The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Deadliest Surgery Ever, Severed Foot Epidemic, Toe-Touching Athletes

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

On season 2 premiere of Weirdest Thing, the weirdest things we learned this week range from dozens of severed feet that wash up in the Pacific Northwest to an operation on one person that killed three people. 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 social media: www.facebook.com/groups/theweirdestthing www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Learn more about all of our stories: https://www.popsci.com/weird Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses 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

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100 day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code Weirdest.

That's code Weirdest for 20% off. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice.

work. Now, Hank says, on line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Oh my gosh. Welcome to season two of the weirdest thing I learned this week. We are finally back and we are so pleased to be here. Before we begin, our next live show is officially on for February 1st. That's a Friday at caveat, our favorite venue in New York City. Tickets are already available and last live show was standing room only. So you want to get on popsight.com slash weird to make sure you get your tickets right now. With that fantastic news out of the way, let's begin season two. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. 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 Learn this week, a podcast from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Claire Maldarelli. And I'm Eleanor Cummins. If you were new to the show and you have made the mistake of not binging season one already, here's how it works. We start by each offering a little tease of some kind of story or fact, curiosity journey that we came across while reporting, reading, writing, being fascinating people who work for Popular Science Magazine, et cetera. And then we vote on which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. 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, how about you start off with your teas? I want to talk about 20 dismembered feet of unknown origin appearing on the Pacific Northwest It's coast my homeland over the last 10 years. Hey, swing in for the fences. Welcome to season two. Oddly enough, mine is also about dismemberment after a fashion. I want to talk about an amputation performed on one person that supposedly killed three people. Incredible.

That's great. What a ratio. And Claire, what's your fact today? don't like to talk about dismemberment. So I would prefer to discuss why. Just because you can't touch your toes does not mean you are not athletic. Well, it's not about dismemberment, but it is about feet. So I feel good about the symmetry of today's episode. What do we want to start with? I want to know why Claire wants to defend not touching your toes. All right.

Oh, okay. I thought we were going to do dismemberg E, watching up shore. No, on weirdest thing, dismemberment is a dime a dozen. Please, tell us about toe touching. Yes, great. This brings me back to my middle school years, which is, you know, a time where I feel like I peaked in many ways, but not in all. So as a middle schooler, one of my life goals was the presidential fitness ward. Anybody else remember?

I remember it. It wasn't a goal so much of a, like, harbinger. of doom. I don't know anything about it. Really? I assumed that it was like in every school, but I guess some schools didn't have it. I don't know if you went to like private school or whatever, but all public schools had this series of gym class tests. They included the number of pull-ups running a mile. And among other things, the last thing you had to do was something called sit and reach where you sat and you had to stretch out your legs. They had to be like flat. And then you would reach forward and try to see as far as you could go. And if you went a certain number of inches past

your feet, then you passed the test. Past your feet? Yeah. Passed your feet. So I got like negative seven. And everyone was like, why? You're like a good, all the other things. Why can't you touch your toes or sit and reach?

So you could do pull-ups, but not touch your feet. Yeah. Okay. I had the mile record and the pull-up record. Wow. And I had negative seven in the sit-in-range. Okay. Now I'm seeing why this is the topic of conversation.

Yes. Thank you. Okay. So by high school, I had completely put it past me. And it wasn't until a few years ago at Pop Psi here in these offices that it all came back to haunt me. So our editor-in-chief, Joe Brown, who tends to think on the elite level side of athletics, which I'm very clearly not. I mean, like, relatively speaking, compared to the average New Yorker, I would say you are an elite athlete. Okay. Well, I'll take that. But there is no Olympic. fix in my future. So we were talking about stretching and he was like, Claire, touch your toes. And I was like, um, problems. I cannot. And he didn't believe me. So I showed him and he was stunned. Okay. So resurfacing childhood trauma. Yes, correct. All this other day at the office. Come to pop's eye.

So all this bottled up anger for the presidential fitness award obviously came back in full force. So I decided what any good journalists will do. I wrote an article about it, and you can find it at popsight.com called Why Can't I Touched My Dose? And I will bring the highlights here, plus some new facts. I reached out to this guy named Jeffrey Jenkins. He was amazing. He's a physiologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He told me a couple of things of note.

