The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Syphilis But Make It Fashion, Cilantro Haters, Quarantine: From Typhoid to Coronavirus

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

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And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of 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 Claire Maldorelli. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first.

Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Eleanor, why don't you start with your teas? I would like to talk about quarantine. Wow. Just the concept. It's, and some very specific upsetting stories that I found. Oh, fun. Yes.

Timely. Yes. Claire? Yes. I would like to talk about why, for some people, cilantro tastes like feet. Okay. I have the weird cilantro gene, but I've never heard the feet comparison. Oh, there's a bunch more that I can share with you.

Great. Also, I'm going to learn more about myself today. My fact is about. syphilis and all the ways it helped shape fashion. Ooh. Such a hypochondriac episode. Claire, I would love to hear more about cilantro. Yeah.

Okay. It's news I can use. Totally. Okay. So there are three events that compelled me to share this fact with you, and I'm going to share all three events with you before I share the fact. So in college, when I first met my friend Lisa, who's now one my closest and dearest friend, so hopefully she won't hate me.

And of all the, like, every time I talk about a friend on weirdest thing or family member, they like it. So hopefully that continues. Okay. We were having lunch together and decided to split a meal. And when the meal arrived, we took a bite. And she literally, well, we both took bites, you know, separately whatever. You get the idea. She spat hers right back out.

And I was like, who is this person? That's not normal. And she was like, oops. I didn't realize it had cilantro. And I was like, that's all so weird response to spitting something out, weird explanation. I gave her the benefit of the doubt clearly. We just had dinner a couple weeks ago. It was fine.

She went well. No one projectile. Yeah. I would like to be friends with her for the foreseeable forever. So, okay. Then second, according to a 2010 New York Times article, in a television interview in 2002, Julia Child described the foods that she hated, and she said, Salantro and Arugula, I don't like it all.

They're both green herbs. They have kind of a dead taste to me. And then she's asked if she would order it, and she said, I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor. Amazing. And third, there used to be a website on the internet called I Hate Salantro.com. And the site is almost solely devoted to haikus, people wrote, expressing their ill will towards cilantro.

And I wrote down a few of them to share with you. Oh, wonderful. Yes, just to show you their sheer poetic brilliance. Oh, soapy flavor. Why pollutest thou food? Thou make me wretched. Soak your dirty feet in lemon water and drink. Taste like cilantro.

Oh, God. Awful leafy green. I hate your popularity. You smell like cat piss. Wow. So this is my fave. Ceylantro, you stay. You taste like a Christmas tree in my burrito.

Okay, so what's the deal? Ever since my friend spat out her meal back onto her plate, I've been extremely curious why I is so much percent of the population somehow hates cilantro. To be totally transparent, I do not love or hate cilantro. It's just there to me. It's the most neutral thing. It is so neutral. See, that's what's so crazy is that hearing people describe cilantro as neutral,

I'm like, no, it has one of the strongest flavors in the world. That is so strange. And Claire's going to explain why. Yes, I, yeah. But, yeah, I've never, I'm with Eleanor. I don't, like, I would love to know what slantrope tastes like. I couldn't tell you. I couldn't pick it out.

Thinking about it now, I'm like, I have no descriptors, nothing. Right. Yeah, exactly. Same. So, Rachel and some other folks think differently. They say it tastes like soap, dirty feet, Christmas trees, cat urine. All bad things to say about. food. And surprisingly, scientists have not yet pinned down what actually causes this dirty

feet taste, but there's a lot of interesting tidbits to share with you. So for a long time, they thought it was solely genetic. And there were all these really good studies in anecdotal evidence to back that up. My own personal anecdotal evidence, Lisa's entire family hates cilantro, except for her dad and her brother. So it's just her mom and her two and her sister. So it's like them three. So, you know, there's some. Interesting genetics there. And then a 2012 study published in the journal, Flavor, great title. Yeah, amazing.

Found that of the 1,639 people, they surveyed 21% of those who identified as East Asians said it tasted like soap. 17% of Caucasians, 14% of those of African descent, 7% of South Asians, 4% of Hispanics, and 3% of Middle Eastern subjects all said soap. So it's like a huge, now it ranges obviously in ethnic groups, but it's, definitely, like, even 3% is a significant part of the population. So it's like, what's the deal? And so subsequently, there's been many genetic studies, including, like, 23 and me asking if you hate cilantro.

