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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees SO4-O months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What? What, what? No, that's how we're starting the episode, Sophie, with God no, with me sneezing and then God bless you. And then this. Everything. That's all you've done way worse. So I'm like, cool with it. How are we doing today? How's everybody? Who are we? Where are we? What are we? This is behind the ********. And today ******* sucks. Are you? Are you? Yeah. When were you born? Are are we all? Was Roe older than all of us? Yeah. I'm not that old. Jesus, man. I don't remember when. My God. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not that old. I'm an I'm an 80s child. I'll put it that way. So, yeah. Yeah. This is the first day of all of our lives that we're recording this. It'll be coming out a bit later, but the day we're recording, this is the first day of all of our lives that Roe V Wade is no longer a thing. 1973. I just looked it up. I should have known that. 1973. Yeah. You thought you thought he was older than Robot City? Miles on me. I get it. I don't know when, when, when. I don't remember. When things happen, medicine ages you. I'm a ******* wreck. I get it. Jesus. I'm sorry. You're a doctor. That means apologize to Doctor Hoda immediately. Doctor. Which means he's an adult and all adults are the same age. Yeah, but we have feelings, too, Robert. I know. I know. Well, you just ain't. I've been so mad. You know what's really messed up? What's that? The history of the subject of today's episode. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. That's what we're talking about today. This is going to be a rough one. I don't have anything else to say this this is gonna be a rough one. Kava. What do you what do you know what do you know about the how how gynecology started as a as a as a discipline in like the Western medical Canton. OK. This is this is going to be hard on me. This is a I'm not like above criticizing medical history. I mean, we have a very bad history. With every everything does though, actually, yeah. But you, you kind of hire hopes for medicine and when you learn about some of the awful stuff in medicine, it it's a little bit disappointing maybe at least because you expect more. But there's a lot of bad people in the world of medicine did a lot of bad things. You've covered a lot of them, even recent ones. And I'm sure OB GYN like a lot of the other medical advances and medical fields. It has probably had some pretty awful characters in it. I think I have a sense of who we're talking about today, if that's, if that's what we're talking about. Yeah. To today we are talking about Jay, Marion Sims. And as a rule, when you Google this guy, doctor J Marion Sims, although again, at the time he became a doctor, like, I I think there's like hairdressers who spend more time in school, like it was. It wasn't that hard at the time, you know, nobody was doing eight years in medical school. There's a lot of cocaine people. Just a lot of nights in the hospitals. That was about it, I'm sure. Lower bar. Yeah. So when you Google J Marion Sims, the thing you'll generally discreet see him described as is the the father of gynecology, which is you would. Oh, I thought you were going to say a Colin Firth doppelganger. I mean, he does look a lot like Colin Firth. Listen, that's Mr Darby you're talking about. Have some respect. Well, I mean, J Marion Sims could have played Mr Darby. Now this is a tough one, cavet, because this guy, unlike a lot of the doc, usually when we have a doctor on here, you're about to hear about them doing some very non doctorly ****. This guy was pretty competent at medicine. He, I mean, he made his mistakes, but he was like kind of on the cutting edge and he legitimately made some very important breakthroughs in medical science. He is not a medical grifter and he was not full of ****. What he was, was a guy. Who used enslaved people as test dummies on which he could, like, cut at his will? And that's what we're talking about today. I'm already sad. Yeah. I do want to start, though, by because, like, because this guy gets called the father of gynecology a lot. I do feel like we should we should go back in time a little bit and talk about kind of what came before him because. Like, obviously this guy. There's a degree of historical credit this guy should get. He invented some of the most basic tools that are still used today in the trade. It's probably fair to say he was one of the first people to practice gynecology in a recognized, modern way. But in a larger sense, saying that, like any person in the 1800s, let alone a dude, could be like, the father of gynecology is like lunacy. Because obviously people have cared about health in in those organs, in that part of the body for forever, and they have been attempting to deal with it. One way or the other for forever. And I I do want to start talking about that just because I don't like limiting our discussion of medicine to like the 1800s when like, **** was getting patented because actually useful things were discovered before that. In time. So obviously. The, It's, you know, hard to say what the first medical practitioner would have been. It is certainly someone whose name has been lost to time, if indeed they had a name, right. Like if you really counting the very first people who figured out that there were different kind of plants or clays and soils. All of these were used in different kind of medical capacities by people in the past. They may have even been people before, like names were a thing that people had. One of the reasons for this is that anthropologists suspect that. A lot of our early understanding of like what herbs and plants and other things were medicinal came from people observing animals. There are animals that will seek out medicinal herbs in nature and use them to alleviate discomfort and aid in healing. This is how probably people learned about different things, including the plants that we get like Advil and stuff basically from. Add plants that like we get. I mean, this is honestly, we're like DMT and **** comes from MAOI's. There's like Jaguars in the jungle that'll seek out banisteriopsis, cappi and whatnot. So, like, all of these, all these different, like medicines. People probably started to find things that were useful in treating ailments by watching animals in the wild take them and kind of like documenting it. It's also worth noting that this is probably not exclusive to humans. Anthropologists suspect that Neanderthals had medical knowledge and presumably acquired it in the same way. This also probably included basic knowledge about how to deal with wounds, because they would people. It's it's not hard to figure out that, like, putting pressure on a bleed can, like, help with the bleed, right? We shouldn't assume that people 30,000 years ago were too dumb to be like, oh, if you hold on to a bleed sometimes they don't die. You know, all that kind of stuff is probably early, early on like medicine. The first documented medical tools in history are believed to be Flint tipped drills and bowstrings used by Neolithic dentists. In Baluchistan around 7000 BCE. Which is pretty amazing. Baluchistan. Are you making that up or is this a place? No, no, no, no, no. But it's a let me, let me double check cause map stuff is always but I believe it's like if this ends up being right into Iran, I'm gonna be really ******. I don't think it's far. I mean, Luke is then. Oh my God. Yeah, there is a Balochistan. Yes S it's one. It's part of Pakistan. OK. So it's. Yeah, it's not far from not far. Yeah. It's like, yeah. And that kind of Indo Arian area. So yeah, that's the 1st and the 1st. A cool tool. And again, these are just the first ones that we've probably the oldest tools that we have on record, right? Which isn't to say that these were the first, but that's interesting to me always that, like, dental tools, although it makes sense. Like the consequences of ******* up with dental surgery are less than, like, heart surgery. So it makes sense that, like, people might have figured that out earlier, right? Yeah, they could see the teeth. Yeah, exactly. See that just by opening their mouths. It's easier access. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously, like, tooth problems would have been all ******* very common, however. Some researchers have recently argued convincingly that the very first recorded medical device in history came much earlier and was not a drill or any kind of surgical tool, but was actually the the statuette commonly known as the Venus of Willendorf, found in Austria in 1908. If you've seen this artifact, and I think anyone who's gotten through grade school has seen it in a textbook, it is one of the most common pieces of ancient art that you'll see. It dates back to about 20,028 thousand years ago. Paper take, and it depicts a rotund woman with substantial breasts and wide hips. The guys who found this in Austria were, like white Victorian dudes. And they assumed immediately that this was *********** of some sort, and that the Venus descriptor was like, the fact that they called it a Venus was like, them making fun of primitive, undeveloped, savage people, right? And like, oh, this is what they thought was hot looking, these weirdos in the past, said those weirdos in the past. So more recently, several groups of scholars have argued that the Venus was in fact. Obstetric aid used by women to track the progress of their pregnancies, the changes in their own bodies and the bodies of others over time during their pregnancy, and perhaps even as part of an attempt to figure out what body shapes were most likely to survive childbirth. Basically, an attempt to document here's who, what our members of our like tribe or clan or whatever look like in different stages of the pregnancies that we can know. Well, the women who look more like this have an easier time surviving the birthing process, right? This is, again, wild. Yeah, it's not. I did not know about that. I know about that statue. It's in like. You're right. It's in every textbook. It's like, you know, and like Michael Crichton books, it's in like a lot of like pop culture when they have this for time travel thing. But like, I had no idea there was an actual use for it. Yeah. One of the ways in which there's been a couple of papers on this at this point, and one of the things the first said, I actually talked to one of the guys who did the 1st paper. One of the things they pointed out is that if you, if you take pictures of the Venus from the perspective of its head, like looking down at its breasts, looking to the side at its hips, they compared that to pictures. Pregnant women took of themselves with the camera like facing where their eyes were of the same parts of their body. And it looks like the depiction of a pregnant person that a pregnant person would make of their own body if they did not have access to like a mirror or something, if they were just looking down at themselves and trying to scope the representation. In 2020, further research was published, and I'm going to quote now from a write up in art critique about it quote published recently in obesity, a scientific journal, Richard J Johnson, Miguel a Lance Lanassa, and John W Fox offered that variation in size among amongst Venus sculptures was directly related to climate and proximity to glaciers because new survival required sufficient nutrition for childbearing women, they write. We hypothesize that the Overnourished woman became an ideal symbol of survival and beauty during episodes of starvation and climate change in Paleolithic Europe. The study further points out that the venuses, often made out of mammoth ivory, stone and horn, were worn down and smooth, likely result of being of being handled, indicating that they were probably passed down through generations. The study proposes that the VENUSES could have been used as tools to teach women coming into their childbearing years bearing years. Then increasing their own body fat would allow them to survive through difficult climates. So be positive. I like it. Yeah. And I I think it's yeah. It's obviously it's unlikely that the venuses we have, any of them particularly, are the very first ones. But but these go back very far, 28, three thousand years or so before the 1st dental drills. Part of what that suggests is that maybe some of, if not the very earliest people practicing medicine and anything that could be considered a kind of like. Uh, organized way would have been women either trying to survive pregnancy or trying to help other women survive pregnancy, right? Which is also very logical if you think about like, you know how like the priorities people would have had back then. I I stayed all this because, number one, we're about to talk about a very different. In the history of Women's Health when the only people who were allowed to study it were men. And I I don't want to pretend because when you call somebody like Jay James, Marion Sims, like the father of gynecology, it does kind of like insinuate that this is the start of, like, Women's Health is like a medical discipline and it absolutely is not right. We people have been working and a lot in a lot of cases we could talk about, you know, midwives in Europe. And like, a lot of how a lot of, like, honestly, a lot of the best knowledge about childbirth and whatnot would have come from them rather than doctors for most of the history of medicine, for reasons we're about to talk about. So just wanted to note, as we get into this really misogynistic and racist story that the history of gynecology does not, in fact, begin with James Marion Sims and gynecology, obstetrics. It's all kind of like woven together at this point because there's not a lot of specialization yet, right when we talk about where we're talking about. Which is the early 1800s. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna move into the story now. James Marion Sims was born in Lancaster County, South Carolina, in 1813. Most of the knowledge we have of his early life comes from his autobiography, the story of My Life, which he wrote 40 years after the experiments that are going to take up the bulk of our discussion today. To give you an idea of the sort of guy he was, the book opens with 40 pages. He had someone else write about what a hero he was. God, the way to do it I'm going to I'm going to do it. I'm going to read you a sample passage for this ******* book cover. His mouth was admirably formed, the lips being of medium fullness, the lower lip somewhat fuller, indicating decision of character. His smile was one of kindly sweetness. His head was rather below than above the average size, and it's unusual height in proportion to its circumference pointed his Gaelic origin, for through his mother the blood of the Macgregors of Mcalpin coursed. Foolproof in the veins of their descendant, his tout ensemble suggested in all respects, Sir John Bell's ideal of the qualities necessary in a truly great surgeon. The brain of the Apollo, the heart of a lion, the eye of an eagle and the hand of a woman. Just so you know, this is classic academics. Classic academics. How it is. This is how it is in the teaching. You go to Mayo, this is everyone's like this. Classic, beautiful Gaelic features. Yeah, beautiful feet in the hands of a woman. That's actually kind of a compliment, though. At least at least that part of it's like, you know, a lady like hands and the heart of a lion, he's perfect. He's a perfect man. Yeah. So, I mean, just as an idea of where this guy's ego ends up, that's like how that's that's what he has someone else, right? Opening his ******* autobiography. Can I just ask you a question? Am I absolutely at some point when he is forced to confront some of the bad stuff that he does, am I going to absolutely hate him for his responses and when he looks back upon it in this book? Yeah, it's it's pretty weasely what he does something. OK, good, good, good. It's one to make sure I was really gonna hate it. So, following 10s of thousands of words of effusive praise, the book opens with Sims explaining how a bunch of people just demanded he write this autobiography. He's like doctors. Autobiographies are normally interesting, but the demand has been so intense that I must. I'm going to tell you I know how this happened because when you're a doctor and you're being followed around