September 10, 2021 • 13 mins
Holly and Tracy talk about the aspects of the stethoscope story that didn't make it into the episode, including the classism related to cleanliness standards that often comes up in writeups about it. Tracy discusses the difficulty in getting a sense of Eunice Newton Foote's personality based on the available documentation of her life.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Happy Friday, Everybody. I'm Holly Fry
and I'm Tracy V. Wilson Tracy. This week we talked
about stethoscopes. Sure did um. I don't know how I
(00:21):
landed there. I was. I'm sure it was a thing
where I saw an image or something and went where
did that come from? Which is often what happens if
I'm doing an episode about an invention. One of the
things we did not get really into because I just
found it kind of like it always is written about
in kind of a sessationalized and yucky way. Is not
(00:42):
only lay a X embarrassment that's often referenced in leading
him to try to think of a way that he
could listen to his patient's chest without having to put
his ear up against her. Um, is that in some
writeups of that moment there is a lot of discussion
about how doctors didn't want to touch their patients because
(01:02):
they were unwashed and gross. Um, which I'm sure is
sometimes sometimes the case. But I don't know, there's no
way to really talk about it without it being a
side street of like maybe, but I don't know, how
clean was the doctor? Right, Like, there's always like a
big discussion about cleanliness standards, and there's a lot of
(01:24):
misconception about it, and a lot of classism falls into
that right where it's like it always has talked about
in this very denigrating way without recognizing that like people
did not have access to running water the way we
do necessarily. So if you were a working person or
like the city's working poor, it wasn't like you didn't care.
(01:45):
You just didn't have all the resources to like take
a bath every day a shower. So I didn't that
Just like I said, it gets all separate thing on
the social situation going on, whereas it kind of always
comes off and write up a little bit snooty of like,
oh yuck, I don't want to touch these people, right,
(02:06):
So I feel like I've heard that story framed not
so much as snooty classism, but as like really restrained
sexual mora's and modesty that too. I mean, that's that
it seems like, if you're doing pattern recognition was quite
likely more of an issue when you considered that Lenik
(02:27):
was also a man who like was so religiously devout
and considered so conservative in that regard that other doctors
were like, wow, you are wound really tightly. Um, So
it would seem natural that he might be a little
bit hesitant to um get right up on a woman
patient for that reason. I think that holds more water
(02:50):
than the he thought his patients were yucky. That may
or may not have factored into why other doctors adopted
it pretty readily. Like we said, not all of them,
but many. But yeah, it's a it's a weird that
becomes like a whole weird secondary social discussion that it
wasn't really germane to the actual tie. Somehow, it reminded
(03:14):
me of back when we did that ignat sum lice
episode and when he was saying everybody needs to be
washing their hands, and there was this argument that a
doctor's hands are always clean because the doctor is a gentleman. Right,
It's like that's cute. Mhm. Humans are humans ill get dirty. Yeah.
(03:36):
It is sad to me how much tuberculosis became the
theme of his life, right from his early age as
a kid, when he lost his mom and then other
family members and his um mentor, and then of course himself.
It is interesting that he seemed to want to be like,
I don't have it, I don't have it right. It
(03:57):
also took I always lose track of where in the
timeline people realized it was a contagious disease for sure,
because that when I was reading a biographical right up
on him in a medical journal and they had mentioned
like he didn't know it was contagious, and I was
like what, and I said, ah, they And that was
where I started to backtrack and realize that there were
(04:19):
still arguments going on about the exact nature of of
what caused tuberculosis um, which is also you know, that's
sad and terrifying thing that comes up a lot in
history of like doctors who are trying to help people
dying from the thing they are trying to fix because
they don't we didn't always know what was going on.
(04:40):
Nice seemed fun, And now I went down here, how
much do you love the idea that what we know
of Pieri's inspiration comes from a poem he wrote about it. Yeah,
that's pretty great, it's pretty fun. Um. It's It's one
of those things where I literally it seemed so I
(05:00):
don't know what the word is for it. It took
me so by surprise that I kept like cross referencing
things to make sure that was not like a weird
translation problem. I'm like, no, no, he really did write
a poem about it. Okay, great, uh, which is quite cute.
