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People Used Bed Bugs as Medicine for Thousands of Years · Ridiculous History

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Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
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Speaker 1: back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
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Speaker 1: so much for tuning in. I am Ben. That's our
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Speaker 1: one and only super producer, Mr Max Williams joined as
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Speaker 1: always with my Ride or Died, the one and only
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Speaker 1: Mr Noel Brown. Yeah. Today it's a little more Die
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Speaker 1: than Ride, just putting it out there. I got my
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Speaker 1: COVID booster yesterday, and I'm a little worse for the
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Speaker 1: wear today, but I'm powering through for the Ridiculous Historians
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Speaker 1: and for you Ben, and for you Max. Taking one
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Speaker 1: for the team here. I'm wrapped in a blanket like
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Speaker 1: a little little lady who lives in the shoe, and
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Speaker 1: hopefully you're blanket is bug free. Today's episode is about
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Speaker 1: bed bugs. Now, like many people growing up, I did
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Speaker 1: not have a ton of personal experiences with bed bugs.
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Speaker 1: I ran into them like there was this very strange,
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Speaker 1: somewhat ruthless mattress program at my boy Scout camps because
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Speaker 1: of the fear of bed bugs. I never actually saw
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Speaker 1: bed bugs, and I thought they might even be kind
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Speaker 1: of like a snipe and a snipe hunt. Until yeah,
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Speaker 1: until I lived in Central America, And in a couple
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Speaker 1: of the houses I stayed in, someone would take me
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Speaker 1: to the side, you know, some sometime during my first
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Speaker 1: day there, and they would say, hey, when you sleep,
1:43
Speaker 1: make sure you sleep with your pants on tucked into
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Speaker 1: your socks. And I said why, and they just said,
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Speaker 1: just do it. It turns out it's because of bed bugs,
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Speaker 1: which were Yeah, bed bugs are in fact real. Um,
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Speaker 1: it's something if anyone you knows, grow grew up living
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Speaker 1: in New York City or spending time, you know, living
2:01
Speaker 1: in apartments in New York City, might be aware of
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Speaker 1: as certainly something to look out for. These things that
2:07
Speaker 1: they hop around to right like they can hop off
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Speaker 1: the bed onto you and vice versa. Um, they're almost
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Speaker 1: like lice. I don't know, how do we describe the
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Speaker 1: common American bedbug. Well, it's a insect. It's it's a
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Speaker 1: common pest. They're very small. They're on the order of
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Speaker 1: millimeters in size. It's like if they were a band
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Speaker 1: instead of being and you will know us by the
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Speaker 1: trail of the dead, they would be like and you
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Speaker 1: shall know us by the trail of the bites. Most
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Speaker 1: people don't see bed bugs easily unless they're definitely looking
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Speaker 1: for them, or unless they're a lot in one place,
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Speaker 1: But when you get the bites, it's hard to mistake
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Speaker 1: them for anything else. We're talking skin rashes, some people
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Speaker 1: have allergic symptoms, blisters. It's just overall unpleasant and it
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Speaker 1: can be really difficult to get rid of them. From
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Speaker 1: my understanding, that's right. The bed bug no officially as
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Speaker 1: Cimex lectularius. They're tiny, flat, parasitic blood sucking insects. They
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Speaker 1: feed on humans and animals while they sleep. They're the
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Speaker 1: opportunistic little buggers, aren't they. They're reddish brown, they don't
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Speaker 1: have any wings, and they roughly according to the c
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Speaker 1: D c UH they are the size of Lincoln's head
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Speaker 1: on a penny, and they can live with for several
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Speaker 1: months without any sustenance at all. So they like to
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Speaker 1: feed on bear skin typically, not like a bear skin rug,
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Speaker 1: like bare human skin where there's no hair, because it's
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Speaker 1: easier for them to get to. But like unlike ticks
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Speaker 1: and you know, lights and stuff, they are a little
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Speaker 1: easier to spot because they don't burrow into areas covered
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Speaker 1: in hair where you have a hard time seeing them
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Speaker 1: right exactly. They spend a lot of their lives in dark,
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Speaker 1: hidden locations. Think like cracks in the wall, think mattress.
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Speaker 1: Seems uh, there's something really interesting too. I don't know
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Speaker 1: how far we'll get with it today, but infestations are
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Speaker 1: pretty common. Man. There's another species that's found primarily in
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Speaker 1: the tropics, but that vampiric grifft, is the same all
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Speaker 1: the world over. For some reason, bedbug infestations have increased
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Speaker 1: since the nineteen nineties. Scientists still aren't sure why. All
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Speaker 1: we know is that the global bedbug population has reached
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Speaker 1: a record high, and everybody in the world today has
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Speaker 1: managed to agree on one thing in these our divisive times.
