SYSK Selects: Your limb is torn off - now what? - podcast episode cover

SYSK Selects: Your limb is torn off - now what?

Feb 29, 202035 min
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Episode description

Were you to be the unfortunate victim of a limb removal of any sort, you could take hope. Here in the 21st century, doctors have gotten pretty handy at reattaching arms and legs, replacing thumbs with toes, rebuilding breasts, all to great success thanks to microsurgery techniques.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Hi there everyone, it's me Josh and for this week's s Y s K Selex, I've chosen so your limbs torn off. Now what. It's a great classic episode filled with neat stories about things like exposed innards and sewing muscles together. It's a good one and it has a really great intro, if I do say so myself. It's from January, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,

and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant and this is stuff you should know because Jerry's over there, King, are you doing buddy? Besides sick, I'm not sick. I'm just I've got a little bit of a bug. But well do you think that's the first step? And yeah, and being sick is saying I'm sick. I definitely believe in psycho somad effects.

You know, the mine has an impact on the body. Well, if you can be a hypochondria, actually you can do the opposite, right, yeah, yeah, you can will yourself into not being Anyway, people, the show must go on, And I just want to point out how dedicated my partner. Here's to his craft. Well, I also want to say, I want to promise that it's not going to be like the great six weeks of No. You don't get that was back in the old days, the unhealthy days.

I smoked and everything. Yeah, your body didn't know how to heal, so it was enjoying nicotine. Now I'm just like I'm I'm not getting sick. I said it to myself last night, and here I am better than you ever Josh two point oh, thank you. All right, let's do this, Okay, are you ready? Yeah, I got a story for you. I bet I know it. I'll bet you know. Yeah. You saw. His name is Everett Knowles Jr. But everybody called him Eddie two days in a why I find the unwholesome. Yeah, and I didn't know Eddie

could be short forever never heard that. I don't think it is. I think he just didn't like his name, Okay, because it seems like you should call him every yeah or heavy ev yea of the big ee something. So he was a little either. He's a little guy, tiny like a little Elvis. Uh. Well, Eddie, we'll call him Eddie because that's what he preferred to be called sure.

He was walking home from school one day in Somerville, Massachusetts, which is a suburb of Boston, and he was walking along the railroad tracks and there just happened to be a train loaded with gravel hauling out of the area very slowly while he was walking alongside, and said, you know what, I'm just gonna have a little thrill right now and grab onto this train. And he did. He successfully grabbed onto the train, was hanging with I believe

his right arm. Yeah, and uh was having the time of his life just dangling there when he misjudged the distance between the train side the train and the side of a tunnel and he was pulled into the tunnel support, smacked it and hung on for a second before he was dropped off of the train. The train kept going through the tunnel, leaving Eddie kind of crumpled and in a little shivering mass at the mouth of the tunnel.

So he stands up and he grabs his arm. He's like, oh, my arm doesn't feel very good, and he starts walking toward town and apparently he walked about a hundred yards uphill when some workers saw him and said, grab that kid. Because he was covered in blood, he was staggering, he looked like he was out of He's clearly in shocks. They grabbed it, ran and got a woman, because at the time, this is n two, a woman was the only one who could provide any kind of initial emergency care.

Um and a clerk at I believe some sort of warehouse um came out and started to apply pressure to this boy's wound. But she had a little bit of trouble. When she tried to close the wound with a tournique, she found that his arm was an attached to his body any longer. He's just kind of holding it there. Very Luckily he was wearing a jacket, or else his arm would have been back at the mouth of the tunnel. Man.

Can you imagine, like the guy is holding his arm basically to keep it from falling out of his jacket, although he didn't know that, you know, no, he didn't. He was in shock. Luckily, he was still lucid enough to like tell everybody who he was, where he lived, and uh. They called the the hospital, and the hospital scrambled some surgeons. But it wasn't until chuck Um he got to the hospital and they started cutting his jacket off that they realized the extent of the damage. This

kid's arm was torn clean off. But the operative word is clean. Yeah, he's right, because Eddie Everett Knowls Jr. Of Somerville, Mass On what May nineteen sixty two, became the first recipient of a full successful limb reattachments, first human recipient. Right. Yeah, it's a good point. They had done that before dogs successfully, and they had they had done all the different surgeries that are required to reattach a limb, but they had never done all of them

at once. Like they'd reattach the nerves, they'd reattach bone, they'd reattached blood vessels, but they had never had a full amputation and a human being successfully reattached. And um. From what I read, the doctor was I don't know about excited, but they had been looking for a case because they thought, like, I think we can do this. We just need the right case, right exactly, you know. And he called his buddy and he's like, I think

we got one. Get in there. They got the They like you said, they'd successfully reattached artery's nerves, bone, that kind of thing, but never all never the whole shebang. So they said, well, we know how to do this. Yeah, if somebody will just come along and present us with an arm pulled leanly off, especially a twelve year old, because that definitely worked at his advantage. Apparently an artery when severed will plug itself up, especially in younger kids.