I love those questions on 23 and me. I'm like, I'm learning so much about myself, beets and asparagus. Yeah. So even then, none of those could actually account for everybody. So some people who had the variants loved cilantro, some people who had the variants, hated the cilantro. So confusing all around. So when I was doing research on the internet, the best thing I found was this really, really good New York Times article written by Harold McGee, who's a food science author.

He said it's sort of, he's found through his research that it's sort of a combination of neuroscience and food chemistry. So according to the article, flavored chemists have found that the cilantro aroma is created by a half dozen or so substances. And most of them are modified fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes. And the same or similar aldehydes are also found in so. and lotions and also in the bug family of insects. Interesting. Wow. Yeah.

So soaps are made by fragmenting fat molecules while with strongly alkaline lie or its equivalent and aldehydes are a byproduct of this process. But why some people tend more towards soap and others don't is still interesting. So it's like you're always getting this like byproduct that tastes like soap. But why are some people like Rachel and my friend Lisa spitting it out and why are some people like us, not hating it and others are just like, I love cilantro, put it in everything. Actually, I don't know if those people exist. I don't think it's like—

Call us. Saracha. Yeah, so why some people tend towards this and others, it makes no sense. And he posed this to a bunch of neuroscientists. And one of them, who is actually used to be a cilantro hater and has willed himself to like cilantro, said that essentially like your senses of taste and smell are primal. So if you taste something that you think tastes soapy or taste like poison, you're going to say, oh, no, this is gross. This is disgusting.

And remember it for next time. And so people who instantly taste this soap-like flavor are like avoid cilantro. And so when they taste it again, it's sort of just like an enhanced sort of mechanism or a feedback pathway. Whereas others who don't have that initial reaction are just like, oh, cilantro, whatever. And so that's why he thinks that maybe... It's like magnified over time. Like, the next time you do it, you will have remembered your aversion and it will be kind of reinforced. Yeah, exactly, which kind of like makes sense from a survival mechanism that like we should remember things that are poisonous to us.

And so this guy tried it out himself and he was like, I love food. I'm a food, like a foodie, a neuroscientist. I know better. So I'm going to force myself essentially to eat cilantro every single day. And he did. And now he actually doesn't mind it. Okay. Well, I think it's pretty common for people who, like, have a really strong aversion to it because of, like, a genetic reason to, like, try to adapt.

I mean, I certainly, I remember a time in my life where if there was any cilantro and anything, I, like, could not enjoy it. Yeah. And now in certain foods, it. can be like easy for me to ignore or I'm like willing to ignore it. So like an interesting like genetics versus subjective taste thing is in my family. I've always known that I hate cilantro and it's like a really strong taste to me. I don't know how I would describe it. I probably wouldn't say soap, but it's just like. Would you say dirty feet or cat urine? I wouldn't. Or a Christmas tree. So I do taste. I think that a lot of beers that are hoppy taste like tree. So I know what

people mean when they say it tastes like Christmas tree. It's not quite that for me. It's kind of like there's no taste like cilantro to me, but it is so intense and so overpowering and unpleasant. But so I found out just a couple years ago that actually my dad was like, well, yeah, like, cilantro tastes kind of bad to me, but like I just learned to ignore it because like, yeah, you know. And then my sister realized that like she loves cilantro and she's like, it tastes so fresh, so springy and she realized that that taste isn't something that most people get. She's tasting what people who, quote, can't eat cilantro taste, but she just likes it. She likes it. Wow.

So she just likes soap. It's like those people that like the smell of gasoline. She doesn't think it tastes like soap. She's like it's just such a like indescribable fresh flavor. And it's like the same way to me, I'm like I can't describe what it tastes like it's just so strong. To her, that's like a positive thing. It's like this really bright note in a day. dish. But for me, it's just that. And my fiance Oliver also hates cilantro, so it makes it

way easier for us to get food together because we're just like, no cilantro on any of it. No, for favor. No cats peeing in our food. I think he hates it even more than I do. I'm like, if there's some in something, I will probably be okay. But if it's the like predominant herb in a dish, it just really ruins it for me. That's so interesting. See, then I feel like there's no faith. There's no, like, good things that will come for you, not just for slancho, not life. No good things. I'm cursed on both your houses. Just cilantro.

