Lore - Episode 121: Uninvited Guest

Episode Date: August 19, 2019

Some threats to our safety and well-being are obvious and easy to spot from a mile away. Over the course of history, people have become very skilled at looking for danger and avoiding it. But some threats are more difficult to spot—and once they strike, the results can be deadly. ——————— The Lore book series: www.theworldoflore.com/books The Lore TV show: www.Amazon.com/Lore Latest Lore news: www.theworldoflore.com/now Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The autopsy began at 11 a.m., but it didn't go according to plan. The crowd of students who had filled the medical theater were there to learn what they could subject on the table, but the work turned out to be more complicated than the lecturers had expected. For the longest time, the dead man's chest refused to give way to their scalpel blades. Finally, though, shortly before the lecture was scheduled to end, one of the medical instructors managed to cut through the corpse's abdomen, but when he did, he sighed with frustration. It was just one more example of the same condition they had seen so many times before — a sandy diaphragm.

The classroom emptied. All of the students had decided that lunch was a better use of their time and migrated out of the room, but when the theater was empty, one student silently crept back inside. His name was James Padgett, and like all the other students, he attended St. Bartholomew's in London because he wished to become a physician, but he was also a bit more curious than most of them. Snaking down to the corpse on the table, he carefully took a sample of the infected tissue that his instructor had called sandy diaphragm. Then, pulling out a hand lens, he gave the sample a closer look and then caught his breath. There was more to the tissue sample than the small, crystal-like grains that earned the condition its name. Padgett would later go on to use a more

powerful microscope and then write up his findings in a paper which he presented to a student group in February of 1835. Sadly, he was beat to the finish line by one of his professors, who discovered what Padgett was researching and then used his more official connections to have his own paper submitted to the Royal Society. James Padgett's curiosity might have started the race, but he lost because he didn't know the shortcuts. What he discovered, though, confirmed something that few of us are ready to accept. We like to imagine that we live in a bubble, that our bodies are safe and clean and free from harm, but if there's one thing that James Padgett and others over the centuries have learned,

it's that we are far from the masters of our own domain. We are, in fact, constantly at risk, a heartbeat away from losing control, vulnerable to a chance encounter that could threaten our well-being, our comfort, or our very lives. It's a threat that has taken the lives of countless people over the course of history, and while some have made it their life's work to study it, most have been woefully unprepared for just how insidious it can be. We'll never see it coming, but the effects have the potential to be absolutely devastating. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. In the world of the Ancient Greeks, one of the most important places in society

were the temples. They were places of worship and sacrifice, filled with those who came to pay their respects and those who worked within them to help make sure everything ran smoothly. There were priests, as you might expect, but there were also assistants known as acolytes who helped them do their job, and one of the things we've learned about acolytes is that they weren't necessarily paid for their work. Instead, they were allowed to earn a living through a barter system. In exchange for regular meals and a place to stay, they showed up and performed their jobs. They lived off the system, so to speak, and that earned them another name, parasitos, which literally means eating at another's table. In the millennia sense,

that term has trickled down to us from Greek to Latin and then to French, finally giving us a word we've all heard before. Parasites. Today, that word has a bit of an unhappy connotation, and for good reason. But back in the days of the Ancient Greeks, it was originally a neutral term. These acolytes metaphorically ate from another person's table in order to support themselves, and that was a normal and accepted part of temple life. But around the 4th century BCE, that started to change. The writers of a number of Greek comedies began to use the term in their plays to refer to dinner guests who turned out to be a bit too difficult to kick out. Freeloaders, we might say. And the connotation

stuck. But etymology aside, cultures around the world have been aware of parasitic relationships for thousands of years, and in many cases, they've treated them with respect. In ancient China, the relationship between a master and a student was often represented by the image of a wasp and the worm. In the Vedic literature of India, that same respect can be found through positive use of the parasite and host metaphor, and they built those metaphors by watching the world around them. Modern historians have studied ancient Egyptian documents that describe intestinal worms, and Roman physicians recorded observing similar creatures inside farm animals and fish. Even though they had yet to be bundled under the modern term of parasite,

people have known about them for a very long time and have studied and labeled them like any other creature for nearly as long. But the real scientific exploration began when people started to study how parasites spread. For a very long time, everyone subscribed to a theory known as spontaneous generation. It was an idea put forward by Aristotle and his followers to explain where lower life forms came from. Humans and animals are born through reproduction. But less complex life, he suggested, simply arose spontaneously. For a very long while, that theory was applied to parasites. Creatures like worms and bugs seem to thrive in a wet, muddy environment, so naturally, they must spontaneously appear there.

