March 17, 2023 • 26 mins
Holly and Tracy talk about some of the odd details in the Alma Petty Gatlin trial and difficulty finding the right language to discuss alcohol misuse. Then discussion turns to vivisection and the hosts' experiences with dissection in school.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday at Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about murder. Yeah, yeah,
I always had to say it. Like Linda Melcher, There's
(00:24):
so much I left out of this story because it
was like Blair and kind of sexist in infantilizing to Alma.
But it merits discussion because these are things that have
not entirely gone away. One of the things that really
(00:45):
stood out to me while I was reading accounts of
the trial was a comment Pardue made. He got to
the trial a little bit late when it started, and
he had to sit in the press box, so reporters
heard him say this. He had not seen Alma in
quite a while. She of course, had still been in jail,
(01:07):
he had not been visiting her, and the first thing
he said when she came into the courtroom was, Wow,
she looks like she lost forty pounds, which she apparently
had lost about forty pounds while she was in jail.
But it also was just super gross, and there was
lots of discussion of her body in the press about
(01:27):
how like some accounts you read of her trial is
about how incredibly pretty she was. And then there are
others that are like, yeah, but remember when she was fat,
and it's just like the grossests, like, oh, she had
been quite chubby before all of this, so maybe this
was good. Like it's just the grossest, ickiest, But that
stuff still happens today. It is not confined to the
(01:50):
nineteen twenties by any stretch of the imagination. Just yucky.
I just want to point out people still do that. Yeah,
don't do that. Now. You hear someone doing that, call
them on it to their face. There's just no need. Yeah.
The other thing that comes up a lot is that
(02:10):
in newspaper accounts, and this will surprise no one, she
was very young, but she was an adult and a
married woman, but they call her the girl all the time. Yeah,
And I'm like, yeah, something that I sort of thought
about as we were talking about, like the press coverage
and how they talked about her, and the emphasis on
(02:32):
what it was going to be like if she had
to be executed by the electric chair and all of
that stuff. It was sort of about how still today
when we're talking about like a young, pretty white woman
being accused of something, it being handled totally differently than
accusations against like a person of color or all of that.
(02:56):
Like that. I kept thinking about that as we're talking
about it. Oh he invoked like her one day children,
Like you know, it was just all very weird. There
was so much circling around, even from the beginning, this
idea that like the police not taking it seriously because
she she could not have done anything. She is a
(03:18):
sweet girl that we all love. And as you said,
if she were not, you know, a cute white girl, yeah,
that would have gone completely differently. That Dodge is pesky. Yeah,
and what a weird way to talk about it to me, Like, well,
(03:38):
this is interesting because to me, and I don't know
where anyone's feelings on the matter stand. Of course, as
I was researching and I would be, I would vacillate
between being like, oh, she totally did it and also
going like, oh, maybe not. And part of what I
kept coming back to were the parts of the version
(04:01):
she told Pardu versus the version she told in court.
And also we don't know that that version she told
Pardu was really what she said, but there was so
much overlapping detail, but it almost seemed like the Dodge
actually becomes a point for me where I'm like, oh,
that kind of makes it seem like she really was
(04:23):
covering for her mother because it's such a weird detail. Yeah,
why would she have included it in her account to
Pardue if she had not heard it from her mother
who said a car came and took him away? Yeah,
And I it seems to me like that point where
someone is trying to reconcile all the details of a thing. Yeah,
(04:43):
and the ones that don't make sense are because they
weren't really the one that was involved in that part
of it, right, But that could just be like a
Pollyanna read on my part, well, and just the whole thing.
I'm like, but who was driving the car? How did
they hear they needed to come take a body away? Right?
