The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Medical Cannibalism, Hildegard of Bingen, Predicting the Weather

Episode Date: May 30, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from nuns, the origin of the cosmos, and the female orgasm to the number of calories in an average human man. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular. science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Eleanor Cummins and I'm Sarah Trodosh. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by all teasing a fact that we picked up while reporting, editing,

reading some other great science journalism, or just kind of clicking around on the internet. And we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Once we've all had the chance to tell our science stories, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. And if you disagree with our vote, we would absolutely love to hear about it on Twitter at Weirdest underscore thing. Sarah, why don't you give us your pitch? First of all, mine's not a weird fact. I'm already violating the entire premise of our podcast. Mine is a heartwarming fact. I'm just that may be... Boo. I know. I'm so sorry. Just amidst the death and destruction, I'm going to bring you just a real nice fact, which is that there's a family in South Carolina

that's been recording the weather every day since 1893 on behalf of the federal government. I will point out that last week we had a heartwarming fact about a really good dog that ended up being the winner because it turned into a story about a taxidermined human. Yes. So, yeah, there's no taxidermined humans or corpses in this tale, unfortunately, but there will be a lot of information about the weather. So brace yourselves for all my interesting facts. And Eleanor, what's your fact today? There was a king in England who had this thing called the king's drops that were part skull, human skull, and part alcohol. I love that you had to specify human skull.

There are so many skulls on this earth. You know, if it was made of like, Ocelot skull, that wouldn't be as weird. It would be metal. That's so true, yeah. Ocelot skull is pretty standard. That would be boring. Shut. This is the weirdest thing I learned this week.

Great. So my fact is about nuns, the origin of the cosmos, and the female orgasm. Wow. Well, you just jumped in there and won it there. So I think we got to go with that. Great. I came across this story in kind of a roundabout way. My sister is an opera singer, and she just commissioned this new piece of music.

I will have the actual piece on Popside.com. You should check it out. This is not nepotism. It's actually extremely good. I can confirm it. It is excellent, yeah. Correct. And it was based on a letter from Caroline Herschel, an astronomer, to her sister in the 1800s.

And for a long time, Caroline was known as just the sister of William Herschel, a very famous astronomer. And she kind of, like, did his housekeeping and, like, kept his books and was known as kind of like the help. and now we recognize that Caroline Herschel was a fantastic astronomer in her own right, discovered a lot of comets, did a lot of the actual mathematic work that we gave her brother credit for it for a long time. And the reason this letter is so great is that she is writing to her sister about how she's thinking about all of these amazing women who science has forgotten. And it's really heartwarming because she was one of those women as well. One of the subjects of her letter is Hildegard of Bingham.

And she was born in 1098 in Germany. She was a nun. And in the letter, Caroline talks about how Hildegard came up with the idea of heliocentrism, meaning that everything revolves around the sun 300 years before Copernicus did. So Hildegard, for people who don't know, real boss lady, for sure. She was the 10th and last child of this well-to-do family in Germany. Of course, with that many children, lots of them joined the church. She went off at the age of eight to learn under a woman named Jutta.

It was kind of a unique spot at the time because it was like a co-ed monastery. I mean, they did not live together. Wild. Right. Real crazy. They didn't actually share a living space, but it was like a joint monastery with nuns on one side and men on the other. And the reason this was so important to Hildegard's story is that it meant she had access to academic texts that were meant for male clergy. All of the science and math that was happening that was exciting was going on in the Middle East.

And it was just around Hildegard's lifetime that people in Western Europe were like, oh, what up, science? and started very luckily for Western Europe, the scholars of the Muslim world had translated the text of the ancient Greeks into Arabic, which meant that then Western Europe could find them and translate them again and actually read them. Otherwise, they would have been lost forever. So she was in this very unique spot for anyone of the time, but especially for a woman, to actually be reading all of this,

exciting, mathematic work that had been, as far as we know, kind of lost to Western Europe for a long time. And she was kind of in charge of a medical practice and botany for the monastery, which makes sense because most of the, all of the medicine was plant-based, really. So if you wanted to practice medicine, you also needed to know what plants helped people and which ones would kill them.

