June 4, 2026 • 9 mins
Fear can be a curious motivator. These two stories show the variety of directions our fear can take us.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm 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 of Curiosities.
(00:36):
A healthy diet is a deceptively complex concept. Many of
us spend our entire lives trying to find combinations of
foods that work for our specific lifestyles and metabolisms. Calorie counts,
vitamins and fats, all the chemistry that goes into food.
We understand so much of it, and yet that makes
it an incredibly daunting task to optimize. And that's without
(00:58):
even mentioning missin information and quack medicine. This may seem
like a purely modern problem, and it is, don't get
me wrong, But like many parts of society, we have
been struggling with diet almost as long as we've known
about different types of food groups, and when medical knowledge
was in its infancy, guess work was all we had.
(01:20):
In New York in the middle of the nineteenth century,
a man named James Caleb Jackson was suffering from a
series of untreatable health issues. He was likely someone that
we would refer to today as immunocompromised. An abolitionist newspaperman,
His frequent sicknesses forced him to sell his share in
the newspaper, essentially taking retirement at the age of thirty six.
(01:42):
Things were not looking good for Jackson. He visited doctors
throughout his entire life, and none of them had been
able to help him. But he did survive spoiler alerts,
and part of the reason why is that he finally
found a medicinal regimen that worked for him. It was
called hydrotherapy, essentially a series of baths in mineral waters.
(02:02):
After visiting a spa in the eighteen forties, he felt
completely restored. The treatment didn't just give him a new
lease on life, it gave him something to devote his
life too, and so he became a diehard advocate for hydrotherapy,
helping to found an institution called glen Haven Water Cure
in eighteen forty seven. This place ironically burned down, but
(02:25):
it didn't slow down his new career. In eighteen fifty
he obtained a medical degree and eight years after that,
he moved to Dansville, New York, where he founded Our
Home on the Hillside, a facility that he would run
for the rest of his life. His patients were like
himself a decade earlier, desperate people who had exhausted everything
that traditional medicine could do for them and were seeking
(02:48):
out alternate cures, and James Caleb Jackson was a reassuring
presence to these sort of people. He was promising a
miracle cure, but he was also no showy snake oil salesman.
He was someone for whom his cure was a lifesaver.
Now under his supervision, Our Home on the Hillside became
an incredible success, serving as many as twenty thousand patients.
(03:10):
Progressive thinkers from around the country even came to give
lectures there, including Frederick Douglass. When he wasn't looking after patients,
Jackson spent his time developing his ideas and strategies for
healthy living. And that's how, in eighteen sixty three, he
came to introduce a special breakfast that would provide a
healthy and nutritious start to the day. You see, the
(03:33):
man had been a farmer before he started his newspaper,
and so, along with his wife Lucretia, he developed a
bland but nutritious combination of wheat and grains. It was
served in the form of cubes that had to be
soaked in milk overnight to become edible. They called it granula.
Sold that the affordable price of twenty cents a pound.
It was a hit with both his patients and New
(03:55):
York at large. At its peak, our home on the
Hillside was producing and selling sixty thousand pounds a year
just to keep up with demand. Over a decade after
the invention of granula, a man from Michigan came to
stay at Jackson's facility. A man who had a wellness
facility of his own back in Battle Creek and was
interested in studying Jackson's methods. His name was John, and
(04:19):
by eighteen seventy seven, John was selling a cold cereal
of his own, which he referred to as granola, legally
distinguishing it from Jackson's invention in order to protect himself
in court. Now some retellings of this story say that
James Jackson sued John for stealing his idea, but the
actual sourcing for that claim is vague at best, and
(04:41):
If we know anything about Jackson, it's that he didn't
seem like the sort of man who aspired to great
influence over the new field of breakfast cereals, and yet
in a way, that's what he created. Granula was the
first cereal, and it grew into an industry worth billions,
all thanks to John's influence. John Kellogg, So the next
(05:02):
time you take a bite of cereal in the morning,
remember that behind all the cartoon marketing, the sugar and
the wheat products, there is a story of a nineteenth
century hydrotherapist and his journey to create a healthy breakfast.
(05:28):
September twenty fifth of nineteen fifty began like any other
Sunday in Toronto, Canada. The stores were closed, the streets
were quiet, and families trickled home from church to relax
and get ready for the week ahead. But in the
middle of the afternoon, the sunny sky began to darken.
Massive storm clouds rolled in over the rooftops, and when
(05:48):
residents squinted out their windows, they saw a pale blue
disc peeking out from behind the clouds. At first, it
looked like a full moon hanging in the afternoon sun,
but in the brief moment when the clouds parted, the
truth became obvious. That was not the moon, it was
the Sun, hanging like a big blue circle amid purple clouds.
