August 8, 2025 • 28 mins
Holly talks about gaining compassion for Fitz Hugh Ludlow through reading his work. Tracy discusses her training in massage school.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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 Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. He paused. Then I was like,
is it my time? I don't know how to do
(00:22):
my talkies. Some days we talked about Fitzhugh Ludlow. This week.
I have so much compassion for him, and at the
same time, I also have a funny thing that's kind
of my initial thoughts on him were less kind than
they became during the research. Okay, because part of it
is that his writing of his first book about his
(00:45):
use of hashish kind of struck me the way like
a trust fund baby will do something for the first
time and think they invented it and like they're the
only person that's ever experiences. But then reading it, when
I actually started reading more of it, and I was like, Oh,
he's really being very frank about the ups and downs
(01:07):
of using mind altering substances and being very honest and
not as a brilliant as I had initially anticipated. I
really came to respect a lot of his work. And
then the fact that while he was dealing with his
own problems and his own difficulties of trying to get
over his opium addiction, that he was trying to advocate
(01:28):
and help as many other people, even though he probably
knew he was not long for this earth. I just
kind of now have a soft spot for him. Yeah,
there's a weird thing I did not include. It gets
referenced in some of his obituaries, and it's because several
of them mentioned that his last public appearance was as
(01:53):
a witness in a weird trial. And I was trying
to figure this whole thing out out because it seems
like there was a mister McFarland who was in some
trouble for various fraudulent activities, and then at some point
(02:13):
fitz Hugh Ludlow had basically ghost written a thing for
him and allowed him to say he had written it,
and he sold that piece, okay, And so that was
the only connection of the two of them. But once
fitz Hugh Ludlow set in court, No, I actually wrote
that it shifted how some of the other evidence was
(02:36):
perceived because that had been used of a thing of
like this man who can write like this and do this,
and it's like, no, he actually can't relate. That fits
Hugh Ludlow with which was just weird. We mentioned briefly
in the episode that his father Henry, after losing his
(02:56):
first daughter, Maria, he loved his kids, but he in
his private writings, noted that he could never love a
child the way that he had loved Maria, Like nothing
could ever fill that vacancy in his heart that he
felt that he had after Maria died. Until and this
makes this whole marriage thing super weird. When fitz Hugh
(03:23):
met Rosalie, Henry's writing was like, Rosalie is the thing
that will fix my sorrow over Mary. I love her
so much. She's the daughter that I lost, and it's
really really odd. Yikes. So then for that person who
your father adores more than you to be the person
(03:43):
that also cheats on you and leaves with your friend, Listen,
there was a lot going on in this young man's
life that was not as him. Yeah, super messy, not great.
I also saw a thing and I couldn't ever figure
out where this came from or connect the dots to
(04:03):
what they were talking about. There was an exhibit done
at Union College about Fitzhugh Ludlow, because that's his alma mater.
And in one of like the plaques about him, it
suggested that his sister Helen was gay, and that he
(04:24):
knew even if other people did not, and that he
had written a short story that was like a thinly
veiled way of talking about her, and that he loved
her and you know, wanted her to be happy. But
I could never figure out which one of his short
stories it was, And I will confess to you I
did not read all of his short stories to find it,
(04:44):
because fitz Hugh Ludlow had a busy pen like he
was a writer's writer. He never stopped producing, So I'm
not sure which that was. If that's true, I would
love to do some more research or find it in
some way. But it's an interesting thing because it's one
more way in which he seemed really progressive about a
(05:05):
lot of things that modern society took a lot longer
to catch up to. You like the way he talks
about treatment for addiction is so different than anything else.
And there's also he's sometimes credited with like kind of
(05:25):
inventing the concept of a halfway house in the way
he describes his treatment center ideal of like being a
place where people can live and kind of like be
living their lives, but also have the support that they
need even after they've gotten over the initial difficulty of
recovery from addiction. Yeah, like the acute withdrawal symptom phase. Yeah.
(05:47):
And it's interesting because I didn't go into all of it.
We read so much of his writing and there was
so much that I had to strike because it was
getting along. But he had this idea about it that
you should do a period of aute withdrawal and then
get the person kind of back on at a lower
dose and progress the step down from there, because he
(06:09):
felt like, if you just do the acute withdrawal and
then leave them hanging, people are more likely to have
a serious relapse. Whereas I don't know the science behind this.
I'm not an expert in this space. I don't know
if that's supported by any other actual like medical or
scientific studies. But this was just from his own experience.
That's how he felt, and that if you could then
reintroduce it in a very controlled way and step down
(06:32):
from there, by the time you get to the lowest dosages,
people will naturally just stop taking it, almost without thinking,
because it's not impacting them in any kind of positive
way anymore, and you're offering up these other activities and
things to engage them in a way that they just won't.
They will have broken their reliance on it, both emotionally
(06:53):
and physically at that point, which is a very interesting idea.
So yeah, I kind of I kind of love him. Yeah,
there's another uns substantiate. Again, it might be in his writings,
but I did not get to read the entirety of
his work. When he was doing his cross country travel
with Beerstadt, he talks about how hard it was to
(07:14):
sleep because in a lot of cases they were in
like a stage coach with other people and you were
expected to sleep sitting up, which he could not do.