That was how by middle age she had become a real scholar. She was recording all of this botanical knowledge and also starting to just kind of expound on all sorts of things. Hildegard had what she thought were visions, which are now pretty widely accepted, at least outside of religious context, as having been migraines. She talks about having oras

and having some kind of like synesthesia-esque, like cross of senses and just being like overwhelmed by light and sound and having these very ecstatic visions. and they really intermingled with the scientific things that she wrote in a way that makes it really difficult to know how much she actually knew. I was able to track down the text that people are referring to when they say that she not only predicted heliocentricism,

but figured out universal gravitation before Newton had suggested gravity. When you're reading it with 21st century cosmological hindsight, everything she's saying could technically be someone describing a heliocentric solar system and could be someone describing the effects of gravity, but it's also so vague. It's really hard to say that that's what it was. Yeah, we could just be sort of putting our own. We want Hildegard to have thought of these things.

But she does seem to suggest that she thinks the planets are orbiting the sun, so that's cool because not everybody thought that at the time. It was much simpler to just be like, no, everything revolves around. us. Another thing that people often like to attribute to her is early thinking about how the seasons worked because she wrote something about how, like, if it is hot in one part of the earth, it must be cold on the other side, as everything must be in equilibrium. You know, maybe she was just doing some really smart math about like the angle of the sun, or maybe she was just like, all things must have balance makes sense to me. Either way, it's clear that she was a really smart lady who

did a lot of really impressive thinking. I would love to know where she was getting her ideas from and how much of it was actual mathematic extrapolation and how much just happens to sound a little bit like something that may have been based on observation. So hard to know in retrospect how, to what degree women like Kildegard were. just trying to fly under the radar. I read this really interesting thing on Twitter the other day from this historian who was talking about the origin of the word spinster. Do you guys know anything about this?

No. So apparently spinster is like obviously spinster, it was originally a job in which you spun wool into threads and yarn. And at the time, if you could, if you were good spinster, you could earn quite a bit of money. So it was one of the very few ways back then that as a woman you could be financially independent. And so now we use spinster as this derogatory, you know, a woman who just doesn't want to get married and she's all alone and cranky. And in fact, spinsters were just secretly living their own lives and not having to marry men out of obligation.

So spinsters should be, we should revere spinsters. Proud. Proud spinster. Absolutely. Then we get to the female orgasm. So finally. Finally. And so Hildegard wrote this description, which I will put in our write-up on popsye.com, that is very clearly about a female orgasm. She's talking about when a woman is making love with a man, and there's a sense of heat in her brain, which brings with it sensual delight.

There's talk of contractions, and she talks about how it's important that these contractions are. occur in order for pregnancy to be successful. So, okay. Sarah has questions. I have so many questions. First of all, the heat in the brain. Was she interviewing women right after they had sex? Like Alfred Kinsey?

Yeah. And the contractions, I mean, I've read about the sex research that went on very recently, and you have to get pretty close, I think, to be observing stuff like that, or you have to be having your own orgasm. Right. So totally unclear how Hildegard did you. so much about orgasm. It's possible that

she was doing some kind of midwifery for people outside the monastery. She probably treated people outside the monastery. Fairly Hildegard was a really curious lady. So I can imagine her being like, here's a thing I will never experience because I am married to the Lord. And so I need to figure it out

so that I know it's medical implications. or maybe Hildegard was having a lot of sex. We just don't know. We just don't know. Maybe she was just masturbating and she was just sort of imagining that that was a thing that happened a lot during sex. And little did she know, like in 1066 or whatever, probably not that many women were having just random orgasms during sex. That could also explain a lot as if she was just working based on the info, the intel within the female monastery and extrapolating. They were all having great orgasms alone.

