The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - When Death Was Sexy, The Knuckle-Cracking King, The Pouch You Never Knew You Had

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a secret pouch in your body to a literally killer fashion trend. 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!  If you want to see us in your town, click here to take our listener survey! Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Purbita Saha: www.twitter.com/hahabita 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. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of 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 Claire Maldarelli. I'm Perbita Saha. Perbita, welcome to the show. Yay. Listeners, Pramita is one of the newest members of team Popsi. She was previously at Audubon and is now a fantastic senior editor for us. And hopefully we'll be on some future episodes of Weirdest Thing, sharing some weird things. Thank you for coming on.

I'm so excited. Awesome. I just actually sent Prubita a link to something about Deadbirds today. Maybe future episode fodder. But yeah, this is how the weirdest thing magic happens. We just slack each other weird things. And they take us off on flights of fancy. Oh, bird pun.

Oh, no. Okay. 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 heard in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene. decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Claire, what's your tease? Yes, I would like to talk about the most dedicated knuckle cracker of all time. Not me. Not me either. Spoiler. Okay, my fact is about an investigation into something called muslin disease, which was supposedly a deadly fashion trend.

I don't want to speak for you because I know your hypochondriac can really have a life of its own. but I don't think this is one that's going to convince you that you have something. You would be surprised, but I take on that challenge. Okay. Fingers crossed. But yeah, investigating this so-called muslin disease, then just led me on a whole journey about the time when the hottest thing you could do as a woman was die. Oh, gosh. Maybe still true today, depending on who you ask.

Rubido, what's your tease? I'll talk about how one of my favorite comedians taught me more. more about a secret part of the female reproductive anatomy. Hmm. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yes. What do we want to start with?

Claire, why don't you tell us about some knuckle cracking? Sounds good. I really want to get this off my chest. Okay. So everyone's been told by their moms, don't crack your knuckles. I don't know. Has I been told that? Has everyone been told that?

I don't know my mom has told me that, but it's something I heard for sure. Okay. Probably like teachers who were mad at me that I was cracking knuckles. But it's definitely like a mom thing. Sure. I don't know. Okay. Well, growing up in my house, my older sister was like the resident knuckle cracker.

And she was capable of popping every single joint and every single flanchi in both of her hands. And it drove my mom insane. And she tried to scare my sister into stopping by telling her all these terrible things that would happen mainly that she would get arthritis. Now my mom also told us, or my grandma told us, then passed it on to my mom. that if you drink coffee, it will stunt your growth. So there are a lot of, like, weird things in the Maldrelli-Donovan household that have been told to us. I wonder why I'm a hypochondriac. But anyway, well, that definitely would have worked on me. I was and still am convinced that I will get every disease on the planet, including this new one that Rachel is going to tell us about later. But my sister is a very different person. She does not fear the arthritis like I do. And even if she did, the whole idea behind getting arthritis from a lifetime of cracking her knuckles, is still pretty much folklore and completely unfounded, and so is stunting your growth from coffee consumption in case you were wondering. So these are all the things that I learned about knuckle cracking in addition to the fact that I will be telling you about. Knuckle cracking is a very popular

pastime. Studies estimate that anywhere between 25 and 54% of the U.S. population cracks their knuckles daily. I believe it. I do too. Yeah. I think it could be even more than 54%. I don't know who they were surveying. It's as popular as the activity is, it's just as popular for researchers and doctors to study the potential health effects of cracking your knuckles. If you put quote-unquote knuckle cracking into PubMed, which is like the greatest search engine on the planet. Claire would think so. It's where Claire can investigate, like put in any keyword and find 10 new diseases that you have. Correct, correct. Or put in my symptoms and get to a diagnosis.

Is your browser homepage set to PubMed? It is not. It will be soon. That's a great idea. So if you put knuckle cracking into PubMed, there are over 30 independent studies looking at what happens to your body when you crack your knuckles now.

