July 10, 2026 • 20 mins
Tracy shares stories of her time in London. There is also a discussion of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin’s marriage.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 spent the whole
week talking about Drothy Crowfoot Hodggen, something that became clear
to me very early in the research was going to
(00:23):
be two parts, both because I wanted to spend a
little more time talking about her peace activism, her work
basically saying we should cooperate internationally as scientists, all of
that which is mentioned in most writing about her, but
maybe not a lot of time spent on it. And
(00:45):
also I just loved her. She's great. I kept finding
more reasons to love her the longer I worked on
the episode, And when I was in England, I set
myself a number of emails that just that said as
the subject line some person's name or some event or
whatever that I had just found reference to. Yeah. I
(01:07):
do the same when I travel. Yeah. Eventually, for some
reason I got tired of doing that and I started
just taking pictures of signs, And then after I got
back to my desk, I was just flipping through my
camera roll and seeing all the pictures of signs I
had taken, and you know, displays in museums and things
(01:28):
like that. And that was when I realized number one,
a bunch of stuff was taggeds happening on Dorothy Hodgkin Road.
And then number two that I had multiple things related
to Dorothy Hodgkin that I had taken pictures of. While
I was doing that, I had also taken pictures of,
first the exterior of the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum, which
(01:52):
is at the hospital where he was working in London. Holly,
have you been there? I have been by there, I
have not been in there, but I know where you're
talking about exactly. So this trip to England, we arrived
in London, Patrick and I spent a few days in London.
We met up with some friends in Birmingham, where Patrick
was at a convention, and then my friend and I
(02:15):
came back to London together, and then Patrick and her
husband came back separately together, and my friend and I
decided to go have dinner at a barge in Little Venice,
which was a wine and cheese barge perfect which we
were planning to have wine and cheese and then do
a second round of food somewhere else, but we filled
(02:36):
up on wine and cheese, and so as we were
walking out there, we saw the exterior of the building.
There's a like a you know, a marker. It's clear
this is the building where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillina. We
came back by a different route that took us on
the other side of the building, and realized that there
(02:56):
was a museum there that I didn't know existed, that
the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum. And this was maybe a
two minute walk from the hotel where Patrick and I
were staying. And so the next morning it was one
of those days where you're just all you're doing is
flying back home, right, but the flight home doesn't leave
until the afternoon, so you have a little bit of time. Yeah,
(03:18):
in the morning, that's time to do something, but not
time to do much. And I said, why don't we
walk over to the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum because it's
two minutes away. It opens at ten, we need to
be checked out of the room by eleven. It was
the perfect amount of time to go. It is a
(03:38):
very small museum. It is his laboratory that has been
reconstructed to look like it looked when he was working there,
and then a room where a brief film is shown,
and then a display about like the development of penicillin
in the history of Penicillin, And it turned out to
just be the really perfect way to close out the trip,
have a brief thing to do before were heading off
(04:01):
to the airport. And then another thing that brought up
the name of Dorothy Crowfet Hodgkin in all of this.
One of the things there were several things that jumped
out to me. One is that we something that we've
referred to when we were talking, which is her doing
chemistry experiments in the house unsupervised. As far as I know,
(04:24):
I think it was in the biography of her that
I referenced, which as I've started doing lately, that was
the thing that I read last after the outline was
largely put together, that kind of filled in some little
gaps in what I knew about her biography. So that
is by Georgina Ferry, and it is called Dorothy Hodgkin,
a Life. It was first published in nineteen ninety eight.
(04:46):
A second edition came out in twenty fourteen. There might
be another edition more recently than that, but one of
the things she said was, quote, modern parents might question
the wisdom of letting children play with naked flames and
the attic of an old house. And I was like, yeah,
I couldn't even play with naked flames at the dining
room table, not in the attic. I mean, you were
(05:06):
a very highly supervised child. I was, yeah, this is correct. Yeah,
like my parents were a little more tired by the
time they got to me because we had I had
three older siblings. Yeah, I was the oldest, and my
mom was an anxious person. Yeah, my mom was too,
but there was a lot of finger crossing and we're tired. Yeah.