That plugging is way more successful and happens more quickly. So this kid just basically presented like the perfect case. The main artery I guess it is brachial artery leading out of his shoulder was a full like two inches out of the wounds. So like they had a lot to work with and work they did. Uh yeah, and they the arm was on ice and they began working immediately.

This is mass general by the way, and um, they started with the arteries and veins, and then the nurse felt, well, they all sort of saw color and they described as a glow kind of came back into the arm. This kid hopped the train, had his arm pulled off, and within two and a half hours they had gotten circulation back. Yeah, and the nurse scrabbed the hand and said, hey, it's warm. That's good, spink and warm. She shook it, made it do the metal sign everybody in the operating theory is laughing.

The bone and the muscle and the nerve and the skin um happened in in later surgeries, and the I think the nerve. They made a pretty important decision at the time was to wait on that altogether, uh, and let it heal some more first, which is as it turns out. Actually, as it turns out, most of this was sort of how they do it today. Like they perfected the process from that point through the seventies and in the eighties is when they really started like humming

with limb reattachment. The only difference that I saw was and we'll get into it a little more, but um. They reattached the arteries first to get circulation, I guess to keep from more and more tissue dying. Um. And then they reattached the bone by driving a screw and using a hammer they nail the screw into the marrow. And then reattached the arm bone. That what is that femur? No femurs in the leg the leg You think I would looked this up already, Yeah, the upper arm bone.

Then they drove that into the other end of the crew normally now though they do they reattach the bone for supervide stability, so when you reattach the arteries and veins and stuff, they won't pull away. Yeah, and he uh it was a success story because he ended up he was uh he couldn't use that hand as his dominant hand any longer, which just said because he was

a good picture. Yeah, but he um was able to eventually get enough use out of it to where, uh they said about like a left hander would have use of his right hand. So he just sort of had to switch that up. But for nineteen sixty two, that's pretty successful, especially considering in nineteen sixty was the very first microsurgery performed just two years previously at the University

of Vermont. Oh yeah, go catamounts. But um, that's dedication so microso surgery, that's really what we're talking about here. It's the use of a microscope to perform surgery. And when you're attaching, you're essentially sewing together little nerves and blood vessels like a millimeter in diameter. You need a microscope and a tiny, tiny little needle, right, and you're using tiny, tiny little sutra thread which is about is is as big as a hair. That's the stuff you're

using to to suture these blood vessels back together. It's not catgut, no, And it's an extremely involved um surgery as you can imagine, but it's step by step. It's like first you do the blood vessels, then you do the arteries, UM, and you do muscles, ligaments, tendons, all this stuff, and you're doing it in this this process. But each each surgery, each part of the procedure is like an enormous surgery in and of itself. So like UM, a limb reattachment which is called um replantation. I thought

it was be called like limbery or something. Some people call it that. I'm a limberist. The saucier doctors call it limbery, but UM, it usually is like as on a whole. The replantation surgery can last like an entire day. Yeah, it's it's intensive, UM And I read too that it uh the whole micro surgery. The concept of using a microscope for surgery was not accepted at first, Like doctors and surgeons were like, no, like you, we can't do that.

We have to look with our eyes, and so it had to be perfected sort of on the fringe by doctor by surgeons who are willing to like accept this might be the future an experiment in their basements. I guess, so on hapless victim maybe or dogs. Yeah, I didn't get the and I didn't look it up, but I didn't get the impression from this article one way or the other how dogs lost their limbs to begin with, Like, was it accidental and they're like, okay, well this we'll

reattach it. Or were they cutting dogs limbs off and then reattaching them, because I'm guessing it was probably the ladder probably. Yeah, I mean we've talked plenty about that kind of topic because I mean, think about it. Why would dogs limbs be pulled off in any more frequency than humans limbs and hence present more cases to practice on. I think they were cutting off dog's limbs and then reattaching, which is messed up. Yeah it is. So you were