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Speaker 1: We hate bedbugs, right, It's true. I think we can
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Speaker 1: reckon unite on that front. Um. That didn't used to
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Speaker 1: be the case. Bed Bugs actually used to be considered
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Speaker 1: a potent form of medicine. That's right, medicine, and not
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Speaker 1: just from their bites, specifically from like collecting them, grinding
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Speaker 1: them up into some sort of powder or like a poultice,
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Speaker 1: and then consuming it to treat things ranging from flu
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Speaker 1: two fevers. Uh. It was even mixed with salt and
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Speaker 1: breast milk in order to create a topical substance to
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Speaker 1: treat things like pink i eye infections. Really really bizarre.
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Speaker 1: It was hugely popular and used for almost fifteen hundred years. Exactly, yeah,
5:11
Speaker 1: we know. One of the earliest texts describing the medical
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Speaker 1: application of bedbugs comes from a collection called d Materia medica.
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Speaker 1: They were ground up the bed bugs, I mean not
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Speaker 1: this collection of texts and consumed as medicine for millennia.
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Speaker 1: During the fifteen hundreds, for instance, people would eat beans
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Speaker 1: that have been stuffed with bed bugs as a way
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Speaker 1: to cure malaria. Uh, spoiler, it's not the best malaria cure.
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Speaker 1: And then they would mix bedbugs with tortoise blood to
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Speaker 1: heels snake bites. People even thought the smell of bed
5:48
Speaker 1: bugs could have a curative effect. It could reverse cataracts,
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Speaker 1: eliminate lethargy, cure earaches, and even get rid of kidney stones.
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Speaker 1: Experts today believe that this weird chapter of medicine peaked
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Speaker 1: in the seventeen hundreds when women were fed bedbugs in
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Speaker 1: order to ease their quote unquote symptoms of hysteria. And honestly,
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Speaker 1: we found that little tidbit through an unexpected source, Johnny B.
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Speaker 1: Pest Control dot Com. So thanks so much, use information
6:26
Speaker 1: or specifically John Bozargan who wrote the article. But then why,
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Speaker 1: I'm sorry, why where where do they get this idea?
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Speaker 1: Where do they get this wild notion? Why bedbugs and
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Speaker 1: specifically some of the materials they mixed it with. It
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Speaker 1: just seems like a real stretch. Yeah, it's weird to
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Speaker 1: understand it. We have to understand the ancient enmity between
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Speaker 1: human civilization and these little critters. Uh, it looks like
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Speaker 1: according to some research from scientists at Charles University in
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Speaker 1: the Czech Republic, they did a genetic annals of the
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Speaker 1: bed bug and from their findings they estimate its origins
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Speaker 1: maybe date back two and forty five thousand years. If
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Speaker 1: that number holds up, then that means that bed bugs
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Speaker 1: could be older than modern humans are. And there's a
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Speaker 1: ton of evidence from other parts of the world that
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Speaker 1: shows us just how old this battle has been. Archaeologists
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Speaker 1: in the nine nineties found fossilized bedbugs at a three thousand,
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Speaker 1: five fifty year old site in Egypt. Their name checked
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Speaker 1: in ancient Greek plays. They're even mentioned in the Talmud.
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Speaker 1: It's nuts people have been like bed bugs have been
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Speaker 1: an irritating topic of conversation for a long long time.
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Speaker 1: Even like people try to cast spells against bed bugs,
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Speaker 1: which I think is cool. There's there's this interesting thing though,
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Speaker 1: because you know, um, there's this this trope in a
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Speaker 1: lot of ancient medicine where where the assumption is one
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Speaker 1: can take something that is harmful and through certain rituals
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Speaker 1: or through certain you know, treatments, you can turn it
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Speaker 1: into something helpful. And I believe that's what happened with
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Speaker 1: bed bugs. There's a really great article on mental floss
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Speaker 1: by Brooke Borel called seven Infested Facts about bed bugs,
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Speaker 1: and on that we learned about the spells that the
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Speaker 1: ancient Egyptian pharaohs would try to have cast on the
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Speaker 1: little guys. We learned that the ancient Greeks would actually
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Speaker 1: try to lure the bugs out to um other flesh
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Speaker 1: by actually tempting them with a hair or a stag
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Speaker 1: feet in their beds, so essentially tying severed animal parts
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Speaker 1: to their bed frames and the hopes of the bed
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Speaker 1: bugs would jump onto them instead. In the eighteen hundreds
8:49
Speaker 1: and nineteen hundreds, as we know, the problematic era for
8:52
Speaker 1: using you know, carcinogenic chemicals to solve problems. We used
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Speaker 1: really really nasty sprays made of arsenic and mercury um
9:01
Speaker 1: and um super toxic fume against like cyanide gas. So
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Speaker 1: we were really you know, meant business like, I don't
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Speaker 1: care if we kill ourselves in the process, as long
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Speaker 1: as we got rid of the bed bugs. Even baseball
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Speaker 1: bats was a thing like that's like taking it a
9:15
Speaker 1: step further than the fly swatter. Uh. They were blowtorched,
9:19
Speaker 1: drenched with gasoline, set on fire. Um. And according to
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Speaker 1: a recommendation from a book from the late eighteenth century
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Speaker 1: called The Complete Vermin Killer, washing bed frames with wormwood
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Speaker 1: and hella bore boiled in a quote, proper quantity of
9:34
Speaker 1: urine was the way to go. Yep, boiling and urine. Uh,
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Speaker 1: that was considered a legitimate approach. And it feels kind
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Speaker 1: of scorched earth honestly. But let's get back to that question.
