Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Hello everyone. Welcome back to Weird World Adventures, the podcast. I'm your host Mallory and I'm here to show you just how weird this world of ours really is. As I mentioned last time, we have a special episode today and that is Michael and I got to speak at the famous Cosmos club in Washington D.C.
all about our new book we've started working on called Medicine and A Chronicle of Gods and Man.
Thank you so much to the Explorers Club Washington D.C. chapter for hosting us. We have the entire event recorded here with the audio and we are presenting it to you all now for our episode this week of Weird World Adventures, the podcast.
So please enjoy. We can't wait to see what you think of medicine and mythology very quickly.
[00:00:57] Speaker C: As Jim said, I'm a journalist specializing in covering mythology, folklore and occult studies. I also like to work with warm weather penguins. For funsies, I work with Magellanic and African penguins, completely unrelated. And throughout my adventures I created and hosted the unique travel show Weird World Adventures on Amazon Prime. A show that takes people to the strangest and most fascinating places around the world, highlights unusual traditions and for the show we really push for things that have a sense of kind of discovery and wonder in each episode. And one of the things we love to highlight is mythology and mythology really people see it and they think that it's fantasy, but it's actually an operating system of a civilization, a way that the society has chosen to explain how the world works around them. So mythology really tells you how a culture sees.
So I think it's really important that we highlight every culture's mythology.
[00:01:53] Speaker D: I think it's one of the most
[00:01:54] Speaker C: important parts of it.
Michael?
[00:01:57] Speaker D: Yeah, as Jen already said, my name is Michael Maldonado. I am a neuroradiologist. So Mallory likes to tell me I spend most of my day looking at pictures of brains and facils and facilitates.
[00:02:08] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:02:11] Speaker D: And I've always had an interest in kind of mythology and the ancient underpinnings that have led us to our scientific understanding as a modern society. And teaming up with Mallory through her show and her journalism has let us kind of both explore that from different angles.
And kind of, as Jim also mentioned, we have co written these three books coming out this month.
[00:02:41] Speaker C: This month last year was busy.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:44] Speaker D: So some examples of our exploration around this area.
[00:02:49] Speaker C: We've mapped some of the legendary hikes in the great Snowpay Mountains, told stories that of the most obscure places around Virginia, which was a lot of fun and written a guide to how to make money while traveling. And we've also co authored several pieces for the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, including a piece discussing the skepticism found in the Kate Broadway show turned movie Wicked, which I was extra excited about. And we're working hopefully in the future here on a piece about the mythology and skepticism behind House of the Dragon. Because I, like I said, love a good lore, and I think that George R.R. martin makes a great lore. So I do like the dragons. But our topic for this evening is based on the next project we're working on together, which is a book discussing medicine and mythology, a chronicle of gods.
[00:03:38] Speaker D: All right, so when we started talking about this book, we kind of realized how much Benson has always been doing, kind of what Mallory has been describing about pathology. It provides an operating system for civilization to understand ourselves and our place within it. Our terminology, our symbols, our very understanding body.
It's saturated with the remnants of our ancient mythology. We just kind of stopped noticing it at some point, or at least kind of stopped calling that. But when you present these two worlds, medicine and mythology, side by side, you realize how much we take for granted in our modern culture that was built on all the legends and lore and knowledge of our forebears.
[00:04:19] Speaker C: And that's exactly what this talk is about and the book that we're working on as well. Medicine and mythology are not opposites. Despite the fact that our brains always kind of try to compartmentalize them that way, they never have been. For most of human history, they were the exact same conversation. And every civilization that has ever existed generally asks one of these two questions over time. What is making me sick? And what do the gods have to say about it? So tonight we're going to show you how those questions shape many cultures from prehistoric times to the modern world. And. And we think you'll leave here seeing things maybe in a different way from that.
It's clearly not comprehensive coverage by any means, because obviously it goes throughout the entire history of the world. But. So we're going to give a very quick, truncated version of this topic in a very limited amount of time, covering, say, around 35,000 years.
So the central thesis we have up here is you cannot fully understand the history of medicine without understanding mythology, and you can't fully understand mythology without understanding medicine. These are two pillars of our civilization that have always been in conversation together, and they remain intertwined today, even though it's hard to see that.
So tonight, we're going to take you through roughly 35,000 years of that conversation, from prehistoric shamans drilling holes in skulls to ancient Egypt to a Moment in Haiti where I learned some really fun things about Fuji that I'd love to share with you guys. And we'll end right here in the modern world, where it turns out mythology is still practiced in medicine, and it kind of covers our hospitals. We just don't know.
So let's start. Before writing existed, before cities, before any civilizations really had names, prehistoric people believed in a combination of natural and supernatural forces, and they had no God of medicine by name. Everything at that time was kind of conceptualized. It was concepts. Their beliefs weren't recorded in that way. But we have artifacts. So the things we have now to analyze this for are artifacts. And specifically it's the Venus figurines.
