Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Medical Cannibalism

Episode Date: April 8, 2014

Welcome to Sawbones, where Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband Justin McElroy take you on a whimsical tour of the dumb ways in which we've tried to fix people. This week: We eat people. Music: "Medicin...es" by The Taxpayers (http://thetaxpayers.net)

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Saabones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books! One, two, one, two, three, four! We came across a pharmacy with a twin that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.
Starting point is 00:00:56 Some medicines, some medicines, the escalant macaque for the mouth Hello everybody and welcome to saw bones a marital tour of misguided medicine. I am your co-host Justin McAroy and I'm Sydney McAroy Sydney I have been watching a great new show That I've been wanting to turn you on to oh no no no you like this one You're always wanting me to watch TV and it's almost always depressing. No, no, this isn't depressing. This is a show called Hannibal and it is about a FBI scientist, specialist, smart fella who solves serial killings with the help of his trusty psychologist, Hannibal Lecter. Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
Starting point is 00:01:46 Right, I'm sure that's very uplifting. I'm sure that's not depressing or dark at all. It's not. It gets a little, I tell you, it's really good the only thing about it though. The more I watch it, I watch it my season and a half. I'm starting to get a little suspicious of this Dr. Lecter.
Starting point is 00:02:04 You mean, I think there's something else going on here. Well, I mean, you mean Hannibal lector, right? Yeah, that's the character's name Hannibal. Hannibal lector. Like, like, I mean, from the movies, right? Are there movies? You don't, you don't know about, I mean, you don't know about the movies that the, it's a story about, it's about a FBI guy
Starting point is 00:02:25 I didn't well gram in his like buddy who's a psychiatrist and they just solve crime together right his buddy handle lector His buddy handle lector, but I'm like I'm starting to suspect for some a little off from madam, right like maybe maybe maybe maybe He's uh, I don't know. Maybe he's got like a secret secret pass. Maybe he's like not as nice of a guy or maybe he's like an Alcohol problem. What no, no, I mean it's not that No, I mean maybe I mean he eats people What yeah, that's the whole thing that's I mean that's silence of the lambs what the Hannibal the movie watching ahead No, like that the movies came first like there were books and movies and I mean it's about Hannibal the Hannibal, the movie. Have you been watching ahead? No, the movies came first. Like there were books and movies,
Starting point is 00:03:06 and I mean, it's about Hannibal the Cannibal. What is, okay, what does being a doctor have to do with being a cannibal? Well, I mean, in his case, nothing. He just likes to eat people. I don't, this is crazy. Like, is this like one of your crazy spoiler theories? No.
Starting point is 00:03:22 Like your theory about how, like, I can't come up with anything right now. Oh, you're theory about full house that it was, they were being forced into stagnation and any deviation from that stagnation would result in their deaths. All I'm saying is that in real life, Beck, you would never agree to have twins and move into the attic and live there with Jesse inde definitely, that's all I'm saying. That's ridiculous. I wanna back up for a second. You said that it doesn't have anything to do with him,
Starting point is 00:03:50 but has canblism had anything to do with medicine over the years? Well, now that you mention it, yeah. The two actually have unfortunately, I should say, have had a lot to do with each other. Tell me about it. So before I tell you about the history of medical cannibalism, also the fairly similar topic of corpse medicine, I want to thank both Jill and Janemari who recommended this
Starting point is 00:04:17 topic. Thanks you too. Independently of each other. So I figured I'd better jump on it. So we're kind of familiar, I think, with the idea of cannibalism. It's eating people, right? You know what that is. And I'm going to talk about when it was used in a medical context, but to give you a little
Starting point is 00:04:36 bit of history, cannibalism has been around for non-medical purposes for unfortunately a very long time. There were early tribes in Brazil and Canada that would eat the bodies of warriors that they defeated in order to obtain their courage. The Aztecs were famous for, I think a lot of people remember those pictures from history books when they were younger, of all the steps. And then at the top there there was like the sacrificial,
Starting point is 00:05:06 you know, table. And then the Aztecs would kill somebody and throw the body down the stairs. I remember, don't you remember that? You have, I think you went to some darker classes than I did in high school, but sure. I'll grant it to you. That mean then they would rip their still beating heart
Starting point is 00:05:19 out of their chest. Oh, you're talking my temple of doom. Okay. Oh no, I'm shakai, okay oh no I'm sure I'm sure was that your history class yeah I did not have good teachers and then there would be people who would eat parts of the the body as well but that was all a sacrifice to the gods right I was very much a religious ceremony the Romans actually practiced a little bit of medical cannibalism, a gladiators who were defeated used to be eaten in some cases.
