March 21, 2023 • 48 mins
The idea of healing via immersion in sacred or special waters dates back to prehistory, and it’s still alive and well in the modern world. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider the myth, history and reality and healing waters. (part 3 of 4)
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're
back with part three of our series on the Healing Waters,
where we have been focusing on beliefs held by many
(00:24):
people throughout history that you could heal various diseases by bathing,
by either immersing yourself in the waters of say warm
or hot mineral springs, or sometimes maybe by drinking those waters. Also,
we talked about the medicinal theories on which some of
(00:44):
these practices were based, especially in the ancient world, such
as the ancient Greek and Roman beliefs in hute moral theory. Also,
in the last episode we talked there was a very
interesting digression you had rob about supposed healing springs that
have creatures living in them, such as little blood worms
or fish trapped in the hot waters. Yeah's luck would
(01:06):
have it. Here in Atlanta, we have a science festival
here as well, the Atlanta Science Festival, and a very
cold morning over the weekend, my family went to a
talk on carnivorous plants about the some of the various
carnivorous plants that are found internally in the southeastern United States.
And at the end of it, the children present got
(01:28):
to feed the carnivorous plants and they were feeding them
blood worms. So and how it comes comes around. I
was like, yeah, I know these guys. I was just
talking about these guys. These would be, of course the
larval forms of little flies rather than the proper worms
that we also discussed. But there was no no iye squirting,
no squirting of the worms in the eyes. Now, nobody
(01:49):
who was putting these in their eyeballs? Good good, Well,
today I wanted to take a look actually at the
paper that first got me interested in this subject, in
the subject of beliefs about the healing powers of balneotherapy
or immersion in the water. And this is a medical
history paper concerning the spa at bath Bath, a location
(02:12):
in southwest England in Somerset that has been used as
a spa going way back back back into at least
as far back as Roman times when it was the
spa of Minerva Sulus. Remember in the previous episode we
talked about how often these these spa facilities built out
by the Romans would kind of be under the heading
of a sort of composite god made of like a
(02:35):
Roman god like Minerva, and then the local deity in
this case it would be some kind of Celtic goddess
named Sulus. So these are merged together. Minerva Sulus rules
over the waters of Bath. And yeah, going way back,
people thought that various illnesses could be healed there. I
wanted to talk about a paper making a case that
(02:55):
maybe for one particular disease there actually is is a
mechanical healing property at the spring. Oh fascinating. You know.
I visited Bath many years ago, like fifteen plus years ago,
and I believe my wife and I went as is
kind of like a day trip out of London by
train and then we took one of those bus tours
(03:17):
of the city and then walked around a bit. But
it was it was really beautiful, and I remember that
you had this this great layered feeling of history there,
like the topography of the city, and they like the
physical building layers of the city revealed, like the deep
time of the area. I was fascinating totally. I would
love to go myself, maybe not to get in the water,
(03:37):
but at least to have a look around. Yeah, I
don't remember. I mean the tours we were on, the
tours we could afford at the time. It definitely did
not have any invitations to get in the water, just
to like buy a coffee mug at the end, that
sort of thing. So the paper I want to talk
about is called a Trial of the Bath Waters the
Treatment of Lead Poisoning by an author named Audrey Haywood
(03:59):
in the journal Medical History, published back in nineteen ninety.
And this paper concerns medical clinical research carried out at
what was called the Bath General Hospital, which opened in
seventeen forty one. Now at the time, one of the
major missions of this hospital facility was to mount what
(04:22):
the authors of this study called a trial of the waters,
which was an attempt to record data to test and
show whether the spa therapy practiced in the pools of Bath,
whether that therapy was actually effective against disease. Now, as
we've talked about, people since antiquity have believed all kinds
(04:42):
of different things that medical complaints could be cured by
soaking in spas, soaking or bathing in warm mineral springs,
sometimes drinking the water as well. If you haven't heard
the last episode yet you should go check that out first.
We talked about plenty of examples in there. But the
question is why did people think that the waters of
these spas were curing their diseases. In modern times, it
(05:05):
has been commonly assumed that this was entirely due to
the placebo effect. To the placebo effect is a beneficial
or healing effect caused by a treatment that has no
actual direct mechanism on the condition itself, and thus, and
thus the apparent healing or improvement is believed to be
(05:26):
caused by the patient's belief that they are being treated
or by their expectation of improvement. And we've talked about
placebo effect plenty of times on the show. It has
a measurable effect. It is a real thing. And so
if nothing else is doing anything for you, at least
the placebo effect maybe kicking in right, So that could
(05:46):
be an explanation for why people maybe would go soak
in the water and think, oh my, whatever got better now.
In the ancient world, there were mechanistic theories of why
the spa would cure you. One example among many is
again humoral theory, the theory that, oh, your fluids are
out of balance. You know, maybe you've got too much
blood or too much yellow bile, not enough flim or something,
(06:09):
and you could deal with these imbalances by calibrating the
two sort of like slider knobs on your body, and
those knobs were wet and dry and hot and cold
because wet, dry, hot and cold were each correlated with
one of the humors. So like, oh, I don't have
it in front of me now, but I think maybe
like blood was like hot and wet or something, or
(06:32):
maybe cool and wet. I don't know anyway, So you know,
if you have too much of one of those things,
you adjust the hotness or coldness or dryness or wetness
of the body in order to get yourself back in balance.
Now we know today that this is not actually how
the body works. This is an obsolete theory. It does
not accurately describe where disease comes from. But having the
(06:54):
belief in it may have led again to placebo effect.
People are thinking that they've got a correct way of
addressing disease, so they're at least having an expectation of improvement. Yeah,
it's like I'm not doing nothing, I'm doing something. I'm
following the advice or the know or being treated by
an expert in their field, and you know, it takes
(07:15):
some of the pressure off, and it puts you in
a situation where you're expecting some level of healing, you're
expecting some sort of positive outcome. Haywood explains the common
modern understanding of this historical practice as quote, the pleasurable
activity of immersion in warm mineral water has social and
psychological benefits but no physiological value. And this probably is
(07:39):
true for the majority of miracle cures people think that
they received at the SPA. But Haywood records that there
is at least one condition where there seems to be
quite strong empirical evidence that the SPA was doing something
to heal the sick. Now what was that condition? It
was what was known as plica pictonum, a type of
(08:02):
paralysis that you get from chronic lead poisoning. M We've
talked about lead poisoning on the show before, so yeah,
certainly has been a widespread problem in the past. We
talked about lead poisoning, I think most recently, most extensively
in an episode called Cupid's Lead, an arrow from a
(08:22):
few years back that was about oh, I don't even
remember what all we got into, and that that was
one where we did have a digression about lead acetate
or sugar of lead, known in Roman times for its
sweet taste. Yeah, you don't want to eat that. But
colica pictonum paralysis you get from chronic lead poisoning has
characteristic symptoms. So it starts with what Haywood calls abdominal colic,
(08:45):
basically meaning abdominal pain. So what a lot of people
might call stomach pain, but actually your stomach is higher
up in your torso you know, pain around the guts,
the intestines, and then also constipation, the inability to move
the bowels, and then eventually after that loss of ability
to control the limbs, but not always with concurrent loss
(09:07):
of sensation. So sometimes you can feel the limbs, but
you can't move them or can't move them correctly. Now,
the interesting thing about Bath is that Haywood writes, because
symptoms were very well documented when patients were admitted to
the Bath General Hospital, we are able to look back
at patients who showed up with this particular condition and
(09:28):
then keep track through the records of whether or not
they were cured, which could be measured and according to
local standards was supposed to be measured rigorously by documented
outcomes like full recovery of limb function. Haywood writes that
by analyzing the records at this hospital, we can see
that from seventeen sixty to eighteen seventy nine, the span
(09:49):
of almost one hundred and twenty years, three thousand, three
hundred and seventy seven patients presented at Bath with paralysis
from lead poisoning, and forty five point four percent of
those patients were documented as cured fully cured, and then
a further percentage of them were documented as having shown
some improvement. Now, it would be much more helpful to
(10:12):
evaluate this in the context of control groups, right. It
would be great if we had control groups that received
no treatment or received a placebo, so we could see
is this actually better? But there are some reasons for
thinking that this recovery rate is above chance or placebo
levels for the same condition, and we'll talk about those later.
So Heywood quotes some seventeenth and eighteenth century physicians on
(10:37):
this condition Collico picctonum, to see what they knew about it.
There is a doctor Rice Charlton actually looks like his
name could be pronounced Charlatan. I don't know if there's
any connection there, but he's describing collico picctonum in the
second edition of a book called Three Tracts on Bathwater
(10:58):
that's bath with a capital B from seventeen seventy four
and Charlatan rights quote in consequence of a most obstinate costiveness.
Costiveness means constipation obstinate costiveness attended with exquisite pain in
the bowels. Upon the constipation being removed and the pain diminished,
the patient loses the use of his limbs, the arms,
(11:20):
and hands. Most commonly, rheumatic pains sometimes attack the limbs
before they become paralytic. Lead we know is remarkably productive
of this complaint. Now, outbreaks of symptoms like this had
been common in Europe for centuries, in fact, going way back,
going back to Roman times, but for the longest time
there was no agreement about the cause. So somebody might
(11:42):
get that, you know, you could recognize what this pattern
of symptoms were. It's like, oh, you've got the thing
where you have abdominal pain, your gut's really hurt, and
then you can't poop, and then your wrist fails and
you can't use your arms. Candidates for the explanation included
unresolved fevers. Just quote here from the paper over indulgence
(12:02):
in acid wines. I don't know how much people do
they want to indulge in acid wines, Like it's your
wine is spoiled, but you really just want to get
in there. I mean, sometimes that's all you have around.