But in 1832, a French scientist discovered that parasitic worms actually lay eggs, and most horrifying of all, that ingesting those eggs can cause someone to become infected. Naturally, there were brave scientists who wanted to put that idea to the test. The Italian scientist Giovanni Battista Grassi infected himself with roundworms, and then studied his own feces, days later looking for new eggs, which of course he found. And I know that sounds disgusting, but he's far from the worst defender in medical history. That prize could very well belong to Shimesu Kiyono. He was a Japanese physician and scientist who conducted his own experiment in 1922 by eating over 2,000 roundworm eggs. Then he gathered

hundreds of eggs from a parasite he found inside a pig and fed those to his brother. And while half of me wants to know how, the other half of me just wants to stop thinking about it entirely. What's fascinating about Kiyono's work, though, is that when the eggs began to reappear, it wasn't just in his feces. Both he and his brother developed bad coughs, and they found parasites in the mucus that was expelled from their lungs. The worms had burrowed out of their digestive system and into their lungs, which is horrifying, yes, but it also widened our understanding of how these creatures work. But even that simple idea that someone needed to ingest the eggs of a parasite in order to become infected was eventually thrown out the door.

In 1896, a German scientist named Arthur Luce was managing his own experiment when he became infected, even after being careful not to eat his subjects. It turns out his infection happened in a much more frightening way. Touch His parasite of choice happened to be the hookworm, and after accidentally brushing his hand over part of the sample, he developed an intense itch in that hand. The hookworms had latched on, drilled in, and then began to burrow into his body. As a scientist, I'm sure he was absolutely fascinated. As a human being, though, I can't help but wonder if he screamed, even just a little. 1. Last Story About These Wonderful Little Hookworms

The discovery that Luce made was terrifying, yes, but it provided answers to an age-old medical mystery. For a very long time, miners and laborers in the construction industry who spent a lot of time in the mud and soil would sometimes develop what was referred to as plumber's itch, or tunnel disease, red, itchy lines that grew just below the surface of their skin. It's probably safe to assume that it was called tunnel disease because of where they contracted it, but there's also a bit of irony there, because what was happening was literal tunneling. You see, some forms of hookworms can't burrow from the skin to the digestive system. They get trapped just below the surface and sort of dig their way along, leaving those red infected tunnels

behind them. Clinically, it all makes sense, and giving it names like Ground Itch or Tunnel Disease certainly helps remove the mystery, but there's one other name for the infection that masterfully captures the full horror of the symptoms, while also hinting at something darker and more terrifying. They called it the creeping eruption. It's one thing to know that parasites exist. We can accept that and even find a way to move forward, but where the true darkness creeps in is when we realize just how devastating they can be, and we can thank one of the students of Arthur Luce for showing us that. Charles Wardwell Styles wasn't German like his mentor. He was born in Spring Valley, New York

in 1867, and after studying with Luce at the University of Leipzig, he returned to America to continue his work in the field of parasitology, and it was just a few years after that in 1902 that he applied his skills to a civil war mystery. Andersonville, Georgia was home to the largest Confederate prison camp ever created. At its peak in 1864, it had become home to over 45,000 people, and nearly a third of them died as a result of the horrible conditions. Just how bad was it? Honestly, it's a miracle that more of them didn't die. Prisoners weren't given enough food, so many of them starved or became ill. They were never giving new clothing, so they would either take clothing from the dead or be left to suffer through cold weather with little to no clothing at all.

They weren't allowed to cook the food that they did have, and with no utensils they often had to eat with their hands, and in a camp with no sanitation, constant rain and mud, and weakened immune systems. That was a recipe for disaster. Before the war was over, the Confederates sent an expert in infectious disease to figure out what was killing so many of the prisoners. After months of study and countless postmortem examinations, he concluded that it was scorbidic dysentery. But for a very long time, that conclusion didn't sit well with others in the medical world. Charles Stiles brought his newfound knowledge of parasitology to bear on Andersonville and reexamined the evidence. In the end, he rejected the dysentery diagnosis and instead

claimed that many of the deaths in Anderson could be blamed on the hookworm, which is horrifying to consider. While these prisoners were fighting for enough nutrition to survive, there were colonies of hungry parasites thriving inside their gut. A short while later, the North American hookworm was recognized as a serious health threat and given the scientific name Necator Americanis. Most, though, simply called it the American killer. But hookworms aren't the only parasite with a history in the new world, and over the years, Stiles would identify many of them. There are so many parasites that I could tell you about. On the surface, all of them act in pretty much the same way. A parasite invades a host and then eats at their table, so to speak.