First and foremost, the Presidential Fitness Award is now defunct. I did not know that. So it was created back in 1966 by then President Lyndon B. Johnson as a way to keep kids fit through a series of quote-unquote challenges. But shocker, most of the challenges that they tested didn't actually test kids' health. It just tested how flexible you were or how many pull-ups you can do. But that's not really a factor of how healthy a kid is. So in 2012, under the Obama administration, health officials did away with that test and moved more towards one that. measures just health. As Jenkins explained to me, the three biggest factors that contribute to

successfully touching your toes are the flexibility of your hamstrings, the range of motion of your hip joints, and the relative length of your arms and your torso to your legs. Now, of all of those, the only thing that you can actually change is the flexibility of your hamstrings. So the range of motion of your hip joints, if you're born with bad hip joint range of motion like I, there's nothing you can do about it. And the relative length of your arms and your torso to your legs. So sadly, for that, I measured my relative length of my arms to my torso and I'm actually quite normal. So I can't blame that. So it's just the other two factors for you. That would be correct, yes. To a certain degree, you can work your hamstring muscles to make them more flexible, but obviously

your hips can't be altered by any of these stretching programs. If we go back to the span of your arms and your legs, if you were to take someone like Michael Phelps, who is famous for his long torso, his long arms and his relatively short legs, which makes him like a killer good swimmer, would likely have no problem touching his toes without doing a single hamstring stretch. Correct me if I'm wrong, Michael Phelps. Challenge acceptance. Generally speaking, more flexibility is a good thing. It promotes blood flow, and according to Jenkins, flexibility, training, and muscle elasticity itself can prevent certain kinds of injuries in sports and other recreational activities. So there's like the reasoning why some types of stretching is good for you.

But he also told me that just because you can't touch your toes doesn't mean that you are not physiologically fit or that you're not healthy. You don't have good, you know, blood pressure, things like that. That has nothing to do with touching your toes. And plus a fun fact, I was like, well, I'm a runner. If I could touch my toes, then would I go to? to the Olympics and he was like, no, actually, if a lot of runners actually can't touch their toes because it means that they have a lot more fast twitch muscles in their hamstrings,

which makes them good runners, but it makes their hamstrings tight. Okay, so. So a cheetah could not touch its toes. You know what? Maybe. So a moral of all that story is not VML touch your toes means nothing. if you're a runner, don't worry, you probably are better off not touching your toes. But if you came to this podcast or you kept listening because you were like, I want to touch my toes and I can't, I have some advice for you from Jenkins.

This is a little physiology lesson. Your muscle groups contain cells called muscle spindles. So whenever you stretch a muscle, these sensory receptors tell neurons within the muscle to fire a signal back to the central nervous system through the spinal. final calm. So it really all has to do with your nerves. This causes your muscles to contract, tighten, and resist the force to be stretched, resulting in that annoyingly painful for me, at least, I don't know about other people, that most of us get when we first reach down to touch our toes and attempt to stretch. However, if you hold the stretch for a minimum of six seconds, you can actually conquer this reflex. Around that time, the muscles Golgi tendon organs,

These are spindles of neurons that sit on the muscle fibers, kick in, and inhibit muscle contractions, allowing your muscles to relax and lengthening the stretch that you do. That's why they tell you to always hold a stretch for 15 seconds because it invokes this effect. Cool. Okay. So I was like, I've tried that. It doesn't work for me. What else he got from me?

And what he told me basically was that pain is very subjective. So for some people, the pain that accompanies those six seconds is just too much. And I was like, hmm, very accurate. But for the majority of people, just holding it for those six seconds or longer, and if you keep doing that every day, you'll sort of get used to that pain. And you'll realize that you actually can reach down further than you think. So it's like psychological. It's psychological. Wow.

So I just have a problem with the pain. I mean, that's fair. Yeah. I actually, I remember, I could like barely touch my mind. toes when I was in dance class in fifth grade that was like not good enough we were supposed to be able to like put our palms flat on the floor oh my god and I thought I was just becoming more flexible but I guess I was just learning to cope with excruciating pain which is kind of what ballet is like especially when you start too late like at 10 years old and have hips that are not at all suited to

it but I can still touch my toes it's been a while since I tried to get my whole palm on the floor, but it did indeed stick with me. Chalice. The stretch over. So jealous. I'm going to try it at the break. I don't know. All right.