Right. And just like, well, this must happen also during sex. And it's important to not overhype what Hildegard was aware of. You know, it was still all couched in the level of medical understanding of the day. For example, she also thought that semen was the blood of man poisoned after his fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, and that it was a woman's body, quote, warming it, possibly through orgasm, that increased conception likelihood. She also wrote, the strength of semen determined the sex of the child, while the amount of love and passion determined its disposition. And the worst case, where the seed is weak and parents feel no love, leads to a bitter daughter.

Wow. Getting into some real problematic areas there, Hildegard. Yeah, no, Hildegard was a problematic fave, for sure. But then, again, was she just telling the dudes what they wanted to hear? I wish we could know. I just realized that I now finally have an answer to that stupid question about what person living or dead would you like want to invite to dinner? I never have an answer but now it's Hildegard because I would want to invite her to dinner like just one-on-one me and Hilda and just sit down and be like so what do you think? Tell me the real deal here. Who's the real Hildegard? Yeah I mean maybe

it will all turn out to be garbage but at least I'll know. Yeah. Thinking about Hildegard and how intriguing what we know about her is but how little we know and how we can't really say how much of what she wrote just happened to line up with knowledge that we have today it drives me a little crazy that it can all be written off as like oh you know she was just writing this poetry because she loved all of god's creation and it just happened to line up with X, Y, and C. Like, what if she was actually really, really trying to figure out physical explanations for things? And what if she had figured some of them out? So, again, obviously, the truth is impossible to decipher, probably somewhere in the murky middle of things. But I do wish that

we were able to say one way or another, you know, whether Hildegarden was just writing sad poems in her journal or was making some of the most groundbreaking scientific extrapolations of her time? On that note, let's take a quick break. Do you wear your pride on your sleeve? Popular Science is partnering with Out in STEM to make limited edition t-shirts with a rainbow pop-sci logo. 100% of the profits go to Out in STEM, a nonprofit that empowers the LGBTQ community in science, tech, engineering, and math fields. Scoop one up before they're gone. And share on social with the hashtag SciPride.

That's SCI Pride. And we're back and ready for the next weird fact. Sarah, how about you to tell us about the weather. Yeah, over to Sarah with the weather. My fact came about because I was trying to find tornado data for an unrelated but still job-related reason. He wasn't doing personal. data research during work time.

I would never do that. That is time theft. I was strictly for work purposes. There's this just absolutely fabulous blog called Beyond the Data run by a bunch of climatologists at NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And basically it's just it's people whose job it is to keep track of our national climatological data. And they run a blog when they just sort of find interesting things.

and as far as I can tell, they're just blogging for themselves, just because it's interesting. And they're always totally fascinating. This fact also involves Thomas Jefferson, as clearly all of my facts have to do with Thomas Jefferson. In the 1640s are the earliest, like, actual systematic weather observations that were taken in America by John Campanius Holm along the Delaware River. It seems like he was maybe just the only one doing it kind of for a century.

and then Thomas Jefferson came along and bought his first thermometer while he was writing the Declaration of Independence and then bought his first barometer just after they signed it. So I guess he just had other things on his mind in just a lot of spare time to go around buying new instruments.

And he kept like an unbroken record of the daily weather until 1816 when he turned it over to a volunteer network that he got going in Virginia. George Washington also kept track of the weather every single day until the day before he died. But of course, back then you could not, you know, you could gather weather from where you were. And then later, if you had enough people, you could gather information, you could understand, like, sort of general patterns. But you couldn't do anything close to forecasting other than, you know, looking at the clouds and trying to predict sort of general movements like that.

For a while, it seems like it was mostly founding fathers keeping track of the weather for some reason, until eventually this sort of. The surgeon general of the Army shortly after the Civil War directed his surgeons to record the weather and the climate, as well as the diseases that they were diagnosing at the time because he wanted to see whether there was a correlation between what the weather was like and whether people, whether his soldiers got sick more often or got certain diseases. So yeah, like the weather, our modern weathering system basically started with the military. and then a guy named Joseph Henry, who was Secretary of the Smithsonian, established a network of 150 volunteers in 1849, who mailed in their reports of the daily wind and temperature and clouds and precipitation. And then because I guess it took him this long to compile it, he did not actually publish that date until 1861, so it's 12 years later.