I like that he dedicated his his book to Lank
(05:24):
as well as two of their I think the other
two doctors were both mentors. They had both studied under,
which is kind of sweet. Anyway, I'm thankful that they
came up with the stethoscope because now we know an
awful lot more about um, you know, disease. And like
I said, we didn't go into super depth, but particularly
(05:44):
that second revision, he really did. Like if you hear this,
the possibilities are this, Like he really laid out a
diagnostic roadmap for for physicians, which is pretty impressive. And
for someone who died in his forties, that's a really
huge to see. And he's not a name, He's not
a name that's on everyone's lips outside of you know,
(06:04):
if you know a lot about medical history. Yeah, I
had questions about pronouncing it. That came up in the
middle of the episodes. Uh. Yeah, So thanks for that, Rennek,
because we sure appreciate it. Today we talked about Eunice
(06:30):
Newton Foot this week, and uh, this is the second
time in recent memory that I've been working on an
episode about somebody where I just have had a really
hard time getting a sense of like their personality, what
they were like as a person, things besides some spare
details of their life to build a kind of narrative
(06:51):
out of UM. Because I had a similar a similar
thing when we were working on Antie Jump Cannon with
their not being like a full on, you know for
adults biography of her. UM. There's even less about Unice
Newton Foot out there in the the publicly accessible world
right now, UM, which made it a little challenging, And
(07:14):
one of those things where I'm just like, you know,
if I lived closer to any of the places where
there might be some of her papers and there were
not a pandemic happening, might be like, guess what I'm
gonna do, drop everything and look for this. Yeah. I
(07:35):
liked Slash was a little bit bummed when we got
to the part about the genealogy writing where they're like,
she was a marvelous painter, and I'm like what, and yeah,
and they don't know anything about that's all I know,
I know nothing else besides that. Um. I. One of
the things I stumbled over when working on this was
(07:56):
a Twitter thread by one of her descendants, UM, trying
to find more information about her, and I like, we
mentioned that there's not a known photograph of her at
this point as of when we're recording it, um. And
in that thread there were some things that were like, well,
here's four pictures of women. One of them could be her,
(08:16):
but we don't really know. Um. Yeah. Some of the
people that she was connected to, either personally or or
through marriage through her children's marriages are like well known
and prominent enough that it seems like there probably is
other information in existence somewhere. Uh. It is a matter
(08:38):
of you know, finding it in archives and people's correspondence
and historical societies and maybe somebody's attic. Yeah, I do.
I will say this completely not related to her biography
or anything important. I think my favorite phrase of the
entire thing is electrical excitation. Yeah. If that doesn't sound
(09:00):
like a band from the eighties, I don't know what
does it does? Yeah? I love it. I would like
for that to be a modern day cover band that
does all of like the synth pop of the eighties, right,
lots of New Order covers. Yeah, that would be great
in my book. I also really appreciated how how accessible
(09:24):
both of their papers were to read in terms of,
um just having a pretty straightforward narrative of what they
did and what they found. UM. And you know, I
don't I don't read scientific journal articles as much now
as I used to when my job was writing for
(09:45):
the website How Stuff Works. But because the field of
science is a lot more professionalized than it was in
the middle of the nineteenth century, um, when there were
a lot of people just doing some experiments in their
own well lab and then publishing that in respectable journals
like the Level of Complexity and and Jargon and uh
(10:08):
and more. Inaccessibility has just trended over time to be
more difficult to get access to and more difficult to
read as a lay person. Yeah. I do love the
suggestion that you can kind of get from what little
we do know about her that she and Elisha were
clearly like partners. Yeah, they seemed to from just the
(10:32):
reading of each of their work. Like, the most obvious
conclusion is that they were a good match and they
had a happy marriage where they did experiments and they
invented things and they patented it. And doesn't that sound
kind of dreamy, That's sounds marvelous. We're gonna do some
science together, Honey, let me make the coffee. Let's get
on it. Yeah, that sounds beautiful. Yeah, we didn't mention
(10:55):
it in the episode, but one of the things that
that Elisha patented was uh and improved ice skate, And
so I kind of love the idea that Unice was
patenting a filling for shoes and boots so that they
would not be squeaking, and he was patenting a sort
of similar but slightly different ice skate. Listen, where is
(11:17):
that filler? Because I still have squeaky shoes. That's a
good question, although I imagine, I imagine that was a
filler that was intended for shoes of the time, which
often had like a much thinner leather sole than like
my sneakers today, which are squeaky. Yeah, I do not
mean the squeak of rubber on floors. I mean the
squeak when you take a step, because those still Yeah,
(11:40):
I remember back when not only were you and I
working in the same office, but that office is in
a different place and then the office that exists for company. Now. Um,
I had this pair of Mary Jane's that I loved,
and the interior pieces of them made just the loudest,
(12:01):
most embarrassing squeak, and I felt self conscious every time
I wore them, and nothing I tried to do to
address it worked well. And that office had very little
sound baffling, so I could see where one would become
self conscious with a squeak that would then carry across
the entire everything. Yeah, yeah, thanks everybody for joining us
(12:25):
for this. You know, Happy Friday again. Whatever is happening
your weekend. I hope it's going to be great. We'll
be back with an episode out of the archive tomorrow,
brand new episode episode on Monday. And if you want
to subscribe to the show, we're anywhere you could want
to get your podcasts, and if you want to drop
us a note, we're at history podcast that I heart
radio dot com. Stuff you missed in History Class is
(12:51):
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Happy Friday, Everybody. I'm Holly Fry
and I'm Tracy V. Wilson Tracy. This week we talked
about stethoscopes. Sure did um. I don't know how I
(00:21):
landed there. I was. I'm sure it was a thing
where I saw an image or something and went where
did that come from? Which is often what happens if
I'm doing an episode about an invention. One of the
things we did not get really into because I just
found it kind of like it always is written about
in kind of a sessationalized and yucky way. Is not
(00:42):
only lay a X embarrassment that's often referenced in leading
him to try to think of a way that he
could listen to his patient's chest without having to put
his ear up against her. Um, is that in some
writeups of that moment there is a lot of discussion
about how doctors didn't want to touch their patients because
(01:02):
they were unwashed and gross. Um, which I'm sure is
sometimes sometimes the case. But I don't know, there's no
way to really talk about it without it being a
side street of like maybe, but I don't know, how
clean was the doctor? Right, Like, there's always like a
big discussion about cleanliness standards, and there's a lot of
(01:24):
misconception about it, and a lot of classism falls into
that right where it's like it always has talked about
in this very denigrating way without recognizing that like people
did not have access to running water the way we
do necessarily. So if you were a working person or
like the city's working poor, it wasn't like you didn't care.
