Behind the Scenes Minis: All Things Clean

Tracy talks about her background writing copy for sanitation and cleaning products. She and Holly also discuss how the implementation of the Wells' recommendations could have prevented a lot of illness.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about soap this week. Yeah,
we did. Here's a little backstory for why I had

(00:22):
it on my list. When Holly and I first joined
the podcast, we were moving from another podcast that we'd
worked on together had a totally different focus, and I
tried to line myself up some initial starting episodes that
I already had more background familiarity with to make this

(00:44):
transitional process hopefully easier, so that I could have a
sort of learning by doing of how to research and
write these episodes with some stuff that I already had
some foundational knowledge in to make it a little easy zeer.
And one of those topics was soap because one of

(01:04):
my previous jobs was writing for a company that sold
cleaning and sanitation products, and I wrote like product literature,
I wrote newsletters for the businesses that we did business with,
so I already had knowledge of various things related to
soap and subpontification and how soap was made, and that

(01:27):
story about the animal sacrifices being burned and washed down
the mountain all of that, And then part of it
was like, is anybody else interested in this? In the
aspects of it that I find interesting, I don't really know.
And then part of it was just you know, over time,
I didn't feel like I quite needed the training wheel

(01:49):
of things I already felt like I could almost write
off the top of my head, and I never got
around to it. But then we got a request for it,
so great, bring it back. Relearn stuff that I have
forgotten in the at this point more than twenty well
more than twenty years since I had that job. Yeah,

(02:12):
I have. We talked about subpontification a lot in the
episode we did on the Lady Who Turned to Soap?
Oh yeah, which I forgot. I have not re listened
to that, and I remember doing the episode, but like
the details of it are not in my brain. Yeah,
And I of course can't think about soap without thinking

(02:34):
about Fight Club a lot. Oh yeah. I also thought
about fight Club a lot, and about how to make soap.
We must first render fat, Yeah, which is I mean, right,
like in Chuck Polinick's book and in his subsequent film, right,
it's referencing all of the dirty things that have to

(02:54):
happen to make soap right, and how that compares to
our modern society which looks very sanitized in many ways,
but is ignoring all of the dirty things that have
to happen to give you a sanitized experience. Uh huh.
I really love that book. I really hate that A
lot of people's takeaway was like violence is cool, and

(03:16):
it's like, oh, missed the point entirely. Yeah, and I
really love that movie as well. One of the things
that I noticed while doing this research is that a
whole bunch of articles about soap were written in twenty
twenty because of COVID. Yeah, a lot of discussion of
where soap came from. This is one of the things
that I have found weird about the beginning of COVID

(03:43):
is that it feels like, to a segment of people,
the idea that you should wash your hands for thirty
seconds was new information. Yeah, And stretching back to that
job that I had where we sold clear in sanitation
products to restaurants and grocery stores, like I had been

(04:04):
washing my hands. I had always been washing my hands regularly,
but specifically washing my hands for thirty seconds with a
little thing playing in my brain to make sure that
I washed it for long enough. Like that goes back
to doing that job more than twenty years ago. And
so the seemingly surprise information that it seemed like about, yes,

(04:26):
you should wash your hands and you should use soap,
I was like, we should have all been doing this
already all of the time. And another thing that happened
around that time was that there was kind of a
little bit of freak out about whether it was okay
to use the Dove beauty bar marketed is one quarter

(04:47):
moisturizing cream to wash your hands during the time of
COVID because it's not actually soap. The answer, yes, it's fine,
it's fine to do that. It's not technically soap. It
does include surfact dents, and the surfactants are the important
part to cleaning your hands sufficiently by washing them. Yeah,

(05:10):
every time I came across another article that I was like, oh,
and this is also from twenty twenty when everyone was
thinking about soap. I'm still thinking about soap, still washing
my hands. I mean, listen, take away all of the
cleanliness specific needs, uh huh, not entirely, but like, I'm

(05:30):
always thinking about soap because it smells good. I'm a
sucker man. Put pumpkin scent in a soap, I'm buying it. Yeah.
This is the first year that I've seen and I
know there are people that are gonna groan at what
I'm about to say. And yes, I am the most
basic woman alive. But this year, for the first time,
I found pumpkin scented laundry detergent. I bought like a

(05:52):
case of it. I love that business. I want pumpkin
everything so and I want it year round. So yeah,
I'm I'm always I'm all about that. Every marketer that
makes fru freugh Redonka doodle soap that smells like uh cake,
candy and pumpkins, they're like, Yeah, what's Holly Fry's email address.
We're a little short this quarter. We gotta to send

(06:15):
them directly to Holland shoot to marketing her way because
we know this will pan out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The
fragrances are also like almost a whole separate history from yes,
the soap, and something that I did not get into here.
I read an article that was not exactly like debunking

(06:38):
the the whole thing about using ash on wool, and
it would combine with lanelin to make soap. Oh right,
It didn't feel like it had been written specifically to
debunk that idea. It was more like, here is an
experimental approach to this historical fact of how people might
have discovered soap, and this experiment was like, yeah, this

(07:00):
with the wool and the lanelin that did not actually
make soap. But one fact thing that they found that
did make soap was cleaning the like cheesecloth type of
cloths that would have been used in perfume making, where
the perfume making would have involved like an oil and

(07:24):
the fragrance and then repeatedly cycling through the oil and
the fragrance to like make the perfume that would stick
on your body. And then you would have these cloths
left over, and you would need to wash the cloths
and they would be embedded at that point with like
fats that had been used in the perfume making process,

(07:45):
and that really did yield more soap, but is not
what was mentioned in those Samerian tablets. I found that
very interesting. I also found it very interesting about how
some of the marketing of soap as soap became like
a real commerce industrial product invented some concepts related to
things like body odor as a product that needed to

(08:08):
or as an issue that needed to be resolved through
the use of soap, And it reminded me a little
bit of the coining of the term halitosis to sell mouthwash. Yeah,
I do have a question, okay, because those things existed.
Yeah the short sure, bad breath and body odor did exist. Yes,

(08:29):
So there is like a fine line of we've solved
this problem versus any amount of this makes you wrong? Sure? Right?
And did you find in any of your research like
that tipping point where it started to be like nothing
that tips off the robots that you're human should should

(08:52):
be allowed. I've had kind of oblique references to that
and to like the differing standards around the world. Like
when I was in college, I had a girlfriend who
spent a summer or a year abroad in France, and
when she got back, she was like, I am so

(09:13):
mad that now I have to spend all this time
every single day showering and washing my hair. Because while
I was in France, it was socially acceptable to like
have a couple of days pass, Like I still felt

(09:33):
like I was okay to be out in public if
it had been a day or two since taking a shower.
But here in the US it has to be every day,
and it has to be like the amount of time
it's taking me to wash my hair every day really sucks,
and I'm mad that this is like what I have
to spend my time on. And I have no concept

(09:55):
of like whether she felt like she had a perceptible
difference in her level of hygiene with an American versus
a French standard, but she definitely felt like in the
United States if she wasn't going out and like if
she wasn't showering before going out, that she was doing

(10:16):
something wrong. Es That makes sense. Yeah, I'm sure there's
probably anthropological and sociological study onto those questions. Yeah, and
like more specifically how those standards are determined and then
socially maintained. Yeah. Yeah, it's super fascinating. I mean there

(10:37):
are also just like the other element of it is
that there are also just personal preferences within that spectrum,
right of like yeah, yeah, I do not like when
my hair is not freshly washed. Me too, But I
know a lot of people who actually think their hair
looks better on like the second or third day. Yeah, Yeah,

(10:58):
and they don't wash even every time they shower, which
is totally fine, but like everybody has like a different
yeah space in there where they feel comfortable, so it
becomes a weird yeah. The sort of like homogenization of
like ultimate cleanliness as the goal. Oh, sure, is always
a little bit silly and weird to me. Sometimes an

(11:19):
algorithm will take me onto I will like wind up
in curly hair maintenance videos. Oh, I get so many
of those, which is like a very different, very different
kind of care than my hair, which is very straight
and less now that I'm older, but from my teens

(11:40):
through age forty was also very oily and if I
did not wash it every day, it felt gross. And
while like natural skin and body care companies would be like,
if you're doing it every day, you're stripping the oils
and if you just stop then it will regulate itself.
I did not find that to be true ever. But
like a lot of people whose hair is really curly,

(12:01):
or people of different races and ethnicities, like shampooing one
hundred bad idea. I would wager that the couple of
books that are more focused on cleanliness than on soap,
which came up in my research, but I did not
get I did not try to check them out or anything,
because I thought that they would probably just take me

(12:23):
down rabbit holes that were not going to help. Probably
have a lot more of stuff about that, like when,
like how cultures develop their idea of what clean is
and how often showering needs to happen to be considered clean.
And then there are cats that don't bathe at all.

(12:43):
It's fine, dude, They're fine. They bathe with their mouths. Yeah, yeah, listen,
we're in prime soap season, so I'm excited right now anyway, Yeah,
getting all the hand soaps stucking up for the year.
I have a you know, personal everyday is Halloween soap rule.

(13:04):
So there are always things that smell like autumnal stuff
for the most part, with a case of bubblegums and
roses thrown in. Yeah, I am that person that has
a stockpile of every cent you could possibly wish for. Yeah,
it's a storage problem. It's not a problem in my heart,
just a problem of space. Right. There are definitely like

(13:28):
a number of soaps and lotions and things that smell
particularly good to me that I especially like using, and
they make me feel little happier. There have been times
that I have like been on a vacation and whatever
product line was being used in the hotel or like
the spa, if I had a spa is it has
just made me feel so happy that I've been like,

(13:49):
I'm buying that and taking it home with me. Yeah
all the time. Oh yeah, yeah. Currently, I have a
lotion that I'm using that is came directly. It's a
vacation lotion that is making my lotioning process happens like
luxury every single day. Vacation lotion. Oh. We talked about

(14:19):
William Firthwells and Mildred Weeks Wells inspired by an episode
of ninety nine percent Invisible that made me real mad.
I re listened to our maxvon Petinkolf episode, which is
one of the things that was discussed in that ninety
nine percent Invisible episode. They were sort of focused on

(14:42):
how Max von Pettenkofer was one of the last people
to like really hype up the idea that miasmas were
spreading disease when the rest of the scientific and medical
community was almost entirely at that point the germ theory
of disease, and how he was wrong about a lot

(15:04):
of stuff, but he was right about some things, Like
he was right about indoor ventilation being really important to
help reduce the spread of indoor diseases. And so it
was very funny to me when I like listened to
this episode of ninety nine percent Invisible and got progressively
more frustrated, And then I re listened to that episode

(15:26):
and was like, oh, I didn't find this extreme. I
didn't find this frustrating at all when we recorded it,
which I think was in early twenty twenty, if I'm
remembering correctly, because like the following five years had not
happened yet, right, But I one of the things that
I have found frustrating over the last five years is

(15:51):
that the COVID pandemic made it so crystal clear that
illnesses that spread through the respiratory system can be spread
very easily in indoor environments with bad ventilation, especially if
they are crowded. And like, even back in the twenty

(16:13):
twenty into twenty twenty one time period, I was like, man,
we just sort of accepted the fact that if you
go to a con, you're probably gonna come home with koncrud.
We could have been living in a world where there

(16:33):
was enough ventilation and enough indoor air sanitation that maybe
that would not have just been viewed as like the probable,
inevitable likelihood of going to a convention. And this is
the same kind of stuff that Mildred and Richard were
talking about like one hundred years ago. I feel you,

(16:53):
uh huh. But the way I con that wouldn't have mattered. Yeah,
Like I think if you're a person that goes to
panels and maybe does other stuff, but if you're like
going somewhere like Dragon Con where it's like huge drink
ups like people, you know what I mean, Like, I
don't know that any amount of air fix it can yeah,

(17:15):
can counter a bunch of drunk people singing in each
other's faces. It's right. Yeah. So I think some of
that is situational for sure, and I mean some cons
probably have a different vibe than that. But I think
so much of the con experience is about connecting with

(17:36):
the people you don't get to see all the time,
and it does tend to devolve into a little bit
of you know, nerdy grab bacchanalia that it may not
have helped that much. That may or may not make
you feel any better about it. It still sucks nobody
was doing it, but yeah, yeah, I feel like we
have all had to do Dexter's lab style personal lamination

(17:58):
to actually prevent concer well, and I'm not saying it
would have possibly eliminated Konkrud entirely, but like reduced it
fewer illnesses. And then, you know, I also sort of
thought about their work with measles, which you know was
then not that long after I think after I don't

(18:22):
remember the exact timeline, even though we've done an episode
on measles, Like measles became preventable through a vaccine, but
at the time that they were doing this work, it
was not, And so it was seen as inevitable that
children would get measles at some point during their childhood
most likely, and if not, they would get measles at
some point eventually, And so it just sort of was

(18:46):
accepted as inevitable that kids going to school would get measles,
and their work seemed promising at least as far as
slowing down the spread of a measles out So it
wasn't a sudden intense crisis. Could that have been built
on to like more stop the spread of measles instead

(19:09):
of slowing it down, maybe things that are not quite
as aggressively contagious as measles, because measles is incredibly contagious.
It's like one of the most contagious illnesses that we
know about. Could that have dropped way down the amount
of disease the amount of disease risk. I also have
frustrations in part because in the last three years or so,

(19:36):
I think the five ish like respiratory illnesses that I
have gotten, three were contracted almost certainly at the doctor
or dentist office. Yeah, and where you know, I was
not having face to face contact with anyone other than

(19:58):
the doctor or the dental hyghgien but was in a
facility where the air had been breathed into by lots
of other people for a very long time, which is
the kind of stuff that their research seemed the most
the most likely of like slowing down. Yeah, And then
I also just have the general question of like, if

(20:21):
we had been living in a world where there was
already a focus, like a very strong focus on indoor
ventilation and indoor air sanitation, if that would have meant
less transmission of COVID, less need for as many long
term interventions against COVID, and if that might have meant

(20:42):
less of a backlash to the idea of public health
than what we are living through in this moment. Who knows.
That's all very speculative. Yeah, this is unfortunately Milan Canderra's
unbearable lightness of being right. You can only have one
life experience. Sure, you can't know what the other possibilities
would have been. It is a good point. It's also

(21:05):
normal to kind of wonder about this stuff and speculating. Oh,
of course, of course. So yeah, I am also interested
and glad to know that there was that Mildred weeks
Wells was like working at the capacity that she was

(21:28):
working at during the time that she was, even though
she was paid way less or not paid at all,
because we don't hear nearly as much about women doing
that kind of work during that period. For sure, do
you like me want to know all of the dirt
on what happened with their marriage? I want so much
more personal information about each of them. That's why I

(21:50):
said at the top of the episode that I have
not read this book Airborne by Carl Zimmer. I did
get it. I got it the last thing in research,
like I had already read all of these other papers
and all of these other articles I had already, like
I had gotten Williams's entire book, Like I had done
all of this stuff, And I was like, man, not

(22:12):
only is not only do I have almost no biographical
information about either of them, some of the information that
I do have I am confused by. Like I was,
for example, very confused by what was going on with
Mildred's father's embezzlement thing, right, and I was having a
really hard time finding any reporting about it. So I

(22:36):
finally got this book to like just sort of try
to confirm details about the two of them, which is
one portion of that book. The biggest thing that helped
me there was learning that her father's the reporting around
her father's accusations and trial and all of that had
been reported with his first and middle initial and not

(23:00):
his whole first name, which that finally led me to
newspaper articles that I could read about it, whereas before
that I was finding basically nothing. And I was like,
what is this financial mismanagement thing in Texas that I
can't seem to find anything about? It seems to be
a big secret. It seems yeah, and like all of
the brief write ups of her grandfather are almost glowing

(23:22):
and how they talk about him, And I was like,
but it seems like there was an an embezzlement thing,
like what having a really hard time. So yeah, the
fact that so much of that is just like a
total mystery. I wish we knew more, And I definitely
wish we knew more about some of the more gossipy stuff,
like what specifically happened in their marriage. Was it really

(23:48):
that the two of them were just difficult to work
with that led to their losing their jobs? Like yeah,
I also, you know, it seems like you did this research,
so you might have insight that I wouldn't. But as
we get to the end of their story where they
just kind of like are working on their own things,
and like, is this one of those instances where they

(24:09):
were living at a time where it was a little
more stigmatized to get divorced, and so they essentially were
separated in behavior but maybe not in declaration. Yeah, they
were still legally married until the end of their lives
as far as I know, But just Mildred didn't seem

(24:30):
to be living a life together at all, No, Mildred
did move to another city with Bud, and even then
it still seems like he was spending some of his
time with them, but not like living with them full time.
I'm imagining to maintain a relationship with his son in

(24:53):
some way could be a reason for that. But yeah,
it seems like for all practical purposes, they were not married,
even though they were legally still married, and they were
definitely not really research partners anymore in the last few
years of their career, after approximately nineteen forty four. And
then I think about married couples who work together, oh yeah,

(25:16):
and how often that creates really toxic situations, And I'm like, yeah,
I could maybe see where people wouldn't want to hear on.
You know, I used to work for a married couple
and it was a nightmare because I realized that they
were argue through their employees, right, and like, just it
just created havoc and it was sucked. And I know

(25:40):
people do it. Yeah, well, in so many companies today
have rules about like if married couples are both employed here,
they cannot work in the same department, they cannot write
like they especially one of them, cannot supervise the other one. Yeah,
And then in academia, there's this whole idea of like

(26:01):
the quote trailing spouse, where like one spouse is the
spouse that the college or university wants to hire, but
they are married and they can only afford to move
if the spouse can also find work, and like that's
a whole thing. Yeah, But the two of them were
like they were in a situation where where they were

(26:22):
both working in the same department. I don't think he
was technically her supervisor, but like, yeah, they were working
together on all of these things together, and he was
paid more than she was, if she was paid at all. Yeah,
And that does seem just like a dynamic that would
be difficult to deal with. I feel compelled to say

(26:43):
I have worked with other married couples that were amazing, sure,
and did not have toxic garbage. In fact, one married
couple that I started working at this company, and I
didn't know they were married for a long time because
they were so hyper professional about like not in any
way being in each other's business at work. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,

(27:06):
oh oh, I wonder all of the secret I do too, meanderings.
I also wonder about their son, because like everything that
was written about him was was pretty general, and also
some of the ways that people described him contradicted each other.
Like there was one paper, the paper that was sort

(27:29):
of about the tuberculosis experiments that was written after his
death use the word that we do not use today
to describe him as intellectually disabled. But there was also
a doctor who examined him when he was being institutionalized
that was like, I don't think he has an intellectual

(27:50):
disability based on his vocabulary and like what we can
tell about his cognition, and his assessment was that it
was a mental illness that involves psychosis and was possibly schizophrenia,
incredibly different from how another account had described him. So
I don't really know. I think that's a good example

(28:11):
of why it is important that there has been and
it's changing now, and I hope it continues to like
that thing where people are reticent when it comes to
speaking about any such things, and as a consequence, there
is a big gap in understanding. Yeah, so people's situations

(28:33):
get described incorrectly all the time, right, And I think
it's getting better, but that is a problem, right, Yeah,
I understand for some people it is uncomfortable or they
don't want to discuss such things, or they're worried they
will say the wrong thing, right, But yeah, it's a
it's tricky, and yeah, we need more information, not less correct,

(28:58):
not necessarily about any given person, but about the possible
various things that a person can can be and have
and do. Yeah. I agree. Anyway, that's my nerdy hippie
moment today. I love nerdy hippie moments. See whatever's happening
on your weekends. I hope it is as as lovely

(29:20):
as it possibly can be. We will be back with
a Saturday classic tomorrow. We will have something brand new
on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the

(29:41):
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