The Infinite Monkey Cage - An Unexpected History of the Body

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

Brian Cox and Robin Ince uncover the unexpected history of the body in the archives of the Royal Society with special guests Prof Helen King, Sir Mark Walport, Keith Moore and Ed Byrne. Together they dissect some of the most surprising and peculiar beliefs that have been held about the body over the last 500 years, from wandering-womb hypotheses to tobacco-enema resuscitations. They unearth how scientific discoveries have often originated from brave individuals, willing to volunteer their own bodies in the pursuit of science. Our panellist Sir Mark Walport has continued in this tradition of self-experimentation, and has with him x-rays of his own faeces for show and tell!Producer: Melanie Brown Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem Researcher: Olivia JaniBBC Studios Audio Production

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. This week on Witness History, we're bringing you programmes about food, the dispute between Japan and South Korea over fermented cabbage. Kristetta Cumberford tells us how she became the first person of colour to be the top White House chef, and how Hollywood bigwigs mocking British food led to the creation of one of the most popular cookery programmes on the planet. Witness History, the podcast that takes you to amazing moments in history told through the eyes of the people who were there. Search and subscribe to Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts. BBC Sounds music radio podcasts.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince and this is the Infinite Monkey Cadaver from the Royal Society in London because we are doing the great work of of course historical scientific institutions. We will be reenacting the illegal dissection of a human being from a graveyard that we visited. But unfortunately, because this is radio, you won't see any of it. But you can imagine the scene. No, today we will be discussing the human body in all its baffling complexity.

Perhaps the most beautiful example of the maxim that natural selection doesn't come up with the best solution, but the least worst. Robin. Why did I go there? Well actually I do accept it. I am very much in terms of like you know I'm the grey goblin in a cardigan right between the two of us and I can say that I do accept as many readers from the Radio Times do that Brian is almost perfect. Except he doesn't have a belly button button make of that what you wish Adam the angel Jimmy Carr and you Yeah, I was gonna explain that joke to the listeners, but I can't now

Yeah, because I think you wouldn't believe that he was like a normal boy like you. You don't think him as a human boy. You think of him as an AI experiment gone wild on Channel 4. But the background you need to understand that joke is that Adam and Eve shouldn't have had... Well, it's one of the most important questions of science is, did Adam and Eve have a navel? And if so, why? Because they weren't born.

Because they weren't born, yeah. So that is mainly what we're going to be dealing with. Didn't they have navels because God poked them to see if they, why? Because they weren't born. Because they weren't born, yeah. So that is mainly what we're gonna be dealing with. Didn't they have navels because God poked them to see if they were done? Oh. That's supposed to be the... I'll tell you what, those nuns taught you well, Ed. Those nuns taught you well. Is that genuinely what you're taught?

It's, I have heard that one before. That it's just, you know, I didn't, not as a fact. I'm no expert. No. I don't think we've ever had so much science in the first three minutes of the show. Let's keep going. Today we're discussing some of the more peculiar beliefs concerning the human body over the last 500 years as documented in the archives of the Royal Society. Joining us today are two eminent professors, an eminent librarian, and a winner of All-Star

Family Fortunes. And they are. So I'm Mark Wulport. I'm a physician by background, and I'm a vice president and joint foreign secretary of the Royal Society. One of the most ridiculous things that humans believed about the body was that gastric and duodenal peptic ulcers were largely caused by stress. And that was until the mid-1980s, by which time I was already a consultant, and how wrong they were.

And I'm Helen King. I'm at the Open University, and I'm a historian of medicine and the body, particularly the female body. But hey, we've all got bodies. And I suppose one of the weirdest things people have believed about bodies is that if you want to give birth to a boy the man has to tie up his left testicle and the woman has to lie on her right side so it goes right to right. If you want to have a girl but who would ever want to do that you do it the other way around. But the other way around you mean the woman ties up her left testicle? You don't know how close you are. It was believed that women had testicles and that women produced seed for a very long time.