Starting point is 00:05:51 Epileptics would eat little bits of their liver or drink some of their blood because they thought it was a cure for epilepsy. How did they get into their liver? Oh, I mean, they cut them open and took it out. Not their own liver. No. Okay, I mean, they cut him open and took it out. Not their own liver. No. Okay, I was thinking.
Starting point is 00:06:06 The gladiators who would get killed while, you know, gladiating. So gladiators would, okay, so gladiators would get killed and the field would be sworn by epileptic, looking for liver to eat. Yup, the epileptic would run down on the field, much like at the end of a football game when you want to tear down the goalposts,
Starting point is 00:06:24 although instead they wanted to carry off the dead gladiators. Any their liver. Any their liver and their blood. It's totally plausible. There was also a belief, I think this is kind of interesting as we're kind of going through some of the tribal populations that practice cannibalism that I think is pretty gory. So they thought that after somebody died, that their soul kind of hung out with their body on earth
Starting point is 00:06:49 for about four days. And then it could ascend to heaven or the afterlife or whatever. So if you ate the body before those four days were up, you would trap the soul forever on earth. Wow. So it was like the worst thing you could do to somebody. Like the added insult to injury,
Starting point is 00:07:07 like debugging the man Halo, that kind of idea. Just the worst, just the worst possible. Maybe worse. Maybe the worst I would say. Wow. There were also on the flip side of that, I should mention cannibalism was not always a bad thing, as crazy as that may sound.
Starting point is 00:07:24 There was the Brazilian Worry Tribe and there's also the Foray people of Papua New Guinea. Both of those tribes people would eat the bodies of their own, you know, members after they would just die naturally or however they would die. And it was a sign of respect and honor to their spirit, kind of like soul recycling, like keeping them as part of the tribe. It's kind of nice actually. Yeah, so well not really because in Papua New Guinea, this actually led to a kuru, which is a disease similar to like mad cow disease. So not great. Not a great idea. You gotta cook it first. That's. Definitely. I don't care how good a friend, Davey was.
Starting point is 00:08:06 You got to cook Davey. Yeah. Now, because if you just eat Davey and Davey's got a brain disease, you're going to get a brain disease. They actually want to... That's not what Davey was want. When I read about this, they said there's some video games. Post-apocalyptic video games where people are all shaky because they ate people.
Starting point is 00:08:21 Really? I thought you would know about that. I know. And it's supposed to be symptoms of kuru. I don't pay that close attention to the stories. And it's like the shooting. So some of these practices in Brazil continued until the 1960s and maybe pop one or getting two.
Starting point is 00:08:34 It's kind of crazy. But anyway. Oh, I bet you're talking about resident evil. Maybe so. Maybe. OK. I don't know. Something about video games, not my area.
Starting point is 00:08:44 But a lot of people are probably familiar with some of these ideas that some of this stuff kind of happened. It doesn't really have a lot of medical connection. Until we get to European history. Uh-oh. Now this is a part of European history that is largely not talked about. Probably because it's kind of embarrassing. about, probably because it's kind of embarrassing. And I will say it makes hypocrites out of a lot of, and not just I don't want to pick on the Europeans because I'm sure that in, you know, in the New World and America, we said the same thing, who picked on tribal populations for cannibalism.
Starting point is 00:09:18 Well, in the 16th and 17th century, it was pretty darn popular everywhere. Wow, really? So the idea was that there were the human corpses, body parts, bones, blood, whatever, could be used as medicine. This idea became very popular for a while. Why did this take hold? Well, there were several different reasons. Some, you know, at the time, we're still dealing with some of the humor theory that there are humors in
Starting point is 00:09:46 the body that you have to balance. And part of that was that there is a spirit to help keep all this imbalance. And so if the spirit exists somewhere in the human body, a lot of people felt like you needed more of it, whatever the spirit was, and you could get it from another human body. So, you know, that was a pretty basic idea was, well, you know, I'm sick. That person was healthy when they died. They probably still have a lot of that health spirit left in their body. Okay, kind of a stretch, but I'll allow it. There's also some influences from homeopathic ideas were popular at their time.
