Miasma Theory and the Evil Air

Prior to the germ theory of disease, miasma theory ruled the day -- the notion that bad air, full of destructive particles, wafted out from the foul places of the earth to corrupt everything it touched. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the origins or the theory, its effects on society and how it eventually gave way to an accurate understanding of contagion.

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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 Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
And today we're going to be exploring a topic in
the history of epidemiology and medicine and uh and a

(00:24):
precursor to modern germ theory. Yes, we're talking about me
asthma theory, which this is. This is something that has
has long fascinated me just as a if nothing else,
just as an idea that I'm just struck by this
vision of bad air rising up out of some Gothic
cemetery and uh, and in fearful humans running for their

(00:47):
lives to avoid that air touching them and turning them
into Google's or something. You know. Yeah, So, if you're
not familiar with this, uh, this long running hypothesis in
human history, I think we should set the scene for
you at the time of the Black Death in Europe.
All right, let's go there, Okay, bring bring them out.
So in the late thirteen forties, the first outbreak of

(01:10):
the Black Death fell on Europe, and it was I
think we can say, without a doubt the greatest human
disaster that had ever come to the continent, right. Uh.
Somewhere between a third and two thirds of the entire
population died. Communities and entire towns were depopulated. People didn't
know what to do with all of the dead and
dying people around them, And perhaps the worst part was

(01:33):
nobody knew what caused it. Now, when we have a
you know, a pandemic, at least we can we feel
like we have some sense of control, you know, I mean,
just many people can still die from pandemics, but you
can understand, Okay, there there is an organism causing this disease.
Maybe medical science can do something about it. We're working

(01:54):
on the problem. But at the time, you just you
had a limited understanding of how us a disease work,
and beyond that you would have to term to supernatural
explanations or perhaps the appearance of of knotted rats in
the ruins of the house, that sort of thing. Yeah,
you know, Actually, what might be worse than people not
knowing what caused the plague was that many people thought

(02:18):
they knew, and almost all of them were wrong. A
little knowledge is a dangerous thing, right, Yeah, So, as
you might expect, some people simply chalk the disease up
to magical punishments sent by God. So in thirteen forty nine,
Archbishop Zusch of York wrote an open letter to his
diocese that read as follows quote, there can be no
one who does not know, since it is now public knowledge,

(02:40):
how great mortality, pestilence, and infection of the air are
now threatening various parts of the world, and especially England.
And this is surely caused by the sins of men who,
while enjoying good times, forget that such things are the
gifts of the most high giver. Now, one could be
optimistic and say, well, we don't think that anymore, but

(03:01):
I still see frequent eclips from television shows of of
of individuals speaking to their congregation, for instance, and saying, oh, well,
clearly this is because of our sin, either this disease
outbreak or this natural disaster. Clearly this is the reason
that we are suffering. But that's kind of a side tension. Now.

(03:22):
I think you're going to have two persistent facts throughout
history and continuing into the future. One is the fact
that you know, great calamities befall humankind, and the other
is the fact that people are always doing something that
other people don't like, and so anytime people can connect
the two, they're gonna try, right. And then also this
this comment, this this confusion of teleological explanations and causitive explanations, right,

(03:48):
trying to explain why this happened, why this, uh, this,
this calamity occurred based on a cause and effect scenario,
and then also trying to work it into your worldview
in which there is some sort of divine infrastructure in place. Yeah.
But then, of course, even at the time you had
some people who tried to come in with their idea

(04:09):
of a scientific explanation. They wanted to get to the
root cause, right. So in thirteen forty eight, King Philip
the sixth of France wanted to get to the bottom
of what was causing the terrible disaster. So he gathered
the most learned scholars of the medical faculty of the
University of Paris, and he charged them with explaining the
origins of the great death and coming up with solutions

(04:32):
to fight it. They came back to him with an answer.
On March twenty five, at about one o'clock in the afternoon,
something crucial and devastating had happened Mars Jupiter and Saturn
all lined up in conjunction within the House of Aquarius,
and this event heralded exactly what France was undergoing at

(04:54):
the time, because the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was
known to cause death and calamity. The conjunction of Jupiter
and Mars was known to bring a pestilence on the wind,
and here you were getting both conjunctions at the same time.
In the words of the historian Old Age Jurgen Benedicto
in his book The Black Death thirteen to thirteen fifty

(05:15):
three quote. In this astrological theory of epidemiology, Jupiter was
assumed to be warm and humid and to draw malignant
vapors both from the ground and from water, while Mars
was assumed to be hot and dry and therefore had
the capacity to kindle such malignant vapors into infective fire.

(05:37):
So they're postulating a cause and effect. The planets lined up,
and that did something to the Earth that caused these
infective vapors to appear, and this was what was causing
the plague. Uh so so so basically situations were astrologically
just right to draw some sort of disease causing vapor

(05:59):
out of the bowels the Earth. Right, So notice how
under this theory there's really not much you can do
to stop the spread of the disease. Yeah, you can't
change the the movement of the spheres. That can't eradicate
the sickness living in the earth. You just left to
suffer whatever occurs. Yeah, this is even worse than like
the theological judgment, right, because at least in that case
you'd think, well, maybe we can pray and petition God

(06:21):
to not do this to us anymore. Right, you can
appeal to God, you can't appeal to the clockwork movements
of the of the solar system. Right. It is a
is a pitiless astrological verdict. But but also despite being
a death by pure active fate, Benedictive notes that since
this theory entailed the more proximate cause of the disease

(06:42):
to be something more in the form of malignant vapors
rather than just straight up curse from God, some thought
that they could help avoid the disease by avoiding those
malignant vapors. So, like the planets cause the Earth to
release malignant vapors, or release malignant vapors on the Earth,
So if you can just avoid breathing this stuff in
or being exposed to it, then you can avoid the plague.