Men's seed, woman's seed, mix, have a little bit of a battle. Whoever wins, that's the bit that you get. So you get your father's nose, if your father's nose seed was having a particularly good day and your mother's nose seed wasn't. Four minutes in and we've never had this much great science on the show. My name is Ed Byrne, a comedian who dropped out of a BSc in horticulture sometime in the

mid-90s from Strathclyde University and one thing I'm fascinated about that people used to believe about the human body is that they used to believe right up until well into the 20th century that there was forensic value in preserving the eyes of murder victims and that you could actually By you could remove the eye and put it in alum and you would give you an image of the last thing They saw when it had I did actually lead to a conviction once because they told a German murderer that they'd done it And that they saw the image of his victims and he confessed. His name was Fritz Angerstein, which if you were to make up a name for a German murderer,

you couldn't do better than Fritz Angerstein, could you? My name is Keith Moore. I'm the librarian at the Royal Society. The weirdest thing we all believe about human bodies is that they're never gonna wear out and they'll last forever. Oh no. That is evidenced by Robin.

And this is our panel. Just before we start, I just want to, one thing that you, David, just talking about there, which is we had the guy, Australian scientist, who basically proved – this was years ago, wasn't it? – who had proved that the duodenal ulcers weren't there. So this was Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. And Robin Warren was a pathologist who saw when he was looking down a microscope at samples, biopsies that were taken from people with dyspepsia, had what looked like bacteria on the surface. And they were there, plain and easy to see, but no one had noticed them before

and Robin Marshall was a young gastroenterologist in training who became his graduate student and basically associated these bacteria, but he then came on to something that we may come back to which is he did a self-experiment So people wouldn't believe him they were convinced that this was all to do with excess acid secretion and They were convinced that this was all to do with excess acid secretion and there was a nasty operation done which was called vagotomy and pyloroplasty where they cut the nerve that was related to the secretion of acid by the stomach and then cut open the exit of the stomach into the duodenum so that food could get out

and it was a horrid operation and of course so he swallowed a culture of corridor operation. And of course, so he swallowed a culture of Helicobacter pylori, which is the bacterium, from two culture plates. And lo and behold, nine days later, he felt really grotty. He had stomach ache. He started vomiting in the morning. And he had taken the precaution of checking that the bacteria was sensitive to an antibiotic

called metronidazole. And his wife told him, he bloody well better take some metronidazole. And the biopsies did show that he'd got gastric inflammation. So it was an amazing example of self-experimentation. And he won the Nobel Prize. And he won the Nobel Prize. That's absolutely right. So there's the advice to anyone who's, no he didn't.

No. Keith, you've been scouring the archive for us. So if we go back right to the start of the Royal Society What are the earliest records here that we have that document the human body? Well, a lot of the early fellows of the Royal Society were physicians. So they were quite interested in in medical matters But they also collected earlier books on medicine and we have a flap book over there, which is one from 1638 by Johann Remerlin. And this is where you lift up the flaps, paper flaps,

and explore the human body as if you were dissecting it bit by bit. And we have here a man and a woman together, so you can compare the differences. Helen, you've got that right in front of you. I know. So, is Helen allowed to look under the flaps? Well, there's a hazard warning in that you may be ambushed by the devil while you do

that. Yeah. Thanks for that. So, this is the most beautiful object. It's a large page. It's got black and white printing on it. It's got a man's body and a woman's body facing each other, various organs sort of scattered around the place. And at the bottom there's a lower torso of a woman and you can lift up all these different flaps. This book is so flappy. Sometimes you've got nine levels of flaps. Just keep going, woo. And it's that thing about what's happening inside the body,

it's all very secret. Before MRIs and x-rays and things, how do you know what's going on inside? You get a flap book. It's basically like, where's spot, but where's spleen? You got it. But could you? So yes, we've got here the devil posed,

can you guess, I think you can, over the female genitalia. What about that? I've heard he spends a lot of time there. And so when you lift that up, then you have a little look and you've got a little clothing and then, oh, naughty bits. Oh, more naughty bits, wombs, oh, innards, oh.

And you just keep going, so many, oh, exciting layers. But it's covered initially by the devil. Yeah. In terms of anatomical accuracy, putting the devil aside, how accurate or otherwise is this? It's not bad, because it's the previous century, the 16th century, where they really get into dissection as a medical technique.

