Stuff You Missed in History ClassTracy and Holly share tetanus shot stories and discuss getting boosters. They then discuss the egos of European explorers in Africa.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We talked about tetanus this week. Yeah, we did so. Very often when we have had anything that's related to science or medicine, anything in that field, when I have been writing the episode, I have started out with an explainer on the illness or the scientific discovery and the sort of what's going on with that and how it works. And this time I said to myself, what if I did something a little different, and what if I tried to incorporate the understanding of how tetanus works as an illness with the historical timeline of its of discoveries about it. And boy was that harder, so much harder. I contemplated just scrapping the entire outline and starting completely over, but I didn't. I stuck with it, even though it was somehow, way way harder to write it that way. Something we didn't mention is a piece of artwork. I don't know what image will wind up being used on our social media to go along with this episode, but there is a painting by surgeon and artist doctor Charles Bell, which was created in eighteen oh nine, and it's called Tetanus following gunshot Wounds, And it's a pretty visceral image showing this person who has tetanus in like a whole body spasm with their whole body sort of arcd like a bow, which is one of the ways that the spasms of tetanus have been described historically. I didn't really have a great place to mention that in the body of the episode itself. Holly, you look like you're looking up what it looks like. Oh, I was trying to check and see if it's the painting I thought it was, and it was.
Yeah.
There was just part of my brain that was like, are you sure that's the same painting and not yeah, some other weird thing. And then while I was looking for it, there's another painting that looks like a portrait of Count or Lock from the Recent and Nose Farautuo, and I got a little psychia. Okay, he did other artwork, other portrayals, portrayals of other diseases and conditions, and I got a little bit sidetracked thinking about that, and then said, Okay, you gotta you gotta focus on this episode. That is more difficult than expect did based on your own decisions to write it differently from usual. I also thought I might tell the story of the time I had to get a tetnis shot, not as a routine immunisation. I have a similar story, but it wasn't me but a sibling. So my story is I was living in Asheville, North Carolina, on a ground floor apartment with no air conditioning, and so I was sleeping with the windows open, and this had worked fine until it didn't. And the way that it didn't is that a strange stray or someone's pet I don't know cat jumped onto the outside ledge of the window while my cat, Villainel, was sitting on the inside sill of the window. And Villainell immediately started freaking out. And so my immediate urgency was to like separate my cat from the window and closed the window so that she would not be like get into a fight with this other cat that I know nothing about, right, And when I grabbed her, she just reflexively bit me in the web between my finger.
And my thumb.
Oh yeah, this, you know has been this is the only time she ever bit anyone. Yeah, displaced aggression is not uncommon in cats that are freaked out about an outside cat.
Yeah.
Yeah, she had never been in any way aggressive in any way, and I think that that was just like I surprised her by grabbing her while she was actively having a confrontation with this strange cat. Yeah.
So, uh, this is, you know, in the middle of the night.
And so I go, you know, I wash my hand and dress my hand as best I can. I go back to bed, and I wake up and it's already swollen and I can see the beginning of like lines leading out of the wound. So I called in sick to work and I went to urgent care and they said, when was your last tetanus shot?
And I said, I don't know.
I think that's a common answer. Yeah, I do know now because I start the clock from the time I got been back. So they gave me a tetanus shot. I also got a big old shot of antibiotics in my buttock, and then I also had to be on oral antibiotics and I was fine, but that was the time that I had to get the tetnis shot because of my like I had gotten all of the recommended vaccines from my childhood, and I know I had gotten like I remember being of an age to have gotten a booster, but I was like, I don't know when that was exactly, and I did not have vaccine records with me.
In that moment.