by, like, a big group of medical students, you have them at your. You have to that their grades, their lives, their future careers are in your hands. And I've never gotten more fake laughs than when I, like, have medical students with me. I'm, like, very sensitive to it. Like, God, what a dream. It's you would think, but at some point it kind of drives you crazy because you're like, wait, was it. Don't don't give me a courtesy laugh. I want. No, you don't have to do that. And that's what's happening to this guy. There's all these students being, Oh my God, you're so amazing. Please tell us how you have to write a book, Sir. Sir, you have to write a book. You have predicted this because he starts to hospitals. So, yes, that's absolutely the case here. I know, I know this guy. I yeah, I know him. So he notes that his, yeah, he gives through some interminable family history before he starts talking about his own birth. He notes that his parents were descended from English colonists in Virginia, that his family had come to North America in 1740, and that his grandfather served in the Revolutionary War quote. When I was 10 or 12 or 11 years old, he showed me a document with Washington's name, signed to it, but I did not have enough sense to appreciate it or to care to know what it was. Who knows if that's true? Might have been, might have just been something he said because it was kind of invoked in this period of time if you were a certain kind of white dude to be like, Oh yeah, my, I had a grandpa or a dad who knew George Washington for sure right now. His grandfather lived to age 95, which is insane in that. That's pretty good now like in the 1800s like that is the toughest *** ** * ***** in several counties. And one one of the he talks a lot about how the minute. Family live long lives, and then he spends several pages whining that his dad died at age 78, which is again, pretty good for the 8 era. Not bad for now. Again, I mean, with American like, health care, Jesus still above average, pretty good. And he spends a long time listing all of the things his dad could have done to have lived longer because he was supposed to live to be over 100. And then after he spends all this time complaining about his father dying early at 78, he notes offhandedly, my mother died at the age of 40. Have common bilious remittent fever, the disease that is cured now with the greatest facility, but at the time was attended with great mortality because they were ignorant of the method of cure. That's it. That's all for mom. That's all for mom. Ohh, this is an amazing time to be alive. Jesus. Share was Dad only lived to 78. What a tragedy if he'd, you know, avoided this and taken this and done this that I told him, Oh yeah, Mom dropped it. 40, but whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Jeez, she didn't have his lips. Did you see my father's lips? They were perfect. Beautiful, full lips. They were beautiful. It's it's great. So Marion Sims was educated from a young age as his father had not really gotten an education and was kind of insecure about it. Right? So he wants his kid, which is normal, right? This kid to have a better life than he did. The family owned a store and so most mornings, 5 year old Marian would hike a mile to the local school, which was run by a Scotsman. He is the kind of by autobiographer who always lets you know the race of everybody who comes up in the book. It is very important, you know, this guy was a Scotsman and you know, the Irishman are Irish and the Germans are Germans. Yeah, he's he's real, real insistent on that now since he was six at the time. SIM says that he remembers little of this. Which is fair. Don't remember a whole lot about being 6, but he does note that quote, the teacher flogged the boys occasionally very severely and stood some of them up in the corner with a fool's cap on, which is probably not weird for the time, but always funny to read about kids getting hit in old timey schools. So school in this part of the United States and this time was often summer term only. That was actually kind of the norm back in the day. You would go to school during the summer because, like, there's no planting or anything during the summer, right? You plant and like the spring and you harvest and kind of like the fall summer. There's not really much for the kids. To do so, that's like the best time and winter. It's usually like you're too busy not dying of freezing to death to go do much in the winter so kids would go to school in the summer. Now, the elder Sims didn't like the idea of his son only receiving a couple of months of schooling per year, so he spent a significant amount of money to send his boy, now aged 6, to a boarding school in 1819. Adult Sims lets us know that this teacher was an Irishman who was badly pockmarked from smallpox. This is, again, critical detail from his childhood for you. He was, quote, a rigid disciplinarian altogether very tyrannical. And I was very unhappy at his house because I think he's living with the teacher. That's the kind of weird boarding school. It's not like a big boarding school. I think it's like this guy runs a school in a town, and people who live in, like, rural communities will, like, send their kids to live with them for a few months and do school. I learned so much weird **** from your show, man. Yeah, it's weird. I think this is pretty common for the period I've read now that's on other cases. It's so great, though. I learned so many little facts. I get the drop on. On on other people, yeah, this is a great one. I'm sorry. You should imagine how much that would suck. It's like you gotta go with your math teacher now, son. It's the only way for you to learn things. Ohh what? What a bad youth that would be. I I ******* love that response. I I learned the weirdest **** for the weird **** but it's great. I love it. I would not choose for that to be how my childhood went. But you know what I would choose for someone's childhood? I I bet you. I bet you would choose them. The delightful product and services that are funding this program. I believe that children have the right to engage in projects and services. And more than anything, I believe that children have. Right to be put on. Child Hunting Island where they can become part of the economy. That's what always gets bleeped out. Fantastic that is. That's what always gets bleeped out. Now you know it, the great what else does but I no one else gets access to. 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I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. We're back. Ohh, kavet. You know, we probably talk about something. Obviously, the FDA just banned jewels to protect the kids. Yeah, I think, you know, youth smoking, youth vaping have actually both been dropping for a while. My opinion, please, is that we ought to do the thing where you just force kids to smoke when they're in grade school, right? Because what's the one way to make not consuming tobacco cool? Something kids do with, like, well, hang out and they won't smoke. Force them to smoke at school? Yeah. Yeah. This was, this was proven a long time ago in a documentary about Donald Duck where he forced Huey, Dewey and Louie to smoke a whole carton of cigarettes and they got so sick that they never wanted to smoke again. I think that makes a lot of sense, that this makes a lot of sense. And if you at home have an argument, I want you to think to yourself, has Donald Duck ever been wrong? And the answer is no, no, and we shouldn't wear pants. And we shouldn't wear pants. We shouldn't wear pants. Shirt cocket give your kids cigarettes. Make them smoke at school. Anyway, back to the podcast. So, so he goes to this boarding school with this Irishman who is, yeah, a tyrannical guy. He's going to live at his house. He, he clearly finds, found the experience somewhat traumatizing because he writes pointedly in his autobiography, quote My convictions now are that the best place for a child under 10 years of age is with his mother. Wow. And it's it does say a lot. Both. About the experience he had that, like, as a as a guy who does not talk about his feelings, he he wants to note this decades later. Like, I think that points to this being pretty traumatizing to him. And also