Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Father of Gynecology

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Robert is joined by Dr. Kaveh Hoda to discuss the history of gynecology. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What? What? What? Nope, that's how we're starting the episode, Sophie. With God Bless You? No, with me sneezing. And then God Bless You. And then this... I mean, honestly, you've done way worse, so I'm like cool with it.

How are we doing today? How's everybody? Who are we? Where are we? What are we? This is behind the bastards, and today fucking sucks. It is. It's not a great day.

When were you born? Was Ro older than all of us? Yeah, I'm not that old, Jesus, man. Well, I don't remember when things happened. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, I'm not that old. I'm an 80s child. I'll put it that way.

So yeah, yeah, this is the first day of all of our lives that we're recording this. It'll be coming out a bit later. But the day we're recording this is the first day of all of our lives that Ro V Wade is no longer a thing. Yeah, 1973, I just looked it up. I should have known that. 1973. Yeah. You thought he was older than Ro V Wade?

Listen, I got city miles on me. I get it. I don't remember when things happened. Medicine ages you. I'm a fucking wreck. I get it. Jesus, I'm sorry. You're a doctor.

Apologize to Dr. Hoda immediately. Kava is a doctor, which means he's an adult and all adults are the same age. Yeah, but we have feelings too, Robert. I know. Well. You just ate. I've been so messed up. Madden, you know what's really messed up?

What's that? The history of gynecology. The subject of today's episode. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we're talking about today. This is going to be a rough one.

I don't have anything else to say. This is going to be a rough one, Kava. What do you know about how gynecology started as a discipline in western medical canon? Okay. This is going to be hard on me. I'm not above criticizing medical history. I mean, we have a very bad history with the United States. Every thing does though, actually.

You kind of have higher hopes for medicine. And when you learn about some of the awful stuff in medicine, it's a little bit disappointing, maybe at least because you expect more, but there's a lot of bad people in the world of medicine, did a lot of bad things. You've covered a lot of them, even recent ones. And I'm sure it will be kind like a lot of the other medical advances in medical fields has probably had some pretty awful characters in it. I think I have a sense of who we're talking about today, if that's what we're talking about.

Yeah. Today we are talking about Jay Marion Sims. And as a rule, when you Google this guy, Dr. Jay Marion Sims, although again, at the time he became a doctor, I think there's hairdressers who spend more time in school. It wasn't that hard at the time. He spent eight years in medical school. There's a lot of cocaine and just a lot of nights in the hospitals. That was about it, I'm sure.

Lower bar. Yeah. So when you Google Jay Marion Sims, the thing you'll generally see him described at is the father of gynecology. Which is you would... Oh, I thought you were going to say Colin Firth's doppelganger. He does look a lot like Colin Firth. Listen, that's Mr. Darby you're talking about. I have some respect.

Well, I mean, Jay Marion Sims could have played Mr. Darby. Now, this is a tough one, Kavit, because this guy, unlike a lot of the doc, usually when we have a doctor on here, you're about to hear about them doing some very non-doctorly shit. This guy was pretty competent at medicine. He made his mistakes, but he was kind of on the cutting edge, and he legitimately made some very important breakthroughs in medical science. He is not a medical grifter, and he was not full of shit. What he was was a guy who used enslaved people as test dummies on which he could cut at his will.

And that's what we're talking about today. I'm already sad. Yeah. I do want to start though by... Because this guy gets called the father of gynecology a lot, I do feel like we should go back in time a little bit and talk about kind of what came before him. Because obviously this guy, there's a degree of historical credit this guy should get. He invented some of the most basic tools that are still used today in the trade.

It's probably fair to say he was one of the first people to practice gynecology in a recognized modern way. But in a larger sense, saying that like any person in the 1800s, let alone a dude, could be like the father of gynecology is like lunacy. Because obviously people have cared about health and those organs in that part of the body for forever. And they have been attempting to deal with it one way or the other for forever. And I do want to start talking about that just because I don't like limiting our discussion of medicine to like the 1800s when like shit was getting patented. Because actually useful things were discovered before that period in time.

So obviously it's hard to say what the first medical practitioner would have been. It is certainly someone whose name has been lost to time. If indeed they had a name, right? Like if you're really counting the very first people who figured out that there were different kind of plants or clays and soils, all of these were used in different kind of medical capacities by people in the past. They may have even been people before like names were a thing that people had. One of the reasons for this is that anthropologists suspect that a lot of our early understanding of like what herbs and plants and other things were medicinal came from people observing animals.

There are animals that will seek out medicinal herbs in nature and use them to alleviate discomfort and aid in healing. This is how probably people learned about different things including the plants that we get like Advil and stuff basically from. The plants that like we get. I mean, this is honestly where like DMT and shit comes from. MAOIs, there's like jaguars in the jungle that will seek out banisteropsis, capi and whatnot. So like all of these different like medicines people probably started to find things that were useful in treating ailments by watching animals in the wild take them and kind of like documenting it. It's also worth noting that this is probably not exclusive to humans.

Anthropologists suspect that Neanderthals had medical knowledge and presumably acquired it in the same way. This also probably included basic knowledge about how to deal with wounds because they would people it's not hard to figure out that like putting pressure on a bleed can like help with the bleed, right? We shouldn't assume that people 30,000 years ago were too dumb to be like, oh, if you hold on to a bleed, sometimes they don't die. You know, all that kind of stuff is probably early, early on like medicine. The first documented medical tools in history are believed to be flint tipped drills and bow strings used by Neolithic dentists in Baluchistan around 7000 BCE, which is pretty amazing.

Baluchistan. You making that up or is this a playstation? No, no, no, no, no. It's a let me double check because map stuff is always but I believe it's like. If this ends up being right next to Iran, I'm going to be really pissed. I don't think it's far. I mean, Baluchistan.

Oh my God. Yeah, there is a Baluchistan. Yeah. It's one it's part of Pakistan. Oh, okay. So it's yeah, it's not far. It's not far. Yeah, it's like, yeah.

And that kind of Indo-Aryan area. So yeah, that's the first and the first medical tool. And again, these are just the first ones that we've probably the oldest tools that we have on record, right? Which isn't to say that these were the first, but that's interesting to me always that like dental tools, it doesn't make sense like the consequences of fucking up with dental surgery or less than like heart surgery. So it makes sense that like people might have figured that out earlier, right? Yeah. They could see the teeth.