I guess, I guess that's true. No accounting for taste,
and other explanations were quote high living and passions of
the mind, so very broad categories, especially on those last two. Yes,
(12:26):
But actually in the eighteenth century the real cause was identified.
In seventeen sixty eight, the British physician Sir George Baker
correctly traced the origin of a particular epidemic of colicopictonum.
This epidemic was called the Devonshire colic to lead poisoning,
specifically caused by the widespread consumption of cider tainted with lead.
(12:50):
He traced it back to where it came from and
found out, yes, it's from this cider that's got all
this lead in it. And when the lead was removed
from the cider, the outbreak of apictonum was alleviated, but Unfortunately,
cider was not the only place you could get lead.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, people had a vast
range of options to explore that would end up causing
(13:11):
overexposure to lead. There was use of lead hardware in
the preparation, storage, and transport of food and drink. And
this is everything everything from lead pipes and lead sinks
to lead cooking pots, lead glazed earthenware, pewter plates, etc.
There were lead based cosmetics. There was lead as a direct,
intentional additive to food and drink, maybe as a color
(13:34):
rent like food coloring, or as a flavor agent. It
lead in some forms taste sweet, or as a preservative
and more on this in a second. And then there
were also lead salts that were used as medicine. In
less severe cases, lead poisoning would cause a sort of
like precursor series of symptoms. So lower levels of lead
(13:55):
poisoning would cause fatigue, weakness, headaches, and what's described as
a general malaise, just kind of a bad feeling of
ill health and discomfort that you can't really locate the
cause of. And while lots of people were dealing with
minor chronic ill health from these baseline levels of lead exposure.
(14:17):
Some people got even more vicious doses of lead, often
from occupational exposure, so you might see referred to colic
of pictonum referred to as painters palsy. People who were
dealing with lead based paints a lot in their line
of work would have higher levels of exposure than everybody else,
and then they might end up with this form of paralysis.
But not just that. There was all kinds of manufacturing
(14:40):
that involved lead at the time. Another major source of
high exposure to lead came from lead adulterated alcoholic beverages.
Again coming back to the example of the devonsure colic
being based insider Haywood Wrights quote, Lead is soluble in
such weak acids as the acetic acid, that's the acid
that's in vinegar, formed when alcohol is exposed to the air,
(15:04):
so alcohol might easily become contaminated. This contamination may occur
incidentally during distillation when lead is leached out of the
soldered joints or base metal condensers, or accidentally if sour
cider or apple must comes into contact with the lead,
which was often used to repair cracks in the cider press.
(15:24):
Adulteration could also occur if the cider was stored in
lead glazed earthenware containers. Poor or acid wines were sometimes
adulterated deliberately in the Roman tradition of using lead acetate
as a sweetener improver or fungicide. Got Reading this makes
me feel so grateful for modern food safety standards and regulations.
(15:48):
Oh absolutely, it's just unbelievable reading like what went into
I don't know, Yeah, but this paragraph here from hey
what also makes me think of the fact that before
the real cause was known, some people accused those who
had this paralysis of indulging in quote, acid wines. It's like, oh,
it's because you drank acidic wine that you have the
(16:11):
paralyzing colic. Those people actually were probably detecting a real
correlation but misunderstanding the cause. It wasn't the acidic wine,
but a heavy metal that, for a couple of different reasons,
is more likely to end up in sour wines. It
might be added intentionally to counteract the sourness, or because
(16:32):
the acetic acid basically the vinegar that forms in a
sour wine, was a solvent for lead that might come
from anything. The storage containers or the manufacturing equipment. Okay,
it makes sense. So people who got more severe lead exposure,
whatever the source, whether that's from maybe occupational exposure if
you're a painter working in one of these factories, or
(16:54):
from drinking alcoholic beverages adulterated with lead. People with these
types of exposure could end up not just with the fatigue,
the headaches, and the malaise, but could end up paralyzed
with the colica pictonum. And then of course if the
disease progressed beyond that, it could lead to convulsions, coma,
and death. And so that's the background. This brings us
(17:14):
back to bath the spa. Though bath had been used
as a medicinal spa since at least as far back
as Roman Britain, according to Haywood, the first documentation of
spa therapy being used to treat what sounds like chronic
lead poisoning comes in a book from fifteen sixty eight
by an English doctor, William Turner, with a title that
(17:36):
really lets you know what the book is all about.
So it's called a Book of the Natures and Properties
as well as of the baths in England, as of
other baths in Germany and Italy. Very necessary for all
these persons that cannot be healed without the help of
natural baths. Very mid sixteenth century book title. So in
(17:59):
this mid sixteenth century book with a paragraph for a title,
Turner chronicled a long list of conditions that he said,
we're allegedly cured by spa treatment after having surveyed the
use of public baths in Germany and Italy. And these
conditions included quote bruising that cometh by falling or beating,
for green or new wounds, and for quote old wounds
(18:23):
falsely healed. But also he said, you know, there's a
convergence of symptoms that can be healed in these things.
And it kind of sounds like colic a pictonum. I
have to say the following sentence from Turner is my new,
all time favorite description of constipation. You've never heard constipation
in terms so evocative. So this is what Turner calls it.
(18:45):
He says, the vain appetite of going to stool when
a man can do nothing when he cometh there, the
hardness and binding of the belly when as a man
cannot go to the stool without capital P physics. I'm sorry,
I don't mean to laugh at lead poisoning, which is
(19:06):
no laughing matter, but that is good. This sounds like
upper class constipation to me, the vain appetite of going
to the stool. It imagine. It makes me think of um,
like the Cooleshov effect. Like you're showing that actor just
gazing at the toilet and you're imagining all of the
like wheels turning in his head as he yearns. Yeah, well,
(19:29):
he needs the physics. I should have looked it up.
I don't know what that word physics refers to. Does
that mean like the intervention of physicians or maybe some
kind of like perfect medicine. That's what I take it
to mean. You need the medical enterprise to intervene. Okay,
so that's the first part of Turner's description, but the
text also refers to paralysis of the body and abdominal pain,
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as well as other symptoms that can be caused by
chronic lead poisoning, such as infertility, spontaneous abortion and pregnancy,
and even gout. So it's possible that Turner is not
correct about spot therapy healing these conditions, but it is
interesting that he lists a large number of symptoms all
associated with lead toxicity as among the things that can
(20:13):
be cured by these spas. So by the early fifteen hundreds,
Bath already had a reputation as a place that could
cure paralysis, and one of the iconic images associated with
this place and its healing powers was a big collection
(20:36):
of discarded crutches. But it was noticed by physicians even
as far back as the sixteenth century that there was
one particular type of paralysis which the waters were better
at curing than other types of paralysis, and this was
what they called palsy after the colic. Again, this seems
to be referring to the exact same pattern of symptoms.
(20:58):
It's colic of pictonum. You have severe abdominal pain, constipation
followed by weakness and paralysis of the limbs. Just one
early case study. This is from a report written in
the early eighteenth century by one doctor Robert Pierce. He
published accounts of his career in medicine in his memoirs,
and he wrote of one typical account. He says, a
(21:19):
guy named a reverend mister Pilkington came to him from
Lincolnshire in sixteen sixty six, and Pierce described this man's
arms as quote hanging like flails, and said he was
unable to dress himself or eat on his own. He writes, quote,
although he was a clergyman, the disease had made a
quaker of him. Oh, I don't know. But after he
(21:42):
bathed and drunk the water at bath for six to
seven weeks, he finally regained control of his limbs, apparently
including the ability to doff his hat in greeting, which,
based on this writing, seems was considered very important, but
at least by this man. Pilkington and a bunch of
sources from the eighteen century reports specific patients who saw
improvement at bath. It was people with paralysis who happened
(22:05):
to be employed as color grinders, pewterers, and chemists, all
people who would have had exposure to lead through their jobs.
So it really seems like a convergence is happening here.
We're seeing a consistent pattern emerging in the records of
who's getting healed at bath. It might be worth noting
what was standard treatment at the time for people with
(22:28):
colica pictonum other than going to bath. Well, sometimes when
it was just the colic and constipation stage, so just
the abdominal pain and constipation. They would prescribe purges and emetics,
so these would be drugs to help induce defication and
to induce vomiting. Sometimes opiates would be given for pain.
For paralysis, additional treatments could include confinement to a bland diet,
(22:52):
and in cases after the actual cause was known, removal
of the person from the lead source. That seems pretty important.
So what was the treatment of bath? How would that
be different? Well, this treatment involved bathing in the water,
so you would immerse yourself up to the neck anywhere
between thirty minutes and several hours, and this would usually
be done starting in the morning, with people either standing
(23:14):
or sitting on stone benches or seats in the water
up to their necks. Starting in the Tudor period, the
water was changed once a day, so they would remove
the water after the baths closed around noon, and then
it would take about nine hours for the pools to refill.
Heywood notes that getting there early in the morning was
(23:36):
popular because it meant that you got cleaner water. Just
think about that. I mean, it's still kind of the deal.
