Behind the Scenes Minis: Disease Pact

not more detail about the paper. The sentence was, historians have only recently acknowledged the role of disease in history. What? And I was like, right, that was my response. What? And the context of this was a military history paper, and so I was like, do you mean maybe only military historians specifically? Right, I'm like, hello, sir, have you

met Samuel Peeps? Right? So, even then, like I remember in elementary school learning what a problem smallpox was during the Revolutionary War, Like I remember multiple mentions of diseases being deadlier than combat in a lot of yes wartime engagements, Like I remember learning about how devastating disease was during the Civil War. So I read this statement and I

was like, what are you talking about? Well, and even before that, like I think about the discussions of the diseases that were introduced by European colonists into Norse Ryanica

that really really devastated a lot of indigenous communities. We knew this isn't really yeah, none of this is new stuff, and so this sort of made me wonder, like, is this person writing is what they are trying to express that there has not been as much really really deep detailed analysis of diseases role in wars right from medical history or from military historians specifically, Like is this a statement that if it were being read by military historians

would go Okay, I get it, I get what you're saying. But since I more of a generalist, AM reading it and I'm like, what are you talking about? It is? Am I just coming from a totally different context than the person who wrote that sentence, because the rest of the article did not seem like they did not know what they were talking about. Right, Listen, We're gonna blame an editor there, Yeah, I say that, having you know, been a copy editor, Sure, I'll take the blame whenever

I don't. But the thing is even that, right, Like there have been discussions of like this military force was significantly weakened by disease and that's why they were not effective in this conflict. Right, So that seems weird unless they're talking about a very specific like no one has been able to run the hard numbers quantify like what percentage of disadvantage or problem was created by these specifics. Like that's the only thing I can think of. But

that seems like such a general sentence. It's not talking about that. Yeah, there there was a like footnote reference to another paper that made it sound like military historians specifically did not want to focus so much on disease because focusing on the role of disease in war took

a lot of the human agency about it. So if what you wanted to be writing about was battles and weaponry and tactics, and really the major driver of the course of the war was diseases, it's like the diseases are stealing your thunder if your interest is on the battles and the weapons and the maneuvers, well, I have feelings they're not charitable. I definitely said what out loud very much the way you said. What when I read that sentence, Yeah, yeah, that's so odd. It was very

very weird. I'm not parsing this file. I'm like, yeah. Something that was much more on the delightful end of the spectrum to me anyway, is that some of Finlay's papers about yellow fever had these illustrations of mosquito mouthparts. And I do not love mosquitoes. I do not like being bitten by mosquitoes. I don't like mosquito bites. I don't like the number of diseases that people can get from mosquitoes, many of which don't have treatments or cures

that are very effective. Right now, I do like their mouths are cool. Oh yeah, they have parts of their mouths that turn into a straw basically. Yeah. They don't fly around with it like a straw all the time. It's like a little velcrow thing, right with the proboscis unfurled. Yeah. And so when I saw that he had drawn these little mosquito mouthparts, I was extremely excited about it. It reminds me of when we talked about years ago Maria

Sibilia Media and her drawings of insects uh huh. Similarly, like in that case it was about not biting people, but about collecting and whatnot. Yeah, but often same you would see the fully unfurled straw apparatus and it was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Back when I used to write for a website called how Stuff Works, I really enjoyed all of the insect and iraqnid articles that I read because they always had such interesting and cool anatomical features.

Beautiful like bees having all of these structures on their bodies to hold pollen, including like sort of little pockets, little pockets to fill up with their pollen as they fly around. I love it. I love it. Get pollen pocket, not to be an use of polypocket, no, no, yeah, I have a My general fear of mosquitoes is more about the cats, since they're a heartworm vector. Yeah, and I will confess that I am not always amazing up with the cats preventatives right right, because listen, we got

sassy girls at our house. Yeah yeah. We had a discussion about this on the show at one point a long time ago, and I don't even remember how it came up. That was about heartworm prevention and cats. And when I was living in like North Carolina and Georgia. I had they were on heartworm prevention and a lot of the places that I lived, But then I moved.

One of the places that I moved, I had a conversation with the vet that was about the risk of heartworm in that area, yeah, versus the risk of the preventive for the heartworm, right, which in that particular case, it was like, there's there's not really a reason to do this. There's there's not a major risk of heartworm here.

There would be more risk from the thing. And we got an email from someone who was really upset because I think they thought I had just decided based on vibes, not that I'd had a thoughtful conversation with the veterinarian about whether that was what they needed. Yeah. Yeah. Our other thing, right, our ladies are always inside. They have no exposure to dogs. We don't even have friends who are dog people that are ever at the house. Yeah.

