Mary Winston Jackson, NASA Engineer

Jackson is most well known as the first black woman to become an engineer at NASA. But she also worked to clear the way for other underrepresented people at NASA, in particular black women.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Folks that
have seen the movie Hidden Figures or read Margot Lee
Shutterley's book by the same title will probably recognize the

(00:24):
name Mary Jackson. She was the first black woman to
become an engineer at NASA, and she's been on my
list for an episode for a while. We have a
collection about women in stem fields, but we haven't talked
specifically about a woman engineer, and she really hasn't gotten
as much recognition as some of the other women who
are featured in Hidden Figures, such as Catherine Johnson, who

(00:46):
calculated the trajectory for the United States first human space
flight and celebrated her hundredth birthday in August. But I
didn't realize until I got into this episode just how
much Mary Jackson also to clear the way for other
underrepresented people at NASA. I mean, she changed the too right,
the whole direction of her career to do this, and

(01:08):
in particular, she did a lot to try to make
more room for black women in the ranks of NASA. Engineers.
That made me even more excited to talk about her today. Yes,
she's pretty great. Uh. And Mary Jackson started working as
a computer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or
the n a C a years before it was absorbed
into NASA. So before we get to her specifically, we

(01:30):
have to back up and talk a little bit about
human computers. If it sounds weird for you to say
someone worked as a computer, that is what they were
called human computers, and how Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory now
known as Langley Research Center came to have a segregated
pool of human computers in the nineteen forties. There were
surely people doing this kind of work in other parts

(01:52):
of the world as well, but our focus today is
really on Europe and North America. In English, the word
computer to being a person who makes calculations or computation,
goes all the way back to the early seventeenth century.
Many of these early computers were men. They were apprentices
and assistants who were doing this work as part of
their education and training to become say an astronomer or

(02:15):
an engineer. But women have played a really important part two,
especially the wives and sisters and daughters of astronomers and
physicists and other scientists, some of whom were scientists in
their own right. These women did calculations to support the
research of their male family members, often without ever getting

(02:35):
the credit for it. One example is mathematician and astronomer
Nicole Rain Lepote, whose husband Jean Andre, was France's royal clockmaker.
She worked with astronomer Joseph Leland and mathematician Alexei Clarroux
to calculate the return of Halley's comment in seventeen fifty eight.
Leland later said, quote, for six months, we made calculations

(02:57):
from dawn to dusk, sometimes even during the meals. The
help given by Madam Napote was such that without her
I would not have been able to complete such a
colossal enterprise. But when Clara published their findings, which were
far more accurate than previous predictions had been, he did
not acknowledge Lepote's work at all. The Harvard College Observatory

(03:19):
started hiring women as assistants towards the end of the
nineteenth century. They cared for glass plates that were used
to record images of the night sky, and they analyzed
and recorded the images from those plates, classifying the stars,
and compiling the data. Observatory director Edward Charles Pickering, in particular,
started hiring a whole group of women computers in eighty one.

(03:43):
They were nicknamed Pickering's Harem, which was not a particularly
nice nickname, and nods too. Sort of a perception that
one of the reasons that some of these departments where
all women was because the men in charge wanted to
be surrounded by young women. You don't talk about that
as much, and other reasons why there were women's staff

(04:04):
of computers, but that was a thing that there was,
at least the perception was going on. One of the
computers at the Harvard College Observatory was Anti Jump Cannon,
who developed the method for classifying stars that is still
used today. During World War Two, hundreds of women worked
as computers at the U. S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory,

(04:26):
doing the math for the firing tables for rockets and artillery.
This included civilian women with degrees in math or science,
as well as women from the Women's Army Corps. Women
worked as computers at the Manhattan Project that Los Alamos
National Laboratory as well. Some more women with math or
physics degrees who had been recruited for that work, and
others were the wives of other Los Alamos employees thanks