Right earlier you get to the pool, the less less
time it's had to absorb certain things. It's had less
time to stuff on the bottom to get stirred up.
That's a good point. Oh you're a swimmer, yeah, do
you try to get there early when you can? I'm
(23:58):
doing only a morning stone or not for these reasons,
just for scheduling reasons. But but yeah, there have been
times where I'm like, oh, they just closed the pool
for a week and now they're reopening. Everything's nice and clean.
I want to get in. I want to be Monday morning,
first thing to get my shot at that clean, clean pool. Nice.
Do you do you have like a waterproof ear buds
(24:18):
or something. Do you listen to music when you swim?
Or I don't even know if that's a thing. Honestly,
I know it is. I see plenty of people do it,
and I just I've never done it. Yeah, well they so.
Heywood says in this paper that sometimes there was music
or other stuff to entertain people while they were bathing.
I guess if you're just supposed to sit in the
warm water for three hours up to your neck and
there's no music or anything that might get boring, well
(24:40):
it makes sense. And you know, I see the same
thing reflected in the YMCA pool that I go to,
like there's there's often some sort of aquatic aerobics class
going on, there's music playing. And I was just thinking
of this when you mentioned earlier, like the social aspect
of of healing at bats and spas. That's something I
(25:00):
think I often failed to think about. But yeah, that's
one of the advantages of going to any kind of
group exercise scenario is that, yeah, you're doing some level
of physical exercise, you're being guided in that physical exercise,
but then you are in the company of other people,
and you're going to get at least some level of
social boost That's true, and I'm sure there was a
lot of socializing going on, especially since I would guess
(25:21):
a lot of the people bathing together. Probably you know,
people came there for different reasons, but probably a lot
of them had similar complaints. It sounds like, and you know,
you can really have a long conversation if you have
like the same medical problem as somebody else. That can
really be a bonding experience. Yeah, And there's also seems
like a high probability that you would have encountered people
(25:44):
from your industry, other color grinders, other pewterers and other chemists,
in addition to people being treated for other maladies. Of
course exactly so, so that's soaking in the water. What
about drinking the water? So heywood Wrights quote drinking the
water became more sceptible after sixteen fifty when a clean
supply was provided which came directly from the spring. And then,
(26:06):
referring to that physician from earlier Pierce Pierce claimed that quote,
advantage has been found by drinking it. Referring to the bathwater,
especially in the bilious chalks, I think that means colics
and the usual effect of them loss of limbs. Interesting again,
I like singling out the people who have the colica
(26:28):
pictonum as the ones who benefit from drinking the water.
And Heywood writes one to two pints were consumed each
morning in divided doses. Sometimes the patients chose to drink
much larger amounts. But this was frowned upon. Has taken
us back to Plenty again, who was talking about the
people who get in the spring and then they just
want to drink it until you can't see their jewelry anymore.
(26:50):
The distrust of too much hydration, so bath gained a
reputation for healing throughout the second half of the seventeenth century,
though at the time it had not yet been revived
as a luxurious spa retreat. Haywood says that the journey
there was kind of treacherous and accommodations were pretty dank.
It was like, you know, it was not fancy yet.
(27:12):
But by the eighteenth century, the physicians of Bath were
convinced that the waters could hear a number of diseases,
including colic epictonum and that, and word of these cares
kind of spread around the country, attracting a lot of attention.
So people were making the journey there in some cases
like royal people. But there were also some doctors from
outside Bath that were skeptical, including Richard Meade, a physician
(27:34):
to King George the Second. So there was impetus to
put together a sort of large collection of data of
like a study that would really convince people to come
there for treatment. And there's a whole section of this
paper that I'm not going to get into because it
concerns the medical aspects lost, but it is very interesting.
(27:56):
It's about the founding of the Bath General Hospital and
what some of the kind of cold, cruel economic realities
of that were that, like a lot of this may
have been driven by locals around Bath wanting their businesses
to benefit from people coming to the springs for medical treatment,
but also them having a problem that like, oh, a
(28:18):
lot of the people who are coming here for healing
are like poor, and we don't want just poor people,
so we want to find a way to get the
poor people out of the city and get rich people coming.
So some less than savory sort of abuse of the
concept of charity here. Yeah, but this does lead to
this large collection of data at the hospital, and Haywood
(28:38):
notes some very interesting measures that were put in place
for the evaluation of clinical results at Bath. One thing
was treatment was regulated, so you're trying to make sure
that patients were getting basically the same thing. They were
getting treated in the same way. Also, because to quote
from Haywood quote, at that time, medical practitioners were notoriously
(28:59):
over optimists when assessing the results of their own treatments.
Because of this, they had outcomes of treatment assessed by
a committee of doctors rather than only by the one
doctor who had managed the case in question. So you're
not getting to just like ride up the outcomes on
your own patients. All right, that's good, spreading it around
a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. They hoped that this would
(29:20):
lead to quote irrefutable proof of the efficacy of the
bath waters for healing. Now I think irrefutable proof is
a little overenthusiastic there, but these are good measures to
put in place, certainly compared to the standards of the day.
So this is not a double blind, randomized controlled trial
that would really wouldn't become a standard until the twentieth century,
(29:41):
but pretty good for the time. Another thing was that
it was agreed that no patient would qualify as quote
cured if they still had any trace of the original
symptoms they showed up with, and they enforced pretty high
standards of record keeping. Okay, so what did the treatment
at bath consist of? Well, first, and very important to note,
(30:02):
patients were extracted from their regular environment for their stay
in bath, which means they were almost certainly cut off
from the original source of lead toxicity lead exposure, and
this in itself is important to keep in mind because
for all we know, this alone could be causing major improvements. Yeah,
(30:23):
giving them just away from their regular everyday exposure to land,
and that could be in most cases either occupational or
from food and drink. And on that last note, they
were given plenty of fresh food at Bath and this
included home brewed beer made there. The additional drinking of
alcohol beyond what was provided by the hospital was forbidden,
(30:45):
so this was another way to cut off additional lead exposure.
They were often given purging medication to treat constipation. Bathing
was generally three days a week in the manner previously described.
So you know, you go sider stand in the water,
you keep your head above the water line, but it
goes up to your neck. And then again, patients would
often drink one to one and a half pints of
(31:07):
the spring water a day, maybe divided into two different doses,
and in some cases they might like sort of pump
the spring water over the paralyzed limb. So, anyway, what
are the results if we look back on them historically,
the results are pretty interesting. By analyzing the records kept
at Bath General Hospital, it seems there is a pretty
(31:29):
good reason to think that the spa therapy at Bath
was doing something to relieve the symptoms of this disease,
in particular of Colica pictonum. The paper includes a table
compiling stats on patients admitted to the Bath Hospital from
seventeen fifty one to seventeen fifty eight. Out of one
five hundred ninety patients total, one hundred and eight of
(31:50):
them were admitted with symptoms indicating that they had paralysis
to to lead toxicity. Those can be further broken down
into paralyzed patients who had occupational exposure to lead. There
were thirty seven of those including readmission and patients with
the Devonshire colic meaning paralysis that was preceded by severe
(32:11):
abdominal pain and constipation, and there were seventy one of
these including readmissions. In the cases of patients with occupational exposure,
fifty nine percent were completely cured and ninety two percent
were improved. In the case of patients with Devonshire colic,
forty two percent were completely cured and ninety three percent
(32:34):
were improved. Now, my initial reaction to this was that's interesting.
But without a control group receiving no treatment or placebo treatment,
or without different treatment groups to compare, how can we
know it was the bathwater in the immersion that was
actually leading to these CUIs what if simply maybe being
away from the lead exposure on its own would produce
(32:56):
the same rates of recovery. Well, that is possible, but
the author considers that and offers some evidence based on
their referral letters correlated with each patient's case in hospital
records that may give us more confidence in the results.
So talking about the specifically the workers who had occupational
(33:18):
exposure to lead, most of them came from London or
the region in the southeast of England, and Heywood writes,
quote fifteen had already been admitted to one of the
London hospitals but had not responded to treatment there. They
were referred to the Bath hospital as quote incurable, but
after treatment in Bath, eight were cured and the other
(33:39):
seven were said to be improved. These results support the
view that the treatment in Bath had something special to offer,
as in London they would also have been removed from
exposure to lead and given purges, emetics and a bland diet,
apparently to no avail. So interesting here, this still doesn't
prove it. It seems we have a kind of crude
(34:01):
analog of a control group based in the treatment histories
from these patients referral letters. So in many cases they
had already been removed from the lead and received other
treatments for a long time in different hospitals and shown
no improvement. So this is still not as good as
a real control group for a number of reasons. For example,
one I just thought of is that it's not concurrent.
(34:24):
So like, you know, the previous treatment that they got
at the other hospitals happened before and then they came
to Bath afterwards. So maybe the cumulative time away from
lead exposure could contribute to better outcomes at Bath and
so forth. But interesting results nevertheless, Yeah, yeah, and results
that would seem to some degree to point back two
(34:48):
questions about the water, like what is it about the
waters of Bath or what they're doing with the waters
of Bath that may or may not be having an impact, right,
that's right. So here's another thing that makes these results interesting.
