Adolf Lorenz, the Bloodless Surgeon

Lorenz is credited with developing treatments that addressed pediatric orthopedic problems. During his lifetime, he was both celebrated and protested within the medical community. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. And today's
topic is a topic that actually came up because of
another show. Uh, one of the episodes on the current

(00:24):
season of Criminalia to the different show that I do. Uh,
we are covering impostors this season, and there was a
topic an impostor whose story made mention of Adolph Lawrence,
the Bloodless Surgeon of Vienna, and I was instantly curious
about that, and it was not really Germaine to explore
in that episode, so that popped over here. So we're

(00:47):
gonna talk a little bit about the incident that connected
Dr Lawrence to a fake doctor. But really his life
story is plenty compelling even without that odd little detail,
including lots of s rises, like you know, some protests
to him within his industry, his his life story, how

(01:08):
he was received and perceived by people. Uh, it's a
good one, so we'll jump right in. Adolf Lawrenz was
born on April eighteen fifty four and wide Nose, Silesia,
which is today vid Nava, part of the Czech Republic
at the time, though it was sat within the Austrian Empire,
this was not a wealthy family. Adolf's father, Johann Lorenz,

(01:31):
worked as a saddler and as an innkeeper. His mother
was Agnes Erlick Lawrenz, and after elementary school, Adolf moved
south to the city of Graz to live with his
uncle from his mother's side, and he also, as part
of that move, started an apprenticeship as a shopkeeper in
a general store. He didn't really like that very much,

(01:51):
uh And while his life's work became medicine, in some ways,
he got there because as a child he was a
decent singer. As a young bull way, his vocal talent
led him to be chosen as a member of the
boys choir of St. Paul Benedictine Monastery in Corinthia, Austria,
and that meant that he could attend school there for free.
He did not have to pay a fee for it,

(02:13):
and it was through this move that he was able
to gain really a strong enough foundation of early education
that he could then go on to higher education. When
Lawrenz was sixteen, he moved from the monastery at Corinthia
to high school in Klagenfurt, near austria southern border. During
this time he brought in money by working as a
tutor for students from wealthy families. He really barely got

(02:37):
by financially, but when he finished at the age of
twenty he started his formal medical training. He moved to
Vienna for that, and this was an area where Adolf
Lawrence showed promise from just the very beginning. While still
a student, he was offered the chance to take a
job as an anatomy instructor because he demonstrated such a

(02:58):
thorough knowledge of this object. This really helped keep him
afloat financially while he worked towards the bigger goal of
wanting to become a surgeon. Yeah, I read some accounts
that say like he got so skilled in the subject
of anatomy because that was one of the things he
was tutoring students at in his his prior school. Lorenz

(03:18):
graduated from medical school in eighteen eighty at the age
of twenty six, and he got a job as an
assistant to an orthopedic surgeon named Johann von dune Rocker
at the Rudolphin her House Hospital in Vienna. Dune Rocker
died not long after Lorenz began working with him, and
he was replaced by Eduard Albert, who kept Adolph on
as his assistant. But as Lorenz became more and more

(03:40):
indispensable to Albert, a problem began to emerge. At this
time in history, carbolic acid was routinely used during surgeries
because of its effectiveness in killing bacteria, and it turned
out that Lorenz was allergic to it. He developed severe
dermatitis any time he was in contact with it. Ed
wired out there didn't want his promising assistant to abandon

(04:04):
medicine altogether because of this problem, so he asked him, quote,
if you cannot get along with wet surgery, why not
try dry surgery? And this is the genesis point of
what would eventually be called bloodless surgery by Lorenz. So
we should note here the term bloodless surgery has a
very different meaning today than what we're talking about here.