(01:45):
You just didn't have all the resources to like take
a bath every day a shower. So I didn't that
Just like I said, it gets all separate thing on
the social situation going on, whereas it kind of always
comes off and write up a little bit snooty of like,
oh yuck, I don't want to touch these people, right,
(02:06):
So I feel like I've heard that story framed not
so much as snooty classism, but as like really restrained
sexual mora's and modesty that too. I mean, that's that
it seems like, if you're doing pattern recognition was quite
likely more of an issue when you considered that Lenik
(02:27):
was also a man who like was so religiously devout
and considered so conservative in that regard that other doctors
were like, wow, you are wound really tightly. Um, So
it would seem natural that he might be a little
bit hesitant to um get right up on a woman
patient for that reason. I think that holds more water
(02:50):
than the he thought his patients were yucky. That may
or may not have factored into why other doctors adopted
it pretty readily. Like we said, not all of them,
but many. But yeah, it's a it's a weird that
becomes like a whole weird secondary social discussion that it
wasn't really germane to the actual tie. Somehow, it reminded
(03:14):
me of back when we did that ignat sum lice
episode and when he was saying everybody needs to be
washing their hands, and there was this argument that a
doctor's hands are always clean because the doctor is a gentleman. Right,
It's like that's cute. Mhm. Humans are humans ill get dirty. Yeah.
(03:36):
It is sad to me how much tuberculosis became the
theme of his life, right from his early age as
a kid, when he lost his mom and then other
family members and his um mentor, and then of course himself.
It is interesting that he seemed to want to be like,
I don't have it, I don't have it right. It
(03:57):
also took I always lose track of where in the
timeline people realized it was a contagious disease for sure,
because that when I was reading a biographical right up
on him in a medical journal and they had mentioned
like he didn't know it was contagious, and I was
like what, and I said, ah, they And that was
where I started to backtrack and realize that there were
(04:19):
still arguments going on about the exact nature of of
what caused tuberculosis um, which is also you know, that's
sad and terrifying thing that comes up a lot in
history of like doctors who are trying to help people
dying from the thing they are trying to fix because
they don't we didn't always know what was going on.
(04:40):
Nice seemed fun, And now I went down here, how
much do you love the idea that what we know
of Pieri's inspiration comes from a poem he wrote about it. Yeah,
that's pretty great, it's pretty fun. Um. It's It's one
of those things where I literally it seemed so I
(05:00):
don't know what the word is for it. It took
me so by surprise that I kept like cross referencing
things to make sure that was not like a weird
translation problem. I'm like, no, no, he really did write
a poem about it. Okay, great, uh, which is quite cute.