The Bath General Hospital records spanned many decades, and they
seem to indicate a consistently higher rate of cure and
improvement for palsy from colica pictonum. So again, lead exposure
(35:13):
paralysis than for other conditions such as paralysis from sources
other than lead poisoning. So it's possible that you know,
maybe the Bath General Hospital doctors were using you know,
they could have been doing all kinds of tricks, consciously
or unconsciously to make their treatments look more effective than
they actually were. Maybe they were using selective admission policies
(35:34):
to improve their outcomes, like picking patients to let into
the study that seemed more likely to improve, or maybe
they were just overly positive in assessing outcomes. But if
any of that were the case, why would the numbers
be so much better for patients specifically with lead poisoning
than for all other conditions. Yeah, because it's the numbers
(35:55):
that really Propoin's interest here, Because if you're just talking
nottally about like the number of abandoned crutches that they
have there, it's like, oh, that's not very convincing, because
there are two majorly compelling reasons that a sick person
might abandoned their crutch, and only one of them speaks
to the effectiveness of the treatment. Yes, that's very good
(36:17):
to point out. So again we get a little bit
of extra confidence just by looking at the difference comparing
the different conditions in their outcomes. So again, all this
like it would not prove it to the standard of
a modern randomized controlled trial, But I think there's at
least a solid reason to suspect that SPA therapy at
Bath did have some healing powers for people who couldn't
(36:38):
doff their hats because of lead. And so this was
the paper that initially got me interested in talking about this.
And the paper finally addresses the question that might be
burning in all of your minds, like if this is
the case, if it was actually effective at curing paralysis
from lead toxicity, how does that work? Well, Heywood's paper
(36:59):
here speculates the first thing is the immersion. So a
big component of this treatment at Bath was spending a
lot of time sitting in warm, mineral spring water up
to your neck, and Haywood argues that this in itself
could contribute to the outcomes documented at Bath General Hospital.
And to back this up, Haywood writes about how in
(37:19):
the nineteen seventies some researchers were doing experiments for the
space program for NASA and trying to simulate the effects
of microgravity, and some of these experiments involved having astronauts
sit up to their necks in warm water for a
long time, and Haywood points to a nephrologist named Murray
Epstein who demonstrated in some papers something kind of interesting.
(37:42):
When you sit around in water up to your neck,
it makes you p more. Specifically, not just p more,
but it increases the rate in which you excrete water,
but not just water, also sodium and calcium. Now, why
on earth would that be. This is also not something
that's one hundred percent clear, but there seems to be
(38:03):
a reasonable explanation Haywood offers, which has to do with
water pressure. So like, if your body is sitting down
below the waterline, you've got water pressing in on your
skin from all directions. And when that water pressure is
pressing in on your legs and your abdomen, it causes
that external flesh to kind of push in some blood
(38:25):
and interstitial fluid. More fluids are getting pressed into the
body from the outside, and Haywood writes, quote and this
extracellular fluid moves into blood vessels in the thorax, meaning
the trunk of the body, producing an increase in central
blood volume of about seven hundred milli leads. Now, it's
interesting that this basically comes back to the idea of
(38:48):
purging fluids from your body, which is something that was
long thought or understood to have some sort of roll
in healing the sick right, and in many cases that
might not have done anything. But I wonder if this
means that in the case of lead poisoning, the purges
would actually be helpful anyway. But to continue here, so
(39:21):
Heywood rights. The consequent rise in right and left atrial
pressures is the stimulus that leads to the large increases
in urinary volume and sodium excretion that are observed during
immersion up to the neck. This is because sensory receptors
for blood volume are apparently situated in the right atrium,
so this relative central hyper volemia, the condition of having
(39:45):
extra blood volume extra fluid volume in the body deceives
the body which reacts as though there had been an
increase in total body fluid volume, not just a reallocation
of fluid. So does that make sense that I think
I'm explaining this right? That The simplified version is when
you immerse your body in water, the water squeezes you
(40:07):
and essentially squeezes some of your extra body fluid into
the core of your thorax. It squeezes from the outside,
so the pressure and the core increases, and because the
pressure in the core increases, this tricks your body's blood
volume sensors into thinking the total amount of fluid in
your body has increased, and thus to compensate for this,
it kicks off complex chain reactions in the the renal
(40:30):
system that lead to increased excretion of urine and of
things that get excreted through urine, sodium, and in this
case calcium. Okay, that makes sense, Yeah, but why would
this have anything to do with lead poisoning. Well, Heywood
notes that the human body typically tends to handle lead
(40:50):
and calcium in a similar way. So when there's lead
in your body, the body treats it kind of the
same way it treats calcium. And so if this is
causing increased excretion of calcium through urine, it may also
be causing increased excretion of lead through urine. And in fact,
Haywood was involved in experiments that were set up at
(41:12):
the Immersion Laboratory in the Bristol Royal Infirmatory Informatory Infirmary
to test this hypothesis, and they in fact did find
that urinary lead excretion goes up when the body is immersed.
So they tested this out on experiments with modern lead
workers who were not suffering from symptoms of lead poisoning,
(41:33):
but still had lead levels much higher than the general
population in their blood. These workers were subjected to three
hour sessions of soaking up to their necks in water
that was thirty five degrees celsius or ninety five degrees fahrenheit,
and the experiments found that the immersion did indeed cause
them to pee out higher levels of lead than people
(41:55):
normally do. Oh wow, okay, haywood Wrights quote. The total
amounts excreted during one three hour immersion period are small
compared to the total body lead, which is predominantly tissue bound. Okay,
so not like free in the blood, but bound up
in tissues. Hey, what goes on? However, if these immersions
were continued to the extent described in the bath hospital records, ie,
(42:16):
three times a week for twenty four weeks, an appreciable
proportion of the total body lead would be removed. We
can therefore suggest that this was a mechanism through which
traditional bath spa therapy could have operated. So that's fascinating.
Just sitting immersed in the warm water apparently could help
(42:37):
you get more lead out of the body faster than
you would doing anything else. Yeah, and this, of course
working in congress with not having a whole bunch of
lead flooding into your system through your occupation or other
environmental causes exactly. So you're removed from the original exposure
to lead, you'd have less lead coming in, and you're
(42:59):
increasing the rate at which lead is going out. Okay,
but there's some other amenities to factor in as well though, right,
that's right. So, as I mentioned, you know, the patients
at Bath, in addition to being removed from the source
of lead and having the immersion, they also got good food,
so that may have been a factor. They got gentle exercise,
that may have been a factor as well. So it's
(43:19):
hard to know for sure with historical cases like this
because you know, you can't you're not running the test yourself.
You can't isolate all the variables. You can only deal
with the data we have from history. But in this case,
I think you could totally plausibly make the argument that
the immersion was really doing something for the people with
(43:40):
lead poisoning. It was doing something more than just getting
them away from the original lead exposure. Now, there was
another interesting part of this. That's the immersion, which Haywood
treats is probably the main explanation, Well, what about drinking
the mineral water Again, hopefully not two levels described by
plenty where your rings disappear, but the level generally prescribed
(44:02):
to drink was like one point five to two pints
a day. And Haywood notes that water from the mineral
springs of Bath has elevated levels of calcium and iron,
and citing a study by Mahafee from nineteen seventy three,
Haywood observes that calcium and iron deficiency actually increase the
body's tendency to absorb lead, and calcium and iron deficiency
(44:25):
increase the toxicity of lead that is already present in
the body. And this has been shown to the extent
that calcium and iron supplements have been suggested as partial
treatment for infants with higher than average levels of lead
in the blood. So it's possible that the mineral water
pints that patients at Bath were drinking that was helping
out as well. Yeah, And I mean, on top of that,
(44:48):
if they're if you're having to if you're having to
pe more because of your soakings in the warm waters,
you need to be drinking more water as well, like
you need to stay hydrated and This is something I
saw reflected in some papers. We'll probably discuss in the
next episode that, like, if nothing else, staying hydrated on
clean water like that alone is beneficial for the body,
(45:12):
like you will because if nothing else, you don't want
whatever's going on with your body to be exasperated by
also having some sort of dehydration scenario going on as well. Yes, exactly,
Hydration incredibly important, so that plays a role as well.
Though I want to be clear this is not should
not be taken as a general endorsement of drinking mineral
(45:32):
spring water, which could have all kinds of things in it.
So it seems like in these cases these people were
probably doing all right, but you don't want to be
drinking water from sources you're not sure or safe, right right, right, Yeah,
But if nothing else, like I say, how much I
wonder like on a case that case basis, like how
much of that person's normal liquid intake would have been
(45:53):
confined to like beers for example, versus you know, they're
still having beer, they're having good beer when they go
to bat, but then they're also having a large amount
of water as well in addition to that beer. So
it seems like there would be a net positive there. Yeah,
so I would say in conclusion, while bathing in a
SPA probably does only work via placebo effect on a
(46:16):
number of the conditions we've talked about throughout the series
so far, on the conditions it was used to treat
throughout history. I think this paper makes a very interesting
case that when it came to paralysis from lead poisoning,
spa therapy was genuine medicine. Yeah, it's fascinating, very fascinating.
All right, Well, we're going to go ahead and close
out this episode on that note, but we will be
(46:38):
back in a part four on baths immersion and also
drinking of naturally occurring spring waters, thermal waters, etc. We
still have some other important topics to discuss here, so
come back for that. In the meantime, we'll just remind
you that our core episodes of Stuffed Toable with Your
(46:58):
Mind published on two season Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do
a short form artifact or monster Factor. Mondays would do
listener mail, and we're already getting some great listener mail
in about these bad episodes, by the way, And then
on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time
to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about
a strange film. Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Pauseway.