(05:27):
So I've played with open flames a lot as a kid.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I don't remember how old I was when I got
a chemistry set, which was one of you know, the
commercially made chemistry sets for children. But I begged for
it for uh, for Christmas, Christmas or birthday, one or
the other, and got it. And most of the experiments
that I wound up doing out of it were the
(05:54):
experiments that I could do unsupervised. Yeah, that did not
involve open flame, did not involve anything that was marked
as being hazardous. Oh, I had my own lighter by
the age of nine. That's funny part of that. To
be fair, It wasn't like I was just running around
setting things on fire, but I already sewed a lot
by that point, and I was taking ballet and I
(06:16):
would singe the ends of the ribbons on my shoes. Yeah,
so I just it was just part of my life
at that point. They got it up free. I also
really thought a lot while working on this episode about
the nature of science as an international cooperative endeavor and
(06:37):
how devastating it is that how much of how much
science funding has been gutted in the United States, because
that effects not just the United States, but all of
these other countries that were interconnected with United States research,
some of the other countries that have started increasing their
science funding to try to make up for the drop
(06:59):
and funding of the United States. Like it is not
it doesn't compare the amount of money that was being
spent in the US. Like just it was enormous and
interconnected with so many things, interconnected with the higher education system.
A lot of university universities have basically been scientific research
centers that were being subsidized by the government, and without
(07:20):
that money, like what happens a lot of the research
is not being done. And then it also connects to
people being denied entry in the United States, or being
not having their visas renewed, or their whole class of visa.
Maybe that's going to go away. Like all of it,
I found. I just kept thinking about it the whole time.
(07:43):
I was thinking about all of her trips to make
connections with scientists and work with people and encourage them
in so many different places, including places that it was
really frowned upon for her to be going, like going
to North Vietnam.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah, like you, I am very disheartened by the funding
cuts that have been made to a lot of programs.
And I know there are people for whom that seems logical.
I don't think their logic is sound, but I understand
how for somebody who is susceptible to this kind of rhetoric.
(08:21):
If someone says they're not producing anything, they're wasting this money,
that might sound like a good idea. But part of
it is that people don't always understand what these labs
and these research groups are doing. It's not like they
can go, look, we made of this this week, Like
some of these studies are years and years long, and
they don't even know what the outcome will be for
(08:43):
quite a ways into it, and it just it breaks
my heart that we're not letting those programs continue and
to have time. I know some have gotten like you
could continue, but you have to hurry everything up, and
it's like, well that's it's not how science works. No
speed science. No, there are processes that are just going
(09:04):
to take time anyway. It's very disheartening. Yeah, and the
results might be no, this doesn't work, and we still
learned something if that's the case.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Right, So yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Something else that I said to you sort of in
a moment between actual recording was about Dorothy and Thomas's relationship.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
I feel like it's an overstatement to describe them as polyamorous,
because that is not an idea that really like that
term had not been coined, right, I don't think for
all of their lives. Definitely not for most of their lives.
And I'm also not fully fully sure what her feelings
(09:59):
were about his other relationships. I know that conceptually she
was like, we should be free to love who we
want to love, But there's a difference between thinking that
conceptually and what your feelings are about it. Yeah, and
I'm not fully confident I know what her feelings were
(10:20):
about it, but it does seem like she knew he
was having these other relationships, that neither of them felt
like it was a betrayal in any way. And then
it just seems to have worked for them that they
were so rarely in the same place for a long
periods of time, but continually writing each other letters. Yeah,
(10:42):
I mean, their whole marriage is unconventional, even if they
did not have whatever agreement or understanding in place that
there could be other romantic partners in the mix. Just
the fact that they barely lived in the same place ever. Yeah, well,
and that was like also the plan for minute one.