They're so right? And so to me, like if she
had like seen the car leaving the driveway, not knowing
(05:09):
who was driving it, not really knowing anything like that,
to me is it would sort of then be reasonable
to be like an you know, a Dodge, somebody in
a Dodge came and took him away. But like otherwise,
I'm like, if it was if she had murdered him,
like then how how did this dodge get summoned? Like,
I just it was very confusing to me. Well, and
(05:32):
there was a piece of information that appeared in kind
of like the raggy newspapers that were like, no, some
people are saying they saw two men leaving the house
that night. But then that move, that story just kind
of like disappears into the ether, which makes you sound
like it never had any real substance. Do you want
(05:53):
to hear like a creepy part. Yeah, okay, So obviously
Smith was dead and in the basement. Yes, the Petties
no longer lived at that house on Lindsay Drive, but
the people that lived there were their friends, and that
house is where Alma and Jean spent their wedding night,
(06:14):
and she knew her dead dad was in the book. Yeah,
it's super weird. That's a weird one. That was a
little like that gave me the huzz Yeah. I was like,
oh no, Almah, maybe you are a sociopath. I don't. Yeah,
something I have struggled with in this episode and other
(06:36):
episodes that I don't think we have talked about on
the show or in the behind the scenes is discussions
around like alcohol addiction and alcohol abuse, because there's been
like a movement away from using the term alcoholism because
it's stigmatizing. There are three different people in my life
(07:00):
who have died as a direct result of alcohol, and
the term misuse, to me, does not encapsulate what they
went through or dealt with. And so when we're talking
about this on the show, especially when we're talking about
(07:21):
somebody who clearly, like while under the influence of alcohol,
was horribly abusive to his family and violent and threatening,
like to call that misuse feels weirdly minimizing. So it's like,
I don't know what the best language is at this
point to both not be stigmatizing but also not minimize
(07:41):
what's going on, if that makes sense. Oh, same boat.
I mean, there are certainly lots of people in my
life who have had a fraught relationship with alcohol. That's
the kindest way I know to put it. And I
have these same exact struggle as you. I'm like, yeah,
(08:02):
misuse sounds a little And I don't want to criticize
people who are coming up with this terminology because I
know it's difficult, but it sounds a little benign in
some cases. Yeah, like this one where it's like no
misuse to me sounds more like someone is perhaps harming themselves.
But this is a person that becomes like a monster
(08:23):
um and I admittedly like my own take on it
is you know, charged with its own bias and experience.
But it's it's tricky. It's hard to know how to
how to talk about those things. I know there are
huge you know efforts that go on, um around all
kinds of substance use and misuse that that people are
(08:45):
really trying to find the right language and it is difficult.
Yeah U. So Yeah. The other thing that is interesting
to me in this to jump to slightly less it's
(09:09):
not less serious and a different kind of serious is
that moment where the authorities did the same thing. Do
you remember where we talked about the last guillotining in
France which is kind of recent and similarly like an
American woman had been murdered and there was all of
(09:30):
that going on, and just as in that case where
the police got accused of doing nothing and they were like,
we have totally been doing things. Shut up, we're trying
to keep it on the d O, the same thing
went on here and it just is one of those
things where that also is kind of a tricky space
of like everyone wants transparency from authorities. Yeah, sometimes transparency
(09:52):
can hurt a case or an investigation of this nature.
And I understand how that is difficult territory to walk. Yeah,
and it can get misused, um and you know, abused
by by people in power who can just say no,
we've totally been doing we're doing it. Um. It's a
but it's an interesting thing that comes up again and again. Yeah,
(10:14):
I UM, I had some similar thoughts about how um
the reverend uh, like leaving aside the question of whether
he should have disclosed something that was like was confided
in his role as like a minister, like aside from that, um,
(10:36):
like he had reported it, but then it was like
aggressively pursuing the matter. Um. And part of me was like,
you've reported it though, like you you did that part
like and now you're so aggressively going after it in
(10:58):
a way, I'm like, what is why is the thing
that you feel so compelled to like continue to push on.
It's it's not as though like you think someone else
is going to come to harm that would be prevented
by right. I mean he always told the press and
(11:20):
anyone who asked him, because he was I mean, it
was not a matter of like later people criticize people
criticized him from the outset. But his thing was that
I really really thought long and hard about this, and
I felt like to be a good citizen, I had
to do everything I could to bring a murderer to justice.
(11:43):
I mean, I don't know what his motivation is. We
never will. It's interesting because there when you read accounts
even today, there are people who are very divided on
this case and how it should have gone down. The
one of the books that I read, in addition to
a lot of the newspaper stuff I combed through, was
(12:04):
by a man who was a boy in Readsville when
all of this was going on, and he had been
one of the people that showed up in the yard
when he found out there was a dead body in
the basement, and he had grown up with the story
and just couldn't quite stop thinking about it. So he
ended up doing a really comprehensive, you know, research and
write up of it, and spoke with Alma in her
(12:26):
later days. And it's it's interesting to me because I
feel like someone in that position could very easily be
very heavy handed and biased in their writing one way
or the other. But it does seem like he's pretty
to me. It reads us pretty even handed where he
(12:47):
does talk about like all of the pros and cons
of everybody involved, Like, yes, the preacher probably shouldn't have
done this, but also he really thought he was doing
at least he claimed he really thought he was doing
what his conscience told him he had to. Yes, Alma
was young and grew up in a horrible, abusive household. Also,
(13:10):
why was her cell green? Like, Yeah, there are a
lot of questions about it that are just kind of strange,
and that's you know, those details are what make a
story like this fascinating. So anyway, Alma and then I
went down the rabbit hole of like when did it
become not okay for religious figures to testify in court?