Yeah, exactly. They could see that just by opening their mouths. It's easier access. Yeah. And obviously like tooth problems would have been all fucking very common. Yeah. However, some researchers have recently argued convincingly that the very first recorded medical device in history came much earlier was not a drill or any kind of surgical tool, but was actually the statuette commonly known as the Venus of Willendorf,

found in Austria in 1908. If you've seen this artifact, and I think anyone who's gotten through grade school has seen it in a textbook, it is one of the most common pieces of ancient art that you'll see. It dates back to about 28,000 years ago, give or take, and it depicts a rotund woman with substantial breasts and wide hips. The guys who found this in Austria were like white Victorian dudes, and they assumed immediately that this was pornography of some sort and that the Venus descriptor was like, the fact that they called it a Venus was like them making fun of primitive undeveloped savage people, right?

And like, oh, this is what they thought was hot. Look at these weirdos in the past, said those weirdos in the past. So more recently, several groups of scholars have argued that the Venus was in fact an obstetric aid used by women to track the progress of their pregnancies, the changes in their own bodies and the bodies of others over time during a pregnancy, and perhaps even as part of an attempt to figure out what body shapes were most likely to survive childbirth. Basically, an attempt to document, here's what our members of our tribe or clan or whatever look like in different stages of the pregnancies that we can know.

Well, the women who look more like this have an easier time surviving the birthing process, right? This is again... Oh, it's wild. Yeah, I did not know about that. It's like a statue. It's in every textbook. It's like Michael Crichton books. It's in a lot of pop culture. There's a time travel thing, but I had no idea there was an actual use for it.

Yeah, one of the ways in which there's been a couple of papers on this at this point, and one of the things, the first set, I actually talked to one of the guys who did the first paper, one of the things they pointed out is that if you take pictures of the Venus from the perspective of its head, like looking down at its breasts, looking to the side at its hips, they compared that to pictures pregnant women took of themselves with the camera, like facing where their eyes were of the same parts of their body, and it looks like the depiction of a pregnant person that a pregnant person would make of their own body if they did not have access to a mirror or something.

They were just looking down at themselves and trying to sculpt a representation. In 2020, further research was published, and I'm going to quote now from a write-up in Art Critique about it, quote, published recently in Obesity, a scientific journal, Richard J. Johnson, Miguel A. Lanaspa and John W. Fox offer that variation in size amongst Venus sculptures was directly related to climate and proximity to glaciers. Because survival required sufficient nutrition for childbearing women, they write, we hypothesize that the overnourished woman became an ideal symbol of survival and beauty during episodes of starvation and climate change in Paleolithic Europe. The study further points out that the Venuses, often made out of mammoth ivory, stone and horn,

were worn down and smooth, likely result of being handled, indicating that they were probably passed down through generations. The study proposes that the Venuses could have been used as tools to teach women coming into their childbearing years, then increasing their own body fat would allow them to survive through difficult climates. Body positive, I like it. Yeah, and I think it's obviously, it's unlikely that the Venuses we have, any of them particularly, are the very first ones done, but these go back very far, 28,000 years or so before the first dental drills.

Part of what that suggests is that maybe some of, if not the very earliest people practicing medicine and anything that could be considered a kind of like organized way would have been women either trying to survive pregnancy or trying to help other women survive pregnancy, right? Which is also very logical if you think about like, you know, how like the priorities people would have had back then. I state all this because number one, we're about to talk about a very different period in the history of women's health when the only people who are allowed to study it were men. And I don't want to pretend, because when you call somebody like James, James, Mary and Sims, like the father of gynecology, it does kind of like insinuate that this is the start of like women's health as like a medical discipline

and it absolutely is not, right? People have been working and in a lot of cases we could talk about, you know, midwives in Europe and like a lot of, like honestly a lot of the best knowledge about childbirth and whatnot would have come from them rather than doctors for most of the history of medicine for reasons we're about to talk about. I just wanted to note as we get into this really misogynistic and racist story that the history of gynecology does not in fact begin with James, Mary and Sims and gynecology obstetrics. It's all kind of like woven together at this point because there's not a lot of specialization yet. Right.

When we talk about where we're talking about, which is the early 1800s. So I'm going to move into the story now. James, Mary and Sims was born in Lancaster County, South Carolina in 1813. Most of the knowledge we have of his early life comes from his autobiography, The Story of My Life which he wrote 40 years after the experiments that are going to take up the bulk of our discussion today. To give you an idea of the sort of guy he was, the book opens with 40 pages he had someone else write about what a hero he was. The way to do it.

That's all I'm going to do it. I'm going to read you a sample passage from this fucking book, Kave. His mouth was admirably formed, the lips being of medium fullness, the lower lips somewhat fuller, indicating decision of character. His smile was one of kindly sweetness. His head was rather below than above the average size and its unusual height and proportion to its circumference pointed his Gaelic origin for, through his mother, the blood of the McGregors of McAlpin caused foolproof in the veins of their descendant.

His tout ensemble suggested, in all respects, Sir John Bell's ideal of the qualities necessary in a truly great surgeon, the brain of the Apollo, the heart of a lion, the eye of an eagle, and the hand of a woman. Just so you know, this is classic academics. Classic academics. This is how it is. This is how it is in the teaching. You go to Mayo, everyone's like this. Classic beautiful Gaelic features.

Yeah, beautiful feet and the hands of a woman. Yes. That's actually kind of a compliment though. At least that part of it's like, you know. Lady like hands in the heart of a lion. He's perfect. He's a perfect man. Yeah. So, I mean, just as an idea of where this guy's ego ends up, that's like how, that's what he has someone else right opening his fucking idol biography.

Can I just ask you a question? Am I at some point when he is forced to confront some of the bad stuff that he does, am I going to absolutely hate him for his responses and when he looks back upon it in this book? Yeah, yeah, it's pretty weasley what he does. Okay, good, good. I just want to make sure I was really going to hate it. So, following tens of thousands of words of effusive praise, the book opens with Sims explaining how a bunch of people just demanded he write this autobiography.

