The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Terrifying Tumbleweeds, Coffee Poops, Three Peters Who Changed Childbirth

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

The weirdest things we learned this week range from tumbleweeds that terrorize entire towns to a tantalizing obstetrical secret. 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 in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- 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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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 Fultman. I'm Claire Maldorelli. And I'm Sarah Trodosh. So on the weirdest thing I've 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, editing, training for marathons across Death Valley or whatever it is Claire's up to these days.

And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear 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. Sarah, would you like to share your teeth? I would. I am going to talk about why the USDA has been waging a war against tumbleweeds for the past 130 years. Very slow war. Yes. Yeah, it's been slow going for them. My tease is that I would like to talk about a family that kept an obstetrical secret for at least 100 years, possibly. longer. Wow. And Claire. Yes, I would like to talk about the fact that not everyone poops after

drinking coffee. Just want to clear the air there, set things straight. Wow. I guess we have to start with that. I have to know. Yeah, I'm very ready to go ahead. All right. Please die. Okay, great. So first, just want to pull the crowd here, which is just me, Sarah, Rachel, and Jess are producer, who poops after drinking coffee? I would say I have a slightly higher likelihood of pooping after drinking coffee. Interesting. Okay. I wouldn't call it an immediate cause and effect situation for me.

That was a very good answer. Thank you. I do not. But there's a time of day for me. You're very regular. Yes, but independent of coffee. Okay. I don't know what that's like.

My gut is not that well-behaved, good for you. Yeah, I would never claim to be a regular pooper, but I used to think I was not a post-coffee pooper until I had to give up coffee recently for other GI problems. And then I restarted and I was like, boy, really gets you going, huh? So I think I am. Okay, great. Yes, okay, so that was the answer I was waiting for. That's also me, Sarah.

I feel you. I actually, I feel like I enjoy it, but I think it's kind of satisfying. It's like, yeah. Well, it's not. I like. I like, I like. I feel like, and this is just based on like anecdotal conversations, I've never talked to someone who says that coffee makes them poop where it's like,

I drink my coffee and then like, oh, Nelly, get me to a bathroom. It's always. Okay. So I think I'm in, I think that I'm in that camp. See, well, but like it's, I. Yeah, that would be me. But like, what I'm saying is that it's, I, um, I tend to get the impression from people that it's like a nice jump start to the pooping process, not a like unpleasant trigger.

So the people that I know, if they drink coffee in the morning, they have to go before they go to the subway. That's what I was literally just going to say that. Okay, so to begin after getting that nice, what's the word? Up close and personal. Yeah, of my colleagues' bowel habits. The novel coronavirus is definitely having a party around. the world these days. And I can't speak for all science journalists, but I am for sure feeling a bit fatigued.

Quite. Yeah. So I feel for you all out there. And I'm usually a coffee drinker, but I have definitely been using, relying on and abusing this drug these past few days and weeks. And as such, I've been pooping a lot more. It's been kind of wrecking havoc on my already sensitive and broken digestive system. Sarah, I really feel you with the GI stuff and everyone out there, bowel issues, bowel diseases, I feel you. Basically, coffee has always made me go a lot and I know that I have an overreactive digestive system, but I was like, this can't be normal. And when I researched it, I found out that I am indeed not normal. I am only 30% of the population poops after drinking coffee.

Yes. It's a very small percentage. I think that you already know this because when I was researching it, Rachel wrote an article about it. She just needs to act surprised. I've written so many articles about moving. They all just blur together. So yes, I'm pretending to be surprised. I remember every fact I've ever written down and published.

So I'll take you back to circa 2010 when I was first introduced to the wonders of this drug. It's always made me go. It was a universal thing. And I just thought that everyone pooped after drinking coffee. Not true. We found out only 30% of the population do. And so now the question is like why. Why do some people poop after drinking coffee and others don't? It turns out that back in the 90s now, I don't know why and I didn't have time to research this, why there were tons of research done, not just on pooping and drinking coffee, just drinking coffee in general in the 90s on PubMed, but they were just really into it back then. Maybe they had some big coffee funders who were like, we need to find out what's happening with this drug. So one study

that was published in 1990 in the journal Gutt, it got the very medical title of effective coffee on distal colon function. Interviewed 60 men and 60 women between ages 17 and 27, and they were given this questionnaire and asked all these questions about their bowel habits and if they felt that any beverages affected their bowel habits and if the answer was affirmative the authors wrote they were asked specifically whether the response was induced by coffee or another drink and how soon enough the beverage had occurred and if other things like smoking eating or exercise could have played a role now I'll get to the answer of that questionnaire later but as a side note I found out that one person in the questionnaire had mentioned that they don't drink coffee ever because they are indeed