(07:06):
So just don't go to places where they're bad smells,
and therefore you might avoid the particular bad smells that
cause disease. Yes, and so this was a thing that
you see throughout history, the linking of disease with foul
smelling objects and things like filth and rotting organic matter,

(07:26):
which in itself, this kind of avoidance behavior may have
sometimes helped people avoid infection, though not necessarily for the
reasons they believed. Now, of course, we know today that
the Black Death was caused by infectious disease caused by germs.
In fact, there is actually still an interesting debate. Almost
all scientists, I think, agree that the Black Death was
caused by bubonic plague or your Cinea pestis, but there

(07:50):
have been some rival hypotheses in the past few decades
that it was something else, like maybe some kind of
viral hemorrhagic fever. Uh, and that topic might be worth
a look on its own for a different episodes. And yeah,
well there's always room to discuss more death. But the
confusion over the cause of the outbreak contu it really
it caused this sense of horror and despair, and many

(08:11):
writers of the time, like Petrarch has all this great
plague poetry is just about like, oh, how much worse
can things get? Is just going on and on lamenting.
I don't know why I sound like that, Like I'm
like calling him out for lamenting the plague. I mean
the plague was really awful. Uh, there there was sometimes
there were more bodies than anybody could figure out where

(08:33):
to put them, and so like to bring out your
dead scenario is literally mirroring things that happened in the past.
But I want to take you to another setting during
the Black Death of the forties, that of Catholic Pope
Clement the Six, who was living in Avignon at the time.
Now you might wonder, wait a minute, why is the
Pope living in Avignon. Shouldn't he be, you know, at

(08:55):
the Vatican. Shouldn't be at Rome For some complicated political
reasons having to do with the French monarchy. There were
several popes in the fourteenth century who lived in Avignon,
and so he so Pope Clement the Six was pope
from thirteen forty two until his death in thirteen fifty two,
which means he was pope when the first large outbreak
of black death hit hit Europe in thirteen forty eight,

(09:16):
and he was notable for granting remission of sins to
those who died of the plague. But he himself survived
the plague. So what did he do? Well? Clement consulted
his surgeons and he wanted to know what's what's what's
the plan? Okay, give me a strategy. And because many
experts believed the bad air was to blame, they recommended,

(09:38):
for example, fleeing to the mountains or somewhere else with
pure air. But if you're pope, you can't just run
off in the wilderness, can you. So instead, on the
advice of his surgeons, Clement barricaded himself inside his palace
in Avignon and sat surrounded by torches and fires, constantly
burning fires under the belief that fire would somehow clear

(10:00):
en or purify the air. It would get these bad
vapors out of it. And whether or not the method
had anything to do with it, Clement survived the plague. Huh.
And it's kind of ironic to given that the first
bit of advice go into the middle of nowhere. It's
probably pretty good advice as well, assuming that this was
was definitely a case of ubonic plague, that it was

(10:22):
the fleas on rats that are living in a cramped
urban environment. Yeah, it would make sense to become a
hermit pope in the woods. But I love this idea
that this is an amazing image the Pope of Fire,
the hermit Pope of fire, barricaded in his castle, surrounded
by fire at all times, sitting locked in this flaming

(10:43):
court because he's essentially making his court mars right, his
his his his environment is the mars that is burning
away the vapors that would otherwise invade his, his abode,
and his body. Yeah, So for the rest of the
episode today, we're going to be exploring this idea of
the mi asthma hypothesis, or as it's often called, me

(11:04):
asthma theory. We just recently had some discussions online about
use of the word theory and hypothesis, so I'm sure
it's not possible to to do it always right here,
but but it's often called me asthma theory, even though
it's not a very well evidence theory. All right, well,
let's let's let's jump into the ne asthma. Let us
allow the mi asthma to roll over us and and

(11:26):
hopefully it won't turn us inside out or anything. Okay,
oh yeah, that fog. Just one sniff of that fog
and your inside out. You know, I could, I couldn't help,
but think of our various fictions about fogs that turn
you inside out, or or fogs that contain either space
monsters or pirate zombies. Uh. We have a lot of
interesting cultural ideas about the dangers of of strange gaseous

(11:52):
bodies moving into our habitats. Well, there are good reasons
to be afraid of fog, well, some types of fog.
I mean, there was like the Great smog that killed
so many people in London. That's just through you know,
breathing bad particulates and stuff. But also of course it's
a driving hazard and all that. I guess these are
features of the modern world, not that's the medieval world.

(12:12):
And if we're talking about the modern world, you also
have to consider the Great War, World War One, in
which we weaponized various gaseous agents, mastering this chemistry of death, uh,
to to create a very real sort of miasma that
would roll in and just feel you're dead in horrific ways.
It's almost like, right after miasthma theory became obsolete, we

(12:35):
started actually creating real miasmas. But we're getting ahead of
ourselves here. So going back to history, throughout much of history,
especially in the medieval period through like the mid nineteenth
century in Europe, many supposed experts were absolutely convinced that
the cause of the spread of disease was not tiny organisms,

(12:56):
not germs, but the inhalation of something called night air
or just bad air. There are million different names for it,
the miasma containing the MIAs mata, so it was known
as the miasma theory of disease, miasma coming from a
Greek word that means to soil, corrupt, or pollute. Yeah,
and this was this was a cornerstone. This is this

(13:18):
wasn't just like popular idea of the time. This was
the cornerstone upon which a lot of additional understanding of
the natural world was based. Yeah, this is what many
experts believed. And the idea was so influential in the
history of epidemiology and study of disease that it still
lingers in some of our modern terminology. Like think about
the roots of the word malaria, mal meaning bad area,

(13:44):
meaning air. The word malaria is made right out of
the concept that the disease was caused by being exposed
to certain types of air. Now, of course, we know
today that malaria is a protozoan parasite. It's spread by
mosquito bites, it gets in the blood. In fact, Charles
Louis Alphonse lave Iran, the French physician who discovered the

(14:04):
fact that malaria was caused by a parasitic organism in
the blood, hated the word malaria, which in light of
his discoveries, he considered to be totally an unscientific word
that you shouldn't use. Instead, he liked the term palludism,
meaning that's from Latin palace meaning swamp or marsh, making
it something means something more like marsh disease or swamp syndrome.

(14:29):
And in fact paludisma is still the French word for
the disease. It's at least a local victory for him
on that front. Yeah, but here we are still like
propagating mi asthma theory every time we say malaria. But
some scholars believe the bad air, So like, where did
the bad air come from? We've heard the idea that
it was astrological forces in the heavens, but there was

(14:49):
also this idea that the bad air lay inside the earth,
or in the soil or in the water, and they
thought it could be released by volcanic eruptions or earthquakes
or other types of things. In fact, there's a great
passage where Shakespeare writes about the astrological version of the
of the Miasma and troy Less and Cressida, where he says,

(15:10):
quote a planetary plague, when Jove, meaning the planet Jupiter,
will or some high vised city hang his poison in
the sick air, when the planets an evil mixture to disorder?
Wander what plagues? What portents? What mutiny? What raging of
the sea? Shaking of earth? Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors, diverting, crack,

(15:33):
rend and derascinate the unity and married calm of states
quite from their fixture. It's a total unity of destructive
forces here, right, So he's combining this kind of like
political chaos and disruption with the idea that the planet
Jupiter will do something to the air to put vapors

(15:54):
in it and poison people and bring plagues. But the
most common version we see throughout his story is not
so much the idea that it's something deep in the
earth that gets released or something that gets you know,
poorted down from the sky from Jupiter or Mars, or
Jupiter Mars interacting, but it's the idea that the particles
in the air, the miasma, are caused by decay, it's decomposition.

