Stuff To Blow Your MindThe idea of healing via immersion in sacred or special waters dates back to prehistory, and it’s still alive and well in the modern world. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider the myth, history and reality and healing waters. (Originally published 03/16/2023)
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for an older episode of the show. This is part two of the series that began airing on last Saturday's Vault episode. This is Washing of the Waters, Part two, originally published March sixteenth, twenty twenty three. I Hope you enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series about healing waters. The belief held by many people throughout history that you could heal your body from illness and restore your health by bathing or by immersing yourself, sometimes just in hot or cold waters, sometimes in the waters of a special spring or location. Now, in the last episode, we discussed the prehistoric origins of bathing, as well as some evidence of ideas that became attached to bathing in the ancient world, for example, ritual and religious ideas about purity. You can see this in the ritual bathing by priests in ancient Egypt, or as ritual washing and bathing procedures outlined in the Bible.
And then also the segue into the belief that became especially popular among the physicians of ancient Greece and Rome that you could cure diseases by immersing the body in hot or cold water, often though not always connected to explanations based on the theory of the four humors. In today's episode, I wanted to kick things off by returning to talk about a few more aspects of a paper we discussed in the previous episode. This was the paper Water and Spas in the Classical World the Journal Medical History nineteen ninety by Ralph Jackson, who was at the time a scholar working for the Department of Prehistoric and Romano British Antiquities at the British Museum in London. Now, as this paper addresses not only beliefs about the healing powers of bathing and water, but also of specific dedicated spa locations, I got interested in the origins of the English word spa, and it seems to me that the most commonly accepted etymology of the word today is that spa is derived from the name of a particular curative mineral spring resort in eastern Belgium, which is called Spa. So Spa the common noun derives from Spa, the proper now in the name of the place, which by the way, is a city that still exists today. You can go to Spa, Belgium. And I saw on their Wikipedia page that one of the violinists on the Titanic was from Spa, Belgium. But the proper noun seems in turn derived from a common noun in the Walloon language, which is a Romance language spoken in eastern Belgium, and the original noun there would have been espa, meaning a fountain or perhaps also referring to a spring. Now, another thing we talked about in the previous episode was a number of names for healing by immersion in water and related practices. So you have the idea of balneotherapy, that is, healing by bathing, often in mineral springs. Hydrotherapy a more general term referring to all kinds of water based treatments for disease, and I wanted to add to that another one that is mentioned in this paper. This is a phrase taken from what the Caesar Augustus did when he was practicing some balneotherapy, he did a practice called taking the waters. So in most cases that seems to refer to, yeah, just immersion like bathing in waters, but also maybe some in some cases drinking the waters. And so I like that because it sounds kind of like you're taking the waters, almost like you take a pill. But it also makes me think of the competitive aspect referenced by Plenty of the Elder when he talks about people bragging about how much of the thermal springs they can take, either like you know, I can soak in this way too long, I can soak in there so long, and then also by allegedly drinking so much from the sulfur of springs that you could no longer see their jewelry because their skin would close over their rings. Sounds like an exaggeration to me, or at least I hope. Yeah.
I've seen this pop up with various springs. We've been looking at it in our research, where there will be traditions of bathing or soaking in the waters, but also of drinking the waters. So it seems like these two are easily cos it's good enough for the epidermis is good enough for the digestive track.
I guess. Yeah. It invites kind of gross questions, like in what order do you do those two things?
Well, I mean, these are the sources of questions one always has to have about one's water supply.
I guess, well, I guess in the sense that, yes, every glass of water you drink contains water that was poop and pee and everything else. The water cycle just continues around the world, but at least we hope today that water goes through some kind of purification process before you can drink it. I'm just imagining, I know, people soaking in sulfur springs and then just scooping that right up on and.
Like a child in a bath. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you have that one to look forward to as well. Don't drink the bath water. See how many times you get to say that? Real quick though, I was thinking about this, I think a lot of this, what we're talking about here, it kind of comes down to a few different realities that are worth pointing out. One, we need water, and two sources of water in the world are not all equal. There are better sources than others, and a lot of the human experiences has had to do with trying to figure out what are the best sources, and so a lot of this you could maybe even look at as just kind of like a human overcomplication of that basic scenario, like I want the best water for me, the water that's not going to make me sick, the water that's going to ensure my continued life, and then we kind of build up everything on top of that.