And by this stage, there have been some amazing anatomists who've come out with all sorts of things. So, I mean, 1559, Rialdo Colombo, oh, I've just discovered the clitoris, for example. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. That wasn't anything to do with his research. And he was about 65 years old

and his wife was furious it had taken that long. Just because someone had to do that joke and I do apologize. Thank you. You shared it beautifully. So he discovered the clitoris and he went, there's this funny little rectangle and if you touch it, even with your little finger, it's a bit personal, isn't it? The woman goes wild and seed flows in all directions. It's back to that female seed that comes out, the female testicles that we don't believe

in anymore. So big moment. But it's not just the clitoris, it's everything else. So in 1543, Andreas Vesalius, one of the most famous anatomists in the history of anatomy, published a huge book in which he went through the whole human body, found all sorts of things like extra little bits of finger that only very few people have, denied the clitoris existed, just saying, looked everywhere, couldn't find it, but you know. It's not an unusual problem, is it?

Historically. And what he did was he did a different way of exposing the body. So rather than having flaps, he had a corpse sort of walking through the environs of his town in Italy, the Italian countryside, all very beautiful. And as the corpse walks, each picture has a bit more falling off. So his muscles sort of fall off and his skin falls off and eventually he's just a load of bones walking through the countryside. So sort of another way of doing, let's go inside the body. This way, the flat book way, you're actually looking in and you're doing it. You, the reader, are lifting the flaps. It's quite exciting.

So, at this point when that was done, wasn't there this theory that basically women would just, because as well as the seed theory, I read somewhere that they were basically just considered to be the equivalent of a barn. That it was the man's sperm would go inside the lady and then it would grow into a baby and really she had nothing to do with it at all. That's one of the theories around. There are lots of theories around because no one really knew. So yeah, that's one theory. Women contribute absolutely nothing.

And of course, wombs have always been weird. So do wombs wander around the body? Most of history people have thought they did. If they wander around the body but then you history, people have thought they did. If they wander around the body, but then you find out there are ligaments anchoring them to the pelvis, you go, oh yeah, but they're special stretchy ligaments. So wombs can still go whooshing up,

but they get pulled back again. So lots of myths about the female body that lasted from the ancient Greeks into the 17th and 18th centuries. Where did that come from though? Why did people think the womb was moving around the body? Because women were sort of seen as unstable in so many ways, mentally unstable, but also physically unstable.

Even their wombs wouldn't stay in position. Was it to do with the menstrual cycle and not understanding of that, or was it something else? It's partly the menstrual cycle. I mean, actually, the menstrual cycle has been seen as a really valuable thing in women's history, in the history of women's medicine, because it's supposed to give women actually a health advantage, because you've got an extra orifice which is letting stuff out.

So in earlier medical systems where they believed in most diseases being due to stuff being overproduced or getting stuck somewhere, having an extra hole to let it out was actually a great thing. So women with a serious fever were considered possibly more likely to get better than men were. Well, moving on, I think we should move on to an account. Let's take like a womb and move on. I think we should move on to an account of a fork that puts up the anus. Oh, I think so too.

Which was by Robert Payne, A case study from 1725. Now can I ask Keith, why do you choose this particular case study? It's the original, I slipped in the shower and found something of their story. Every emergency room has one, you know, but this is an 18th century version, which I just think is fantastic. An account, I love it, it goes straight to the point with the heading, an account of a fork put up the anus that was afterwards drawn out through the buttock. James Bishop, an apprentice to a ship carpenter in Great Yarmouth, about 19 years of age, had violent pains in the lower part of the abdomen for six or seven months. It did not appear to be any species of the colic.

He sometimes made bloody urine, which induced me to believe it might be a stone in the bladder. He was very little really. At no point, when he's got all these things wrong with him, has he said, well, I did once put a fork up my bum. You know, there's no mention of it. You would think even a 19-year-old apprentice to a ship carpenter would still know there might be a connection between his severe pain.

I don't know, but the ship stuff, I'm thinking a bunch of sailors knocking about and that he didn't realize that when he was asleep, when he was drunk one night, someone stuck a fork up there. And so he didn't even, he was totally unaware of the foot, but we are only at the beginning of the story, so this may well, may have a revelation. A tumor appeared in the left buttock

on or near the gluteus maximus, two or three inches from the verge of the anus, name of my band at college. A little slow big upwards. A short time after he voided perlent matter by way of the anus every day for some time. That's very scientific, but some time. That's a very scientific sometime. The tumor broke, I suspected, a fistula inano but could not get the

probe by the orifice of the sore into the rectum shortly after. The prongs of a fork appeared through the orifice of the sore. So just poked out through his buttock and they basically made an incision and pulled it out. But he said he didn't feel any pain at the 19-year-old until it started to come out again. But you've missed why he did it, which is he was costive. In other words, he was constipated. So this was a bit of self-therapy, allegedly.

