Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we talked about Adolph Larenz this week, who is is interesting, fascinating, troubling. The thing that really struck me in doing research on him was this whole controversy within the medical community and how difficult it can be in a situation like that to tease out the reality from all of the varying and very vehement opinions. Right that, um I mentioned it, they're even you know, within statements that criticized his work also kind of contradicted themselves as saying, we already do that work, and it's like wait, wait, wait, wait wait. Um So that was like a fast, neating and tricky part to me because I'm not a doctor. Might know that might shock you, but I'm not. Uh, And it's hard I think even I mean, you see it even within the medical community for people to evaluate, because there were some doctors who were like, no, he's great, what do you do him? And others who were really angry about it, and and the public loved him, which adds a whole other layer, because whether any of those people criticizing or supporting him were conscious of it, they were surely being impacted by the public opinion of him, and by the fact that he was literally on the front pages of papers all the time whenever he came right. This is one of those cases where it's recent history and it's still difficult to teach because you can't psychoanalyze every single person, like even if and even if in the moment you had psychologists standing by to do that work, you would probably still not get a full picture. So those are always interesting to me. I just realized, uh so as we were talking in that in the episode, I was talking about my grandmother who had scoliosis, and I said that she had no treatment for it beyond adjusting the hems of her skarts. I don't actually know. It's totally possible that some time before I was born she did have some kind of treatment, but the end result was still that she had a pretty pronounced spinal curvature that uh, you know, required her to alter all over clothing. But then also I remember she was diagnosed I think with mitral valve prolapse based on what the blood flow rushing through her heart sounded like through as a stethoscope. And it turned out that it was really that her heart was tipped because of the curvature and um and uh and so that was like a whole process of like unexpected side effects. It also reminded me of whichever, um I think it was Deanie. Was that the Judy Bloom book that was about scoliosis. Don't remember, I was like a snooty child who didn't read Judy Bloom. I was like busy with other things. And let me just tell you, as an adult, no, no shade of Judy Bloom, and there as a kid, I had this weird bias against it, like that's what all of the mainstream girls read that are not intellectuals. I'm not, which is just what a pretentious little weasel I was, and in some ways continue to be. Yeah, well I just google it on my phone and yes, that is Deany by Judy Bloom, a book that I probably read more than once because since scoliosis runs in families really often, like I was constantly being monitored to see how my spine was doing, um and so like this was a book that I read a lot in my teen years as I was going through that uncertainty. Yeah. The other thing that is really interesting that became kind of an in sharp contrast and appearance to me um was that, you know, I mentioned at the top that this came up in our Criminalia episode about the person that masqueraded as a doctor to assist him. And what's very interesting is that if you look at stories of that person's life, they definitely kind of couch it as though he was seeking he was practicing medicine, which he was not actually. I mean, obviously he was representing himself as a doctor, but he wasn't doing hands on care with patients, which is something that gets left out, and it really wasn't until I was like looking at old archival newspapers covering the story that they were the ones pointing out, you know, and even in because it's much more sensational to think the worst, even in pretty like buried parts of the article where it'd be like, oh no, no, he just he was just writing things down. He wasn't touching patients, but that's never part of it. And you see how like depending on what the story is being presented as how those details shift. And it's just a good reminder to always be digging and looking in the margins and finding the buried lead in some cases. Um. Yeah, I have m many thoughts about the sort of backbiting and in fighting amongst the medical community, especially, you know, once it becomes something. We've talked on the show many times before about um, scientific disagreements and people feeling that they weren't getting credit or that they had been overlooked in in discussions of something. But this one is also unique because it does play out in the papers in a very public way at a time when the public was very big on the person involved, and so it's a it's just an interesting look at how those things get handled by the press, particularly at that period of time in the twenties and thirties. Yeah, I could. I could look at professional disagreements play on the press all day, every day. As long as they're in