Holly and Tracy discuss the complexities of Isabella Bird's story, as well as the similarities between the pneumonic plague in Wu Lien-Teh's story and what we're living through in 2020.
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Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and Happy Friday, everybody. I'm Holly Fry. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. I hope you've had a delightful week. This week we talked about Isabella Lucy Bird. Yeah, yeah, I have to laugh, just because she is really, really tricky to unpack. There are a few things that I wanted to mention. One is, if you read that Anna's Daughter biography of her, there really is an awful lot of fun writing about weird little vignettes in Isabella's life that never make any of the major like you know, if you read an article about her in a travel journal or a scientific journal, etcetera. But like there are gems like apparently she allegedly thwarted an assassination attempt at one point because she got into a cab and apparently at this point, uh in I believe she was in London. At the time, it was common for people to like throw kind of a packet of papers that were advertisements bundled together into cab windows as people were getting in them. Um, and she realized that there was already one on the seat. But in fact it turned out to be papers about this assassination attempt, which she then brought to the authorities and allegedly had her um her the place where she was staying guarded that night because there was worry that she was in danger for having been part of the There are a lot of stories like that that are completely unsubstantiated that make me wonder if Isabella Lucy Bird wasn't just a really good storyteller with her friends, because the things like that come up over and over. The other thing that I wanted to mention, we continued to call her by Miss Bird throughout, even though she did get married and became technically Mrs Bishop Uh in her late forties. This is something that also kind of was the case with her work. Um. She continued to be known by Bird because that was her established professional name as a writer. Her name often would appear as Isabella Bird with in parentheses Mrs Bishop or Mrs J. L. Bishop next to it. Um, which is just an interesting thing, but it seems like Mrs Bishop feels like a weird name to call her to me. Yeah, And the other thing I wanted to mention, we talked about it a little bit in the episode that these letters that she would write back to Henny were dense, like there, I ran across a photo of one of the originals and I was just like, holy crap, how could anybody ever read this? Because it is like, not only is it um, she has a handwriting that is not as specially easy to read, but like there's no spaces between the lines. It's like the way she's writing in cursive, the line underneath the one before it is crossing over the one above it just a little bit. And it's like that throughout the entire letter, Like it's very cramped, and she wrote long letters. There is a story of one letter that she wrote to a particularly um important person in a leadership position that was allegedly a hundred and sixteen pages or something. Goodness, and I think nobody read that letter, Like can you imagine writing I don't remember that was to John Murray or if that was too, like a leader of a foreign country. But I just can't imagine thinking anybody would want to hear a hundred and sixteen pages of my writing in a letter. That's a lot of pages. Yeah, yeah, She's fascinating and it's tricky, right. I wanted to be very careful about how we talked about her various medical issues and how she portrayed them, and hopefully we didn't uh, you know, do anything clunky or miss Steppi there. It's very it's very difficult because you want to be sensitive to you like, the modern audience and and how much more we know about how these things work. But also you're working with someone who talked about all of these things in a a very old school way that is not as enlightened. Yeah. Well, and then so often when we're talking about figures from the past who are described as like in quotation marks poor health, like sometimes it's like it's so unclear what was actually going on, and you know, it's it's the folks that I know today who are who are chronically ill will describe themselves as chronically ill and will like name their specific illness if they know, like if there's been an actual diagnosis, because sometimes those are also very difficult to get a diagnosis for. But like, sometimes we're looking at folks in the path and it's like, well, they were they were tired a lot, they they seemed not well, and it's like that's all. We don't really have anything to go on yeah, there's all kinds of explanations for that that ranged along a spectrum that includes like a chronic illness that nobody had a name or diagnosis for at the time, but also includes things like you're living in a repressive society where you were not allowed to have a job or be educated. Right. Uh yeah. I read one um brief piece that brought up the question this is very speculative, so please no, I'm not saying this is the case, but it was an interesting thing to think about. That brought up the point that her illnesses started to manifest after Henrietta was born, and wondering if there wasn't at least in childhood, and element of feeling that she had lost her attention base in her parents because now they had two kids to split it between, and that she was in some ways using various complaints as a way to put focus back on her which kids do. I mean, that's not an uncommon thing to happen in in families when the dynamic shifts in that way. But we can't Again, it's the same problem. We can't ever really know because there's no doctor to go back to, and in fact, even any records to go back to and be like, was this true? Did she have actual symptoms that you recorded and noted? Did you? We don't know, right, I don't know. Most of what we know about Isabella Lucy Bird is what Isabella Lucy Bird told us. Yeah, what she wanted us to now. One of the episodes we did this week was about Wulianda and the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic that started in Super Fun Topic UM. When the pandemic first started, I consciously avoided doing episodes that were like, specifically about a terrible disease outbreak, just because it felt like everyone was under so much stress about it that I was like, there's stuff we can do that's relevant that does not feel like it is also going to be traumatizing for no reason. Um, And now it is. However, many months later, we're recording this on July twenty one, and I kept coming back to this this particular topic Um, both because his life and work are so interesting and so important to the overall idea of of public health in China, and also because I kept hearing just the little piece of the story and other podcasts that were about masks in general. One of the things that really came across to me as I was researching. This is how similar this epidemic is with what is happening right now in terms of people having to figure out what was happening and what would work and what wouldn't as they were going because it was like it started out with everybody being like, all right, plague. Plague is spread by fleas and rats. We got this, we know how this goes. It was not being spread by fleas and rats. It was being spread by coughing. Um. And then a lot of the response that was happening among people, like the people who were being quarantined and the people who were being told no, you cannot go visit your family another town, um, like not understanding why and not wanting to do it. One of the later epidemics that that we was involved in helping to control, which we did not get into at all. UM, there were incidents of like plague enforcement, people being kidnapped, and riots over quarantine means, and um they distributed some mean like sixty thou masks to people or distributed mass just sixty people. I'm not actually sure which way that went, but a lot of the same, like people pushing back against being given public health directives that we're going to up end their everyday lives. Yeah, I am. I will tell you the thing that I chuckled about, perhaps most in this episode, which has very little to do with the actual epidemic we discussed. I suddenly was thinking how it might be kind of lovely to have a plague doctor's mask filled with garlic. I do love garlic me too. There's nothing better than roasting garlic and smelling it all over the house for me. As if you don't like garlic, that would feel different. One of the things about those plague doctor outfits um that I kind of went down a rabbit hole on that, and I was not able to get a satisfactory solution because there's so much writing about it that's meant for a popular audience. That's like kind of a surface level read on stuff. Um Number one. Sometimes people associate those plague doctor masks with the Black Death, but really that that was much later, the pointy beaked plague doctor masks. And the other thing is a lot of the visual references to those masks were meant to be satiric, like this was a satirical drawing. So it's like, what, Okay, what did they actually look like if this thing was satire? And I think a lot of times some of those illustrations that were meant to be satire are used as illustrations on articles about the plague Doctor costume without acknowledging it, which sometimes makes me wonder did the writer of this article in like a popular website know that that was supposed to be satire? And I don't know the answer. Um, I'm looking for extant examples. There is one that looks almost like a hybrid um of the early early early diving apparatus. It's like a leather full head gear with the sort of peplum flange on the bottom that covers the shoulders, and it looks more like a pointy beak like you would see like a straight ahead pointy beak, and it it does have a beak well, and you would need some kind of protuberance if you're gonna stick a bunch of garlic up in there. Um. But yeah, so it seems like there were some a little like that, but the ones we usually see are more extreme examples. This is from one is in the Berlin Museum and one is in the I'm going I'm reading this off of a historians blog, So I'm not like verifying any of this in real time. Um, and one is in the ingle Stop Museum and they both look pretty much like that, like they have interestingly enough, And this could be the ravages of time. Instead of the beak pointing down it it uh tapers and move slightly up at the end. How funny. But again that could be just how it shifted in shape over time. Yeah. One of the other things that I saw a lot in popular writing about the Stobic was people describing Woo's mask as the precursor to the N nine And I'm like, that only makes sense if what you are saying is that it was used to try to prevent the spread of illness. Right, that's a big leap in between those two. Yeah, because the whole thing about the N ninety five is like it is not a woven cotton material. That's a whole other story that is covered in some of those other episodes that I mentioned in the listener mail segment of our show Homo Stotic. If you'd like send us an email or History podcast and i heart radio dot com, and you can also find us on the iHeart Radio app and Apple Podcasts. And wherever else you like to get podcasts. 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. H