(16:19):
Any rotting or decomposing organic matter was believed by miasma
theorist to release these tiny particles of pollution or miasmata,
which could be identified by the presence of a foul smell.
In fact, this idea was so influential that there were
places where there was this miasthma that informed things like

(16:40):
where you would put cities like the first century BC
Roman architect Vitruvius wrote a treatise on architecture, including a
section on how to site the founding of a new town,
and he took miasma theory into consideration as a public
health concern when thinking about where you should put your towns.
He wrote, quote in setting out the walls of a city,

(17:02):
the choice of a healthy situation is of the first importance.
It should be on high ground, neither subject to fogs
nor rains. Its aspects should be neither violently hot nor
intensely cold, but temperate. In both respects. The neighborhood of
a marshy place must be avoided, for in such a sight,
the morning air uniting with the fogs that rise in

(17:24):
the neighborhood will reach the city with the rising sun,
and these fogs and mists, charged with the exhalation of
the finny animals, will diffuse and unwholesome effluvia over the
bodies of the inhabitants and render the place pestilent. Well
that's just common sense. But again we given the idea
that this was a kind of a corner stone understanding

(17:46):
of the world, and you can definitely see. I mean,
even even Lavaron wanted it to be called wanted malaria
to be called something like marsh sickness or swamp disease,
not because he thought it was caused by bad air
coming off the swamps, but knew that it was. You
know where these mosquitoes that delivered the disease dwell that
it is most likely to infect you. So there they

(18:08):
were identifying some kind of relevant factors there. It is
probably good if you are taking public health into consideration,
not to build your city in a swamp or next
to a marsh where it's going to be having all
these mosquitoes come in to give you the marsh fever,
but they didn't have the mechanism correctly identified. All right,
on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and

(18:29):
when we come back, we're going to continue to discuss
the history of my asthma theory. Thank alright, we're back.
So I wonder if mi asthma beliefs might be older
than history itself, because you find me asthma type writings
when you go way back into history, it seemed like
it was already established this idea that certain types of

(18:52):
air and vapors caused diseases. Like around four b C.
The Greek physician Hippocrates was writing about malaria, which was,
as we've said, was already you know, named after bad
air uh, and it was known by many different names
back then, such as like the marsh fevers or the
agg use. And in a text called on Airs, Waters
and Places, Hippocrates wrote about how certain environments and seasons

(19:15):
carried air that could communicate different diseases. Well, yeah, I
mean I think I think something worth driving home is
that the truthiness of the theory does seem to closely
align with our basic instincts to feel discussed and avoid
certain odors, at least until the source of those odors
are better understood. I mean, don't hang around the latrine

(19:36):
fields is solid advice? Were repelled? Uh, And that repulsion
serves as a sort of physiological safety net. But the
bad air that communicates to us the potential dangers of
such a place are not necessarily the cause of the dangers.
Sort of like blaming your phone for all the robo
calls you're getting. Science, you know, often challenges us to
think in a way that goes beyond the evolved reactions

(19:58):
of the biological human. Yeah, exactly. Blaming the air is
kind of a shooting the messenger thing, Yeah it is.
But of course, as we've been discussing here, this was
an idea that not only gained traction but remained in
play for a very long period of time. I was
reading from a book titled The Scented Ape, The Biology
and Culture of Human Odor by David Michael Stoddart and

(20:20):
the author in this point uh to the the idea
that bad odors, you know, causing disease. That this goes back,
he says, through two key physicians. There's the Arabian physician
have A Sina who lived nine eight through ten thirty seven,
who noted that the odor of urine changed during sickness
and could be used to diagnose the illness. And of

(20:43):
course this is sound, but the observation caused others of
the time to develop the idea that these odors were
the cause of the disease and their expulsion was the
illness leaving the body. So the strange smell in the
urine that was the sickness leaving the patient. Yeah, you
can find parallels to this type of thinking and all
kinds of things, like what about the idea that sometimes

(21:06):
illnesses cause diarrhea and vomiting. That you could look at
that and say, oh, okay, so and so is sick.
What we need to do is give them enemas and
induced vomiting to purge all that stuff out that's making
them sick. But in fact that doesn't always help somebody
who's sick. Most of the time, you don't want to
do that. Yeah, you're you're taking Yeah, you're you're, you're
you're recognizing like an actual bodily function and the purpose

(21:30):
behind that bodily function. But then you're you're taking it
too far, your misunderstanding the cause now. Startard also points
to the Greek physician Galen several hundred years earlier, who
correctly judged that odors were perceived in the brain, but
he also incorrectly judged that they gained direct accents access
to the center of the brain via hollow olfactory nerves,

(21:52):
despite Aristotle's previous argument that scent receptors were in the
lining of the nose. Galen's theory survived for more than
a millennium, and Studdard also points out that English judges
as late as the nineteenth century would still take bunches
of sweet smelling flowers with them on jail visits to
ward off jail fever, which was what they called typhus.

