Elizabeth Blackwell's Curious Herbal

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A few weeks ago, I
took a little trip to England, and while I was there,
I took the train to Oxford and I visited the

(00:23):
Ashmolean Museum. They currently have an exhibit called in Bloom,
How Plants Changed Our World, and I really enjoyed that.
And one of the things I saw in that exhibition
was a facsimile of Elizabeth Blackwell's book A Curious Erbil.
There's a longer title than that, which we will be
reading later. I'm saving it, savoring the long title. So

(00:48):
I knew this was a different Elizabeth Blackwell from the
one we have covered on the show before, who became
the first woman in the US to earn an MD
in eighteen forty nine. Our episode on that Elizabeth Blackwell
came out in twenty fourteen. This Elizabeth Blackwell was born
in London, more than a century before the American doctor Blackwell,

(01:10):
and was known for her achievements as a botanical illustrator.
And if you read articles about Elizabeth Blackwell, including fairly
recent ones. It is very possible to highly likely that
you will get some incorrect details about who she was
and where she was born. Some of these errors actually
date back to her own lifetime, and then they were

(01:32):
repeated and embellished in the decades that followed. And one
reason is that more than a decade into their marriage,
Elizabeth's husband, Alexander became infamous for reasons that we are
going to get into. People writing about him naturally wanted
to include some details about his well known wife. He
had been born in Aberdeen, so people just assumed that

(01:54):
she had two and eventually people found and Elizabeth from Aberdeen,
who seemed to be about the right age to have
married Alexander. She had been baptized in seventeen oh nine.
And this other person was Elizabeth Blatrie, who was a
daughter of a merchant, and she was baptized in seventeen
oh seven, so their ages seemed to match up, but

(02:15):
that was the wrong Elizabeth. Yeah, and I found this
situation very confusing when I was researching this, because there
were two wildly different stories of who this person was,
no explanation for the contradiction, and most of the credit
for correcting this information goes to Janet Styles Tyson, who
completed a PhD thesis on Elizabeth Blackwell in twenty twenty one.

(02:38):
Tyson's thesis points out that there's really nothing to substantiate
a marriage between Elizabeth Blatrie and Alexander Blackwell, but there
was an Elizabeth Simpson who married an Alexander Blackwell in
Holborn on October first of seventeen thirty three. When she
finished her thesis, though Tyson could not verify the these

(03:00):
were the same Elizabeth and Alexander as we're talking about today,
those names, all the names involved were common enough that
it was within the realm of possibility that they could
just be different people. But then in twenty twenty two,
Tyson was working on an essay to go into a
new edition of Elizabeth Blackwell's herbal She was trying to

(03:23):
personally examine as many copies of the book as she
possibly could, and that took her to David M. Rubinstein
Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University, and the
copy in that collection included a two page preface that
had not been in any of the other copies that
Tyson looked at, and it was a preface that Blackwell

(03:44):
had written herself, and it was dated April twelfth, seventeen
thirty nine. And in that preface she said that she
was the daughter of Leonard Simpson. So Elizabeth Simpson was
born in the city of London on April twenty third,
the sixteen ninety nine, to Leonard and Alice Simpson. She was
baptized on May fourth of that year. The Simpsons lodged

(04:07):
with a shoemaker who was also named Simpson, so that
might have been their relative. In this newly discovered preface,
Blackwell said of herself quote, I, from my very infancy
showed an inclination to imitate pictures and to attempt drawing
such things as pleased me. Whether this proceeded from the

(04:28):
strong impressions made on my tender brain by the agreeable
objects I was daily surrounded with my father, Leonard Simpson,
being a painter or a genius born with me, I
can't determine. Sadly, Elizabeth did not get the benefit of
much art instruction from her father, who died when she
was still very young, but as she got older she

(04:50):
developed a particular love for drawing and painting flowers, and
for representing them in her needlework. She was also very
curious about the flowers and plants that she encountered out
in the world, especially the ones that were growing in
the wild. But when she tried to look these plants
up in books, she often found herself frustrated and dissatisfied.

(05:12):
And this was because, in her words, the illustrations in
those books were often quote too small and confused to
be instructive. As she grew up, Elizabeth Blackwell continued pursuing
her childhood love of learning about drawing and painting plants
and flowers. Eventually, she started working on solving that problem

(05:33):
of two small and cramped illustrations, embarking on a project
of making full size depictions of plants, with each picture
on its own page. It is possible that she was
inspired by the work of Maria Sibulia Median, who we
have covered on the show before, and who published three
volumes of flower engravings between sixteen seventy five and sixteen eighty.

(05:56):
After Blackwell finished some samples of these full page flowers drawings,
she showed them to some gentlemen of her acquaintance, who,
in her words, were quote pleased to commend the performance. However,
She went on to say, quote, but this scene of
pleasure was interrupted by some misfortunes which deprived mister Blackwell

(06:18):
of all employment and so far reduced us that I
found it necessary to consider what I could do towards
supporting my family. Her friends encouraged her to quote make
proposals for designing, engraving, and publishing by subscription a set
of prints of the physical plants, which work they judged

(06:38):
would be very useful and acceptable to the public. So
that mister Blackwell was of course her husband, Alexander Blackwell.
They had gotten married in seventeen thirty three. There are
various stories floating around about the two of them having
eloped in secret, but this seems to have been a
fabrication that appeared in the early nineteenth century. Alexander's birth

(07:01):
date is unclear, but since he was baptized in seventeen
oh nine, it is possible that he was at least
a decade younger than Elizabeth. Alexander was from a respectable family.
His father, Thomas, was a minister who served as moderator
of the General Assembly of the Church at Scotland, as
well as a professor of divinity and principal at Mareschal

(07:22):
College in Aberdeen. Alexander had a brother, who was also
called Thomas, who was a classical scholar and historian and
the author of multiple books. Most sources about Alexander say
that he had a university education and studied medicine in
Leiden in the Netherlands, but there's no clear documentation of

(07:43):
this anywhere, and just no record of his ever earning
a degree. As for the misfortunes which deprived mister Blackwell
of all employment, some accounts say that Alexander was practicing
medicine without the qualifications to actually do so, and that
after this re suspicion, he and Elizabeth had to flee

(08:03):
to London. That doesn't really make sense, though, since Elizabeth
was from London and that is where they got married.
These accounts make it sound like the couple had to
start over in a place that was new to them,
but it seems like they were already in London when
this supposed quackery allegation would have happened. In Scotland, the
misfortunes that were connected to Alexander's work as a printer

(08:26):
are easier to substantiate. About three years before he and
Elizabeth got married, he had started working as a corrector
at a press belonging to a man named mister Wilkins,
and then after their marriage, Alexander decided to start his
own press, and it's possible that his startup costs came
from Elizabeth's dowry. But the Stationer's Guild had a monopoly

(08:50):
on printing and a person had to complete an apprenticeship
before they could become a printer on their own. Alexander
Blackwell had not gone through an apprenticeship and was not
a member of the Stationer's Guild, so he faced a
lawsuit almost immediately. On July tenth, seventeen thirty four, he
appeared in court under charges that he quote exercised the

(09:12):
art and mystery of a printer, not having served regular
apprenticeship in the trade. Alexander was fined, and apparently he
did not have the money to pay that fine. Two
months later, he was declared bankrupt. According to some accounts,
he spent two years in a debtor's prison, but the
bankruptcy would have allowed him to avoid imprisonment. Regardless of

(09:36):
whether Alexander was imprisoned or not. After all of this happened,
it fell to Elizabeth to try to provide for them,
and we will get to that after a sponsor break.
Elizabeth Blackwell's plan of supporting her family and paying off

(09:59):
her husband's bad debts by publishing prints of medicinal plants
required her to develop a whole network of contacts and
supporters in the world of English medicine, alchemy, and botany.
In August of seventeen thirty five, physician Alexander Stewart wrote
a letter of introduction to Sir Hans Sloane, President of

(10:19):
the Royal Society, describing Blackwell as the quote niece of
Sir William Simpson, one of the Barons of the Exchequer,
whom you know, and first cousin to my Lady Cook Windford,
whom you also know. This letter described Blackwell as a
quote very ingenious person and said she was embarking on

(10:40):
a project to create illustrations of about five hundred medicinal
plants and have them engraved. It also said that she
already had the support of Isaac Rand, director of the
Apothecary's Physic Garden now known as Chelsea Physic Garden, where
the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries grew their medicinal plants. Rand

(11:02):
had helped Blackwell develop the proposal for this project, which
was also being provided for Sloan to review. Along with
the letter of introduction. Blackwell also had the support of
doctor Richard Meade, fellow of both the Royal Society and
the Royal College of Physicians, and Thomas Pellett, President of
the Royal College of Physicians. Her first prints of these

(11:25):
plants were just the illustrations of the plants labeled with
their names, but eventually she also started including descriptive text
about the plants and their uses and preparations. A major
source of that text was the seventeen twenty one edition
of the Dispensatory of the Royal College of Physicians. Joseph Miller,

(11:47):
Master of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, was also on
board with Blackwell's project, and his Botanicum of Finchinale, or
a Compendious Herbal Giving an Account of all such Plants
as are now used in the Practice of physic was
another major source for the descriptive text. Neither Botanicum of
Finchinale nor the Dispensatory was illustrated, so the idea was

(12:11):
to bring all of this information under one cover, making
the illustrations more useful to people who didn't already have
one of these other texts. In seventeen thirty six, Blackwell,
either by herself or with Alexander, since it's not totally
clear whether he was imprisoned or not, rented lodgings at
for Swan Walk that was across the street from the

(12:34):
physic Garden, and that gave Blackwell easy access to the
plants so that she could draw them from life. On
April twenty seventh of that same year, her first child,
a son named William, was baptized. Tragically, William died a
few days later and was buried at Saint Luke's Chelsea
on May third. This was very sadly not the family's

(12:56):
only loss in an era of widespread child mortality. A
daughter named Blanche was born in seventeen thirty seven and
died the following year. Blackwell started selling flower prints to
subscribers through printer Samuel Harding in seventeen thirty seven, and
these serialized sets of pages were called facicules and uncolored

(13:17):
faccules cost a shilling each. Colored versions, which Blackwell hand
colored herself after printing, cost two shillings. She produced a
faccule of four prints a week every week for one
hundred and fifty weeks, and that gave her an ongoing
source of steady income. As she was working on this project,

(13:38):
her subscribers could collate all the faccules and have them
bound once they were complete, which means there is a
lot of variation among the more than one hundred bound
volumes that exist in libraries and museum collections today. Most
of these are in the UK, Western Europe, and North America.

(13:58):
Four illustrations a week is a lot, especially considering that
Blackwell didn't really take breaks for things like pregnancy or
giving birth, or caring for a newborn or grieving the
death of a child. She had to work really quickly.
She focused on making sure that outlines were correct, and
then she did less shading if she was running out

(14:18):
of time. Her production schedule was also tied to what
was growing or blooming at the Apothecary's physic garden. She
incorporated other research, but the plants that she could draw
from life really took priority, and that meant there wasn't
always a logical order to the fascicules or the bound
copies that were made from them. She wrote of these limitations, quote,

(14:41):
I homely hope my subscribers will show their goodness in
pardoning these defects, and that my good friends, who were
anyways helpful to me in carrying on this work, will
accept my most hearty thanks. If it should please God
to give my life and health, I shall employ my
leisure in finishing the plate, rectifying mistakes, and supplying defects

(15:03):
that they may be more complete. Some accounts say that
Blackwell's husband helped her with the text of the book,
including providing information about the medicinal uses for the plants
or translating the plant's names into different languages. Sometimes this
work is described as happening from his cell in the
Debtors prison, but it is not fully clear how involved

(15:26):
he was in this part of this production, since most
of the text has a clear connection to the Royal
College of Physicians dispensatory and Joseph Miller's Botanicum Efficionality. Alexander
was definitely involved in the arrangements and contracts for getting
the book printed, though under the doctrine of coverture, married

(15:47):
women in the UK did not have their own legal
existence beyond that of their husband, Alexander's signature is the
one on formal agreements related to printing and distribution, although
there are are also explicit acknowledgments that the work was Elizabeth's.
Blackwell likely also had some help with some of the

(16:08):
steps that were required to produce these prints, but she's
generally recognized as creating a watercolor drawing of each plant
and also hands coloring the printed pages for the subscribers
that paid for them to be colored. She also either
etched or engraved the plates that they were printed from.
Engraving and etching are two different ways of preparing a

(16:32):
plate for printing by incizing the design into the surface.
Those kinds of printing techniques are known as italio printing,
and that's in contrast to things like woodblock printing that
we've talked about on the show before, where the parts
of the wood that are not part of the design
are removed. That category of printing is known as relief printing.

(16:55):
Contemporary sources describe Blackwell's work using the terms engraving and
etching almost interchangeably, but these are different techniques. Blackwell's illustrations
appear to be etched, while the pages containing explanatory text
look like they were engraved. Etching is also something Blackwell
probably could have learned to do more easily than engraving

(17:17):
because of the steps involved. There are documents in which
Blackwell mentions using a calligrapher for the explanatory text, so
it's possible that she did the etchings for the illustrations
while someone else engraved the calligraphy. Regardless, by illustrating the plants,
making the plates, and coloring them, she was doing three

(17:38):
different jobs that were more often handled by completely different people.
When Blackwell had finished one hundred and fifty sets of
four illustrations in seventeen thirty nine, bookseller John North printed
them as a complete two volume book under the title
A Curious Irbil, containing five hundred cuts of the most

(17:58):
useful plants which are now used in the practice of
physic engraved on folio copper plates after drawings taken from
the life by Elizabeth Blackwell, to which has added a
short description of the plants and their common uses in
physic that the is of course spelled ye, which I love.
At the time, the word curious had a lot of

(18:21):
meanings that it does not really carry today, including made
with care, carefully worked out or accurate. This is Blackwell's
only known published work. The printed volumes of The Curious
Irbil included an endorsement that she had also printed alongside
calls for subscribers, dated October one, seventeen thirty five. It

(18:44):
read quote, this undertaking was honored with the following public
recommendation by the underwritten gentlemen, we whose names are underwritten,
having seen a considerable number of the drawings from which
the plates are to be engraved, and likewise some of
the color plants think it's a justice done to the
public to declare our satisfaction with them and our good

(19:06):
opinion of the capacity of the undertaker. This was followed
by the names of nine men, five of them mds.
They included some of the men that we have already mentioned,
Richard Meade, Alexander Stewart, Joseph Miller, and Isaac Rand. Different
copies of her books also contained an assortment of dedications

(19:27):
to various learned men who had supported her work or
helped her with it. This rbel was one of the
most comprehensive texts on medicinal plants that was available in
Europe in the early mid eighteenth century, and it was
the first major erbel to be published by a British woman.
It included plants from the Americas in Asia, places where

(19:48):
England neither had or had previously had colonies, which meant
there were a lot of plants that Europeans had never
seen before included in it. The fact that it was
illustrated made it a use full reference for doctor's apothecaries
and others who needed to gather and prepare their own plants,
including women who wanted to grow medicinal plants in their kitchen,

(20:09):
gardens or Both were also popular as literature, so Blackwell's
readers also included lay people who were able to afford
something as expensive as a five hundred page book for
their libraries. While her book was widely praised in being
endorsed by the Royal College of Physicians, there were critics

(20:30):
who dismissed it for not including new information. While it
was true that most of the text came from two
well established references, neither of those books had been illustrated.
We will get to Elizabeth Blackwell's life after finishing her
book after a sponsor break. Sources are contradictory when it

(20:58):
comes to Alexander Under Blackwell's debt, bankruptcy, possible imprisonment, and
exactly how it was all affected by the publication of
Elizabeth Blackwell's Curious Herbal. Some say that the proceeds allowed
Elizabeth to pay off Alexander's debts and get him out
of prison, but then he kept racking up new ones.

(21:20):
Something that is more clearly documented is that the Blackwells
had to work to protect the copyright on Elizabeth's work,
and that by extension, they were protecting the income that
they could earn from that work. On March ninth of
seventeen thirty eight, they filed a complaint at the Court
of Chancery against eight named men and quote diverse other

(21:41):
persons for infringing on their copyright. The idea of authors
having legal ownership of their work was fairly new in
England and was first established under the Statute of Anne
of seventeen ten. Prior to that, ownership and copyright had
been regularly by the Stationers Guild rather than by the

(22:02):
government or the courts. Bound copies of Blackwell's Herbal probably
would have been covered under the Statute of Ann, but
only because they were in the form of a book.
Unbound fascicules would not have been protected, and that's a
gap that was closed under the Engravings Act of seventeen
thirty five, also known as the Hogarth Act, after painter

(22:24):
and engraver William Hogarth, who we have covered on the
show before. Yeah, so that was just a few years
before Blackwell filed this suit, and her suit was the
first copyright case in England involving works created by a
female artist. Witnesses in the case included apothecary Robert Nichols,
who testified to supplying Blackwell with plants to draw, and

(22:48):
Blackwell's brother Elizabeth Simpson, who testified about seeing Blackwell work
on the book, and also William Hogarth, who was an
expert witness and testified about the work that was being
sold by these other men being copies. This case also
involved a lot of discussion that grew from law and
the concepts that covered. Being fairly new, like Blackwell's artwork

