TMI

Today's tour will give us all a chance to enjoy some music and a good book. But the experience won't be what you expect it to be.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales right
there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome
to the cabinet of curiosities. To paint like da Vinci,

(00:29):
to sculpt like Rodin. Skills like those take years, often decades,
to acquire, and they don't just happen. Such talents require
intense practice before one even comes close to matching the greats.
For Rosemary Brown, though, who had been born in London
in nineteen sixteen, her dream was to write music like
the masters Bach chopin Beethoven. But Rosemary didn't even play

(00:53):
an instrument until she was in her thirties, when she
started taking lessons on a secondhand piano. That wasn't her
first foray into music, though. When she was seven, she
was visited by a composer who told her that he
would make her famous, that she would write music heard
all over the world. His name was France List, and
he died over thirty years earlier. That would be Rosemary's

(01:16):
only contact with Liszt or any other ghostly composer for
twenty five years until her adult piano lessons. Soon after
she got married and had a child, and then the
lessons stopped. It seemed her interactions with the spirit world
had ended too, which was surprising given her family's history
of paranormal activity. Rosemary's parents and grandparents, among other members

(01:39):
of the family, were all said to be psychic. In
interviews later in life, she said that even she had
the ability to see and hear the dead. By nineteen
sixty one, she and her husband had two children, But
then the unthinkable happened. Mr. Brown passed away, leaving Rosemary
a single mother with a boy and a girl to
take care of at home. But wouldn't be the only

(02:00):
life changing moment she would face. Three years after her
husband's death, Rosemary reconnected with an old friend, France List
had come to pay her a visit, and this time
he brought some of his friends with him, including Brahms, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff,
and Mozart. It started out of the blue. Rosemary had
been at home recovering from an accident and had grown board.

(02:24):
With little else for her to do, she sat down
at her piano and tried to plunk out a little
song from her childhood, something to occupy her mind and hands.
While she healed, and that's when she realized her hands
were no longer her own. They'd become possessed by France List,
who then used them to compose intricate and beautiful music,
something too difficult for Rosemary to ever play on her

(02:46):
own with only a handful of lessons under her belt.
Through List, other composers would also speak through her, using
her hands to either play their compositions on the piano
or record them on paper without any treamant to get
in the way. When she had completed her transcriptions, she
would then present them to the ghostly composer to play,
since she didn't have the skill. Once again, they would

(03:09):
take over her hands and play what they had written
to make sure she had recorded it right. When she
wasn't being used as a human piano player, Rosemary conversed
with her ghostly guests. She said List was fascinated by
how much Banana's cost and Chopin hated the idea of television.
But eventually Rosemary showed her creations to a Scottish music

(03:31):
teacher named Mary Firth, who helped to fund her work.
With enough money to get by, she quit her day
job and devoted all her time to writing what her
spirited friends told her too. She also started making guest
appearances on BBC radio programs and television shows in the
United States, including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Of course,
with any newfound fame comes both adulation and rejection. The

(03:55):
public may have been captivated by her music, but the
greater musical commune he was pretty dismissive. Noted composer Leonard
Bernstein wasn't convinced her work was that of the dearly departed.
Conductor Andre Prevan was so put off by the pieces
that he said that if they were real, Rosemary should
have left them on the shelf. But some composers look

(04:16):
beyond the process and did see genuine talent. British composer
Richard Rodney Bennett couldn't believe his ears. He said that
even though some of what she wrote wasn't very good,
there's no way he could have faked writing Beethoven like Rosemary.
In the end, though Rosemary's talents weren't as supernatural as
she'd claimed. Psychologists and musicologists concluded that what she was

(04:38):
really doing was called unconscious composition, that the composers were
almost like separate personalities inside of her, each one taking
over at a different time and using the untapped musical
talent that Rosemary already possessed. Over the course of her career,
Rosemary Brown composed hundreds of pieces, many of which have
been performed and recorded by orchestras all over the world.