And if that's the metaphor you want to walk away with, it'll do a good job of encapsulating much of the parasite world. But there are other, more insidious versions as well. Just about everyone knows what a barnacle is, right? Technically, it's an arthropod, an invertebrate that has an exoskeleton. Insects, spiders, shrimp, and lobster are all arthropods, and so are barnacles. You've seen them before. They tend to look like crusty hockey pucks that cling to the rocks just below the surface of the ocean or on the hull of a ship. They can even be found on whales. Got it? Good. Because there is a particular type of barnacle known as the rhizophilia,

and it's different from most of its peers. It has no hard shell, and it doesn't look anything like them either. Instead, it has adapted to be a parasite, and what it does is utterly horrifying. The rhizophilia will attach itself to a crab in a very barnacle-like way. But that's where the similarities stop. After that, it begins to grow root-like filaments that spread throughout the crab's body, slowly taking control. In the end, the barnacle will not only control the crab's brain, but also its reproductive system, guiding it to mate with another infected crab, which, of course, produces more rhizophilia. The frightening thing is that once the barnacle has taken control, the crab will forever think of itself as a female barnacle, and it will care for

the barnacle's eggs as if they were its own. It's the natural world's version of the alien from the Ridley Scott movie franchise, infecting a host body and using it to gestate its own offspring, which then dramatically burst out, of course. And it's also the darker side of the coin. In most instances, people have viewed them in a simple, transactional way. There's a parasite, and there's a host. And everything that happens is contained within the intimate relationship that they have with each other while still retaining their own identity. But the rhizophilia breaks that idea and replaces it with something much more complex and dangerous, because it's not just our bodies that are at risk, but the very world we live in.

Parasites have the power to change lives, destroy communities, or transform cultures. And given the right circumstances, they can even alter the very course of history. Henry didn't get a fair start at life. Born in Wales in 1841, his mother abandoned him, and his father and grandfather both died before he was five. But after a decade in the workhouse, he escaped all that and traveled to America, where he planned to start a new life. The next decade was a blur. He fought for the Confederates in the Civil War, but was captured and sent to a prison camp in Chicago. There, he converted to the Union side, but was soon discharged after he became too sick to fight.

In 1864, he managed to join up with a U.S. Navy, quickly working his way to the position of ship's record keeper, and it was there that he learned that he had a talent for recording stories. In fact, he was better than good. When the war was over, he spent a brief amount of time traveling through the Ottoman Empire, but when he returned, he took up the pen and began to write tales of the American West. His accounts of federal military attacks on the Native Americans of the Great Plains might have been overhyped and glorified, but they landed him a writing gig at the New York Herald as an overseas correspondent. In 1869, fate came knocking on his door. It was the owner of the newspaper, and he had a mission for young Henry Stanley,

the travel to Africa and search for Dr. David Livingstone. He was a British missionary and explorer who had set off three years earlier to find the true source of the denial, but much of the world believed he had vanished. The truth was, the British consul in Zanzibar knew exactly where he was, and Stanley's boss wanted him to get an exclusive interview. The culmination of that journey is well known, even if you don't know the details. Stanley made his way south from Egypt through the rainy season. Between the mud, disease, and small skirmishes with locals defending their land, roughly 75% of Stanley's party died before reaching their destination. But when they did, and Stanley saw Livingstone for the first time,

he claimed to have uttered that now famous question. Dr. Livingstone, I presume? Today it's clear to historians that Stanley was a gifted liar who was prone to crafting his own fantastical version of real-life events. Livingstone never recorded that phrase of greeting, and Stanley mysteriously destroyed the pages of his diary that covered that day so we only have his word to back it up. In fact, the chances are good, it never happened at all. But his retelling of their real meeting was enough to convince the New York Herald to send Stanley back to Africa in 1874. The mission this time was to map more of the waterways that Livingstone had started, and so Stanley spent three years following the Congo River,

all the way to the Atlantic. Then he headed to Europe to find a financial backer to continue, selling it as an investment into the politics of the Congo. After England ignored the offer, King Leopold II of Belgium jumped at the chance. For the next five years, Stanley became the chief agent responsible for organizing what would become one of the world's most brutal imperial outposts of European power, the Belgian Congo. And sadly, he was a horrible representative of Europe to the people of Africa. Through the 1880s and 90s, Stanley crisscrossed back and forth across Africa, creating a highway that allowed imperial troops to easily march in and take control. He was less an agent of progress and more a harbinger of colonialism.

