Behind the Scenes Minis: Hearts and Arts

Tracy and Holly share experiences of having their hearts monitored using EKG technology. They also talk about whether or not Albert Bierstadt had any natural talent. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about electric cardiograms this week.
We sure did. You're wondering why we didn't postpone recording

(00:22):
because I have a little cold. We did. We did,
in fact postpone the recording. We got to the end
of the window for postponing things, so it became we
got to record the podcast. Now, I will say it
does seem like the fates have been trying to get
us to not record this time. Yeah, it's been a

(00:43):
kind of an ordeal this particular week. I'm going a
prefaces by saying I'm not asking for medical advice. Please
do not send medical advice if you find yourself writing
an email that starts I know you said not to
send medical advice, but please don't send that either. But
I'm going to tell the story of the two times
that I got an electric cardiogram. So the first time,

(01:05):
this was more than twenty years ago, I was having
a palpitation issue. I worked at a place where we
had a nurse, and so first I went to the
nurse and told her what I was experiencing, and the
nurse said that I should go to urgent care, which
I did, and they hooked me up to the machine
and that was normal. Then they were like, Okay, we're

(01:27):
going to just put you on this monitor for a while.
Just chill out in this room and we'll be back
to check on you in a little bit, and I
said cool. While they were gone, I started to really
need to pee and it was one of those things
where I couldn't stop thinking about it, and the like

(01:50):
need to go to the bathroom was stressing me out.
And then that was making the monitor like that was
making my heart rate go up, which I was also
aware of because I could see and hear the monitor
and it was a cycle. And finally the nurse came
back in. It was like whoa, what is going on?

(02:11):
And I was like, I've got to be so bad anyway,
the urgent care at that time also this becomes a
story about how our medical system in the United States
has broken. This is pre Affordable Care Act that we're
talking about. Is how long ago this was still broken.
They wanted to give me an event monitor, which is

(02:31):
kind of like a Halter monitor, but instead of continually
recording my heart I was supposed to mash a button
when I was experiencing the palpitation feeling that I was having.
Because nothing had other than the fact that when I
urgently needed to use the bathroom, my heart rate was
very high. Nothing had seemed unusual at urgent Care, so

(02:53):
they give me this thing. I at this point was
working as a massage therapist in a very fancy spa
and the monitor was under my clothing. It wasn't visible
to people. But the first time that I needed to
activate it, I was in the elevator at work, sort
of behind the scenes, and I learned that it made

(03:17):
an audible noise that I would compare to the sound
of a dial up modem connecting. Gotcha, And I was like,
I can't wear this at work. I am a massage therapist. Like,
if I'm in a room with a client and I
mashed this thing, it's going to do this. And if
I just don't mash it, because it's going to make
this loud noise in the middle of somebody's massage, like,

(03:38):
then I'm not getting the thing, Like I'm not getting
the monitoring that I'm supposed to be getting, so I
called the urgent Care and they were like, just send
it back. Months pass and I get a bill for
six hundred dollars, which is a tiny amount of money
compared to a lot of today's medical medical bills. But

(04:00):
it was six hundred dollars that I did not have
because the provider for the event monitor was out of network,
and because for some reason I didn't get a bill
for this until months after it had like the service
had happened. I was passed the deadline to to like

(04:21):
file like to get them to get the insurance company
to like revisit their denial of the claim right, and
I was like, I don't I don't have six hundred dollars.
Nobody talked to me about this costing six hundred dollars.
Nobody talked to me about the fact that the provider
for this thing was out of network. Apparently no one

(04:43):
thought to see if they were in my network before
signing me up for a six hundred dollar thing. That
they didn't the signing me up for a six hundred
dollar thing without like talking to me about it. And
then I moved away and that was the end of that.
And decades have passed without me ever again hearing about
that six hundred dollars, like it never went to collections

(05:04):
or anything like that. It's just a whole it's a
whole weird thing that is weird. That was all probably
stress related. I don't know's it's the problem stopped happening. Hooray.
That time I did have irritation from the adhesive on
the the electrons. This time, we have talked about how
I have been, like, I have hypertension, I'm on medication

