Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we're separating the lupine from the canine from the vulpine. Or rather, how did wolves turn into dogs and why don’t foxes fit in?
 
The Soviet Union in the 1930s was not a great place to be. And while we wouldn’t ever say they suffered the most, one group who experienced what might be called ‘interesting’ challenges were geneticists.
 
You see at the time, genetic, biological and agricultural research was dominated by a bloke by the name of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. And he had some… interesting theories. One in particular was that you could educate plants to turn into other plants. Educate the rye into wheat. You know the trick. Agricultural alchemy.
 
Ok, that’s crackpot. 
 
But these views (Lysenkoism) ended up the only acceptable theory in the Soviet Union at the time. Genetics was officially declared “a bourgeois pseudoscience”. In fact some geneticists - including rising star of genetics Nikolai Belyaev - went missing in the night, never to be seen again. Just for his science.
 
But Nikolai’s brother Dmitry Belyaev wanted to fight back. 
 
So at the age of 20 he launched a secret quest in the middle of the Stalinist Soviet Union to repudiate Lysenko, keep the genetic flame burning for his brother - and for the sake of actual science of genetics and the non-actual science of cuteness, domesticate the fox!
 
Gaining work as a lab technician Dmitry carried out breeding programs to breed the softest fox fur imaginable, and to answer deeper questions of domestication. Why had wolves turned into dogs but foxes remained wild? What brought about cuteness, and strange patches and colourings?
 
And so, framing his experiment as an effort to improve the production of furs he launched a study that still continues today. What happens when you try to domesticate a fox? And, perhaps the most important question science has posed - can you manufacture cuteness?
Sources:
How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog) by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut
The Gulag Archipelago
Dmitry BelyaevSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Recast - Dmitry Belyaev's Secret Quest To Domesticate The Fox

We all know that sugar is bad for our teeth.
 
But... how did we come to know that?
 
It’s fairly common to see a healthy set of pearly whites now, but scroll back just a few decades, this wasn’t the case. A study in Sweden in the 1930’s found that even 3 year old children had cavities in 83% of their teeth.
 
That’s bad. That’s real bad.
 
See, the Swedes love their sweets. They even have a special term for Saturday Candy! 
 
With the knowledge we have today, the connection between candy consumption and cavities is blatantly obvious. But back then, they were still trying to figure out why people had black teeth… or no teeth at all. 
 
In fact during the World Wars, toothlessness was so prevalent in the United States that the military restricted recruits to men who had six teeth intact. As long as you had six teeth, you were good to go.
 
But what was to be done? At that point, dentists were divided on the cause of dental decay.  Was it due to an underlying disease? Was it due to overall diet? Or… was it candy? (Thankfully people had figured out by then that tooth worms weren’t to blame).
 
So, The National Board of Sweden decided to undertake a long term nutritional study to determine the root cause of dental cavities once and for all. Aptly named the Vipeholm Hospital sugar experiments!
 
They did in fact determine the cause (yes, it’s sugar), but the way they went about it was, well… not so ethical. 
Sources 

The New Yorker -  How to eat candy like a Swedish person
History of Dentistry - History of Dental Caries and Cariology
CNN Health - The Swedish cavity experiments: How dentists rotted the teeth of the mentally handicapped to study candy’s effect
Atlas Obscura - An Adorable Swedish Tradition Has Its Roots in Human Experimentation
Wikipedia - Vipeholm experiments
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Recast - The Sugar Experiments of Vipeholm

Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we're re-living the horrors of Easter Island.
 
Easter Island is about as tiny and remote as you can get on the surface of our planet. It’s just 23 kilometres long (on its longest side), and as close as you can get to the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. So you’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it.
 
But of course, you have.
 
You’ve heard of Easter Island - or Rapa Nui, as it is known to locals and should be known to everyone - because soon after it was settled by intrepid Polynesian explorers around the 12th century, the new inhabitants took up a fascinating cultural practice of carving and erecting thousands of Moai, or giant stone heads, along the circumference of the island. They brought the inhabitants spiritual protection and later, pop culture fame.
 
But you’ve probably also heard of Easter Island because sometime after the locals began erecting these thousands of Moai, the population - and culture - of the island collapsed. From a fertile paradise with perhaps ten thousand happy, farming, statue-building inhabitants, by the 20th century, there were barely a few hundred islanders, and the island itself was an arid relic of what once was. Archaeological expeditions described it as an exhausted terrain. The Moai were abandoned.
 
But what was to blame for such destruction? 
 
The leading theory has been that the people of Rapa Nui over-exploited their own resources, leading to civil war, mass stone head tipping and ruin. This makes Easter Island a poster child for human folly and the dangers of climate change. 
 
But is this theory right? Or is the actual story perhaps more prosaic than that? What other factors (*ahem* racism) could possibly be (*cough* genocide) at play here (*mumbles* lies about cannibalism to justify Christian-ising the place)?
 
Join Dr’s Will and Rod as they get to the bottom of the destruction of the forgotten people of Rapa Nui.
 
Sources 

Benny Peiser’s ‘From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui’. 
DiNapoli, Crema, Lipo, Rieth and Hunt’s ‘Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)’ in Nature Communications 
BingUNews: ‘Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong’ 
Princeton: ‘Jacob Roggeveen, 1659–1729’ 
Easter Island Travel: ‘Ship logs of 1722 voyage of Jacob Roggeveen’ 
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Recast - What Happened on Easter Island, and Why it Matters

Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we try and understand why oh why people drink their own urine.
 
Ok... to people who don't do it, it's weird and gross and wrong. But to people who do do it, it's basically the golden fountain of youth.
 
We have been fascinated with our own urine for a while now (humans that is, not the two of us). Back in medieval times, urine was considered to be a crucial diagnostic tool. Using a urine wheel, these medieval folks would diagnose disease based on the colour, smell, and taste (yes, taste) of a person's wee. Presumably by the time the colour got to ‘black as very dark horn’ the prognosis was not excellent.
 
