Fight Club

trying to make it through their shifts. But before it was dominated by rampant commercialism, Black Friday defined several terrible events in human history, one of which, however, forged the suffragettes of the United Kingdom into hardened warriors, not only armed with protests, signs and slogan, but with a new set of skills to deliver some much needed justice. On November eighteenth of nineteen ten, women marched through the streets

of London. Their destination was the houses of Parliament. Their mission. Voting rights for women legislation had been introduced which would grant the right to vote to one million British women, but the Prime Minister wouldn't hear it. The Women's Social and Political Union or the w SPU, refused to accept his decision, and a protest ensued. As they stormed parliaments front door, the police stepped in and began violently arresting protesters.

Many were assaulted by officers, and two were killed in the pursuit of equality. As a result of the police's actions, the WSPU realized that they would need to protect themselves going forward. Worried about their physical safety, many began wrapping cardboard around their ribs prior to attending protests. Others, though, wanted to make sure they could handle themselves in a fight. If they were going to be thrown to the ground and attacked, they would go down swinging. And that was

where Edith Garud came in. She was barely five feet tall, but she knew just how to address the injustice that her fellow suffragettes were facing. She and her husband, William, were jiu jitsu instructors. They were both supposed to attend a WSPU meeting that followed the Black Friday incident, but William had been too sick to attend, so Edith went alone. She demonstrated how even though a woman might be smaller or lighter, than her mail attacker, she could leverage his

own momentum against him and incapacitate him. She targeted specific points on the body, contorting an attacker into numerous uncomfortable positions and bending limbs in ways that were never meant to bend until he was left prone on the floor. She also knew how to flip a man over her shoulder and land him flat on his back. Her goal had not been to engage the police or start beating up random men in the streets. Edith was training women to fight back against men who used their size, strength

and status to assault them. As the press got wind of her classes, though, they began running satirical articles and cartoons at her expense. After all, how could a few dozen of them trained in martial arts ever hope to stand up to organize police. Well, they did, and they did it as a team. They called themselves the Bodyguard and made headlines protecting important members of the women's suffrage movement.

In one instance, they'd been tasked with keeping outspoken activist Emmeline Pankhurst safe from arrest at a major speaking events. The Bodyguard were arranged on stage in a half circle behind the podium, A bouquet of flowers in each woman's hand. Pankhurst crossed the stage to address the crowd, and she wasn't more than a few minutes into her speech when the cops burst in. Fifty officers ran towards the stage, their batons raised high above their heads, ready to strike,

but the Suffragette warriors had come prepared. Buried in the leaves of their bouquets were strands of barbed wire, which the bodyguard members swung at the police in an effort to keep them from getting too Pankhurst. In the end, though they failed their mission. Pankhurst was taken into custody, but sometime later she got her revenge, and her bodyguards were there once again to help. It happened as Pankhurst gave another speech, this time from the balcony of a

home in London's Camden Square. As expected, the police showed up and waited outside for her to finish and come downstairs, But when she finally stepped outside, she was surrounded by women from the Bodyguard who tried to keep the cops at bay. Their efforts proved fruitless as officers rushed Pankhurst and shoved her to the pavement. They hauled her to her feet and pulled back the veil, and quickly realized

that they had been played. The person they had captured was a member of the bodyguard, standing in as a decoy while the real Pankhurst had slipped away during the struggle. Thanks to Edith Garud and her students, the Suffragettes showed men all over England that they were not to be trifled with. They were strong, they were smart, and they were clever. The press dubbed them amazons armed with iron will as, in a fearsome fighting style that they referred

to as suffragetsu. James Jeffrey was a bit of an overachiever. Born in Scotland in seventeen fifty nine, he grew up to chair both the botany and anatomy departments at Glasgow University. As the head of two burgeoning scientific fields, especially where anatomy was concerned, he was often at the forefront of new discoveries. Unfortunately, his methods were not always sound. He was once accused of stealing a woman's body from a

cemetery for research purposes. His home was attacked and his reputation was tarnished until he was absolved of any charges. In November of eighteen eighteen, Jeffrey dissected the body of Matthew Clydesdale, a murderer who had been recently hanged. But while dissection provided the professor with further understanding of the

human body, it still didn't tell him everything. For example, he wanted to know the effects of electricity on the central nervous system, so he hooked Clydesdale's remains up to an early battery called a voltaic pile, and passed the current through the corpse. The deceased man's hand and fingers twitched in the operating theater as students and other professors looked on in horror. It sounds cruel, but Jeffrey performed these experiments so that he could better treat the living.

By knowing the internal structure of the body and how it reacted to specific stimuli, he was able to devise new methods of treatment for the sick and injured. Pregnant women benefit of the most from Jeffrey's advanced knowledge. If a childbirth proof particularly difficult, maybe due to the size of the fetus or the position, the prevailing method of freeing the baby was called symphysiotomy. It was a painful procedure where the pelvic area was expanded by cutting through cartilage, ligaments,

and even bone with a sharp knife. Recovery, though, was a long, complicated process that often led to other health issues. Later, doctor Jeffrey knew that a better way was possible, and so he teamed up with fellow Scottish surgeon John Aitken to find one. They decided to start with the source of all their troubles, the knife. It took too long to use and caused too much pain, So Aitken and Jeffrey devised a new kind of blade, one that was

wrapped with a series of small, serrated segments. It featured two handles, one on either side, and the doctor using it would pull each handle from side to side across the bone, cutting through it more easily. Aitken went on to modify the design to include a hand crank. No longer would someone have to drag the blade back and forth. As they turned the crank, the chain would move on its own, allowing for greater control during cutting. As time

passed and technology advanced, the device changed as well. Bernard Hein, German orthopedist, came up with his own version in eighteen thirty He called it the osteotome, translated from and to literally mean bone cutter, and its uses grew from simply aiding in childbirths to other procedures such as amputations. It wasn't until nineteen o six when the osteotome was modified once again, but this time it wouldn't be used to

slice through bone. Samuel J. Ben's, a man from San Francisco, wanted to cut down a few giant redwoods in the forest and needed something faster and easier to use than his ax, so he filed a patent for a larger, more powerful iteration of the osteotome, one that could fell a tree in minutes instead of ours. Thirteen years later, James Shand of Canada would be granted his own patent for such a machine, the rights of which he would

lose in nineteen thirty. After that, German tool company Festo took the idea and turned it into a full fledged business. That original design that had started in Scotland so many years before was now much larger. It ran on electricity and could cut through almost anything, mainly would Symphysiotomies were eventually a and and in favor of safer, more medically

sound techniques like the c section. However, the device invented by two Scottish surgeons in the late eighteenth century would go on to change the face of several different industries, including construction, logging, and forestry. And let's not forget the sound of its worrying teeth, which have provided countless nightmares for fans of horror movies over the past few decades, all thanks to the device we now call the chainsaw. 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 Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.