(13:35):
Just its own little side research projects. We talked about
the brown Dog affair, and by extension, vivisection and the
anti vivisection movements for a rough topic for both of us.
(14:01):
Did like we've always tried to explain what anti vivisection
meant when it has come up in the show, but
like it like that specific aspect of a person's life
has always been kind of just a side note, and
what was a podcast about something else? Right, Like Vernon
Lee's writing, like the anti vivisection was like a sentence,
(14:24):
so I wanted to do an episode that talked about
it a little bit more detail. But then also when
I heard about the brown dog affair, it was just
such a weird people got so upset about that statue
and the medical journals publishing on it are bizarre to me.
Like we mentioned that the anti vivisection is testimony was
(14:46):
dismissed as being hysterical, But in terms of what I
read in research for the podcast, I'm not saying I
read every single thing they ever wrote, but in terms
of what I made read in the statements they made
everything they we're saying was way more direct and reasonable
and sometimes passionate, but nothing that I would put into
(15:10):
the realm of excessively emotional or quotation marks hysterical. Well, meanwhile,
like the British Medical journal is talking about people smashing
things with a hammer is like doing the will of
their king, And I was like, these medical write ups
are way more like emotionally overwrought to me than anything
(15:31):
that the anti vivisectionists were writing in like what I
read about this? So I just found that a weird,
a weird thing that I want to talk about. Yeah, yeah,
It's that's often the case, right, The people who accuse
other people of being irrational are the ones being the
(15:53):
most irratical. The anti daggers seemed very irrational to me.
Something that did not seem irrational, though, was the like
a lot of the core elements of the movement because
like a lot of the work, but my work is
not the right word I actually want, but like, there
(16:14):
were a really really important medical discoveries that we have
talked about on the show that have been made possible
through research on animals, like developing insulin to save the
lives of people with diabetes, everything about tetrology of follow
and how the Blaylock Tausig Thomas shunt was developed, Like
(16:39):
that involved a lot of dog research, And I don't
know if those discoveries would have been possible without research
on animals. If it had been possible, it would have
taken so so much longer. And it's like that just
just people feel very strongly about whether that is okay. Right. Yes, Simultaneously,
(17:03):
there was a lot of stuff that was going on
in the like eighteenth, nineteenth, early twentieth century that wasn't
necessary and wasn't respectful of the animals involved and didn't
try to protect them from pain, and that's not something
that's necessarily gone away. Like when I was in eighth
(17:24):
grade in biology class, we had to dissect frogs, and
this is what led to me being a vegetarian for
many years, because my classmates, particularly the boys, were awful
and how like they were not living frogs that was
(17:46):
like the what was supposed to happen in ninth grade
biology or whatever, but the way they treated these animals
was awful and their behavior during the class was awful,
And I was like, I don't think we are earning
anything that's actually useful to us in our lives through
this exercise in the eighth grade classroom, and the behavior
(18:07):
of my classmates is unacceptable and disrespectful, and I don't
want to do it again. And as I was thinking
about that, I was like, and also, I don't think
I want to eat animals either, And right, that's as
how not only did I wind up sitting in the
chemistry classroom during dissection and my high school biology class.
(18:31):
I did not take high school anatomy at all because
I did not want to do the dissections that were
required in that class. And I don't know if my behavior,
like my classmates had matured to the point that they
were less awful about it, but I still was, like
I just I don't think this was helping me learn
(18:51):
in a meaningful way. Right. This is an interesting point
because I feel like, I mean, I wasn't there, but
I feel like, Um, for a lot of kids that
do become comedians in that situation, it's often a coping
(19:16):
mechanism for them, right, Like, It's not what's working for
you obviously, right, but the intent is not always so
much to disrespect the animal involved, but just to like
get emotional distance from the situation. Right. Like I had
a similar Like I was freaking out when it was
frog time. And this will sound very callous, but honestly,
(19:40):
like I know I mentally needed the thing. My dear,
dear friend who was doing it with me, um started
doing Hello my baby Jay frog with the frog, and
that like broke the tension of it. I was still upset, yeah,
but he recognized like that, uh, you know, a bugs
bunny or Looney TUN's reference would would at least help
(20:03):
me like emotionally reset. So I think there's that too
to consider. Um. I don't want to get into detail
of what my classmates were doing because that's horrifying. But
it was way worse than saying than singing that my
baby song with the frog. Yeah, there was also a
frog that ended up in a lunch room chafing dish
(20:24):
at our school. Oh no, yeah it was. It was dramatic.