(05:27):
for my blood pressure. I needed to have my dosage
adjusted and I had gone for a follow up for
that and my doctor was like, why is your heart
rate a little high? And I said I don't know,
and I had been putting in my pulse along with
my blood pressure readings, and she was like, it's been
a little high pretty much this whole time. Let's get
let's get an EKG. I at my physical I had

(05:49):
already gotten all of the of the various blood work
for things that might cause a person to have an
elevated heart rate, and all of that had been normal,
and the the EKG was almost was like also normal.
And when I was asked, have you ever had one
of these before? I was like, oh, yeah, it was

(06:09):
probably more than twenty years ago at this point. She
was like, yeah, this is it. It's changed almost none
since then, but the machine will probably take less time.
And for my specific experience, the adhesive electrodes did not
cause me any irritation whatsoever, which I was glad about
because I do tend to react to adhesives. Sometimes I

(06:30):
do too in medical contexts. So it was a great
move for me to drop the very unwieldy topic for
this because I was like, I bet I can do
an electro cardiogram episode way faster than I can finish
this unwieldy thing. That turned out to be totally correct.
Even working through having a cold the whole time. I

(06:52):
did not feel ill enough during the work week to
need to take sick days. My voice sounded terrible. I
returned to the unwieldy topic, which is coming. I definitely
would not have finished it on time. I continued trying
to work on it. It turned out to be kind
of a tangle. It is coming, though I'm not gonna

(07:13):
spoil what it is. It's gonna be soon. There. One
of the papers that I read while researching this was
about automated ECG interpretation, and it was called Automated ECG Interpretation,
A brief History from high Expectations to deepest Networks in
the journal Hearts And here's a quote quote. The purpose

(07:37):
of this article is to review the development of automated
ECG processing from its beginnings to the present day, with
the hope that between the time the article was written
and published there will not have been some world shattering
development to make the content of this paper outdated. I mean,
I found that hilarious, the refrain of all scientists everywhere

(08:00):
right now. Yep. We have occasionally recorded an episode on
something on the podcast and then in less than twenty
four hours there's a major discovery of that related to that,
something that seems more likely to happen in a field
like automated ECG interpretation. I also noted we've had a

(08:20):
number of medical episodes lately, and they've been pretty focused
on Europe and North America, and I think some of
that has to do with like where the centers of
academic and medical research were, But then some of it
is also probably just information availability. It's totally possible that
there were other discoveries elsewhere in the world. That I

(08:42):
just did not uncover in what I was working on.
So I wanted to and not acknowledge that this topic
reminded me of a thing that I forgot. Okay, which
is it. I don't think I had ever had an

(09:04):
EKG until last year, which is I've talked about it
on the show. I'm fine, everything's fine. But I had
been having weird chest pain. Oh yeah, And I had
done a like is this heart burn? Because I almost
feel like a jerk for saying this. I had never
experienced heart burn in my life. I can eat all

(09:25):
of the cruel and evil things and the most I
will do is burp, but I don't get a burning
sensation like I don't. So I did not know. And
I did a telehealth consult because it was like the
middle of the night, and the doctor that I talked
to was like, Hey, you're in your fifties. This could
be a heart attack. Maybe you go to the er now.
And I went to the er and I didn't even
have like this information all the way out of my

(09:47):
mouth before like an orderly came screeching around the corner
with the cart and was like, I'm still filling out
paperwork and they did it and they're like, hey, your
heart's fine, your heart's actually great, and I was like, okay, good.
I thought I would go home, but that was when
I had my gallbladder out. But the other thing that
I had quite forgotten was that I'm presuming it was
some form of a halter EKG. When I was admitted

(10:12):
and I was in the hospital, they continued to monitor
my heart just for safety, and so I had one
that lived or I had, you know, electrodes that lived
on me. And I didn't know until later when I
was like, what the heck's going on that it was
sending all of my info continuously via Wi Fi to
the nurses station. Oh yeah, until I like scratched myself

(10:35):
in my sleep and undid one of the electrodes, which
to them looked like I was crashing. And right right
there were a lot of very concerned people in my room,
and I'm like, what what's happening? Yeah, wonderful of them
to be on the spot, but yeah, I was just
a dang dong that moved my gown around and scratched