I know 30 doesn't sound like a lot, but there are a lot of diseases in the world. So to devote 30 to knuckle cracking, I think is a big deal. Not just looking at knuckle cracking, but also looking into what goes into that. signature pop. And so I'll describe that to you and then show how everything is related. So the popping is caused by this liquidy, slightly jelly-like stuff called synovial fluid, which lubricates and surrounds

every joint. And when you forcefully bend your fingers in just the right way, this creates this bubble of air within the snowvial fluid. And some people think that it's when the bubble bursts that results in this pop. But Rachel told me earlier before this episode or during it or, you know, whenever, she has time to tell me things that apparently is kind of controversial. And some people think it's actually when the bubble is being produced that creates this sound. It's like when there's a vacuum forming and it's like a vacuum forming. Because it's like a question of like microseconds between the whether it's the forming of the bubble or the bursting of the bubble. Right. Right. But the key is that this, you know, the popping house.

happens. And the popping sound, I don't know about you all, but I think it's very addicting over the years. I was not as a child, but I too have become addicted to cracking my knuckles. And I just really love the sound of when it cracks. And I like how various knuckles have different sounds. I think about this too much, I think. For Vita's giving me this really weird book. She's like, who is this coworker or a new coworker of mine? Once you pop, you just can't stop. Wait, so which is your favorite most? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I'm glad you asked.

I really like, which I prefected in, like, college, these, like, little teeny ones. I don't think I could do it now. Oh, the ones where you have to kind of, like, press your fist to get them. And you either do it, wait. Oh, that was a good one. And you either do them, like, really quickly at once or some people, like, what Rachel was showing, that you do it, like, all at once. And it goes, click, click, click, click, click. I'm like, I'm so jealous of you.

But yeah, that is my favorite pop. Do you have a favorite knuckle cracking pop? You don't have to. I honestly like to do my big toe. Oh, I don't think that's... I can't. I have never been able to. Yeah, I have strange feet.

But I don't think that's an auditory thing. It's more the feeling in my feet. Like, it tremors through my feet once I've done it. Totally, totally. Yeah, it is very, like, it's satisfying, which is funny because it's like, it's not like a very powerful sense. It does seem like it kind of like because your body knows something is releasing, even though it's such a tiny, unimportant release, it's like, yeah. I can now move on with my life.

I so agree. But while the pop is super addicting to me, it's the pop that freaks a lot of people out at the same time in a lot of the studies of like people who are surveyed say like why they hate knuckle cracking so much is like the pop sounds so jarring. like one person or a couple of people compared it to scratching on like a chalkboard, which I like have never like scratching a chalkboard is very painful to your ears. Cracking your knuckles is just a cool popping sound. I would never relate the two, but apparently a lot of people do. So, you know, people hear this popping sound. They're like, this sounds terrible and so it must be terrible.

And so I think like this is my opinion of how all of this started with that it would cause arthritis because it's just such a jarring sound that it must be like terrible. for your body to create this sound. But if you look at all the observational studies, now these just look at like connections and seeing similarities between things, that's a really bad description of observational studies. I'm going to go with it, though.

One of the largest to date published in 1990 in the anales of rheumatic diseases, it looked at 300 people and 74 of them called themselves or identified as habitual. knuckle crackers, the rates of arthritis between the 75, or 74 rather, habitual knuckle crackers and the non-knuckle crackers was exactly the same. And multiple other studies, similar to this one, observational ones have found similar conclusions, that there's no relationship to arthritis and cracking knuckles. Now, those are observational studies. So it's really hard to do a study that

looks at people who like tell somebody to crack your knuckles and then tell other people not to crack your knuckles and then go live life right now that brings me to donald unger now donald hunger like my sister like any normal kid i think love to crack his knuckles but his mom too hated it and scared him into thinking it would give him arthritis so when he reached adulthood he did the ultimate test and sacrifice. He studied himself, and he wrote about his findings in the journal of arthritis and rheumatology in 1998, and I will just read his letter to you because it's quick, concise, and short and amazing. To the editor, does knuckle cracking lead to arthritis of the fingers? And he writes about himself in the third person, but this was really signed, Donald Unger.

