The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Victorian Sex Drugs, Milk in Your Veins, Radioactive Dishes

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

The weirdest things we learned range from injecting cow's milk into a person's veins (don't worry, it's fresh!), to a modern gay sex drug with Victorian origins. 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 Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Marion Renault: www.twitter.com/MarionRenault Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess 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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That's code weirdest for 20% off. 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 for Citizens Bank. My blood type is B-negative, and I try to live up to that every day. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of things. science and heck 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 learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. And I'm Marianne Rennon. And Marianne is our intern right now and making her weirdest thing debut. So welcome. Thank you. We're going to start today a little bit differently than normal before we get into our fact sharing. So we talk a lot about how to help promote the weirdest thing. And this isn't a fun drive, though actually you can sponsor us using the Anchor app. I remember at one point or another saying, you know, if you leave reviews and ratings for us on Apple, even if you don't listen to us on Apple, it helps other people find the show because of algorithms. And I probably gave some throwaway promise about how we might

share reviews on the show because that's just a thing people say on podcasts. And I do a lot of repeating things that people say on podcasts. But now we're going to actually share some of our favorite reviews. So, and I am going to read the usernames. Oh, Joe Brown. Who's that? I don't know. It sounds like it might be the editor-in-chief of popular science, but it's a really common name. Very. So this other Joe Brown says, a very refreshing science podcast. I love the whimsy of this podcast. I love the wimsy of this podcast. So many science podcasts are so heavy, but this one had me laughing out loud. Three things you'd never know, delivered by three incredibly smart science journalists. That sounds unbiased to me.

Now we have a review from Chemistry Teacher Type Lady, which the rest of these reviews are real, I promise. We love you, Joe. Thanks. Chemistry Teacher Type Lady says, this is my favorite podcast of all time. The appropriate bits get passed into my chemistry class. The inappropriate bits get passed onto my friends and family. Love you guys. Keep educating us on rare diseases, Claire. Oh my God, I love that.

Claire's not here, but we will pass that along, for sure. And one more for right now, and then I will sprinkle some others throughout the episode. Princess Banana Hammack. Yes. My monarch. The raining.

Long may she rain. Princess Banana. Hannah-Hemmick says, the most delightful thing. Science people and non-science people alike, I encourage you to listen to just one single episode of people who have receipts and know what they are talking about. That was in all caps. I'm just trying to stay true to Princess Banana Hemmick's vision. I felt it. You can wow every family member and pal with the things you learn here with some genuine laughs along the way. Or just geek out to these facts given to us by intelligent women with soothing. voices. This podcast has made me more interesting at parties. Highly, highly, highly recommend.

I love that because that is exactly how we sell this podcast to our listeners. It is what I want it to do for you. I want you to freak people at parties, but in a way that makes them want to talk to you more, even though they're really freaked out. So, love that. Thank you for listening, chemistry teacher type lady and princess banana hammock. We love you. And with that, we're going to dive into the show. But like I said, we're going to have some more of these. We'll have some more on a future episode. Go on Apple right now before you forget. Rate review. Thanks. 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, scrolling around Twitter, begging for

Apple reviews, et cetera. And then we 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. And we do it with soothing voices. Elinor, why don't you start with your teas? I would like to talk about radioactive dinnerware. It's a long history. It's spooky. We can't give it up. And Marianne, how about your teas? Doctors used to think injecting people with milk was a really good idea. I still think that's a good idea. It depends on what your end goal is.

Yeah, what are you doing later? Okay, my tease is that a Victorian heart medicine eventually became a gay sex drug. Sign me up. Gonna shoot up some milk and then do whatever this is. And then just eat some radioactive dinner. Pop off. Yep. So what do we want to start with?

I would like to hear about this Victorian sex drug. Okay, great. Yeah, we can start with Victorian sex drugs or, yeah, that's basically. Eventually. If you cram it together, it is a story about Victorians. I mean, I'm not going to say Victorians weren't using this drug for sex. Who are we to say? But I have to start out by saying that this is completely ripped off from an article by

Alex Schwartz, who was recently on Weirdest Thing and recently finished his intern. with us. Alex, this was a great article. I loved editing it as the science editor at Popsai. I do a lot more editing than I do writing. So most of my work is behind the scenes, but I'm really proud of everything we put out. But this, especially, I was like, oh my gosh, I learned so much that I did not know going in. What a journey. So everyone has to read it, but I'm going to share the outline. Also, he made his own art, which you can only see a few follow up online. It's true. You can't see it on the radio. So it's good. It's beautiful. So we did this for Pride Month because gay sex.

