Home Remedy

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
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. I don't know about you,

(00:37):
but my memory these days is pretty bad. I can
barely remember to pick up the milk when I'm at
the grocery store anymore. And yet there exists people in
this world whose minds contain multitudes. Actress Mary Lou Henner
famously had a condition called hyperthymesia, which allows her to
remember almost every detail of her entire life. She can
recall names, dates, and times of various events from her

(00:59):
past asked, no matter how small. Only sixty two people
in the world have been diagnosed with hyperthymesia, and we
are still learning what causes it and how it affects
those who possess it. But Stephen Wiltshier doesn't have hyperthymesia,
which you might think he does considering his special talent.
His mind is also a steel trap, but he isn't

(01:20):
able to recall every moment of his life like the others. Instead,
he has cities on the brain. Wiltshier was born in
London in April of nineteen seventy four. His parents had
come from the Caribbean, raised their son in the Little
Venice district of West London, and Stephen was nonverbal early on,
and three years into his life he was officially diagnosed

(01:40):
with autism. Sadly, that same year, his father was killed
in a motorcycle accident. Around five years old, Stephen developed
a number of interests. Like a lot of kids, he
had a passion for vehicles, especially American cars and London buses,
as well as animals, and to express his love for
these topics he began drawing them. But a few years

(02:01):
later he shifted his focus from cars and creatures to buildings.
His skills were evidence even from a young age. He
understood perspective and proper technique in a way that most
children his age just didn't. And he couldn't keep the
pencil out of his hand either. But his teachers saw his.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Obsession withdrawing as a means to an end in an
effort to get him to speak, they confiscated his art supplies.
Their thought was that if he wanted them badly enough,
he would ask for them. After struggling with the sounds,
Stephen eventually managed to say the word paper, and from
there his vocabulary quickly grew. He was speaking in full
sentences by the age of nine. But his language skills

(02:39):
weren't the only thing progressing. His drawings were also getting better,
and one of his teachers took notice. They didn't just
see raw talent, they saw true art, and started entering
his work in a number of local competitions and exhibitions.
Stephen sold his first piece when he was only eight
years old. As he took home more and more awards,

(03:00):
I started asking questions, how could this child create such
stunning drawings? And the answer is simple, That's because Stephen
is a savant. When he stopped drawing animals and automobiles,
he pivoted to crafting elaborate and detailed architectural sketches of
made up cities. He would create them in his head,
then transfer them to paper. He drew soaring skyscrapers and

(03:21):
road systems, all of which were proportional and well thought out.
He then turned his attention to actual skylines and cities.
His first ever commission came from the former Prime Minister
Edward Heath, who asked Stephen to draw Salisbury Cathedral for him.
Now you have to understand what set Stephen's sketches apart.
Isn't necessarily his artistic talent, which, don't get me wrong,

(03:42):
is significant. It's that he only needs to see a
place once in order to recreate it from memory. For example,
after a brief helicopter ride over London, he drew a
detailed four mile expanse of the area without the need
for a single reference photo. Another chopper trip, this time
twenty minute flyover of New York City, yielded a nineteen

(04:03):
foot long panorama incorporating over three hundred square miles of
the city, all from memory. But he still manages to
add some flare of his own to his scenes every
now and then. One of his sketches is titled City
of London ten Years in the Future and features a
number of yet to be built skyscrapers overlooking the Thames.
Another is called the Great brand New and depicts a

(04:25):
pair of hands holding a globe teeming with buildings that
jut out from its surface like porcupines, quills, Stephen's work
spans the globe, with drawings of places in America, Singapore,
Canada and Europe that would be hard enough for any
artists to draw, even with the use of reference photos,
but knowing that they were all done from memory and
in such great detail puts them on a whole other level.