(22:15):
But typhus incidentally is caused by a bacterium spread by
body lice, fleas, or chiggers to the plague. Yeah so,
but it's another example of people, even in the nineteenth
century still having a miasmic understanding, or at least on
a superficial level um of disease. No, miasma theory was

(22:36):
still absolutely in full swing in Europe in the nineteenth century.
I mean, it wasn't untill late in the nineteenth century
that we really we really got a beat down on it. Now.
In researching this, I also looked back to Virginia Smith's
excellent book clean A History of Personal Hygiene Impurity, which
is a faculous read. She'd basically throughout the book charts

(22:57):
how humans have always had this this understanding of what
is personal hygiene and then what is sort of moral
or spiritual hygiene, uh, and and how these become just
entertangled throughout history. Cleanliness is Godliness, yeah, exactly, And it's
it's a delightful book along those lines. But she talks
a little bit about miasthma. The idea that it's was

(23:20):
seen by the Greeks is this this dirt that caused disease,
the dirt of destruction. Uh. And it could be supposedly
generated in any place at any time, for any divine reason,
but was generally associated with like a foul setting, you know,
be at a place of the dead or a place
of of decay, and the Greeks believe that these seeds

(23:42):
of disease or miasmin quote, wafted down from the outer
universe in billowing clouds of people, of polluted air, and
whatever it touched its stained, and the staining of a
fabric was a key example of the process. And I
believe we We've already mentioned that the Greek word uh
me anno is even defined as uh as you know,

(24:03):
to die with another color, to stain uh, as well
as to defile, pollute, sully, contaminate, to soil, but also
to defile with sins. Again coming back to that idea
that humans cannot help but complicate their understanding of bodily, physical,
or even biological cleanliness with some sort of a moral

(24:24):
or spiritual component. Yeah, we've always got this metaphor in
our language, don't we. I mean I am soiled with sin. Yeah,
I'm gonna get clean. I'm going to cleanse myself. It's
it's very difficult to separate the two and with I
mean putting a third thing in there, with health, get
a clean bill of health, or like or if you

(24:46):
have an addiction or something, people might say, I'm gonna
get clean. Yeah. Interesting, this trifecta of of health, of hygiene,
and of moral rectitude. Yeah, think clean thoughts, but you know,
without realizing, yeah, you can, you can have very dirty
thoughts that are extremely hygienic. It's it's entirely possible now.

(25:06):
As we've been exploring, and we'll continue to explore. European
thinkers really went whole hog on mi asthma theory. But
it's not confined to Europe. This is a thinking this
common throughout the world. There was mi asthma thinking in
ancient China, there's mi asthma thinking in India. It's something
that's very natural, I think for people to conclude, and

(25:28):
thus I think is almost maybe a cultural universal Well,
it really begins to feel like a necessary step. You know,
if this were a civilization video game or or say,
you know, science fiction novel like something for me and
in banks, it would seem like that would be a
necessary stage of development that a culture would have to
go through before they got to the germ theory of disease.

(25:51):
And I think we should point out that, um, it
wasn't always throughout history that you had this misguided me
asthma hypothe the system against a clear and correct germ
theory contagion hypothesis. Sometimes the options seemed to be you
had a miasma theory of disease, in which epidemics were
spread ambiently through the air, and a contagion theory of disease,

(26:13):
where epidemics were spread by physical contact. Most of the time,
neither of these is exactly correct, but each one has
got a part of the truth right, right, And and
it's realizing that something is happening in the physical world,
be it with you know, physical touch, or it's conveyed
through the vapors and the gases around us. Yeah. But

(26:34):
by the seventeenth century, is pointed out by by Smith,
miasma theory was quote held to be true beyond doubt. Again,
it was a cornerstone of science, um though the actual
arcana and mechanisms had yet to be found. But but
she adds that there were there were at least a
three things you can point to that show how the
how miasma theory is remaining alive. She says that Venetian

(26:58):
physician Sentorio Sentaorio, he's a Josh and Chuck favorite. Oh yeah,
is he? Yeah? Got there into him. I can't remember
which one called him the guy so nicely named him twice. Well, yeah,
Sentario Sentario through sixteen thirty six. So he'd proven that
the body breathed out a miasma of perspiration. Uh. Then

(27:19):
you also had chemist discovering gases even though they had
not yet discovered oxygen, and scientists were in the process
of discovering that plants breathed as well. But of course
this wasn't just about figuring out how the world worked.
It was also about combating the plague. And if you've
ever seen a plague doctor mask, which I'll make sure

(27:39):
to at least include an image of an illustration of
this on the landing page for this episode of Stuff
to Buy Your Mind dot com. If you look at
one of these masks, you can see the emphasis put
on air circulation. Man, no sketchy website is complete without
some clip art of a plague doctor mask, you know
what I mean. It's like, that's like the stock photo
that's like in every creep corner of the Internet as

(28:01):
the plague doctor mask, I know, And there are only
so many like widely distributed illustrations of it that on
one level they begin to feel less special. And yet
every time I look at one at one, I still
get wrapped up in the excitement of everything that's going
on with it. Well, it is really interesting to plumb
the frame of mind that designed it, right, Yeah, I
mean it's essentially a hazmat suit for the play gears

(28:25):
to avoid bad smells. So, as a Stoddard points out
in the center date, Uh, these were doctors who wore
long leather coats rubbed with bees wax. They wore gloves
and long bird like masks, and the mask themselves, the
snout of it was filled with with herbs and dried petals.
And then they used a cane to probe the patient's

(28:46):
armpits and growing for signs of infection. And they used
a sounding stick so they could listen to the patient's
pulse without actually coming into physical contact. Now my understanding though,
this would this would differ depending on who were examining.
Maybe we're examining a peasant versus examining royalty, so you
wouldn't necessarily, you know, poke the keen with the stick,

(29:07):
but you would definitely poke the peasant. So like if
Pope Clement the sixth were too, maybe wonder if he
had the plague and had a physician come in and
look with look at him. He wouldn't have put up
with the stick, right, Yeah, you would get a stick
free evaluation. Sometimes there were scented substances in the tip
of that dust stick or cane and uh. I've also
read that the bird like appearance of the plague doctor

(29:30):
maybe why we sometimes call a bad doctor a quack
because they look like a duck um. But at Yeah,
it's all about distancing the know who's uh from the
smell uh. And another controversial treatment method of the day,
if we can call it a treatment, was quote aerial quarantine.
So you don't want your home to catch plague, simply

(29:52):
box it up, shutting out all the plague gear, like
it's a night of the living dead and you just
want to keep the evil out. Then you can just
purify it with good odors within. It's kind of basically
what what we were talking about earlier with the with
the Pope of Fire. Yeah, and some some of the
things you read about where people went to I don't
know why I was about to say great links, not

(30:14):
actually great links, kind of normal lengths to avoid the
night air was like they close all the windows at night,
you know, because you didn't want that bad night air
getting in. Yeah, But at the same time, it was
still obvious to many people of the day that ceiling
up a body of air didn't necessarily seem to help matters.
Uh and and since seventeen century, riders had observed that