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Speaker 1: The medicine here, what made people believe bedbugs, whether their
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Speaker 1: odor or their corps, has had medicinal uses. Well, we
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Speaker 1: have to understand that for a long time, the world
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Speaker 1: of medicine was a guessing game that came out of
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Speaker 1: long standing natural traditions and also came out of spiritual beliefs. Right,
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Speaker 1: medicine and magic or spirituality were inextricably intertwined for a
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Speaker 1: very long time, and because people were trying new solutions,
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Speaker 1: almost everything was at one point or another and non
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Speaker 1: orthodox or out of the box solution. And well, yeah,
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Speaker 1: we've got a list of things that don't that you
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Speaker 1: wouldn't hear a doctor say today, But I assure you,
10:37
Speaker 1: ridiculous historians, these were common real things. People used to think.
10:42
Speaker 1: Yogurt would prevent you from becoming old. People used to think,
10:46
Speaker 1: you know, a good a good dose a heroine would
10:49
Speaker 1: help with your cough, opium with your asthma. Um, you
10:54
Speaker 1: could wear a belt that would if you were impotent,
10:56
Speaker 1: you could wear a belt that would give you electric shocks.
11:00
Speaker 1: And if you're throat was sore, why not snarf down
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Speaker 1: some dog poop. True story. Oh no, thank you. Um,
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Speaker 1: you know, unless it definitely works and I'm totally game. Uh.
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Speaker 1: This was also wasn't this kind of the era of
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Speaker 1: John Harvey Kellogg. Um, you know, the founder of the
11:14
Speaker 1: Kellogg Company, serial company. But he was known for his
11:18
Speaker 1: unorthodox treatments, like I think he would give people yogurt enemas,
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Speaker 1: presumably because he thought it would do something good for
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Speaker 1: their you know, their health, and that that would have
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Speaker 1: been a later use of this kind of stuff. But
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Speaker 1: these remedies have been around, uh for a long time,
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Speaker 1: and even today if people use holistic remedies that some
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Speaker 1: from more traditional medical backgrounds might you know, look askance at.
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Speaker 1: But it's the power of belief is as a hell
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Speaker 1: of a thing, right, yeah, yeah, just like when my
11:47
Speaker 1: GP told me that I could cure my malaise by
11:50
Speaker 1: walking wider shins around a you tree during solstice, you know,
11:55
Speaker 1: and I was like, Okay, I'll try asper In first,
11:58
Speaker 1: but I appreciate the hustle. Yeah, you go to do
12:01
Speaker 1: you go to? You go to Dr Merlin as well? I?
12:03
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I actually go to dr Acula. Um he sucks,
12:07
Speaker 1: so if I love the way he holds his hand though, yes, yes,
12:13
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you. Max more of it so we
12:16
Speaker 1: we know that if you got sick in the actual
12:21
Speaker 1: first century, like first century CE, you needed to be
12:25
Speaker 1: less of a picky eater than normal because one cure
12:30
Speaker 1: for the flu or what we would call the flu
12:33
Speaker 1: now generally any bad fever. According to the physicians of
12:36
Speaker 1: the time was this idea of mixing bed bugs was
12:40
Speaker 1: STU seven if you're an adult, for if you're a child.
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Speaker 1: The quote is actually instructions for preparing kimisses of ye
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Speaker 1: bed which is what they called bed bugs yea, put
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Speaker 1: them in meat with beanies and what we did down
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Speaker 1: before the feat as a remedy for sweating sickness. That's again,
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Speaker 1: that's from that book we mentioned earlier. D Materia. Medicup
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Speaker 1: isn't sweating sickness malaria basically. I believe that's correct. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: I believe that's at least one term for malaria. For sure.
13:13
Speaker 1: I feel like I've got sweating sickness right now, but
13:15
Speaker 1: unfortunate don't have any bed buck lan. I'm just gonna
13:17
Speaker 1: have to sleep it off. But it's true. I mean,
13:20
Speaker 1: if you were not able to, you know, suck this
13:23
Speaker 1: stuff down, you could be shamed by the local apothecary
13:26
Speaker 1: um and that would be no good. He'd be ostracized
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Speaker 1: in the community for not taking your medicine. Um. Let's
13:31
Speaker 1: say that you had something known as scabs of the
13:34
Speaker 1: privy c the priv t s a k A. You know,
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Speaker 1: uh sensitive area uh scabs. Bed bugs were apparently quite effective. Also,
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Speaker 1: like we said, they were used for eye infections when
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Speaker 1: mixed with salt and uh and and quote women's milk.