This practice morphed into more urine-related fun times, specifically uromancy - a form of divination by studying urine. AKA Piss Prophets.
 
And then we come to urophagia. The weird gross quack medicine that is drinking your own urine! Urine was used in several ancient cultures for various health, healing and cosmetic purposes…and still is today.
 
Coen van der Kroon is a present-day advocate and has written an entire book researching both the history and present-day uses of urine. The book is very aptly called The Golden Fountain.
 
You’ll be relieved to know that van der Kroon tackles his subject with sensitivity and conviction. The book is not only a comprehensive history of urine use but a user-friendly guide to urine’s practical application. The health benefits and life-enhancing properties he (and his devotees) claim are numerous. Revitalised energy, a cure for depression, immune system boosting…
 
Why on earth have we not caught onto this earlier?
 
You may not have ever wanted to know about this practice, but your intrepid explorers at The Wholesome Show have done the hard yards for you today - so sit back, pour yourself a glass of something delicious, and enjoy!
 
Sources
 
Consciousness and Cognition: The inhibitory spillover effect: Controlling the bladder makes better liars
 
health: Why You're a Better Liar When You Have to Pee
 
Science Alert: These Urine-Fuelled Socks Generate Enough Power to Transmit Wireless Signals
 
American Journal of Nephrology: The medicinal use of urine
 
22 words: 20 things to do with Urine besides flushing it
 
Buzzfeed: 31 Things You Should Definitely Know About Pee
 
Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Piss Prophets and the Wheel of Urine
 
The Yoga Institute: Coen van der Kroon
 
The Golden Fountain - Coen can der Kroon
 
BBC: Please can everyone stop drinking their own urine?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Recast - The People Who Drink Their Own Urine

Talking with animals and aliens is the stuff of children’s stories and conspiracy theorists. But for John Cunningham Lilly, it was his life's work.
 
So, who on earth is John Cunningham Lilly?
 
At the age of 16, most of us can barely organise our way out of a paper bag, hold more than a grunting conversation with our friends, or ask anything intelligent of anyone. 
 
But Lilly wasn't just anyone. See, at 16 he had a pretty profound question: whether the mind could render itself sufficiently objective to study itself. 
 
Woah.
 
It became his life's work trying to answer that question. Where it took him may surprise you.
 
Early in Lilly’s career, it led him to become the first scientist to locate the pain and pleasure centres in the brain. And the first to... artificially stimulate them. 
 
But, you don’t study techniques for stimulating pain and pleasure in the brain without the FBI, the CIA, Air Force Intelligence, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Security Agency, Army Intelligence, and the State Department all becoming interested.
 
So when Lilly realised that furthering this research meant the weaponisation of it, he abandoned the research and found another way to answer his question. 
 
Flipping the script, Lilly decided that sensory deprivation might be a pathway to understanding the mind. His quest to be cut off from sight, sound, temperature and gravity led him to invent the first-ever isolation tank. Not only was it the most relaxing thing he had ever been in, his time in the quiet, wet darkness led him to find “other things”. He experienced presences, both known and unknown. He eventually began to see through to another reality.
 
At this point in his career, after guidance from some alien beings and a chance encounter with the gargantuan brain of a pilot whale, Lilly’s secret mission to study the human mind turned to the study of bottlenose dolphins.
 
Lilly was determined to bring humans and dolphins into close proximity, so they could learn from each other and humans could teach the dolphins English.
 
This work led him to believe that dolphins deserved a seat at the United Nations, and the creation of the little-known Order of the Dolphin. 
 
But did Lilly actually manage to talk to animals? And did he ever actually answer that driving question - can we understand our own mind?
 
Sources 

Bruce Clarke’s John Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin, and Communication Out of Bounds
Gerard A Houghton: John Lilly Obituary 
Alex Leyman’s John C. Lilly: The Mad Scientist Who Gave LSD to Dolphins 
John C Lilly’s Dolphins' Complex Communication
John C Lilly’s Autobiography The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography [described by the New Age Journal as “at times naive and frustrating”]
John C Lilly / Ecco - Dolphin Voice, uploaded to Youtube by musick2138
Christopher Riley’s The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa funded project that went wrong.
Maria Temming and Anthony Crider’s The Order

Aliens Told Me Dolphins Can Talk: The John C Lilly Story

Humans really love a hobby and it seems the more obscure the hobby, the more obsessed we become. But if you’re looking for the gold medal in obscure and obsessive, you need look no further than Victorian salmon fly-tying.
 
Back in the Victorian era ‘recipes’ for the perfect fly-tying involved the most exotic of materials - fancy threads, unusual bits of fur and, most importantly, exotic and rare feathers.
 
Of course, you’d imagine the point of creating these elaborate flys is to sucker in the biggest possible fish.
 
But salmon don’t give a shit about the colour or the beauty of flies. They eat anything that looks and behaves insectish.
 
But people that got into this hobby, didn’t use them to fish. Don’t be ridiculous. The idea of dropping one of their creations into the water - better yet having it scarfed down by a gross fish - was horrifying. The same goes for today. The overwhelming majority of the 21st-century fly-tyers have no idea how to fish. It’s all about bragging rights and respect or something…
 
And one of the most infamous-and-modern fly-tying obsessed humans goes by the name of Edwin Rist. Rist came across fly-tying when he was 10 years old and became infatuated with tying the old Victorian recipes that called for the most exotic feathers you can imagine. Hanging out on the internet forums, Edwin quickly realized such fancy ingredients don’t come cheap.
 
Luckily young Edwin had another obsession to distract him from elaborate fly-tying pursuits: he was also a prodigy flautist. But to be a truly competitive flute-guy, he needed a bloody excellent flute. And they too are not cheap. So, after getting into the Royal Academy of music he started to think…how could he make some serious cash?
 