it points to kind of what was going on at the time that he also felt the need to tell other readers in the late 1800s, like, don't separate small children from their parents. Yeah, that was probably crazy at the time. Yeah, what? This guy is super aggressive, making weird soft. Now from this very early age, Sims was extremely competitive against his peers. The school had a daily challenge where if you got like kudos or something, you know if you basically you got like a a praise from the teacher. If you were the first kid who got to class, you got to sit in a special seat and Simms wound up in a rivalry. There was this 10 year old who was always the first kid in class whose name he remembered like 80 years later and he gets into like a competition with this kid over who can get to school. Fastest quote. And this kid's name is James. Ram so this is him writing. However, the boy that got ahead of James Graham had to rise very early in the morning. I remember getting up one morning long before Daybreak. The dread of my young life was mad dogs and runaway inwards. I started off for the schoolhouse on a trot an hour before day, looking anxiously from side to side, and before and behind, fearing all the time for those two great bug bears of my young life, these mad dogs, and run away in words with which the minds of the young were so often demoralized by ***** stories. So ah. I really hate this guy. And he is he is he is talking here about runaway slaves, right? Which is a boogie like, kids get warned. Like, hey, if you wander off the path you go into the woods like they're runaway slaves, they'll murder you, right? Like it's a it's a whole thing white people tell their kids, you know? That's what he's referring to, right? Is these stories he would have been told of a kid of like runaway slaves hiding in the woods that he has to watch out for. Obviously nothing ever happens, but the fact that he refers to them that way and he does not use that polite term should be a hint as to this. Fellows attitudes on racism. Yeah, although I again, as racist as this is, I do want to note, like he is totally normal for his time because it is the United States in the early 1800s. You know he is. He is growing up deep within, like slavery, and there is nothing about it that he finds unsettling other than the thought that he might get hurt by a freed slave, right? Or an escaped slave, right. So in second grade, his teacher had one remarkable peculiarity. Which was that quote. It made no odds whether a boy was good or bad. He invariably got a flogging on the first day. So one of his teachers in second grade is like, first time a new kid comes in, I'm on a whip him. It's like gang initiation. What? I know, it's the worst school. I I bring this up because he goes on to tell the story of a 7th grade who got 7th or a 7 year old who got flogged because he had to spend a single day in their class. And the kid wasn't a student, his brothers were, and his mom had to go into town, so she dropped him off at the school because she didn't want to leave him at home. Out with the ******* again. This is like, these are the people who are raising him. These are the adults in his culture, right? We're taking you somewhere safe, son. To the floor. We don't want you to hang out around the slaves. Let's take you to go get beaten with a whip by your teacher. There's seven. You can handle it. So I think you're getting an idea of how this kid's early life went right and and kind of the culture that raises him and its values. When Marion was like 12, his dad is elected Sheriff of Lancaster Village, which most sources will note was north of Hanging Rock Creek. You can probably guess who tended to get hung there and why. Once his dad was established in a prominent position, he was able to send his son to Franklin Academy, where he studied for two years before earning admission to South Carolina College. So he starts college at 14, which is not abnormal at the time, right? Again, in this same period of time, if you're in Germany, if you're an most of like the Western world at age 14, you're legally an adult in a lot of the West, right? Like you're you're starting to do a man's work in that period of time. So it's not wild that he's going to college at age 14. He does well in college. He's quickly admitted to the Euphrates in society, which is a literary fraternity for nerds. The Euphrates Society existed. As a result of a split of with an older fraternity, and for whatever it's worth, the one Marian joined was the less less famous of the two because their sister fraternity, the Clarius Sofix Society, counted a bunch of famous people as members, including John C Calhoun. Umm. So yeah, by this point, he had decided to become a doctor, and while he was at South Carolina College, he basically interns with a local doctor. Right. And this period of time medicine, it's still this kind of hybrid of the way it had existed pretty much forever, which is you find a doctor and you like. Become their helper and that's how you learn a lot of the tools of the trade. But there's also a school, there's also medical schools and you can get like, you know a degree and stuff, but kind of both things are are common, which is not like today you know, you have like your, your, what do you call it, residency and stuff. But in this period of time he kind of starts his residency at the same time as he's starting to go to medical school. And medical school is not nearly as formal. So his medical schooling starts. His formal medical schooling starts with a 3 month course at a Medical College. Charleston. But he finds that too hard, so he quits. He goes to Philly and he gets joins a worse medical school. That's what I want in my doctor. Three month course was just too intense. Well, you know the, the old joke. You know what they call the Doctor Who quits his medical school after three months and goes to a worse medical school and graduates at the bottom of that medical school. You know, they call him a doctor. That's right. Classic joke. Good stuff. I mean, I like 3 months now. You couldn't, you can't become a paramedic on in three months, right? Isn't that like a year or so? Three months would be like one rotation in like be gone. Yeah, yeah, it's it's very little. In today's standards, but he does eventually get into a worse medical school. He graduates in 1835 and is, in his words quote, a lackluster student who showed little ambition, he noted in his memoirs. I felt no particular interest in my profession at the beginning of it. Apart from making a living. I was really ready at any time and at any moment to take up anything that offered or held out any inducement of fortune, because I knew that I could never make a fortune out of the practice of medicine. I didn't really feel passionate about my work until I realized I could really make people suffer. Yeah, until I learned how to get ******* rich, I didn't care about being a doctor. So he is a graduated Dr at age 22, which man, I don't know that I think 22 year old should be driving cars. But yeah, it's a different time. You know, it is a different very far off. And there's a lot less medicine to learn, right? There's much less medicine to learn. So if you even go back now like 10 years, like 10-15 years, like the books we took for our step one. Training test. They were like maybe a 1/4 inch thick. And now over the years they're like 2 to 3 inches thick of all the stuff you have to learn just in that one for that one test. So in the last, it's been a little bit more exponential in terms of what we have to learn in terms of the sciences. But yeah, I imagine back then it was like maybe a pamphlet and like, yeah, pay attention if you condensed all of the good medical information you could have fitted into a scene, right? Yeah. Right. Mostly it would have been wash hands underlined a bunch. They were pretty far from that. Yeah. That is a, that is a contentious debate at the time. Yeah. People are getting stabbed with four steps over it. That's exactly right. Yeah. So, you know, he's a doctor, 22. He goes back to his hometown now. He has no actual clinical experience. He had never worked in a hospital. He basically, like kind of by his own admission, didn't know how to do anything. His