(06:10):
At that very moment, one of Canada's most famed astronomers,
Helen Sawyer Hog, was passing through a park. The sky
had grown so dark that she saw a gaggle of
ducks sleeping in the middle of a pond, with their
heads tucked under their wings, as if they thought that
it was the dead of night. Helen knew that something
highly unusual must be happening in the sky, but she
(06:31):
had no idea what, and so she rushed to her lab.
She hurried past rows of houses and apartment buildings with
the lights on in every window, and then suddenly the
whole streets went dark. Seconds later, a piercing alarm rang
out in the distance. A police car raced down the
street with its sirens blaring and lights flashing under the
(06:51):
swirling purple sky. All across Toronto, the quiet streets devolved
into pandemonium. The phone lines at the police stations were
ringing off the hook with panicked residents wondering what was
going on. Had the sun exploded. Was there a nuclear attack,
an alien invasion, the apocalypse? But when Helen got to
(07:13):
her lab, she and her colleagues quickly put together the truth.
All of this terrifying chaos had a surprisingly mundane cause.
It seems that the dark clouds were the result of
a wildfire that was raging in the forests of British
Columbia and Alberta, almost two thousand miles away from her.
The smoke particles were unusually large and dense, and they
(07:34):
scattered certain wavelengths of light from the sun, making it
appear blue instead of its usual yellow. On top of that,
as the sky had darkened that afternoon, everyone in Toronto
had turned on their lights at the same time, and
the sudden surge in electricity had overloaded the power lines,
causing a blackout. The electrical failure, in turn, had accidentally
(07:56):
triggered the alarms at banks all over the city, and
the police had rushed out to respond to these false alarms,
filling the darkened streets with a horrid cacophony of sirens.
In short, the world wasn't ending, even though it sure
did feel like it was. In the days that followed
the wildfire, smoke moved eastward, turning the sky blue over
(08:17):
northeastern United States, the British Isles, and even as far
east as Denmark. It took another month for the autumn
rain in the snow to finally put the fire out,
and once it had stopped smoldering, the sky finally went
back to normal. I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour
(08:37):
through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created by
me Aaron Mankey in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and
written by the Grim and Mild team, and produced by
Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the people
who make it over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities.
You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of
Curiosity's hardcover book, available in book stores and online, as
(09:01):
well as ebook and audiobook. And if you're looking for
an ad free option, consider joining our Patreon. It's all
the same stories, but without the interruption for a small
monthly fee. Learn more and sign up over at patreon
dot com, slash Grimandmild, and until next time, stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm 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 of Curiosities.
(00:36):
A healthy diet is a deceptively complex concept. Many of
us spend our entire lives trying to find combinations of
foods that work for our specific lifestyles and metabolisms. Calorie counts,
vitamins and fats, all the chemistry that goes into food.
We understand so much of it, and yet that makes
it an incredibly daunting task to optimize. And that's without
(00:58):
even mentioning missin information and quack medicine. This may seem
like a purely modern problem, and it is, don't get
me wrong, But like many parts of society, we have
been struggling with diet almost as long as we've known
about different types of food groups, and when medical knowledge
was in its infancy, guess work was all we had.
(01:20):
In New York in the middle of the nineteenth century,
a man named James Caleb Jackson was suffering from a
series of untreatable health issues. He was likely someone that
we would refer to today as immunocompromised. An abolitionist newspaperman,
His frequent sicknesses forced him to sell his share in
the newspaper, essentially taking retirement at the age of thirty six.
(01:42):
Things were not looking good for Jackson. He visited doctors
throughout his entire life, and none of them had been
able to help him. But he did survive spoiler alerts,
and part of the reason why is that he finally
found a medicinal regimen that worked for him. It was
called hydrotherapy, essentially a series of baths in mineral waters.
(02:02):
After visiting a spa in the eighteen forties, he felt
completely restored. The treatment didn't just give him a new
lease on life, it gave him something to devote his
life too, and so he became a diehard advocate for hydrotherapy,
helping to found an institution called glen Haven Water Cure
in eighteen forty seven. This place ironically burned down, but
(02:25):
it didn't slow down his new career. In eighteen fifty
he obtained a medical degree and eight years after that,
he moved to Dansville, New York, where he founded Our
Home on the Hillside, a facility that he would run
for the rest of his life. His patients were like
himself a decade earlier, desperate people who had exhausted everything
that traditional medicine could do for them and were seeking
(02:48):
out alternate cures, and James Caleb Jackson was a reassuring
presence to these sort of people. He was promising a
miracle cure, but he was also no showy snake oil salesman.
He was someone for whom his cure was a lifesaver.
Now under his supervision, Our Home on the Hillside became
an incredible success, serving as many as twenty thousand patients.
