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The Most Bizarre Things Humans Did to Avoid Death · The Mind of a Man

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Drinking gold. Alright, so imagine you're a medieval doctor. You've
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: got zero understanding of biology, zero understanding of chemistry, and
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: a patient who is very much dying in front of you.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: What do you do? You give them liquid gold. Obviously.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: This wasn't some fringe weirdo doing this in a basement.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: This was mainstream medicine. Paracelsus, one of the most influential
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  Speaker 1: physicians of the 16th century, genuinely believed that gold, being
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: the most perfect of all metals... could cure the most
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: imperfect of all conditions, which was, you know, being sick.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: His logic was basically, gold doesn't rust, gold doesn't decay,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: gold is eternal. Therefore, if you consume gold, you become eternal.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Which is not how any of this works, but sure,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: go off king. So they dissolved gold in acid to
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: create something called aurum potabile, drinkable gold, and they fed
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: it to patients. Rich patients, mostly. Because gold is expensive,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: which created this absolutely wild situation where being wealthy didn't
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: just mean you got better health care. It meant you
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: got worse health care, but in a more expensive way.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: The poor people who couldn't afford the gold were accidentally
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: doing better by just not drinking corrosive acid with dissolved
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: metal in it. The treatment obviously didn't work. What it
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: did do was cause kidney failure, nerve damage, and, in
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: sufficient doses, death. So in their attempt to avoid death,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: they were administering death. Just with extra steps, and a
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: much larger invoice. And the funniest part? We still use
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: gold in medicine today. Gold compounds are used to treat
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: rheumatoid arthritis. So Paracelsus was in the right zip code,
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: completely wrong neighborhood, wandering around confidently like he knew exactly
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: where he was going. Trepanation. Here's one that will make
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: you instinctively put your hand on your head. Trepanation is
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  Speaker 1: the practice of drilling a hole in someone's skull while
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: they are alive. Not to access the brain for surgery,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: just to make a hole. For vibes, for health, for
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: the energy to flow better. This is not ancient history
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: that we discovered and went, ah, yes, those primitive cave people.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: The oldest trepan skull we've found is from around 7,000
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: years ago, which, yes, is ancient, but here's the thing.
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  Speaker 1: We've found thousands of these skulls across every continent, spanning
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: from the Stone Age all the way to the 19th century.
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  Speaker 1: The last documented non-surgical trepanation in the Western world happened
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  Speaker 1: in the 1960s. A man drilled a hole in his
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: own skull with a dentist's drill in his bathroom. He
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  Speaker 1: then wrote a book about how great he felt afterward.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: He went on television to promote it. The medieval reasoning
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: was that evil spirits were trapped inside the skull and
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: causing illness. Headaches, spirits, epilepsy, definitely spirits. depression, spirits having
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: a party in your cranium, you need to give them
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: an exit. So you grab a tool that looks disturbingly
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: like a corkscrew, and you get to work. And here's
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: the part that should genuinely haunt you. Many of these
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: patients survived. We can tell because the bone shows signs
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: of healing around the holes, meaning these people woke up,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: felt the draft coming through their skull, and just continued living.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: Some skulls show multiple holes drilled at different times in
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: the same person's life, which means they went through this, recovered,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: and then at some point thought, you know what, I
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: could use another one of those. The worst part is
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: we don't fully understand why it sometimes worked. Possibly for
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: relieving pressure from skull fractures. Possibly releasing built-up fluid. Possibly
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  Speaker 1: the infection that should have killed them was somehow contained.
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  Speaker 1: Or possibly the human body is so aggressively determined to
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  Speaker 1: survive that it'll pull through even when you are actively
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: drilling holes in your own head. Mercury as medicine. Mercury
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  Speaker 1: is the liquid metal. It's shiny. It's beautiful. It moves
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: like water. It's mesmerizing to look at. It is also catastrophically,
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: aggressively poisonous in almost every form it takes. The ancient
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Chinese knew this. They still used it as medicine because
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: it looked too cool not to. Qin Shi Huang, the
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  Speaker 1: first emperor of China, the man who built the Great
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  Speaker 1: Wall and the Terracotta Army, was obsessed with immortality. He
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  Speaker 1: sent expeditions to find the mythical islands where immortal beings lived.