Starting point is 00:10:23 Kind of the, we talked about light cures like. So bits of skull might be helpful for a headache. Sure. So that was popular at the time. There was also this kind of suspicion that every creature had some sort of predetermined lifespan, like based on illness. And there, you know, at some point,
Starting point is 00:10:43 everything just kind of goes, could put and you die. So if you were killed in an accidental way by some sort of you know violence or you might get there might still be some well if you're part of the expression meat on them bones. Exactly. You still got some life in yeah that they could harvest you know by eating you. Sure. So how did they, so they had this idea, where did they get the bodies from initially? Uh, caveats. Not yet. First, the Egyptian mummies. Oh, man. I know. That's why I've never found a mummy. Because they were all eaten by the Europeans. All I ever wanted to do is find one mummy. Never. So they were, they started, you. All I ever wanted to do was find one mummy.
Starting point is 00:11:26 So they were, they started, you know, uncovering these mummies. There were a lot of archaeological digs that were finding these mummies. And, you know, I guess maybe it was because the flesh was so far removed from human flesh at that point. An aged perfection. It was dry age. Like a fine steak. Yeah. Like a fine steak. Yeah. Um, like prosciutto. It was, it was prized because it was, they knew there was a way that the Egyptians used to preserve human
Starting point is 00:11:54 flesh that they didn't really understand. And so they thought there was some sort of magic or science or something special about that. And then the, like I said, I think part of it was just the aesthetic. The flesh no longer looked like flesh. It was dry and dark and crumbly and it was something you could easily like crush up and make a powder out of and sprinkle on something and it would have very little, you know, in your mind, contextually to do with like a human. Right. So that's where people started. We've got these mummies. Let's grind them up and eat them. That's certainly what you were hoping for when you paid for mummification. Can I get a guarantee, I gotta tell you Dale, this is a little steep from my taste.
Starting point is 00:12:37 Can I get a guarantee from you that opportunistic future people won't eat me? Well, it's kind of a shame because really, I guess people who couldn't afford to be mummified were probably better off. Yeah. They couldn't be eaten by Europeans. Yeah, take that or people who just... Or people who did pay to be mummified
Starting point is 00:12:57 but didn't spring for the sealant. Because that sealant, it's gonna keep those, yeah, the people who will talk to eat you out. You gotta get the sealant. Yep. So, let's talk about what parts of the human you can use for medicine, or well, I should say this, you can't use it for medicine, but they thought you could. Okay.
Starting point is 00:13:17 And what they used it for. So, first of all, the flesh of a human. Okay. So, you can crumble it up, and this is how they originally used a lot of mummy, because like I said, it was all dry anyway, so you can make it powdery really easily. So you could crumble it up into like a powder
Starting point is 00:13:34 and use it in a tincture to stop, they thought you could use it to stop internal bleeding. Oh, okay, like, okay, so that doesn't, there's a certain logic to that, right? So it's like a powdery blood, so like help coagulate, like a thickener. I mean, it wouldn't work, but I can see where they're coming from. Sure, right, of course it wouldn't work. It makes sense to me, of course it wouldn't work.
Starting point is 00:13:53 The, it was used for blood clots, it was used for coughs, it was used for menstrual problems. So a wide array of uses for human flesh. You, you could take the whole, the whole big piece of the corpse, make a paste out of it and put it on any bruises you have, which seems a little extreme for a bruise. It's just gonna go away. I mean, just, you know, don't grind up a human
Starting point is 00:14:16 and put it on there. There was one particular recipe that I liked, which was if you could find the flesh of a cadaver, of a, like, a man who was reddish, or had reddish hair, something red. And if he was around 24 and dead from violence, not an illness, and then you cut it into chunks, and then you added some more and a little bit of aloe, and then soaked it in wine for several days, that that would be really good for just about anything you can come up with. Or nothing. Maybe.