So I think I have.
There we go.
So that is a Venus figurine that I saw in Blauburg and Baden Windberg in Germany.
So across Europe and Asia, we have Venus figurines, which are small carved female forms found dating back 35,000 years.
And what's interesting about them is there are no identifying features. It is meant to just represent an idea.
So they were purely representational of the idea that fertility was important to a society.
They were almost certainly fertility projects. They were ritual items, which tells us something profound. The very first thing humans formalized into religion was the body, and specifically the body's ability to create new life. So that's what we're doing.
There was no scientist, there were no physicians, There were healers, and they operated at the intersection of the physical and the supernatural. So it's starts at a very distinct place where medicine and mythology are one.
[00:07:43] Speaker D: And some of the things that these prehistoric medicine ended would be generally sophisticated even by our modern standards. This is one of my personal favorite examples. I think I first saw this as a kid, or the skeleton remains of it. But this is called trepidation. So if you've seen.
If you've ever seen one of these skulls kind of with the drilled hole in it, or what looks like a not natural kind of basket over the head, skull crack. It's called trepanation. It was the practice of drilling or scraping a hole into a human skull.
Archaeologists have found trepanned skulls from well before written history.
The procedure was performed for a whole bunch of reasons back then, but probably most commonly for head trauma, epilepsy, severe headaches would also be potential causes or. Or problems that they would have tried to treat this with. The remarkable thing about this is we essentially still do this procedure in modern neurosurgery. So it's one of the oldest surviving medical procedures in Human history.
The modern version is called a craniotomy or a variation on that, where a patient, for whatever reason, brain injury, a brain hemorrhage, a big tumor, anything in the brain that's gonna cause increased pressure within a closed box, we will take off a piece of the skull, you know, to get to the blade and try to relieve it, but also just to relieve that pressure. Anything growing in a closed space, you know, something's got to give.
So we still do that. The tools are obviously much different, but the principle behind them is the same. And prehistoric medicine men figured this out through just observation and ritual, and it is still with us today. So those are the diagrams where you would potentially do a variety of moving a piece of the skull to relieve those pressures. Today kind of lines up with the ancient skeleton there.
[00:09:33] Speaker C: It's crazy. It's crazy to me that we're still doing things from prehistoric times.
Then we go into the ancient Sumerians. The ancient Sumerians give us the first named goddess of medicine, and it's Gula. And she's depicted as a physician and midwife with her arms raised and ready to heal. And she was subjectively one of the most important deities in the pantheon there, likely just below Ishtar. And I just like to think about what that means, that in one of the earliest civilizations on earth, the healer was one of the most important divine magical figures. But here's what I love the most about Sumerian medicine. They had two kinds of healers. The Asu, who used plants and physical remedies, and the Aspi, who used spells and rituals. And these two practitioners were considered equally valid. So they were equally respected, despite the fact that one works kind of with what you would expect in more traditional medicine and one more in the mythological realm. So the herbalist and the exorcist worked together side by side. So medicine and mythology did not compete with each other. They collaborated, and early healers connected with gods to heal the body. And I will say we just talked previously about how there was no face. There was no, you know, back in prehistoric times, it was just the idea of something. We are now starting to name our gods of medicine.
And in Sumerian times and Babylonian times, it was the idea of the gods became important, and the rulers of a civilization became important. So the small folk kind of still didn't matter, but it was anyone that they felt defined a destiny of a civilization became important to have a name and a face, but it would really just be the gods at this point, and the kings
[00:11:25] Speaker D: and the medicine side of their culture, the Asu, they used a variety of medicinal plants and minerals in their healing tonics. Over 250 different plants that we've recorded. A lot of these plants have active ingredients that we use in modern medicines.
A lot of the chemicals come from plant based sources. We even have a whole branch of modern pharmacology that is focused on just identifying active ingredients within natural sources. Fields called pharmacognosine.
But for example, the Sumerians were the first people we know of that used fish oil as a therapeutic remedy. I'm sure everybody has seen fish oil sold at essentially any pharmacy.
Omega 3 fatty acids used for all sorts of heart related conditions.
They also used alcohol as a early form of anesthesia.
And it's the first time that this was documented in medical written history.
The principle chemical suppression of consciousness is what we still do to manage pain today. We just use a different chemical in a more controlled way. So the chemistry is obviously very different today. But the instinct, the goal kind of their thought process, very much the same.
[00:12:45] Speaker C: Then we have Egypt.
We arrive at one of the civilizations most associated with mythology and they do not disappoint for the that the Egyptian God of medicine is Heka. And he is one of the most fascinating figures we discuss in the book. He was not just the God of healing, he was also the personification of magic itself. So in Egypt, medicine and magic were literally the same word. And here's the detail that stops people.
