The Brown Dog Affair

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 Fry. At various points on the show,
we have mentioned that someone we were talking about was

(00:23):
an anti vivisectionist, so that's included Emma Hardy, who was
married to Thomas Hardy, as well as author Vernon Lee.
And then we've also talked about anti vivisectionists as a
group opposing medical research and drug development that used living
animals in some way, so that included the production of

(00:45):
early smallpox vaccines and research into isolating and producing anselin
sort of. It's a thing that has kind of come
up in passing a lot. Almost we haven't ever really
focused on the anti vivisection movement or talked in much
more detail about what that meant. So the term vivisection

(01:06):
was first used in English in the eighteenth century to
describe the act of cutting or dissecting a living organism,
so not an animal that had died, but an animal
that was alive, and the words vivisectionist and anti vivisectionist
were both coined in the nineteenth century to describe people

(01:28):
who either defended or opposed experiments that were done on live,
non human animals. The term vivisection is still used today.
There are still anti vivisection organizations, but when people talk
about this as a movement, they're generally focused on the

(01:48):
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that is what
we are talking about today with the Brown Dog Affair.
This was a series of demonstrations and riots arounding a
statue that had been erected in the Battersea area of London,
a statue commemorated dogs who had been killed due to vivisection. Also,

(02:11):
just the note we are aware that humans are also animals,
but adding the words non human before animals every time
we say it in this audio podcast like that would
be incredibly cumbersome. So we know everyone knows what we
mean when we say humans and animals, and we recognize

(02:32):
that yes, humans are also animals. There's almost part of
me that wants to say it every time so people
will realize how stilted it will become. Okay, that is
probably the last laughing that's really going to happen, because
this is, you know, not the most fun subject. Vivisection
became a major focus for animal rights activists in Britain,

(02:54):
but the first animal cruelty laws to be proposed in
the UK didn't reference it at all, because at that
point it wasn't really being done in a formal or
public way. Instead, laws proposed in the early nineteenth century
focused primarily on blood sports like cockfighting and bull baiting,
and on the treatment of livestock, farm animals and working

(03:15):
animals like cart horses. So these laws were motivated by
changing attitudes about animals and how people thought animals should
be treated, but they were also motivated by perceptions about
poor and working class people. There was a sense that
watching and participating in blood sports or mistreating working animals

(03:38):
would lead to some kind of moral decay or decline
in poor people. There was not, however, as an example,
a similar sense that activities like fox hunting would cause
a decline among the rich. Like there were people who
opposed fox hunting, but there wasn't really like a legislative

(03:59):
pressure to try to stop rich people from hunting foxes.
But there was a sense that cruelty to animals had
a negative effect on people more broadly, particularly among animal
rights activists and social reformers. Lewis Gomperts, who established the
Animal's Friend Society in eighteen thirty three, submitted a list

(04:20):
of five reasons against cruelty to animals in the organization's
periodical quote. First, it injures the animals themselves. Second, it
injures the feelings of well disposed persons, takes up their time,
and creates animosity between them and the perpetrators. Third, it
initiates mankind to be cruel to man. Fourth, its excess

(04:43):
is generally so great as much to engage the attention
otherwise due to the human species. Fifth, these reasons give
birth to offense to the deity. One of the earliest
animal protection laws to be passed in Britain was the
Cruel an Improper Treatment of Cattle Act that was also
called Martin's Act after Irish Member of Parliament Richard Martin.

(05:08):
Martin proposed a number of different animal protection laws during
his political career, including other laws that targeted dog fighting
and bear baiting. King George the Fourth gave him the
nickname Humanity Dick because of this focus on animal protection.
Martin's Act was passed in eighteen twenty two and it
outlawed quote the cruel and improper treatment of horses, mayors, gelding's, mules, asses, cows, heifers, steers, oxen, sheep,

(05:37):
and other cattle, so it didn't cover animals like dogs
and cats. It didn't mention vivisection. Similarly, when the Society
for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals was first established
in eighteen twenty four, its primary focus was on the
humane treatment of carriage horses. Eighteen twenty four was also

(05:58):
the year that more people in the UK started to
be exposed to the idea of vivisection, as French experimental
physiologist Francois Mugendie started holding public vivisections in London. Musgendie
is sometimes credited with introducing or at least popularizing animal
experimentation as part of scientific and medical research in Europe.

(06:21):
Although various anesthetics had been in use in parts of
Asia for centuries, they really weren't widely used in Western
medicine yet, and the first demonstration of modern anesthetics in
Europe was still decades away. So the animals that Musgendie
vivisected were not anesthetized, and they were very clearly in pain.

(06:44):
To make things worse, some of the descriptions of Musgendie's
demonstrations suggest that he was enjoying this. He was immediately
denounced by animal rights activists. Richard Martin, among other people,
called him a disgrace to society. Animal rights activists were
not the only ones criticizing vivisection. A significant number of

(07:06):
doctors and medical students disapproved of it as well. Medicine
was in the process of becoming a more formalized, professionalized field,
and a lot of people thought vivisection could damage the
reputation of the entire profession. There were some parallels to
the opposition to ignose semel Vis's recommendation that doctors washed
their hands, which was happening around the same time. In

(07:29):
the view of the medical establishment, doctors were gentlemen. Gentlemen's
hands were always clean, and gentlemen also did not cut
into live animals. Some medical schools and institutes did start
incorporating vivisection into their research work and their instruction, though,
and as the practice spread, public opposition to it did

(07:51):
as well. Some people called for strict regulation of vivisection
to ensure that animals didn't needlessly suffer, and that any
procedures that were carried out on them would have some
kind of a real positive impact, either for the animal
or for humanity. Others called for vivisection to be banned entirely.

(08:12):
In addition to this spectrum of how people opposed vivisection,
there was also some variety in how anti vivisectionists approached
other animal rights issues. So, for example, some anti vivisectionists
were also vegetarians, while others weren't really opposed to eating meat,
or wearing leather, or even hunting for sport. They saw

(08:32):
vivisection as this particularly cruel, specific thing. The anti vivisection
movement was largely led by women, and it had a
lot of overlap with the suffrage movement. There was this
sense that women and non human animals shared a common
struggle and that neither of them had equal rights with
men or agency over their own lives. Many of the

(08:55):
men who were active in the movement were laborers and
trade unionists, and sometimes their advocacy carried kind of a
similar sense that their bodies were being exploited through work,
just as animals bodies were being exploited through vivisection. Because
the anti vivisection movement was so associated with women, and

(09:16):
because caring about animal welfare was seen as overly sensitive,
men who were part of the movement were often disparaged
as being effeminate, and people who supported vivisection just dismissed
the entire movement as standing in the way of scientific
and medical progress and valuing animal lives over human lives.

(09:38):
Two women who later became a big part of the
anti vivisection movement were Lisa Schartau and Emily Augusta Louise
lend of Hogabee, who was known as Lizzie. They said
of this dismissal quote, we are all familiar with the
again and again repeated description of the pain involved in
experiments on animals as being similar to that caused by

(09:59):
a prayer of a pen. Words like the above quoted
implied that anti vivisectionists do not know the truth about vivisection,
and that if they did, they would at once give
up their ill informed agitation and replace it by a
profound admiration for the great men who were engaged in
this praiseworthy and unselfish practice. In eighteen seventy six, Francis

(10:22):
Power Cobb and the Victoria Street Society led an anti
vivisection campaign that ultimately led to the passage of an
Act to amend the law relating to Cruelty to Animals.
Also known as the Cruelty to Animals Act of eighteen
seventy six and sometimes called the Vivisection Act of eighteen
seventy six, this act outlawed the performing of animal experiments

(10:46):
that were quote calculated to give pain. Experiments on live
animals were permissible only if they were performed with quote
a view to the advancement by new discovery of physiological knowledge,
or of knowledge which will be useful for saving or
prolonging life, or alleviating suffering. In addition, people performing such

(11:08):
experiments had to be licensed, and the animals had to
be anesthetized to the point that they would feel no pain.
If the animal was likely to feel pain after the
procedure was over, or if the procedure caused serious injury,
then the animal was to be euthanized before the anesthesia
were off, unless doing so would quote frustrate the object

(11:28):
of the experiment. The Act also banned vivisection as an
illustration for lectures in places like medical schools, and it
banned the performance of vivisection for the purpose of attaining
manual skill at a procedure. But there were some exceptions
to a lot of this. Vivisections during medical lectures were
allowed if they were absolutely necessary for the instruction of

(11:52):
people who were then going to go on to prolong
people's lives or alleviate their suffering. If using anesthesia would
quote frustrate the object of the experiment, than the experiment
could be done without it. The law also laid out
some special considerations regarding dogs, cats, horses, asses, and mules

(12:13):
in vivisection. After this law was in place, vivisection continued
to become more widespread, and we'll talk more about that
after a sponsor break. As we mentioned before, the break.

(12:34):
Under the Cruelty to Animals Act of eighteen seventy six,
vivisection required a license. Over the next fifteen years after
the law was passed, more than six hundred and seventy
five people got one of those licenses, but that was
a tiny, tiny fraction of the total number of people
who were practicing medicine or teaching physiology. Or doing some

(12:55):
other work that might involve vivisection. Most practice ns just
really did not have anything to do with it. Even so,
though the number of vivisections was rising dramatically, according to
Richard D. French, who published a book called Anti Vivisection
and Medical Science and Victorian Society in nineteen seventy five,

(13:17):
the number of vivisections rose from a little more than
three hundred a year in eighteen eighty to ninety five
thousand a year in the nineteen teens. Two of the
people who were conducting vivisections in London were physiologists Ernest
Starling and William Bayliss, who worked at University College London.

(13:39):
The two of them were collaborators, and Bayliss was also
married to Starling's sister. Among other things, Starling is credited
with coining the word hormone after a series of discoveries
the two men made together involving the function of the pancreas.
A lot of this research was conducted on dogs. The
vivisections that led to the brown dog affair were on

(14:00):
one that was described as quote a big brown dog
of the terrier type, and December of nineteen o two,
Starling conducted a procedure on this dog in which he
tied off the dogs pancreas. This was part of ongoing
research into diabetes, and he said that within a couple
of days the dog had recovered from that procedure and

(14:22):
was acting normal and free from pain. Two months later,
on February second, nineteen oh three, Starling conducted a second
procedure to inspect the results of that earlier legation of
the pancreas and to look at any fluid that was
then contained in the pancreas. Although that Cruelty to Animals

(14:42):
Act of eighteen seventy six was interpreted as meaning that
an animal could not be subjected to vivisection more than once,
this actually fell under one of its exceptions, because Starling
was like examining the changes that had been brought about
by that first procedure, something he would have been able
to do if he had euthanized the dog afterward. But

(15:04):
then Starling gave the dog to William Bayless, who wanted
to conduct a demonstration involving the dog's salivary glands for
medical students at University College London. Bayless hoped to stimulate
the glands with electrodes and show that the pressure in
the salivary system could be greater than the dog's blood
pressure for reasons that are unclear, Though this didn't work. Afterward,

(15:27):
Bayliss gave the dog to a student named Henry Dale,
who wanted to study the dog's pancreas further. After removing
the pancreas, Dale euthanized the dog. Witness statements contradict on
which method Dale used. As a side note, Dale would
go on to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine along with Otto Loewe, for research into neurotransmitters.

(15:51):
Two of the people who were in the audience during
this demonstration involving the dog's salivary glands were Lisa Sharks
and Lizzie Lindoff Hogaby, who we quoted back before the break.
These were two upper class women from Sweden who were feminists, vegetarians,
and animal rights activists. Sometimes they are described as having

(16:13):
infiltrated this lecture to expose the practice of vivisection. That's
only part of the story, though. These two women had
come to the UK to study physiology and to study
how vivisection was being used in physiological research and instruction.
They had enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women,

(16:34):
and their original plan had involved completing a full course
of study, something they eventually abandoned because, in their words quote,
physiology is at present inseparable from experiments on animals, and
nobody objecting to them could have any chance of obtaining
a degree. The London School of Medicine for Women didn't

(16:57):
allow vivisections, so Schartau and Linda Hogaby attended demonstrations at
other institutions and organizations all around London. They kept a
journal of their experiences and what they witnessed at these demonstrations,
and at some point they showed their notes to Stephen Coleridge,
Honorary Secretary of the National Anti Vivisection Society. On May first,

(17:19):
nineteen oh three, Coleridge gave an address before an audience
of about two thousand people at an Anti Vivisection Society meeting.
He detailed what the two women had seen. His remarks
were also published in the London Daily News the next day,
and in all of this he specifically mentioned William Bayless
Bayliss's attorney contacted Coleridge saying that his statements about the

(17:43):
vivisection were untrue, and after some back and forth failed
to reach any's kind of resolution, Bayliss sued Coleridge for libel.
A trial ran for four days in November of nineteen
oh three. Although Schartau and Lindaff Hogaby's account said that
no anesthetic had been used during the demonstration and there
had been no mention of an anesthetic administered previously, Bayliss

(18:06):
and others associated with the university testified that the dog
had been anesthetized to the point of unconsciousness. Schartau and
Lindoff Hogaby appeared as witnesses, although their testimony was dismissed
as hysterical. In the end, Bayliss was awarded two thousand
pounds in damages. Schartau and Lindoff Hogaby really don't seem

(18:29):
to have anticipated that the account that they showed Coleridge
was then going to lead to this trial and a
libel suit against him. They had also published their journals
as a book called The Shambles of Science Extracts from
the Diary of two students of Physiology. The February second
vivisection was in that book, in a chapter that was

(18:50):
called fun. After the trial and the judgment against Coleridge,
they pulled their book. They removed that chapter, and they
made some other edits to try to protect themselves from
further legal action before rereleasing it in nineteen o four.
While this trial did not find that Bayliss's vivisection had

(19:11):
been unlawful in any way, it was widely covered in
the press and it brought a huge amount of publicity
to the practice of vivisection in general, and to the
Big Brown Dog in particular. Anna Luisa Woodward, founder of
England's branch of the World League for Protection of Animals,
started raising money for a statue to commemorate the dog,

(19:32):
as well as all the other animals who were killed
as a result of vivisection. This monument was made by
English sculptor Joseph Whitehead, with a statue of a bronze
dog atop a marble water fountain for both people and dogs,
a very tall fountain like the few were standing up.
The dog portion would be above a person's head. This

(19:55):
was ready in nineteen o four, but a site wasn't
ready for it to be installed till nineteen o six.
It was placed in Lachmir Recreation ground at the center
of Lachmir housing estate, and was unveiled on September fifteenth,
nineteen oh six. This statue had an inscription that read
quote in memory of the brown terrier dog done to

(20:16):
death in the laboratories of University College in February nineteen
oh three, after having endured vivisection extending over more than
two months, and having been handed from one vivisector to
another till death came to its release. Also in memory
of the two hundred thirty two dogs vivisected at the

(20:36):
same place during the year nineteen o two, men and
women of England? How long shall these things be? Medical students,
researchers and others who thought vivisection was necessary and even
laudable immediately disliked the statue and found its inscription to
be needlessly incendiary and inaccurate. But for about a year

(20:58):
people who objected to it mostly just left it alone.
But we will get to how that changed after another
sponsor break. We mentioned earlier that the memorial to the
brown dog had been placed at a recreation area at

(21:21):
the center of Latchmere Housing Estate. This was a newly
built council housing estate, in other words, of public housing
development in the Battersea borough of London. It was the
first such development in England to be built by workers
who had been directly hired and paid by the council.
The Battersea Trades and Labor Council had advocated for this

(21:44):
direct labor approach, arguing that it would help protect workers
pay and working conditions, while also providing higher quality work
for the community. The development itself also reflected Battersea's local politics,
with streets who were named after radical politicians and leftists,
as well as names like Freedom Street and Reform Street.

(22:06):
At the start of the twentieth century, Battersea had a
progressive local government, with John Burns, who was a socialist
and labor leader, representing Battersea in Parliament. The area was
also home to a lot of labor activists, socialists and
political radicals. The National Anti Vivisection Hospital, which was established
in nineteen o two, was located in Battersea. There was

(22:29):
also the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, sometimes just called
the Battersea Dogs Home. This is one of the oldest
animal rescues in the UK. Founded by Mary Tealby in
the Holloway district of North London in eighteen sixty, it
had moved to Battersea in eighteen seventy one and started
sheltering cats in eighteen eighty three. Basically, if you were

(22:49):
going to put an anti vivisection dog statue somewhere in
London at the start of the twentieth century, it just
made a lot of sense to put it in Battersea.
In nineteen seven, a carnival was held in Battersey to
raise money for the Anti Vivisection Hospital. There were three
central funds that distributed donations two hospitals, but the Anti

(23:11):
Vivisection Hospital really got little to no money from any
of them. This was both because of its public stance
against vivisection and all the kind of political nuance associated
with that, and also because it's motto of no vivisection
in schools, no vivisectors on staff, no experiments on patients

(23:32):
kind of seemed to imply that other hospitals were experimenting
on patients. These funds kind of wanted to distance themselves
from all of that. This carnival brought renewed attention to
the anti vivisection movement in Battersey and the statue of
the Brown Dog, and on November twentieth, nineteen o seven,

(23:53):
a group of medical students tried to smash it with
a sledgehammer. Ten people were arrested in fun. Two days later,
more students rallied in support of their arrested classmates and
against the magistrate who had levied the fine. They tried
to burn the magistrate in effigy, but they couldn't get
it to light and wound up throwing it in the Thames.

(24:15):
Five more people were arrested after a student demonstration on
November twenty fifth, and protests continued from there. According to
a pamphlet that was later published describing these protests, the
anti Doggers, as they were known, had become quote alarmingly
uncontrollable and unreasonable by about December fifth. On December tenth,

(24:37):
at least a thousand people protested in Trafalgar Square, carrying
brown toy dogs on poles and chanting things like down
with the brown Dog. There were some like very petty
anti brown dogs songs and chants that people wrote for this.
At the same time, demonstrators and Battersea tried to wrench
the dog off of its pedestal with a crow bar,

(25:00):
but were dispersed by the police. On December eleventh, protesters
disrupted an anti vivisection Society meeting, shouting down the speakers,
setting off crackers, and throwing quote quantities of a pungent chemical.
As protests continued, students started burning dogs in effigy and
marching with toy dogs impaled on stakes. Meanwhile, a variety

(25:23):
of people came together in Battersea to try to resist
these demonstrators and protect the statue, including suffragists, labor activists,
and socialists. Some of the people who tried to defend
the statue were anti vivisectionists, but others saw this whole
dispute as a symbolic defense of their own rights as
laborers and as human beings, something that anti vivisectionists thought

(25:44):
might be diluting their message. All of this was covered
extensively in medical journals, which generally sided with the students.
One commentary published in the British Medical Journal offered the
opinion that as studentshing the statue with a hammer would
be quote doing what is his moral duty to his

(26:05):
college teachers and comrades, and his strict legal duty to
his country and his king. The medical publication Medical Press
and Circular published a piece that described the riots as
evidence of quote pent up hatred felt by certain classes
towards medical science and medical men, even though the medical

(26:25):
students had generally been the instigators in all this. Newspapers
covered the protests as well, with much of that coverage
criticizing anti vivisectionists and even the statue itself. A December
twenty fourth editorial in The Times called its inscription quote
a downright lie, a gross, deliberate, carefully thought out lie.