We were not to the age of having the kind of electronic medical records that exist for a lot of this stuff. Now. Yeah, here's how I learned what tetanus was. Okay, I think I've told you before that when I was young, we had a farm in the Pacific Northwest because my parents thought farms were idyllic and they grew up on farms and we should somehow have a farm. Yeah, I don't know. It was weird. Upon that farm, in the kind of wooded area of it, there was a giant tree that we used for various playtime activities. My siblings are all a good bit older than me, and they not wanting to do kid things like climb trees, et cetera, devise this thing where they basically like tied a rope to one of the higher branches, and then they tie at the end of that rope that dangled like a piece of wood to make a handle, and they would basically like grip the piece of wood and then they would push each other and swing m M big time fun. Except you know, sometimes teenagers aren't really thoughtful about what piece of wood they tie to the end of the rope for their little swing adventure. Sure, one of my siblings, I don't know who, but I have suspicions picked up a random piece of wood from our woodpile and tied it on there. And my middle sister grabbed it and got a rusty nail right through her hand. Oh no, And that's how I learned about tennis. Yeah, because she went into the house. I think I was inside playing because I was not cool enough to hang with them. I was their little jerky sister. But I remember her coming into the house and like the sort of ripple of panic from my KOOKI and anxiety prone mother because my sister just thought like, oh, I have a cut in my hand. I need to have this dressed. And my mom went from that to I think my dad said, hey, do we have her up to date on tennis shots? And suddenly it was like operation in Ergensia. Everybody kind of lost their mind. There was the rushing into the car and the running away, and my sister came back looking very bedraggled and like she had really been through it, because she definitely got some heavy hitting shots and the badonk and other places. And that's how I learned what tennis. Yeah, and became so afraid. I was never touching that tree or the That tree was a hazard, I will say, because it also had I think it was like a was it a cedar tree? It was something. It also had like some very elastic y branches that were kind of bouncy that we would also swing on. And at one point, like I had gripped onto one of the branches and my brother pushed me and I went flying and we thought I had a broken arm for a minute. I didn't, but it was just banged up real bad. I don't you know, kids on farms that are not really farm kids maybe don't do smart things. Yeah, or maybe we were just a real careless lot.
I don't know.
That tree was a menace.
Yeah.
Tetanus. I was talking to Patrick as I was working on this, and I was like, did you know that if you get tetanus your muscles can spasm so hard that you can break your own bones And he was like yes, And I asked him two or three other weird questions about tetanus, and then I said, I, you know so much about tetanus and he was like what, Like this was the thing we were all terrified of as children. Don't step on a rusty nail, you might get tetanus. And I was like, but you had your shots, like you if you get your shots, probably not going to get tetanus, which is good because it sounds awful. Listen, the nineteen seventies were a lawless time. We didn't all stay on shot schedules. I think I was on for sure that I was definitely on like the shot schedule, because that was the like my mom was very focused on things like that. And then I think I've said before on the show that I was the recommendation for how many measles vaccines to get changed after you and I were the age that we would have been getting them normally, and we were going to go visit my grandmother when I was in my early teens and there was an active measles outbreak happening there at that time, and my mom took me to the pediatrician to get another shot before that trip for that reason, so that I think I was like thirteen or fourteen. Yeah, we went ahead and got boosters this year.
Yeah.
The reason I didn't go ahead and get a booster is because I had that shot when I was fourteen or thirteen, like somewhere in there. And it seemed like, as this outbreak is spreading people who are interested in getting a vaccine and are just like behind or not sure their status or the age bracket that you and I are where. They probably only got one shot as a kid. I kind of wanted to allow all of those folks that are a higher need than me to go and get them. I know, you can also get tighters checked to see if you still have immunity to stuff. Yeah, we I had talked to our doctor about it and or I don't know if it's our doctor or a pharmacist, and they were like, you know what, at your age, if you can't remember, we just skipped the tighter and do the shot. Yeah, great, great. I did talk to my doctor about it at my physical about whether I should whether I should get another DOCE, or whether I should get my tighter checked, and she was like, I think, based on what you've just told me, I think you're fine, and we would not need to order that. I did also confirm that, even though I do not believe I ever had chicken pox, I should get a shingles vaccine in a couple of weeks here after I turned fifty, and I should also get the new Macacle pneumonia vaccine again in a couple of weeks here after I turned fifty. Yeah, I'm gonna take a little trip for myself, and then when I come home from a trip, on my list of things to do, it's gonna be going to get my vaccines. So fun. They prevent you from getting serious and potentially deadly illnesses. They do not cause autism. That is that is established at this point. Even if they did cause autism, the idea that your child dying is preferable to your child being autistic is very troubling and offensive, and frankly, a lot of the things that RFK Junior has been saying are also offensive. Oh my lord, it was. I have been out of the country, yeah, for a while, a little less than a couple of weeks, and I was out of the country and busy enough that I wasn't looking at news or social media much, and neither were most of the people I was with, and we were at like some I don't know, if we were at dinner, at like a little you know, cocktail gathering or whatever, and one of my friends opened up social media and then went, oh no and shut it immediately, was like, let's just stay in our weird vacation bubble because nobody needs to hear what's going on and what's coming out of that person's mouth, not for.