And why is this account in the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society? What's the scientific value? So, I mean, I think in the early days, a lot of the reports in the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society were case studies of things that were interesting and odd. And in fact, you know, that's not particularly interesting these days, but you still learn an enormous amount from single rare things happening and they tended to be submitted as letters Which if they were interesting were then published in the philosophical transactions and that idea that Progress was made by a chance chance. Yeah, there is things that happened

That's quite central to the early history of medicine. Well, and and to this day actually so I'll give you a specific example So I'm this book and oops the covers come with my hand, but actually Just to describe the what is that? What was it so the cover was already What is it? Yeah. What was it? So the cover was already off, Mark. You're okay there.

So this is Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice by William Beaumont. It's an American book from 1834 and has a very curious story about a fur trapper. Absolutely. So I'll tell you all about him. So this chap, William Beaumont, who was a surgeon, encountered a guy called Alexis St. Martin. And he was a voyageur, and the A.G. in the middle. He wasn't a voyageur. He was a voyageur.

And they were the people who worked for licensed fur traders in Canada. Anyway, he had the misfortune to be shot with a musket in 1822 and was extraordinarily lucky to survive, because it basically made a bloody great hole in his stomach. Initially, whenever he ate, he had a very stormy recovery. The food will come out through this opening between the skin and the stomach, but after a while, the food started

to be just disappear normally and digested. And so this gave William Beaumont the perfect number of one experiment where he could have access to this guy's stomach. And he did an incredible series of experiments. The ethics of all of this doesn't really bear a consideration. But what he would do is he would put food on silk

and put it in the stomach and then investigate what happened to it. And he used every experimental tool imaginable. So on August 1st, 1825, introduced through the perforation into the stomach the following articles of diet suspended by a silk string. Viz, a piece of high-seasoned a la mode beef, a piece of raw salted fat pork,

a piece of raw salted lean beef, a piece of stale bread, and a bunch of raw sliced cabbage. And then at only interval now, he pulled all this stuff out to see what had happened to it. And so at one o'clock an hour later, the cabbage and the bread were about half digested, but the meat was unchanged.

He put it back in the stomach. At two o'clock, he pulled them out again. He found the cabbage, bread, pork and boiled beef was all cleanly digested and had gone from the string. At two o'clock, the ala mode beef was partly digested and I could go on, but the smell and taste of the fluids of the stomach was slightly rancid and the boy complained of some pain and uneasiness at the breast and he returned them again. And the next day he said, well, I'll give him some caramel pills.

That was Mercurus chloride. Mercury is terribly poison. Used as a purgative. But, I mean, he did some extraordinary things because he basically licked the stomach. So he stumbled, Beaumont stumbled the stomach with his tongue and found that before he'd had any food, it was all right. But the second he put any food in the stomach, it became acid. I mean, he really was an extraordinary experimenter. He sent a pint of this chap's fluid across the Atlantic to Baselius in Sweden, the great chemist.

And I don't think I got a reply, actually. But it was an astonishing example of what you can learn from an extraordinary adverse event. The ability to sew the guy up was... We had the prize. It could have been sewn up. He could have been sewn up. That's certainly true. Did he decide not to...

I mean, I know you didn't know the guy. I'm not suggesting that, but is there any record of how voluntarily he decided not to sew it up? I think there were economic grounds which basically meant that the chap didn't have any income and so basically he took him into service. It sounds like the old magician thing, doesn't it? It's all that silk thread and now flags of the world and an old sausage as well. That's true about brain injury as well, isn't it?

That a lot of psychiatric study has been done just because of what part of the brain has been damaged in an accident or something. Or a stroke. I mean, that's exactly right. In the 19th century, how the nervous system mapped to different functions in the body could be mapped by either an injury or a tumour sometimes, or a stroke, because you knew exactly where it was in the brain, and then you knew which part of the body didn't work. I remember reading about, is it Claudius Galen?

Yeah, Galen. Apparently it was only when he was basically treating gladiators who'd been injured that he realised that people had always thought the heart was the thinking area, is that right? That's right. And then he found out, he thought hang on a minute, I'm not so sure because it seems that anyone who's had half of their brain eaten by a lion is behaving really erratically. And so again, that's just kind of quite grotesque,

but at the same time going on, I'm just going to make a couple of notes. Moving through the history of medicine, so we move through, we've got a series of artifacts which are detailing inoculations initially for the smallpox in what 1724? Well, that's right. So the idea of inoculating against smallpox, which is a major killer, was brought to England by Lady Mary Waterly Montague.