I guess mailing it all took quite a while. But the weather network really took off with the invention of the television, Because with the telegraph, you could get information quickly enough over a large enough area. You could say, like, if there was a storm system over this part of the country yesterday, we can predict that it's going to move in this general pattern over the next couple of days. So he had this whole system going in the mid-1850s. It got all the way out to New Orleans. And he would share his dispatches with the Washington Evening Star,

which was a newspaper, and they would publish the daily weather for nearly 20 cities back in 1857, and then just slowly expanded until they were doing with hundreds and hundreds of cities. It wasn't until 1870 that it was actually someone's job other than just Joseph Henry's pet project because basically sailors realized that they really could benefit from warnings about incoming storms. And so Congress authorized the Army's signal service to take. takeover storm warnings and then extended it later in 1872 to the rest of the U.S. because storms don't just happen over the ocean. And then in 1890, Congress established the Weather Bureau.

They actually, I think, calculated that if you had a volunteer recording the weather every 25 miles, you could accurately measure things like average rainfall over an area with like an acceptable amount of error. And then that became what is now like the National Weather Service. That was the beginning. But I think it's really interesting because so much of the reason any of this actually worked was just because volunteers agreed to take in all this data, especially at a time when that was not easy. Even today, I would probably not volunteer to just take a bunch of weather data and be saving it constantly and a file, and it's pretty easy for us now. I mean, if you had to write it down every single day and make sure it was accurate and then mail it in, and then other people

had to compile the data by hand, it was a really laborious process. And it was only because these people just wanted to volunteer. Like in 1895, there were 2,000 people in the Cooperative Observer Program or like the COOP program. Do you know if like, so were we the first country to set about doing this, like systematically? I know that there were, there were definitely a lot of people interested in the weather, like, in the U.K. But I think because the states are so big, we had this massive network. I mean, even within the U.K., it's not a massive area of land in comparison to, like, the entire. Yeah, I imagine in the U.K.

You can just all watch the same cloud. Yeah. Rain. Tomorrow, rain. But, like, you know, in 1895, they had weather stations in non-states. Right. just because it was a useful thing to do. And today there are more than 11,000 people who just want to record the weather for the good of the nation.

See, there's something like so like adorably American, I feel like about that, you know, just about passion for the weather. Like I feel like, you know, everyone makes fun of it as like, oh yeah, like you're talking about the weather again. But like, come on. So cool. The weather is interesting. I'm sorry I keep making fun of you for talking about the weather. Thank you. That means a lot to me. I think weather's really interesting.

And one of the most complicated things we do, like we do not have an accurate appreciation for how hard it is to predict the weather. People are always angry at their local meteorologists for getting the weather wrong. I'm angry when they get the snow wrong, personally. But we shouldn't because it is so, so hard. Like we literally have supercomputers trying to work on better predicting weather because there's so much randomness. I think it's beautiful.

I mean, these people, like, because so many, volunteers were recording the weather in the 1800s, we have this massive climatological record, and it is still part of how we go back and look at how much global warming has affected our world. And it was all the way up until the 90s that they were just recording it on paper, and they would mail it at the end of each month to their local weather forecast office. And so that is how a family in South Carolina, they passed it down from a father to a daughter to a niece and the niece is still recording the weather every day in South Carolina.

Eleanor is overcome. I think it's so lovely. It is really lovely. So were there any like, I mean, obviously there were no monetary rewards. That's the definition of volunteering. But I should say some of them get paid some very small amount. Okay. But it's like, I think a third of them maybe.

Interesting. So I guess my question was like, were you getting feedback, you know, or was Is it just that it was cool to see that like your local paper actually had some information to offer about what was coming? That's a really good question. There don't seem to be, there's not a lot of information from that end, unfortunately, because these are people who seemed to have volunteered out of the goodness of their heart and they weren't the people writing history. They just love science. Yeah. I mean, I have to assume that that was the reason.