(47:19):
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(47:39):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart radio,
this is the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're
listening to your favorite shows the first time time by
(48:03):
a p
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're
back with part three of our series on the Healing Waters,
where we have been focusing on beliefs held by many
(00:24):
people throughout history that you could heal various diseases by bathing,
by either immersing yourself in the waters of say warm
or hot mineral springs, or sometimes maybe by drinking those waters. Also,
we talked about the medicinal theories on which some of
(00:44):
these practices were based, especially in the ancient world, such
as the ancient Greek and Roman beliefs in hute moral theory. Also,
in the last episode we talked there was a very
interesting digression you had rob about supposed healing springs that
have creatures living in them, such as little blood worms
or fish trapped in the hot waters. Yeah's luck would
(01:06):
have it. Here in Atlanta, we have a science festival
here as well, the Atlanta Science Festival, and a very
cold morning over the weekend, my family went to a
talk on carnivorous plants about the some of the various
carnivorous plants that are found internally in the southeastern United States.
And at the end of it, the children present got
(01:28):
to feed the carnivorous plants and they were feeding them
blood worms. So and how it comes comes around. I
was like, yeah, I know these guys. I was just
talking about these guys. These would be, of course the
larval forms of little flies rather than the proper worms
that we also discussed. But there was no no iye squirting,
no squirting of the worms in the eyes. Now, nobody
(01:49):
who was putting these in their eyeballs? Good good, Well,
today I wanted to take a look actually at the
paper that first got me interested in this subject, in
the subject of beliefs about the healing powers of balneotherapy
or immersion in the water. And this is a medical
history paper concerning the spa at bath Bath, a location
(02:12):
in southwest England in Somerset that has been used as
a spa going way back back back into at least
as far back as Roman times when it was the
spa of Minerva Sulus. Remember in the previous episode we
talked about how often these these spa facilities built out
by the Romans would kind of be under the heading
of a sort of composite god made of like a
(02:35):
Roman god like Minerva, and then the local deity in
this case it would be some kind of Celtic goddess
named Sulus. So these are merged together. Minerva Sulus rules
over the waters of Bath. And yeah, going way back,
people thought that various illnesses could be healed there. I
wanted to talk about a paper making a case that
(02:55):
maybe for one particular disease there actually is is a
mechanical healing property at the spring. Oh fascinating. You know.
I visited Bath many years ago, like fifteen plus years ago,
and I believe my wife and I went as is
kind of like a day trip out of London by
train and then we took one of those bus tours
(03:17):
of the city and then walked around a bit. But
it was it was really beautiful, and I remember that
you had this this great layered feeling of history there,
like the topography of the city, and they like the
physical building layers of the city revealed, like the deep
time of the area. I was fascinating totally. I would
love to go myself, maybe not to get in the water,
(03:37):
but at least to have a look around. Yeah, I
don't remember. I mean the tours we were on, the
tours we could afford at the time. It definitely did
not have any invitations to get in the water, just
to like buy a coffee mug at the end, that
sort of thing. So the paper I want to talk
about is called a Trial of the Bath Waters the
Treatment of Lead Poisoning by an author named Audrey Haywood
(03:59):
in the journal Medical History, published back in nineteen ninety.
And this paper concerns medical clinical research carried out at
what was called the Bath General Hospital, which opened in
seventeen forty one. Now at the time, one of the
major missions of this hospital facility was to mount what
(04:22):
the authors of this study called a trial of the waters,
which was an attempt to record data to test and
show whether the spa therapy practiced in the pools of Bath,
whether that therapy was actually effective against disease. Now, as
we've talked about, people since antiquity have believed all kinds
(04:42):
of different things that medical complaints could be cured by
soaking in spas, soaking or bathing in warm mineral springs,
sometimes drinking the water as well. If you haven't heard
the last episode yet you should go check that out first.
We talked about plenty of examples in there. But the
question is why did people think that the waters of
these spas were curing their diseases. In modern times, it
(05:05):
has been commonly assumed that this was entirely due to
the placebo effect. To the placebo effect is a beneficial
or healing effect caused by a treatment that has no
actual direct mechanism on the condition itself, and thus, and
thus the apparent healing or improvement is believed to be
(05:26):
caused by the patient's belief that they are being treated
or by their expectation of improvement. And we've talked about
placebo effect plenty of times on the show. It has
a measurable effect. It is a real thing. And so
if nothing else is doing anything for you, at least
the placebo effect maybe kicking in right, So that could
(05:46):
be an explanation for why people maybe would go soak
in the water and think, oh my, whatever got better now.
In the ancient world, there were mechanistic theories of why
the spa would cure you. One example among many is
again humoral theory, the theory that, oh, your fluids are
out of balance. You know, maybe you've got too much
blood or too much yellow bile, not enough flim or something,
(06:09):
and you could deal with these imbalances by calibrating the
two sort of like slider knobs on your body, and
those knobs were wet and dry and hot and cold
because wet, dry, hot and cold were each correlated with
one of the humors. So like, oh, I don't have
it in front of me now, but I think maybe
like blood was like hot and wet or something, or
(06:32):
maybe cool and wet. I don't know anyway, So you know,
if you have too much of one of those things,
you adjust the hotness or coldness or dryness or wetness
of the body in order to get yourself back in balance.
Now we know today that this is not actually how
the body works. This is an obsolete theory. It does
not accurately describe where disease comes from. But having the
(06:54):
belief in it may have led again to placebo effect.
People are thinking that they've got a correct way of
addressing disease, so they're at least having an expectation of improvement. Yeah,
it's like I'm not doing nothing, I'm doing something. I'm
following the advice or the know or being treated by
an expert in their field, and you know, it takes
(07:15):
some of the pressure off, and it puts you in
a situation where you're expecting some level of healing, you're
expecting some sort of positive outcome. Haywood explains the common
modern understanding of this historical practice as quote, the pleasurable
activity of immersion in warm mineral water has social and
psychological benefits but no physiological value. And this probably is
(07:39):
true for the majority of miracle cures people think that
they received at the SPA. But Haywood records that there
is at least one condition where there seems to be
quite strong empirical evidence that the SPA was doing something
to heal the sick. Now what was that condition? It
was what was known as plica pictonum, a type of
(08:02):
paralysis that you get from chronic lead poisoning. M We've
talked about lead poisoning on the show before, so yeah,
certainly has been a widespread problem in the past. We
talked about lead poisoning, I think most recently, most extensively
in an episode called Cupid's Lead, an arrow from a
(08:22):
few years back that was about oh, I don't even
remember what all we got into, and that that was
one where we did have a digression about lead acetate
or sugar of lead, known in Roman times for its
sweet taste. Yeah, you don't want to eat that. But
colica pictonum paralysis you get from chronic lead poisoning has
characteristic symptoms. So it starts with what Haywood calls abdominal colic,
(08:45):
basically meaning abdominal pain. So what a lot of people
might call stomach pain, but actually your stomach is higher
up in your torso you know, pain around the guts,
the intestines, and then also constipation, the inability to move
the bowels, and then eventually after that loss of ability
to control the limbs, but not always with concurrent loss
(09:07):
of sensation. So sometimes you can feel the limbs, but
you can't move them or can't move them correctly. Now,
the interesting thing about Bath is that Haywood writes, because
symptoms were very well documented when patients were admitted to
the Bath General Hospital, we are able to look back
at patients who showed up with this particular condition and
(09:28):
then keep track through the records of whether or not
they were cured, which could be measured and according to
local standards was supposed to be measured rigorously by documented
outcomes like full recovery of limb function. Haywood writes that
by analyzing the records at this hospital, we can see
that from seventeen sixty to eighteen seventy nine, the span
(09:49):
of almost one hundred and twenty years, three thousand, three
hundred and seventy seven patients presented at Bath with paralysis
from lead poisoning, and forty five point four percent of
those patients were documented as cured fully cured, and then
a further percentage of them were documented as having shown
some improvement. Now, it would be much more helpful to
(10:12):
evaluate this in the context of control groups, right. It
would be great if we had control groups that received
no treatment or received a placebo, so we could see
is this actually better? But there are some reasons for
thinking that this recovery rate is above chance or placebo
levels for the same condition, and we'll talk about those later.
So Heywood quotes some seventeenth and eighteenth century physicians on
(10:37):
this condition Collico picctonum, to see what they knew about it.
There is a doctor Rice Charlton actually looks like his
name could be pronounced Charlatan. I don't know if there's
any connection there, but he's describing collico picctonum in the
second edition of a book called Three Tracts on Bathwater
(10:58):
that's bath with a capital B from seventeen seventy four
and Charlatan rights quote in consequence of a most obstinate costiveness.
Costiveness means constipation obstinate costiveness attended with exquisite pain in
the bowels. Upon the constipation being removed and the pain diminished,
the patient loses the use of his limbs, the arms,
(11:20):
and hands. Most commonly, rheumatic pains sometimes attack the limbs
before they become paralytic. Lead we know is remarkably productive
of this complaint. Now, outbreaks of symptoms like this had
been common in Europe for centuries, in fact, going way back,
going back to Roman times, but for the longest time
there was no agreement about the cause. So somebody might
(11:42):
get that, you know, you could recognize what this pattern
of symptoms were. It's like, oh, you've got the thing
where you have abdominal pain, your gut's really hurt, and
then you can't poop, and then your wrist fails and
you can't use your arms. Candidates for the explanation included
unresolved fevers. Just quote here from the paper over indulgence
(12:02):
in acid wines. I don't know how much people do
they want to indulge in acid wines, Like it's your
wine is spoiled, but you really just want to get
in there. I mean, sometimes that's all you have around.
