Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Anesthesia

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why subways are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Anesthesia, known for knocking you out. Famous for being a surgery thing, probably. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why anesthesia is secretly incredibly fascinating. There, folks, hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden.

Katie! Yes. What? Pack it up. We're done. We're done. What is your relationship to or opinion of anesthesia? Anesthesia. And I guess the British English is anesthesia, and it's spelled slightly differently.

It's all just like Greek root stuff. Anyway. Anesthesia. Yeah. I like it personally. It's helped me when I got. my wisdom teeth removed. Yeah.

And recently when I made a boy. So I'm a big fan of it. I've had local anesthesia, you know, the normal amount, tooth stuff, dentistry. And then I had an epidural for making a boy. Yeah. On a family level, same here. Yeah. All around.

Yeah. I think I can put that out there. You're on a family level. It's like, well, you know, Brenda's had stuff. Yeah. What if I got one too just to participate? Like, give me, you with the epidural over here. Yeah.

I don't want to walk. Hey, give me a shot of that. Give me a shot of that. Yeah. I had a walking epidural, actually. I'm sure maybe we'll talk about that. The differences. Oh, yeah, I'm not in a ton of detail.

I feel like I should say up top. this will be a relative layman and historical take on anesthesia, partly because we'll get into why there is some mysterious elements of modern anesthesia. We mostly know it works practically. It's magic. I will sound like I don't know how it works, but it'll be partly because it's mysterious. Yeah, nobody knows.

It's magic. It really does feel like magic. When I had my wisdom teeth out, I remember they're giving me the general anesthesia, and I was like kind of count. They were like, all right, countdown from 100. And I was like, easy. And I was like 99, 98. And then I started to get kind of confused around 95.

And I was like, numbers, man. When you think about it, it's just like, how does there even be numbers? And then I was gone. And then I was in the middle of a conversation with a nurse. And I was like, wait, I thought you guys were supposed to do a wisdom teeth on me. And she was like, yes, honey, we already did that. And, you know, you're done. I was like, but no, no time has passed.

So that was wild. The feeling, like it was literally just like, I was like, wait, I don't, numbers. Come on. That's silly. And then in the middle of a conversation. And I had no recollection of the beginning of the conversation. I just became conscious while talking to a nurse. And apparently I'd been talking for like five minutes.

And I had no memory of the five minutes before. I didn't know what I had said. Apparently they were talking to me about using a wheelchair. And I was going like, I would think I'm fine. And they're like, no, we don't think you are. I was like, well, I think I am. And then I was like, hello, who are you? Where am I?

Right. It's just so comedic and fun that after general anesthesia, you're supposed to kind of not do anything for 24 hours because you were a comedy character. Yeah. Everything says no major decisions on top of no driving and other practical stuff. Right. Like stuff like the Cleveland Clinic will say, don't redo your will or whatever, because you're dumb. Yeah.

Alex, have you ever had a general anesthesia? Yeah, so wisdom teeth. And I guess I'll just disclose. Everything's totally fine and I've had one colonoscopy, even though I'm younger than 45. So yeah, they made sure everything is fine. And it was like your wisdom teeth experience and my wisdom teeth experience where I was curious when we'd start and it was finished. We were all done. Right. They told me I had done a great job of the prep for the colonoscopy and I got way too proud. I was like, yeah. I mean, from what I have heard from from persons whose identity I will

retain an anonymity of out of respect. It was cookie. It was cookie. It was cookie. It was cookie. Yeah, apparently the prep is no fun. This individual calls the prep super colon blow, which I think is like an S&L bit. It is. And it's apparently extremely thorough.

I don't want to pry into your personal situation, Alex. But from what I have heard, pride in a job well done. of surviving that is, I think, warranted. I'm glad I work from home because, yeah. Yeah. It was just obliterating our toilet for like two days. Is that why you're in the bathroom right now? It's, uh...

Right. I also love doing it. Yeah. Yeah. The gating on the microphone is just tremendously good. Super Cullid gait. Yeah. Yeah. And also the same thing.

is such a, as we're kind of saying, ordinary topic, right? Like, in the industrialized world, people get anesthesia often, and usually in their life, they'll get it sometimes. So perfect sift topic. Thank you to Silver seeks gold on the Discord for suggesting it. It ran away in the polls.

And on every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called You put the stats in the coconut to count numbers up with the stats in the coconut to count Numbers up.

Nice. Yeah, that was suggested by L.S. Greger. Thank you, L.S. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. Now I want a dachery. That was my main colonoscopy prep.

It was dachery, daquery, daquery, dacry, you know? That sounds not so bad. The first number here is about 60,000 Americans. Mm-hmm. There's an estimate from the MIT technology review a few years ago, but about 60,000 Americans get general anesthesia each day in the United States. Whoa, that's a lot of people. Yeah, like a sizable town worth of Americans are under each day. Can you imagine a town full of people on anesthesia?

Just everybody, like. I can. It's called Washington, D.C. Those clowns in Congress. Oh, boy. He went there. He went there. Bam. Politicians. Here do, no, near.

Wow. Got him. Yeah. And then, you know, far more people receive a less comprehensive local or regional anesthesia. And also, I feel like this is a joyful topic if you have any relationship to it. Because you're in the luckiest third or so of humans. if you've received anesthesia successfully. I'm going to link to the Lancets.

In 2015, they assembled a group called the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery to Explore, like, access to surgery in the world. And in 2015, they estimated about 5 billion people can't get access to anesthesia in a professional way. And in the world's poorer countries, it's about 9 and 10. Basically, the rich people there can get it. So if you've had anesthesia, you're lucky. That's cool. You know, even if it was scary or whatever.

Yeah. It's cool, but we got to make it so that it's not lucky to get anesthesia one of these days. Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's where we should go. And also, it's useful various ways. The next number here is four, because there are really four broad goals of various forms of anesthesia, four different things we're trying to do. The famous one is pain relief. Yeah, that's the good one.