During the author's childhood, various renowned authorities, his mother, several aunts, and later his mother-in-law, informed him that cracking his knuckles would lead to arthritis of the fingers. To test the accuracy of this hypothesis, the following study was undertaken. For 50 years, the author cracked the knuckles of his left hand at least twice a day, leaving those on the right as a control. Thus, the knuckles on the left were cracked at least 36,500 times, while those on the right cracked rarely and spontaneously. At the end of the 50 years, the hands were compared for the presence of arthritis.

There was no arthritis in either hand and no apparent differences between the two hands. knuckle cracking did not lead to arthritis after a 50-year controlled study by the one participant. While a larger group, he admits, would be necessary to confirm this result, this preliminary investigation suggests the lack of correlation between knuckle cracking and the development of arthritis of the fingers. And then he adds all this great, like, lit review that he did, a search of the literature revealed only one previous paper on this subject and the authors came to the same conclusion. This result calls into question whether other parental beliefs, e.g. the importance of the importance of the subject of the subject. eating spinach are also flawed. Apparently he hates spinach. I love spinach.

I don't know. Eat spinach everyone. Yeah. Good. Like sauteed, you know. Okay. Further investigation is likely warranted. In conclusion, there is no apparent relationship between knuckle cracking and the subsequent

development of friths of the fingers. This study was done entirely on the author's expense with no grants from any governmental or pharmaceutical source signed Donald L. Hunger, MD, Thousand Oaks, California. So if that doesn't convince you, I don't know what will. That's amazing. Can you imagine the discipline of just cracking your knuckles on one hand and not the other for so many years? I know.

I feel like sometimes I think of myself as like a disciplined person. Like I clean my bathroom once a week on Sunday nights and like random stuff like that. And I don't think I could do what Donald did. A hero, truly. Sacrifice his life for science. He did. He really did. So that's mainly what I have to say about knuckle cracking. I did find that, like, in all of my other research, I was trying to find other tidbits to tell you all, but really found that there's no other serious injuries or long-term conditions that could result from knuckle cracking. The only thing that I found was in the American Journal of Orthopedics. I couldn't access the journal. Like, I just couldn't find the study. So all I had was this, like, four-sentence preview. And it just says we present two cases in which acute injuries were suffered. while the patients were attempting to crack their knuckles, but they don't say what they are, and I can't find it.

I can totally imagine someone like jamming or even breaking a finger. That's what I was looking for. It would be like a fluke situation where just like their angle of attack was a knuckle cracking gone wrong. Yeah, exactly. Now I really want to crack every single buckle. Yeah, I'm fitting my big toe. So let's take a quick break and then we'll be back after cracking everything. Okay, we're back.

And I'm going to talk about muslin disease. Great. So this started because I was looking at a roundup of deadly fashions, because I love to read stuff like that, just like fashion trends that were bad for your body. There's all different examples all over the world. You've got corsets. You've got foot binding. You've got muslin dresses, perhaps. So according to this listicle I read, thin muslin dresses that were popular after the French Revolution may have contributed.

to a health epidemic. And I decided I must know more. So after the French Revolution, things got very weird in a lot of ways. There were a lot of rules for a while about limiting excess. But then the rich people came back into power and there just wasn't the moniker anymore. It was just, you know, rich people. So things just got like bizarre. Like people were almost more over the top with their displays of wealth than they had been before the French Revolution. and in just like doing weird new things with it. One example is that there were these balls that were only open to the grown children of people who'd been guillotined. And they would wear morning clothes and would allegedly greet each other by like rolling their heads really violently.