I guess, I guess that's true. No accounting for taste,
and other explanations were quote high living and passions of
the mind, so very broad categories, especially on those last two. Yes,
(12:26):
But actually in the eighteenth century the real cause was identified.
In seventeen sixty eight, the British physician Sir George Baker
correctly traced the origin of a particular epidemic of colicopictonum.
This epidemic was called the Devonshire colic to lead poisoning,
specifically caused by the widespread consumption of cider tainted with lead.
(12:50):
He traced it back to where it came from and
found out, yes, it's from this cider that's got all
this lead in it. And when the lead was removed
from the cider, the outbreak of apictonum was alleviated, but Unfortunately,
cider was not the only place you could get lead.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, people had a vast
range of options to explore that would end up causing
(13:11):
overexposure to lead. There was use of lead hardware in
the preparation, storage, and transport of food and drink. And
this is everything everything from lead pipes and lead sinks
to lead cooking pots, lead glazed earthenware, pewter plates, etc.
There were lead based cosmetics. There was lead as a direct,
intentional additive to food and drink, maybe as a color
(13:34):
rent like food coloring, or as a flavor agent. It
lead in some forms taste sweet, or as a preservative
and more on this in a second. And then there
were also lead salts that were used as medicine. In
less severe cases, lead poisoning would cause a sort of
like precursor series of symptoms. So lower levels of lead
(13:55):
poisoning would cause fatigue, weakness, headaches, and what's described as
a general malaise, just kind of a bad feeling of
ill health and discomfort that you can't really locate the
cause of. And while lots of people were dealing with
minor chronic ill health from these baseline levels of lead exposure.
(14:17):
Some people got even more vicious doses of lead, often
from occupational exposure, so you might see referred to colic
of pictonum referred to as painters palsy. People who were
dealing with lead based paints a lot in their line
of work would have higher levels of exposure than everybody else,
and then they might end up with this form of paralysis.
But not just that. There was all kinds of manufacturing
(14:40):
that involved lead at the time. Another major source of
high exposure to lead came from lead adulterated alcoholic beverages.
Again coming back to the example of the devonsure colic
being based insider Haywood Wrights quote, Lead is soluble in
such weak acids as the acetic acid, that's the acid
that's in vinegar, formed when alcohol is exposed to the air,
(15:04):
so alcohol might easily become contaminated. This contamination may occur
incidentally during distillation when lead is leached out of the
soldered joints or base metal condensers, or accidentally if sour
cider or apple must comes into contact with the lead,
which was often used to repair cracks in the cider press.
(15:24):
Adulteration could also occur if the cider was stored in
lead glazed earthenware containers. Poor or acid wines were sometimes
adulterated deliberately in the Roman tradition of using lead acetate
as a sweetener improver or fungicide. Got Reading this makes
me feel so grateful for modern food safety standards and regulations.
(15:48):
Oh absolutely, it's just unbelievable reading like what went into
I don't know, Yeah, but this paragraph here from hey
what also makes me think of the fact that before
the real cause was known, some people accused those who
had this paralysis of indulging in quote, acid wines. It's like, oh,
it's because you drank acidic wine that you have the
(16:11):
paralyzing colic. Those people actually were probably detecting a real
correlation but misunderstanding the cause. It wasn't the acidic wine,
but a heavy metal that, for a couple of different reasons,
is more likely to end up in sour wines. It
might be added intentionally to counteract the sourness, or because
(16:32):
the acetic acid basically the vinegar that forms in a
sour wine, was a solvent for lead that might come
from anything. The storage containers or the manufacturing equipment. Okay,
it makes sense. So people who got more severe lead exposure,
whatever the source, whether that's from maybe occupational exposure if
you're a painter working in one of these factories, or
(16:54):
from drinking alcoholic beverages adulterated with lead. People with these
types of exposure could end up not just with the fatigue,
the headaches, and the malaise, but could end up paralyzed
with the colica pictonum. And then of course if the
disease progressed beyond that, it could lead to convulsions, coma,
and death. And so that's the background. This brings us
(17:14):
back to bath the spa. Though bath had been used
as a medicinal spa since at least as far back
as Roman Britain, according to Haywood, the first documentation of
spa therapy being used to treat what sounds like chronic
lead poisoning comes in a book from fifteen sixty eight
by an English doctor, William Turner, with a title that
(17:36):
really lets you know what the book is all about.
So it's called a Book of the Natures and Properties
as well as of the baths in England, as of
other baths in Germany and Italy. Very necessary for all
these persons that cannot be healed without the help of
natural baths. Very mid sixteenth century book title. So in
(17:59):
this mid sixteenth century book with a paragraph for a title,
Turner chronicled a long list of conditions that he said,
we're allegedly cured by spa treatment after having surveyed the
use of public baths in Germany and Italy. And these
conditions included quote bruising that cometh by falling or beating,
for green or new wounds, and for quote old wounds
(18:23):
falsely healed. But also he said, you know, there's a
convergence of symptoms that can be healed in these things.
And it kind of sounds like colic a pictonum. I
have to say the following sentence from Turner is my new,
all time favorite description of constipation. You've never heard constipation
in terms so evocative. So this is what Turner calls it.
(18:45):
He says, the vain appetite of going to stool when
a man can do nothing when he cometh there, the
hardness and binding of the belly when as a man
cannot go to the stool without capital P physics. I'm sorry,
I don't mean to laugh at lead poisoning, which is
(19:06):
no laughing matter, but that is good. This sounds like
upper class constipation to me, the vain appetite of going
to the stool. It imagine. It makes me think of um,
like the Cooleshov effect. Like you're showing that actor just
gazing at the toilet and you're imagining all of the
like wheels turning in his head as he yearns. Yeah, well,
(19:29):
he needs the physics. I should have looked it up.
I don't know what that word physics refers to. Does
that mean like the intervention of physicians or maybe some
kind of like perfect medicine. That's what I take it
to mean. You need the medical enterprise to intervene. Okay,
so that's the first part of Turner's description, but the
text also refers to paralysis of the body and abdominal pain,
(19:51):
as well as other symptoms that can be caused by
chronic lead poisoning, such as infertility, spontaneous abortion and pregnancy,
and even gout. So it's possible that Turner is not
correct about spot therapy healing these conditions, but it is
interesting that he lists a large number of symptoms all
associated with lead toxicity as among the things that can
(20:13):
be cured by these spas. So by the early fifteen hundreds,
Bath already had a reputation as a place that could
cure paralysis, and one of the iconic images associated with
this place and its healing powers was a big collection
(20:36):
of discarded crutches. But it was noticed by physicians even
as far back as the sixteenth century that there was
one particular type of paralysis which the waters were better
at curing than other types of paralysis, and this was
what they called palsy after the colic. Again, this seems
to be referring to the exact same pattern of symptoms.
(20:58):
It's colic of pictonum. You have severe abdominal pain, constipation
followed by weakness and paralysis of the limbs. Just one
early case study. This is from a report written in
the early eighteenth century by one doctor Robert Pierce. He
published accounts of his career in medicine in his memoirs,
and he wrote of one typical account. He says, a
(21:19):
guy named a reverend mister Pilkington came to him from
Lincolnshire in sixteen sixty six, and Pierce described this man's
arms as quote hanging like flails, and said he was
unable to dress himself or eat on his own. He writes, quote,
although he was a clergyman, the disease had made a
quaker of him. Oh, I don't know. But after he
(21:42):
bathed and drunk the water at bath for six to
seven weeks, he finally regained control of his limbs, apparently
including the ability to doff his hat in greeting, which,
based on this writing, seems was considered very important, but
at least by this man. Pilkington and a bunch of
sources from the eighteen century reports specific patients who saw
improvement at bath. It was people with paralysis who happened
(22:05):
to be employed as color grinders, pewterers, and chemists, all
people who would have had exposure to lead through their jobs.
So it really seems like a convergence is happening here.
We're seeing a consistent pattern emerging in the records of
who's getting healed at bath. It might be worth noting
what was standard treatment at the time for people with
(22:28):
colica pictonum other than going to bath. Well, sometimes when
it was just the colic and constipation stage, so just
the abdominal pain and constipation. They would prescribe purges and emetics,
so these would be drugs to help induce defication and
to induce vomiting. Sometimes opiates would be given for pain.
For paralysis, additional treatments could include confinement to a bland diet,
(22:52):
and in cases after the actual cause was known, removal
of the person from the lead source. That seems pretty important.
So what was the treatment of bath? How would that
be different? Well, this treatment involved bathing in the water,
so you would immerse yourself up to the neck anywhere
between thirty minutes and several hours, and this would usually
be done starting in the morning, with people either standing
(23:14):
or sitting on stone benches or seats in the water
up to their necks. Starting in the Tudor period, the
water was changed once a day, so they would remove
the water after the baths closed around noon, and then
it would take about nine hours for the pools to refill.
Heywood notes that getting there early in the morning was
(23:36):
popular because it meant that you got cleaner water. Just
think about that. I mean, it's still kind of the deal.
Right earlier you get to the pool, the less less
time it's had to absorb certain things. It's had less
time to stuff on the bottom to get stirred up.