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  Speaker 1: He consulted alchemists constantly, and his alchemists blessed their terrible.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: Little Hearts told him that mercury, which they called liquid silver,
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  Speaker 1: was the key to eternal life. So he drank it. Regularly.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: In increasing doses. He died at 49, which for a
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  Speaker 1: man with his resources and access to food and health
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  Speaker 1: care in 210 BCE was actually quite young. The symptoms
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: described in historical records, mood swings, erratic behavior, paranoia, increasingly
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: bizarre decisions in the final years of his life, are
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  Speaker 1: textbook mercury poisoning. The man killed himself trying not to die.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: And then his tomb, which is one of the greatest
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  Speaker 1: archaeological sites ever discovered and has mostly not been excavated
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: because the Chinese government is being careful, allegedly contains rivers
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  Speaker 1: of mercury. Flowing rivers of liquid mercury used to represent
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: the rivers of China. Soil samples around the tomb show
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  Speaker 1: mercury concentrations 100 times higher than normal. His burial chamber
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: might be the most poisonous room in human history. He
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: literally built his own tomb out of the thing that
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  Speaker 1: killed him. But the mercury madness didn't stop with Chinese emperors.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: In Europe, mercury was the primary treatment for syphilis for
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: about 400 years. The saying was, Patients were given mercury pills,
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: mercury ointments, mercury vapor to breathe in. Doctors would seal
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: them in wooden boxes with mercury burning underneath and let
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: them sweat. They lost their teeth. Their gums turned black.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Their hair fell out. Many died. But the survivors? Sometimes
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: the syphilis was gone. Because mercury is so toxic that
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: it killed the bacteria. It's the medical equivalent of burning
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: your house down to get rid of a mouse. Technically effective,
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: not ideal. Bloodletting. This one genuinely makes medical historians want
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: to lie down in a dark room. For roughly 2,500 years,
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: from ancient Greece through to the mid-19th century... The dominant
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  Speaker 1: theory of medicine was that your body contained four humors. Blood, phlegm,
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  Speaker 1: yellow bile, and black bile. Health was these four things
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  Speaker 1: being in balance. Illness was them being out of balance.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: And the most common treatment for almost any illness was
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: to remove some of the blood, because blood was considered
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  Speaker 1: the most likely culprit when things went wrong. Fever. Bleed
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  Speaker 1: the patient. Infection. Bleed them. Pneumonia. Bleed them. Headache. Bleed them.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Too happy. Probably bleed them. Can't be too careful. The
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: tools were either a lancet, basically a scalpel, that would
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  Speaker 1: cut open a vein, or leeches, which were the preferred
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: method for delicate areas. The medical leech industry was so
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  Speaker 1: enormous in 19th century Europe that there were leech shortages.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: France alone imported 40 million leeches per year. There were
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: leech farms. There were leech brokers. There were speculators trading
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  Speaker 1: in leeches like they were oil futures. George Washington, father
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  Speaker 1: of the United States, hero of the revolution, died in
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  Speaker 1: 1799 after his doctors removed approximately 40% of his total
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: blood volume over the course of a single day. He
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: had a throat infection. He was probably going to survive
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: the throat infection. He did not survive the treatment. The
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  Speaker 1: deeply uncomfortable truth is that bloodletting did occasionally work. Not
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  Speaker 1: because of the humors, but because some conditions... Hemochromatosis, where
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: the body retains too much iron, certain cases of high
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: blood pressure, are genuinely treated by removing blood. Modern medicine
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  Speaker 1: still uses it in a controlled way. But the doctors
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  Speaker 1: doing it in 1700 had no idea why it worked
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: when it worked. They were right by accident. Like throwing
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: darts in the dark and occasionally hitting a bullseye, except
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: the dartboard was a human being. Urine therapy. We need
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: to talk about drinking pee. Not as a one-time survival thing,
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  Speaker 1: not as a desperate measure, as a deliberate, enthusiastic, ongoing
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  Speaker 1: medical practice that dates back thousands of years and, I
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  Speaker 1: cannot stress this enough, still has active practitioners today who
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: will argue with you about it on the internet. The
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: ancient Egyptians used urine to treat eye infections. The Romans
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: used it to whiten teeth. Urine from Portugal was apparently
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: considered premium grade and was imported specifically for dental use.