Starting point is 00:14:51 Or getting you arrested. Yeah. Nausea. Or psychiatric evaluation. Right. Or if you don't like that. It's highly invading your parents. You could just take his his heart and pulverize it and then take one dram on an empty stomach
Starting point is 00:15:06 if you get dizzy. Wow. I mean, I don't know if that would impact my dizziness at all, but now I have some light nausea. Well, I don't understand is how dizzy are you? Uh, yeah, I don't know the point of dizziness where you go from low a better so down to whoa I better eat someone I've never
Starting point is 00:15:28 Better eat it on mommy. I've never been that dizzy in my entire life. You need me to help you up No, just can't be Can you just give me some mommy real quick? Go down to the drugst and purchase the mummy Why can't I I don't know I don't because I know Why do they think their grandchildren were coming to if they ate all the mommies.
Starting point is 00:16:07 It really shows the lack of force of insight, you know? Mommies are the only way. Yeah, clearly mommies, mommies like oil and coal are all gonna go away someday. You know, for every mummy, you gotta plant three mommies. Okay, you know, for every mummy, you got to plant three mummies. That's the only way. The mummy station is gonna keep us staying away. He's so happy. We're gonna have to look for alternative mummy sources.
Starting point is 00:16:37 Is it a crowd of mummies? For wind mummies or solar. Oh, Christ. Yeah, everybody tells you that ethanol mummies are that are gonna be the fix. But that's not really that. That's not really not trying to say on corn mummies. That's a whole other problem. Holy crap. Okay. Alright, so one of their mummy parts can we eat? Well, okay, I kind of
Starting point is 00:17:03 alluded to this already, but the skull was also a great thing for its medicinal value. Like I said, it's good for headaches. If you grind up the skull into powder, it's great for headaches. Again, for epilepsy, because they kind of had a sense of epilepsy started with the head, which they were, I mean, you know, the brain, they're right. Not that grinding up a skull works for that. No, yeah. There was a certain recipe that called for mixing it with chocolate, ground up skull with chocolate, and making a drink out of it.
Starting point is 00:17:32 Huh? I wouldn't be too bad. I wouldn't try it. Yeah. I'll drink a little team. So the difference got calcium. And this was, the skull was particularly popular among the royals.
Starting point is 00:17:42 Well, yeah. King Charles II had something invented, well, he purchased a large amount of ground up skull and had it dissolved in alcohol. And he would carry it in a tiny little dropper. They were called the King's Drops. And he paid a ton of money for this stuff. Yeah, I'd probably charge a king for that too.
Starting point is 00:18:05 And he would take these drops pretty much every day. Which would be too bad. I mean, it's an alcohol, you know. Yeah. But King Francis I was also enamored with Skull Powder. And he would carry some, at least some part of the mummy, skull or something in a pouch at his waist at all times. Just to keep that good mummy energy flowing into him.
Starting point is 00:18:27 Just in case it was in case he got an accident or got sick. Okay, yeah, you got to keep an emergency mummy. It was like his epic pen. Okay, so many mummy me. I can't reach my mummy. Do you have a first day kit? No, but I've got some mummy. Get a back.
Starting point is 00:18:42 In a bag time around my waist. I found a mummy. I'm gonna eat it. Similar to the skull, it was also believed that the moss that would grow over the skull, like while it was decomposing buried in the ground. This moss is called azznea. Okay. Was very good. It had all kinds of medicinal properties. And they thought it was good for epilepsy. Again, a lot of stuff was good.
Starting point is 00:19:12 Everything was nobody understood epilepsy. So we'll just throw anything at it. Yeah. And then for nosebleeds, which actually, there's a little bit of sense here. Really? So you would take like a wad of the moss and shove it up your nose when you had a nose blade. Well, yeah, I mean, that's not that far from what we would be doing, so with TP. Right. So I mean, that probably works.
Starting point is 00:19:33 Yeah, right. And then wait. And then wait. But the, the, the, the, the, Usnya, I will say, um, it was a lot of people, a lot of people tried to make like fake, Usnya tried to like sell you powders and stuff that looked like it was made of the moss, but wasn't. So the people who were smart or had enough money to do so would demand that it come attached to the skull.
