Stuff You Should Know - 10 Bizarre Medical Treatments

Episode Date: March 24, 2015

Medical science has a long and storied history of trying out cures and procedures that later strike us as wacky. And they're still at it today! Learn about bizarre treatments, from opium for children to tobacco smoke enemas in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation, he's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all, and now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times, it'll be funny, we'll push the envelope, we have a lot to talk about. Welcome to the Most Dramatic Podcast Ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry to my right. This is Stuff You Should Know. Why are your eyes closed? That is creepy.

You sound like Shwetty Balls, Alan Baldwin's Shwetty Balls skit from Saturday Night Live. Man, that just wafted right over here now. I'm all mellow. You mellow? Yeah. You iry? Yes, I love that the beginning of this article talks about Botox. I thought it was a pretty good intro.

It was though. One day, we're going to look back on injecting botulinum toxin A into your face and think that's just crazy. Yeah. Like, I think it's crazy now. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I see what you mean. It's nuts. Yeah, if you step back and look at it, for sure. Paralyzing your face muscles to look younger? Yeah, especially if you've ever seen Dead Calm. Why? Did you ever see that movie? Yeah, out on the water with the boat?

Yeah. Remember, he said that's what happened to the other people on the boat is that they all got botulism and died. Oh, I don't remember that. Yeah, that was his whole set up. His excuse or his explanation for what happened was botulism. But yeah, that's what I think of when I think botulism is Dead Calm. And with Botox, he ended up looking like a freak.

Oh, don't be judgmental. I'm not being judgmental, but it was pretty judgmental. No, that's judgmental, I guess. But yeah, I think that's my stance, is if you want to do that, then more power to you, but I think people look weird when they look consistently surprised. So they don't use it just for that. They use to treat migraines, excessive sweatiness. Ooh, I should get it.

Also known as hyperhydrosis. Yeah. Botox? What, like in the armpit or the hands? Yeah, like directly in there. I guess this toxin goes in and like deadens the nerve cells, maybe. I can't remember. The point is we're both agreed, even in a roundabout way, that it is a very strange,

bizarre, you might say, medical treatment to inject toxin into your face to look youthful. Yeah, I was judgy. I take it all back. It's all right. People want to do what they want to do. That's fine. But my personal feeling is that it doesn't have the desired effect to make you look like you think you look.

I'm proud of you. Thank you. So, Chuck, botulism, botulin, botox, we should say, is pretty much nothing compared to some of the other stuff that we've used in the past. And in some cases, still continue to use, because this is all based on an article on House of Words called 10 Bizarre Treatments Doctors Used to Think We're Legit. It turns out that some of this stuff actually still is legit. Yeah.

And we should plug our friends over at Sawbones. Yeah, yeah. Justin and his wife, Dr. Sidney McElroy and Justin does the My Brother and My Brother and Me podcast with his brothers. They have a spinoff, not spinoff, they have their own podcast, Sawbones, where they talk about antiquated medical, that's all they talk about, is antiquated medical treatments. And they said they were inspired by our podcast to start that one. Yeah, but every time we send somebody over to listen to them, they don't come back.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. So... Stop it, McElroy's. Yeah, we created a monster. But anyway, we are in turn inspired by them, and it's just a big... Bloodfest.

We're blowing smoke up each other's butts. Tobacco smoke. I tried to see if that was literally where that term came from, to blow smoke up your arse, but all it did was redirect to the fact that people used to do this for real. And I don't know if that's really where the term came from or not. I don't... I don't either. I can tell you where the treatment supposedly came from.

Yeah. It came from a legend. It looks like a legend. I think at the time they took it as a factual story, that a man rescued his drowned wife from a river, I think in France, and didn't know what to do, and a soldier just happened to walk by and said, take this pipe and blow the smoke, like stick one end into her rectum, and blow on the lid end, until she comes too. I don't think we've even said yet what we're talking about, which is a tobacco enema.

