The Talking Dead

Some academicsThe Talking Dead discover groundbreaking concepts, while others become them. Today's tour should explain exactly what we mean.

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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. We've all been there, those days when we
wake up too early and barely function on a few
hours of sleep. We pump ourselves full of coffee, but
it's never enough, and so we shamble through the workday
like zombies. It's unknown whether French neurologist Jules Qatard was

(00:51):
a morning person or not, but he certainly understood what
it was like to feel like the walking dead. He
observed it firsthand. Qatard, born in France It's in eighteen forty,
started his medical career at the Pier Sulpetriar University Hospital,
where he interned later on as a full fledged doctor.
He took a strong interest in those who suffered from
cerebral vascular accidents otherwise known as strokes. He wanted to

(01:15):
know more about the effects on the brain, so he
would often perform autopsies on those who had died because
of them. But in eighteen eighty two, a woman walked
into his office with something new, something different, something strange.
She was only ever known as Mademoiselle X, and on
that day she rattled off a list of symptoms for
doctor Quitard. She claimed, as hard as it is to

(01:36):
believe to have nobody, an odd admission that probably sounded
like a joke at first, but she was completely serious.
According to Mademoiselle X, she had no nerves, stomach, chest,
or bowels, not even a brain. She was literally nothing
but skin and bones. Now, clearly doctor Coutard could see
that something about the woman was not right, but it

(01:57):
wasn't the symptoms she listed off. She was all there physically,
All the body parts that she claimed to be lacking
were still intact. Her mental faculties, however, had taken a
nose dive. Mademoiselle X went on claiming to have no
soul and that without any internal organs to process her food,
she had stopped eating. There was no God, no devil,
and believed that she was immortal. She was convinced that

(02:20):
she could not die, at least not by natural means.
In order to kill her, she said she would need
to be set on fire. Qatard, fascinated by the patient's claims,
turned to his medical texts for help. He found that
another woman about a hundred years earlier had been examined
by a Swiss scientist named Charles Bonnet, who had recorded
symptoms almost exactly like these endured by Mademoiselle X. This

(02:44):
other woman had been cooking at home when she suddenly
lost feeling in one half of her body. She had
become partially paralyzed. Eventually, the paralysis subsided a bit, and
the woman was able to explain to her daughter's the situation.
She was now dead and had to be dressed in
a shroud and put into a coffin. The daughters did
as they were told and laid her to rest until

(03:05):
she fell asleep. Once the ruse was over, they took
off the shroud and put her back in her own bed.
Clearly their mother was sick. There had actually been a
number of cases over the years where people believe that
they were dead, and Cotard believed that it was a
previously undiagnosed form of depression that he called hypochondria, called delirium.
Those who suffered from it were often sad, shut down, mentally,

(03:28):
didn't feel pain, believed they had no internal organs, and
thought that they would actually live forever unless forcibly killed. Today, however,
the syndrome has a new name, derived from the man
who discovered it. It's called Qatard's delusion, and it's believed
to be caused by neural misfirings in the part of
the brain that recognizes and reacts two faces. It's similar

(03:48):
to capgrad delusion, which makes people think that their loved
ones have been replaced with impostors. Cotard's delusion occurs in
patients who don't recognize their own faces and insist that
the people they are or were don't exist anymore. It's
a rare condition, affecting about two people worldwide, and is
typically treated with a variety of medications like antidepressants and

(04:11):
anti psychotics. However, pills don't always work, and electro convulsion
or shock therapy is sometimes needed. As for Mademoiselle X,
there were no pills for her to swallow, nor was
she subjected to any kind of therapy. She eventually passed away,
but not from fire. Sadly, she started to death. Doctor
Jules Quatard went into medicine to understand the human brain.