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Speaker 1: For about thirty years, bedbugs have been like the mortal
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Speaker 1: enemies of of humans. If they were to be found
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Speaker 1: in a home today, it could absolutely cause some serious panicking.
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Speaker 1: Like you know, it's gross. It's like when you kid
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Speaker 1: comes home from school with lights it makes you feel
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Speaker 1: like you're dirty or something like that. It's got a
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Speaker 1: stigma around it in our society, paranoia, you know, like
14:11
Speaker 1: like calling up what was that bugman's name, Uh, I'm
14:14
Speaker 1: gonna call him Johnny, called Johnny B. Because this is
14:18
Speaker 1: serious business. But you know, if you look back further
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Speaker 1: to ancient history, you really do see these physicians believed
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Speaker 1: in the power of these parasites, even while simultaneously, you know,
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Speaker 1: being fearing them in some way. They were considered this
14:34
Speaker 1: kind of cure. All until in the last years of
14:38
Speaker 1: BC that concept started to wayne. I guess my question is, like,
14:42
Speaker 1: what odd choice just out of nowhere? Like it was
14:45
Speaker 1: there there's no truth to any of this, So how
14:49
Speaker 1: do they all of a sudden like, yeah, that's the one.
14:51
Speaker 1: There's a there's tons of other bugs they could have used.
14:53
Speaker 1: Why the bed bugs. Well, again, there is this there's
14:57
Speaker 1: this trope you see in ancient medicine, this belief that
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Speaker 1: the one can take something that would ordinarily be dangerous
15:06
Speaker 1: and with the proper preparations or rituals in the world
15:10
Speaker 1: of ancient medicine, you could make it curative. The idea
15:15
Speaker 1: that some variety of the poison, uh to put it
15:19
Speaker 1: one way, could contain the antidote. Sure, it's like if
15:22
Speaker 1: you take just a little bit of snake venom over
15:25
Speaker 1: a period of time, it could potentially defend you against
15:28
Speaker 1: snake bites. Or you can take a little bit of
15:31
Speaker 1: like a virus into your body and you might feel
15:33
Speaker 1: a little ill, especially while you're recording a podcast. And
15:36
Speaker 1: it's a really good it's really good point backs. Yes,
15:39
Speaker 1: we're not we're not so different, you and I. And
15:42
Speaker 1: then I'm speaking to the ancient the ancient Greeks. Some
15:46
Speaker 1: of these preparations that border on the insane. The series
15:49
Speaker 1: one from a medical advice um poem in fact, called
15:54
Speaker 1: the by the by the physician Quintus Serenus Saminikus, and
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Speaker 1: he said, shame not to drink the wall lice mixed
16:03
Speaker 1: with wine wall lice. That's the first. I like that.
16:07
Speaker 1: And garlic bruised together at noonday a specific time again
16:12
Speaker 1: yeah uh huh. Moreover, a bruised wall louse with an egg.
16:17
Speaker 1: Ee repine not for it to take this loathsome yet
16:22
Speaker 1: full good I say, alright, yoda, Yeah, repine. Repine means
16:28
Speaker 1: to feel, means to worry, to feel or express discontent.
16:34
Speaker 1: So it's like fretting. So don't repine, which is weird
16:37
Speaker 1: because it might sound a little close to recline. Lay back,
16:41
Speaker 1: so it can be confirmed, which is to express an opinion, right,
16:46
Speaker 1: or supine or lupine. Yeah, so we know that according
16:50
Speaker 1: to plenty of the elder, who, by the way, was
16:52
Speaker 1: a huge proponent a bedbug as medicine, your preparation would
16:57
Speaker 1: depend upon the sickness you were trying to treat. Uh.