And it, but it comes from the Ottoman Empire. That's right. Yeah, from Constantinople. Yeah. So the women there would have effectively smallpox parties where they would have smallpox matter taken from survivors. They put it in nutshells, cut your arm, bind the nutshell to that, that introduced smallpox matter to the arm. And this began to take off in England. Lady Mary promoted the idea, including to the arm and this began to take off in England. Lady Mary promoted the idea

including to the aristocracy and we have some of the records here. She inoculated her own daughter first of all, quite a brave thing to do, and after a few Newgate prisoners began on the English royal family which is rather amazing you know. Yeah the children of the royal family. I love that very casual after a few Newgate prisoners. It was only six, only six. This week on Witness History, we're bringing you programmes about food, the dispute between Japan and South Korea over fermented cabbage, Christetta Cumberford tells us how she became the first person of colour to be the top White House chef

and how Hollywood bigwigs mocking British food led to the creation of one of the most popular cookery programmes on the planet. Witness History, the podcast that takes you to amazing moments in history told through the eyes of the people who were there. Search and subscribe to Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Was there any understanding of the process by which this was offering protection against the disease at that time? Not really, but I mean they did the challenge studies so I mean they knew it was specific and they did challenge people with smallpox afterwards and found that it wasn't, they were protected. But I mean, Joran was astounding because he really was the first rigorous quantitative medical scientist. And so he answered three questions. Firstly, the thing you'd quite like to know is what's the risk of dying of

those who'd been inoculated? Because this was not completely safe. And so in 845 inoculations, 17 people died. That was 2%. This would not pass the test for a modern vaccine. But then he wanted to know, what was the risk of an un-inoculated person dying of natural smallpox, which is a really critical question. And actually, and they used bills of mortality for that, they found that just over 8%, so

one in 12 of all deaths at the time were attributable to smallpox. So this was a really important cause of death. And then finally, he asked the question, what's the risk of someone who contracts smallpox dying as a result? And that was over 16%. So I mean, this really did reduce your risk of dying. But nevertheless, if you were one of the unfortunate ones that did, there wasn't much consolation to you or your family. It's interesting that the royal family were...

Absolutely. ...with those kind of odds because we have a predisposition as humans, don't we, to not really understand statistics in that sense. The reduction of risk, it feels like the best thing to do is just try and... It's a risky thing to be inoculated at the time. You're absolutely right. But I mean at the time they were inoculated they had no idea that it was 2% you know they are on about the first two pages of that volume you find Princess Amelia and Princess Caroline who were two of the daughters of George II I think. I think also we kind of underestimated the fear of smallpox. I mean, Lady Mary of Montague lost a brother to smallpox.

She was a society beauty. Her complexion was completely ruined by it. It was a dangerous, dangerous thing, a big killer. And people would take treatments if they thought it was gonna make the difference for them. And they were especially concerned about their children. Yeah, and that individual thing has to be important because as Keith says, you know, Lady Mary's brother died of it. That personal thing is enough to make you think, okay, I'll take this risk.

Is there something as well, looking at these, you know, it feels to me that sometimes there's a very short memory that we can go back there are people alive today who Saw their friends sometimes die of diseases that have either been eradicated or almost eradicated and now in the 21st century During kovat, etc. We've seen a lot of kind of an anti-vax movement It feels to me there is a real pragmatic thing behind knowing these stories of knowing what life was like I think that's absolutely right. I mean scarlet fever was something that people thought had gone away. This was a major killer up until the middle of the 19th, 20th century when penicillin was discovered. But scarlet fever is beginning to come back.

As antibiotic resistance rises then we're seeing infections that people had forgotten about. Now Helen you mentioned earlier x-rays. We've got quite a few remarkable records of early X-rays. I should say it was discovered in 1895. We had a discussion about how to pronounce it. I said Röntgen, I would say. Röntgen. Röntgen, yeah. So 1895, one of the seminal discoveries in history of particle physics actually led to the revolution in atomic physics not long. But actually there's a wonderful photograph here which was taken I think at a party here,

well at the Royal Society, a Royal Society soiree not long after the discovery, 1896, where there's this beautiful x-ray of a hand, which again is this, the cavalier sort of, x-rays now are rather carefully controlled things because we understand them, but this is only a few months after the discovery of these things, and there they are at a party, taking x-rays of each other.