We're no saw bones. Tobacco enemas literally blowing tobacco smoke up the rectum of an individual for a health reason. Right. And in this case, the original reason was to revive a drowning victim, which is apparently what it was initially used for when it came into widespread use. I guess it was in widespread use, and apparently it did work in this initial legend. The wife came too on the fifth blow, and went to a local bar, and got a drink, and then

went home after being resuscitated from drowning, and then having a pipe in her rectum with smoke blown up her butt. Yes. There's speculation that if it did work, it was the intrusion of the pipe, or later on the bellows, that probably did it. But the thinking at the time was that nicotine was a stimulant, and that this would directly stimulate the person back to life. That's right.

You mentioned drowning victims, that it was so commonly used as a method for helping drowning victims that this equipment was put alongside major waterways, like very much like we would have a defibrillator today. They had these along like the River Thames, and you had to know where they were. And in 1774, Drs. William Hawes and Thomas Cogan in London formed the institution for affording immediate relief to persons apparently dead from drowning, and they later changed that name to the Royal Humane Society. That makes a lot better.

And they promoted this method by paying people four guineas to anyone who could successfully revive a drowning victim. I'll bet in those kits along the waterways, you go to use it, and the tobacco would be missing because local 12-year-olds had gotten into it. That's a good point. And there was even a little rhyme at the British Medical Association in 1774 at a meeting. Tobacco glister, because it was also called a glister, G-L-Y-S-T-E-R, these kits. Tobacco glister, breathe and bleed, keep warm and rub till you succeed, and spare no pains

for what you do, may one day be repaid to you. What is going on? You know, what goes around comes around. What's going on in the 18th century in England? I guess if you're giving a tobacco enema to somebody and you know that little rhyme, you probably would stop, because you'd be like, I don't want this coming back to me. I'd just rather pass on to the next world. Well, Dr. Richard Mead was the first guy who pioneered this in mid-1700s, and by 1811

it was kaput, because they were like, this is not working, and it's bad for you. And you're blowing smoke up someone's butt. Right. What are you thinking? Well, Dr. John, doctors were used to prescribe cigarettes going through the other end. That's right. Which is all untrue, supposedly. Oh, really?

Yeah, I guess that was the Edward Bernays thing. Oh, yeah. Hand-tent. All right, next up we have Mercury. If you've ever heard, or if you've ever seen the awesome exhibit, the Terracotta Soldiers, did you ever see that? No. China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang.

He was the one with the Terracotta Soldiers? Yeah, he was the one that was buried in this basically underground city that was so vast, and had all these Terracotta Soldiers guarding him. And his own specific tomb, they've, I was about to say, raided much of it, but they've explored much of it, but not his actual tomb still, because it has a moat of liquid mercury around it. So he's still in situ because of the local tomb? That's pretty neat.

And he took the stuff to make himself immortal, which is ironic, because it's super toxic and it killed him before he was 40. Yeah, but at the opposite effect. It did. His death didn't apparently get out to the rest of the world, because mercury was used in other kinds of medicines for a very long time, apparently up until the 40s. If you had syphilis, your doctor would give you some sort of ointment, sometimes an injection of mercury, to treat syphilis, and it may or may not have treated syphilis, but it would

definitely make your teeth fall out and make you what would, I guess, generously be called agitated. Yes. It had, there's a host of horrible things that can happen to you from mercury exposure. Yeah. The last cinnabar was what they used in China as the ore of mercury for 2,000 years. And it's just, I find it crazy that, I know it was the first emperor of China, so it was a long time ago, but it just seems weird that, hey, take this thing to make you live forever

when it's actually one of the most toxic things you can put in your body. Yes. They had it backwards. Supposedly Jeremy Piven had mercury poisoning in 2008, because he was eating sushi twice a day. I remember that. And then I heard that, and then I think I remember hearing that that wasn't true, and it was, maybe it was like made up to get out of a movie or something.

I don't know, I'll have to look into that again. I definitely remember when that happened, though, pretty strange. Sure. I mean, I love sushi, like anyone, go back and listen to our sushi podcast. But I've never had mercury poisoning. So Chuck, up next is one of my favorites, but I could find almost nothing more on this. I found that it did, in fact, exist. Yeah, me too.

And there's schematics and stuff on the internet. But the whirling chair, there's not much to it. No. Again, mid-19th century, when the mentally ill were treated very poorly, locked away, put in iron cages. They had one thing I found called a tranquilizing chair, and it's basically, it looks like an electric chair you're just sitting up completely strapped in, but you have a box over your head.