(23:12):
was drawn from life, not from her own imagination, did
that fall under the law's definitions, which included a lot
of references to invention and design. Ultimately, yes, Also, how
could the court account for the fact that the work
was created by a woman while the legal ownership was

(23:33):
with her husband. In this case, both of the Blackwells
were plaintiffs, and the court acknowledged Elizabeth as proprietor of
the work. In the end, the Blackwells were awarded an
injunction that was supposed to stop the other publishers from
stealing her work, but because she hadn't marked the Prince
with the date of their first printing, which was required

(23:55):
under the law, she was not awarded monetary penalties the injunction,
and also didn't fully put an end to the infringement.
There are things like advertisements and printed warnings from after
this point about fraudulent editions of the herbal. If Alexander
Blackwell did go to Debtor's prison, he was out by
seventeen forty, and in seventeen forty one he published a

(24:18):
book on agriculture called A New Method of Improving cold
wet and barren lands, particularly clayey grounds, with the manner
of burning clay turf and molehills, as practiced in North Britain,
to which is added the method of cultivating and raising
fruit trees in such soils. Did Alexander Blackwell have the

(24:40):
knowledge and expertise that would allow him to write an
accurate book on this subject unclear, but he did get
a job working for James Bridges, Duke of Chandos, as
director of improvements on the Duke's land. After that, things
get murky for Alexander, and a lot of the writing

(25:00):
about what happened next is vague or contradictory, or both. Apparently,
on the recommendation of the Swedish ambassador in London, he
went to Sweden, where he got a job at court.
This most likely happened while Elizabeth was pregnant with their son,
also named Alexander, who was born in seventeen forty two.

(25:21):
The elder Alexander seems to have worked as both a
court physician and on agricultural improvements, and in seventeen forty
five he published an essay on the improvement of Swedish agriculture.
It appears that Elizabeth was preparing to join her husband
in Sweden in seventeen forty seven, and she sold the

(25:42):
remaining rights to her herbal to bookseller John Norse. The
Blackwells had sold partial rights to Norse over the years,
and this final sale of the remaining rights also included
unsold books and the printing plates. This cleared some debts
that Elizabeth had accrued that were connected to the printing
of the finished book, as well as other debts of Alexander's.

(26:05):
But then, on July twenty ninth, seventeen forty seven, probably
before Elizabeth would have embarked on this journey, Alexander was beheaded.
According to a pamphlet that was published about this that
same year, he was suspected of quote being employed as
an agent for some courts abroad. Swedish biologist Carl Naus

(26:27):
reportedly called Alexander Blackwell a self assertive ignoramus, and also
claimed that Alexander Blackwell had tried to bribe the king
to appoint an English counselor. Linnaeus also claimed that Alexander
had been having an affair with a married woman and
had supplied that woman with poison in order to kill

(26:48):
her husband with it. Some of this also seems to
have been connected to court intrigue and a dispute over
the Swedish line of succession, all of which could have
been an entire other subject, but I did not get
into it because it seemed very complicated, especially since this

(27:08):
episode is not about Alexander, and some accounts frame Alexander
is kind of hapless, while others make it sound more
like he was basically a con artist who was always
getting into some kind of shady scheme. That seventeen forty
seven pamphlets said that when he went to his execution,
he knelt down on the wrong side of the block.

(27:28):
When the executioner said that he needed to go to
the other side, he replied without emotion that quote. As
it was the first experiment he ever made in that way,
it was not to be wondered that he should need
a little instruction. In her brief biography of Elizabeth Blackwell,
Lydia Maria Child wrote quote, this ill fated man seemed

(27:49):
predestined to be unfortunate in all things save his affectionate
and excellent wife. He formed various schemes, in all of
which he was successively disappointed. James Bruce, author of the
eighteen forty one Lives of Eminent Men of Aberdeen, wrote quote,
his life was checkered by terms of prosperity and misfortune.