That's no, no, thank you. Um so, yeah, I got
instead of dissecting frogs in high school biology, I got
to write an essay about why I did not want
to do it, and then I was excused from class
and set in the set in the chemistry. Yeah. Um
(20:45):
so anyway, like as I have complicated feelings about all
of this, Oh yeah, this puts me in mind of
all of the ways that various pop culture media has
tried to like work through this issue. Right. I'm trying
to remember what show it was like a you know,
like a a teen drama kind of show where one
(21:08):
of the was just saved by the bell. I don't
know where one of the students couldn't bear the thought
of doing the dissection, and their teacher like went to
great personal effort to find like a computer simulation of
the whole process so that they could do it. And
(21:30):
then I didn't watch the show. I don't know why
I watched this episode. I'm sure I was like intoxicated
or something. With friends, there was an episode of nine
O two one oh about vivisection. Do you remember? I
have no idea and I never watched that. Yeah. Where
Andrea who was she premed? She I don't know what
(21:50):
it was. UM worked in a lab where they were
doing some animal experiments. I don't think it was vivisection,
but it was other experiments, and like some of the
other years in her friend group were protesting the lab
for what the experiments it was doing, and it became
like one of those deep, you know, drama television discussions
(22:11):
of like the benefits and dangers of any experimentation. So, yes,
I think about all of the ways that bless them
TV writers have tried to help people work through this.
I will thank you for minimizing the amount of things
that would make me cry in this episode. Yeah, yeah,
(22:32):
I only cried like twice. I got more than halfway
through them. Where I had to take it. He did.
He did a very good job, and some of the
things that were emotional were not what I thought would
be when writing it, which is how it goes sometimes, Yeah, surprises,
surprises always. Yeah. But as I was working on this,
(22:52):
I found various you know, anti Fifth Section organizations that
still exist that have laid out various arguments for wanting
to like end the practice entirely. And it's one of
those things where there's just a whole ethical layer that
I feel like is often complicated to people, Like there
(23:13):
are some people who feel very strongly one way or
the other, very easily definable pro or anti, and then
for me, there's a bunch of stuff that's just in
the middle, and I'm like, this thing, this stuff seems wrong.
Like I make a point of trying to buy you know,
(23:34):
Vegan not tested on animals space products. But also, you know,
I have a cousin who had a major heart surgery
as a child, who probably would not have survived childhood
had there not been experiments involving the hearts of animals first.
So it's hard. Yes, Anyway, one thing that I wish
(23:59):
I had more information about was Lizzie Lindolf Hoggaby and
the other the other folks that we talked about, Like,
I just I'm like, this is very fascinating to me.
We've got a couple of like one was aristocratic, the
other I think was actually a member of the nobility.
They had come from Sweden to do all of this
that simultaneously motivated by wanting to learn and then also
(24:22):
wanting to like learn how vivisection was used into like
advocate against vivisection being used in this kind of instruction.
But I just like, I don't know what their personalities were, Like,
I don't know what their lives are like beyond this
particular incident and some of the other figures in the
(24:44):
movement we do know a lot more about. But I
was like, you know, I wish I had like a
more robust sense of who these were as people. But
if that information is around, I sure did not find it.
Maybe somebody should write a novel. Maybe someone has, and
(25:04):
there's a novel about the Brown Dog Affair, but like
a novel about a lesser known nineteenth century and early
twentieth century anti vivisectionist. There's probably something written in Swedish,
probably so that would. Yeah. I run into that from
time to time where I'm like, oh, dear, it's not well. Also,
(25:27):
occasionally we will get topic suggestions from people who do
not live in the United States and who like live
in a country where English is not necessarily a predominantly
spoken language, and it will be sort of like, oh,
you should do an episode on so and so. There's
a ton of information about them, and like here in
the like there's really not those ones, and it can
(25:49):
make it a little tricky. So anyway, you have ideas
about episode topics anything like that, you can drop us
a note. History Podcast us. But iHeartRadio dot com. Hey,
it's Friday. Whatever is going on on your weekend. You know,
if you've got to work this weekend, I hope everybody
is great to you. And if you're off this weekend,
(26:12):
I hope you're able to take some time and rest.