Well, what's funny is that was one of the more humane techniques for treating mental illness. Yeah. That was like the result of the humanism progressive movement from the mid-19th century. That's crazy. And sad. Oh, yeah. The history of the treatment of mental illness, not just like...

Yeah, we've talked about it a lot. Just across the ages, it's really, really sad. Yeah, very misunderstood, and still is in a lot of ways, I think. But the whirling chair was not a lobotomy, it was not an ice shower or a laxative. Or an insulin coma. Or an insulin coma. It was much better. It was a chair with a spring and lever system, basically, where they... it looks like they

had a... it was hooked up to a... Like a crank? Yeah, like a crank that you basically just spun these people around until they passed out. Yeah. And based on the schematics I saw, if you were the operator, you had to wear pantaloons. Yes. That's right, and apparently they would say it would cure your schizophrenia because it would shuffle the contents of your brain in just the right way.

Yeah. Imagine being strapped to a chair that was spun around where you became so dizzy that you passed out. Yeah. And on top of it, you have schizophrenia. Right. And then on top of that, they came out and you say, how are you feeling? Are you cured?

I'm cured, yes. Can I please go home now? Yeah, seriously. Or like, hey, at least we're not burning you at the stake for being a witch. I wish there was more out there on that, too, though. I think a lot of this stuff is just... it went the way the dodo, so there's not much info on it. Yeah.

I mean, there's nothing. Yeah. There was such a thing as a whirling chair. Here's how it worked, and the reason why they used it was to rearrange your brain if you had schizophrenia. That's right. So we'll keep going because this is a lot of fun. Yes, it is.

But first, we have to take a commercial break, and we will do that right now. Attention, Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand-new Tell All podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope, but I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about.

For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all, and now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this, and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day.

Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running

and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology? It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back, Chuck and Chuck. Do you remember what we recorded yesterday where we were talking about Antioch T? So remember we talked about how oxygen goes through and steals electrons from other atoms

and other molecules to stabilize itself? And that's the process of oxidation? If you take that process and multiply it by powers of millions, what you have is radiation poisoning, exposure to high levels of radiation is what I'm trying to say. For the most part, we do everything we can to avoid this kind of thing. But it turns out that in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there were a lot of products on the shelf that did the opposite, that introduced radiation in the form of radium in the hopes that it would promote health and cure disease.

Yeah. Mary and Pierre Curie discovered it in 1898, and by 1910, the U.S. was manufacturing synthetic radium to use in such things like radium chocolata from Birkenbrown, or radium bread from the Hitman Block Bakery. Radium bread. It was bread baked with radium water, and popular until 1936. And radium water was a big thing, the reason why it was a big thing, apparently it kicked all of this off because there are natural spas in places like Hot Springs, Arkansas.

And somebody started investigating the waters and found radon there. And they said, well, radon, that's radioactive. Where can we find that? And they said, how about radium? So they started putting radium in everything. Yeah. They had, here's some of the other products, and you can look these up. They're a lot of fun when you look at these old school ads, you know?

For the Revigator, it was a radium lace bucket, basically, with a little spigot, it's like a little water tank that holds your water. So it just introduced radiation to whatever water you put in. Yeah, or you could get what they call the radium coin, that you could just drop like an alka-selser into your water. Oh, nice. There was the radium scope, which was a toy in 1942 that offered the luminescence, and the ad also said it also doubles as a wonderful nightlight because it glows.

No. Oh, yeah. Wow. It was for kids. Wow. Toothpaste. It was a name, Alfred Curie, who was in no relation, really, even though he used that to his advantage.

I'm sure. The Curie name. And he also had the Tho-Radia brand of cosmetics rejuvenates and brightens the skin. This also kind of brings to focus why little kids' chemistry sets frequently included radioactive materials, like in the middle of the 20th century. Does it glowed? Well, no, because you could get it in water if you wanted to or cosmetics or contraceptives or chocolate.

So why wouldn't you put it in a kid's chemistry set, too? Sure. So before, I didn't understand that. Now I understand. So supposedly, the trend really started to die off in the 30s, though, thanks to something called Radithor. And Radithor was a little tincture that you would take, these little couple-fluid ounce bottles that were highly radioactive.