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  Speaker 1: Ancient Indian medical texts recommended drinking your own urine for
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: a variety of conditions. The Chinese used it. The Aztecs
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  Speaker 1: used it. Multiple independent civilizations around the world looked at
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  Speaker 1: the liquid their body was actively trying to expel as
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  Speaker 1: waste and thought medicine. The 17th century English physician John
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Floyer wrote extensively about urine therapy. You were supposed to
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  Speaker 1: drink your first morning urination because it was believed to
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  Speaker 1: contain the most potent healing compounds. People treated everything with it. Jaundice,
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  Speaker 1: skin conditions, ear infections, arthritis. There are records of it
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  Speaker 1: being used against plague. Here's the wild thing. Urine is
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  Speaker 1: sterile when it leaves the body. It contains urea, which
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: has genuine antibacterial properties. Early wound care absolutely benefited from
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: pouring urine on injuries in environments where clean water wasn't available.
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  Speaker 1: So it wasn't completely insane. Just mostly insane. The drinking part, though.
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  Speaker 1: Your kidneys filtered those compounds out because your body was
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  Speaker 1: done with them. Drinking them puts them back in. Your
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: kidneys then have to filter them again. With each cycle,
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  Speaker 1: the concentration of waste products increases slightly. You are not
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  Speaker 1: healing yourself. You are making your kidneys do extra homework
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: for no reason. But tell that to the people in
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: online forums today who insist morning urine smoothies have changed
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: their lives. Some conversations you cannot win. Tobacco. When Europeans
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: first encountered tobacco in the Americas in the 15th and
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: 16th century, they didn't think recreational drug. They thought cure.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Indigenous Americans had been using tobacco in ritual and medicinal
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  Speaker 1: contexts for centuries. And when European explorers saw it being
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: used to treat wounds, clear sinuses, and manage pain, they
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  Speaker 1: did what Europeans of that era did with everything they encountered.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: They took it home and immediately over-claimed its benefits by
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: a factor of about a thousand. By the 1600s, tobacco
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: was being prescribed for literally everything. Headaches, toothache, fatigue, hunger, sores,
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  Speaker 1: bad breath, plague prevention. A French ambassador named Jean Nicot
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: the man whose name became nicotine, sent tobacco to the
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  Speaker 1: French queen Catherine de' Medici as a cure for her
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: son's migraines. It apparently helped. This launched a continent-wide craze.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: Doctors instructed patients to smoke tobacco to clear the lungs
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: of moist humors. They prescribed tobacco smoke enemas, yes, exactly
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: what it sounds like, for intestinal disorders, typhoid fever, and
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: drowning victims. There were special kits sold for this purpose.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: The phrase blowing smoke up someone's backside is a real
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: historical medical procedure before it became a metaphor. The Royal
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: Humane Society in England officially recommended tobacco smoke enemas as
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: a drowning resuscitation technique and installed tobacco enema stations along
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: the Thames River. This is real. This happened. And the
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: really painful part is that nicotine does have genuine pharmacological effects.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: It has shown some promise in research for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: It's a powerful stimulant. The indigenous medicinal uses weren't completely wrong.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: But inhaling combusted plant material directly into your lungs dozens
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: of times a day forever is, we now know, a
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: slightly suboptimal health strategy. Marie Curie discovered radium in 1898.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Within about 15 years, someone had put it in toothpaste.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: The early 20th century was the most dangerously optimistic period
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: in medical history. Radioactivity was new. It was exciting. Scientists
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: were calling it a fundamental life force. And the public
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: heard energy that makes things glow and thought, I want
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: some of that. Radium water became a thing, not water
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: that had trace contamination. Deliberately radioactive water that was bottled
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: and sold with a premium price tag as a health tonic.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Spas opened in cities across Europe and America offering radium baths.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: You would soak in radioactive water because of a vague
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: promise that it would invigorate your cells. There was radium toothpaste.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: For a sparkling, energetic smile. Radium chocolate. Radium cosmetics. Women
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: applied radioactive face cream because it made their skin glow.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: In the most literal possible way. It made their skin
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: glow because of Cherenkov radiation. That is not a feature.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: The most famous case is Eben Byers, a wealthy American
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: socialite and amateur golf champion who, in 1927, was recommended
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: a product called Radither, a certified radioactive water sold in
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: little bottles. He became obsessed with it, drinking two or
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: three bottles a day, convinced it was the secret to
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: his athletic performance and energy. He drank about 1,400 bottles total.