And then really almost all the kinds. the second goal is relaxing your muscles because that makes it not only easier to cut into a part of the body or put something into an orifice of the body, but that also helps make sure that your body's parts don't like flex or push back or something when they do that. Right. So you don't like kick the surgeon or some other thing like that. Yeah, possible TMI when I got an IUD placed. I did almost kick the obstetrician. Not intentionally. It was just, you know, surprise. Surprise at the pain. Yeah. If it was an Italian obstetrician, they'd respect it. It's a soccer country. They get it, you know? Right. No yellow card for me. And yeah, so that muscle relaxation, along with pain relief,

is especially key for lots of regional or specific anesthesia, everything from, an epidural, which is a spinal block or even, you know, tiny removing a mole on skin, all sorts of things. And then the other two purposes are related to each other. It's unconsciousness and memory loss. Ooh. And, you know, that's not necessarily the explicit goal, especially the memory loss, but it is one way anesthesia helps us through procedures. because there are consistent rare reports of people gaining consciousness while under general anesthesia. So if you also don't remember the experience, that helps. See, now it's interesting because this part actually scares me a lot. I have a lot of empathy for myself, which is really great of me, of course.

Clapping, clapping. Everyone clap. And so when I think about, say, something that a version, of me will go through that maybe I don't remember. It's like that's scary. Just because my future cell phone remember, it doesn't mean my more near future cell phone experience something terrible. Because this was something I went through with like when I was asking other people like,

hey, how's the whole childbirth thing? They're like, oh, it's but you won't remember it. And I was like, that's not helpful, actually. We didn't hear that. Wow. That you won't remember. Yeah, I heard a lot that it's like painful, but you forget about the pain. Oh, oh.

Not that you'll have like amnesia, but that you'll like, it'll be painful a little but then you'll kind of forget the pain and you'll only remember the good stuff. And I can actually say that that's not the case for me. I remember basically all the bad parts. And I actually like wrote sort of my thoughts down immediately after because like I was like, this is a surefire way to make sure I don't forget how I felt. And, you know, it was like. Yeah, memories.

Yeah, it was definitely like a mixed bag, though, because I was, I got, unlike a lot of the type of epidurals that are like completely or mostly pain blocking, I got a walking epidural, which sort of lowers the pain, but it doesn't remove it. So, and then they also like shut, shut it off for the pushing part, which was, I didn't love. That was, that was wild. But I do remember that. It's like scary to me the idea of during surgery, you have a scary experience, but you don't remember it. So it's all cool.

Yeah, especially the, it's okay. I don't remember feels very the television show severance, you know? Like there's even a section of that show where there seems to be people using the severance procedure to not remember giving birth. Like they run into somebody like that. Yeah. The memory loss thing with unconsciousness, this is sort of a general. anesthesia thing that might be part of the goal. And this gets us into one of the many ways anesthesia is weirdly mysterious. And according to Smithsonian Magazine, there was a survey in the UK in

2011. They found across three million surgeries, there were only about 150 cases of people gaining consciousness out of general anesthesia. 150 out of three million is incredibly rare. And on top of that, only a few dozen of those people woke up at a time besides the very end. Like they just woke up slightly early. And then of those people, only a couple of them experienced any physical pain, let alone bad pain. Okay. Yeah.

So if only two or three people across three million were awake and feeling any pain, that's literally about a one in a million chance. It's so rare. That's pretty good. Yeah. I mean, and it's probably better otherwise to sort of forget if you hear stuff like, hey, where'd my tongs go? Anyways, who cares? So I'm back up.

I dropped my golf teas. Surgeons love to golf. Yeah. Has anyone seen my bag of ants? Yeah. I think it's probably fine. Those are good odds. I like those odds. I'm going to get an antect to me just to be safe.

If there are any other, I want them out. I know. My aunts. Yeah, no, those are very good odds. Like, just a few, a handful out of $3 million. That's like, I mean, you're so much more likely to be in a car accident than that. So, yeah, that's great. Exactly. Or to have, like, most of the diseases that would require a surgery.

You know, it's fine. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No, it's fine. And there are other estimates that vary, but that's, one strong survey. And then the other strange thing is there might be some low level of consciousness that we don't remember. And that's something we're continuing to study. The number here is May

26. So right now when we're taping. That's recently as a now. I was like, that's recently. And then I looked at my computer. I was like, that's now recently. Yeah. In May 2026, a team at the Baylor College of Medicine. They published a new study in the journal Nature, which suggests that some people's brains have a hippocampus that is still active and learning things during general anesthesia. Wow. So they are what we consider knocked out and their hippocampus is processing stuff. Right. The experiment they ran, they took seven people who were scheduled for surgery to treat epilepsy and would be given propofal as a general anesthetic. I'm also going to link the We talk about deja vu.

We talk about epilepsy patients accidentally being a really useful population for neurology studies because they receive brain surgery often. Yeah. But these seven epilepsy patients get general anesthesia, and then two groups of them both show something interesting. They were all given probes about as thin as a strand of hair going into their hippocampus. Three of them were exposed to a series of repetitive beeps interspersed with differently pitched tone. that the researchers called oddball, like they stick out in the pattern. And then the brain recordings of those people

showed that their neurons learned to discriminate between those unexpected sounds and regular beeps. That's wild. And then the other four people, an even weirder thing, the other four people heard roughly seven-minute-long segments of the podcast, The Moth Radio Hour, which is a famous storytelling podcast.

And the researchers say the participants hippocampi were processing the language in real time. And then some of them responded more often to nouns. Others responded more often to verbs. Side thing I love that podcasts were involved. But either way, all seven of these people reflected some sort of the brain doing something during being anesthetized. So maybe the memory loss is crucial than not knowing any of that, you know? After they woke them up from anesthesia, did they test them at all to see if they had any sort of above chance recollection of things from the podcast or from the tones? Apparently they just didn't remember anything.

Yeah. I see. If it had been this podcast, they would have remembered right? Yeah, they would have been like antoctomy. Oh, what a bit. Yes. Yeah. Alex, you know where semi-aquatic large mammals go to learn?

Where, Katie? At the hemp. God damn. I wonder. I wonder at the hippocampus. Yeah, there we go. Thing to do, Alex. I think you landed it.

That's great. Yeah. Okay. Continue. Yeah, so anesthesia, it turns out it's basically something we know how to do in a practical way and still do not understand every little step of. One key source here is anesthesiologist Emery Brown, who is staffed at Massachusetts General Hospital and also a professor at MIT. He describes anesthesia as a reversible coma. I'm going to say I don't love that.