I don't even know how you would go about enrolling people. Like you just send out a message and say, hey, is anyone in town? interested in the weather. Yeah, it seems like doubly generous that you would spend her time this way, but also that, like, it was for some sort of far-off goal. You know, like, I don't know. It seems like there's a lot of delayed gratification

that now we're like, wow, thanks so much. But, like, what were, you know, what were they actually getting out of it? Nothing. They were just great. Even now, I mean, if you're one of the people who manned one of the 11,000 stations, you're sending in your data all the time,

but it's not like you get to see the process by which your information turns into a forecast or turns into an understanding of our climate. Although actually there was one story recently about one of the coups, I think it was a coop, all the way up in what used to be Barrow, Alaska and got renamed to its original name, which I'm sure I'm going to butcher, but it's something like Utkjavik. I'm saying that wrong, and I'm sorry about that. but it's near point Barrow, which is the northernmost point in America. And it is warming so fast that recently the data accidentally got thrown out by an algorithm

that is actually designed to detect when a sensor has gone awry and something is wrong. So basically like the National Centers for Environmental Information have this very complicated algorithm that basically is like compares every station to nearby stations and compares whether that station is sort of out of whack. So if you have, you know, three surrounding stations that are measuring that it's 30 degrees and one station is measuring that it's 45 degrees, probably that one, something is wrong with that one station. But not in Point Barrow. But not in Point Barrow because like October in the 21st century in Point Barrow is 7.8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was in the late 20th century, which is very troubling. Very troubling because it's warming faster that far north than it is anywhere else. And yeah, it is warming so fast that their algorithm was like, nah, this can't be right.

It's absolutely wild. There was also, I happened to know about the Coupe program because I wrote about one of the stations for, our weather issue last year because one of the coop stations in Loma, Montana, was the site of the record for the biggest 24-hour temperature change ever. Oh my gosh, I remember this. It was wild. It was 103 degree change from negative 54, which it's amazing that it was negative 54 to begin with. Negative 54 degrees Fahrenheit to 49 between January 14th and 15th, 1972. I love that neither. of those temperatures is like pleasant. No.

I mean, I'm 49 comparatively. It's great, but it's not like it went from being, I don't know. I guess it, I would, it would be, there would be something really whimsical about it going from negative 20 to like. Balmy. Yeah, balmy. But it's just like, well, now it's chilly. I check my math.

But I love that it just went from being like ungodly cold to being chilly. Yeah. A chilly evening. I think it's wild because that was from a Chinook wind, which is like winds that come down from over mountains. It's really common in that part of Montana that air comes down a mountain and as the atmospheric pressure increases, the air temperature increases. And if the wind is moving fast enough, it happens really quickly and it basically heats up all this air and the wind comes rushing down the mountain and it's swept into this town. And that's how you get 103 degree temperature change. go back to very, very low?

I think not instantaneous, like not nearly as quickly but yeah, because the wind is just a temporary thing, but there's just like this massive cold air block sitting over Montana. Shunuk winds sometimes break windows in towns where it happens

because the temperature, because the temperature change happens so quickly. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because our glasses is only designed to it's not 130 degrees is beyond what they've designed it to withstand, which is pretty wild. So yeah, that was my heartwarming little segment here. Love it. It's citizen science at its best because there's a lot of citizen science. It is

obviously very worthwhile today, but a lot of it is gamified because more people will do it, obviously. Like that's, you know, that protein folding game, I would not have done that if it were not a game. And it's not just like, oh, take a picture of birds while you're out. Like it's not a thing you do in your spare time, it is, like, you're committing to being the people who run that station every day. And literally, like, the national climatological record depends on you. And what you write down goes into an official permanent collection. Well, on that note, we're going to take a quick break. It's been scientifically proven that Monday is the worst day of the week. Or at least it used to be, because now that's when you can expect new episodes of Pop Size other podcasts last