(05:02):
She might not have been visited by the spirits of
the greatest composers who had ever lived, but she certainly
unlocked the gift for music that she was finally able
to share with the world, and, judging by how far
it's reached, it certainly struck a chord. Knowledge can be

(05:29):
a dangerous thing to both the person wielding it and
to anyone on the other end. A little, well timed
knowledge can shatter beliefs and friendships and alter one's entire
view of the world. But can it make a person sick?
In America, in a little knowledge went a long way
in killing a lot of people. It all started when

(05:52):
a Nebraska woman died suddenly from something called consumption. We
know it today as tuberculosis, but at the time it
was a misunderstood disease. Thousands of people who contracted it
died simply because they didn't know where it came from,
or how to fight it. They fled to sanatoriums, where
fresh air, therapies and strict diet promised to cure them

(06:13):
of what ailed them. But nothing worked because tuberculosis wasn't
like the common cold. It wasn't a virus to be
sweated out in a sauna or a hike in the woods.
It was a disease caused by bacteria. But people back
then didn't know that. When faced with a pandemic and
limited information at their disposal, it was only natural for
panic to set in. You see, the woman who had

(06:37):
died in Nebraska, it wasn't just anyone. Her name was
Jesse Allen, and she had a very special job. She
was a librarian. She was also one of the many
librarians who died battling tuberculosis. After a while, the public
started looking around at the victims and noticed some similarities.
It seems that many of the other women who had

(06:58):
died were also librarians, and Jesse and the other victims
had been librarians at a time when public libraries were
gaining support across the country. Meanwhile, private subscription libraries were
going out of fashion. The wealthier classes, though didn't want
the public in their spaces, particularly the poor public. The
public library was open to everyone. It welcomed people from

(07:20):
all walks of life, and with those people came dirt
and germs and the possibility of tuberculosis. Jesse Allen's death,
along with the deaths of countless other librarians and patrons,
had led to what was known as the Great Book Scare.
During the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, there
was a belief that tuberculosis was spread by library books.

(07:43):
When a book changed owners, it would carry the germs
from one barrower to the next. Like I said, they
didn't know any better, so this was the best they
could do, and so Jesse Allen became the unwitting face
of the scare. Her death was used to warn off
potential patrons just when public libraries needed their support the most.

(08:04):
Although she was one of the most famous victims of
the disease, she was by no means the first. In fact,
the Great Book Scare had really gotten going during the
late eighteen seventies. About fifteen years before Alan's death, W F. Pool,
a librarian from Chicago, had consulted several doctors about the
potential of books carrying disease. It wasn't just tuberculosis he

(08:27):
was worried about either. Smallpox and scarlet fever were also
on the top of everyone's mind, both in the United
States and in Great Britain. The information he received from
medical professionals led to legislation being passed here and overseas.
In England, the Public Health Act of eighteen seventy five
prohibited the lending of betting and clothes. After Alan's death

(08:49):
and presumably others, books were added to the list of
unlendable items in nineteen o seven. If you were believed
to have tuberculosis while borrowing a book from the library,
you were better off holding onto the book rather than
returning it, not unless you wanted to pay the he
define of forty shillings about two dollars in modern American currency.

(09:11):
Back in the US, though, the prohibition of book lending
was a matter of states rights, and librarians were considered
enemies for allowing such diseases to spread. They cleaned the
books every day using formalde hyde, steam and other solutions.
Of course, studies were conducted in labs. Forty guinea pigs
had contaminated pages placed in their cages, and all forty died.

(09:34):
In another experiment, monkeys were given a glass of milk
served atop a book carrying some kind of contagion. But honestly,
it didn't matter what made the animals sick. If they
had gotten ill in the presence of an affected book,
it was common to assume that the book had something
to do with it. Eventually, libraries stopped lending books out
If titles were thought to be contaminated, they were actually burned.

(09:58):
The public had developed a mass phobia of borrowing books,
that is, until something changed. Perhaps it was due to
the lack of other entertainment in many small towns, or
maybe someone had taken a look around and thought everyone
was getting upset about nothing, that their fears were being
stoked by an increasingly sensationalist media. New studies were coming

(10:20):
out claiming that books couldn't get a person sick, no
matter how often that book was lended or to whom,
whatever it was, People started to trust books again, and
those brave librarians led the charge. After all, the public
library was at risk of disappearing entirely, which had kind
of been the point. Much of the books scare had

(10:41):
been started by people and institutions who were afraid of
what the public library represented. Access to information, to subversive materials,
to content not meant for everyone to see. As much
as the book scare had been about stopping the spread
of disease, it had also been about controlling access to knowledge.

(11:01):
To those in power, knowledge was a disease, and the
more it spread, the more it would contaminate the public.
It could lead to protests and impure thoughts. But the
people wanted their books, and they wanted to broaden their
horizons with the help of the public library. Thankfully, despite
what the newspapers had reported about consumption, the public saw

(11:22):
through the bogus reports, and amazingly, the American people knew
better than to believe everything they read. I hope you've
enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was

(11:47):
created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
learn all about it over at a World of Lore.
Dot come, and until next time, stay curious.