No, thank you. Yeah, a drug-induced reversible coma. And it's just something we know how to do really well for the practical purpose. And then there remain endless surprises that we still haven't found out about exactly how it works, which is amazing. And also, anesthesia is so useful and so wildly safe. A few people die of it. Apparently, the figures are around one in 200,000 people will die under general anesthesia. So that's also why people often like check in with a loved one right before they go under because there's that tiny, tiny, tiny chance.

But, you know, because it's so useful and so overall safe, we just do it. And we hope we'll figure out the exact details later. You know, great. I wonder if those statistics are complicated at all by the fact that general anesthesia is often used in like when people may have some vulnerabilities. So each individual's risk may be different than one in 200,000, which is still very small. Exactly. And that's what all our resources this week say. And I hope I said we're linking to stuff like the Cleveland Clinic and also the Mayo Clinic in particular.

We're not doctors, but those and everywhere else, it says individual risk factors vary widely in terms of anesthesia. The less healthy you are, the more risky it is. And also, you probably still need the procedure. So when you add that all up, anesthesia is basically safe and 100% worth it. Yeah, like don't avoid a procedure just because of anesthesia. I mean, it is one reason that they don't typically use anesthesia willy-nilly for things that you can do, like, local rather than general. Yeah. Just to reduce that risk.

So, like, if you're getting a vasectomy and you're wondering, like, hey, this really feels like something I would like to not be conscious for. but they recommend just local that that's why because they want to you know like eliminate risk that's unnecessary but yeah the risk is very low and a really useful thing for surgery is like you can actually look into the specific surgery that you're getting or procedure that you're getting and look into the rates the survival rates of that specific surgery at even maybe even more specifically at the hospital that you're going to And that should give you a good idea that it's the risks of anesthesia are very low. Yeah.

Everything you said, yeah, especially that your doctors do no harm, right? Like they would only put you under if it seemed worth it. Generally speaking, generally, when the procedure calls for general anesthesia, it's because there's just no way to do it otherwise. Yeah. Local anesthesia wouldn't do it or a spinal block wouldn't do it. Yeah, and especially for people who, you know, we have data on where people listen to the podcast. Most of the countries where this podcast is popular, you have industrialized and advanced medicine.

So they know what they're doing. Right. Yeah. It is so worth doing. And I kind of love the mysteriousness of it, especially because solving it gets us into takeaway number one. If we gain a more scientific understanding of how anesthesia works, it might be through experiments where we ennesthetes. where we anesthetize plants. Hmm.

It turns out we can give plants anesthetic, and they react to it like, you know, animal life forms do. And that is super interesting. It might help us unravel the whole thing and figure it out. Do they confess their love to their crushes? It's like, Fern, I love you. Uh, uh. Hmm. Fern's a nice lady.

name. I'm thinking about that now. Right. Anyway. Ivy also. I could have done Ivy, but, you know. Yeah, I feel like that thing from before of it's a drug-induced reversible coma is not something pop culture wants to deal with at all. So all anesthesia in pop culture is jokey or just like a deep sleep or you confess stuff. It's all jokes. But it's like no movie or TV show wants to be like our main characters in a coma. Oh, well. You know. Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a downer.

But so how do we, what's, what's up? Because plants don't, plants don't got brains. I hate to break it to you, Alex. Plants do not got brains. They don't have nerves. They don't have a nervous system. So how are they reacting to anesthesia in a way that is even, you know, comprehensible? Yeah.

We are basically observing their bodies going into less activity, if not a torpor-ish thing or coma-ish thing. And we're curious if that means plants have sort of some kind of plant version of consciousness. But either way, we know that if we give them chemicals along the lines of giving anesthetic to a human, they do something kind of similar physically, which is really, really weird. Is the anesthesia the same type of substances we use on people? Apparently, some are the same and some are different. Okay. And I don't really understand it well enough. Yeah.

Are we just using kind of like an IV hooking these plants up? Like, what is like putting a mask over their plant faces? What's happening? Yeah, and one reason it does make sense to try is humans, it's usually either a mask where you breathe it in or an injection. And so we can do injections to plants. And some of the things we use are diethyl ether or lydocane, both of which are forms of anesthetic that are used on humans. Ether is a big when people breathe in.

Lytocane gets injected. So it is weirdly kind of similar. Like topical lydocane especially is something we can give to pea tendrils. We can give it to Venus fly traps. We can give it to lots of different kinds of plants to see if they continue to do their usual stings. Yeah, because Venus flytraps, like they don't have a nervous system, but they do have trigger hairs that one could see as, you know, similar to our, the way that our sensory organs work.

Yeah. And the key sources here are a piece for the New York Times trilobite section by Joanna Klein and a piece for Smithsonian Magazine by Jason Daly. They're both covering a study in 2018 in the journal Annals of Botany, where mainly, mainly German university research team mainly injected lytocaine into plants. They did a few other things too, but they said that they were building on research where they had found that plants do produce their own chemicals like menthol and ethanol and even cocaine to possibly dull pain or be an anesthetic. And so they said, let's look at this more closely by giving these kinds of things to

plants. Right. And they have two main theories about what's going on because when they tried to then like stimulate the plants they did not react to things in the way they normally do and then when the chemical wore off they started reacting again as if they had been under like a person under general anesthesia. When it comes to

Venus fly traps it's easy to kind of see reaction versus no reaction right because if they have the trigger hairs and they're little it's not a mouth but the little flaps and when a fly or another insect steps on it the trigger hair causes a chain reaction that causes the trap to snap shut. But in other plants, what are the sort of reactions that they're looking for?

With other plants, P-tendrils are apparently relatively responsive to just movements of air or being touched. And then when they were anesthetized, they didn't do anything. And then other plants that do a leaf curl when they're touched just didn't do anything either. So across the board of what they tested, all the plants could go under anesthesia. Right. And like you said, no nervous system. They're probably not like changing thinking because they're not thinking. Right.