Yeah, so is that why a lot of the paintings around here from that period, everyone seems to have a hook? Yeah, so could you describe some of these, the history of x-rays, which is relatively recent. We're coming into the turn of the 20th century now. These photographs were taken by Alan Archibald, Campbell Swinton, who's a very interesting

electrical engineer. He pretty much predicted how television was gonna work before anybody had invented television. He'd been a photographer since he was a school boy. He was interested in new photographic techniques. So when x-ray photography came along, he was the first in England to make x-ray photographs. And at a Royal Society Soiree, he took photographs of great figures, the great scientists of the day. And they also took pictures of hidden items. So for example they'd take an x-ray photograph of a purse so you could see the coins inside

without opening the purse. So they... It was almost a party trick at the time. It's a party trick, yeah, yeah. Haven't you brought, Mark, a particularly personal x-ray with you? I have, yes. I have. I'll pass it round. If you hold it up to the light, you might be able to guess what it is. But for the audience, it's... So this is an x-ray of me.

And as a medical student, I was sort of desperate to get involved in research and publications. And in fact, so I volunteered for this study, which was a study done at Central Middlesex Hospital measuring gut transit time, in other words the length of time that food took to get from your mouth out the other end. Well I can see there's no fork up here. No. But what you can see is it's got lots of little radio-paint plastic markers. And so what they gave us was you would swallow with your breakfast a little packet of plastic markers

and basically collect everything that came out the other end for days afterwards and then they would x-ray the stools, so these are x-rays of my stools. And it was actually a rather hairy time because this was in 1976 when the IRA were bombing London and you had to sort of take these things to Central Middlesex Hospital on the tube in a bloody great thermos flask full of dry ice which looked extremely sinister. It didn't smell too bad because it was frozen and I found the paper when I was looking at it and I got my name on the paper. So what did you find out?

Because now we've looked at your stools and you know what, it is the first time that's really happened on this show. So with all the plastic markers, was it always breakfast first of all? Yes it was breakfast and actually you should worry about recovery and what they didn't tell me at the time is they didn't get them quite all back so I suspect there may still be one hiding in my appendix. I'm just worried about you, you said it's like a thermos flask, I was thinking of someone suddenly going, Mark I tried some of your soup yesterday. Well I've never said this before but some of them ended up in my mother's freezer for a while. She was pretty unkeen. She was like, I've

got some of this black pudding with me breakfast. Helen, have you ever found yourself involved in an experiment and thinking, do you know what, sometimes people look at me askew when I'm at parties but I'm just doing research. No, but I have to say I did break the all-comers record in bowel transit time at a clinic, so I'm just going to say, you know, you may think you've got it but I broke a record. So bowel transit time. Yes. Okay, so this was with barium meal. So it's very specific. It's the point at which your barium meal goes from your tummy

to the point where it's whizzing into your gut. I wouldn't like to say how fast it was, but they did say afterwards. I've broken the record. Do you know what I mean? Just a rough idea, minutes, hours, what are we talking about? It was not very many minutes, actually. It was pretty quick.

You have this thing where barium meals and barium enemas. Sorry, it's such a great topic. So, you know, one lot goes in the top, one lot goes in the bottom, and then they x-ray the bit in the middle that they can't get the barium to. So they're busy working out

what point they have to do that. It's the only record I've ever broken. I'm not much more very important. In America, when someone would say on a show, I've got the fastest bowled transit time, people would have gone crazy for that. They'd have all applauded. But here we are in London going, yeah, whatever.

I'm very impressed. I'm very impressed. I have a small certificate for swimming. Was that at the same time? Just so you know, your bowled transit while you were swimming was slightly slower, but we've had to close the pool down. And seeing that, given that you brought up enemas, and I don't know if that's the right thing to do anyway. But given that you brought them up, you have a story about tobacco enemas. Yes, tobacco enemas, it's a thing.

So nicotine in tobacco was only discovered to be a poison in, I think, 1811 or something like that. It's late. And so until then, tobacco had an exciting session in the 18th century, where it was considered to be the answer to pretty well everything. So actually that guy with the fork and the constipation could have been done with a tobacco enema. It was used for gynecological conditions, it was used for headaches. The idea was that tobacco, up your bum, would warm your insides and sort of make everything feel a lot better.