And I'm like, brother, I feel you. So I read
this in one biography, but it wasn't sourced and I
wasn't sure where it came from, so I didn't want
to include it in the episode. But there is a
(07:37):
piece of writing that suggests that he borrowed like ten
yards of rope and then he tied it around the
top of the coach in a way that he could
wiggle under the rope, Like one loop of it was
at his feet, one was up at his shoulders, and
he would stick his coat behind his head and he
(07:57):
would ride on top of the stage coach as a
bed so that he could get some real sleep because
he could sitting up. I don't know if that's true,
but I am kind of charmed by it. Yeah, as
a person who really struggles to Like I used to
take overnight trains from Atlanta to Washington, d C. And
back when we were owned by Discovery, And I also
(08:22):
had a phobia of getting on airplane and attempting to sit,
like attempting to get any sleep like that was incredibly hard.
And I would say a modern Amtrak train is way
more comfortable than a stage coach. Yeah, and like those
seats have more leg room and recline more than airplane seats.
(08:43):
Anytime I'm on a red eye flight now, probably not
sleeping much there either, And if I could rig up
some kind of something to suspend my legs from right, yeah, Yeah,
I'm the same I am international flight if it's an
overnight or like going from here to Europe is usually
(09:04):
an overnighter. Uh huh, I'm not sleeping period, end of
I don't even try anymore. Yeah, because I can't sleep
sitting up. I'm gonna walk up and down the aisles.
Even if I have a very nice seat, I can't sleep. Yeah,
I think well meaning people might send links to some
of the various things that are supposed to loop over
the tray table or whatever, and please do not for
(09:26):
many reasons, one of them being I am too tall
for any of those devices. I just find them all
very claustrophobic. Yeah, like a lot of things that are
made to kind of give your foot a place to
to rest or hang on a plane do not. They
do not do that for people who are as tall
(09:48):
as me. Yeah, they well, and they don't work for
people as short as me because it can't always reach
them anyway. Yeah, there's no But I do sort of
love this idea that he's like, I'm going to to
solve this problem. I have gone days without sleep. My
body will not allow me to sleep sitting up in
a stagecoach. So can I just tie myself to the roof?
(10:09):
And it seemed to work for him, if indeed that's correct.
Like I said, I didn't find the source, but he
wrote so prolifically that I did not read all of
his accounts. Sure so sure, but I'd like to I
really do like the way he writes. It is very florid,
but his turns of phrase are quite fun, and aside
from the gross surprise racism, I just like his writing style.
(10:35):
I think that was most of what I had on
Fitzhugh Ludlow, really surprisingly progressive advocate in the realm of
addiction and treatment, and I just think, like, I'm sure
there are others, but I don't remember ever having read
another account of withdrawal that is so frank outside of
(10:58):
a medical text that will literally tell you the horrible
things your body is going to do. So I appreciate
his openness. I wish he had stayed around longer, because
maybe he could have continued to advocate and we would
have gotten farther ahead in the you know, destigmatization of
these issues and maybe actually gotten more people help sooner. So,
(11:20):
fitz Hugh Ludlow, I hope, wherever you are, you see
that we're trying. We talked about Paracelsus and the doctrine
of signatures this week. Uh huh. That man loved Mercury. Yeah,
I loved it for everything. I've had him on my
(11:40):
list for an episode for a really long time, and
I think at one point, I also had the Doctrine
of Signatures on my list, and I was like, I
don't really feel like there's enough here to have a
whole episode. There would have been enough for a whole
episode if it had focused on if I had combined
the two, which is exactly what happened. You did. Yes, Yeah,
(12:01):
I find the whole thing really fascinating and also horrifying
and also fascinating. Yeah, but I made myself laugh, or
the Internet made me laugh with my he really loved
mercury thing. First of all, I think that's probably he
probably just poured mercury on that dude's leg. Yeah, And
I don't know if it really healed it or not,
or maybe his body just healed on its own and
(12:23):
he took credit. But you know how, if you're on
like in many many search setups will work this way.
But if you're on like an Internet archive full text
book page and you search for a word, you'll get
little yellow bars at the side of the scroll bar
(12:45):
that show where it shows up in the document. If
you go into almost any of his books and search mercury,
it's almost a solid line everywhere. He's just like mercury mercury.
I heart mercury, like he loves it so much. Yeah, man,
that's poison. Yeah, yo, you're killing people your mention of poison.
(13:07):
Though it brings up a quote from him, and of
course all of these are translated. But I really like
this because it may not be the first, but it's
the earliest instance I have stumbled across of this now
pretty famously used idea. Right, we always hear the dose
makes the poison, and he wrote, quote, what is there
(13:30):
that is not a poison? All things are poison and
nothing is without poison solely the dose determines that a
thing is not poison. It was like he kind of understood.
Maybe he thinks he's using mercury judiciously all the time.