I like that he dedicated his his book to Lank
(05:24):
as well as two of their I think the other
two doctors were both mentors. They had both studied under,
which is kind of sweet. Anyway, I'm thankful that they
came up with the stethoscope because now we know an
awful lot more about um, you know, disease. And like
I said, we didn't go into super depth, but particularly
(05:44):
that second revision, he really did. Like if you hear this,
the possibilities are this, Like he really laid out a
diagnostic roadmap for for physicians, which is pretty impressive. And
for someone who died in his forties, that's a really
huge to see. And he's not a name, He's not
a name that's on everyone's lips outside of you know,
(06:04):
if you know a lot about medical history. Yeah, I
had questions about pronouncing it. That came up in the
middle of the episodes. Uh. Yeah, So thanks for that, Rennek,
because we sure appreciate it. Today we talked about Eunice
(06:30):
Newton Foot this week, and uh, this is the second
time in recent memory that I've been working on an
episode about somebody where I just have had a really
hard time getting a sense of like their personality, what
they were like as a person, things besides some spare
details of their life to build a kind of narrative
(06:51):
out of UM. Because I had a similar a similar
thing when we were working on Antie Jump Cannon with
their not being like a full on, you know for
adults biography of her. UM. There's even less about Unice
Newton Foot out there in the the publicly accessible world
right now, UM, which made it a little challenging, And
(07:14):
one of those things where I'm just like, you know,
if I lived closer to any of the places where
there might be some of her papers and there were
not a pandemic happening, might be like, guess what I'm
gonna do, drop everything and look for this. Yeah. I
(07:35):
liked Slash was a little bit bummed when we got
to the part about the genealogy writing where they're like,
she was a marvelous painter, and I'm like what, and yeah,
and they don't know anything about that's all I know,
I know nothing else besides that. Um. I. One of
the things I stumbled over when working on this was
(07:56):
a Twitter thread by one of her descendants, UM, trying
to find more information about her, and I like, we
mentioned that there's not a known photograph of her at
this point as of when we're recording it, um. And
in that thread there were some things that were like, well,
here's four pictures of women. One of them could be her,
(08:16):
but we don't really know. Um. Yeah. Some of the
people that she was connected to, either personally or or
through marriage through her children's marriages are like well known
and prominent enough that it seems like there probably is
other information in existence somewhere. Uh. It is a matter
(08:38):
of you know, finding it in archives and people's correspondence
and historical societies and maybe somebody's attic. Yeah, I do.
I will say this completely not related to her biography
or anything important. I think my favorite phrase of the
entire thing is electrical excitation. Yeah. If that doesn't sound
(09:00):
like a band from the eighties, I don't know what
does it does? Yeah? I love it. I would like
for that to be a modern day cover band that
does all of like the synth pop of the eighties, right,
lots of New Order covers. Yeah, that would be great
in my book. I also really appreciated how how accessible
(09:24):
both of their papers were to read in terms of,
um just having a pretty straightforward narrative of what they
did and what they found. UM. And you know, I
don't I don't read scientific journal articles as much now
as I used to when my job was writing for
(09:45):
the website How Stuff Works. But because the field of
science is a lot more professionalized than it was in
the middle of the nineteenth century, um, when there were
a lot of people just doing some experiments in their
own well lab and then publishing that in respectable journals
like the Level of Complexity and and Jargon and uh
(10:08):
and more. Inaccessibility has just trended over time to be
more difficult to get access to and more difficult to
read as a lay person. Yeah. I do love the
suggestion that you can kind of get from what little
we do know about her that she and Elisha were
clearly like partners. Yeah, they seemed to from just the
(10:32):
reading of each of their work. Like, the most obvious
conclusion is that they were a good match and they
had a happy marriage where they did experiments and they
invented things and they patented it. And doesn't that sound
kind of dreamy, That's sounds marvelous. We're gonna do some
science together, Honey, let me make the coffee. Let's get
on it. Yeah, that sounds beautiful. Yeah, we didn't mention
(10:55):
it in the episode, but one of the things that
that Elisha patented was uh and improved ice skate, And
so I kind of love the idea that Unice was
patenting a filling for shoes and boots so that they
would not be squeaking, and he was patenting a sort
of similar but slightly different ice skate. Listen, where is
(11:17):
that filler? Because I still have squeaky shoes. That's a
good question, although I imagine, I imagine that was a
filler that was intended for shoes of the time, which
often had like a much thinner leather sole than like
my sneakers today, which are squeaky. Yeah, I do not
mean the squeak of rubber on floors. I mean the
squeak when you take a step, because those still Yeah,
(11:40):
I remember back when not only were you and I
working in the same office, but that office is in
a different place and then the office that exists for company. Now. Um,
I had this pair of Mary Jane's that I loved,
and the interior pieces of them made just the loudest,
(12:01):
most embarrassing squeak, and I felt self conscious every time
I wore them, and nothing I tried to do to
address it worked well. And that office had very little
sound baffling, so I could see where one would become
self conscious with a squeak that would then carry across
the entire everything. Yeah, yeah, thanks everybody for joining us
(12:25):
for this. You know, Happy Friday again. Whatever is happening
your weekend. I hope it's going to be great. We'll
be back with an episode out of the archive tomorrow,
brand new episode episode on Monday. And if you want
to subscribe to the show, we're anywhere you could want
to get your podcasts, and if you want to drop
us a note, we're at history podcast that I heart
radio dot com. Stuff you missed in History Class is
(12:51):
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio 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
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