Well, I guess that's a good cue for us to stop. And after Eleanor touches her toes or doesn't, we'll come back. Stay tuned to find out. We're back. And Eleanor, why don't you tell us about some feet? Oh, God. Do you insist? This thing that I'm about to talk about is listed on Wikipedia.

It has its own page. it's called the Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries. I think that's a really great way into this story. Basically, it's this thing that I would say is right up there with Sasquatch, except it's 100% verified and totally real. In the Pacific Northwest, we're talking about like northern Washington State and southern British Columbia, Canada. There's this really weird phenomenon of dismembered feet showing up on beaches. The first event actually goes back to 1887. I didn't know this before, but A full leg in a boot showed up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and it gave its name to Legen Boot Square, which is a shopping plaza that you can visit to this day.

That's a great namesake. Yeah, but things really ratcheted up in about 2007, 2008. So that's like when I was in middle school and early high school. Over the course of about 15 months, seven feet show up on this beach. Yeah. It was really weird because it was originally all men's feet and also all right feet. So if you have not been staying up to date on this phenomenon like that, and you heard about it at the time, like that's what you'll remember, because it just seemed so creepy, like some kind of strange machinations had made it happen this way. Yes, that is definitely a serial killer.

Yeah. So four of them matched in the end. So of those seven feet that eventually show up in this 15-month period, they eventually do find some left feet. They also find some women's feet. A few of them match, and so you have a total of five bodies, but the bodies never actually show up. Which is pretty atypical. Yeah. Usually when you find one body part, you can identify the other body parts, and that's absolutely not true here.

And all of them, I have to say, okay, this is maybe contentious and maybe you should cut this. But I have to say that the shoes were really ugly. The Canadian Mounties put together this infographic where you can see where all of the shoes were found and pictures of the shoes. And they're all like new balance from like 2004. Like they're really chunky. Honestly, I think Kanye West would really like them. they look like the yeezy look that he's brought back. But they all look like they weigh like 40 pounds.

Like they're just like thick, very bulky. That's just a side note for the system. A fashion reportage, if you will. So over the next decade, more and more feet keep washing ashore in the same region. And it's like truly a fixture of my childhood. These feet. Last week my mom texted me and said something to the effect of, you know, I was thinking there hadn't been any feet in a while.

And I knew exactly what she was talking about. And she was like, and what do you know? and she sends me a link to a story that another human foot showed up on Jetty Island in Washington State on January 2nd. That's the 20th foot in the last 10 years. Yeah, Happy New Year from Washington State home of serial killers. There have been like a bunch of theories floating around. Wait, just theories.

No one has figured this out. We'll get there. One that I remember hearing as a kid was like, well, these are just bodies that are being thrown over cruise ships, obviously. Another one is that they were... Cruise ships always get it. Yeah. And another one was that they were like the eight.

Asian tsunami of 2004. That was like a really big one that people were saying that these were all just bodies that had eventually made their way across the Pacific Ocean. A big one, which Rachel, you already alluded to, is that the Pacific Northwest does have statistically an unusual preponderance of serial killers. And someone was like, this is just someone who's leaving feet behind as as their calling card. Exactly. And so. It's really gross. If you're listening, find a new one. So in reality, two of those feet have been tied, unfortunately, to suicide using DNA analysis. But literally the other 18 are completely unexplained. And it has led to a lot of hysteria, not just among, like, journalists or citizens,

or even the people who find these feet, because all of these feet are found by laypeople who, like, live near a river or on a beach and stumble across a foot, but also, like, among experts. There's just like so many crazy things that people have said over the last 10 years about what this could possibly be. So a lot of it really does remain unexplained, but I wanted to share a few facts about decomposition for your consideration as I continue to build my case for what is going on here. Yes, great. First of all, ankles, hands, and heads, extremities in general, are known to detach themselves from bodies. That's actually pretty well established because they have pretty weak connections to the rest of your body. But usually body parts turn to soap when they're, you know,

in water for that long. That's a pretty common thing that happens with fats, right? Like, they're just going to sort of dissolve over time. But shoes actually help to preserve detached feet. And athletic shoes in particular are considered fairly buoyant. There's a really great quote out there from an expert who's like, there's a reason you're not finding the feet in stilettos. And so some analyses would suggest that an athletic shoe could actually float as far as a thousand miles with a foot in them. Wow. Which is really fascinating. You know, I'd go a thousand miles.