I think I've seen the like the dose determines the poison,
like attributed to him as the originator of it. I
(13:53):
don't know if that's actually the case or not. It's true,
It's really it's so hard to say for sure that
any particular person originated first. Yeah, and sometimes we will
have said for a long time that so and so
coined such and such, and then you know, somebody digs
up something from fifteen years previously and goes, oh, here's
(14:16):
the same thing though, Oh, Paracelsus. Yeah, you were gonna,
I think, share your stories of the doctrine of signatures
being invoked in your professional work. Yeah, so the preside. Yeah,
I so, many many years ago I had I'd had
a couple of writing jobs that were really unsatisfying. They
(14:39):
all involved basically business to business writing work, and there
were a lot of things that I found it. I
found difficult and uninteresting, and I said I should learn
to do something else. But I did not have the
money or the time to go back to college and
start over. And I could get a massage therapy certification
(15:01):
in six months and still work part time during that
six months. Yeah, so that's what I did. And at
that time, North Carolina was just at the beginning of
licensing massage therapists. A lot of states were like, this
was sort of at the beginning of the movement to
license and regulate massage. I went to this massage school
and one of the classes that we had to take
(15:22):
was an erbal medicine part of the curriculum. My personal
feeling is that this does not actually belong in massage therapy.
That rbal medicine is not in a massage therapist's scope
of practice. And we had this herbal medicine instructor who
brought various things into the classroom and was passing them around,
(15:47):
and like she would, she was passing around one of
them and she was like, yes, I'm not even gonna
say what it is, because I, like you said in
the episode, I don't want to like have some scraping
coy episode turn this into advice for people. But it
was a It was a route that she was passing
around and talking about how good it was as a
quote immune tonic, which is not really a thing, and
(16:11):
she was like, feel how sturdy this is? How strong
it makes me? Think of how you know, strengthening your
body and strengthening your immune system. Remember the doctrine of signatures.
I don't think I would have been able to stop
laughing that. Honestly. The two biggest frustrations that I had
(16:32):
working as a massage therapist. One was that the places
that I was able to get a job were mostly
day spas and resort spas, and I was working every
weekend and in the case of the resorts, every holiday,
and that was hard. But then also my professional colleagues
would say nonsense, and it I was like, that's that's
(16:56):
not a real thing. The microwave is not the molecules
of your food backward. It's just not it's not how
it works. That's the real thing. Somebody said to me
one time. So you are reminding me of a wackadoo thing,
a coworker said to me once. But we'll go finishers. Yeah. Yeah,
(17:18):
so yeah, just this whole, this whole herbal medicine class,
like it came up repeatedly and sometimes I was like, yes,
that root kind of does look like a man, but
it also looks like a nerve, and it also looks
like a tree, and it also looks like, uh, I
don't know the branches of your lung anatomy like this, Yeah,
(17:43):
this could look like so many different things. And yeah,
we do know for sure that there are various herbs
that do have some kind of medicinal use. Also, like
there are whole indigenous traditions involving food and medicine and
(18:04):
you know, botany and the environment that are not really
what we were talking about in this episode. Like we
were talking about like a very European medical tradition and
one of the things that I found frustrating is that
sometimes the folks who are sort of operating in this
space today will kind of latch on to indigenous traditions
(18:27):
or traditions from other parts of the world that they
that they're not part of and that they don't have
a connection to, and the can kind of use it
to back up what's basically a remnant of sixteenth and
seventeenth century European medical medical in quotation marks nonsense. Yeah. Yeah,
(18:47):
it's one of those things too, where like there are,
like you said, indigenous oral traditions, but you can't cherry
pick them out of context to justify kind of operating
on vibes. Yeah, it comes to sidey. Yeah, vibes is
really what I think of a lot with the doctrine
of signatures. Yes, it's very much vibes. You made me
(19:10):
laugh thinking about a colleague who once was marveling at
the way salt would help with icy sidewalks. Uh huh,
And she just said so earnestly and so sweetly. She
was a lovely human. I just don't understand it. It's
the molecules. And I have used the phrase it's the
molecules so many times so many times throughout my life
(19:33):
since then, it's the molecules. My massage therapist education also
included a unit on nutrition. Nutrition is also not within
the scope of practice of a massage therapist, and our
(19:54):
nutrition teacher told us that if your nutrition was perfect,
that you would never become ill in your life. You
just wouldn't. You would have perfect nutrition, and you would
never have any kind of illness, and you would never
get any kind of chronic illness, you would never develop cancer,
and then one day you just stopped being a gay. Yes,
(20:16):
a lot of the things that she talked about, like
this was just a very time consuming, labor intensive approach
to food that she was kind of advocating in the classroom.
And one of my classmates offhandedly said, oh, so does
your husband help you with all of this cooking, and
she said no, he had a massive stroke, and we
(20:38):
all just yeah, yeah, we all just sort of stared, stunned,
and nobody wanted to say, so, were you not feeding
him correctly? But that like that, I don't know, that's
just the kind of stuff that came up. The parts
of my massage therapy education that were about anatomy and
(20:59):
physicology and kinesiology and massaging people. Those were great, Yeah,
And then there were other parts where I was like,
I'm not sure why we need to learn us to
get licensed, and also some of this is not real. Yeah.
I have definitely heard many people invoke that idea of
like sometimes the old ways are best, and I'm like,
(21:23):
please go to a doctor. Like, I'm not gonna say
nothing ever was discovered that was helpful, but also please
go to a doctor. Well, and especially now that we're
living in the era of RFK Junior being the Secretary
of Healton, Yeah, services like, yeah, yes, go to a doctor.