The next few minutes.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was very fear Like, the most recent, in my opinion, most offensive and disgusting thing was after this article or this episode was like already completely written, like it was just waiting for you to return for Japan. And then I was like, now there's another thing to be mad about about vaccines. There's always another thing.
Yeah. Yeah.
To be very clear, there is a broad spectrum of autism. That is why it's called a spectrum. And there are people on that spectrum who do need daily care all the time, and that is true. They are still human beings, they are still part of our society and part of our world, and they are not some to be eliminated. I don't know, I feel like we could live in a world where we were focused on making sure everyone has access to the world that we live in instead of a world instead of trying to eliminate people to make our lives simpler. Yeah, eliminate people, because that's what we're talking about.
Anyway.
Anyway, you can check out previous episodes that we've got about the eugenics movement in the archive if you want to do that. Otherwise you just want to depress the heck out of yourself even more. Get real mad. We talked about Cidi Mubarak Bombay this week. My sad brain just wants to do calling doctor Bombay, calling doctor Bombay, come in, come in right away. This is funny for all of my Bewitched fans in the crowd.
Yeah.
I so it's clear from having you know, everyone who has listened to this episode. If you're somehow listening to a Friday behind the scenes having not heard the episode, I would feel like in a lot of cases, that's not going to make any sense, but you know, just in case somehow that's what's happening in your life right now. A lot of that episode is drawn from the accounts of these men who went on these expeditions and the books they wrote about them later and there are so many of them, and I kept getting confused about them, and I wound up temporarily at the top of the outline just having this list of names and links so that I would not confuse who had written which book about which of these things, because everyone that we talked about wrote at least one book about it.
And even with that, occasionally.
Like there was a time that Holly caught in as we were recording this where I had just put the wrong name of one of these guys.
Hopefully that was the only time.
In fairness, it had referred to that guide just a sentence earlier, so it's just yeah, yeah, a finger repeat in typing, not a big Hopefully we didn't mess it up any other times. I will reiterate all of these books are online in multiple places. They're all in the public domain. There's a lot of racism in there. I did not read. I did not include any of the most re racist things. There are parts of what we did read that kind of kind of have some of the threads of some of the stereotypes that people in like the UK had about people from Africa, about there being like simple and happy, and there is some of that, But I do think that he as a person, like he is widely described as being like a very happy and upbeat and a very kind person that sort of resonates through all of people's writing about him. But yeah, I did not put in big long quotes filled with the N word, which there are many of.
Yees.
I have some theories, Okay, you kind of touched on it in the ways that people wrote about him and different perceptions of him, because I really do think some of it, whether it is surely racially motivated, like there's surely racists racist root to it, but I really think like speak seemed like a pretty chill dude in many ways.
I can be wrong.
I don't certainly didn't know him personally, but you know, all of his writing that you quoted in this is very much about his appreciation for all of these people that helped him, how kind he found them. And then all of the subsequent ones have to me this edge of what I would call snoops petuits, like they're just they are clearly wealthy white dudes, yeah, who are now in a place where they're having to take advice from someone that they perceive as lesser, and it bruises their egos to be told like, dude, you cannot walk today, do you not know? And it's easier to say he's wasting my time. Then I'm a little weaker than I thought. Like that.