Was this tobacco lit? It was blown and exactly so yeah just be very careful with that. Once they got into this in the 18th century, they then developed the bellows to actually get it up there. So you didn't have to do it yourself, which obviously is a lot less risky. But not as romantic. It is. So the Royal Humane Society, which was very keen on the risks of people drowning, the Royal Humane Society really supported the tobacco enema in the case of people drowning. The Royal Humane Society really supported the tobacco enema in the case of people who seem to have drowned

to bring them back to life. It's all that warming thing. So they even put up along the Thames little what to do if you find someone drowning kits, which included tobacco enemas. Mouth to mouth is a considerable improvement, I think, for many lifeguards. Yeah, I think you're right.

There's progress there. Well, one of the other artifacts we've got, which we haven't talked about, improvement I think for many lifeguards. Yeah, I think you're right, there's progress there. One of the other artifacts we've got which we haven't talked about is microscope slides of goat tissue from 1905. That's right, I have them here. So this is... This is actual goat tissue, not greatest of all time.

This is goat tissue, so these are little microscope slides with pieces of goat on them. These are part of the experiments run by John Scott Haldane, who's a fellow of the Royal Society, and he was very interested in atmospheric gases and the effect on the human body. He did some very interesting work on miners' diseases and how gases affect miners. He did some work on bad smells in Parliament. Make up your own jokes about that. But why I like him is because he applied this kind of scientific research on behalf of the Royal Navy. And unfortunately, he did have a knack of experimenting

on goats, hence the slide there, the bits of goats to suit. So he put them in barometric chambers and exposed them to different pressures. But he also did this with his son, J.B.S. Holden. If a scientist wants to run an experiment, he usually just reaches for the nearest small child in those days. So JBS Haldane was at 13 years old,

put into a Royal Navy diving suit and chucked overboard, amongst other things, in order to research the effects of different pressures at different depths on the human body. And didn't he end up with a perforated ear drum? Oh, what JBS did later, he continued the researchers during the Second World War, again on behalf of the Royal Navy, continuing his father's research. And yeah, he managed to perforate ear drums and all kinds of things in pressure chambers.

And he could blow smoke out of his ear drums apparently. Yes, his party trick. He couldn't combine that with the enema, could he could blow smoke out of his eardrums apparently. Yes his party trick He couldn't combine that with the enema could he? Yeah Perfectly perverse erudite or did the son just pretend not to hear him when he called him Son come here. I need you. That's a little experiment But these words, you know, we got comes to the end these words be flexing We've heard some remarkable stories, but this is ultimately how we acquired knowledge, knowledge about physiology, knowledge about medicine. Well, should we feel guilty about it then?

So it's uncovering the secrets of nature by looking at really informative individuals, in the case of medicine, who can tell you something that you wouldn't discover by any other route. And frankly, that happens to this day. And one of the powers of modern genetics is that often very unfortunate people who've got mutations in particular genes, studying them tells you, and not only good for them because it establishes what's wrong, but it tells you what the function of the genes are. So this is still an absolutely fundamental principle of medical research. You know, when we look back, so we've heard some very unusual stuff, and it's easy, isn't

it, to set it in a historical context and say, all these people didn't know anything, it was kind of barbaric. And now we know everything. But as you said, Mark, there were 1980s, we're doing rather strange things with ulcers and getting it completely wrong. So the question would be I suppose, do you think it's still possible that we're looking at some medical conditions and doing things now which in 50 years time people will be out, we'll probably still be here on Radio 4 having this discussion. You will, you'll definitely be there, you don't grow old, no bellybuttons.

And people have said what were they doing that for in 2024? having this discussion. You will. You'll definitely be there. You don't grow old. No bellybuttons. Yeah. And people have said, what were they doing that for in 2024? I think it's pretty certain that that's going to be the case. I mean, there's so much we still don't know, and particularly when it actually comes to the mind. You know, we're treating people who have quite severe mental illness without any really good understanding of how cognition works. So I

think there's going to be lots of examples like that where people will look back and say what did they think they were doing? One thing that always gets me, people say now, you get a lot of, oh, in my day we didn't have food allergies or intolerances. No, you just had sickly children who just never put on weight and never made it past the age of 15, you know what I mean? But it was like, just because we identify allergies and intolerances doesn't mean we've just invented them or made them up now. It's great, because in my day we never had these things because we were all dead. Yeah. But it's also the case that diseases change over time as well, particularly infectious diseases.