I've been trying to make it a point to myself
to rest. Sometimes that's working out, sometimes not others. We'll
be back with a brand new episode on Monday, but
before that, Saturday Classic Tomorrow. Stuff You Missed in History
(26:35):
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday at Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about murder. Yeah, yeah,
I always had to say it. Like Linda Melcher, There's
(00:24):
so much I left out of this story because it
was like Blair and kind of sexist in infantilizing to Alma.
But it merits discussion because these are things that have
not entirely gone away. One of the things that really
(00:45):
stood out to me while I was reading accounts of
the trial was a comment Pardue made. He got to
the trial a little bit late when it started, and
he had to sit in the press box, so reporters
heard him say this. He had not seen Alma in
quite a while. She of course, had still been in jail,
(01:07):
he had not been visiting her, and the first thing
he said when she came into the courtroom was, Wow,
she looks like she lost forty pounds, which she apparently
had lost about forty pounds while she was in jail.
But it also was just super gross, and there was
lots of discussion of her body in the press about
(01:27):
how like some accounts you read of her trial is
about how incredibly pretty she was. And then there are
others that are like, yeah, but remember when she was fat,
and it's just like the grossests, like, oh, she had
been quite chubby before all of this, so maybe this
was good. Like it's just the grossest, ickiest, But that
stuff still happens today. It is not confined to the
(01:50):
nineteen twenties by any stretch of the imagination. Just yucky.
I just want to point out people still do that. Yeah,
don't do that. Now. You hear someone doing that, call
them on it to their face. There's just no need. Yeah.
The other thing that comes up a lot is that
(02:10):
in newspaper accounts, and this will surprise no one, she
was very young, but she was an adult and a
married woman, but they call her the girl all the time. Yeah,
And I'm like, yeah, something that I sort of thought
about as we were talking about, like the press coverage
and how they talked about her, and the emphasis on
(02:32):
what it was going to be like if she had
to be executed by the electric chair and all of
that stuff. It was sort of about how still today
when we're talking about like a young, pretty white woman
being accused of something, it being handled totally differently than
accusations against like a person of color or all of that.
(02:56):
Like that. I kept thinking about that as we're talking
about it. Oh he invoked like her one day children,
Like you know, it was just all very weird. There
was so much circling around, even from the beginning, this
idea that like the police not taking it seriously because
she she could not have done anything. She is a
(03:18):
sweet girl that we all love. And as you said,
if she were not, you know, a cute white girl, yeah,
that would have gone completely differently. That Dodge is pesky. Yeah,
and what a weird way to talk about it to me, Like, well,
(03:38):
this is interesting because to me, and I don't know
where anyone's feelings on the matter stand. Of course, as
I was researching and I would be, I would vacillate
between being like, oh, she totally did it and also
going like, oh, maybe not. And part of what I
kept coming back to were the parts of the version
(04:01):
she told Pardu versus the version she told in court.
And also we don't know that that version she told
Pardu was really what she said, but there was so
much overlapping detail, but it almost seemed like the Dodge
actually becomes a point for me where I'm like, oh,
that kind of makes it seem like she really was
(04:23):
covering for her mother because it's such a weird detail. Yeah,
why would she have included it in her account to
Pardue if she had not heard it from her mother
who said a car came and took him away? Yeah,
And I it seems to me like that point where
someone is trying to reconcile all the details of a thing. Yeah,
(04:43):
and the ones that don't make sense are because they
weren't really the one that was involved in that part
of it, right, But that could just be like a
Pollyanna read on my part, well, and just the whole thing.
I'm like, but who was driving the car? How did
they hear they needed to come take a body away? Right?
They're so right? And so to me, like if she
had like seen the car leaving the driveway, not knowing
(05:09):
who was driving it, not really knowing anything like that,
to me is it would sort of then be reasonable
to be like an you know, a Dodge, somebody in
a Dodge came and took him away. But like otherwise,
I'm like, if it was if she had murdered him,
like then how how did this dodge get summoned? Like,
I just it was very confusing to me. Well, and
(05:32):
there was a piece of information that appeared in kind
of like the raggy newspapers that were like, no, some
people are saying they saw two men leaving the house
that night. But then that move, that story just kind
of like disappears into the ether, which makes you sound
like it never had any real substance. Do you want
(05:53):
to hear like a creepy part. Yeah, okay, So obviously
Smith was dead and in the basement. Yes, the Petties
no longer lived at that house on Lindsay Drive, but
the people that lived there were their friends, and that
house is where Alma and Jean spent their wedding night,
(06:14):
and she knew her dead dad was in the book. Yeah,
it's super weird. That's a weird one. That was a
little like that gave me the huzz Yeah. I was like,
oh no, Almah, maybe you are a sociopath. I don't. Yeah,
something I have struggled with in this episode and other
(06:36):
episodes that I don't think we have talked about on
the show or in the behind the scenes is discussions
around like alcohol addiction and alcohol abuse, because there's been
like a movement away from using the term alcoholism because
it's stigmatizing. There are three different people in my life
(07:00):
who have died as a direct result of alcohol, and
the term misuse, to me, does not encapsulate what they
went through or dealt with. And so when we're talking
about this on the show, especially when we're talking about
(07:21):
somebody who clearly, like while under the influence of alcohol,
was horribly abusive to his family and violent and threatening,
like to call that misuse feels weirdly minimizing. So it's like,
I don't know what the best language is at this
point to both not be stigmatizing but also not minimize
(07:41):
what's going on, if that makes sense. Oh, same boat.
I mean, there are certainly lots of people in my
life who have had a fraught relationship with alcohol. That's
the kindest way I know to put it. And I
have these same exact struggle as you. I'm like, yeah,
(08:02):
misuse sounds a little And I don't want to criticize
people who are coming up with this terminology because I
know it's difficult, but it sounds a little benign in
some cases. Yeah, like this one where it's like no
misuse to me sounds more like someone is perhaps harming themselves.
But this is a person that becomes like a monster
(08:23):
um and I admittedly like my own take on it
is you know, charged with its own bias and experience.
But it's it's tricky. It's hard to know how to
how to talk about those things. I know there are
huge you know efforts that go on, um around all
kinds of substance use and misuse that that people are
(08:45):
really trying to find the right language and it is difficult.
Yeah U. So Yeah. The other thing that is interesting
to me in this to jump to slightly less it's
(09:09):
not less serious and a different kind of serious is
that moment where the authorities did the same thing. Do
you remember where we talked about the last guillotining in
France which is kind of recent and similarly like an
American woman had been murdered and there was all of
(09:30):
that going on, and just as in that case where
the police got accused of doing nothing and they were like,
we have totally been doing things. Shut up, we're trying
to keep it on the d O, the same thing
went on here and it just is one of those
things where that also is kind of a tricky space
of like everyone wants transparency from authorities. Yeah, sometimes transparency
(09:52):
can hurt a case or an investigation of this nature.
And I understand how that is difficult territory to walk. Yeah,
and it can get misused, um and you know, abused
by by people in power who can just say no,
we've totally been doing we're doing it. Um. It's a
but it's an interesting thing that comes up again and again. Yeah,
(10:14):
I UM, I had some similar thoughts about how um
the reverend uh, like leaving aside the question of whether
he should have disclosed something that was like was confided
in his role as like a minister, like aside from that, um,
(10:36):
like he had reported it, but then it was like
aggressively pursuing the matter. Um. And part of me was like,
you've reported it though, like you you did that part
like and now you're so aggressively going after it in
(10:58):
a way, I'm like, what is why is the thing
that you feel so compelled to like continue to push on.
It's it's not as though like you think someone else
is going to come to harm that would be prevented
by right. I mean he always told the press and
(11:20):
anyone who asked him, because he was I mean, it
was not a matter of like later people criticize people
criticized him from the outset. But his thing was that
I really really thought long and hard about this, and
I felt like to be a good citizen, I had
to do everything I could to bring a murderer to justice.
(11:43):
I mean, I don't know what his motivation is. We
never will. It's interesting because there when you read accounts
even today, there are people who are very divided on
this case and how it should have gone down. The
one of the books that I read, in addition to
a lot of the newspaper stuff I combed through, was
(12:04):
by a man who was a boy in Readsville when
all of this was going on, and he had been
one of the people that showed up in the yard
when he found out there was a dead body in
the basement, and he had grown up with the story
and just couldn't quite stop thinking about it. So he
ended up doing a really comprehensive, you know, research and
write up of it, and spoke with Alma in her
(12:26):
later days. And it's it's interesting to me because I
feel like someone in that position could very easily be
very heavy handed and biased in their writing one way
or the other. But it does seem like he's pretty
to me. It reads us pretty even handed where he
(12:47):
does talk about like all of the pros and cons
of everybody involved, Like, yes, the preacher probably shouldn't have
done this, but also he really thought he was doing
at least he claimed he really thought he was doing
what his conscience told him he had to. Yes, Alma
was young and grew up in a horrible, abusive household. Also,
(13:10):
why was her cell green? Like, Yeah, there are a
lot of questions about it that are just kind of strange,
and that's you know, those details are what make a
story like this fascinating. So anyway, Alma and then I
went down the rabbit hole of like when did it
become not okay for religious figures to testify in court?