That's a good point. Oh you're a swimmer, yeah, do
you try to get there early when you can? I'm
(23:58):
doing only a morning stone or not for these reasons,
just for scheduling reasons. But but yeah, there have been
times where I'm like, oh, they just closed the pool
for a week and now they're reopening. Everything's nice and clean.
I want to get in. I want to be Monday morning,
first thing to get my shot at that clean, clean pool. Nice.
Do you do you have like a waterproof ear buds
(24:18):
or something. Do you listen to music when you swim?
Or I don't even know if that's a thing. Honestly,
I know it is. I see plenty of people do it,
and I just I've never done it. Yeah, well they so.
Heywood says in this paper that sometimes there was music
or other stuff to entertain people while they were bathing.
I guess if you're just supposed to sit in the
warm water for three hours up to your neck and
there's no music or anything that might get boring, well
(24:40):
it makes sense. And you know, I see the same
thing reflected in the YMCA pool that I go to,
like there's there's often some sort of aquatic aerobics class
going on, there's music playing. And I was just thinking
of this when you mentioned earlier, like the social aspect
of of healing at bats and spas. That's something I
(25:00):
think I often failed to think about. But yeah, that's
one of the advantages of going to any kind of
group exercise scenario is that, yeah, you're doing some level
of physical exercise, you're being guided in that physical exercise,
but then you are in the company of other people,
and you're going to get at least some level of
social boost That's true, and I'm sure there was a
lot of socializing going on, especially since I would guess
(25:21):
a lot of the people bathing together. Probably you know,
people came there for different reasons, but probably a lot
of them had similar complaints. It sounds like, and you know,
you can really have a long conversation if you have
like the same medical problem as somebody else. That can
really be a bonding experience. Yeah, And there's also seems
like a high probability that you would have encountered people
(25:44):
from your industry, other color grinders, other pewterers and other chemists,
in addition to people being treated for other maladies. Of
course exactly so, so that's soaking in the water. What
about drinking the water? So heywood Wrights quote drinking the
water became more sceptible after sixteen fifty when a clean
supply was provided which came directly from the spring. And then,
(26:06):
referring to that physician from earlier Pierce Pierce claimed that quote,
advantage has been found by drinking it. Referring to the bathwater,
especially in the bilious chalks, I think that means colics
and the usual effect of them loss of limbs. Interesting again,
I like singling out the people who have the colica
(26:28):
pictonum as the ones who benefit from drinking the water.
And Heywood writes one to two pints were consumed each
morning in divided doses. Sometimes the patients chose to drink
much larger amounts. But this was frowned upon. Has taken
us back to Plenty again, who was talking about the
people who get in the spring and then they just
want to drink it until you can't see their jewelry anymore.
(26:50):
The distrust of too much hydration, so bath gained a
reputation for healing throughout the second half of the seventeenth century,
though at the time it had not yet been revived
as a luxurious spa retreat. Haywood says that the journey
there was kind of treacherous and accommodations were pretty dank.
It was like, you know, it was not fancy yet.
(27:12):
But by the eighteenth century, the physicians of Bath were
convinced that the waters could hear a number of diseases,
including colic epictonum and that, and word of these cares
kind of spread around the country, attracting a lot of attention.
So people were making the journey there in some cases
like royal people. But there were also some doctors from
outside Bath that were skeptical, including Richard Meade, a physician
(27:34):
to King George the Second. So there was impetus to
put together a sort of large collection of data of
like a study that would really convince people to come
there for treatment. And there's a whole section of this
paper that I'm not going to get into because it
concerns the medical aspects lost, but it is very interesting.
(27:56):
It's about the founding of the Bath General Hospital and
what some of the kind of cold, cruel economic realities
of that were that, like a lot of this may
have been driven by locals around Bath wanting their businesses
to benefit from people coming to the springs for medical treatment,
but also them having a problem that like, oh, a
(28:18):
lot of the people who are coming here for healing
are like poor, and we don't want just poor people,
so we want to find a way to get the
poor people out of the city and get rich people coming.
So some less than savory sort of abuse of the
concept of charity here. Yeah, but this does lead to
this large collection of data at the hospital, and Haywood
(28:38):
notes some very interesting measures that were put in place
for the evaluation of clinical results at Bath. One thing
was treatment was regulated, so you're trying to make sure
that patients were getting basically the same thing. They were
getting treated in the same way. Also, because to quote
from Haywood quote, at that time, medical practitioners were notoriously
(28:59):
over optimists when assessing the results of their own treatments.
Because of this, they had outcomes of treatment assessed by
a committee of doctors rather than only by the one
doctor who had managed the case in question. So you're
not getting to just like ride up the outcomes on
your own patients. All right, that's good, spreading it around
a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. They hoped that this would
(29:20):
lead to quote irrefutable proof of the efficacy of the
bath waters for healing. Now I think irrefutable proof is
a little overenthusiastic there, but these are good measures to
put in place, certainly compared to the standards of the day.
So this is not a double blind, randomized controlled trial
that would really wouldn't become a standard until the twentieth century,
(29:41):
but pretty good for the time. Another thing was that
it was agreed that no patient would qualify as quote
cured if they still had any trace of the original
symptoms they showed up with, and they enforced pretty high
standards of record keeping. Okay, so what did the treatment
at bath consist of? Well, first, and very important to note,
(30:02):
patients were extracted from their regular environment for their stay
in bath, which means they were almost certainly cut off
from the original source of lead toxicity lead exposure, and
this in itself is important to keep in mind because
for all we know, this alone could be causing major improvements. Yeah,
(30:23):
giving them just away from their regular everyday exposure to land,
and that could be in most cases either occupational or
from food and drink. And on that last note, they
were given plenty of fresh food at Bath and this
included home brewed beer made there. The additional drinking of
alcohol beyond what was provided by the hospital was forbidden,
(30:45):
so this was another way to cut off additional lead exposure.
They were often given purging medication to treat constipation. Bathing
was generally three days a week in the manner previously described.
So you know, you go sider stand in the water,
you keep your head above the water line, but it
goes up to your neck. And then again, patients would
often drink one to one and a half pints of
(31:07):
the spring water a day, maybe divided into two different doses,
and in some cases they might like sort of pump
the spring water over the paralyzed limb. So, anyway, what
are the results if we look back on them historically,
the results are pretty interesting. By analyzing the records kept
at Bath General Hospital, it seems there is a pretty
(31:29):
good reason to think that the spa therapy at Bath
was doing something to relieve the symptoms of this disease,
in particular of Colica pictonum. The paper includes a table
compiling stats on patients admitted to the Bath Hospital from
seventeen fifty one to seventeen fifty eight. Out of one
five hundred ninety patients total, one hundred and eight of
(31:50):
them were admitted with symptoms indicating that they had paralysis
to to lead toxicity. Those can be further broken down
into paralyzed patients who had occupational exposure to lead. There
were thirty seven of those including readmission and patients with
the Devonshire colic meaning paralysis that was preceded by severe
(32:11):
abdominal pain and constipation, and there were seventy one of
these including readmissions. In the cases of patients with occupational exposure,
fifty nine percent were completely cured and ninety two percent
were improved. In the case of patients with Devonshire colic,
forty two percent were completely cured and ninety three percent
(32:34):
were improved. Now, my initial reaction to this was that's interesting.
But without a control group receiving no treatment or placebo treatment,
or without different treatment groups to compare, how can we
know it was the bathwater in the immersion that was
actually leading to these CUIs what if simply maybe being
away from the lead exposure on its own would produce
(32:56):
the same rates of recovery. Well, that is possible, but
the author considers that and offers some evidence based on
their referral letters correlated with each patient's case in hospital
records that may give us more confidence in the results.
So talking about the specifically the workers who had occupational
(33:18):
exposure to lead, most of them came from London or
the region in the southeast of England, and Heywood writes,
quote fifteen had already been admitted to one of the
London hospitals but had not responded to treatment there. They
were referred to the Bath hospital as quote incurable, but
after treatment in Bath, eight were cured and the other
(33:39):
seven were said to be improved. These results support the
view that the treatment in Bath had something special to offer,
as in London they would also have been removed from
exposure to lead and given purges, emetics and a bland diet,
apparently to no avail. So interesting here, this still doesn't
prove it. It seems we have a kind of crude
(34:01):
analog of a control group based in the treatment histories
from these patients referral letters. So in many cases they
had already been removed from the lead and received other
treatments for a long time in different hospitals and shown
no improvement. So this is still not as good as
a real control group for a number of reasons. For example,
one I just thought of is that it's not concurrent.
(34:24):
So like, you know, the previous treatment that they got
at the other hospitals happened before and then they came
to Bath afterwards. So maybe the cumulative time away from
lead exposure could contribute to better outcomes at Bath and
so forth. But interesting results nevertheless, Yeah, yeah, and results
that would seem to some degree to point back two
(34:48):
questions about the water, like what is it about the
waters of Bath or what they're doing with the waters
of Bath that may or may not be having an impact, right,
that's right. So here's another thing that makes these results interesting.