first two patients are newborn babies, and both of them die instantly. This makes him sad for reasons that I think are understandable. To be fair, with the best medical knowledge at the time, there's a pretty good chance he wouldn't have those babies because it is 1835, yeah, yeah. So he gets very sad and he flees to Alabama. He lives there in a disreputable boom town, presumably drinking too much due to the fact that he described it as, quote, nothing but a pile of gin houses, stables, blacksmith shops, grog shops, Taverns, and stores thrown together in one promiscuous huddle. You will note that three of the six business types he describes are just different types of bars. We have the Gin House, we have the room house. We have the Whiskey House. We have the rye whiskey house. So in 1836, home from Alabama, he marries a woman named Theresa. And in 1837, he and his new bride moved to Macon County to get Sims's first real job, which is working as a plantation physician. So as you probably have guessed, his primary patients there are not plantation owners. They probably hired better doctors because he's not very good at this point. His patients are enslaved people, right? Now, in some ways, this is not an inherently evil job because, like, slavery is wrong. But, like, it's not wrong to provide medical care to enslaved people, obviously. And he did a lot of operations on club feet, cleft palates, crossed eyes, like, and that's like, even if you're working for a plantation owner, if you are carrying out medical procedures on people who are enslaved, it's like good to do that. So this is not like a job that is necessarily the worst thing you could be doing. At this time, if you're interfacing with the slave economy, however, the job of plantation Dr does not just mean being paid to take care of enslaved people. It is fully integrated into the machinery of slaveholding and the South budding human trafficking business. See, the foreign importation of slaves had been banned in 1808, which meant the growing demand for enslaved black people in the United States was served primarily by forcing enslaved people to make babies and then selling those babies, right. You cannot import more enslaved people after 1808. The way that the slave economy keeps going is they force enslaved people to have children and then they steal those children and sell them, right? That is how it works. Yeah. Doctors are a critical part of this because, again, not the easiest thing to keep mothers and babies alive in this period of time. Now, I want to quote now from a write up by Monica Cronin quote, enslaved women were not only expected to reproduce, but it seems reproduce often. As Dorothy Roberts wrote, slave women's childbearing replenished the slave labor force. Black women bore children who belonged to the slave owner. In the moment of their conception, Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States of America, acknowledged that a woman who brings a child every two years is more profitable than the best man of the farm. So? So they're part of this machine to keep slavery going, the economy of it. And they are arguably a critical part of the most profitable part of this machine, because the slave owners themselves will argue that keeping enslaved women breeding is more profitable than any individual labor. Labor, right? So Sims's work was very much critical in maintaining the profitability of his employer slave empires, and he was not an insignificant part of this machinery in the state of Georgia. This write up from history net goes into more detail. According to Vanessa Gamble, University professor of Medical Humanities at George Washington University, Sims, his practice was deeply rooted in the trade for enslaved people. Sims built an eight person hospital in the heart of the trading district in Montgomery. While most healthcare took place on the plantation, some stubborn cases were brought to physicians. Like Sims, who patched up in slave workers so they could produce and reproduce for their masters again, otherwise they were useless to their owners. This brings up the concept of soundness, says Gamble. Being sound meant they produce for men and women and reproduce for for women, right? So this is like, yeah, this is the thing. Now, we are somewhat reliant upon Sims here for information on the size and scope of his practice, but his claim is that his practice was not merely one among many, but the largest surgical practice. But the largest surgical practice in Alabama and the largest practice any doctor in Montgomery had ever had up to that point. Again, he is a narcissist. This may be untrue. That's I'm not saying that to, like, mitigate his crimes. It's just like he's not an entirely reliable narrator here. And and the fact that he is just like, I had the most racist medical profession of anyone in the field, I was the biggest racist and the greatest racist doctor you've ever seen. Yeah, but and also it is entirely possible he was the biggest. You know, that's not an impossible. Thing. He's certainly a significant part of this. And it's also, as you said, worse, noting that he's like, I was the most important of the racism doctors, yeah. And again, he he has so many patients because he provided an economic like a cost effective way for slave owners to keep their human assets productive in. In that sense, as a doctor, Sims had to treat female patients regularly and he hated this. No doctors at the time liked working on women. This is going to be gnarly, so buckle up. But one of Simpson's major critics, Dorinda Ojinaga, explained it this way in her article for the Journal of Medical Ethics quote. Complicate the situation even more. The medical specialty of gynecology did not exist. The practice of examining the female organs was considered repugnant by doctors who were almost all males. In fact, an American Medical schools, obstetrics and child delivery were taught by the use of dummies, and often it was not until the doctor was in practice that he actually delivered a baby. According to Wertz and Wertz, 1977, young doctors rarely had any clinical training and what the theory of birth meant. In practice, many arrived at a birth with only lectures and book learning to guide them if they and the laboring. Patients were fortunate they had an older, experienced doctor or attending woman to explain what was natural and what was not. Many young men were less lucky and were embarrassed, confused and frightened by the appearances of Labor and birth. So most doctors know almost nothing about labor about. But again, this is part of why, like, you're in better hands a lot of times with a midwife here than you are, like, going to a doctor for this. And if I could be fair for a second, there was very few things in medicine that scared me when I was doing my medical school training, but childbirth was one of them. Like it it was. I found it terrifying. The risks were the the scared holding babies. Exactly. I mean, like, I. Just you don't wanna **** it up so bad. It was it can be so stressful. I mean that's not, I don't think that's quite the issue that all these people are facing at the time. But I I'm just gonna say it's it is a really tough field. I have a lot of respect for OB GYN. I mean so one field of course it's like the one field of medicine where you're not just avoiding death, you're actually bringing life into the world. So it's kind of like cool in that that way, but it's also very high risk, high reward sort of thing and then there's like the the lows can be so low. It's like soul crushing if it happens, you know, and and one has to assume, you have to assume. There are the odd, like shining examples here of like male doctors who actually give a **** about this, but they are very few and far between and for the most part, like doctors are scared of this and don't know much about it. And part of this is based on the very, again, Victorian attitudes towards like sex and sexuality at the time. So to give you an idea of how ****** ** this is when Sims was trained as a doctor. The standard medical procedure for doing a pelvic exam was to look directly in the eyes of the patient and nowhere else, because actually looking at their genitals would have been inappropriate. Really