November 8, 2019 • 11 mins
This is a new feature for the show! On these Friday minisodes, Tracy and Holly will talk in more candid terms about the week's episodes and their research. This first one covers Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins and Dr. Couney's Baby Sideshow.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to a little behind the scenes mini sod of stuff
you miss in History Class. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. This is a little new something that
we're trying. Uh huh, We're gonna be adding it into
(00:23):
our feet on Friday's. One of the things that we
get requests from listeners for a lot of the time
is a little bit more kind of casual insight into
our process or how we feel about shows that we
have worked on. And so every week we're going to
kind of do a little round up, a little five
to ten minute talk about the shows that debuted that week. Yes,
so this week we have two shows. Unusually, they were
(00:46):
both researched and written by me. Often one episode is
my research and one is Holly's research, but just because
of the way the calendar fell, they were both mine
this week. And the first one was about the witch
Finder General, which is not something that I had on
like my long term. It didn't turn out to be
(01:08):
a Halloween episode because it came out in November, but
it's kind of Halloween e and it's theming and it
wasn't on my long term list of things to talk
about in the more October time period. It was something
that earlier in the month I just sort of stumbled across,
possibly while googling the novel The Discovery of Witches by
(01:30):
Deborah Harkness, which it is a totally unrelated thing. One
of the things that struck me while I was working
on this episode. I have joked before if Game of
Thrones were real, and if I had lived in Game
of Thrones, I would have been beheaded in season one. Uh,
And when I was working on this episode, I was
(01:52):
thinking about how if I lived in early modern Europe,
I would be accused of witchcraft, because not only am
I kind of a cranky into my middle years person,
you can sometimes be short with people who rubbed me
the wrong way. Also, I had adopted not one, but
two black cats in the weeks immediately before recording this episode.
(02:14):
UM and cats were viewed very suspiciously, and black cats
especially very very suspiciously. And then on top of that,
we have been um clicker training them and they can
mostly sit on command about eighty percent of the time,
and I think that would have been incredibly frowned upon
by my neighbors. For the record, cats very easy to
(02:36):
click your train. It's just a different deal than with dogs.
Yet I have trained ours to sit on command and
go in their crates on commands so that I don't
have to fight them into crates. Um. They're especially good
right now at recognizing that one of us is intending
to practice sitting, Like if they realize that there are
treats and a clicker in hand, immediate sitting happens. So
(02:59):
I've been trying to kind of sneak up with the sitting.
One of our previous cats, we had taught him several tricks.
We had taught him sit, lie down, and roll over,
and he would get so excited when the treats and
the clicker came out that he would just start cycling
through those tricks over and over, like one of these
is going to be right, and I'd really like to
get a snake right away. Um. One of the things
(03:21):
I wanted to mention about which finder we mentioned it
in the episode, is that it is this weird juxtaposition
of some really terrible stuff, like women were treated very
badly and the handling of this issue was done in
a way that kind of seemed like they wanted to
drum up their own business, which is terrible. But the
flip is that there's a lot of really whimsical and
(03:43):
nutty stuff that is worthy of like the most creative
fantasy novel you could imagine. It gets into that weird
space where you're kind of enjoying it, but you also
feel guilty for enjoying it. Exactly. I had that exact response,
and I also, as I was working on a script,
initially had a lot more quotations from the documentations of
(04:04):
the trials at the time, um because they they were
just so weird and delightful, sometimes in a weird way.
I mean, what they were talking about was horrifying, But
I remember transcribing into the outline and then later deleting it.
This whole testimony somebody had given about how somebody had
nipples in her secret places, but they were not piles,
(04:27):
because I know what piles are, having experience to them myself.
And it just went on and I was like, this
is so weird and funny in a bizarre way and
not funny at all at the same time, because like
they're using this testimony to convict a woman of witchcraft.
Well and moreover, for me, the part that made me
kind of feel like uneasy about it is it really
(04:49):
became this strange, obsessive cataloging of women's bodies. Yeah, which
is a whole other thing that you know, Rob's women
of their agency and is very creepy and strang ange
and also makes the men involved seemed like very a
very twisted version of lascivious. In some cases it's tricky,
But I did come away with a desire to get
(05:10):
a tattoo of Vinegar Tom, Vinegar one of the familiars
we discussed. Yes, as soon as I sent you the
artwork for the episode that had the picture of Vinegar
Tom in it, your immediate response was, now, I have
to get a Vinegar Tom tattoo. I know, I just
gotta figure out where it's going to go. I can't
keep getting tattoos of every show we do yet finding
ideas of things that I want to turn into tattoos.