There was a passage that I found in the writings
(21:44):
of Paracelsus that I actually quite liked. I don't necessarily
agree with exactly what he is saying, but it has
a lovely concept to it. I read it, and it's
about sleep, because as we know, I have a fraught
relationship with sleep, but I like this one. Natural sleep
(22:04):
is the rest of the body, which recuperates as wasted energies.
Now the day pertains to bodies, night to spirits. Bodies
work in the day spirits at night. The sleep of
the body is the waking time of the spirit. For
the two cannot operate together, being contraries and mutually incompatible things.
Whatsoever is done by the body during sleep is really
(22:25):
performed by the spirit. Okay. I don't think that there
are two parts of me that cannot exist at the
same time. But I do like the idea that sleep
is restorative, that you will wake up with your body
having done things that seem almost miraculous. That's all. I
don't really think that a spirit takes over and massage
is my body. Ah'd be great. That's probably why I
(22:50):
can't sleep. The spirit keeps waking me up. I'm like, stop, stop.
The spirit is a large cat sometimes. Yeah. I had
a bad night of sleep that night, and I like,
I just I was. I kept waking up, and I
was having trouble settling back down. And then one of
the cats came over and they normally curl up next
to me and it's very cute and comforting. But what
(23:12):
she decided to do in that moment was to get
on the side of my body and make her pause
into just little pokers that poked me in the ribs
in the sixty phone, and I was like, why you
could be here and I would be comfortable, But now
you're here and you're disrupting the spirit of my sleep. Yeah,
(23:35):
I don't mind when the cats walk all over me,
because I'm probably awake anyway. Yeah. Yeah, I've just never
had a all of the like practice good sleep hygiene
stuff doesn't really help me very much. I wake up
sixteen times a night usually, and not just like random stirrings,
but like I'm awake for a while. And I will
(23:58):
say it's genetic. Throughout my family, a lot of people
with the same sleep weirdness. It's fine, I'm fine. I've
operated this way since a childhood. I remember there being
almost an argument with my kindergarten teacher because I said
something about being able to stay up as late as
I wanted, and my parents having to explain, like, we
(24:22):
all kind of have some sleep problems, and she can
go to bed, but if she's awake, she can read
a book, because it's torture to sit there and lie
awake with nothing. It was just a thing, you know.
They were worried that I lived in some sort of
wild stable where I was just running free and doing
(24:43):
whatever a five year old wanted to do. But in fact,
my parents knew we all had sleep disorders, probably also
easily cultivated. I don't know. I've tried all the sleep tricks.
They don't work for me. They may work great for
other people. I'm not going on vibe. So I've seen
doctors about it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sort of imagining the
(25:03):
well meaning emails that we may get advising you to
see a doctor about your sleep. Yeah. No, I it's
the thing. It's already happened. Yeah. It's also weird to
me though, because the flip is that it doesn't bother
me at all to be awakened in the night, Like
I don't Yeah, I don't care if somebody. If I'm
sharing a hotel room with somebody that's not my beloved
and they're snoring and it wakes me up, I'm like, cool,
(25:26):
they're snoring, that's fine. Yeah. If i'm you know, if
an animal is on me, if the phone ring, none
of that bothers me. Yeah. My beloved is not the same.
He likes to sleep. Yeah, it's it can be a
little challenging, especially when you do have cats that are rude.
For a number of years, stretching back a while, I
(25:46):
have generally woken up sometime in the two or three
o'clock in the morning range, and then I'm awake for
a bit, yeah, and then I go back to sleep.
And just accepting that that's how it works for me
made that a lot better, because when I was like
stressing out about the fact that I was awake, that
(26:09):
did not help at all. And similarly, I've also it's
a thing that I've discussed with my doctor, all of that,
but just sort of being like, all right, it's it's
three point thirty, I'm awake. I'm probably going to be
awake for at least an hour, and if I'm just
chill about it, probably I'm going to go back to sleep.
That was about the case this past weekend, in part
because I took a very long hike for the first
(26:30):
time in a very long time, and my whole body hurt. Yeah,
and then a cat was putting her paws into like
the most uncomfortable parts of me possible. Yeah, kitties. Yeah.
If I my two thirty ish wake up is my
longest one, and I sometimes will just get out of
bed and go sit in the living room and like
(26:52):
mess around on my phone till my brain goes you're
sleepy again, and then I'll go back to bed because
if I just sit in bed, I will make Brian's
night horrible. Yeah, Or in some cases, the bad cat
is so bad that we are invited to move to
the guest room by my mom because she is the
cat that is very bonded to me. Right, and the
(27:13):
two of us will have a slumber party every night,
chatting and meowing. But it's very funny in any case.
If this is your weekend coming up, I hope you
get great sleep if you can. If you can't, I
hope you have figured out a system that works best
for you so that you do your spirit is doing
the things it needs to do to recover. If you
do not have a weekend coming up, I still hope
(27:34):
you get great sleep. I hope everyone is kind to
each other. I hope you have fun things. I hope
you eat the most delicious things and that you feel
restored in whatever way makes the most sense to you.