(04:25):
If you google it, you will find very different things today.
Bloodless surgery is an approach to surgical procedures that uses
no transfusions of blood from a donor source. But for Lorenz,
that term was used in a sense of no blood
being drawn. He did not make incisions in his patients,
so the work that he did would be more accurately

(04:46):
described in today's terms as orthopedic manipulation is carefully moving
and shifting a patient skeletal structure to correct problems and
improve their mobility. And this was a really very new
area of medicine in the eighteen hundreds, and Lorenz, with
his masterful understanding of anatomy, was really drawn to it.

(05:10):
Early on in his career, Larenz started working primarily with children.
He developed treatments that used a series of plaster casts
to correct pediatric orthopedic problems. As his patients grew over
several years, he developed treatments for several congenital conditions, including scoliosis,
hip dislocation, and club foot, and soon Larenz began publishing

(05:31):
books about his work, a detailing, for example, the various
mechanical means that he used to correct scoliosis and treating
club Lorenz developed a system that stretched the patient's tendons
and ligaments over time and then put the affected leg
in a final stage leg cast and it stayed there
until it was healed in the proper position. But it

(05:54):
was really hip dislocation that became his specialty. So this
is a situation where during fetal development, the hip joint
doesn't form as it should. It's not aligned properly, and
that creates an instability in the joint that worsens as
the child grows. You'll also see this referred to as
developmental displayia and Dr Lorenz's approach was, as with his

(06:16):
other treatments, all about slowly forcing the head of the
femur into its proper position using a series of casts
along with traction and surgical manipulation. Again no incisions. One
contemporary description of the Lorenz method for treating congenital hip
displacement describes the first stage as one where the child

(06:38):
is placed under anesthesia and the operator manipulates the leg
to stretch and sometimes even tear the muscles of the
legs so that they're not pulling on the femur. Next,
the operator manipulates and shifts the femur until it quote
drops into the socket. Then quote to prevent relocation, the

(06:58):
leg is drawn outside ways to an angle of ninety
degrees and is held in this position by a plaster cast.
After a brief period of recovery, the child would be
encouraged to use the leg as part of recovering. Although
there wasn't anticipated six months to two year period of
being in a cast, Lorenz estimated the success rate with

(07:22):
this is about sixty. That seems low to me, but
but uh, you know, my knowledge of orthopedic procedures is nil. So.
In eighteen eighty four, Lorenz got married to a woman
named Emma Lecker, and their wedding took place on October
five of that year. Eleven months later, the couple had

(07:42):
a son, Albert, on September two, eighteen eighty five. Albert
would eventually follow his father into orthopedics, and then much
later in nineteen o three, Adolph and Emma had a
second son, Conrad, who went into the animal behavior field.
In eighteen eighty nine, Lorenz was granted a special professor
a position at the University of Vienna so he could

(08:03):
share his methods with the medical students there. He taught
his approach to the students and researchers and other doctors.
Among his colleagues in Austria, he gained the nickname Gibbs
doesn't or plaster teacher. Yeah, that's one of those things
that people often note, like, hey, that sounds almost kind
of like uh an insult, but he didn't really seem

(08:25):
to mind. According to Lorenz, he was asked to consult
in the case of young King Alfonso the thirteenth of Spain.
Alfonso had been born a king, his father had died
not long before he was born, and his mother, Maria Christina,
who was serving as regent, was Austrian. So she reached
out to the Austrian doctor, who was already seen, if something,
as a miracle worker, to treat her son, who was

(08:48):
reportedly just generally sort of weak after a childhood about
with the flu during the pandemic. He did, of course,
you know, after treatment, continue to live in rule. So
asumably things went well. In the late eighteen nineties and
early nineteen hundreds, things were very busy for Adolph. He
published his book on the Healing of Congenital hip Dislocation

(09:10):
in eighteen nineties. Six that year he also became an
advisor to the Austrian government. In nineteen o one, he
co founded the German Orthopedic Society. He gave numerous lectures
at medical conferences explaining his techniques, and then he started
traveling the world to meet demand for his treatments. In
just a moment. We're going to talk about the wealthy