No. That part might not be true, but there were definitely balls for relatives of guillotined people where they all like dressed in black and were like, let's party. And so there were also some like weird fashion trends that were almost like almost like Dadaist in their level of like absurdity with fashion. Like for example, if we've ever seen the movie A Clockwork Orange and they're wearing a little like bowler hats. I don't even know if that's kind of half there, but little hats like monocles and like walking around with canes. And it's like very much reminiscent of fashion trends that actually existed among like well-to-do young French men in these years after the French Revolution when wealth. became okay to display again, but people, like, didn't know how to do it without being weird. And so through some combination of, like, the glorification of aristocratic women, like, sitting

in plain white shifts waiting to be guillotine, and then the simplification of fashion for years due to laws immediately following the war, and just like the absurd subcultures of grieving and traumatized young people among the rich, it became very popular to wear these extremely thin dresses, regardless of the weather. Marie Antoinette, you know, not long before her death, had started wearing these, like, very like, like, plain white dresses when she was on, like, her little fake farm, if you've seen the movie about Marie Antoinette, she had a little fake farm where she liked to, like, the eggs were all pre-clean, and she'd be like, look, an egg right from a chicken.

But she'd still wear her wigs with these extremely... Yes, but they were, like, chill wigs. They were really like flowy wigs. So yeah, this is all to say that in kind of like 19th century France and even elsewhere in Europe, a lot of women were wearing extremely thin dresses, which was so different from what had been the fashion before the French Revolution. You know, they had had so many layers and corsets and framework. Petty coats. Yes.

Like just like wire frames of all sorts under your hair, under your skirts, exactly. Some people still say today, but definitely some people said at the time that women would damp in the cloth of their very simple white dresses to make it even clingier. So it was like the skinny jeans of the 19th century. And contemporary scholars actually blamed flu and consumption outbreaks on women catching a chill because they were wearing these thin and or damp dresses. Even though that's proven to not cause a cold. That is my next note. I said Claire is going to say being cold doesn't give you a cold, and that is true. Though if you're really cold when you have like advanced tuberculosis, that's probably not like great for you. You should like wear a sweater. But there's no evidence at all that women typically dampen the cloth. It's probably something that like occasionally maybe courtesans would do in a very like performative way, like wet t-shirt contest style.

Or it was related to like satirical cartoons. They loved satirical cartoons at this time. and there are a bunch of them of women in dresses where like the dresses are literally like up their butts so that you can see, you know, the whole butt. And men loved making fun of how see-through these dresses were. So it's possible that jokes about how women looked like they were wearing like clingy wet garments turned into people just saying like, yeah, it's a thing all the young women are doing. And we're really bad historically at picking out satire, especially when it comes to the behavior of young women. So what became more intriguing to be in looking at this was the link between these wispy fashions and shivering young women and the beauty standards of the day which glorified death. So I was reading this book that was originally published in 1901 about tuberculosis because there was, you know, when I said that doctors would sometimes blame these wispy dresses that may or may not have been dampened for effect for contributing to outbreaks of what they called muslin disease that was tuberculosis. which at the time was frequently called consumption, but it was before anyone had isolated the bacterium that actually causes TB.

So they really didn't actually know how it was transmitted, but it was reaching, like, epidemic levels. So it was something that people thought about and talked about a lot, even though they didn't really understand it. So I was reading this book originally from 1901 about TB, and I came across a passage about Edgar Allan Poe's two consumptive brides, the first being his child bride, Virginia. And apparently at a party in 1842, she was dressed in white and, quote, delicately, morbidly angelic. And then she was like playing music and she had a hemorrhage in her lungs and coughed up, quote, a wave of blood all over her dress. And he found this like charming. He was like, my beautiful, my beautiful delicate bride. I think she was also like 14 at the time.

So yikes. But we now know that tuberculosis is from a contagious. bacterium. It existed for thousands of years, infected humans for thousands of years based on archaeological evidence, but it reached epidemic levels due to like crowded living and lack of sanitation in cities, but it is really easily transmitted once you have it through coughing and spit. So it very quickly transcended class. So the reason it became so much more common was people being crowded into these really like unhygienic cities and slums. But then once it existed in a city, like anybody could get it. It was anyone's game. Yes, exactly. So that's how tuberculosis then came to

be considered an actually upper class disease. Because if you just got sick and died and you were poor, they were like, ew, gross, you know, whatever. Bye. And it also probably like killed you much quicker because you were working and, you know, didn't have access to as much food and warmth, etc. But some doctors actually thought that beauty was like a sign you were more susceptible to TB because they would talk about how girls who grew up being, like, thin with pale skin and, like, red lips and bright eyes that they seem to get TB more than other girls. But it was because, like, those were usually a sign of the low-grade fevers you might have for years before you started having really dangerous TV symptoms. So you would just be kind of, like, wasting away and have, like, a low-grade