(30:36):
a change of air was helpful. Um. You know, I
think we've we've all encountered situations where we are boxed
in somewhere with a bad smell, be it a smelly
dog in a car, or a you know, a very
small child with a soiled diaper in a closed room
and changing the air a change podcast studio, or some

(30:58):
some sweaty hosts of been in there for a few
hours before you exactly, yeah, some a circulation of the
air is u is sometimes desirable And and they were
not blind to this, you know, they they too had
experienced sweaty rooms and uh and and soiled infants before.
Can you imagine how rough it would be for a
mi asthma theorist at like a festival or concert outdoors

(31:22):
where you gotta go use the porta John's but you know,
like you gotta hold your breath the entire time you're
in there. You'll get the plague. I don't know. That
is an interesting question. What would a denizen of the
seventeenth century make of a modern porta potty? I feel
depending on who you're asked. In some cases they might
think this is amazing, this is this is a vision
of the future I didn't even dare hope for whereas

(31:45):
other porta potties they might say, yeah, this is this
is horrible. Why would you use the restroom here and
not behind that tree over there? All right, so I
guess we need to discuss what happened to miasthma theory,
Like how did it go away? Yeah? Like I mean
is generally what seems to be the case is that
you have new signs that comes along and knocks a

(32:07):
previous theory out of contingent. Yes, Now, there was no
single cause for the demise of miasthma theory. As we said,
it was sort of um one side of a long
running and confusing debate where the different sides would sort
of bleed into each other. But it got chipped away
at by many lines of evidence over the centuries. One
of the greatest and most important final blows to me

(32:29):
asthma theory came from the work of an English doctor,
an epidemiologist named John Snow, not to be confused with
Game of Thrones John Snow right spelled differently John with
an H, but still a hero very much. So John
Snow is a cool guy from history. He So, I've
got a couple of sources I'm going to be referring

(32:50):
to for the story of John Snow. One is an
article called John Snow, m d. And Anesthetist to the
Queen of England and Pioneer Epidemiologists by Michael A. Ramsey,
and the other is an article by Stephen Halliday from
two thousand one from the British Medical Journal. So these
are about the life of John Snow. So. John Snow
was born in March eighteen thirteen in the city of

(33:13):
York in northern England, and he was the oldest of
nine children. His father was a manual laborer and his
family lived in Micklegate, which was one of the poorest
and most unsanitary parts of York at the time. People
who lived there got their water from natural sources like wells,
or from the two nearby rivers, which were the Swale
and the Ooze. Well, that doesn't that doesn't sound good,

(33:37):
not like T M and T use but so U
s e oh okay, but it's it sounds like secret.
But have you ever seen a turtle get down? I
have at the zoo, but not not in the way
that you mean it. Okay. Anyway, Unfortunately, this water that
the people of Michelegate were getting at the time was

(33:57):
often just filthy. It contained way ston runoff from quote
and as as Ramsey says, quote market squares, cesspools, cemeteries,
and dung hills. So just imagine your water goes through
all that before you get it to drink. Ah, the
delicious necro water. Yeah. So Snow became apprentice to a

(34:18):
surgeon apothecary in eighty seven and he enrolled in the
hunter Rion School of Medicine in London. While he was there,
he also got experience working at Westminster Hospital, which had
a problem. Actually, the hospital had what's known as a
dead room, where students could perform post mortem dissections of
patients who died in the wards. Unfortunately, a lot of

(34:40):
the students who performed these dissections would get sick. Eventually,
Snow was able to figure out through experiments what was
going on, what was making the medical students sick was
not the bodies themselves, but a preservative used to keep
them from decaying arsenic. The bodies were embalmed with arsenic,
then the students performed the dissections, they inhaled arsenic vapor,

(35:04):
and then they got sick. So Snow's research led to
different preservation practices for cadavers, but it also was the
end of It also led to the end of the
manufacture of candles made with arsenic, which apparently burned very
brightly but put off toxic arsenic fumes. Other claims to fame.
After Snow completed his medical education in London in the

(35:25):
eighteen thirties and forties, he became an expert in respiration
and asphyxiation, and he also became one of the world's
leading anesthetists, studying the medical use of ether and chloroform
to anesthetize people for surgery. Uh Snow played a very
important role leading to the acceptance of anesthetics for pain
relief and childbirth. Like at the time, a lot of

(35:46):
people thought that it was for some reason immoral for
women to have pain relief while giving birth. That's because
of the whole biblical description right of the punishment. It
seems like there was a link there, like leaders of
the Anglican Church preached against pain relief for for women
in childbirth from the pulpit. But then Ramsey writes quote. However,

(36:08):
on April seventh, eighteen fifty three, Queen Victoria asked John
Snow to administer chloroform analgesia for the delivery of her
eighth child, Prince Leopold. This was such a success that
it was repeated for the delivery of Princess Beatrice three
years later. Obstetrical anesthesia now had the royal blessing, and
medical and religious acceptance soon followed. But John Snow's real

(36:31):
claim on history came the interaction between miasthma theory, germ
theory and cholera. So the first pandemic of Asian cholera
in England occurred in Newcastle in eighteen thirty one while
John Snow was working as a surgeon's apprentice, and the
second pandemic of Asian cholera hit London in the fall
of eighteen forty eight. Now, the prevailing theory about the

(36:53):
spread of cholera at the time was sort of a
mixture of a dash of contagion theory with a huge
helping of me asthma theory. Basically, most people at the
time believe that cholera was an infection that spread through
particles disseminated ambiently in the air, which would then settle
in the atmosphere in low lying areas, and proponents of

(37:14):
miasma theory laid blame for the disease on workers in
industries that produced nasty odors, including slaughter houses, rendering plants,
and as as Ramsey notes, quote bone merchants and the
miasma theory of disease was not the only odd idea
about the power of smells in Victorian Britain. For example,
Professor H. Booth, writing and builder in eighteen forty four wrote,

(37:39):
quote from inhaling the odor of beef, the butcher's wife
obtains her obesity that that seems quite a stretch, but
Holiday actually notes a lot of interesting beliefs about miasma
theory at the time, and especially about bad smells. So
Sir Francis Head, he notes, was a colonial governor who
served in Canada, and in eighteen forty two had argued

(38:02):
that quote some settlements in the America's had been rendered
dangerous by the plowing of virgin soil, which had exposed
decaying vegetable matter and the miasms that rose from it.
Also in eighteen forty two, the English social and public
health reformer Edwin Chadwick, who lived from eighteen hundred eighteen ninety.