Because you have no, like, reason to force yourself to eat slantro because your fiancé hates it just as much. It's true. It's true. And I think I've, I've, like, achieved as much as I need to in terms of, like, being able to ignore it so that I can be, like, an adult accepting food that's given to me and not being like, I got to pick out every little piece of cilantro. That's exactly what my friend.

She's like, I just want to be at a restaurant with, like, fancy people and be able to eat cilantro if it, like, happens to be in a dish. Yeah. I think we should get rid of it. Like, the devil's parsley. Most of us don't care. So why are we torturing those who do? Yeah.

Like, she always, when she knows it's going to have. If we're out together and she knows it's going to have cilantro, like, she's just, like, can we ask for it not to be on it? I'm like, yeah, I don't taste it to begin with. Why would, why would I care? Yeah. Yeah. So maybe we should just. I think we're the bad guys. Wow, this has taken a turn for the worst for me. Okay, so then, well, I was going to share this little, like, service journalism piece for Rachel and other folks, but maybe we're the problem, so I shouldn't do it. Please, give me your advice. Okay, so cilantro pesto. If you, like, crush it up, Not blender. You have to do it like mortar and pestle style. And that apparently it changes like the leaf enzymes break down gradually and it converts the aldehyde into other substances with no aroma.

Whoa. That totally makes sense because I've definitely had like things that clearly have cilantro in it and I like it doesn't, it's not just that it's not overpowering. Like I don't really taste it. So it make those were probably things where it was massaged like hail. Yeah. Yeah. So now all you have to do is. carry around a mornor. Yeah, exactly. Let me just crush up our food. Wow. Yeah, that's my fact. And I found out that I'm just basically a terrible person and so is Elinor.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. And Elinor. Yes. Why don't you tell us about disease? Oh, I would love to. So right now, quarantine is in the news. Sure. Because of the coronavirus, which is a novel.

virus that is spreading around the world. And so people are using this method of containing anybody who shows symptoms or has been around people who show symptoms. And so this idea of isolation as a way of stopping the spread of disease goes back millennia. In Leviticus, that's the Bible. They describe a mosaic law of isolation. So if you're showing signs of this like white spotted disease. I'm actually not sure what they were referring to. But if you show signs of this, the Bible says you have to spend seven days in isolation, and then the rabbi will come, and he will check on you, and if you are still showing signs, you have seven more days in isolation. And I guess theoretically, this repeats until you either get better or die. But the modern idea of quarantine has its own

really fun story. It comes from the Venetians, and in 1377, they had a city-state in Croatia that decided to isolate ships and their crews for 30 days on islands offshore before letting them into Croatia because they were sick of the black death. They were over it. It killed like one in four or like one in three people. It was bad. And so they were like, you know what, we're just like not going to let these people who keep bringing the black death in. So they just have to hang out.

And literally the idea was like if they live, then they're not sick. And if they don't live, then they were sick and so we're fine, and that's okay. And eventually, the Venetians expanded this to 40 days, which is where you get Quaranta Giorni or quarantine. Oh, my goodness. Yes. I love that. And what's amazing is that modern analyses have suggested that the plague, the Black Death,

really takes 37 days to go from sort of silent incubation to death. And so it was the proper amount of time. Like, they finally figured it out. And so it was fairly successful. 30 days was not enough time. No, no. People were wondering and the men starting to show signs. But yeah, so the Quaranta Giorni really worked for them.

And the Venetians were also big in the development of other methods of isolation. So this is where you get leper colonies in the Middle Ages. And the idea was that if you isolated people with leprosy, ideally on their own island, then they wouldn't be able to, like, spread. their disease, which, by the way, isn't actually really how leprosy works. We now know you have to be, you have to have a certain set of genes to be susceptible in the first place. It is not at all like the Black Death. And they called these, I just thought this was interesting to go back to like how much of this is kind of religious. They called them Lazaros or like Lazarus because of

the beggar Lazarus. And so they were operated by the Catholic Church as kind of like charity, except they were terrible and they just sent you away to an island. And that continued. you know, well into the modern era. Like in the 19th century, Hawaii had Lazzaretto's on the island of Molokai, which you can, like, go visit. It's a national park now. But this whole idea was operating in parallel of a more recent phenomenon in French, which is called cordonsanitaire.