I can't think of any of our friends that has a dog right now that would be over on the regular. So the risk is pretty low if we're a little slacky. Although I had a funny thing recently, gosh, it was probably a month ago. We had everybody in for their annual and they always asked like, are you keeping up with And I'm like, I'm sorry, and they the vetech that I talked to was like, you know what, probably eighty five percent of our clients are really up to

date on it. I was like, well, that's a high number. Yeah. We also have that problem of one of our cats being extra robust and needing like the higher dose than Yeah. Yeah, we do a flee in tick prevention on hours even though they never go outside because I go outside a lot. Oh yeah, you're out in the woods having yeah, and nature experiences. You know. If I can take a tick prevention for myself, I would do that. Just put the

cat stuff on the back of your neck. And then also because we live in a very old house in an area that has woods and whatnot around it, occasionally we do get mice inside and they can also bring in yeah. Yeah, yeah, oh, I had not thought about that for you. Yeah, it's a whole other, yeah, whole other potential concern. Yeah. So, especially since Opal in particular

is she likes to find a mouse. We haven't seen one in the house in quite a while, but she likes she thinks they should be toys, and I try to get them away from her anyway. To return to Yellow to Yellow Few and Carlo Swan Finlay, we talked about how a man named Juan Santos Fernandez had established this institute, this research institute. He really wanted to find

the cause of yellow fever. And I think the impression I get is that after Walter Reid came down and confirmed what Finlay had been saying the whole time, Juan

Santos Fernandez was like really kicking himself. He was like, I could have had this discovery on my list of achievements, and I don't because I totally dismissed this guy and called him the mosquito Man, which launched my brain when we were talking about it onto a whole different, like yeah, cryptid trajectory of what a mosquito man would look like, And I'm like, how would it compare to moth man? Would people also think it was a sand hill cret?

Like I was literally down the road so far, I was realing back here now I'm thinking about a human sized person with the mosquito mouthparts. Yeah, honestly, is really cool. And his name is Captain Proboscis the brain is busy. So yeah, I'm glad I finally got to this episode because it's been more than a decade since I've said I want to talk about the Skuy some more. Yeah, it's wild the way time passes. How dare it really does? It really does? And we talked about Samuel Hartlib in

the Heart Lib Circle this week. Uh huh. I find this whole concept fascinating. Yeah, that there are I mean, this is a thing that always fascinates me. In everything that we talk about, there are just, in a manner of pattern recognition, people that pop up over and over that get that are obviously next to points in history where they knew a lot of people, influenced a lot of people, et cetera. He's unique because he's that, but there's not a whole lot of knowledge about him in

like you know, general history. You kind of have to find the HEARTLB scholars to learn about him, and I just think that's interesting. Yeah. One of the things that I am always tickled by, but especially in this instance, is how you know when there's not a lot of ready documented information about somebody. Sometimes you can see the vibe of when people are kind of filling in the blanks or making some positions, or even kind of putting

their own opinion in the mix. Sure, which is I'm not dogging any of those people, like you're trying to make the narrative work. It's fine. But one of the things that was interesting was that any of the times when Heartlib was excluded from something, why the office of a dres never happened, or why he was left out of the Royal Society, and one especially with the Royal Society.

I saw one paper about it that kind of hinted like, well, he was so tied to like, you know, the hyper sort of almost puritan thing and so religious that the Royal Society was like, yeah, I mean, we're Christians, but you're you're a lot. But that doesn't seem to have really been the thing, right when you look at it. He wasn't. I mean, as we mentioned in the show, he wasn't that he wasn't in the mix talking out like any of these scientific concepts with a lot of people.

He wasn't trying to be part of their their meetings or their little circle. He was just trying to like be a steward of that information. Yeah, So I just find that interesting he was more like a librarian than a scientific researcher, and a lot of the other people that were part of the founding of the Royal Society

were like doing hands on research of some sort. Yeah, and it's at least from the quoted material in the episode, it seems like he not only was he not doing some kind of hands on research, he also seems like he wasn't really super in depth reading anybody else's stuff. He was more passing it around, like circulating it. Yeah, he was like a catalog librarian. Yeah. Yeah, he and was like, oh, would you do you have a request

for that paper that so and so wrote? I have, I'm making you a copy, that's my problem, and was like making sure that people got those And because he was publishing things, he clearly had access to, you know, print materials and could could make duplicates of things in whatever way he was doing it. So, I mean, I I feel like it just was like a It would have been almost weird for him to have been, yeah, a member when you view it through that lens, like, no,