(38:22):
He wrote an eighteen forty two report on the sanitary
condition of the laboring population of Great Britain. So Chadwick
wanted to make people's lives better. He was a social reformer,
but he argued that what we should do is improve
sewage and drainage systems in housing to remove dangerous foul smells.
He later told a parliamentary committee in eighteen forty six quote,

(38:45):
all smell is if it be intense, immediate acute disease,
And eventually we may say that by depressing the system
and rendering it susceptible to the action of other causes,
all smell is disease. Oh wow again shooting the messenger here. Yeah.
So in eighteen ninety, at a Royal Society of the

(39:06):
Arts meeting on sewage and waste disposal, Chadwick gave a
talk and The Builder the same magazine again reported quote
Sir Edwin concluded his somewhat prolox communication by by advocating
the bringing down of a fresh air from a height
by means of such structures as the Eiffel Tower and
distributing it warmed and fresh in our buildings. Now, wouldn't

(39:29):
that be a great addition to our public health infrastructure.
I would towers to suck the sky are down. I'm
surprised I haven't seen Maybe I have seen this and
just haven't zeroed in on the detail. But you see
these sort of these, these these older visions of an
advanced future with archaic flying machines and towers. I wonder

(39:49):
if this uh works its way into any of those visions,
you know, the use of towers to grab clean air
and bring it back down for the masses. Yeah, would
that show up in like H. G. Wells or something.
I don't know. I'm gonna to look at particularly some
of the French illustrations again, it might show up there. Well.
At least here you can see a departure from the
ideas that we talked about earlier, like during the plague,

(40:09):
where they thought that maybe bad noxious air would come
down from outer space or from the planets or something.
I hear the ideas that the bad air is low lying,
and it settles in low lying areas, what you need
to do is bring down fresh, clean air from up
above to sort of air it out. But one of
the unfortunate side effects of Chadwick's proposal, I mean, obviously,

(40:31):
nobody's going to really protest the idea of removing sewage
from the houses and stuff. That seems like a good idea.
But Chadwick's proposal, uh led to the idea that foul
smelling ways should be efficiently funneled away from houses and
neighborhoods and down to the river from which many people
were still drawing their water. So this in they're trying

(40:53):
to prevent color exactly. Yeah, So we'll get to that
in a minute. Uh. In eighteen forty four, the physicis
shan Neil Arnott, who lived eighteen seventy four told a
Royal Commission quote, the immediate and chief cause of many
of the diseases which impair the bodily and mental health
of the people and bring a considerable proportion prematurely to

(41:15):
the grave is the poison of atmospheric impurity, arising from
the accumulation in in and around their dwellings of the
decomposing remnants of the substances used for food and from
the impurities given out of their own bodies. So he's
saying human excrement and rotting food waste release particles into

(41:36):
the air that wind breathed in are the cause of disease.
And crazily enough, Florence Nightingale was even convinced of the miasmata.
She believed that scarlet fever, measles, and smallpox could all
be caused by bad odors, especially those emanating up from
the drains underneath housing, and she tried to encourage good
health by making hospitals sweet smelling. I think sweet smelling

(41:59):
medical facilities are kind of disturbing. Actually, you don't want
to smell a sweet smell. I think medical facility should
smell like cucumbers. It's like when you encounter, you know,
a really obnoxious air freshener. You know it's um It
can be almost like a chemical assault on your senses.
And then also there is the question what is this
covering up? This was deployed for some reason and it's

(42:20):
probably horrible, but anyway, so all this stuff was in
the air, right, all in the air, so to speak.
The idea of me as mata was everywhere all the
pretty much all the experts believed in it, but John
Snow was not convinced. Because he'd done a lot of
work with inhaled things, right, so he'd work closely on
cases where people were subject to toxic inhalence. He even

(42:43):
worked on a case where a young woman died from
an overdose of chloroform from a rag because it hadn't
been administered properly. And from his experience with arsenic vapors
and all that, he knew that the potency of airborne
toxins was directly linked to their concentration in the immediate
vicinity of the victim. If slaughter houses and bone merchants

(43:07):
and all the other sources of waste and food waste
and animal parts and stuff like that, if that was
what was producing the miasma that caused the disease, shouldn't
the people closest to these places and the people who
worked in them be the most affected by the disease? Yeah,
And that the bone merchants would be the ones that
were like essentially wiped out by cholera. Yeah, And yet

(43:31):
Snow noticed this was not the case. So to prove
his case, he gathered evidence showing that cholera could only
infect someone if they swallowed quote morbid matter from an
infected person, often meaning particles of their excrement particles of
their poop. So essentially he showed that the disease was
at least partially waterborne. And and what did this evidence

(43:53):
consist of? Well Snow put together a geographical model of
cholera infection in London by determining how many people had
died from the disease in thirty two different subdistricts of
the city, and he found in the first instance that
families who drew their water from sources supplied by parts
of the Thames River above London higher upstream had very

(44:15):
few infections of cholera, whereas people who drew their water
from sources supplied by the lower Thames lower down in
the in the river where more things had been entering
the river above the water source, they had lots of
cases of cholera. And the cause for this was that
cholera has spread by oral ingestion of fecal matter from
other people infected by the disease, so as the sewage

(44:38):
produced by cholera patients in London was disposed of. It
generally made its way down into the Thames, and then
water companies drew the water back from sections of the
river directly below that and redistributed the filthy water contaminated
with fecal matter to families for drinking and home use. Uh.
And I've got this great illustration here. In the year

(44:59):
eighteen fifty, the magazine Punch published a cartoon of what
they thought a drop of the water from Thames must
from the Tims must look like up close? You know
what do we see here, Robert? Oh, Well, it just
looks like it's loaded with sort of a hybrid of
cartoon characters and microscopic organisms. Just like it's almost like
a like a Bosch painting exactly. That's what I was

(45:20):
thinking of. Yeah, it's hieronymous bosh and a drop of water.
I'll try to include this image on the landing page
for this episode of Stuff to Bulive dot Com so
that everyone else can see it as well. Yeah, So,
what was John Snow's recommendation for avoiding the cholera outbreaks?
It was, can you guess clean water exactly? Draw your
water from distant sources from clean sources far away rather

(45:42):
than polluted parts of the river nearby, and Snow's ideas
were not initially accepted by everyone. Snow was criticized by
miasma theorists the Lancet Ran an article of viscerating his
waterborne infection theory, and most experts still favored some version
of the explanation from bad air particles in the air.
So then, cholera struck London yet again in eighteen fifty four,