And when they say like pain, because like as far as we know, plants can't experience pain because there's no nervous system, there's no central nervous system or brain, but is the idea that there could be some sort of the production of these. chemicals could somehow mute a response that is not good for the plant in certain circumstances? Yeah, that's the idea. Yeah, like it can mute something that the plant does to protect itself a little bit and is sort of a stimulus-based reaction. Yeah. Interesting.

And they have two main theories about like how an anesthetic works on plants. One is that it binds to receptors in the cells. And then that activates a set of chemical activity. that makes the plant stop being the equivalent of conscious. And then the second theory is that anesthesia affects the lipid layers of cell membranes. So then compounds can't move in and out of the cells. And the cells basically just stop doing anything. Right.

And so either of those functions or a few other different ideas could be exactly how anesthetic works on us. Like especially general anesthetic. Maybe it's rerouting our brain pathways. so they just stop doing the things they usually do. Maybe the cell membranes are being altered. Maybe specific receptors are being blocked, especially depending on which anesthetic you're using. That could vary or we aren't totally sure.

We just know it works. Cell structure in plants is very different from animals. They have rigid cell structures, walls versus animals who have a more pliable cell membrane. So, yeah, it's very interesting that you could get similar potential effects of drugs. Ether is crazy because, like, Ether is, that was, I think, one of our earlier anesthetics. And it's so, it's so risky, though. It can, like, now we have quite low death rates when it comes to anesthesia. but if I remember correctly, like ether was, you know, like the method of like, hey, here,

huff some ether was not great. It was not. And that story gets us into our next takeaway. Because takeaway number two, dentists, carnies, and social drug users gradually invented human anesthetic across about 50 years. Cool. And ether was a key, like, we did it. Ether was the one for the first major anesthetic operation.

Was it the helium and balloons that or the clowns having to use laughing gas to make themselves funnier? Laughing gas, a.k. nitrous oxide was kind of the first substance that people said, oh, maybe this can lead us to an anesthetic. Yeah. Didn't they used to use it in like parties and stuff because they thought it was funny? Yeah, that's the social drug users here. They were like, what a funny thing to do. And then after decades of that, some people started thinking of something responsible to do with it. Eh, that's boring. Yeah. The cool thing is just to make all the drugs super, super duper illegal, so you can't do any research on them.

There we go. Now we're talking. Yes. That's why plants are making cocaine, maybe, some of them. Yeah. Put those plants in jail. But they just grow through the bars. Nah, nuts.

And key sources here are an amazing book. It's called Empire of the Scalpel, the History of Surgery. Really enjoyed it. It's by medical historian and practicing surgeon Ira Rutko. And then I'm also linking to digital resources from the London Science Museum and the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. But Rutko, he says that basically the whole history of surgery begins in 1846. Because in 1846, people invented anesthesia.

And before that, there were like surgical practices, but it was basically a limited amount of cutting into a totally awake person. It's hard to do when they're screaming and flailing like a bunch of babies. Truly. Like he says the main skill as far as whether someone was good at surgery or not was being fast. And then like the secondary skill was being physically big to pin the person down. Like it was a relatively male. fields partly in the sense of like male athletes as a population might be a little bigger and stronger, you know?

Right. Just being a barbarian, right? Like, all right, got to rip your arm off real fast. Yeah. That of ERA also gives us the word sawbones for what later became called surgeons. Check out the Amazing MaxFond podcast, Sawbones. It has an actual doctor on it and also her husband. It's great.

Yeah. Cool. But yeah, quoting Rutko, the gamut of surgical operations before anesthesia remain narrow, mostly bloodletting, amputation, drainage of abscesses, extraction of rotten teeth, and setting of fractures, end quote. All the juicy ones. Yes. And it almost like wasn't a field, right? Like there were medieval people who called themselves barbers who did this kind of cutting, but otherwise basically a doctor. might do some of this if they had to, and otherwise it wasn't a job. And so anesthesia,

Ruckus says it's one of two developments that made all of what we think of as surgery possible. The other is solving post-operative infections. But with anesthesia, we start to change this in the late 1700s from surgery, just pinning someone down and chopping. And the beginning was a few professional chemists. Because especially someone named Humphrey Davy, who's an important British scientist who isolates a lot of elements of the periodic table and advances electricity and so on. He's using electricity to separate out various compounds, and one of them is nitrous oxide, also named Laughing Gas.

Laughing gas is the nickname. Right. And Davy, as far back as the year 1800 theorized, quote, as nitrous oxygen, in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place. So he was sort of already on the right track there. Yeah, especially the idea that if there's not that much blood,

because whether he knew it or not, there's less infection risk probably if there aren't huge wounds. So kind of both parts of making surgery possible he was guessing at an 1800. but nobody really took any him up on that for decades. They just used it for partying. Yeah, for like about 50 years, people just threw parties or put on carnival-type shows where they use nitrous oxide to make people goofy and also dull them. And then either you and your friends are taking it and enjoying it or you're watching somebody be goofy, you know?

That's kind of it. So, like, people were entertained by just watching someone. get high, is that basically? Yeah, and one of those shows helped American dentists start to invent an anesthetic purpose here. The show that was in 1844, it was in Hartford, Connecticut. Apparently, Europe and the United States were full of what Rutko calls itinerant Barker-ish amateur scientists. So just like a guy who had some nitrous oxide and would travel around dosing people with it as a show. And so a dentist, dentist named Horace Wells paid 25 cents for a ticket to one of these shows.

People complain about television and iPhones, but, you know, I mean, like when you look at the state of entertainment throughout the years, it wasn't all wholesome. Yeah, it really wasn't great. So this guy is named Horace Wells. He is a dentist in Hartford, Connecticut. He's at this show, and he basically gets an insight from the show going. wrong. One of the people who takes nitrous oxide jumps wildly about the stage, plows knee first into a large wooden bench. And Wells noticed that the guy is so injured, he's bleeding and needs to be like carried, but the guy doesn't seem totally aware of his wound until the gas wears off.

And Wells is a dentist, he says, what if we could pull teeth without pain with that? That'd be nice because it wasn't that like, whole thing of, and I say it's like pulling teeth, you know, because it was bad. It's really bad, yeah. And Rucco also says that in the mid-1800s, U.S. dentists, that was not quite its own profession, there'd either be like a trained doctor who tried to take some like side courses or read some books about dentistry or there would be like blue collar type people who pulled teeth. And there wasn't quite like a degree in dentistry yet at the time. What about rope tied to a donkey, tied to a tooth, and then carrot? Yeah, carrot is key.