(05:33):
You know what, I will never want to get a
tattoo of what's that? A baby? No? Uh, that's been
our other show this week. Yes, our other show this
week was on on Dr Cooney's Baby Side Shows, which
is something folks have been asking us to do for
the entire time that we have been on this podcast,
and it comes in waves right like there'll be a
right up on it on the internet somewhere, and we'll
(05:53):
get a lot of requests. A book came out about it,
called The Strange Case of Dr Cooney, UM, which I
was able to like sort of check in a couple
of pages of that book. I wasn't able to get
the book from the library and time to actually use
it as part of the research, but I had plenty
of other resources to draw from. So people have been
asking us to do it for so long, and really
(06:16):
it was just one of those things where I was like,
I've I've had a lot going on. UM, not as
much in the immediate recent path, but several of the
more distressing episodes that we have done this year have
been my research. And we were getting ready to go
on tour, and I was like, I need something that
I can that I can get together before we get
(06:36):
on tour, and this thing that people have been asking
for for so long seems like good material for it. UM.
The thing that struck me while working on this was
when we talk about somebody on this show who had
no medical background and started in a huckster kind of
way trying to sell something with their non medical background. Normally,
(06:59):
at best, what that person was accomplishing was nothing. Right,
when we talk about somebody who was marketing some kind
of cure all or somebody who was positioning themselves as
some kind of healer and they actually had no background
to do any of that, normally, best case scenario is nothing,
and then worst case scenario is a bunch of people die.
(07:20):
So having this episode where Dr Cooney doesn't seem to
have had a medical degree, maybe he did, maybe that
just the records were lost. It doesn't seem that he
was a doctor, though the math doesn't add up on
his medical training. I want to believe that he was
really a doctor, but I don't think that he was.
But he he successfully saved a lot of babies, like
(07:42):
the survival rate and his incubator side shows was way
above what would happen if these babies were just sent
home without any further care. And that that's not a
story that we tell very often on the show. It Normally,
if we're talking about somebody who had no background or
experience doing something like that. The story goes a lot differently. Yeah,
(08:03):
I um, the whole thing is is fascinating in the
not fascinating way to me, because, as I've been very
frank about, I have a phobia about baby I know
to some people that makes me a monster. I just
I'm not a baby's person. So the idea of paying
to look at premature babies is really odd to me.
I'm like, why would you do that? Why wouldn't you
(08:23):
buy some socks instead with that money? But at the
same time, like you have to acknowledge that that was
the thing. I will also say that there is a
title of a book that I had to talk about
in this episode where the word nursling is involved, and
for some reason that just skeemed me out so bad.
I felt bad. I felt bad that you got the
(08:44):
nursling part. I mean, if that's the worst thing that
befalls me today, I really have nothing to complain about.
But it was just one of those things where I
was like, I didn't even fully understand why this gives
me like the creepies here, I am. Um. So we
also back after we talked about Dr Virginia Apgar. At
some point after that when we had a T shirt store,
(09:05):
we had a T shirt design that says look at
the babies, because like that became sort of the theme
of that show about how Virginia Apgar had had been like,
if you will just look at these babies, you will
prevent a lot of problems that are happening with their
medical care. Uh. And for some reason that was just
delightful to me. And so we have this look at
the Baby's shirt in our store, and that look at
(09:26):
the Baby's shirt could also work for this episode. It
could have I ever told you I'm scared to wear
mine because I'm scared someone will show me babies. Oh no,
here's my baby, and I'll be like, no, you've misunderstood horribly.
I don't want to be a monster, but I don't
want to look at your baby. You could do what
I do when I get a shirt. And then I
realized there's something maybe questionable about the shirt, which is
(09:49):
where it to sleep? Oh no, I know, I'm scared
I'll invite some sort of baby energy into my room.
I'll just wake up with babies in my room and
there'll be a ghost baby in your house. Maybe maybe
I'll find somebody who wants it and make sure they
get it. Well, that's good. Um, I think we've kind
of covered some ground on both of our episodes. Next
(10:11):
week we have some more exciting fun things coming up
and we will talk about those next Friday. So hopefully
you have enjoyed this kind of look behind the scenes
that are insights and thoughts into what we work on
on our day to day basis. Uh and UH let
us know if you want us to cover any particular
territory like our research process, or if you have a
question about one of the shows, we could probably involve
(10:32):
some Q and A here if there's time. Ever good.
It's pretty open ended in nebulous, so we have a
little bit of playtime here on Friday's. Yeah, and if
you're wondering, hey, is this going to change something about
the existing episodes that I know and love, that answer
is no, not even a little is complete add on
and nothing nothing that impacts the recording of the regular show.