(11:03):
It was like, we're going to get married, We're going
to go on a honeymoon, but we're immediately going to
live in two different places.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
When I was in college, I might have told this
story before. When I was in college, I dated a
guy for a chunk of my time in college, and
his parents were both tenured professors at different universities in
different states. And that was just because like that was
how their careers had evolved. They had both wound up
on a tenure track in different places, and so they
saw each other on weekends, holidays, summers, and they did
(11:32):
a lot of driving back and forth between western North
Carolina and North Georgia. And my perception was that that
worked for them and it you know, they had basically
two households in two different places that their children went
back and forth depending on what was going on, and
it seemed to work out.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
I used to work with a guy who lived It
was in my brief foray into the gaming industry when
I was wearing at Cartoon Network and he I realized
after that I didn't want to stay in gaming because
so many people like the game publishes and then you know,
not that long later, either that whole team gets sunset
(12:13):
or sometimes the company closes or whatever. Like it's a
very for a lot of people, not everybody, but for
a lot of people. It is a very kind of
migrant career to have where you're constantly on the moon,
kind of volatile. And their thing was like, well, we
need somebody to have a base of operations, like we
need I know, one stable place while recognizing that this
(12:33):
other person is going to live in other places a
lot of the time, and for them. They were very devoted,
Like he was very devoted to his family, and they
made it all work. But I would be miserable. Yeah, yeah,
I don't want to live away from Brian. No, he's
a bff. It's funny to me because like it's obvious
(12:54):
to me that this kind of relationship is not a
relationship that would work for you and Brian in any way. Yeah,
but the fact that they got married so quickly after
meeting one another, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's a little parallel.
That did kind of remind me of you and Brian. Well,
their marriage date is very close to ours as well,
which made me feel a little I'm like, oh, another
(13:14):
person that, yeah, married right away after they met in December.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
I do feel like all of the distance and separation
was hard for their kids. Oh, it had to have
been at least some of the time. And I don't
know how her other siblings felt about what their somewhat
similar upbringing was, Like, like Dorothy talked about it making
(13:41):
her a more independent person and that really becoming a
part of her later life. That I don't really fully
have a sense of how the younger sisters felt about
how often their parents were separated. How often they were
separated from their parents? Yeah, I mean it's this is
another interesting parallel, right, Like, and there's not necessarily one answer,
(14:02):
because there are like my dad's career military, so there
were times he was gone for sometimes years at a time,
and I credit that with one of the reasons I'm
very independent. But it's also like, because that was a
time where my mom was not always coping with things
very well, and so I just kind of had to be.
So it's like, on the one hand, great, it may
(14:23):
be super independent, on the other not great for the
family overall, you know what I mean. You can write
both simultaneously, so it's tricky. If they didn't write it
down anywhere, Yeah, we may never know. Yeah, yeah, I
did have to giggle at one point when she was
told to rest for a month. Yeah what no, your
(14:46):
hands no, right right. My impression was that she got
no diagnosis at that doctor visit when she was told
to rest for a month, right, And then she got
home and found that John Bernal had made a breakthrough
while she was at the doctor, So I think she
had no diagnosis and these orders to rest, and was like, well,
(15:08):
I'm immediately diving into this huge project that we've made
a big breakthrough on. I mean, I just can't imagine
any scenario where I just rest for a month. Yeah,
I'd lose my mind. Like, sure, take time off of
work for a month, that sounds fun, Like I would
love no obligation life for four weeks, but I would
still be Putter's McGhee. I'd be in the summer making stuff.
(15:29):
I'd be you know, scooting along doing I don't know, trips, Yeah,
things I just don't like. It sounds like that rest
for a month was especially because she was going for
a complaint with pain in her hands. Pain in her hands. Yeah,
it would be a lot of do nothing for a month.
And I think, again, this is before the wealth of
(15:49):
entertainment options one hands these days. Oh sure, Like at
that point, would you just sit quietly in a room?
I don't, Yeah, that's torture and I have I have
absolutely no concept whatsoever of whether rest would be helpful
or harmful for somebody with rheumatoid arthritis, which they did
not know yet from my understanding, was what she had right, Yeah,
(16:10):
because they're like, there are conditions where doing exercise is helpful,
but there are also conditions where exercise can cause a
flare up or can exacerbate situations unless it's done really carefully.
And I did not look into which of those well
or what combination is the case with rheumatoid arthritis. But yeah,
like just as being like, oh no rest for a month,
(16:32):
we have some in my family. And it's not the
same for everybody. Okay, so you know what I mean.