(09:31):
patient whose treatment rocketed Lorenz onto the public stage. But
first we're going to pause and have a little sponsor break.
By nineteen o two, Adolf Lorenz's reputation was so well
established that he was requested to travel to Chicago by

(09:52):
the wealthy Armor family to treat Lolita Armor. That is,
incidentally the same Armor family name you have likely seen
in your local grocery store because they made their fortune
in meatpacking. Lolita had congenital hip dislocation, and Dr Lawrenz
treated one of her hips. She had already had surgery
on them performed by a doctor named John Ridland, and

(10:14):
while that first surgery was initially reported as a success,
before long one of her hips was displaced again, and
that was when her parents reached out to Dr Larenz.
The arrival of a doctor from Europe intending to practice
medicine in the US got the attention of the Illinois
Board of Health. That board insisted that he needed to

(10:34):
be licensed in the state before he treated anyone. There
were both supporters and detractors for this, and plenty of
Lorenz supporters saw it as an insult to the man
in his work, but Dr Lawrenz didn't seem to mind
and consented to take the State Board exam, which he passed. Yeah,
that's an issue that comes up again. Leader. The Chicago

(10:55):
Tribune ran a lengthy article shortly after the procedure in
which Lorenz described the whole thing of that that first
initial treatment in detail. He told the Tribune quote, it
required about two hours to perform the operation. The right
leg was drawn down until the end of the femur
reached the socket where it could rest. Then I turned

(11:16):
the limb out at right angles and applied to heavy dressing.
Over this was placed a thick plaster of Paris cast,
which will hold it in place until spring. The cast
is so placed that it will allow free movement of
the knee, so that it will be possible for the
little girl to walk after two or three weeks. She
will be able to sit up in a few days
and will not suffer much at any time. It was

(11:38):
reported in the papers that Lorenz received a whopping seventy
five thousand dollars for treating six year old Lolita Armor,
but also in his time in Chicago, he visited numerous
hospital wards to consult and treat patients for free. This
was something that he did any time he was in
the States throughout his life. After World War One, he

(11:59):
told the press he would always do it because the
US had helped the children of Austria with food and
supplies during the conflict. This treatment of the beloved child
of one of the richest families in the United States
came with a significant amount of media attention. I mean
this was like a headline event in a lot of
papers after his work with Lolita. When he was expected

(12:20):
to visit a city, there were always multiple write ups
in the local press about it, and as a consequence,
lines of people would form outside of any hospital he
was expected to visit to give these free clinics made
up of parents just hoping that he could offer their
child a little bit of hope and possibly some treatment.
When he moved on to Baltimore after Chicago to see patients,

(12:43):
their interest was so great among other medical practitioners that
one of his bloodless surgeries had to become a ticketed
event just to try to manage the crowd that wanted
to observe it. Didn't charge money for these tickets, but
it was basically like if you didn't get a ticket,
you cannot come in. While he was in the DC area,
he was also invited to meet President Theodore Roosevelt, so

(13:04):
that gives you a sense of just how big a
name he was at this point. But there were also
plenty of doctors who were really flummixed by all the
media attention around this doctor who was doing things. They
didn't feel like we're groundbreaking at that point. And the
Literary Digest in nineteen o two an article was included
titled the Significance of Doctor Lorenz's Visit that quotes from

(13:27):
another article in The Independent. According to that right up quote,
Professor Lorenz does not come to teach our American orthopedic
surgeons are specialists in the treatment of deformed children, something
they did not know before. Lorenz's operation has been practiced
in this country for almost, if not quite a decade
of years, and some of the best results attained by

(13:51):
the use of the method invented by the Vienna professor
have been exported from America. The point made in this
writing is that the significance that was referenced in the
title of the article was really that the press around
Lorenz's work meant that a larger number of people in
the US knew about that work and they might seek treatment,