And that was the idea of instead of keeping people sort of like offshore or like in this like 40-day kind of quarantine, what you would do is you would create geographic boundaries around communities and sort of say, you know, healthy people should not come here or like the sick people inside cannot leave. And this is like sort of a modern like development on this idea of the 40 day quarantine. And so one example I was reading about was in Gunnison, Colorado. They imposed a quarantine on themselves during the Spanish influenza. And so that was like in from October 1918 to February 1919, they were like, if you come in here, you will be arrested. Like, you have to spend time in quarantine. And they were like a mining town and they had the railroad running through. And so they had

signs all over the place that were like, if you get off the train here, like, you are going to be forced into quarantine. And if you don't like agree to this, you will be jailed. And, you know, it was one of those things where to some degree you could maybe say it was successful. Like, they appear to maybe have had fewer deaths than neighboring communities. who did receive the Spanish influenza from these people on the trains, but people still did die. And that's where, like, quarantine brings up these serious concerns about human rights, right? Because, like, what does it mean for, like, a government or a public health official or

whoever to say, like, you cannot move, right? And you cannot do things anymore until we're, like, certain that the disease has left you. So there's actually a UN council resolution that was adopted in 1984 called the Syracusea principles, which was supposed to sort of control this to some degree. And the idea was that this could easily be like an authoritarian sort of strategy for like controlling the movement of people. Like we have to kind of specify when a quarantine is appropriate. But I was reading through it.

And as with so many UN things, it is very vague. I feel like it is extremely open to interpretation. It says that a quarantine needs to be based on laws. What laws? The laws of the land. It should be legal. It should be evidence-based. It should be necessary, proportional, and gradual.

So I feel like... Do they have any, like, links, you know? Is it, like, interactive? For more insight. No, that's it. And so, yeah, like, okay, I feel like, given that we're talking about, like, epidemic diseases, right? Like, that are ravaging communities, you could say a lot of things. are proportional under those circumstances.

So we're kind of, we don't really have a great control over this. And this is like, Typhoid Mary is the classic example of this. Have we talked about her on the podcast before? I don't believe so. Yeah, I don't know her. I'm not sure if she's ever actually come up. Okay. So, I mean, like, Typhoid Mary is basically an American, like, myth at this point, right?

Yeah. Like, she is. Can you catch me up? Yeah. I don't know Mary. Yeah. So typhoid Mary was living in New York, and she was discovered to be an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. And typhoid is spread by, like, fecal matter.

Yes. So, like, shared bathroom facilities. It was, like, especially a problem in, like, if you lived in housing where, like, multiple families shared a bathroom. Tenement style. Yeah, yeah. Which is, like, where she was living. And she was also specifically, like, a housekeeper. So she would move into people's house.

She would be responsible as well, right? Like, because it's a fecal-borne illness. Like, okay, let's be honest, we're all walking around with, like, a little bit of shit all for everything. Yeah. Like, poop particles everywhere. Everywhere. And so she would live in the house.

She'd use the facilities, but then she'd also go and make your food, right? So she's, like, fully integrated into your life. And she never shows any symptoms. So people, like, don't know, like, oh, this woman has this disease. So they hire her. And then it turns out, like, all of these people keep. falling ill and the public health officials, you know, do their investigative work and they're like, yeah, this asymptomatic carrier has infected over the course of her life, 51 people.

Oh my gosh. And so she is forced into state ordered isolation. And she spends 30 years of her life. Wait, because she couldn't get rid of it? Yeah, they had no cure. This is like she was born in the 1860s and she ends up dying in the 1930s. And so like in that time we have nothing to offer like her or the people who are being. infected by her. And so they're just, they literally sent her to North Brother Island in the

East River, like, by Rikers Island, which was like this like hospital sanitarium kind of place. And they were like, you can never leave. Well, and in the defense of the public health officials, I'm pretty sure they had like repeatedly asked her to like stop working. Like a cook. Yeah. Stop interacting with people. And her defense, how else was she going to like have a livelihood? So she, and also I think. maybe this is contested now, but there was often the narrative that she, like, didn't really believe that she had typhoid and was doing it to people because she had no symptoms. So, how are you supposed to believe? Right.