Some people do better if they're keeping up light amount
of work and others just have inflammation that makes movement
very very painful. Yeah, and it it gets exacerbated when
they try to do more like exercisey things. Yeah. So
(16:52):
I think it just depends. I don't I mean, I
could be wrong, And I also am going off of
some of that being quite old information, you know, a
couple of decades old. So I'm sure modern stuff there's
a lot more therapies, medications, et cetera. But I don't
think it's the same for every person now so complicated
in a variety of ways. I think the closest thing
(17:13):
I've ever experienced is that are number one. When I
was in high school, I got mono, Yeah, and I
had about two weeks when I really could do almost
nothing physically, and then the first time I got COVID.
The first few days of having COVID, I did not
feel as sick as I have felt a couple of
(17:34):
different times in my life when I had like the
I felt worse, one time when I had the flu,
and one time when I had a really bad bacterial
upper respiratory infection. I felt physically worse, but I was
so tired that I couldn't even think about the decision
of what could what can I watch next? Right, very often,
(17:56):
so I just started watching things that were really long,
like the entire and also that I had seen before,
because I couldn't focus on things either. If I liked,
let's watch the entire BBC Pride and Prejudice mini series
because I know how that story goes, and this goes
on for a very long time, so I won't even
have to get up and like change anything, right, and
(18:17):
that I continued to have a lot of like really
serious fatigue after getting better from like the respiratory symptom
part Yeah, and then also developed tachycardia. It's a party.
It's a party. It was the whole thing anyway, So yeah,
that's the closest thing I can imagine to like rest
for a month, not really the same thing. Anyway. I
(18:42):
gotta be busy bee, I can't even just watch a thing.
I gotta be doing so. Yeah, once again, I love
Dorothy Croffet Hodgkin. Yeah, she's true, very glad that my
trip to England kept just putting her in front of her.
Whatever is happening on your weekend, I hope you're able
(19:04):
to take some time for yourself to rest, to rejuvenate
yourself a little bit, and that you're able to have
patience with yourself and with other people, and that other
people are patient with you. I know sometimes I try
other people's patience. I think everybody does. Yeah. I hope
(19:24):
there's as little of that as possible over your weekend.
And if you're at work, I hope work goes very
well and then everyone's nice. We will be back with
a brand new episode on Monday, and we'll have a
Saturday classic tomorrow. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(19:47):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio 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 spent the whole
week talking about Drothy Crowfoot Hodggen, something that became clear
to me very early in the research was going to
(00:23):
be two parts, both because I wanted to spend a
little more time talking about her peace activism, her work
basically saying we should cooperate internationally as scientists, all of
that which is mentioned in most writing about her, but
maybe not a lot of time spent on it. And
(00:45):
also I just loved her. She's great. I kept finding
more reasons to love her the longer I worked on
the episode, And when I was in England, I set
myself a number of emails that just that said as
the subject line some person's name or some event or
whatever that I had just found reference to. Yeah. I
(01:07):
do the same when I travel. Yeah. Eventually, for some
reason I got tired of doing that and I started
just taking pictures of signs, And then after I got
back to my desk, I was just flipping through my
camera roll and seeing all the pictures of signs I
had taken, and you know, displays in museums and things
(01:28):
like that. And that was when I realized number one,
a bunch of stuff was taggeds happening on Dorothy Hodgkin Road.
And then number two that I had multiple things related
to Dorothy Hodgkin that I had taken pictures of. While
I was doing that, I had also taken pictures of,
first the exterior of the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum, which
(01:52):
is at the hospital where he was working in London. Holly,
have you been there? I have been by there, I
have not been in there, but I know where you're
talking about exactly. So this trip to England, we arrived
in London, Patrick and I spent a few days in London.
We met up with some friends in Birmingham, where Patrick
was at a convention, and then my friend and I
(02:15):
came back to London together, and then Patrick and her
husband came back separately together, and my friend and I
decided to go have dinner at a barge in Little Venice,
which was a wine and cheese barge perfect which we
were planning to have wine and cheese and then do
a second round of food somewhere else, but we filled
(02:36):
up on wine and cheese, and so as we were
walking out there, we saw the exterior of the building.