(04:34):
What he found was one of the rarest and strangest
symptoms ever recorded. The truly dead may not have been
able to speak for themselves, but for Qatard, the undead
certainly had a lot to say. William never set out

(05:02):
to become a legend, yet that's exactly what he became
later in life. Though many don't know his name today,
they're familiar with the character he inspired, but we'll get
to that later. William was born in New York City
in eighteen nineties seven. To Janets and Felix, travel was
practically built into their DNA, with Janet whisking a young
William off to Mexico to witness an ongoing revolution when

(05:24):
he was only six weeks old. Though he was born
in New York, William spent many years growing up in Asia.
He attended the Buddhist monastery of Nishi hang Ganji in
Kyoto and graduated as a Doctor of Divinity. From there,
he traveled to Paris and Germany for additional schooling at
the Sorbonne and University of Berlin, respectively. William was practically

(05:44):
a professional student, eventually getting his doctorates in philosophy from
christ Church, Oxford in nineteen twenty two, which he paid
for by teaching Chinese at the University of London. During
his time there, the Buddhist Society of Great Britain and
Ireland asked the school to send an academic mission to
the capital of Tibet, Lassa. At the time, permission had

(06:05):
to be granted to Westerners looking to visit, permission that
was often denied. William and the mission were sent with
several specific goals. First, to sit with His Holiness the
Dali Lama and explain to him how Buddhism was being
taught in the West. Second, William and his team were
to get filmed footage of Tibet, specifically of the city's

(06:25):
great Cathedral. Though the trip had been approved by the school,
the Tibetan government had other ideas. Neither William nor the
mission would be allowed into Lassa. He tried three different
times to convince them to let him in, either alone
or with one other colleague, but each time he was
met with the resounding no. William, however, refused to take

(06:46):
no for an answer. Rather than turn around and head home,
he went deep undercover. According to a Time magazine article
from ninety eight, it said that he stood naked while
a companion covered his body with brown stain and squirted
lemon juice into his blue eyes to darken them. William
you see, disguised himself as a Tibetan cooley or low

(07:08):
status worker, and paid a few locals to help him
over the mountains to the forbidden city. He overcame a snowstorm, dysenterry, leeches,
and mosquitoes, finally reached Lasa in February of n Once there,
he alerted the Tibetan authorities of his arrival, and they
agreed to furnish him with lodgings and keep his identity
under wraps. Unfortunately, a mob of monks discovered who he

(07:32):
was and began stoning his house. William snuck out, clad
in his disguise and joined the throng of monks attacking
his home. He lasted six weeks there before he was
finally forced to leave. Back in London, it was clear
that William had kicked off an international incident, with the
school's India office in constant communication with William himself. After

(07:52):
much back and forth, William resigned from teaching and took
a job with the Chicago Times to become their Far
East correspondent. He then went on served during World War
Two as a naval officer and put his knowledge of
the Japanese language to good use. But war was no
place for an academic like William. Once the fighting had ended,
he returned to his first love, teaching, and lectured all

(08:14):
over the United States. He taught at Harvard, gave talks
at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and
even spoke at various military colleges across the country. He
finally settled down at Northwestern University, where he taught political
science for the remainder of his life. Williams soon learned
that even the most boring classes would fill up quickly
if students wanted to learn from certain teachers. William had

(08:36):
become something of a celebrity, you see, due to his
questionable antics when he was younger. Students wanted to hear
his stories and learned from the man who had snuck
into places he wasn't meant to go all in the
name of knowledge. They registered in droves, filling up his
classes each and every semester. Had William been right in
forcing his way into Tibet and most likely not, but

(08:58):
that had been typical of Americans and Europeans for centuries.
Williams actions did, however, go on to inspire his students
and Hollywood as well. The story of a swashbuckling professor
traveling to ancient cities and even taking on the Nazis
sounds like just the kind of character to enthrall movie audiences,
and he did when he debuted in nine Raiders of

(09:21):
the Lost Dark. William Montgomery McGovern had been one of
the key influences in the creation of everyone's favorite fictional archaeologist,
Indiana Jones. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,

(09:42):
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
dot com. The show was 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 the World of Lore dot com. And until

(10:03):
next time, stay curious. Yeah h