(14:13):
not suggesting that the significance was that it was really
all that new. No, they did credit him for really
pioneering some treatments, but they were like, yeah, but we've
all been doing it for a while at this boy um.
And it was one of those things where for a
lot of families, particularly families that did not have a

(14:33):
whole lot of income, there was kind of an expectation
prior to this that if you had a child that
had an orthopedic problem, you kind of taught them to
live with it lot brether than getting it treated, and
that this shifted that idea a little bit. Lorenz was
asked to visit other cities when he returned to the
US in nineteen o three for his follow up care
with Lolita Armor. He was invited to speak at the

(14:55):
American Medical Association's annual meeting in New Orleans in three
and he up did that. He also visited Dallas, Texas
right after that appearance, and that visit is credited with
inspiring the construction of what would become the Baylor Medical Center.
That press and the popularity that Lorenz had gained in
the US came with some problems. Many members of the

(15:17):
medical community in the US thought that Lorenz and showing
up and only seeing patients briefly was really creating more
problems than he solved. Right. Remember, these are long term treatments.
They're not super quick, so it's like you're giving them hope,
but you can't really do the follow through if you
then go back to Vienna. Almost twenty years after he

(15:38):
had been called to Chicago to treat Lolita Armor, and
having returned to North America repeatedly to see sometimes hundreds
of patients a day at any hospital he visited, he
was once again planning a trip to the US in
one when a public statement was issued by a group
of Chicago doctors who thought that Lorenz should not be
allowed to practice medicine in their facility. In an article

(16:01):
covering this Chicago uproar, the New York Times listed St.
Luke's Presbyterian Hospital, Children's Memorial, and the Home for Destitute
Crippled Children among those hospitals that were very adamant in
their stance that Dr Lorenz was not welcome there. This statement,
made by the Collective of Orthopedic Surgeons which honestly, like

(16:23):
the name of the hospital that we just read, contained
some very outdated language that's offensive by today's standards. That
statement reads, quote the proposed visit of Dr Lorenz will
accomplish more harm than good, and we are opposed to
any plan by which countless numbers of cripples will have
their hopes raised to the skies, only to have them

(16:44):
blasted when they find they have been misled. His visit
will serve only to make every cripple in America dissatisfied
and disappointed. Some would be disappointed because they were unable
to reach the quote miracle man, others because he would
not be able to treat them. As a matter of fact,
all those who came in contact after he left with

(17:05):
the many cases which Professor Lawrenz operated upon during his
former visit, saw many results they were glad they were
not responsible for, and for which they felt Professor Lawrenz
would have been heartily ashamed could he have stayed in
the country to take care of them. At the end
of the statement, the group affirms that Lawrence's presence is

(17:28):
an insult to the orthopedists already working in Chicago, that
he can't do anything they can't do themselves, and that
they will not give follow up treatment to any patient
he treats. Yeah, it's an interesting thing because on the
one hand they're saying he's doing things that are hurting people,
and then they also say those are the same exact

(17:49):
things we're already doing, and so it's a little like,
wait a minute, there's some you're contradicting yourself a little
bit there. Um. The controversy around Lawrence's night teen t
one trip to the US continued, and when Lolita Armour's
case was brought into the discussion as not having been
the success that it was touted as in the early

(18:09):
nineteen hundreds, it was the Armor Heiress herself, at this point,
an adult married woman, who came to his defense. She said, quote,
I cannot say that a perfect cure has been affected
in either hip, but the hip treated by Dr Lorenz
is far better than the other one, which he could
do little with because it had been too badly mishandled.
He said, I myself believe that had it not been

(18:31):
for the work done before he was called on my case,
he would have effected a complete cure. She also gave
the statement to a paper quote Dr Lorenz is undoubtedly
a much better orthopedic surgeon than any we have in
this country. He proved that when he cured me after
all others here failed. Lorenz's problems with access to US