He's like, doctors are autobiographies aren't normally interesting, but the demand has been so intense that I must. I'm going to tell you, I know how this happened, because when you're a doctor and you're being followed around by like a big group of medical students, you have them at your, you have to, their grades, their lives, their future careers are in your hands. And I've never gotten more fake laughs than when I like have medical students with me. I'm like very sensitive to it. God, what a dream.

It's, you would think, but at some point it kind of drives you crazy because you're like, wait, was that, don't, don't give me a courtesy laugh. I want, you don't have to do that. And that's what's happening to this guy. There's all these students being, oh my God, you're so amazing. Please tell us how you have to write a book, sir. Sir, you have to write a book. You have predicted this because he starts to hospital. So yes, that's absolutely the case here.

I know, I know this guy. Yeah. I know him. So, um, he notes that his, uh, yeah. He gives through some interminable family history before he starts talking about his own birth. He notes that his parents were descended from English colonists in Virginia, that his family had come to North America in 1740, and that his grandfather served in the Revolutionary War.

Quote, when I was 10 or 12 or 11 years old, he showed me a document with Washington's name signed to it, but I did not have enough sense to appreciate it or to care to know what it was. Um, who knows if that's true. Might have been, uh, might have just been something he said because it was kind of in vogue in this period of time. If you were a certain kind of white dude to be like, oh yeah, my, I had a grandpa or a dad who knew George Washington for sure.

Yeah, right. Um, now his grandfather lived to age 95, which is insane in that. That's pretty good now. Like in the 1800s, like that is the toughest son of a bitch in several counties. Yeah. Um, and one of the, he talks a lot about how the men in his family live long lives, and then he spends several pages whining that his dad died at age 78, which is again, pretty good for the eight era.

Not bad for now again. I mean, with a married man like healthcare as it is, that's pretty good. Um, and he spends a long time listing all of the things his dad could have done to have lived longer because he was supposed to live to be over a hundred. Yeah. Um, and then after he spends all this time complaining about his father dying early at 78, he notes offhandedly, my mother died at the age of 40 of common bilious remittant fever,

the disease that is cured now with the greatest facility, but at the time was attended with great mortality because they were ignorant of the method of cure. That's it. That's all for mom. That's all for mom. Oh, this was an amazing time to be alive. Jesus Christ.

It sure was. Dad only lived to 78. What a tragedy if he'd, you know, avoided this and taken this and done this that I told him, oh yeah, and mom dropped it 40, but whatever. Yeah. She didn't have his lips. Did you see my father's lips? They were perfect.

My father's beautiful full lips. Oh, they were beautiful. Oh, it's great. So Mary and Sims was educated from a young age as his father had not really gotten an education and was kind of insecure about it, right? So he wants his kid, which is normal, right? He wants his kid to have a better life than he did. The family owned a store and so most mornings,

five-year-old Marion would hike a mile to the local school, which was run by a Scotsman. He is the kind of autobiographer who always lets you know the race of everybody who comes up in the book. It is very important, you know, this guy was a Scotsman and you know the Irishmen are Irish and the Germans are Germans. Yeah, he's real, real insistent on that. Now, since he was six at the time,

Sim says that he remembers little of this period, which is fair. I don't remember a whole lot about being six, but he does note that, quote, the teacher flogged the boys occasionally very severely and stood some of them up in the corner with a fool's cap on. Which is probably not weird for the time, but always funny to read about kids getting hit in old-timey schools. So school in this part of the United States in this time

was often summer term only. That was actually kind of the norm back in the day. You would go to school during the summer because like, there's no planting or anything during the summer, right? You plant in like the spring and you harvest in kind of like the fall. Summer, there's not really much for the kids to do. So that's like the best time and winter, it's usually like you're too busy not dying of freezing to death

to go do much in the winter. So kids would go to school in the summer. Now, the elder Sims didn't like the idea of his son only receiving a couple of months of schooling per year. So he spent a significant amount of money to send his boy, now age six, to a boarding school in 1819. Adult Sims lets us know that this teacher was an Irishman who was badly pockmarked from smallpox.

This is, again, critical detail from his childhood for you. He was, quote, a rigid disciplinarian altogether very tyrannical. And I was very unhappy at his house because I think he's living with the teacher. That's the kind of weird boarding school. It's not like a big boarding school. It's like this guy runs a school in a town

and people who live in rural communities will send their kids to live with them for a few months and do school. I learned so much weird shit from your show, man. Yeah, it's weird. I think this is pretty common for the period. I've read about this on other cases. It's so great though.

I learned so many little facts I get to drop on other people. This is a great one. I'm sorry, go on. Imagine how much that would suck. It's like you got to go live with your math teacher now, son. It's the only way for you to learn things. What a bad youth that would be. I fucking love that response.

I learned the weirdest shit from it. It's a lot of weird shit, but it's great. I love it. I would not choose for that to be how my childhood went. But you know what I would choose for someone's childhood? I bet you you would choose them the delightful product and services that are funding this program. I believe that children have the right to engage in projects and services

and more than anything, I believe that children have the right to be put on child hunting island where they can become part of the economy. That's what always gets bleeped out. Fantastic. That is. That's what always gets bleeped out. Now you know it.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Oh, Kave. You know, we should probably talk about something. Obviously, the FDA just banned jewels to protect the kids. I think, you know, youth smoking, youth vaping have actually both been dropping for a while. My opinion, Kave, is that we ought to do the thing

where you just force kids to smoke when they're in grade school, right? Because what's the one way to make not consuming tobacco cool? Something kids do like they'll hang out and they won't smoke, force them to smoke at school. Yeah, this was proven a long time ago in a documentary about Donald Duck, where he forced Huey Dewey and Louie to smoke a whole carton of cigarettes. And they got so sick that they never wanted to smoke again.

I think that makes a lot of sense. That does make a lot of sense. And if you at home have an argument, I want you to think to yourself, has Donald Duck ever been wrong? And the answer is no. No. And we shouldn't wear pants. And we shouldn't wear pants. We shouldn't wear pants. Shirt cock it, give your kids cigarettes, make them smoke at school.

