Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about Sir Humphrey Davy all week. I would say, usually when we are talking about a poet whose poems are in the public domain, I will try to find a poem and we will have one in the episode. We have even done this with such people as Natalie Clifford Barney, who, in my personal opinion, I did not find her poetry to be great, but I did feel like it was. I mean, in French it's probably a lot better, but what she wrote in English I found to be like kind of it did not move me in the way that poetry generally does, but I felt like it was, you know, indicative of her, her life, and I still wanted to read some of it. We did not read any Humphrey Davy poems because while there are lots and lots of them that have been unearthed by this whole project to transcribe all of his journals, I did not go to confirm, like what the copyright status on any of that is generally stuff that is that old is not protected by copyright anymore. But when you get into something that is like somebody's journal that has been newly transcribed, sometimes the organization that is doing that transcription has some kind of rights over it. I don't know. But the other answer is the poems of his that I did find, they were all very long, even one that was printed as a fragment of a poem. That fragment still went on for pages. And I couldn't even find like a little snippet that I felt like could stand on its own and be fun to read and listen to. I personally just found it very ponderous, and I could not even make my mind focus on it. And I'm saying this as a person whose college degree was partially devoted to poetry. Well, I mean he wrote him while he was high, So like I, this is no surprise whatsoever to me. Yeah, some of them while he was high, and some of them while he was like in the lab stuck on whatever problem he was working on. So it was more like sort of trying to shift the brain gears a little bit. Yeah, that's why we don't have any Humphry Davy bombs. Oh, I borderline wonder if we were to exhum Humphrey Davy do a little testing how much B twelve depletion, we would find that had maybe caused some brain damage. That is one of the things that can happen with excessive nitrous oxide. Yep. Yeah, brain and nerve damage from B twelve depletion. Yeah, with chronic use. And it sounds like he got pretty cavalier about his use of it if he was just strolling about with his bag of g and enormous amounts of it. And that's really like a lot of the places where nitrous oxide is like illegal for recreational use today, That's like one of the things that has been cited is that like when it's not illegal, a lot of times it is fairly easily available. I don't want to get into the ways that people can extract it from things that are not meant to be consumed. It's like a whole other thing. But because it is sometimes readily available in places that it is not regulated, it's possible for people to inhale large amounts of it and inhale large amounts of it for a long time, and that can't have some pretty serious risks. Yeah, it's one of those things that, like in a medical use is the side effects tend to be things like a headache and maybe some nausea. But when somebody is using lots and lots of it, it is possible to nearly asphyxiate or asphyxiate yourself the way that Davy dearly did at some points. Yeah, it's interesting because if you read about nitrous oxide use, one of the things that's always mentioned is that it is not addictive. Oh and I'm like, uh, maybe not chemically addicted, right, like your body doesn't need it, but clearly, I mean he even talked about people who didn't want to stop sucking in air during his demonstrations. It's like, it may not be chemically addictive, but that doesn't account for like the psychological like just drive and desire. People would have to continue using it, which is always one of those tricky things when talking about any kind of substance that alters your brain, right, Like, no, it's not addicted. I mean there was for a long time. Having being a person of a certain age, I remember a long period where there was a lot of discussion about how cocaine was not addictive, and it's like, but people are addicted to it so like you're not factoring in something here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It also makes me think about Kubla Khan. Yeah, you know, and I'm like, was Coleridge Hitten nitriss when he was because the whole thing is right about like there's this amazing thing I saw when I was asleep, but I could never describe it, although he describes it in the poem, So he's a lying liar who lies. But sure. I mean, I love my romantic poets, but I also recognize them as like project men. Yeah, and I'll just also like various romantic poets also were using other substances, yeah, to nitrous oxide, so yeah, but specifically that idea of seeing things in a sleeping state. I mean, it could I can also be attributed certainly to other things. But it did make me think about Kubla Khan in a different way, knowing that he too was playing in the nitrous oxide pond. Right, I'm free, David. Yeah. My thing with Roget's reaction, m right, I'm sure you have heard