allergic to it. Oh. And yeah. Mm-hmm. Right? Wait, allergic to coffee? Yes, correct. Thank you. That was my exact reaction. It turns out that that person wasn't just lying and being like, yeah, I'm allergic to this because I don't like it or whatever. It turns out you can actually be, it's super rare, so don't freak out. But you can actually be allergic to caffeine itself. So according to a 2015 case report, researchers found a rare case of a person who went into anaphylactic shock, grabbing caffeine intake. And so this person and I guess others out there, including this person in the questionnaire, have to abstain from coffee. I guess it's like ignorance is bliss, though. Like if you don't know the amazing effects of coffee. Yeah, that's true. It's fine. So back to coffee and pooping. At this point,

they did this study and they found out that about 30% of those people surveyed in the questionnaire sort of reacted to caffeine consumption or rather coffee consumption, not always caffeine, as we'll note later. But people drank coffee, about 30% of them pooped after, defecated, had bowel movements. I have a lot of synonyms for going to the bathroom. Then the researchers kind of looked into, and not just in the study, but they all looked into, like, what are sort of like the mechanisms behind this? And it turns out it's actually incredibly complicated. And for a long time, they thought that it was just because of the caffeine, because caffeine itself is actually like a bowel stimulator.

So it just increases perisalysis, which is like the movement of the contraction of your bowels, which kind of gets things going in there. So they thought it was just caffeine and that's it. But when they were doing all these surveys and things, they found that people also had this reaction when they drank decaffeinated coffee. And then it didn't happen if they drank Diet Coke or Coke and other things with Kempath. caffeine in it, so it just didn't make sense that it would just be caffeine. So these are a couple of things that they found, but the real answer is that it is still a mystery. However, there are some predominant theories that I can mention here. So first, a compound in coffee itself that makes coffee acidic, and one of the reasons so many people get heartburned from it, I get heartburned

from coffee. It's just a, it's a bad drug, but I love it anyway. Getting older is just a series of, like, realizations that things you used to enjoy you can't enjoy anymore. Yeah, that's true. For real. Yeah, so a compound called cholinergic acid, I might have butchered that, but we're just going to go with it. Essentially triggers stomach acid production, which in turn makes the stomach want to empty itself more quickly into the intestines, and thus it has this like sort of

ripple effect throughout the rest of your digestive tract. So if you empty your contents more quickly, everything sort of just like moves through. So that could be one of the reasons. And then coffee also has a number of different chemicals and things in it that researchers think are triggering certain hormones, including gastrin. And gastrin is also, in addition to caffeine, a bowel stimulator. So if gastrin is produced in high amounts, it also triggers perisolis, which increases the rate of bowel movements. But that was kind of it. And they asked all these questions.

I mean, back in the 90s, if you look back at these studies, there were just like tons and tons of questionnaires asking anything that could have been related to why people went to the bathroom when they did. And they just really couldn't figure out what was it in coffee that made only 30% of the population so affected by this. But that rest of the 70% essentially not affected at all. One positive thing is that apparently it helps this 30% of people who in this population group, if they're in that group and they have surgery, a lot of times apparently after surgery, it's hard for people to like... Oh, yeah. Constipation after surgery is a big problem. Yeah, so they often tell people to like drink coffee because it tends to help. And I would like to note that I really feel for all these people in these studies, but everyone has asked this question.

in the questionnaire that it's like, given all that happens to you after you drink coffee, will you ever stop drinking the beverage? And between 90 and 98% said, no, we'll still keep drinking coffee. It's worth the bowel pain. But it turns out that over time, if you just keep drinking coffee, it's sort of almost like, I guess, alcohol in a way that the more you consume, the more your body needs to both feel the buzz and to poop. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. So it was kind of an unsatisfying answer, I guess. I wanted to know like the exact mechanism because I'm very interested in mechanisms as to why I poop so much after coffee. But I mean, it's, you know, I like coffee. It works well. I feel like I'm cleansed afterwards and I'm ready to go for the day. Jess is laughing at me. I think my segment is done. Would anyone like to comment? Wow. Well, yeah, it's super interesting. And, you know, it is one of the things that we just, like, don't know a ton about. And maybe we'll never have an exact answer for because it's like who's going to fund the definitive study on coffee and pooping. Totally. And I feel like there's so many, like, psychological and physical factors that go into pooping that... It's a very personal experience. Personal endeavor. Awesome. Okay. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And Sarah, tell us about some tumbleweeds. Yes, I would love to. So the year is 1873, maybe 1874. We're not really sure. In the town of Scotland, South Dakota, the state of South Dakota has really only just been created. The settlers are moving in. They're kicking the Sioux people off of their land that is rightfully theirs and turning all this big flat space into basically one big crop field. And in the process of importing basically like cheap seeds from Russia. Some poor farmer is planting a field of flax and he accidentally plants something else alongside