It’s here we meet the collections of Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist, illustrator and Charles Darwin competitor. In the mid-1800s Wallace had murdered (sorry) collected a huge variety of critters, including many thousands of birds. Most of his collection went to The Natural History Museum at Tring.
 
This collection is of immense historical significance and contains specimens that are exceedingly rare and irreplaceable. But when Rist found out about this collection he thought, damn that’s a lot of delicious, and lucrative, fly-tying feathers.
 
So to further his flute career, he did the obvious thing: he hatched a plan to rob the museum and sell the feathers on the infamous dark-feather fly-tying under-web.
 
But how did it all play out? Did Edwin do the deed? Did he flog enough feathers to buy his dream flute? And …did he get away with it?

Previous episodes mentioned:
How To Hide A Battleship
Non Fungible Tulips
 
Sources:
 
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century (2019) Kirk Wallace Johnson
 
One Obsessed Musician, 299 Birds, and a Very Weird Crime (National Geographic)
 
The Great Feather Heist: Th

The Great Feather Heist

Battleships are very large, belch smoke and move pretty slowly. If you were tasked with hiding one out on the open water, how would you go about doing it?
 
This has been a long-standing challenge and the military’s best attempts were all pretty average. Low visibility grey was their answer. Not a great answer, but an answer.
 
In April 1917, German U-boats were sinking 8 battleships a day! Grey battleships were not cutting it.
 
The person who came forward with a solution was no less than an artist from the British Army, Norman Wilkinson. His brilliant idea? It’s impossible to camouflage ships, so let’s do the total opposite.
 
Wilkinson’s aim was not to conceal the battleships but to confuse the enemy. He developed a radical camouflage scheme that used bold shapes and violent contrasts of colour and coined it dazzle camouflage.
 
These ships look like floating cubist paintings. They are entirely ridiculous. You can probably guess the army’s reaction. For an institution that prided itself on being sneaky and subtle, this was far too radical and bright.
 
During a demonstration of dazzle, it’s said that a confused U.S. admiral went off, yelling, “How the hell do you expect me to estimate the course of a God-damn thing all painted up like that?”. 
 
Wilkinson was subsequently asked to help set up an American dazzle department under the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair.
 
But it turns out that the history of dazzle camouflage is not such a simple story.
 
Wilkinson claimed the idea. But, aside from nature having perfected dazzle camouflage over millennia (hello zebras on the savanna), quite a few other chaps came up with pretty much the exact same strategy.
 
While it’s entertaining to try and untangle who deserves the ultimate dazzle crown, there’s another question that really needs answering: did dazzle camouflage actually work?
Sources:

Norman Wilkinson (artist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Wilkinson_(artist)
Norman Wilkinson https://artuk.org/discover/artists/wilkinson-norman-18781971
Norman Wilkinson CBE RI https://darnleyfineart.com/artist/norman-wilkinson/
WW1: How did an artist help Britain fight the war at sea? https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/how-did-an-artist-help-britain-fight-the-war-at-sea/zmkx8xs
Toy Boat Camouflage http://camoupedia.blogspot.com/2012/07/toy-boat-camouflage.html
Camoufleuse: The Dazzling of Women at War https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/camoufleuse
Dazzle camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
Women Camouflage Artists http://camoupedia.blogspot.com/2010/03/women-camouflage-artists.html 
How the Absurd "Dazzle" Camouflage Strategy Ended WWI Carnage https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/how-the-absurd-dazzle-camouflage-strategy-ended-wwi-carnage
When the British Wanted to Camouflage Their Warships, They Made Them Dazzle https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-british-wanted-camouflage-their-warships-they-made-them-dazzle-180958657/
http

How To Hide A Battleship

Have you ever had a curiosity so strong that you’ve considered staying awake for 180 hours, tapping your spinal column with cocaine, consuming deadly parasites or pumping 6L of hydrogen up your bum?
 
Probably not. And that is most likely because you are not an idiot.
 
But - there’s a fine line between idiocy and genius, particularly in medical science.
 
And so today we explore some of the most extreme stories of heroes and scientists who have experimented on themselves in the name of science (though some of these experiments will make you wonder - name of…science?).
 
These experiments are daring, shocking, hideously painful and, at times, absolutely the last thing you would want to do to yourself as a human.
 
(And it will come as perhaps deeply unshocking that just 12 of 465 cases of self-experimentation over the last 200 years were women).
 
These experiments weren’t all pain without glory, however. Seven documented self-experimenters went on to win Nobel Prizes for their self-experimentation work. And incredibly, in 89% of instances, the self-experimenters obtained positive results in support of a hypothesis or produced valuable data. 
 
But not all of them. Some saw catastrophic levels of failure. Some died. And some held science back by decades by their work.
 
Is this kind of self-as-guinea-pig testing ethical? And how far is too far?
 
The heroes, the idiots and the sad stories are all here.
 
Previously mentioned episodes:
 
The Schmidt Pain Index!
 
Barry Marshall Drinks Something Weird!
 
Why We Forgot The Cure For Scurvy
 
Sources


Jason Bittel’s This Guy Got Himself Stung 1,000 Times For Science—Here’s What He Learned


Dominic Bliss’s National Geographic article: This man gets bitten by deadly snakes in the name of science


Alex Boese’s Electrified Sheep


Jennifer Levine’s Notable examples of self-experimentation in science


Stubbins Ffirth: An Inaugural Dissertation on Malignant Fever; with an attempt to prove its non-contagious nature from reason, observation, and experiment


Laura Turner Garrison’s Mental Floss article 10 Scientists Who Experimented on Themselves


Brian P Hanley, William Bains and George Church’s Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation: Ethics History, Regulation, Scenarios, and Views Among Ethics Committees and Prominent Scientists in Rejuvenation Research


Healthline: From Metabolism to LSD: 7 Researchers Who Experimented on Themselves


New Scientist’s The high life of the self-experimenters


Wikipedia: Self-experimentation in medicine


Wikipedia: The 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic


Window Through Time: The vomit-drinking doctor, Stubbins Ffirth (1784 – 1820)
Allen B Weisse’s Self-Experimentation and Its Role in Medical Research in Tex Heart Inst J
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Heroes and Idiots of Scientific Self-Experimentation!

