Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: The Clap

Episode Date: May 25, 2017

Live from Austin, Texas, it's ... well, it's one of the grossest episodes Justin and Dr. Sydnee have ever recorded. So, sorry about that. Anyway, let's talk about The Clap! Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones 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. I'm not a sense the askeleton my cop for the mouth For the mouth

Welcome to solbos, a man or two of misguided medicine. I'm your go host Justin Tyler McElroy And I'm Sydney smear all McElroy Y'all The first 10 times. Cute. I'll grant you. So we already had, we have a topic picked out for this episode. I mean, I hope we do. And I have this, I think this is so good.

It's really funny, hold on. Just let me get through. And we thought that rather than us tell you, what we thought or you thought. What I thought is that rather than us tell you the subject of the episode is that you would tell us. Are you ready? Not a real.

No, I don't. No. I don't. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap.

That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap.

That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap.

That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. That's right, we're doing the clap. somebody was right, somebody said gonorrhea. Oh, Dunk, I did think it was Climidia. I'm so very sorry. And for the occasion, because I didn't know about this really clever thing, Justin was going to come up with. At the last minute, I brought gonorrhea with me to Austin. We picked that up. Share with all of you.

And we picked that up at your terror toys. Yeah. The only time it's nice to share gonorrhea with your friends. Here it is. What's gonorrhea? Well, I'm gonna tell ya. First of all, thank you, John and Diane, not Jack and Diane, John and Diane, for recommending this topic. Gonorrhea comes, first of all, the word gonorrhea.

Where does that come from? So from the ancient Greek for flow of seed. So. Yeah, OK. Yeah, OK. One, no life, eat you. Everybody, first of all, just buckle in, because that's the kind of episode this is.

Do you think, you think Ria is the flow part? Because diarrhea, I would think, would be of the same. Hey, it's linguistics, all right? I'm not, it's not all jokes, okay? This is a linguistics, explanation of linguistics. But for a long time, it was thought that gonorrhea was just some sort of irregular flow of semen that all that was happening was like,

I don't know what's going on, I don't feel, I don't feel like I'm into it right now, and I didn't see this coming, but now, now this is happening. And so people thought it was just semen. Okay. And a lot of the symptoms early on their descriptions were mainly associated with the symptoms that come with a penis because men more more likely to have symptoms than

women. And so you see a lot of this association with just what happens to the penis as opposed to everything else. Okay. Why is it called the clap? I have, oh, ugh. I have heard that the reason it's called the clap is because the... I have... When you came in and your... Weiner. Was having the gonorrhea, which I still don't know what it is to be clear.

Right. That when they would have it, the doctor would go, like that and slap it. And thank you. I'm assuming Jesus wasn't present, but thank you. That is one theory as to why it was called white is called still the clap. Not so much doctors, it was like a medical procedure. Like here I got this. Hey, if that's rap on my gloves. If that's not real and you spend an afternoon coming up with that, get a life.

OK. Get it. Get a coffee. It was more like a recommendation for like a do-it-yourselfer. Like, if you can't pee because there's so much discharge there, you could either clap it, or take something really heavy and just kind of... Oh!

Smack it. You just gotta keep pushing through, sister. It's maggot. It's maggot. You just gotta keep pushing through, sister. The other theory is actually, then this is probably more likely, is that it comes from the word,

the French word for brothels. Back in the day, a brothel would be called a clappier, which was the same word at the time that was used for like a rabbit hutch as well. And so. Some some some odd evenings that led to I'm sure. So that's probably that's probably actually where the clap came from although it is associated with that and

there was also an old English word that meant to throb that was called clap on so somewhere and there probably the brothels though. Okay let's go with that because I don't ever want to think about my thing again. Or you could just call it the drip because that's the other. It's the other way. It is, it is as, as most of you it seems now, a sexually transmitted infection. And it's caused by a bacteria, nice, serious gonorrhea that looks like this little guy. And it can cause symptoms like burning when you pee. That's like the classic thing, right? Does it burn when you pee? Obviously, there's discharge, because we've talked a lot about discharge.