Yeah, yeah. That was pretty much the second kind of guy. Right. And so Wells is the first kind. He's a doctor and interested in dentistry. And so he arranges to have this like carny guy. visit his office and give him some nitrous oxide to work with. And then Wells tested on himself. He has a colleague extract a molar that needed pulling anyway. And Wells is amazed that it didn't hurt. He says he tastes blood in his mouth. He feels the space and supposedly exclaimed, quote,

a new era in tooth pulling. He thought he'd said that. In reality, he was like, Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. And then from here, there's basically a chaotic series of steps in Boston. Wells goes to Boston because that's where a bunch of amazing universities are and also Massachusetts General Hospital. So like medical colleges at places like Harvard are working at this hospital.

And unfortunately, two other guys both help Wells discover this and also take most all the credit and the money. Oh, what? So Wells' life doesn't work out that well Because he was also depressive and it's bad And he's missing a tooth still Oh no He whistles when he talks Nobody likes that

Yeah, I can't do the sound But wealth You know? Like there's a huge whistle at the end I'll just end up sounding like Sid from Ice Age Yeah Yeah, so Horace Wells, along with a guy who was formerly his dental practice partner named William Thomas Green Morton, and then Morton's Harvard instructor John Collins Warren. They also work with another chemistry tutor named Charles Jackson and that other group of people, they progress this idea to the point where they do more tooth extractions with nitrous oxide.

And then within about two years, they've developed the practice to use ether. And in 1846, William Thomas Green-Morton performs pain-free surgery on a man's jaw in an operating theater that is now called the Etherdome, because it is the first place anesthetic surgery ever happens in a substantial way. Nice. The Etherdome, dome, dome. Yeah. Yeah, someone had like a complex. tumor in their jaw and he removed it and they didn't feel any pain. Sunday, Sunday, removing tumors. I'll link atlas obscura. Yeah. And also surgery all happened in these

weird theaters where there's super vaulted seating and a bunch of men with moustaches watching. You know, it wasn't like now. Yeah. I mean, even before anesthesia, right? They used to do that. And it would be just uncontrolled screaming and them twiddling their mustaches going, hmm, quite, yes. Criots. Right. They'd be smoking heavily and saying we should invent baseball. Yeah.

You know, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But and this one surgery, it was October 16th, 1846, if you want to celebrate the anniversary this year. But it was global news almost immediately. The Boston newspaper. carried accounts of it with headlines like successful operation in all caps because a successful operation was pretty big news.

Yeah, it's incredible. The idea that you go from surgery just being torture to it not being tortuary. That's huge. It's legitimately massive, yeah. And then, like, basically the news was spread as fast as technology allowed. Like a steamer left to Boston for Liverpool to bring less. and medical journal copies to tell the British this existed. It was so associated with Boston that apparently when a London surgeon did this for the first time

just weeks later, he told the crowd in the operating theater, quote, gentlemen, we are going to try a Yankee Dodge for making men insensible. And then he proceeded to cut a guy's leg off and the guy did not feel it that much. and they said, oh, this really is a miracle. Yeah. The guy was like, ah, ah, oh. Oh. Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, so like within three months of inventing this, it had been done in Austria, Germany, Russia, and by an American missionary in China. Like, it was just global immediately because it is a miracle. wonderful. Yeah. This would be as if we found a universal cure for cancer, right? Like, it's that revolutionary.

Yeah, almost even more so, yeah. Because then people said, oh, what if surgery can be more than just a really fast cut on a wriggling, screaming person? Like, can we do more in every field of medicine? Yeah. Let's get in there. Exactly. Like speed almost doesn't matter anymore. And now you have the American.

medical TV drama thing where they can have conversations and be in love with each other, you know? Right. And droopy dog can be a surgeon now. I'm about to open up the thoracic cavity. All leads back to droopy. Yeah. And yeah, folks, we have more to explore about anesthesia. That's two takeaways and a bunch of numbers. We're going to take a quick break and, you know, knock out for it. And we're back and we have a couple more anesthesia takeaways. And the next one is takeaway number three. Before the invention of anesthetic, European surgeons told themselves pain was necessary and helpful for surgery.

Well, that's just cope, as the youth say these days. That's just some copium when you should be having anesthesia. Yeah, and Ira Rucco talks about this a lot. Like, it is really copium. Like, the person is screaming and thrashing and the surgeons told themselves, surely that means they're lively, you know? Right. Pain must make you lively and make it work better in the end. Sure.

Really makes the blood pump. As you can see as it splurts out of their wound. Yeah, yeah. And one tell that they were just sort of comforting themselves as practitioners is that also for thousands of years, people have sought ways to pain kill, like to alleviate pain. They just didn't have great ways to do it. Sure. Like the Greeks, Romans, many other cultures in the world, they tried alcohol, they tried opium.

They would also try just dunking a food in a vinegar or something, you know, just all sorts of weird things. Like there were claims about mandrake roots being some sort of analgesic where you're really just eating a weird root. Nothing's happening. Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's desperation, man. If you've ever had a real bad migraine, you chew on a brute, chew on dirt. Yeah, the topic this week is basically pain and people try so hard to not feel it for that great reason that it would be nice.

Yeah, great. Yeah, I'm not a fan. So like hemlock, ivy, mulberry juice, wine, just everything's been tried. And then especially in Europe, when none of that made a big. difference on something like an amputation, they just started telling themselves that the pain is helping and working. And that actually if they weren't feeling pain, this would be more dangerous. Right. And this also ended up playing into some, like some denominations of Christianity regard pain as ultimately good, right? Like it's, it's the more you suffer, the more you are

close to God and the more you are Christ-like. And so then that played into a sort of moral and Christian belief around pain. And so, okay, the pain and surgery is also part of why this is a good thing. Like, it's part of healing. I kind of just like being a wimp. So I hope that's like, I hope that's cool with any deities. Yeah. I'm just going to try to be a good person in other ways.

