Bugs Under The Skin

Ever feel like there are bugs crawling around in your body? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore alleged incidents, medical publications and the reality of delusional parasitosis. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lane, and I'm Joe McCormick. Robert.
What's the weirdest thing you ever got stuck up your nose? Oh?
I think I've been very fortunate. I know plenty of

(00:23):
other people who have tales of siblings getting odd objects
lodged up their nostrils, being a marble, or I think
my brother in law had a piece of carpet stuck
up there something. You know, you hear all these stories,
and luckily, I don't think I've ever had anything, um,
anything stuck in my nose. So unfortunate in that regard.
You know, your mention of the marbles makes me think

(00:45):
about did you ever see that old episode of the
show Home Movies where their take on the like judas
pre supplemental messages thing is. There's a rock band who
I think does a does a public service announcement song
called don't put Marbles in your nose, but it also
keeps put them in there. Now, I think that the worst,
especially like childhood experience of anything going into an unexpected

(01:09):
orifice would be um when I had some sort of
small insect fly into my ear. Oh really, yeah, which
which the main distressing thing is that a little bug
once it gets inside your ear is it's extremely loud.
So I do. I do remember that quite clearly. It's
looking at the outside from the inside, it's a horrible feeling. Yeah.

(01:29):
And I remember like my dad was there and he
jumped in and I guess it happened at the house
because they had some like rubbing alcohol and like they
poured a little bit of that into my ear and
that took care of it. Well, that experience is going
to be a great jumping off point for our discussion today,
because I think we should start off by playing one
of my favorite games that we play on this show,
which is go into old medical journals and read some weirdness.

(01:52):
Oh yes, So I want to talk about a case
report that was published in December of eighteen thirty in
the medical journal The Lancet. This is a truly disturbing report.
So if you if you get picked out easily, you
know fair warning. So let us read from the Lancet.
A farmer's wife, twenty eight years of age, residing in
the neighborhood of mets had for a long time been

(02:15):
affected with an unpleasant itching sensation in the nose with corrisa,
which means running nose, to which symptoms. In the year
eighteen seven, violent headache exceeded so that she was at
length obliged to apply for medical aid. The headache was
irregularly intermittent, and generally began at the root of the nose,
in the middle of the forehead, or at the right

(02:37):
frontal region, extending thence first to the right side and
then over the whole head. The attack was accompanied by
a great discharge of tears, and sometimes even nausea and vomiting.
The features were forcibly distorted, the jaws firmly closed, and
the eyes and ears so very sensible that she could
not bear the least light or any noise. At other

(02:59):
times became delirious, pressed the head between her hands, and
ran about in a state of distraction. The pain was,
according to her statement, like the strokes of a hammer,
or as if something was perforating the skull, and the
fits generally returned about twelve times in twenty four hours.
Sometimes the headache continued uninterruptedly for several days. The corsa,

(03:22):
or running nose again existed during the whole period, and
the discharge was occasionally very feted and mixed with blood. Okay,
so we're starting off pretty gross already. This poor woman
is suffering these terrible chronic symptoms. She's got the headache,
she's got the swelling, she's got the sensitivity and the
eyes and the nose and all that. Uh, and then
she's also got this discharge mixed with blood. It's always

(03:45):
distressing in any case to have fetid discharge. The idea
that it's fetted is very worrisome. Okay, So continuing, some
medicines were employed, but no regular plan of treatment was followed,
and it was not before a twelve month suffering that
this singular affection terminated after the expulsion of a worm
from the nose, which moved with rapidity and when placed

(04:08):
in water, remained alive for several days. It was afterwards
killed by being put in alcohol and then sent to
Monsieur Mareschal, who reported the case to the society. He
found the animal to be more than two inches in
length and one line in breadth, and I looked that up.
Apparently a line is a unit of measure. That was
not very well standardized. It probably means like a tenth

(04:29):
of an inch or twelfth of an inch, so not
not very wide, um, but two inches in length. It
had too antenna, was so not not a proper worm, right,
not a proper worm. Was of yellowish color, flat, and
consisted of sixty four rings on each of which were
two legs. So definitely not a worm. Uh. Mr Marshal's

(04:50):
subsequently transmitted the insect to Messieurs Holandra and Roussel, who
ascertained that it was a skulla pendra electrica. Okay, so
if had two legs per segment. Yeah, that sounds an
awful lot like a centipede. Right, you are, Robert, this
is a centipede we're talking about. This report alleges that

(05:10):
this woman had this chronic condition for more than a year,
which was alleviated when she finally blew a centipede out
of her nose. Still, that's got to be pretty satisfied. Yeah, yeah.
Talked about what is the is there a word for that?
The psychological thing where like people are obsessed with, like
a removing objects from their body, the satisfaction people get

(05:31):
from like picking a huge booger, or from from pooping
a large poop I don't know, but or popping a
pimple too. Yes, I thought about this on and off
for years, and I would love to explore it in
an episode if there is enough material out there about it,
because clearly it is an obsession, like their whole video
channels on YouTube associated with with this sort of thing.

(05:52):
And um yeah, And when I hear people talk about
imagine the virtual realms willn't happen in the future, and
I'm thinking, well, yes, you're gonna have your obvious sex
and violence oriented uh experiences, but they're gonna be like
whole virtual realms, just just devoted to the popping of

(06:12):
of surrealistic pimples. Yeah, what is the grand theft auto
of like visceral body perching experiences? Yeah? Before I forget,
I do want to give a hat tip because I
came across this story on the blog of a British
writer named Thomas Morris, who covers a lot of horrifying
medical history and is definitely worth following if you're interested
in this kind of stuff, So shout out to Morris,

(06:33):
who we will return to again in a minute. But anyway,
back to the centipede coming out of the nose. So
there are probably some good reasons to question the details
of this report. Right, just because it was published in
a medical journal like the Lance, it doesn't mean it's
necessarily true, especially this far back in history. But we
can we can come back to that. So the the
insect alleged here, it's not actually an insect. It is

(06:54):
a centipede. It's the skull of Pendra electrica, reportedly bioluminescence centipede,
according to a catalog by Bozard in Nature in eight
quote a well known luminous insect. Again not an insect,
but well known luminous insect whose light is but rarely
seen owing to the insect living underground and in manure heaps. Okay,

(07:15):
so that's how it would have seen what it was
doing up in her sinuses maybe, or that's maybe that's
how it ended up there, like she was snorting manure.
There you go. But the bottom line is this, this
report is that a woman had a glowing centipede living
in her nose for over a year, which is a
bit far fetched. Yeah, I think so, but I mean,
it's impossible to know for sure, but I'm I have

(07:37):
a lot of doubts. But Yeah, so I wanted to
explore more and then later we'll get into the more
general territory. I think of Creepy Crawley's getting into body orifices,
and I think we're going to be focusing primarily not
on things that are saying obligate parasites, because that's a
more trodden ground. Right, you might understand why, like say

(07:57):
leech could get into the human anus because it's seeking
that kind of environment, right, or or certainly indo parasites
that even if they're not Certainly there are plenty of
human endo parasites, but they're also are indo parasites of
other species that can end up in our bodies. And
even though they are not at home here, um, this
home is very much like the home they desire. Right,

(08:19):
So we're not so much talking about like hookworms, tape worms,
human bot flies and all that, which we have discussed
in other episodes, but we're talking more today about creatures
that don't need to be in the human body and
wouldn't normally seek it out, but somehow they at least
reportedly end up there. So coming back to the skull
Apendra centipedes of the genus skullopendra can be truly awesome predators.