(18:52):
medical facilities continued well beyond Chicago. When he was invited
to visit various New York clinics by Health commission or
Royal s Copeland. The staff members at several hospitals protested.
There was also a statement from the State Board of
Education making clear that Lorenz was not licensed in New
York and warning him not to perform any surgeries. On

(19:16):
top of that controversy, news broke on December three that
the assistant who had been helping Dr Lorenz in New
York was not a doctor assigned to him by the
Health Commissioner as he had claimed to be, but was
in fact a man with no medical credential simply posing
as a doctor. That man was Stephen Weinberg, who was
a serial impostor. This is the story we referenced at

(19:39):
the top of the show, and in the case of
Dr Lorenz, he had met Lorenz's ship at the dock
when it arrived, and he introduced himself to Lorenz as
Dr Clifford Wayman, who was sent to assist the visiting
orthopedist and in his guide Weinberg was accepted at his word,
but to be clear, uh he wasn't performing any medical
procedures or therapies in this room. He was basically handling

(20:01):
administrative needs for Lawrenz, such as managing appointments and taking
notes during meetings. This ruse lasted a week before an
anonymous tip was called into the hospital where Lawrence was working,
and the impostor was quickly replaced with a more appropriate assistant.
But this whole thing was more bad press for Lorenz,
which did not help his situation. The protests eventually led

(20:23):
the City Health Department to rule on December tenth that
Dr Lawrence could not perform any of his surgeries himself
in New York, but could direct other doctors in what
to do, and they could do it and remain within
the letter of the law. He was notified of this
and sent the forms he would need to fill out

(20:44):
to apply for his license. The New York State Board
of Regents, who supported Lawrence's work, accelerated the process and
issued him a special license to address the matter. As
a consequence, Lawrence did perform and estimated twenty orthopedic surgery
is in his visit to New York and saw more
than two thousand other patients. Throughout his years of visiting

(21:06):
the US, crowds had continued to gather in the hope
of getting treatment from him during his charity clinics. Yeah,
there are press photos and even some early newsreels of
literally just crowds outside of hospitals waiting for him to
arrive and hoping that they can get their child and
to see him. Lawrence never lacked for supporters, even when

(21:28):
protests against him within the medical community were at their height.
On January two, two so just a month after all
of that hubbub, the New York Daily News ran a
short piece that was titled better Late than Never, and
that piece opened with quote at alf Laurenz, Viennese surgeon,
has been granted a license to practice in the state

(21:48):
of New York. Thus, after weeks of delay, the state
Board of Regents has started to make amends to a
man who came to the American people in altruism and
who was paid in abuse. He in behind the adverse
criticism was professional jealousy. Adolph Larenz suffered his name and
pictures to occupy countless newspaper front pages. It isn't done

(22:10):
in the American medical profession. It isn't ethical. We're going
to talk about a questionable surgery that Dr Lorenz had
to try to treat his lagging energy, but we will
pause for a minute first to hear from the sponsors
that keep stuffy miss in history class going in. Dr

(22:35):
Lorenz made headlines not as a medical practitioner but as
a patient when he had a quote rejuvenation surgery that
was performed by Dr Eugene Steinoch, also a Vienna, and
this surgery followed a period in which Lorenz had collapsed
from exhaustion several times while visiting hospitals in the US.
But the Steinoch procedure, which was touted as a means

(22:57):
for aging men to regain their useful and g and vitality,
it was really just a partial vas ectomy. Steinach, who
had plenty of problematic ideas about sexual health and gender
identity and de aging treatments, believed that his procedure would
cause the body to be flooded with hormones and result
in increased energy. This procedure was a fad for a time,

(23:20):
but it was of course eventually discredited. As for Lorenz,
he always spoke very highly of the results and how
much better he felt after having the surgery, but the
reality was that this had been done as a secondary
procedure that he had while also undergoing prostate surgery. So
it's very likely that his improvement was really the result
of having a more serious issue addressed. This is one