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  Speaker 1: By 1931, he had lost most of his skull. The
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: radiation had dissolved the bones in his head. His jaw
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: was gone. His skull was collapsing inward. He died in
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: 1932 at 51 years old. The Wall Street Journal ran
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: his obituary under the headline, The Radium, Water Worked Fine
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: Until His Jaw Fell Off. One of the greatest headlines
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: in the history of journalism. Zero percent a good way
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: to avoid death. Malaria. Now, here is one that started
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: as genuine medical practice and somehow sounds more insane the
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: more you learn about it. In the early 20th century, neurosyphilis,
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: syphilis that has progressed into the brain, was a death sentence. Slow, horrifying,
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: and inevitable. There was no treatment. Julius Wagner Jarek, an
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: Austrian physician, had an idea so crazy that it either
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: means he was a genius or had simply stopped caring
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: about what was reasonable. He noticed that some patients with
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: psychiatric conditions seemed to improve temporarily after they developed a fever.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: A high fever. The kind your body produces when fighting
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: a serious infection. He wondered, what if you could weaponize
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: that fever? So he infected neurosyphilis patients with malaria. On purpose. Deliberately.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: He took blood from a malaria patient and injected it
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: into people with syphilis-damaged brains. And it worked. The malarial fever,
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: which can spike to 104... 105 degrees Fahrenheit, was high
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: enough to kill the syphilis bacteria that had colonized the brain.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Once the syphilis was gone, he treated the malaria with quinine,
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: which was a reliable treatment by that point. Wagner-Joregg won
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 for this, the
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: only Nobel Prize ever awarded for a treatment that involved
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: deliberately giving patients a second, different deadly disease to kill
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: the first one. The patients who received this treatment faced
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: genuine risk of death from the malaria. Some of them
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: died from it. But they were already dying from the syphilis,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: so for many of them it was a calculated gamble
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: that occasionally paid off in the most spectacular way. This
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: is technically the history of medicine working exactly as intended.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: It's still absolutely unhinged. Freezing people. Let's go to the
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: other extreme. Not fever. Ice. In the 1960s, a physicist
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: named Robert Ettinger published a book called The Prospect of Immortality,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: in which he argued with genuine scientific seriousness that the
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: correct response to dying was to immediately freeze your body
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: and wait for future civilizations to fix whatever killed you
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: and wake you up. This became cryonics, and it is
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: still happening right now, today, in the 21st century. There
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: are currently over 400 bodies and a small number of heads,
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: Just heads, separated from the bodies, stored separately, sitting in
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: tanks of liquid nitrogen at facilities in the United States
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: and Russia. The heads are there because some people only
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: paid for head preservation, operating on the logic that future
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: technology will not only revive them, but will presumably also
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: build them a new body, which is either optimistic or
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: terrifying depending on your perspective. The preservation process involves replacing
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: your blood with a cryoprotectant, essentially antifreeze, which reduces ice
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: crystal formation in your cells. Because ice crystals forming inside
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: cells is what destroys them during freezing. The technology has
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: gotten better. Early patients were frozen badly, with significant ice
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: crystal damage. Whether the information that constitutes a person's identity
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: and memory could survive this process is a question that
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: no one can currently answer, because no one has been
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: successfully revived. The pitch is essentially, you're going to die
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: any you might as well be frozen and take a
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: very long shot. The worst case scenario is that it
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: doesn't work and you're still dead, which is where you
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: were headed regardless. The people who sign up for this
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: are not all eccentric billionaires. There are teachers, engineers, ordinary
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: people who have read the science, decided the gamble is rational,
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: and are now on a waiting list to be defrosted
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: by some future civilization that will apparently have both the
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: technology to revive frozen humans and the interest in doing so,
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: which is two very large assumptions to be making. transfusing
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: wrong blood. For most of human history, if you lost
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: too much blood, you died. Simple. Brutal. Nothing to be done. Then,
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: in the 17th century, some very brave and very wrong
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: doctors decided to fix this. Richard Lower performed the first
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: animal blood transfusion in 1665, moving blood from one dog
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: to another, and it worked. This was so exciting that