Starting point is 00:19:56 I want the skull with the moss growing on it so that I know for sure that this is the real deal skull moss and not that imposter skull moths that grew on not a human body on a tree or something. What about blood, so we had to be eating mummy blood. Well, I do. I have a lot to tell you about blood, Justin, but unfortunately I'm not going to be able to do that quite yet. I don't know if that's something that your insurance will cover, me informing you about
Starting point is 00:20:27 blood. So I'm going to need you to head over to our billing department and find out, okay? Sure. The medicines, the medicines that I've given my cards for the mouth. Blood. Tell me about blood, Sydney. So let me tell you about blood, Justin. Thanks for settling up your accounts.
Starting point is 00:20:44 It's my blood. I'll me tell you about blood, Justin. Thanks for settling up your accounts. It's my blood. I'll provide you with some more medical information. So, you know, the idea that blood could be used for something that blood has a lot of power, that's not a new concept. I mean, all throughout medical history, we find people doing weird things with blood. And that lady on American Horror Story Coven. Remember, Madame Delores? Yes, who like to like, and this idea probably comes from this, who like to, you know, rub blood all over her skin to keep it youthful and drink blood to stay young and healthy.
Starting point is 00:21:14 Right. And this is very simple. There's also a special on the history channel, every Halloween about people like this. About people who were like real vampires, but they weren't real, I mean, they weren't real vampires because there aren't real vampires history channel. Okay, history channel. There aren't real vampires or werewolves. We know this history channel.
Starting point is 00:21:31 I try to fool this history channel anyway, sorry. So we get upset about that. Yeah, it's literally the, the, the, a brief diversion. It's literally the most you could screw up your job. History channel isn't be like vampires. Well, I don't know, are they? They aren't. Stop it.
Starting point is 00:21:47 You're embarrassing yourself anyway, sorry. Although we do watch it and enjoy it. I mean, we'll watch it. So blood was good for vitality, that makes sense. Now, the one thing that got tricky about blood and the reason that, and this is, as I'm gonna talk about, we started to move away from mummies as our only source for human flesh medicine,
Starting point is 00:22:07 was that the thought was, if you're gonna get blood, it's gotta be fresh. They're just making this stuff up wholesale. Yeah. If it's gonna help you, it probably needs to be fresh blood. Not mummy blood. Not mummy blood,
Starting point is 00:22:20 because how do you get mummy blood? Fresh mummy blood is one of the great oxymoron. So, the closer you could get to fresh, the better the blood was gonna be. If you didn't like ingesting it just as blood, and I don't. Well, because I mean, that's, I mean, how did people consume the blood, they just drank it.
Starting point is 00:22:40 But if that freaked you out, which it should, hello. There was a recipe that one guy came up with for blood marmalade. Oh, delicious. You can spread that on your toast in the morning. Why not? Don't let the kids get that. Wasn't like pattington bear a big part of Marmalade. I don't remember that from the book. Vampire pattington love blood marmalade. They thought of course. Don't forget to start on vampire mad line. Love our bread, we love our butter,
Starting point is 00:23:09 but most of all, we love blood. Obviously blood from young healthy people was better, or virgins, even better. Listen, I'm 33 now, and I obviously know the blood from young people is better. This got to the point where people would stand at the hanging scaffold when somebody was going to be hanged, hung hanged in that context of tang, right? And would have their cups ready.
Starting point is 00:23:40 And afterwards, sometimes, if the hangmen was in a good, good mood, would slice up in a vein for you and let you take a little bit for the road. I bet you got kicking some shillings though. Well, yes, you had to pay him. What was even better is if you were lucky, it was going to be a beheading, a public beheading. So then you could either, you know, as soon as the head, get that Gallagher splash mat on the front row and just collect it. That's exactly it. They would try to get as close as possible to get sprayed by the blood when the head came off.
Starting point is 00:24:13 Oh my God, I thought I was kidding. No, dead serious. That should be the so-called solvents I thought I was kidding. No, people would either bring their cup to try to drink some or at the very least get sprayed by the blood after the head was chopped off. Yikes. Fat was also used, that was another popular human substance.
Starting point is 00:24:34 Human fat bandages were soaked in. So again, we're moving into fresher corpses. Human fat can be liquidy when it gets warm. Anybody who's ever been in anatomy lab has experienced this. You can soak bandy when it gets warm. Anybody who has ever been in an anatomy lab has experienced this. You can soak bandages in it and wrap wounds in it for wound healing. Or you can just rub it all over your skin. It's good for gout, arthritis, rheumatism, whatever. Just rub fat all over you.