his crops, which is a single tumbleweed. And we don't know. We don't know who this farmer was or what he thought of that tumbleweed. He probably didn't think a whole lot of it. It was just some weird brambly plant. But year after year, there's just like more and more tumble weeds. and then eventually in... Can we pause to say what a tumbleweed is?

Oh, of course. I've seen them like in Western movies in motion. Same. Yeah, that's what I'm picturing right now. So I realize that it must at some point come from the ground, but I don't really know what it is. So when it grows from the ground, it's basically like, picture the tumbling weed part, but green.

So like it's a big... Alive. It's a big, extremely thorny. brambly bush and they're like they're much bigger than you think they can they get three feet tall and six feet wide which is just crazy I guess that makes sense because when you see them tumble in they're like dried up and shriveled so they must be pretty large to shrivel down yeah and they don't really they don't really do the whole like leaf thing they just sort of grow thorns and like hundreds of thousands of seeds and then when they're done with that the like plant

It has quite a big root base, actually. But then when it's done producing seeds, it goes through like a programmed death. And then it breaks off from its base and it rolls around. It goes a tumblein, spreading its seeds. And that's the point of the tumbling is to spread its seeds everywhere. It would be beautiful if they weren't so terrifying. But that's the tumbleweed. There's actually like a bunch of, there's several kinds of plants that produce a tumbleweed.

A tumbleweed is technically like the tumbling thing, but there's like one, one main kind that has infiltrated the U.S. The tumbliest wheat. The tumbliest of them and I think the largest one. So, yeah, they came from, ours came from Russia originally. But yeah, so the tumbleweeds are a tumbling. And then eventually in October of 1880, it was bad enough that somebody wrote to the Department of Agriculture to basically say like, hey, there's this weird plant. And it keeps showing up in our fields and we're not really sure what it is. Like maybe someone should check this out.

And the USDA probably filed that in basement somewhere for about another decade. And then eventually people sent them like actual samples of tumbleweeds to say like, hey, this is a weird thing. You should come check this out. But this time it was not just in South Dakota. It was like the other side of South Dakota, like hundreds of miles away and North Dakota. And so the USDA figures, well, we should probably maybe send someone out there to figure that out. they sent a man whose name I wish I were making up, Lister Hoxie Dewey. Those are just three random sounds.

Yeah, it doesn't even sound like a name. But he was an assistant botanist, and he went out there, and he basically finds that, like, they have taken over the planes. One farmer wrote that other farmers were, like, giving up their homes. It was so bad the tumbleweeds were just taking over. In 1891, one legislator proposed building a fence. around the state of North Dakota, I'm not sure if it was to keep the tumbleweeds out or to keep them in. But at that point, it was kind of a moot point because they had like gotten the tumbleweeds.

Quarantine the tumbleweeds. But at that point it had gotten like it was into Canada. It was as far west as California because like that this time you have this massive railroad spread and you have tons and tons of new farms. And it just like they spread in seeds and people plant them and they thrive in fields, which is really convenient. Dewey, our friend Lister Dewey, wrote that the rapidity with which the Russian thistle has spread far exceeds that of any weed known in America. Very few cultivated plants even, which are intentionally introduced and intentionally disseminated, have a record for rapidity of distribution equal to that of this weed is basically like the fastest

takeover by a plant like ever. So today they grow in literally every state except for Alaska and Florida, which includes Hawaii. by the way, they have crossed the ocean to Hawaii. Wow. I know. But they grow, like, especially well in very arid climates. They can grow in pretty much anything, it seems like, but they do well in the dry. So that's why we now associate them with the American West, sure, even though they are native to, like, Northern Africa and the Middle East and, like, parts of Siberia.