the thing. It comes up a lot in relation to like everything that can alter your mental space, from like you know, alcohol to cannabis to much harder drugs like whatever you walk into that experience with is just gonna get amplified. And I'm like, was Roget just a super anxious dude and so this whole thing just made him feel like I am out of control and he was just white knuckling through it. Totally possible, which is I mean, he kind of even a loose like I could get used to this. Yeah, but my initial reaction is that I don't like it. Yeah, that sounds like somebody who has had their anxiety highly triggered by being in this altered mental state. Mm hmm. Yeah, let's let's keep doing more experiments. Guys. I'm just gonna walk around town, hang out back. Yeah. My other thing is about Frankenstein, okay, which is not even it has nothing to do with every dating, okay, but it is that I love every time we mentioned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein because to me, more than I won't say all other but many other works of literature and history, that is clearly one of the most important, not just because of its like reputation as like a you know, a key pillar of Gothic literature or whatever, but because we can't stop engaging with it as a culture. Do you know what I mean, Like, there is another Frankenstein movie coming out next year, ye, with Oscar Isaac as Doctor Frankenstein. Can't wait, can't wait wait? Okay yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it looks very good. But like we love that story as humans as a piece of entertainment, and so it just makes me think about how sort of seminal it is in terms of like hitting a chord with everyone subconscious that the idea of creating a living being from dead things and what that'sicology is. We're fixated on whether we know that or not. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. I have an embarrassing story about Frankenstein relating to my years of college. Okay, great. There was one year when I was in college where I had two different courses that each involved reading Frankenstein, and I think one of them was maybe humanities and the other was a literature course. And I wrote a paper for my literature course in which I don't remember exactly what my argument was, but I was entirely focused on that frame story in Frankenstein. Oh, I never actually read Frankenstein. There is a frame story. Oh yeah, yeah right. I'm saying that to listeners who may not I'm sure you know it well now I'm thinking of Elsa Lanchester, so you know, keep going. So I don't remember exactly what my argument was, but I had a whole argument about just the frame story part I turned in for my literature class, and I got a B on it, in which my professor, as his note, said that my paper was very well argued and very well substantiated, but he just disagreed with my conclusion. And I was so livid about this that I went to the department head, Oh my goodness, in part because it was, I think this was my junior year, and so I had stuff that I was like attempting to get on the path of going to grad school, and like this be on this paper was going to mess up my grade, and it was going to mess up my GPA, and it was going to mess up everything with my ambitions toward getting an advanced degree, which I never did. And that's one of the things that I look back on now and I just kind of think about what an arrogant, pretentious person I was when I was twenty. I mean, who wasn't who was? We all were? We all were one thing. Another sort of side note that jumped out at me in this episode is when we were talking about the pneumatic Institute or institution, I don't remember which it was called. We might have called it both in the episode, and how it was in hot wells, and how in hot wells there were baths that people went to, but there you also drank the waters, which I think that like not everyone because when you think of a place called bath, you're thinking of bathing, probably, but a lot of times these places that had baths also taking the waters involved drinking the waters, right, not just having the various bathing type spa stuff that also happened a lot of the time. And it reminded me of how when we were in Italy a couple of years ago and we stayed at a little town called Monticatini Cheremi and Patrick and I stayed there after every the trip had concluded, most people had gone home, and he and I stayed there an extra day to just sort of have a decompression day before we went on to have a little trip to Venice before we went back home. And there was a place that you could go and pay a couple of euro to walk around that had been a spa and the buildings. A lot of them were like these neoclassical buildings, and it just seemed like an interesting place to walk around. And it also had been a place where people drank the waters from these hot springs, and you still could. They had little cups and they had little spigots that you could turn on and drink the water. And I was like, no, thanks, because what I am not interested in doing is accidentally giving myself some kind of gi situation right on this last three days in Europe, planning to go have a nice couple of days in Venice, and now I'm kind of like, should I have tried the water? Well? I mean to be clear, so no one thinks Tracy was being, you know, overly cautious. We had two people in our group who had gotten horrible they got stomach issues. Yeah, yeah, and so I think we were all on kind of high alert about what we consumed after that. Yeah. Well, and it was also during the era of COVID where you had to pass a COVID test, yeah, to get back into the United States. I am not in any way suggesting you can get COVID from drinking water. I'm just saying, like we were all hyper conscious of everything, everything health related. Yes, so yeah. By the way, before we go any further, I feel like I have done a disservice in talking about next year's Frank and Stein movie, okay, because I did not mention, okay, that it is adapted and directed by Geirma del Toro. Okay, this is exciting. I'm I mean, I will buy all the tickets. I will go every day. That's like going. It's made of all your favorite things, like more, yes, please, I'm on board with this whole thing. So yeah, I really did think that we were going to have a one part episode that was going to be primarily about Humphrey Davy and his nitrous oxide self experimentation. And then I was like, but this whole thing with the miners lamp and the fighting about I was like, we need to talk about that too. And he had all these notable things later in his career and then oh, kind of ending on a downer note of having several like non successes after you know, the first half of the first half of his life being like, man, this person is a chemistry genius well, and he is involved in embroiled in so much drama at the end of his life, and I find myself wondering because you did the research on this and I did not, and most of the research, it seems like, suggested that he could be a pill. But I'm also like, was everybody kind of a pill at this point because they all thought like they were doing the most at a time when, like they're everything was new, I mean not everything, but a lot of things were very new and so science drama. Yeah, yeah, So I think tomorrow is the day that the Horace Wells Gas War classic episode will be out about how people did start using nitrous oxide for like anesthesia purposes for dental procedures, and then we'll have a brand new episode on Monday. What that's about, I don't know. I haven't looked at the calendar. We'll be back though. Drop us a note if you'd like history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and otherwise we will talk to you again, Soude. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about Sir Humphrey Davy all week. I would say, usually when we are talking about a poet whose poems are in the public domain, I will try to find a poem and we will have one in the episode. We have even done this with such people as Natalie Clifford Barney, who, in my personal opinion, I did not find her poetry to be great, but I did feel like it was. I mean, in French it's probably a lot better, but what she wrote in English I found to be like kind of it did not move me in the way that poetry generally does, but I felt like it was, you know, indicative of her, her life, and I still wanted to read some of it. We did not read any Humphrey Davy poems because while there are lots and lots of them that have been unearthed by this whole project to transcribe all of his journals, I did not go to confirm, like what the copyright status on any of that is generally stuff that is that old is not protected by copyright anymore. But when you get into something that is like somebody's journal that has been newly transcribed, sometimes the organization that is doing that transcription has some kind of rights over it. I don't know. But the other answer is the poems of his that I did find, they were all very long, even one that was printed as a fragment of a poem. That fragment still went on for pages. And I couldn't even find like a little snippet that I felt like could stand on its own and be fun to read and listen to. I personally just found it very ponderous, and I could not even make my mind focus on it. And I'm saying this as a person whose college degree was partially devoted to poetry. Well, I mean he wrote him while he was high, So like I, this is no surprise whatsoever to me. Yeah, some of them while he was high, and some of them while he was like in the lab stuck on whatever problem he was working on. So it was more like sort of trying to shift the brain gears a little bit. Yeah, that's why we don't have any Humphry Davy bombs. Oh, I borderline wonder if we were to exhum Humphrey Davy do a little testing how much B twelve depletion, we would find that had maybe caused some brain damage. That is one of the things that can happen with excessive nitrous oxide. Yep. Yeah, brain and nerve damage from B twelve depletion. Yeah, with chronic use. And it sounds like he got pretty cavalier about his use of it if he was just strolling about with his bag of g and enormous amounts of it. And that's really like a lot of the places where nitrous oxide is like illegal for recreational use today, That's like one of the things that has been cited is that like when it's not illegal, a lot of times it is fairly easily available. I don't want to get into the ways that people can extract it from things that are not meant to be consumed. It's like a whole other thing. But because it is sometimes readily available in places that it is not regulated, it's possible for people to inhale large amounts of it and inhale large amounts of it for a long time, and that can't have some pretty serious risks. Yeah, it's one of those things that, like in a medical use is the side effects tend to be things like a headache and maybe some nausea. But when somebody is using lots and lots of it, it is possible to nearly asphyxiate or asphyxiate yourself the way that Davy dearly did at some points. Yeah, it's interesting because if you read about nitrous oxide use, one of the things that's always mentioned is that it is not addictive. Oh and I'm like, uh, maybe not chemically addicted, right, like your body doesn't need it, but clearly, I mean he even talked about people who didn't want to stop sucking in air during his demonstrations. It's like, it may not be chemically addictive, but that doesn't account for like the psychological like just drive and desire. People would have to continue using it, which is always one of those tricky things when talking about any kind of substance that alters your brain, right, Like, no, it's not addicted. I mean there was for a long time. Having being a person of a certain age, I remember a long period where there was a lot of discussion about how cocaine was not addictive, and it's like, but people are addicted to it so like you're not factoring in something here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It also makes me think about Kubla Khan. Yeah, you know, and I'm like, was Coleridge Hitten nitriss when he was because the whole thing is right about like there's this amazing thing I saw when I was asleep, but I could never describe it, although he describes it in the poem, So he's a lying liar who lies. But sure. I mean, I love my romantic poets, but I also recognize them as like project men. Yeah, and I'll just also like various romantic poets also were using other substances, yeah, to nitrous oxide, so yeah, but specifically that idea of seeing things in a sleeping state. I mean, it could I can also be attributed certainly to other things. But it did make me think about Kubla Khan in a different way, knowing that he too was playing in the nitrous oxide pond. Right, I'm free, David. Yeah. My thing with Roget's reaction, m right, I'm sure you have heard the thing. It comes up a lot in relation to like everything that can alter your mental space, from like you know, alcohol to cannabis to much harder drugs like whatever you walk into that experience with is just gonna get amplified. And I'm like, was Roget just a super anxious dude and so this whole thing just made him feel like I am out of control and he was just white knuckling through it. Totally possible, which is I mean, he kind of even a loose like I could get used to this. Yeah, but my initial reaction is that I don't like it. Yeah, that sounds like somebody who has had their anxiety highly triggered by being in this altered mental state. Mm hmm. Yeah, let's let's keep doing more experiments. Guys. I'm just gonna walk around town, hang out back. Yeah. My other thing is about Frankenstein, okay, which is not even it has nothing to do with every dating, okay, but it is that I love every time we mentioned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein because to me, more than I won't say all other but many other works of literature and history, that is clearly one of the most important, not just because of its like reputation as like a you know, a key pillar of Gothic literature or whatever, but because we can't stop engaging with it as a culture. Do you know what I mean, Like, there is another Frankenstein movie coming out next year, ye, with Oscar Isaac as Doctor Frankenstein. Can't wait, can't wait wait? Okay yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it looks very good. But like we love that story as humans as a piece of entertainment, and so it just makes me think about how sort of seminal it is in terms of like hitting a chord with everyone subconscious that the idea of creating a living being from dead things and what that'sicology is. We're fixated on whether we know that or not. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. I have an embarrassing story about Frankenstein relating to my years of college. Okay, great. There was one year when I was in college where I had two different courses that each involved reading Frankenstein, and I think one of them was maybe humanities and the other was a literature course. And I wrote a paper for my literature course in which I don't remember exactly what my argument was, but I was entirely focused on that frame story in Frankenstein. Oh, I never actually read Frankenstein. There is a frame story. Oh yeah, yeah right. I'm saying that to listeners who may not I'm sure you know it well now I'm thinking of Elsa Lanchester, so you know, keep going. So I don't remember exactly what my argument was, but I had a whole argument about just the frame story part I turned in for my literature class, and I got a B on it, in which my professor, as his note, said that my paper was very well argued and very well substantiated, but he just disagreed with my conclusion. And I was so livid about this that I went to the department head, Oh my goodness, in part because it was, I think this was my junior year, and so I had stuff that I was like attempting to get on the path of going to grad school, and like this be on this paper was going to mess up my grade, and it was going to mess up my GPA, and it was going to mess up everything with my ambitions toward getting an advanced degree, which I never did. And that's one of the things that I look back on now and I just kind of think about what an arrogant, pretentious person I was when I was twenty. I mean, who wasn't who was? We all were? We all were one thing. Another sort of side note that jumped out at me in this episode is when we were talking about the pneumatic Institute or institution, I don't remember which it was called. We might have called it both in the episode, and how it was in hot wells, and how in hot wells there were baths that people went to, but there you also drank the waters, which I think that like not everyone because when you think of a place called bath, you're thinking of bathing, probably, but a lot of times these places that had baths also taking the waters involved drinking the waters, right, not just having the various bathing type spa stuff that also happened a lot of the time. And it reminded me of how when we were in Italy a couple of years ago and we stayed at a little town called Monticatini Cheremi and Patrick and I stayed there after every the trip had concluded, most people had gone home, and he and I stayed there an extra day to just sort of have a decompression day before we went on to have a little trip to Venice before we went back home. And there was a place that you could go and pay a couple of euro to walk around that had been a spa and the buildings. A lot of them were like these neoclassical buildings, and it just seemed like an interesting place to walk around. And it also had been a place where people drank the waters from these hot springs, and you still could. They had little cups and they had little spigots that you could turn on and drink the water. And I was like, no, thanks, because what I am not interested in doing is accidentally giving myself some kind of gi situation right on this last three days in Europe, planning to go have a nice couple of days in Venice, and now I'm kind of like, should I have tried the water? Well? I mean to be clear, so no one thinks Tracy was being, you know, overly cautious. We had two people in our group who had gotten horrible they got stomach issues. Yeah, yeah, and so I think we were all on kind of high alert about what we consumed after that. Yeah. Well, and it was also during the era of COVID where you had to pass a COVID test, yeah, to get back into the United States. I am not in any way suggesting you can get COVID from drinking water. I'm just saying, like we were all hyper conscious of everything, everything health related. Yes, so yeah. By the way, before we go any further, I feel like I have done a disservice in talking about next year's Frank and Stein movie, okay, because I did not mention, okay, that it is adapted and directed by Geirma del Toro. Okay, this is exciting. I'm I mean, I will buy all the tickets. I will go every day. That's like going. It's made of all your favorite things, like more, yes, please, I'm on board with this whole thing. So yeah, I really did think that we were going to have a one part episode that was going to be primarily about Humphrey Davy and his nitrous oxide self experimentation. And then I was like, but this whole thing with the miners lamp and the fighting about I was like, we need to talk about that too. And he had all these notable things later in his career and then oh, kind of ending on a downer note of having several like non successes after you know, the first half of the first half of his life being like, man, this person is a chemistry genius well, and he is involved in embroiled in so much drama at the end of his life, and I find myself wondering because you did the research on this and I did not, and most of the research, it seems like, suggested that he could be a pill. But I'm also like, was everybody kind of a pill at this point because they all thought like they were doing the most at a time when, like they're everything was new, I mean not everything, but a lot of things were very new and so science drama. Yeah, yeah, So I think tomorrow is the day that the Horace Wells Gas War classic episode will be out about how people did start using nitrous oxide for like anesthesia purposes for dental procedures, and then we'll have a brand new episode on Monday. What that's about, I don't know. I haven't looked at the calendar. We'll be back though. Drop us a note if you'd like history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and otherwise we will talk to you again, Soude. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.