Well, yeah, that's exactly right. And this brings us back to the next thing from this paper I wanted to talk about, which is when we discussed Jackson last time, we were talking about more general ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about the healing powers of bathing, but I mentioned there were also beliefs about the medicinal virtues of specific water sources, either for bathing or drinking, or sometimes both, and Jackson lists a number of examples of this, and of course plenty talked about specific waters in the sense of waters with specific properties, so maybe a sulfur springs versus alum springs and the different ailments that those could address. But here you can actually get into specific lowcalum so a few mentioned in Jackson's paper. One is the the aqui Cutili, which is a mineral spring northeast of the city of Rome. Both Plenty and Kelsus mentioned the cold waters of the spring as having the power to cure stomach disorders. In particular, Jackson also mentions the sulfur springs of Aquiabuli. This is near the town of Tivoli, also northeast of Rome, and Jackson writes quote described by Vitruvius, Strabo and Marshall, recommended by Plenty for the healing of wounds, and frequented by Augustus when he was troubled with rheumatism. But one of the most famous locations in the ancient Roman world for bathing was the facilities in the city of bay Ye, which is near Naples, famous for its baths fed by hot springs, and Jackson writes quote Kelsus recommended the sulfurous sw wet baths in the myrtle groves above bay Strabo characterized the place by its hot springs that were quote suited both to the taste of the fastidious and to the cure of disease. And Plenty believe that quote nowhere is water more bountiful than in the bay of Baye, or with more variety of relief, meaning relief from disease. However, Baye and its hot baths interestingly combined multiple reputations, so it was a place of healing from disease, but it also had a reputation as sort of a vice magnet or a party town. So imagine what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. But for ancient Rome, which was already had, you know, sort of a kind of baseline vegaciness to it, you get hints of this reputation in the writings of ancient authors. For example, Marshall described a story of a virtuous woman who went to Baye and while she was there, she know she hung out in the baths and then ended up deciding to leave her husband for a youth that she met there. And Marshall rights quote she arrived at Penelope and departed a Helen, which is very judgy, but gives you an idea of what they thought.
Yeah, and you know, and this strikes to something that's kind of key to the overall history of certainly baths and spas in European history, like that at times they become morally suspect, and that can of course lead to the downfall of various bath and spot cultures in different areas.
Sure, and of course it was also a place. This is another aspect of the kind of the vagas equality of it. It was a place of opulence and extravagance for the rich, hosting private villas of emperors, fancy spa facilities that had a lot of amenities. Jackson writes quote. Nevertheless, a vast sector of baths, imposing buildings to enclose the hot springs and sulfurous vapors. Grandiose rooms and extensive loggia and porticos have all been identified in the multi level complex terraced into the volcanic slope above the bay and Gulf, and the paper goes on to describe a number of sort of individual buildings here, one misleadingly named the Temple of Mercury, misleading because it appears to not actually have been a temple, but a place for soaking in hot spa waters. And this was this gigantic rotunda that was again built up up on the volcanic slope, and it had these big windows to let light in from the top, but also to ventilate the sulfurous fumes. And it was said to in some ways resumable the design of Hadrian's Pantheon. Another interesting thing about the area of Bay is that there have been found artifacts from the time which are glass bottles that have engravings on them that are supposed to depict this area, the region of baye. Like, there was one example sighted in the paper and included on a plate that has all these engravings on the glass that's described as a quote bulbous glass bottle that was found in North Africa and it has like these drawings that are supposed to represent this area near Naples. And it's thought that maybe these were glass bottles where the water from Bay was bottled so people could take it away as a souvenir and I don't know, maybe just hang on to it or drink it later or something.
That's fascinating. And of course we still see that today with various waters that even if they're not considered sacred, and in many cases they are still considered sacred at the very least, it's some sort of a curio you take home with you, some sort of keepsake of a trip.
Yeah. Now, though most were not as luxurious as the facilities of Bay, which were for the rich and powerful. Many regions of the Roman Empire had their own spa facilities, even kind of far flung regions that were far away from the imperial center. Jackson mentions especially regions where the locals practiced Celtic religions. So this would have included parts of Gaul, which is sort of modern day France and Germany because water deities in Celtic mythology held a special importance. And this also brings up an association between the development of Roman baths or spas and the presence of the Roman military in places far away from Rome itself, from the imperial core. When the legion moved in, this would often lead to the development of a spa resort at a natural thermal spring, and a spa would become a place for wounded soldiers to heal or place for recreation and sort of maintenance of good health among the ranks. And Jackson mentions that, so you know, the Romans come in, their military comes in, and they build a spa. That this was not done out of a sense of kind heartedness to the locals, like look what we're doing for you. It was out of self interest, because it was for the Roman troops or at least for their benefit, even if it was also open to locals.
