A Happy Accident

The two stories on display today illustrate just how much we can learn about something if we spend enough time digging for the truth.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. She wasn't supposed to be Annie, but autocorrect
has been causing problems for writers longer than any of
us realize. It was in eighteen sixty one and the
patriarch of the Riley family, Reuben, left home to join

(00:48):
the Union Army. He became the captain of the first
Company of Indiana Volunteers from Hancock County. Reuben was injured
during the Battle of Rich Mountain in Virginia and was
sent home to his family once he recovered. Heard. Not
long after Reuben's returned to Greenfield, Indiana, their household grew
by one. An orphan named Mary Alice Smith came to

(01:09):
live with them in the winter of eighteen sixty one.
She was about eleven years old, but her early life
is a mystery. We don't know the circumstances that brought
her to the Riley family, but we do know that
she was born in Liberty, Indiana and was about the
same age as one of the Riley boys, James. We
also know that she wasn't an orphan, at least not

(01:29):
in the way that we would think. Her parents death
hadn't been the beginning of her troubles. They had separated
when she was four years old, and she was sent
to live with her grandmother. It would be another four
years before her parents actually died. Mary Alice, who everyone
just called Ali, was forced to bounce from one extended
family member to the next until she ran out and

(01:49):
had to rely on the kindness of strangers. At that time,
there weren't many institutions that took in abandoned kids, especially
not on the frontier. Adoption wasn't common, and the foster
care system didn't exist yet, so many children like Ali
were sent to live with families looking for an extra
pair of hands to help around the house. Ruben Riley,
well known to be a kind and generous man, was

(02:11):
thinking about returning to the battlefield, and he knew that
his wife would need help while he was gone. The
bargain was always pretty simple. A child would be taken
in and exchange for bed and board. They would do chores,
look after children, and generally earn their keep. Ali had
boarded with other families before the Riley's, so she likely
knew what to expect. Reuben Riley's son James, remembered Ali's

(02:34):
arrival well, later describing her as a slender wisp of
a girl with spindle ankles, barely dressed for winter weather
in a calico skirt in a summer hat. She had slim,
blue veined wrists that she tossed among those loose and
ragged tresses of her yellow hair. But what really stood
out to James was the hollow, pale blue eyes, which

(02:57):
followed every motion with an alertness that sugged rust did
a somewhat suspicious mind. Maybe she didn't trust the new family,
or maybe she didn't trust anyone. Happily, Alie warmed up
to the Riley's and soon became the children's favorite playmate.
They complained whenever chores took her away from them, and
delighted in her infectious sense of humor and optimism. She

(03:19):
was even known to say, I'm mighty glad I'm come
to live in this here house. Ali's joy in little
things deeply impacted James, who recalled how she turned her
chores into little games, talked to herself, and how she
found their grand curving staircase majestic. James carried her memory
with him even after she left the family. Many years later,

(03:42):
in a now grown up and respected author, James Whitcomb
Riley published a poem called elf Child. The poem described
the day a little wisp of a child came to
live with his family, the chores she did, and the
wild scary stories she told. Riley public the poem in
the Indianapolis Journal, but changed the title to Little Orphan

(04:04):
Alley to better remember his old friend. But then something
bizarre happened when the poem went to the printers, although
no one knows how. Maybe the type setter wasn't pain
enough attention. Maybe James, like some of us, had handwriting
that sent teachers into fits of despair. In any case,
the l's were replaced with ends, and little Orphan Annie

(04:25):
was born. From there, Annie seemed to take on a
life of her own. In n eighteen, she became a
silent film character, the subject of a song arrangement, and,
of course, most famously, the nineteen four comic strip. The
New York Daily News published the first strip that year
about Little Orphan Annie, her dog Sandy, and Daddy Warbucks.

(04:46):
Annie had grown far and beyond what James Riley had
likely expected when he had written a poem about a
childhood friend. I wonder if either James or Ali expected
to see Annie one day make her debut on Broadway
or grace the silver screen. Not once, not twice, but
four times. Riley published other poems about Ali over the years.

(05:07):
Where is Mary Alice Smith? Being one of the most
well known, he wouldn't have had to look too hard
to find her, though she worked in a tavern briefly
after leaving the Riley family, but eventually married and settled
down with her husband, John Wesley Gray in Hancock County, Indiana.
But there's wasn't the viral world that we live in today.
She didn't know the poem was about her until nineteen fifteen.

(05:29):
Ali outlived James by several years, surrounded by children and
grandchildren who might as well have delighted in the Indiana
tradition of reading Little Orphan Annie around Halloween. Despite or
perhaps because of the best efforts of ye old auto
correct Orphan Annie has gone on to inspire plenty of
people with her cheerfulness and optimism, even another Indiana author,

(05:53):
John Gruel and his popular character Raggedy Ann. But that's
a story for another your day. Every so often doctors

(06:15):
come out with studies declaring certain foods as either being
healthy or unhealthy. Two cups of coffee a day can
prevent heart disease, but the caffeine can spike your anxiety.
Eggs are high in vitamins like B twelve and ribel
flavor that can also negatively affect your cholesterol. It's never
fun finding out the foods and beverages we love the
most may actually be hurting us. But nowadays we can