And I don't want to sound like I'm like picking on Christianity or something. and all these cultural beliefs about pain are fuzzy and developed in fuzzy ways, but they ended up lasting well into the 1900s in specific cases. Apparently pain and childbirth was seen by some Christian leaders and denominations as, like, essential and makes you more like Jesus' mother Mary and like a really important thing. I have a gigantic baby-sized soapbox about that. I think that's, I think that's. I think that still is pervasive in medicine particularly when I, we kind of touched on this earlier,

but particularly when it comes to women's medicine, the idea that pain is natural and like, yeah, duh, but it's, and there's definitely a lot of this idea that like pain during childbirth is healthy and necessary. And I looked into a lot of the research about it. And it's really not, like, the use of epidurals is not associated with like worse outcomes. There's like some slight evidence that being able to feel some sensation during pushing, like not being totally numb and feeling some pain or some sensation is a good thing because it helps you know when to push. But that's it.

It doesn't have to be extraordinarily painful. But I do think that maybe especially in Italy, I don't know, but some of the, I think some of the old kind of like Catholic ideas about pain and childbirth does make its way into modern medicine in a way that is not particularly good. Like here where I live, epidurals are widely available, but there's a lot of, there are regions in Italy where it's really hard to get an epidural and there are like doctors who will say that it's good for women to feel pain during childbirth and it's, you know, that's not strictly speaking, like some amount of feedback, body feedback is good. It doesn't have to be excruciating pain. That's just weirdness. Yeah, the main example of all that here is the Catholic Church. And the source is an amazing book called Matrescence by journalist Lucy Jones. She writes about 1956 is the year here.

1956 is when a Catholic Pope sanctions pain relief and childbirth for what's doctrinally and officially the first time in the history of Catholic theology, 1956. Sanctioned meaning like allowed for it. Yes. And in his address, Pope Pius X. 12th sanctioned it but still criticized it. And Pope Pius X.12 said that childbirth doesn't always have to be painful. Not everyone experiences pain. and he said that pains can be the fault of the woman's attitude and that, quote, incorrect behavior, psychic or physical could cause increased difficulties. Excuse me?

Like, I don't want to, I don't want to fight a Pope, but I'm coming close. I think Pius I, the 12th has it coming. Your words, your words is a lapsed Catholic. Yeah, yeah, I can lead the way here. Yeah. Because then the other thing he said is that the pain and suffering of childbirth carries spiritual value. Quote, suffering can be a source of good if she bears it with God and in obedience to his will, end quote. Oh, kiddochi.

So basically his statement is that fine, we will minimally sanction relieving your pain and childbirth. And it makes you a bad Catholic if you do that. 1996. That's his position on anesthesia for like, or pain relief for passing kidney stones. Is that like you want to squeeze one of them fellows out your urethra without any pain relief? It's one fun thing about being a pope say is nobody makes you do comprehensive medical statements. Like nobody asks you about 99% of medicine and then you just spat off about the stuff you pick. Like, whoa, I'm not doctor.

Hey, I'm just a guy in the fun outfit and the hat, you know? Hey, man, kidney stones are natural. Just pass them without any assistance there, Mr. The pain will bring you closer to God. Yeah, no, that's that's, I don't agree with that. Yeah, and with all of this stuff about pain during surgery, it's something that it seems like various cultures have been grappling with for at least about 10,000 years.

In super general terms, there's archaeological evidence because we've found it in skull bones of surgeries that are called now Trapanning, where they make a hole in the skull. Yeah. And if you survive, you got to keep a piece of your skull. Where is a cool necklace? I'm not even joking. Right, right. And like, yeah, some cultures you do.

And weirdly, Trapanning was not necessarily lethal. That's why people did it. Not necessarily lethal. It's a great tagline for a surgery. Right. And so like in the Etherdome in Boston, they did the first anesthetic surgery in 1846 AD. And for 10,000 years before that, people just had to figure out how they felt about performing a surgery without relieving the pain. Because you really can't with something massive like that. Right. Did they ever just like do kind of caveman surgery where you knock someone out with the big rock, hope that they don't? die from the brain trauma and then do your surgery? Apparently yes. Yeah, like that's a route to

unconsciousness. Oh. Is knock somebody out physically. Yeah. Sure. Oh, so they did. Okay, I thought I was joking. Yeah. And that kind of thing, it's fuzzy, right? Like, we don't have great medical records of 10,000 years ago. But sure. Like, we think they probably tried that because they understood that you can be, uh, seem to be sleeping if you get hit in the head in some cultures. Yeah. I mean, it's really bad if you're knocked out for more than like a few well it's bad if you're knocked out for any amount of time but if it's more than a few seconds it's a very bad like the movies kind of get that wrong where it's like you can knock someone out you wake them up later and they're just like fine and it happens all the time in action movies where it's like hey this is like a non-lethal

way to take someone out but like if you knock someone out and they are unconscious for like a while that's usually because their brain just suffered significant trauma and could be swelling and swelling and pushing on their skull. So that's going to not be good. Right. And then if there were like medical cases for Trapan, it would often be because somebody's brain or the fluids were swelling, you know, and they're trying to relieve it. Like, like all of this was very, very wildly experimental.

But in cultures where probably the concept of experimentation wasn't even developed yet, right? Like they don't have the scientific method. They're just trying to figure stuff out. But they did have clubs to knock you on the head. Big old clubs. Oh, yeah. Big old clubs and sharp things. They were like, someday we'll have mustaches and sit at an operating theater.

Oh, someday. Right. Yeah. Someday we'll be like in a show where we all are banging each other inappropriately around. doctor stuff. But right now. Oh, I had a different interpretation of banging there, as you said it. Right. But now I get it. But no, no, if you live, you finish. Right now we're banging each other with clubs. Someday I will be McSteamy, said the Neanderthal-related caveman. Right now, my physique is just what everyone has because we lift mammoths. Oh, geez. Do you think

they had a version of house back then that was just called cave? He's looking over a guy with like a mammoth tusk sticking in his head and he's like, me, think me, no problem. The prequel is about Dr. Gregory tree branch. We're not walking up right yet. We live in trees. No. Yeah.

Well, one last takeaway here about kind of modern history again. Takeaway number four. For the whole second half of the 1800s, Anesthesia technology often led to more surgical deaths due to infections and explosions. What? And what? It turns out ether is pretty flammable. Oh, dear.