the past, that's more fun. There have been times when I've been trying to figure out what to do a podcast on next that I've been googling things like historical scientific disputes. Yeah. Um, it is also to me really really interesting. Like I said, we contrade, we talked about the contradiction of of medical practitioners who simultaneously criticized his work and said they were doing the same work. But it's also interesting to me that most of them acknowledge that he had developed all of these techniques, but then they kind of wanted him to shut up and get out of the country, which is a whole other like layer to that whole Like what is really the crux of the problem, especially when a lot of a lot of people were so in favor of his work and in favor of supporting him that they were willing to like make sure he got to sit for board exams in a much you know, quicker process than the average person would be able to have access to, etcetera. Um. And then it always gets ruined by somebody being really able at gross in some way. Yeah. Yeah, that is the other thing about that coverage, and and we talked about it some in the show, just the way that language has changed around orthopedic issues, disability of any kind the medical community. Like, there's so many headlines from that period talking about his work that just make you cringe, and you look at them today and you realize we're still figuring a lot of things out. I'm sure in another fifty years people will cringe at all of today's headlines for being incredibly ignorant. Always in motion is the future. Uh. We talked about Hugo Gernsbach or Gern's back. I'll see. I'll hear people say all the time. I sometimes use them interchangeably, just to to roll with the flow and cover all bases. Yeah. We had a whole conversation that we cut out of the show that I say, we are our producer Casey or whoever is helping Casey with edits. Uh, cut that out for us how to say it? Yeah, because she'll hear it both ways. And I think he's it's one of those names that is common enough, you know, in a particular area that lots of people have said it lots of different ways. So I am pronunciation has transcended whatever his lifetime pronunciation was. In my opinion, he's an obviously an interesting one. But he's also interesting because there's so much that you've got to leave out to do an episode on him that isn't really worth putting in and expanding it to a two fur because it's really like, boy, he sure was a nutty eccentric um And it's just more and more evidence of that. Um, there's one thing that I didn't mention because again I never found a hard bit of evidence for it that he apparently went through a period when he was quite young where he gambled a lot, but he eventually lost enough that he was like, oh, I should stop doing that. Yeah, Um, I had. There was a write up about him in Life magazine in the nineteen fifties and there's a quote in it that made me laugh so hard because they're talking about him as a writer, and you know, he did obviously write fiction, but was, as we said several times, not known for being a great writer. And this journalist is specifically mentioning the novelization that came out of his uh, his initial modern electric series that he did to fill out pages, and says to describe the book as a novel is stretching the definition of that word to the screech point. You know, it's cute. Alice is from Switzerland. There's no crazy, very simplified, easy to digest love trope in there. Like everything is a very simple story to follow. Nothing gets too confusing. Um, there were a lot of, um, like I said, details about him that I didn't put in. One of the things that I saw that I really enjoyed was that he didn't um believe in funerals um because he really what he's saying is that he doesn't believe in our current system of burying people in cemeteries because in his view, he thought that over time, people will keep dying until the entire earth has to be a graveyard. I mean, he's not wrong, right. He came up with this idea that we should freeze all of our corpses and shoot him into space at speeds that are calculated to remove them from our solar system. That seems uh man, just tossing your garbage in the neighbors. Yeah, that's have there's levels of problems with that. Um. Somehow, that reminds me, though of a thing that I was reading where there are not a lot of places in the world. I it's I don't want to misspeak, because I'm like recalling an an article that I read some stretch of time ago. But it was basically about how the idea that your loved ones remains are going to be buried in this cemetery in perpetuity is not a universal idea, and that there are lots of places where you basically you pay rent on the grave site, and if you have no surviving relatives paying the rent on that grave site anymore, it's going to be somebody else's UM. For that reason of like, where we continue to give each person their own grave site, then eventually it's all grave sites. It reminds me of UM Did You Uch Far Escape? When it was on some There was one episode where Rigel, who was one of the puppet characters, was sort of having this concept of of UM cemeteries explained to him. And I won't quote it accurately because