The rivers were rumored to be shimmering and spectacular. Archaeologists doubted it, though, because water ways of Mercury seemed to be more fiction than fact, but still they were curious to see if these silvery rivers and other stories about Emperor shinshi Huan's tomb were true. Shinshi Huan became China's first emperor in two b C after six other Chinese
states fell to him in bloody battles. While it's true that he was responsible for the deaths of untold thousands during his tumultuous reign, he was also credited with stimulating significant cultural and intellectual advancement. He was passionate about infrastructure too. Among other things, he ordered the construction of a canal that linked the yang z and the Pearl river systems, and extensive network of roadways, and the creation of provinces
as well as China's Great Wall. It shouldn't surprise you to know, then, that he also began constructing his enormous underground mausoleum thirty six years before his death. And when I say enormous, I really mean it. He built something more than a grave. He created a sprawling underground compound the size of an American football field. Tradition tells us that his inner burial chamber, which has yet to be excavated to this day, by the way, contains a scale
replica of his empire. It was something like a giant dall house, a country in miniature that Shinshi Huan planned to preside over in death. Legend tells us that he included facsimiles of animals, laborers, stables, offices, and statues of government officials. He ordered the creation of palaces and towers and scenic vistas, and as I mentioned a moment ago,
it was also said that he wanted mercury rivers. For years, scholars weren't sure if this latter wish was executed, but in the nineteen eighties researchers found that the levels of mercury in the burial mound above the tomb were exceptionally high, potentially giving credence to the seemingly fantastical idea that man made rivers of mercury were buried below the surface. And when we look at the emperor and his contemporaries, they were quite familiar with the substance mercury you see was
used in several ways. In ancient China, mercury sulfide, often called cinnabar, is bright red in color and was often used in artwork and decorations. Mercury was also used to cure many common ills, from infected sores to insomnia. Because it's the only metal that's liquid at room temperature, perhaps it was natural that inquisitive minds also felt like it might contain some sort of magical property. And that brings us to another use for mercury that was long a
part of Chinese tradition, alchemy. Alchemists used mercury to dissolve other metals and create amalgams that were used in things like guilt plating, but we're also thought to have other broader applications. Using the Taoist concept of yin and yang, it was suggested that cold, watery mercury and bright, fiery gold could be blended in ideal proportions to sustain life. One legend tells of a man who extended his life by ten thousand and years after consuming wine spiked with it.
But the first person that we understand to have definitively pursued the specific goal of immortality was none other than shinshi Huan. Indeed, among the many famous legacies of the first Emperor of China was his own quest for immortality and the so called elixir of life, a much fabled and deeply sought after means of living forever. He sent search parties out to the far reaches of his empire, and as part of this quest, he worked a little
closer to home too. The emperor tasked court doctors with cooking up a number of mercurial concoctions in the hopes of figuring out how to engineer immortality in a cauldron. He hoped, and searched and plotted for immortality. But it's good that he planned so lavishly for the afterlife. Not only did his mercury laced potions not grant him eternal life, but they probably contributed to his early death. We know
now that the element is highly toxic to humans. Today, the medical industry is indeed in the business of prolonging life. A link between modern medicine and the quest for immortality is inextricable, but maybe not in the way you might have expected. This is a story of magic and medicine. It's a story of our ever present quest to find, distill or create elixirs that put off death, even if just for a while. I'm Aaron Manky and welcome to
bedside manners. Diseases come in all shapes and sizes. These days, an average person with access to Google might be able to do a quick search and figure out what that strange rashes or what's wrong with their tonsils. Internet access has made armchair experts out of many of us mere mortals, But at one time, sickness was the realm of the gods. The word that we translate to the English disease finds its ancient origins in the idea that something is without
well being or divine favor. For thousands of years, humans believe that gods were integral to sickness and to healing, both in terms of affliction and its treatments. How to treat illness and disease has evolved over the course of human history. Since time immemorial, humans have used a wide range of natural materials like plants, minerals, and other substances to treat sickness. Medicine and medicinal practitioners have existed for
far longer than we have records for. However, in the mid sixth century, BC, people began to think about the world, human life, and health and wellness in a very different way. On Nature, a work of prose published by Anaximander of my Leaders, proposed that the world wasn't simply created as a playground by the gods for the gods, but rather it was a natural entity with its own processes which were able to be studied and explained on its own terms,