There's a like a you know, a marker. It's clear
this is the building where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillina. We
came back by a different route that took us on
the other side of the building, and realized that there
(02:56):
was a museum there that I didn't know existed, that
the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum. And this was maybe a
two minute walk from the hotel where Patrick and I
were staying. And so the next morning it was one
of those days where you're just all you're doing is
flying back home, right, but the flight home doesn't leave
until the afternoon, so you have a little bit of time. Yeah,
(03:18):
in the morning, that's time to do something, but not
time to do much. And I said, why don't we
walk over to the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum because it's
two minutes away. It opens at ten, we need to
be checked out of the room by eleven. It was
the perfect amount of time to go. It is a
(03:38):
very small museum. It is his laboratory that has been
reconstructed to look like it looked when he was working there,
and then a room where a brief film is shown,
and then a display about like the development of penicillin
in the history of Penicillin, And it turned out to
just be the really perfect way to close out the trip,
have a brief thing to do before were heading off
(04:01):
to the airport. And then another thing that brought up
the name of Dorothy Crowfet Hodgkin in all of this.
One of the things there were several things that jumped
out to me. One is that we something that we've
referred to when we were talking, which is her doing
chemistry experiments in the house unsupervised. As far as I know,
(04:24):
I think it was in the biography of her that
I referenced, which as I've started doing lately, that was
the thing that I read last after the outline was
largely put together, that kind of filled in some little
gaps in what I knew about her biography. So that
is by Georgina Ferry, and it is called Dorothy Hodgkin,
a Life. It was first published in nineteen ninety eight.
(04:46):
A second edition came out in twenty fourteen. There might
be another edition more recently than that, but one of
the things she said was, quote, modern parents might question
the wisdom of letting children play with naked flames and
the attic of an old house. And I was like, yeah,
I couldn't even play with naked flames at the dining
room table, not in the attic. I mean, you were
(05:06):
a very highly supervised child. I was, yeah, this is correct. Yeah,
like my parents were a little more tired by the
time they got to me because we had I had
three older siblings. Yeah, I was the oldest, and my
mom was an anxious person. Yeah, my mom was too,
but there was a lot of finger crossing and we're tired. Yeah.
(05:27):
So I've played with open flames a lot as a kid.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I don't remember how old I was when I got
a chemistry set, which was one of you know, the
commercially made chemistry sets for children. But I begged for
it for uh, for Christmas, Christmas or birthday, one or
the other, and got it. And most of the experiments
that I wound up doing out of it were the
(05:54):
experiments that I could do unsupervised. Yeah, that did not
involve open flame, did not involve anything that was marked
as being hazardous. Oh, I had my own lighter by
the age of nine. That's funny part of that. To
be fair, It wasn't like I was just running around
setting things on fire, but I already sewed a lot
by that point, and I was taking ballet and I
(06:16):
would singe the ends of the ribbons on my shoes. Yeah,
so I just it was just part of my life
at that point. They got it up free. I also
really thought a lot while working on this episode about
the nature of science as an international cooperative endeavor and
(06:37):
how devastating it is that how much of how much
science funding has been gutted in the United States, because
that effects not just the United States, but all of
these other countries that were interconnected with United States research,
some of the other countries that have started increasing their
science funding to try to make up for the drop
(06:59):
and funding of the United States. Like it is not
it doesn't compare the amount of money that was being
spent in the US. Like just it was enormous and
interconnected with so many things, interconnected with the higher education system.
A lot of university universities have basically been scientific research
centers that were being subsidized by the government, and without
(07:20):
that money, like what happens a lot of the research
is not being done. And then it also connects to
people being denied entry in the United States, or being
not having their visas renewed, or their whole class of visa.
Maybe that's going to go away. Like all of it,
I found. I just kept thinking about it the whole time.
(07:43):
I was thinking about all of her trips to make
connections with scientists and work with people and encourage them
in so many different places, including places that it was
really frowned upon for her to be going, like going
to North Vietnam.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah, like you, I am very disheartened by the funding
cuts that have been made to a lot of programs.
And I know there are people for whom that seems logical.
I don't think their logic is sound, but I understand
how for somebody who is susceptible to this kind of rhetoric.