fever and, like, cough occasionally. And they were like, yeah, all these hot girls keep getting TV. all the hot girls with rosy cheeks who just like cough prettily. So they thought it was probably something, first of all, that ran in families. But also there was this idea that it was actually like the over-excitment of a passionate constitution would cause the disease. So for a while it was male poets who were really into this idea. Lord Byron, who was featured on the show several times. He was on maybe the first episode. Yeah.

Yeah, Claire was talking about how he. was the first celebrity diet. He ate potatoes and crackers and vinegar. That was it. He really wanted to be pale and thin and beautiful. He was also recently on an episode where I talked about Mary Shelley because Lord Byron was a real dog. I did a lot of women wrong. He apparently said, how pale I look. I should like, I think, to die of consumption because then the women would all say, see that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying. Oh my God. That is such a Lord Byron quote. He just wanted to eat potatoes and vinegar until he was nothing. So, yeah, there was this sense that it was like because, again, you had these bright eyes from the fever and really pale skin, but then like rosy cheeks.

And you were kind of like languid. So it all lent itself to this idea that you were just like, you were like full of fire, but it was so much that it like weakened you. And that was the fire. That was the fever that was, you know, making you full of fire. and then weakening you. So yeah, into like the mid-1800, you saw the rise of what some researchers, a lot of this comes from a book by Carolyn A. Day called consumptive sheik. They called a consumptive chic.

And you had like tiny waste often involving corsets. And also corsets were great for consumptive chic because it would also make your collarbones stand out more. And so like as much of your bones could stand out as possible great, tiny waste, pale skin, which they often, you know, use like arsenic to get. So that was not great. Big bright highs, which they often use belladonna drops to get poisonous. Don't do that. You have this general sense that beautiful young women from like good families are actually like more likely to get TB because it's this like you're just kind of like overcome by your gentle nature and like the passions of the world have just like overwhelmed you. Wow, I really hate this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Then it was like I read one thing that was like in the 1850s, a few physicians. even thought that the spitting of blood that would happen when you were, you know, having

like hemorrhages in your lungs was evidence of a displaced form of menstruation. Oh my God, no. It's literally, it's all just one, the body's just one thing. Guys are just terrified of menstruation. I think men still believe this probably. Yeah. Absolutely true. So yeah, it really transferred from that time when Lord Byron was like, we should all be so

lucky as to be skinny and sad and lethargic to being like really a disease of wealthy women and something to be emulated. Once we understood it more, which happened when... Wait, did you say emulated? Like people wanted... Right, so people would use arsenic to give themselves for their skin. So yeah, it was very much like, tuberculosis already kind of made people fit the beauty ideals that existed, but then as more and more people got tuberculosis and they were really...

glorified. A lot of the pre-Raphaelite models had consumption. A lot of famous cortisans were painted, you know, looking pale and like kind of glistening and then they died of consumption. So that just kind of was like a feedback loop where then people were like, oh yeah, even more of this like pale and sweaty look, please. Really all they needed was like a Sephora and a Pilates machine. Yeah, absolutely. And so once we understood it more, it 1882 when the microbe was identified. Then, like, once people knew that it was spread by bacteria, it really lost its aristocratic edge. And so then they were like, ew, gross. Consumption is from germs. So it's only for poor people. So actually, then fashion shifted to highlight

curves because they were like, you don't want to die of consumption. Maybe you should eat a little bit more. so you don't just like pass out and die. Dresses were starting to be made shorter so that you wouldn't drag germs inside from the filthy streets, which probably didn't do much. I feel like that was like that's good smart. Yeah. I was like it's worth a try. It definitely would have made like houses cleaner, if not less full of TB germs. And then like, you know, doctors started to tell people to go to like warm climates as therapy for TB.