They had just tons of radium in them. And I guess one of the owners or one of the investors in the company, his name was Eben Byers. He was a pro golfer, too, I believe. He very publicly died of radiation poisoning because he drank three bottles of this stuff a day. Wow. So after that, the public was like, maybe we shouldn't be doing this anymore.

Well, another thing they used it for, between 1917 and 1926, the U.S. Radium Corporation used luminous paint to paint clocks, clock faces, so you could see them. And workers were even taught to shape paintbrushes with their mouths to maintain a finer point. So they were sticking the paintbrushes with the paint on them in their mouth. And they encouraged them to paint their nails, their teeth, and to ingest it. But management, suspiciously, always stayed away and avoided exposure themselves. And I know there were a bunch of lawsuits because of that. And the other thing I found, too, was they used it before Viagra and Cialis.

There were, they called them Bowgis, B-O-U-G-I-E-S, radioactive wax rods inserted into the urethra. Ah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, for a number of reasons. Yeah. Or they had like an athletic supporter containing a layer of radium impregnated fabric that you would wear if you had trouble getting an erection. That's not nearly as bad as the rods.

No, no. All right. How about ureotherapy, dude? So this one apparently is labeled quack medicine. But there's a lot of, there's a lot, it makes sense intuitively. So ureotherapy? Drinking or ingesting or having your own urine shot into your bloodstream. Yeah, yeah.

Some people inject it. Yeah. It's still a thing. It is still a thing. Yeah. Here's why. Urine is a byproduct of the blood. And when, so in urine 95% of your urine is water, 2.5% roughly is urea.

Which is actually a, has antimicrobial, antifungal and antibacterial product or properties. And it also has another 2.5% mineral stuff like that, salts, things like that. Apparently if your blood is toxic, you have toxins in your blood, your body, your body is triggered to clean it out and your urine is clean. If your urine has toxins in it, your blood is cleaned out too. There's like the symbiotic feedback loop where if one's clean, the other one's clean. If one's toxic, the other one's toxic. And that you can trigger a blood cleaning, your blood cleaning drive, supposedly by drinking

your own urine. By reintroducing the toxins over and over again, your blood could be conceivably cleaner. That's the thinking behind this. And there's actually, again, intuitively it makes sense. Yeah. Some people still think it can stimulate your immune system and actually fight cancer. Exactly. Basically by making your body, basically your immune system react more vigorously.

Right. It's like running it through the ringer on purpose. Yeah. The problem is, is there's no evidence behind it. Exactly. There are individual reports of it stopping cancer growth, but no scientific evidence has come out in favor of it. But people still do it.

Yeah. And there's also been tons of stories about people surviving for days and weeks by drinking their own urine after being trapped in like a collapsed hotel or something like that. Right. But yeah, there's still, I guess, pockets of people who engage in urine therapy. Yeah. And also we should mention it is, does not help your jellyfish sting out of there. No.

I did it. Don't be dumb on that. Oh, really? It actually definitely makes your jellyfish sting worse. That's another one of the things. Like why do people say that if it makes it worse? I don't know. It was on episode of Friends For God's sake.

I know. You know? And they propagated the lie. Jerks. Who peed on who? I can't remember. I think. Didn't they all pee on Monica?

Yeah. I think Monica got peed on. But I don't know if it was everybody. Maybe it was everybody. Of course, they didn't show it. It probably wouldn't have been. I don't know. Yeah.

I think it was. Yeah. Courtney Cox. All right. This next one. Bit of a warning. It is sexual in nature. So if you're listening, maybe you should go ask your mom or dad if you should continue

listening. If you're a child. Yeah. An honest kid. Or no. If you're an adult. Call up your elderly mother or father. Yeah.

Say, can I listen to something about the female orgasm? Right, which supposedly apparently for especially in the Victorian age, but for centuries before that was widely considered not to exist. Yeah. Right. But strangely, there was a medical procedure that women would undergo called a pelvic massage. Yes. To treat.

I don't think we even said hysteria. Right. Because women were hysterical, quote unquote. Right. They couldn't have orgasms, but they could have hysteria. Yeah. Which we should point out what hysteria was is normal female sexuality. Okay.