talking about microsurgery. What I saw was um replacing toes for thumbs. Got big sixties. That was a big one. So you had a a thumb on your foot or a big toe on your hand, big toe on your hand, because apparently fifty to seventy of all the utility in your hand is in your thumb. And if you're missing a thumb, you might as well just not have your hand. You don't need a big toe quite as much. You can use a cane or something like that. Thanks to your new toe thumb and um that that became perfected

in the sixties toe thumb. That's a good band name. Yeah, And then in the seven these um free flat tissue transfer became a big thing, which is basically going to a part of your body, harvesting an area of your body like under your thigh, your abdomen um, I think you're back, lower back, and then just basically taking the gap and sewing it back together, right, so you have a scar, but you also have a portion of your

body that's diminished in size. Um, and then taking that and using it to basically do what we understand as a skin graft, which which requires microsurgery as well. Um, it's just basically taking this part here and putting it back over here where there's a bunch of damage and reattaching all of the nerves and the blood vessels and everything. Yeah. I saw when I was looking up photos of this kind of thing, I came across something that I had never seen before. And I didn't. I didn't get the story,

but you could almost. I mean I sort of gathered what was going on just from the photo series. But up someone was degloved on the on their fingers basically

from like the hand knuckles forward. All the fingers had no skin, and they from the looks of it, they inserted it into an arm, like into a bicep, the fingers and like they lived there for a while, like inserted under the skin of the arm, and that that skin they later would remove the fingers and it came off as like a big flat skin graph like sticking your hand in an envelope, and uh, eventually formed like webbed fingers and then fingers. That is crazy, But like,

I don't know, man, I just saw these photos. I should have done. I mean, it doesn't really have anything to do with this, but it was just remarkable they see someone with their fingers stuck in their bicep under the skin. Like, I'm having trouble visualizing this. I need to see these photos. Yeah, I'll dick him up the show to you. Yeah, if you want to see some really gross stuff, you can just google. Um. Microsurgery or replantation is another one man it's just nasty stuff out,

but amazing like that they can. And I looked at so many of them. I kind of got to that point where I was like, well, this isn't gross. This is what the body looks like without skin sometimes, and which is gross. Nuts. I wouldn't grossed out bodies without skin or gross. I don't think so. I think. I think it's the beauty inside. You couldn't desensitize my friend. Well, before we get any further, Chuck, let's do a message break, because I got some good stuff coming up. So, Chuck,

we understand microsurgery. Now it's frankensteiny in right, Yeah, you're basically just sewing stuff together. Yeah, because I mean, like, let's say you have a dead person who has a great hand and you have a live person who's got a poor hand. You cut off the live person's hand, cut off the dead person's hand, and attached the live or the dead person's hand and a live person. That's

that's Frankensteinian. That's what they're doing. And it's pretty cool cool. Um, but if this ever happens to you, if if say you have a poor hand and that it's no longer attached to your wrist. Yeah, that hand sucks, right and it's all crushed and damaged or whatever. No, no, no, let's say it's intact. And you say, you know what, I think through my shock that I might be a good candidate for replantation of my hand. What do you do? Well, you want to call nine one one immediately, because that's

just the first thing you do. You get, go ahead and get folks on the way, or you can ask someone with you to call nine one. That's not putting anyone out. Yeah that's true. If you can't dial, maybe you don't have hands, right, you can tell Sirie to call nine one one. Job. Yeah, I actually changed my series to a dude, so it's not a hurt anymore to an englishman. Actually, yeah, it's kind of fun Reginald.

I don't know what his name is actually, but he'll say stuff like, you know, I'll say call Josh and he'll say ringing Josh, oh yeah, instead of calling Yeah, it's classy, kind of fun. Anyway, Um, you want to dial nine one one, get them on the way, and then immediately you want to just try and stabilize the patient. You want to stop the bleeding, either with heavy pressure

or a tourniquet above the wound like a sixties female. Yeah, exactly. Uh. And once you get the patient um stabilize and they're not going to bleed out there in the kitchen or wherever it is. Um. You want to get the digit or the hand or the limb and put it on ice, but not directly on ice. Put it in a bag

and then put that bag on ice. Yeah, you want to pack pack it in ice as much ice as you can find, but you want to make sure that in the bag that you put the the hand or the digit or whatever in there's no ice and there's no water because wall or causes it to shrivel, and that means you won't be able to reattach it. Yeah, and ice you can actually if I put if I cut off my finger and I threw it in a bucket of ice, it could actually get frostbite. Yeah. That's crazy.