creepy. Yeah, you are staring in their eyes, not looking at what your hands are doing. Really trying trouble. Yeah, yeah, just the description of this is very uncomfortable. Yes, makes me very uncomfortable. Probably seems like it is hard to do good medicine that way, right? Not an OBGYN, but I assume that makes it more. Difficult. So again I I stayed all this to note that like given both just kind of the the the limitations of science and the cultural limitations placed on doctors and the doctor's place on themselves in this. It is was basically impossible to solve what was probably the worst pregnancy related illness of the day which was vaginal and rectal fistulas. Now these can be deeply unpleasant things to deal with. The gist of the issue is that a whole develops and this is like a thing that happens due to. Getting that baby out of there, the trauma of a delivery, yeah, yeah. A whole develops between a woman's bladder and vagina. This can lead to constant, uncomfortable and uncontrollable urinary incontinence. And worse versions of the condition lead to uncontrollable fecal incontinence too. I probably don't need to be labour. What an issue this would be for anyone suffering from it and what kind of impact this would have on their life, right? People with these fistulas cannot safely carry additional children to term. So if they are enslaved people. Number one, you can't really work with this, right? It it gets in the way of you being able to labor and be a productive economic unit, and you also cannot bear additional children. So in the minds of a slave holder, this health issue turns a woman into a complete financial loss, right? Which is how they think about these women, right? These human beings are purely financial instruments for them. You know, they look at them as like chattel, almost like not they're not, they're not looking at them as they would look at. A normal patient, right? So from the perspectives of the people who own slaves, this is a major financial issue. And obviously from the perspective of both enslaved women and free women, this is also just like a horrific health problem that there is no cure for, right? Because this affects everybody. And it's, I mean, I don't I again feel like I don't have to believe why everyone would want there to be a cure for this. I just feel the need to point out that the people who are paying J Marion Sims, who's going to work on this problem, want it cured specifically for financial reasons. Right, right now, Jay Marion Simms was going to be the guy who fixes this problem, which is sort of surprising because up until his 30s, Women's Health was pretty much just an afterthought for him as he wrote. Quote, I never pretended to treat any of the diseases of women, and if any women came to consult me on account of any functional derangement of the uterine system, I immediately replied, this is out of my line. I do not know anything about it. Practically, he advised them to seek. He advised them to seek help with a different physician. But all this changed. One day, a few years into his practice, when he was called to work on a woman who had fallen off a horse and was in pain around her back and pelvis, he assumed he'd she dislocated her uterus, which I guess is the thing that can happen. I'm. I'm he probably. He was probably her hip or something. Yeah, but he said ** *** he thought she had dislocated her uterus. Right now, without going into too much detail here, he, like, gets his hands up in there and he kind of by accident, relieves her pain without meaning to. He, like, pushes a bunch of air into the vagina, which dilates it and, in his words, pushes it back in its normal place. I'm not entirely certain what he's talking about here, but the end result of this is that while he's kind of rooting around in there. Because of the stuff that he does, he's able to get a Gooch. This woman also has a fistula, which had been an untreatable problem for her. And because of what he's doing down there, because of the dilation of the vagina, he's able to see this fistula and be what he thinks is probably like one of the first doctors to get a good look at it. And he's close enough to it. He can't quite see it enough, but he's he sees enough of it. He's close enough to seeing that. He's like, I feel like I know how I could get a better look at this thing. And obviously, again, he's not actually an incompetent. After his he he quite rationally is like, well, look, I'm really close to seeing this thing. If I can get the right tool so that I can actually get a good look at this thing, I can figure out how to treat them right, which is perfectly reasonable medical logic at this point. Now, the only issue is that the right tools did not exist. Today, doctors who work on this thing, one of the tools that we use is called a speculum. And Doctor Sims is the one who invents the precursor to the speculum. He does it by buying a pewter spoon. He grabs 2 medical students and he goes back to his patient. He writes. Quote I got a table about 3 feet long and put a coverlet upon it and mounted her on the table on her knees with her head resting on the palms of her hands. I placed the two students, one on each side of the pelvis, and they laid the hold of the nads and pulled them open. Before I could get the bent spoon handle into the vagina, the air rushed in with a puffing noise, dilating the vagina to its fullest extent, introducing the bent handle of the spoon. I saw everything as no man had ever seen before. So it is it, yeah. You know, and we, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the concept of a speculum. I'm. Yeah. I don't actually know. I'd be curious to see some pictures, but I assume these are much. We, we now think about the sort of disposable bivalve plastic, you know, vaginal speculum. I'm assuming this was some sort of came out looking like some sort of medieval horror device. It probably looked unsettling. Yeah. Yeah. But this is like, this starts the process that leads to the modern medical speculum, right. Like he is. And this is, this is like, good. So far everything we've talked about in this moment. Like this good medicine. I would. I would say he's on the right path. He's doing something. He's trying something. He's. Yeah, he's he's following logically. He's trying to relieve a person's, you know, suffering. And he realizes that he can see the fistula and he's got enough working room to experiment with surgical treatments for it. Now, this is a big moment, right, a big moment. And just like medicine, but after this point, things take a much darker turn because this patient he's got, she's a woman who has some means. She's not going to let him experiment on her on, like, surgically experiment on her. Because, again, it shouldn't be surprising to people. Experimenting on fistula surgery is nightmarishly painful and dangerous, for reasons that should be very obvious, because it is the 1830s. This is part of why so little progress had been made on the problem. But as George or but as Alabama's largest plantation, Dr Marion Sims had a massive, basically unlimited supply of women. With fistulas, women whose consent was immaterial and their owners had no reason not to send them off. With Doctor Sims, because, as we've discussed, a slave who cannot give birth or work is nothing but a money sink, and so Marian starts to make deals with slave owners. They will give him their slaves for as long as he would need them as test subjects. He will pay for their food, which he did complain about constantly in his memoirs, and the slave owners would cover the tax that he had to pay, and he would use them as experimental test subjects. Oh my God. Yeah. I I will say I don't, I won't belabor it and also it's not my wheelhouse. I'm not an OB GYN, but my dad is. So I you know dinner conversations in the Hoda family growing up were very different than yours probably. And this procedure is requires a high level of skill these days. Anesthesia with either general or like you know spinal talking about that. Yes and and are very tough things to do and I think they take probably like an hour. To do so, they're not like quick things in and out, they're like lengthy procedures, surgeries, because you have to dissect the mucosal plane. So it's really, it's it's pretty OK. I'm just, I'm just trying to get myself ready. No, I mean and that that's the thing. Again, we'll be talking about this later. This guy is legitimately good at what he does. Like the actual he is not a quack. The actual thing he comes up with is an important thing. We're going to talk about some other aspects of that that make this even more morally. Questionable, but like what he's what he's doing, he's not, he's not bad at the medical side of it. It's the ethics side of it that where things become problematic. But you know what else is problematic? Not not sure for sure. Not having products and services. Exactly. Not engaging with these products and these services is the ultimate way to be problematic. Because if you're not engaging with these products and services, are you really? Alive or American? Exactly. Bam. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. 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And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? That's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Oh, oh, Merry Christmas. It's not Christmas. It's nowhere near Christmas. It's, I thought Paul had murdered you, Santa Claus. He did. He did. Paul Shaffer shot Santa Claus in a ditch. And today we're going to shoot our fond recollection of our OB GYN residencies and the medical training or something like that. We're certainly going to complicate it, so. So he gets these a number of slave owners to agree to hand over enslaved women to him. He is effectively their owner during this period of time in a legal sense of the word. He begins his experiments in 1845. He is 33 years old. Most historians writing about this will note that he had three patients, Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsy, and I had not heard the name Anarcha before this dope *** name spelled like you'd think it is. And this is where we get to the root of why Doctor Sims has been cancelled by modern critics. They allege that what he did was human experimentation without consent, because true, informed consent is impossible from a person who is enslaved. Like, you can't consent to be experimented upon if you are owned by the person doing the experimenting. Now, I don't think the ethics there are complicated like, like, you know, autonomy. It's like the most basic of medical ethics you have to have. Formed consent and you have to have some control over one's body. Exactly. Exactly. Now, there are a number of people who are detractors to this idea, and the most notable of them is Doctor L Wall. We will be talking about this guy quite a bit. You know, on this show we occasionally will have like, defenders of weird ****** ** things. Often it'll be like we're talking about some British Empire ************ and like his biographer who thinks he's he's the bees knees and like writes long things defending him, massacring people in Africa or whatever. This is a bit different. Doctor Elwell, I think is very, very wrong, and some of his arguments are pretty messed up. That said, from what I can tell, he spent a lot of his career flying to impoverished parts of the world and performing surgeries on people with fistulas. I think his he's passionate about this because he's dedicated his career to dealing with this specific health issue, and Sims is the guy who, like most, fixed it. Again, lol. Wall is wrong here, but he's not the same as like some dude whose job is to professionally defend the British Empire, because it does seem like his day. Job is helping people for free with a serious medical issue, which is nice. Anyway, wanted to provide that context because we will be tearing apart some of these. Got this guy's arguments in a little bit here and I'm sorry, he's a modern Dr L Yeah yeah he's he's around right now. He has, yes. I think his arguments are bad, but here is one he made in a write up in the Journal of Medical Ethics. This is an ongoing series of arguments that that other people have had with him. Quote The first assertion. Was that it was unethical by any standard to perform experimental surgical operations on slaves because slaves by definition, could not have given voluntary informed consent for surgery. Underlying this assertion as the hidden presumption presupposition that enslaved women with fistulas did not want surgical care for their condition, and that they were therefore coerced into having unwanted and perhaps unnecessary surgery. Now I would argue that that's not actually a hidden presupposition because, like we're not saying they don't want surgical care, we're saying they can't give informed consent to be experimented. Time, which is different, right? Obviously anyone who has a medical condition wants it to be treated. But that doesn't mean you want to be a test subject, you know, in a medical experiment. His argument, then, is that this particular medical problem is such a nightmare that these women were basically beating down sims's door to get treatment. And his memoir, Sims, claims that he received enthusiastic consent from Lucy, Anarcha and Betsy. We have no actual evidence of this. This is something he writes down later. None of these women, as far as we know, could read or write. They have left us absolutely no written documentation of their consent. I called absolute ********* on this guy by by the way, I'm so sorry. I know I shouldn't do this. You're giving me all the information right now. But I just googled this guy. I'm so fascinated to know that there's like a modern day, like enthusiast of Doctor Sims. And there is this article in the Journal of Medical Ethics by L Wall, the medical ethics of Doctor J Marion Sims. A fresh a fresh look at the historical record that one of the things that we're quoting from here is that. Yeah. Conclusions, he says in conclusion. It's difficult to make a fair assessment of the medical ethics of past practitioners. Yeah, I don't think it is here, buddy. He seems pretty open. I think. Yeah, who knows? It's gonna get, it's gonna open up further. So again, #1, obviously outside of what I just said, even if you ask a person that you legally own if they consent to surgical experimentation and they say yes, that still doesn't count as consent, right, for a variety of things, I think what should be obvious reasons, right, because you own them legally and like, again, they don't like if their consent is immaterial, then I don't know that I like I I don't think they can consent and that's current like medical ethics. That they cannot consent. Yeah. To respect autonomy, they have to be given all the tools to make their own informed decision. And I'm certain that was not happening. Yeah. But. But, I mean, even outside of that, number one, we have no evidence other than sims's words that they told him that they consented. And I wanna quote from that write up by Monica Cronin again. She notes that Simms published his memoirs well after the end of slavery in the United States and that he may consciously have wanted to put himself in a positive light by claiming that these women had consented to his experiments. Quote. Sims memoirs is likely to be a reflection of changing attitudes towards formerly enslaved people and self-conscious image making as it is to be an accurate portrayal of events now. L walls argument is that it's pretty obvious the women would have consented because a fistula is such a horrible thing to endure. He goes into some detail here quote in addition to the continuous stream of urine and sometimes feces to which they are subjected, these victims have prolonged obstructed labour. Also often suffer from secondary infertility, loss of vaginal function due to extensive scarring of the birth canal. Damage to the pubic bones, contractures of the lower extremities from neuromuscular damage, recurring pelvic and urinary tract infections, horribly diminished self-esteem, damaged body image, and, not infrequently, severe depression, even suicide. The cumulative devastation wrought by this process can be appalling. It is hardly the relatively minor condition referred to by historian Deborah Kuhn McGregor, and he does have a point there. I think it's probably a bad call to refer to this as a relatively minor condition, but then L wall