Starting point is 00:24:59 I mean don't. Don't do that. This is gross. There were also minor uses for brains, for the stuff that come out of a gall bladder, for breast milk, for bladder stones. There were other kind of recipes that centered around these products,
Starting point is 00:25:16 but the main things, like I said, the blood, the fat, the skull, the flesh, that's what people were using. But as we've alluded to, the problem is they were running out of mummies. There's a limited supply of mummies people. You can only eat so many. And obviously, you know, I haven't said this so far. There were people who were against this. Not everybody was into eating people, and there were plenty of doctors and clergymen and politicians, and then just normal, like,
Starting point is 00:25:51 everyday people who were like, hey, I don't think we should eat people. That sounds like a bad idea. We probably shouldn't eat all the mummies. Like, maybe we're gonna like look at them in a museum someday or have my children with them. It's me, 1700s, 12th of Brimley. maybe we're gonna like look at them in a museum someday or my children with me. 1712 for Bremley.
Starting point is 00:26:07 It seemed like there's not as many mummies around as there used to be. Yeah, I've been no descendant to mummy eating a serious problem. If we were there to be mummies for the next generation, we've got to stop eating them. Well, you got to stop eating them. Because of the the relatively fewer amount of mummies available for eating they started to become pricey The price I saw quoted at one point was five sterling a pound Wow Which I'm guessing was a lot of the organic mummy pricey
Starting point is 00:26:47 They so because it was becoming so pricey and because there weren't as many mummies available, um, especially people in the lower classes, we're trying to find ways to benefit from this good, dead people medicine without, you know, having to break the bank. So they started trying to cure, and I used the word cure as in like ham or meat. Okay. Cure recently dead, especially strong men, but women would do too, as long as they were healthy and vital before they died, struck down in the flower of their youth. That's essential. The potential. The potential. That's what you're wanting.
Starting point is 00:27:22 They would start curing them in like honey and herbs So like put them in a box fill it with honey There are a bunch of herbs in there put them in the ground and then you can take chunks of that and use it for medicine They they were also as you mentioned earlier. This is when grave robbing for this purpose became pretty popular so You know, I mean if you were an enterprising young pharmacist or doctor or whoever, you know, dig up some bodies and sell stuff as medicine, if nobody was dead, as a last resort and you don't want to kill anybody, please don't. You could always drink menstrual blood. No, I think I'm just gonna just keep my dizziness.
Starting point is 00:28:10 Thank you. I'll just be dizzy. How bad are you feeling? Yeah, what problem do you have? They talked about even after... I would eat a mummy first. There, I said it. I need a mummy. After some royalty died, if they had some sort of illness that caused bleeding before they died,
Starting point is 00:28:31 the rags or the towels that were used to wipe up the blood, would be like people would rub them on themselves and try to squeeze them and soak them in water to drink that, to get some of that royal blood. Now obviously as you can imagine, you know, if grave robbing isn't bad enough, some really bad stuff came out of this because anytime, well, there's a shortage of dead people that we can use to make medicine. We need some more dead people. You can imagine that somebody started doing some bad stuff. One of the worst examples I found was, and I didn't know this,
Starting point is 00:29:08 Pope Innocent the eighth, on his deathbed, to try to keep him from dying, his doctors prescribed him the blood of three young boys. And he drank the blood of all three of these young boys in an attempt to save his life before he Eventually succumbed to his illness and all three boys died Now he's the one your people consider and foul, right? That's Pope innocent to make it will is that the one your people You're people you're gonna just throw this around your people listen, okay? The Catholic Church has not had a Spotless history when it comes, young boys. Sorry, and We've screwed up Sometimes take ownership of your mistakes not the yes, no the pope and not
Starting point is 00:29:59 Posed not infallible all the time. Hopee innocent, the eighth, the eighth, Poe innocent was the one that drank the blood of your boy. The first seven probably didn't. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Probably. Of course, this led to people who were poor and desperate being compelled to sell their blood for money.