So we hope you'd enjoyed it. If you would like
(10:54):
to write to us, you can do so at History
Podcast at House of Works dot com. We are also
on every social media as Missed in History, and our
website is Missed in History dot com. You can subscribe
to the show on Apple podcast the I heart Radio app,
or wherever it is you get your podcasts. Stuff you
(11:14):
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to a little behind the scenes mini sod of stuff
you miss in History Class. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. This is a little new something that
we're trying. Uh huh, We're gonna be adding it into
(00:23):
our feet on Friday's. One of the things that we
get requests from listeners for a lot of the time
is a little bit more kind of casual insight into
our process or how we feel about shows that we
have worked on. And so every week we're going to
kind of do a little round up, a little five
to ten minute talk about the shows that debuted that week. Yes,
so this week we have two shows. Unusually, they were
(00:46):
both researched and written by me. Often one episode is
my research and one is Holly's research, but just because
of the way the calendar fell, they were both mine
this week. And the first one was about the witch
Finder General, which is not something that I had on
like my long term. It didn't turn out to be
(01:08):
a Halloween episode because it came out in November, but
it's kind of Halloween e and it's theming and it
wasn't on my long term list of things to talk
about in the more October time period. It was something
that earlier in the month I just sort of stumbled across,
possibly while googling the novel The Discovery of Witches by
(01:30):
Deborah Harkness, which it is a totally unrelated thing. One
of the things that struck me while I was working
on this episode. I have joked before if Game of
Thrones were real, and if I had lived in Game
of Thrones, I would have been beheaded in season one. Uh,
And when I was working on this episode, I was
(01:52):
thinking about how if I lived in early modern Europe,
I would be accused of witchcraft, because not only am
I kind of a cranky into my middle years person,
you can sometimes be short with people who rubbed me
the wrong way. Also, I had adopted not one, but
two black cats in the weeks immediately before recording this episode.
(02:14):
UM and cats were viewed very suspiciously, and black cats
especially very very suspiciously. And then on top of that,
we have been um clicker training them and they can
mostly sit on command about eighty percent of the time,
and I think that would have been incredibly frowned upon
by my neighbors. For the record, cats very easy to
(02:36):
click your train. It's just a different deal than with dogs.
Yet I have trained ours to sit on command and
go in their crates on commands so that I don't
have to fight them into crates. Um. They're especially good
right now at recognizing that one of us is intending
to practice sitting, Like if they realize that there are
treats and a clicker in hand, immediate sitting happens. So
(02:59):
I've been trying to kind of sneak up with the sitting.
One of our previous cats, we had taught him several tricks.
We had taught him sit, lie down, and roll over,
and he would get so excited when the treats and
the clicker came out that he would just start cycling
through those tricks over and over, like one of these
is going to be right, and I'd really like to
get a snake right away. Um. One of the things
(03:21):
I wanted to mention about which finder we mentioned it
in the episode, is that it is this weird juxtaposition
of some really terrible stuff, like women were treated very
badly and the handling of this issue was done in
a way that kind of seemed like they wanted to
drum up their own business, which is terrible. But the
flip is that there's a lot of really whimsical and
(03:43):
nutty stuff that is worthy of like the most creative
fantasy novel you could imagine. It gets into that weird
space where you're kind of enjoying it, but you also
feel guilty for enjoying it. Exactly. I had that exact response,
and I also, as I was working on a script,
initially had a lot more quotations from the documentations of
(04:04):
the trials at the time, um because they they were
just so weird and delightful, sometimes in a weird way.
I mean, what they were talking about was horrifying, But
I remember transcribing into the outline and then later deleting it.
This whole testimony somebody had given about how somebody had
nipples in her secret places, but they were not piles,
(04:27):
because I know what piles are, having experience to them myself.
And it just went on and I was like, this
is so weird and funny in a bizarre way and
not funny at all at the same time, because like
they're using this testimony to convict a woman of witchcraft.
Well and moreover, for me, the part that made me
kind of feel like uneasy about it is it really
(04:49):
became this strange, obsessive cataloging of women's bodies. Yeah, which
is a whole other thing that you know, Rob's women
of their agency and is very creepy and strang ange
and also makes the men involved seemed like very a
very twisted version of lascivious. In some cases it's tricky,
But I did come away with a desire to get
(05:10):
a tattoo of Vinegar Tom, Vinegar one of the familiars
we discussed. Yes, as soon as I sent you the
artwork for the episode that had the picture of Vinegar
Tom in it, your immediate response was, now, I have
to get a Vinegar Tom tattoo. I know, I just
gotta figure out where it's going to go. I can't
keep getting tattoos of every show we do yet finding
ideas of things that I want to turn into tattoos.