Heka was also known as the cannibal pharaoh. So he had to devour other gods to maintain his power to heal.
So the God of medicine was sustained by consuming divinity in order that he could heal because he did so. So that's a mythology that tells you something very specific about how the Egyptians understood the transfer of power and then put that into their mythology and their practices of medicine. And this is my favorite thing in the world to talk about. Okay, then there's Imhotep.
He's great.
You, you probably know him because he is the villain from the mummy films.
That's him. Boris Karloff in the 1930s as Nemo Tep. And there's Emotep in the 1999 Mummy movie, which I think is one of the greatest films of all time. Even though it's terribly wrong and inaccurate, we still love it. And then there's us cosplaying from the mummy, but they brought it back to theaters this year. So we really like that a lot.
Imhotep was the first physician in history to be recorded by name.
So he is the first doctor that we actually can put a name on, which is great.
And he was a priest, he was an engineer, he was a physician, and he was eventually deified.
So the real emotep was so extraordinary that the ancient world actually turned him into a God. And he practiced medicine, mythology and engineering.
And I really can't get over the fact that Universal picked him at random in the 1930s to represent one of the first monsters in their monster universe. And we are still making monster movies about emotep, despite the fact that he was actually a really great guy in the first known position in the world.
[00:14:59] Speaker D: Poor guy.
[00:15:00] Speaker C: Poor monster.
All right.
[00:15:05] Speaker D: The ancient Egyptian physicians, they're extraordinary even by modern standards. So the civilization itself lasted over 3,000 years. And this is a civilization that later on had classes to teach ancient Egyptians.
[00:15:21] Speaker C: That is really fun. And I think people don't know that is the span of ancient Egypt lasted so long that in ancient Egypt they were studying ancient Egypt.
[00:15:33] Speaker D: This is a culture that produced an enormous number of medical advances.
Genuinely humbling by our still modern standards. They invented laxatives using castor oil, figs and bran. They extracted salicin from willow bark to reduce pain, inflammation. Salicin is actually the precursor compound in modern aceticylic acid or aspirin.
So we still need it for exactly that reason.
They practiced cauterization after surgery. They were, I think, the first documented use of antiseptics. They created toothpaste from eggshells, natron pumice, and they even had a rudimentary form of toothbrushes from twigs.
So pretty, pretty advanced for 3,000 years ago. They were also the first people that documented immigration. A disease characterized by excessive thirst, frequent urination and weight loss, and treated it with dietary restrictions. This would be the disease we know as type 1 diabetes.
[00:16:37] Speaker C: All right, so here we kind of transition out of some of the more ancient things and there starts becoming laws into our medicine. And I wouldn't say medicine mythology as to really split as much, but you see a transition where everything becomes much more compartmentalized.
The Babylonians did something no civilization had done before. They turned medicine into a formal institution. So they have the Codex Hammurabi, which was released somewhere around the 1700. There's between 1700 and 1750 BC and it's debatably when sometime in there. It's one of the oldest legal documents in the world, and it's embedded within it. It has a sliding fee schedule for medical services, patient rights, required medical records, and outcome measurements with legal penalties if they were neglected so they actually legalized medicine here in Babylon.
And at the same time, I love this part. They still believed in witches and demons and divine punishment causing illness.
So they've really kind of legalized it, but it's still not separated from the supernatural, is what is causing our illnesses. They practice rituals that look remarkably like modern faith healing. They consulted omens and astrology as a part of medical diagnoses. And the business model was modern.
So the business model is modern, the metaphysics is ancient. And they held both simultaneously at an equal level, without contradiction.
[00:18:12] Speaker D: Something we'll have to blame them for. Corporatization of health care.
[00:18:15] Speaker C: I know it started there.
[00:18:16] Speaker D: It all went back there.
They also made observations that were generally ahead of their time. For example, they believed that socioeconomic factors such as loss of status, loss of property, loss of authority, directly affected physical health. In modern medicine, we refer to those as social detriments to health. Things like chronic stress from poverty, instability, marginalization, obviously have measurable effects on our health, can be very detrimental to cardiovascular health, our immune functions, and our overall mortality. So even the Babylonians that long ago described that phenomenon. It was 4,000 years ago. They certainly didn't have the mechanisms understood or sussed out, but they had observed that pattern all the way back then.
[00:19:04] Speaker C: And then we get to Greece, the ancient Greeks made a radical move. They were the first civilization we know to declare, at least formally and philosophically, that disease was not supernatural in origin.
They had no demonic possession, no divine punishment. They believed that physical illness had physical causes, and the physical causes could be observed, reasoned about, and treated. So there's a huge shift here in how we're treating medicine. And that's a civilizational breakthrough. And it came with philosophers, with Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and all the good guys, and most importantly for our purpose, Hippocrates.