(08:43):
They tend to step over what is for me one
of the most shocking and unpleasant of lines, which is
when invertebrates prey on vertebrates. That's something something about that
always feels backwards and scary and not okay, I mean,
I mean part of it perhaps is that. And I
feel like this is a kind of an undercurrent to

(09:04):
to this earlier example is that invertebrates. Invertebrates will undoubtedly
feast upon vertebrates. You know they are there, They're going
to be some of the primary devours of our of
our deceased form, and and certainly older generations that were
more associated and more closely aligned with physical death, they

(09:26):
would have witnessed this more often, both in the bodies
of animals but also in the in in human bodies
from time to time. But I'm talking about predation. You're
talking about you outright killing, which seems like theyre It's
it's like this is they have crossed the line, like
the line being you shall eat us when we are dead,
but now shall not do the killing right. It's supposed
to be like humans eating lobster is not lobster cousins

(09:50):
eating human cousins. I mean, that is clearly verboting, but
it's just not it's just not verboting. It happens in
nature and there are examples of skull pender that do this. So,
according to a two thousand five article in the Caribbean
Journal of Science by Mulinary at All quote, Scullopendrid centipedes
prey on frogs and toads up to ninety five millimeters long,

(10:11):
small lizards, snakes up to two hundred and forty seven
millimeters long, birds up to the size of a sparrow,
and both field and house mice. So you've got some
centipedes in this genus that are getting down on birds,
they're getting down on mice, but presumably due to size restrictions.
I think if there are actually any cases of Sculla

(10:33):
Pendrid's getting in people's noses, it's it's going to be
not the ones that twists their many legged bodies around
mice and sparrows and eat their warm blooded mammal flesh.
Right that those would have probably be too big to
end up in the nasal cavity. Now back to Thomas Morris,
the medical history writer who brought this case to my attention.
On his blog. He writes in his blog post that
he thinks it's unlikely that the centipede would have survived

(10:57):
inside the woman's nasal sinuses for his long the report alleges,
which is more than a year. And I think that's
I don't know, It's one of those things where it's
hard to know for sure, But that does seem like
a likely objection to throw right right. It's like, what
would it be eating in there? Uh, could it really
like survive in there that long without getting blown out
or killed in some other way? Yeah, it just doesn't

(11:19):
seem sustainable. On the other hand, the report is detailed,
it's published in a reasonably reliable source, it does seem
to be reported by a physician. It just seems sort
of inherently unlikely. Then again, you know, there are all
kinds of things we go to. We can talk in
a minute about the possibility of hoaxes of confusion. I mean,
what if just like a centipede happened to get up
in her nose during the last day or so of

(11:41):
an otherwise bad nose inflammation period. That also seems unlikely.
But so um, this is not the only reported case
of a centipede up the nose. In fact, I came
across a totally separate case from an old medical archive,
also dug up by Thomas Morris on his blog. This
was years ago. Uh, this is from the first volume

(12:03):
of Medical Essays and Observations, published in seventeen sixty four.
So here's this case quote. A woman of good heel constitution,
meaning she was healthy about thirty six years old, began
to complain of a fixed pain in the lower and
right side of her forehead. During the last two years,
this pain became continual, accompanied with convulsions, often depriving her

(12:27):
of both her reason and rest. She was two or
three times brought to death's door by it. At the
end of four years, after trying several medicines to no purpose,
and despairing of any relief, and yet not knowing what
to do, she took to taking repeat snuff so it's
like tobacco snuff. She had not taken the snuff for
a month when behold seized one morning with a fit

(12:50):
of sneezing and blowing her nose. After to her great surprise,
she found a worm rolled up in a little blood.
This worm, when stretched to its full length was six
inches long and but two When it contracted itself, it
was two lines broad and one and a half thick,
of a coffee color, convex on one side and flat

(13:11):
on the other. It was of the centipede kind and
had fifty six feet on each side. It had two eyes,
and both its head and tail were armed with two forks.
It lived eighteen hours in an empty bottle, and three
or four hours after brandy had been put to it.
The egg that produced this worm, in all probability, was

(13:31):
sucked in along with the air she breathed, and carried
after to the frontal sinus, where it met with a
proper need us, meaning nest, to give it both growth
and increase. All right, Well, at least we have a
on a hypothesis here of how it could have wound
up there, right, Maybe, I mean that seem well, she

(13:51):
sucked in the eggs somehow and it hatched in there.
That also, I don't know. I'm not a centipede expert.
That seems a little bit unlikely, but it sounded like
the The implication here was that it might the egg
might have been in the snuff. At any rate, there's
there's at least a there's a there's an attempt at
explaining how it wound up in there. It's not like,
oh God has has put a centipede in thy head.

(14:13):
It is clearly a spontaneous generation of centipedes. Right, clearly
we have we have a theory about it. We have
an hypothesis about how it could have ended up in there,
and then the story of how it ended up coming out.
It's about to get weirder. Guess what the reporting physician
recommends as a treatment for centipede sinus blowing, blowing one's nose. Nope.
Monsieur Letra, who related the story, advises in all such

(14:36):
stubborn cases as will not submit to either external or
internal means, to come to the trapan which may be
employed with all safety. That's right, trepanning if the insect
won't come out. Now, we've talked about trepanning on the
podcast before. What what's going on here? You bring out
the drill, that's right, we're talking. Usually usually the idea
would be we're going to drill a hole in the

(14:57):
skull to relieve pressure into uh and and therefore a
relieve you of your symptoms. But I guess this is
the idea of like, Okay, it needs that centipede needs
out of your head. It's not coming out through the
naturally occurring gateways. We shall make a new gateway in
the head for the centipede. Right, I mean this is
almost like the centipede is kind of taking the role

(15:17):
of the stone of madness in the medieval form here. Uh.
Though again I want to allow I feel this is unlikely.
It's not impossible lady had a centipede in your sinus. Uh.
He also recommends using oil and acrid plants to force
it out. That maybe seems more reasonable. That would be like,
let's try that first. Yes, let's let's check those off

(15:38):
the list first. Okay, that's not all. I feel like,
who's the Who's the game show host who says that's
not all. You're gonna get more prizes? I don't know.
The cat in the hat says that, okay, I might
a game show host, the cat in the hat, I
will be the cat in the hat and said, that's
not the last of the centipedes up the noses, but
we got more for you, including with more tobacco associate ship.