That is crazy, but it's also pretty cool. Yeah. And you don't want frostbite on your because you know you won't be able to use it anymore. Now. Frostbite is just um dead tissue brought about by exposure to extreme cold. That's right. So after the teacher right there. It is. After you've got it on the ice, in the bag on the ice, you've called mine one one, you've got

the bleeding stopped. You want to cross whatever fingers you have remaining and hope that you've got a good hospital nearby with some surgeons that aren't doing much at the moment or who are willing to cancel their schedules and say let's go do this. Yeah, get off the golf course. So when you get to the hospital, there's some things you can expect. If all of your surgeons have coming from the golf course, they should be ready and waiting

for you. And Um, like we said, for they're going to reattach the bone to provide stability um for the rest of the surgery. And there's probably still going to be a little bit of a gap there because they need to get in there. Um. And then they start reattaching your your blood vessels, and just like with Eddie Knowles, um, that just gets you know, the blood flow going and essentially makes that limb alive once more, right well, and

it also keeps it from further dying. Um. Because Chuck, it turns out that like there is a finite amount of time which is understandable, but we we are aware of how much time a limb can just sit around in the hot sun starting to go you know, fit it. Yeah, and there's so for example, Um, if you have a whole arm or a whole leg cut off, remember death Proof. Yeah, that girl has her legs like sticking out of the window and mad Mike is that his name Kurt Russell?

When he some and her legs goes. Um. If she had survived and her leg just laid there out at room temperature, um, it could have been good for six to twelve hours. I imagine you're really pushing it at twelve hours. But if say you have somebody who's like this leg needs to be put on ice and does everything right, it could stay refrigerated for four days and still be reattached. Yeah. Um. They point out though in

this article, ideally you're having that surgery that day. Yeah, but if you within hours, within minutes, they're talking ideally Basically, the sooner the better. As soon as they're ready to go, you should be ready to go as well. But you're right, Um, if that is not the case and you have uh, some good refrigeration going on, you can last for about four days. Yeah, and apparently it's not even necessarily the skin tissue that um that leads to problems and reattachment

after being exposed or room temperature. It's muscle degradation. Oh yeah, interest thing. Uh. So you you get there, you're getting your surgery done. Um, you probably are going to expect to go through that first long surgery bone reattachment, blood vessel, maybe some muscle fiber and sure, and then they'll say we'll put the nerves off for later. Um. And then later on down the road will be a skin graft of some kind, like a UM free flap surgery like

I was talking about. And the free uh refers to the the free like this part of this tissue from your body has been removed the donor site. Oh, it's not the cost of the surgery, it's it's been cut free. Right, And then you have that makes sense and then UM, it really is simpler than you think. It's reattaching and hopefully everything takes and you fight the infection off and you start the rehab process, which, UM, it takes a long time, and it's it's grueling and not fun. It

can be weird at first. Uh. They point out the article and be weird to look down and see your army attached. But I imagine no weirder than looking down and seeing your arm not attached. You know, it would probably be a comfort to see it reattached. But you're a jerk if you're like, oh, it's kind of crooked. Yeah, but apparently sometimes it can feel a little different, and uh that can be a little strange and off putting. It's not like, oh, I'm just like I was before, right,

you know, better than ever? Um and Tom wrote this one my good friend time chief, he said. He also talked about something called cross transfer. This was mind blowing, which is basically like if if just re plantation is Frankensteinian, this is even more so. Yeah, I didn't quite get the purpose of the hand. Uh, Basically, you're getting a a left hand on your right arm. Let's say, Uh, so your thumb and your pinky would be in weird places, right,

your palms still facing the right direction, but thumb is switched. Yeah. Yeah, but what's what's the point of that if you have a bad hand and a good hand. I don't know if that's they only had like a left hand available at the time. I don't know that one. I got the other one where basically they take your lower leg beneath your knee. So like, if your upper leg is damaged and your lower leg is fine, let's just say your upper leg is wasted for whatever reason, but your

lower leg is fine. They'll cut it off, the lower leg and basically turn it around right, and then your knee becomes locked. Your calf muscles then serve the function that your thigh muscles used to, and your knee joint is now in your ankle. Then you also are going to be wearing a prosthetic obviously because you have no thime muscles um and you're turned around foot which is now backwards. Is extra support for that prosthetic foot or leg,