(46:06):
and Snow went back to work on it. He conducted
more epidemiological research linking rates of cholera infection directly to
sources of water, and most famously, he isolated a single
water pump on Broad Street as the source of a
huge number of cases of cholera and subsequent deaths. Like
locals had been complaining that the water coming out of

(46:27):
the pump smelled bad, and Snow followed up by collecting
information about who had died from cholera in the Soho
area where the pump was. There were a staggering number
of cholera deaths centered just around this one water pump,
and Snow was able to convince the local board of
governors of his theory, and they removed the handle from
the Broad Street pump. The local outbreaks seemed to go

(46:49):
away after this, but Snow's critics argued, well, maybe it
had been on the wane anyway, and then the handle
was replaced. Holliday writes, quote Snow's conclusions were dismissed by
the members of the Committee of Inquiry appointed by Parliament
to inquire into the eighteen fifty four cholera epidemic. Commenting
on Snow's hypothesis that deaths had resulted from the consumption

(47:09):
of contaminated water drawn from the Broad Street pump, the
committee concluded, quote, after careful inquiry, we see no reason
to adopt this belief. The committee came down firmly in
favor of the supposition that the coloradic confection multiplies rather
in air than in water. You know, I'm reminded again
of Game of Thrones John Snow, because it's somewhere scenario,

(47:30):
you know that John Snow and Game of Thrones is saying, look,
the White Walkers are a threat. You've gotta you've gotta
realize this. You gotta do something about it. You know, like, no, no, no,
that's ridiculous. We know how the world works. Right, and
this is it, and he's coming up against similar opposition
is saying no, no, no, don't try and rewrite me
asma theory. This is the way disease works exactly. But unfortunately,

(47:51):
and now we know that ultimately Snow was proved right
or at least partially right, that that colera is definitely
spread through water, can also be spread through food and
other things. But unfortunately Snow never lived to see his
theories gain wide acceptance, since he died of a stroke
in eighteen fifty eight at the young age of forty five.
But we now know that Snow's theory was mostly correct.

(48:12):
Cholera is caused by a bacterium Vibrio colorae. Colorae infects
the body by being ingested, as we've said, where it
reproduces and creates toxins that attack the gut and cause
watery diarrhea, and then this diarrheal discharges prolific and of
course it can easily kill a person infected with the
disease through dehydration within hours if they're not treated. Lots

(48:33):
people die of cholera uh and the cycle of infection
occurs when the infected person's fecal matter gets back into
water sources that people drink from, or ends up on
food that people eat. And fortunately, cholera has been mostly
eliminated in wealthier nations through sanitation, sewage disposal, and water treatment,
but it still affects a lot of the world today.

(48:53):
There's still a lot of work to do on cholera. Uh.
The w h O sites research from indicating that there
are somewhere between one point three to four million cases
of cholera infection worldwide every year and between twenty one
thousand and a hundred and forty three thousand deaths. So
this is like a major world disease. Yeah, it's so
easy to take it for granted, especially in in countries

(49:16):
like the United States where generally you're using a If
you use bathroom facilities, you are you have drinking water
coming out of the saint drinking water coming out of
the showerhead, drinking water filling the toilet into which you
are going to urinat or defecate. Yeah, and that's actually
one of the things that led to the understanding that

(49:38):
snows theories were correct. Other people began to accept Snow's
theory after he died, once they saw what a difference
it made to keep drinking water separate from sewage disposal.
So in the second half of the nineteenth century, uh
Snow's theory of cholera and German theory in general started
to get this wide acceptance, and it was due to
multiple factors in Great Britain, specifically Snow's former critics, including

(50:02):
the Registrar General William Farr, who had been a miasma
theory guy. He he later became convinced to the role
that water and drainage played in the cholera outbreaks after
a subsequent epidemic in eighteen sixty six, because in the
years just before this epidemic, the engineer Sir Joseph Basil
gets plans for a contained sewer and drainage system had

(50:23):
been put in place in a lot of parts of London.
Construction was still going on until eighteen seventy five. But
like we were just saying, the main benefit of the
sewer system was that it would keep sewage separate from
the water supply, and the eighteen sixty six epidemics shows
the areas that were well drained did not suffer cholera outbreaks,
but neighborhoods with lingering defective drainage were still hit yet

(50:45):
again with cholera, and then also in eighteen two, Hamburg
was struck with cholera, but the now well drained London
was not. In London, of course stank at the time
in eighteen ninety two, if you were still thinking maybe
it's the stinks that call as cholera, London smell bad.
Holiday attributes the lingering sting mainly to horse maneuver and

(51:06):
stuff like that in the streets. But yeah, it's still
smelled bad. But people weren't getting colera anymore because they
were keeping their water clean. The incoming water was clean
and the disposed of water was separately removed. Of course,
a bigger part of the puzzle was the increasing isolation
and identification of specific microbial life forms with their corresponding diseases,

(51:27):
like Fibrio colorade, identified by Felippo Paccini and later by
Robert Coke is the cause of cholera, uh the identification
of Bacillus and Thracis by Robert Coke in the eighteen
seventies is the cause of anthrax, and so on. Once
you could link these individual germs to the diseases, they
caused miasma theory didn't have much of a place anymore.

(51:49):
All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
we come back, we will continue our discussion of miasma theory.
Than alright, we're back. Okay, so we've discussed how miasma
theory got finally knocked out. But you know, I think
about how miasthma theory was wrong, but it might have
done us a lot of good. Right, Yeah, Yeah, I

(52:10):
think you can certainly make a case for for it
being a perhaps a necessary step in our understanding of
the world. Yeah, because, specifically, as we've pointed out, versions
of the theory that linked disease to foul smelling air
would be somewhat useful because air, the matter that causes
air to smell foul, can itself also carry and allow

(52:30):
the growth of harmful bacteria, sewage, dead bodies, spoiled food. Um.
And if you think about specific cases, you think about
the Pope of Fire, Clement the sixth. He didn't become
infected with the plague. Now we don't know whether the
fire actually saved him. It's possible, it's impossible to know
for sure. But one thing that we would later discover

(52:51):
is that you can sterilize your environments with heat. Yeah.
And also, as Virginia Smith points out in her book,
we do kind of go from obsession with the asthma
and filth diseases too, obsessions with something called autointoxication, which
I'll get into in a bit, and uh, an obsession
with bacteria living in our bowels, and from their interest
in bacterial fermentation, which quote proves to be a fruitful

(53:15):
lead towards GM germ theory. And of course greatly improved
microscopes also helped. But again I'm stuck with this idea
that this is maybe just a necessary step in the
technology tree, uh, that the humanity used to get to
our modern understanding of illness. Yeah, well wait a minute,
but I want to know more about the auto intoxication.