17:01
Speaker 1: And we don't have to get too into the nitty
17:03
Speaker 1: gritty grossness of this, but we do need to note
17:07
Speaker 1: that pharmacopeia we mentioned, damn materia medica in a very
17:12
Speaker 1: real way, became a precursor to Western pharmacology. It would
17:16
Speaker 1: go on to influence medicine for like the next one thousand,
17:20
Speaker 1: five hundred years, and that's why some of these kind
17:25
Speaker 1: of whacky do bedbug medicine ideas continued to be practiced
17:30
Speaker 1: in Europe for centuries. They even get mentioned in later
17:35
Speaker 1: pharmacopeias like Treasury of Health. You would think that as
17:38
Speaker 1: the centuries progressed, people would eventually say, hey, bedbugs can't
17:43
Speaker 1: cure cataracts just due to their smell. But medicine did
17:47
Speaker 1: not progress as steadily as some other human pursuits, so
17:50
Speaker 1: these bedbug cures for things like vomiting, ear infections, even
17:54
Speaker 1: snake bites would still be mentioned in later medical text
18:00
Speaker 1: And we mentioned that trumped up pseudo medical condition quote
18:05
Speaker 1: unquote female hysteria, which yeah, medicine held onto for far
18:11
Speaker 1: too long. And so there was a religious aspect to
18:15
Speaker 1: this in the Middle Ages. And we get this from
18:17
Speaker 1: Lisa Sarahson, who was an Oregon State University historian who
18:22
Speaker 1: was at the time of this interview writing a book
18:25
Speaker 1: about the history of vermin and she said that in
18:28
Speaker 1: earlier days, having bedbugs was seen as a sign of dirtiness, fine,
18:33
Speaker 1: get it, but she says it was also seen sometimes
18:36
Speaker 1: as a sign of holiness because the mortification of the
18:39
Speaker 1: flesh was like an imitation of Christ, and people thought
18:43
Speaker 1: that was kind of a good thing. Okay, all right,
18:47
Speaker 1: I know it feels like a stretch, but this is
18:49
Speaker 1: also the heyday of flagelence. So yeah, with the like
18:53
Speaker 1: you're talking about where you like beat yourself over the
18:55
Speaker 1: back that like hair shirt that was just like irritate
18:59
Speaker 1: the wounds for the rest of the day. So we've seen,
19:02
Speaker 1: you know, physicians talk about this being an effective way
19:05
Speaker 1: of curing everything from the flu to bed wedding. In fact,
19:10
Speaker 1: there was one particular physician that actually described it like this.
19:15
Speaker 1: His name was Conrad gessner Um, and he said that
19:19
Speaker 1: bedbugs bites and stings will quote provoke urine as a
19:25
Speaker 1: diuretic and stop children's water that goes from them against
19:28
Speaker 1: their wills. So it's another miracle cure for for bed
19:31
Speaker 1: wedding because nobody wants to nobody wants to wake up
19:34
Speaker 1: in a in a in a wetted bed. But we
19:37
Speaker 1: do start to see the tide turn a little bit
19:41
Speaker 1: against bed bugs as a cure because the focus began
19:45
Speaker 1: to shift more to them as a sign of you know, uncleanliness, right, yeah,
19:49
Speaker 1: a sign of being lower class. So back to back
19:52
Speaker 1: to our story and uh Dr Sarason, who says that
19:57
Speaker 1: nobody wanted bed bugs in their bedroom and common attitudes
20:02
Speaker 1: towards parasites bedbugs in particular, began to change in the
20:06
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds as Europeans came into contact with people from
20:10
Speaker 1: other parts of the world. They said, you know what,
20:12
Speaker 1: we don't want to be around parasites, and so they
20:16
Speaker 1: began using parasites as a way to dunk on any
20:21
Speaker 1: people they didn't like. She points out that the English
20:24
Speaker 1: of the time thought the Scots were riddled with lice,
20:29
Speaker 1: and they started calling Scotland Liceland, which which is petty.
20:34
Speaker 1: It's petty enough that it gives me a chuckle, though,
20:36
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me? The English were just taking a
20:39
Speaker 1: big old on Scotland. I've never seen that before in history.
20:43
Speaker 1: I know, it's an unprecedented time and I feel like
20:47
Speaker 1: we now we officially owe the people of Scotland an
20:51
Speaker 1: episode all their own. We're with you, folks, and the
20:55
Speaker 1: first exterminators that said they could explicitly get rid of
20:59
Speaker 1: bedbug actually do come about in this time period in
21:02
Speaker 1: the seventeen hundreds, and their recipes for how to get
21:07
Speaker 1: rid of bedbugs were to be fair just as strange
21:11
Speaker 1: sounding as the recipes people used in bed bug medicine.
21:16
Speaker 1: One example from Atlas Obscura is this recipe that says, okay,
21:22
Speaker 1: if you get rid of here's the way you get
21:23
Speaker 1: rid of bedbugs. Use the smoke of cow dung and
21:26
Speaker 1: rotting cucumber and ox scale combined with vinegar droppings from
21:31
Speaker 1: a roasted cat with egg yolks and oil to form
21:34
Speaker 1: an ointment that you can rub on to furniture. This
21:37
Speaker 1: is like some double double toil and trouble kind of stuff,
21:41
Speaker 1: like I have news, you know, wing of bats, roasted cat?