your limb. It's pretty cool. It's basically saying, like, how can we take this and use it to even better utility now that its original purpose has been destroyed? Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. I tried to find photos of a cross transferred hand, but I couldn't find any photos, and weirdly, pictures of Madonna kept popping up. Does she have something I don't know? Dude? Like, I tried all sorts of Google searches. And she images of her kept popping up, So I don't know, maybe she's got two

left feet or something. She does not what was said in uh Waiting for Guffman. Uh he literally had two left feet. It was kind of a dumb joke, was it? I thought it was. Yeah, So, Josh, that's one way we talked about microsurgery. But there's perhaps another even better way, which will cover right after this message break. Al Right, so we've discussed how you can have surgery, but there may be an actual way to regrow things. Yeah, this

is far, by far the more preferable of the two. Yeah, like fingers, but not like you know, you can't lose a whole finger and regrow. It's got to be above the bone. Like let's say you get the tip of your finger, like your fingernail cut off right and you can't find it. And even better, this just involves like dumping a magic powder on that that wound. So if you if you have your finger cut off below the nail, right below the nail, which happened to a guy in Cincinnati,

um in two thousand and five who owned a hobby shop. Yeah, I used to love those places, man, I go in and be like, I just want all the model airplanes and everything. Yeah, Eddie's Trick Shop in Atlanta was my go to, which I've just discovered still exists. Um, not too far from my house. Is it a magic shop? It's it's like everything. Like they had models and had magic kits, they had you know, whoopee cushions was sort of like a catch all. Yeah. I liked both of those,

but I never went to one that was the same. Yeah. Anyway, Um, this guy, this hobby shop owner, as far as we know, he sold no magic items. Um, he was demonstrating why a motor was very dangerous in an RC plane. He did a good job, I guess, and cut his finger off, and uh apparently his brother was had something to do with finger with tissue regeneration and said, yeah, he was

in the biz. Yeah. And the guy went to the doctor the hospital, and doctors like, we'll give you a skin graft to just kind of cover this weirdness, but um, you know, you lost your finger t s. And the guy's brother was like, don't give the skin graph just yet. Come over. I'll give you a beer, and UM, I'm gonna put some I'm gonna put some something that's called extracellular matrix on your wound, and let's see what happens. And they did, Yeah, and magic happened. Then it regrew.

The guy not only regrew his finger, he regrew apparently not the bone, but very surprisingly the nail bed and fingernail, which apparently, like you don't grow a nail bed back, Like even if you cut off just the tip of your finger, like that, nail beds never growing back. This guy's nail bed grow back. That's awesome. Yeah. Extra cellular matrix is awesome. Um. That's basically like the glue that holds ourselves together. And um, not just us, plants and

animals and trees and they all have it uh in it. Uh, it's functions outside the body cells. That's why it's called extra cellular obviously. And it's collagen. We talked a lot about collagen, the protein that's um, you know, super good for all kinds of things, especially growing skin. Yeah, like you know it's in skin cream and stuff like that. Sure. Um, so typically what they use is uh, this was a powder from pig bladder. But um, I've seen I saw a video on the New York Time site that showed

how they do it today. And this is mainly for um. Like, Uh, let's say you got you didn't want a skin graft for some reason, or it wasn't possible to get a skin graft and you you've lost all the skin on your thigh. They would get a pig bladder and they they spread it out and they remove all the cells basically, yeah, because this stuff doesn't have pig cells. No, don't harvested from a pig body. Yeah, but they still remove the cells in all the DNA with like a chemical bath,

and basically what's remaining is the matrix in it. They end up drying it out and it looks like and cut it into sheets and it looks like a sheet of like parchment paper and then they will put that on your leg and it immediately just starts going to work. Yeah. They used to think that extracellular matrix was just something that provided structure for cells to grow around like a fetal in the fetus. Yeah, because if you're if you're in the fetus and like something happens, you lose a toe.