We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic
episode and then on Monday with something brand new. Stuff
(27:56):
you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more pod casts 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 Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. He paused. Then I was like,
is it my time? I don't know how to do
(00:22):
my talkies. Some days we talked about Fitzhugh Ludlow. This week.
I have so much compassion for him, and at the
same time, I also have a funny thing that's kind
of my initial thoughts on him were less kind than
they became during the research. Okay, because part of it
is that his writing of his first book about his
(00:45):
use of hashish kind of struck me the way like
a trust fund baby will do something for the first
time and think they invented it and like they're the
only person that's ever experiences. But then reading it, when
I actually started reading more of it, and I was like, Oh,
he's really being very frank about the ups and downs
(01:07):
of using mind altering substances and being very honest and
not as a brilliant as I had initially anticipated. I
really came to respect a lot of his work. And
then the fact that while he was dealing with his
own problems and his own difficulties of trying to get
over his opium addiction, that he was trying to advocate
(01:28):
and help as many other people, even though he probably
knew he was not long for this earth. I just
kind of now have a soft spot for him. Yeah,
there's a weird thing I did not include. It gets
referenced in some of his obituaries, and it's because several
of them mentioned that his last public appearance was as
(01:53):
a witness in a weird trial. And I was trying
to figure this whole thing out out because it seems
like there was a mister McFarland who was in some
trouble for various fraudulent activities, and then at some point
(02:13):
fitz Hugh Ludlow had basically ghost written a thing for
him and allowed him to say he had written it,
and he sold that piece, okay, And so that was
the only connection of the two of them. But once
fitz Hugh Ludlow set in court, No, I actually wrote
that it shifted how some of the other evidence was
(02:36):
perceived because that had been used of a thing of
like this man who can write like this and do this,
and it's like, no, he actually can't relate. That fits
Hugh Ludlow with which was just weird. We mentioned briefly
in the episode that his father Henry, after losing his
(02:56):
first daughter, Maria, he loved his kids, but he in
his private writings, noted that he could never love a
child the way that he had loved Maria, Like nothing
could ever fill that vacancy in his heart that he
felt that he had after Maria died. Until and this
makes this whole marriage thing super weird. When fitz Hugh
(03:23):
met Rosalie, Henry's writing was like, Rosalie is the thing
that will fix my sorrow over Mary. I love her
so much. She's the daughter that I lost, and it's
really really odd. Yikes. So then for that person who
your father adores more than you to be the person
(03:43):
that also cheats on you and leaves with your friend, Listen,
there was a lot going on in this young man's
life that was not as him. Yeah, super messy, not great.
I also saw a thing and I couldn't ever figure
out where this came from or connect the dots to
(04:03):
what they were talking about. There was an exhibit done
at Union College about Fitzhugh Ludlow, because that's his alma mater.
And in one of like the plaques about him, it
suggested that his sister Helen was gay, and that he
(04:24):
knew even if other people did not, and that he
had written a short story that was like a thinly
veiled way of talking about her, and that he loved
her and you know, wanted her to be happy. But
I could never figure out which one of his short
stories it was, And I will confess to you I
did not read all of his short stories to find it,
(04:44):
because fitz Hugh Ludlow had a busy pen like he
was a writer's writer. He never stopped producing, So I'm
not sure which that was. If that's true, I would
love to do some more research or find it in
some way. But it's an interesting thing because it's one
more way in which he seemed really progressive about a
(05:05):
lot of things that modern society took a lot longer
to catch up to. You like the way he talks
about treatment for addiction is so different than anything else.
And there's also he's sometimes credited with like kind of
(05:25):
inventing the concept of a halfway house in the way
he describes his treatment center ideal of like being a
place where people can live and kind of like be
living their lives, but also have the support that they
need even after they've gotten over the initial difficulty of
recovery from addiction. Yeah, like the acute withdrawal symptom phase. Yeah.
(05:47):
And it's interesting because I didn't go into all of it.
We read so much of his writing and there was
so much that I had to strike because it was
getting along. But he had this idea about it that
you should do a period of aute withdrawal and then
get the person kind of back on at a lower
dose and progress the step down from there, because he
(06:09):
felt like, if you just do the acute withdrawal and
then leave them hanging, people are more likely to have
a serious relapse. Whereas I don't know the science behind this.
I'm not an expert in this space. I don't know
if that's supported by any other actual like medical or
scientific studies. But this was just from his own experience.
That's how he felt, and that if you could then
reintroduce it in a very controlled way and step down
(06:32):
from there, by the time you get to the lowest dosages,
people will naturally just stop taking it, almost without thinking,
because it's not impacting them in any kind of positive
way anymore, and you're offering up these other activities and
things to engage them in a way that they just won't.
They will have broken their reliance on it, both emotionally
(06:53):
and physically at that point, which is a very interesting idea.
So yeah, I kind of I kind of love him. Yeah,
there's another uns substantiate. Again, it might be in his writings,
but I did not get to read the entirety of
his work. When he was doing his cross country travel
with Beerstadt, he talks about how hard it was to
(07:14):
sleep because in a lot of cases they were in
like a stage coach with other people and you were
expected to sleep sitting up, which he could not do.