Exactly. To fall down on your beach and scare you to death. So yeah, most of the shoes were manufactured for North American markets, but at least one was sold in India, which gives some, like, interesting legitimacy to this idea that they're all floating out there in the ether. And then the other thing that's worth noting, I think, is that it was long thought that a human foot could survive up to three decades. in like quote unquote optimal conditions because there was like this strange theory that was

pretty dominant in science for decades that in a waterborne environment a whole body could just sort of float under the waves for like unknown periods of time but obviously research has shown that oceanic scavengers will do away with a body fish eat fish are hungry and they will consume any meat in a few days so that's no longer believed to be true in other words like the sea is hardly optimal. But at the same time, there does seem to be this kind of temporal component, because most of the shoes that turned up in 2008, specifically, were manufactured between 1999 and 2004, which does indicate that they'd been floating for a long time. And the feet inside them weren't like perfectly intact. They were pretty significantly decomposed. In some cases, it sounds like it

was just bone left in the shoe. So it does seem to be that this could have been going on for a long time and sort of accumulating. With all this in mind, the question is like, what the heck am I supposed to it to make of all of this. And this is a deeply unsatisfying answer. I really am sorry to disappoint you. But today, experts say that is just currents. There's a quote from Parker McCready, who's an oceanography professor at the University of Washington, my alma mater. He told Vox, things that float at the ocean service move with the currents, but also are pushed a bit by the wind, and this can be significant in getting them to shore. The prevailing winds here, he's talking about, you know, around the sailor sea are west to east and so floating stuff in this part of the Pacific gets blown to the

coast effectively. In other words, the environment seems to just be collecting what is evidently dozens, 200s, 2,000s of body parts that are in the Pacific Ocean and just happens to concentrate them in this one area of the world in a really creepy way. And I don't know if this makes it better or worse, but in turns out that body parts washing up is actually pretty common. I think that it's like the sheer consistency of these body parts in the sailor sea and the fact they're all feet is creepy. Yeah. But like just the feet. Just the feet.

But like other body parts, you know, that also are sort of detached from the body itself, have washed up in New York City, in Rio, in Charleston, in St. Louis even, like on the Mississippi River, in Fiji and others. And sometimes in those cases it's been detached feet as well. I'm not sure if that makes it more or less creepy, but it basically sounds like. They're just like way more feet in the Pacific Ocean than anyone would imagine. Oh, God. And this particular piece of the country is really receptive to those feet. Okay. What freaks me out the most is that all these sneakers must have some killer foam in them.

Yeah. To have them flow to the top. I mean, I want to run in these sneakers. Yeah. Some of them are hiking boots too, which makes like less sense to me. Those seem dense, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I wonder if it's going to become more common because it's so popular right now to have those shoes that are basically like socks on a foam platform. They're so bouncy. Yeah. So just perfect storm for the feet. For the floating feet. Wow. Also just like one more quick question. Eleanor, we discussed how you're like really freaked out by feet. Yes. So I'm really amazed that you just delivered that without. Delivered this whole story about feet. Thank you. I really love the First Amendment, and I believe in my commitment to journalism, so I overcame. For some reason, this feels to me more about, like, ugly floating shoes than about feet per se. So I didn't have as much trouble tackling it as I would literally anything else about feet, including this conversation now that has turned into me thinking about feet. Plus, I feel like you grew up with it, so you've been, like, desensitized your

whole life to just the particular realm of feet washing up shore. Yeah. Which seems to be different than feet. What a thing should be desensitized, too. Only in the Pacific Northwest. Let's step away for a quick break. And then we'll be back with one more quick fact. Hey, weirdos.

Looking for awesome popular science merch? We've got you covered at popsye.threadlist.com. Pick up t-shirts, notebooks, tote bags, mugs, and other great swag with iconic vintage covers or modern designs. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite Popsie shows. like the weirdest thing I learned this week. All that and more at popseye.threadlist.com. That's p-op-s-C-I-threadlist.com.

Okay, we're back, and it's time for another dismemberment story, my dismemberment story. We're going to go back in time for this one. These days, you'd probably be surprised to hear a surgeon brag about how quickly they can perform a particular procedure. I mean, sure, like, maybe they're like, oh, you know, I did that heart transplant so quickly. well, but the thing that they would really be emphasizing was the success of the surgery

and their technical skill. But before anesthesia was introduced into the medical world, which was in 1864, not that long ago, speed was really the most desirable quality in your surgeon, because the quicker they sliced, the less time you spent in hopeless agony and the last time you spent bleeding onto the operating table before they could stitch you up. In general, side note, as you might imagine, people avoided surgery at like all costs. But sometimes it was unavoidable. Obviously, amputations were necessary on occasion. They were starting to do things like mastectomies for obvious breast cancer.

We were not total dumb-dums in the world of medicine by the mid-1800s, but we certainly did not have anesthesia. And interesting point about that, actually. A lot of the stuff that I'm going to be talking about today, I got from Dr. Lindsay Fitzherris's blog. She's a doctor and medical historian, an author, and host of a YouTube series called Under the Knife. Her blog is really awesome and she has a lot of cool medical history on it. But one thing I saw there, you might ask, why didn't they just knock people out? Like, alcohol, a brick over the head.

And anything should have been better than just like cutting into you while you were awake. But a lot of doctors actually thought that the pain was important because it was, It would keep you energized and therefore alive. I think they basically thought the adrenaline was the only thing keeping you from bleeding to death, which is a little misguided, I guess. So they didn't want their patients unconscious. They were like, the pain is part of the process. Part of the process.

So surgery, not fun for most of its history. And a fast surgery was the best you could hope for. That's where Robert Liston comes in. Some historians have referred to him as the fastest knife in the West End. He had a one in ten fatality rate, which was really good at the time. Oh, my God. That was really good. That was on the table anyway.

That was not counting people who died of complications later. That is a really great name. Yeah. What a title. And some accounts actually talk about him holding the scalpel in his teeth to free up his hands, which isn't crazy because this is right around the same time that there was a famous uproar over the suggestion that you might want to wash your hands between handling a corpse and delivering a baby. You might want to? Yeah. Physicians thought this was absurd. They were angry about it,

probably because it suggested that women and babies had been dying because they hadn't washed their hands. So they were like, what good would that do? So yeah, it's really not hard to imagine Robert Liston, the fastest knife in the West End, holding his scalpel between his teeth covered in blood, just tams deep in your organs. So anyway. This is so upsetting. That's who Robert Liston was. Liston had a few really famous surgeries.

There was a book written about him in 2004 by medical historian Richard Gordon, where he reviewed a few of them. And I will get to those. And I will get to his most famous and infamous surgery. But first we're going to talk a little bit more about how just god-awful surgery was at the time. because I really want you to have context for why people would submit themselves to Robert Liston and why he was doing the things he did, which led to cutting off fingers and testicles that were not meant for removal. So in 1750, the anatomist John Hunter described surgery as a humiliating spectacle of the futility of science,

and the surgeon as a savage armed with a knife. Oh, God. Another description from around that time, in 1811, this woman named Fannie Bernie had a mastectomy for breast cancer. And she wrote some really vivid descriptions of the surgery. She said, when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast, cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves, I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. That means she screamed. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole. time of the incision, and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still. God. It's like Edgar Allan Poe could not have written that. It's haunting.

Yeah, it is truly haunting. And it's just like, it's wild to think about having to just be awake for surgeries. In fact, her surgeons decided to limit her anxiety by picking a day at random for her surgery and only giving her two hours notice. All right. Because this silly woman was anxious about them cutting off her breasts while she was awake. And watched. And watched. Yeah. And like I said, many doctors actually thought the pain was important to keeping their patients alive. And so some of them would actually secure them upright in chairs, like lashed the chair so that it was easier to keep you from moving. Because it was really dangerous if a patient started thrashing around. And they did. Obviously, the patient is thrashed around. No one can lay still.

calmly while someone is cutting off a part of their body. And that's where Robert Liston's famous cases come in. We'll do some of the less famous cases before we get to the one that killed three people. I'm nervous. So according to Richard Gordon's book, his fourth most famous case, I mean, I think it's kind of a subjective thing to rank his most famous cases, but it's a great selection, Richard. So thank you. The fourth most famous case, removal in four minutes of a 45-pound scrotal tumor, who's owner. had to carry it round in a wheelbarrow. I assume before the surgery.

I don't think he, like, brought it out. You'll never believe what happened to me. Though, I don't know, maybe. The third most famous case, he had an argument with his house surgeon. Was the red pulsating tumor in a small boy's neck, a straightforward abscess of the skin, or a dangerous aneurysm of the carotid artery? Pooh! Liston exclaimed impatiently, whoever heard of an aneurysm in one so young.

So then he whipped out a knife and cut it open and the boy died. But the artery lives in University College Hospital Pathology Museum. His second most famous case, we're getting there. He amputated the leg in two and a half minutes, but in his enthusiasm, the patient's testicles as well. Just off. Oh, my God. And that brings us to his most famous case, which is often cited as having a 300% mortality rate. So he amputated a man's leg in under two and a half minutes, but the patient actually died afterwards because there was gangrene in the hospital.

At the time of the surgery, Liston actually also sliced off the fingers of his young assistant, who then also died of gangrene because that's how gangrene works. And then allegedly, he also caught the coattails of a guy watching the surgery because, again, we didn't know that bacteria was a thing. so people would just watch surgeries in actual surgical theaters. No one understood that the more people you packed into the room, the more likely you were to give someone gangrene. So he allegedly, like, sliced into the jacket of a very old man, maybe physician, who was watching. And there was blood splashing on him, and he felt the knife catching on his coat tails.

He thought he had also been accidentally cut into, which is like a pretty reasonable thing, given that an assistant had just had his finger sliced off. And that this man is a menace. This guy sounds like Edward Cisorhan. And so according to Lur, he died of a heart attack because he thought he had just been stabbed. Out of fear. Yeah, exactly.

I really tried to find a primary source for this third death. The first two are very straightforward. Of course, people who had amputations died of gangrene all the time, like almost literally all the time. People literally did not wash their hands. And they like walked in off the street to watch search. because they were crazy wild. And so that one's easy to believe. The assistant is also pretty easy to believe because if you were performing surgery on

someone who wasn't sitting up tied to a chair, you had to have people hold them down physically. So there was almost certainly always an assistant with their hands very close to where the cutting was happening. And Robert Liston did not waste no time. He was the fastest knife in the West End. And you do not get that title by looking out for. your assistant's fingers. Yeah, you don't get that title without cutting off a few fingers. Yeah, you can always get another assistant. You do what it takes. You can always get another assistant.

You can't get a new reputation. No. So, yeah, that I totally believe. Do it for the brand? Yeah. I am sure that many surgical assistants died of gangrene at some point or another during this period. The third person, the spectator, it all seems a little theatrical to me. and I was not able to confirm it. It's certainly something that gets shared a lot, and it could be true. You know, an old man having a heart attack because he thought he'd been literally stabbed

by a wild surgeon. Yes, it could have happened. Do we know that it happened? No. And if you have some primary literature on this, please send it my way, because I would love to read it. That's the story of Robert Liston

and his surgery that killed at least two, possibly three people. I feel like watching two people die, I wouldn't even need to think I got cut. I would just die up here. Well, the two gangrene victims took a while to die. Oh, okay. So everyone, the surgery was ostensibly a success, minus a few fingers. The man who had a heart attack, if true, had it the best of everyone in box.

Yeah, crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Swift exit. Out like a light. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and apparently being covered in blood was like a badge of honor because it meant you were performing a lot of surgery. then very quickly.

I just like pour one out for the heroin surgeons were just literal mad men who just cut off limbs. With their teeth. Yes. So what's the weirdest thing we learned this week?

Feet washing up short. It's really hard to beat. Can't beat those feet. Yeah. Thank you. Congratulations, Eleanor. Yeah, this one's dedicated to my home territory. Hometown victory. 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 right now. And if you like what you hear, please rate in rubeos on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsci. dotthreadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, and our editor, Jason Letterman. Our theme music is by Billy Cannon.

If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank.