May 12, 2014 • 34 mins
The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which killed somewhere between 20 million and 50 million people, started just as World War I was winding down. Nobody cured it, or really successfully treated it. A fifth of the people in the world got the flu during the pandemic. Read the show notes here.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and Holly
So we don't normally start out with corrections. Very first
thing that I need to do that today. Okay, So
(00:24):
you remember our our pig war episode where we talked about, uh,
you know, a war that almost happened because of a
pig I do. I accidentally said in that episode that
somebody traveled via the Panama Canal to get out to
that part of the world. Ye, so that was wrong.
It was a little whoopsie Daisy. That was yes, that
(00:45):
was my source said via Panama, and my dumb brain
just filled in the part that says canal there. The
canal did not exist yet. I'm very sorry. Please stop
emailing us about you. Here's what I'm saying. If that's
the worst crime you commit, I think we're in pretty
good hands. I know, I think this is maybe like
(01:06):
that was maybe the second hugest most email generating error
in the podcast. And I'm not even going to mention
what the other one was because we haven't gotten a
message about it. And maybe six months, and it's from
years before we came on the show, like you getting
corrections about it when we started. So yes, I am
so sorry that I auto completed something that was not
(01:27):
built yet in the world. Uh. And I'll try not
to do that again. And today we're gonna talk about
something completely different. Yes, so just not long ago at all.
We asked on Facebook for people to tell us some
ideas of things that they wanted to talk about that
were events in history, because we have lots of episodes
about people, and some people prefer events, and for whatever reason,
(01:48):
whenever I sit down to do the podcast, my brain
turns up people a lot of so weird. Even if
I try to pick a subject that is not a
people and is an event eventually sort of as the
notes and the plot line are kind of playing out
as I'm doing my research, it almost always had the
focusing on one particular person that was part of it.
(02:10):
I don't know if that's just some sort of brain
situation that it wants to focus on one smaller piece
or what, but it happens. It's tricky to pick an
event and not do that for me. Well, conveniently, the
event that people asked for the absolute most was the
Wreck of the Batavia, which at that point we had
already recorded and edited and it was just waiting to
be published. So that worked out really well. We delivered
(02:32):
so quickly without meeting to you. I know. We had
a couple of other things that were m maybe not
quite as much as heavily requested at that one, but
extremely frequently requested, And one of them is what we're
going to talk about today, which is the so called
Spanish flu epidemic of nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen. So
somewhere between twenty million and fifty million people died of
(02:56):
the flu during this epidemic, which started just as World
War One was winding down. So a lot of our
past episodes that are about diseases are really about the
people who saved us from them. So like our smallpox
episode is all about Edward Jenner and his smallpox vaccine,
and our tuberculosis episode is all about Salmon Waxman and
(03:18):
Albert Shots and the discovery of streptomycin, which was the
first antibiotic that could treat it. Sarah and Deblinus episode
called Polio the Dread Disease is also largely about the
vaccines that have nearly eradicated polio from the world. But
the story of the flu pandemic of eighteen, nineteen, eighteen
and nineteen nineteen is not that has a lot more
(03:40):
in common with our episode about encephalitis lethargico, which also
happened right about the same time. Uh. The flu epidemic
is probably why a disease that was as crazy and
terrifying as in as encephalitis lethargic is not a better
known event in medical history. UH. The flu just completely
over out in it because it killed so many people.
(04:02):
But like encephalitis lethargica, the pandemic flu came and it went.
Nobody could treat it, nobody could cure it. A fifth
of the people in the world got the flu that
during the pandemic, and UH. Usually while the typical flu
is hardest on elderly people in the very young, this
(04:22):
time it was deadliest among year olds, and in that
age bracket it was so lethal that in the United States,
for example, the average life expectancy dropped by more than
a decade just as a result of how many people
died from the flu, which is scary. I feel like
I should confess that I have this completely unfounded fear
(04:42):
that I will die of a random flu. This is
also why we are doing the episode now and not
at the height of flu season, as we're exiting flu season.
I mean, every time might get the flu, my thought
is this is the one that's gonna take me down.
So hopefully I won't have any panic attacks while we record. Yeah,
(05:03):
I will keep my fingers crossed. So before we start, though,
we should talk a little bit about what the world
of medicine and what public health were like in nineteen eighteen.
So in many parts of the world, nations hadn't really
standardized or regulated what was required for a person to
call themselves a doctor, so people practiced medicine with all
(05:24):
kinds of different credentials or with no credentials, and patent
medicines which really didn't have any medical value. And we're
mostly alcohol and ladana most of the time, we're still
pretty prevalent. There was a lot of stuff floating around
that was just not legitimate for treating anything. And at
this point, Alexander Fleming had not yet discovered penicillin. That
was still a decade away, and its use as a
(05:47):
drug was even further out than that. So penicillin wouldn't
have helped fight the flu, since influenza is a virus
and penicillin kills bacteria, but it might have helped some
of the people who wound up with bacterial pneumonia after
contracting the flu. And this is more just to sort
of point out a milestone of where we were in
medicine when this flu epidemic was happening. Yeah, So in
(06:10):
spite of some of these things that we think of
as basics today, like requiring people to be trained to
call themselves doctors and antibiotics and things like that, things
had really advanced a lot in the world of medicine
over the past century. Before the epidemics started, most parts
of the industrialized world at this point had understood and
(06:31):
accepted the germ theory of disease. So at this point
pretty much everyone was on the same page in most places,
uh that germs cause disease, and doctors had also figured
out exactly which germs caused a number of diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria,
and cholera. The idea of a reportable disease, or one
(06:51):
so dangerous that all cases of it needed to be
reported to government authorities also existed, but even though there
had been another serious flu epidemic a couple of decades before,
influenza wasn't really reportable in most places until this particular
epidemic had really gotten dire, and at that point it
was too late for warning the government to do really
(07:13):
any good. Yeah, what they already knew there was a
big problem. By the time people were able to start saying, hey,
there is a big problem. Vaccines also existed. There was
a vaccine for smallpox, there was a vaccine for rabies.
Other vaccines were also in the works, and people really
thought as the as the epidemic got going that a
vaccine for the flu was just around the corner. As
(07:37):
we talked about in the encephalitis lethargica episode, though, figuring
out how to make a vaccine for a disease when
you don't know what's causing the disease is really hard,
and not only did doctors not know what was causing
the flu, they also had it pinned on a completely
different germ. They thought it had a totally different cause
than it really did have. So at the start of
(07:59):
the epidemic, the purported culprit for the flu was a
bacterium that had been named Piper's basilius after its discoverer,
who was a German scientist named Robert Friedrich Peifer, and
he made the connection between his baxillus and the flu,
but he hadn't really proved this connection, and as the
epidemic war on, it became abundantly clear that Piper was wrong.
(08:20):
The baxilus he discovered was not present in sick patients,
and deliberately exposing people to it didn't give them the flu.
So even though an international team was dedicated to trying
to create a vaccine, none of their work proved effective,
and at first uh they were after the wrong germ,
and then they didn't have a good starting point. So
(08:42):
all of this together combines to mean that when the
flu turned really deadly in nineteen eighteen, there was not
much that legitimate doctors could do for their patients besides
to keep them in bed and keep them as fed
and hydrated and comfortable as possible. The most most of
the things that had any efficacy at all were about prevention,
which basically involved keeping the sick people quarantined and trying
(09:03):
to educate people about how to keep themselves from being
exposed and doctors knew that the flu was spread by
coughing and sneezing, so they gave the common sense advice
about covering your nose and mouth and staying away from
people who were coughing and sneezing. Oh, and also telling
people not to spit on the ground. So don't spit
on the ground please. You know, their debates over whether
(09:27):
that's a civil way to behave in general, but uh,
sick people don't spread no, no spitting. It's gross and
it spreads illness. So there were also a lot of
public health campaigns that were trying to get people who
were sick to stay at home, which probably sounds kind
of familiar to when there's a big flu outbreak today. Uh.
(09:48):
They especially, we're trying to educate people who were sick
to get them to stay away from crowds. And businesses
got in on the deal to trying to warn people
who were ill to go home. So a sign at
one theater in Chicago read influenza frequently complicated with pneumonia
is prevalent at this time throughout America. This theater is
(10:11):
cooperating with the Department of Health. You must do the
same if you have a cold and are coughing and sneezing,
do not enter this theater. And then, in all capital letters,
go home and go to bed until you are well.
That seems wise. Not all of the advice on prevention
was sound, though. Many people in public health recommended that
(10:32):
people wear masks, and some places even required that masks
be warned by law, but this was in fact not effective. Yeah,
masks are kind of effective when there's bacteria involved, but
when it's a virus, the viruses are just too small.
Before we get into how this disease spread and where
(10:54):
it was first reported and all that, let's take a
brief moment for a word from a sponsor, So back
to exactly what happened when this disease made its debut.
The first reports of flu in this pandemic came in
May of nineteen eighteen in Europe, and the first reports
were amongst soldiers, so large numbers of otherwise healthy young
(11:15):
troops were just becoming really ill with flu like symptoms.
So they were getting coughing and sneezing and body aches.
Most of them were recovering within a few days. And
apart from the fact that this was disrupting a war,
it was not a really big deal, but then the
disease jumped from the military to civilians in Europe, and
from there it spread to most of the rest of
the world over the course of just a couple of months.
(11:38):
It was still a relatively mild disease, much like the
seasonal flu most of us have had at one time
or another in our lives. It wasn't pleasant, but it
was also not especially alarming. This disease faded away later
in the summer, but then in August it mutated and
became really a lot more serious. This terrifying strain of
(11:59):
the flu was reported in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States,
in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and then Breast, France, and these
were all port cities, so it's possible that the disease
had spread between three of them on ships. And this time,
along with the typical flu symptoms of coughing and sneezing
and a sore throad and body aches, the disease caused
(12:20):
very high fevers between a hundred and two and a
hundred five degrees Fahrenheim. Patients felt exhausted and their eyes
became bloodshot, and some even had severe nosebleeds or gastro
intestinal problems. Even though this flu was a lot worse
from the flu that had spread earlier in the spring,
A lot of people still recovered, but a pretty substantial
(12:42):
portion of people developed a devastating pneumonia, which was caused
by one of a number of bacteria. It was a
secondary infection that was like a complication of this flu.
Their lungs filled up with fluid and started hemorrhaging, and
death often came alarmingly fast, with people going from sitting
upright and talking to being dead within hours. See, these
(13:02):
are the stories that make me paranoid about the flu.
This is this is why I read an article when
I was working on this about that episode of the
about the flu pandemic that was in the Down n
Abbey TV show. Yeah, so spoiler alert for Down n Abbey.
It's similarly, uh, make some people in the household really
really sick, and it has one There's one particular character
(13:23):
who goes from being she's sick, she's has she has
the flu. She goes from I'm sick with the flu
two I'm dead end an episode which is not uncommon
for TV, but also was really how it worked so
when doctors performed autopsies on these patients who had died,
they found out their lungs and their spleens were just
grotesquely swollen. So a description from a doctor who was
(13:46):
stationed at Fort Devan's outside Boston from that September, here's
what he had to say. This epidemic started about four
weeks ago and has developed so rapidly that the camp
is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till
it has passed. These men start with what appears to
be an ordinary attack of la grippa or influenza, and
(14:08):
when brought to the hosp so abbreviation for hospital. When
brought to the hosp they very rapidly developed the most
biscus type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two
hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheekbones,
and a few hours later you can begin to see
the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over
(14:29):
the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored
men from the white. It is only a matter of
a few hours then until death comes, and it is
simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible.
One can stand to see one, two or twenty men die,
but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort
(14:51):
of gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about
one deaths per day and and still keeping it up.
There is no doubt in my mind there is a
new mixed infection here, but what I don't know. And
from the ports cities where this really started sort of
blossoming outward, the disease spread really rapidly over the next
(15:13):
couple of months. It spread all over the world, and
then it too faded out. Although another mild wave of
flu went on around early nine, it's hard to pinpoint
exactly how many people died during the pandemic. Medical records
from the era were already kind of sketchy even before
you threw a devastating pandemic into the mix. To make
(15:36):
things even more chaotic. Doctors often misdiagnosed milder forms of
the flu was common colds, and sometimes they diagnosed this
much more serious version as another disease entirely like cholera.
The disease also moved so quickly that public health agencies
could not accurately track what was happening. So in the
decade after the pandemic, the estimated global death toll was
(16:00):
a million people, but modern researchers who have gone back
and tried to reconstruct things have marked the number as
much higher, between thirty million and fifty million people died worldwide.
So that sort of leaves us to wonder why this
particular flu was so incredibly bad. Uh. We know that
the war often takes a giant share of the blame
(16:21):
for the spread of the flu pandemic, and it's definitely
true that the flu followed the troops and that it
spread like wildfire amongst soldiers in close quarters, and the
soldiers returning home from the war brought the disease with them.
Battlefield injuries and other illnesses also made it harder for
soldiers to fight off the flu, so camps for the
war were basically like flu incubators. It's also definitely true
(16:45):
that the war meant that a lot of the medical
personnel who were trained at the time had been tasked
to help with the military, and so they were not
available to help the civilian population. As the epidemics started
to spread, communities in more rural areas asked their various
government organizations to please send doctors and nurses to help them,
(17:06):
but often the few who weren't part of the war
effort fell victim to the flu themselves while they were
traveling to their patients. But it really it wasn't just
about the soldiers or the effects of the war. Even
if the epidemic had happened during peacetime, hospitals just wouldn't
have been able to handle the influx of so many patients.
Temporary hospitals had to be built in churches and schools
(17:28):
and community centers, and some hospitals even expanded their capacity
by housing their patients intents on hospital grounds. And the
way of life in the late nineteen teens also played
a big role in the spread of the disease. Cars
were not in widespread use at this point, and many
larger cities around the world had developed extensive public transportation systems,
(17:50):
so that was bringing sick and healthy people into contact
with each other on street cars, on trolleys, and on subways,
and several parts of the world people were also traveling
really extensively by train, so, for example, in the United States,
train travel peaked in nineteen twenty, just a year after
the epidemic, and these long trips in close quarters. Similarly,
(18:11):
UH fueled the spread of the disease. Some of the
most popular leisure activities in nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen
also drew big crowds. So movie theaters have become affordable.
They were extremely popular, and they were very widespread. They
were everywhere, and that made them a hot bed of
infection UH. There were also dance halls and amusement parks,
(18:33):
and in many places governments restricted activities or shut them
down entirely to try to keep people from gathering. Some
towns even canceled school UH and canceled church services, and
universities suspended their operations in an effort to just sort
of stop this spread that was going on everywhere people gathered.
Cities also shut down or restricted their public transportation systems
(18:56):
that were at this point so popular, and drivers, either
with their city's authority or acting on their own, would
refuse to carry passengers who weren't wearing masks or who
they suspected to be ILL. And although all of these
factors have been about industry, people in rural and developing
areas were not spared in the least in the United States,
(19:16):
the Eskimo population was disproportionately hit with the flu, and
in rural and developing areas, people were left with no
medical care and very little reliable information about what was
actually going on or what they could possibly do about it.
The lore, which took so much of the blame for
spreading the disease, wound up ultimately killing sixteen million people,
(19:38):
but that number was just dwarfed by the total death
toll from the flu. So before we talk about the
aftermath of of this devastation, let's take another brief moment
and have a word from a sponsor, so to to
get back to the aftermath of this this flu pandemic.
On top of the astounding loss of life, the flu
(19:59):
pandemic had a lot of economic and social impacts. So
many people were sick that public and municipal services completely
shut down because there was nobody left to do the work.
Garbage was piling up in the streets in cities were
sanitation workers were particularly hard hit. Telegraph systems failed when
there were not enough operators that were healthy enough to
(20:21):
come into work. Kind of reminds me of stories about
the Black Death and how so many people would die
that there was no one left to bury them. Yeah.
Small businesses went bankrupt because their proprietors became too sick
to work or they died, And then insurance companies also
went bankrupt because their incoming claims skyrocketed. If trains were
found to have sick people aboard, stations along the routes
(20:44):
would actually forbid them from stopping. So even the ones
that we're working were subject to some you know, limitation. Yeah,
and then that trickled down with its own effects of
people not being able to get to where they needed
to go. The public was also often really genuinely panicked,
and government took steps to try to maintain calm, including
trying to filter or suppress information about the pandemic. So
(21:06):
the telegraph was one of the primary modes of communication
at this point. The telephone had been invented, but it
was still extremely expensive, not at all prevalent in places
that weren't very affluent or places that were rural, so
a lot of people were relying completely on the telegraph
to communicate with people over long distances. Telegraphs ran on
a network of human operators who were privy to everything
(21:29):
that was being transmitted because they were the ones that
were sending out the codes. So in the United States,
for example, the Public Health Service gave all of its
officers codebooks to use anytime they were sending information about
the pandemic, so the tele the telegraph operators wouldn't be
able to figure out what was being said and go
spread alarm among other people. And once it was all over,
(21:52):
perhaps because it had been so terrifying, and perhaps because
it came on the heels of a war that had
stretched on for years, most bowl really just seemed to
want to forget that the whole thing had happened, and
so for a long time, research into its cause and
its progression we're actually quite minimal. In October of nineteen eighteen,
so as the epidemic was still going on, doctors began
(22:15):
to correctly theorize that the flu was caused by a
virus and not a bacteria. But influenza A virus wasn't
isolated until many years later, in nineteen thirty three. Influenza
A is what causes most epidemic strains of the flu
to other types. Influenza B and C weren't isolated until
nineteen forty and nineteen fifty, respectively, and the vaccine didn't
(22:38):
come around until nineteen four, and because the flu mutates
every year, the vaccine has to change every year to
keep up. This is why the vaccine provides better protection
some years than others, because some years it's just a
better match to what's actually happening, and it keeps up
with the mutation right. Other, although less deadly pandemics also
(22:59):
followed and nine teen fifty seven and fifty eight, and
then again in nineteen sixty eight and sixty nine. There
was also the H one and one swine flu pandemic
in two thousand nine, and other flu seasons have also
had the potential to turn into pandemic flu, but ultimately didn't.
Scientists continue to study the nineteen eighteen nineteen nineteen pandemic
(23:21):
to try to figure out exactly what made it so
bad in the hopes of preventing another uh similar situation
in the future. They've done things like tried to reverse
engineer the genes of the nineteen eighteen version of the
flu and try to figure out what modern drugs might
be effective against something like that. In two thousand five,
researchers sequenced the genome of the flu virus. They used
(23:44):
samples from the body of an Inuit woman who had
been buried in a mass grave after the flu killed
ninety percent of her village, and according to this research,
the flu came from an H one and one avian virus.
The sort of scientific verdicts then has flipped back and
forth a little about whether the pandemic flew came from
(24:04):
an avian or a swine origin, and then in February
of uh an article published in the journal Nature put
the primary theory back to being an avian origin. In January,
historian Mark Humphreys published a paper in the journal War
in History theorizing a potential cause for the pandemic. During
(24:26):
World War One, ninety six thousand Chinese workers were transported
by rail to work on the Western Front. He found
medical records describing a respiratory virus that broke out in
southern China the year before, one that Chinese officials later
said was identical to the so called Spanish flu. About
three thousand of the workers were quarantined with flu like symptoms.
(24:49):
Racist doctors called the sick workers lazy and then sent
them back to their camps, and at the time of
his papers publication, he was waiting on test results from
samples for confirmation. Yeah, this is one of those things
where at least according to everything that I was reading
about it, uh, tests should confirm this theory. But at
this point a lot of people are like, yeah, that
(25:09):
makes a lot of sense. Um, So obviously that means
that this had nothing really to do with Spain. We've
left this for the end that the name Spanish flu
only came about because Spain's press was uncensored at the time,
so most of the earliest information that people got about
the illness came from Spain, where people weren't restricting the
(25:32):
information that was published about it. So it really got
its unfortunate association just by the fact that they were
the most informative. They were being the least obbus skating
about what was happening. So, yeah, this whole story is
really alarming to me. I have, or I had when
(25:53):
I was young. I had a living great grandfather who
was born in Undread, and so things didn't seem like
they were in the distant past to me until they
had happened before he had been born. So when I
was little, the fact that this whole thing had happened
while he was alive, I was like, this could happen
(26:16):
again right now because that is an extremely recent past
and now as an adult, I still think this could
really happen again right now. But it's not because of
like the state of medical knowledge is just because viruses
can be terrifying. Yeah, Like I said, I have a
completely irrational level of fear of the flu. I don't
(26:36):
know why. I don't know where that came from. It's
just it's irrational. Exercise caution, I would say my level
of fear of it is irrational. Okay, that that maybe
maybe I know some one of those things I won't overshare.
But last week I had a brief visit from food poisoning,
and I immediately my brain started whirling with that, Oh
my gosh, no, what if this is some really terrible
(26:58):
version of the flu and I will be pay zero.
It's irrational. Yeah, I think the thing that's made me
most afraid of illnesses like this is a game that
I've played on the iPad called Plague Incorporated, where basically
you try to make your plague kill everyone in the world,
and like there's there are ways you can do it
(27:18):
where it just basically spreads silently among everyone and then
it turns completely deadly, and whenever I see that happen,
I'm like that that could happen. It could really happen.
I like how your entertainment choices are reinforcing your fears.
That's really good. Sometimes that's what happens. Yes, do you
have listener mail? I do have listener mail. This listener
mail is from Sarah, and she says I love the
(27:39):
podcast and have written before when you two were doing
pop stuff. I really enjoyed your episode on foot finding
and couldn't help, but wonder if other cultures might view
our Western custom of circumcision in the same light. I
know it has a deep religious meeting for many people,
but the typical surgery done in a hospital doesn't follow
Jewish guidelines for circumcision. Babies of don't remember the procedure
(28:01):
and will heal better than adults choosing to undergo the
operation if it is. But it is still a cosmetic
procedure that can't really be reversed, and it's given without
consent of the child. I know some men whish they
weren't circumcised and feel they didn't get a say in
the matter, and in recent years many people have advocated
against it. I personally haven't made up my mind about it,
but there are strong arguments on both sides. Maybe if
(28:23):
I have children, I will have to make a decision.
It's still hard for me to think that I might
permanently change boy's body just because it is a cultural norm.
I should point out that I don't believe circumcision is
in any way as life altering as the act of footbinding,
but that it is something for our society to consider.
And then she sent some show ideas. So I think
this was like one of the most uh reasoned emails
(28:49):
about circumcision that we got after the footbinding episode. Yeah,
it's a topic people feel very passionately about, and we
got a lot of emails about it. We owe a
lot that some of them were extremely screaming at us.
So here is why I can't I'm not sure if
it was you or B who said there's not really
a modern equivalent of this in the West, uh, but
(29:10):
I think we both pretty much felt that and feel
that you're doing the episode. So here is why I
did not put circumcision into the same category as footbinding.
So both of them are they're performed or were are
or were performed on children. Without their consent. They are
(29:30):
not medically uh critical. There are some arguments about medical
benefits of circumcision, but it's like not something that it's
an elective procedure. That's a good way to put it. Um,
And they do change up person's body, But circumcision is
not ingrained into American culture the way that footbinding is,
(29:54):
Like it was pretty much the thing to do with
baby boys for many years. Uh, but that did not
mean that baby boys who were not circumcised were ineligible
to be married. Yeah, I mean footbinding. We talked about
it in the episode. If a family had chosen not
to bind the feet of their daughter, they were sort
of condemning her to a pretty rough life, like she
(30:17):
would basically automatically be on one of the lowest runks
of society, right. Um. There's also a lot of really
contradictory research about exactly what affect that circumcision does or
does not have on, for example, a man's sexual health. Um.
There are pros and cons in the the things that
are like medical benefits, like it, it appears that being
(30:41):
circumcised lowers the risk of HIV TRANSI transmission. Um like
their their arguments on both sides of that. Footbinding, on
the other hand, has zero medical value at all whatsoever,
and is crippling. So Yeah, and we talked about in
that episode that they they found that women that had
had their feet bound later on in their in their
(31:03):
older years had a higher instance of osteoporosis than women
that did not. Yeah, And I think it's possible that
a hundred years from now or five hundred years from
now or something like that, it's entirely possible that culture
will look back on circumcision and make the equation that, yes,
it was just as bad as as footbinding. But like,
(31:25):
we're not at that point in culture or history yet.
Like there are some parallels, but I cannot at all
say that they are equivalent. Well, and the other thing
to consider is that, unlike footbinding, whether or not a
man is circumcised is not immediately obvious to passers by
in the street. Um Whereas women that were caught in
(31:48):
that middle ground that we talked about, after footbinding had
been outlawed and fallen out of favor but still had
their feet bound, people were taunting them and in some
times assault them in the street because they could obviously
see that they were part of this older tradition that
was now not in favor. Yeah, Whereas that would not
(32:09):
be the case if circumcisions suddenly were completely eradicated as
a practice and that had sort of legacy. Circumcisions are
not going to get taunted in the street because people
will not know. I think too in my mind, for
something to be equivalent to uh, to fit binding, it
would have to be simultaneously crippling performed on children without
(32:33):
their consent and so ingrained in a culture that that
we're moving it from. That culture had would have all
kinds of other ramifications. So a lot of the other
suggestions that people wrote into us about things that they
were like, well, what about women wearing high heel shoes
that can deform their body? Like that is adults making
a choice themselves. Uh. And you know, if you don't
(32:54):
wear high heel shoes, that doesn't mean you're going to
be socially outcasts for the rest of your life. So
it has to fit all of those things at the
same time for me to say, okay, yet that would
be a modern equivalent. Yeah, and I in us saying
there's not a modern equivalent. It's not to diminish the
discussion that people are having about issues like circumcision, but
it just it doesn't meet the same criteria right, So yes,
(33:18):
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other subject, we are at History Podcast at
Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot
com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss
in History. Are tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler
dot com, and our pentterestes pinterest dot com slash missed
in History. We have a website of our very own
(33:38):
where we are putting all of the podcast episodes, in,
all of our show notes, and all of that. It
is at missed in history dot com. If you would
like to learn more about what we've talked about today,
you can go to our parent company's website, how stuff
Works dot com and put the word flue in the
search bar and you will find how the flu works.
You can do all of that and a whole lot
(33:59):
more at our website, which is how stuff works dot
com for more on there's thousands of other topics because
it how stuff works dot com. Audible dot com is
(34:22):
the leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken
word entertainment. Audible has more than one thousand titles to
choose from to be downloaded to your iPod or MP
three player. Go to audible podcast dot com slash history
to get a free audio book download of your choice
when you sign up today
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and Holly
So we don't normally start out with corrections. Very first
thing that I need to do that today. Okay, So
(00:24):
you remember our our pig war episode where we talked about, uh,
you know, a war that almost happened because of a
pig I do. I accidentally said in that episode that
somebody traveled via the Panama Canal to get out to
that part of the world. Ye, so that was wrong.
It was a little whoopsie Daisy. That was yes, that
(00:45):
was my source said via Panama, and my dumb brain
just filled in the part that says canal there. The
canal did not exist yet. I'm very sorry. Please stop
emailing us about you. Here's what I'm saying. If that's
the worst crime you commit, I think we're in pretty
good hands. I know, I think this is maybe like
(01:06):
that was maybe the second hugest most email generating error
in the podcast. And I'm not even going to mention
what the other one was because we haven't gotten a
message about it. And maybe six months, and it's from
years before we came on the show, like you getting
corrections about it when we started. So yes, I am
so sorry that I auto completed something that was not
(01:27):
built yet in the world. Uh. And I'll try not
to do that again. And today we're gonna talk about
something completely different. Yes, so just not long ago at all.
We asked on Facebook for people to tell us some
ideas of things that they wanted to talk about that
were events in history, because we have lots of episodes
about people, and some people prefer events, and for whatever reason,
(01:48):
whenever I sit down to do the podcast, my brain
turns up people a lot of so weird. Even if
I try to pick a subject that is not a
people and is an event eventually sort of as the
notes and the plot line are kind of playing out
as I'm doing my research, it almost always had the
focusing on one particular person that was part of it.
(02:10):
I don't know if that's just some sort of brain
situation that it wants to focus on one smaller piece
or what, but it happens. It's tricky to pick an
event and not do that for me. Well, conveniently, the
event that people asked for the absolute most was the
Wreck of the Batavia, which at that point we had
already recorded and edited and it was just waiting to
be published. So that worked out really well. We delivered
(02:32):
so quickly without meeting to you. I know. We had
a couple of other things that were m maybe not
quite as much as heavily requested at that one, but
extremely frequently requested, And one of them is what we're
going to talk about today, which is the so called
Spanish flu epidemic of nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen. So
somewhere between twenty million and fifty million people died of
(02:56):
the flu during this epidemic, which started just as World
War One was winding down. So a lot of our
past episodes that are about diseases are really about the
people who saved us from them. So like our smallpox
episode is all about Edward Jenner and his smallpox vaccine,
and our tuberculosis episode is all about Salmon Waxman and
(03:18):
Albert Shots and the discovery of streptomycin, which was the
first antibiotic that could treat it. Sarah and Deblinus episode
called Polio the Dread Disease is also largely about the
vaccines that have nearly eradicated polio from the world. But
the story of the flu pandemic of eighteen, nineteen, eighteen
and nineteen nineteen is not that has a lot more
(03:40):
in common with our episode about encephalitis lethargico, which also
happened right about the same time. Uh. The flu epidemic
is probably why a disease that was as crazy and
terrifying as in as encephalitis lethargic is not a better
known event in medical history. UH. The flu just completely
over out in it because it killed so many people.
(04:02):
But like encephalitis lethargica, the pandemic flu came and it went.
Nobody could treat it, nobody could cure it. A fifth
of the people in the world got the flu that
during the pandemic, and UH. Usually while the typical flu
is hardest on elderly people in the very young, this
(04:22):
time it was deadliest among year olds, and in that
age bracket it was so lethal that in the United States,
for example, the average life expectancy dropped by more than
a decade just as a result of how many people
died from the flu, which is scary. I feel like
I should confess that I have this completely unfounded fear
(04:42):
that I will die of a random flu. This is
also why we are doing the episode now and not
at the height of flu season, as we're exiting flu season.
I mean, every time might get the flu, my thought
is this is the one that's gonna take me down.
So hopefully I won't have any panic attacks while we record. Yeah,
(05:03):
I will keep my fingers crossed. So before we start, though,
we should talk a little bit about what the world
of medicine and what public health were like in nineteen eighteen.
So in many parts of the world, nations hadn't really
standardized or regulated what was required for a person to
call themselves a doctor, so people practiced medicine with all
(05:24):
kinds of different credentials or with no credentials, and patent
medicines which really didn't have any medical value. And we're
mostly alcohol and ladana most of the time, we're still
pretty prevalent. There was a lot of stuff floating around
that was just not legitimate for treating anything. And at
this point, Alexander Fleming had not yet discovered penicillin. That
was still a decade away, and its use as a
(05:47):
drug was even further out than that. So penicillin wouldn't
have helped fight the flu, since influenza is a virus
and penicillin kills bacteria, but it might have helped some
of the people who wound up with bacterial pneumonia after
contracting the flu. And this is more just to sort
of point out a milestone of where we were in
medicine when this flu epidemic was happening. Yeah, So in
(06:10):
spite of some of these things that we think of
as basics today, like requiring people to be trained to
call themselves doctors and antibiotics and things like that, things
had really advanced a lot in the world of medicine
over the past century. Before the epidemics started, most parts
of the industrialized world at this point had understood and
(06:31):
accepted the germ theory of disease. So at this point
pretty much everyone was on the same page in most places,
uh that germs cause disease, and doctors had also figured
out exactly which germs caused a number of diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria,
and cholera. The idea of a reportable disease, or one
(06:51):
so dangerous that all cases of it needed to be
reported to government authorities also existed, but even though there
had been another serious flu epidemic a couple of decades before,
influenza wasn't really reportable in most places until this particular
epidemic had really gotten dire, and at that point it
was too late for warning the government to do really
(07:13):
any good. Yeah, what they already knew there was a
big problem. By the time people were able to start saying, hey,
there is a big problem. Vaccines also existed. There was
a vaccine for smallpox, there was a vaccine for rabies.
Other vaccines were also in the works, and people really
thought as the as the epidemic got going that a
vaccine for the flu was just around the corner. As
(07:37):
we talked about in the encephalitis lethargica episode, though, figuring
out how to make a vaccine for a disease when
you don't know what's causing the disease is really hard,
and not only did doctors not know what was causing
the flu, they also had it pinned on a completely
different germ. They thought it had a totally different cause
than it really did have. So at the start of
(07:59):
the epidemic, the purported culprit for the flu was a
bacterium that had been named Piper's basilius after its discoverer,
who was a German scientist named Robert Friedrich Peifer, and
he made the connection between his baxillus and the flu,
but he hadn't really proved this connection, and as the
epidemic war on, it became abundantly clear that Piper was wrong.
(08:20):
The baxilus he discovered was not present in sick patients,
and deliberately exposing people to it didn't give them the flu.
So even though an international team was dedicated to trying
to create a vaccine, none of their work proved effective,
and at first uh they were after the wrong germ,
and then they didn't have a good starting point. So
(08:42):
all of this together combines to mean that when the
flu turned really deadly in nineteen eighteen, there was not
much that legitimate doctors could do for their patients besides
to keep them in bed and keep them as fed
and hydrated and comfortable as possible. The most most of
the things that had any efficacy at all were about prevention,
which basically involved keeping the sick people quarantined and trying
(09:03):
to educate people about how to keep themselves from being
exposed and doctors knew that the flu was spread by
coughing and sneezing, so they gave the common sense advice
about covering your nose and mouth and staying away from
people who were coughing and sneezing. Oh, and also telling
people not to spit on the ground. So don't spit
on the ground please. You know, their debates over whether
(09:27):
that's a civil way to behave in general, but uh,
sick people don't spread no, no spitting. It's gross and
it spreads illness. So there were also a lot of
public health campaigns that were trying to get people who
were sick to stay at home, which probably sounds kind
of familiar to when there's a big flu outbreak today. Uh.
(09:48):
They especially, we're trying to educate people who were sick
to get them to stay away from crowds. And businesses
got in on the deal to trying to warn people
who were ill to go home. So a sign at
one theater in Chicago read influenza frequently complicated with pneumonia
is prevalent at this time throughout America. This theater is
(10:11):
cooperating with the Department of Health. You must do the
same if you have a cold and are coughing and sneezing,
do not enter this theater. And then, in all capital letters,
go home and go to bed until you are well.
That seems wise. Not all of the advice on prevention
was sound, though. Many people in public health recommended that
(10:32):
people wear masks, and some places even required that masks
be warned by law, but this was in fact not effective. Yeah,
masks are kind of effective when there's bacteria involved, but
when it's a virus, the viruses are just too small.
Before we get into how this disease spread and where
(10:54):
it was first reported and all that, let's take a
brief moment for a word from a sponsor, So back
to exactly what happened when this disease made its debut.
The first reports of flu in this pandemic came in
May of nineteen eighteen in Europe, and the first reports
were amongst soldiers, so large numbers of otherwise healthy young
(11:15):
troops were just becoming really ill with flu like symptoms.
So they were getting coughing and sneezing and body aches.
Most of them were recovering within a few days. And
apart from the fact that this was disrupting a war,
it was not a really big deal, but then the
disease jumped from the military to civilians in Europe, and
from there it spread to most of the rest of
the world over the course of just a couple of months.
(11:38):
It was still a relatively mild disease, much like the
seasonal flu most of us have had at one time
or another in our lives. It wasn't pleasant, but it
was also not especially alarming. This disease faded away later
in the summer, but then in August it mutated and
became really a lot more serious. This terrifying strain of
(11:59):
the flu was reported in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States,
in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and then Breast, France, and these
were all port cities, so it's possible that the disease
had spread between three of them on ships. And this time,
along with the typical flu symptoms of coughing and sneezing
and a sore throad and body aches, the disease caused
(12:20):
very high fevers between a hundred and two and a
hundred five degrees Fahrenheim. Patients felt exhausted and their eyes
became bloodshot, and some even had severe nosebleeds or gastro
intestinal problems. Even though this flu was a lot worse
from the flu that had spread earlier in the spring,
A lot of people still recovered, but a pretty substantial
(12:42):
portion of people developed a devastating pneumonia, which was caused
by one of a number of bacteria. It was a
secondary infection that was like a complication of this flu.
Their lungs filled up with fluid and started hemorrhaging, and
death often came alarmingly fast, with people going from sitting
upright and talking to being dead within hours. See, these
(13:02):
are the stories that make me paranoid about the flu.
This is this is why I read an article when
I was working on this about that episode of the
about the flu pandemic that was in the Down n
Abbey TV show. Yeah, so spoiler alert for Down n Abbey.
It's similarly, uh, make some people in the household really
really sick, and it has one There's one particular character
(13:23):
who goes from being she's sick, she's has she has
the flu. She goes from I'm sick with the flu
two I'm dead end an episode which is not uncommon
for TV, but also was really how it worked so
when doctors performed autopsies on these patients who had died,
they found out their lungs and their spleens were just
grotesquely swollen. So a description from a doctor who was
(13:46):
stationed at Fort Devan's outside Boston from that September, here's
what he had to say. This epidemic started about four
weeks ago and has developed so rapidly that the camp
is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till
it has passed. These men start with what appears to
be an ordinary attack of la grippa or influenza, and
(14:08):
when brought to the hosp so abbreviation for hospital. When
brought to the hosp they very rapidly developed the most
biscus type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two
hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheekbones,
and a few hours later you can begin to see
the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over
(14:29):
the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored
men from the white. It is only a matter of
a few hours then until death comes, and it is
simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible.
One can stand to see one, two or twenty men die,
but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort
(14:51):
of gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about
one deaths per day and and still keeping it up.
There is no doubt in my mind there is a
new mixed infection here, but what I don't know. And
from the ports cities where this really started sort of
blossoming outward, the disease spread really rapidly over the next
(15:13):
couple of months. It spread all over the world, and
then it too faded out. Although another mild wave of
flu went on around early nine, it's hard to pinpoint
exactly how many people died during the pandemic. Medical records
from the era were already kind of sketchy even before
you threw a devastating pandemic into the mix. To make
(15:36):
things even more chaotic. Doctors often misdiagnosed milder forms of
the flu was common colds, and sometimes they diagnosed this
much more serious version as another disease entirely like cholera.
The disease also moved so quickly that public health agencies
could not accurately track what was happening. So in the
decade after the pandemic, the estimated global death toll was
(16:00):
a million people, but modern researchers who have gone back
and tried to reconstruct things have marked the number as
much higher, between thirty million and fifty million people died worldwide.
So that sort of leaves us to wonder why this
particular flu was so incredibly bad. Uh. We know that
the war often takes a giant share of the blame
(16:21):
for the spread of the flu pandemic, and it's definitely
true that the flu followed the troops and that it
spread like wildfire amongst soldiers in close quarters, and the
soldiers returning home from the war brought the disease with them.
Battlefield injuries and other illnesses also made it harder for
soldiers to fight off the flu, so camps for the
war were basically like flu incubators. It's also definitely true
(16:45):
that the war meant that a lot of the medical
personnel who were trained at the time had been tasked
to help with the military, and so they were not
available to help the civilian population. As the epidemics started
to spread, communities in more rural areas asked their various
government organizations to please send doctors and nurses to help them,
(17:06):
but often the few who weren't part of the war
effort fell victim to the flu themselves while they were
traveling to their patients. But it really it wasn't just
about the soldiers or the effects of the war. Even
if the epidemic had happened during peacetime, hospitals just wouldn't
have been able to handle the influx of so many patients.
Temporary hospitals had to be built in churches and schools
(17:28):
and community centers, and some hospitals even expanded their capacity
by housing their patients intents on hospital grounds. And the
way of life in the late nineteen teens also played
a big role in the spread of the disease. Cars
were not in widespread use at this point, and many
larger cities around the world had developed extensive public transportation systems,
(17:50):
so that was bringing sick and healthy people into contact
with each other on street cars, on trolleys, and on subways,
and several parts of the world people were also traveling
really extensively by train, so, for example, in the United States,
train travel peaked in nineteen twenty, just a year after
the epidemic, and these long trips in close quarters. Similarly,
(18:11):
UH fueled the spread of the disease. Some of the
most popular leisure activities in nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen
also drew big crowds. So movie theaters have become affordable.
They were extremely popular, and they were very widespread. They
were everywhere, and that made them a hot bed of
infection UH. There were also dance halls and amusement parks,
(18:33):
and in many places governments restricted activities or shut them
down entirely to try to keep people from gathering. Some
towns even canceled school UH and canceled church services, and
universities suspended their operations in an effort to just sort
of stop this spread that was going on everywhere people gathered.
Cities also shut down or restricted their public transportation systems
(18:56):
that were at this point so popular, and drivers, either
with their city's authority or acting on their own, would
refuse to carry passengers who weren't wearing masks or who
they suspected to be ILL. And although all of these
factors have been about industry, people in rural and developing
areas were not spared in the least in the United States,
(19:16):
the Eskimo population was disproportionately hit with the flu, and
in rural and developing areas, people were left with no
medical care and very little reliable information about what was
actually going on or what they could possibly do about it.
The lore, which took so much of the blame for
spreading the disease, wound up ultimately killing sixteen million people,
(19:38):
but that number was just dwarfed by the total death
toll from the flu. So before we talk about the
aftermath of of this devastation, let's take another brief moment
and have a word from a sponsor, so to to
get back to the aftermath of this this flu pandemic.
On top of the astounding loss of life, the flu
(19:59):
pandemic had a lot of economic and social impacts. So
many people were sick that public and municipal services completely
shut down because there was nobody left to do the work.
Garbage was piling up in the streets in cities were
sanitation workers were particularly hard hit. Telegraph systems failed when
there were not enough operators that were healthy enough to
(20:21):
come into work. Kind of reminds me of stories about
the Black Death and how so many people would die
that there was no one left to bury them. Yeah.
Small businesses went bankrupt because their proprietors became too sick
to work or they died, And then insurance companies also
went bankrupt because their incoming claims skyrocketed. If trains were
found to have sick people aboard, stations along the routes
(20:44):
would actually forbid them from stopping. So even the ones
that we're working were subject to some you know, limitation. Yeah,
and then that trickled down with its own effects of
people not being able to get to where they needed
to go. The public was also often really genuinely panicked,
and government took steps to try to maintain calm, including
trying to filter or suppress information about the pandemic. So
(21:06):
the telegraph was one of the primary modes of communication
at this point. The telephone had been invented, but it
was still extremely expensive, not at all prevalent in places
that weren't very affluent or places that were rural, so
a lot of people were relying completely on the telegraph
to communicate with people over long distances. Telegraphs ran on
a network of human operators who were privy to everything
(21:29):
that was being transmitted because they were the ones that
were sending out the codes. So in the United States,
for example, the Public Health Service gave all of its
officers codebooks to use anytime they were sending information about
the pandemic, so the tele the telegraph operators wouldn't be
able to figure out what was being said and go
spread alarm among other people. And once it was all over,
(21:52):
perhaps because it had been so terrifying, and perhaps because
it came on the heels of a war that had
stretched on for years, most bowl really just seemed to
want to forget that the whole thing had happened, and
so for a long time, research into its cause and
its progression we're actually quite minimal. In October of nineteen eighteen,
so as the epidemic was still going on, doctors began
(22:15):
to correctly theorize that the flu was caused by a
virus and not a bacteria. But influenza A virus wasn't
isolated until many years later, in nineteen thirty three. Influenza
A is what causes most epidemic strains of the flu
to other types. Influenza B and C weren't isolated until
nineteen forty and nineteen fifty, respectively, and the vaccine didn't
(22:38):
come around until nineteen four, and because the flu mutates
every year, the vaccine has to change every year to
keep up. This is why the vaccine provides better protection
some years than others, because some years it's just a
better match to what's actually happening, and it keeps up
with the mutation right. Other, although less deadly pandemics also
(22:59):
followed and nine teen fifty seven and fifty eight, and
then again in nineteen sixty eight and sixty nine. There
was also the H one and one swine flu pandemic
in two thousand nine, and other flu seasons have also
had the potential to turn into pandemic flu, but ultimately didn't.
Scientists continue to study the nineteen eighteen nineteen nineteen pandemic
(23:21):
to try to figure out exactly what made it so
bad in the hopes of preventing another uh similar situation
in the future. They've done things like tried to reverse
engineer the genes of the nineteen eighteen version of the
flu and try to figure out what modern drugs might
be effective against something like that. In two thousand five,
researchers sequenced the genome of the flu virus. They used
(23:44):
samples from the body of an Inuit woman who had
been buried in a mass grave after the flu killed
ninety percent of her village, and according to this research,
the flu came from an H one and one avian virus.
The sort of scientific verdicts then has flipped back and
forth a little about whether the pandemic flew came from
(24:04):
an avian or a swine origin, and then in February
of uh an article published in the journal Nature put
the primary theory back to being an avian origin. In January,
historian Mark Humphreys published a paper in the journal War
in History theorizing a potential cause for the pandemic. During
(24:26):
World War One, ninety six thousand Chinese workers were transported
by rail to work on the Western Front. He found
medical records describing a respiratory virus that broke out in
southern China the year before, one that Chinese officials later
said was identical to the so called Spanish flu. About
three thousand of the workers were quarantined with flu like symptoms.
(24:49):
Racist doctors called the sick workers lazy and then sent
them back to their camps, and at the time of
his papers publication, he was waiting on test results from
samples for confirmation. Yeah, this is one of those things
where at least according to everything that I was reading
about it, uh, tests should confirm this theory. But at
this point a lot of people are like, yeah, that
(25:09):
makes a lot of sense. Um, So obviously that means
that this had nothing really to do with Spain. We've
left this for the end that the name Spanish flu
only came about because Spain's press was uncensored at the time,
so most of the earliest information that people got about
the illness came from Spain, where people weren't restricting the
(25:32):
information that was published about it. So it really got
its unfortunate association just by the fact that they were
the most informative. They were being the least obbus skating
about what was happening. So, yeah, this whole story is
really alarming to me. I have, or I had when
(25:53):
I was young. I had a living great grandfather who
was born in Undread, and so things didn't seem like
they were in the distant past to me until they
had happened before he had been born. So when I
was little, the fact that this whole thing had happened
while he was alive, I was like, this could happen
(26:16):
again right now because that is an extremely recent past
and now as an adult, I still think this could
really happen again right now. But it's not because of
like the state of medical knowledge is just because viruses
can be terrifying. Yeah, Like I said, I have a
completely irrational level of fear of the flu. I don't
(26:36):
know why. I don't know where that came from. It's
just it's irrational. Exercise caution, I would say my level
of fear of it is irrational. Okay, that that maybe
maybe I know some one of those things I won't overshare.