Anyway, back to the podcast. So he goes to this boarding school with this Irishman, who is a tyrannical guy. He's going to live at his house. He clearly found the experience somewhat traumatizing because he writes pointedly in his autobiography, quote, my convictions now are that the best place for a child under 10 years of age is with his mother.

Wow. And it does say a lot both about the experience he had, that like as a guy who does not talk about his feelings, he wants to note this decades later. Like I think that points to this being pretty traumatizing to him. And also it points to kind of what was going on at the time that he also felt the need to tell other readers in the late 1800s, like don't separate small children from their parents.

Yeah. Yeah. That was probably crazy at the time. Yeah. What? This guy is so progressive and weird. He'll make him soft. Now, from this very early age,

Sims was extremely competitive against his peers. The school had a daily challenge where if you got like kudos or something, you know, if you basically, you got like a praise from the teacher. If you were the first kid who got to class, you got to sit in a special seat. And Sims wound up in a rivalry. There was this 10 year old who was always the first kid in class

whose name he remembered like 80 years later. And he gets into like a competition with this kid over who can get to school fastest, quote. And this kid's name is James Graham. So this is him writing. However, the boy that got ahead of James Graham had to rise very early in the morning. I remember getting up one morning long before daybreak.

The dread of my young life was mad dogs and runaway inwards. I started off for the schoolhouse on a trot an hour before day, looking anxiously from side to side and before and behind, fearing all the time for those two great bugbears of my young life, these mad dogs and runaway inwards, with which the minds of the young were so often demoralized by Negro stories. So... I really hate this guy.

And he is talking here about runaway slaves, right? Which is a book, like kids get warned like, hey, if you wander off the path, you go into the woods, like there are runaway slaves, they'll murder you, right? Like it's a thing white people tell their kids, you know? That's what he's referring to, right? Is these stories he would have been told of a kid of like runaway slaves hiding in the woods that he has to watch out for.

Obviously nothing ever happens. But the fact that he refers to them that way, and he does not use that polite term, should be a hint as to this fellow's attitudes on racism. Yeah, although I, again, as racist as this is, I do want to note like he is totally normal for his time, because it is the United States in the early 1800s, you know? He is growing up deep within like slavery,

and there is nothing about it that he finds unsettling other than the thought that he might get hurt by a freed slave, right, or an escaped slave, right? So in second grade, his teacher had one remarkable peculiarity, which was that, quote, it made no odds whether a boy was good or bad. He invariably got a flogging on the first day. So one of his teachers in second grade is like, first time a new kid comes in, I'm on a whip him.

It's like gang initiation. It's the worst school. I bring this up because he goes on to tell the story of a seventh grade or a seven-year-old who got flogged because he had to spend a single day in their class, and the kid wasn't a student. His brothers were, and his mom had to go into town, so she dropped him off at the school

because she didn't want to leave him at home, quote, with the Negroes. Again, this is like, these are the people who are raising him. These are the adults in his culture, right? We're taking you somewhere safe, son, to the flog house. Yeah, we don't want you to hang out around the slaves. Let's take you to go get beaten with a whip by a teacher. You're seven, you can handle it. So I think you're getting an idea of how this kid's early life went, right,

and kind of the culture that raises him and its values. When Marion was like 12, his dad is elected sheriff of Lancaster Village, which most sources will note was north of Hanging Rock Creek. You can probably guess who tended to get hung there and why. Once his dad was established in a prominent position, he was able to send his son to Franklin Academy, where he studied for two years before earning admission to South Carolina College.

So he starts college at 14, which is not abnormal at the time, right? Again, in this same period of time, if you're in Germany, if you're in most of the Western world at age 14, you're legally an adult in a lot of the West, right? You're starting to do a man's work in that period of time, so it's not wild that he's going to college at age 14. He does well in college. He's quickly admitted to the Euphradian Society,

which is a literary fraternity for nerds. The Euphradian Society existed as a result of a split with an older fraternity, and for whatever it's worth, the one Marion joined was the less famous of the two, because their sister fraternity, the Clareasophic Society, counted a bunch of famous people as members, including John C. Calhoun. So, yeah. By this point, he had decided to become a doctor,

in South Carolina College. He basically interns with a local doctor, right? In this period of time, medicine, it's still this kind of hybrid of the way it existed pretty much forever, which is you find a doctor and you become their helper, and that's how you learn a lot of the tools of the trade. But there's also a school, there's also medical schools,

and you can get a degree and stuff, but kind of both things are common, which is not like today. You have your, what do you call it, residency and stuff. But in this period of time, he kind of starts his residency at the same time as he's starting to go to medical school, and medical school is not nearly as formal. So, his medical schooling starts,

his formal medical schooling starts with a three-month course at a medical college at Charleston. But he finds that too hard, so he quits, he goes to Philly and he joins a worse medical school. Ah, that's what I want in my doctor. That three-month course was just too intense. Well, you know the old joke, you know what they call the doctor who quits his medical school

after three months and goes to a worse medical school and graduates at the bottom of that medical school. You know what they call him? A doctor? That's right. Classic joke. Ah, good stuff. I mean, on like three months now,

you can't become a paramedic in three months, right? Isn't that like a year or so? Three months would be like one rotation in like babydyne. Yeah, it's very little in today's standards. But he does eventually get into a worse medical school. He graduates in 1835 and is in his words, quote, a lackluster student who showed little ambition. He noted in his memoirs,

I felt no particular interest in my profession at the beginning of it apart from making a living. I was really ready at any time and at any moment to take up anything that offered or held out any inducement of fortune because I knew that I could never make a fortune out of the practice of medicine. I didn't really feel passionate about my work

until I realized I could really make people suffer. Yeah, until I learned how to get fucking rich. I didn't care about being a doctor. So he is a graduated doctor at age 22, which man, I don't know that I think 22 year old should be driving cars, but it's a different time. You know, it is a different time. Very far off.

And there's a lot less medicine to learn, right? Yeah. There's much less medicine to learn. If you even go back now, like 10 years, like 10, 15 years, like the books we took for our step one training test, they were like maybe a quarter inch thick. And now over the years, they're like two to three inches thick of all the stuff you have to learn, just in that one,

for that one test. Yeah. So in the last, it's been a little bit more exponential in terms of what we have to learn in terms of the sciences. But yeah, I imagine back then it was like maybe a pamphlet in life. Yeah. Pay attention.