They have taken over an enormous portion of the world at that point, which, as I said, is because they're so good at tumbling. So good at tumbling. So good at it. And as I was reading out this, I thought I was like, you know, kind of silly at first because, like, tumbleweeds are funny. And my picture, my like mental image of them is just like them tumbling in big empty spaces. And like, what's the problem if they're just tumbling around the plains? But the problem is like because they thrive in fields and things, that means they're near to the people.

And then that means that when the winds pick up, it blows like thousands of tumbleweeds onto roads. like houses and cars and they have thorns. Oh, no. So they get tangled and they get stuck in big piles. And I'm just, I have a visual aid for you guys. This is a New York Times article from this year on New Year's Eve of this year, tumbleweeds piled up 30 feet high on Washington State Route 240. Oh, no.

They had to shut down 20 miles of highway and they spent 10 hours literally digging out cars from tumbleweeds like their snow drifts. They had to get snow plows to clear them. This sounds like if Disney decided to go into horror films they would pick the tumbleweed. The tumbleweed is taking over. Wow.

Okay. So look at this video. Look at a Disney horror film. Yeah. I mean like it's literally they are clearing piles of them, piles upon piles. And this has happened. This is not the only time it's happened. In April 2018, they buried house is in Victorville, California. And the same thing happened in 2014 in Clovis, New Mexico, where the Air Force, the Air Force

had to come help dig people out of their homes because they were covered in tumbleweeds. Two counties in Colorado had to declare a state of emergency when an outbreak of tumbleweeds buried their towns. It was literally called an outbreak of tumbleweeds. So the problem is kind of like it's very hardy. It can grow basically in any soil. There are stories that the first thing to grow back at the nuclear testing. sites in Nevada were tumbleweeds. And like, obviously it is problematic that they, like, bury

houses and cars, but also they, like, clog up agricultural equipment because they blow into fields and, like, get all jammed up. And they create fire hazards because they're basically, like, big balls of kindling. So they burn very quickly and very hot. And so for this reason, the USDA has been, like, desperately trying to find a way to stop them since the 1890s. And they have had, like, exactly zero success. In the 70s, they tried releasing two moth species that would feed on the plant and the moths have thrived, but so have the tumbleweeds. They just keep going. In 2004, I was reading about researchers who, like, found the species of mite that eats the tumbleweeds, like, in their native area and petitioned the USDA to basically, like, release the mite in the U.S. in the hopes that that would

work. I couldn't find any information, so I assume the USDA never gave them permission. But in 2014, another group said that they'd found a fungus that should kill, like only the tumble weeds. And they applied to the USDA to release that, but I think that didn't work out either. I think the problem is, like, understandably, the USDA doesn't really want to just release new pathogens into the U.S. wild, which is understandable. We have a very bad track record for the whole, like, trying to release something. thing to take care of one problem. And then that would be like, oh, there's too much grass, have some goats.

Oh, no. Exactly. So, yeah, the plant researchers are, they keep being very excited. The theory being because tumbleweeds aren't really related to anything that grows in the U.S., that the things that, in fact, tumbleweeds don't really affect other plants. But, like, we don't know. That's a big risk. But, yeah, the tumbleweeds are, if anything, stronger than ever.

There's like a new hybrid species that grows in California now that's bigger, bigger and better than ever. It reproduces faster. So it's not looking great for the battle against the tumbleweeds. And for the horror film, now is the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think this could be the new, like the blob or whatever that movie was. Yeah. The tumble. The tumble weed. Well, that's a horrifying fact, but in a much less existentially threatening way than we normally have horrifying facts on the show. So thank you for that. You're so welcome. I strive to be less sex essentially threatening the future. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And credit for this fact has to go to

my fiance Oliver, who sends me a lot of ideas for facts, which I sometimes use, sometimes don't. But this one, for whatever reason, he has hounded me about ever since he first sent it to me. and he was like, I have this fact about how forceups were a family secret for hundreds of years. And I was like, that's a good fact. But I think when he first sent it to me, we had literally just recorded the episode where Claire, you talked about the chainsaw being invented for childbirth. That horrified all of my family. They were like, who are you? So I was like, we need to space it out.