So what we'd call purulent or, I mean, pus. It's pus. You can have pain in things like your testicles or in the pelvic region. And then it can cause some like rare things where it spreads to joints and causes infections there or meningitis. These are much more rare. And it can affect things like the uterus

and the fallopian tubes and cause a lot more problems than just discharge. And you can also get it in your throat, which I learned from degrassi. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah! Yeah! Because it goes there. It does go there. And apparently, so does Goneria. The symptoms start about four to six days after you've been infected. And a lot of people are never going to get them. So you may be infected with Goneria and never know,

which you're still, you can still transmit it, even if you don't have symptoms, but. So it's tight. Yeah. And you can get it again. So you can get it, be treated, and then get it again. You're not immune forever. It was so common throughout history in men

that for a long time, it was assumed that all women just had it. Like, from birth, they've just got it. And at any time you have sex with one, you're rolling the dice. You might get it, too. And that was not true. Not true, okay. No, I suspected, but...

It's been talked about, and now when I say gonorrhea specifically, symptoms that are consistent with what we now know to be gonorrhea have been talked about since and now when I say gonorrhea specifically, symptoms that are consistent with what we now know to be gonorrhea have been talked about since ancient times, there's probably a lot of overlap with individual cases between gonorrhea and chlamydia, and then sometimes syphilis gets thrown in there with other symptoms. But generally speaking, we think that we've known

about gonorrhea since Hippocrates. He wrote about something that was probably called, well, that was probably gonorrhea, but he called it strangery, and it was because of the slow, painful urination that comes with it. It was like strangling your urine flow. So it was named that. LAUGHTER

Both Galen and one of our favorite features on sawbones, Plenty the Elder. CHEERING and one of our favorite features on Sawbones, Plenty the Elder. Uh... They both had the same theory that it was, it had to do with basically your seamen has become poison. And so now it hurts. Plenty didn't have a lot.

Usually he has like 30 treatments for anything. For this, he was like, er, the only thing that I know will help, definitely are onions and leeks. Sure. You could definitely just eat a lot of those, and it will go away, but he says, but you might not want to, because they are gonna give you farts, so.

Mm-hmm. That's a man who knew his priorities. And the treatments that they recommended back then were things like massage or cooling foods. When we talk about the time where we believed in the four humors, this was thought to be like a hot disease. And so you needed cool things to try to balance it out. So like, eat some cooling foods or take a cold bath

and drink some vinegar. And don't have sex. They did say that. Don't have sex because they just thought it made it worse. They didn't amass spreading it. They thought the cold stuff would drive away all the warm humors and you'd get better. They had more elaborate treatments

that actually don't sound too bad, where you like wrap the affected organ in wool and rose oil and dump some white wine on there. And some olive oil. Now, as you well know, that is my nightly ritual. I'm so happy to hear that it's also been preventative. They also had, you can throw on a poultice of something that like smells nice, like margaram and rosemary,

maybe a little bit of dill, maybe some honey. Lots of herbs and spices, and at the end, throw in some friction for good measure. And I was reading this and thinking, hold on a second. Do you want to eat penises? Because I think that that's what y'all are angling for. That was the world. Whatever, you just sounded like the first 30 seconds of an episode of Hannibal, okay?

Don't look at me with that judgment. They're you're weird old people Other other not quite as I don't know pleasurable ancient treatments included things like of course bloodletting because why not? Yeah, we do it for everything do it for this too Anything that would make you puke was thought to be a good treatment So just something that'll make you throw up and then in addition, you know harmless things like him lock Or some poppies because then you'll feel better. Or maybe just some lettuce, or some coriander, or some lentils, because we don't know. We're just guessing.

We just got protein, that's good. We just got this stuff. There are mentions of it probably in the Bible. There are a couple of mentions of something called Zav or Zava, and that's probably a reference to gonorrhea or something like it. They talked about it in ancient Persian culture. You would place a metal plate over your groin if you had it,

and then sleep in a cold bed. There you go. Probably not too much of a problem to find a cold bed if you're strict with gonorrhea. That's probably custom to that. In the middle age, vinegar, we've talked about before. Vinegar has been a very popular treatment for everything for a long time.

