Max von Pettenkofer’s Anticontagionism

Pettenkofer's ideas about how cholera spread weren’t exactly right, but they still had really beneficial impacts on the way we live.

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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 the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy be Wilson. Hey, as
we record this, we're in the middle of a pandemic.
We sure are. This is the first time that we

(00:23):
have recorded the podcast with everyone involved in their houses. Yeah,
we are entirely remote this go around. This is our
first of those. As Tracy just said, so, uh, Tracy
is usually at home, but today I am also at home,
and Casey are amazing super producer, also at home. So
um fingers crossed that our maiden voyage of doing it

(00:45):
this way works out fine. We did a test, it
worked out fine. But yeah, all of this that's going on,
all of these changes to our day to day lives,
however temporary they may be, and the virus that has
caused all of this at me to thinking about contagion
and germ theory and the various points in history where

(01:05):
people have been trying to figure out the science of disease.
And as I kind of snorfled around on the Internet
looking for things related to that, it led me to
Maximum Pettenkofer and one of the things that I found
in my research for this was a lecture by Yale
professor Frank Snowdon. It's part of their Open Yale Courses,

(01:25):
and he described Pett and co Forer as quote the
most sophisticated and scientifically robust of those we might call wrong.
So Pett and Cofer's ideas about specifically how cholera but
also other diseases spread, we're not exactly right. But even
though he was kind of on the wrong track, his

(01:47):
work still had some really beneficial impacts on the way
that we live. And he also had a lot of
twists and turns in his early life. And I'm hoping
that those which are pretty entertaining, plus talking about these
concepts in a way that's a little bit removed from
what we are all currently living through, will offer a
way to consider just how far we've come in figuring

(02:08):
out epidemiology. We do need to offer a quick heads up.
There is a brief mention of suicide in this episode.
I'll add an additional heads up just because I was
eating my breakfast when I got to this part of
the outline. Towards the end of the episode, there's a
little gross medical bit that you know it'll become clear
when we get closer to it. Yeah, no, part of
you will doubt was that it so. Max von petten

(02:32):
Coffer was born at home on December three, eighteen in Liechtenheim, Bavaria,
near the Danube River. His father wasn't exactly a farmer.
He worked the land, but really only to the point
of subsistence. It was not a vocation really on his part. Yeah,
they were very poor. His family was Catholic and they
were obviously of extremely modest means. Max was fifth in

(02:55):
the birth order. He had a total of seven siblings,
so that is a very z and crowded house. It
made for more people than could realistically fit in their
living situation. Max, as a consequence, did not have a
bedroom of his own. He actually betted down each night
in the hallway, which kind of a landing at the
top of the stairs that had a little crooked to
the side of it, and that is where he slept

(03:18):
those early years of Max's life. Unsurprisingly, we're not particularly happy.
The family's poverty took its toll, as the pett and
Coverers just never had enough to make ends meet. When
Max was nine, his fortunes changed though he was sent
to Munich to live with an uncle, Dr Franz ex
Pett and Cover. Franz was a successful apothecary. He was

(03:38):
in a way better financial position than Max's parents were,
so that constant state of need was no longer part
of Max's life. After he moved to Munich, there was
just a whole new future of possibilities opened up for him,
and this is a case where he definitely explored a
lot of them. First off, he started a formal education,

(03:58):
so he attended Grammar's Cool and then he went on
to high school and he graduated in eighteen thirty seven
when he was eighteen. He graduated with honors, and he
initially seemed to be leaning towards literary scholarship. He also
wrote poetry, which is good enough to be published in
a collection. He shifted his focus after he enrolled in
college at the University of Munich. The idea on his

(04:21):
uncle's part was that Max could study pharmacy and chemistry
and then eventually take over the apothecary, and Max started
his higher education with that as the plan. But there
was also a problem, which was it turned out that
he hated those courses. He also dabbled with the idea
of law, maybe even theology. Those eventually turned out not
to hold his interest either. Oh, if you've ever taken

(04:44):
a class you hated, it's excruciating, So to have a
bunch of them, I feel for him. Uh So Naturally,
with none of these other ideas about his future really
being anything that was working for him, he decided to
become an actor, perfectly normal path for a scientist. Uh.
He remembered acting in school plays and loving it, so

(05:05):
that seemed to him like a perfectly good option that
he hadn't explored yet. As you may imagine, none of
this went over particularly well with his uncle. Uh. Their relationship,
as a consequence, did, on a serious note, become really,
really tense, and eventually there was a physical altercation where
Franz hit his nephew and Max. At that point, this
associated himself from his uncle, which also meant that he

(05:28):
was separating himself from his uncle's financial support. His whole
theater thing actually seemed like it might play out for
a little while. In eighteen forty, he was appearing on
stage as Max Tenkof in various productions. He was handsome
and smart, and his time studying literature in his younger
years really served him well. But depending on which biographical

(05:50):
account you read, it seems like his reviews might have
been pretty mixed, and it became apparent that this was
not going to be away for Max to support himself. Yea,
some accounts say that he got pretty um consistently, not
even panned. It wasn't even that it was like people
were like, he's fine. Others say he did he did

(06:10):
quite well. So we don't really know, but clearly it
was not a career that was going to work out.
But he did make an important connection during this time
as an actor. He met a young woman named Helene
petten Koeper. They have the same name because she was
a cousin, and they fell in love. The two of
them married, and it was actually this marriage that ended
up reconnecting Max to his uncle Franz, and Helene helped

(06:34):
encourage the two men to reconcile. In eighteen forty one,
Max moved back to Munich with his new wife and,
with his uncle's support, started to study medicine. Just a
year after that, he was publishing articles on chemistry, specifically
on the detection and isolation of arsenic in March of
eighteen forty three, he was granted an apothecary degree, and then,

(06:55):
after completing his medical thesis on South American plants that
were believed to have curative properties, he received the degree
of Doctor of Medicine, Surgery and Obstetrics. Yeah. I'm not
clear on why this whole science thing worked for him
this round, unless he was really just trying to step
up and find a vocation in which he could support

(07:17):
not only himself but his new wife. He was very
dedicated to Helene, But this time around it was like
his curiosity kind of worked out and he got pretty
into his medical career. Petton Coopher's medical education had always
focused primarily on chemistry, and his first position after completing
his education was working in a lab in Wurtzburg researching

(07:39):
urine and isolating various substances in it. In this work,
he showed that hiperic acid and sulpho cyanic acid were
present in urine, and he also noted a component that
was high in nitrogen, although he didn't specifically identify it.
Later chemists would identify that as creatine and creatinine, and
he also developed a way to test urine for bile salt,

(08:00):
and that test has actually continued to be used right
up to the modern day. He then moved on to
the University of Geisson in eighteen forty four to continue
his work as a chemist, but after working under mentor
usedace Vun Lee Big for a while there, it was
apparent that he wasn't going to be offered a professorship,
which is something he had hoped for. There just were

(08:21):
not any open positions. Yeah, it wasn't an issue with
him not doing good work because though it did not
lead to a full time job, his work with Lee
Big was quite fruitful. He developed a copper amalgam for
dentists to use as a filling for teeth. He also
developed away along with Lee Big, to prepare meat extract
as a suit base. That actually led to a company

(08:42):
being started, and his interest and his skill in chemistry
really suited industrial chemistry projects quite well, so he shifted
away from medicine for a while. He was still using
his chemistry knowledge on the job that he landed in,
but it was very different from what he'd been doing before.
He worked in a mint until eighteen forty seven, and

(09:03):
in his time there it was his job to refine
and improve the minting of coins so the most valuable
medals used in their production could be stretched as far
as possible. One of the other things that he worked
on at this time in his life was developing a
way to save paintings from mildew that formed as their
varnish broke down. You know, I fell in love with
him for this. Uh. He figured out a way to

(09:25):
really carefully apply alcohol vapor to the surfaces of paintings
and in doing so reactivate the varnish so that it
would kind of reseal the painting and protect its surface
from molden mildew. Penn Koefer had been made an associate
in the Academy of Sciences in eighteen forty six, and
in eighteen forty seven he was finally offered a professorship

(09:45):
at the University of Munich. He taught medical chemistry there.
This was a newly created position. He was paid a
small yearly salary plus two measures of wheat and seven
measures of rye. He had a research space at his disposal,
and his lectures covered topics including public health, sanitation, diet,
physical chemistry, and hygiene. Yeah, his interest in all of

(10:08):
those really really continues throughout his life, and as we'll see, uh,
it becomes very important. Three years into this new position,
Pettenkofer's responsibilities grew because his uncle Franz died in eighteen
fifty and as a consequence, Pettenkofer inherited Franz's position as
court apothecary, so he was kind of advising the government

(10:29):
on on matters of chemistry. And this appointment included the
residents that his uncle had lived in, in which Max
had lived in as a child, so he got a
house out of the deal, and he also got an
additional salary for the apothecary positions. And things are going
quite well. We are about to get into the work
that Pett and co forerd did while trying to understand
the spread of cholera, but first we will pause for

(10:51):
a quick sponsor break. Starting in the eighteen fifties, cholera
became the focus of much of Pett and Cooper's work.
In eighteen fifty five, his fortunes continued to expand and
his standing in the scientific community grew as well, and

(11:13):
he was able to move his lab into the newly
built Institute of Physiology, where he had more space to work,
and this was also the year that he published a
really important work, Investigations and Observations on the Method and
Spread of Cholera. During this time, one of the important
concepts that he wrote about was the idea of a
healthy carrier. While he didn't agree with the contagion theories

(11:35):
at the time, and we're going to get into that
in a moment, he did think that there could be
people who showed no sign of illness whatsoever and yet
helped spread certain elements of disease. Max von Pett and
Cooper started sharing his idea that cholera was linked to
a micro organism, but he was also adamant that whatever
that microorganism was wasn't enough to make someone sick by itself.

(11:58):
He thought a series of conditions had to be met
to cause an epidemic. There had to be the microorganism,
specific local conditions, seasonal conditions, and individual susceptibility. He really
didn't believe in the developing ideas that would eventually lead
Louis Pasteur and Robert Coke to develop germ theory. Yeah,
germ theory had been kind of developing over time, but

(12:19):
they really solidified it uh in the eighteen hundreds. Pett
and Kopher's idea was represented by the simple mathematical equation
of X plus Y equals z, and in this model
the outcome Z was cholera. The variable X was the
presence of a micro organism, which, again on its own,
he believed to be harmless, and the why variable represented

(12:42):
the local conditions that were contributing factors that would enable
that micro organism to actually become infectious. He thought that
general n cleanliness offered nutrients for that X micro organism
to thrive, and that water and warm temperatures and porous
soil were also important contributors. The microorganism needed to ferment
basically kind of the way a plant germinates, and then,

(13:05):
building on miasma theory, it would release infectious elements into
the air. And this idea of Pett and Cooper's came
to be known kind of colloquially as the groundwater theory.
It's also sometimes called localization theory. This theory was an
opposition to the work of British physician John Snow, who
we have an episode on and the Archive. Snow believed

(13:26):
that whatever was causing cholera was something that was ingested
and was not miasmatic. In eighteen forty nine, Snow had
written an essay entitled on the Mode and Communication of
Cholera outlining this idea, and in eighteen fifty four it
seemed like he had proven it when he identified a
water pump in London's Broad Street that seemed to be

(13:47):
the source of multiple people's infections. That's a very short
version of his story. H pettent Cofer was pretty adamant
that Snow was oversimplifying things. He acknowledged that John Snow
had clearly identified some factor in this whole process in
the water, and he actually wrote that no one in
his right mind could dismiss that finding. But what exactly

(14:08):
was it about the water that caused illness? He felt
as though it just could not possibly be a water
borne pathogen. By the way, that word was not even
in in the vernacular at that time. It wasn't coined
until later. But he thought that anything that would have
been in the water by the time it got to
a human would have been far too diluted to actually
be dangerous. That big gap in understanding really drove Pett

(14:32):
and Cooper's work for the rest of his life. He
wrote paper after paper over the next four decades, reiterating
and refining his ideas. This stoked the fires of a
long debate in the medical and scientific communities between the contagionists,
who thought that Snow had identified the problem, and the
anti contagionists, who thought there were far more factors involved

(14:55):
than simply passing some sort of germ from person to
person and bo Cholera was a concentration of his work,
Pettenkopher continued to develop theories and experiments in other fields.
Uh this is one of those things where you don't
realize how much he worked on until you really dig in,
because most of the biographies of the articles you find

(15:15):
about him are just about his anti contagionism and cholera.
But in eighteen sixty one he developed the first breath
analysis apparatus. It was a chamber in which a subjects
excelation could be analyzed to determine how the body was
consuming and using fats and carbohydrates, forming an important foundation
of metabolic research. He was then able to use that

(15:38):
data that he gathered to develop some of the earliest
calculations of caloric needs that a person may require in
various living conditions. In eighteen sixty four, he became rector
of the University of Munich. His influence and his work
in hygiene led King Ludwig the Second of Bavaria to
believe that hygiene research should be part of all of

(15:59):
Bavaria as higher learning institutions. The king ensured that Bavarious
three universities all had chairs of hygiene. Pett and co
Forer filled that role at the University of Munich. Once
these positions were established, hygiene became a required course and
all their medical curriculums. And we're going to talk more
about some of his work in hygiene as we go along.

(16:20):
Uh In eighteen sixty five, Pett and co Forer, frustrated
at the lack of journals that were publishing studies of hygiene,
just formed his own uh Zitch Drift for Biology, which
is Journal of Biology was the result. In eighteen seventy two,
he was offered a very lucrative position. The University of
Vienna was building a new hygiene institute. They asked him

(16:44):
to run it. This was an enticing offer, but Pett
and co Forer really preferred to stay in Bavaria, so
he used this offer to his advantage and told the
University of Munich that Vienna really wanted him so that
he would consider staying only if he had an instant
tute of hygiene there in Munich. The university agreed to
build him one, which took the next seven years, but

(17:07):
it did get done and Petton Coopher stayed ran this
hygienic Institute at the University of Munich once it opened
in eighteen seventy nine. The institute was highly influential. It
served as a prototype for other education and research programs
around the world. That was a direct inspiration for the JOHNS.
Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore that

(17:29):
was founded in nineteen seventeen. And one of the most
important publications during this time when he was really really
prolifically contributing to this idea of hygiene is a science
was a lecture titled the Value of Health to a City,
and this work broke down in numbers the cost of
having a population that wasn't in good health. He noted

(17:52):
the average number of sick days taken by a worker
in Munich at the time, which was twenty and he
calculated that those days cost the city three point four
million gould In a year, and he then I outlined
how if they developed a sewage system and they raised
sanitation standards, the city could actually far exceed making up
for those losses and actually save additional money every year.

(18:14):
He studied how air quality impacted population health, how clothing
impacted health, and the benefits of raising plants indoors. He
examined how ventilation could contribute to or detract from overall health.
The pet and Coper number, which is a number that
represents quote an absolute CEO too concentration of zero point

(18:34):
one percent or one thousand parts per million, is still
used today. His teaching reflected his findings. He evangelized the
importance of clean air, clean water, clean soil, a clean home,
as well as good clothing and nutrition. Thus, this idea
of hygiene as a medical issue really became an interdisciplinary field.

(18:55):
Pet and Coper really considered the role of environment in
a person's health, and to him it was very clear
that city planning should include this as a consideration. He
was not obviously the first person to think about this.
You can find texts going far far back into ancient
times where there are some connections being made about living
conditions and health. But his work to identify specific causal

(19:19):
relationships between the way people live and their health beyond
what could be considered common sense was pretty new, and
he recognized that this was a field that would also
have to be agile as civilization shifted over time, writing quote,
it is a peculiarity of hygiene to change its field
of research and, within certain limits its field of study,

(19:40):
according to time and circumstances. Even as the Hygienic Institute
was under construction, other job offers came in. When Petton
Cooper was asked to become head of the German Empire
Health Council in eighteen seventy six, he turned it down,
although he did serve in a smaller role as a consultant.
We are about to head into the later years of

(20:00):
Pett and Cooper's life, including one very strange and risky experiment,
but first we are going to pause for a word
from the show's sponsors. The eighteen eighties were prolific for
Pett and Cooper, who continued his examination of cholera and

(20:22):
his defense of his theory of how disease spread. In
eighteen eighty two, he collaborated on a project titled Handbook
for Hygiene with the German physician Hugo Wilhelm von Ziemsm.
And that handbook which makes it sound like a handy
thing you could put in your pocket, was actually published
in five volumes. In eighteen eighty three, Petten Cooper founded
a second periodical archive for Hygiene. This wasn't many ways

(20:47):
an outlet for pett and Cooper to continue his writing
about hygiene and disease in eighteen eighty six. In eighteen
eighty seven, he wrote a total of seven fifty six
pages of content for this journal. The same year he
founded it, German microbiologist Robert Coke showed that Vibrio colora
was the bacterium responsible for cholera. Pettenkofer continued to believe

(21:10):
that this was only part of the cause. Though although
Pettenkofer defended his ideas really to the end, Coke's work
eclipsed his as it became the accepted scientific fact. One
of the big drivers in his writing and research was
field work. Pettenkofer was never just postulating about all of
his ideas about how disease was passed. He wasn't just

(21:33):
sitting in his study. He actually made a point to
travel to locations where there had been cholera outbreaks and
study the conditions there, because he was always looking for
additional data to add to his ever growing body of works,
all in the hopes that he could crack this problem
and bring an end to epidemic outbreaks. And that's an
important side note that we should make here. The reason

(21:55):
the debate between contagionists and anti contagionists was so impassioned
was because these were serious matters of public health. How
could scientists and the municipalities who took their council protect people.
In eighteen forty nine, a London cholera outbreak that had
inspired Snow's work claimed the lives of more than fourteen

(22:16):
thousand people. And this was only one issue that was
in play. There were also leprosy which is now more
often called hands and disease, typhus, plague, and yellow fever.
Disease was something that everyone took seriously and that scientists
were constantly trying to understand, even if they came to
drastically different conclusions. So, going back to Maxivon Petton Coopher's

(22:38):
field epidemiology, particularly in instances where the location of an
outbreak didn't fit the model that he had developed, he
was pretty quick to go there and try to figure
out why. In most cases, these were instances where a
city or a village that had had an outbreak was
not built on porous soil, which was something that he
felt was vital to how this whole system worked. For example, Malta,

(23:03):
there had been a cholera epidemic on the island in
eighteen thirty seven, but Malta was rock, which would seem
to contradict Pett and Cofer's theory about porous soil. But
when he actually went and visited the island, he saw
that that rock was in fact porous. It's limestone, so
he felt like this actually supported his idea. Conversely, he

(23:24):
noted that the city of Leon, France, had not had
an outbreak, despite being a major metropolitan area that had
two rivers that skirted the city center and a bustling
trade business. Pett and Cofer concluded that even though there
were other factors that might contribute to an outbreak in Leon,
the fact that the city's substrate was granted had saved

(23:45):
it from epidemics. Yeah, he was like, this whole fermentation
process cannot happen here because granite uh and through all
of this cholera study. He was also still advocating for
a general improvement in hygiene everywhere as a key to
good health, and particularly drinking and just having good clean water,
even though he didn't agree with the idea that contaminated

(24:07):
water was what spread cholera. He thought everybody should just
have clean water because that was best. He wrote quote
for good health, pure water is as necessary as pure air,
good food, comfortable quarters, and so forth. I myself am
an enthusiast in the matter of drinking water, but not
from fear of cholera or typhoid fever, but simply from

(24:28):
a pure love for the good. For me, water is
not only a necessary article of food, but a real
pleasure which I prefer and believe to be more healthful
than good wine or good beer. He was a borderline teetotaler.
He was not really a fan of alcohol at all Boo.
When Pett and Cooper turned seventy, the cities of Munich

(24:50):
and Leipzig each gave him cash gifts to be used
for his pet and co forer Foundation of Hygienic Investigation.
In eighteen ninety, he was elected as president of the
Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and in three he was given
Munich's highest honor, which was the gold Burgess Medal, and
that was in recognition of his lifetime of work. Is

(25:11):
nine also brought some sorrow. Max's wife, Helene died that year,
and the couple had also lost three of their five
children over the years, and all of this loss really
took a toll on the scientist in his later life.
The most dramatic story of Pettenkopher's life and work took
place in eighteen nine two. It is the part that
I referenced grossing me out when I read this outline

(25:33):
during breakfast. He was so convinced that a micro organism
alone could not make you sick that he put his
own life on the line to prove it. On October
seven two, he got a culture of vibrio colliery from
a sick patient. He makes it into bullion and he
drank it. The experienced quote light diarrhea with an enormous

(25:54):
proliferation of the basilly in the stool, but he recovered
pretty quickly. The two of his students tried the same thing.
They both survived, but also became very ill. These were
Pettenkofer's thoughts on his rash experiment quote. Even if I
had deceived myself and the experiment endangered my life, I
would have looked death quietly in the eye, for mine

(26:16):
would have been no foolish or cowardly suicide. I would
have died in the service of science, like a soldier
on the field of honor. Health and life are as
I have so often said, very great earthly goods, but
not the highest for man. Man, if he will rise
above the animals, must sacrifice both life and health for

(26:37):
the higher ideals. In Pettenkofer retired from teaching. Two years later.
He also gave up his court apothecary position, and then, finally,
in eighteen ninety nine, he ended all his other professional
obligations and retired primarily to Lake Starnberger in the southwest
of Munich. We had a summer home there. In early

(26:57):
nineteen o one, Pettenkofer entered a cious depression triggered by
a painful throat infection. On February tenth, nineteen o one,
he shot and killed himself. His body was autopsied, and
it revealed that he had been living with chronic meningitis,
as well as symptoms that would later be recognized as
cerebral calcification. Betton Cofer was buried in his beloved Munich

(27:21):
and thal Kirkner Cemetery. Today there's a statue of him
in Maximilian Square in Munich. The Hygienic Institute at the
University of Munich, which Pettenkofer had leveraged his Vienna offer
to get built, was destroyed in World War Two and
it was bombed on July four. More than twenty years later,
in nineteen sixty seven, it was finally rebuilt and it

(27:43):
became the Maxivon Pettenkofer Institute. That institute continues today as
a research and teaching organization focusing on microbiology, epidemiology and virology,
and it also offers hygienic microbiological testing for clinical facilities.
His period ucal Archive for Hygiene still exists today, although
it's now published under the name International Journal of Hygiene

(28:06):
and Environmental Health. Maxillon, pret and Cooper may have been
wrong about the causes of epidemics, but he was obviously
onto an important aspect of public health with his staunch
defense of hygiene as vital for the well being of
all humankind. The work that he did, as we said,
led to sanitary reform in a number of places, which

(28:26):
significantly improved the community's quality of life. And in modern epidemiology,
there is a recognition that exposure and outcome can be
influenced and modified by other factors, although it's not a
cause and effect situation, like he thought, Yeah, there's they're
definitely all kinds of things that can influence how easy
it is for a pathogen to spread and uh infect people.

(28:49):
But like it's not like you, you would only contract
color o with these specific things happening, like you thought.
So to quote with a quote that nicely summer rises
pet and Cooper's ideology about the importance of good health. Quote,
everyone who lives upon the earth deserves to be well,
for a life without health is a misery martyrdom from

(29:10):
which everyone longs for release, and when it may not
be by other means, even by death. I don't know
that everyone would agree with that perspective, but it does
seem like some up his whole philosophy. Yeah, good health
is the only way to live, and if you can't
have it, it's not worth living. It's a little bit grim. Yeah,

(29:30):
I'm like ablest right, Uh, Yeah, it's a He's such
an interesting creature, and that he his position in all
of this really does get eclipsed by UM Coke and
by uh Louis Pasteur who were doing their stuff. And
again because he was fundamentally wrong about contagion, but all

(29:54):
of the other stuff he did was amazing. I had
no idea about his work in metabolic science until I
had gotten pretty deep into research, and I was like,
wait a minute, which is really fascinating because that's stuff
that is still used all the time today, um, and
it's an important part of some people's lives. Like if
you are an athlete, you're depending on science that he

(30:16):
developed to like maintain your optimal performance, because most athletes
have a very serious, like nutrition plan that's developed after
measuring how they're burning carbohydrates and fat, and that is
all part of this. I love that, Uh, here's a
trick that is happening as we transition to this new
age of recording at home, I usually keep a nice

(30:37):
stack of listener mail prepped in the office, and I'm
bummed because that's one of the things that we won't
be able to do for a little bit um because
we're not there to receive it. And in fact, I
think that building is is not going to be receiving it,
at least not in the normal way that we have
been Um, which stinks. But we'll get back to it,
I promise once all of this blows over and I

(30:58):
can get back to your marvel parcels and postcards, they
will be top of mine. If you've been thinking of
sending something to us, we definitely appreciate your thought and generosity.
I would wait, yeah, hold off, because I don't know
the fate of that stuff right now. Um. I'm sure
it's going somewhere, and it's probably like being stored somewhere,

(31:19):
but I don't know how long it's gonna take for
anything to eventually get parceled out actually to us once
everything is back up and running. So if you have
something you've been longing to send us, just sit on
it for a bit. It'll still it'll still be sendable
with what we're all done. Um yeah. So what I
will do is take this opportunity to thank our listener, Catherine,

(31:41):
who is also someone who I interact with on Twitter
a lot and has become something of a friend, and
she very sweetly sent me a Godzilla magnet and a
little r two D two lapel pin like R two
D two in this really stylized way to our office.
It was one of the last things I was able
to open and before all of this happened. So thank

(32:02):
you so much, Katherine, Like that was just the sweetest
and I love that it relates to both Star Wars,
which I love, and Godzilla, which we have talked about
on the show before, and I also love. If you
would like to write to us, email is a very
safe bet that you can do that at History Podcast
at i heart radio dot com. You can also still
find us on social media as Missed in History pretty

(32:23):
much everywhere. And if you would like to subscribe to
the podcast, if maybe you're a new listener who has
stumbled upon us looking for something to entertain you in
these times have shut in uh, you can do that
on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or
wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in History

(32:45):
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
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