(08:21):
If someone says they're not producing anything, they're wasting this money,
that might sound like a good idea. But part of
it is that people don't always understand what these labs
and these research groups are doing. It's not like they
can go, look, we made of this this week, Like
some of these studies are years and years long, and
they don't even know what the outcome will be for
(08:43):
quite a ways into it, and it just it breaks
my heart that we're not letting those programs continue and
to have time. I know some have gotten like you
could continue, but you have to hurry everything up, and
it's like, well that's it's not how science works. No
speed science. No, there are processes that are just going
(09:04):
to take time anyway. It's very disheartening. Yeah, and the
results might be no, this doesn't work, and we still
learned something if that's the case.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Right, So yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Something else that I said to you sort of in
a moment between actual recording was about Dorothy and Thomas's relationship.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
I feel like it's an overstatement to describe them as polyamorous,
because that is not an idea that really like that
term had not been coined, right, I don't think for
all of their lives. Definitely not for most of their lives.
And I'm also not fully fully sure what her feelings
(09:59):
were about his other relationships. I know that conceptually she
was like, we should be free to love who we
want to love, But there's a difference between thinking that
conceptually and what your feelings are about it. Yeah, and
I'm not fully confident I know what her feelings were
(10:20):
about it, but it does seem like she knew he
was having these other relationships, that neither of them felt
like it was a betrayal in any way. And then
it just seems to have worked for them that they
were so rarely in the same place for a long
periods of time, but continually writing each other letters. Yeah,
(10:42):
I mean, their whole marriage is unconventional, even if they
did not have whatever agreement or understanding in place that
there could be other romantic partners in the mix. Just
the fact that they barely lived in the same place ever. Yeah, well,
and that was like also the plan for minute one.
(11:03):
It was like, we're going to get married, We're going
to go on a honeymoon, but we're immediately going to
live in two different places.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
When I was in college, I might have told this
story before. When I was in college, I dated a
guy for a chunk of my time in college, and
his parents were both tenured professors at different universities in
different states. And that was just because like that was
how their careers had evolved. They had both wound up
on a tenure track in different places, and so they
saw each other on weekends, holidays, summers, and they did
(11:32):
a lot of driving back and forth between western North
Carolina and North Georgia. And my perception was that that
worked for them and it you know, they had basically
two households in two different places that their children went
back and forth depending on what was going on, and
it seemed to work out.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
I used to work with a guy who lived It
was in my brief foray into the gaming industry when
I was wearing at Cartoon Network and he I realized
after that I didn't want to stay in gaming because
so many people like the game publishes and then you know,
not that long later, either that whole team gets sunset
(12:13):
or sometimes the company closes or whatever. Like it's a
very for a lot of people, not everybody, but for
a lot of people. It is a very kind of
migrant career to have where you're constantly on the moon,
kind of volatile. And their thing was like, well, we
need somebody to have a base of operations, like we
need I know, one stable place while recognizing that this
(12:33):
other person is going to live in other places a
lot of the time, and for them. They were very devoted,
Like he was very devoted to his family, and they
made it all work. But I would be miserable. Yeah, yeah,
I don't want to live away from Brian. No, he's
a bff. It's funny to me because like it's obvious
(12:54):
to me that this kind of relationship is not a
relationship that would work for you and Brian in any way. Yeah,
but the fact that they got married so quickly after
meeting one another, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's a little parallel.
That did kind of remind me of you and Brian. Well,
their marriage date is very close to ours as well,
which made me feel a little I'm like, oh, another
(13:14):
person that, yeah, married right away after they met in December.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
I do feel like all of the distance and separation
was hard for their kids. Oh, it had to have
been at least some of the time. And I don't
know how her other siblings felt about what their somewhat
similar upbringing was, Like, like Dorothy talked about it making
(13:41):
her a more independent person and that really becoming a
part of her later life. That I don't really fully
have a sense of how the younger sisters felt about
how often their parents were separated. How often they were
separated from their parents? Yeah, I mean it's this is
another interesting parallel, right, Like, and there's not necessarily one answer,
(14:02):
because there are like my dad's career military, so there
were times he was gone for sometimes years at a time,
and I credit that with one of the reasons I'm
very independent. But it's also like, because that was a
time where my mom was not always coping with things
very well, and so I just kind of had to be.