Specifically for this, in the middle ages, you'd want to actually inject vinegar into your penis. If you wanted to, you know. No, I don't think so. Get right to the source. What else you got? In England, it was a little better. If you were royalty in England,

they had a better concoction for you. It's still an injection, but instead it's made of breast milk, almond milk, sugar, and violet oil. Better than vinegar? Yeah, better. I don't know. Sure. Ghanaaria got to be such a problem that there were actually laws passed to try to stop people

from getting it. They knew it was associated somehow with sex. I obviously didn't know the particulars. But in 1161, English parliament passed laws to try and stop the spread of what they called the perilous infirmity of burning. Although nobody really knew the cause, so it was really hard to like regulate spread of it, because nobody was quite sure what was happening. Louis the 9th and 1256, he went a step further and said,

you know what, we're not going to regulate this, we're going to banish anybody who has it. Nice. Just throw them out, and everybody was kind of freaking out. Nobody knew how to stop it, so everybody took to kind of washing their bits in vinegar, because that seemed to, I don't know, something smells different.

The epidemics of gonorrhea that did on the flip side lead to an interest in the concept of public health and the idea of public health officials that would work for the government and try to force people to get treated, which would be particularly bad because their treatments were terrible and didn't work. But I mean, even without like even without your ability to refuse,

that's the first idea of we're gonna force you to come in and try to get treated for this because we are spreading it to people, we don't know how. It also helped lead to the secularizing of medicine because at the time, there were a lot of physicians who had to take orders of the priesthood as part of their physician training.

And Pope Boniface said, like, if this is what we're gonna be doing, maybe we can let doctors do their own thing, and we can do something else, and that was actually the beginning of the secularizing of medicine, where they said, let's just separate that out, and maybe you can just go to, not med school,

you know, you can pretend to be a doctor, and you don't have to be a priest, too. So as I finally saw Sangle was every week, thank you, gonorrhea. The medicines, the medicines, the escalate macabre for the mouth. Now, I mentioned this guy in another episode, but I have to bring him up again in case you haven't heard it.

We thought for a long time that maybe gonorrhea and syphilis were part of the same disease, that it was just different phases of the same disease spectrum. And there was a guy who was so convinced that he thought, I'm gonna do whatever it takes to figure it out. His name was John Hunter. He was a doctor in London, and he was treating a ton of sexually transmitted infections.

At this point in history, London was booming. This was in like the mid to late 1700s. London was booming, and there was a lot of prostitution, and a lot of people had both gonerian, civilist, and a lot of people were arguing like doctors. This is the same thing, or they different things. There's the clap in the pox, is it the same or different? Hunter thought they were the same disease,

and the only way we're ever gonna prove it is if we get some goneria and we give it to somebody who's never had either, and then we see what happens. The problem was he had to find somebody that he knew for sure, never had either. And who better than himself? Nice. So the way he the way he went about this is he got some pus from the penis of a patient who had diagnosed with gonorrhea. And he made some cuts. Sorry.

In his own penis. And then he just kind of rubbed it in there. And some doctors will just do anything for medicine for their training. I bet afterwards you're like, guys, do you want to rename it Hunter's Disease or something? Can I get something out of this, please? He actually, you're not far off, so he ended up, he got the shanker that we associate with syphilis. And he also got symptoms of gonorrhea. And he thought, I did it, I proved it.

This was all just gonorrhea to begin with. It's all the same thing, they're the same disease. I win, I'm right. And it became known briefly as the Hunterian shanker. Because it was Hunter's Shanker. Oh, for him. Except he was wrong. It took him a long time to undo the damage he did,

and finally just broke the news to him, John. You just gave yourself both gonerian ciflis. Ah! That dude had both, and now you got both. Sorry, man. Sorry. But hey, in a few years, they'll talk about John a medical history podcast.

So, got that going for you. Twice. Twice. You're the only person that they'll drag you out again. For public harassment. Other than plenty of the elder. Yeah, plenty of you. They'll just drag you out again and again.

In the 17 and 1800s, the treatments largely consisted of mercury. That was the biggest thing you would do. A lot of injections, again, directly into the penis. And a lot of these treatments, again, focus mainly on people with penises, but that's because at the time they really thought, because it presented more in people with penises

that they were the ones who got it, even though we knew that that wasn't true. Now, the reason they figured out this is they've actually uncovered a lot of the implements that would be used to inject the mercury like syringes from like old ships where like people would be trapped for long periods of time and it gets bored and thinking like, man, it hurts when I be, I gotta do something. What do we have?