And the drug, can anyone guess what the drug is? It's poppers. Party. Yeah. So. Meso dilation. So let's start with what poppers are. They are emerald nitrite.

So you inhale this chemical and what does it do? It lowers your heart rate. It kind of dilates blood vessels. It relaxes muscles. So it's, you feel warm in your face and head because blood is rushing there. And you feel kind of woozy because of the drop in heart rate. And it also just relaxes all of your involuntary muscles. And it's popular, specifically among men who have sex with men, because it relaxes involuntary muscles,

which is a really good way to keep yourself from getting hurt if you're having oral or anal sex or any kind of sex, really. but it really took off in the gay community, which I will talk a little bit more about in a minute. But the thing that I didn't know going in is that the history of Popper starts in the Victorian era. So this French chemist Antoine Ballard, he synthesized Amel Nitrate in 1844. And even then, he talked about how smelling the chemicals vapor made you lightheaded. You now know that's because your blood pressure drops when you smell it, or rather when you inhale it, what you are doing when you smell it. And a few other chemists around the era described other physical effects like throbbing arteries,

flushing face, increased heart rate. And then came Benjamin Ward Richardson. And he was like, this does things to the heart like we've never seen before. In 1864, he theorized that it caused vasodilation, you know, the dilation of blood vessels. And he actually passed it around at medical conferences so people could try it for themselves. So just imagine a bunch of Victorian-era doctors just doing poppers. I love it. Divisive.

I would go to a lot more conferences. Yeah, if it were popper. Yeah, if it was like that. The one I went to was not like that. So poppers, again, the community of chemists and doctors were aware of them. But then they became popular as a medical treatment. And this was because cardiac disease was starting to get more attention at this time. And one of the most common symptoms is angina pectoris, which is just chest pain when the heart muscle is not getting enough blood.

And doctors were trying everything for this. They tried bloodletting. They tried brandy, which I'm sure helped you feel better, but didn't really help with your angina. And then this one physician figured out that if you put a little bit of emily, nitrate on a cloth and had the patient inhale it, the pain would disappear. They would get a flushed face and maybe be a little loopy, but they felt better. And there had been nothing like it. And in 1881, an editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal called it a neglected drug because doctors were kind of reluctant to use it because of that whooshy feeling.

Is that why, like, sniffing napkins used to be such a thing? I feel like people were always smelling their handkerchiefs. Oh, they did a lot of, um, that was often just cocaine. There was a lot of snuff in general in the Victorian era. They stuck a lot of things up their noses. And there was a lot of like carrying things around in tins for medicinal purposes and then just kind of like veiling your face as you take it. Yeah. Propriety when using cocaine. Exactly. But eventually it did it did catch on and it became one of several vasodilators that was used to treat angina. So by the early 20th century, they started to look like kind of proto-poppers because they were coming in these little tins of glass vials wrapped in cloth. So you would, it looked like a little pieces of saltwater taffy is what Alex said in the article, which I just love. And so if you were having a spell, you would crush a capsule so it would soak through the cloth and then you could inhale it. And that made a popping sound, ergo poppers.

That's honestly like a genius transportation method. Yeah, I think so. There's something so fun about it. Let me just crush my drugs. One second. So they broke glass files? I think it was like it was wrapped in cloth, so you would crush it and the cloth would keep the stuff. It would be like a thin glass file.