(05:33):
You know what, I will never want to get a
tattoo of what's that? A baby? No? Uh, that's been
our other show this week. Yes, our other show this
week was on on Dr Cooney's Baby Side Shows, which
is something folks have been asking us to do for
the entire time that we have been on this podcast,
and it comes in waves right like there'll be a
right up on it on the internet somewhere, and we'll
(05:53):
get a lot of requests. A book came out about it,
called The Strange Case of Dr Cooney, UM, which I
was able to like sort of check in a couple
of pages of that book. I wasn't able to get
the book from the library and time to actually use
it as part of the research, but I had plenty
of other resources to draw from. So people have been
asking us to do it for so long, and really
(06:16):
it was just one of those things where I was like,
I've I've had a lot going on. UM, not as
much in the immediate recent path, but several of the
more distressing episodes that we have done this year have
been my research. And we were getting ready to go
on tour, and I was like, I need something that
I can that I can get together before we get
(06:36):
on tour, and this thing that people have been asking
for for so long seems like good material for it. UM.
The thing that struck me while working on this was
when we talk about somebody on this show who had
no medical background and started in a huckster kind of
way trying to sell something with their non medical background. Normally,
(06:59):
at best, what that person was accomplishing was nothing. Right,
when we talk about somebody who was marketing some kind
of cure all or somebody who was positioning themselves as
some kind of healer and they actually had no background
to do any of that, normally, best case scenario is nothing,
and then worst case scenario is a bunch of people die.
(07:20):
So having this episode where Dr Cooney doesn't seem to
have had a medical degree, maybe he did, maybe that
just the records were lost. It doesn't seem that he
was a doctor, though the math doesn't add up on
his medical training. I want to believe that he was
really a doctor, but I don't think that he was.
But he he successfully saved a lot of babies, like
(07:42):
the survival rate and his incubator side shows was way
above what would happen if these babies were just sent
home without any further care. And that that's not a
story that we tell very often on the show. It Normally,
if we're talking about somebody who had no background or
experience doing something like that. The story goes a lot differently. Yeah,
(08:03):
I um, the whole thing is is fascinating in the
not fascinating way to me, because, as I've been very
frank about, I have a phobia about baby I know
to some people that makes me a monster. I just
I'm not a baby's person. So the idea of paying
to look at premature babies is really odd to me.
I'm like, why would you do that? Why wouldn't you
(08:23):
buy some socks instead with that money? But at the
same time, like you have to acknowledge that that was
the thing. I will also say that there is a
title of a book that I had to talk about
in this episode where the word nursling is involved, and
for some reason that just skeemed me out so bad.
I felt bad. I felt bad that you got the
(08:44):
nursling part. I mean, if that's the worst thing that
befalls me today, I really have nothing to complain about.
But it was just one of those things where I
was like, I didn't even fully understand why this gives
me like the creepies here, I am. Um. So we
also back after we talked about Dr Virginia Apgar. At
some point after that when we had a T shirt store,
(09:05):
we had a T shirt design that says look at
the babies, because like that became sort of the theme
of that show about how Virginia Apgar had had been like,
if you will just look at these babies, you will
prevent a lot of problems that are happening with their
medical care. Uh. And for some reason that was just
delightful to me. And so we have this look at
the Baby's shirt in our store, and that look at
(09:26):
the Baby's shirt could also work for this episode. It
could have I ever told you I'm scared to wear
mine because I'm scared someone will show me babies. Oh no,
here's my baby, and I'll be like, no, you've misunderstood horribly.
I don't want to be a monster, but I don't
want to look at your baby. You could do what
I do when I get a shirt. And then I
realized there's something maybe questionable about the shirt, which is
(09:49):
where it to sleep? Oh no, I know, I'm scared
I'll invite some sort of baby energy into my room.
I'll just wake up with babies in my room and
there'll be a ghost baby in your house. Maybe maybe
I'll find somebody who wants it and make sure they
get it. Well, that's good. Um, I think we've kind
of covered some ground on both of our episodes. Next
(10:11):
week we have some more exciting fun things coming up
and we will talk about those next Friday. So hopefully
you have enjoyed this kind of look behind the scenes
that are insights and thoughts into what we work on
on our day to day basis. Uh and UH let
us know if you want us to cover any particular
territory like our research process, or if you have a
question about one of the shows, we could probably involve
(10:32):
some Q and A here if there's time. Ever good.
It's pretty open ended in nebulous, so we have a
little bit of playtime here on Friday's. Yeah, and if
you're wondering, hey, is this going to change something about
the existing episodes that I know and love, that answer
is no, not even a little is complete add on
and nothing nothing that impacts the recording of the regular show.
So we hope you'd enjoyed it. If you would like
(10:54):
to write to us, you can do so at History
Podcast at House of Works dot com. We are also
on every social media as Missed in History, and our
website is Missed in History dot com. You can subscribe
to the show on Apple podcast the I heart Radio app,
or wherever it is you get your podcasts. Stuff you
(11:14):
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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