(28:11):
He might have been considered ill fated if that man
could be called unhappy, that had such a woman to
his wife. We know very little about what happened to
Elizabeth in the years after her husband's execution. According to
some accounts, she had trained as a midwife before embarking
on her erbil, and she may have gone back to

(28:32):
that profession. She died in London in seventeen fifty eight
at the age of fifty nine, and was buried in
the churchyard of the Chelsea Old Church. Her Irbel continued
to be printed and sold in the years after her death,
and was popular at least to the start of the
nineteenth century. A German language version was published in Nuremberg

(28:52):
by Christophe True between seventeen fifty seven and seventeen seventy three.
Many many prominentce meges, scientists, physicians, and other scholars had
copies of the Curious Irbel in their collections, including Carlinaeus
and Sir Joseph Banks. Linnaeus reportedly gave Blackwell the nickname

(29:12):
Botanica Blackwellia. Elizabeth Blackwell is the only woman to be
included in James Bruce's Lives of Eminent Men of Aberdeen.
He said of her herbal quote, a man of generous
mind will feel more pleasure in turning over these two
large folios, with their hundreds of plates each one of

(29:33):
them bearing the inscription Elizabeth Blackwell, Delineavitt sculpts it at
pinksit than he would in handling an earring of Cleopatra
or even a lock of Helen of Troy's hair. That
very glowing sentence immediately follows a very long paragraph about
how he thought that women should not write books, which

(29:53):
we will talk about on Friday. In her eighteen forty
six book Biographies of Good Wives, past podcast subject Lydia
Maria Child quoted physician and botanist Richard Pulteney as saying
of this book quote for the most complete set of
drawings of medicinal plants, we are indebted to the genius
and industry of a lady exerted on an occasion that

(30:16):
redounded highly on her praise. And that is the other
Elizabeth Blackwell than the one who's probably more famous today
in the United States. At least, do you have famous
listener mail? I do I have listener mail. So this
listener mail follows a conversation that Holly and I had
about our trip to Morocco and falling asleep on the bus.

(30:40):
And I was just involuntarily asleep when we were on
that bus, and Holly was chagrined at how many people
were sleeping because we were missing a lot of cool stuff,
beautiful things. So Moe wrote and said, after sort of
setting the context, I laughed. So when Tracy talked about

(31:01):
how she wanted people to be awake on the bus
when we honeymooned in Ireland, we took the bus a lot,
and girl, those buses knocked me out. No matter how
much sleep I had the night before or wanted to
be awake, I crashed. My dear husband just laughed and
told me about what I missed on the drive seals

(31:21):
so many ancient buildings, great countryside. We still giggle about
it and we try to avoid buses when we travel.
No pets, but for pet tax. Here is my sister's
three legged kitty Ace and my friend's frenchy Carl trying
to stow away in her luggage. Thanks for all you do.
I absolutely love the show and I'm so behind because
I love to binge it. Keep up the good work,

(31:42):
Morocco sounded amazing. I hoped to take one of these
trips with you guys, somedate. Mo So first, this email
was so funny to me, and I can't remember if
I've already said it on the show, but Patrick and
I also took a bus day trip when we were
in England and the boas I again was involuntarily asleep.
And in this case, I think it was a combination

(32:04):
of two things. One it was that it was very warm,
even with the air conditioning cranked. We were there during
the hottest May in England in the past one hundred years,
rough summer already there having a really hard heat wave
summer currently, not just in the UK but in other
parts of Europe. So even with the air conditioning fully

(32:27):
on full blast, it was very warm on the bus.
And then I also have a little co two monitor
in my backpack from back in the days of uh
like returning to travel after COVID started. That is just
sort of my little warning of hey, that the ventilation
in this space that you're in is terrible, and it

(32:48):
just lives inside my backpack. And according to that little
COEO two monitor, the ventilation also on the bus was terrible.
So we were just there was not enough oxygen and
it was just walking and so yeah, and so every
time we got on the bus, I fell asleep and
I did not want to be asleep. I wanted to
see the drive out to Stonehenge. I wanted to see

(33:10):
the drive to Bath. I wanted to see the drive
into the Cotswalls. I would say I have slept through
probably seventy percent of the bus travel time. So yeah,
I feel you, and you're ruined. You're ruined, Irish honeymoon.
And then we also have beautiful cat pictures. Oh a
black kitty. I love them so much. And then yes,

(33:34):
a little Frenchy on top of a suitcase trying to
stow away on a trip. Baby, So yes, thank you
so much. Mo. If anybody has tips about staying awake
on buses, I honestly I would appreciate them, as long
as the tips are not take a bunch of stimulants,
because that's not going to help me have a good

(33:54):
time on the bus. Yeah, because you can't chug coffee
the way I can. Is that not anymore than it
will be awake all night and then that will compound
the problem more following day on the bus. No, no,
you keep it going. You got to keep us in
this journey. So yeah, if you would like to send
us a note where a history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.

(34:18):
If you would like to see the show notes to
our episode with all of the various sources that we use,
that's at our website, which is missed in hisstory dot com.
And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio
app or anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

(34:41):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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