you're you're yeah, you're cataloging things. Okay, we have to talk about the pact because I'm obsessed with it. It's so funny. It's sort of cute, sort of sweet. I feel like they had a treehouse and they would go up there and they would pull the ladder up after them. Yeah, but what I find so what just I had fits of giggles when I was reading about it because this

idea of like and it's our secret. I'm like, my, dudes, everybody knows this is your life work, and this isn't a secret, Like why did you put that clause in there? Like is there some aspect of this I'm not grasping, Like yeah, and we won't tell anyone. And I'm like, you tell everybody all the time. I guess they're just not saying. And we signed a document about it. I don't, right. And that's the other thing. If it's supposed to be a secret, you documented it. You kept that document forever. Yeah.

I love it so much. It's so silly. Yeah, Tracy, we're gonna make a podcast, but it's our secret. It's gonna be a secret. This feels like like this feels like something that would have happened between like me and two other girls standing at the end of the hallway in high school. We're gonna decide we're gonna form this secret pact. Yeah, my mental picture of how this would enact for me went even farther back than this. I'm like,

this happened on the four square core in second grade. Okay, we couldn't write in Latin then, so now or ever. It made me laugh so hard. It made me laugh so hard. I love the whole like there will be no secrets, it's gracious. I don't mean to mock. There's an earnestness to it that is actually so charming. But the part that like we're going to keep it secret just I was like, but you're not. You write other pamphlets about how important this work. Yeah, I love it.

I love it, and I'm glad of it because you know, he distributed a lot of information, listen do I I don't agree with his concepts that like if we all read the Bible more, we would be a better nation. You gotta have got to let people do their thing, whatever religion they choose or don't choose. It's fine. I also found the very funny the idea of like uniting all of the Protestants into one like this is sort of running a foul of the concept of the Protestant movement,

the Protestant Reformation. Yeah, I mean, I do love the idea of like, if everyone has universal education, we will all understand each other better. Yeah, it will be a more egalitarian and utopian community because everybody will get it. But at this point in our lives that we're living right now, it seems like even if you give people the information, they may not digest it. They might willfully misuse it to hurt other people. Yes, the worst, But

I love the idea. I love the hippie part of it, where it's like, you, guys, we would all be cool to each other if we all spoke Latin, if we could all mean ancient Latin texts. Do you know what was one of the hardest parts of this episode for me? It's very silly John Durry, because you know, I want to call him John Drury all the time for no reason. I'm afraid I did at some point and neither of

us caught it. I don't think you did, because I was listening for it because I knew I was so predisposed to do so, So I don't think you did. But I feel like he lives on very lane right in the theater where all the ghosts are. I really Samuel Hartlib is kind of a precursor to me wanting to talk about boil in his chemistry. So oh yeah coming, Yeah,

I'm not sure when, but it is coming. Yeah, And again I do love the idea of like a little you know, intellectual correspondence group, but like that's not exclusive, and like anybody who wrote to him and was like, hey, I heard you have this thing like a broker of great information. Terrific. Yeah, yeah, I have it right from the source. Do you want to read that guy's paper. I'll make you a copy. Absolutely terrific. I love your noble efforts, even if I don't agree with all of it,

the concept is real good. I wonder what he would make of the end. He might feel like he's been put out of a job. He'd either be really into it or really heartbroken. Well, or maybe it would be his job. I think he would find things like Wikipedia just spectacular. I was thinking more archive dot org and probably but remember and he was in the contemporary thing, so it wasn't all about archives for him as much

as about sharing newly developing ideas. Like now his stuff is in dot org, and I do love that the University of Sheffield makes all of his papers available. Nice. I had some tricky times with search, but I think that's a user error thing and not of them thing. Uh, but you can if you just want to kill a weekend. I mean, there's thousands and thousands and thousands of documents. You could not read them all unless you put aside time, like a large chunk of your life to just become

a heart lip scholar. But it's it's very interesting if you can get through the very clunky linguistic style, right. Sorry, Samuel, and I don't mean to criticize, it's just hard to speaking of chunks of time in your life. If you have days off coming up, I hope they're stupendous. I hope that you hang out and relax and do whatever hippie or non hippie thing you want to do that makes you feel rejuvenated and good about the world, and

that we are all kind to one another. If you have to work or you are saddled with a lot of obligations this weekend, I hope that those go super duper smoothly and that they all wrap up a little faster than you're expecting, so you get some time back to do whatever you want. Eat a cupcake sounds great. We will be right back here on Monday with a new episode. We will also be here tomorrow with a classic Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production

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