21:45
Speaker 1: Whoever heard of that? I'm sorry, my my fever is
21:48
Speaker 1: causing me to rhyme spontaneously. I just feel like this
21:51
Speaker 1: is like, you know, the person who would be trying
21:54
Speaker 1: this would have just tried to like dous like you know,
21:57
Speaker 1: like wasn't there here that involved mixing at all with
21:59
Speaker 1: urine like and stuff? Surely, yeah, so the room is
22:03
Speaker 1: gonna have like human urine and out cow dung and
22:06
Speaker 1: then rotting cucumbers that It's like, it is it a
22:10
Speaker 1: worth what is it a worthwhile? Trade off? Is what
22:11
Speaker 1: you're asking? I think, like, give me the bug bites
22:15
Speaker 1: that a deal. Yeah, I don't want to smear myself
22:18
Speaker 1: with you know, animal feces and you know, drinking ground
22:22
Speaker 1: up you know, insects and stuff, and it's like, you know,
22:25
Speaker 1: come on, yeah, but here's my question. Nowadays we talk
22:29
Speaker 1: about things in terms of like staples, right, like what
22:32
Speaker 1: are the staple ingredients that you would normally find in
22:35
Speaker 1: the kitchen or household cleaners or whatever. And this makes
22:40
Speaker 1: me wonder what the households staples of Middle Ages Europe. Were.
22:44
Speaker 1: Were they like with someone like, oh yeah, roasty cat, Okay, yeah,
22:48
Speaker 1: ox dung? How doy do are we out of ox dung?
22:51
Speaker 1: I can't believe we just picked up some ox poop earlier.
22:54
Speaker 1: This is well, they likely would have had a family
22:57
Speaker 1: ox and they could have just gone and procure some
23:00
Speaker 1: of it's dung from from you know, the barn area.
23:02
Speaker 1: I assume the roasted cat is disturbing though. Yeah, I
23:06
Speaker 1: don't like that. I want it at all. I think
23:07
Speaker 1: I think it's three cat lovers. They don't like that.
23:09
Speaker 1: I want it at all. I just got a six
23:11
Speaker 1: pack of roasted cat. This is perfect. So anyhow, uh,
23:23
Speaker 1: now we go across the pond when Europeans started to
23:28
Speaker 1: traverse the Atlantic and mass they brought a bunch of
23:33
Speaker 1: other stuff with them. They've been a lot of unintentionally.
23:36
Speaker 1: They brought diseases, they brought bed bugs, they brought the rats,
23:42
Speaker 1: the roaches that would always infest ships. And this is
23:46
Speaker 1: not to say that these kinds of creatures did not
23:49
Speaker 1: exist in other parts of the world. It's just it's
23:53
Speaker 1: just known that their hygiene wasn't the same kind of
23:59
Speaker 1: hygiene you would see how a modern cruise ship, for instance.
24:02
Speaker 1: So the bedbug family does have a lot of species.
24:05
Speaker 1: Were primarily talking about those two that we mentioned at
24:08
Speaker 1: the top. But according to Robert Snetzinger, Professor emeritus of
24:12
Speaker 1: entomology at Penn State University. According to him, experts still
24:16
Speaker 1: aren't sure whether it was the infamous cimex lectilarious or
24:22
Speaker 1: one of its related cousins that came with Europeans across
24:27
Speaker 1: the Atlantic. But there's something interesting, there's a little mystery here.
24:32
Speaker 1: Loose Sorkin at the American Museum of Natural History says
24:37
Speaker 1: that there's no native American word for bedbugs, no indication
24:42
Speaker 1: of it. So this to him is compelling, if not
24:48
Speaker 1: full proof, argument that bedbugs are a colonial thing, or
24:53
Speaker 1: that's how they got to North America. I love solving
24:56
Speaker 1: a good history mystery. It's all I can do to
25:00
Speaker 1: stay alive. I gotta rhyme. I gotta keep the rhyme going. So,
25:03
Speaker 1: as we said, these little guys are some of the
25:05
Speaker 1: biggest opportunists of the inset community. And they absolutely thrived
25:09
Speaker 1: in the New World. UM, particularly after the railroad happened,
25:13
Speaker 1: because you know, they were just being transported all over
25:15
Speaker 1: the place and they could find new homes in the
25:18
Speaker 1: days before cars and planes. He had a salesman, uh
25:22
Speaker 1: and business travelers that would you know, go door to
25:24
Speaker 1: door selling their wares and all that, staying in these
25:27
Speaker 1: uh kind of fleabag motels. That's probably where the name
25:29
Speaker 1: came from. Uh. They were near train stations and they
25:32
Speaker 1: essentially became these like hubs for the distribution of bed
25:37
Speaker 1: bugs to people's actual homes. Yeah, it's exactly right. And
25:41
Speaker 1: the prevalence of bedbugs as this rose, as they became
25:44
Speaker 1: more common and uh unfortunately more familiar to people across
25:50
Speaker 1: the US, the popularity of bedbug cures also went into
25:55
Speaker 1: a steep decline. Lice and bedbugs were still kind of
25:59
Speaker 1: homemade folksy attempts securing things like tumors and goiters in
26:04
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds, but the medical experts of the
26:07
Speaker 1: day were less and less likely to treat this as