And so, you know, each generation lives in the context of the diseases of their time. I mean, we haven't talked much about the environment causing disease. And so the pattern of disease does actually change over time. I suppose in my experience, I'm that generation where we all had our adenoids and tonsils out

because you did. Yeah, yeah. We all did and now we don't. You know, so there's a simple change. And I think there's a whole area now we don't. So there's a simple change. I think there's a whole area that we haven't discovered at all much about which is menstruation. I mean it's kind of everyone here who's a woman has done it but we don't really know much about what you can do with menstrual blood. So it's only recently there's been some work on testing menstrual blood for diabetes.

So rather than having to have a blood test, you can just test a woman's menstrual blood. Wow. That's suggesting something completely different from the history of menstrual blood, which was seeing it as some weird phenomenal stuff that was just disgusting and had all sorts of impurities in it. Actually it could be the future of medicine for many people. Ed, for you, what do you think is the thing that we'll look back at in 50 years' time and go, why, my goodness, we believe that?

I think the idea that a male body with a larger degree of muscle mass and low amount of body fat was somehow ever aesthetically pleasing. I think we should return to the idea of the pale, slight person with just a little bit of a pot as being the ideal. And apparently if you tie up your left testicle that does all pretty much help. And with that advice. Thank you to our panel, Sir Mark Walpert, Professor Helen King, Ed Byrne and Keith Moore. Right, we always ask the audience a question and today's audience of the Royal Society we ask them what is the most unexpected thing you found out about your body? What have you got there Brian?

I swallowed a two pence piece by accident university, and it might still be there. What are the chances? Could it still be there? That tube, should it not have come out? I think it would largely corrode it away, but... Maybe tobacco... Human metallurgy is not one of my topics. Tobacco might help. I've got... I cannot visit the eyelets of langarans.

The eyelets of Langerhans? Langerhans. Yeah, they're structures in the brain. No, no, they're not. Well, they're in the pancreas. Oh, sorry. Oh, no, but Brian's wonder a lot like his womb. He's all over the shop.

It's where your insulin comes from. What are the ones that have some weird names like that in the brain, aren't they? Yes, there is something, I'm not sure it's gonna come to me. But anyway, yeah, no, lying on your hands is where insulin comes from. Ed? Somebody called David Hastings has simply said, in answer to the question, what is the most unexpected thing you found out

about your body, they've just answered, Prince Andrew's sweat glands. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. This is lovely.

This is from Callum who says, despite my worst efforts, it can still work. And that is, and Callum says, it'll be 80 next July. It's very literal. Also says the bowel transit, oh sorry, yeah, there's another. What else you got? Very literal from Paul. What's the most unexpected thing you found about your body?

My keys and my wallet. Ed? What's the most unexpected thing you found about your body? My keys and my wallet. So yeah. Ed? Somebody has said that they found out that they were a clone of Brian Cox. And then they've deliberately put a dot, dot, dot, and then the Scottish actor exclamation. Things, oh, yes, right.

I'm not going to read that one, because that is, anyway, ends wetter. Anyway, so that's the end of this series. and we always like to give you a bit of homework for everyone listening and everyone in the room here. So because we were away for a couple of months we would like you to go away and see if you can discover a new star or if you can effectively use a smoke enema. And if you do both at the same time there'll be a special treat. You'll win dinner with Brian Cox.

Just to cover ourselves legally, the BBC takes no responsibility for any damage incurred as a result of not understanding that that's a joke. In fact, you then give me the continue, it just says the BBC takes no responsibility. Full stop. So there we are. So we will be back in the New Year. So you'll be listening to this very close to Christmas, so we should say Happy Christmas But if you listen to this when they all go out in one fell swoop rather than on radio 4 Remember, there's only 90 more shopping days till Christmas. So we've covered both areas there. Bye. Bye I'm Hannah Fry and I'm Dara O'Briain. Till now nice again. I'm Hannah Fry

And I'm Dara O'Brien And in the all new series of Curious Cases, things are getting curiouser and curiouser. We'll be looking the universe squarely in the eye and demanding an answer to your everyday mysteries. Including... Can you actually die of boredom? Why do some people taste music? And how many lemons would it take to power

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