Sexual performance, in particular impotence, is something that’s plagued chaps since they first crawled out of the swamp, rose up onto our hind legs, looked down, and bellowed WHY WON’T YOU WORK YOU BASTARD!
 
If there’s one thing you can rely on history to provide, it’s infinite examples of how men across the ages have laboured to enhance, increase, or at the very least enable performance…
 
Erectile dysfunction shows up in Egyptian tombs, Greek cup paintings, and even the Old Testament, with no limit to the wacky treatments they dreamed up to treat it. Not least, drinking the semen of hawks and eagles (how the hell do you get that stuff?).
 
On this very show, we’ve talked about some of these sophisticated, not-exactly-scientifically sound performance enhancers over the years from special elixirs to penile prostheses to testicle grafts. And of course, more mechanical means have also been tried for centuries. 
 
But today’s fix is all in the realm of chemical intervention and actual science! There’s a first time for everything, huh?
 
1983 was the year that real science came to the fore, but not quite in the way we’ve come to expect. Renowned physiologist Sir Giles Skey Brindley made an impractical yet convincing discovery involving phentolamine injections and lacking animal models, he used himself as a  guinea pig. Dressed in a loose tracksuit and with some prior preparatory injections, Brindley presented his findings in what has now come to be known as the infamous Brindley lecture, aka how NOT to communicate science.
 
Luckily, just 6 years after this exceptional performance the main scientific surprise discovery of today’s tale arises…
 
British Pfizer scientists Peter Dunn and Albert Wood had been researching a drug that they hoped would be good for treating high blood pressure, imaginatively calling it UK-92480. Early trials indicated little hope for its use as a heart disease treatment, nevertheless, a British patent was filed for sildenafil citrate, AKA Viagra, as a heart medication. Of course, we all know what viagra became famous for.
 
But Viagra’s erective effects were most emphatically a happy accident, and if it hadn’t been for an especially observant nurse, it may never have thrust its way into the spotlight.
 
Previous episodes mentioned:
 
Dr Serge Voronoff's Monkey Balls!
 
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard and The Origin of Performance Enhancing Drugs!
 
A Brief History of Penis Transplants
 
A Brief History of Aphrodisiacs!

Sources
 
The Little Blue Pill: An Oral History of Viagra The story of the drug that changed sex and made billions. By John Tozzi and Jared S Hopkins
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-11/the-little-blue-pill-an-oral-history-of-viagra?leadSource=uverify%20wall
 
The Viagra Craze - A pill to cure impotence? Afflicted men are saying Yesss! But is this the end of sex as we know it? By Bruce Handy
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,98

The Story Of Viagra - From Side Effect To Fully Erect

A little bonus episode for you today, and we hope you enjoy the shorter format. Let us know in the comments on YouTube or by leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts if you would like more episodes in this bite-sized form.
 
If you have listened to the previous episode “What The Hell Happened To The Left-Handers?”, you’ll know that National Geographic sent out a survey using scratch and sniff cards back in 1986. The scents they included were: banana, musk, cloves, rose, androstenone (a chemical found in sweat) and… mercaptans.
 
Today we expand on the tragedy that made mercaptans famous, and why we tend to enjoy this very unique smell more as we age.

LINKS:
The Wholesome Show on YouTube
 
SOURCES:

https://aoghs.org/oil-almanac/new-london-texas-school-explosion/
https://www.gasodorizer.com/gas-odorization-history/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mercaptan, My Captain!

If you’re left-handed you're part of a group that makes up about 10% of the population. And this rate of left-handedness has been consistent. Historical and archaeological records, reaching as far back as the Neanderthals, tell us that we’ve had this background rate of left-handedness for quite literally all of human history.
 
All of human history, that is, except for a small blip between the 19th and 20th centuries.
 
But before we explore that weird anomaly, one of the most interesting things about this story is how we have come to work out how many left-handers there have been across history.
 
From studying silhouetted hand prints to analysing paintings, drawings and sculptures, scientists have been able to chart left-handedness back to the Palaeolithic era. Amazingly, tooth striations from Neanderthals help us understand that there have always been lefties. In more recent history, researchers have turned to photos, hospital records and documentaries. Thank goodness for all those old docos that contain endless footage of people waving at the camera. We wave with our dominant hand, so these film reels are an accidental census of left-handedness.
 
But do you know what's weird about those images of waving crowds from the beginning of the 20th Century? The number of left-handers seems to drop off as they get younger.
 
Which is where the anomalous data enters. Pulling all the data on left-handers together from cavemen to now, we see there is a pronounced dip in left-handers in the 19th century.
 
So here's the question - where the hell did all the left-handers go during the 19th century?!
 
There are three main theories, but these still remain theories: death, fewer babies, or long-standing prejudice whipped up by seriously villainous people.

Previous episode mentioned:
 
The Best Years Of Your Life!
 
Sources

Accident proneness and handedness by WF Daniel and RA Yeo
Biased semantics for right and left in 50 Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages, by Wulf Schiefenhovel
Handedness and longevity: archival study of cricketers by Aggleton, Bland, Kentridge and Neave
Left-handedness and accident-related injury risk by S Coren
Left Handed: Bad science and bad attitudes are the problem, not the left hand by Free Thought Blogs
National Geographic Smell Survey, by Charles Wysocki and Avery Gilbert
New London School Explosion, by Petroleum History Almanac
Old books on left-handedness, by Keith Milsom
Problems Related to Left-Handedness by KC Garrison
#PyrfumeCodefest Twitter Thread by Joel Mainland
Retraining left-handers and the aetiology of stuttering: The rise and fall of an intriguing theory, by Howard I Kushner
The history and geography of human handedness by IC McManus
The surprising geography of American left-handedness by Christopher Ingraham
The Sniff Survey, by Boyce Rensberger
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What The Hell Happened To The Left-Handers?