26:12
Speaker 1: solid medicine. In fact, most bedbug research at this point
26:16
Speaker 1: pivoted to figuring out the best ways to get rid
26:20
Speaker 1: of these jokers, you know, smoke them out with pete fires,
26:23
Speaker 1: sterilized furniture with boiling water this time, not you're in
26:27
Speaker 1: and scattering plant ash, uh, fumigating with cyanide, which feels
26:32
Speaker 1: a little extreme. Unfortunately, that type of treatment, which was
26:37
Speaker 1: prevalent in the nineteen twenties, resulted in numerous deaths of humans,
26:43
Speaker 1: not just bed bucks. Not again, according to Snetzinger, and
26:47
Speaker 1: he discusses all that in his book which you can
26:49
Speaker 1: get called The rat Catcher's Child, The History of the
26:52
Speaker 1: Pest Control Industry. Once the nineteen forties came along, pesticides
26:58
Speaker 1: like DDT where used, and they could kill typhus and
27:02
Speaker 1: malaria carriers like mosquitoes. During World War Two, which is
27:05
Speaker 1: very important. Um they also proved to be very useful
27:09
Speaker 1: in the fight against bed bugs, and their numbers really
27:12
Speaker 1: took a dive for about thirty years. Then we we
27:16
Speaker 1: kind of came into what we would call the Golden
27:19
Speaker 1: era for America's mattresses. Yes, there was a time where
27:23
Speaker 1: you wouldn't see two mattress firm stores right across the
27:26
Speaker 1: street from each other anywhere you go. Uh. I still
27:29
Speaker 1: don't understand why that's the thing. Um, but it is
27:32
Speaker 1: a total grifh. But the Environmental Protection Agency outlawed the
27:37
Speaker 1: use of some of these chemicals for health and environmental reasons,
27:41
Speaker 1: and other insecticides that were very useful in you know,
27:45
Speaker 1: squashing down this bug epidemic. We're also banned things like
27:49
Speaker 1: chloradine and diazignon. That happened in the nineteen eighties. So
27:54
Speaker 1: what happens. You got these little resilience bed bugs starting
27:58
Speaker 1: to kind of poke their heads up. A Um. It
28:01
Speaker 1: has absolutely made a comeback. Yeah. Yeah, And people are
28:07
Speaker 1: traveling internationally way more often in this period of history. Uh,
28:12
Speaker 1: you know, excluding the pandemic times. The idea that these
28:16
Speaker 1: parasites could heal people didn't completely go the way of
28:22
Speaker 1: the Dodo. However. In two thousand two, the authors of
28:27
Speaker 1: a book called Asked the Bugman, a pest management guide,
28:30
Speaker 1: found an unexpected repository of ancient Greek medical knowledge in
28:36
Speaker 1: the Midwest. They found that in some parts of Ohio,
28:40
Speaker 1: even in two thousand and two, eating seven bed bugs
28:43
Speaker 1: mixed with beans is was still considered a cure for
28:48
Speaker 1: chills and fever. That's the exact number of bugs recommended
28:51
Speaker 1: in the ancient day Materia medica. And it's it's interesting
28:57
Speaker 1: because again, these q wars might seem really strange at
29:02
Speaker 1: the very least, if not laughably gross, but that human
29:07
Speaker 1: terror of bedbugs, it was kind of what drove them
29:11
Speaker 1: to turn to bedbugs for relief. There had to be
29:14
Speaker 1: some way in which these creatures presents and their biting
29:18
Speaker 1: and they're tormenting made sense, so they had to find
29:22
Speaker 1: some use for them. It just turned out, and we
29:24
Speaker 1: can't say this pretty conclusively that a lot of these
29:28
Speaker 1: treatments are not on trying to be diplomatic, they're not
29:32
Speaker 1: on the level of modern medicine. This is not medical advice.
29:37
Speaker 1: But what we can say for sure is go to
29:41
Speaker 1: your doctor if you're concerned about some of these conditions.
29:45
Speaker 1: And you know what, if your doctor tells you that
29:47
Speaker 1: you need to do some weird stuff with bed bugs
29:50
Speaker 1: to get better, then tell us about it, because we
29:53
Speaker 1: would love to hear it. I want to hear you
29:55
Speaker 1: know somebody's GPS say like, well, uh, I'd say, you
30:00
Speaker 1: need about seven bed bugs to do the job. Here.
30:03
Speaker 1: Grind him up with beans, I recommend Garbonzo, maybe a
30:06
Speaker 1: little a little white northern being. And but really quickly
30:10
Speaker 1: back to Thomas Muffett Um, who was a sixteenth century
30:13
Speaker 1: medical enthusiast and writer. Um also apparently the source of
30:18
Speaker 1: the Little Miss Muffett nursery rhyme, or at least the
30:21
Speaker 1: inspiration for it. He had a quote that I think
30:24
Speaker 1: is really telling about the exact thing we were talking about,
30:27
Speaker 1: the attitude of how the idea of consuming something dangerous
30:31
Speaker 1: you know, has its like you know, appeal right. He said,
30:35
Speaker 1: by the conduct of nature, hath produced nothing that in
30:38
Speaker 1: some part is not good for man. And therefore that
30:41
Speaker 1: which the comedian god thought hurtful man's posterity hath found beneficial.