(23:41):
of those things that kind of gets talked about because
it involves I imagine personal things, and also because people
don't understand it in these very sort of hazy, cloaked references,
and I think nobody really understood what was being done
in the general press, uh, And so it is one
of those things of like, oh, this surgery fixed everything
for him. They didn't really understand what was done or

(24:03):
what else he was having done. At the same time.
The year after the rejuvenation surgery at alf Lawrenz retired
from active practice, but he kept visiting the US regularly
for the next thirteen years to consult with doctors and patients,
primarily in New York. In the early nineteen thirties, Lorenz
was asked by the press to weigh in on whether
paralysis would negatively impact a person's ability to lead. This

(24:28):
is part of an effort to create a commentary on
the health of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When asked about it, Lorenz,
who was speaking specifically about infantile paralysis, stated quote, this
disease does not in the least affect mental qualities. It
has absolutely nothing to do with the brain. A person
stricken may get crooked limbs, but we'll never get a

(24:49):
crooked brain. The person who has had infantile paralysis could
never be your run champion, but he could be king, emperor, president, executive,
or what ever else needs like qualifications. Lawrenz cited the
thousands of patients he had seen in his fifty plus
years of practice who had some level of paralysis, none

(25:10):
of which appeared to him to be mentally affected. He
also worked on his autobiography during this time, which was
published in nineteen thirty six and was titled My Life
and Work. And this book got pretty mixed reviews. Most
write ups about it note that it comes off as
really self aggrandizing. Fellow orthopedes Dr Frank D. Dixon wrote

(25:31):
a review of Lorenz's autobiography in the October ninety six
issue of the American Journal of Public Health, and that
review reads, in part quote, the revealing side of the
book lies in its frank egoism and egotism. That Dr
Lorenz gave himself undue supremacy in his thoughts is evident
from the very beginning of the book. That he gave

(25:52):
himself undue prominence in speech becomes a conviction as the
last words read. That Dr Lorenz contributed greatly to the
advancement of orthopedic surgery is unquestioned. That he was a superman,
accomplishing cures that were beyond the skill of others is
open to debate. Yet his words can leave no other
impression than that he felt that he stood out above

(26:14):
all others of his guild. Dr Lorenz died on February
twel at the age of ninety one in Altenburg, Austria,
which is northwest of Vienna, and a lot of the
treatments that Lorenz developed have been refined, of course, significantly
over the years, but a lot of them still often
resemble Dr Lorenz's approach. The most common treatment for club

(26:36):
foot in babies is still a series of casts to
correct the position of the leg and foot as the
child grows. Scoliosis has a wide range of treatments now,
depending on the severity of a patient's condition and their age,
from spinal bracing to surgical procedures, and congenital hip dislocation
is treated in a variety of ways today, from a
soft splint known as a pavlic harness in infants to

(26:58):
full surgeries. I know we touched on this earlier, but
it just made me think about how also there was
a common treatment for scoliosis which was to do nothing,
which I am pretty sure was the course of action
for my grandmother. Lots of people never got treated, rehemming
all of her skirts because they were an inch too

(27:19):
long on one side, because her hips were uneven. Like, Yeah,
that was the level of attention paying to that. So Lorenz,
as we've discussed, UH drew criticism as well as praise
during his lifetime, and even today it becomes difficult to
grapple with some of the things that he said over
the years. One of the most difficult and one which

(27:40):
is often left out of discussions of his life is
his really ablest views on children who were born with
all kinds of medical challenges In his book My Life
and Work, he asserts that it's better for children with
some conditions to die than to live in quote untold
misery and suffering. He also stated and while visiting New
York in late ninety five, that two members of his family,

(28:04):
a daughter in law and an uncle, who were quote
incurably diseased, had been given excessive narcotics to hasten their
deaths as a form of mercy killing, and during that
same interview he said he believed that every physician has
probably been a mercy killer, and that he would want
the same for himself. In contrast to those controversial and

