Behind the Scenes Minis: Bonsai and Flexner

Holly and Tracy talk about the soothing nature of bonsai as well as the places in popular culture it pops up. They also unpack the complex nature of talking about Flexner's legacy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Casual Friday.
I'm Holly Fry. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. One of the
things we talked about this week was the history of Bondsai. Yeah,
it has been on your list for so long it um.

(00:24):
I will also confess to you that um, as part
of doing this episode, you know you get maybe you don't,
you know how I get obsessed with some of the
stuff we briess. I may have reached out to of
bond psai um Nursery so I can get some of
my own to start, just a couple. I'm not gonna

(00:45):
be too foolish. I have that bad problem where I
get interested in something and then I ordered twenty two
of that thing because I'm overenthusiastic. And then I'm like, oh,
this is more than I can handle. I didn't this time. Yeah,
just too bad too. Yeah, I gotta come up with
good names for him. Yeah. I will keep you posted

(01:06):
on their uh their success. I fear I have a
mixed thumb when it comes to gardening in general. Right,
Like I can grow a rose like nobody's business. I
don't know why. It's really just blind luck uh and
I do pretty well with hardy hybiscus, but there are
other plants that just are like goodbye and I can't
save them, and it breaks my heart. So hopefully my

(01:27):
bonds I will survive. Um. I discovered while doing this
episode also like one of the greatest coping mechanisms I
could ever ever envision, which is to go on YouTube
and watch long videos of people clipping their bonds eye

(01:48):
um or like if you see a bondsay master, who
will talk through like how they're caring for that. It's
so soothing. It's the best. I'm not a person that's
great at met it paian Um, I'm not great at
being still I'm not so for me, this is kind
of like a good bridge to that kind of mental

(02:09):
state where I'm just like, I suddenly find myself just
completely enraptured quietly watching these videos for long periods of time.
That's cool. I quite enjoyed it. I feel like I
should also mention the other thing that comes to my
mind every time the subject of Bond's eye comes up,
which is not a good representation of it. There used

(02:32):
to be an animated series called Home Movies, which was
by Lauren Bouchard and UH it starred Brendan Small. Lauren Buchard,
in case you don't know, is the creator of Bob's
Burgers as well and now Central Park, UM, which are
also shows that I love. And there was a character
on Home Movies called Coach McGirk that was voiced by
John Benjamin and he was like this kind of big

(02:54):
train wreck of a soccer coach the Selementary School. But
in one episode, with absolutely no context, one of the
kids goes to his house and it's a very rudimentary
animation style and he's just sitting there with a bunch
of bonds eye trees, cultivating them and it's so out

(03:15):
of character and so completely random for that character to
be doing, and they never explained it. I just loved it. Um.
There was another popular culture thing that came up in
a lot of the discussions that I read both online
and in books about how Bonds I became popularized in

(03:37):
uh in American pop culture. Can you guess what it is?
The Karate Kid. Yes, this is where I confess that
I have never seen any of those movies. Yeah, I
have definitely seen the first one, UM and I I
don't know if I've seen other ones, but I can

(04:00):
visualize a scene of taking care of bonsai, and that
like Karate Kid one, I was just known as the
Karate Kid when it originally came out. There was no
one after it. Obviously. Yes, there were actually a lot
of bonsai apparently those movies, but I having never seen them,
even though I am in exactly the right age range

(04:24):
to have watched them when they came out. I think
that was probably one of those many instances where I
was too um it was too cool for popular culture,
its mainstream for me. I'm gonna go do you know,
start trying to read in Parsterida, which I never really
got very good at. I'm gonna go watch and alue,

(04:44):
you guys watched Karate Kids. So pretentious on my part,
so pretentious, rivaling me for some pretentiousness, but most of
my pretentiousness was like post college. Oh no, I got
that stuff out of the way early, and then I
got to my just free to be stage earlier than
most people. Yeah. Uh yeah, but it's interesting. I have

(05:05):
always loved the concept of bonsai, but admittedly, uh through
that very very uninformed sort of pop culture angle on it.
So as I have gotten older and have done more
reading on plant life and gardening in general and started
to really appreciate just how much effort goes into the

(05:27):
design and creation of these pieces. Um, I realized, one
it's amazing, and two it's something I probably would never
have the focus to achieve. Yeah. Yeah, how that potato
bonds I come out? Yeah, like you, I have mixed
results trying to grow plants of any sort. Um, So

