Behind the Scenes Minis: Traveling and Diseases

Tracy and Holly talk about traveling for live shows, and the ways people often pick apart things people say to find hidden meaning. They also discuss the ways that humans process information about disease. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. This week we had our live recorded episode
on Jean Stratton Porter from our lap show in Indianapolis. Yes,

(00:22):
what a fun time. It was a very fun time.
We had very good luck overall in terms of our travel. Yes,
this show was recorded in that magical awful time where
the software glitch caused a lot of problems for a

(00:43):
lot of airlines. Yeah, anytime we are planning to travel
somewhere for some kind of live show, there's sort of
a mental calculation about like how long the flight is,
what the flights schedule is like, and if we flew
to the venue on the day there was any kind
of problem, is there any chance we can still make
the show. We've had a number of times we're flying

(01:07):
on the day has been fine, especially when we've been
like on a tour going from one city to the
next city to the next city. Usually we're flying that morning,
doing a show that evening next day, do it all
over again. People who've been listening to the podcast for
a really long time may remember the time that we
had a live show to do in Dallas, and our
flight got diverted to Shreveport. That is the closest to

(01:31):
a show not happening that has ever happened to us
personally so far. Knock on wood this time. Just the
combination of the length of flying, especially from Boston like that.
There are not a ton of direct flight options into
Indianapolis from the places that we live, so we each

(01:53):
we flew in the night before, Yeah, and then the
next morning got up and I think the first thing
I saw on my phone and was you texting me
saying I'm glad we flew in last night. And I
was like, what is happening right now? And then I
learned that there was a huge it problem that had
led to cancelations all over the place. We might have

(02:15):
still made it if we had flown in on that day,
but it would have been really really close, and if
it had not worked out. The ticketing system at the
Historical Society was also affected by the bug. Yes, so
for them to and they couldn't email people because that
was also effected, right everything, if it had gone, if
it had not happened, if we had not made it there, Yeah,

(02:39):
there may have been a lot of people showing up
to discover that we weren't there. So I'm glad we
got very I'm glad it worked out as it did.
And then the flight holl Mine was early and yours
was a little late but manageable. Yeah, mine was delayed
by like four hours in the end.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
That didn't bother me a bit. I was sitting there
eating and having drinks and I just hung out and yeah,
I kind of had it in my head that might happen,
So I was not chagrined in the least. It was
just fine. Yeah. So yeah, that was that was our
travel travel experience, traveling on a particularly fraud travel day.
Jean Stratton Porter. We made it clear in that episode, uh,

(03:20):
that I had a lot of fondness for And then
got to the part of writing a novel that was
definitely a product of its time, not clear whether it
reflected her own personal attitudes or not, but regardless of
whether it did reflect her own personal attitudes, like it

(03:41):
was a novel with a very racist person as the hero,
and that sort of tempered my your adoration, my adoration,
because I really was the whole time I was working
on it reading her descriptions of the birds and the
moths and the things that she would do to try
to get good pictures of the like. I just I

(04:01):
loved it so much. We did not bring up in
that episode that a lot of what she wrote about
and a lot of what she thought about nature and
life had a lot in common with the Transcendentalists, and
the Transcendentalist movement was significantly before her time. Really, a

(04:22):
lot of those folks were writing long before she was,
but they were for sure people whose work that she
knew and referenced and was familiar with. Like there are
quotes about throw and her various writing stuff like that,
And so I kind of went back and forth about
whether to talk about how she clearly was influenced by

(04:43):
the Transcendentalist movement, and there was so much other stuff
already in the episode that I did not wind up
putting it in there. Yeah, it was a lengthy episode
to begin with, so you got to make cuts. Yeah,
especially when you are doing a live s that is
scheduled for a certain amount of time, you want to

(05:06):
still have a few minutes for questions at the end,
which we did have some questions at the end. Yeah,
some of the folks who were there were people who
work at the historical societies or at historical sites that
are associated specifically with Jeane Stratton Porter places that she lived,
Limberlost Swamp, all of that. I think they have maybe

(05:27):
a little bit more insight into her thought process regarding
her husband. Yeah, and the impression that I got is
sort of in line with what I had concluded without
getting into a ton of detail, which is that like,
she definitely had made it clear from the get go
that she was not going to be like the traditional life,

(05:48):
right and that if what he wanted was for someone
to stay home and keep house and raise children, that
that was not what she was doing. So I like,
I think think he definitely on that front, knew what
he was getting into when he married her. I still
am real foggy though on like the specifics of when

(06:09):
she moved to California and he didn't like what. I
can imagine a million different scenarios there, you know, in
a range of just like he had businesses that he
had to attend to and couldn't really move at that
point to her being kind of like I would rather
go be on my own, don't really know uhh, So

(06:31):
she tend tend to be very private about a lot
of her more personal thoughts and feelings on stuff, which
makes sense given you know, we talked about in the
episode that she had to move in some cases to
get away from people showing up on her doorsteps. So like,
I could completely understand a lockdown situation on any of

(06:52):
your personal business, yeah, even if it's completely benign. Yeah.
And we really see the same thing happening today with
people who become famous in one way or another and
suddenly have Reddit communities or whatever devoted to dissecting everything

(07:12):
they say, to look for hidden clues about their personal
lives and feelings and stuff that is really invasive. And
I feel like that's something that, like the growth of
the Internet and the growth of social media really enabled
at a scope that was not quite so possible when

(07:34):
people's outlets were things like conversations and letters with their
friends and newspapers and magazines and stuff, and not like
an online always on community where people can spend extraordinary
amounts of scrutiny on an offhanded comment someone gave it
an interview, right, I mean, I obviously that comes with

(07:58):
some inherent weirdness and but I do often just chuckle
at people in you know, completely harmless ways, trying to
like pick apart things people have said and figure out
like what they're actually trying to telegraph, and often it's
like there's nothing there. Yeah, you're literally like that person

(08:20):
said that thing about doors closing and then went on
with their day. They it didn't mean anything especially weighty,
but now you've attached this meaning to it that they
have no part of. Those always fascinate me a little bit. Yeah.
I used to be an avid reader of a blog
called Ask a Manager, especially when I was a manager,

(08:43):
which I'm not anymore, and I like, I learned so
much from that blog about being a manager. And it's
often described as like a really supportive comment community. Yeah,
but I've also very frequently seen, especially if somebody writing
a letter was doing something that seems maybe troubling or unpopular,

(09:03):
like just inordinately close reading looking for subtext of things
that people have said, and it's like, this is an
email someone wrote to a blog. They probably didn't spend
three weeks fine tuning the wording on it. And if
they did spend three weeks fine tuning the wording on it,

(09:26):
it might not actually mean anything, right, Well, those are
the moments where I always find myself being like, wait,
does this mean all of these people are always speaking
in like a cloaked, clouded version of what they're actually thinking.
And I'm like, oh, who has the energy for that? Like,
I know this is why I'm a very direct person, right.

(09:49):
I can't. I can't even be passive aggressive. It's too
much work. So yeah, anyway, Jean Stratton Porter, we wanted
to do an episode that was related to something that
was happening at the History Center while we were there,
and I'm glad that was the one that we chose.

(10:11):
I'm glad we got to make a quick run through
the exhibit about her while we were there. That's again
running until October. It's a beautiful exhibit. Yeah, it's really cool.
Before we made this trip, I had kind of thought about, like,
would it be reasonable to try to go out to
one of the historical sites associated with her? And I

(10:33):
did not start looking into that with any kind of
planning at all. But it also became clear that like
what needed to happen was resting before the show. Yeah,
not going on a road trip somewhere to see her
house or limberlost swamp or something such fun, such fun.