If you condensed all of the good medical information, you could have fitted into a zine. Right. Mostly it would have been wash hands underlined a bunch. Right. They were pretty far from that. Yeah. That is a contentious debate at the time.

Yeah. People are getting stabbed with forceps over it. That's exactly right. Yeah. So, you know, he's a doctor, 22. He goes back to his hometown. Now he has no actual clinical experience. He had never worked in a hospital.

Basically, kind of by his own admission, didn't know how to do anything. His first two patients are newborn babies and both of them die instantly. This makes him sad for reasons that I think are understandable. And to be fair, with the best medical knowledge at the time, there's a pretty good chance he wouldn't have saved those babies because it is 1835. Yeah. Yeah.

So he gets very sad and he flees to Alabama. He lives there in a disreputable boom town, presumably drinking too much due to the fact that he described it as, quote, nothing but a pile of gin houses, stables, blacksmith shops, grog shops, taverns and stores thrown together in one promiscuous huddle. You will note that three of the six business types he describes are just different types of bars. We have the gin house.

We have the rum house. We have the whiskey house. We have the rye whiskey house. So in 1836, home from Alabama, he marries a woman named Teresa. And in 1837, he and his new bride move to Macon County to get Sims's first real job, which is working as a plantation physician. So as you probably have guessed, his primary patients there are not plantation owners.

They probably hired better doctors because he's not very good at this point. His patients are enslaved people, right? Now, in some ways, this is not an inherently evil job because like slavery is wrong, but like it's not wrong to provide medical care to enslaved people, obviously. And he did a lot of operations on club feet, cleft pallets, crossed eyes, like, and that's like even if you're working for a plantation owner, if you are carrying out medical procedures on people who are enslaved,

it's like good to do that. So this is not like a job that is necessarily the worst thing you could be doing at this time if you're interfacing with the slave economy. However, the job of plantation doctor does not just mean being paid to take care of enslaved people. It is fully integrated into the machinery of slaveholding and the South's budding human trafficking business. See, the foreign importation of slaves had been banned in 1808, which meant the growing demand for enslaved black people in the United States

was served primarily by forcing enslaved people to make babies and then selling those babies, right? You cannot import more enslaved people after 1808. The way that the slave economy keeps going is they force enslaved people to have children and then they steal those children and sell them, right? That is how it works. Doctors are a critical part of this because, again, not the easiest thing to keep mothers and babies alive in this period of time. Now, I want to quote now from a write-up by Monica Cronin.

Quote, So they're part of this machine to keep slavery going, the economy of it. And they are arguably a critical part of the most profitable part of this machine because the slave owners themselves will argue that keeping enslaved women breeding is more profitable than any individual labor, right? So Sims's work was very much critical in maintaining the profitability of his employer's slave empires. And he was not an insignificant part of this machinery in the state of Georgia. This write-up from HistoryNet goes into more detail.

According to Vanessa Gamble, university professor of medical humanities at George Washington University, Sims's practice was deeply rooted in the trade for enslaved people. Sims built an eight-person hospital in the heart of the trading district in Montgomery. While most health care took place on the plantation, some stubborn cases were brought to physicians like Sims who patched up enslaved workers so they could produce and reproduce for their masters again. Otherwise, they were useless to their owners. This brings up the concept of soundness, says Gamble.

Being sound meant, they produce for men and women and reproduce for women, right? So this is like, yeah, this is the thing. Now, we are somewhat reliant upon Sims here for information on the size and scope of his practice. But his claim is that his practice was not merely one among many, but the largest surgical practice in Alabama and the largest practice any doctor in Montgomery had ever had up to that point. Again, he is a narcissist. This may be untrue.

I'm not saying that to like mitigate his crimes. It's just like he's not an entirely reliable narrator here. And the fact that he's just like, I had the most racist medical profession in the field. I was the biggest racist and the greatest racist doctor you've ever seen. Yeah. And also, it is entirely possible he was the biggest. You know, that's not an impossible thing here.

He's certainly a significant part of this. And it's also, as you said, worse noting that he's like, I was the most important of the racism doctors. Yeah. And again, he has so many patients because he provided an economic, like a cost effective way for slave owners to keep their human assets productive in that sense. As a doctor, Sims had to treat female patients regularly and he hated this. No doctors at the time liked working on women. This is going to be gnarly.

So buckle up. One of Sims' major critics, Derinda O'Genuga, explained it this way in her article for the Journal of Medical Ethics. Quote, To complicate the situation even more, the medical specialty of gynecology did not exist. The practice of examining the female organs was considered repugnant by doctors who were almost all males. In fact, in American medical schools, obstetrics and child delivery were taught by the use of dummies. And often it was not until the doctor was in practice that he actually delivered a baby.

According to Wurts and Wurts, 1977, young doctors rarely had any clinical training on what the theory of birth meant in practice. Many arrived at a birth with only lectures and book learning to guide them. If they and the laboring patients were fortunate, they had an older, experienced doctor or attending woman to explain what was natural and what was not. Many young men were less lucky and were embarrassed, confused and frightened by the appearances of labor and birth. So most doctors know almost nothing about labor, but again, this is part of why you're in better hands a lot of times with a midwife here.

Then you are going to a doctor for this. And if I can be fair for a second, there was very few things in medicine that scared me when I was doing my medical school training, but childbirth was one of them. I found it terrifying. The risks were the... I'm scared holding babies. Exactly.

I mean, you don't want to fuck it up so bad. It can be so stressful. I don't think that's quite the issue that all these people are facing at the time, but I'm just going to say it is a really tough field. I have a lot of respect for OB-GYNs. Of course. It's like the one field of medicine where you're not just avoiding death. You're actually bringing life into the world.

So it's kind of like cool in that way, but it's also very high risk, high reward sort of thing. The lows can be so low. It's like soul crushing if it happens. I know. And one has to assume, you have to assume there are the odd shining examples here of male doctors who actually give a shit about this, but they are very few and far between. And for the most part, doctors are scared of this and don't know much about it.