Starting point is 00:30:22 Not. Not unlike today's college. Exactly. Exactly. Only unlike today's college. Exactly. Exactly. Only at this point, you would either cut yourself and sell a cup of your blood to somebody wanted to drink it, or if you were willing,
Starting point is 00:30:36 you could get more money if you would let an old person suck it directly from your arm. But that's how you could make the most most because they thought if they could get it straight from the source, then you're really, you know, I don't know. Drinking blood. Drinking blood. Then you're drinking blood. There was also, as we've talked about before, a lot of bleeding going on, bloodletting
Starting point is 00:30:59 at this point, you know, from doctors and barbers and whatnot. So there was an added incentive to one, bleed your patient may be a little more than they need to. Because then you just take all that blood, put them in some jars, advertise them in your shop window and sell them. Hey, why not? So you're bleeding one guy and having another guy drink it. Sure. And you can bleed him later. Convenience. And then as I, again, as I kind of mentioned, the executioner has had a whole side business now. So you could just divvy up your corpses
Starting point is 00:31:32 and sell them off to people in chunks or sell their blood or whatever you wanted to do. I mean, a lot of the time, if we're talking about criminals, these people are not gonna get like a proper burial. Right. So nobody was going to get like a proper burial. Right. So nobody was going to object to what the executioners were doing with the bodies. Good for the environment. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:31:53 But I mean, I mean, bad for like human soul, bad for human, like, just a world of large and for the earth. So you know, and the fear of this was, if we look back and a lot of this supposition, were people killing, like, beggars or lepers, were they grabbing plague victims and using them for this possibly dead criminals? Was this a motivation for killing off members of society that they thought wouldn't be missed? Maybe. I don't know. This led me to question like, hey, maybe Sweeney Todd was a doctor. Did you consider that?
Starting point is 00:32:32 Maybe. Maybe. Just baking up people's minds. Maybe they wouldn't have been so upset if they'd found out what was actually in the movie. They would have been excited. Hey. They might have been stoked. He just took the wrong, it was the wrong, like, average. Should have advertised. Yeah. Does this happen today, said, I mean, is this a mental practice? No, we don't eat people anymore. I mean, I mean, you shouldn't eat people anymore.
Starting point is 00:32:52 The best I could come up with as like a correlation to today was, I know that placenta eating is popular among, I don't know, Matthew McConaughey and somebody else, other people on the internet, we watched it, people blend up their placenas and eat them. Yeah, why not? But other than that, and I don't know that that's, I mean, yes, that is a human product. Thank goodness no one is harmed or killed. But otherwise, no, there is no medical benefit
Starting point is 00:33:20 to eating people. I can't believe I had to say that. Yeah, there, just a little benefit to eating. Please I can't believe I had to say that. Yeah, there. There's no medical benefit to eating. Please don't eat people, thanks. And thank you to you at home listening for being so cool. I know it's kind of a different kind of change having to advertise on the show,
Starting point is 00:33:37 but you're not losing the show. And we get to feed our daughter. So that works great. So this is a really important part. It's a really important part. But no, seriously, we're not that hard. All right, we appreciate you guys being so cool about it in advance.
Starting point is 00:33:52 Remember you can tweet at solbones. It is our username on Twitter. Thank you to people tweeting about us like Melinda, your psychofuture X bin Olympic Rob Thomas Claire Jarvis Samo Bamboo Medea or maybe media maybe I bet media media probably Nicole Angelic Hamilton Tiffany in Corey Dutson Mike F many many many many many many others. Thank you so so much Yeah, thank you guys you can always tweet at us to at Sydney,
Starting point is 00:34:25 Macaroy or at Justin Macaroy. And I think it's going to do for thanks to taxpayers. Let us use their song medicines for our intro and I'll show you on Twitter by other music. And I guess it's going to be at maximum fun. dot org. Listen to all the shows there, like George Jesse Go, Wim and Pow, Wimbabwe, Mother. Stop podcasting yourself. My brother, my brother and me.
Starting point is 00:34:49 Oh, thank you so much, Cindy. And all the other shows that Justin isn't a part of. Yeah, there's many. I mean, I mean, I don't feature just by wrong. I'm in many more there. I'm there are many that do not feature me and they are well worth your time. All the maximum fun.org is as our forums and so much else.
Starting point is 00:35:05 Anyway, that's gonna do it for us. Thanks for listening to our show. We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode of Soft Buns Until Then, I'm Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. As always, don't drill a hole in your head. Alright! Maximumfund.org Comedy and Culture, Artistone,
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