September 18, 2026 • 22 mins
Holly talks about the lack information about Pinel’s family, and how much she’d like to see Oscar Wilde use social media. Tracy discusses the way the Cooley episode narrowed down the scope of her originally planned topic.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey. And
I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And we talked about Philippe Pinel
this week. Yeah, not a name I had heard of,
I don't think. I am very intrigued by his whole story.
(00:24):
I mean, I like medical history in general. I like
psychiatry and psychology history a lot, as you may have
guessed from things I have selected in the past. And
I find his story especially intriguing because it does represent
somebody who is so forward-thinking in the field, but is
also kind of tripping over their own feet. Kind of, yeah.
(00:45):
Forward-thinking in some ways, unlimited in other ways. Yeah. One
thing that we did not talk about until we got
to the point where we mentioned that he had a
son who also became a psychiatrist was his family, because
I did not find a lot of information about when
he got married, who he married. I know he had
a son, and I've seen a painting of him with
(01:06):
what appeared to be a son and daughter, but there's
no information regarding his daughter or his wife. So apologies.
If you are a scholar of Pinel and you know,
let me know. We similarly did not mention Ashurbanipal's wife
or children other than the two sons. I just didn't
(01:27):
find a ton of... It can be... no family information time. Yeah,
sometimes those people get documented, and sometimes they don't. I
mentioned when we were talking about the quote that we
read about him saying, like, some people will tell you
that brain lesions are the cause of mental issues, but
(01:48):
I'm telling you no. And he's obviously super wrong. We
know that that can be the case. I really feel
like at that point... he had started to believe that
he could potentially cure anyone. And so to admit, and again,
this is my theory, no basis in anything I read.
(02:08):
But I think to admit that like, oh no, it's
something physical that can't actually be helped would have messed
up his whole sense of purpose in what he was doing. Yeah,
that makes sense. That's just my guess. But based on
the way he writes about people and treatments that he did,
I really feel like that's probably the heart of why
(02:29):
he was so dismissive of the physical science of it.
He also did an interesting thing and is, to the
best of my knowledge, the first person to ever approach
it this way. One of the things we didn't talk
about a lot were all the ways he classified his
mental alienation groups. But one thing that he wrote a
(02:50):
good bit about was the difference between people who are
always in a state of mental alienation versus people who
have episodes and other times they are in their normal,
for lack of better phrasing, right mind, right? And he
started developing this way of treating them and working with
those patients where when they were not in an episode,
(03:13):
he would discuss their case with them very transparently and
be like, how do you think we, you and I together,
can address this person you become when That crops up
and how can we help this move your treatment forward,
which is just an interesting idea. Uh-huh. Again, he needed
(03:33):
more science backing up all his stuff. Yeah. But I
am sort of, I don't know if impressed is not
the word, but it is quite striking the way that
he always saw his patients as from a very human
lens and never was like... Uh-huh. in the parlance that
was often used, they're at this point animals, I can't
deal with them. He always knew that there was somebody
(03:55):
in there that he just needed to get to, which
I really appreciate and find the most hopeful about his
writing and his work. Yeah, he's just an interesting guy.
Interesting dude. I love that he was like, are we
not doing baths? This is the easiest. Right. Hey, look,
people aren't dying of stupid things anymore because they're clean. Yeah.
(04:16):
A lot of that, maybe not to the extent of
literally not having a bath for the patients. But, like,
a lot of that is... These are still things that
are issues in institutions today. For sure. Like, my mom's
career for a long time was long-term care for disabled children,
and they were all children who had multiple complex disabilities. Right.
(04:40):
Extremely high support needs. And... my mom one time did
like a training video for the staff that was basically
about things like, yes, we don't know if this child
is self-aware. They still deserve privacy. Like when going to
the bathroom, that kind of stuff. Like, reinforcing the, like,
(05:03):
these are, we're, these are all, these children are all
people and they all have the same right to dignity
and respect. Yeah. Even when we are not sure whether
we are able to communicate with them or them with us. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah,
it is, it's really interesting in that, like, both of
those are just you know, both like the work your
(05:25):
mom was doing, the stuff Pinel was doing, it's all
really rooted in just kindness and respect, which it's kind
of funny when you kind of break it down to
that level of simplicity to be like, and that was
very forward thinking. It's very disheartening. I'm not laughing because
it's funny. I'm laughing because it sounds so absurd. Yeah.
But has been a problem with humans for a long time. Yeah.
(05:49):
Reading papers about him because there's a lot of scholarship
about him. I feel like he's one of the go-tos
that people do when they're doing like a PhD or
something because I found so many papers. There is often
a very bifurcated path. Like people are either like, this
guy was great. He's why we're doing a lot of
what we do today. Or what a train wreck. I
(06:09):
can't believe he just accidentally stumbled on some stuff. that
moved things forward, but he was doing it all wrong.
And of course, then you have the Foucault of it all,
which I can't even. I felt like I needed to
mention that because it gets brought up in almost everything
you read about him, about Pinel, that like Foucault really
hated Pinel's ideas. And I'm like, yeah, but did you
(06:29):
read that Foucault stuff? Because he just wanted people to
be allowed to go untreated and not ever address any problems.
And like to him, imposing treatment on people was taking
away personal choice. Which I could see in certain instances,
but if someone is dangerous, that's not really an option.
(06:51):
Michelle Foucault, you had a lot of feelings and thoughts.
I think Foucault might like some of the TikTok influencers.
I think we just wrote a play. Yeah. I would
watch this play, Michelle Foucault dealing with the age of
social media and influencers. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there's
(07:14):
something there. I've always wondered, like, if someone would do
a thing that's like, if Oscar Wilde had TikTok. Right. Wow.
Which I think I would watch nonstop. Yeah. I'd be like, damn,
he's really sassy and opinionated. And I don't agree with everything,
but I can't stop looking. Although I do love me
(07:36):
some Oscar Wilde. We talked about Coley's toxins, one of
the earliest cancer immunotherapies. Some of the sources that I
looked at for this and their timelines of cancer immunotherapy
(08:01):
started with ancient Egypt. Under the argument that in ancient Egypt...
one of the treatments for cancers involved sometimes cauterizing the
site of the cancer, sometimes making some kind of other, like,
attempt at removing the cancer, and then dressing this area
(08:23):
with bandages and poultices and stuff. And it seemed like
the argument was they probably would have gotten an infection
from that, and the infection... might have then prompted the
body to also attack the cancer. And I felt like
that was a reach. I mean, yeah, I'm sitting here
(08:45):
and I'm like, I mean, I see where you could
land there, but it does seem like an awfully long walk.
It was a long walk to me. Also, when I
started on this, I was just imagining that it would
be a historical overview of the history of immunotherapy. And
that came about because I am pretty sure in addition
(09:06):
to this experience that I had watching the news at
my parents' house and going, cancer immunotherapy? I thought, did not.
Mary Robinette Kowal, who is an author and has been
a guest on our show, didn't she suggest a history
of immunotherapy as a topic one time? Then I went
through my notes and It's possible that she suggested that.
(09:27):
It's also possible that she suggested a history of IV
therapy because I have it written down each way. And
whatever that conversation was, it was long enough ago that
I no longer have the email or the social media
comment or exactly where it came from. Either way, though,
was one of the things that kind of combined together
(09:47):
to make me think this would be a fun thing
to do. Maybe not fun, but like this would be
an interesting thing to do for the show. So I
started out collecting information for a historical overview of cancer immunotherapy.
And as I got into the more modern decades, starting with, say,
(10:09):
the 70s and the 80s, every next step in the
possible timeline... was an entirely new immune system concept to
need to understand and explain. Oh, yeah. And I just kept,
I was just writing all of them down. So-and-so discovered
(10:30):
blah-de-blah in whatever, in, like, 1997, and thinking, I'm going
to have to go back to this and, like, figure
out how to explain this thing, the blah-de-blah that was discovered.
And also, I was dealing with a mild respiratory illness
at this time that was not the end of the world,
(10:53):
but was making it harder to cope. think and concentrate.
And I realized two things simultaneously. One was that I
had way too many notes for a one-part episode, and
a one-part episode was what was feasible to do at
this moment in our calendar and in our lives. And
then number two, there was no possible way I was
(11:14):
going to understand all of these things. And then also
that Coley's toxins seemed like a whole topic all by
themselves that I found very interesting and that I found
much more able to reasonably explain. So when I went
through and then started writing the actual outline from my notes,
(11:34):
I had a tiny little overview of what immunotherapy means.
I had some other stuff about that that got deleted,
got into Coley's story, got to the end of Coley's life,
got to why we don't really use these as a
treatment in the And then I had, I think, four
pages of subsequent timeline notes that I just deleted. No,
(12:00):
you saved those for later. I did not save them
for later. I think I would have saved them for
later had I not been ill and maybe not thinking
as clearly as normal. Also, those many years of timeline,
things that came after the death of Coley are pretty
(12:22):
easy to reconstruct. Should I at some point decide to
revisit the idea of like an overview, historical overview of immunotherapy?
I do have a question. Do it. Because you specified
in this outline and in what you just said that
they're not used in the U.S. Are there places where
people are using them? Yes, it seems like yes. And
(12:46):
it seems like the places where they are used are
places where maybe the pharmaceutical and medical system is not
quite as regulated or perhaps... there is a broader set
of exceptions to the general rules for people who have
(13:07):
things that seem to be not responding to other treatments.
As far as I know, there's not like a... big
pseudoscience focus on these toxins as a, like... Which is
surprising to me. Yeah. But I also felt like the
way it was discussed in some of the more official, like,
(13:31):
cancer research... cancer awareness bodies did seem like it was
the thing that everyone acknowledged that like people could glom
on to this as a pseudoscience. If they just needed
something to do. But again, it's like there are newer,
more effective, more specific, more conclusively demonstrated treatments at this point.
(13:57):
And even when he was, you know, publishing his work,
the fact that he had what appeared to be approximately
a 10% cure rate, that's not a huge percentage. But
the alternative for a lot of the cancers that he
was working with was, like, amputate this limb and hope.
And that's not a lot. And there are, for a
(14:21):
lot of the cancers that he was working with, other
options today. I'm just surprised because it does seem like
the kind of thing that some people would get very
obsessed with under the claims of a natural cure. Don't
(14:41):
do that. A natural cure of bacterial toxins. It's one
of those things that it's like, it seems like when
it did work for people, it seemed miraculous and gave
people years of life that they probably would not have
had otherwise. Yeah. But also just did not work at
all for some people. One of the things that makes
(15:11):
further study of them more difficult is today we have
this thing called GMP rules, which are good manufacturing practices.
and developing things that follow those rules when you are
making pharmaceuticals and other substances, it can be very expensive
and very difficult. And it was already difficult and expensive
to make these toxins. And when there are other things
(15:34):
that are being developed and being explored that seem more
consistently promising in some ways, that does not leave a
lot of reason to sink lots and lots of money
to something that is going to be So expensive. Right.
That may or may not work. A couple of side notes.
We mentioned that Coley worked at three different hospitals. He
(15:56):
was on staff at all three of them at the
same time. Not for his whole career, I don't think,
which seemed to be a normal thing. He was working
with a lot of the same surgeons at multiple different hospitals.
And it's today, I think, I'm not a surgeon. I
don't think I even know any surgeons. I do know
some people who work in the medical field. You don't
have a secret surgery career? I don't know about that. No,
that'd be weird. I think it is common for, like,
(16:19):
surgeons to have privileges at multiple hospitals to be able
to conduct surgeries there, but it seems like he was
considered a staff member at multiple hospitals, which I think
that might not be quite as common today. If you're
a surgeon and you know that not to be true,
feel free to explain how your profession works. I feel
like we're having an accidental theme in things that we're
(16:42):
recording today. about people stacking their careers. Oh, sure. Multiple
jobs at once. So Coley and Dr. William T. Bull,
who Bull had been the original doctor of this patient
that he had tracked down, they both worked together at
the hospital that came to be known as the Hospital
(17:02):
for Special Surgery, in addition to their work at New
York Hospital where this thing happened. And I think also
at the cancer hospital. At the hospital for special surgery,
the two of them developed new surgical techniques for treating
hernias in children. Very cool. Like, replacing techniques that, as
(17:23):
I understood it, basically didn't work for most kids. They
developed a whole new approach to do it that made
it possible to treat hernias in children that had previously
not been treatable. That's amazing. So, yeah, this was, like,
not a biography of Coley. It was only focused on
his work with his toxins. But, like, he did have
(17:44):
other things in his surgical career besides that. Counterpoint is
not the exact word, but, like, on a sadder note,
it seems like his treatment of Bessie Daschle when he
was trying to figure out what was going on with her,
that might have made it worse. Oh, gotcha. So he
(18:04):
was a brand new... like, just a few months on
the job as, like, having finished his internship, brand new
as a surgeon, operating on his own. He did not
have any reason to think that this 17-year-old had bone cancer.
So his way of basically looking in her hand to
(18:24):
see what was going on seems like it probably broke
some of the tumor into parts that then circulated through
her body and seeded tumors elsewhere. Which he didn't have
a huge reason to have thought that that would even
be an option, because why would a 17-year-old have had
bone cancer? Right. And I don't think he even knew
(18:49):
that at the time, or even suspected it at the time.
But other people with medical knowledge that have written about
him have sort of said, like, that might have made
it worse. It kind of reminded me of, I don't
know if it's used anymore, but there was a treatment
for uterine fibroids that was basically sending a little drill
(19:09):
in there to kind of blast them up. Yeah. But
what if it actually is a tumor? Right. That could
be malignant? Like, that then just... Like, are you propagating it?
Propagates cancer cells. Right. Yeah. And then the last thing
that I had written on here was just like, there
was so much stuff I did not have to learn
(19:30):
and figure out how to explain once I narrowed down
this topic. Which I think trying to learn and explain
all of them would have been a really tall order,
even if I had not been somewhat unwell the whole
time I was working on it. Yeah. Here's the Murphy's
Law for me that always happens. in that scenario. Yeah.
(19:51):
When I'm like, this is going to be a hard one,
but I can do it. That's the week that, like,
everything explodes. Uh-huh. Where it's like, oh, and your refrigerator died.
And also, there's a, you know... mangled raccoon on your
deck that needs help. And also, these are things I'm
making up. These are not things I'm dealing with. But
it's always like, there's like a weird thing where the
universe goes, hey, you think you can handle that? Guess what? Yeah. Yeah.
(20:16):
I felt bad enough to take half a day off
partway through my illness, which I have not needed to
do in a while. I've been very blessedly not sick
in a while. So the fact that I then needed
a half day to lie around. Well, let's keep it
that way. Yeah. Knock on wood. Knock on wood. I
(20:39):
had just gotten back from some travel, and it's pretty
sure something that I picked up in transit. So, yeah. Yeah.
Do you have anything else that you would like to
say about Coley? No, because you said knock on wood,
and now Amy Stewart is singing in my head. Okay. Well...
(21:00):
Whatever is coming up on your weekend, I hope that
it goes as well as is possible, even better than expected,
better than you think is possible. That's what I hope.
I'm thinking back to the days when my days off
used to be on Tuesday and Wednesday every week, which
in some ways was kind of fun. Yeah. If you
(21:23):
have a Tuesday or Wednesday or other midweek time off,
or if you are in a place where you're needing
to have overlapping things and not a lot of time off,
then I hope you're able to take a little time
to have a moment for yourself. Do something that's a
little refreshing for yourself. treat yourself or maybe treat somebody
else or treat both of you everybody gets a little
(21:44):
treat we will be back with a brand new episode
on monday and of course we'll have a saturday classic
tomorrow stuff you missed in history class is a production
of iheart radio for more podcasts from iheart radio visit
the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen
(22:06):
to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey. And
I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And we talked about Philippe Pinel
this week. Yeah, not a name I had heard of,
I don't think. I am very intrigued by his whole story.
(00:24):
I mean, I like medical history in general. I like
psychiatry and psychology history a lot, as you may have
guessed from things I have selected in the past. And
I find his story especially intriguing because it does represent
somebody who is so forward-thinking in the field, but is
also kind of tripping over their own feet. Kind of, yeah.
(00:45):
Forward-thinking in some ways, unlimited in other ways. Yeah. One
thing that we did not talk about until we got
to the point where we mentioned that he had a
son who also became a psychiatrist was his family, because
I did not find a lot of information about when
he got married, who he married. I know he had
a son, and I've seen a painting of him with
(01:06):
what appeared to be a son and daughter, but there's
no information regarding his daughter or his wife. So apologies.
If you are a scholar of Pinel and you know,
let me know. We similarly did not mention Ashurbanipal's wife
or children other than the two sons. I just didn't
(01:27):
find a ton of... It can be... no family information time. Yeah,
sometimes those people get documented, and sometimes they don't. I
mentioned when we were talking about the quote that we
read about him saying, like, some people will tell you
that brain lesions are the cause of mental issues, but
(01:48):
I'm telling you no. And he's obviously super wrong. We
know that that can be the case. I really feel
like at that point... he had started to believe that
he could potentially cure anyone. And so to admit, and again,
this is my theory, no basis in anything I read.
(02:08):
But I think to admit that like, oh no, it's
something physical that can't actually be helped would have messed
up his whole sense of purpose in what he was doing. Yeah,
that makes sense. That's just my guess. But based on
the way he writes about people and treatments that he did,
I really feel like that's probably the heart of why
(02:29):
he was so dismissive of the physical science of it.
He also did an interesting thing and is, to the
best of my knowledge, the first person to ever approach
it this way. One of the things we didn't talk
about a lot were all the ways he classified his
mental alienation groups. But one thing that he wrote a
(02:50):
good bit about was the difference between people who are
always in a state of mental alienation versus people who
have episodes and other times they are in their normal,
for lack of better phrasing, right mind, right? And he
started developing this way of treating them and working with
those patients where when they were not in an episode,
(03:13):
he would discuss their case with them very transparently and
be like, how do you think we, you and I together,
can address this person you become when That crops up
and how can we help this move your treatment forward,
which is just an interesting idea. Uh-huh. Again, he needed
(03:33):
more science backing up all his stuff. Yeah. But I
am sort of, I don't know if impressed is not
the word, but it is quite striking the way that
he always saw his patients as from a very human
lens and never was like... Uh-huh. in the parlance that
was often used, they're at this point animals, I can't
deal with them. He always knew that there was somebody
(03:55):
in there that he just needed to get to, which
I really appreciate and find the most hopeful about his
writing and his work. Yeah, he's just an interesting guy.
Interesting dude. I love that he was like, are we
not doing baths? This is the easiest. Right. Hey, look,
people aren't dying of stupid things anymore because they're clean. Yeah.
(04:16):
A lot of that, maybe not to the extent of
literally not having a bath for the patients. But, like,
a lot of that is... These are still things that
are issues in institutions today. For sure. Like, my mom's
career for a long time was long-term care for disabled children,
and they were all children who had multiple complex disabilities. Right.
(04:40):
Extremely high support needs. And... my mom one time did
like a training video for the staff that was basically
about things like, yes, we don't know if this child
is self-aware. They still deserve privacy. Like when going to
the bathroom, that kind of stuff. Like, reinforcing the, like,
(05:03):
these are, we're, these are all, these children are all
people and they all have the same right to dignity
and respect. Yeah. Even when we are not sure whether
we are able to communicate with them or them with us. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah,
it is, it's really interesting in that, like, both of
those are just you know, both like the work your
(05:25):
mom was doing, the stuff Pinel was doing, it's all
really rooted in just kindness and respect, which it's kind
of funny when you kind of break it down to
that level of simplicity to be like, and that was
very forward thinking. It's very disheartening. I'm not laughing because
it's funny. I'm laughing because it sounds so absurd. Yeah.
But has been a problem with humans for a long time. Yeah.
(05:49):
Reading papers about him because there's a lot of scholarship
about him. I feel like he's one of the go-tos
that people do when they're doing like a PhD or
something because I found so many papers. There is often
a very bifurcated path. Like people are either like, this
guy was great. He's why we're doing a lot of
what we do today. Or what a train wreck. I
(06:09):
can't believe he just accidentally stumbled on some stuff. that
moved things forward, but he was doing it all wrong.
And of course, then you have the Foucault of it all,
which I can't even. I felt like I needed to
mention that because it gets brought up in almost everything
you read about him, about Pinel, that like Foucault really
hated Pinel's ideas. And I'm like, yeah, but did you
(06:29):
read that Foucault stuff? Because he just wanted people to
be allowed to go untreated and not ever address any problems.
And like to him, imposing treatment on people was taking
away personal choice. Which I could see in certain instances,
but if someone is dangerous, that's not really an option.
(06:51):
Michelle Foucault, you had a lot of feelings and thoughts.
I think Foucault might like some of the TikTok influencers.
I think we just wrote a play. Yeah. I would
watch this play, Michelle Foucault dealing with the age of
social media and influencers. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there's
(07:14):
something there. I've always wondered, like, if someone would do
a thing that's like, if Oscar Wilde had TikTok. Right. Wow.
Which I think I would watch nonstop. Yeah. I'd be like, damn,
he's really sassy and opinionated. And I don't agree with everything,
but I can't stop looking. Although I do love me
(07:36):
some Oscar Wilde. We talked about Coley's toxins, one of
the earliest cancer immunotherapies. Some of the sources that I
looked at for this and their timelines of cancer immunotherapy
(08:01):
started with ancient Egypt. Under the argument that in ancient Egypt...
one of the treatments for cancers involved sometimes cauterizing the
site of the cancer, sometimes making some kind of other, like,
attempt at removing the cancer, and then dressing this area
(08:23):
with bandages and poultices and stuff. And it seemed like
the argument was they probably would have gotten an infection
from that, and the infection... might have then prompted the
body to also attack the cancer. And I felt like
that was a reach. I mean, yeah, I'm sitting here
(08:45):
and I'm like, I mean, I see where you could
land there, but it does seem like an awfully long walk.
It was a long walk to me. Also, when I
started on this, I was just imagining that it would
be a historical overview of the history of immunotherapy. And
that came about because I am pretty sure in addition
(09:06):
to this experience that I had watching the news at
my parents' house and going, cancer immunotherapy? I thought, did not.
Mary Robinette Kowal, who is an author and has been
a guest on our show, didn't she suggest a history
of immunotherapy as a topic one time? Then I went
through my notes and It's possible that she suggested that.
(09:27):
It's also possible that she suggested a history of IV
therapy because I have it written down each way. And
whatever that conversation was, it was long enough ago that
I no longer have the email or the social media
comment or exactly where it came from. Either way, though,
was one of the things that kind of combined together
(09:47):
to make me think this would be a fun thing
to do. Maybe not fun, but like this would be
an interesting thing to do for the show. So I
started out collecting information for a historical overview of cancer immunotherapy.
And as I got into the more modern decades, starting with, say,
(10:09):
the 70s and the 80s, every next step in the
possible timeline... was an entirely new immune system concept to
need to understand and explain. Oh, yeah. And I just kept,
I was just writing all of them down. So-and-so discovered
(10:30):
blah-de-blah in whatever, in, like, 1997, and thinking, I'm going
to have to go back to this and, like, figure
out how to explain this thing, the blah-de-blah that was discovered.
And also, I was dealing with a mild respiratory illness
at this time that was not the end of the world,
(10:53):
but was making it harder to cope. think and concentrate.
And I realized two things simultaneously. One was that I
had way too many notes for a one-part episode, and
a one-part episode was what was feasible to do at
this moment in our calendar and in our lives. And
then number two, there was no possible way I was
(11:14):
going to understand all of these things. And then also
that Coley's toxins seemed like a whole topic all by
themselves that I found very interesting and that I found
much more able to reasonably explain. So when I went
through and then started writing the actual outline from my notes,
(11:34):
I had a tiny little overview of what immunotherapy means.
I had some other stuff about that that got deleted,
got into Coley's story, got to the end of Coley's life,
got to why we don't really use these as a
treatment in the And then I had, I think, four
pages of subsequent timeline notes that I just deleted. No,
(12:00):
you saved those for later. I did not save them
for later. I think I would have saved them for
later had I not been ill and maybe not thinking
as clearly as normal. Also, those many years of timeline,
things that came after the death of Coley are pretty
(12:22):
easy to reconstruct. Should I at some point decide to
revisit the idea of like an overview, historical overview of immunotherapy?
I do have a question. Do it. Because you specified
in this outline and in what you just said that
they're not used in the U.S. Are there places where
people are using them? Yes, it seems like yes. And
(12:46):
it seems like the places where they are used are
places where maybe the pharmaceutical and medical system is not
quite as regulated or perhaps... there is a broader set
of exceptions to the general rules for people who have
(13:07):
things that seem to be not responding to other treatments.
As far as I know, there's not like a... big
pseudoscience focus on these toxins as a, like... Which is
surprising to me. Yeah. But I also felt like the
way it was discussed in some of the more official, like,
(13:31):
cancer research... cancer awareness bodies did seem like it was
the thing that everyone acknowledged that like people could glom
on to this as a pseudoscience. If they just needed
something to do. But again, it's like there are newer,
more effective, more specific, more conclusively demonstrated treatments at this point.
(13:57):
And even when he was, you know, publishing his work,
the fact that he had what appeared to be approximately
a 10% cure rate, that's not a huge percentage. But
the alternative for a lot of the cancers that he
was working with was, like, amputate this limb and hope.
And that's not a lot. And there are, for a
(14:21):
lot of the cancers that he was working with, other
options today. I'm just surprised because it does seem like
the kind of thing that some people would get very
obsessed with under the claims of a natural cure. Don't
(14:41):
do that. A natural cure of bacterial toxins. It's one
of those things that it's like, it seems like when
it did work for people, it seemed miraculous and gave
people years of life that they probably would not have
had otherwise. Yeah. But also just did not work at
all for some people. One of the things that makes
(15:11):
further study of them more difficult is today we have
this thing called GMP rules, which are good manufacturing practices.
and developing things that follow those rules when you are
making pharmaceuticals and other substances, it can be very expensive
and very difficult. And it was already difficult and expensive
to make these toxins. And when there are other things
(15:34):
that are being developed and being explored that seem more
consistently promising in some ways, that does not leave a
lot of reason to sink lots and lots of money
to something that is going to be So expensive. Right.
That may or may not work. A couple of side notes.
We mentioned that Coley worked at three different hospitals. He
(15:56):
was on staff at all three of them at the
same time. Not for his whole career, I don't think,
which seemed to be a normal thing. He was working
with a lot of the same surgeons at multiple different hospitals.
And it's today, I think, I'm not a surgeon. I
don't think I even know any surgeons. I do know
some people who work in the medical field. You don't
have a secret surgery career? I don't know about that. No,
that'd be weird. I think it is common for, like,
(16:19):
surgeons to have privileges at multiple hospitals to be able
to conduct surgeries there, but it seems like he was
considered a staff member at multiple hospitals, which I think
that might not be quite as common today. If you're
a surgeon and you know that not to be true,
feel free to explain how your profession works. I feel
like we're having an accidental theme in things that we're
(16:42):
recording today. about people stacking their careers. Oh, sure. Multiple
jobs at once. So Coley and Dr. William T. Bull,
who Bull had been the original doctor of this patient
that he had tracked down, they both worked together at
the hospital that came to be known as the Hospital
(17:02):
for Special Surgery, in addition to their work at New
York Hospital where this thing happened. And I think also
at the cancer hospital. At the hospital for special surgery,
the two of them developed new surgical techniques for treating
hernias in children. Very cool. Like, replacing techniques that, as
(17:23):
I understood it, basically didn't work for most kids. They
developed a whole new approach to do it that made
it possible to treat hernias in children that had previously
not been treatable. That's amazing. So, yeah, this was, like,
not a biography of Coley. It was only focused on
his work with his toxins. But, like, he did have
(17:44):
other things in his surgical career besides that. Counterpoint is
not the exact word, but, like, on a sadder note,
it seems like his treatment of Bessie Daschle when he
was trying to figure out what was going on with her,
that might have made it worse. Oh, gotcha. So he
(18:04):
was a brand new... like, just a few months on
the job as, like, having finished his internship, brand new
as a surgeon, operating on his own. He did not
have any reason to think that this 17-year-old had bone cancer.
So his way of basically looking in her hand to
(18:24):
see what was going on seems like it probably broke
some of the tumor into parts that then circulated through
her body and seeded tumors elsewhere. Which he didn't have
a huge reason to have thought that that would even
be an option, because why would a 17-year-old have had
bone cancer? Right. And I don't think he even knew
(18:49):
that at the time, or even suspected it at the time.
But other people with medical knowledge that have written about
him have sort of said, like, that might have made
it worse. It kind of reminded me of, I don't
know if it's used anymore, but there was a treatment
for uterine fibroids that was basically sending a little drill
(19:09):
in there to kind of blast them up. Yeah. But
what if it actually is a tumor? Right. That could
be malignant? Like, that then just... Like, are you propagating it?
Propagates cancer cells. Right. Yeah. And then the last thing
that I had written on here was just like, there
was so much stuff I did not have to learn
(19:30):
and figure out how to explain once I narrowed down
this topic. Which I think trying to learn and explain
all of them would have been a really tall order,
even if I had not been somewhat unwell the whole
time I was working on it. Yeah. Here's the Murphy's
Law for me that always happens. in that scenario. Yeah.
(19:51):
When I'm like, this is going to be a hard one,
but I can do it. That's the week that, like,
everything explodes. Uh-huh. Where it's like, oh, and your refrigerator died.
And also, there's a, you know... mangled raccoon on your
deck that needs help. And also, these are things I'm
making up. These are not things I'm dealing with. But
it's always like, there's like a weird thing where the
universe goes, hey, you think you can handle that? Guess what? Yeah. Yeah.
(20:16):
I felt bad enough to take half a day off
partway through my illness, which I have not needed to
do in a while. I've been very blessedly not sick
in a while. So the fact that I then needed
a half day to lie around. Well, let's keep it
that way. Yeah. Knock on wood. Knock on wood. I
(20:39):
had just gotten back from some travel, and it's pretty
sure something that I picked up in transit. So, yeah. Yeah.
Do you have anything else that you would like to
say about Coley? No, because you said knock on wood,
and now Amy Stewart is singing in my head. Okay. Well...
(21:00):
Whatever is coming up on your weekend, I hope that
it goes as well as is possible, even better than expected,
better than you think is possible. That's what I hope.
I'm thinking back to the days when my days off
used to be on Tuesday and Wednesday every week, which
in some ways was kind of fun. Yeah. If you
(21:23):
have a Tuesday or Wednesday or other midweek time off,
or if you are in a place where you're needing
to have overlapping things and not a lot of time off,
then I hope you're able to take a little time
to have a moment for yourself. Do something that's a
little refreshing for yourself. treat yourself or maybe treat somebody
else or treat both of you everybody gets a little
(21:44):
treat we will be back with a brand new episode
on monday and of course we'll have a saturday classic
tomorrow stuff you missed in history class is a production
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