And the other thing it turns out is, I love Ira Rekko's framing. He says it really took two landmark discoveries to create modern surgery. And we had anesthesia decades before we had a consistent practice to prevent infections after operations. Yeah, that's the tricky one. Because actually we had, speaking of like childbirth, we had the understanding of C-sections for a long time because it's pretty obvious, right? Like the baby is not coming out the door, so you have to make a new door. But the problem was in addition to bleeding was infection.

So it had a really high fatality rate, mostly due to infection. And it remains weird that C-sections are C-Syrean sections are named after the Roman Empire era, you know? That's so weird. Oh, really? Is that what that is? I had no idea. Oh, Caesar! Duh! Caesar!

Cesarian! Yes, yes. I thought it was named after the salad. Yeah, but apparently it's a medical myth that Julius Caesar's son with Cleopatra needed a C-section. and their son was named Caesarian. Right. It's all still named after it, yeah, you know? But it was featured in Shakespeare.

No one born of a woman can kill me except that it's like Cesarian. It's kind of silly because. Macbeth, yeah. Yeah, it's Macbeth and it's kind of silly because it's like basically saying like if it's a C-section, the child's not born, which is a little bit dumb, William. And Tolkien also thought it was dumb, and that's why he had the prophecy of, you know, no man can kill me. And then it turns out it's like Ewan.

So that's, uh, there's a parent. Yeah. Tolkien's is better. Yeah. Tolkien was also pissed off that the trees didn't actually, weren't actually like big walking trees. So he put trees in. That's what I read on the internet anyways. I'm not a Tolkien scholar.

So I'm sorry if I'm wrong. I do like that Tolkien does. better versions of both the Macbeth workarounds. Yeah, that's fun. Like, his Burnham Wood would be, you know, a bunch of fun talking trees. Right. Sometimes, you know, we need fun talking trees and to be less judgmental about gynecological procedures, William. Where were we? He's, William has to go see the principal, I think. The principal's a woman. If you're imagining a man, you're sexist. How did the principal's son be in the principal's office when the prince, wait, hang on. The doctor riddle, yeah.

The doctor was a boy the whole time. He was a child doctor. He was young Sheldon. That's what I'd say to sexism, bazinga. I say bazinga to sexism. Bazinga. Okay. Yeah, so key sources here are historical medical.

library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. That group does stuff like around the Motor Museum in Philly. It's amazing. Oh, man. I have never been there, but I think it would make me not feel good because of the formaldehyde stuff. I went and that stuff usually messes me up, but it was just like so interesting. I could take it for the one visit, actually. It was so cool. Yeah. And I'm easily off stuff. I would go and I would look at stuff. And then I would like, someone would try to serve me like some stew later and I'd not want it. The other source here is the U.S. National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick Maryland.

Yeah, so there's an odd thing where anesthesia did help people and also caused a lot more deaths for about 50 or 60 years. Right. Because of two major problems, one of them infections, right? Like the second half of inventing modern surgery was inventing ways to prevent things like sepsis. And that could be a whole other episode. The key scientists are Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister. There was also a doctor named Ignat Semmelweis who helped parallel develop the ideas and put them in practice in Hungary. Is that where Listerine comes from? Lister? Yes. Yes, named after him.

They're sanitizing stuff. He was an English doctor. Nice. Yeah. Cool. And then Louis Pester was interested in bacteria and did a lot of work too. Is that where pasturization comes from? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And then wait, who was the third one? Ignat Semmelweis. Does that, is that where Simulvice? Yeah, Grand Theft Auto Semmelweis City. Yeah, he made that game. Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Yeah, you're a Higaria doctor stealing cars. Yeah.

Oh, exciting. But to be clear, it's not that the anesthesia itself causes infection. It's that the anesthesia enables you to do more complex surgeries, get in there, open stuff up. And when you're doing that, then that gets infected. So it's like you kind of put in the cart before the horse and then the horse dies as sepsis. 100%. That's the problem. Yeah.

Right. And like really including horses probably. Because, yeah, here's Ira Rukko's description. Quote, if anything, the availability of surgical anesthesia worsened the problem. Since pain no longer impeded surgeons' technical capabilities, they performed increasingly complex and invasive procedures that reached deeper into the body, which led to overwhelming infections and mortality rates of 50% or higher. Yeah.

So they briefly said, oh, now surgery is perfect and nothing's wrong. And then noticed people were really dying more because the surgeries were more elaborate because the person laid still. Right. And they were like, you know, scratching, like scratching their butts and then getting in there with their bare hands. They really understand hand washing. Right. And they also started to notice that they were both able to do more successful surgery, but also there was a lot more death in two wars.

Two of the, there were two wars right after the development of anesthesia where it was used a bunch. the Crimean War and the U.S. Civil War. Like Battlefield Medics apparently used it right away. The Crimean War was 1853 to 1856. It was a European alliance trying to prevent Russia from invading and taking the Crimea. A war correspondent reported that Russian doctors performed every operation with chloroform no matter how trivial it might be. Apparently French army doctors used anesthesia over 25,000 times in the war. Right. And these were cases where basically it was like too much anesthesia and then your like parasympathetic nervous system just is like what? And then it was that and the infections. Yeah. Because I see. Okay.

Because yeah, like you said, early use of anesthesia, people didn't totally know how to do it well and there would be deaths directly from it. But ether and chloroform were the two early anesthesias for big stuff. Nitrous oxide is still in use but for relatively minor relief. Ether and chloroform, yeah, like people would either die of improper administration of that or die of the infection because it was a bigger surgery. But especially in battlefield medicine, doctors just went for it because the person's gone through a horrible physical trauma. They're probably going to die anyway. Let's just try stuff.

But it would kind of increase the death rate because they were maybe doing surgery more than they should have been. Yes, yeah. And then also they'd see that a few people who just lucked out infection-wise would survive truly horrible injuries. Like they were amazed. But then the other people died and they wondered why. Right.

Right, right. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, because like that's like part of modern medicine is determining when you do or don't need surgery. And then, of course, there's all the, all the modern hygiene and anti-infection things. But yeah, like, that's why it's not just like always immediately. jump to general anesthesia in surgery is, you know. Yeah, yeah.