And so then like sun exposure and light exercise became. more popular. So like it started to become trendy to look healthy and radiant and not glowing in a way that looks like maybe you're about to pass out and die. Wow, what a concept. Yeah, I know. It's crazy. Healthy is cool. And it's just so interesting because it really does come down to this obsession with women who are close to or actually dead. And it was like a very pervasive thing leading up to and during the Victorian era. And it's really, it's like pretty simple when you think about it. A woman who is near death is as passive and delicate as a woman can be.

There's this one, there's a lot of poetry and art around this concept. But this one that I came across that I felt like just really said it all was this poem by William Butler Yeats called, He Wishes His Beloved for Dead. Oh my God. So I don't have the whole poem here. but some select quotes He claims that if his beloved were lying cold and dead He would lay his hand on her breast

And she would murmur tender words to him And that she wouldn't hasten away Even though she has the will of wild birds So it's like you can You can finally control this wild, passionate woman Because she's dead But she was wild and passionate So he gets to like have his cake and eat it too

Yeah exactly exactly So yeah just to just really fascinating glimpse into a topic that will probably inspire several more episodes of weirdest thing because once you talk about like why people romanticize corpses so much to the extent that they influence decades of fashion, you know, there's a lot there. And it's still a thing today, obviously, you know, there are periodically, there will be some like high fashion editorial shoot that features like a tableau that's clearly the lead up to. And or aftermath of violence against women.

You know, there's like a beautiful high-fashioned model like laying at the bottom of a set of stairs or having people like menacingly walk up to her. And we still, obviously, as a culture, are pretty obsessed with the idea of women being imperiled and threatened. But at least now, I don't think most mainstream culture is obsessed with women literally laying there about to die slowly of consumption. As Edgar Allan Poe said of his second wife with consumption, she had a cough that was killing her by inches and there were almost no inches left.

And that was really the most you could hope for just to be one inch of a woman and hold on as long as possible in that state. Marmering. So that's it. That's what I got. That's great. A lot to think about. What would be the fashion trend from rich people today that would, I guess it would. differ by country, but that would really have that kind of top-down effect on society.

Yeah. I can't think of anything. I'm like, what would it be? I don't know. Like gluten-free or something. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, there are like a lot of like lifestyle trends that have that kind of effect. I mean, I guess like you have high heels and skinny jeans and other things where it's like it just becomes the norm that this very uncomfortable

thing is what's popular. And so then that affects like the way we move and the way we want other clothes to fit and the kinds of activities we want to participate in. But yeah, I don't know, certainly nothing to this extent. Luckily, we are no longer such a slave to fashion, but we probably still have a long way to go. I did get an email from Levi's about their latest high-waisted jeans, which are called ribcage jeans. Ouch. That's not high-wasted above your waist. How much higher can they go?

Well, right, because, like, originally high-wasted jeans were us, like, rebelling against low-cut jeans that are, like, you know, at least for most bodies past pubescence, like, just, like, not going to be flattering, not going to be comfortable. They cut you right where you don't want jeans to cut into when you sit. And, you know, for a while, high-wasted jeans, it was like, I remember a bunch of, like, hot takes from dudes being like, girls, your high-wasted jeans look dumb. And I was like, I don't care. Also, they don't.

They look great. But now it's like if you, if the highways of jeans literally go up like to your underboop, then that's just a corset. I was, I did actually, I tried like an Instagram ad shaper for like, you know, wearing under like formal wear. And it was very much like, you know, spanks. Like they just squeeze you all like uniformly. And it's really not meant for like highlighting curves, which is totally true. They just kind of like squish your thighs. into your butt. And this was like, you know, this is cut and designed so that it actually like

only cinches you in where you want it to. And it works really well, but I put it on. I was like, this is a girdle. This is just literally a girdle. And yes, it works very well. But like there's a reason why girdles became unpopular. It's because they're faking uncomfortable. I guess we haven't gotten to a point where we can have something as relatively comfortable as a pair of spanks that is as effective as a girdle. And that's, I guess that's the white whale. Totally. We'll watch this space. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And Pramita, it is time for your first weirdest thing fact.