(04:49):
to hidden figures. Today the idea of a whole department
of human computers is heavily associated with Langley and the
Space race, but within the n a c A. Computing
departments weren't unique to Langley. Other n a c A
facilities had them as well. They also significantly predate the
Space program. Langley created its first computing pool in ve

(05:13):
hiring five women as computers. These women did their calculations
by hand, with the help of slide rules, mathematical tables,
and mechanical calculators. Before the computing pool was established, Langley's
engineers and scientists had been performing all of their calculations themselves,
and the idea was that moving the calculating work over

(05:34):
to a dedicated department could free up those men to
focus on the science and the engineering, while also making
the process of computing faster and more accurate. That's also
why all of those wartime departments were women, because the
men were needed to go to combat roles. At first,
many of the men who had previously done their own
calculations resisted this idea and doubted whether women could do

(05:58):
the necessary mass. But the creation of the Computing Group
had exactly the outcome the organization had been looking for.
It was faster and more accurate. Plus, since women were
being hired for the positions, they could be paid much
less than the engineers and scientists whose work they were absorbing.
Of course, we are not endorsing that fact that the

(06:20):
administrators liked it. There's a lot to unpack. It's unfortunate,
but that was part of the logic train. Yeah, computing
was also considered a sub professional position, while engineering was
a professional one. So the top of the ranks for
a computer was mathematician, and that was equivalent to an
entry level position for a male engineer. So, in other words,

(06:42):
the top of the computing ranks lined up with the
bottom of the engineering ranks. And that brings us to
how this job occupied a complicated spot in the grand
scheme of things. Often women computers were paid significantly more
than they might have been in other work that was
open to them because things like teaching school. But at
the same time, many of the women who were hired

(07:04):
to be computers were overqualified for the job, and as
we just talked about, they were handling work that had
previously been done by men who were higher up in
the org chart. Because the computers were women and their
jobs were seen as subordinate to those of male engineers,
they also faced sexism in a way that they might
not have in other industries. These disparities became even more

(07:26):
pronounced when Langley started recruiting black women to work as computers.
In July of ninety one, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive
Order eight o two, which said, in part quote, there
shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in
defense industries and in government because of race, creed, color,
or national origin. This executive order followed extensive advocacy by A.

(07:51):
Philip Randolph and other black labor and civil rights leaders,
and it also established the Fair Employment Practices Committee to
make sure that order was in forced. This executive order
came as the United States was preparing for war. The
previous May, the President had called for the US to
build fifty tho aircraft. This was a dramatic increase in

(08:12):
aircraft production, up from fewer than one airplanes a month.
Langley was where aircraft manufacturers were having their high performance
aircraft tested and improved. Langley engineers would put aircraft through
test flights and wind tunnels and evaluate their performance and
suggest improvements and refinements on the design. The goal was

(08:33):
to make aircraft safer, faster, and more effective. So when
the President made this call for more aircraft, that gave
Langley a lot more work to do, and the n
a c A had to hire a lot more people
across the facility to do it. The expansion was so
huge and dramatic that it led to a housing crisis
in the area around Langley, addressed in part by building

(08:56):
a dormitory to house some of the women. A three
hundred seventy two unit dorm opened in the summer of
nineteen forty three with a house mother who locked everything
up at eleven PM. At first, a lot of these
new hires were white candidates, but before long there just
weren't enough white candidates to fill all the jobs, many
of which were intended to be temporary, wartime positions and

(09:19):
not long term careers. So after Executive Order A D
eight oh to the administration at the n a c
A started actively recruiting black candidates to phill these jobs.
Langley had black employees before this point, but mostly doing
things like janitorial work and groundskeeping in food service. This
was the first time that Langley had recruited black employees

(09:40):
for professional and sub professional roles. Although the executive order
barred discrimination in hiring, Virginia, where Langley is located, was
still racially segregated by law, so this newly hired group
of black computers who started work in Ninette were placed
in a segregated section known a the West Computing Group

(10:01):
or just the West Group, in which black women reported
to white supervisors. This also meant adding segregated restrooms in
a segregated area of the lunch room. Segregation was so
strictly maintained that many of the white computers and lab
employees didn't realize that the West Group even existed. There
was one computer named Miriam Man who made it a

(10:23):
point of repeatedly removing the colored computer sign that was
used to mark the blacks only part of the cafeteria.
She would just basically take it and put it in
her purse and leave, and a few days later it
would show back up on the table again, and all
the computers were like, we know, we know, this is
where you want us to sit. We know this is
our designated area. You don't have to keep pointing it

(10:45):
out to us. And her husband was like, Miriam, they're
gonna fire you. Miriam was kind of like, what they're
gonna have to to kept doing it until they finally
stopped putting the sign there. I'm like, that would be
a firing well earned. In my opinion. We mentioned a
few minutes ago how a woman might be better paid
as a computer than she had been while working at

(11:05):
another job, while still being overqualified for that computing job.
This was particularly true for black women. Many had done
exceptionally well in their study of math and had advanced degrees,
years of experience teaching math and science, or both. Many,
but certainly not all, of the white computers did not.
They might have a math degree but little to no

(11:28):
experience beyond college. Additionally, teaching was really one of the
most prestigious jobs that was available to black women in
the nineteen forties. Within their communities, black teachers were really
regarded with a lot of respect and admiration, and the
increase in pay between working as a teacher and working
as a computer could be even more dramatic for black computers.

(11:49):
Than it was for white ones. Black teachers overwhelmingly taught
in segregated schools for black children, and they tended to
have poorer facilities and much lower pay than the schools
for white children. But once they got to Langley, these
women were just a computer. They were often looked down
on by the engineers whose calculations they were carrying out.

(12:11):
Although the women hired as computers typically enjoyed and excelled
at math, other people perceived that work as tedious drudgery.
It could almost feel like a simultaneous step up and
a step down, And for many of the women, the
fact that they were doing critical wartime work at a
facility as prestigious as Langley, but still being segregated by

(12:31):
their race was even more galling. It was a little
bit later, but still into this same world that Mary
Jackson stepped when she got hired to work at Langley,
and we will get to her after a sponsor break.
Mary Jackson was born Mary Winston on April in Hampton, Virginia,

(12:56):
not far away from Langley. She was from a large
family and her parents, Ella and Frank Winston, were extremely
focused on making sure all of their children got a
good education. And we're really good citizens and role models.
Mary attended high school at George P. Phoenix Training School,
which was on the campus of Hampton Institute, which is
now Hampton University. Hampton Institute has actually come up on

(13:19):
the show before, most recently. It is where Susan La
Flesh Picott continued her studies before going to medical school
and becoming the first Native American woman in the US
to earn an m. D. Hampton Institute was founded in
eighteen sixty eight to teach trade and industrial skills to
freed people, as well as to train them to become teachers.
By the nineteen twenties that had become a college with

(13:41):
numerous courses of study. The city of Hampton didn't provide
education for Black children beyond elementary school, so the Hampton
Institute had established Phoenix Training School for that purpose. Mary
graduated from Phoenix with highest honors and went on to
college at the Hampton Instant too. She expected that she
would become a teacher, but she pushed herself to finish

(14:04):
a double major in mathematics and physical science, even though
that was a far more strenuous course of study than
she would need to teach. She graduated in nineteen two
and was soon hired as a teacher at a segregated
school for black students in Maryland. About a year later,
Mary moved back home. Her father had become ill and
she came back to help look after him, but she

(14:26):
found that she couldn't get a teaching job back in Hampton.
Two of her sisters were already teaching in Hampton, and
there were nepotism rules that kept her from being able
to join them, so she had to find a job
somewhere else. She started out as the secretary at the
King Street USO, doing everything from keeping the books to
acting as a hostess. The King Street USO was one

(14:48):
of the many USO centers established to serve black members
of the military. The USO had a policy of serving
the entire military regardless of race, but a lot of
places had segregated USO center for reasons ranging from black
service members requesting them to Jim Crow laws requiring them.
Mary worked at the King Street USO until the end

(15:08):
of World War Two, and it was there that she
met her husband, Levi Jackson, who was a serviceman from Alabama.
They got married in nineteen forty four and in nineteen
forty six, they had their first child together, a son
who was also named Levy. Throughout all this Jackson was
active with the Bethel A. M. E. Church, where she
and her family had long been members. She also started

(15:29):
serving as a leader for the church's Girl Scout troop,
which she would do for about thirty years. She did
not yet have a daughter. Her daughter, Caroline, was born
several years later, but she loved the Girl Scouts. She
was a teacher, a mentor, and a big sister for
the girls in the troop, many of whom were from
working class and poor families with parents who did agricultural

(15:49):
or domestic work. While she was working as the Girl
Scout leader, Jackson started doing something that would also be
a hallmark of her time at NASA and before that,
the n a c. A. She really that the girls
that she worked with to see what was possible beyond
what was familiar to or expected of them, and she
wanted to open as many doors for them as she could.

(16:09):
So she arranged all kinds of field trips and projects
aligned with all the various merit badges to really try
to broaden their experience of the world and encourage them
to set really ambitious goals for themselves. Later on, Jackson
would also play a key role in integrating the Black
and White Girl Scout councils in the area into one
integrated council in her part of Virginia. Jackson returned to

(16:32):
work when Levi Jr. Turned four. She applied for a
clerical position with the Army and a computing position at Langley.
The offer from the Army came first, and she worked
there for a few months before being offered the computer
job at Langley, where the Army agreed her skills would
be of better use. She started her job as one
of the West Area Computers on April five, n one,

(16:54):
at the age of six. That was just a few
months after Dorothy Vaughan became the head of the West
Area Computers, having started out as one of the West
Area's mathematicians. This made Vaughan the first black supervisor at Langley.
This was almost three years after President Harry Truman had
signed executive orders and one that happened in July and

(17:19):
ordered the desegregation of the federal workforce and the US
Armed Forces, but segregation was still required by law in Virginia.
That had not changed, so when Jackson started work at Langley,
the West Area computers were still, in the words of
administrative officer Kemball Johnson quote, composed entirely of Negro women.

(17:39):
The restroom and cafeteria facilities were also still segregated. It had, however,
become a lot more common for the West Area computers
to be assigned out to other departments at Langley for
periods of days two months to work on specific projects.
This became more and more common as the white East
Area computers shrank in number as their members were promoted

(18:02):
or permanently transferred into other departments. In nineteen fifty three,
after two years in the West Computing Group, Mary Jackson
was assigned to a project on Langley's East Side along
with several white computers. Jackson didn't know the layout of
the buildings on the East side at all, and when
she asked her coworkers from that side of the campus
for directions to the restroom, they pointedly told her that

(18:25):
they did not know where her restroom was. Jackson was
frustrated and angry, not just about the insult of her
bathroom and the dismissive way that her colleagues had talked
to her, but also about being a second class citizen
at Langley because of her race, even though she was
a computer and she had more experience than some of
her colleagues did. Later that day, she ran into Kashmirez Zarnecki,

(18:48):
who worked at Langley's supersonic pressure tunnel. He asked how
she was doing, and she answered him honestly. From a
number of angles, it was socially unacceptable for a black
person to unload their feelings on a white person, especially
when it came to racism and discrimination. And it's not
entirely clear whether Jackson had just gotten so fed up

(19:10):
that she lost her temper or whether she had perceived Zarnecki,
who had immigrated from Poland, as someone it was safe
to be candid with, but either way, Zarnicki asked her
why she didn't come work for him, and she agreed to,
and this was before he learned that she had majored
in both math and science. We don't want to apply
that these racial disparities and who it's okay to like

(19:33):
vent feelings too, were like, we don't want to imply
that those disparities are gone. But that was what was
happening at the time, so Jackson really made a name
for herself almost immediately in this in this new department,
when she completed some calculations for John Becker, who was
the chief of the Compressibility Division and was multiple rungs

(19:54):
up the ladder above Zarnicki, Jackson's final numbers didn't look
quite right, and Becker insisted that they were wrong, but
Jackson insisted that they were right. It turned out that
Jackson had done all the calculations flawlessly, but the data
that Becker had given her to start with was wrong.
This earned her an apology and praise not only for

(20:14):
her skill, but also her confidence and her insight. Serniki
soon suggested Jackson joined the Engineer Training program. The n
a c A had very few women engineers at all,
and no black women engineers. The engineer training program required
after work classes from the University of Virginia, which were
held at Hampton High School, which was still whites only,

(20:36):
so to take the needed courses to become an engineer,
Jackson had to get a special dispensation from the city
of Hampton to allow her to take the classes that
she needed. She did, and in nineteen fifty eight, after
she finished her courses, Mary Jackson was promoted to engineer.
This made her the n a c as first black
woman engineer and possibly the first black woman working as

(20:58):
an aeronautical engine near anywhere in the United States. Was
a year of big changes at Langley, and we're going
to get to those after we first paused for another
sponsor break in. The n a c A and other

(21:20):
similar organizations were merged together into the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration, or NASA. As part of that whole process,
the West Area Computing Group, which at that point was
the last segregated department in the organization, was finally formally disbanded.
There were only nine employees of the West Computers by then,
including Dorothy Vaughn, who had been running it for seven years.

(21:42):
At that point, those remaining computers were moved to various
engineering groups around Langley, and Vaughan was one of the
ones who started working with the IBM computers that were
gradually making human computers obsolete. Women who had been working
with mathematical tables and mechanical calculators began working with punch
cards instead. Mathematicians were gradually replaced by data analysts, and

(22:05):
the teams working with the IBM computers were integrated in
terms of both race and gender, although over time more
and more of the data analysts were young men. Mary
Jackson co authored her first paper in Night as Well,
effects of nose angle and mock number on transition on
cones at supersonic speeds. She continued to work with Zarnecki

(22:28):
at the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel. In addition to her work
as an engineer, Jackson informally mentored women and minorities, especially
the ones who were hoping to get promoted into engineering roles.
In a way, she was replicating and building on something
that had always existed at the West Computing Group. Because
they were segregated from the white staff, the West Computing

(22:48):
Group had developed a deep network of support and resources
among themselves. This gave them the tools to try to
mitigate some of the racial discrimination that they faced on
the job, something that black men, who were scattered across
the organization could struggle with. So as Jackson mentored people,
she tried to maintain that support network, including connecting to
the former West Group computers who were now working in

(23:11):
other parts of the organization. As the Space race wound
down and the US Aeronautics industry became less focused on
the idea of supersonic transport. Langley went through numerous re
ords and reductions in force. Jackson continued to work in
the supersonic pressure tunnel, specializing in how air behaves in
proximity to supersonic aircraft. She took classes in the programming

(23:35):
language for tran to be able to work with the
IBM computers as well, but eventually her career hit a
glass ceiling. Staff at Langley were paid according to the
civil service pay scale known as the GS scale, which
ranks people in pay grades from one to fifteen. Jackson
got up to GS twelve, which was the top of
the non management scale for her role. There were very

(23:57):
few women at Langley in grade GS thir teen or above,
and Jackson found that no matter how hard she worked,
she just could not get to that next level. In
nineteen seventy nine, Casimirez Zarnecki retired, and by that point
Jackson had written or co written twelve technical publications for
NASA and its predecessor. But rather than continuing to struggle

(24:19):
for another promotion that seemed like it would just never come,
she decided to change directions. A position had opened up
as Langley's Federal Women's Program Manager. This was a role
that would let Jackson focus on what she had been
doing informally as well as through the committees that she
had been on at work, and it was also a
demotion down to GS eleven, which she willingly accepted for