If you are a fetus, if you're in the fetal position in the womb and you lose a toe, that toes growing back. Yeah, you know, you grow a vestigial tail that goes away. Your feet and hands start out being webbed, so you're growing a lot of stuff and

then getting rid of it. But you can also regrows stuff that you're not supposed to lose up to the age of about two, and then I think the general ideas that the extra show matrix just kind of goes dormant in humans, right, But they thought that it was just structure, and then they realize that no, this is actually creating some sort of signal to the rest of the body to say, hey, don't scar regrow instead, And it goes and recruits stem cells and says, come over here,

and let's rebuild this finger. This hobby shop accident was too ironic. Let's reward this man with a regrown finger, and don't forget the nail bed. That's what ex cellular matrix says to everything else. Yeah, and it's uh, it's

pretty cool. The problem with um why you can't normally just regrow a finger is because when something like that happens, the trauma happens, your body says it recognizes it, and the immune system kicks in and it's gonna swell up and get inflamed, and scar tissue is gonna start to form, and extra cellular matrix prevents the inflammation, prevents scar tissue from forming and basically tells the body like, no, I'm just gonna grow like normally, right, not scar tissue, just

regular old cells. But like you said, after a certain age, it just goes away, Like we have the extra cellular matrix still, but it's function or its ability to trigger regrowth is just becomes dormant or something happens to it. And with this pick bladder stuff, um, they're they're starting to wonder, is there a way that we can just trigger this naturally in the body. And if that's the case,

then say hello to regrowing a whole head. I mean you never know, because they pointed out that like deer can regrow antlers and um, things like that, and they're so different than us cellularly, right because it has bone, cartilage, yeah, skin, sure, Um, all those things are in your hand, your arm, your leg, and you would need to regrow all those two for something to really be considered regrown. You can't just regrow the leg but not the bone. It'd still be impressive,

but you're like it's kind of flopping there. Have you ever seen the picture of that UFC fighter who's like kicking the guy and he breaks his own leg and it's just like almost like a cartoon or mcgahey. Oh yeah, well it's mcgahey. Yeah. Yeah, that's stuff. UM triggers the old mirror neurons big time. Makes me weak. Uh So that's basically I mean, they've they've been experimenting with war veterans Iraqi war veterans. Uh. And actually the New York Times video, I saw that it was a war veteran

who was having this done to his thigh. Yeah right, I think it was skin and tendons and yeah, and it was you know, it looked an early but it was functioning and that counts. You got anything else? No, I think that's it. There's literally nothing else to say about I agree, sir. All right. Uh well, then if you want to learn more about replantation, you can type that word into the search bar how stuff works dot com and it'll bring up a couple of cool things

at the very least. Also, UM, type in extracellular matrix, which is pretty cool sounding. Um, and that'll bring up another article too. And uh since I said those things, it's time for listener mail. That's right, I'm gonna call this correction. You get these from time to time, and we like to read him. Yeah, from time to time. Hey guys, Jerry loved the work you do. I love listening to the show. I wanted to write in though,

with a correction regarding Lewis and Clark. I'm working towards my PhD in art history and I am particularly interested in the history of medicine and disease. On the middle of the show, Josh mentioned that the Adventure Party inadvertently discovered syphilis had not been known to Europeans up to that point. This is actually not the quite the case.

Syphilis goes back pretty far in European history. It was first documented in the late fifteenth century after a conflict between France and Italy, and remained an issue for europe peaking around the mid nineteenth century. Nineteenth century. Yeah, okay, Josh did have part of it right though, when he said that the party blamed it on Native American groups. Early on, everyone wanted to blame the disease on everyone else.

No surprises here. But after that initial conflict, the French referred to syphilis as the Neapolitan sickness, while the Italians named it the French sickness, a trend that continued as the stuff spread. You you if you're interested. It's really fascinating stuff, especially the cures that became popular. Mercury was a really nasty one. History of Syphilis by Claude Catel is a pretty good reference. She read a book called the History of Syphilis. Somebody wrote a book called the

History of Syphilis. Anyway, I just wanted and that was Claude q u e accent of Google t e L. So he's French. That is nice. Isn't that what that's called? I don't remember anymore. I don't either. Anybody just wanted to put it out. Car song. Yeah, that is from Katherine. I'm sorry, Kathleen Pierce into disease. Thanks very very in paintings about disease. I guess so thanks a lot for letting us know that. Kathleen. I feel like I've been set straight. Uh. If you want to set us straight,

we like to be corrected, right, Yeah, and nothing better. Uh. All you have to do is tweet to us to initiate contact. You can tweet to us using our handle s y s K podcast. You can go on to Facebook. That's another great way to contact us. Yeah, you can complain there. Uh, we people love doing that. We're at Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcasts at how stuff Works dot com and although you can't complain, uh, you

can enjoy our website Stuff you Shouldn't dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios. How Stuff Works for more podcasts for my heart Radio because at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows

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