it is another viral mass epidemic that people might have been experiencing. And basically, the last paper I could find published about this in 2006 was basically saying scientists need to talk to historians more about which populations were where, which populations had this disease, because they're so laser focused on this spike in European populations without really studying anywhere else in the world that had the plague. So regions of Asia, regions of Northern Africa, things like that, where it would be also really useful to have data about HIV resistance, the specific mutation and whatnot to see where and how it might have evolved. But it is an open question mark.

So the answer to this question is very much, we don't know how, like it might be just some combination of it was advantageous to have this mutation and helped some people survive some disease, and then they had more offspring and spread. It could have been some person just had this mutation and then with so many people dying, then it proportionally rose across the rest of the population just because there was that huge population restriction. Could have been many other things. And this detective work is ongoing to try and figure out which of those things it is

because we're interested in HIV treatment. And so people are just trying to understand how this existed. Yeah. I mean, it's, that sounds like a somewhat typical story of this is a weird thing and then sort of becomes more than it, than we actually know

in the translation to headline to headline to headline to headline. Yes, and in not so many words, that is, that is in fact the answer to the question. Yeah. I'm not succinct. And also that like genetics is very complex because sometimes genes just do stuff. They did like, there isn't necessarily.

It doesn't have to be a driving of evolutionary pressure to a gene proliferating. Sometimes it kind of happens fairly randomly. So it doesn't have to be a large effect for it to show for it to show up. Sometimes there isn't any effect at all. All right. And for our listeners on Patreon, we're going to answer a bonus science couch question. Sam, what do we got? Katrina Salmons1448 on YouTube asked, do plague doctors purposefully look like birds? I know the beaks were filled with herbs, but I feel like they could have also made an elephant

nose or some other shape lol. It's a cone. I think it was. It's a great question. I've never wondered that. If you want to hear that answer to that question, as well as enjoy our episodes ad free, you can head on over to Patreon. That's patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents. At our $8 a month tier, you get our episodes ad free and some extended shenanigans as we answer a bonus science couch question every episode. The Tangents Patreon and all of its perks are staying up through the end of the show, and we will be sharing updates as soon as we can

on where to find Patreon content after the show ends. So keep an eye on all of our socials and on Patreon itself for those updates. Our patrons, you're the best. We are so grateful for your support of the show. And also remember, you can get that poem book with over 200 science poems of varying quality at Complexly.store. And I am going to snap that one up immediately.

I'm very excited that it's the thing that exists in the world. And I'm amazed by how much of that there is. If you want to ask the science couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents or check out the YouTube community tab where we'll send out topics for upcoming episodes every week or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon. Thank you to Will Frund on Patreon, at home journeying on Twitter and everybody else who asked your questions for this episode. John, thank you for coming on the show.

I can't believe it's taken us this long to have you on. It is my joy. Thanks for having me. And of course, if you wanna learn all about what John has learned about, you can go to everythingistb.com and pre-order a copy of Everything Is Tuberculosis, which is a lovely and very good book.

It's a banger. It's gonna be very successful. That's what the world is crying out for, Hank. Well, it's gonna be successful. I think it's gonna be shockingly successful at its goals. I hope so. Fingers crossed. If you like this show and you wanna help us out, it's so to be shockingly successful at its goals. I hope so. Fingers crossed. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's so easy to do that.

First, just go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents to become a patron. You can access to all that stuff we just talked about. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you're listening, which is very helpful and helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green.

I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Sam Schultz. And I've been John Green. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Stempert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our social media organizer is Julia Puz-Puzayo. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti.

Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Betish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green, and of course we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lightened. But one more thing. As we talked about, the bubonic plague is characterized by painful inflamed lymph nodes called buboes, which were the target of many medieval medical treatments from bloodletting to rubbing different concoctions on top. One such concoction was a paste made of plant

materials like tree resin and white lily root and human feces. Needless to say, rubbing poop on sometimes open wounds did not make things better and in fact may have made things worse. We've been around poop for so long. Why did we think perhaps? Why did we think we should rub poop on open wounds. Maybe, usually it's gross. What a bad call. But this time it could work. I never have, I never think that will work.

It's never, never gets on the list.