There is no better way to conquer things than with great big explosions. The thing to be conquered in this episode? Rain (humans just love punching on with nature).
This story begins with a strange observation. After the Civil War in America, soldiers of all ranks, abilities and backgrounds often spoke of drenching drain after battles. This apparent connection rose to the level of received wisdom. In essence — many believed the powerful explosions of battle brought rain.
 
This idea really took off in the US in 1871 with the publication of Edward Powers’ book ‘War and Weather’, a chronicle of battles that were followed by precipitation.
 
This deep wisdom did not consider the fact that battles fought in temperate locales like Virginia, averaged rain every four days. And the battles seldom started in drenching rain…Whatever. Powers had an idea. And the idea had promise. Lots of consistent big booms bring rain. Welcome to the wild world of concussionism.
 
But so far it was just a theory, so Powers thought, “time to prove it”. He harangued politicians to pony up some cash to fund some field tests.
 
Luckily for Powers, it was the late 1880s and people were settling the Great Plains in vast numbers, and they were struggling with severe, ongoing droughts. Perfect opportunity! Powers was granted $9000 to test concussionism.
 
But who would run this scheme?
 
Enter our hero: General Robert. G. Dyrenforth. Broad-shouldered, capable and extravagantly optimistic, Dyrenthforth was a relentlessly self-promoting chap. He saw vast possibilities where others didn't. He asserted that man's dominion over the continent could be extended to the heavens and to the four winds. Most importantly, he subscribed to the theory that there is no problem a little gunpowder can’t fix. Basically, Dyrenforth was concussionism’s poster boy.
 
Over the next five months, Dyrenforth assembled a team, collected gear, and found a test site. To be really precise, his first experiments mimicked a battlefield. In detail. A lot. He set up 3 lines of boom stuff that looked like an artillery battery. There were jury-rigged mortars to lob dynamite and rackarock charges into the air, balloons to float skyward and denote with furious force: the whole nine yards! Over several weeks they blew up multiple oxyhydrogen balloons and detonated thousands of pounds of explosives.
 
Dyrenforth’s reports quickly claimed success - torrential rain. It was all going swimmingly. He even came up with an elaborate theory as to why the booms led to rain.
 
Of course, as we all know, no experiment is perfect, and Dyrenforth was not without his detractors. But he was a man on a mission, driven to prove to all and sundry that concussionism was the cure to America’s frontier farmland water woes. So, was it…?
Previous episodes mentioned:
Weather War
Operation Popeye
 
Sources:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/rain-of-error/
MAKING WAR ON JUPITER PLUVIUS  - THE CULTURE AND S

Desperate For Rain, He Bombed The Sky

The way the story goes, the Summer of 69 was when all hell broke loose in Cleveland.
 
It was the summer the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. Choked with industrial effluent and chemicals it burst into flames. It is said that this is the event that birthed the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Authority. America was galvanised by this shocking event. Things started to change.
 
But the thing is, this was not the first time the Cuyahoga River had burst into flames.
 
We feel like the most obvious question is, how does a river which is by definition “a large natural stream of water” burst into flames?! Shouldn’t the water act as some sort of fire deterrent? 
 
But water was no match for the horrors contained in the Cuyahoga River.  
 
When surveyors first came across this river in 1796 they knew they’d hit gold. It was connected to one of America’s largest lakes and was an excellent shipping route. Cleveland was born and industry boomed. And back then, as well as being shipping routes, rivers were the industry's drain. Flush it all down the river and it’s someone else’s problem.
 
And so, the Cuyahoga River quickly became the dump for all manner of lovely things. Waste from oil refineries, paint factories, steel mills, coking plants and slaughterhouses. Raw sewerage. Trash. If you had something you didn’t want, into the river it went.
 
It got pretty bad, bubbling away like a deadly stew. So bad that it was commonly accepted that if you fell into the river, you should get yourself to hospital, fast.
 
With reports like this, it’s not a stretch to believe that it liked to spontaneously burst into flames. Well, maybe not spontaneously, but it didn’t take much to ignite that bad boy. 
 
The thing is, that fire in 1969 was not the first time the river had caught alight. The river had been prone to catching alight at least nine times before 1969. And that fire in 1969, well, almost no one noticed.
 
So how does a run-of-the-mill river fire in a badly polluted river that almost no one noticed transform into such an environmentally revolutionary moment?
 
The events that transpired say something deeper about how we look at the world, and what it takes to get us to change. 
 
Sources:

Smithsonian Magazine: The Cuyahoga River Caught Fire at Least a Dozen Times, but No One Cared Until 1969
David and Richard Stradling’s Perceptions of the Burning River: Deindustrialization and Cleveland's Cuyahoga River in Environmental History


Not Enough to Drink - Google Books


Cleveland's Cuyahoga River caught fire 50 years ago. It inspired a movement.


51 Years Later, the Cuyahoga River Burns Again - Outside Online


America's Sewage System and the Price of Optimism - TIME


Oral Histories of the 1969 Cuyahoga River Fire - Belt Magazine

 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Truth About The Cuyahoga River Fire

The car has been around for over a century, which makes it easy to forget that there were real-life humans behind its invention, not to mention a messy, complex journey of invention.
 
There are of course some well-meaning gentlemen that were involved in the invention of the automobile. But, possibly one of the most important figures was a woman by the name of Bertha Benz.
 
Bertha Benz’s husband was a locomotive engineer, Karl Benz. After getting into a good deal of debt in an iron manufacturing business, he was bailed out by his then fiance Bertha and, with her financial support, set about on his lifelong dream of creating the first true automobile.
 