Like, I don't believe half the things my doctor tells me. So, like, I think there was, there was, there seemed to be no way to contain her other than literally containing her. Yeah. And also, like, giving her room and bored since she wasn't allowed to cook for people anymore. Yeah, no, I feel for both parties. Like, what are you supposed to do when this person, like, literally? I mean, it's like a classic, like, utilitarian philosophical problem except it's, like, real. Like, what does it mean when one person can infect this many people?

Right. But, yeah, also, like, of course she continued to work. Yeah, like, she was like, I feel fine. Yeah, and she was like, I also need to make money and they didn't offer her any other solutions until they basically made her a public health prisoner. So, Typhoid Mary dies in 1938, and, you know, she is this kind of, like, legendary figure. there's a lot of myths and stuff surrounding her. And she has, I think, you know, a demonstrable impact on public health in the United States. In 1944, the federal government passed the Public Health Service Act, which is to the first time that they gave themselves formally the right to, quote,

apprehend, detain and examine certain infected persons who are peculiarly likely to cause the interstate spread of disease. And so that is sort of where our first official quarantine authority comes from. Today, the quarantine operation is managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so the CDC, and they operate at least 19 international airport quarantine facilities, as well as a land border crossing in El Paso, Texas. And then they're responsible for the whole region. So the thinking is like, similarly to the Venetians, like, disease will be coming from outside. And so we will stop the people and we will put them in these cells. But also like if cases show up, you know, like in Chicago, like the airport quarantine facilities, like they're the ones that are responsible for sort of helping the whole region with this work. But, you know, similarly to, I think like Tyford Mary shows like a really interesting example of like the intersections of like class and disease, right?

And like her need to keep providing for herself. Quarantine is also like extremely racialized. So historically we have not only like leper colonies, but also the idea of. So the idea of like ethnic enclaves or ghettos and specifically Chinatowns in the United States, like are also operating in that model. I think we don't think about how like historically they were ways of segregating people literally on the belief that they were dirty and like carrying disease, right? And that was the idea there. So in the U.S., Chinese people were made when they started immigrating in the 19th century to live in these sort of communities that were apart from white Americans who thought that they were dirty and carrying the plague. San Francisco had the plague from 1900 to 1904, and this is like a super famous case in the history of public health, because they placed all of these really aggressive quarantines on Chinatown and then eventually on all Asians in the state.

And the thing was that the governor denied that there was even any cases of plague in the state and said that public health officials who had been sent in by the federal government to try to control the situation were injecting the plague into Chinese corpses to scare people. So there was all of this like crazy fearmongering that was going on back and forth at the time. And eventually he's the governor and these sort of conspiracy theorists like succeeded in kicking the public health officials out of San Francisco. And the plague then continued. And it's not. Wow. Go figure. Interesting.

And it's not as though these quarantines, these like racialized quarantines were like a smart strategy in any sense. They're like very non-specific and extremely prejudicial. but the counterattack on them also meant that the public health officials couldn't do their work. And so, you know, it's just like this ongoing thing that we're seeing with the coronavirus today where there is a genuine need, right, to stop diseases from spreading. We know that scientifically backed quarantine is one strategy to do that. But there are just so many other things that intersect with the practice of quarantine that make it really difficult to get right. and I think can often end up sort of hurting people as much as it ends up containing disease and helping people. So, you know, the United States has obviously imposed quarantines related to the coronavirus.

I was just listening this morning to people on a cruise ship off of Japan on NPR who are like talking about how they've just learned how to tweet well, like an imposed isolation on this cruise ship because they have nothing else to do. But, you know, the situation in Wuhan in particular where the coronavirus is thought to have originated is particularly. is particularly upsetting and people are calling it a human rights violation because it's the city of 11 million people on lockdown. And they're going around, they're checking everyone's temperatures. Like, it's very, very controlled. And, you know, the strategy is now opening up concerns. Like, how will they get more medical supplies? How will they get more food?