Yeah. Yeah. Just and then. And then you feel great. That's the sound of doing a popper. So yeah, then there's the question of like, when did it become a gay thing? The answer is probably always. The best guess from people who have researched this is that people who have researched this is that,

The patient's prescribed poppers noticed their effects and noticed some of the sexual nature of their effects. So people who were so inclined to take advantage of those side effects probably did so, you know, in the 1800s. It's only when the drug stopped being the most common thing for angina that it becomes noteworthy as a gay drug. Also, it's starting to be okay to be openly gay, you know, as you. get into the 20th century, obviously not everywhere and not to a satisfying extent. But, you know, there's starting to be culture that we have good records of and that people were aware of outside of the culture. And so that's when we start to notice that gay men love poppers. And so in 1960, they've been out for like 100 years. We have documented medical use and no associated fatalities,

which is really good for any drug. And so the FDA approves them for over-the-counter purchase. But then they start to be associated with gay recreational use. Dun-dun-da. Yeah. And a lot of researchers think that, like, this is why they got targeted. And so now ML Nitrite is illegal. The reason you can still buy poppers is that another substance with really similar effects,

isobutal nitrate, is not. covered it in the ban, though it has to be sold as a room motorizer or CD cleaner or some other thing that's made up and everybody knows it and it's fine. Imagine being like, everyone seems to be having so much fun. I now need to interfere, which is basically what happened. Yeah, absolutely. And it is the association with the gay community that keeps poppers from being legal. You know, there's really no research at all suggesting they're dangerous. You know, they some people, I definitely was under the impression that they had the same dangers of doing whippets or something, like any kind of inhalant. And it's actually, it doesn't affect your brain. All of the

sensations you feel are because of that change in heart rate and vasodilation. So it can be dangerous if you have underlying heart conditions, and especially if you are, for example, taking a lot of Viagra and maybe also have a heart condition. and then do poppers. Not so great, but there are a lot of things you could do under those circumstances that would not be so great. And there's some evidence I've covered a couple studies about how they can cause eye damage, but that seems to be a pretty rare side effect and also seems to come from like pretty habitual use. There are like a couple case studies of people having eye damage from using them. What's the pathway or proposed connection? Oh my God,

I asked the right question. Yeah, I wrote an article about one of the these studies about how poppers may damage your peepers. And there were just a few cases in there of damage to retina. And it was usually just in one eye or the other, which the researchers found very strange. And the one commonality seemed to be that all of these patients had been using the substance that's replaced what was originally known as poppers. And in fact, some of them, it was when they switched Brams from a genuine popper, if you will, to one of the replacement chemicals that's used to skirt regulation. But they were like, the researchers have no idea why the two would act differently.

They're not sure what the mechanism is. But again, like the relative risk is very, very low. The main concern of researchers in studies like these is that because poppers are relatively speaking, such a safe party drug, that people might be totally careless with them. Right. And most negative effects are due to people getting them on their skin, which can cause burns or drinking them, which I was like, ooh, does anyone do that? And Alex was like, only straight people who don't know how to take them. And I was like, that's fair.

So if you're listening to this and you want to try poppers, don't drink them. They're for sniffing. That's my take. Advice. But I learned so much from Alex's article. And one of the things that really surprised me is that there was a time. when people thought poppers were behind HIV and AIDS. Of course.

What hasn't been blamed for AIDS? Literally. That's it. Yeah, that's it. That's the one thing. That's it. So, you know, it's the early days of the AIDS crisis. The CDC first started calling it AIDS in 1982.

Before that, it was just kind of considered like a cancer that was targeting gay men specifically. There was a lot of confusion. And obviously it was a really terrible time for many people, but especially the gay community. And lots of people were dying. And it might seem crazy now to connect Poppers with a deadly epidemic. But you had the wider U.S. community that was really saying AIDS was a gay problem and was isolated to the gay community, which wasn't actually true, of course, and which was really just about the gay problem. and was isolated to the gay community, which wasn't actually true, of course, and which was really just about their lack of regard for all of these dying gay men.

So then within the gay community and among researchers who were less horribly bigoted, they were like, but what is it in the gay community that is making it so much more prevalent there. Right. Like, how do we stop this? Like, we need to find out what's actually... Right. There was actually this book. called Death Rush, which was detailing the supposed connection between AIDS and Poppers and the

Poppers industry, which was estimated at 50 million in 1978. So the thesis of the book was like Big Poppers doesn't want you to know. And it was just because there was a correlation, right, between people who were coming in with AIDS and people who used poppers. But that's because there was an association with gay men having sex and people who use poppers. And And poppers actually make penetrative gay sex safer. Ironic to all the haters. Right. Ironically, because if your muscles are more relaxed, you're less likely to have tearing and bleeding, which is how a lot of HIV is transmitted.