Well, mine goes back a few months ago to when I went to see a stand-up show by Hannah Gadsby of Nanette fame, if anyone has seen that Netflix special. Excellent. So Hannah Gadsby is from Australia. She was touring. the U.S. for her newest stand-up routine, which is fantastic, and I think will also be streamed pretty soon. So the name of the show was called Douglas, which was named after her dog. Makes sense. But then she goes down this rabbit hole of talking about historic gynecology. And it stems from Douglas. She wanted to talk about this very little known part of the female anatomy, which is called the Pouch of Douglas, and it kind of floats in your body between Claire or Rachel, do either of you know about it? I was just like, like playing it in my head.

I'm fascinated. I don't know. So if you're listening from home and also didn't know, don't feel bad. It's this tiny little space that floats between your rectum and your vagina. And Hannah Gadsby basically described it as, you know, when you have a piece of luggage or a suitcase and there's that one zipper that, you always unzip and it doesn't actually open the suitcase, it just like makes it a little bit taller. I know exactly what zipper that is. That was her analogy, which is perfect. But medically, it's called the recto uterine pouch. Very sexy.

It's also called the Patch of Douglas, which I'll get into, or a cul-de-sac. Just a nice suburban. Yeah, very suburban. You could see like your family practitioner maybe using that analogy on you or something. So the reason why it's named after a man, even though it only exists in female bodies, is it goes back to Mary Toft, which I know is one of Rachel's icons. She actually dressed up as her for Halloween this year. Yes, that's a live show. So this is back in 1700s, England.

And James Douglas, he was a Scottish physician and a midwife, which there were a lot of male midwives at this time. So that was becoming quite the trend. And that has its own fascinating story because part of it is that forceps came into play in birthing techniques. And only male physicians were using these forceps and kind of took over the midwife space to deliver babies. So anyway, James Douglas was one of these midwives. Some documents call him a feminist midwife because he opened a clinic where underprivileged women. could actually have a safe space to give birth. Sounds great.

He also did public dissections of dead female cadavers where he would invite people, mostly rich people, to come to his house and watch him look at different parts of... Yeah, of female parts. So fun stuff. He was also a physician extraordinary to Queen Caroline. I don't know what that title means. But it sounds wonderful, I guess. So the Mary Toff connection.

Basically, Mary Toft, have you talked about it on the show before? Yeah, yeah, we had an episode about her. I'm just the briefest version is that she pretended she was giving birth to rabbits repeatedly by shoving chunks of dead rabbit and other animals into her softened cervix. And she fooled many doctors for quite a time. But then it was eventually found out because they, isolated her and people were found trying to sneak her rabbits. So she can.

So like Donald Unger, the knuckle cracker, a true dedicated individual to swaying scientific opinion. So James Douglas was one of the skeptics when it came to Mary Toft. And eventually it did come out that this was a giant hoax and she went to prison for it. And this only grew James Douglas's career because he was one of the smart, quote, unquote, few who was like, this is physically impossible. So during these many public dissections, James Douglas, you know, he got more into kind of mapping the uterine area in women. And one of the spots he found is this pouch of Douglas.

So essentially, there's no real way to describe it. It's like this region of negative space where it just allows your organs. It's not an organ itself because it doesn't really have a specific function, but it allows your other organs to kind of slide by and expand. It's just there to hold everything else. To cushion? Yeah. Yeah. It's like that, I don't want to say a friend with benefits, but like that one friend who you just like keep on going back to you when you just need like a shoulder.

Yeah, totally. That's the passion of that. Back burner. Yeah, exactly. I've seen in some medical journals as it being described as an infantimal space, which I feel as hyperbally because we are not infinitesimal on our insides, no matter what you think about women. But, yeah, so it provides a lot of cushion. It kind of supports your bladder, you know, when you're really, you know, trying to go for days without being, I guess. Don't recommend that.