(16:00):
So with the snuff third case documented right, alongside the
first one in this In this source from the eighteenth century,
Monsieur Malow reported that one of the king's household troops
complained for three years of an acute pain in the
left frontal sinus, which extended to the eye of the
same side, so as to endanger his losing it. He

(16:20):
had also a buzzing noise in his ear to relieve
which he had some oil of sweet almonds put into it,
And in two days after he perceived in his left
nostril and itching and stinging, as if something moved there,
which he could not discharge, but by putting his finger
into his nose, when behold, he pulled out a worm,
which ran swiftly on the palm of his hand, though

(16:42):
covered with a viscous matter and snuff of which this
gentleman took plenty. This worm was put into a tobacco
box with snuff in it, where it lived five or
six days. All the patients complaints ceased after this worm
came away. The only difference between this and the former
is this this worm was six lines only long, and

(17:02):
had but one hundred feet, but there was this singular
in both cases. The former was thought to be expelled
by the use of tobacco snuff, whereas this subsisted three
years with a plentiful use of the same weed, and
after its expulsion lived five or six days on the
same all right, So the idea here is that the
centipede lived for years in this guy's head because he

(17:25):
kept putting snuff in there, and it was eating the snuff.
It seems to be at least partially the implication. I
don't know about eating the snuff. There seemed to be
multiple reasons to doubt the story, especially if you're taking
on that detail about the last one, like surviving by
eating tobacco. Tobacco, of course, contains nicotine, which is a
powerful poison. Like so many of the drugs that humans

(17:45):
consume on purpose recreationally, nicotine is supposed to discourage animals
from taking the from consuming the plan and this is
one of the reasons nicotine can be used as a
natural pesticide. However, I do want to take a really
brief digression just to point out unfascinating creature I came
across here that does survive on tobacco and nicotine, and
that is the man Duca Sexta Robert do you know

(18:08):
about this one. I no, I wasn't familiar with the
man Duca sexta. Oh, this is great. So this is
a moth of this finger day family and in its
larval stage, so meaning as a caterpillar. This species is
sometimes known as the tobacco hornworm. So the tobacco hornworm
eats the leaves of the tobacco plant. And the horn
hornworm has a special gene called c yp six B

(18:29):
forty six that allows it to metabolize nicotine. And now
there's a twist. It doesn't just metabolize the nicotine. It
uses this tobacco in its diet to produce a chemical
defense sometimes referred to in the literature as toxic halitosis.
It's killer tobacco breath. And so when the hornworm is
threatened by a predator like a wolf spider, it can

(18:51):
defend itself by releasing nicotine through pores in its skin,
which drives away the predator. And this has been confirmed
by research that found that hornworm is fed on low
nicotine food were more susceptible to being attacked by wolf spiders.
But at the same time, I do not think that
a tobacco hornworm was in this guy's sinus, right, yeah, yeah,

(19:11):
there's a big difference between this this larva that is
uh you know, clearly it has evolved to feed on
the leaves of this plant versus the predator that is
the centipede. Okay, so we got doubts about all these reports.
But that that's three centipede in the nose reports. Now
you know what. I found one more old centipede in
the nose report. This one from the Journal of Laryngology

(19:33):
and Ontology by W. P. May M E y j
E S. I don't know how to pronounce that, but
I think this is a report from Amsterdam. And this
is from and this report goes a woman farm worker
from the countryside appeared to the physician with the complaint
of a headache over the right eye that had persisted
for months, combined with a chronic running nose. The doctor

(19:57):
did not immediately detect any major problems except for stuff
swelling in the nasal cavity and conjunctivitis or you know,
inflammation of the eyes. So to help less in the
swelling go down, the doctor ordered menthol with boric acid
for the woman to snuff up. Uh. Man, every time
you read these You're just like, wow, these old treatments
are boric acid. Um. But so she snuffed it up.

(20:20):
A few days later, the woman returned. Uh. After she
has snuffed up the menthol and the boric acid, she
has a fit of sneezing and quote found in her
handkerchief a small insects still alive. She had put it
in some brandy and took it to me. The insect,
which was about seven millimeters long, turned to be a centipede. Uh. Centipede,

(20:40):
of course, is not an insect, but uh. This report
says after the centipede was sneezed out, all the woman's
symptoms went away. So it's difficult to tell how much
stock we should put into these stories about centipedes in
the human body, apparently like reported by physicians to real
medical journals and publications, uh and on. Fortunately, as we
will explore in the rest of this episode, it is

(21:02):
not in principle impossible for insects, centipedes, and other small
creatures to get inside a person's cranial cavities. That does happen,
and we'll discuss more later. At the same time, these stories,
at least some of them, seem kind of suspicious for
the quality of how long the centipede was supposedly alive
inside the human Maybe not impossible, but it's definitely questionable.

(21:26):
They also to me, at least, I don't know if
you've got the same feeling, Robert. They call to mind
the story of Mary Toft, the eighteenth century englishwoman and
first class hoax artists who had doctors and surgeons convinced
that she was repeatedly giving birth to rabbits. Oh yes,
I remember this story, and apparently she really damaged some
medical reputations because she had some some guys on on

(21:49):
the line saying like, oh, yeah, I saw it. This
lady gave birth to like rabbit parts and like part
of an eel and parts of a cat, which if
nothing else shows you like, here's an example, like somebody's
willing to go through the grossness of of producing um
to say, part of a rabbit from their body as
a hoax. So putting a centipede up your nose, really

(22:10):
it's a lighter sentence. Or I mean, in some cases,
all you'd have to do is show up with the
centipede in a handkerchief in a bottle of brand yeah,
and say this came out of my nose. Now, why
people would really be compelled to do that, I don't know.
But then again, people have all kinds of crazy reasons
for doing stuff. I mean, people just like to make
up weird stories sometimes, Yeah, could just be for for

(22:33):
the sheer attention of the thing. Yeah. Uh. Then again,
I don't want to totally discount the full nature of
these stories, because there are also modern reports of centipedes
and body cavities. Some tend to be reported with like
an air of sensationalism that kind of prejudices me against
just accepting them. For example, in k A t V,
a local news station in Arkansas reported the fourteen year