apart from any reference to the god's activities. People started thinking more about the natural causes of sickness, if the gods weren't to blame, than who or what us. People began thinking about their bodies, inner workings. Disease came to be seen as natural in origin rather than supernatural. This would lead to a lot of speculation about how natural medicines could be used internally. The fifth century BC brought
a major seismic shift. During this time, the Greeks devised and committed to paper the idea that medicine might be formally defined as a craft, and thus it could be systematized and practiced by formally studied crafts people. One of the most influential figures in this invention of medicine, as scholars call it, was a fellow named Hippocrates, who you'll get to know a little bit more over the course
of this series. Hippocrates was highly influential, and his school of thought created the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of Greek medical works. In general, Hippocratic medicine understood disease as an internal imbalance of one of four key fluids known as the humors, and healing was concerned with restoring the balance of them, largely through diets and exercise. The physician gay
And would later appear on the scene. Building upon ideas of those who came before him, he worked on developing a significant catalog of natural cures, most of which were plant extracts. His recipes would be systematized as they traveled around the world during the next several centuries. While these Greek ideas faded out in the West, they were picked
up by Arabic writers. These natural solutions gained momentum in the East, where they were further built upon and developed, before being brought back to the West around eight hundred years ago in the twelfth and thirteen centuries. In the eleventh century, for example, a Persian scholar named Albi Rooney cataloged an extensive collection of medicines from Central Asia and with it, he suggested that pharmacy, a term derived from the Greek word pharmacon or poison, should be considered a
distinctly separate branch of the healing arts. He thought it required its own line of study. By twelve thirty one, the Holy Roman Emperor signed the Constitutions of Malfi into law, creating official legal codes around healing that extended across his empire. Formally trained physicians were deemed to be of a scholarly class, while apothecaries, those who mixed their medicines, consisted of tradesmen. But they continued to work closely together, dispensing cures under
a strict legal code that governed their activities. But of course there are ways to get around the rules. You see, these laws were hard to enforce through both the Ancient and Renaissance worlds. From East to west, most big cities had their own apothecaries, and many of them to boot. They were small businesses, after all, they needed to make their ends meet. Sometimes they would take advantage of their clients,
selling them mislabeled products and jacking up the prices. They might sell old or spoiled things, and sometimes they would knowingly sell cures that were known to be deadly in order to turn a profit. We'll get to more of that later in the season. But alongside the often creative apothecaries, up sprouted another possible answer to the many ailments of the early modern world, a particular kind of craftsperson with
sometimes equally dubious concoctions. By the thirteen than fourteen centuries, another group was already beginning to make small waves in medical practice and theory, a group born of magic and mysticism that brought us to medicine as we know it today. The Alchemists. The apocalyptic visions kept him awake at night. John Franciscan Friar believed that the Antichrist's arrival was imminent, But though his brow was sweaty and his pulse was quick,
he knew that he was ready. John believed that he was in on the secret of how to defeat the devil and his demonic army. He believed that the key lay in his knowledge of alchemy and its ability to restore health and wealth to the virtuous. So John tinkered in his workshop, preparing his potions and talking of divine revelations. He was eventually thrown in jail by the pope for his blasphemy, but John was onto something. Exactly what he was onto was less about the devil, though, and more
about what John had boiling over the flame. To us today, medicine can sometimes feel like nothing short of magic. It has allowed the deaf to hear and the blind to see. It's made infection disappear and pain vanish. It's brought innumerable people back from the brink of death. And maybe we've all felt it in smaller ways, maybe when the doctor gives us the right antibiotics, or when our sinus is finally clear. At least it always feels that way to me.
The origins of the chemical based medicines which we are prescribed today are very much intertwined with the philosophy and experiments of alchemy. Now, when you hear the word alchemy, you probably think about mad scientists in secret medieval labs filled with fire and smoke and glass, all cooking up optimistic experiments and the hopes of turning lead into gold. That's the picture that movies and books tell us about, anyway,
But there's so much more to it than that. The history and the goals of alchemy are much broader than I could tell you about today in this one single episode. But throughout much of history there's been one common thread that I'd love to tell you about, one very precious item which you might have heard of, the Philosopher's Stone. Now I should point out that the Philosopher's Stone is kind of a misleading name. The stone was rumored not to be a stone at all, but a fine powder.