(10:55):
it myself in a way that yeah, ruined their feedback.
I don't fully know what happened because you are typically
not conscious during a colonoscopy unless you're me. I wake
him every time when I had been taken to the
recovery room after I got a colonoscopy, and I was,
you know, I had been brought my clothing and I

(11:17):
was in kind of like, you know, a private area
where I would recombobulate myself. They were unhooking me from things,
and then somebody went, oh, that explains it. And similarly,
like a monitor wire had had come off of what
it was supposed to be attached to. So I'm like,
what was happening in the room while my thing was

(11:39):
going on? Was somebody like, I don't know, something seems wrong,
but she seems fine. Whatever it was was a dislodged monitor.
You also gave me an unwieldy things memory. Oh yeah,
of a recent event. Okay, so some time ago, perhaps
a year and a half, huh, I was working on

(11:59):
a subject which became unwieldy. Yeah, and I kind of
abandoned it and then I forgot all about it. And
recently it has come to my attention that my sewing
room must be reorganized. It's really like in a rough shape.
If somebody looked at it. They wouldn't trust me to
make a bed, let alone make a garment like it.
It's become such a mess. And so I started like

(12:22):
basically pulling everything out of there, running stuff to our
storage unit, and then we're gonna put in new shelving
and like rebuild it out. But while I was doing that,
I uncovered several books that had become buried under fabric
that I had been using to research this other subject.
I was like, huh, I wonder how far along I
am on that. Maybe I should pick that b Yeah, yeah,

(12:45):
so it might still happen. We'll see, Yeah, I don't know.
My wieldy topic is definitely happening. It is I would
say seventy percent written at this point. Once I got
all of my note taking done. It was not like
the writing process has gone really quickly on it, but
like there was just too much left to do for
it to have been done in that amount of time.

(13:06):
So my one last thing that I have written on
my list of notes that I made for myself about
the behind the scenes for this. I don't know how
I wound up on the villain Eintoven Wikipedia page, because
like we don't that's not that's not where I'm researching episodes.
So I think I might have like clicked on somebody

(13:27):
else's source link on their thing and it turned out
to be Wikipedia or whatever. But there is a Jack
the Ripper section on the villain Wanchoven Wikipedia page alleging
that he was a suspect for being Jack the Ripper.
I was shocked by this because until reading that paragraph,

(13:52):
I had thought about what a nice guy he seemed
to be, Like, he seemed to be very focused on
giving other people credit for their work, even though that
you know, like he didn't necessarily need to credit someone
who did work independently of him, where they came to
a similar conclusion, but he did. I have no idea
what he was like as a person, but the fact

(14:13):
that he wanted to split his nobel money with an
earlier assistant also a thing that I that just sort
of was like, this seems like he might have been
a nice guy. And then I get to somehow on
the Wikipedia page and there's this Jack the Ripper thing.
So then I started trying to like find out what
people saying, we're saying about him possibly being Jack the Ripper,

(14:37):
and I didn't find any other reference to it in
any places that have stuff about potential Jack the Ripper's aspects.
I have deories you do. Yeah, okay, because maybe dabbling
more Jack the Ripper reading than you. But yeah, well,

(14:59):
and I am by no means a Jack the Ripper
expert in either, but I do love that story. Yeah,
it's a whole world of research that I have not
touched in any way. But I will say there are
two things that are like, oh, I see how he
got on the list, uh huh. One is that almost
any doctor practicing at the time got on the list

(15:22):
at some point. The other is that he was a foreigner, sure,
and a doctor and that Okay, that's like the double
trouble of well, you have an accent, you clearly must
hate women and be weird. So I think that's probably
all it was. Or maybe he was a super creeper.
I don't know, but uh, those are That pattern plays

(15:43):
out a lot if you look at at a lot
of the medical professionals in the area. It was like
the crosshatching of like doctors check doctors who are foreign
born check check check check check. Like it automatically and
exponentially increased their their their suspect level for the authorities. Yeah,

(16:05):
it was one of those things where I was like,
where did this information come from? And it's got that
tag on Wikipedia of citation needed, and that I wasn't
able to like reverse engineer any sort of citation for it.
So anyway, I think that's all I've really got to
say about electric cardiograms and today's behind scenes. I'll say
hooray for them. Yeah, older than I realized they were.