(22:56):
old boy and Selene County woke up with terrible pain
in one of his ears. He reached into his ear
pulled out a four inch long centipede. Uh. The family
reportedly put the centipede in a plastic bag and took
the boy to the emergency room. He was okay. Uh.
In the hospital reported they never encountered a centipede in
an ear before. I guess nothing about that story is
really implausible, except that it always gets picked up by

(23:19):
like the daily mail, And that's how you see it um,
and so that sort of prejudices me against it. But
for the record, I tried to find recently documented cases
of centipedes in the nasal cavity and couldn't find anything,
though I did find reports of centipedes in the human ear.
So it seems like if centipedes do get up in
the sinuses, up in the nose, that's it's much more

(23:39):
rare for that to happen than for other cranial invasions,
such as say, cockroaches in the ear, which we'll get
too later. All right, on that note, we're gonna take
a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank Alright,
we're back. So we've discussed centipedes crawling around in one's
head allegedly. Uh where what parts of the human bodies

(24:02):
are we going to next? Ye? Well, I think we should.
We should take a foray into the oral cavity. So
let's establish some basic facts here. Uh. First of all,
the question can bugs get inside your body cavities? The
answer is yes, that that can happen. It does sometimes happen, right,
and anything, we need more bugs in our mouths because
we should be eating more bugs. Oh, that's a totally

(24:23):
different question. Yeah, I mean we're I think we're on
the record being pro intomate Feji here, but not talking
about the mouth cavity so much because that's less of
a worry, right, And unless the bug is poisonous, if
you swallow it, you know it's just protein. It's yeah,
it's gonna be digested. The problem would really be if
it's in a cavity that is not meant to accept
incoming solid matter. So this is where we're getting into

(24:46):
the ear, Yes, exactly. And so it's time to talk
about cockroaches because cockroaches are apparently one of the most
common animals to end up in human orifices in real
documented cases. I was reading a National Geographic article about
this by Erica Ingleholped and she sites an interview with
a North Carolina State University entomologists named Kobe shawl a

(25:07):
few of Shaw's quotes and insights. Of course, first of all,
it's not uncommon for a cockroach to show up in
the human ear. That just does happen. People show up
at hospitals all the time with a cockroach lodged in
their ear. Apparently the no is as much more unusual this.
This is like a less common thing to find, but
also not totally unknown why cockroaches. Well Shall says, cockroaches

(25:31):
are constantly searching for food, and actually ear wax might
be an attractive source of nutrition to them. Ear wax
tends to contain microbiota that emit a particular kind of
volatile compound, volatile fatty acids, and these airborne compounds are
similar to what might be present in meat. So your
ear wax might smell like meat to a hungry cockroach

(25:56):
crawling into those meat caves. It's like that that meat
wax straight to the butcher's shop gets you some some
gabba google in the ear. You're agool anyway. Shall suggests
it's possible that secretions from the nasal passage might also
be appealing as a kind of food to cockroaches, and

(26:18):
don't know for sure, but as possible. But it's also
worth emphasizing that cockroaches are not parasites. They're not like cookworms,
they're not like the human bot fly. It is not
in their interest to get stuck inside a human body cavity, right.
That is, it's an extreme environment best left to the specialists. Right, So,
when a when a cockroach ends up in a human
ear or even in a nose. It is generally all

(26:40):
just a big misunderstanding. They didn't mean they didn't really
want to get stuck in there. They don't want to
be inside you. They'd rather be somewhere else. But it
just happened they were hungry. Now that that being said,
one can well imagine that this could be a path,
a long path to parasitism in an organism um, such
as to say, the the theories regarding of the emergence

(27:03):
of vampire bats that they may have once feasted on um,
you know, in the larva that might be present at
a at a wound site on some sort of megafauna,
and then over time that develops into a more strategic
consumption of blood directly from the you know, the large herbivore,
as opposed to drinking the blood eating the body of

(27:25):
the parasites that prey upon the larger before. So an
evolutionary path over like millions of years, not over like
a night or a year. Nowhere we're going to get tomorrow,
and nowhere that we have arrived yet. Oh, that is
an interesting evolutionary path of the path from say like
a cleaning mutualism to parasitism, but it would have to
be a situation like the thing about it is. For

(27:46):
the cockroach, especially in a human habitat, there's plenty to eat.
There are plenty of other things to eat, like the
that the ear wax. If it were, you know, a
great source of of a sustenance, it's probably not the
best source of sustenance for the creature. Well even so,
it probably might just smell like sustenance. Uh So, almost

(28:07):
all incursions of roach kind into human orifices happen while
the human is asleep. That almost never happened while the
persons awake, and they also almost always feature small specimens
of the creature involved. You don't tend to get a
giant cockroach in your ear. You get a little juvenile cockroach,
one of those movie or zooch cockroaches. Movie ors, what
do you what do you mean? Because you're watching a

(28:29):
movie or you go to the zoo, you're probably gonna
encounter one of those giant, kising cockroaches. And then likewise,
if it's a film about cockroaches, sometimes they'll throw one
of those in just because some people keep them as
pets in there more they're just grossery looking there's a
zero percent chance you'll get a giant, hissing cockroach in
your ear. If you get one, it will be a
little one, you know, not as big a deal. Um.

(28:51):
But also wild bugs can get inside the human body sometimes.
Most of the reports and images of this you see
on the internet are fake. We want to phasize this
all that. You know, you'll see this on social media.
You'll see reports in the tabloids, spiders crawling under people's skin,
burrowing into wounds and all that. It's pretty much all fake.
In like, cockroaches really do get into ears, but almost

(29:14):
every image you see on the internet is not real. Likewise,
a lot of the reports you read on the internet,
especially from kind of viral sources, they're not real either.
One common example is, and I don't know, Robert, have
you ever come across the story of like ants getting
in through the ear and eating the brain. I don't
think I have, but that does sound like the kind
of thing you might read and forward from Grandma or something. Exactly.

(29:37):
They get through the gain in the ear and eat
the brain if you like, eat sweets before going to bed,
or they crawl in one ear and crawl out the
other ear. These things do not happen. There are no
records in the medical literature of anything like this happening,
and it doesn't make sense on its face. Insects do
sometimes go in the ear, but they don't eat the brain.
They don't infest the deeper cranium. That just doesn't happen.

(30:00):
But it's easy to see why stories like this, the
untrue stories, especially about like spiders crawling under the skin,
or ants getting in through the ear and eating the
brain and all that kind of thing, why they are
very popular and clicky and share able, and why they
take hold of the public consciousness, why they become entomological folklore,

(30:20):
because I think they ping a very sensitive spot in
our in our you know, neurology, that like, there's a
certain part of human nature that seems very finely tuned
for recognizing parasitism and creepy Crawley's and anything that might
be getting on you, because there are real parasites out there.