It was thought to be read or maybe white, or sometimes even purple. But whatever it looked like, alchemists believed that it was the secrets ingredient of transmutation, the ability to transform one substance into another, to shapeshift and renew. The ability of transmutation was considered all powerful, but no one had gotten close enough to prove it. Some claimed that this mythical substance had been given by God to Adam.
According to some legends, it was used by Noah to create the arc, and by Moses to build the Tabernacle and its vessels, by Solomon to build a temple. The alchemists, however, sought not just to find the stone, but to make the stone. You see, it was thought that the stone could remove impurities and turned base things into precious things. It was believed that by rearranging base properties of any element, say in lead, it can morph into something else gold.
But over time the goal of alchemists evolved. It led to a fairly systemized understanding of medicine, which was chemical at its heart. The desire to remove impurities from metal was expanded, and it was thought that disease, understood as impurity of the body, could potentially be transmuted into health and perhaps in perpetuity following along. Okay, so far, basically alchemy was trying to take not so great things and
turn them into better things. Now, one of the most important alchemical methods, as it would come to bear on medicine, was the use of distillation. This was a central tool of alchemy of any kind and one of the ways the alchemists hoped to extract what they called quintessence, or the fifth essence, out of simple substances like plants or minerals.
Extracting this quintessence was not exactly like reducing a substance to active ingredients, since this fifth essence was understood to be a celestial party that was dormant in earthly materials. It was thought to be incorruptible and capable of making powerful medicines which could remove any form of corruption from the body. Importantly, for the medical world, this rather esoteric process led to the very real discovery of alcohol, which
was understood to be the quintessence of wine. Recipes from making alcohol started to appear in the twelfth century, and by the next it became known as Aqua vitae the
water of life. Now our Franciscan friar John of Rupeskosa was rumored to have been a gold making alchemist from his jail cell it seems that he was the first to propose that a kind of total panacea was attainable by distilling not just wine, but things like herbs, animal products, and especially minerals like gold, antimony, and mercury, and then mixing medicines from them by way of a chemical process.
A proto chemistry, he proposed that an elixir of life could be attained by a careful hand and a watchful eye. He was far ahead of his time, and he was hunished for it. But he wasn't the first, and he certainly wasn't going to be the last. The journey had been a long one, but the doctor was no stranger to life on the road. What followed him were stories and legend, a heady blend of fact and fiction that is hard to parse out. He was something of a
myth of his own making. But what we do know to be true is that he was a genius and a provocateur. But whether the story you're about to hear is fact or fiction, well, I'll let you decide for yourself. As the story goes in our traveling healer was about one miles from his Austrian home of English dot Germany. His studies had taken him far and wide, so this short trip seemed easy by comparison. He made his way
to an end to rest for the night. His reputation preceded him, it seems, because not long after arriving, the inn's owner asked him to examine his twenty three year old daughter. She had been paralyzed since birth. The doctor prepared a cure for her of something he called as off the Red Lion. It was a fancy name he had given to his recipe, his own medical concoction of alchemical mercury. He considered this to be universal medicine. He told her to take a pinch of the remedy with
some wine after each meal. She will sweat profusely, he told her, But that's just evidence that it's working. Soon after, the innkeepers got the shock of their life when their daughter walked into the room, having been bedridden her whole life. It was said that she threw herself at the doctor's feet and gratitude. This, of course, was no ordinary doctor,
no peddler of ancient theories about humors and diets. This was Theophrastus Philippus Aurelius Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known to us as Paracelsus, and he was famous, and too many he was infamous. Medicine during the Renaissance period was taught through a theory based bookish recitation of the ancient writers like Galen, rather than establishing theories through practice. Galenic doctors would diagnose and prescribe treatments to patients, sometimes without ever