So that was wild. That we believed that for a while. And then, you know, once HIV was actually isolated, people were like, oh, now we can study how this is actually transmitted. But popper's just like never really. shook that besmirch on their their reputation. Yeah. But they have persisted as an important part of culture. And I won't just reread Alex's entire article to you.

There's a lot of amazing stuff here. And yeah, just like what a journey for this freaky little chemical. Keep popping. Indeed. From Victorian ladies with angina to the streets of the Castro. Poppers. Long may they rain. Never stop ever popping.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to read a couple more reviews before we get to Eleanor's fact. Okay, so this one is either from Mr. Slowers or Mrs. Lowers. So, whichever you are or both, thanks for reviewing. Five stars. Can we hang out? Yes.

Mr. Slowers or Mrs. Lowers, we can. I assume the girl's giggling would annoy. me, but it was the opposite. It's endearing. I can't think of another term to describe their banter and what sounds like real friendship. It's true. It's so true. Thank you. Join us, Mrs. Lowers, Mr. Slower. They sound like nerdy BFFs. They are far from stupid and they work hard and seem to enjoy making this podcast. It's educational and hilarious, my new favorite. This is extremely validating to me. Also, our friendship is true. Yes. I, Eleanor and I recently sang a duet. of shallow.

I tell everyone about it. I was Bradley Cooper. So it's real. Leave me a review. We both really committed to our rules. On this little iTunes. Anyway, do one more. This one is from Uncle Duke 9-1-1.

That's really good. Weirdest thing. Upsaking millennial Twinkies. Thank you for that. Unfortunately, you accidentally. made your review a one-star review instead of a five-star review. But thank you for recognizing that we are up speaking, millennial Twinkies. We appreciate you, Uncle Duke, 911.

I can only assume you're still listening because most of the messages I get like this come from people who stalk me. So, thanks. All right, Eleanor. Yes. Let's talk about radioactive dinnerware. Great. Okay. So this is one of those facts that I can't stop talking about. It's appeared in passing in two of my stories, but I decided it was time to more fully explore it. So yes, it is now time to talk about uranium glass. So uranium is a naturally radioactive heavy metal. You probably know it as the substance that people enrich into atomic weapons and power plants. But it was once a popular substance in glassware. So starting in the 1830s, entrepreneurs began adding uranium.

to their recipe as a way to add new colors to their products. As we've talked about multiple times on this show, colors are hard. They are so hard that people decided to turn to a naturally radioactive heavy metal. Which colors? Makes sense. Green is really hard, so it was often made with arsenic. Right. Shields green. Toxic green.

This is a similar story. So one of the first producers was an Austrian guy named. named France Xavier Riedel. And he's from the very popular wine glass company, Riddle. And he was the fifth generation of his family in this line of work already in the 1830s. His ancestor had started the company in the 1760s, and they just kept handing it down to new reedles. And each reedel was expanding the company's scope. So by that time, it included everything from like traditional glassware to like chandelier parts to France. This thing was he was a really great engraver. But it was a very competitive time. So he was like, how do we make our reedal products stand out? I don't know why that name is just tickling me. Because it sounds like wheedle, the Pokemon. I can make anything about Pokemon, but I digress.

But yeah, these glass people are out of control, man. There's this blog that was like, it spelled Rydell. Like Rydell High School in the John Hughes movie. Okay, but it's, they were like pronounced like needle. So now I know. I don't look like a fool to all the glassmakers listening to this podcast. Okay. So Franz's solution to this problem of an oversaturated competitive market was Anna Gelb and Anna Groon.

So basically, he created these two new products, which he named for his daughter, Anna. In German, gelb means yellow and grun means green. And they were the two main colors that you could get by adding uranium to your glass mix. Honestly, it looks a lot like urine. It's not a very attractive color. But some of it maybe is like green. grapey or apple-y, if I'm being kind, or maybe just a radioactive glow. And the style totally took off.