(10:59):
That is the cool thing if you are in that
area and are thinking about going go because there are
a lot of her photographs and photographs of her as
part of that that are really really fun to look at. Yeah,
they are really good. And they also have a fabulous
Chuck Taylor exhibit going on right now, which I was
very excited. And their very quick pass through that all

(11:19):
sit their staff very kindly as they were trying to
close down for the day, let us run through there.
I just wanted to see shoes. I just wanted to
see shoes. Yeah. One of the things we talked about

(11:40):
this week was three diseases named after places, a little uplifting, fun,
light discussion that won't leave you feeling weird or paranoid
at all. I know when I was sort of writing
the entro to it, originally, I had this like very
explicit sentence that was like, if get it sick from

(12:00):
an incredibly casual exposure just out trying to live your
life is gonna make you have intrusive thoughts for the
foreseeable future, maybe skip this. And then I was like,
that seems a little heavy handed for a content note.
But Yeah, when I heard about the outbreak of Legionari's

(12:21):
disease at the Mountain State Fair in North Carolina, that
was just like people walking past a hot dub display.
I was like, yikes, I feel that way about pretty
much every neurovirus outbreak. Yeah, is traced to a specific place, Holly,
You and I have talked about how I went on
the Jonathan Colton cruise in March of twenty twenty as

(12:43):
as the COVID nineteen pandemic was about to start. It
hadn't been declared a pandemic when we left, teetering on
the brink. Yeah. Yeah, And you and I have talked
about your surprise that I got on the ship. I
was literally telling people, Tracy's not getting on that boat.
I guarantee it. She's going to Well, she's going to
decide the night before that's not happening. Well. One of

(13:05):
the big reasons that I did is that at that
point I had been on several cruises, and nourovirus outbreaks
are so common on cruise ships that every single time
I went on one of these, I was like, is
this the time that we're all getting nourovirus on this cruise,
and when we left, COVID was still being downplayed. I

(13:26):
don't remember if they had even named it COVID yet,
but like it was still being downplayed in a way
that was very like just wash your hands right, don't
go licking stuff, You'll be fine. And so it sort
of felt like something a little riskier than maybe the flu.

(13:47):
But having already had the idea of infectious illness factored
into going on a cruise so many times, it just
sort of felt like like, this is another potential disease thing.
This is a normal way to think about a cruise anyway. Yeah,
and then you know, then while we were on the cruise,
suddenly the COVID situation. It didn't actually become a lot worse.

(14:08):
It had been that bad the whole time, right, it
just got it got recognized a lot. I used to
have a job that involved reading the CDC's Morbidity and
Mortality Weekly Report, so you know, I have a weird
nostalgia for it. I have also worked at a job
one time that got written up in the Morbidity and

(14:30):
Mortality Weekly Report.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
Uh, And as I was scrolling through to get all
of the reports about the Legioneer's outbreak and the Norwalk
illness outbreak. Just scrolling through, I found one that was
about a cruise ship outbreak. This is just a sentence,
quote quote coliform bacteria in numbers too numerous to count,

(14:56):
were found in the ship's potable water distribution system, and
I was just like, yikes, bump, yikes, yikes. This was
one of many Yike's moments of working on this episode.
Another big one was the research involving the people who
were incarcerated at the prison, because the first thing that
I read about it was almost like a side comment

(15:17):
that was one of those things that was printed at
a medical journal seemed to just take for granted that
the people reading would know what this study was, so
it was sort of like a not even full sentence
of and then the experiment blah blah at the prison,
and I was like, oh, no, I need to look
at more information about this experiment at a prison. And

(15:40):
I have access to lots of different journals through multiple
library cards and memberships, and this was one where I
needed to ask my spouse to get it from where
he works because I didn't have access to any of
my local things. And I sent him this email that
said something like, can I have this paper, please do

(16:00):
not read it, do not even look at the headline
too closely, and he sent me. He sent it back
to me and was like, I'm glad I got this
after luncheon, not before, and I was like, I tried
to warn you. And then when I opened it, I
had accidentally asked for like a commentary that was from

(16:20):
later on that had the identical title of the original paper,
and I had to ask him to get it get
another way. I felt really bad about that. Yeah, and
then the I was like, Okay, so I don't actually
have more clarity on like the specifics of how they
recruited people out of prison for this. I did not

(16:42):
know that there had been other people who were not
in the prison that had been part of it. Anyway,
you talked about having thoughts about how diseases are named.
I do because and this actually ties into a bigger
discussion in my opinion. So I found myself like thinking

(17:05):
in that moment as we were discussing the way that
we have to be very careful to not name a
disease after any place or group or anything. It's a
kind of a depressing take. So just know that we
cannot I'm gonna not use expletives, but pretend they're all

(17:27):
in here, because you know they're exasperated expletives in here.
We cannot trust our fellow humans to not be jerks. Well, sure,
and I hate that and it makes me sad the
people that started calling COVID before it even had an
official name, but people who started applying terms about Asia, yeah,

(17:49):
and in some cases just using explicitly racist language about
Asia and Asians to describe like it sucks and it's awful.
It does, and I feel like we're in So the
reason why I say this opens up like a bigger
thing is that I feel like if you look at
the psychology of the way people interact with information about illness,

(18:11):
like I understand one hundred percent, your little lizard brain
has a fear response, and so you want to push
away any of that in any way you possibly can.
But like, I feel like we are in this unique
position right now where we have just watched people and
continue to watch people deal with information about contagious disease.

(18:36):
And I hope someone is doing a lot of research
on the psychology of how we have all managed. I mean,
I know there have been some, but I really feel
like there could be a big holistic examination of the
ways that Yeah, you know, in some ways, I feel
like being on at the point where COVID is now

(18:57):
considered endemic and not in a cute, just pandemic going on,
that a lot of people who got through it relatively
unscathed kind of feel like superhuman and like they maybe
are not taking the possibility of other infectious dicises right
as seriously as they could or should. It's just really weird.

(19:19):
And then of course people that recognize that they are
either predisposed because of other existing conditions or perhaps they
got a prettyarly bad case of COVID and may have
recovered but now are concerned about you know, we have
seen cases of like long COVID that pop up several
years after the fact, or you know, things that we
don't even have really a whole lot of documentation for.

(19:42):
I feel like it's separated people into thinking like, eh,
it's fine, and others into like everything is potentially a
serious disease. Yeah, like we all need to be really careful,
and those those two mindsets are having a lot of
struggle with one another. Yeah, And I hate that I wish,
I wish everybody it could be cool. I think a

(20:05):
lot of people from a lot of different directions have
various frustrations about how how the CDC handled and messaged
around the COVID pandemic, which I think, like, even though
there is essentially nothing being done at this point, I
think is still because of its worldwide prominence, like still

(20:28):
technically classified as a pandemic right the World Health Organization,
I don't think has changed never. Yeah, And there's some
stuff where it's just like it gets so frustrating, Like
it's I am at this moment getting ready to take
a trip to take my elderly parent to get a
medical procedure in the state of North Carolina where there

(20:49):
is a new law where like there's kind of a
medical reasons exception about it, but like a law about
mask wearing in public. And I'm just like, I'm taking
my dad to a medical facility. Yeah, during a big
COVID wave, Like there's a lot of COVID going around
right now. My mother is incredibly high risk. Uh, and

(21:12):
I would just generally not like to get COVID because
when I got it, which I've only had at once,
it was bad I didn't have to go to the hospital,
but I missed multiple days of work, and then for
a week after that, I had to work in a
recliner and when I tried to record, my watch kept
telling me my heart rate was too fast, and like

(21:34):
then I was just exhausted for probably another two weeks
after all that. And it's like that is not just
a cold, uh, which is what people like to say. Yeah,
I mean I feel like there. I was just thinking
about this the other day and my husband and I
were just discussing it because I had traveled a few

(21:54):
weeks back and two of the people that I had
traveled with or had seen during my travels tested positive
for COVID not long after. And it was a little
bit before I saw you in Indiana, and I knew
you had this coming up. So I was like testing
every day. Yeah, And I never had symptoms and I
never tested positive. And I even did like a you know,

(22:16):
a grown up test in a facilit negative negative negative,
And I was like, I don't know if I just
got lucky because I'm very like tactile. I hug all
my friends, I kiss them on the cheek, et cetera.
And I was like I don't. I don't know why
I didn't get this, And I was asking that we
were talking about vaccination status, and I was like, did
you get your spike vacs? And at least one of

(22:40):
those people was like what, And I was like, we
have failed in messaging about yeah, this too. Like I
feel like now when I have talked to numerous friends
and I don't want to throw anybody under the bus
because a lot of people who are pretty darn informed
are like, I didn't even know we had another wind coming.
I didn't, right, has Unless you're like going to your

(23:02):
GP on the regular and your GP is really on
top of it, right, you might not know that there
are new variations that will that are being formulated theoretically
to keep up with the shifting mutations of the virus.
But like, if you aren't doing that, it's not like
there are bulletins going out. It's not like you would

(23:24):
have to literally be hunting it down on your own
all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think information is
sort of going out within medical professionals and like not
making its way to the public unless you're on Unless
you wind up on the COVID cautious side of TikTok,
in which case you might get more information than is

(23:45):
really helpful to you. That sort of brings me around
to like the last thing that I had written on
my list of ideas to talk about on the Friday
behind the Scenes, which is that at the beginning of COVID,
there were a lot of steps that were being taken.
A lot of times people thought they would be helpful,
steps would not really be helpful. Steps that included things

(24:08):
like either wiping down or disinfecting restaurant menus or giving
people a way to order things that was not a
physical menu that they would hold. That's not really helping
for COVID. There's a lot of stuff that's still around
that's like recommendations to protect yourself, and one of those
things is hand washing, and like people get really snippy

(24:30):
about it and are like, that's not how COVID spreads.
COVID is airborne, and I'm like, you know what does
spread that way?

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Though?

Speaker 1 (24:36):
Norovirus? So much stuff, Yeah, you know what else? I
would not like to get neurovirus. There's just so much.
There are lots of food borne illnesses that like hand
washing is a big, big part of protecting yourself. And
protecting other people if you were preparing or handling their food.
So I got I get a little irritated by like

(24:57):
this sort of weird almost backlash against hand washing because
it is not a preventative for COVID. Like, here's my thing.
It takes so little effort and it can protect you
from other stuff. Why would you fight this? Right? Right?

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, I do have a a.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
Personal hilarity of my own ignorance on a thing which
I don't know if someone told me this growing up
and I just operated with this for a long time,
or if I had made a presumption based on something
someone told me when I was a kid, because for
the longest time, I thought to get away from less

(25:49):
scary things. The differentiator between having a cold and having
a flu was if you barfed. Huh, Like I didn't
know that you could have a flu that was not
about like throwing up or having bathroom emergencies. I just
thought that was a super bad cold. And this is
a falsehood that persisted in my knowledge base well into

(26:11):
my adulthood. One of my personal pet peeves is the
term stomach flu because that has nothing to do with influenza. Right.
Influenza is a separate thing. Right, that's its own illness
and can also be very serious and like a flu

(26:33):
shot every year is not going to protect you from
whatever gi illness that people are describing as stomach flu. Right.
I thought you were going to say you thought the
differentiator was whether you have a fever.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
No.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
I literally thought it was a barf situation. Yeah. Yeah,
the one time as an adult person that I have
actually been diagnosed with the flu, I was also very sick.
And again I did not have to go to the hospital,
but I think I missed an entire week of work

(27:08):
and I remember calling our coworker at the time, Julie,
to tell her that I was not coming in for
like the fourth day in the row. Yeah, And when
I got back to the office, she was like, you
sounded so bad I wanted to disinfect my phone. Uh

(27:29):
So anyway, Yes, it's just my little personal pet peeve
about terms stomach flu. Yeah, I believe it. I also
the discussion of PPE made me chuckle a little, which
is not to say that it's a laughable thing. I
want to I'm trying to figure out the best way
to discuss this without being disgusting. Some number of years back,
as you may recall, I had a little surprise hospital stay.