(13:35):
Just its own little side research projects. We talked about
the brown Dog affair, and by extension, vivisection and the
anti vivisection movements for a rough topic for both of us.
(14:01):
Did like we've always tried to explain what anti vivisection
meant when it has come up in the show, but
like it like that specific aspect of a person's life
has always been kind of just a side note, and
what was a podcast about something else? Right, Like Vernon
Lee's writing, like the anti vivisection was like a sentence,
(14:24):
so I wanted to do an episode that talked about
it a little bit more detail. But then also when
I heard about the brown dog affair, it was just
such a weird people got so upset about that statue
and the medical journals publishing on it are bizarre to me.
Like we mentioned that the anti vivisection is testimony was
(14:46):
dismissed as being hysterical, But in terms of what I
read in research for the podcast, I'm not saying I
read every single thing they ever wrote, but in terms
of what I made read in the statements they made
everything they we're saying was way more direct and reasonable
and sometimes passionate, but nothing that I would put into
(15:10):
the realm of excessively emotional or quotation marks hysterical. Well, meanwhile,
like the British Medical journal is talking about people smashing
things with a hammer is like doing the will of
their king, And I was like, these medical write ups
are way more like emotionally overwrought to me than anything
(15:31):
that the anti vivisectionists were writing in like what I
read about this? So I just found that a weird,
a weird thing that I want to talk about. Yeah, yeah,
It's that's often the case, right, The people who accuse
other people of being irrational are the ones being the
(15:53):
most irratical. The anti daggers seemed very irrational to me.
Something that did not seem irrational, though, was the like
a lot of the core elements of the movement because
like a lot of the work, but my work is
not the right word I actually want, but like, there
(16:14):
were a really really important medical discoveries that we have
talked about on the show that have been made possible
through research on animals, like developing insulin to save the
lives of people with diabetes, everything about tetrology of follow
and how the Blaylock Tausig Thomas shunt was developed, Like
(16:39):
that involved a lot of dog research, And I don't
know if those discoveries would have been possible without research
on animals. If it had been possible, it would have
taken so so much longer. And it's like that just
just people feel very strongly about whether that is okay. Right. Yes, Simultaneously,
(17:03):
there was a lot of stuff that was going on
in the like eighteenth, nineteenth, early twentieth century that wasn't
necessary and wasn't respectful of the animals involved and didn't
try to protect them from pain, and that's not something
that's necessarily gone away. Like when I was in eighth
(17:24):
grade in biology class, we had to dissect frogs, and
this is what led to me being a vegetarian for
many years, because my classmates, particularly the boys, were awful
and how like they were not living frogs that was
(17:46):
like the what was supposed to happen in ninth grade
biology or whatever, but the way they treated these animals
was awful and their behavior during the class was awful,
And I was like, I don't think we are earning
anything that's actually useful to us in our lives through
this exercise in the eighth grade classroom, and the behavior
(18:07):
of my classmates is unacceptable and disrespectful, and I don't
want to do it again. And as I was thinking
about that, I was like, and also, I don't think
I want to eat animals either, And right, that's as
how not only did I wind up sitting in the
chemistry classroom during dissection and my high school biology class.
(18:31):
I did not take high school anatomy at all because
I did not want to do the dissections that were
required in that class. And I don't know if my behavior,
like my classmates had matured to the point that they
were less awful about it, but I still was, like
I just I don't think this was helping me learn
(18:51):
in a meaningful way. Right. This is an interesting point
because I feel like, I mean, I wasn't there, but
I feel like, Um, for a lot of kids that
do become comedians in that situation, it's often a coping
(19:16):
mechanism for them, right, Like, It's not what's working for
you obviously, right, but the intent is not always so
much to disrespect the animal involved, but just to like
get emotional distance from the situation. Right. Like I had
a similar Like I was freaking out when it was
frog time. And this will sound very callous, but honestly,
(19:40):
like I know I mentally needed the thing. My dear,
dear friend who was doing it with me, um started
doing Hello my baby Jay frog with the frog, and
that like broke the tension of it. I was still upset, yeah,
but he recognized like that, uh, you know, a bugs
bunny or Looney TUN's reference would would at least help
(20:03):
me like emotionally reset. So I think there's that too
to consider. Um. I don't want to get into detail
of what my classmates were doing because that's horrifying. But
it was way worse than saying than singing that my
baby song with the frog. Yeah, there was also a
frog that ended up in a lunch room chafing dish
(20:24):
at our school. Oh no, yeah it was. It was dramatic.