Also, every one.
Of these expeditions sounds miserable, but there was just so much illness, and some of it serious illness, and even if not serious, you know, the not serious illness parts, there were, uh, just all kinds of injuries and all kinds of delays and all kinds of They thought that they were going to be able to make it to this place, but now they have to camp out and it's like swampy and hot and full of bugs. And two different people supposedly leading the expedition both have eye inflammation that means that they mostly can't see very well. Like none of it sounds fun to me, it does. And so sometimes when I'm reading these accounts and I'm reading the times that they sound kind of judgy about about what Bombay was doing or decisions he was making, I'm just like, was this really a bad decision? Or are you just mad and uncomfortable?
Right?
And I mean we have all reached that point, like whether it's when you're traveling or you're just in the middle of like a really busy season or whatever, where like the the stresses on your body make you less magnanimous and more prone to be fussy and crabby. Yeah, sure, so that's a natural part of it. But then like when you get home and you're writing about it, theoretically you are not feeling those same stresses, and maybe, yeah, you don't have to be a jerk, Yeah, especially considering this person actually knows what they're doing and you've never been there before, so don't dare.
Yeah.
There has been a lot more writing in more recent years about how critical the work and knowledge of like the locally hired African people was to like all of these expeditions, and then also the people that had either returned to Africa from India or had been in some cases hired in India specifically to come on an expedition to Africa, and how you would have like in most of these expeditions, there would be a very small group of white officers from somewhere in the UK that had usually been in the military service, like some number between maybe six and ten of them, and then the entire rest of the company were either either people hired locally from any of like the African tribes and kingdoms there were hired in India. Those were the people that were doing They were carrying all the stuff, they were making all of the negotiations for the most part between the the with the like the kingdoms and the and the empires that they were passing through. If Stanley or Livingstone or whoever had just gone down there by themselves without any help, they would have died right away. They would have gotten four miles and collapsed.
Yeah.
So there's been a lot more, not even just recently, like not just within the last twenty years, but within the last like fifty years, a lot more writing about how much all of these you know, so called European exploration expeditions was like they were all like really grounded in the the labor and the knowledge of the African people whose continent they were quote exploring. Yeah, it's more like they were being guided round. Yes, yes, And probably those poor people that were doing all that work were like this big dumb, fussy baby is here again? Got to take them to try to find the source of the Nile. We could have told them, but they want to learn the hard way. So here you brother get in the boat. I will say, back when we recorded that episode about hat Shepstuit and the Voyage Dupunte, that was a Saturday classic, I stressed a lot more about whether we were covering enough history from parts of the world other than North America and Europe. I still try to select a diverse range of topics to talk about.
But no matter which things we're focusing on in terms of diverse.
There's always stuff that's just not ever in Like it's that's there will there will never be enough of that particular thing, right, So it's like still my goal to include things from all over the world. But sometimes if some months pass without something else from a different part of the world, like that is no longer a thing causing me to lose sleep.
At night.
In the way that it was earlier.
Sometimes anxiety drives the bus. Yeah, there's also just the realities we've talked before about how if we are talking about something that is related to North America or Europe, this starting question is not do I have the cultural context to talk about this adequately? And sometimes when we are talking about things from Africa or Asia, South America, like places that we aren't as steeped in sometimes I look at something and I go, no, I don't have the cultural competence to do this justice at all. And recognizing my own limits there has been like part of the learning curve of more than a decade on this podcast, well over a decade at this point. So yeah, anyway, I try to talk about lots of different things on the show, but now I'm better at recognizing my own limitations in doing that. Hey, I know we're all living in times that are full of a lot of chaos and uncertainty and for a lot of us with frustrations and upset. So whatever's happening, whatever's progressing in your life, I hope you're able to find a moment where you're able to find a little piece, a little moment of joy. All of those things are we need them to, you know, continue to do the things that we're all trying to do in our lives. We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and something brand it's new on Funday. 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,