(30:40):
Uh So we're sort of hyper primed, I think, to
make monsters within this category, right, and and and sometimes
we overtly make monsters of them too. It's not count
out the role that horror plays in all of this,
Like In thinking of this, how many of you thought
back to Stephen King's Creep Show and the scene where
all the cockroaches burst out of e. G. Marshall. That's

(31:01):
a great one, Yeah, and in a whole bit that's
about like fear of creepy crawleys and cockroaches, you know.
And we have all these stories too, have like vampires
dying and bursting into you know, a wave of centipedes
and uh bugs. Well, e G. Marshall, I think he
plays like a Howard Hughes type character, right, He's got
he's like a rich guy who keeps himself secluded because
he's afraid of like bugs and germs and everything. Right.

(31:24):
And there's also I think with this innate, this innate
fear of our body being habitat for something, and our body,
our bodies are habitats. We learn more about that essential
nature of our being every day. Uh. But it's part
of the horrors of the grave, and the idea that
we would they would things would be living within us
while we were alive is grotesque, yeah, exactly. But I

(31:45):
mean your body needs to be a habitat for your microbiome.
You don't want it to be a habitat for other
larger creatures. And so, while it is not impossible for
bugs to get inside human body cavities like, there are
cases where it definitely happens. Oh yes, we will discus
us more before this episode is over. Many, and I'd
say probably the vast majority of cases in which someone

(32:06):
is convinced they have bugs inside their body are cases
of what's known as delusional infestation, also known as delusional
parasitosis or sometimes as eck Bombs syndrome. Yeah, name for
Swedish neurologist Carl Axel Eckbomb, who published siminar accounts of
the disease in and basically the idea here is that, um,

(32:29):
you know, one comes to believe that parasites are infesting
your home, your surroundings, your clothing, and ultimately your body. Now,
of course, these reports are not isolated to real actual
parasites like hookworms and you know that kind of thing.
It it also includes delusional ideas about insects and other
creatures that are not actually parasites. Right, and and very

(32:51):
often the way it ends up going is is someone
feels that they are infested by something, you know, they
feel that they have uh parasites inside their body and
their bowels, under their skin, there's some sort of an
itching sensation, et cetera. And then they go to the
doctor and the doctor looks at them and says, no,
there's nothing, there's nothing there, but they know they feel

(33:12):
that they believe it, and they begin going down this
road of trying to figure out what's wrong. Um. But
of course, ultimately it is not a problem. It's not
a dermatological problem, it's not a it's not a medical
biological problem. It is a psychological problem. It is a delusion.
So you see this sometimes in the cases of stimulant abuse,

(33:35):
especially methamphetamine abuse, can result in delusional parasites. Uh. Sometimes
you've seen these referred to as cocaine bugs, or you
know the ideas of tweakers who pick at their skin
in search of the bugs that they feel in their skin. UM.
The Bohart Museum of Entomology points out that high fevers
and severe alcohol withdrawal can also produce these symptoms, along

(33:56):
with visual hallucinations of the bugs and question. UM. I
should also point out there's a there's a wonderful I
don't know if wonderful as the word for it. There's
a very uh. There there's a there's a there's a play, powerful,
powerful play by Tracy Letts that I actually got to
see performed locally here in Atlanta, is really really, really

(34:17):
good called Bug uh. And it was later made into
a two thousand and six film by William Friedkin, starring
Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, and Harry Connick Jr. Harry Connick Jr. Yeah,
I don't know who he. I haven't seen the film version, um,
but I know that the two main characters are Judd
and Shannon in the film. Um. But but it's quite good.

(34:37):
There's a lot of skin in it, a lot of
bug delusions. Uh. And it begins with conspiracy theories about
the infestation of the room or the apartment that they're
staying in, and then they end up having the shared
delusion of their bodies being infested by some sort of
a parasite. Anyway, that's the that's the fiction. But the
fiction that does line up reasonably well with some of

(34:58):
the realities. The delusion can ultimately result in self mutilation
is one attempts to remove the bugs, or as one
excessively scratches at the skin. There's actually a wonderful article
that came out about this couple of years ago from
Eric Boudman, and he actually won a two thousand eighteen
Science and Society Journalism Award for his article Accidental therapists

(35:20):
for insect detectives. The trickiest cases involved the bugs that
aren't really there. Published in UH in s t a
t Uh, he describes an individual suffering from this delusion
who consulted an exterminator. Uh. Then they consulted their doctor,
and then they went to a dermatologist. And each time
they weren't getting the answers that they wanted and then

(35:42):
they needed they were they each time they were told,
you know, there are no bugs in your house, there
are no bugs in your skin. Uh Like. Ultimately they
took to uh filling a bathtub up with insecticide and
climbing into it. And but even that they didn't solve it.
They got out and they still felt the presence of
the bugs. And that's where, as A. Boudman explains in
his article, that's where Dr Gail Ridge entered the scenario.

(36:05):
A public entomologists, meaning people come to her with specimens
and questions to the tune of like twenty three people
a day and she works at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.
So this individual came to her and she tried to explain, no, look,
this is how insects actually interact with your skin. This
is how you know actual parasites work. Um. And she

(36:25):
ended up seeing the individual a handful of times before
she learned that they died. Um. So in this case.
In others, uh Dr Ridge here often has to weigh
in on cases that are far more psychological than entomological.
That makes sense, now. Budman's paper is is a great read.
I'll try to include a link to it on the
landing page for this episode at at the website stuff

(36:47):
to Bling your Mind dot com. But it makes a
number of very interesting points. First of all, these patients
are really suffering, even though doctors tend tend to in
many cases dismissed them and send them away. Right, Like
if you show up at a doctor's office and you
say I've got bugs inside my body and then the
doctor just checks and says, no, there are no bugs
in there. That that shouldn't be case closed, right, That

(37:09):
should be like there should be a sign that something
is wrong that you do need help in a way
even if there aren't physically insects. But it's it's a
difficult scenario because the best treatment for their suffering is
usually an antipsychotic. But there, there, you there. But generally
the problem that the struggle is getting them to accept
that their problem is psychological and that they need to

(37:30):
see a mental health professional because they're coming in here
they believe that only a powerful anti parasitic is going
to do the trick. Uh and or that an insect
specialist is required. Quote Ridge sees as many as two
hundred of these cases a year. She isn't the only
one with this unintentional expertise. A whole network of entomologists,