And I'm like, brother, I feel you. So I read
this in one biography, but it wasn't sourced and I
wasn't sure where it came from, so I didn't want
to include it in the episode. But there is a
(07:37):
piece of writing that suggests that he borrowed like ten
yards of rope and then he tied it around the
top of the coach in a way that he could
wiggle under the rope, Like one loop of it was
at his feet, one was up at his shoulders, and
he would stick his coat behind his head and he
(07:57):
would ride on top of the stage coach as a
bed so that he could get some real sleep because
he could sitting up. I don't know if that's true,
but I am kind of charmed by it. Yeah, as
a person who really struggles to Like I used to
take overnight trains from Atlanta to Washington, d C. And
back when we were owned by Discovery, And I also
(08:22):
had a phobia of getting on airplane and attempting to sit,
like attempting to get any sleep like that was incredibly hard.
And I would say a modern Amtrak train is way
more comfortable than a stage coach. Yeah, and like those
seats have more leg room and recline more than airplane seats.
(08:43):
Anytime I'm on a red eye flight now, probably not
sleeping much there either, And if I could rig up
some kind of something to suspend my legs from right, yeah, Yeah,
I'm the same I am international flight if it's an
overnight or like going from here to Europe is usually
(09:04):
an overnighter. Uh huh, I'm not sleeping period, end of
I don't even try anymore. Yeah, because I can't sleep
sitting up. I'm gonna walk up and down the aisles.
Even if I have a very nice seat, I can't sleep. Yeah,
I think well meaning people might send links to some
of the various things that are supposed to loop over
the tray table or whatever, and please do not for
(09:26):
many reasons, one of them being I am too tall
for any of those devices. I just find them all
very claustrophobic. Yeah, like a lot of things that are
made to kind of give your foot a place to
to rest or hang on a plane do not. They
do not do that for people who are as tall
(09:48):
as me. Yeah, they well, and they don't work for
people as short as me because it can't always reach
them anyway. Yeah, there's no But I do sort of
love this idea that he's like, I'm going to to
solve this problem. I have gone days without sleep. My
body will not allow me to sleep sitting up in
a stagecoach. So can I just tie myself to the roof?
(10:09):
And it seemed to work for him, if indeed that's correct.
Like I said, I didn't find the source, but he
wrote so prolifically that I did not read all of
his accounts. Sure so sure, but I'd like to I
really do like the way he writes. It is very florid,
but his turns of phrase are quite fun, and aside
from the gross surprise racism, I just like his writing style.
(10:35):
I think that was most of what I had on
Fitzhugh Ludlow, really surprisingly progressive advocate in the realm of
addiction and treatment, and I just think, like, I'm sure
there are others, but I don't remember ever having read
another account of withdrawal that is so frank outside of
(10:58):
a medical text that will literally tell you the horrible
things your body is going to do. So I appreciate
his openness. I wish he had stayed around longer, because
maybe he could have continued to advocate and we would
have gotten farther ahead in the you know, destigmatization of
these issues and maybe actually gotten more people help sooner. So,
(11:20):
fitz Hugh Ludlow, I hope, wherever you are, you see
that we're trying. We talked about Paracelsus and the doctrine
of signatures this week. Uh huh. That man loved Mercury. Yeah,
I loved it for everything. I've had him on my
(11:40):
list for an episode for a really long time, and
I think at one point, I also had the Doctrine
of Signatures on my list, and I was like, I
don't really feel like there's enough here to have a
whole episode. There would have been enough for a whole
episode if it had focused on if I had combined
the two, which is exactly what happened. You did. Yes, Yeah,
(12:01):
I find the whole thing really fascinating and also horrifying
and also fascinating. Yeah, but I made myself laugh, or
the Internet made me laugh with my he really loved
mercury thing. First of all, I think that's probably he
probably just poured mercury on that dude's leg. Yeah, And
I don't know if it really healed it or not,
or maybe his body just healed on its own and
(12:23):
he took credit. But you know how, if you're on
like in many many search setups will work this way.
But if you're on like an Internet archive full text
book page and you search for a word, you'll get
little yellow bars at the side of the scroll bar
(12:45):
that show where it shows up in the document. If
you go into almost any of his books and search mercury,
it's almost a solid line everywhere. He's just like mercury mercury.
I heart mercury, like he loves it so much. Yeah, man,
that's poison. Yeah, yo, you're killing people your mention of poison.
(13:07):
Though it brings up a quote from him, and of
course all of these are translated. But I really like
this because it may not be the first, but it's
the earliest instance I have stumbled across of this now
pretty famously used idea. Right, we always hear the dose
makes the poison, and he wrote, quote, what is there
(13:30):
that is not a poison? All things are poison and
nothing is without poison solely the dose determines that a
thing is not poison. It was like he kind of understood.
Maybe he thinks he's using mercury judiciously all the time.