(24:41):
the sake of helping other people. In one she was
offered the role of Equal Opportunity Specialist, and she went
to Washington, d C. To train for it. She spent
the last years of her career at NASA focused on
making sure women and minorities had equal opportunities. At Langley
and these roles, Jackson took a more form all approach
to the mentoring that she had been doing while she

(25:02):
was still an engineer. She realized that a lot of
the people who seemed like they were being overlooked for
promotions had basically the same degree and experience as their peers,
but they might be missing one particular course or one
specific skill. She started intentionally seeking out people who fit
this pattern to encourage them to go take that one

(25:23):
class they needed to close the gap that She paid
particular attention to women in the lower ranks of the
organization who had the right skills and background otherwise to
become an engineer. She also kept this focus outside of work,
working as a Girl Scout leader and doing extensive lecturing
and workshops at high schools in her area, demonstrating for
students that neither engineering nor Langley was a world reserved

(25:46):
only for white men. She said of this work quote,
sometimes they are not aware of the number of black
scientists and don't even know of the career opportunities until
it is too late. Jackson retired from Langley in She
aped up her volunteer community and church work after retiring,
and she died on February eleventh, two thousand five, at

(26:06):
the age of eighty three. She died in a retirement
home in Hampton, Virginia, and was survived by her children,
as well as grandchildren and great grandchildren. In the Salt
Lake City Board of Education unanimously voted that Jackson Elementary
School in Salt Lake City, previously named for President Andrew Jackson,
would be renamed Mary W. Jackson Elementary School. That same year,

(26:29):
the U. S. Senate passed the Hidden Figures Congressional Gold
Medal Act, which would award the Congressional Gold Medal to
Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn Mary Jackson, and Dr Christine Darden.
Darden was the first black person of any gender to
be promoted to the senior executive service at Langley. The
House referred the bill to a committee in November of eighteen.

(26:50):
As of when we are recording this, which is the
end of January nineteen, there have not been further updates
on it, perhaps unsurprisingly given what January was like in
the government. That is true. Uh, oh, Mary, I love
her so much. I do too. If you want to
learn um more about the computers and more about like

(27:13):
life at Langley during all this time, really do go
read Hidden Figures. You can also, if you like, go
amuse yourself by reading the one star reviews of the
book Hidden Figures by people who clearly thought they were
signing up to read a novel. Oh well, yeah, these

(27:36):
things like this book introduces ten new characters in a
paragraph and then just never follows up on them. Agin,
I was weren't characters, honey, they were people, people with
their hearts. Um, do you have listener mail for us?
But do I have a couple of pieces of listener mail? Uh?

(27:56):
They are about um sa shrewda So just a heads up,
we're gonna talk a little bit about surgery. We heard
from a couple of people that they did not enjoy
hearing the descriptions of surgery in that episode. The first
thing is a quick correction that came in from Dave.
Dave pointed out that we talked about one of the
reasons people might have needed a nose reconstruction was because

(28:17):
of late stage syphilis, and how as he understood it,
when Sashruda was doing his writing and teaching, that would
not have been an issue in India. It is true
that the most mainstream idea about how syphilis spread to
Europe and then beyond is that it came back from
the America's with Christopher Columbus's expeditions, after there was, you know,

(28:39):
transit between Europe and North America. That has been the
very long standing um assumption we've I think we've had
a couple things on Unearthed that suggests it might not
have worked quite that way. But yes, I conflated two
different pieces of material to get something that did not
make a lot of ants um. By the time the

(29:03):
British were writing down things about this whole nose reconstruction,
they were witnessing. At that point, there would have been
people that might have tried to have their nose reconstructed
because of having late stage syphilis, but um that would
not likely have been the case based on when Sastruda
was writing. We also have something from Marcelo. I hope

(29:24):
I am pronouncing your name correctly. This email says, dear
esteemed s y M Historians. I am a longtime fan,
first time caller who happens to be a facial plastic
surgeon in Brazil specialized in nasal reconstruction. I loved your
most recent episode on Struda and i ur Veda, which
most of us read at some point during our residency training,

(29:45):
as I usually love all your episodes. Here are a
few answers to your questions. We still use the so
called Indian forehead flap as what can be easily called
the workhorse of our nasal reconstructions, except as a bit
modified from its original central position into what's more scientifically
termed a Paramedian forehead flap. It's most important advantage over

(30:08):
the cheek advancement flap allegedly practiced by Shahruda, or even
the forearm peticled flap practiced by the bolognaise is that
it's petticle is based on an arterial blood supply i e.
The supertri clear artery, which ensures a markedly diminished chance
of tissue necrosis of the most distal portion of the flap. Furthermore,

(30:28):
that bears the advantage of being more versatile, allowing for
much better contouring of finer structures of the nasal tip
that allows for the semblance of a natural nose, mostly
because of the availability of more tissue from the forehead
and or scalp that can be harvested without performing the
nearby facial structures like the eye, and because of that
arterially based guaranteed of blood supply. As a rule of thumb,

(30:50):
the longer a flap is, the less blood is supplied
to its most distal regions. With an arterial blood supply
embedded into the peticle flap, there is much more range
of blood supply to these distal read However, we do
still use cheek advancement flaps for certain defects in the nose,
mostly to the nasal side walls, and some smaller defects
on the nasal dorsom. The Italian flap obviously offers the

(31:11):
advantage of less scars on the face, but because such
scars can be so well managed, it offers no extra
advantage over locally based pedicled flaps, so you'd be hard
pressed to find any surgeon using that technique today. There
are other flaps as well, none is frequently used, the
more more dependable than the modified Indian forehead flap. Keep
up the great work and thanks for all historical knowledge.

(31:33):
I hope you two have a great trip. Cheers. Thank
you so much for this email. We have gotten several
emails answering a number of questions from the Sashruda episode,
and this one is a little longer, so we might
read other ones in a future episode. I had to say,
I was very delighted at how many surgeons were like,
I can help you with this. We did. We have
gotten a lot of emails from surgeons. I'm glad so

(31:54):
many surgeons are listening to and enjoying the show. I'm
glad I remember pretty much all of that medical terminology
that I just read from the time I took anatomy
and physiology, which just feels like a feat giving how
much knowledge my brain just Jettison's in our work podcast
on the daily I lose. I always feel bad when

(32:14):
someone asked me something about a show and I don't
even remember doing the show at all. Yeah, they'll be like, oh,
did you ever think about And I'm like, I know,
I don't even know. I did I ever think about that? Ever?
I don't know. I'll be like, yes, you did it,
and I feel very bad. My apologies if you ever
talk to me and I don't know what. I don't
remember which topic it was. But as I was wrapping

(32:37):
up my time hosting This Day in History Class, I
was looking for the outline for a stuff you missed
in History Class episode that like that thing was that
day in History and I couldn't find it on my
computer and I couldn't figure out why. And I was like,
but I wrote this, why don't I have it? I
didn't write it, You wrote it. I got it fused

(33:00):
with a totally different topic that I did, right, been
there anyway, That's how our brains work. Everyone, after years
and years, you can't remember all the details of every show. Nope, nope.
But if you remember details of shows, if you would
like to write us an email about them, We're at
History Podcast how stuff Works dot com. And then we're
all over social media at missed in History. That's where

(33:22):
you'll find our Facebook and our Pinterest, in our Instagram
and our Twitter. You can come to our website, which
is missed in History dot com. You can find the
show notes for all the episodes Holly and I haven't
worked on. You can find uh searchable archive every episode ever,
and you can find information about our trip to Paris
coming up in June. And you can subscribe to our
show on Apple podcast, the I Heart Radio app in

(33:45):
anywhere else you get your podcasts. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works
dot com