I'm gonna whittle a syringe. You got some mercury. If you didn't like that, you could try, you could try a cinnabar fumigation. Cinebun? No. I don't think they had that then. No, okay.

This was before the invention of cinnabun. They, Because I was about to be like, I found my treatment. That's what I, I'm going with that one. So you would take a hot iron, and you would put some, no, don't worry, this isn't too bad.

You'd take a hot iron, and you would put some mercury and some sulfur on it, and then you would like put it underneath, you sit on a seat with a whole, like basically like a toilet, and put this underneath it, and then like make yourself like a little tent, like some blankets, like a blanket for it,

some tents, and then just sit in there and inhale. Go on a mission, quest. Yeah. And just fumigate your nethers with, you know, mercury. It's better in the injection. Yeah, I'm for sure, for sure, for sure. Low bar, but it definitely, it clears it.

There were a couple herbal remedies that got really popular in the 1800s. Sure, for sure, for sure, low bar, but it definitely it clears it. There were a couple herbal remedies that got really popular in the 1800s. One was this pepper-like spice from Sumatra called Cubebs. And then there was something else called Balsam of Copaiba. And both of these were very popular and thought

that they helped to reduce the inflammation from the disease, so much so, in fact, that in the year 1859, Great Britain imported 151,000 pounds of this stuff. That's a big gonorrhea problem. That's a lot. In the 1870s, we finally started to figure out that gonorrhea could cause problems for people with vaginas and uteruses and cervixes and phloetian tubes and all the other things that gonorrhea can spread to and

cause other problems. We discovered pelvic inflammatory disease is a condition that can result from untreated, not just gonorrhea but gonorrhea in this case. And also the fact that it can affect your fertility long term. So we finally figured those things out as well as the fact that if someone gave birth to an infant while they were infected with gonorrhea, that babies could get a condition in their eyes, called opthalmia neonotorum,

and that it can actually, it was actually one of the leading causes of blindness for a long time. They figured out how to treat this and this worked with silver nitrate. Really? Yeah. Well good.

So we were starting to learn, imagine my release. Some things. So we were starting to figure things out by the late 1800s. And this is when Dr. Albert, nicer, nicer, nicer, finally, isolated the bacteria. Right. Come on. You just said, nicer, like, as we all know.

And you, at every one of the audience, is like, uh-huh. Go on. I'm with you. That's the nice area gunnery. And I see where I'm gunnery. Like, nice area. Nice area. It's the... I said that at the beginning of the show! That was a lot of penis slapping ago. It's the name of the bacteria.

Got it. This is a guy. Anyway, so Ow, figured it out. And he tried to make a vaccine. And it was a very, I was starting to read about this. It was 1910, and there was a vaccine for gonorrhea. And I'm thinking, I'd never heard of this. Why don't we use it?

And first of all, it wasn't very effective. And secondly, it was like, you had to take injections every third day for months, and then it still didn't work very well. I wanna meet this cat, it was like, listen. I know me, okay? I know my lifestyle. I'm definitely gonna get cutteria.

I will do it repeatedly. I will do literally anything for a slim chance to let the occasions of me get cutteria. Well, listen, Paul, couldn't you just try, no. No, I will not alter my lifestyle for you. Well, listen, Paul, couldn't you just try, no. No. I will not alter my lifestyle for you. Give me the shot. Again.

I will see you on Wednesday. LAUGHTER Because we had figured out the connection with the infection in newborns eyes in gonorrhea. In the early 1900s, you see some crazy ideas of what to do during the birthing process, where they're like, all you gotta do is clean the vaginal canal by painting everything with iodine,

just everything, just the vagina, and make sure that you're also going to like spray, they created this like, the special spray douche that like had nozzles on the side. So you could insert it into the vagina and spray the walls of the vagina. But not the cervix, they didn't wanna do that. So you like stuff cotton in there first

and then just spray everything down. Yeah. And then they encouraged douchein, which we know you shouldn't douche, but they thought, well, the alternative would be telling everybody to work condoms, and that seems cumbersome. So. Yeah. And also, that would be effective.