having seen them. This time, during which Theophrastus was born, was one of great general upheaval. The Renaissance birth new ideas and changed all areas of life, from economics, arts, and religion to medicine. His mother had died early in his life, so he was cared for by his father, who was a physician and a teacher. As a young man, Theophrastus worked briefly in Austrian silver mines, where he received
a basic understanding about medals and their properties. According to some scholars, Theophrastis wrote under the name Paracelsus for the first time while in medical school around fifteen fifteen. Taking on a Greek or Latin pseudonym was customary for the scholarly class at the time as a way to show affinity with ancient minds. But what we know is that whatever affinity he once had for his predecessors quickly grew
into disdain. In fact, Paracelsus spent the rest of his life working in response to them and what he saw as their deadly, misguided and classist shortcomings. The problem with his education, Paracelsus pointed out, was that nothing should ever be so firmly established that it could not be questioned. But indeed he found the backbone of his education to be rigid on critical and silencing. Doctoring as it was taught in universities to the elite classes, was stuck in
the far past. He considered Galen's humorl medicine to be nothing but charlatanism, and the folks who practiced it more eager to take money from the sick and the naive than to actually help them. He worried that anyone with the doctor's title could basically get away with murder. Times had changed, civilizations had come and gone, so had diseases
and epidemics too. Wouldn't it make sense that thinking about how to heal the body had evolved as well, and he could see how stuck in their thinking they were. But he wasn't content to just read old and obsolete writers of ancient Greece and then try to apply tired ideas to modern times. So he took to the road, covering thousands of miles, searching for better methods of healing. He was a true student of the world, absorbing lessons
and insights as he made his way. If a cure was known to local surgeons and folk healers, as well as monks, midwives and magicians, he sought it out. What mattered to him was finding a deep understanding of nature and how it worked, based on experience and practice, not just ideas. Through that line of questioning. He believed that he would be able to understand the body. Heaven is man and man is heaven, he proclaimed, asserting that our bodies and the cosmos are more or less the same.
Everything is made of sulfur, salt, and mercury, which he called the triaprima. He believed that alchemy was everywhere. He believed that each body was a natural alchemist and was the job of the body's processes. One internal alchemist to separate what was healthy from what was harmful. And then, of course there's the external alchemist, which is to say, the alchemist himself, who applied their knowledge and skills to
help the inner alchemist with that process. To Paracelsis, each disease had a specific cause and required a specific remedy. He believed natural cures were incomplete without an alchemist's intervention. He thought that the healing properties of plants, herbs, and minerals had to be unlocked in a sense, and the keys to this unlocking required great knowledge, care, and most
of all, hands on experience. Depending on the dose, He believed anything could be poison through processes the alchemists used, like fermentation, digestion, distillation, and cooking. They separated harmful or useless parts of natural substances. Doing so enabled and allowed them to isolate the healing properties that could then be
used to treat specific illnesses. Suffice to say, he wasn't a popular guy with the establishment, and his pompous personality and snark that he leveled at the Galinist physicians probably didn't help. The powers that be lampooned him. They mocked him, They found him blasphemous. They saw him as a radical and an outsider. They retaliated against him after he was posted as the city's physician in Basil, Switzerland, in fifty seven.
It didn't help that during a citywide Midsummer bonfire in that same year, he decided he would cast out his own demons, So into the fire went The Encyclopedic Canon of Medicine, a medical text book based on the teachings of Galen. Paracelsus, left the next year. In the years that followed, he continued to travel around Europe, studying diseases, practicing medicine, and writing several books. But no matter where he went, he still courted great controversy from traditional physicians.