And part of this is based on the very, again, Victorian attitudes towards sex and sexuality at the time. So to give you an idea of how fucked up this is, when Sims was trained as a doctor, the standard medical procedure for doing a pelvic exam was to look directly in the eyes of the patient and nowhere else, because actually looking at their genitals would have been inappropriate. Really creepy. Yeah. You are staring in their eyes, not looking at what your hands are doing.

Really uncomfortable. Yeah. The description of this is very uncomfortable. Yes. Makes me very uncomfortable. Probably seems like it is hard to do good medicine that way. Right. Not an OBGYN, but I assume that makes it more difficult.

So again, I stayed on this to note that given both just kind of the limitations of science and the cultural limitations placed on doctors and the doctors placed on themselves in this period, it was basically impossible to solve what was probably the worst pregnancy-related illness of the day, which was vaginal and rectal fistulas. Now, these can be deeply unpleasant things to deal with. The gist of the issue is that a whole develops, and this is like a thing that happens due to getting that baby out of there. The trauma of a delivery. Yeah.

Yeah. A whole develops between a woman's bladder and vagina. This can lead to constant uncomfortable and uncontrollable urinary incontinence, and worse versions of the condition lead to uncontrollable fecal incontinence too. I probably don't need to be labor what an issue this would be for anyone suffering from it and what kind of impact this would have on their life. People with these fistulas cannot safely carry additional children to term. So if they are enslaved people, number one, you can't really work with this.

It gets in the way of you being able to labor and be a productive economic unit, and you also cannot bear additional children. In the minds of a slave holder, this health issue turns a woman into a complete financial loss, right? Which is how they think about these women, right? These human beings are purely financial instruments for them, you know? They look at them as like chattel almost. They're not looking them as they would look at a normal patient. Right.

So from the perspective of the people who own slaves, this is a major financial issue. Obviously, from the perspective of both enslaved women and free women, this is also just like a horrific health problem that there is no cure for, right? Because this affects everybody. And it's, I mean, I don't, again, feel like I don't have to believe or like why everyone would want there to be a cure for this. I just feel the need to point out that the people who are paying Jay Marion Sims, who's going to work on this problem, want it cured specifically for financial reasons, right?

Right. Now, Jay Marion Sims was going to be the guy who fixes this problem, which is sort of surprising because up until his 30s, women's health was pretty much just an afterthought for him. As he wrote, quote, I never pretended to treat any of the diseases of women. And if any women came to consult me on account of any functional derangement of the uterine system, I immediately replied, this is out of my line.

I do not know anything about it practically. He advised them to seek, he advised them to seek help with a different physician. All this changed one day, a few years into his practice, when he was called to work on a woman who had fallen off a horse and was in pain around her back and pelvis. He assumed she dislocated her uterus, which I guess is a thing that can happen. He probably, it was probably her hip or something. Yeah, he said he thought she had dislocated her uterus, right?

Now, without going into too much detail here, he like gets his hands up in there and he kind of by accident relieves her pain without meaning to, he like pushes a bunch of air into the vagina, which dilates it and in his words, pushes it back in its normal place. I'm not entirely certain what he's talking about here, but the end result of this is that while he's kind of rooting around in there, because of the stuff that he does, he's able to get a good, this woman also has a fistula, which had been an untreatable problem for her.

And because of what he's doing down there, because of the dilation of the vagina, he's able to see this fistula and be what he thinks is probably like one of the first doctors to get a good look at it. And he's close enough to, he can't quite see it enough, but he sees enough of it, he's close enough to seeing that he's like, I feel like I know how I could get a better look at this thing. And obviously, again, he's not actually an incompetent doctor. He quite rationally is like, well, look, I'm really close to seeing this thing.

If I can get the right tool so that I can actually get a good look at this thing, I can figure out how to treat them, right? Which is perfectly reasonable medical logic at this point. Now, the only issue is that the right tools did not exist. Today doctors who work on this thing, one of the tools that we use is called a speculum. And Dr. Sims is the one who invents the precursor to the speculum. He does it by buying a pewter spoon. He grabs two medical students and he goes back to his patient.

He writes, quote, I got a table about three feet long and put a coverlet upon it and mounted her on the table on her knees with her head resting on the palms of her hands. I placed the two students, one on each side of the pelvis, and they laid the hold of the nades and pulled them open. Before I could get the bent spoon handle into the vagina, the air rushed in with a puffing noise, dilating the vagina to its foolish extent.

Introducing the bent handle of the spoon, I saw everything, as no man had ever seen before. So it is, yeah. You know, and we, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the concept of a speculum. I'm, I don't actually know. I'd be curious to see some pictures, but I assume these are much, we now we think about the sort of disposable bivalve plastic, you know, vaginal speculum. I'm assuming this was some sort of, came out looking like some sort of medieval horror device.

It probably looked unsettling. Yeah. Yeah. But this is like, this starts the process that leads to the modern medical speculum, right? Like he is, and this is, this is like good so far. Everything we've talked about in this moment is like this good medicine, I would, I would say. He's on the right path. He's doing something.

Yeah. He's doing something. Yeah. He's following logically. He's trying to relieve a person's, you know, suffering. And he realizes that he can see the fistula and he's got enough working room to experiment with surgical treatments for it. Now, this is a big moment, right? A big moment in just like medicine.

But after this point, things take a much darker turn because this patient, he's got, she's a woman who has some means. He's not going to let him experiment on her, unlike surgically experiment on her because, again, it shouldn't be surprising to people. Experimenting on fistula surgery is nightmarishly painful and dangerous for reasons that should be very obvious because it is the 1830s. This is part of why so little progress had been made on the problem. But as George, or, but as Alabama's largest plantation doctor, Marion Sims had a massive, basically unlimited supply of women with fistulas. Women whose consent was immaterial and their owners had no reason not to send them off with Dr. Sims. Because as we've discussed, a slave who cannot give birth or work is nothing but a money sink. And so Marion starts to make deals with slave owners.

They will give him their slaves for as long as he would need them as test subjects. He will pay for their food, which he did complain about constantly in his memoirs. And the slave owners would cover the tax that he had to pay. And he would use them as experimental test subjects. Oh my God. Yep. I will say, I won't belabor it. And also, it's not my wheelhouse.