There were many failed attempts by Karl before he had any success with a saleable automobile. These contraptions started out as three-wheeled vehicles that could reach 25kph (wild speeds in the day of the horse-drawn carriage). By the time they reached “Model III”, these machines were saleable and one could opt for some sick mods like a folding roof and additional vis-à-vis bench seats, the height of comfort.
 
However, back then, automobiles were not an easy sell. They were loud, shuddering, unreliable and, well, they didn’t involve horses. How dumb! As we know all too well, humans are, in general, terrible at embracing change. The general view back in the 1800s was that these “horseless carriages” were absolutely impractical.
 
However, this public had yet to encounter Bertha’s genius.
 
It’s helpful to point out here that Karl was no Elon Musk. By all accounts, he was meticulous, patient and conservative and prone to bouts of self-doubt and depression. Karl had some serious doubts about the practicality of his inventions and wondered if they’d ever be useful for anything more than quick jaunts around town.
 
But Bertha was made of different stuff and could see a little further than her husband’s limited view.
 
Not only did she have impressive intelligence, but she also disagreed with her husband and spoke out resolutely against dissenters of the automobile.
 
So in 1888, following the release of Model III and tired of her husband’s general attitude, Bertha took matters into her own hands. Bertha roped her two teenage sons into her plans and took a trip. This trip included the first roadside repairs, the first automatic marketing stunt, the first case of a wife borrowing her husband’s car without asking and the first violation of intercity highway laws in a motor vehicle. And it set the scene for the automotive revolution.
 
Sources:

https://americanhistory.si.edu/america-on-the-move/fill-up
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/short-picture-history-gas-stations-180967337/
https://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM01356b.htm
https://www.hotcars.com/the-story-of-bertha-benz-and-the-first-long-distance-road-trip/
https://group.mercedes-benz.com/company/tradition/founders-pioneers/carl-benz.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz
https://group.mercedes-ben

Bertha Benz Invents The Road Trip!

Scurvy is zero fun. We’re not sure how much you know about this disease but it’s not a walk in the park. Okay, it’s fair to say that not many diseases are a gentle stroll through a pretty field of flower-filled gardens, but scurvy really is an incredible bastard. The only thing going for it is that you’re generally dead pretty quick.
You start off feeling a little tired, sore and short of breath. Your gums start to hurt and your legs swell. Then, your darkening, swelling legs develop purple, black, red or blue spots, your muscles start wasting away and you start hallucinating. Then your teeth fall out, your gums rot, old wounds open up and you become so weak and sick that you die. Put simply, it is horrible and gross.
And scurvy is not a recent phenomenon. 
It has plagued humans since ancient times. It hammered early agricultural societies, and we can even see evidence of it in ancient writings.
But while it has always been around, it really took off in the age of the explorers.
Take, for example, Vasco de Gama’s 1497 journey around the Cape of Good Hope. One hundred of his one hundred and sixty men died. In fact, all shipowners and governments in the 15th-18th centuries assumed that 50% of the crew on a long voyage would die of scurvy. Imagine starting your voyage knowing that you had a 50/50 shot at actually living to see the end of it. 
It doesn’t sound like a great time. We’re surprised anyone wanted to voyage anywhere with odds like that. But scurvy’s scourge continued right through to modern times with cases occurring still today in the malnourished.
As a deficiency disease, and possibly one of the easiest things to treat and cure, we humans have done a truly remarkable job of continuing to get scurvy. We’ve overlooked the cause of scurvy and have been bizarrely forgetful when the cure was stumbled across.
Of course, it was never a matter of just forgetting. Colonial trades and fear of poisoning played a role, as did a range of whacky treatments that confused everyone. And as always, a healthy dose of terrible science communication was thrown in there too. 
Join us while we poke fun at the ridiculous amount of times this simple yet horrific disease kept resurfacing, and why lemons (not limes) reign supreme.
 
Previous episodes mentioned:
Ep 276 - Philip Nitschke's Quest to Allow Us To Die
Ep 111 - Drinking your own urine? 
 
Sources

Jeremy Hugh Baron’s article in Nutrition Reviews: Sailors' scurvy before and after James Lind – a reassessment
Idle Words: Scott And Scurvy
Anu Lall: SCURVY, When Medical Arrogance killed 2,000,000 men
Curious Historian: The Scourge Of Scurvy
The Guardian: The secret of how Amundsen beat Scott in race to south pole? A diet of raw penguin
Journal of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh: The role of scurvy in Scott’s return from the South Pole
The Journal of Nutrition: Scurvy and Cloudberries: A Chapter in the History of Nutritional Sciences
Leviathan: Ishmael's Recovery: Injury

Why We Forgot The Cure For Scurvy

If you were knocking on death’s door and the door wasn’t opening quickly enough, would you want to be able to give it a shove yourself?
 
To have agency over your death is a tricky subject, but that hasn’t stopped Philip Nitschke from diving into it head first.
 
To understand why Nitschke felt compelled to go down such an onerous path, let’s first give you a sense of his personality as a young chap.
 
When he was 18, someone stole Nitschke's car radio. The police weren’t too concerned about it so Nitschke waited in the boot of his car with a 0.22 calibre rifle for the thief to come back for the car speakers.
 
That may seem slightly insane to a regular human being, but Nitschke needed to serve some justice. He figured that he could solve his own problems.
 
As a young med school graduate, feeling compelled to help people solve their own problems too, Nitschke was intrigued by the idea of euthanasia for those that wanted to end their lives peacefully and on their own terms.
 
And in 1996, in the Northern Territory, Nitschke became the first doctor in the world to administer a legal, lethal, voluntary injection.
 
As a result, Nitschke became an outspoken advocate and crusader for euthanasia. As you can imagine, it hasn’t been an easy road, but it certainly hasn’t been boring.
 
Nitschke invented death machines, originated a euthanasia flash mob and created a Comedy Festival show entitled ‘Dicing with Dr Death’. The reviews were actually pretty good!
 