(06:36):
quickly learn the truth and adjust our diets accordingly. That
wasn't the case, however. In nineteenth century Tokyo, also known
as Edo, a disease was running rampant through the country,
especially among the emperor's family and other nobles. Back then,
they called it kaka, but today it's known by the
name barry Berry. Unlike other illnesses which would often target

(06:57):
the poor, barry Berry was killing Japanese nobility instead, and
that led to its other nicknames, The Edo sickness, or
the affliction of eddo Someone with berry Berry would often
get symptoms such as swollen legs, sluggish speech, paralysis, and
eventually death, but nobody knew the disease is caused at
the time. It struck the Emperor's aunt, Princess Kazu in

(07:19):
the late eighteen hundreds and kicked off a massive investigation
into its origin. Her husband had also died from a
similar medical mystery ten years prior, possibly the same disease.
Some doctors first believed barry Berry was caused by spending
too much time on damp ground, while others prescribed fasting
and various homeopathic remedies to cure the condition. A samurai

(07:41):
afflicted with the disease agreed to try the herbal remedy
one doctor prescribed to him, and he died months later.
Mug Warts, an aromatic flowering plant, was also sometimes applied
to the backs of patients and then burnt off the skin,
but it didn't work. As time passed, more of japan
Ends upper echelon continued to perish from barry Berry until

(08:03):
a doctor named Kinda Heiro Takaki took up the cause. Takaki,
who had enlisted in the Navy in eighteen seventy two,
witnessed the same illness strike the Japanese sailors that he
had served with back then. His superiors hadn't thought anything
of it, but Takaki knew something was going on. He
eventually left the Navy and enrolled in medical school in England.
Once he was finally in a position to address the issue,

(08:26):
he took action. As the director of the Tokyo Naval
Hospital and later the vice director of the Naval Medical Bureau,
Takaki started talking with Japanese sailors afflicted by barry Berry,
and he made some important observations. First, prisoners suffered from
the disease more than anyone else on the ship. Sailors
and low level officers were affected slightly less, and higher

(08:47):
ups almost never. He also noticed that the officers aid
a diet that was higher in protein than that of
the prisoners, and attributed that to the cause of barry
Berry's proliferation among the lower ranks, who almost never eight protein.
The disease was also strangely limited to Japan. European and
American sailors were not affected by berry Berry, but their

(09:07):
bread heavy diets couldn't be adopted by the Japanese sailors.
They found it off putting. Still, Takaki wanted to get
to the bottom of the issue. Then around eighteen eighty two,
he got his chance. A training ship called the Usual
had been loaded with Japanese cadets and navigated all around
the Pacific Rim. It landed in places such as South America,

(09:28):
New Zealand, and Hawaii before coming home. Upon its return,
the re Usual had lost twenty five members of its
three hundred and seventy six person crew to berry berry.
Almost half the people on board had developed some form
of it as well, so Takaki's new protein rich diet
was greenlit aboard another training ship, the Sukuba, which set

(09:48):
sail in February of eighteen eighty four with three hundred
and thirty three sailors on board. There was a lot
writing on this journey, as Takaki had assured the Emperor
that his plan would succeed. Word came back from the
ship seven months later in a telegram it read, not
one patient, set your mind at ease. When the Tacuba

(10:10):
finally returned, the results spoke for themselves. Fourteen crew members
had developed barry Berry and nobody had died. The only
reason those fourteen had even contracted it was because they
hadn't been following Takaki's diet regiment. After his successful trial,
the good Doctor had carte blanche to alter the diets
of the entire naval fleet, and in doing so he

(10:31):
managed to reduce reports of berry berry by percent, and
nobody else died from it again. Sadly, Takaki's methods were
shunned by others in the medical community, and the army
was still dealing with berry berry outbreaks regularly. He had
tried mixing barley with their daily rice to up their
protein intake, but many saw barley as a holdover from

(10:52):
ancient traditional methods rather than something a cutting edge Western
doctor might prescribe. What nobody, including Takaki, realised, however, was
that one specific food was slowly killing everyone. It was
a staple of their cuisine and relatively inexpensive, so it
was served everywhere. The culprit white rice. White rice was

(11:14):
made through a painstaking process of husking and polishing, resulting
in a bright white grain. Unfortunately, that process also stripped
the rice of its natural thiamine. Since white rice was
a symbol of higher status within Japanese society. For a
long time, berry berry mostly affected the nobility. It was
also served on board navy vessels in the eighteen eighties

(11:36):
as a primary source of energy and sustenance, causing a
B one shortage in many Japanese sailors. And that's what
barry berry really is, a vitamin B one or thiamine deficiency.
Takaki had figured out that more protein was the way
to combat the disease, even if he never understood why
the rice was the problem, but his work did help

(11:58):
future researchers dis cover the root cause of barry Barry.
It also earned him a place among Japanese nobility in
nineteen o five, as well as a new nickname, the
Barley Baron, and following his death in nineteen twenty and
Antarctic Peninsula was named Kakaki Promontory after him. He is
the only Japanese person to have such an honor. That's

(12:20):
what you get when you stick to a problem like
white on rice. 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 created by me, Aaron Manky

(12:43):
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 the World of Lore dot com. And until
next time, stay curious.