(03:10):
Progressive thinkers from around the country even came to give
lectures there, including Frederick Douglass. When he wasn't looking after patients,
Jackson spent his time developing his ideas and strategies for
healthy living. And that's how, in eighteen sixty three, he
came to introduce a special breakfast that would provide a
healthy and nutritious start to the day. You see, the
(03:33):
man had been a farmer before he started his newspaper,
and so, along with his wife Lucretia, he developed a
bland but nutritious combination of wheat and grains. It was
served in the form of cubes that had to be
soaked in milk overnight to become edible. They called it granula.
Sold that the affordable price of twenty cents a pound.
It was a hit with both his patients and New
(03:55):
York at large. At its peak, our home on the
Hillside was producing and selling sixty thousand pounds a year
just to keep up with demand. Over a decade after
the invention of granula, a man from Michigan came to
stay at Jackson's facility. A man who had a wellness
facility of his own back in Battle Creek and was
interested in studying Jackson's methods. His name was John, and
(04:19):
by eighteen seventy seven, John was selling a cold cereal
of his own, which he referred to as granola, legally
distinguishing it from Jackson's invention in order to protect himself
in court. Now some retellings of this story say that
James Jackson sued John for stealing his idea, but the
actual sourcing for that claim is vague at best, and
(04:41):
If we know anything about Jackson, it's that he didn't
seem like the sort of man who aspired to great
influence over the new field of breakfast cereals, and yet
in a way, that's what he created. Granula was the
first cereal, and it grew into an industry worth billions,
all thanks to John's influence. John Kellogg, So the next
(05:02):
time you take a bite of cereal in the morning,
remember that behind all the cartoon marketing, the sugar and
the wheat products, there is a story of a nineteenth
century hydrotherapist and his journey to create a healthy breakfast.
(05:28):
September twenty fifth of nineteen fifty began like any other
Sunday in Toronto, Canada. The stores were closed, the streets
were quiet, and families trickled home from church to relax
and get ready for the week ahead. But in the
middle of the afternoon, the sunny sky began to darken.
Massive storm clouds rolled in over the rooftops, and when
(05:48):
residents squinted out their windows, they saw a pale blue
disc peeking out from behind the clouds. At first, it
looked like a full moon hanging in the afternoon sun,
but in the brief moment when the clouds parted, the
truth became obvious. That was not the moon, it was
the Sun, hanging like a big blue circle amid purple clouds.
(06:10):
At that very moment, one of Canada's most famed astronomers,
Helen Sawyer Hog, was passing through a park. The sky
had grown so dark that she saw a gaggle of
ducks sleeping in the middle of a pond, with their
heads tucked under their wings, as if they thought that
it was the dead of night. Helen knew that something
highly unusual must be happening in the sky, but she
(06:31):
had no idea what, and so she rushed to her lab.
She hurried past rows of houses and apartment buildings with
the lights on in every window, and then suddenly the
whole streets went dark. Seconds later, a piercing alarm rang
out in the distance. A police car raced down the
street with its sirens blaring and lights flashing under the
(06:51):
swirling purple sky. All across Toronto, the quiet streets devolved
into pandemonium. The phone lines at the police stations were
ringing off the hook with panicked residents wondering what was
going on. Had the sun exploded. Was there a nuclear attack,
an alien invasion, the apocalypse? But when Helen got to
(07:13):
her lab, she and her colleagues quickly put together the truth.
All of this terrifying chaos had a surprisingly mundane cause.
It seems that the dark clouds were the result of
a wildfire that was raging in the forests of British
Columbia and Alberta, almost two thousand miles away from her.
The smoke particles were unusually large and dense, and they
(07:34):
scattered certain wavelengths of light from the sun, making it
appear blue instead of its usual yellow. On top of that,
as the sky had darkened that afternoon, everyone in Toronto
had turned on their lights at the same time, and
the sudden surge in electricity had overloaded the power lines,
causing a blackout. The electrical failure, in turn, had accidentally
(07:56):
triggered the alarms at banks all over the city, and
the police had rushed out to respond to these false alarms,
filling the darkened streets with a horrid cacophony of sirens.
In short, the world wasn't ending, even though it sure
did feel like it was. In the days that followed
the wildfire, smoke moved eastward, turning the sky blue over
(08:17):
northeastern United States, the British Isles, and even as far
east as Denmark. It took another month for the autumn
rain in the snow to finally put the fire out,
and once it had stopped smoldering, the sky finally went
back to normal. I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour
(08:37):
through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created by
me Aaron Mankey in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and
written by the Grim and Mild team, and produced by
Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the people
who make it over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities.
You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of
Curiosity's hardcover book, available in book stores and online, as
(09:01):
well as ebook and audiobook. And if you're looking for
an ad free option, consider joining our Patreon. It's all
the same stories, but without the interruption for a small
monthly fee. Learn more and sign up over at patreon
dot com, slash Grimandmild, and until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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