extends his argument, and what I think is a real ****** **. Place quote in alleging that it is unethical for slaves to participate in any form of medical experimentation, Ojinaga and the other writers seem to imply that they wouldn't, that it would never have been appropriate for slaves to undergo innovative surgical operations, no matter what their problems might have been. Critics of the stripe conveniently ignore the differences between non therapeutic and therapeutic medical experimentation. In the former case, participants can have no reasonable expectation of obtaining direct personal benefit from whatever is done, but in the case of therapeutic experimentation, research participants. They gained direct and sometimes substantial medical relief as a result of their participation in a clinical trial. At the time, Sims began his experiments to repair the fistulas affecting afflicting his African American slave patients, there was no effective therapy for vesicovaginal fistula. Many surgeons in different countries had made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to close vezo vaginal fistulas and put it into the tormenting loss of urine that these suffering women experienced. With rare exceptions, all such attempts failed. Now, one of the key points against this argument that he's making. Is that that last part is not true, right? And and again, if there were doctors who had successfully provided therapeutic treatments for fistula and had done it without experimenting on enslaved people, then it's reasonable to it's even more reasonable to say that Doctor Simms was engaging in unnecessary human experimentation on its slaved people, and several doctors had treated fistulas successfully as far back as 1675. John Paul Mettauer of Virginia had successfully treated one in 1840, and by 1855 had repeated this feat. 27 times George Hayward had closed his first fistula in 1839. Now this techniques that Doctor Sims is going to develop are more repeatable, and and and are an important, really important part in figuring out a better and and kind of more mainstream treatment for this. And he was probably the most tenacious Dr in his field, attempting to figure out a replicable treatment. But the fact that multiple other doctors were working successfully on fistula in the same. Without an experimenting on enslaved people further makes the case that. Doctor Sims was not experimenting on these women because there was no other way, nor was he doing it primarily for their benefit. He did it because it was easier. That's that's pretty key to me. Yeah. I mean, I I guess on one hand, you know, it's fine to make this argument that, you know, prior to like 1974 with like the National Research Act and the Belmont report, all that stuff that came after the Tuskegee experiment. Like it's fair to say that before that there was no framework. Of like, you know, IRB's studies that you need that that that's a a fair argument. But you can't get around the fact that even at the time it I'm sure it was widely considered unethical. And then yeah, I'm assuming he's doing these without anesthesia, but is he not? Yeah, but Esthesia was around from like I think 18461847. I think the anesthesia was around at this point, right? Yeah. We are going to. We'll be talking about that a lot in Part 2. No no we will be. That's that's important. I just get excited we will be getting into that. But yeah, it's it's also worth noting that like, and this is also very important, while Marion Sims does make sure to claim that the three women who are named in his book gave their consent, he also introduces quite blithely that there were multiple other enslaved women he used his test subjects. Some accounts, like 7, he doesn't even give their names. He makes vague comments that they wanted his help. There is no claim that, like, these people even consented to the extent that like the others did, which again is not really consent. But like that's part that often that gets ignored by L wall. It gets ignored by a lot of people. It's like, well, he names, he gives the names of three of them, but there were a lot of heat because why would he bother? Right? Like they're not people to him. And again, later in his memoir. Despite these, this like, single, vague claim he makes about consent, he also makes this note quite and this is how he introduces that there were other women he experimented on who were not named. I got three or four more to experiment on, and there was never a time that I could not at any day have had a subject for an operation. This again, he's very clear about what he's doing here. Yeah, I mean, he he he's he sees them as test subjects, not as humans. I mean again, the very basics of like medical ethics, like even I know and I'm not like an expert in medical ethics by any means. Non malfeasance, autonomy, justice, all these like basic concepts that are again very basic. They're not all modern stuff are are not being adhered to in the slightest here. Yeah and that's I mean that's what we're going to leave it for. Part One we get into Part 2, it's it's actually even worse than that kavat. But you know what's not? Worse than that. Is the podcasts or podcasts that you host? Yeah, that's right. I actually no. Now I host 2 the yes, you do. The first one is the House of Pod. It's a sort of humor adjacent medical podcast I have on lots of great guests. We have doctors, we have musicians, we have Roberts, we have Sophie's come on the show and we we talked about medical stuff, science stuff. It's fun and that you can find anywhere you find your podcast it is. Thank you. It's a it's a good time when you might learn something, very, very learn some stuff and we kind of cover, if you like these same sorts of topics that you guys cover. Here you will cover a lot of this similar stuff. And then there's a new show I'm doing with Rebecca Watson who is awesome, amazing of a skeptic and we it's called girls on boys. It is a podcast where we talk about take deep dives on the show the boys, which I find immensely entertaining and I think is one of the best satires on TV show. I also yeah man Eric Kripke knows how to do. Gore some of the best television. Gore I've seen in ever. We we should talk about exploding penises at some point man. That's a good scene. It was, I mean, the whole prostate. Anatomy is there's a question there with that, but I'm not surprised. Yeah, but this show is amazing and it and and it impresses surprises me in the most fun ways. So yeah, I think it's a smart show. We talk about it. That's girls on boys. It's a podcast you can find it. ITunes? Yeah, check that out. I have a book called after the Revolution. If you wanna buy it and you're looking where you can get it, an indie bookstore in your area, you can check out this thing I just learned about called bookshop.org. If you go to bookshop.org type in after the revolution, you can find my book. There's a couple of dollar discount on it now. You can also just go to AK Press after the revolution. Just Google that and you'll find it. So I love that book, buddy. It's a great book. It's really good. It's really enjoy. Thank you. Thank you. Working on the sequel. You can get it everywhere else, too, wherever the **** you find a book. But someone told me book shop.org helps out indie bookstores, so maybe try that out right on. Yeah, and go to calzonemedia.com to see the the rest of the stuff we're working on. Check out, you know, Ghost church and politics, cool people, cool stuff. Plus all out. Come on. Or else. *******. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPREA. Ker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So four whole months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Bobby Bones from the Bobby cast. We are Nashville's most listened to music podcast in depth interviews with your favorite country artists, plus the biggest songwriters and producers in Nashville, all from the comfort of my own home so it gets a little more laid back. They're sharing stories behind the biggest songs in country music and personal stories that you will not hear anywhere else. So if you love country music, I think you will love this podcast. Listen to the Bobby. Guest on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcast.