May 29, 2026 • 22 mins
Tracy talks about a strange statement in a paper she read while working on the Carlos J. Finlay episode. Holly shares her amusement at the pact Hartlib and his friends made.
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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. This week we talked about Carlos
Swan Finlay and yellow fever, and we talked a lot
about mosquitoes. Yeah. When I was doing the research on this,
(00:27):
a statement was made in one of the papers that
I just did a double take about. And I don't
I don't want to throw this author under a bus.
So I'm just gonna say what the sentence was, and
not more detail about the paper. The sentence was, historians
have only recently acknowledged the role of disease in history. What?
(00:51):
And I was like, right, that was my response. What?
And the context of this was a military history paper,
and so I was like, do you mean maybe only
military historians specifically? Right, I'm like, hello, sir, have you
met Samuel Peeps? Right? So, even then, like I remember
(01:18):
in elementary school learning what a problem smallpox was during
the Revolutionary War, Like I remember multiple mentions of diseases
being deadlier than combat in a lot of yes wartime engagements,
(01:40):
Like I remember learning about how devastating disease was during
the Civil War. So I read this statement and I
was like, what are you talking about? Well, and even
before that, like I think about the discussions of the
diseases that were introduced by European colonists into Norse Ryanica
(02:01):
that really really devastated a lot of indigenous communities. We
knew this isn't really yeah, none of this is new stuff,
and so this sort of made me wonder, like, is
this person writing is what they are trying to express
that there has not been as much really really deep
(02:22):
detailed analysis of diseases role in wars right from medical
history or from military historians specifically, Like is this a
statement that if it were being read by military historians
would go Okay, I get it, I get what you're saying.
(02:44):
But since I more of a generalist, AM reading it
and I'm like, what are you talking about? It is?
Am I just coming from a totally different context than
the person who wrote that sentence, because the rest of
the article did not seem like they did not know
what they were talking about. Right, Listen, We're gonna blame
(03:06):
an editor there, Yeah, I say that, having you know,
been a copy editor, Sure, I'll take the blame whenever
I don't. But the thing is even that, right, Like
there have been discussions of like this military force was
significantly weakened by disease and that's why they were not
effective in this conflict. Right, So that seems weird unless
they're talking about a very specific like no one has
(03:30):
been able to run the hard numbers quantify like what
percentage of disadvantage or problem was created by these specifics.
Like that's the only thing I can think of. But
that seems like such a general sentence. It's not talking
about that. Yeah, there there was a like footnote reference
to another paper that made it sound like military historians
(03:53):
specifically did not want to focus so much on disease
because focusing on the role of disease in war took
a lot of the human agency about it. So if
what you wanted to be writing about was battles and
weaponry and tactics, and really the major driver of the
course of the war was diseases, it's like the diseases
(04:16):
are stealing your thunder if your interest is on the
battles and the weapons and the maneuvers, well, I have
feelings they're not charitable. I definitely said what out loud
very much the way you said. What when I read
that sentence, Yeah, yeah, that's so odd. It was very
(04:43):
very weird. I'm not parsing this file. I'm like, yeah.
Something that was much more on the delightful end of
the spectrum to me anyway, is that some of Finlay's
papers about yellow fever had these illustrations of mosquito mouthparts.
And I do not love mosquitoes. I do not like
(05:05):
being bitten by mosquitoes. I don't like mosquito bites. I
don't like the number of diseases that people can get
from mosquitoes, many of which don't have treatments or cures
that are very effective. Right now, I do like their
mouths are cool. Oh yeah, they have parts of their
(05:26):
mouths that turn into a straw basically. Yeah. They don't
fly around with it like a straw all the time.
It's like a little velcrow thing, right with the proboscis unfurled. Yeah.
And so when I saw that he had drawn these
little mosquito mouthparts, I was extremely excited about it. It
(05:46):
reminds me of when we talked about years ago Maria
Sibilia Media and her drawings of insects uh huh. Similarly,
like in that case it was about not biting people,
but about collecting and whatnot. Yeah, but often same you
would see the fully unfurled straw apparatus and it was
(06:06):
pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Back when I used to write
for a website called how Stuff Works, I really enjoyed
all of the insect and iraqnid articles that I read
because they always had such interesting and cool anatomical features.
Beautiful like bees having all of these structures on their
(06:29):
bodies to hold pollen, including like sort of little pockets,
little pockets to fill up with their pollen as they
fly around. I love it. I love it. Get pollen pocket,
not to be an use of polypocket, no, no, yeah,
I have a My general fear of mosquitoes is more
(06:51):
about the cats, since they're a heartworm vector. Yeah, and
I will confess that I am not always amazing up
with the cats preventatives right right, because listen, we got
sassy girls at our house. Yeah yeah. We had a
discussion about this on the show at one point a
(07:13):
long time ago, and I don't even remember how it
came up. That was about heartworm prevention and cats. And
when I was living in like North Carolina and Georgia.
I had they were on heartworm prevention and a lot
of the places that I lived, But then I moved.
One of the places that I moved, I had a
conversation with the vet that was about the risk of
(07:37):
heartworm in that area, yeah, versus the risk of the
preventive for the heartworm, right, which in that particular case,
it was like, there's there's not really a reason to
do this. There's there's not a major risk of heartworm here.
There would be more risk from the thing. And we
(07:57):
got an email from someone who was really upset because
I think they thought I had just decided based on vibes,
not that I'd had a thoughtful conversation with the veterinarian
about whether that was what they needed. Yeah. Yeah. Our
other thing, right, our ladies are always inside. They have
(08:18):
no exposure to dogs. We don't even have friends who
are dog people that are ever at the house. Yeah.
I can't think of any of our friends that has
a dog right now that would be over on the regular.
So the risk is pretty low if we're a little slacky.
Although I had a funny thing recently, gosh, it was
probably a month ago. We had everybody in for their
(08:38):
annual and they always asked like, are you keeping up
with And I'm like, I'm sorry, and they the vetech
that I talked to was like, you know what, probably
eighty five percent of our clients are really up to
date on it. I was like, well, that's a high number. Yeah.
We also have that problem of one of our cats
being extra robust and needing like the higher dose than Yeah. Yeah,
(09:03):
we do a flee in tick prevention on hours even
though they never go outside because I go outside a lot.
Oh yeah, you're out in the woods having yeah, and
nature experiences. You know. If I can take a tick
prevention for myself, I would do that. Just put the
cat stuff on the back of your neck. And then
(09:24):
also because we live in a very old house in
an area that has woods and whatnot around it, occasionally
we do get mice inside and they can also bring
in yeah. Yeah, yeah, oh, I had not thought about
that for you. Yeah, it's a whole other, yeah, whole
other potential concern. Yeah. So, especially since Opal in particular
(09:44):
is she likes to find a mouse. We haven't seen
one in the house in quite a while, but she
likes she thinks they should be toys, and I try
to get them away from her anyway. To return to
Yellow to Yellow Few and Carlo Swan Finlay, we talked
about how a man named Juan Santos Fernandez had established
(10:09):
this institute, this research institute. He really wanted to find
the cause of yellow fever. And I think the impression
I get is that after Walter Reid came down and
confirmed what Finlay had been saying the whole time, Juan
Santos Fernandez was like really kicking himself. He was like,
(10:31):
I could have had this discovery on my list of achievements,
and I don't because I totally dismissed this guy and
called him the mosquito Man, which launched my brain when
we were talking about it onto a whole different, like yeah,
cryptid trajectory of what a mosquito man would look like,
And I'm like, how would it compare to moth man?
(10:52):
Would people also think it was a sand hill cret?
Like I was literally down the road so far, I
was realing back here now I'm thinking about a human
sized person with the mosquito mouthparts. Yeah, honestly, is really cool.
And his name is Captain Proboscis the brain is busy.
(11:16):
So yeah, I'm glad I finally got to this episode
because it's been more than a decade since I've said
I want to talk about the Skuy some more. Yeah,
it's wild the way time passes. How dare it really does?
It really does? And we talked about Samuel Hartlib in
(11:42):
the Heart Lib Circle this week. Uh huh. I find
this whole concept fascinating. Yeah, that there are I mean,
this is a thing that always fascinates me. In everything
that we talk about, there are just, in a manner
of pattern recognition, people that pop up over and over
that get that are obviously next to points in history
where they knew a lot of people, influenced a lot
(12:04):
of people, et cetera. He's unique because he's that, but
there's not a whole lot of knowledge about him in
like you know, general history. You kind of have to
find the HEARTLB scholars to learn about him, and I
just think that's interesting. Yeah. One of the things that
I am always tickled by, but especially in this instance,
(12:24):
is how you know when there's not a lot of
ready documented information about somebody. Sometimes you can see the
vibe of when people are kind of filling in the
blanks or making some positions, or even kind of putting
their own opinion in the mix. Sure, which is I'm
(12:45):
not dogging any of those people, like you're trying to
make the narrative work. It's fine. But one of the
things that was interesting was that any of the times
when Heartlib was excluded from something, why the office of
a dres never happened, or why he was left out
of the Royal Society, and one especially with the Royal Society.
(13:08):
I saw one paper about it that kind of hinted like, well,
he was so tied to like, you know, the hyper
sort of almost puritan thing and so religious that the
Royal Society was like, yeah, I mean, we're Christians, but
you're you're a lot. But that doesn't seem to have
(13:28):
really been the thing, right when you look at it.
He wasn't. I mean, as we mentioned in the show,
he wasn't that he wasn't in the mix talking out
like any of these scientific concepts with a lot of people.
He wasn't trying to be part of their their meetings
or their little circle. He was just trying to like
be a steward of that information. Yeah, So I just
(13:52):
find that interesting he was more like a librarian than
a scientific researcher, and a lot of the other people
that were part of the founding of the Royal Society
were like doing hands on research of some sort. Yeah,
and it's at least from the quoted material in the episode,
(14:15):
it seems like he not only was he not doing
some kind of hands on research, he also seems like
he wasn't really super in depth reading anybody else's stuff.
He was more passing it around, like circulating it. Yeah,
he was like a catalog librarian. Yeah. Yeah, he and
was like, oh, would you do you have a request
for that paper that so and so wrote? I have,
(14:36):
I'm making you a copy, that's my problem, and was
like making sure that people got those And because he
was publishing things, he clearly had access to, you know,
print materials and could could make duplicates of things in
whatever way he was doing it. So, I mean, I
I feel like it just was like a It would
have been almost weird for him to have been, yeah,
(14:57):
a member when you view it through that lens, like, no,
you're you're yeah, you're cataloging things. Okay, we have to
talk about the pact because I'm obsessed with it. It's
so funny. It's sort of cute, sort of sweet. I
feel like they had a treehouse and they would go
up there and they would pull the ladder up after them. Yeah,
(15:17):
but what I find so what just I had fits
of giggles when I was reading about it because this
idea of like and it's our secret. I'm like, my, dudes,
everybody knows this is your life work, and this isn't
a secret, Like why did you put that clause in there?
Like is there some aspect of this I'm not grasping,
(15:40):
Like yeah, and we won't tell anyone. And I'm like,
you tell everybody all the time. I guess they're just
not saying. And we signed a document about it. I don't, right.
And that's the other thing. If it's supposed to be
a secret, you documented it. You kept that document forever. Yeah.
(16:02):
I love it so much. It's so silly. Yeah, Tracy,
we're gonna make a podcast, but it's our secret. It's
gonna be a secret. This feels like like this feels
like something that would have happened between like me and
two other girls standing at the end of the hallway
(16:25):
in high school. We're gonna decide we're gonna form this
secret pact. Yeah, my mental picture of how this would
enact for me went even farther back than this. I'm like,
this happened on the four square core in second grade. Okay,
we couldn't write in Latin then, so now or ever.
(16:48):
It made me laugh so hard. It made me laugh
so hard. I love the whole like there will be
no secrets, it's gracious. I don't mean to mock. There's
an earnestness to it that is actually so charming. But
the part that like we're going to keep it secret
just I was like, but you're not. You write other
(17:11):
pamphlets about how important this work. Yeah, I love it.
I love it, and I'm glad of it because you know,
he distributed a lot of information, listen do I I
don't agree with his concepts that like if we all
read the Bible more, we would be a better nation.
You gotta have got to let people do their thing,
(17:35):
whatever religion they choose or don't choose. It's fine. I
also found the very funny the idea of like uniting
all of the Protestants into one like this is sort
of running a foul of the concept of the Protestant movement,
the Protestant Reformation. Yeah, I mean, I do love the
(17:57):
idea of like, if everyone has universal education, we will
all understand each other better. Yeah, it will be a
more egalitarian and utopian community because everybody will get it.
But at this point in our lives that we're living
right now, it seems like even if you give people
the information, they may not digest it. They might willfully
(18:20):
misuse it to hurt other people. Yes, the worst, But
I love the idea. I love the hippie part of it,
where it's like, you, guys, we would all be cool
to each other if we all spoke Latin, if we
could all mean ancient Latin texts. Do you know what
was one of the hardest parts of this episode for me?
(18:41):
It's very silly John Durry, because you know, I want
to call him John Drury all the time for no reason.
I'm afraid I did at some point and neither of
us caught it. I don't think you did, because I
was listening for it because I knew I was so
predisposed to do so, So I don't think you did.
But I feel like he lives on very lane right
(19:06):
in the theater where all the ghosts are. I really
Samuel Hartlib is kind of a precursor to me wanting
to talk about boil in his chemistry. So oh yeah coming, Yeah,
I'm not sure when, but it is coming. Yeah, And
again I do love the idea of like a little
(19:29):
you know, intellectual correspondence group, but like that's not exclusive,
and like anybody who wrote to him and was like, hey,
I heard you have this thing like a broker of
great information. Terrific. Yeah, yeah, I have it right from
the source. Do you want to read that guy's paper.
I'll make you a copy. Absolutely terrific. I love your
(19:52):
noble efforts, even if I don't agree with all of it,
the concept is real good. I wonder what he would
make of the end. He might feel like he's been
put out of a job. He'd either be really into
it or really heartbroken. Well, or maybe it would be
his job. I think he would find things like Wikipedia
just spectacular. I was thinking more archive dot org and
(20:16):
probably but remember and he was in the contemporary thing,
so it wasn't all about archives for him as much
as about sharing newly developing ideas. Like now his stuff
is in dot org, and I do love that the
University of Sheffield makes all of his papers available. Nice.
I had some tricky times with search, but I think
that's a user error thing and not of them thing. Uh,
(20:37):
but you can if you just want to kill a weekend.
I mean, there's thousands and thousands and thousands of documents.
You could not read them all unless you put aside time,
like a large chunk of your life to just become
a heart lip scholar. But it's it's very interesting if
you can get through the very clunky linguistic style, right. Sorry, Samuel,
(21:01):
and I don't mean to criticize, it's just hard to
speaking of chunks of time in your life. If you
have days off coming up, I hope they're stupendous. I
hope that you hang out and relax and do whatever
hippie or non hippie thing you want to do that
makes you feel rejuvenated and good about the world, and
(21:23):
that we are all kind to one another. If you
have to work or you are saddled with a lot
of obligations this weekend, I hope that those go super
duper smoothly and that they all wrap up a little
faster than you're expecting, so you get some time back
to do whatever you want. Eat a cupcake sounds great.
We will be right back here on Monday with a
(21:44):
new episode. We will also be here tomorrow with a
classic Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
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. This week we talked about Carlos
Swan Finlay and yellow fever, and we talked a lot
about mosquitoes. Yeah. When I was doing the research on this,
(00:27):
a statement was made in one of the papers that
I just did a double take about. And I don't
I don't want to throw this author under a bus.
So I'm just gonna say what the sentence was, and
not more detail about the paper. The sentence was, historians
have only recently acknowledged the role of disease in history. What?
(00:51):
And I was like, right, that was my response. What?
And the context of this was a military history paper,
and so I was like, do you mean maybe only
military historians specifically? Right, I'm like, hello, sir, have you
met Samuel Peeps? Right? So, even then, like I remember
(01:18):
in elementary school learning what a problem smallpox was during
the Revolutionary War, Like I remember multiple mentions of diseases
being deadlier than combat in a lot of yes wartime engagements,
(01:40):
Like I remember learning about how devastating disease was during
the Civil War. So I read this statement and I
was like, what are you talking about? Well, and even
before that, like I think about the discussions of the
diseases that were introduced by European colonists into Norse Ryanica
(02:01):
that really really devastated a lot of indigenous communities. We
knew this isn't really yeah, none of this is new stuff,
and so this sort of made me wonder, like, is
this person writing is what they are trying to express
that there has not been as much really really deep
(02:22):
detailed analysis of diseases role in wars right from medical
history or from military historians specifically, Like is this a
statement that if it were being read by military historians
would go Okay, I get it, I get what you're saying.
(02:44):
But since I more of a generalist, AM reading it
and I'm like, what are you talking about? It is?
Am I just coming from a totally different context than
the person who wrote that sentence, because the rest of
the article did not seem like they did not know
what they were talking about. Right, Listen, We're gonna blame
(03:06):
an editor there, Yeah, I say that, having you know,
been a copy editor, Sure, I'll take the blame whenever
I don't. But the thing is even that, right, Like
there have been discussions of like this military force was
significantly weakened by disease and that's why they were not
effective in this conflict. Right, So that seems weird unless
they're talking about a very specific like no one has
(03:30):
been able to run the hard numbers quantify like what
percentage of disadvantage or problem was created by these specifics.
Like that's the only thing I can think of. But
that seems like such a general sentence. It's not talking
about that. Yeah, there there was a like footnote reference
to another paper that made it sound like military historians
(03:53):
specifically did not want to focus so much on disease
because focusing on the role of disease in war took
a lot of the human agency about it. So if
what you wanted to be writing about was battles and
weaponry and tactics, and really the major driver of the
course of the war was diseases, it's like the diseases
(04:16):
are stealing your thunder if your interest is on the
battles and the weapons and the maneuvers, well, I have
feelings they're not charitable. I definitely said what out loud
very much the way you said. What when I read
that sentence, Yeah, yeah, that's so odd. It was very
(04:43):
very weird. I'm not parsing this file. I'm like, yeah.
Something that was much more on the delightful end of
the spectrum to me anyway, is that some of Finlay's
papers about yellow fever had these illustrations of mosquito mouthparts.
And I do not love mosquitoes. I do not like
(05:05):
being bitten by mosquitoes. I don't like mosquito bites. I
don't like the number of diseases that people can get
from mosquitoes, many of which don't have treatments or cures
that are very effective. Right now, I do like their
mouths are cool. Oh yeah, they have parts of their
(05:26):
mouths that turn into a straw basically. Yeah. They don't
fly around with it like a straw all the time.
It's like a little velcrow thing, right with the proboscis unfurled. Yeah.
And so when I saw that he had drawn these
little mosquito mouthparts, I was extremely excited about it. It
(05:46):
reminds me of when we talked about years ago Maria
Sibilia Media and her drawings of insects uh huh. Similarly,
like in that case it was about not biting people,
but about collecting and whatnot. Yeah, but often same you
would see the fully unfurled straw apparatus and it was
(06:06):
pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Back when I used to write
for a website called how Stuff Works, I really enjoyed
all of the insect and iraqnid articles that I read
because they always had such interesting and cool anatomical features.
Beautiful like bees having all of these structures on their
(06:29):
bodies to hold pollen, including like sort of little pockets,
little pockets to fill up with their pollen as they
fly around. I love it. I love it. Get pollen pocket,
not to be an use of polypocket, no, no, yeah,
I have a My general fear of mosquitoes is more
(06:51):
about the cats, since they're a heartworm vector. Yeah, and
I will confess that I am not always amazing up
with the cats preventatives right right, because listen, we got
sassy girls at our house. Yeah yeah. We had a
discussion about this on the show at one point a
(07:13):
long time ago, and I don't even remember how it
came up. That was about heartworm prevention and cats. And
when I was living in like North Carolina and Georgia.
I had they were on heartworm prevention and a lot
of the places that I lived, But then I moved.
One of the places that I moved, I had a
conversation with the vet that was about the risk of
(07:37):
heartworm in that area, yeah, versus the risk of the
preventive for the heartworm, right, which in that particular case,
it was like, there's there's not really a reason to
do this. There's there's not a major risk of heartworm here.
There would be more risk from the thing. And we
(07:57):
got an email from someone who was really upset because
I think they thought I had just decided based on vibes,
not that I'd had a thoughtful conversation with the veterinarian
about whether that was what they needed. Yeah. Yeah. Our
other thing, right, our ladies are always inside. They have
(08:18):
no exposure to dogs. We don't even have friends who
are dog people that are ever at the house. Yeah.
I can't think of any of our friends that has
a dog right now that would be over on the regular.
So the risk is pretty low if we're a little slacky.
Although I had a funny thing recently, gosh, it was
probably a month ago. We had everybody in for their
(08:38):
annual and they always asked like, are you keeping up
with And I'm like, I'm sorry, and they the vetech
that I talked to was like, you know what, probably
eighty five percent of our clients are really up to
date on it. I was like, well, that's a high number. Yeah.
We also have that problem of one of our cats
being extra robust and needing like the higher dose than Yeah. Yeah,
(09:03):
we do a flee in tick prevention on hours even
though they never go outside because I go outside a lot.
Oh yeah, you're out in the woods having yeah, and
nature experiences. You know. If I can take a tick
prevention for myself, I would do that. Just put the
cat stuff on the back of your neck. And then
(09:24):
also because we live in a very old house in
an area that has woods and whatnot around it, occasionally
we do get mice inside and they can also bring
in yeah. Yeah, yeah, oh, I had not thought about
that for you. Yeah, it's a whole other, yeah, whole
other potential concern. Yeah. So, especially since Opal in particular
(09:44):
is she likes to find a mouse. We haven't seen
one in the house in quite a while, but she
likes she thinks they should be toys, and I try
to get them away from her anyway. To return to
Yellow to Yellow Few and Carlo Swan Finlay, we talked
about how a man named Juan Santos Fernandez had established
(10:09):
this institute, this research institute. He really wanted to find
the cause of yellow fever. And I think the impression
I get is that after Walter Reid came down and
confirmed what Finlay had been saying the whole time, Juan
Santos Fernandez was like really kicking himself. He was like,
(10:31):
I could have had this discovery on my list of achievements,
and I don't because I totally dismissed this guy and
called him the mosquito Man, which launched my brain when
we were talking about it onto a whole different, like yeah,
cryptid trajectory of what a mosquito man would look like,
And I'm like, how would it compare to moth man?
(10:52):
Would people also think it was a sand hill cret?
Like I was literally down the road so far, I
was realing back here now I'm thinking about a human
sized person with the mosquito mouthparts. Yeah, honestly, is really cool.
And his name is Captain Proboscis the brain is busy.
(11:16):
So yeah, I'm glad I finally got to this episode
because it's been more than a decade since I've said
I want to talk about the Skuy some more. Yeah,
it's wild the way time passes. How dare it really does?
It really does? And we talked about Samuel Hartlib in
(11:42):
the Heart Lib Circle this week. Uh huh. I find
this whole concept fascinating. Yeah, that there are I mean,
this is a thing that always fascinates me. In everything
that we talk about, there are just, in a manner
of pattern recognition, people that pop up over and over
that get that are obviously next to points in history
where they knew a lot of people, influenced a lot
(12:04):
of people, et cetera. He's unique because he's that, but
there's not a whole lot of knowledge about him in
like you know, general history. You kind of have to
find the HEARTLB scholars to learn about him, and I
just think that's interesting. Yeah. One of the things that
I am always tickled by, but especially in this instance,
(12:24):
is how you know when there's not a lot of
ready documented information about somebody. Sometimes you can see the
vibe of when people are kind of filling in the
blanks or making some positions, or even kind of putting
their own opinion in the mix. Sure, which is I'm
(12:45):
not dogging any of those people, like you're trying to
make the narrative work. It's fine. But one of the
things that was interesting was that any of the times
when Heartlib was excluded from something, why the office of
a dres never happened, or why he was left out
of the Royal Society, and one especially with the Royal Society.
(13:08):
I saw one paper about it that kind of hinted like, well,
he was so tied to like, you know, the hyper
sort of almost puritan thing and so religious that the
Royal Society was like, yeah, I mean, we're Christians, but
you're you're a lot. But that doesn't seem to have
(13:28):
really been the thing, right when you look at it.
He wasn't. I mean, as we mentioned in the show,
he wasn't that he wasn't in the mix talking out
like any of these scientific concepts with a lot of people.
He wasn't trying to be part of their their meetings
or their little circle. He was just trying to like
be a steward of that information. Yeah, So I just
(13:52):
find that interesting he was more like a librarian than
a scientific researcher, and a lot of the other people
that were part of the founding of the Royal Society
were like doing hands on research of some sort. Yeah,
and it's at least from the quoted material in the episode,
(14:15):
it seems like he not only was he not doing
some kind of hands on research, he also seems like
he wasn't really super in depth reading anybody else's stuff.
He was more passing it around, like circulating it. Yeah,
he was like a catalog librarian. Yeah. Yeah, he and
was like, oh, would you do you have a request
for that paper that so and so wrote? I have,
(14:36):
I'm making you a copy, that's my problem, and was
like making sure that people got those And because he
was publishing things, he clearly had access to, you know,
print materials and could could make duplicates of things in
whatever way he was doing it. So, I mean, I
I feel like it just was like a It would
have been almost weird for him to have been, yeah,
(14:57):
a member when you view it through that lens, like, no,
you're you're yeah, you're cataloging things. Okay, we have to
talk about the pact because I'm obsessed with it. It's
so funny. It's sort of cute, sort of sweet. I
feel like they had a treehouse and they would go
up there and they would pull the ladder up after them. Yeah,
(15:17):
but what I find so what just I had fits
of giggles when I was reading about it because this
idea of like and it's our secret. I'm like, my, dudes,
everybody knows this is your life work, and this isn't
a secret, Like why did you put that clause in there?
Like is there some aspect of this I'm not grasping,
(15:40):
Like yeah, and we won't tell anyone. And I'm like,
you tell everybody all the time. I guess they're just
not saying. And we signed a document about it. I don't, right.
And that's the other thing. If it's supposed to be
a secret, you documented it. You kept that document forever. Yeah.
(16:02):
I love it so much. It's so silly. Yeah, Tracy,
we're gonna make a podcast, but it's our secret. It's
gonna be a secret. This feels like like this feels
like something that would have happened between like me and
two other girls standing at the end of the hallway
(16:25):
in high school. We're gonna decide we're gonna form this
secret pact. Yeah, my mental picture of how this would
enact for me went even farther back than this. I'm like,
this happened on the four square core in second grade. Okay,
we couldn't write in Latin then, so now or ever.
(16:48):
It made me laugh so hard. It made me laugh
so hard. I love the whole like there will be
no secrets, it's gracious. I don't mean to mock. There's
an earnestness to it that is actually so charming. But
the part that like we're going to keep it secret
just I was like, but you're not. You write other
(17:11):
pamphlets about how important this work. Yeah, I love it.
I love it, and I'm glad of it because you know,
he distributed a lot of information, listen do I I
don't agree with his concepts that like if we all
read the Bible more, we would be a better nation.
You gotta have got to let people do their thing,
(17:35):
whatever religion they choose or don't choose. It's fine. I
also found the very funny the idea of like uniting
all of the Protestants into one like this is sort
of running a foul of the concept of the Protestant movement,
the Protestant Reformation. Yeah, I mean, I do love the
(17:57):
idea of like, if everyone has universal education, we will
all understand each other better. Yeah, it will be a
more egalitarian and utopian community because everybody will get it.
But at this point in our lives that we're living
right now, it seems like even if you give people
the information, they may not digest it. They might willfully
(18:20):
misuse it to hurt other people. Yes, the worst, But
I love the idea. I love the hippie part of it,
where it's like, you, guys, we would all be cool
to each other if we all spoke Latin, if we
could all mean ancient Latin texts. Do you know what
was one of the hardest parts of this episode for me?
(18:41):
It's very silly John Durry, because you know, I want
to call him John Drury all the time for no reason.
I'm afraid I did at some point and neither of
us caught it. I don't think you did, because I
was listening for it because I knew I was so
predisposed to do so, So I don't think you did.
But I feel like he lives on very lane right
(19:06):
in the theater where all the ghosts are. I really
Samuel Hartlib is kind of a precursor to me wanting
to talk about boil in his chemistry. So oh yeah coming, Yeah,
I'm not sure when, but it is coming. Yeah, And
again I do love the idea of like a little
(19:29):
you know, intellectual correspondence group, but like that's not exclusive,
and like anybody who wrote to him and was like, hey,
I heard you have this thing like a broker of
great information. Terrific. Yeah, yeah, I have it right from
the source. Do you want to read that guy's paper.
I'll make you a copy. Absolutely terrific. I love your
(19:52):
noble efforts, even if I don't agree with all of it,
the concept is real good. I wonder what he would
make of the end. He might feel like he's been
put out of a job. He'd either be really into
it or really heartbroken. Well, or maybe it would be
his job. I think he would find things like Wikipedia
just spectacular. I was thinking more archive dot org and
(20:16):
probably but remember and he was in the contemporary thing,
so it wasn't all about archives for him as much
as about sharing newly developing ideas. Like now his stuff
is in dot org, and I do love that the
University of Sheffield makes all of his papers available. Nice.
I had some tricky times with search, but I think
that's a user error thing and not of them thing. Uh,
(20:37):
but you can if you just want to kill a weekend.
I mean, there's thousands and thousands and thousands of documents.
You could not read them all unless you put aside time,
like a large chunk of your life to just become
a heart lip scholar. But it's it's very interesting if
you can get through the very clunky linguistic style, right. Sorry, Samuel,
(21:01):
and I don't mean to criticize, it's just hard to
speaking of chunks of time in your life. If you
have days off coming up, I hope they're stupendous. I
hope that you hang out and relax and do whatever
hippie or non hippie thing you want to do that
makes you feel rejuvenated and good about the world, and
(21:23):
that we are all kind to one another. If you
have to work or you are saddled with a lot
of obligations this weekend, I hope that those go super
duper smoothly and that they all wrap up a little
faster than you're expecting, so you get some time back
to do whatever you want. Eat a cupcake sounds great.
We will be right back here on Monday with a
(21:44):
new episode. We will also be here tomorrow with a
classic Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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