But he kept bringing it up. So I was like, I cannot stand you asking me one more time why I have not used this fact yet. And it is a good one. So finally, getting Oliver off of my back and telling you all about the history of forceps. So we see surgical instruments improvised or otherwise being described in aiding childbirth as far back as the sixth century BC actually. But for most of human history, you were using an instrument. instrument to either help deliver a fetus as a last it effort to save the fetus if the mother was dying or more often these instruments would be used to remove the fetus if the mother was about

to die and if the fetus was like really not going to survive. So it was not, we didn't really have procedures for assisting childbirth that led to a living parent and child. But forceps, were a part of that. And by the way, that is also what Cesarian sections were for most of their history until fairly, you know, recently, is that you could perform a C-section, but the mother was not going to survive that. So that was like a last-ditch attempt to save one of the two people who would otherwise die. But forceps are where that starts to change for better and for worse. and they have this really fascinating history. And it starts in the 16th century with a French Huguenot, meaning a Calvinist Protestant,

named William Chamberlain. And he fled to England to escape Catherine Dumedici, who was the wife of Henry II, and then regent for three of her sons. And she was killing Protestants all over. And she definitely did not want them to be doctors. So William Chamberlain pieced out of France and ended up in England. England. And he had very confusingly two sons named Peter. Don't know why. Be less creative. I've heard of fathers naming like all their sons after them like Wolfgang Mozart. Like all his

siblings were named Wolfgang. But I have, this is the first I've heard of, you know, William for some reason named multiple sons Peter. So maybe like an air and a spare, but just for a name you really like. So, yes, both Peters would become famous medical practitioners. So there's Peter the elder and Peter the younger. And both got into trouble with the College of Physicians for having a kind of devil-may-care attitude. And in the case of the younger Peter, or maybe one of their sons also named Peter, unclear, I saw conflicting reports. But one of these Peters got in trouble with the College of Physicians for dressing too flamboyantly. And I just think that's really important. Oh my gosh. And even though I can't confirm which Peter it was, I felt like it needed to be said.

Wow. How flamboyant is too flamboyant do you think for them? Right. I do not know. But it must have been a sight to behold. So these guys, we know that William Chamberlain when he fled France was some kind of surgeon. But the Peters became known as being, quote, man midwives, which was really the beginning of obstetrics. So basically, you know, for all of human history, most labor and delivery had been attended by either female family members or women who had passed down this knowledge of childbirth specifically. And it wasn't something that, like, physicians of any kind really had anything to do with. And at this point in history, surgeons and physicians are only called to the childbed if there's something horribly wrong,

and they're doing one of these surgical interventions that ends with a dead mother or a dead baby. So they're who you call when, like, you need to do something surgical, and you know it's probably going to end badly. But for most deliveries, including ones that were dangerous, as most, quote, natural childbirth is, Even so most of the interventions that existed were passed down by midwives and not part of the medical establishment. And so the Peters were part of kind of the first efforts to bring labor and delivery under the umbrella of a physician's duties. And so actually a lot of where they butted heads with the College of Physicians was them trying to kind of like create professional organizations of midwives to like have them talk to physicians.

And the College of Physicians was like, you're right that they're really stupid and we should be paying attention to how stupid they are and trying to fix that. But how dare you say that that's our problem or that we should associate with them? It was this very convoluted conversation. And this is not to suggest that Peter the elder or the younger had some like enlightened feminist respect of midwives, but they were like, this should be something that male doctors do and are involved with. So they at least understood that midwives had expertise that they should be paying attention to, even if they thought that they could like perfect it by

creating surgical instruments. And so that's where the forceps come in. So forceps are, it look kind of like unsharp sharp scissors. on sharp scissors. And the idea being that you put them in to the birth canal when the cervix is dilated and you clamp them and lock them so that the baby's head is held in the forceps. And you tug, by all accounts, shockingly hard. And it usually goes okay. This is not to say that forceps cannot cause their own damage.

Certainly you have to know how to use them and even in the right hands. they can cause, you know, things like nerve damage, but it is surprisingly successful labor and delivery intervention, given how barbaric it looks. And so here's what we know, that one of the Peters, not sure who, a lot of people give the elder the credit, but it's not really, I'm not really clear on why they invented the forceups. They had not existed before as far as we know. And they started bringing them to deliveries, and it would result in a difficult labor that normally would have either gone on for a really long time and been really awful or ended with one or both parties dead. Suddenly they were successfully delivering babies. And they wanted to keep this a secret.