week in tech. Every week, we recap the big technology stories that you may have missed. You could subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocketcasts, or SoundCloud. Now, back to the weirdest thing I learned this week. All right, and we're back with our last weird fact from Eleanor. Right. So, as you may remember, my tease was about King Charles II of England and about these king's drops that he used to, you know, improve his health. And it just happened to be made of skulls that were pulverized and mixed with alcohol,

which I'm sure the alcohol did wonders for his mood. but I'm not sure about those skulls. So I wanted to talk a little bit today just about medical cannibalism. Yeah, which has a really long history. Starting in like the Middle Ages, and I want to make this very clear, into the Victorian era. People ate other humans for their health. So I'm just getting that out there. That is what medical cannibalism is, just to be clear.

Yeah, that is medical cannibalism. Because it's what it says on the tin. Eleanor has been saying this phrase to me all week telling me just like teasing what the fact would be. And every single time I just have this like, but what is medical cannibalism again? What? Yeah, it's gnarly. Basically, there's a very long history of this practice. And it sort of peaked in the Renaissance and then as I said, continued into the Victorian era.

But basically one of the sort of principles is of this idea of like sympathetic magic. And so if you were able to take preferably a recently dead person's body, and, like, you consumed part of the body part that was ailing you, that you could become better. So, like, if you had really bad headaches, try some skull. Or your AIDS. So an alarming amount of medicine was just, like, like, cures like. Absolutely. Yeah, that's the whole premise here.

blood jam was good just in general preferably from a criminal who was killed by the state a lot of people really loved the leftovers of public hangings which maybe was just about a supply demand kind of thing and I just I was just going through this

and found it really fascinating one of the questions that I feel like I had was why did it sort of continue for so long I feel like we all, it's like a cultural mem. I'm just kidding, it's a cultural meme. You know, to make fun of people in like the Middle Ages because they knew nothing and everything they said was silly. But the Victorian era was like five minutes ago.

And yet everyone was just like, give me a piece of that mummy. We'll get to that later. Give me a piece of that publicly executioned person. And I was sort of like, what was going on? So there was actually a lot of scholarship about like why the Renaissance and into the Victorian era was so weird and people are essentially arguing these experts

who have spent a lot of time in the primary literature from that era that it was such a confusing time given how science was upending so many old sort of religious beliefs and these very clearly laid out ways of looking at the world that everyone subscribed to that then sort of rise of the natural world and these other explanations got really easily blurred with the supernatural. Wow.

And so people were just sort of like casting about for meaning and explanation, and they found it in like these ways that now were just like, oh my God, what were you doing? Sort of like adolescence, but like at a societal stage, it sounds like. They were really confused. A lot of the scholarship just directly blames Charles Darwin for exacerbating it. Wow. Because he had his own, you know, he was very religious and his wife was religious

for her entire life. But, you know, he had this, like, whole sort of prolonged sort of falling out of faith as he sort of established his ideas better. And then as those were, like, sent into the wider world, everyone was just like, well, guess we got to start from scratch making sense of things. And so, as I said, that involved mummies. At this time, there were, like, a lot of colonial countries sort of casting about all over the world looking for things that they thought.

were cool or pretty that they could take. And one of those was definitely mummies. The Victorian England sort of upper crust loved Egypt so much. And so one of the ways that they sort of, you know, bridge these ideas of, like, medical cannibalism with their newfound treasures was to do, like, these unwrapping parties of mummies, pulverizing mummy parts, and using them to, like, put them in your gout wound. He was very unsanitary.

Yeah, I was like, I wonder if any of these things worked. And one recommendation I could find was that stuffing, you know, a pulverized mummy up your nose would stop a nose bleed. So would anything else? Yeah. Yeah, that was the one. Like dust? Well, I think in this idea you would kind of mix it into a paste and then naturally it would stab your nose from bleeding. You just stick it up there.