We know that now. Right. Back then it was hysteria. So somehow, somewhere along the way, and apparently there's evidence that in ancient Greece, the pelvic massage was carried out. Yeah. So in the Victorian age, you would go to your doctor if you're a woman and get a pelvic massage, and then you would be brought to what was called hysterical paroxysm, which

is? Orgasm. Right. You made me say it. Which didn't exist. That's right. They also, it was hysteria or wandering womb was what it was also called. Well, wandering womb was different.

Oh, it was? Yeah. That was like the idea and apparently hypocritees either at least espoused it if he didn't come up with it. So it was the idea that the womb or the uterus floated freely inside the woman and if it moved around too far, it could cause all sorts of other problems. Gotcha. So it's different than hysteria.

But the treatment was the same. Yes. Which was bringing a woman to climax. Right. A doctor. A hysterical paroxysm. Yes. And the doctor would do this initially using his hands.

And you know, I read one article from the New York Times about it and said there is no evidence that the male physicians enjoyed this. On the contrary, this male elite sought every opportunity to substitute other devices or have the husband or midwife come in and, you know, take care of business for them. Gotcha. So it wasn't some pervy doctor. This is a lot of misunderstanding going on at the time. All over.

They said by the end of the 19th century, 75% of women suffered from hysteria, which can also be read as 75% of American women were normal sexual human beings. And I guess the other 25% were just repressed and didn't know they should be or could be normal sexual human beings. So it's just crazy. They call it hysteria. And that it went up until the 1920s. So you were saying that doctors were looking for any kind of substitute that you could

get their hands on? Yeah. Well, apparently in the late 19th century, somebody introduced the vibrator. After that, it became a medical device originally when it was introduced, right? Yeah, because it brought that time to achieve the hysterical paroxysm down from anywhere up to an hour down to about 10 minutes, ideally. And you could buy them at Sears and Roebuck, you know. It was, like you said, a medical device.

And women loved them. And by the 1920s, they started to appear in erotic films. And that's when people were like, oh, well, this is not something we should use. This is no longer a medical device. Yeah, which is interesting. It's all sort of backwards, isn't it? So this one to me, Chuck, the next one leeches. Yeah, we talked a little bit about medical leeches before because they are still around,

which is kind of hard to believe if you've never heard that little tidbit. Yeah. And that's why in the intro, I was saying, like, hey, some of this stuff still works. And leeches are a sterling example of that. So for a very long time, you know, barbers were originally called barber surgeons. Yeah. And they were called that because they would perform lots of surgery, which is why the barber pole is red and white.

That's right. Supposedly they would hang their bloody towels and they would flip around in the wind. And the barber pole is symbolic of that bloody towels whipped around in the wind outside of barbers. Yeah. Supposedly. That's the legend as far as I know. I think it's true.

I believe it. But one of the things that barbers would engage in was blood blighting. Yeah. You remember the old China life sketch with Steve Martin years ago? He was a barber. You know, this is in the 70s, I think, when he was a guest. And people would come in for everything and he was like, you just need a good bleeding. Like everything under the sun people would come in for.

Let's just put a lancet in there and open up a vein and see what happens. And that's basically what they did. They would, you know, it was this more spiritual thing like the evil spirits would be out. Yeah. Through your blood. Or like we mentioned in the Anesthesia episode, they would use that for anesthesia and do stupor through blood loss. But they wouldn't always use lancets.

Oh, and apparently that was one of the reasons why George Washington may have died was just too much blood blighting. Oh, really? His doctor really, really put his foot on the gas with blood blighting. And when he was on his deathbed, he should go to Mount Vernon. Didn't you go? Yeah, I've been a couple of times. There was like a whole, they have like, I think there's the blood blighting bowl that

they used on them still there. Oh, I didn't even notice. There's a separate museum that's like brand new. I went to all that stuff. Is that where it is? Yeah. But I mean, you know, there's the bed that he died in right here. Yeah.

You can go lay in it. Blood blighting bowls right there. Yes. You can't go lay in it. Yeah, it rather than lancets, they would also sometimes use or very frequently use leeches. And they've been using them for thousands of years apparently for blood blighting. Yeah. And this was back when they practiced what was known as humoral medicine based on the

four humors in the body, which is everyone knows because of the popular t-shirt we sell, flim yellow bile, black bile and blood for the four humors. Right. What t-shirt do we sell? I was just kidding. Yeah, totally. The four humors just have that on there. And then S-Y-S-K on the front.