30:47
Speaker 1: So there you go, and with Muffett, Muffett, and with Muffett,
30:51
Speaker 1: I think we will call it a day. I believe
30:55
Speaker 1: it's safe to say all three of us were very
30:57
Speaker 1: surprised to learn that bed bugs were once considered a
31:01
Speaker 1: go to source of medicine. But there are stories we
31:04
Speaker 1: didn't get to that we might get to in the future. Uh.
31:07
Speaker 1: The U. S. Army weaponized bed bugs, trying to use
31:10
Speaker 1: them as bloodhounds in the field of war. It turns
31:13
Speaker 1: out that bed bugs have uh sensitivity to certain colors,
31:18
Speaker 1: and it is their time to shine because since the
31:22
Speaker 1: nine nineties, these little guys have been on a roll. Uh. Max,
31:26
Speaker 1: I believe maybe we do it this way. I believe
31:29
Speaker 1: you said you had some personal experience in the trenches
31:32
Speaker 1: of the bedbug war. Oh, oh, yes, I I see
31:36
Speaker 1: you remembered I mentioned that. Yeah. I have never actually
31:40
Speaker 1: personally had bedbugs, but you know, in my younger and
31:42
Speaker 1: maybe dirtier days, I had something similar called carpet beetles
31:46
Speaker 1: in my bed. Carpet beatles. Yeah sounds scary, dude, that
31:50
Speaker 1: sounds bigger they are. Don't get them. Keep your stuff clean,
31:57
Speaker 1: all right, Well, that is good advice. We'll have to
32:01
Speaker 1: go offline maybe and learn a little bit about the
32:04
Speaker 1: terrifying reign of carpet beatles in the meantime. Thank you
32:08
Speaker 1: so much, One and only super producer, Mr Max Williams.
32:11
Speaker 1: Thanks to Casey pegro nol. Thank you so much for
32:15
Speaker 1: hopping on. You know, I have good news. I hear
32:18
Speaker 1: that the uh, the the booster blues as I call them,
32:22
Speaker 1: are relatively short lived. So hopefully it'll be like a
32:26
Speaker 1: twenty four hour bug, not a bed bug. Just oh
32:29
Speaker 1: thank god. Well it started in the middle of the nights.
32:31
Speaker 1: Hopefully I'm halfway there. Um, but I actually have a
32:34
Speaker 1: pretty light day today, so I'm going to go cuttle
32:37
Speaker 1: up and listen to some podcasts. Yeah, there's nothing like
32:40
Speaker 1: listening to a good podcast. We're a little biased, but
32:43
Speaker 1: this is the part where we thank you, fellow ridiculous historians.
32:47
Speaker 1: We can't wait to hear your bedbug stories. We hope
32:51
Speaker 1: nobody has bedbugs right now. And h please consult a
32:56
Speaker 1: actual doctor for medical conditions. Please consult and actually germinator
33:00
Speaker 1: for tips on getting rid of bedbugs. Don't boil poop
33:04
Speaker 1: and you're in just yet. Thanks of please God, no,
33:08
Speaker 1: please God no. Uh. Thanks of course to our number
33:13
Speaker 1: one favorite bed bug of the show, Jonathan Strickland ak
33:17
Speaker 1: the Quister. We have got to get him back on
33:19
Speaker 1: the air. Indeed, indeed, um, he's our like human bedbug. No,
33:25
Speaker 1: that's not nice. He's better than that. He's more of
33:28
Speaker 1: a carpet beatle type figure. But thanks to him. Nonetheless,
33:33
Speaker 1: Thanks Christo Hasciotis needs, Jeff Code here in spirit, Alex Williams,
33:36
Speaker 1: who composed our theme. H Gabelusier, the Homie, um who else?
33:41
Speaker 1: So many people to think. I feel like I'm doing
33:43
Speaker 1: an acceptance speech in awards, but I'd like to thank Kanye.
33:46
Speaker 1: I'd like to thank myself. Um, I'd like to thank
33:50
Speaker 1: uh yeah. Also shout out to Gabe. Big announcement, we'll
33:54
Speaker 1: have this doing Gabe Joints on the show coming up.
33:57
Speaker 1: He is now the host of This Day in History Class,
34:02
Speaker 1: so do check it out. We're super excited, We're super
34:05
Speaker 1: proud of him. You've heard him on the show before,
34:08
Speaker 1: so I can't wait to hear what you think about
34:11
Speaker 1: his about his newest endeavor. Check it out. We'll see
34:15
Speaker 1: you next time. Folks. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
34:24
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
34:27
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.