(16:28):
I mean I knew how that they are critical to
cardiac care. I don't think I had a sense of
just how many different things can be detected in one
until really working on this. We talked about Albert Beerstott

(16:52):
this week. Indeed, I almost said this weekend. I mean
I did talk about him in the preceding weekend with
friends and my husband, but that's not the same. His
work is so staggeringly beautiful that the almost clinical way
he approached it boggles my mind. Yeah. Occasionally when we

(17:14):
talk about somebody having talent, like I will hear objections
to the idea of talents as a thing, and it's like,
there are definitely people who find some things that come
very easily to them. Yes, And so when it comes
to things like artistic talent. There are for sure people

(17:35):
who find the process of making art and learning how
to do it comes easy to them, and also people
who like really have to work at it, and it
feels like more of a struggle. And I don't know
how he personally felt about the process of learning to
make art, but it does seem clear from like the
episode as he wrote it, that it was something that

(17:57):
he intentionally worked toward, not something that he necessarily just
felt an aptitude for from the beginning. No, and I
couldn't find the accounts. But in that lecture that we
mentioned that was given by Karen Quinn, I couldn't. I
couldn't find her source for it, but she mentioned that

(18:18):
accounts by his family are like, yeah, he wasn't actually
very good at all, like growing up, we don't know
how this happened. I mean, they know that he studied,
but it wasn't like he was like a thunder kind
that was like, oh, yeah, this child will become a
great painter. He will become one of the best known
painters of our lives. Yeah. Yeah, I remember being in

(18:38):
you know, art class in elementary school and the like,
there was one kid who could just sketch these amazing
lifelike sketches of people, while the entire rest of the
class was like one step up from finger painting. I

(19:00):
felt like that that was the case with him. No,
not at all. I will say though, his family did
seem to have an interest in visual media. And I
say that because we mentioned in the episode that he
was a pretty quick adopter of photography as a reference
collection tool, right, and his brothers also did a lot

(19:24):
of photography. One of his brothers became a professional photographer,
and I found in one thing that I looked at
and mentioned that he had actually opened a photography studio
with his brothers that was quite successful, But I couldn't
ever find verification of that, so I didn't include it
in the episode. It may be that he financially backed

(19:45):
them and he wasn't really involved in that business at all.
But one of his brothers did have a lot of
photography credits and helped him capture imagery sometimes when they
traveled together, and I think his other brother also did
some So I mean, again, I don't know much about
that brother and whether or not he was like I
love photography, it's my passion, or if he was like
photographs seemed lucrative. I really really yeah, And I thought

(20:11):
that quote that we included towards the end, that was
written shortly before he died was really germane in all
of this, because it's that line skill prevails over imagination
in the Dusseldorf artists. They I mean, these are skillfully
executed paintings. They are absolutely beautiful, in my opinion the

(20:34):
way I understand why our listener El who wrote in
was completely captivated by it, because the dramatic effect of
lighting in particular is just it will it will stop
you in your tracks. It's so beautiful, and it gets
into a bigger discussion of the creator versus the audience,

(20:54):
and like what the truly important part of that equation is, Right,
It doesn't matter matter that he wasn't necessarily like I'm
stricken with pain at the beauty of this, I must
paint it, and was instead like, stamp a picture of that,
Stamp a picture that I'm gonna pay this to my
studio later. It doesn't matter to me that that was
how that played out, because what matters to me is

(21:14):
that a person was emotionally moved by it later. Right, Yeah,
So that's a whole big discussion of art. There are
a lot of interesting discussions going on in the art
world right now about the meaning of the finances of

(21:35):
art and like how art becomes treasured to a degree
that the average person cannot possess art, and like what
it means to actually like the inflation of art value
and what art value means, which gets very heavy and interesting.
There lots of interesting discussions you can find about it.
But I mean, my thing has always been I don't

(21:59):
care if this person was doing this for any particular reason.
I don't care if they were moved. I'm sure moved
by it. Like, Yeah, I mostly see this kind of
discourse in the in the context of writing rather than
visual art, just because of the kinds of folks that
I tend to to follow, And I would say I

(22:21):
am familiar with the ongoing work of way more current
writers than current visual artists, and I will often see
discussions of the fact that, like the way we talk
about writing and the way we talk about creativity, a
lot of times people put this almost supernatural spin on