And yes, you did read that right. Death machines are a real thing. Dying in a peaceful, reliable and dignified manner is surprisingly difficult. Nitschke’s newest death machine iteration (which currently only exists in VR form) is called Sarco (named after sarcophagus) and looks like it belongs in a Tesla display centre. 
 
Why has Nitschke fought so hard for our right to die? And what is the state of voluntary assisted dying  (and his medical licence) now? Also - what happened to that car radio thief? 
 
Jump on into this episode and find out.
 
Previous episodes mentioned:
Ep 275 - Chinese Restaurant Syndrome or Why We Panicked About MSG
Ep 270 - Non Fungible Tulips!
Ep 267 - What Do We Do With The Immortal Quadrillionaires?
Ep 153 - Safety Issues at the Los Alamos Lab!
 
Sources:

https://www.economist.com/1843/2019/12/12/a-design-for-death-meeting-the-bad-boy-of-the-euthanasia-movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_device
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-05/ama-speaks-out-over-nitschke-claims/4670282
https://www.exitinternational.net/about-exit/history/
https://www.exitinternational.net/sarco/
Australian Man First in World To Die With Legal Euthanasia 1996https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/26/world/australian-man-first-in-world-to-die-with-legal-euthanasia.html
https://maxdogbrewing.com
https://www.9news.com.au/national/dr-death-to-fight-nitrogen-complaint/6765eccc-5b3f-45b5-9fda-15cd70940740
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/15/nitschke-

Philip Nitschke's Quest to Allow Us To Die

In August 1968, a rather innocuous letter to the editor was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
 
Dr Ho Man Kwok had written in speculating on the reason he felt so ghastly after eating at a Chinese restaurant. Was it the soy sauce or the cooking wine? Or perhaps, he offered up, it was the monosodium glutamate seasoning - MSG.
 
The prominent symptoms, as he described them, were numbness at the back of his neck, general weakness and heart palpitations.
 
Surely Dr Kwok hadn’t just overeaten or sampled a few too many beverages during the evening. There must be another explanation and something else to blame.
 
The New England Journal, which clearly did a lot of background checking, thorough research and fact-finding *ahem* decided to run with this madness and the term “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” was coined.
 
And so, the flurry of MSG bad-mouthing and hysteria took off.
 
Now, more than five decades later surveys suggest that a whopping 43% of Americans believe that MSG is bad for you. And we wouldn’t be surprised if Australia fell in line with this statistic.
 
The “syndrome” has exploded to encompass symptoms far beyond Dr Kwok’s initial complaint. People report muscle tightening, burning sensations, and almost fainting. And, most notably, an irresistible urge to take off all your clothes.
 
We can certainly blame MSG for that... 
 
But is this all bollocks? Are there any real studies from the whole of science that prove or disprove these theories? After a few sprinkles of MSG in their beer, Will takes Rod on a journey through racism, hysteria and deliciousness all in the name of acquitting MSG in the court of public opinion.
 
Previous Episodes Mentioned:
Musical Maladies - And Fakes!
 
Sources

Jennifer LeMesurier’s Poroi (An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention) article: Uptaking Race: Genre, MSG, and Chinese Dinner
Ian Mosby’s: ‘That Won-Ton Soup Headache’: The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, MSG and the Making of American Food, 1968–1980
Michael Blanding’s article in Colgate Magazine: The Strange Case of Dr Ho Man Kwok
Richard D Lyons article in the New York Times: ‘Chinese Restaurant Syndrome’ Puzzles Doctors. May 19 1968
Herbert Schaumburg and Robert Byck’s article in Science: Monosodium L-Glutamate: Its Pharmacology and Role in the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome
This American Life’s The Long Fuse
The Washington Post’s: Beware of musher's knee and hooker's elbow
Umami Information Center: Kikunae Ikeda
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chinese Restaurant Syndrome or Why We Panicked About MSG

Our episode today begins in the 1960s with Laszlo Polgar and his hot and saucy epistolary courtship with a foreign language teacher named Klara.
Correction here. Laszlo's letters were less hot and saucy and more….precise and instrumental. There was no time for detailing THE karma sutra. László was on a mission. He wanted to raise child geniuses. So, in his letters to Klara, he outlines the pedagogical experiment he intends to carry out with his future progeny.
Laszlo clearly knows how to woo a lady.
The guiding theory behind this experiment was that Laszlo believed that any healthy child had the innate capacity to become a genius if their education starts by the time they are three, and specialises by the time they are six.
All he needed was a wife to jump onboard, so to speak.
Klara was clearly intellectually aroused by his letters and, in rough translation from Hungarian she said to László “Mate, I am bloody in”.
And so the great experiment began.
After what was probably some very methodical, precise and well-thought-out intercourse, they had three children. Susan (1970), Sophia (1974) and Judit (1976).
Now that they had their subjects, it was time to start phase two - education. László believed public education only produced mediocre minds - but homeschooling was illegal in Hungary at the time. After a battle with an armed policeman, he won on the homeschooling front.
Now that they could successfully and legally educate their children at home, the next hurdle was to find the specialisation that would allow the genius to blossom.
Their eldest daughter Susan sorted that quandary when, aged four, she found a chess board in a closet. Was she obsessed from that very first sighting? Probably not. To be fair, she was just trying to find something that resembled a toy to play with. The household wasn’t big on barbies or monster trucks.
Now that Susan had inadvertently picked a speciality, it was decided - all three girls would become chess masters (it’s not an experiment without replication).
The next hurdle to overcome was infiltrating the boys club that was chess at the time.
Back in the 1970s, less than 1% of top chess players were female. So, Laszlo's mission turned him into a women’s rights activist as a nice little side effect.
Did Laszlo and Klara succeed in their genius-raising experiment? How do they feel about the outcome? And where are Susan, Sophia and Judit now?
 
Tune in to find out.
 
Previous episodes mentioned:
The Actual Genius of Paul Erdős
Dozenalism!
 