(26:47):
The same day, The Times also published a piece from
surgeon and pro vivisection campaigner Stephen Paget, which called the
Battersea Memorial no better than indecent exhibitions, obscene pictures and
black famous oratory. By the end of December nineteen oh seven,
the Battersey Borough Council was debating whether to change the

(27:08):
statue's inscription to something that might not provoke so much
ire than. On January seventh, nineteen o eight, Battersea's Chief
Commissioner of Police informed the council that it would need
to either remove the statue or budget seven hundred pounds
a year to pay for twenty four hour police protection.
In debates over what to do, Lizzie Landolf Hogaby defended

(27:31):
the statue's inscription word by word as accurate. A pamphlet
detailing the protests and what had led to them was
published under the name Edward K. Ford in nineteen oh eight.
This was probably a pseudonym, and their speculation that Landolf
Hoggaby wrote it. If that's the case, though, there were
passages that must have been included to try to dispel suspicion,

(27:54):
Like there's a whole passage on the author being surprised
that suffragists were taking up the cause of anti vivisection,
because those two things seemed unrelated. But Lindoff Hogabee was
a feminist herself and would have known about the overlap
between those two movements. There's also a passage in which
the author talks about going to buy a copy of
Shambles of Science to read it for himself. But of

(28:17):
course Lyndoff Hogabe co wrote that although the Battersea Council
ultimately voted to leave the statues inscription unchanged, a new
Conservative administration was elected in November of nineteen oh nine,
and the newly installed councilors voted forty two to four
to dismantle the memorial. A Brown Dog Memorial Defense Committee

(28:39):
was established and gathered about five hundred members, and about
two hundred thousand people signed a petition opposing the statues removal.
The Animal Defense and Anti Vivisection Society, which had been
co founded by Lizzie Lindoff Hoggabey and Nina Douglas Hamilton,
Duchess of Hamilton, coordinated protests against the statues removal. In

(29:01):
spite of all of that, the statue was secretly removed
during the night in March of nineteen ten under police guard.
It's believed that sometimes afterward it was destroyed, probably melted
down so that a future administration could not reinstall it.
A Royal Commission on Vivisection had been established in nineteen

(29:23):
oh six, prior to the start of the brown Dog protests.
It issued its report in nineteen twelve, finding that quote
experiments on animals adequately safeguarded by law, faithfully administered, are
morally justifiable and should not be prohibited by legislation. The
report described the commissioners as hearing contradictory testimony on virtually

(29:44):
every question they considered, which is unsurprising given that it
heard testimony in favor of vivisection as well as testimony
from anti vivisectionists, including Coleridge and Lyndoff Hogabe. The Commission
did recommend hiring more inspectors to better enforce existing laws,
as well as placing stronger limits on the methods that

(30:04):
could be used to anesthetize or sedate an animal. The
Commission also recommended more restrictions to guarantee the painless euthanasia
of animals that had been the subjects of experiments. Lizzie
Landolf Hogaby continued to be a leading figure in the
anti vivisection and animal rights movements, as well as being
involved in other social and philanthropic causes all the way

(30:27):
until her death in nineteen sixty three. She was involved
in another libel case in nineteen thirteen after the Animal
Defense and Anti Vivisection Society put up a really pretty
graphic anti vivisection display. This display included a taxidermy dog
that was made to represent the Brown Dog from nineteen

(30:48):
oh three after it had been vivisected. She filed suit
against the palmw Gazette for its coverage of the display,
acting as her own attorney in court, her testimony ascribed
as being just kind of a marathon of like hours
of opening statement. Although she lost this suit, it once

(31:08):
again drew more attention to vivisection and the opposition to it.
In the last years of her life, she worked with
Fern Animal Sanctuary, which Duchess Hamilton had founded at the
start of World War Two to help care for animals
whose people were going off to war. The UK has
passed a series of laws related to vivisection since the

(31:28):
Brown Dog affair, including the Protection of Animals Act of
nineteen eleven and the Animals Scientific Procedures Act of nineteen
eighty six. There are also additional laws that relate to
animal rights and animal cruelty, including the Animal Welfare Act
of two thousand and six. As we mentioned at the
top of the show, there are still anti vivisection organizations

(31:49):
in the UK and elsewhere that continue to advocate for
a total ban on the practice. There are also, obviously
also organizations that are focused on like animal experimentation more broadly,
including things that you wouldn't really describe as a vivisection
because it doesn't really involve something like a surgical procedure.