(53:35):
So this is this was really interesting. I was reading
up on this, Uh, auto intoxication. Uh, this peaked as
a health buzzword in the nineteen hundreds. And as Mary
Roach pointed out in her Salon article Passing Gas and
in her excellent book Gulp, which is all about, um,
the science of human digestion and the quest for an

(53:56):
understanding of how digestion works, Uh, it was a it
was just a natural offshoot of myasthma theory. Roach says, quote,
if one bought into the dangers of miasthma's, it wasn't
much of a leap to buy into the dangers of
one's own internal sewage. Purveyors of laxatives and intimate devices
played up the connection, referring to the colon as quote,

(54:19):
the human privy an obstructed sewer, and this cesspool of
death and contagion. Yeah. So, like the idea is that
if bad smelling stuff comes out of you, there's bad
stuff inside of you, and you need to get rid
of it as much as possible. Yeah, the poisonous gas
was coming from inside the colon, for instance, as a

(54:40):
Dr Walter C. Alvarez wrote in the nineteen nineteen essay
in the Journal of the American Medical Association. UH. He
wrote that this intuitive sense in this theory really resonated
with folks. Quote they reasoned that if feces are foul,
then the body must be in the best condition when
freest from such material. And this essay, by the way,

(55:01):
he was this played a big role in turning the
tide against um this idea of auto intoxication. UH. The
whole essay is pretty great, but I want to read
just this bit from the intro. The caveman of the
glacial period and the savage of today would doubtless agree
that practically all diseases due to the malevolence of evil spirits.

(55:22):
The idea constituted the first system of medicine. The next
one appeared with the dawn of civilization, when men awoke
to the possibility that some diseases might arise from spontaneous
derangements of the bodily functions, particularly those concerned in excretion.
They reason that if feces are foul, then the body
must be in the best condition when free is from
such material. The idea, which is based on what appears

(55:45):
to be an obvious truism, has always been an attractive one,
particularly to the lay mind. The ancient Egyptians purge themselves
at certain times in the moon's cycle, just as many
people now take caluml in the spring. For thousands of years,
physicians have been in the habit of purging their patients
when they have not known what to do. We see
then that the present day dread of stasis and autointoxication

(56:09):
is nothing new. In the eighteenth century, the high priest
of the cult was Joe was Johann comp who believed
that all disease was due to impacted feces. Under his teaching,
the use of large medicated enemies became immensely popular and
the apothecaries fattened off the hypochondriacs. Then, just as the
quote internal bath specialists do today internal bath. Yeah, that

(56:33):
is the worst term ever, internal bath. So you had this, uh,
this one company that the Tyrrell Hygienic Institute Tyre, the
Tyrell Corps has nothing to do with with replicants, but
this was This was the organization created by Charles Alfred

(56:53):
Tyrell Um. He was essentially the Colon Klin's expert of
the day, and the chief produ was the JB. L.
Cascade Colonic Irrigator. J B L, by the way, stood
for Joy Beauty Life. Wait, isn't that also a brand
of speaker it Maybe I don't know if that stands
for Joy Beauty Life as well, but uh, it might

(57:14):
have a slightly different connotation. Yes it is. It's a
it's a brand of speakers. All right. Well, I'll leave
our our listeners to explore what that stands for. Unless
you have a quick answer for us, Well, I don't know,
Joy Beauty Life. Maybe one product was developed from another,
like we're listening to our favorite music through colonic irrigators. Well,

(57:35):
in addition to create putting out this product, they also
put out thousands of promotional pamphlets for doctors to give
their patients. And not everyone was won over by this
fake disease and it's fake treatments. And you might well
be thinking, hey, isn't this a problem worth sewing a
few dog anuses shut over? What? No, I'm not thinking that.
So it was indeed, because it's Mary Roach points out

(57:57):
in nine quote physician and otto intoxication doubter Arthur Donaldson
artificially and incontrovertibly constipated three dogs by temporarily sewing shut
their anus. That is horrible. And in this experiment he
observed quote no physical symptoms beyond a mild loss of
appetite occurred and there was no internal poisoning. He also

(58:19):
checked their blood and so this provided uh some additional
ammo against this idea of auto intoxication, which itself was
a child of mi asthma. And I might add that
this is a child of miasma, that is that still
lives in our world. You will still see plenty of
of of of agents of Tyrrell at work in the world.

(58:41):
You mean, all the like the pseudoscience and the clan's culture. Yeah,
and filth building up in the colon and become This
is the kind of thing that I find that I
encounter in an uh little clickbait images at the bottom
of various blog posts, was like this famous actress removed
this from her colon and now she will live to

(59:01):
be a hundred and fifty. That's sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah,
and it's some sort of grotesque picture that you still
feel obligated to click on just to figure out what
you're looking at, and then you find no answers in
the in the clickbait content, of course. Cleanse your toxins. Yeah,
so that's auto intoxication in a nutshell. If you want
to know more about that, again, I highly recommend Mary
roaches salon article or her book Gulp, It's it's miasma

(59:24):
theory on the inside. Yeah, so there you have at
miasma theory in a nutshell. I would say one thing
you should take away from this episode is if you
are lucky enough to have access to clean water that
is separate from your sewage disposal system. You should recognize
that this is a thing that you're very fortunate to experience.
You should be thankful for it. It's something we take
for granted in our lives, but it's a huge part

(59:46):
of what makes like city life livable. Indeed, all right,
if you want more episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind,
you know where to go. I don't know to Stuff
to Blow your Mind dot Com. That is the mothership.
That's where you'll find all our episodes going back to
the very beginning. You'll find log posts and links out
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(01:00:08):
the discussion module where you can engage with with Joe
and myself as well as various other listeners who have
lots of intriguing thoughts on topics we are discussing, topics
we should discuss, et cetera. Oh yes, so big, thanks
as always to our audio producers Alex Williams and Tory Harrison.
And if you want to get in touch with us

(01:00:31):
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like us to do in the future. Uh to just
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