France's idea spread across Europe, and it remained popular for almost 100 years. It's unclear if people were concerned about any potential danger of uranium. The objects glow under an ultraviolet light, and if you passed a Geiger counter over them, they definitely beep. But mostly it seems that they were just, you know, trying to get ahead of their competitors in this fierce glass market of the mid-Aidium. 1900s. Also, weren't people like taking radioactive tonics for their health? Yes. And putting on radioactive makeup? Yes. So in context, this was the least of their concerns. And it was working. People were gobbling up these objects. You could get uranium glass serving trays, decorative bowls, vases, candle stabbers, dinner plates, probably an urn. I don't know. But that would be my hope. If it was a glass object, it could be a uranium glass object. And the process continued to evolve, yielding new huge.

Basically, if you added these heat-sensitive chemicals, you can kind of control the distribution of green and this milky white color. So you see a lot of glasses where, like, the body of the chalice is like this deep green color. And then at the edges, you know, like where you'd put your lips to it, it's this milky white. And people really liked that. I'm not the biggest fan, but to each their own. And this created this whole booming industry called Vaseline glass, because it kind of looked like what Vaseline looked like in a vat. And don't you love to have Vaseline decorating your home? I put Vaseline on all my furniture.

So during the Great Depression, uranium glass declined in production and popularity. It had a little bit eventually to do with the war effort, which is really interesting. So when the United States realized that uranium was a great weapon when enriched and processed, they carefully restricted it secretly too, which is like a weird idea, but they were doing that. So it was really hard to get your hands on uranium, like any uranium that was like on the market was going straight to this war effort. And apparently the Glass Museum of New Zealand says that the British government actually confiscated materials from uranium glassmakers in that period in the early 1940s. I assume without explaining anything, they were just like no more. So rude.

But I also think it has a little bit to do with things falling out of fashion. Like if you look up uranium glass, which I implore you to do, it looks like something you would see in a hot. haunted Victorian home. It should sit exclusively on hand-embroidered lace doilies. It's ugly. It might be something. I was thinking, like, can I call this ugly? And I was like, well, the only way I would buy it was for irony, like, to put it out and be like, look at my ugly cup.

So I think it's okay to say that. And if anyone disagrees, I understand. And my thesis about the changing aesthetics is further supported by the. invention of something called Fiestaware. Oh my God. My mom loves Fiestaware. Yes. Okay, so I realized my grandma had Fiestaware.

When I was growing up, we would go over to her house and every ice cream, like everything in the Fiestaware bowls. Have you ever? No. Okay. So they're just like these really sturdy, enormous, like proportionally challenged ceramic bowls. And plates, just all sorts. And they have like these consent. trick circles in them. And they come in, I feel like they're all in like funny colors.

They're all fiesta color. Yeah. My grandma had mint green once that I remember really well. And then like a strawberry pink. What did your mom have? I remember having a lot of orange. Definitely. We got a lot of it on sale at Boscoves. Where is that? What is that? Oh, it's just a department store. That was our regional department store. Got it. I think they're all close now. I'm fishing because in the 1930s, the Homer Loughlin Company of West Virginia, which started Fiestaware, was producing its red bowls and saucers with uranium oxide. So I just wanted to know where you acquired yours and in what year. It was not secondhand. It was at Las Cove's in the late 90s.

Okay. So all is well. But basically, yeah, the original way that they started to get that, like, famous fiestaware red, orange color was by taking uranium oxide, which has been described by various sources as, being a little bit naturally red, but it definitely had to do with the chemical engineering process they were using. And they could dye these ceramics with this glaze. And in 1969, the primary Fiestaware company stopped producing the line. But at least seven other people were sort of doing this red-orange Fiestaware at the time. Those have all kind of petered out. Like, you can definitely still acquire Fiestaware, but it obviously does not have the hold over

the American psyche that it once did. It was so wildly popular at the time that, you Andy Warhol collected Fiestaware, which is such a random fact I learned in my Fiestaware adventure. Anyway, as much as I hate uranium glass clearly, I love Fiestaware. I felt so like taken back to a time in my childhood when I exclusively lived off of snack wells. Oh, God. Yeah. Snack wells and fiestaware. America.