All of a sudden, I never want to get rid of it. So this was proprietary information. And we've, since in the 1800s, the original four-saps were actually found under the floorboards of one of their family home. So we now know that they have these forceps and we're using them. But throughout the 16th century, 17th century, first the Peters and then their descendants, one of their sons was named Hugh and there were a few other. There was another Peter, as I said. There was another Peter, who people usually refer to as Dr. Peter to distinguish him

from Peter the elder and Peter the younger. That were also doctors? Yes. Well, they were mad midwives. So again, it may have been Dr. Peter, who was too flamboyant in his dress. But we know that for generations, they were bringing these forceps into the labor and delivery room, which was just a bedroom at that time. And in their quest to protect their invention, they would carry the instruments in a big gilded chest. It took two people to carry the box.

And so people thought it must be some, like, massive piece of machinery. It was just foreseps in there. They're not that large. But they didn't want anyone to guess, but inside. And so then they would blindfold the woman in labor. Oh, my gosh. And they would only the Chamberlains could be in attendance. And apparently the birth would take place under a blanket so that nobody could see what was happening with the forceps.

And apparently. Wow, they thought very highly of themselves. Apparently people outside would hear like. like weird noises, like bells and screams. It seems like they just did a bunch of weird stuff to make people like gossip about what they might have been doing. And then it ended with a healthy baby. So everybody was like, what? Wow.

They're an amazing invention. And so we know that in 1670, Hugh Chamberlain almost blew the secret because he went to visit Paris hoping to sell the secret to the French government. because I guess the family was hard up on funds. And so then someone there challenged him to deliver a baby of a woman who had dwarfism and had a very deformed pelvis. And she had been in obstructed labor for eight days. And he was not... Eight days? Yes.

What? Not great. Not a good time. I didn't know you could be in labor that long either. I mean, the longer you're in labor, the more risk of, like, fetal heart rate. dropping and the oxygen dropping you get into. So it's not great. And this is exactly when we would, you know, use an intervention like forceps. Unfortunately, he was unsuccessful. So he went home without selling the secret. And in fact, we now know that the Chamberlain's original design,

just based on the shape of it, would have had trouble working with any kind of malformed pelvis, which was actually more common back in the day because more people had nutritional diseases like rickets where it affected bone formation or more people had had very like traumatic deliveries. Perhaps someone had gone at them with a chainsaw or the precursor to one of those. So like there were a lot more people delivering babies who had pelvic malformation that could interrupt natural delivery. And unfortunately, the original forceps did not have the right shape to deal with that kind of problem. So we know in the 1700s other obstetricians started to develop their own forceps. And many of these were better equipped to handle differences

in pelvic shape, which is great because that's where the forceps could be most necessary. And some people suspect that one of the descendants of the Peters hadn't had any male descendants himself. So he didn't have anyone going into obstetrics. So he kind of let the secret leak because he understood that like family legacy was important, but also understood that like people should know about this thing they'd been doing to save babies for at least 100 years. So, yeah, that's how they kind of, you know, came into the general public knowledge. But the forceps, a lot of people, we actually have an article about this on popside.com that I'll link to in our article on popside.com slash weird, that a lot of people think that forceps were kind of the start of the medicalization of childbirth,

which makes sense because it was these first. like male midwives who wanted to legitimize obstetrics. And that meant doing things that midwives had not done traditionally and being like, we can do this stuff to save babies that has never been done before. And we only know how to do it because of surgery and real medicine. And so because male doctors had none of the centuries of lived and shared experience that female midwives had had, they really only knew how to show up and use forceps or some on our instruments, just as they had previously only really known how to show up and pull out a

dead or dying baby with brute force. So women who knew forceps saved lives just kind of assumed that that meant the right thing to do was to have a man come use forceps to pull your baby out. So they started to use them in situations where they really weren't necessary. And in fact, I don't know if any of you here watched Mad Men, but there is a famous episode of Mad Men, I think it's called the fog, where Betty Draper, yes, Betty Draper goes into the hospital to have a baby and she's like in a hallucinatory drugged fog the whole time and just like wakes up with a baby. And this is actually like how things worked for a long time.

Dr. Robert A. Bradley, who is known for advocating for husband coach delivery, which sounds very paternalistic and I guess kind of is. But the overarching idea was very novel and good, which is that like, you know, Like you could give people a bunch of information before they went into labor, and it would empower them to have mostly unassisted childbirth, you know, kind of like Lamas breathing and that kind of thing. And he called the, he was doing this in like the 1940s, 1950s, 1950s, and he called the mid-20th century the knock-em-out, drag-em-out era of obstetrics.