It said that Stanley would shoot local people without warning and that he had a knack for stealing ivory, and all of it made him a superstar back in England. He'd come full circle and lived out everyone's dreams. After starting life as an orphan in a workhouse in Wales, he found himself being welcomed home to a reception at London's Royal Albert Hall. Royalty, aristocrats, and members of the wealthy elite all crowded around to shake his hand and congratulate him on his accomplishments. There was fan mail, and awards, and magazine covers, and of course, the book deal which turned into a national bestseller. In 1895, he was elected to the British Parliament, and four years later, he was knighted by Queen Victoria herself. And that's the story of Henry

Stanley, or at least the one that history remembers the most. But Stanley's journey across Africa did more than earn him medals and applause. He left a trail of destruction and catastrophe in his wake that is almost impossible to quantify, and at the center of much of it was something we would only be able to see under a microscope. Stanley's highway across Africa opened the way for imperial troops to march in and take control. It provided an easy route for slavers to go deeper into the continent and steal human beings from new native groups, but it also spread something that had remained isolated until his arrival, the trypanosome parasite. The symptoms caused by its infection earned it the nickname the sleeping sickness. Patients first experience fever and headaches,

as well as swollen lymph nodes and internal organs like the liver and spleen. Then the parasite crosses into the brain, bringing on mental confusion and overwhelming sleepiness. After the patient falls into a coma, death is close behind. For much of the 1800s, that parasite was trapped in pockets along the coast of western Africa. Sure, folks would get sick, but because they rarely traveled outside their small regions, the parasite never migrated. That is, of course, until Stanley arrived to blaze an easy accessible highway from the Atlantic Ocean to the interior of Africa. You can see where this is going, right? Stanley arrived with over 700 soldiers and servants, and early on, they unknowingly encountered the parasite. Then, as they traveled from place

to place, they infected the inhabitants of each new community they met. Over and over, the parasite found new hosts, spreading like a wildfire, with Stanley holding the match. They wouldn't be until 1903 that a microbiologist named David Bruce discovered the carrier of the parasite, a biting insect called the tzitzifly. Today, historians believe that the wave of sleeping sickness that followed in Stanley's wake contributed to an outbreak that took the lives of millions of people across Africa. Just in the area around Lake Victoria alone, the parasite was responsible for nearly a quarter of a million deaths. Which has caused some to talk about it within the framework of what's referred to as

the Revenge of Nature, that the world around us has a way of keeping humanity in check. After all, humans have a history of damaging ecosystems and altering the very landscape of the places we live. Some people believe that parasites are one way the world exacts that revenge. True or not, it certainly invites us to stop and think about the consequences of our actions. Because sometimes, it seems, the world around us bites back. There is a hidden world inside each of us. A world of organs and systems and the careful balance between sickness and health. We can't see much of it with our naked eyes, but it's there, just beneath the surface. One good example is a parasite called toxoplasma

gondii, which can be ingested through contaminated drinking water. It's primarily carried by cats, but can also live inside human beings. And according to most parasitologists, over half of all people on the planet carry them, usually without symptoms, or at least the sort of symptoms you might expect. But one study from 2007 hints at a darker impact. It seems that the presence of the parasite can actually have an effect on our behavior. Over the course of this 11-year study, Jaroslav Fleger discovered that people infected by the parasite behave differently from those who aren't. Men who are infected apparently tend to ignore rules more often and exhibit jealousy and suspicion. They tend to be more opinionated and argumentative about

those opinions. Infected women share that same suspicion and anxiety, but also become more outgoing and persistent. Take from that whatever you want, but it's clear that parasites can alter our minds just as well as they do our bodies. And maybe that's why parasites are so frightening to us. Yes, the things they can do are horrifying to consider, the disease and damage that they can cause. But it's their near invisibility that frightens us the most. We might not know that we've been invaded until it's too late. And by the time we know there's work to do, that work has already become overwhelmingly difficult. Looking back on history, it's that gap between infection and awareness that holds the most opportunity for tragedy. We certainly saw that in Henry Stanley's

tale. It could take weeks for an infected member of his party to show any symptoms at all. And by then, the Tzitzi fly from each new region had taken a bite, picked up the parasite, and moved it on to someone else. By the time they knew, it was too late. Still, even though they were unaware of their role in the spread of the sleeping sickness, Stanley and his European backers were more than happy to treat the outbreak as an invitation to keep going. In fact, they used the medical emergency as a convenient excuse to ramp up their colonial efforts. They got people sick, then flooded in under the pretense of helping them get better, which only continued the cycle. It's a perfect demonstration of how powerful

parasites can be. They invade a host, feast on its resources, and then leave them too weak to stop the infection from spreading. They've taken control long before the host knows what has happened, and it can take extraordinary effort to flush them out. In the end, I suppose, Henry Stanley's tale has taught us a difficult lesson to accept. Not all parasites are microscopic. Stories of curious scientists and colonial explorers seem like a logical place to find parasites, hiding in the corners until the time is right. I get that, and they've certainly given us a lot to think about. But I have one more story for you, and it's a lot closer to home, maybe too close.