Like, when you blockade yourself, you have only the resources, you know, behind the blockade. So this is, like, an ongoing situation that, like, you know, I think it's just interesting to look back as the coronavirus situation continues to develop, but also just like all future diseases, right? Like this is one of the things that we consistently do. And it's interesting to understand. And that we've not completely figured it out. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, even the, you know, the U.S. has imposed a travel ban. So foreign nationals who have been to China in the last 14 days and who aren't immediate family members of citizens or legal permanent residents of the U.S. are just not allowed in the U.S. And people who are exempt from that, whether they're citizens, immediate family members of citizens or permanent residents, have the 14-day quarantine imposed when they come, having been in China in the previous 14 days. And the World Health Organization has repeatedly advised against any travel bans. Because the World Health Organization says there isn't evidence that this helps significantly.

It increases fear. It disrupts economies. and that like it's best to, you know, advise people not to take unnecessary travel to the center of the epidemic, obviously, but that it doesn't make any sense for any country to bar people who have been to another country entirely. But from the U.S. perspective, you know, the CDC has said on numerous occasions, like, we are taking drastic action because of a drastic situation. So, yeah, it really is like you can say that measures have to be evident. based, but like people just pick the evidence they want to base it on. Totally. So yeah, we really don't know enough about how epidemics turn into pandemics, which is a problem.

Yes. So that was my fact. Cheery. It didn't have as much like hypocontria moments that I was expecting. Yeah. So I'm coming away slightly. Okay. I'm glad to hear that.

Thank you. Okay. Well, let's end it now before things take a turn. We'll be back after a quick break with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And I'm here to talk about syphilis. Which I know I've talked about before on weirdest thing, because we talked about the guy who won the Nobel Prize for treating syphilis by giving people malaria to, like, cook it out of them with a fever, which is not a great idea.

But was the best we had, apparently. A prize winning. Yeah. But just a little, a brief primer on syphilis, since it is one of those diseases that I think a lot of people think of as being like old-timey. They don't know a lot about it. So it's caused by this spiral-shaped bacteria. It's really spunky. It's very sassy looking called a trepanema pelidin.

And its origin is disputed for a long time. People maintained that it was in the Americas and was brought over by colonizers as they, you know, went back and forth. But it's also possible that it was actually already endemic in Europe. And just like it reaching like epidemic levels in Europe just like happened to kind of come somewhat after expeditions to the new world. That's interesting. So like it may have just been lurking and like people had it. And then all of a sudden it kind of like flared up potentially. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. At a societal level. Right. Not a flare up in an individual. Right. And it really was something that like just. went from being not a big deal to being a really big deal.

Basically, outbreaks in Europe became noteworthy around the late 1400s. It showed up in Naples during a French invasion, which is why the Italians called it the French Pax. But actually, like, if you look back at the names that have been given to syphilis, like, people blamed it on other countries. Of course. They were like, it's the British plague. It's the French Pox. You know, everybody, because it would kind of like travel with arms. Everybody would just blame it on like the army that had just passed through. But yeah, around the 15th century, it like became an epidemic and then it became endemic, meaning like so many people had it that it was just a fact of life. You didn't have outbreaks of syphilis. All of Europe was in an outbreak of syphilis for like hundreds of years. So the symptoms these days penicillin tends to treat syphilis pretty handily. So while it still exists and it's actually in some

Some demographics becoming more common. Generally, penicillin, you're done, you're good. You know, shot to the butt cheek. Great. But before antibiotics, the way it would tend to play out is that you would have what was called a shanker, a firm, painless, non-itchy ulceration. So really just upsetting visually, that's primary syphilis. And then secondary syphilis is a more systemic rash, often affecting the hands and

souls of feet and more of those ulcer-like sores. Then you have latent syphilis, which can last for years and has no symptoms. And actually, throughout the history of syphilis, you'll see people mistaking it for multiple diseases because of how it will, like, calm down for a while and then come back. Interesting. So a lot of the supposed cures of syphilis were probably just like people getting over their secondary syphilis stage and going into latent. And they'd be like, great, all of the hot pokers we put on your sores. That was literally one of the cures. It worked. And then later they'd be like, you idiot, you got yourself syphilist again. That is not how much. It's just one, one syphilis. And then tertiary syphilis is later, you know, it can be decades after you become infected.

And you can have neurological degeneration where syphilis is attacking the brain. You can have heart problems, vision problems are quite common, and these sores called gumas, which can have a necrotic center so it can be, yeah, or it can just be these big non-cancerous growths. So basically, a lot of bad stuff, not good, not recommended. I like how they just went for it and naming all of things. And they're like, it's terrible. Shankers and what was the other one? Gumas.