(22:43):
it when like, it's it's work. Yeah, it's work, and
people should be paid for their work and the like
mythologizing of the whole creative process does a disservice to
writing and other creative work from multiple angles. Yeah, I

(23:05):
mean in the art world, this is a big part
of that discussion, right, Like an artist is a professional
maker of art, and they should be paid for their
time and their effort and the time and effort that
they spent you know, getting educated or practicing or whatever
to get to the point that they can make something
that you find of value enough that you want to

(23:26):
have it in your home or in your life or whatever.
This gets me on another soapbox, but like it's that
juxtaposed against this person painted a piece of art, and
in a lot of cases, like in modern arts, sometimes
people will be like, I don't see the technique in this,
and yet it commands high for low five price tag,

(23:47):
you know, five digit price tag, and people not understanding
why that would be. And it is like a bigger
discussion too about economic demand and markets and what people
are actually paying for. Is it really the art or
is it the status of owning the art? Like it's
so heady and it's such a long and big thing.
But my other thing is this, if you like art

(24:12):
and we are also in a world where on the upside,
artists and access to art has become a little more
democratized in some ways. Right. You can find a lot
of people online selling their art that make absolutely beautiful
and incredible pieces of work. But often because I do
have a lot of friends that are artists, it is

(24:34):
shocking and mortifying to me how many people will try
to haggle an artists down from their asking price. And
it's like, because people think you made this, you could
make more, why do you want so much money? You
can just make another one. And it's like, no, because
I spent time making this one, right, that is what

(24:54):
you're paying for. Yeah, I also spent the time like
learning and practicing and honing my craft, in honing my art. Yeah,
that's wild to me. We believe in paying artists in
this household. I feel strongly about this issue. Yeah. That's
on my trip to Asheville from a few weeks ago.
At this point, they were having a festival in the
River Arts District, which was one of the places that

(25:16):
was devastated by Helene, with some of the with a
lot of galleries and studios just absolutely destroyed. Yeah, and
it like if you look at the map of the
River Arts District before Helene. It is maybe three times
as big as the map of what was open when
I was there. And I literally just walked around buying
small pieces of art from people. Anything I saw that

(25:39):
I liked that, I thought, Okay, I can get this
in my luggage going home. I just bought it. And
I don't know, I don't remember what the point was
of this besides the fact that, like, I loved seeing
how many people there were who were out there selling
their art and how different some of it was from

(25:59):
each other. Yeah, and I love that, and I love that,
you know, there is a place that, you know, all
of these various artists like created a place that was
a home for this that they are now recreating in
the aftermath of the hurricane. Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm
such a believer in patronizing artists as much as you can.
I think I've said before that my tattoo artist owns

(26:24):
an art gallery, and it's a portion of the gallery
space is what's set aside for tattoos, and so it
is the dangerous equation of me sitting there for several
hours at a time looking at beautiful art and not
coming home having purchased. Yeah, there are so many times
and I'm like, Brian, there's painting in the car, right,

(26:45):
It's okay, and I love it. There's so much that
That is where I had my birthday this year. I
had a bunch of friends and we went to the
gallery and they closed the gallery for us, and they
designed flash just for us, and we all got tattoos
and looked at art. And several of my friends were like, oh,
I see why this is in fact a problem, right, right,

(27:06):
She's just wonderful. More people patronize artists, take care, take
care of the artists. There are lots of people that
need patronizing, not in the negative, obejorative sense of that word,
but in terms of like supporting them in their their careers.
Artists are but one, but they're one that is very
special to me. So if this is your weekend coming up,

(27:28):
you can either buy some art from a local artist,
or you can go to a museum and appreciate art
that way that also supports the arts. If you don't
have time off, I hope you get to look at
something pretty that makes your heart feel good and happy
and whole, or evoke something in you that is important
and meaningful to you. I hope everybody's nice to each other,

(27:51):
and that we find ways to appreciate each other and
art and the joyous things in the world as much
as we can. I know that's hard sometimes, but it's
really important. We will be right back here tomorrow with
a classic episode, and then on Monday we will have
something brand new. Stuff you missed in History Class is

(28:14):
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