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: it immediately made people want to try it on humans,
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: which is the standard arc of medical history. Success in
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: one context, immediately over-apply. Jean-Baptiste Denis in France performed the
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: first human blood transfusion in 1667. He transfused sheep's blood
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: into a 15-year-old boy who had been bled heavily by
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: doctors— you'll recognize this as a previous entry in this
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: video— as a treatment for fever. The boy survived. Denny
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: declared victory. He then transfused sheep's blood into a man
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: named Antoine Mauroy, who had severe mental illness, on the
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: theory that the gentle, calm nature of a sheep would
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: transfer through its blood and soothe the patient's agitated mind.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Mauroy survived the first transfusion. He survived the second. He
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: died after the third. His wife sued Dennis for murder.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: Dennis was acquitted, but the French government banned blood transfusions.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: England banned them. The Pope banned them. Transfusion medicine went
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: dormant for about 150 years because it kept killing people
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: in ways that doctors couldn't explain. The explanation, which nobody
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: understood until the 20th century, is blood types. Different people
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: have different blood types, and transfusing the wrong type, or
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: animal blood, into humans causes your immune system to attack
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: the foreign blood cells with such extreme aggression that your
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: kidneys fail and you die. Karl Landsteiner discovered blood types
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: in 1901 and won the Nobel Prize. Transfusion medicine immediately
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: became safe and miraculous. It just took 234 years and
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: a lot of dead patients to get there. Cocaine. There's
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: a period in the late 1800s and early 1900s that
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: medical historians sometimes refer to with only slight exaggeration as
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: the cocaine era. Cocaine was isolated from coca leaves in 1860.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: It was immediately apparent that it was a powerful stimulant
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: with remarkable properties. It numbed pain on contact. It produced
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: energy and confidence. It suppressed appetite. In a world without
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: effective anesthetics, without antibiotics, And without any stimulants beyond caffeine,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: this seemed like an absolute miracle drug. Sigmund Freud wrote
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: a paper in 1884 called Uber Coca, in which he
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: praised cocaine enthusiastically as a cure for depression, fatigue, and
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: morphine addiction. He recommended it to friends and family. He
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: took it himself regularly. He described the feeling it produced
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: as exhilaration and lasting euphoria. which in no way differs
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: from the normal euphoria of the healthy person. Freud was
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: high while writing about how cocaine makes you feel normal.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: Cocaine was added to wine. Vin Mariani, a mixture of
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: wine and coca leaves, was endorsed by Thomas Edison, President
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: William McKinley, and Pope Leo XIII, who apparently enjoyed a
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: glass in the evenings. The pope gave the creator of
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: Vin Mariani a gold medal. the Vatican endorsed cocaine wine.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: The original Coca-Cola contained trace amounts of cocaine alongside the
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: cola nut caffeine, hence the name. When cocaine was removed
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: from the recipe in 1903, the company kept using decocanized
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: coca leaf extract, which still gives the drink its distinct flavor,
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: which means every Coca-Cola you have ever drunk contains a
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: processed extract of the plant that cocaine comes from. Cocaine
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: eyedrops were used in surgery, Cocaine throat sprays. Cocaine toothache
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: drops for children. There are advertisements for children's cocaine products
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: that look completely identical to modern Dayquil packaging, except the
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: active ingredient is cocaine. Carl Collar, an ophthalmologist, discovered in
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: 1884 that cocaine was an effective local anesthetic in the eye,
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: which was a genuine breakthrough and forms the basis of
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: modern local anesthesia. That part worked. The rest of it
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: was just a lot of cocaine being administered to a
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: lot of people by enthusiastic doctors who had no idea
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: what addiction looked like because they'd never seen it at
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: that scale before. Staring at the sun. Here is a
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: practice so obviously terrible that you would assume no one
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: in history has done it voluntarily and seriously. You would
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: be wrong. Solar gazing, deliberately staring at the sun, typically
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: at sunrise, or sunset, has a history dating back to
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: ancient civilizations. Various mystical traditions held that sunlight absorbed through
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: the eyes could provide sustenance, energy, or spiritual advancement. There
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: are historical claims in certain texts that enlightened practitioners could
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: live on sunlight alone and required no food. In the
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: early 2000s, a man named Hira Ratan Manek became an
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: international sensation by claiming to have not eaten solid food
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: for years and to sustain himself through solar gazing and
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: water alone. He was observed by researchers, reportedly including NASA-commissioned doctors,
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: who claimed he showed no signs of starvation. He appeared
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: on television. He toured internationally. He had tens of thousands
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: of followers. He was also observed buying food and eating
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: it on multiple occasions, which somewhat undermined the central premise.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: But his followers didn't care. Solar gazing continued. The practice
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: involves progressively increasing the duration for which you stare directly
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: at the sun. starting from seconds and working up to
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: longer periods. The advice given is to do it at
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: sunrise and sunset when UV radiation is lower. UV radiation
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: being lower does not mean UV radiation is zero. Staring
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: at the sun at any time causes solar retinopathy. The
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: light literally burns the retina. There is no safe way
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: to stare directly at the sun for extended periods. The
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: resulting damage is permanent. you cannot regenerate burned retinal cells.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: The people who followed this practice and progressed to the
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: extended gazing periods have, in multiple documented cases, gone blind.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: The pitch was, stare at the sun to achieve enlightenment
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: and possibly not need food anymore. The result was, went
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: blind and still needed food. Arsenic. If you lived in
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: 19th century Austria and you looked pale and sickly, Your
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: doctor might recommend arsenic. Not by accident. On purpose. As
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: a treatment. In the Styria region of Austria, farmers and
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: peasants were well known for habitually eating arsenic. They called
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: it arsenic eating. They consumed doses that would kill an
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: unhabituated person. And they seemed fine. Reportedly robust, with good complexions, strong,
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: and energetic. The arsenic they claimed improved their stamina, their health,
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: their appearance. This practice was observed by a Dr. Fontasciutti,
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: who wrote about it extensively and explained what was actually happening.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Chronic exposure to small doses of arsenic causes the body
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: to develop a tolerance mechanism. Arsenic stimulates red blood cell production,
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: which genuinely does improve coloring and oxygen capacity. It also
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: causes blood vessels near the surface of the skin to dilate,
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: giving a rosy, healthy appearance. So it worked. in a
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: narrow and extremely dangerous way for a while. The arsenic
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: was building up in their bodies the whole time. Long-term
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: arsenic exposure causes cancer, particularly of the skin, lungs, and bladder.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: It causes nerve damage. It causes cardiovascular disease. Victorian women
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: used arsenic-based face powders for the same reason. Arsenic wafers
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: were sold through the post with a tagline promising a clear,
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: radiant complexion. Arsenic-treated wallpaper was so common in Victorian homes,
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: the vivid emerald green of Scheel's green paint. And wallpaper
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: was arsenic-based that historian James Horton has argued Napoleon Bonaparte
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: may have been slowly poisoned by his own wallpaper during
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: his exile on St. Helena. You were trying to be beautiful.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: You were decorating your house. Your wallpaper was poisoning the air.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: This is not a metaphor. The mold that grew on
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: arsenic-laden wallpaper in damp conditions released arsenic gas. Homes were
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: quietly killing their occupants, and no one connected the dots
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: for decades. We talked about radium water. Let's go further.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: In the 1950s, a trend emerged in Montana around the
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: Mary Widow Health Mine, an old uranium mine. where people
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: would pay to sit underground in the radioactive tunnels for
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: hours at a time, believing that low-level radiation exposure would
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: cure their arthritis, heal their injuries, and rejuvenate their bodies.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: This was not a fringe operation. At its peak, there
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: were multiple such facilities in Montana. Thousands of people traveled there.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: Doctors sometimes recommended it. Patients testified before Congress that it
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: had cured their conditions. Celebrities visited. There were waiting lists.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: The scientific basis was a theory called radiation hormesis, the
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: idea that small doses of something harmful can actually be beneficial,
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: stimulating the body's repair mechanisms. This theory is not insane.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: It's actually debated in radiation biology to this day, and
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: some research supports a version of it for very specific
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: exposure contexts. But sitting in a uranium mine breathing radon
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: gas is not a controlled therapeutic dose. Radon is the
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. You cannot
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: see it, smell it, or taste it. You are breathing
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: it in while sitting in a deck chair reading a magazine,
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: convinced your joints feel better while your lungs are absorbing
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: radioactive particles. The facilities are still operating. People are still going.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: Reviews on Google show visitors praising the health benefits. The
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: mine offers package deals. It has a gift shop.