Yeah, those are foreboding. They sound like enemies in a Mario game. Yes Guma and his troopers Also, Shanker is spelled Like, like, chancer I always want to say it like Chaucer, but it's not

It's Shanker My favorite writer But we're not here to talk about How tertiary syphilis Like melts your brain We're going to talk about How syphilis influenced a little thing

Called fashion Oh, wow Did you not see that? Have you heard of it? Oh, I know fashion. Just recently got bangs. It's true. All right.

So we're going to talk about three major fashion moments that may have been fueled by syphilitic frenzy, if you will. So big powdered wigs, a classic sign of wealth and excess in many European cultures. And they existed for a long. time in different forms, but a lot of people think that they were really popularized by the wealthy by Louis XIV of France. He reigned from 1643 to 1715, and he started losing his hair at age 17. Now, of course, it's possible he was losing his hair for any number of reasons, but it is quite widely believed that he had syphilis because he was kind of a bit of a tart. With syphilis, you know, when you get those rashes and sores, it can cause hair loss and all.

also just kind of like a scabby scalp in general. It's not a pleasant situation for you or for people looking upon your royal head. So it's believed by some historians that powdered wigs had become popular for these ever-growing populations of people who had syphilis as a way to cover up their hair loss and their skin sores. And that Louis XIV, had such profound hair loss from his syphilis that he was like, yeah, that sounds great. get me one of those. And that once he was doing it, other fashionable, wealthy people were like, all right, all right. Got to get one. I believe that.

Yeah. His cousin, Charles I second of England, who started going gray quite young and some people think also had syphilis, also jumped on the wig. Or maybe he was stressed. Right. Maybe he was distressed because of a syphilis. So he also started wearing wigs. And he in particular really solidified the powdered wigs place. as a symbol of like you being a member of polite society.

And in fact, he is why judges and lawyers started to wear them around 1680. Until then, lawyers were expected to have just like short, clean hair and beards. But Charles II had made a powdered wig so ubiquitous with being like a nobleman that it started to become a thing that they all did. Also, powdered wigs were great for lice, which everybody had. because while getting rid of lice in your own hair was like an arduous process. Yeah. If you shaved your head to wear a wig, then the lice would just infest the wig,

and you could send those to a wigmaker, and they'd just boil the wig. And that would kill the lice. Why don't you just shave your head for a bit? Get rid of the lice? Yeah, but then you'd be bald. Then people would think you had syphilis. It's temporary. So, yeah.

And also just fun fact, not related to syphilis, Powdered wigs were already kind of on their way out in a fashion sense by 1795. But in an attempt to fund the Napoleonic Wars, British politicians put a tax on hair powder. They put a tax on a bunch of luxury goods to try to come up with the money they needed to fight Napoleon. Always taxing things, those Europeans. And anyone wishing to use hair powder had to get an annual certificate from their local justice of the peace. and it cost a guinea a year, which is something like $150 to $200 today. Oh, my God.

And so powdered wigs were already not super popular anymore, but this kind of like killed them. Yeah. People were not willing to pay. They should have stormed a ship in the harbor. Just thrown out all the powder in protest. I totally buy that argument about him like syphilis but make it fashion. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Well, we've talked about like consumptive sheets. week before where because so many rich, beautiful people had tuberculosis, it just kind of created this feedback loop where then the symptoms of tuberculosis where that was the height of beauty. Just like skinny and sweating. Yeah. And like flushed. Yeah. So with syphilis, you just did a lot of covering up as your body rotted off of you.

So that became popular. But yeah, another possible fashion influence was the cod piece. So this is a little bit contested, but in 2004, Dr. Kahn Scott Reed of Australia speculated in a study that the proportions of the codpiece were at times so extreme and even like grotesque that he suspected there was some functional mechanism there that it wasn't just about like highlighting your imaginary penis. Right. And what is that? Oh, oh, a cod piece from our producer Jess says what is the cut. So it's just like the like fake bulge. Like a metal.

Like a metal. Like tights. Totally. Yeah. Or like on your armor. I remember the first time I ever saw a codpiece. My parents took me to England when I was 10. And we were, I think, in the Tower of London or something.