The Bath General Hospital records spanned many decades, and they
seem to indicate a consistently higher rate of cure and
improvement for palsy from colica pictonum. So again, lead exposure
(35:13):
paralysis than for other conditions such as paralysis from sources
other than lead poisoning. So it's possible that you know,
maybe the Bath General Hospital doctors were using you know,
they could have been doing all kinds of tricks, consciously
or unconsciously to make their treatments look more effective than
they actually were. Maybe they were using selective admission policies
(35:34):
to improve their outcomes, like picking patients to let into
the study that seemed more likely to improve, or maybe
they were just overly positive in assessing outcomes. But if
any of that were the case, why would the numbers
be so much better for patients specifically with lead poisoning
than for all other conditions. Yeah, because it's the numbers
(35:55):
that really Propoin's interest here, Because if you're just talking
nottally about like the number of abandoned crutches that they
have there, it's like, oh, that's not very convincing, because
there are two majorly compelling reasons that a sick person
might abandoned their crutch, and only one of them speaks
to the effectiveness of the treatment. Yes, that's very good
(36:17):
to point out. So again we get a little bit
of extra confidence just by looking at the difference comparing
the different conditions in their outcomes. So again, all this
like it would not prove it to the standard of
a modern randomized controlled trial, But I think there's at
least a solid reason to suspect that SPA therapy at
Bath did have some healing powers for people who couldn't
(36:38):
doff their hats because of lead. And so this was
the paper that initially got me interested in talking about this.
And the paper finally addresses the question that might be
burning in all of your minds, like if this is
the case, if it was actually effective at curing paralysis
from lead toxicity, how does that work? Well, Heywood's paper
(36:59):
here speculates the first thing is the immersion. So a
big component of this treatment at Bath was spending a
lot of time sitting in warm, mineral spring water up
to your neck, and Haywood argues that this in itself
could contribute to the outcomes documented at Bath General Hospital.
And to back this up, Haywood writes about how in
(37:19):
the nineteen seventies some researchers were doing experiments for the
space program for NASA and trying to simulate the effects
of microgravity, and some of these experiments involved having astronauts
sit up to their necks in warm water for a
long time, and Haywood points to a nephrologist named Murray
Epstein who demonstrated in some papers something kind of interesting.
(37:42):
When you sit around in water up to your neck,
it makes you p more. Specifically, not just p more,
but it increases the rate in which you excrete water,
but not just water, also sodium and calcium. Now, why
on earth would that be. This is also not something
that's one hundred percent clear, but there seems to be
(38:03):
a reasonable explanation Haywood offers, which has to do with
water pressure. So like, if your body is sitting down
below the waterline, you've got water pressing in on your
skin from all directions. And when that water pressure is
pressing in on your legs and your abdomen, it causes
that external flesh to kind of push in some blood
(38:25):
and interstitial fluid. More fluids are getting pressed into the
body from the outside, and Haywood writes, quote and this
extracellular fluid moves into blood vessels in the thorax, meaning
the trunk of the body, producing an increase in central
blood volume of about seven hundred milli leads. Now, it's
interesting that this basically comes back to the idea of
(38:48):
purging fluids from your body, which is something that was
long thought or understood to have some sort of roll
in healing the sick right, and in many cases that
might not have done anything. But I wonder if this
means that in the case of lead poisoning, the purges
would actually be helpful anyway. But to continue here, so
(39:21):
Heywood rights. The consequent rise in right and left atrial
pressures is the stimulus that leads to the large increases
in urinary volume and sodium excretion that are observed during
immersion up to the neck. This is because sensory receptors
for blood volume are apparently situated in the right atrium,
so this relative central hyper volemia, the condition of having
(39:45):
extra blood volume extra fluid volume in the body deceives
the body which reacts as though there had been an
increase in total body fluid volume, not just a reallocation
of fluid. So does that make sense that I think
I'm explaining this right? That The simplified version is when
you immerse your body in water, the water squeezes you
(40:07):
and essentially squeezes some of your extra body fluid into
the core of your thorax. It squeezes from the outside,
so the pressure and the core increases, and because the
pressure in the core increases, this tricks your body's blood
volume sensors into thinking the total amount of fluid in
your body has increased, and thus to compensate for this,
it kicks off complex chain reactions in the the renal
(40:30):
system that lead to increased excretion of urine and of
things that get excreted through urine, sodium, and in this
case calcium. Okay, that makes sense, Yeah, but why would
this have anything to do with lead poisoning. Well, Heywood
notes that the human body typically tends to handle lead
(40:50):
and calcium in a similar way. So when there's lead
in your body, the body treats it kind of the
same way it treats calcium. And so if this is
causing increased excretion of calcium through urine, it may also
be causing increased excretion of lead through urine. And in fact,
Haywood was involved in experiments that were set up at
(41:12):
the Immersion Laboratory in the Bristol Royal Infirmatory Informatory Infirmary
to test this hypothesis, and they in fact did find
that urinary lead excretion goes up when the body is immersed.
So they tested this out on experiments with modern lead
workers who were not suffering from symptoms of lead poisoning,
(41:33):
but still had lead levels much higher than the general
population in their blood. These workers were subjected to three
hour sessions of soaking up to their necks in water
that was thirty five degrees celsius or ninety five degrees fahrenheit,
and the experiments found that the immersion did indeed cause
them to pee out higher levels of lead than people
(41:55):
normally do. Oh wow, okay, haywood Wrights quote. The total
amounts excreted during one three hour immersion period are small
compared to the total body lead, which is predominantly tissue bound. Okay,
so not like free in the blood, but bound up
in tissues. Hey, what goes on? However, if these immersions
were continued to the extent described in the bath hospital records, ie,
(42:16):
three times a week for twenty four weeks, an appreciable
proportion of the total body lead would be removed. We
can therefore suggest that this was a mechanism through which
traditional bath spa therapy could have operated. So that's fascinating.
Just sitting immersed in the warm water apparently could help
(42:37):
you get more lead out of the body faster than
you would doing anything else. Yeah, and this, of course
working in congress with not having a whole bunch of
lead flooding into your system through your occupation or other
environmental causes exactly. So you're removed from the original exposure
to lead, you'd have less lead coming in, and you're
(42:59):
increasing the rate at which lead is going out. Okay,
but there's some other amenities to factor in as well though, right,
that's right. So, as I mentioned, you know, the patients
at Bath, in addition to being removed from the source
of lead and having the immersion, they also got good food,
so that may have been a factor. They got gentle exercise,
that may have been a factor as well. So it's
(43:19):
hard to know for sure with historical cases like this
because you know, you can't you're not running the test yourself.
You can't isolate all the variables. You can only deal
with the data we have from history. But in this case,
I think you could totally plausibly make the argument that
the immersion was really doing something for the people with
(43:40):
lead poisoning. It was doing something more than just getting
them away from the original lead exposure. Now, there was
another interesting part of this. That's the immersion, which Haywood
treats is probably the main explanation, Well, what about drinking
the mineral water Again, hopefully not two levels described by
plenty where your rings disappear, but the level generally prescribed
(44:02):
to drink was like one point five to two pints
a day. And Haywood notes that water from the mineral
springs of Bath has elevated levels of calcium and iron,
and citing a study by Mahafee from nineteen seventy three,
Haywood observes that calcium and iron deficiency actually increase the
body's tendency to absorb lead, and calcium and iron deficiency
(44:25):
increase the toxicity of lead that is already present in
the body. And this has been shown to the extent
that calcium and iron supplements have been suggested as partial
treatment for infants with higher than average levels of lead
in the blood. So it's possible that the mineral water
pints that patients at Bath were drinking that was helping
out as well. Yeah, And I mean, on top of that,
(44:48):
if they're if you're having to if you're having to
pe more because of your soakings in the warm waters,
you need to be drinking more water as well, like
you need to stay hydrated and This is something I
saw reflected in some papers. We'll probably discuss in the
next episode that, like, if nothing else, staying hydrated on
clean water like that alone is beneficial for the body,
(45:12):
like you will because if nothing else, you don't want
whatever's going on with your body to be exasperated by
also having some sort of dehydration scenario going on as well. Yes, exactly,
Hydration incredibly important, so that plays a role as well.
Though I want to be clear this is not should
not be taken as a general endorsement of drinking mineral
(45:32):
spring water, which could have all kinds of things in it.
So it seems like in these cases these people were
probably doing all right, but you don't want to be
drinking water from sources you're not sure or safe, right right, right, Yeah,
But if nothing else, like I say, how much I
wonder like on a case that case basis, like how
much of that person's normal liquid intake would have been
(45:53):
confined to like beers for example, versus you know, they're
still having beer, they're having good beer when they go
to bat, but then they're also having a large amount
of water as well in addition to that beer. So
it seems like there would be a net positive there. Yeah,
so I would say in conclusion, while bathing in a
SPA probably does only work via placebo effect on a
(46:16):
number of the conditions we've talked about throughout the series
so far, on the conditions it was used to treat
throughout history. I think this paper makes a very interesting
case that when it came to paralysis from lead poisoning,
spa therapy was genuine medicine. Yeah, it's fascinating, very fascinating.
All right, Well, we're going to go ahead and close
out this episode on that note, but we will be
(46:38):
back in a part four on baths immersion and also
drinking of naturally occurring spring waters, thermal waters, etc. We
still have some other important topics to discuss here, so
come back for that. In the meantime, we'll just remind
you that our core episodes of Stuffed Toable with Your
(46:58):
Mind published on two season Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do
a short form artifact or monster Factor. Mondays would do
listener mail, and we're already getting some great listener mail
in about these bad episodes, by the way, And then
on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time
to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about
a strange film. Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Pauseway.
(47:19):
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(47:39):
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Robert Lamb
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Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.