(37:51):
a universities, research stations and even at natural history museums
is all too familiar with these requests. So they come in,
they bring scabs, samples of skin. Is proof. One of
the individuals that Budeman talks to is Nancy Hinkel from
the University of Georgia at Athens, so close by here
and uh. Hinkel says that inquiries like this take up

(38:12):
twenty percent of her time and that every state has
quote somebody like Gael or meat like there's somebody in
there that that this is becoming increasingly their work. In
other words, cases of delusional parasitosis are rare in the
medical field, but far more common in the intomol entomological world.
Extreme cases may end in severe alteration to one's life,

(38:35):
even suicide or death. Um. Here's one more quote from
the article. Quote. Even when an entomologist notices the tailtell
signs of DP, there is little that can be done
over the phone. Biologists estimate that there are some six
point eight million anthropod species on Earth. Even the most
fanciful description could at its root be a real insect.
Well that's sort of like what we're running into with, uh,

(38:57):
with the cases of the centipedes up earlier, Like we
didn't we're not there to see it, so we don't
really know for sure. We're just reading these accounts, and
so we're stuck with saying like, I don't know, I
don't think this likely happened, but we can't be sure.
I mean, you can't roll it outright. So part part
of the problem identified in this article is that what's

(39:17):
needed here are psycho dermatology outposts in the medical world
where where the connection between the science of the mind
and signs of the skin is more established, so there's
greater ease and finesse moving patients toward proper psychological treatments.
And there apparently are a few places in the United
States and some in the Netherlands that have begun to

(39:38):
do this. Uh. One of the accounts that the author
includes here mentions a doctor in Amsterdam that that deals
with patients and they've they've sort of figured out how to,
you know, first form a relationship of trust with the
patient and then at the appropriate time, you know, let
them know like this is something you need to see
a psychiatrist about, and and sometimes sweetening the deal by

(40:02):
pointing out pointing to a two thousand fourteen paper about
how some drugs that treat delusional disorders also happened to
kill kill parasites. So I think that's interesting, you know,
pointing figuring out that, like, like they're they're more of
these cases occurring than one might think. And if we
just if medical professionals, entomologists, uh, etcetera. Are are better

(40:25):
positioned to move them towards encourage them to go seek
appropriate help, Uh, everyone's going to be better off. Yeah, absolutely, though,
I mean, this is such a hard problem and it's
also part of a broader problem which is present in
the medical and mental health communities where it's um, it
just tends to be a fact that people who are

(40:46):
experiencing delusions and psychosis another you know, most of the
conditions that cause them to experience delusions and psychosis also
tend to entail ideation patterns that made people resistant to
correct die gnosis. So like if you tell a person that, Okay,
you know, what you think you're experiencing is not physically
the case, and you know, like anti psychotic medication could

(41:08):
help you, Uh, it just tends very often to be
the case that people don't respond well to being told that,
and that they say, no, that's not right, right, And
then oftentimes there's a stigma against a seeking professional help
for for mental problems or having any kind of mental
disorder or delusion. And then again back to just the
nature of insects and infesting our homes, like how hard

(41:31):
are are fleas to see? How hard a chiggers to see? Um,
you know, without getting into just the whole list of
various parasitic organisms that are basically invisible to us. So again,
it doesn't I mean, if you're one is presented with
the option like, well, either other people just can't see

(41:51):
this creature because it's small, or other people can't see
this creature because it is a delusion of your mind.
You can see why people are more inclined to believe
that it's is something that they just haven't found the
right entomologists, they haven't found the right dermatologists to identify
the problem. Yeah. Well, I guess we'd certainly hope that
by like establishing procedures like this where you've got sort
of a chain of people to talk to where you

(42:12):
established trust with the patient, and by trying to remove
stigma from seeking mental health help, uh, that maybe maybe
this kind of thing could get better. I don't know,
I would hope, so yeah, yeah, because according to what
I've read, the antipsychotic medications do help the individuals. So like,
you know, there there there is, there is a treatment.
It's not one of these because there are certain mental

(42:34):
conditions We've discussed various delusions where there is not really
an exit, you know that where things are pretty dire.
But this seems to be something that is in many
cases very treatable. Again, if proper treatment has found and
again I get the sense. I don't know if if
this lines up with what you you're reading, but I
get the sense that the vast majority of the people

(42:54):
who show up and say I've got a bug in
me do not actually have a bug in them, like
the psychle logical cause of these symptoms. I mean, the
symptoms are real in both cases, but psychological causes are
far more prevalent than the entomological causes. All right, we're
gonna take another break, give you a few minutes to
listen to an advertisement and maybe feel your skin a

(43:14):
little bit. Let's see see how you're feeling. But we'll
be right back with more more tails of of of
bugs in the skin and bugs of the mind. All right,
we're back. So, as we were just discussing, it's clear
that the majority of cases where people think they've got
like a bug inside a body cavity or under their
skin or something. And if you think you've got bugs

(43:36):
under your skin, you're pretty much always going to be wrong.
If you think you have a bug in the body cavity,
even then you're probably mistaken. There there's probably not a
bug in there. But we can't say that's the case
always because sometimes bugs do get in there. So I
think it's time to talk about that a little more
and about UH, and maybe get to talking about what
to do if there actually is a bug in a
body cavity. Um. So I came across the article from

(44:00):
the Oxford University Press, Journal of the Entomological Society of America,
and the piece is by the American biologist and entomologist
and National Medal of Science Laureate may Baron Baum. Just
a few interesting facts about baron Baum I found. Uh.
In addition to being a renowned entomologist, I think she
sounds very much like our kind of people. She created

(44:21):
an event at the University of Illinois called the Insect
Fear Film Festival, which, according to its website, is an
opportunity to quote watch insect themed horror movies, handle live
insects at our petting zoo, learn about insects you fear,
and then get t shirt stickers, balloon insects, and your
face painted. This sounds like my kind of event. I

(44:42):
would love to go to that. This sounds great. Yeah,
we'll have to look out creature features and then touch
in real insects. That sounds wonderful. It sounds like she's
very comfortable um marrying, you know, sort of like the
pop culture, the insect myths and all that, using that
as a window to share re all knowledge about entomology
and the role of insects in our lives with people.