Okay. We could be a big seller. Yeah, sure. Who doesn't want a shirt that says black bile and flim? Yeah, flim. So with blood blighting or with using leeches for blood blighting, everyone who, I think it was the Indians originally from India who came up with this using leeches for blood blighting.

And they were really onto something. Sure. And as you said, medical leeches are still in use today here in the United States. They are an FDA-approved medical device. That's right. And leeches secrete something called herudin. That's what I'm going with, herudin. Herudin.

H-I-R-U-D-I-N. I'll bet the guys from Sawbones would have said it, right? And in their saliva, you will find herudin and herudin is an anticoagulant or no, it's a coagulant. Yes. It's a coagulant, so you don't bleed to death. It has antibiotic properties. It's a numbing agent, and it's a vasodilator, right?

Which means that it relaxes your blood so it can flow more freely. But it also is an anticoagulant, so you don't bleed to death. All of this in leech saliva, and they use it today for, like, skin grafts and for when they reattach limbs, that kind of thing. Yes. I think we had someone even write in and send us pictures of their medical leeches, which are in little vials. It's pretty cool.

It is pretty neat. But I mean, this is an ancient, ancient, millennia-old medical technique that is still, to this day, used, and it's an FDA-approved medical device. Now, leeches are. I just think that's really cool. It is super cool. You know, because it means they're still an open mind in the medical community. Oh, yes, way open.

You know? You can try whatever. We are going to keep going. I say we do all 10 for the first time ever. What about you? Yeah, let's do it. All right. We're going to keep going right after this.

Attention, Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand-new Tell All podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about.

For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all, and now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this, and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day.

Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Chitikler, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running

and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Patrick Curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. There's a Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. We're back. Yeah, man. We're taking it home with...

I'm just... I'm doing some... I'm taking some medicine, man, some cocaine and opium. I bought it at the corner store. Yeah, and then you could buy your rig to inject it from the Sears catalog. Yeah, my cocaine kit. Yeah. And scene.

So, were we doing a scene? I was playing myself. Yeah, I was doing a scene. Apparently, you could get morphine, cocaine, all this stuff very, very easily, and in tons of medical or medicine and elixirs that you would buy over the counter in the 19th century. Yeah, and not just medicines. Cocaine was in a lot of stuff, most notably, Coca-Cola at first, cocaine tooth drops, give your kids cocaine throat lozenges.

We did... You just reminded me... We did a gallery. There's a gallery on stuff you should know. You have the cocaine poster, right, the kid... Yeah, cocaine tooth drops. It's like crazy medical ads or medicine, pharmaceutical ads from yesteryear. We'll put that up when this is really good stuff.

But that one's in there, the cocaine tooth drops, and it's got a little kid playing happy because he's on cocaine. Yeah, playing vigorously. And look at this kid. Did you see Mrs. Winslow's soothing syrup for teething children? I did. Look at how wasted that kid is. Yeah, he can't even pick his head up off the pillow.

It's hilarious. His eyes are half-lidded. He's like, I love teething. For the throat lozenges, the ad says, indispensable for singers, teachers, and orators. To quiet a sore throat. And to quiet the demons in your head. Yeah, or to add the demons in your head. Or how about this, cocaine wine.

The Coca wine market was really big. I've not heard of that. Yeah, the Vin Mariana was the most recognized and most popular brand at the time, but there were a lot of them. And that's just cocaine. We also talked about opium. There was something, I saw another ad for something called Stickney and Pours Paragoric, and McCormick made that, the popular spice maker.

And they even have the recommended doses for infants, children, and adults. And it was 46% alcohol, and the rest was opium. Wow. 92 proof. Man. Oh, is that Lodanum or Lodanum? Oh, Lodanum? Yeah.

No. But that was like an opium-alcohol mix, right? Yeah, maybe I guess it was Lodanum. Is that how you say it? Lodanum? Yeah, I think so. Gotcha. It's not the same as the Lodid, right?

Right. It's different. But the Lodid is an opiate, but it's just a straight-up opiate that's used for medicine. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. People just used to put a few drops under their tongue, and it would see their child. Or like, I know we've talked about the Soderbergh's TV show of the Nick. The Nick. Is that on still?