And you know, they have like all those little museums. And I rounded a corner. And I was at the height of a codpiece that belonged to King Henry, the eight, the one who killed all his wives. And he loved a codpiece. He loved a cod piece. Enormous. It was like metal and like, you know, he's like theoretically lumbering around in this like chain mail. And then he has this enormous cod piece.

And I was just so shocked. So that's from syphilis. Right. So this paper argued that because of the time during which they were popular, it was probably a time when people were dealing with syphilis. extensively and that it may have been used to like because people had bundles of bandages on their genitals that this was like used to disguise that bulge by making it fashion. I did find one article where a scholar disputes this by saying that first of all their penises weren't put into cod pieces based on what we know. So it's not like they were containing your bandages. But the argument being made in the 2004 paper wasn't that.

It was that you created a bulge with your bandages. So you might as well make a bigger bulge. Yeah. With a cod piece so that people thought it was deliberate. Or if everyone has a bulge, no one has a bolt, you know. This is also addressed on the production. You can't just walk into your room and be like, Henry the 8th got a lot of syphilis. And this person also argued that no prints would take on a fashion trend associated with syphilis or disease, to which I say.

hard disagree. Yeah. Because literally everyone had syphilis. So there wasn't much choice. And also, you know, kind of the whole point was that a king or prince might have to adopt one of these fashion work around because they, like so many people, had a disease that was affecting, you know, their face or body. And people would just like buy it.

They'd be like, yeah, great. He's doing it. We're all going to do it. Yeah, it sounds like penicillin really. ruined thing. Yeah. We haven't had a fashion development since. Yeah, but apparently, you know, cod pieces were popular for less than a century, and we

actually just don't know a ton about them. Like, there aren't enough of them preserved and they weren't popular for long enough of a period that we can, like, really discern what they were for. Okay. And so the last fashion movement, possibly propelled by syphilis. So this is from a racked article, RAP, by Jennifer Wright. in 2015 about the history of sunglasses. And sunglasses were not invented because of syphilis.

They have existed in various forms for centuries. Apparently in the 12th century, in Asia, they were worn by judges, so you couldn't discern their expressions. I love that. Yeah, I love that. But apparently in the 19th and 20th century, they became quite popular among people who had syphilis because their eyes were often quite sensitive. and so tinted glasses could make going about the world more bearable for them.

And they also provided a helpful home for your fake nose. Oh, no. Yes, a disfigured nose is one of the hallmarks of tertiary syphilis. Oh, my gosh. So people would have these little nose covers. They were literally wearing those nose glasses. Oh, my God. No.

Yeah. Yeah, this is real. I will put a picture of this on popside.com. And then you put your wig on top of it? I think at that point you could wear like hats and things. It was powdered wigs were not the fashion anymore. Maybe unpowdered wigs, I guess. But yeah, it was like, it's not like it fooled anybody.

No. But it was, it allowed people to not. It meant that you didn't have to deal with people like. Focusing on. Yeah. If they were focusing on it, they were focusing on your big metal fake nose and not you're like oozing syphilitic sore. oven nose, which is, you know, it's sad that people had to hide.

It's sad that there wasn't a treatment for this, like, very systemic disease. Today, like I said, syphilis is pretty easily treated, but it is, like, on the rise in certain demographics. And, in fact, the latest report on sexually transmitted infections from the CDC noted that there's a really troubling rise in congenital syphilis, which is when a newborn contract syphilis during delivery. And that can cause all sorts of problems, blindness, horrible skin disfigurement, tons of developmental problems. And so, yeah, if you get tested early and often, including if you're pregnant and there's any chance, literally any chance, you may have syphilis. And it's a king's disease, you know, so like don't feel bad. Yeah, it's true. You're in great company. Yeah.

But yeah, you know, any disease that is as prolific as syphilis was is bound to influence the culture. And it did. I loved that. That's it. I'm going out and buying a wig and a nose. Yeah, it really is wild how much the prosthetic noses are just those costume giant glasses and noses. Yeah. Like, yes.

Just like a really earnest version of that. Wow. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Wow, I feel like all the things that could grow with syphilis. Yeah. Or that have come from syphilis. Definitely. Yeah.

We owe syphilis a great debt. That we do. Thank you. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show.

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