Let's go with douchein. Sorry again, everybody. Sorry. Like I said, Silver nitrate was used for eyes, and so they thought, well, maybe that's good for other symptoms too, so applying silver nitrate directly inside the urethra was tried for a while. Other forms of silver, like bear, marketed their own colloidal silver, specifically

for your penis in the alien lady. I said that right on the bottle. And then things, this is the time when things like arsenic and bismuth and mercury were just like, yeah, just using for anything. So until the 1930s, like a lot of like, you know, poisons and heavy metals and things like that. And then fever cabinets came along.

Now, fever cabinets were not just used for gonorrhea, but they were definitely used for gonorrhea and syphilis as well, actually. But you would, basically, it was like a big coffin that you laid in, except not your head. You left your head out, and they would heat it to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. So really hot.

And the thought was like, we're just gonna kill all the bacteria with this really hot thing we're gonna have you lay in. And you would lay there for like 10 hours. Ugh. They went a step further for gonorrhea by heating instruments to like 120 degrees that you could actually place internally. No.

So either the vagina or the rectum with these, yeah, this was not good. This is bad on many levels. And then thank goodness we're the 1940s in their antibiotics. Phew. Thank you. Again, antibiotics.

Thank you, antibiotics. They started by using penicillin because we had it and sulfa drugs, those were the earliest antibiotics. And it worked for a while so long, the late 1940s, when we started seeing resistance. So not too long, but don't worry, we have other antibiotics now. This ends happy.

You're fine. This was especially good because there was a lot of concern for this during both World War I and World War II. So World War II, we finally had antibiotics, which was great. And I only mentioned this, because in both you see this horrible victimization of women as being the secret vectors for disease that they're not going to tell you about. And you can see these posters from, especially World War Two, where it has posters of these lovely looking ladies smiling at you, and it's like, she may look clean. Good time, girls, pickups, prostitutes,

and you know, you can't defeat the axis if you have VD, so. Sorry, I mean, I'm sorry from guys, I'm sorry. Again, I'm very sorry. It's a condoms, guys. Come on, condoms. In general, antibiotics helped, and awareness helped, and education of how it was transmitted,

and that you could use a condom, and that this was helpful. This all helped, and we started to see cases of gonorrhea decline, and this was really good. And it actually, it's crazy. You see that until the 60s and 70s, when everything spikes back up, real high again Which was a lot of things. I mean obviously sexual liberation and more people having having sex with multiple partners But there was also birth control which was great

But it led to a decrease in the use of condoms if not great for things like gonorrhea Don't worry. We see things have died back down again. We figured it out again. So what do we do now? Oh. I thought it was called chlamydia. So. I will say this. You've mentioned chlamydia a couple times.

And it's not a crazy thing to bring up because gonerian chlamydia are buddies. And they run together often. So if you've been diagnosed with one, it's good to get tested for the other just to make sure. And they're both easily treated. And generally, if we suspect that, we treat you for both, at the same time. So like I've already mentioned, we have antibiotics that work.

Although just in the last few years, there were stories that you may have read. They kind of hit the media where we had new resistance strains of gonorrhea. So we had to like change our dosing and pick certain antibiotics that we always use and we couldn't, you couldn't mess around with it. Not like, I hope we weren't messing around with it before. Yeah.

You couldn't give people like the fake antibiotics anymore. Yeah, sometimes you think your doctor's giving you a fake antibiotic. But obviously the biggest thing is, you know, use a condom, get tested, get treated, and treat everybody's partners, and there you go. And now we have antibiotics, so it's good. Hooray science! Yay!

I want to say thank you so much to, first off to Austin. Hello, thank you. Thank you to the taxpayers from Lettuce Their Song Medicines is the intro and outro of our program. Thank you to the maximum fun family of podcasts. They have a lot of great programs. You can find them all at maximumfun.org. Thank you to the Paramount for having us here. It's a beautiful venue.

It's been real nice. And of course, thank you to you both listening here at this beautiful theater at home. But that's going to do it for us. So until next week, my name is Justin McArroy. I'm Sydney McArroy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy.

I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy.

I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. Alright!