Just put a tampon up there. Yeah, exactly. She's the man. But yeah, so like the, there's this Victorian expert named Richard Sugg. And in an interview with the Smithsonian magazine that I found, he said, the question was not should you eat human flesh, but what sort of human flesh should you eat? Wow. That's the only question, really, that's the money quote.

Yeah. And people really particularly love, like I said, like they would eat, you know, sort of like human blood pudding. That was sort of like a panacea. But the big thing was just like fat. Human fat was like, put it on your gout. put it on your baby. Like, it'll fix everything. And so you used to be able to buy human fat by the pound from your pharmacy

or cut out the middleman and head straight to the executioner. This is like the 1800s. The middle to late 1800s I'm talking about, just to remind everyone. So executioners were making money on the side, taking the cadavers apart and selling all the bits off to people. I went the Bloomberg Business Magazine investigation about how this whole idea was just to get rid of this cargo. Wow.

Yeah, it's crazy. But anyway, I, you know, looking through this, I was just like, this is wild, this is weird. But I also think it's kind of amazing to think about, like, what today sort of falls under like similar categories. You know, like, we

feel so uncomfortable by the word cannibalism. But it's obviously very near and and dear to our culture. I found this amazing research paper that actually calculated the the exact breakdown of calories in a human man. Oh, even better.

So in an average adult human male, there are 125,822 calories of fat and protein. Sorry, could you repeat that number again? 125,000. 822 calories. How do you measure? Measure a man. Oh, my God. That worked out so beautifully.

Wow, that almost made me want to eat someone. If we could write a musical that was rent, but about eating organs. Wow. Sweeney Todd's retry. Yeah, that's been done. That's true. Barbershop Rent. But more scientific.

Okay, so in an average adult human male, there are 125,822 calories of fat and protein. For comparison, I thought this was really interesting because they're talking sort of about, you know, why, you know, we don't really eat each other that much. And it was like maybe it's too few calories. So for comparison, a mammoth would have 3,600,000 calories. So like, yeah, we are caloric cheat day. Oh, my God, yeah. And so they actually did, though, a breakdown. And because it's a human man, you know, there are some interesting missing parts I cannot speak to, for example, the caloric value of a placenta.

But what I thought was really fascinating was, like, fatty tissue just in general is about 50,000 of those calories. The skeleton, which, how do you get into that? They're saying that, you know, it's from bone marrow. That's the answer. That's how you get into that. You break into that and then you suck out that marrow. That's about 25,000 calories of man marrow. And then, you know, each of the organs has their own sort of calories.

fascinating 2,500 calories in an adult man's liver. And it breaks it all the way down to teeth. So 36 calories. What? 36 calories in teeth. That's the most horrifying part of this study so far. This is just proof we're not Victorian. Then the other thing I was sort of looking in, though, is like, why are we not cannibals?

There are a couple interesting cases. Like, for example, there's this disease called Kuru, which is this situation in Papua New Guinea, where there was some, you know, like ritual cannibalism. and it caused disease that was characterized by muscle spasms and dementia and not being able to control whether you were laughing or crying and then eventually yeah true true a very severe case of life and then you died and then when they looked in these bodies it was there was no trace of any kind of infection but there were holes in the cerebellum so essentially like the body wasn't really really understanding that there was an invader there when they were like cannibalizing another human being. And so this is, you know, sort of been compared to like mad cow disease, a form of transmissible spongeiform encephalopathy, where you can, you know, get really sick from eating your own species. So that's sort of the main...

Shouldn't eat brains. Definitely you should not eat brains or spinal cords. But yeah, that's sort of the main argument today. You just had so many wild fact in there. I don't even really know how to process all that. I'm still really upset about the concept of eating teeth. Me. That's what's for dinner. Okay.

I think we're reaching the end of our fact spiral here. So we are going to cut this off before we get even weirder about eating human teeth. Eleanor definitely wins, though. Yes, I would say so. Really? Oh, yeah. A number of things I just learned about eating humans. Thank you so much on behalf of me and King Charles II.

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