(45:03):
Let's look at the fear, let's look at the sensationalism,
and then let's look at the reality. Yeah, and so
she seems very cool. She's also apparently had a character
named after her in the classic X Files episode War
of the Copper Phages, which is one of the best
episodes in the entire series, quite relevant to today's topic
because it discusses cockroaches ideas about cockroach infestation and delusional

(45:25):
infestation or delusional parasitosis, which is a big big thing
in the episode. The character named after her is apparently
it's named and I did remember this character, uh named Bambi.
Barrenbaum recalls she's sort of like a weird entomologist who
Molder develops a crush on and Scully gets jealous of
over the phone, and I recall she also has some

(45:47):
theory that UFO sightings are actually caused by swarms of insects,
but that's the X Files character, not the real Dr
Baron Baum. So this article, by the way, if you
can look it up, it's really pretty great, the one
from nine. So she collects references from the medical literature,
including an interesting study from nineteen eighty seven by Baker

(46:08):
which found a hundred and thirty four cases of foreign
objects found in children's ears. Of those undred and thirty
four objects, twenty seven were insects, and of those twenty
one were cockroaches. So that the others you ask, well,
I actually looked up to study to find out what
the others were. The other six of those twenty seven
where one ant, one fly, three spiders, and one tick.

(46:31):
Only one of those has any business being in there.
The tick you can only blame so much because you
know that's it's a tick. It's gross, it's it's there
to suck skin. The ticks actually the worst one. I
don't really bear a lot of ill will to cockroaches.
I don't love having them in my house, but you know, ticks,
I just you know, just newcomb. Yeah, I like we
discussed in our our episode on ticks. Uh, certainly everyone

(46:53):
should go back and listen to if you want to
feel gross about the woods, Um, you know that they
are out to get us. They are out to get us.
Most of these other cases there are just mistakes. But
the tick wants you, and it's seeking you, and if
you venture into its abode, it will find you. So
baryon Bomb mentions that a common method for removing cockroaches

(47:13):
from the ear is to drown a cockroach in liquid
of some kind before removal. It is much like my
dad did with the bug that flew into my ear.
I think that was that was a good good thing
to do. And now ideally I'm not gonna say people
should usually try to deal with bugs and body cavities
on their own, because there are cases where having like

(47:33):
a medical opinion is important, but that does seem to
be a pretty pretty reliable way to deal with it.
Drowning liquids throughout a medical history of included Ben's a cane,
sucinal coline, is superbole, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, ether, water, vegetable oil,
mineral oil. Want to be clear, I'm not recommending all
of those, especially since things like ether are flammable. A

(47:55):
more recent technique that's been used in clinics, pioneered nineteen
eighty is the use of lydocaine spray. This is usually
used as a topical anesthetic, right, you know they sprayed
on you to numb the skin. But when applied to
a quote inter intro, sorry not inter intra aural cockroach, uh,
it tends to paralyze the insects so the insect can

(48:17):
be safely removed, or even better, the initial application of
light acaine solution spray sometimes causes the problem to resolve itself,
as in the case of one intervention by O'Toole at
all published in nineteen five, in which after the light
decaine application quote, the roach exited the canal at a
convulsive rate of speed and attempted to escape across the floor,

(48:38):
presumably with a road runner esque sound effect. Me be uh.
And then Baron Boum notes that quote the simple crush
method was quote ultimately responsible for the demise of the
cock row. But now I got a dead cockroach in
my ear. No, it wasn't in the ear, it was
on the floor. Okay, that's that's that's fine. No, no, no,
I want to be very clear. Don't try to step

(48:59):
on a cockroach and somebody's ear. That is not That
doesn't work at all. Uh. That method was then improved
upon in nineteen eighty nine, with the addition of a
metal suction tip to vacuum the cockroach out. Reportedly, after
one case the Lyda Kaine spray was was applied and
then the patient suddenly exhorted the doctor to quote, get

(49:19):
that sucker out of my ear. So they used the
vacuum to get it out. Um. But then also she
relays some reports about fly larva or maggots colonizing the
orifices of humans, such as the nose or the euro
genital tract, though she seems a little skeptical about the
case report that uh that that was about the euro
genital tract. One of the medical reports she discusses, relayed

(49:40):
by Battia and Lund in the Journal of Laryngology and
Otology in nineteen concerns this thirty five year old man
in London who had an infestation of oestrus ovis a
sheep nasal bot fly in his nose in the thirty
five year old man's nose. Apparently this happens more commonly
in shepherds and people who deal directly with sheep. That

(50:03):
makes sense. It's a little perplexing how this guy in
London got one. He claimed he had nothing to do
with sheep, but who knows. According to the report, he
had been quote sneezing out several maggots during the preceding
six weeks before he called a doctor, and Baron Bomb
points out that it's kind of odd that it took
him that long to call a doctor after sneezing out maggots.

(50:26):
I would also think if you, if you seem to
be consistently sneezing out matt maggots, you do have a
small window to really succeed on the sideshow circuit. You know,
like like the second it starts happening, books some appearances
and uh and and do it as fast as possible
while the magic is still there. Come see the amazing
maggot gig uh And perhaps the most troubling recent case

(50:49):
and don't worry, it has a happy ending of a
cockroach in a body cavity that I came across was
this one. So on February one seen a doctor m
in Shankar uh Stanley Medical College Hospital in Chennai, India
removed a cockroach from a woman's skull and this one
was in her sinus cavity. So here's a definite like

(51:10):
this is this is this is earlier centipede territory. Right.
We don't know if there were ever really centipedes in there,
but definitely a cockroach can get in there. It was
innercinus cavity in between her eyes, and it had apparently
crept up her nose while she was asleep. And fortunately
Dr Shankar was able to remove the insects successfully with
an endoscopic procedure and the woman was fine. If you've

(51:32):
got a strong stomach, there's a video of this you
can watch on the internet. Uh, well, no, thank you,
but but but secondly, it does make me think of
the little woman who lived in the shoe. So if
centipedes are not naturally occurring naturally crawling into people's sinus cavities,
but of occasionally a cockroach may, then perhaps the centipede
is just that at individual's initial attempt to deal with

(51:53):
the problem, uh, that doesn't work, and then they have
to go to the doctor and they don't you know,
you know, it's it's like if you try and you know,
work on your own weight toenail or something, or do
your own dynastry and then you go finally and seek
professional help. You don't want to tell them. Oh yeah,
I tried to do this stupid thing of my own first,
and now I'm here with you. No, you just say,
I guess there's a cockroach up there? Did you say

(52:15):
the old lady who lived in a shoe? I think
you meant who swallowed a fly? Yea, it might be
the same one. She swallowed a centipede to catch the flush.
She snorted a centipede to catch the cockroach that wriggled
and jiggled and wiggled and side roach. Perhaps she'll die, yes,
but she didn't. Well no, wait, I'm not saying this
woman actually did that. But the woman in the case,

(52:36):
very clear did not. I don't remember what happened to her.
I think I don't know. Well, uh so I think
we should end here with a discussion of what to
do if you actually think there's a bug in one
of your body cavities, if you think you've got a
centipede or a cockroach up your nose or in your
ear or whatever, what's your plan of action? So, first

(52:58):
of all, we want to size again. Even if you
feel very convinced, there is a very good chance you're mistaken,
and that should be good news, right Like people feel
creepy Crawley sensations for all kinds of reasons, and animals
actually getting inside the body cavities. Though there are a
lot of stories collected of it over the time, the
chances of it happening to you are pretty rare, especially

(53:19):
if you don't live in a tropical climate. Right now,
I do want to stress everything we said earlier about
delusional parasitosis. If you do, if you do have substance
abuse issues, that could be part of the problem. But
but you shouldn't be afraid to see a doctor over
the symptoms if that's the case. But your symptoms could
be quite unrelated to any kind of substance abuse issues.