(28:26):
troubling ideas, Lawrence also had some strong feelings about quality
of life that are far less problematic and actually fairly insightful.
He believed that the quote American way of life as
he witnessed it evolving in the early twentieth century was
at its core unhealthy. In nine six, he gave an
interview in which he expressed a belief that the pursuit

(28:49):
of prosperity that was driving culture in the United States
was only going to make life worse for most people.
He noted that while at home in Austria prior to
World War One. He was considered well off and successful,
though not rich by US standards, but he lost his
small fortune in World War One and was able to

(29:09):
continue on with his life without much anxiety because he
felt his greatest assets were his health and his ability
to find happiness, not his finances. Some of his words
on this topic were laid out graphically, almost as though
it were a poem, as the lead into an article
in the Miami Herald in February, and it reads, in
part quote, you live too swiftly, and you're ever increasing

(29:32):
pace kills and is killing you. Your great fault, as
I see it, is the tendency to overdo more and more.
You make life a fit, full fever. You regard life
as a race course along which you must tear at
heart straining speed. You refuse to stroll in its happy
veils or to tarry in its peaceful gardens. You're almost

(29:52):
hysterical mode of living, maybe productive of financial results, but
you will pay a penalty in nerve racked bodies and
shortened lives if you would be healthy and happy and
live your allotted span. You must practice moderation in all things.
You rush through your work, you rush through your play.
You rush through your meals, you rush through romance, and
you rush to your graves. In the last decades of

(30:15):
his life, Adolf Lawrenz was nominated for a Nobel Prize
in Medicine eight times. He never won, though his younger
son Conrad did with the Nobel Prize in Physiology and
Medicine for his work in animal behavior in nineteen seventy three.
There's always secret horror that is always the lesson. Definitely.

(30:39):
Uh yeah, do you have listener mail for us? Yes? Uh,
this is um also medical sort of hearkening back to
our our episode on John Dalton. Uh. It is from
our listener Erica, who says I really enjoyed your episode
on John Dalton, and especially Holly's note of learning that

(31:00):
her dad had anomalous color vision very late in life.
It reminds me of a friend of mine. We were
at a weekend gathering and someone had brought a bag
of wasabi dried peas which were brownish red or brownish green.
We were all debating whether there was a difference in
the spice levels between the two. When my friend walked
in and we asked his opinion. He ate a green
one and gave it a thumbs up, and then we

(31:20):
asked him to try a red one, and he laughed
like we had told a joke. A bit confused, we
asked him again. He chuckled again, but with far less certainty,
and after one more round, it came out that he
thought we were messing with him, and that they were
all the same color. Said friend was at the time
of this story, a thirtysomething engineered a big software company.
An immigrant to the country, he was married. He had

(31:42):
generally lived in the world a great deal, and he
discovered his own anomalous vision by way of a party snack. Uh. Incidentally,
his wife came in shortly after, and upon hearing this story,
laughed and said, well, that explains some things. Thank you
so much for the podcast. I'm not keeping up as
well as I did pre pandemic as my commute is
no more. Don't worry. We all have falloffs. There's nothing

(32:03):
to apologize for me too, honestly. Yeah, but I do
enjoy listening to it while running and have turned my
mom onto it as well. Best Erica. Thank you so much, Erica,
And like I said, nobody ever apologized for falling behind.
Time is finite and whatever you need to do to
make the most of yours is great. Do that? Yes, yeah.

(32:25):
I Also my podcast listening fell off because it was
normally what I would have playing while I would walk
to the grocery store or the library or you know,
the pharmacy or whatever, and um, during the pandemic, those
walks greatly reduced. Right, none of us were transiting in
any manner quite as much. But we thank you so much,

(32:47):
Erica Good. It's always there to go back to. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History Podcast at I heart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media as Missed
in History. Yeah. If you have yet subscribe to the
podcast and think that sounds like something you'd like to do,
it is easiest pie. You can do it on the
I heart Radio app or anywhere else you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is

(33:15):
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.