But last week I had a brief visit from food poisoning,
and I immediately my brain started whirling with that, Oh
my gosh, no, what if this is some really terrible
(26:58):
version of the flu and I will be pay zero.
It's irrational. Yeah, I think the thing that's made me
most afraid of illnesses like this is a game that
I've played on the iPad called Plague Incorporated, where basically
you try to make your plague kill everyone in the world,
and like there's there are ways you can do it
(27:18):
where it just basically spreads silently among everyone and then
it turns completely deadly, and whenever I see that happen,
I'm like that that could happen. It could really happen.
I like how your entertainment choices are reinforcing your fears.
That's really good. Sometimes that's what happens. Yes, do you
have listener mail? I do have listener mail. This listener
mail is from Sarah, and she says I love the
(27:39):
podcast and have written before when you two were doing
pop stuff. I really enjoyed your episode on foot finding
and couldn't help, but wonder if other cultures might view
our Western custom of circumcision in the same light. I
know it has a deep religious meeting for many people,
but the typical surgery done in a hospital doesn't follow
Jewish guidelines for circumcision. Babies of don't remember the procedure
(28:01):
and will heal better than adults choosing to undergo the
operation if it is. But it is still a cosmetic
procedure that can't really be reversed, and it's given without
consent of the child. I know some men whish they
weren't circumcised and feel they didn't get a say in
the matter, and in recent years many people have advocated
against it. I personally haven't made up my mind about it,
but there are strong arguments on both sides. Maybe if
(28:23):
I have children, I will have to make a decision.
It's still hard for me to think that I might
permanently change boy's body just because it is a cultural norm.
I should point out that I don't believe circumcision is
in any way as life altering as the act of footbinding,
but that it is something for our society to consider.
And then she sent some show ideas. So I think
this was like one of the most uh reasoned emails
(28:49):
about circumcision that we got after the footbinding episode. Yeah,
it's a topic people feel very passionately about, and we
got a lot of emails about it. We owe a
lot that some of them were extremely screaming at us.
So here is why I can't I'm not sure if
it was you or B who said there's not really
a modern equivalent of this in the West, uh, but
(29:10):
I think we both pretty much felt that and feel
that you're doing the episode. So here is why I
did not put circumcision into the same category as footbinding.
So both of them are they're performed or were are
or were performed on children. Without their consent. They are
(29:30):
not medically uh critical. There are some arguments about medical
benefits of circumcision, but it's like not something that it's
an elective procedure. That's a good way to put it. Um,
And they do change up person's body, But circumcision is
not ingrained into American culture the way that footbinding is,
(29:54):
Like it was pretty much the thing to do with
baby boys for many years. Uh, but that did not
mean that baby boys who were not circumcised were ineligible
to be married. Yeah, I mean footbinding. We talked about
it in the episode. If a family had chosen not
to bind the feet of their daughter, they were sort
of condemning her to a pretty rough life, like she
(30:17):
would basically automatically be on one of the lowest runks
of society, right. Um. There's also a lot of really
contradictory research about exactly what affect that circumcision does or
does not have on, for example, a man's sexual health. Um.
There are pros and cons in the the things that
are like medical benefits, like it, it appears that being
(30:41):
circumcised lowers the risk of HIV TRANSI transmission. Um like
their their arguments on both sides of that. Footbinding, on
the other hand, has zero medical value at all whatsoever,
and is crippling. So Yeah, and we talked about in
that episode that they they found that women that had
had their feet bound later on in their in their
(31:03):
older years had a higher instance of osteoporosis than women
that did not. Yeah, And I think it's possible that
a hundred years from now or five hundred years from
now or something like that, it's entirely possible that culture
will look back on circumcision and make the equation that, yes,
it was just as bad as as footbinding. But like,
(31:25):
we're not at that point in culture or history yet.
Like there are some parallels, but I cannot at all
say that they are equivalent. Well, and the other thing
to consider is that, unlike footbinding, whether or not a
man is circumcised is not immediately obvious to passers by
in the street. Um Whereas women that were caught in
(31:48):
that middle ground that we talked about, after footbinding had
been outlawed and fallen out of favor but still had
their feet bound, people were taunting them and in some
times assault them in the street because they could obviously
see that they were part of this older tradition that
was now not in favor. Yeah, Whereas that would not
(32:09):
be the case if circumcisions suddenly were completely eradicated as
a practice and that had sort of legacy. Circumcisions are
not going to get taunted in the street because people
will not know. I think too in my mind, for
something to be equivalent to uh, to fit binding, it
would have to be simultaneously crippling performed on children without
(32:33):
their consent and so ingrained in a culture that that
we're moving it from. That culture had would have all
kinds of other ramifications. So a lot of the other
suggestions that people wrote into us about things that they
were like, well, what about women wearing high heel shoes
that can deform their body? Like that is adults making
a choice themselves. Uh. And you know, if you don't
(32:54):
wear high heel shoes, that doesn't mean you're going to
be socially outcasts for the rest of your life. So
it has to fit all of those things at the
same time for me to say, okay, yet that would
be a modern equivalent. Yeah, and I in us saying
there's not a modern equivalent. It's not to diminish the
discussion that people are having about issues like circumcision, but
it just it doesn't meet the same criteria right, So yes,
(33:18):
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other subject, we are at History Podcast at
Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot
com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss
in History. Are tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler
dot com, and our pentterestes pinterest dot com slash missed
in History. We have a website of our very own
(33:38):
where we are putting all of the podcast episodes, in,
all of our show notes, and all of that. It
is at missed in history dot com. If you would
like to learn more about what we've talked about today,
you can go to our parent company's website, how stuff
Works dot com and put the word flue in the
search bar and you will find how the flu works.
You can do all of that and a whole lot
(33:59):
more at our website, which is how stuff works dot
com for more on there's thousands of other topics because
it how stuff works dot com. Audible dot com is
(34:22):
the leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken
word entertainment. Audible has more than one thousand titles to
choose from to be downloaded to your iPod or MP
three player. Go to audible podcast dot com slash history
to get a free audio book download of your choice
when you sign up today
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!