I think I've seen the like the dose determines the poison,
like attributed to him as the originator of it. I
(13:53):
don't know if that's actually the case or not. It's true,
It's really it's so hard to say for sure that
any particular person originated first. Yeah, and sometimes we will
have said for a long time that so and so
coined such and such, and then you know, somebody digs
up something from fifteen years previously and goes, oh, here's
(14:16):
the same thing though, Oh, Paracelsus. Yeah, you were gonna,
I think, share your stories of the doctrine of signatures
being invoked in your professional work. Yeah, so the preside. Yeah,
I so, many many years ago I had I'd had
a couple of writing jobs that were really unsatisfying. They
(14:39):
all involved basically business to business writing work, and there
were a lot of things that I found it. I
found difficult and uninteresting, and I said I should learn
to do something else. But I did not have the
money or the time to go back to college and
start over. And I could get a massage therapy certification
(15:01):
in six months and still work part time during that
six months. Yeah, so that's what I did. And at
that time, North Carolina was just at the beginning of
licensing massage therapists. A lot of states were like, this
was sort of at the beginning of the movement to
license and regulate massage. I went to this massage school
and one of the classes that we had to take
(15:22):
was an erbal medicine part of the curriculum. My personal
feeling is that this does not actually belong in massage therapy.
That rbal medicine is not in a massage therapist's scope
of practice. And we had this herbal medicine instructor who
brought various things into the classroom and was passing them around,
(15:47):
and like she would, she was passing around one of
them and she was like, yes, I'm not even gonna
say what it is, because I, like you said in
the episode, I don't want to like have some scraping
coy episode turn this into advice for people. But it
was a It was a route that she was passing
around and talking about how good it was as a
quote immune tonic, which is not really a thing, and
(16:11):
she was like, feel how sturdy this is? How strong
it makes me? Think of how you know, strengthening your
body and strengthening your immune system. Remember the doctrine of signatures.
I don't think I would have been able to stop
laughing that. Honestly. The two biggest frustrations that I had
(16:32):
working as a massage therapist. One was that the places
that I was able to get a job were mostly
day spas and resort spas, and I was working every
weekend and in the case of the resorts, every holiday,
and that was hard. But then also my professional colleagues
would say nonsense, and it I was like, that's that's
(16:56):
not a real thing. The microwave is not the molecules
of your food backward. It's just not it's not how
it works. That's the real thing. Somebody said to me
one time. So you are reminding me of a wackadoo thing,
a coworker said to me once. But we'll go finishers. Yeah. Yeah,
(17:18):
so yeah, just this whole, this whole herbal medicine class,
like it came up repeatedly and sometimes I was like, yes,
that root kind of does look like a man, but
it also looks like a nerve, and it also looks
like a tree, and it also looks like, uh, I
don't know the branches of your lung anatomy like this, Yeah,
(17:43):
this could look like so many different things. And yeah,
we do know for sure that there are various herbs
that do have some kind of medicinal use. Also, like
there are whole indigenous traditions involving food and medicine and
(18:04):
you know, botany and the environment that are not really
what we were talking about in this episode. Like we
were talking about like a very European medical tradition and
one of the things that I found frustrating is that
sometimes the folks who are sort of operating in this
space today will kind of latch on to indigenous traditions
(18:27):
or traditions from other parts of the world that they
that they're not part of and that they don't have
a connection to, and the can kind of use it
to back up what's basically a remnant of sixteenth and
seventeenth century European medical medical in quotation marks nonsense. Yeah. Yeah,
(18:47):
it's one of those things too, where like there are,
like you said, indigenous oral traditions, but you can't cherry
pick them out of context to justify kind of operating
on vibes. Yeah, it comes to sidey. Yeah, vibes is
really what I think of a lot with the doctrine
of signatures. Yes, it's very much vibes. You made me
(19:10):
laugh thinking about a colleague who once was marveling at
the way salt would help with icy sidewalks. Uh huh,
And she just said so earnestly and so sweetly. She
was a lovely human. I just don't understand it. It's
the molecules. And I have used the phrase it's the
molecules so many times so many times throughout my life
(19:33):
since then, it's the molecules. My massage therapist education also
included a unit on nutrition. Nutrition is also not within
the scope of practice of a massage therapist, and our
(19:54):
nutrition teacher told us that if your nutrition was perfect,
that you would never become ill in your life. You
just wouldn't. You would have perfect nutrition, and you would
never have any kind of illness, and you would never
get any kind of chronic illness, you would never develop cancer,
and then one day you just stopped being a gay. Yes,
(20:16):
a lot of the things that she talked about, like
this was just a very time consuming, labor intensive approach
to food that she was kind of advocating in the classroom.
And one of my classmates offhandedly said, oh, so does
your husband help you with all of this cooking, and
she said no, he had a massive stroke, and we
(20:38):
all just yeah, yeah, we all just sort of stared, stunned,
and nobody wanted to say, so, were you not feeding
him correctly? But that like that, I don't know, that's
just the kind of stuff that came up. The parts
of my massage therapy education that were about anatomy and
(20:59):
physicology and kinesiology and massaging people. Those were great, Yeah,
And then there were other parts where I was like,
I'm not sure why we need to learn us to
get licensed, and also some of this is not real. Yeah.
I have definitely heard many people invoke that idea of
like sometimes the old ways are best, and I'm like,
(21:23):
please go to a doctor. Like, I'm not gonna say
nothing ever was discovered that was helpful, but also please
go to a doctor. Well, and especially now that we're
living in the era of RFK Junior being the Secretary
of Healton, Yeah, services like, yeah, yes, go to a doctor.