I don't know. I haven't kept up with it lately. But in the opening episodes, I mean, the doctor, what's his face is like shooting cocaine between his toes on a daily basis. I watched Ed Wood again the other day. First of all, it's even better than ever. It's a great movie. Hilmary, so great.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I forgot Martin Landau's like a junkie in it. Yeah. He's an opium fiend, right? Yeah. Yeah. But he injects it using his Sears and Roebuck opium injection kit.

Oh, was it Sears and Roebuck? No. But probably. Yeah, they used to sell lots of crazy things. So yeah, strong drugs available over the counter until people wised up and started making strong drugs pharmaceutical style. Right. Yeah.

They're like, you can't have this anymore unless you come to the hospital. Exactly. I'll hook you up. How about Trepanation Man, which you pointed out we talked about before in the lobotomy episode? I think so. I know we've mentioned it at some point because we talked about the movie Pie. Yeah.

Where spoiler alert. Oh, yeah. Big spoiler. That's how it ends. Yeah. Well, it turns out that people have done that. There was a guy named Bart Hughes who was a, I guess, kind of like a crazy genius from the 1960s.

We're just crazy. He decided that our brains originally were constructed for us to be walking on all fours. And once we started walking upright, the blood supply to our brain was diminished. Makes sense in a weird way. He also decided that our skulls had grown to decrease blood flow in the brain. And that the best way to counteract this was to cut a hole in your skull to allow more blood flow. Yeah.

That's what trepanation is. Drilling a hole in your skull. Right. Or cutting a whole piece, a square, a circle, like removing a sizeable chunk. There's evidence of trepanation that goes back thousands of years. Like 10,000 years. Yeah. And some of these skulls show almost half the skull removed.

But what's crazy is with trepanation, including Bart Hughes' own self-trepanation, the patient frequently survived. And this is long before anesthesia. We're talking, again, 10,000 years ago, where people were basically held down and somebody in say Peru or Mesoamerica or India or Russia, all over the place. This practice was carried out. They would grab an obsidian rock and start shaving away at the scalp and then basically chisel out a portion of the skull and remove it to allow the brain to either to allow evil

spirits out. Yeah. Back then, that was more of the line of thought. Or it's possible that they were treating an injury and this would reduce brain swelling. I found a great article in Vice. They did an interview with Amanda Fielding, who in the 1970s trepanned herself. She was a follower of Bart Hughes, I'll bet. She was, I think.

She's a director of the Beckley Foundation who does research into consciousness, man. She actually made a little film of her doing it, which you can watch. It looks like Super 8 and it's like super choppy. It's not very intensive, but it's two and a half stars, two and a half stars, two tomatoes. But it does show her drilling herself in the head. She said she was very cautious and prepared very carefully, but she used an electric drill with a flat bottom and a foot pedal, tested the drill on the membranes of my hand to see if it would damage the skin and then did it and made a film about it.

And then she said, afterward I wrapped my head in a scarf, ate a steak to replace iron from lost blood and went to a party. And she points out that she's not advocating self trepanation at all. But she said it benefited her. She said there was a feeling of the tide coming in slowly and gently, very subtly. One thing she really noticed was a change in her dream patterns. Her dreams became much less anxious, but she also says that it could be a placebo as well. She acknowledges all that.

But it was interesting. This was the 1970s and I think she was a follower of that guy because she said that the loss of pulse pressure in the brain when your fontanelles closed basically is the reason that she did it. She fully believed that. That's part hues all over the place. Yeah, totally. So don't do it, people.

No. Do we need to say that? I don't think so. I hope not. All right. We got one more. You thought it couldn't get any weirder. Corpse medicine.

A.K.A. cannibalism. Yeah, that's another way to put it. Which we did not cover in cannibalism, weirdly, did we? I'd be surprised. I don't think we did. I think that was pretty comprehensive if we didn't. You don't remember doing it. Of course, that doesn't mean anything.

So corpse medicine or cannibalism is basically eating human flesh to cure disease. And apparently, it started out with the Egyptians who decided that if you ate mummies. Yeah, or mummy powder, at least. Yeah. It could cure a lot of different diseases. Yeah, like muscle aches and headaches. They also would rub human fat on, like, topically on your body if they thought something was wrong.