(32:10):
On December twelfth, nineteen eighty five, a new dog monument
by British sculptor Nicola Hicks was installed in Battersea Park
in London. This dog is modeled after her own terrier,
Brock and it was commissioned by the National Anti Vivisection
Society and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection.
It was moved to a different location in the early

(32:32):
nineteen nineties. As far as I know, it is still there.
Then in twenty twenty one, Paula s Owen published a
novel about this called Little Brown Dog, and also had
a sort of lightweight model of the original monument produced.
This model was placed for a time at the location
of the original statue in Lashmir Recreation Ground. This was

(32:54):
part of a campaign to have a full replica of
the original statue permanently in all there. As far as
I know, nothing has happened with that. That I only
found references to like the lightweight model of it being placed,
which is temporary as far as I know. So that's
the Brown Dog affair. Do you have listener mail that

(33:17):
is not that I knew. I shoul knew, so I
first thing I have real quickly. This is from Luanne,
whose email is about our World War Two balloons episode.
Lu Anne wrote, are you sure the balloon you mentioned
was named the George Washington Park Curtis Custis seems far

(33:39):
more likely, lu Anne? In fact, yes, we did mean
George Washington Park Custis, and the outline said George Washington
Park Custis, and I said Curtis for unknowable reasons. I
don't know. My brain just auto filled a more common name.
You're going to reading jail. George Washington Custus. George George

(34:03):
Washington Park Custus, adopted son of George Washington, father in
law to General Robert E. Lee. Not a name I
immediately had in my head. I obviously knew it was
a historical figure, because that's who boats get named after.
But yeah, just sorry for auto completing the wrong name.

(34:26):
The other is from Caitlin, and Caitlin wrote about a
discussion that we had about children's books that are accidentally traumatizing,
and Caitlyn wrote, high tracing, Holly, I've written a few
times with tales for my job in a preschool, but
your listener mail on the war Balloons episode had me
cracking up. As a teacher whose policy is that if

(34:47):
a kid can ask a question, they deserve some kind
of answer that isn't a brush off, I've gotten into
some strange conversations at storytime. One notable exception was Madeline
about the Little French Girl in her classmates. I loved
those books as a child, and I thought the rhymes
and repetition might appeal to my kids, so I read
it at circle one day. Oops, some questions I got

(35:08):
all in preschool or dialect of course? What's an appendix?
What was wrong with Madeline? What's a surgery? Do I
gotta get a surgery? What's a scar? I can only
imagine the conversations at home that day, and I still
haven't figured out an explanation for the purpose of an
appendix that satisfies a preschooler. Love the show and greatly

(35:30):
look forward to each new episode, Caitlin. Caitlin then said, ps,
with the recent passing of Judy Human, might an episode
about the section five of flour, a sit in or
the law itself be possible? So many people have no
idea the breadth of loss the disabled community is facing.
Judy was an icon who will be sorely missed. So

(35:51):
I have already written back to Caitlin and I told
them that number one, that story is hilarious about the
Madeline things. Number two, we actually have already talked about
the five O four sit ins. It was an episode
that we did that was a six impossible episodes that
was all about like direct action resistance, with the five

(36:11):
O four sitens being one of them. Judy Human also
makes a very brief appearance in our episode on the
Independent Living Movement. When I heard about her death, I
was thinking about doing an episode specifically about her, but
number it can be very tricky sometimes to do an
episode about a person who has just died, and also

(36:32):
a lot of the things that we would be talking
about in that episode, like the five O four sitens,
have already been covered on other episodes, So I did
want to just take a moment to recognize Judy Human.
So thanks so much for this note, Caitlin. There are
lots of obituaries and retrospectives and things like that that

(36:57):
are out there about Judy Human right now, and then
Judy also had like a podcast very active in terms
of communicating with people about disability and disability rights. So
there is a wealth of information for folks who want
to know more. So thank you again Caitlin for this note.
If you would like to send us a note about

(37:18):
this or any other podcast, we're at History Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com and we're all over social media at
miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app and wherever else you'd like to get podcasts.

(37:40):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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