Yeah. So there isn't a ton of medical research on it just because it seems like doctors don't quite know what to do with the pouch of Douglas. But in recent times, there have been more gynecologists and surgeons looking into this space because it seems to be a good indicator of really serious gynecological or reproductive issues. So, for example, like they can check it for lesions that. can affect other parts of the uterine area. It can be the way that your parts slide against it. I don't know exactly the mechanism, but by looking at that motion within the pouch of Douglas, doctors might be able to detect if you'll get endometriosis later in life.

And endometriosis is, you know, an extremely painful condition that affects a ton of women, where just like when you're having your period, period and your uterine lining sheds every month. Instead, your uterine lining grows on, like, other parts, like your intestines and other tubes. It also tries to shed but has nowhere to go. So then you just have a ton of dead tissue up in there, and that buildup is, you know, painful, deadly, whatnot. So there needs to be, like, a lot more investigation into this, but it's possible that the Patch of Douglas can help with some preventative. measures, also with ectopic pregnancies. Sometimes there are like some really terrible side effects

that can also show up in this space. So it's still a mystery, but I just love this idea that we have this little pouch inside ourselves. And, you know, it's maybe we're all marsupials, but we just don't show it on the outside. I don't know. How does it feel to know that you just have this new part? It's really fascinating that it is like different. find by its negative space. That's super interesting. And I wonder if it will actually, like, if it does, well, I guess it doesn't have any functions, so I guess it can never be an organ eventually.

But I think it's always cool when you hear about, like, new organ. I'm like, oh, man. Especially because their bodies seem to be, to have evolved to be so efficient. Like, everything is packed in there and everything has to have a use. Has to have a reason, yeah, or a use for it. But maybe not. I bet there's more uses. for the pouch of Douglas.

Yeah. Because like why else would it be there, right? Yeah. What was that other, like, Oregon recently? It was like the mesentary or something. Oh. I forget what it was. Yeah.

That, like, sits on the outside of your intestines and, like, holds your intestines and... Like a nice hug. Like a nice hug. Yeah. Like an actual suitcase. Yeah. For your intestines. Well, and there's, like, you know, for years, everyone was like,

the appendixes vestigial organ. Like, it doesn't do anything. And now there's a bunch of research on, like, well, maybe actually there's like some important microbiome stuff going on in there, which sucks because mine is gone. Oh, really? Yeah. And, I mean, it's good that it's gone because I had appendicitis, so it would have sucked to keep it in there.

But at the time, everyone was like, don't even worry. It doesn't even do a darn thing. You're better off without it. Yeah. Well, and actually, now there's a lot more research into how often you. you can avoid appendectomies by just using antibiotics. And so I'm like, what if like 10 years from now everyone's like, yeah, can you believe we used to just like lop those off whenever they were infected? Right.

So much we still don't know about the human body. Yeah. Yeah. So shout out to Hannah Gadsby for teaching me something that my gynecologist never taught me. I'm definitely going to fire her. I love it. I love it. I would do the same.

So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Oh, this is hard. They're all such a good one. Yeah, it was a good week. Yeah. I mean, I love learning about a new disease and a new organ. But I don't think I have tuberculosis, luckily. I'm really glad.

Once I said that I was like, because I knew that you wouldn't think you had muslin disease. Right. Because you're not walking around in like wet dresses. Yeah. But then I was like, oh, no, but what if she thinks she has tuberculosis? So I'm glad you don't. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I'm confident.

I think it may be a tie week. I think we learned three really interesting things about bodies. Yeah. Dead bodies, a lot of bodies. Right. I was going to say, I was like, I don't think I have TB. So maybe I think that this new organ I might have is also cool. Not organ, but, you know, dead space.

Dead space. Infantismal space. I really, I mean, the knuckles is just so relatable, obviously. and to think that we do these things without actually knowing how they affect us. Absolutely true. But, you know, that muslin yarn that you spun was just... Yeah. It went in so many directions, I did not expect.

Just a nice Victorian necrophilia tale. Yeah, and you got in your Lord Byron references, which I'm quickly learning. It's truly an all. That was like the last thing I found, and I was like, yes. I love it. Great. Well, a great week for all of us. weirdest thing. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available

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