I've got someone understands. But speaking of collectors like Mr. Warhol, uranium glass is actually. very sought-after collectible today. So I was looking, I was looking for a while at a rare set of Vaseline glass shades, which are all these like creepy, milk, white, like yellow. What is a glass shade? Does anybody know? Like a lamp shade? Yeah. And they looked smaller than that. They looked like decapitated handbells. I was very... I was just for like tiny little, little lamps. Maybe with candles instead of... That makes sense. So maybe you put them over a candle, but they're eight for more than $5,000.

Wow. So people are just freaking hype about this uranium vassaline glasses, this whole market. The only place I've ever seen this reported on, which I think is part of my obsession is I'm just like, how do people not talk about this all the time, is in collector's journals. Like they just want to talk about their uranium glass all day. Fortunately, for all of them, for Andy Warhol and his ilk, these objects, well, they do trigger a Geiger counter rating. According to most estimates, they're probably no more radioactive men putting your face to your television. set. So smushed in it right on there.

Licking your TV and licking a uranium glass cup equal. So if you have any of these collectibles haunting your attic, don't be afraid to grab them with your bare hands and get them listed on eBay because no one wants them in their own house. Wow. Amazing. Let's take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back.

And I have just a couple more reviews to share. Again, reminder, these are reviews left on our Apple podcast page, and it would be so great if you would rate and review us on Apple, even if you don't listen there, because it helps get our show rated higher, which helps other people find it. And that is a feedback loop we would like to keep feeding so that we can feed ourselves. If our livelihood depended on this podcast making money, we'd all be dead. But we still love to do it. So here are a couple more reviews. We've got one from SimCard 997. Yes.

That says we're bingeworthy. Been binging this for the past week. It's fun, informative, and addicting. Definitely recommended for curious minds who like to learn. Thanks, SimCard 997. And then I saved my favorite username for last. Well, I don't know if I'd say favorite because we had Princess Banana Henna. But this one is from Kinnuck Duck, 1959.

That's Kinectuck, 1959. The subject line is, don't do podcasts, but this one is great. Yes. I love the stories and the hosts. They laugh so much, it makes me laugh too. I can't wait to see what they come up with next. I love all the interesting facts and trivia. I go around at work telling their stories to everyone.

I am the company weirdo for sure. You got to listen. Thanks, Kinnuck Duck, 1959. Yes. You are the company weirdo. That is so beautiful. I love how all of these reviews are. I like to be belligerently intelligent. That is our target demographic. So yeah, we love all of our listeners. Thank you so much. And please rate and review if you haven't already. And also always feel free to reach out to us on Twitter at Weirdest underscore Thing. Or you can join our Facebook group, which is full of fellow weirdos. Or you can leave a voice message through the Anchor app or the Anchor website. And yeah, we just, we love to see it. We love you. Thanks, y'all. All right, Marian, it is time for your inaugural fact. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. So why don't you tell us about injecting people with milk? I would love to. So we should be really grateful that when we get transfusions today at modern hospitals, we can expect to receive clean human blood.

Because in the 1600s and in the centuries that followed, physicians liked to inject animals and humans with everything from. from milk to urine, beer, sheep's blood, saline solutions, and perfluorochemicals, which are a group of polymers that are kind of like Teflon. So today we know what human blood is. It's this perfectly engineered cocktail that delivers oxygen and nutrients throughout our body. Like urine. Much like urine. Our blood vessels form 100,000 mile highway for blood to truck wasted kidneys. When we're injured, blood forms a clot to plug the wound.

blood is precise, blood is efficient, it is life-giving, but for much of human history, we did not understand exactly what it was. As we know, the basis of ancient medicine was the idea that good health was achieved through the balance of bodily fluids, especially blood, so practices like leaching and bloodletting that tinkered with your internal equilibrium seemed legitimate. So it wasn't really until William Harvey's discovery of blood circulation in 1628 that really, quote, paved the way for natural philosophers to begin imagining the possibility of putting things into veins and arteries for the first time. And that's according to medical historian Holly Tucker. So at this point in history, people really start wondering what they could pump into the human body to cure diseases or

change personalities. One very fun suggestion is the English anatomist astronomeran architect, Sir Christopher Wren thought that ale, wine, and even opium could be a good substitute for human blood, which would have been fun. I guess some people are still kind of trying that in their own way. That's amazing. They were like, oh, if we just inject stuff because obviously blood is who you are. Blood is a personality. Then you will just become that thing. What is my personality? Wow. And so the 1660s saw sort of European craze for animal blood transfusions. The English doctor Richard Lauer used quills as an aqueduct between dogs for dog-to-dog transfusions. Because they're hollow? Like, the bones. Yeah, so it was literally like a hole in one dog and then a bunch of quills and then a hole in.