There was a passage that I found in the writings
(21:44):
of Paracelsus that I actually quite liked. I don't necessarily
agree with exactly what he is saying, but it has
a lovely concept to it. I read it, and it's
about sleep, because as we know, I have a fraught
relationship with sleep, but I like this one. Natural sleep
(22:04):
is the rest of the body, which recuperates as wasted energies.
Now the day pertains to bodies, night to spirits. Bodies
work in the day spirits at night. The sleep of
the body is the waking time of the spirit. For
the two cannot operate together, being contraries and mutually incompatible things.
Whatsoever is done by the body during sleep is really
(22:25):
performed by the spirit. Okay. I don't think that there
are two parts of me that cannot exist at the
same time. But I do like the idea that sleep
is restorative, that you will wake up with your body
having done things that seem almost miraculous. That's all. I
don't really think that a spirit takes over and massage
is my body. Ah'd be great. That's probably why I
(22:50):
can't sleep. The spirit keeps waking me up. I'm like, stop, stop.
The spirit is a large cat sometimes. Yeah. I had
a bad night of sleep that night, and I like,
I just I was. I kept waking up, and I
was having trouble settling back down. And then one of
the cats came over and they normally curl up next
to me and it's very cute and comforting. But what
(23:12):
she decided to do in that moment was to get
on the side of my body and make her pause
into just little pokers that poked me in the ribs
in the sixty phone, and I was like, why you
could be here and I would be comfortable, But now
you're here and you're disrupting the spirit of my sleep. Yeah,
(23:35):
I don't mind when the cats walk all over me,
because I'm probably awake anyway. Yeah. Yeah, I've just never
had a all of the like practice good sleep hygiene
stuff doesn't really help me very much. I wake up
sixteen times a night usually, and not just like random stirrings,
but like I'm awake for a while. And I will
(23:58):
say it's genetic. Throughout my family, a lot of people
with the same sleep weirdness. It's fine, I'm fine. I've
operated this way since a childhood. I remember there being
almost an argument with my kindergarten teacher because I said
something about being able to stay up as late as
I wanted, and my parents having to explain, like, we
(24:22):
all kind of have some sleep problems, and she can
go to bed, but if she's awake, she can read
a book, because it's torture to sit there and lie
awake with nothing. It was just a thing, you know.
They were worried that I lived in some sort of
wild stable where I was just running free and doing
(24:43):
whatever a five year old wanted to do. But in fact,
my parents knew we all had sleep disorders, probably also
easily cultivated. I don't know. I've tried all the sleep tricks.
They don't work for me. They may work great for
other people. I'm not going on vibe. So I've seen
doctors about it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sort of imagining the
(25:03):
well meaning emails that we may get advising you to
see a doctor about your sleep. Yeah. No, I it's
the thing. It's already happened. Yeah. It's also weird to
me though, because the flip is that it doesn't bother
me at all to be awakened in the night, Like
I don't Yeah, I don't care if somebody. If I'm
sharing a hotel room with somebody that's not my beloved
and they're snoring and it wakes me up, I'm like, cool,
(25:26):
they're snoring, that's fine. Yeah. If i'm you know, if
an animal is on me, if the phone ring, none
of that bothers me. Yeah. My beloved is not the same.
He likes to sleep. Yeah, it's it can be a
little challenging, especially when you do have cats that are rude.
For a number of years, stretching back a while, I
(25:46):
have generally woken up sometime in the two or three
o'clock in the morning range, and then I'm awake for
a bit, yeah, and then I go back to sleep.
And just accepting that that's how it works for me
made that a lot better, because when I was like
stressing out about the fact that I was awake, that
(26:09):
did not help at all. And similarly, I've also it's
a thing that I've discussed with my doctor, all of that,
but just sort of being like, all right, it's it's
three point thirty, I'm awake. I'm probably going to be
awake for at least an hour, and if I'm just
chill about it, probably I'm going to go back to sleep.
That was about the case this past weekend, in part
because I took a very long hike for the first
(26:30):
time in a very long time, and my whole body hurt. Yeah,
and then a cat was putting her paws into like
the most uncomfortable parts of me possible. Yeah, kitties. Yeah.
If I my two thirty ish wake up is my
longest one, and I sometimes will just get out of
bed and go sit in the living room and like
(26:52):
mess around on my phone till my brain goes you're
sleepy again, and then I'll go back to bed because
if I just sit in bed, I will make Brian's
night horrible. Yeah, Or in some cases, the bad cat
is so bad that we are invited to move to
the guest room by my mom because she is the
cat that is very bonded to me. Right, and the
(27:13):
two of us will have a slumber party every night,
chatting and meowing. But it's very funny in any case.
If this is your weekend coming up, I hope you
get great sleep if you can. If you can't, I
hope you have figured out a system that works best
for you so that you do your spirit is doing
the things it needs to do to recover. If you
do not have a weekend coming up, I still hope
(27:34):
you get great sleep. I hope everyone is kind to
each other. I hope you have fun things. I hope
you eat the most delicious things and that you feel
restored in whatever way makes the most sense to you.
We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic
episode and then on Monday with something brand new. Stuff
(27:56):
you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more pod casts 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
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.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!