(05:49):
I've never tried anything with with bonds eye specifically, not
even the potato thing, which even as a child, I
was like, I think this misses the point. Yeah. I
feel like my mom, who similarly had sort of a
flighty attention span and would get obsessed with things for

(06:11):
about twelve minutes at a time. I feel like she
purchased one of those like really fakey bonsai from like
a craft store at one point that had like a
lot of things glued into it, and I'm not even
sure if it was alive or not. I think probably
a lot of kids in the US have a similar

(06:33):
experience in terms of their exposure if they're in our
age range to bonsai in like the seventies and eighties.
R One of the things we talked about this week
was Abraham Flexner and the Flextioner Report. Yeah. Yeah, I
was glad when you brought this up, because when you did,
I had just listened to the saw Bones episode UM

(06:53):
that I'd like mentioned in in the podcast, which mentions
that efforts to reform our medical education generally lead to
schools for black students being closed. That, like I said
in the episode, like that episode is really worth listening
to for a different angle on the same topics. Yeah,

(07:14):
it's um. As I said in the episode, it's I
have such a complicated relationship with this material because I
want to support the idea of educational reform. And certainly
there were a lot of really really not high minded
medical schools opening in the US that basically were like
can you write a check, please come in uh, And

(07:36):
those obviously needed to not be operating or not operating
the way they were. But this did create such a
long term ripple effect, uh for the black community that
it's really really um, sort of difficult to still think

(07:56):
like that was a great thing. Um. It's in interesting
to think about how much power that one report had
that like half of the medical schools in the country
had closed within ten years of its publication. Yeah. Um,
that is a lot of a lot of power for
someone who was not from the medical community to have wielded. Yeah.

(08:17):
That's one of the things that was mentioned in the
episode was that because he had an outsider his perspective,
he was able to look at everything without a lot
of preconceptions. Um. And it's like, there's there's truth to that,
but that also means that he didn't have experience. Yeah,
he didn't have contexts. Yeah. Um, it's like it's a
fair point that that medical schools needed to be reformed

(08:41):
and that there wasn't a lot of standardization and stuff
like that, but like like not really comprehending that the
bar was being set that most schools wouldn't be able
to reach. Yeah, it was definitely a part of it,
and that disproportionately the school is not able to reach
that bar. We're going to be the only schools that
were really open to black doctors. Yeah, And it's one

(09:04):
of those things that, um, you know, when you think
about the long term ramifications on the health of black
people in the United States, like this literally was part
of a problem that already existed but only got worse,
where there was not trust in the medical system, and

(09:26):
as a consequence, there have been a lot of people
that do not see a doctor when they need one,
Like there is a just general downgrading of health for
that entire black community that happens as a consequence of
this one report coming out. Um that literally today is

(09:47):
still a problem that we're dealing with. This isn't even
though it is history. It is history that is still
impacting people, whether they realize it or not, um, which
is what makes it so troubling and why the we
need to be very mindful of looking at moments like
this and recognizing like the cause and effect where we're
still in the effect part of something even though we

(10:09):
may consider it settled history. Yeah, for sure, It's still
just kind of baffles me that he thought that, like
any any black person that wanted a medical education could
go to one of two schools, Like he didn't really
think that. I mean, he we mentioned it a little bit,
like he recognized that this was a limitter, but to him,

(10:30):
the tradeoff was that it would just be better to
not have black doctors from those other schools then it
would be to have black doctors. You know what, I mean, like,
to have poorly educated black doctors, in his opinion, was
going to be a much worse problem than having no
black doctors, which is a weird way to look at it. Um,

(10:51):
just like you can't have any help because it's not
excellent help. Again, Ideally, sure, you want everyone who is
looking after people's health to have been excellently educated. But
to say no, no resources are good enough, so you
don't get any resources is a really really big problem. Yeah,
it's it's the perfect being the enemy of the good.

(11:14):
And yes, and he seemed to think that the bolstering
of Howard and Maherry would have some sort of ripple
effect where black education in the medical field would just
get better everywhere, and that subsequent openings of universities would
be at that level. And it's like you're presuming an
awful lot on how this is going to work going forward. Um. Yeah, again,

(11:39):
all the blind spots of Abraham Flexner are a big,
big problem. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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