But certainly it does speak to the value that the Romans placed on this spa culture.
Yes, and it's also interesting how that cultural importance means it gets sort of wrapped up in religious ideas as well, because Jackson writes that under Roman rule, in one of these areas of the Empire, you build a spa, and a deity of the local religion would usually be conflated with a Greco Roman deity that had similar powers or patronage, and thus you'd get situations like you had in the German city of Achen, where the local Celtic deity Granus was combined with the Greco Roman figure of Apollo the Healer, and thus the composite cult figure Apollo Granas is born and rules over the local hot springs the spa there. And this is interesting because it helps give you a sense on the ground how these spas were used. Jackson includes an image from an early second century votive altar found near Achen appearing to depict Apollo Granis. Here this composite figure of the Greco Roman and the Celtic deity, and in describing it, Jackson writes quote, the enthroned God holds a liar and a plectrum to musical instruments, and carries his bow and quiver of arrows over his right shoulder. An inscription records that the altar was dedicated in fulfillment of a vow by l Latinius Masser, a native of Verona and senior officer or Prefectus castororum of the ninth Legion, who may have been restored to health at the spa. So you get healed to the spa, that may mean that you have to now make a donation there. Maybe you made a vow to the local deity and said, like, Okay, if these waters heal my wound or heal my sickness, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna be the sponsor of this altar or something. Now, this paper also gets into another major SPA location, a very historically important and interesting one at Bath in England. But I think I'm going to save that one for the next episode in the series because that brings up its own fascinating mysteries and histories. So we'll come back to Bath.
Now for the next example. We're going to look at here. I wanted to hit on something from Irish tradition, in part because the week this episode is coming out, it's the week of Saint Patrick's Day, and I like to spend my research time a little bit on something Ireland related. And I found a great example in the waters of Leak Slip Spa. Now you'll find numerous thermal springs in Ireland, and you also find this tradition of healing wells and holy wells that you also see throughout England. You know, you'll find sacred wells in Ireland as well, different wells and different springs or attributed different healing properties for different maladies. And you'll also findly connected to such figures as Saint Patrick, but also to older gods and goddesses of Irish tradition. But at any rate, balneo therapeutic medicine in Ireland was especially big in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and at least the early nineteenth centuries.
Yes, And this sort of correlates with how it seems that after the Roman so you know Greco Roman world, medical treatments involving bathing or immersion were very popular, and it seems that kind of declined later in the Roman Empire. And was again comparatively rare through the early Middle Ages. But then there was sort of a resurgence and interest in bath culture and in medicine involving bathing in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and then there was another big rush for it, I think maybe in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
Yeah, so a lot of this, you see the fads come and go right now, specifically with leak Slip here. This is located near the town of leak Slip in northeast Ireland. Its spelled le ei x LP, and I understand that this area in general is a major Irish water source, or at least there are various videos online about the importance of the various water operations located in this region. This particular SPA, however, was apparently it's not one that has like a deep history in and of itself, or at least that doesn't seem to be the case based on the research I was looking at. Apparently the spa was uncovered in seventeen ninety three by workmen digging the Royal Canal. They discovered the spring, and then as they were developing everything, they ended up building it out into kind of a Romanesque spa, and it was apparently quite popular for a good run there, but then it fell out of use steering the early nineteenth century, and based on what I was reading, it was like for a while it was just kind of in ruins. And yeah, I think this probably lines up with just sort of a general dip in the popularity of bounteotherapeutic medicine. Now, when you initially start reading about the Leak Slip Spa, you know, it basically sounds like any other spa situation you might be looking at, you know, sulfurous waters that were thought to have healing properties, Romanesque baths catering to folks in search of such healing. But what really caught my attention is that in this particular story anyway, there is also a worm.
A worm.
Yes, So as we move into this, I'd like to turn to the writings of Caesar Otway, who live seventeen eighty through eighteen forty two. He talks about this in his eighteen thirty nine book A Tour in Connate, and he describes Leak Slip Spa as follows. And I have to warn this is all just part of a gigantic run on sentence that I guess was just the style in those days. All right, Please, I don't know if I can summon the energy to give it proper justice.
I have faith.
Od Way writes, it is not only a beautiful but an extraordinary spring. For if you believe all the neighbors, not a fish or frog will live in its waters. And though there be a floculent, rusty, colored, ochroous matter constantly rising to the surface of the well, exactly similar to that which is found in springs strongly impregnated with iron, yet no test, either gallic acid or pruseate of potash, can identify any iron. But in the center of this floculent matter is found a very red little worm, about half an inch long, which all those who still who have still faith in the celebrity of the well say, is the sovereignist remedy alive for a sore leg? Nay more, let anyone who has drank over night from fifteen to twenty tumblers of punch, and whose head is so hot that it makes the water fizz into which it is plunged, Let him, I say, but take a quart or two of the water of this spring. On the following morning, and he will lose all his whiskey fever and walk home as cool as a cucumber. I assure you, gentle reader, I have seen Sundry making the experiment, and I actually saw them afterwards sober.
WHOA, I want to read the rest of this guy's book.
Yeah, Like I say, it has a great energy to it, so to refresh. Otway is telling us that nothing else lives in these waters, but they seem like iron infused waters despite negative testing, and that floculation occurs, creating a kind of wool like coagulation on top of the water in which you'll find tiny red worms. These waters will cure you of your sore leg or your punch inflicted hangover. Either.
That is a great story. And this did make me look up floculent. Okay, So floculent means kind of like coagulant. It means making particles clump together. Didn't a new word for the vocab.
Yeah, but I think you know sometimes I guess you see it with like the kind of foaminess on top of of like flowing waters where they kind of like get kind of dead ended in a particular part of the stream. That kind of thing or at least that's what I'm picturing in my head.
Okay, but when he's talking about the worm, I can't tell does he mean literally a worm, like a biological organism a worm, or does he mean like a worm like clump of something.
He appears to mean an actual worm, because I found plenty of other references to it. These details that I'm about to read are from a twenty twenty one source survey of the heritage of Holy Wells and County, killed there by Laughlin at Ulf for Ireland's Archaeology Plan Heritage Solutions.
Quote.
A small worm lived in the scum on the top of the pond, and people used to put it between two pieces of cloth and rub it to their eyes as a cure for weak eyes. Some people left the pieces of cloth on the briars beside the well, but others didn't as there was no saint associated with the well.
So what there's no saint there to scold you into leaving the pieces of cloth on the briers beside the well, so you would just what's steal the cloth?
I'm less sure about what they're getting at with that, but okay, it's hard for me to get past the idea that Okay, not only yes, are there tiny red worms in these thermal springs, but you also are going to essentially squeeze them into your eyeballs or something like that, something way too close to that to initially said, well with me.
So you're what, You're squeezing out the little red worm juice into your eyes, and that cures their weakness.
I guess, And it's maybe going through the cloth a little bit. I couldn't find much in the way of other references to that particular process, but still it seems to be the case that there are multiple accounts of the red worms here. So setting aside any actual curative effects of the worms, you know what might they be. Obviously, to live in such an environment, you need some matter of thermophile or extremomophile organism, and we know that there are plenty of examples of those sorts of organisms, creatures that are able to thrive in heated waters, for example. But I was looking around and there there are plenty of accounts of red worms and also things described as worms living in thermal spring environments around the world, with some certainly endemic to particular springs or immediate environments, and others more sort of widespread. For example, cet Brews and Animal Life in Hot Springs, published in nineteen twenty seven in the Quarterly Review of Biology. Rites of the blood worms that are found in particular waters understood at least by this author, to be the larval form of various midges, and that while they might occur in various waters, the author described having encountered them in a shallow thermal pool at yellow Stone National Park.
Oh Okay, so it may so, this so called worm may have not been permanently a worm, but one of the stages of life of another organism, maybe the larval form, like a of a type of fly exactly.
Yeah, And you can look up images of this like these are well documented. But they're yeah, they're not true worms. They have legs there, they're a larvae now there. But still that doesn't solve everything because there are also Sulfur cave worms to consider. There was a recent study of these creatures at Sulfur Cave and Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Thousands of these worms live in the waters there, and Aaron Scott at All for NPR described them as follows in September of twenty twenty two. Quote the worm blobs look like dark red sea an enemies wriggling in the stream bed. The individual worms are around one inch long, then is pencil led and live off the bacteria in the cave, which in turn lives off the sulfur. See that's already checking off some boxes there.
Yeah. Yeah.
Now, the worms in this case, dubbed LiMnO drillis sulfur insists, seem endemic to this particular thermal spring, but one of its relatives, LiMnO drillis Hoffman history, is also red in color and is very tough, able to live in polluted waters that other organisms can't handle. And it's very widespread and is found in Ireland.
Oh okay, so another candidate right right now. Interesting.
In either case, the red coloration of the worm or larva is due to hemoglobin molecules in the organism. Both midge larva and in the worms in question here are sometimes called bloodworms. They're both referred to as bloodworms, and I found an article about this with the Missouri Department of Conservation pointing out, hey, if you're talking about blood worms, you might be talking about a larva. You might be talking about a particular type of worm.
Both good for weak guys.
In either case, though, I would say, don't go finding tiny red worms or larva and squeezing them into your eyeballs. I looked around to try to find any details on folk remedies or folk medicine traditions that involved squeezing red worms into your eyes and or in any way really using them medicinally, and I could not find anything. Granted, that's exactly the sort of thing that in some cases maybe lost to history.
Though Yeah, I think there are tons of fulk remedies that never or only barely make it into print. Yeah.
Now, I did run across one article concerning mysterious cattle diseases kind of a throwback to our Halloween episodes.
Oh. I had to think for a second, but yes, in past October we did a couple of different livestock malady series. We did the stuff on the cattle mutilation panic of the nineteen seventies and on the traditional beliefs about elfshot, where people thought that the sort of subtle folk were using spiritual weapons to harm their livestock.
Yeah, I found in this case, it was an article from nineteen fourteen titled the cattle disease called Canog and its traditional cure by amulets and charms, and this was by William F. D. Vismus Kane, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland nineteen fourteen. So the author here notes that the actual symptoms of the disease vary, and it's basically one of these situations where you have kind of a catch all term that's referring to probably different ailments in different species, and at least in some cases it was attributed to some sort of biting insect, but also to the consumption of some sort of worm. Now the worm that is blamed, it seems like accounts vary. There's like one account saying it's some sort of a black worm, which obviously isn't what we're talking about here. But there's at least some cases where they refer to a tiny red worm as being a potential cause of the ailment. And so the author here is citing one of these accounts. There's a discussion of quote, a very small worm is red as scarlet and found in the height of summer and never found at the time of the year when the canog is seen. The sighted source indicates that the scarlet worm does not cause canog. Canog he stresses is treated via blood letting, But the illness caused by ingesting the scarlet worm is said to cause the head to swell, and then you cure it by reaching inside the cow's mouth and squeezing or popping a bladder that has grown at the root of the tongue. And I was just kind of nodding my head to this. I was like, Okay, I guess that's the thing that happens. But the author here cites a Professor Mason of Dublin quote, I think the scarlet tiny worm of the writer is with little doubt, the well known blood worm frequent in shallow water in summer, and is the larva of the cheronomus, a kind of crane fly, a perfectly noc with animal. And then Mason seems to just dismiss this bladder bursting cure as a quack cure, similar to one that was done by quack doctors that would cure an animal by bursting internal bladders on the spine. So some sort of, you know, some sort of like a fake healing technique. I don't know if this is a solid accusation that the professor is making or if there maybe there was some sort of folk remedy in play and some sort of like swelling on the back of the tongue. But Professor Mason seems to be saying like, no, no, no, that's just some quack trying to you know, cheat you out of a few coins by reaching down your cow's throat.
So this might be more akin to curing your cattle of elf shop by having them like eat fairy crabs and then poking them with a special knife or something.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting to think about again this paper, it deals in part with the use of amulets to cure mysterious ailments, but there are other ways to supernaturally address a particular ailment. Another note about the bloodworm midge larvae. Here, they're consumed all the time by trout so and I believe you can actually get them as bait as well. So perhaps some of our anglers out there have some experience with these blood.
Worms floculent fly fishures let us know.
Yeah, and they seem harmless. I think some people can have allergic reactions to them. I saw a twenty thirteen paper about this, but again I wasn't able to turn up anything about their use in folk medicine, or the use of the other type of organism that is sometimes referred to as a bloodworm having any kind of role in folk medicine. So again, don't go squirting worms into your eyes. But I think it is fascinating because we have a situation here where, yeah, there's the more traditional sort of sulfur springs scenario going on, but then this added level of, oh, there's something about the things that live in the spring water, there's something about the organisms in it that have some reputed beneficial health effect.
Yeah, and I certainly haven't read anything about that in the ancient Roman context or anything.
Yeah, but it did end up reminding me of another example of supposed therapeutic waters with organisms that live in them, in which in cases where at least some traditions value the presence of the organisms themselves, which leads us to the world of fish. So, and some of you may know exactly where this is going, But my earliest exposure to anything out there about this about there being fish in therapeutic waters and the fish or the therapeutic part of the immersion experience. I mean, the most I think that it ever happened is I've maybe been occasionally nibbled by a fish in a lake or at the beach. But back in two thousand and nine, my wife and I visited Arawona National Park in Thailand and toward Erawan Falls. These are beautiful waters, So basically you have just like a whole system of waterfalls with these very clear pools in between them that have kind of like this blue appearance, very beautiful, and there are fish in those pools, and you were encouraged to, you know, come up, dip your feet, take your shoes off, get your feet in those waters, and then the fish will come up and nibble on the dead skin of your feet, which tickles.
But in some cases you're saying, some people believe there to be health consequences of this kind of thing.
Right right now, I don't know specifically about the tie scenario, if there if there's any kind of like traditional thaie medicinal understanding of these fish. If memory serves the guides on this particular trip, they just made reference to it being a pedicure. I don't remember there being any kind of medical argument made for it. But I know this is probably ringing about with a number of people out there because there is this wider spread use of supposed fish pedicure services, where you've got go to some sort of a pedicure business and you will put your feet into a tank that has fish in it, and the fish will eat the dead skin off your feet.
Once again, it seems like a thing that's unusual and interesting enough that a lot of people, I bet would do it just for the novel experience, even if it doesn't do much better than a pumice stone for getting dead skin off your foot.
Yeah. Now, I'm not sure exactly what species of fish this was that I encountered in Thailand. Again, it's a while back, and I didn't take notes at the time. I'm not sure if they mentioned a specific species, but I see some references online and these are like not papers or anything, but just like reviews and so forth, referring to it being a gara rufa or a gara rufa. I guess more accurately, And this is a particular This is the fish that is often encountered in these supposed fish pedicure services that you'll encounter some places. They're illegal in some places, and I'm not recommending you go out and try them. And we'll come back to why in a minute here, But yeah, I saw some references to it being this Gara rufa, but those are at least I understand to be native to Western Asia, and I'm not sure if this could be a situation where they could potentially even be invasive there, because I was reading on the US Fish and Wildlife Service website that they're rated as like a low uncertain invasive risk. So yeah, I'm not sure if this could even conceivably be the same species, But research indicates that there are definitely are other Gara species, and there are Gara species in Thailand. There are at least three. There's one that's called Gara Fluvia tillis, and this seems to reside in the same general area that I'm talking about here. So if I had to just guess at all of this and we ultimately all this is would be a gas based on some of the things I was reading, I would say maybe it's that species, but I just don't know for sure. But the gar Ufa has certainly traveled around the globe via the fish pedicure industry, and I know a number of you have probably caught wind of this one way or another. The idea being that you go to this business, to a business, you immerse your feet into a tank full of these fish, and they nibble away at the dead skin on your feet, like revealing like a brighter or more vibrant skin.
I don't know why I thought you were going to say the face of God.
You know, it's we talked many and we've just spoken many times on the show about situations where there's some sort of like especially in oceanic environments, where there's some sort of a grooming species that helps out another animal. I mean, most recently we talked about the whale lice on whales and how they're essentially doing the same thing. But to be clear, when we're talking about it being a pedicure service that you're encountering like in a tank under a table, that is not a natural environment scenario. This is a very augmented scenario, and there are various issues to be had with it. Yeah, definitely, Yeah, on one hand, potential sanitation concerns, but then also ethical concerns as well concerning the fish. And as a result, yeah, it's banned in many places. So yes, there are other garafish, but the Gara rufa is native to the Middle East, particularly parts of Jordan, Syria, and Turkey, and in the wild they feed on detritus, algae and tiny animals, but in the absence of better food sources, they will feed on dead skin. So the alleged origin of the fish pedicure is most in most of the literature we're looking at is the Kangle hot spring in Turkey. Now, again we're talking about hots in an area long known to human beings, so it's likely that these springs were known and utilized for all the reasons humans have visited thermal springs throughout their history. And while the fish were certainly here, they were certainly present in this location. It seems things have changed in the last one hundred years or so, one hundred years plus. So there's a two thousand and seven Scientific American paper. This is one I think you turned up and sent me Joe, titled fish that Go Skin Deep. And I guess it's not so much an article. It's kind of a short bit.
It was just a short, little snippet article, but it had a very interesting detail in it.
Yes, yeah, it adds a little bit of historical detail that I was having trouble finding in other studies quote these fish have acquired a taste for humans, largely because they have little choice. The spring is too hot to sustain enough algae and plankedon to feed them all. In the past, the fish were able to move between the spring and a creek that runs nearby, but after learning of a story about a local shepherd who's wounded legs healed after being dipped into the spring in nineteen seventeen, builders walled off the spring from the creek. In the nineteen fifties to preserve a captive school. A Turkish family has now constructed a hotel, villas and a playground, and markets the resort to Sorias's patients.
Now, I came across this short Siam article because we were looking at papers that seem to be focused on the question of is this treatment actually effective or not for pariasis. It seems obviously this is a form of alternative medicine. So I don't know if I have an opinion or not on whether there's any evidence this is actually useful for siriasis. I guess I would have my doubts. But the fascinating thing to me was the thing about like enclosing this fish population that used to go back and forth, but apparently now is stuck in the pool.
Yes, and would otherwise maybe not eat dead skin off of people's feet, but given that it is an altered environment, they are encouraged to do so due to the lack of other food sources. Still, I think the basic scenario here wrote what it reveals about the natural environment that has been augmented. This does kind of line up with the Thailand scenario where again, in that Thailand scenario you had various clear pools that were connected by multiple cascading waterfalls. So sort of these kind of like traps of small aquatic habitats that are connected. But you can see why you might end up with the population of fish in a given pool that are hungry, that have maybe exhausted what they can eat, and are then happy to check out anything that is introduced. So advocates of this treatment sometimes called ichthiotherapy, they toubt it is either a general cosmetic pedicure sort of procedure or is a treatment for skin ailments such assiriasis. Again, we're not going to weigh in too much on the ups and downs of this. This is getting into the area of alternative medicine. But certainly when you're dealing with the fish take environment version of it, there are some definite reasons to stay clear of it.
Anyway.
In both of these cases, we have the blood worms, we have these little fish that nipple at your toes. These are both situations where we have spring waters that are noted for their health benefits in part or entirely due to the organisms that live in them, the animals that live in them. And I think it leads at least worth noting that thermal springs continue to be of interest to scientists because of potential extremophile organisms that might live there that also might reveal some sort of unique antibiotic discoveries. Though I don't think this is the sort of thing that they merely bathing in the waters would unlock.
For a person, right. It would be more that, like the organisms there are useful for research on antibiotics, not that like you going to cure your diseases, but just by getting in the water.
Yeah, that I don't think anybody's making those claims. But then against the exact sort of claims that could end up being made about a given spring, like bathe in the extremophile waters of extremophile springs, unlock the unknown antibiotics for your own well being, that sort of thing.
Well, the hot spring blood worms and the hot spring fish. I did not imagine this at all as an angle we would end up going down. But this has been fascinating, and our series on the Healing Waters will have to continue with at least one more episode, maybe a couple more next week. There's a lot more interesting stuff to talk about, of course, with a lot of the alleged cures we've been talking about up to this point, probably the majority of them. If there was an effect, it may have been a placebo effect, but there may actually be some cases where there's pretty good evidence of balneotherapy of various kinds, even in particular spring waters, having an actual, direct mechanistic effect on healing certain illnesses. And if that is the case, we're gonna talk about some examples of that next time.
Yeah, so be sure to join us for that discussion. There's more strange stuff in the Healing waters.
It'll be floculent, yes.
Yes, don't drink the floculent waters.
Don't drink the bathwater. All right.
Well, as we close out here, to want to remind everybody that our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You'll find them on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On Mondays, we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do a short form artifactor Month to Factor, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film.
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