(04:49):
Stephen Wiltshire is someone with incredible talent, one that he
has honed over the past forty some odd years, and
it's clear that his only limits now are his imagination
and having enough paper. Long before Martha Stewart taught television

(05:18):
viewers how to bake bread and fluff their pillows, another
lifestyle guru imparted her wisdom on the masses. Her name
was Hannah Woolley. You've probably never heard of her before,
but if you had been around during the sixteen hundreds,
you definitely would have known her name. She was the
Martha Stewart of the seventeenth century, the Gwyneth Paltrow of
the pre industrial era. She was, to use the terminology

(05:40):
of her day, a domestic goddess, although her road to
fame was quite bumpy. Hannah was born in England in
sixteen twenty two. While little is known about her early life,
she must have had access to a handful of educational opportunities.
She was said to have so called musical abilities and
a working knowledge of Italian. The details of her parents'

(06:01):
lives have been lost to history, but we do know
that Hannah became an orphan in sixteen thirty six at
the age of fourteen. Needing a way to support herself,
Hannah applied for jobs as a governess, which was sort
of like being a live in tutor. Her aptitude for
music and languages landed her a job in the home
of an English noble woman, teaching the family's children. Ten

(06:22):
years later, when Hannah was twenty four, she quit her
job to marry a teacher named Benjamin Woolley, and together
they had four kids of their own. Throughout the sixteen
forties and sixteen fifties, Hannah devoted her time to caring
for her home and her children. She was unique in
that she kept meticulous records of her household chores during
a time when less than a quarter of British women

(06:42):
were literate. Hannah could read and write, which gave her
the ability to catalog the recipes that she made at home.
By the early sixteen sixties, Hannah had journals full of
domestic advice. There were exact measurements for preparing a violet
flower syrup, detailed instructions on how to make eel high,
and her opinions on the best way to decorate a

(07:03):
mantle with wild moss and mushrooms. Of course, she planned
to pass these writings down to her children when they
grew up, but Hannah thought other people might benefit from
her knowledge too, and so in sixteen sixty one she
published a cookbook entitled The Ladies Directory. While cookbooks weren't
brand new, Hannah's was the first ever published by a woman,
and it was a big hit, big enough that she

(07:25):
decided to keep writing more. In sixteen sixty four she
published another cookbook called The Cook's Guide, and then very suddenly,
her husband passed away. Now an orphan and a widow,
Hannah had to figure out how to care for herself
and her four children. In sixteen seventy she wrote a
book called The Queen Like Closet, which, despite the name,

(07:45):
did not chronicle the clothing of monarchs. Instead, it was
in all around how to manual for housekeepers. It was
also Hannah's biggest success yet, being reprinted four times and
translated into German. Hannah became one of the first British
women ever to make a living as a writer. She
continued publishing cookbooks and housekeeping manuals all throughout the seventeenth century,

(08:07):
eventually becoming a household name in England. And here's the
most interesting part. Hannah was writing during a time when
medicine was considered part of the domestic sphere. In addition
to eel pie and mushroom decor, she also created recipes
for medications and wrote instructions on how to perform minor surgery.
And yes, most of these home remedies were what we

(08:29):
would now call old wives tales. This was, of course,
the era when medicine centered around balancing the bodies for humors,
which were believed to be blood, yellow bile, black bile,
and phlegm. Gross, I know, but this idea of four
humors dates all the way back to ancient Greece and
it was the way that people understood their bodies for
over two thousand years. And so a lot of Hannah's

(08:50):
medicinal recipes are focused on how to raise or lower
the amount of certain humors. Lentils and cabbage were thought
to increase levels of black bile. Blood letting, literally making
yourself bleed on purpose was thought to decrease fever. Vinegar
syrup could flush out excess phlem and it also was
a cure for the plague. But if that's not a

(09:11):
bold enough claim for you, Hannah also thought that she
had a cure for breast cancer. Just mix a little
goose dung with the juice of a celidyne flower, apply
it like an ointment, and you'll be better in no time.
But while a lot of Hannah's medicinal experiments should never
be recreated, there is value in her work and in
folk medicine in general. Modern studies often find nuggets of

(09:32):
truth in weird ancient medicinal beliefs. In fact, a two
thousand and six study found that the extract from the
celandine flower actually does slow the growth of cancer cells,
which means that Hannah Woolly's curious seventeenth century cancer treatment
might not be as crazy as it sounds. But still,
I think all of us can agree we can probably
skip out on that goose dung. I hope you've enjoyed

(09:59):
today's guide it 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 Mankey 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

(10:21):
learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.