I'm not an OB kind, but my dad is. So, you know, dinner conversations in the Hoda family growing up were very different than yours probably. And this procedure requires a high level of skill these days. Anesthesia with either general or like, you know, spinal. We'll be talking about that. Yes. And are very tough things to do. And I think they take probably like an hour to do.

So they're not like quick things in and out. They're like lengthy procedures, surgeries, because you have to dissect the mucosal plane. So it's really, it's pretty, okay, I'm just trying to get myself ready. No, I mean, and that's the thing. Again, we'll be talking about this later. This guy is legitimately good at what he does. Like the actual, he is not a quack. The actual thing he comes up with is an important thing.

We're going to talk about some other aspects of that that make this even more morally questionable. But like what he's doing, he's not bad at the medical side of it. It's the ethics side of it that where things become problematic. But you know what else is problematic? Not. Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. Not having products and services.

Exactly. Not engaging with these products and these services is the ultimate way to be problematic. Because if you're not engaging with these products and services, are you really alive? Or American. Exactly. Damn. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good, bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Oh, Merry Christmas. It's not Christmas. It's nowhere near Christmas. I thought Paul had murdered you, Santa Claus. He did. He did. Paul Schaefer shot Santa Claus in a ditch. And today, we're going to shoot our fun recollection of our old, kind, resident C's and the medical training or something like that. We're certainly going to complicated coffee. So he gets these a number of slave owners to agree to handover enslaved women to him. He is effectively their owner during this period of time in a legal sense of the word.

He begins his experiments in 1845. He is 33 years old. Most historians writing about this will note that he had three patients, Lucy, Anarca, and Betsy. And I had not heard the name Anarca before this dope ass name. Yeah. Spelt like you'd think it is. And this is where we get to the root of why Dr. Sims has been canceled by modern critics. They allege that what he did was human experimentation without consent because true informed consent is impossible from a person who is enslaved. Like you can't consent to be experimented upon if you are owned by the person doing the experimenting.

Now, I don't think the ethics there are complicated. Like, you know, autonomy, it's like the most basic of medical ethics. You have to have informed consent and you have to have some control over one's body. Exactly. Exactly. Now, there are a number of people who are detractors to this idea and the most notable of them is Dr. L. L. Wall. We will be talking about this guy quite a bit. You know, on this show, we occasionally will have like defenders of weird fucked up things. Often it'll be like we're talking about some British empire motherfucker and like his biographer who thinks he's the bee's knees

and like writes long things defending him, massacring people in Africa or whatever. This is a bit different. Dr. L. L. Wall, I think is very, very wrong and some of his arguments are pretty messed up. That said, from what I can tell, he spent a lot of his career flying to impoverished parts of the world and performing surgeries on people with fistulas. I think he's passionate about this because he's dedicated his career to dealing with the specific health issue and Sims is the guy who like most fixed it. Again, L. L. Wall is wrong here, but he's not the same as like some dude whose job is to professionally defend the British empire

because it does seem like his day job is helping people for free with a serious medical issue, which is nice. Anyway, wanted to provide that context because we will be tearing apart some of these guys' arguments in a little bit here. I'm sorry, he's a modern doctor? Yeah, he's around right now. Yes, I think his arguments are bad, but here is one he made in a write up in the Journal of Medical Ethics. This is an ongoing series of arguments that other people have had with him. The first assertion was that it was unethical by any standard to perform experimental surgical operations on slaves because slaves by definition could not have given voluntary informed consent for surgery.

Underlying this assertion is they hidden presupposition that enslaved women with fistulas did not want surgical care for their condition and that they were therefore coerced into having unwanted and perhaps unnecessary surgery. I would argue that that's not actually a hidden presupposition because we're not saying they don't want surgical care. We're saying they can't give informed consent to be experimented upon, which is different, right? Obviously, anyone who has a medical condition wants it to be treated, but that doesn't mean you want to be a test subject in a medical experiment. His argument then is that this particular medical problem is such a nightmare that these women were basically beating down Sims's door to get treatment. In his memoir, Sims claims that he received enthusiastic consent from Lucy, Anarka, and Betsy. We have no actual evidence of this. This is something he writes down later.

None of these women, as far as we know, could read or write. They have left us absolutely no written documentation of their consent. I call absolute horseshit on this guy. Exactly, yes. By the way, I'm so sorry. I know I shouldn't do this because you're giving me all the information right now, but I just Google this guy. I'm so fascinated to know that there's a modern day enthusiast of Dr. Sims. There is this article in the Journal of Medical Ethics by L.L. Wall. The medical ethics of Dr. J. Marion Sims.

A fresh look at the historical record. One of the things that we're quoting from here is that. In his conclusions, he says, in conclusion, it's difficult to make a fair assessment of the medical ethics of past practitioners. Yeah, I don't think it is here, buddy. This key seems pretty open. I think, who knows? It's going to open up further. So again, number one, obviously, outside of what I just said,

even if you ask a person that you legally own if they consent to surgical experimentation, and they say, yes, that still doesn't count as consent, right? For a variety of things, I think what should be obvious reasons, right? Because you own them legally. Again, if their consent is immaterial, then I don't think they can consent. And that's current medical ethics is that they cannot consent. To respect autonomy, they have to be given all the tools to make their own informed decision, and I'm certain that was not happening.