References:

herway - Epistolary Relationship: 6 Reasons To Bring Back Old-School Romance
Wikipedia - László Polgár
Psychology Today - The Grandmaster Experiment
The Conversation - What’s behind the gender imbalance in top-level chess? 
Independent - A man with a talent for creating genius: William Hartston meets Laszlo Polgar, the father of three world-class chess players
The Guardian - Judit Polgar: 'Everything was about chess'
Chicago Tribune - Trained

Laszlo Polgar's Quest To Raise A Chess Genius

Our goal here at The Wholesome Show is to make you feel happy, amused and entertained. But a fair warning that we must sometimes journey through a rather astonishing volume of grotesque and sad death to get you there.
 
We won’t apologise for it. It is our duty.
 
In this episode, we travel back to the 18th and 19th centuries - a generally dire time to be alive. Infanticide - the killing of unwanted children - was a horrifyingly common reality. 
 
Luckily at the time, there was a relatively liberal emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Joseph II, that decided to try and do something about this epidemic of child killing. 
 
First of all, he established foundling homes, where unwanted infants could be dropped off.  There was even a convenient after-hours “chute” for those times you couldn’t possibly get there during business hours to give away your children. Convenience was key, even in those days.
 
Then Joseph II set up maternity hospitals, for mothers to give birth in. Was this a brilliant success? Let’s say a little bit of yes and … quite a lot of no. You see, there was a rumour going around that while these hospitals were free, they were in fact … houses of death. 
 
How did all this death occur?
 
Well within 24 - 48 hours after exhausted women in need of a solid nap gave birth, they became incredibly unwell. Relentless fevers, excruciating abdominal pain, headaches…These women would go downhill very quickly.
 
Now, because it was the 18th century they had some wacky ancient treatments. The ever trusty leeches, a bit of bloodletting, lots of mercury, opium (that part sounds pretty good), and of course enemas. Because everyone feels like an enema when they’re knocking on death’s door.
 
Did these treatments work at least? No. No they didn’t. These hospitals don’t get to be known as “Houses of Death” without quite a lot of death.
 
This is where we come to the hero of our story - Dr Ignaz Semmelweis. 
 
Upon starting work as an obstetrician at the maternity wing of the Vienna General Hospital, Semmelweis realised pretty quickly that something was wrong. Surely a large part of the puzzle was missing.
 
Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that would go on to save hundreds and thousands of lives, but he unfortunately paid the ultimate price. Tune in to the episode to hear why Ignaz Semmelweis is truly a martyr to science.

Previous episodes mentioned:
A Brief History of Medical Leeches!
The History And Future Of The Death Certificate
 
Sources

British Medical Journal: Infanticide and Excessive Infant Mortality
Caroline M De Costa The Medical Journal of Australia: “The contagiousness of childbed fever”: a short history of puerperal sepsis and its treatment
Ignaz Semmelweis: The etiology, concept, and prophylaxis of childbed fever
K Codell Carter & Barbara R Carter: Childbed Fever
Museum of Contraception and Abortion: The Vienna Foundlings and Orphans Home
Paige Mathieson: Midlands Historical Re

The Martyrdom of Outspoken Hand Washer Dr Ignaz Semmelweis

Have you ever had a dream that you just had to do no matter how crazy or how dangerous it might sound to anyone else? A dream so core to your being that nothing was going to stop you realising it no matter the obstacles?
 
Nail Armstrong sure did. As did Marie Curie. Edmond Hillary too.
 
But recently, we found out about a human who eclipsed all those wannabes.
 
That man was Larry Walters.
 
Even as a very young lad, Larry imagined himself flying. 
 
His inspiration? 
 
Balloons. 
 
His idea first took flight when he came across helium balloons on a trip to Disneyland. But it really cemented at the age of 13 when he came across weather balloons at the army disposal store.
 
From then on, he dreamt of nothing else.
 
Well, we can’t 100% confirm that he dreamt of nothing else, but it’s more dramatic if we say that.
 
Larry did attempt to become a pilot to get his fix of zooming through the air. But his bad eyesight stopped him joining the airforce.
 
This dream of his refused to die.
 
He was a man on a mission.
 
Many years after his trip to Disneyland, Larry devised a foolproof (ahem) plan to strap 42 weather balloons filled with helium to a lawn chair and launch into the unknown.
 
The lawnchair was really sturdy apparently. There was surely no cause for concern.
 
Larry’s idea was to float up to about 30 feet, drift lazily for a few hours out over the Mojave Desert and then pop some balloons and drift back down.
 
Sounds like a nice way to spend an afternoon really.
 
Larry prepared. He packed an altimeter (because, height), CB radio, two litres of Coca-Cola, eight plastic bottles of water (for ballast), and a BB gun. There were reports of a stashed six pack as well.
 
The thing he was in very short supply of was maths.
 
Strap in, as we join Larry on his ‘peaceful float across the Mojave desert’.
 
Sources

8 of the Weirdest Items in the Smithsonian's Archives

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/556928/weirdest-items-smithsonian-archives

How the Balloon-Borne “Flying Lawn Chair” Got Into the Smithsonian

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/flying-lawn-chair-180972974/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia

The strange, sad odyssey of ‘Lawn Chair Larry’

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-strange-sad-odyssey-of-lawn-chair-larry-3b943991179c
 

Before There Was “Up,” There Was “Lawnchair Larry” 

https://allthatsinteresting.com/lawnchair-larry-walters

Larry Walters; Soared to Fame on Lawn Chair

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-11-24-mn-60236-story.html
 

Did Larry Walters Fly in a Lawn Chair Attached to Helium Balloons?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/up-up-and-away/
 

Floating on a Lawn chair Over L.A.? He was Living Out His Dream

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidrupert/floating-on-a-lawnchair-over-l-a-thats-no-fool-thats-a-hero/
 

The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/06/01/the-man-in-the-flying

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