God. So you would have this thing called Twilight Sleep, which was a combination of drugs that, dulled pain a little or a lot, but not entirely. But more importantly, they made you forget the whole process of delivery. It's like Propheaval, I think, puts you in Twilight. And it was actually, it was started in Germany, and the way it was done there, it required tons of attention.

I think they had to triple their delivery staff because you would give expectant mothers, this painkiller and this sedative. And then you would have to really monitor them because it wouldn't totally get rid of the pain, so they would be, like, making a lot of noise and thrashing around. And you would have to really monitor them to, like, understand what stage of labor they were in and assist them. And the way it was done in Germany, they almost never needed forceps. It made labor very easy. And so it became really popular.

And there were articles about it. And so then feminists in America in the early 1900s read about this and started advocating for it. It was actually very controversial, like male obstetricians didn't want to let it happen. And feminists saw it as a way of errant. the physical and emotional labor of childbirth by making it something that they could just like wake up the next day and be like, what even happened? Is that a baby? Yeah.

But as you know, if you have seen that episode of madmen and like most medical interventions for women in the U.S. during the 20th century, it was really turned into something not good, where it was really the only option for most women going to the hospital to have a baby and it was not done the way it had been done in Germany where you had triple the staff. Basically, they would just kind of like tie women to a bed and they would scream a lot. And they did often use forceps because it was much easier to just kind of drag the baby out than to try to let a natural delivery happen while a woman was in that weird, drugged, agitated state. So things were really weird for a while. And you may ask, how often do we use forceps

now that we don't knock him out and drag him out. And the answer is that people started getting interested in suction as an alternative, which only really started to make sense once plastic was invented, because now you can put a nice gentle plastic suctiony cup on the baby head and use it the way force-up. Yeah. It's a vacuum-assisted delivery. I mean, I wouldn't say it is. Wait, that's really what it's called? Yeah, yeah. So they just suction onto the baby and just pull them out? Yeah, yeah. And it's not like. a, you know, like a turn on the vacuum. It's like, it's like a big, big kind of plunger. Wow. I love this. In a lot of situations where forceps would previously have been the best way to

speed the delivery up if, say, you know, if a heart rate is dropping or there's just some reason why the baby is not quite getting out. Yeah, now they commonly use just a little bit of a and just, yeah, exactly, a nice little. And then the baby. And the baby is, and the baby is, it. And then the baby is, has like a little, because it was first used in France, they call it a shingong. The baby has just like a little bit, their head is just a little bit raised in the middle from the suction cup, but that goes away because babies are very squishy. And yeah, so now actual metal forcepts are quite rare because there's, you know, less of a risk of bruising and nerve damage with these suction cups.

And also now that we know how to do C-sections without killing everybody, they are often a more reliable intervention where forceps or section would previously have been what we would have gone for. Then again, there are a lot of people who say that C-sections have become way more common than they should be in the U.S. There's a huge debate about how much intervention is actually appropriate. And it is like a very murky debate. And I do not envy people who are trying to like make informed decisions as they prepare to have a baby these days. But forceps really did mark like a turning point in the way we thought about giving birth. And it wasn't all bad. I mean, it's true that childbirth fatalities were very, very common. So like

some amount of developing intervention was really a good thing. And it's great that the medical establishment now sees childbirth as like something they should at least pay attention to. And And it's all thanks to these Peters, the many, many potentially flamboyantly dressed Peters. And so thanks to them. I don't know if I want to have a baby right now. I know. Every time we talk about pregnancy on the show, I want to have children less. Same.

It's a scary adventure. There's nothing comforting to say. It's just like, yeah, it's weird. I mean, I think it is. We are having a lot of conversations about labor, delivery, and maternal mortality in the last couple of years that are very should have happened sooner, but it's really reassuring that so much of it is being talked about and is out in the open now. Any closing thoughts?

I think that I would rather have foreseps than a chainsaw. That's very true. There are many things I would rather have than a chainsaw anywhere near my vagina. So, you know, that's just me. But, and tumbleweens. And tumbleweens. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I think childbirth, the forcips freaks me out.

Yeah, childbirth always wins the weirdest thing. It's true. Nothing is weirder than our basic need to reproduce and the way it's really messed up. But I have to say that the tumbleweeds was an intriguing journey for me because I truly had never thought twice about what they are. And it turns out they are a. a intrepid, brutal, invading force. So, yeah, good for them. Much scarier than I thought.

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