I'm literally going from very distant memory, but he was like, you keep your dead right there with you. It was just horrified by the idea. And if you watch Futurama, eventually we start burying people uh in other places because we'll have you know, we'll need to have satellite cemeteries to handle it. Yeah. Well, and there's culturally so many different UH ways of dealing with death and what to do with remains after death, Like none of these things are universal at all. That was a weird little digression. We just went on the best kind UM. One of the things I love reading reading Gernsbeck's work is that you know, at the time him he was writing a lot of his early stuff, the word technology had not been coined yet, and so it is that fun. I mean, to me, this is one of the delights of history, is seeing the ways that people kind of talked around concepts that didn't have a name yet. I mean, even scientifiction is hilarious and charming. This is also a thing I didn't I didn't get into you, he claimed. I mean, he came up with the word scientifiction, but he also claimed that he came up with the word television and some other things. You know. He was he was not like the not not afraid to be his own hype man. He made a lot of claims. He made a lot of claims, and he I mean, he did have a lot of um insightful predictions about things that would come to fruition, but also lots that were completely cockamami. He apparently also was known to send food back in restaurants if it didn't arrive at the table in a way that he liked, like to all be plated perfectly, and he was not afraid to send it back several times. Yeah, don't don't do that, which to me is just like pers nicketty, but um, you know, I'm usually too hungry. I don't care. It's fine. Fine, is it in front of me? Do I have a fork? Yeah? I think the only time I've ever sent something back in a restaurant like it was literally burns to the point of not being pleasing to eat anymore, and not a dish that was supposed to be charred in any way. Right, right. Otherwise, even if I get something and it's just not so my taste, I'm I'm not sending it back. Yeah. It is also just I love sort of doing comparative reads on what much later people working in the science fiction space think about him, because it is very polarized. There are people who still sort of lauded him. Is like this charming nut of a man who really like created this this entire you know, the concepts with his his focus on community of fandom and and this idea of science fiction is this place where we could think about the future. But then there are others who are like, he was a problem in all the ways, and why are we why are we lauding him as this masterful, amazing person. Yeah, there's there's so much gatekeeping in the world of science fiction, both among like the writing aspect and some in some cases and among the fandom, like from all sides, there can be a lot of gatekeeping. And so the idea that somebody who was so central to establishing the idea that science fiction was its own genre was like, here's the mathematical formula of what counts like that drove me up a lall. Yeah, well that and that it had to be predictive of the future, when there's a lot of science fiction that is not that but as you know, uh speculates on on other things or or is born of a what if scenario of the past, um, which yeah, it's a little But then when you read his stuff, as we said, he would contradict himself all the time, and to him, I think he was just like, well, I'm just spitballing, And so he didn't see it as this big contradictory thing. He didn't even see himself really as like, I don't think as the arbiter of all these things. He was just kind of like, bad, this is how I'm thinking about it, This is how I But it also gets into that idea of a cult of personality right where there are people even now who will refer to him as like uncle Hugo, as though he's still like a person in their lives even though they have never met him and he has never been part of their you know, personal or professional development. And so that's the other thing of like, how much of that is him saying this is what I say, and how it has to be versus that community that he was putting together going well, Hugo says, So that's the rule. I rolled my eyes, right, I mean, this is part of the problematic aspect of things like that, um and and even those two opposing viewpoints we mentioned regarding changing the name to Wonder Stories, it's pretty exemplary of how problematic that can be. Right, when everyone has has a voice, you're going to get some love that are not great takes. That's just the bottom line, uh, Which not to say that everyone shouldn't have their own take, but you have to be able to discern the good from the bad. Uh. Once again, thanks for spending time with us this week. If you're headed into a weekend with time off, having absolutely great time and and do lots of things that bring you joy. If you don't have time off and you're working, try to find those things that bring you joy anyway best you can. We're cheering for you. We will be right back here tomorrow with the classic episode and on Monday with news stories. Stuff you missed in History. Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we talked about Adolph Larenz this week, who is is interesting, fascinating, troubling. The thing that really struck me in doing research on him was this whole controversy within the medical community and how difficult it can be in a situation like that to tease out the reality from all of the varying and very vehement opinions. Right that, um I mentioned it, they're even you know, within statements that criticized his work also kind of contradicted themselves as saying, we already do that work, and it's like wait, wait, wait, wait wait. Um So that was like a fast, neating and tricky part to me because I'm not a doctor. Might know that might shock you, but I'm not. Uh, And it's hard I think even I mean, you see it even within the medical community for people to evaluate, because there were some doctors who were like, no, he's great, what do you do him? And others who were really angry about it, and and the public loved him, which adds a whole other layer, because whether any of those people criticizing or supporting him were conscious of it, they were surely being impacted by the public opinion of him, and by the fact that he was literally on the front pages of papers all the time whenever he came right. This is one of those cases where it's recent history and it's still difficult to teach because you can't psychoanalyze every single person, like even if and even if in the moment you had psychologists standing by to do that work, you would probably still not get a full picture. So those are always interesting to me. I just realized, uh so as we were talking in that in the episode, I was talking about my grandmother who had scoliosis, and I said that she had no treatment for it beyond adjusting the hems of her skarts. I don't actually know. It's totally possible that some time before I was born she did have some kind of treatment, but the end result was still that she had a pretty pronounced spinal curvature that uh, you know, required her to alter all over clothing. But then also I remember she was diagnosed I think with mitral valve prolapse based on what the blood flow rushing through her heart sounded like through as a stethoscope. And it turned out that it was really that her heart was tipped because of the curvature and um and uh and so that was like a whole process of like unexpected side effects. It also reminded me of whichever, um I think it was Deanie. Was that the Judy Bloom book that was about scoliosis. Don't remember, I was like a snooty child who didn't read Judy Bloom. I was like busy with other things. And let me just tell you, as an adult, no, no shade of Judy Bloom, and there as a kid, I had this weird bias against it, like that's what all of the mainstream girls read that are not intellectuals. I'm not, which is just what a pretentious little weasel I was, and in some ways continue to be. Yeah, well I just google it on my phone and yes, that is Deany by Judy Bloom, a book that I probably read more than once because since scoliosis runs in families really often, like I was constantly being monitored to see how my spine was doing, um and so like this was a book that I read a lot in my teen years as I was going through that uncertainty. Yeah. The other thing that is really interesting that became kind of an in sharp contrast and appearance to me um was that, you know, I mentioned at the top that this came up in our Criminalia episode about the person that masqueraded as a doctor to assist him. And what's very interesting is that if you look at stories of that person's life, they definitely kind of couch it as though he was seeking he was practicing medicine, which he was not actually. I mean, obviously he was representing himself as a doctor, but he wasn't doing hands on care with patients, which is something that gets left out, and it really wasn't until I was like looking at old archival newspapers covering the story that they were the ones pointing out, you know, and even in because it's much more sensational to think the worst, even in pretty like buried parts of the article where it'd be like, oh no, no, he just he was just writing things down. He wasn't touching patients, but that's never part of it. And you see how like depending on what the story is being presented as how those details shift. And it's just a good reminder to always be digging and looking in the margins and finding the buried lead in some cases. Um. Yeah, I have m many thoughts about the sort of backbiting and in fighting amongst the medical community, especially, you know, once it becomes something. We've talked on the show many times before about um, scientific disagreements and people feeling that they weren't getting credit or that they had been overlooked in in discussions of something. But this one is also unique because it does play out in the papers in a very public way at a time when the public was very big on the person involved, and so it's a it's just an interesting look at how those things get handled by the press, particularly at that period of time in the twenties and thirties. Yeah, I could. I could look at professional disagreements play on the press all day, every day. As long as they're in the past, that's more fun. There have been times when I've been trying to figure out what to do a podcast on next that I've been googling things like historical scientific disputes. Yeah. Um, it is also to me really really interesting. Like I said, we contrade, we talked about the contradiction of of medical practitioners who simultaneously criticized his work and said they were doing the same work. But it's also interesting to me that most of them acknowledge that he had developed all of these techniques, but then they kind of wanted him to shut up and get out of the country, which is a whole other like layer to that whole Like what is really the crux of the problem, especially when a lot of a lot of people were so in favor of his work and in favor of supporting him that they were willing to like make sure he got to sit for board exams in a much you know, quicker process than the average person would be able to have access to, etcetera. Um. And then it always gets ruined by somebody being really able at gross in some way. Yeah. Yeah, that is the other thing about that coverage, and and we talked about it some in the show, just the way that language has changed around orthopedic issues, disability of any kind the medical community. Like, there's so many headlines from that period talking about his work that just make you cringe, and you look at them today and you realize we're still figuring a lot of things out. I'm sure in another fifty years people will cringe at all of today's headlines for being incredibly ignorant. Always in motion is the future. Uh. We talked about Hugo Gernsbach or Gern's back. I'll see. I'll hear people say all the time. I sometimes use them interchangeably, just to to roll with the flow and cover all bases. Yeah. We had a whole conversation that we cut out of the show that I say, we are our producer Casey or whoever is helping Casey with edits. Uh, cut that out for us how to say it? Yeah, because she'll hear it both ways. And I think he's it's one of those names that is common enough, you know, in a particular area that lots of people have said it lots of different ways. So I am pronunciation has transcended whatever his lifetime pronunciation was. In my opinion, he's an obviously an interesting one. But he's also interesting because there's so much that you've got to leave out to do an episode on him that isn't really worth putting in and expanding it to a two fur because it's really like, boy, he sure was a nutty eccentric um And it's just more and more evidence of that. Um, there's one thing that I didn't mention because again I never found a hard bit of evidence for it that he apparently went through a period when he was quite young where he gambled a lot, but he eventually lost enough that he was like, oh, I should stop doing that. Yeah, Um, I had. There was a write up about him in Life magazine in the nineteen fifties and there's a quote in it that made me laugh so hard because they're talking about him as a writer, and you know, he did obviously write fiction, but was, as we said several times, not known for being a great writer. And this journalist is specifically mentioning the novelization that came out of his uh, his initial modern electric series that he did to fill out pages, and says to describe the book as a novel is stretching the definition of that word to the screech point. You know, it's cute. Alice is from Switzerland. There's no crazy, very simplified, easy to digest love trope in there. Like everything is a very simple story to follow. Nothing gets too confusing. Um, there were a lot of, um, like I said, details about him that I didn't put in. One of the things that I saw that I really enjoyed was that he didn't um believe in funerals um because he really what he's saying is that he doesn't believe in our current system of burying people in cemeteries because in his view, he thought that over time, people will keep dying until the entire earth has to be a graveyard. I mean, he's not wrong, right. He came up with this idea that we should freeze all of our corpses and shoot him into space at speeds that are calculated to remove them from our solar system. That seems uh man, just tossing your garbage in the neighbors. Yeah, that's have there's levels of problems with that. Um. Somehow, that reminds me, though of a thing that I was reading where there are not a lot of places in the world. I it's I don't want to misspeak, because I'm like recalling an an article that I read some stretch of time ago. But it was basically about how the idea that your loved ones remains are going to be buried in this cemetery in perpetuity is not a universal idea, and that there are lots of places where you basically you pay rent on the grave site, and if you have no surviving relatives paying the rent on that grave site anymore, it's going to be somebody else's UM. For that reason of like, where we continue to give each person their own grave site, then eventually it's all grave sites. It reminds me of UM Did You Uch Far Escape? When it was on some There was one episode where Rigel, who was one of the puppet characters, was sort of having this concept of of UM cemeteries explained to him. And I won't quote it accurately because I'm literally going from very distant memory, but he was like, you keep your dead right there with you. It was just horrified by the idea. And if you watch Futurama, eventually we start burying people uh in other places because we'll have you know, we'll need to have satellite cemeteries to handle it. Yeah. Well, and there's culturally so many different UH ways of dealing with death and what to do with remains after death, Like none of these things are universal at all. That was a weird little digression. We just went on the best kind UM. One of the things I love reading reading Gernsbeck's work is that you know, at the time him he was writing a lot of his early stuff, the word technology had not been coined yet, and so it is that fun. I mean, to me, this is one of the delights of history, is seeing the ways that people kind of talked around concepts that didn't have a name yet. I mean, even scientifiction is hilarious and charming. This is also a thing I didn't I didn't get into you, he claimed. I mean, he came up with the word scientifiction, but he also claimed that he came up with the word television and some other things. You know. He was he was not like the not not afraid to be his own hype man. He made a lot of claims. He made a lot of claims, and he I mean, he did have a lot of um insightful predictions about things that would come to fruition, but also lots that were completely cockamami. He apparently also was known to send food back in restaurants if it didn't arrive at the table in a way that he liked, like to all be plated perfectly, and he was not afraid to send it back several times. Yeah, don't don't do that, which to me is just like pers nicketty, but um, you know, I'm usually too hungry. I don't care. It's fine. Fine, is it in front of me? Do I have a fork? Yeah? I think the only time I've ever sent something back in a restaurant like it was literally burns to the point of not being pleasing to eat anymore, and not a dish that was supposed to be charred in any way. Right, right. Otherwise, even if I get something and it's just not so my taste, I'm I'm not sending it back. Yeah. It is also just I love sort of doing comparative reads on what much later people working in the science fiction space think about him, because it is very polarized. There are people who still sort of lauded him. Is like this charming nut of a man who really like created this this entire you know, the concepts with his his focus on community of fandom and and this idea of science fiction is this place where we could think about the future. But then there are others who are like, he was a problem in all the ways, and why are we why are we lauding him as this masterful, amazing person. Yeah, there's there's so much gatekeeping in the world of science fiction, both among like the writing aspect and some in some cases and among the fandom, like from all sides, there can be a lot of gatekeeping. And so the idea that somebody who was so central to establishing the idea that science fiction was its own genre was like, here's the mathematical formula of what counts like that drove me up a lall. Yeah, well that and that it had to be predictive of the future, when there's a lot of science fiction that is not that but as you know, uh speculates on on other things or or is born of a what if scenario of the past, um, which yeah, it's a little But then when you read his stuff, as we said, he would contradict himself all the time, and to him, I think he was just like, well, I'm just spitballing, And so he didn't see it as this big contradictory thing. He didn't even see himself really as like, I don't think as the arbiter of all these things. He was just kind of like, bad, this is how I'm thinking about it, This is how I But it also gets into that idea of a cult of personality right where there are people even now who will refer to him as like uncle Hugo, as though he's still like a person in their lives even though they have never met him and he has never been part of their you know, personal or professional development. And so that's the other thing of like, how much of that is him saying this is what I say, and how it has to be versus that community that he was putting together going well, Hugo says, So that's the rule. I rolled my eyes, right, I mean, this is part of the problematic aspect of things like that, um and and even those two opposing viewpoints we mentioned regarding changing the name to Wonder Stories, it's pretty exemplary of how problematic that can be. Right, when everyone has has a voice, you're going to get some love that are not great takes. That's just the bottom line, uh, Which not to say that everyone shouldn't have their own take, but you have to be able to discern the good from the bad. Uh. Once again, thanks for spending time with us this week. If you're headed into a weekend with time off, having absolutely great time and and do lots of things that bring you joy. If you don't have time off and you're working, try to find those things that bring you joy anyway best you can. We're cheering for you. We will be right back here tomorrow with the classic episode and on Monday with news stories. Stuff you missed in History. Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.