In his later years, while remaining optimistic about his skills as a physician. He did gain some humility, it seems, acknowledging that he could not cure everything, and that some diseases were indeed impossible to cure. Paracelsus died in Salzburg in September of fifteen forty one. How well, we can
never be certain, but there are some ideas. It was found that he had ten times the amount of mercury and his bones, something that can happen due to long exposure to the substance and occupational hazard for any alchemist, especially a medicinal one. Was Paracelsus poisoned while creating medicine or was he trying and failing to heal himself from ailments acquired by his craft. His bones share this detail, but as far as the how and the why, they
are silent, and Paracelsus left us no other clues. In time, many Paracelsian ideas would, like those of Galen, be later rejected. However, he and his followers were still an important link in the chain that got us from Galen to modern pharmacology. It's undeniable that without the ideas and pursuits of alchemy and their applications to healing, we would not have the kind of chemical based pharmaceutical medicine that we have today. Paracelsus helped to transform the craft of pharmacy from a
botanic science into a chemical science. It can be said that his methods and his personality redirected the course of medicine. He wasn't the first person to think this way, but he was one of the most influential. Today, one could study alchemy at the Paracelsis College in Australia and even purchase alchemical elixirs online. The roots of science are magical. They are full of fantasy and mysticism, which seems like a strange dichotomy today, but if you think about it,
these ideas were cutting edge for their time. The folks at the Helm were not too different from the innovators and industry disruptors of today. The world mocked them, but they quietly embraced them. Their ideas and personalities, often bombastic, polarizing, and arrogant, brought attention to the causes they stood for, and thankfully, with time, their ideas were built upon in ways that allowed progress to march forward, for an untold number of lives to be saved, Even if we're still
trying to figure out how to live forever. We've certainly come a long way since the days of blaming gods for everything that ails us, although I have to admit replacing burnt offerings with experimental elixirs laced with mercury and other mysterious substances sounds just as frightening to me. And yet experimenting is how we learn. But, as one last story will show us, no progress as possible without risk. Stick around through this brief sponsor break, and my teammates
Robin Miniter will tell you all about it. Right, Isaac just didn't feel right. He felt it in his bones, and those around him noticed it. Two. He had grown irritable, unbalanced. It was true that he was a temperamental guy to begin with, but it was clear that there was something else afoot. Something was troubling him deeply. Isaac lay awake at night, haunted by the restless hours as the morning
came closer. He had been having trouble with his memory recently, a problem that became more pronounced as he spent more hours working in the summer of his published had become somewhat unhinged. He was publicly picking fights. People couldn't help but notice and whispers about his erratic behavior spread. Isaac was many things, a math professor, a physicist, and an astronomer, but among his scientific interests were some that were a little bit more, shall we say, esoteric. Isaac was, after all,
an Avid alchemist. Papers discovered as recently as nineteen forty revealed that he had tried to make gold on many occasions. Isaac was convinced that ancient alchemists had indeed discovered the secret to making it, but their secrets had been lost. He wanted to find them. A key to this investigation was mercury. Mercurial compounds were used to treat everything from the flu to parasites well into the twentieth century. Though it's fallen out of style in day to day use,
it's still all around us. The element is unavoidable. It comes from the food we eat, the water we swim in, and the air we breathe. We find it in our glass thermometers, are light bulbs, are batteries, and our household disinfectants. A person's reaction to the substance is unpredictable. For some people, it might appear to cure them. For others it could kill. Nevertheless, we still see it being used in the cosmetic industry,
namely in skin whitening products. The skin whitening industry is worth eight billion dollars a year and profits are continuing to climb. In two thousand, twenty two zero Mercury Working Group found unsafe amounts of mercury and over a hundred and twenty of these products. And these aren't fringe items found on the back shells of apothecaries. They are widely available on global e commerce sites like eBay and Amazon. As for our friend Isaac, he died in his sleep
one cold night in March. He had lived the old age of eighty four, having become one of the greatest scientists of all time. Before he died, Isaac Newton gave us the theory of gravity and taught us how the solar system worked. He sketched out the building blocks for calculus and invented an early form of physics. In the late nineteen seventies, strands of his hair were tested. It was revealed that they contained more than fifteen times the
normal amount of mercury that the body should have. While we can't say for certain that his death was caused by a slow poisoning. It can help to explain the potential causes of strange behaviors later in life. It's possible that he was using mercury for more than his alchemical experiments like Paracelsis. It was possible that he was trying to use the very thing to cure himself that ailed
him and died as a result. Grim and Mild Presents Bedside Manners was executive produced by Aaron Manky and narrated by Aaron Manky and Robin Miniter. Writing for this season was provided by Robin Miniter, with research by Sam Alberty, Taylor haggerd Orn and Robin Miniter. Production assistance was provided by Josh Thane, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
You can learn more about this show, the Grim and Mild team, and all the other podcasts that we make over at Grim and Mild dot com, and, as always, thanks for listening.