(27:51):
I've had a couple of those. Yeah, a sickly person
and I'm quite robust, really, but I had what turned
out to be a bacterial intestinal infection. That was a
little scary at the time, but you know, I'm fine.
But initially when they admitted me, they did not know

(28:12):
if I had seediff and those tests take a while
to come back, so my poor nurses, who were amazing,
had to has mad up every time they came in
my room. And you, I mean, you would have thought
I had cured a long term, unwieldy disease when they
found out that they no longer had to do that anymore. Yeah.

(28:33):
It just is such an arduous additional step for people
that are managing the care of multiple people at a time. Yeah,
and it, you know, slows down their whole like schedule
for the day. I certainly appreciate that they do it
and that all of that was being done, but I
was I mean, obviously I was also very grateful, But

(28:57):
when you were talking about like the need to do
training people on how to use it, I was like, oh, yes,
because even just gloves, like even if the only thing
you're doing is putting gloves on. It is very easy
to especially taking gloves off, do it in a way
that you touch your skin with a glove. Yeah, and

(29:20):
now that's that's contaminated. And I also, like I think
I did want to say, I don't I don't think
I actually said this in the episode anywhere, But like
the World Health Organization investigators who came during the first
Ebola outbreaks, they really stressed like they were like, these
medical staff are people who care about what they're doing.

(29:42):
They're doing their best. They just don't have the resources
and the training to be able to prevent an outbreak
of an illness like this, because like nineteen seventy six,
not as many bloodborne illnesses identified as now, not as
much of a focus on blood borne pathogens prevention for

(30:06):
their transmission. And then again like getting into and out
of a full gown and mask and gloves and booties,
and like getting into and out of all that, especially
getting out of it after you treated somebody without like
it's a whole thing, And like if you just put

(30:27):
it on and yank it off like it's you're probably
going to wind up either touching your skin to it
or touching something else that then is contaminated. Yeah. Well,
and it's also worth pointing out, right in some of
these hospitals that we were talking about, there was one
you specifically mentioned the staff numbers. It was only like
seventeen people, So like, when you consider that is a

(30:49):
tiny group of people, yeah, who in an outbreak situation,
are then having to care for a lot of people, Like,
it's so easy in the desire to you, even if
you're being very careful, just to like speed up that
x amount that somehow breaks that whole chain of caution
that you have to maintain in the putting on and

(31:11):
taking off, Like I can't imagine. I don't think I
would probably do it properly in that scenario, right, So
it's easy to be like, oh, they didn't know any better,
what a bunch of like no, no, no, Well, and
I think that seventeen person staff was at a facility
that had one hundred and twenty beds, so like a
lot of patients for each nurse. That also somehow reminded

(31:34):
me of like I've heard people who work in medicine
talk about how a lot of times family members don't
realize how easy something is to spread so like a
well meaning family member will refill the water picture for
their sick love one, not realizing that that water pitcher

(31:54):
has now contaminated the water fountain with whatever that person
yea had, Like it's an ongoing thing. Anyway, we have
taken a number of digressions from I will also say
uh germane to the listener mail, I do have an
episode coming about Norway. Nice, it's not great. It's not

(32:18):
an upbeater. Well, so just brace for that. But uh yeah,
but I would love to do more Norwegian topics because
it sounds great. Yeah, whatever's happening on your weekend, I
hope it goes well. I hope if anybody in your
circle is ill, including you, I hope everybody is recovering

(32:38):
as well as possible. Everybody washes their hands. You can
find our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you
get your podcasts, and we'll be back. It was Saturday
Classic Tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff you

(32:59):
missed in History. Clu is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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