Yeah, but I mean, even outside of that, number one, we have no evidence other than Sims's words that they told him that they consented. And I want to quote from that right up by Monica Cronin again. She notes that Sims published his memoirs well after the end of slavery in the United States, and that he may consciously have wanted to put himself in a positive light by claiming that these women had consented to his experiments. Quote, Sims's memoir is as likely to be a reflection of changing attitudes towards formerly enslaved people and self-conscious image making

as it is to be an accurate portrayal of events. Now, L.L. Wall's argument is that it's pretty obvious the women would have consented because a fistula is such a horrible thing to endure. He goes into some detail here. Quote, in addition to the continuous stream of urine and sometimes feces to which they are subjected, these victims of prolonged obstructed labor also often suffer from secondary infertility, loss of vaginal function due to extensive scarring of the birth canal, damage to the pubic bones, contractures of the lower extremities from neuromuscular damage,

recurring pelvic and urinary tract infections, horribly diminished self-esteem, damaged body image, and not infrequently severe depression, even suicide. The cumulative devastation brought by this process can be appalling. It is hardly the relatively minor condition referred to by historian Deborah Kuhn McGregor. And he does have a point there. I think it's probably a bad call to refer to this as a relatively minor condition. But then L.L. Wall extends his argument in what I think is a real fucked up place. Quote, in alleging that it is unethical for slaves to participate in any form of medical experimentation,

Ojanuga and the other writers seem to imply that it would never have been appropriate for slaves to undergo innovative surgical operations, no matter what their problems might have been. Critics of this stripe conveniently ignore the differences between non-therapeutic and therapeutic medical experimentation. In the former case, participants can have no reasonable expectation of obtaining direct personal benefit from whatever is done. But in the case of therapeutic experimentation research, participants may gain direct and sometimes substantial medical relief as a result of their participation in a clinical trial. At the time, Sims began his experiments to repair the fistulas afflicting his African-American slave patients. There was no effective therapy for vesicovaginal fistula.

Many surgeons in different countries had made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to close vesovaginal fistulas and put it into the tormenting loss of urine that these suffering women experienced. With rare exceptions, all such attempts failed. Now, one of the key points against this argument that he's making is that that last part is not true, right? And again, if there were doctors who had successfully provided therapeutic treatments for fistula and had done it without experimenting on enslaved people, then it's even more reasonable to say that Dr. Sims was engaging in unnecessary human experimentation on enslaved people and several doctors had treated fistula successfully.

As far back as 1675, John Paul Mattauer of Virginia had successfully treated one in 1840 and by 1855 had repeated this feat 27 times. George Hayward had closed his first fistula in 1839. Now, the techniques that Dr. Sims is going to develop are more repeatable and are an important, really important part in figuring out a better and kind of more mainstream treatment for this. And he was probably the most tenacious doctor in his field attempting to figure out a replicable treatment. But the fact that multiple other doctors were working successfully on fistula in the same period without experimenting on enslaved people further makes the case that Dr. Sims was not experimenting on these women

because there was no other way nor was he doing it primarily for their benefit. He did it because it was easier. That's pretty key to me. Yeah, I mean, I guess on one hand, you know, it's fine to make this argument that, you know, prior to like 1974 with like the National Research Act and the Belmont Report, all that stuff that came after the Tuskegee experiment, like it's fair to say that before that there was no framework of like, you know, IRBs, studies that you need. That's a fair argument, but you can't get around the fact that

even at the time, I'm sure it was widely considered unethical. And then, yeah, I'm assuming he's doing these without anesthesia. But is he not? Yeah, but anesthesia was around from like, I think 1846, 1847. I think the anesthesia was around at this point, right? Yeah, we are going to, we'll be talking about that a lot in part two. No, no, no, we will be that's that's important. I just get excited. We will be getting into that.

But yeah, it's it's also worth noting that like, and this is also very important, while Marion Sims does make sure to claim that the three women who are named in his book gave their consent, he also introduces quite blithely that there were multiple other enslaved women he used as test subjects by some accounts like seven. He doesn't even give their names. He makes vague comments that they wanted his help. There is no claim that like these people even consented to the extent that like the others did, which again is not really consent, but like that's part that off it that gets ignored by LL wall. It gets ignored by a lot of people because it's like, well, he names, he gives the names of three of them,

but there were a lot of it because why would he bother, right? Yeah, like they're not people to him. And again, later in his memoir, despite these like single vague claim he makes about consent, he also makes this note quite and this is how he introduces that there were other women he experimented on who were not named. I got three or four more to experiment on and there was never a time that I could not at any day have had a subject for an operation. Again, he's very clear about what he's doing here. Yeah, I mean, he sees them as test subjects, not as humans. I mean, again, the very basics of like medical ethics, like even I know and I'm not like an expert in medical ethics by any means,

non malfeasance, autonomy, justice, all these like basic concepts that are again, very basic. They're not all modern stuff are not being adhered to in the slightest here. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's where we're going to leave it for part one. We get into part two, it's actually even worse than that, Kava. But you know what's not worse than that? Is the podcast that you host? That's right. I actually now now I host two. The first one is the House of Pod.

It's a sort of humor adjacent medical podcast I have on lots of great guests. We have doctors, we have musicians, we have Roberts, we have Sophie's come on the show. And we we talk about medical stuff, science stuff. It's fun. And that you can find anywhere you find your podcast. It is. It is a fun show. Thank you. It's a good time and you might learn something very, very, very important. You learn some stuff and we kind of cover if you like these same sorts of topics that you guys cover here,

we'll cover a lot of similar stuff. And then there's a new show I'm doing with Rebecca Watson, who is awesome, amazing of a skeptic. And we it's called Girls on Boys. It is a podcast where we talk about take deep dives on the show, The Boys, which I find immensely entertaining. And I think it's one of the best satires on TV show. Yeah. Man, Eric Kripke knows how to do gore.

Some of the best television gore I've seen in the ever. We should talk about exploding penises at some point. Oh, man, that's a good scene. It was, I mean, the whole prostate anatomy is there's a question there with that. Yeah. I'm not surprised. Yeah. But the show is amazing and it surprises me in the most fun ways.

So I think it's a smart show. We talk about it. That's Girls on Boys. It's a podcast. You can find it at iTunes. Yeah. Check that out. I have a book called After the Revolution. If you want to buy it and you're looking where you can get it in the indie bookstore in your area,

you can check out this thing I just learned about called Bookshop.org. If you go to Bookshop.org, type in After the Revolution, you can find my book. There's a couple of dollar discount on it now. You can also just go to AK Press After the Revolution, just Google that and you'll find it. So there you go. I love that book, buddy. It's a great book. It's really good.

It's really good. It's a great book. Thank you. Working on the sequel. You can get it everywhere else too, wherever the fuck you find a book. But someone told me Bookshop.org helps out indie bookstores. So maybe try that out. Go to CoolzOnMedia.com to see the rest of the stuff we're working on.

Check out, you know, Ghost Church, Red Poll, cool people, cool stuff. Check it all out. Come on. Or else. Motherfuckers. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.