Drinking the blood of a gladiator in ancient Rome was supposedly enough to cure your epilepsy. Yeah. How about that? Yeah. Drinking blood was a big one just throughout the ages. Speaking of mummies also, it wasn't just food. There's this awesome cult of weird article about mummy brown up until the 19th century. I think maybe even the 20th century, mummies were used to make a specific type of brown

pigment used in paints called mummia. Interesting. Yeah. And then the artists started to figure out where it was actually coming from and they stopped using it. But mummia brown came from mummies. Is that still a color? I think, yeah.

So you can get, like, bare premium plus mummy and brown. Right. Right. I don't think it's made with mummies anymore, but yeah, I've seen it before. I'd seen it before I read the article. Huh. So it's out there somewhere. Yeah.

What else would they eat? Fat bones? Yeah. Fat bones. Yeah. Grind it up and eat it. And you'll be cured. That's right.

There's a pretty cool Smithsonian article called the gruesome history of eating corpses of medicine if this kind of thing rings your bell. If you just got to know more. Yeah. Yeah. You got anything else? No. You ready for a nap?

Yeah. Yeah. And this one. Yeah. If you want to know more about bizarre stuff, type the word bizarre in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it will bring up this and who knows what else. Yeah. We got a lot of bizarre things in there.

Yeah. And both of us just said bizarre. So now it's magic listener mail time. Hey, before I read listener mail, I want to ask a favor for my notes. Songs for Kids is a great foundation run out of here in Atlanta. What they do is they put musicians in children's hospitals and camps for kids with special needs and basically play music for them. That's awesome.

It's that simple and it's really neat and you can start a fundraising page through your band. Right. So I thought let me try and raise $2,000. Whoa. That's lofty goal. I thought it was pretty small. Oh yeah.

That's what it is. So my old man band El Chippo, we started a page and you can donate as little as $10 and that would really mean a lot to me and those kids. So just go to songsforkidsfoundation.org slash El Chippo, E-L-C-H-E-A-P-O, that's the band. Do you have a song in particular you want to play? No. You'll play any of the 500 songs? I'll play any of them.

That's a great attitude. Yeah. Just go to songsforkidsfoundation.org slash El Chippo and like I said, donate $10 or more if you want and help El Chippo reach their goal of $2,000. And I really appreciate it folks. Nice. All right. So listen to me.

I'm going to call this the or the, the, the or the, greetings from Manhattan guys. I just finished catching up on a few weeks of podcasts. I was excited to hear you mention the pronunciation of the in the folklore episode. I studied vocal music throughout my youth and in college and one of the more important rules for my teachers that stuck out with me was about the word the. Word and word combinations can sound surprisingly different when they're sung versus spoken. So there are a bunch of interesting tricks used to counteract this dip thongs are used to emphasize two adjacent vowels.

So a listener can hear both while glottal stops create a discrete stop between words. So they sound distinct rather than like a big old mess of sounds. With the word the, the trick is to slightly adjust how it's pronounced. The should be used when it precedes a word beginning with a consonant and the, sorry, and the should be used when it precedes a vowel may sound silly and bourgeois, but there is a reason for this. Like Josh guest, a phrase like the apple sounds normal when it's spoken, but when you're singing and your words are strung together, it starts to sound a lot more like the apple.

Make sense, which is weird and a made up word, but switch to the apple and suddenly you've got yourself two fine words that sound recognizable, even when sung. Next time you're listening to any vocal music, keep an ear out for this. I bet you'll start to notice this use everywhere. Big shout out to my former vocal teacher, Mrs. Alpharth, A-U-F-F-A-R-T-H, Alpharth. So you would say the Alpharth. That's right. Not Alpharth.

So she thanks her for making her such a nut about pronunciation and that is from Nicole. Thanks a lot, Nicole. Very nice. We appreciate that. More knowledge. Just, we just keep packing it in. It's oozing. If you want to impart some more knowledge, if you want to inject it like some sort of

urine therapy into our veins or botulism in our face, you can tweet to us via syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House.

But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill Podcast and I want to tell you about a really exciting episode.

We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was, whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like I already love myself enough. Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself?

No. This is Cheekies and Chill on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.