That's no, no, thank you. Um so, yeah, I got
instead of dissecting frogs in high school biology, I got
to write an essay about why I did not want
to do it, and then I was excused from class
and set in the set in the chemistry. Yeah. Um
(20:45):
so anyway, like as I have complicated feelings about all
of this, Oh yeah, this puts me in mind of
all of the ways that various pop culture media has
tried to like work through this issue. Right. I'm trying
to remember what show it was like a you know,
like a a teen drama kind of show where one
(21:08):
of the was just saved by the bell. I don't
know where one of the students couldn't bear the thought
of doing the dissection, and their teacher like went to
great personal effort to find like a computer simulation of
the whole process so that they could do it. And
(21:30):
then I didn't watch the show. I don't know why
I watched this episode. I'm sure I was like intoxicated
or something. With friends, there was an episode of nine
O two one oh about vivisection. Do you remember? I
have no idea and I never watched that. Yeah. Where
Andrea who was she premed? She I don't know what
(21:50):
it was. UM worked in a lab where they were
doing some animal experiments. I don't think it was vivisection,
but it was other experiments, and like some of the
other years in her friend group were protesting the lab
for what the experiments it was doing, and it became
like one of those deep, you know, drama television discussions
(22:11):
of like the benefits and dangers of any experimentation. So, yes,
I think about all of the ways that bless them
TV writers have tried to help people work through this.
I will thank you for minimizing the amount of things
that would make me cry in this episode. Yeah, yeah,
(22:32):
I only cried like twice. I got more than halfway
through them. Where I had to take it. He did.
He did a very good job, and some of the
things that were emotional were not what I thought would
be when writing it, which is how it goes sometimes, Yeah, surprises,
surprises always. Yeah. But as I was working on this,
(22:52):
I found various you know, anti Fifth Section organizations that
still exist that have laid out various arguments for wanting
to like end the practice entirely. And it's one of
those things where there's just a whole ethical layer that
I feel like is often complicated to people, Like there
(23:13):
are some people who feel very strongly one way or
the other, very easily definable pro or anti, and then
for me, there's a bunch of stuff that's just in
the middle, and I'm like, this thing, this stuff seems wrong.
Like I make a point of trying to buy you know,
(23:34):
Vegan not tested on animals space products. But also, you know,
I have a cousin who had a major heart surgery
as a child, who probably would not have survived childhood
had there not been experiments involving the hearts of animals first.
So it's hard. Yes, Anyway, one thing that I wish
(23:59):
I had more information about was Lizzie Lindolf Hoggaby and
the other the other folks that we talked about, Like,
I just I'm like, this is very fascinating to me.
We've got a couple of like one was aristocratic, the
other I think was actually a member of the nobility.
They had come from Sweden to do all of this
that simultaneously motivated by wanting to learn and then also
(24:22):
wanting to like learn how vivisection was used into like
advocate against vivisection being used in this kind of instruction.
But I just like, I don't know what their personalities were, Like,
I don't know what their lives are like beyond this
particular incident and some of the other figures in the
(24:44):
movement we do know a lot more about. But I
was like, you know, I wish I had like a
more robust sense of who these were as people. But
if that information is around, I sure did not find it.
Maybe somebody should write a novel. Maybe someone has, and
(25:04):
there's a novel about the Brown Dog Affair, but like
a novel about a lesser known nineteenth century and early
twentieth century anti vivisectionist. There's probably something written in Swedish,
probably so that would. Yeah. I run into that from
time to time where I'm like, oh, dear, it's not well. Also,
(25:27):
occasionally we will get topic suggestions from people who do
not live in the United States and who like live
in a country where English is not necessarily a predominantly
spoken language, and it will be sort of like, oh,
you should do an episode on so and so. There's
a ton of information about them, and like here in
the like there's really not those ones, and it can
(25:49):
make it a little tricky. So anyway, you have ideas
about episode topics anything like that, you can drop us
a note. History Podcast us. But iHeartRadio dot com. Hey,
it's Friday. Whatever is going on on your weekend. You know,
if you've got to work this weekend, I hope everybody
is great to you. And if you're off this weekend,
(26:12):
I hope you're able to take some time and rest.
I've been trying to make it a point to myself
to rest. Sometimes that's working out, sometimes not others. We'll
be back with a brand new episode on Monday, but
before that, Saturday Classic Tomorrow. Stuff You Missed in History
(26:35):
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