Bad Blood

because the throw up germ lives between your fingers. When you're an adult, you're given the less fun version, you don't want to spread disease to yourself and others. Abrasive though it can be, this hand washing propaganda is actually the result of decades of hard won medical none that represents a major public health breakthrough on par with vaccinations and fluoride. And as it so happens, we owe that breakthrough to one man who no one wanted to listen to.

Ignaz Semmelweis was born in eighteen eighteen to a Jewish family in Hungary. By eighteen thirty seven, he was pursuing a career in the budding world of medicine. He traveled to Vienna, Austria, to work at the hospital Vienna General, was one of the premier medical facilities in all of Europe, but being that Ignaz was both Jewish and Hungarian, he met with a lot of prejudice that limited the areas of medicine that he was allowed to work in. However,

that prejudice set Ignas on a fateful course. He landed in obstetrics, the area of medicine dealing with pregnancy and childbirth. This wasn't seen as a particularly desirable post back then. Childbirth had been the domain of female midwives for centuries, but Ignaz was determined to make the best of it. Upon his arrival at the maternity division, he soon learned of a disturbing trend. There were two wards under his purview, one where midwives delivered babies and one where doctors performed

the deliveries. In the midwives ward, the mortality rate of the mothers was relatively low. In the doctor's ward, though, the mortality rate was shockingly high, potentially as much as one in ten women. The women died of what was called child bed fever, a horrible affliction that saw the women develop fevers, terrible sores, and other symptoms that are just too gruesome to mention here. Needless to say, they

died in a lot of pain. Ignaz was determined to find the cause of this affliction, and he went about it in a fairly scientific way for his time. He observed the conditions in both wards and tried to come up with as many differences as possible, but many of these differences were superficial. In the midwives ward, for example, women gave birth on their side, while in the doctor's ward they gave birth on their backs. And when he asked the doctors to start changing the position of the women,

he didn't notice any change in their mortality rates. He noticed that a priest in the doctor's ward would ring a bell that sometimes startled the word women. Ignaz had the priest get rid of the bell, but he still didn't notice any change in the deaths. Finally, a somewhat morbid breakthrough came when Ignaz's friend and fellow doctor, Jakub Kolechka nicked himself while performing an autopsy. Within days, he developed the same symptoms as the women, and he eventually died.

It was an almost sacrificial death, because it led Ignaz to realize that the answer had been in front of him all along. The most important difference in the doctor's ward was that it had doctors, doctors who performed autopsies and then carried particles from those dead corpses and passed them on to their pregnant patients. Ignaz immediately ordered the doctors in his division to start washing their hands and instruments after autopsies. His choice of cleaning solution was less scientific.

He picked chlorine because that was what the janitors used, and that just so happened to be an excellent sterilizer, and wouldn't you know it, the mortality rate in the doctor's ward plummeted. Ignaz didn't have the word words yet, but we know today that his corpse particles were bacteria and childbed fever was sepsis a form of infection that still affects tens of millions of people each year. Unfortunately,

Ignaza's guidelines didn't stick. His doctors didn't like the idea that they were killing their patients, so they ignored his advice. Ignaz eventually left the hospital and ultimately ended up in an insane asylum, where some believe he died of the very infection he had worked to prevent. But in the decade following his death, scientists would start to observe and

identify bacteria as the cause of infection. Ignaz Semmelweis's discoveries taught us a very important lesson, wash your hands, but his colleagues's reactions taught us another one, don't be afraid to admit when you're wrong. On the twenty first of May of nineteen fifty two, a large crowd gathered at speak Airport in Liverpool, England. They watched as a Dakota aircraft climbed into the sky. In the back of the

plane sat a man. The main attraction for this event a man with a pair of wings strapped to his back. Leo Valentine was a birdman, not a superhero, perhaps, but one whose sense of showmanship would not be out of place in a comic book. Between the years nineteen thirty and nineteen sixty, there were seventy five daredevils who earned the title Birdman for their attempts to fly. Seventy two of the seventy five died while attempting their stunts, so it was not a pastime for the faint of heart.

Born in nineteen nineteen, Leo Valentin had been obsessed with flights ever since he was a child. But young Leo couldn't just get on a plane and see what it was like because commercial aircraft wasn't available yet to the public. The Wright Brothers first flew in nineteen o three, and aviation had a long way to go before the average

person could board a plane. Leo, however, was undaunted. Driven by his passion for flight, he would join a regiment of French paratroopers at the outbreak of World War II. He would survive the war with his passion for flight intact. His greatest injury was a shattered arm during the invasion of occupied France. After he was discharged from military service, Leo resumed his intense study of aerodynamics. He would, not, however,

follow in the footsteps of Orville and Wilbur write. His goal was not to design an aircraft, but to become one himself, flying as free as a bird. He experimented with delayed release parachutes, attempting his first free fall in nineteen forty eight. This test was in his mind a success, as he was able to freefall for about eighteen hundred feet before opening his chute and making a safe landing. He designed a pair of canvas wings in nineteen fifty,

getting a step closer to achieving bird like flight. However, trial and error can be a risky thing when you're defying gravity. His first attempts to flight with these wings was a near disaster. He jumped from a plane over a French village, only to realize that the canvas wings did not fully support his weight. Luckily, he had his parachute to fall back on should his wings fail. And fail they did over and over again. He would abandon his early canvas designs for wings made of balsa wood

supported with an alloy frame. He flew this design successfully a number of times, drawing crowds of greater and greater size, and his reputation grew as a performer. He was called Valentine, the most daring man in the world, and whether he flew successfully or not, viewers would be in for a great show. So by the time he boarded that Dakota on May twenty first, Valentine had his routine down to

a science. The plane would fly nine thousand feet over the crowd, and he would jump off, gliding majestically through the air, deploying his parachute at the last minute to land safely. A crowd of over one hundred thousand people watched eagerly as the aircraft climbed higher and higher. Leo stealed himself and prepared to jump backwards out of the plane, much like a scuba diver entering the water. But things went wrong almost immediately. One of his wings caught the

airplane's door and splintered. When Leo exited the plane, he was in a tailspin, unable to stabilize himself or extend his wings to slow his fall. His parachute deployed and immediately caught in the shattered frame of his wingsuit. The most daring man in the world crashed into a nearby field, dying on impact, a gruesome end to Valentin's career and his life. While this may seem like no more than a tragic, inevitable downfall, Leo Valentin's death is not the

end of his story. Today, skydiving is a safe and popular activity for thrill seekers, and the position you assume to control a free fall is known as the Valentin position. A fitting legacy, you might say, for a man who skydived into Brittany to fight the Nazis. Oh and by the way, among the crowd at his final air show were some of the most famous people from living Paul McCartney and George Harrison were there, years before they would

become world famous as members of the Beatles. Also nearby was a three year old boy who would remember the day for the rest of his life. In fact, his shock would eventually transform into a series of influential horror stories. His name was Clive Barker, the future author of the Books of Blood and director of Hell Raiser, a man who Stephen King dubbed the future of horror back in the nineteen eighties. It seems that in the attempt to live his dream, Leo Valentin became part of some of

the world's most infamous nightmares. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series and tele vision show and you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.