Stick around after this short sponsor break, and I'll tell you all about it. We don't know her real name. In most articles about her, she's listed as simply a woman from Ontario, although at least one scholarly paper has given her the pseudonym Edith Beckett. But it's her story that's important, and I don't want to skip it just because we can't name her. I'm sure you'll understand. Edith was a woman who lived in Ontario, Canada in the middle of the 1900s, and one day in 1942, she did what a lot of people do. She went grocery shopping. For her, though, this particular trip to the store was just a walk down the street, where a peddler was selling sausages. I think New York City hotdog

vendor, but uncooked. I imagine she did this because it was convenient. Maybe the closest butcher was too far out of her accessibility. Perhaps she only had a few minutes to grab something before work. We don't know her specific situation, but that's okay. The important thing is that we know who she purchased the sausages from. It turns out the peddler made it himself. He bought the pork from a meatpacking facility in town, and then used his own grinder and tools to finish the job. I don't know if he always sold his own sausages from one location all the time, or if he traveled around town ringing a bell like some sort of a weird meat-based ice cream man, but on that particular day, he was there to sell some of his product to Edith.

She took them home, of course, and later got them out to cook up for lunch. Her family was waiting, and it had been a long day. But she probably had done this a hundred times before. She knew the recipe by heart. All she really needed to do is taste it to know if the seasoning was right. She popped a small piece into her mouth and nodded. Just a few more minutes and it would be ready. Her family ate it up, too. The court documents specifically state that they enjoyed it, which I'm sure was a good thing. But within a few hours, Edith wasn't feeling well. Just Edith. No one else. She was feverish and sweaty. After struggling with nausea for an hour or so, she began to vomit violently. And there was the diarrhea as well. Her stomach felt as if a hot

iron had been dropped inside it. Of course, there was probably a moment when Edith assumed it was food poisoning. But one look at her family, who had all eaten the same meal as her, told her that couldn't be the case. They were fine while she was in agony. And it only got worse from there. By the end of the week, nothing had changed. She was still experiencing all the same extreme symptoms that had plagued her since the beginning. Her fever spiked and her body ached so badly that she could barely get out of bed. And soon after, her heartbeat began to weaken. Edith was dying and no one could figure out why. But we know why, don't we? That very same parasite that James Padgett had studied at St. Bartholomew back in 1835,

known today as Trichonella spiralis, had hitched a ride inside Edith's body. It turns out that it was probably that little taste she took before the sausage was fully cooked, because inside one gram of infected meat can be more than 1,000 Trichonella larvae, just waiting for a new home. Once inside, the parasite will invade the small intestine, and from there it will spread outward. The muscles quickly become home to small colonies known as nurse cells, sort of like a swollen cyst filled with fluid. And those cysts grow larger and stronger as time goes by, eventually giving birth to new larvae, repeating the process. The good news is Edith survived. I don't know how, but I can guess that she managed to get medical

help in time. And that's a good thing, don't get me wrong. But there's no silver lining here. Edith's health would never be the same. Like an old tree that's been gutted by infestation, her body continued to suffer from digestive issues for the rest of her life. And that's not all. It turns out that even though the adult Trichonella might die off eventually, those nurse cells don't. Waiting inside them are thousands of dormant larvae, just waiting for their current host to die so that they can infect a new one. And those nurse cells can survive for over three decades. Don't get me wrong, not all parasites are actually bad. There are parasitic fungi that grow on plants, like mushrooms, and leeches, a parasitic

bloodsucker, are still used effectively in medical treatments today. But those are small exceptions in a big, scary world, a world that's often too difficult to see with a naked eye. So stay safe, wash your hands, and maybe cook that meat just a little longer. Because no one wants to play host to an uninvited guest. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Carl Nellis at Music by Chad Lawson. There is much more to Lore than just a podcast. There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts,

Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both of them. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn more about both of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now. You can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi, and I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. you