(53:40):
And in this case, it's it's really important to realize
that it is treatable with antipsychotic medication, and cases like
this are not as rare as you might think. Though obviously,
again I can see where that could be a struggle
to to realize, you know, okay, it's not a situation
of of an insect crawling into my skin, r into
my body. It's a it's a more elusive concept. It's

(54:02):
there's something, there's an illusion in my mind that has
to be addressed. If the causes are psychological, there is
not shame in seeking treatment. Seeking treatment will help you.
So that's what you should do, right, What should you
not do? Oh? Okay, well, if you even if whatever
the real causes, if you think something is in your ear, say,
or in your nose, first piece of advice is do

(54:24):
not try to kill or crush it, because if there
actually is an insect in there, you're not seriously in
danger of a bug inside your nose or your ear
eating your brain. That's not gonna happen. You should seek
medical attention as soon as possible, but it's not gonna, like,
you know, eat the contents of your skull. What you're
actually in greater danger of is bacterial infection in the cavity. Uh.

(54:48):
And I mentioned earlier that article that interviews the entomologists
Kobe shawl Shall points out that one of the worst
ways you can put yourself at risk of infection with
a roach in your orifice is to crush it because
this could release it's mighty legions of gut bacteria into
your own body, and that can lead to an infection.
And there's a wonder, wonderful historic example of this. Yeah,

(55:10):
So I want to talk about the English explorer and
British Indian Army officer John Hanning Speak, who was famous
for exploring the Nile River to find what was believed
to be its source in the eighteen fifties. And there's
this story related and Speaks diaries that one night he's
resting in his tent and the tent quote became covered
with a host of small black beetles, evidently attracted by

(55:32):
the glimmer of the candle. And then he went to
sleep even though all these beetles are around, and he
later woke up with one of the beatles crawling in
his ear. Quote, He began, with exceeding vigor, like a
rabbit in a hole, to dig violently away at my tympanum.
The queer sensation this amusing measure excited in me is
past description. What to do? I knew not so Speak

(55:55):
tried to get it out by washing his ear canal
with melted butter. This didn't work. Uh. Then he tried
to dig it out with a knife, and this was
a bad move. He only killed and presumably crushed or
cut up the insect and wounded his own ear. And
then the ear became infected quote for many months. The
tumor made me almost deaf, and aid a hole between

(56:15):
the ear and the nose, so that when I blew it,
my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed.
Six or seven months after this accident happened, bits of
the beetle, a leg, a wing, or parts of the
body came away in the wax. Uh. And I should
just mention that I actually found the story related in
that classic Snopes article about bugs eating through the ear

(56:37):
into the brains. That's where I got the quotes from.
But they're originally from I guess speaks diaries, as passed
along in a book about Sir Sir Richard Francis Burton. Right. Uh, yeah, yeah.
This is just one of many amazing incidents from the
travels of John Hanning speaking captain Sir Richard Francis Burton,
with whom he sought the source of the nile and

(56:57):
the bug incident here is actually to picked it in
the film The Mountains of the Moon, which starred Patrick
Bergen as as Richard Francis Burton and Ian Glenn. Most
people know as uh Sir Mormont from a Game of
Thrones jor the end All. Yeah, he played John Hanning Speak.
It's uh, I haven't seen it and forever. I saw

(57:19):
when I was a kid and and loved it. But
it also stars Richard E. Grant, Fiona shap Peter Vaughan,
Delroy Lindo, Bernard Bernard Hill, Omar sha Reef. So it
had a great cast, and I remember being a quite
an interesting film and a great introduction to two just
fascinating characters from history. Yeah. Well, I just wanted to
mention quickly that, uh, it's impossible to be sure, like

(57:41):
we don't know what actually caused Speaks infection, but it
seems very likely that simultaneously crushing the insect and cutting
his own ear with the knife made the problem much
worse than it would have been if he just let
the beatle try to get out, and then that probably
may have led to an infection. Yeah, after you brought
this up, I popped out Edward Rice's biography of Burton,

(58:04):
and he mentions that that Burton sometimes criticized Speak for
a bit of like reckless ambition, especially in the African wilds.
But then again the two clashed at times and had
like a tremendous falling out and somewhat hated each other
later on in life. But at any rate, one of
one assumes that Burton was not tremendously easy to get
along with either. Um. But at any rate, if you

(58:25):
want to see of a cinematic depiction of this, this
beetle in the ear incident, it is. It is in
that movie The Mountains of the Moon, along with one
of the other more harrowing encounters they had. Also is
also depicted in which Somali spearmen tie up and stab
speak numerous times with their spears, and then a throne

(58:46):
spear skewers Burton through the cheeks through it so through
one cheek and out the other. Yeah, yeah, you see.
And you see all these like later portraits of Burton,
and you can often see the scar on each each
side of the face. Oh that's like a Garma del
Toro movie injury. It's like what is Oh it's in
Pan's Labyrinth where the guy gets cheek trauma. Oh yeah,

(59:07):
well this was. This is a classic case of cheek trauma,
like cheek trauma, but also dental trauma because the spear
damna like took out teeth and damage the jaw but
he was able to. They both traveled back to England
after the incident, and both had had lots of medical
care attend to their wounds. Well yeah, so part I
guess the moral of the story here is don't be

(59:27):
like speak. If you actually do think you have a
cockroach or an insect in your ear or whatever, don't
crush it, don't kill it. Do your best to stay calm.
Seek medical attention as soon as possible. A doctor can
examine you and tell if something is actually in there
or not, and if there is, they can try to
remove the animal if it's actually there. If there's not
something in there, you should seek medical attention to They

(59:49):
can try to help figure it, figure out what's going on,
and possibly prescribe medication to alleviate your symptoms. All right,
So there you have it. Obviously, if you have any
experience with any of these scenarios yourself, for or if
you just have heard some folk tales of such things,
or you have a favorite cinematic um uh intrabody bug
threat you want to share, let us know you can

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(01:00:54):
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