It's not always just evil demonic insurance companies, although a lot of the times it is. Right. And yeah, and the battlefield, they were just like, we just got to go for it. Every one of these cases is different and horrible. And a few years later, the U.S. Civil War is 1861 to 65. apparently about 80,000 operations on both sides used anesthetic because they had it and why not? Yeah. But it took until like the late 1860s for safety from infections to begin to be a thing in a modern way in surgeries.

So that finally started to make surgery modern. And the other good change is a shift from not using ether and using more chloroform and then other better modern drugs because ether is flammable. And so apparently as soon as the 1850s, there's records of ether causing fires or explosions in operating theaters. Right. Where it's like a surgeon's like, ah, another successful leg amputation and then lights up a cigar and then boom. Truly, because they were big smokers partly, yeah. But the other thing was like trying to cauterize wounds with heat. And so that catches.

Right. Because you filled the room with ether or also with pure oxygen. And, you know, it's bad. Which isn't, wasn't cauterization actually something that did help reduce some mortality because the high heat kills bacteria? Yes, yeah. So that was one way they either lucked into or knew they were solving some infections. But if you're using flammable anesthetic and like the crummy masks or piping that doesn't hold it in very well, you can blow everybody up. Because cauterization was not, it was not like to kill bacteria.

it was to stop bleeding and sort of like seal off the wound. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So it is a good thing for what it is. And then it really took until later in the 1800s for people to realize we got to be more careful with either or replace it completely because fires. Like what's the point of doing a brilliant surgery and then everything's on fire or blowing up? Sorry, I thought you said either or, but you said either or. That's confusing.

Yeah. It is. It's a little confusing. It's like when doctors bang, you know what I mean? Yeah. Who's on first rotation? I don't know. When did we learn about germs?

Like when did we know that bacteria were doing bad things to these large gaping wounds? A lot of it involved Louis Pester. Yeah, because he was initially doing that with food safety more, but then looking beyond that into bacteria being a problem. But other people put together building blocks before that. It really just took into the 1800s to start to figure that out well. So those guys you mentioned, pasture lister and Dusseldorf? It might as well be.

Yeah, Ignaz Semmelweis was just a working doctor who tried stuff that those other scientists were figuring out in a more scientific. way. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, all of them really kind of separately, luckily, in conjunction with other people drug partying their way into anesthetic. We really start to get modern medicine at the end of the 1800s. And it's awesome that every listener was born after it. It's great. We're all really lucky. Yeah, for sure. That's, it's awesome not getting, you know, your leg cut off because of a mild infection. It really is.

It's a plain statement that's true. And I laugh because, wow. You laugh because Alex finds it funny when people get their limbs cut off. Everyone shame Alex. No. No. Mask slipped, right?

Oh, geez. This guy loves it. Yeah. The limb chopper enjoyer. Folks, that's the main. episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega takeaway number one, we only have a practical working understanding of anesthesia and we're trying to learn more of the details

of anesthetizing humans by doing experiments where we anesthetize plants. Mega takeaway number two, dentists, carnies, and social drug users gradually invented anesthetized. anesthetic across about 50 years. Takeaway number three, before the invention of anesthetic, European surgeons told themselves pain is helpful and important in making surgery go well. Takeaway number four, anesthesia led surgeons to kill lots more patients for the whole second half of the 1800s due to infections and explosions. And then lots and lots of numbers this week, especially about how common and widespread.

wildly safe anesthesia is in the modern world. Also, the extraordinary rarity of anyone waking up under general anesthesia. And a bizarre study published a couple weeks ago, suggesting that while you're under general anesthetic, maybe your hippocampus would like to hear podcasts, secretly incredibly fascinating, plug it in, play it, hit it. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now.

if you support this show at maximum fun.org, members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is how anesthesia helped invent the office of acting presidents of the United States. That and an amendment and colonoscopies solved almost 200 years of constitutional confusion. Visit SIFPod.com. fun for that bonus show for a library of more than 24 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. I also want to do another shout out to the podcast, Sawbones. I feel like it is unique across all the podcasting in

both being funny and featuring an actual doctor. It's Justin McElroy and Dr. Sidney McElroy, walking you through things that you will truly love if you liked our anesthesia episode at all. Anyway, by being a member, you get all sorts of special audio, and thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fund.org. Key sources this week include a book that I truly enjoyed, and I'm sure will be a source for future episodes about these kind of topics. The book is called Empire of the Scalpel, The History of Surgery. That's by medical historian and practicing surgeon Ira Rutko. Also, when I double-checked his information in taping this outro, I learned that a few months ago, Dr. Rutko passed away.

So he was an award-winning surgeon and award-winning author all at once, which is incredibly hard to do. Not all medical practitioners are also excellent science communicators and history communicators. So, you know, blessings to Dr. Rutko and his family. Hope they're all right. Our other key sources this week are a ton of digital resources from respected institutions. institutions, both about medicine and medical history. I usually lean on the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic when there are medical questions to explore, because we are not doctors, but those are good places to look. There's also some exciting science journalism from the New York

Times and Smithsonian Magazine about plants receiving anesthesia. And beyond that, we've got digital resources from the London Science Museum, the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, the U.S. National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland, and the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. And not to keep going about our sources, but one other book that I read actually in the process of us preparing to have our son, Baby Schmidt. It's a book called Matrescence. It's by journalist Lucy Jones, and she cites some truly amazing things about what's called Matrescence, the process of becoming a mother. And that's where we got the story about Pope Pius the 12th.

his public grudging sanctioning of pain relief and childbirth from the top of the Catholic Church. Like Katie said, I'm a lapsed Catholic, so I feel able to criticize that. And also I'm glad there was some progress there. Popes can be more and more progressive. Anyway, enough about that. That page also features resources such as native-land.com. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, a traditional land of the Muncie Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skate people and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are

very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each, Each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 65. That's about the topic of labor unions.

One fun fact there, we have tags on clothing, thanks to labor unions inventing them, as a signal that your clothing was union made. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more, which I believe is on hiatus and has an amazing back catalog. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode.

Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then Maximum Fun A worker-owned network

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