So it's like, on the one hand, great, it may
(14:23):
be super independent, on the other not great for the
family overall, you know what I mean. You can write
both simultaneously, so it's tricky. If they didn't write it
down anywhere, Yeah, we may never know. Yeah, yeah, I
did have to giggle at one point when she was
told to rest for a month. Yeah what no, your
(14:46):
hands no, right right. My impression was that she got
no diagnosis at that doctor visit when she was told
to rest for a month, right, And then she got
home and found that John Bernal had made a breakthrough
while she was at the doctor, So I think she
had no diagnosis and these orders to rest, and was like, well,
(15:08):
I'm immediately diving into this huge project that we've made
a big breakthrough on. I mean, I just can't imagine
any scenario where I just rest for a month. Yeah,
I'd lose my mind. Like, sure, take time off of
work for a month, that sounds fun, Like I would
love no obligation life for four weeks, but I would
still be Putter's McGhee. I'd be in the summer making stuff.
(15:29):
I'd be you know, scooting along doing I don't know, trips, Yeah,
things I just don't like. It sounds like that rest
for a month was especially because she was going for
a complaint with pain in her hands. Pain in her hands. Yeah,
it would be a lot of do nothing for a month.
And I think, again, this is before the wealth of
(15:49):
entertainment options one hands these days. Oh sure, Like at
that point, would you just sit quietly in a room?
I don't, Yeah, that's torture and I have I have
absolutely no concept whatsoever of whether rest would be helpful
or harmful for somebody with rheumatoid arthritis, which they did
not know yet from my understanding, was what she had right, Yeah,
(16:10):
because they're like, there are conditions where doing exercise is helpful,
but there are also conditions where exercise can cause a
flare up or can exacerbate situations unless it's done really carefully.
And I did not look into which of those well
or what combination is the case with rheumatoid arthritis. But yeah,
like just as being like, oh no rest for a month,
(16:32):
we have some in my family. And it's not the
same for everybody. Okay, so you know what I mean.
Some people do better if they're keeping up light amount
of work and others just have inflammation that makes movement
very very painful. Yeah, and it it gets exacerbated when
they try to do more like exercisey things. Yeah. So
(16:52):
I think it just depends. I don't I mean, I
could be wrong, And I also am going off of
some of that being quite old information, you know, a
couple of decades old. So I'm sure modern stuff there's
a lot more therapies, medications, et cetera. But I don't
think it's the same for every person now so complicated
in a variety of ways. I think the closest thing
(17:13):
I've ever experienced is that are number one. When I
was in high school, I got mono, Yeah, and I
had about two weeks when I really could do almost
nothing physically, and then the first time I got COVID.
The first few days of having COVID, I did not
feel as sick as I have felt a couple of
(17:34):
different times in my life when I had like the
I felt worse, one time when I had the flu,
and one time when I had a really bad bacterial
upper respiratory infection. I felt physically worse, but I was
so tired that I couldn't even think about the decision
of what could what can I watch next? Right, very often,
(17:56):
so I just started watching things that were really long,
like the entire and also that I had seen before,
because I couldn't focus on things either. If I liked,
let's watch the entire BBC Pride and Prejudice mini series
because I know how that story goes, and this goes
on for a very long time, so I won't even
have to get up and like change anything, right, and
(18:17):
that I continued to have a lot of like really
serious fatigue after getting better from like the respiratory symptom
part Yeah, and then also developed tachycardia. It's a party.
It's a party. It was the whole thing anyway, So yeah,
that's the closest thing I can imagine to like rest
for a month, not really the same thing. Anyway. I
(18:42):
gotta be busy bee, I can't even just watch a thing.
I gotta be doing so. Yeah, once again, I love
Dorothy Croffet Hodgkin. Yeah, she's true, very glad that my
trip to England kept just putting her in front of her.
Whatever is happening on your weekend, I hope you're able
(19:04):
to take some time for yourself to rest, to rejuvenate
yourself a little bit, and that you're able to have
patience with yourself and with other people, and that other
people are patient with you. I know sometimes I try
other people's patience. I think everybody does. Yeah. I hope
(19:24):
there's as little of that as possible over your weekend.
And if you're at work, I hope work goes very
well and then everyone's nice. We will be back with
a brand new episode on Monday, and we'll have a
Saturday classic tomorrow. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(19:47):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.