another time. And he wrote of the procedure, this done, sew up the skin and dismiss him, and the dog will leap up from the table and shake himself and run away as if nothing ailed him. Yeah, because he just poked him with a bunch of quilts. I'm sure he's ailed. Feeling more lively now. Yeah. And so shortly after that, Lower famously transfused lamb blood into a clergyman. And I have a visual aid for this, which just might amuse you guys. Oh no. The lamb and the man are not looking at each other. Both are ashamed. So this is the kind of stuff they were very into. Around the same time, in 1667, French physician Jean-Baptiste Denise bled a 15-year-old boy with leeches 20 times.

And then he transfused him with about a cup and a half of sheep blood. The boy survived. So he did it again with a laborer who also survived. And then later that winter, Denise transfused a noted madman. Everyone calls him a madman. So a madman named Antoine with calf-serville. blood. This guy, though, he did die. And there was a whole controversy where Antoine's wife blamed Denise, who was charged with murder. Good. And then he was acquitted. And then it later

turned out that Antoine died from arsenic poisoning and that his wife was then accused of killing him. But because of the... Oh, juicy! Yeah, yeah. And all of that, the whole trial, everything, and part of all of that controversy, animal blood transfusions were outlawed by the end of the century. Do you think that she was like, hey, this doctor was trying this really promising, new thing you should try it? I think so. Yeah. She knew what was up. She's just like walking him around like busy intersections and signing him up for medical experiments.

So if you kind of fast forward 100 years, then you see some of the first successful human blood transfusions. And you also see a lot of really messy, horrific failed ones. So at this point in history, exchanging bodily fluids and doing blood transfusion was seen as totally undependable and untenable because we still didn't know about blood types. We didn't know about blood-borne diseases. And we didn't even know how to keep blood supplies from coagulating. Which is kind of gross. Is this like the 1800s? This is like the 1700s.

Okay. And so physicians started casting about for alternatives. As one University of Michigan pathologist noted in 1969, frustrated and discouraged with blood as a transfusion product, effective substitutes were sought, and for a short time, milk seemed to be the panacea. Oh, man. The idea was that the fatty particles in milk could help regenerate white blood cells,

so it might be used to treat diseases. Amazing. Yeah. They just really took that idea. and ran with it. The first milk transfusions took place in the midst of an 1854 cholera epidemic when two doctors brought a cow into a Toronto hospital and pumped the animal's milk into their own patients, but don't worry, the milk was passed through gauze and kept in a warm bowl. So it was totally cool. Good. That's how you keep milk from going down. I was worried.

Warming it. Make sure to pass it through the gauze. The results were mixed. Some people did very well. Other people died. A funny little side. notice the two doctors resign sort of in indignation after the city of Toronto refused their application for a quote good cow. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So many more doctors, though, followed suit, and I hope I have a bunch of old-timey doctor names for you guys. So a doctor T.G. Thomas transfused cow's milk into a woman suffering from severe uterine hemorrhaging. A Dr. William Pepper remained optimistic about the procedure even when his patient complained of a headache, fever, and renal issues after their cow milk infusions.

Dr. J.S. Prout. Sorry, this sounds kind of funny. Dr. J.S. Prout suggested a medical legal use for milk transfusions and proposed that they might prolong life to allow the victim of an assault to identify his assailant. Oh. Just prop you up long enough to see justice done. Syringe so you can point at someone. Dr. Bryson of St. Louis claimed in 1878 that the procedure was,

would in a few years entirely supersede the transfusion of blood. Did they all approach their patients and say, you're injecting 1%, but you could be injecting a hole if you wanted to? Yes. I'm Dr. Pepper. I know. It's no Dr. Pepper. Yes.

Today we would do it with soy milk or whatever for the vegan. Oat milk. Oat milk. I do it every morning. I have a green drink and then I inject my oatmeal. Look at me now. In 1873, he injected 1.5 ounces of goat's milk into a patient's vein. This patient was soon wracked with vertigo, chest pain, and uncontrollable eye movement.

So naturally, how doubled the dose of goat milk? More, please. The patient died in his own account of the procedure. He was of the opinion. It had no effect. He continued his experiments on dogs. He bled seven of them to near death And then attempted to revive them with milk

He performed milk transfusion On a seriously ill woman in front of a live audience And they watched as a goat was brought into the operating room And milked before their very eyes Just to prove that it was Fresh. Well, there was a lot of arguments among physicians About how fresh the milk had to be

Yeah, that was like a sticking point. Naturally. Yeah, so Howe had one last hypothesis, which was I keep on putting animal milk in people what I really need to do is put human milk in human people. So in 1880, he acquired three ounces of breast milk from a new mother to use for a final infusion experiment, in which the patient's breathing stopped by the second ounce of milk he administered. She was supposedly revived by artificial respiration and, quote, injections of morphine and whiskey.

What? That's all I know about this. That sounds so uncomfortable. Death seems better. Yeah. And it was after this final experiment. that how kind of conceded, and this bizarre chapter of medical history came to an end. It was the end of the milk injection craze.

He did the work. He did. He tried everything. We tried everything. There have been, of course, advances in blood transfusion since then. We learned in 1901 about blood groups. In the 1930s, we drained cats, and then we filled them with hemoglobin-based substitutes, which led all of their kidneys to fail.

Oh. I thought that was going to be a good one. Nope. more failed hypotheses. We've tested other blood substitutes in humans, though even the most promising efforts were later found to increase the risk of heart attacks. There's only one artificial blood product called Hemopure that has ever been approved for sale, and it's only legal in South Africa and Russia. In the U.S., it can only be administered under specific circumstances, such as when a Jehovah's Witness refuses human blood transfusions. So all of this is wild to me because even though

we can engineer incredibly sophisticated prosthetics to replace lost limbs, we still rely on donations for our modern supply of blood, and that actually has a lot of problems. Anything from surgery to cancer treatments, injury, care, organ transplants, and childbirth might require a supply of blood. In catastrophic scenarios, car accidents in remote areas, natural disasters, overseas combat, lack of access to blood is its own medical crisis. Each year, about 60,000 people in the U.S. die from hemorrhaging before they can reach an emergency room. The amount of blood we need never matches the amount of blood we have. A man named Dr. Allen Doctor told me that. An interesting side note. It was meant to be. My dentist is named Dennis. Also, one time we

interviewed a horse researcher whose last name was like horseman. And they say there's free will. By some estimates, if a scientific group were able to create or develop an effective blood substitute that can do everything that blood can. It would be worth $15 billion annually. Let's get in on it. Joseph Howe was trying to get on it with this milk stuff. He was a pioneer visionary. All this is to say that a century and a half of past since the milk craze, and there is still no safe, effective artificial blood product approved in the U.S. or Europe. We have still yet to come up with a synthetic solution to this seemingly unsolvable biological puzzle. For now, artificial blood remains a holy grail of trauma medicine and efforts to imitate it have all been

in vain. Oh! She did it. Yeah. Amazing. Wow. Well, my blood type is B negative, and I try to live up to that every day. Mine is A plus, and I also try to...

I'm an O positive. I don't feel anything about my blood type. I think I am, at least. I'm an O something. I hope I'm never in need of a transomese. fusion and I'm the only one who can speak for me and my mom. I need my mom to be there. Just carry around a gallon of milk.

You'll be fine. Help me, doctor. It's fresh. Okay, what was the weirdest thing we learned in this? Milk blood. Yeah, milk blood for sure. Also, the username Princess Banana Hammock. Yes, she would have Princess Banana Hammock won.

Well, congratulations. Thank you. Wow. Let's all drink some milk from a uranium chalice. Oh, yeah. Yes. Only if it looks like there's Vaseline rubbed all over it. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast.

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