And yet even the Greeks kept a God of medicine, which is interesting, because they don't believe that the gods are causing sickness, but they still have a God dedicated to medicine. Asclepius, son of Apollo. And he carried the rod of Asclepius, which is a staff with a single serpent wrapped around it. His temples were a place of healing, of dream incubation and pilgrimage. And the rational Greeks maintained a mythological healer still in their pantheon despite all of that, because mythology never fully leaves a culture. It just changes its relationship based on. On the science at the time.
[00:20:25] Speaker D: And Hippocrates, he's probably the single most identifiable historical figure within medicine. He's considered the father of modern medicine. He established perhaps the first medical School on the island of coast. But he gave us more than we typically credit him for. He introduced a lot of terminology we still use today, such as physician diagnosis, therapy, trauma, sepsis, symptom.
He also famously created the Hippoc oath, which modern physicians still take in an adapted form today.
It's a much younger me taking it many years ago.
[00:21:02] Speaker C: You have him to thank for it.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:21:05] Speaker D: And a story that I particularly love because it intersects medicine and pathology in an unexpected way is the symbology here
[00:21:15] Speaker A: now they call them family that we
[00:21:16] Speaker D: often associate with medicine in America. The one here with the double stakes is the caduceus. It's probably the one most people associate with medicine.
It was actually not originally a medical symbol. And it's the staff of Hermes.
[00:21:33] Speaker C: Yes. Who's the trickster guy?
[00:21:34] Speaker D: Who's the trickster messenger God. And the story behind this is that was erroneously picked at the turn of the 20th century, World War I era, by the U.S. army, and they branded it all over their medical tents. And it has basically stuck with us since then. So you'll see it on ambulances, on hospitals now. But the, I guess original mythological staff is the single snake here, that's the rod of Asclepius.
So a mythological clerical error.
We've been stuck with it ever since.
[00:22:09] Speaker C: And it's funny because I went to use some Tums the other day for the heartburn and it has the caduceus on the Tums bottle. And I'm like, well, that's not the right one. But it is now part of our mythology and what we use to define our medicine, even though it was supposed to be Flavius and then it's Hermes.
[00:22:32] Speaker D: All right.
And one other thing the Greek gave us that's worth mentioning. They were the first people to discover the pineal gland. It's a very small cone shaped structure that's deep in the center of your brain. The Greeks were so kind of struck by its central location so deep in the brain that they named it the third eye. They also recognized that it had a connection to light and rhythm.
What it does by our modern understanding of it is it regulates our melatonin, has a central role to play in our circadian rhythm and how we respond to light. So the phrase third eye is still used both by neurologists to describe the pineal glands, photoreceptive properties, but also by mystics describing a spiritual perception, third eye. So the Greek anatomists back then used the same two words. The science and mythology are still used to this day, sharing that vocabulary.
[00:23:36] Speaker C: And then we go to see, we're jumping very fast through everything. The Mayan world. The Mayans believed that illness was a punishment from the gods. So we're kind of shifting back a little bit that way. Specifically, that sickness meant your soul had been captured by snake. Supernatural being. Shamans work to rebalance the mind and the body and the spirit. And they induced altered states of consciousness as both a medical and a religious tool.
And yet, alongside all of that, their shamans were also very skilled surgeons. So they sutured wounds with human hair.
Human hair has a tessel strength and compatibility properties that are in fact, similar to the sutures used in delicate modern surgeries today. They performed trepanation, which we talked about from prehistoric times. They created dental prosthetics. And they were among the earliest practitioners of what might now be called psychedelic assisted rituals, which, again, is using altered states of consciousness to treat both physical and psychological suffering. So they held the mystical and the
[00:24:39] Speaker D: surgical in the same hand and the psychedelic assistant rituals. It's something that's kind of coming back into a current area of study. Probably heard a lot about using low dose kind of microdose, ketamine or other psychoactive substances in the treatment of mental health. So a very active area of modern research.
[00:24:58] Speaker C: Yeah, it's very, very new too. Like, as far as ketamine, only popularized or newly popularized, I should say.
And yeah, altered states of consciousness are a huge topic. If you go into any kind of folkloric or occult studies, that's one of the big topics in that world.
And speaking of this one also just fascinates me. I want to take a moment to talk about one of the most misunderstood religious traditions in the world, Haitian voodoo.
Voodoo is fascinating. And then there's Haitian voodoo, which is different than voodoo that's practiced in New Orleans. But overall, in voodoo, God does not involve himself directly in the days of man and the affairs of everyday humans. Instead, the loa, which are clever kind of trickster spirits, serve as intermediaries between the earth realm and God and the law of medicine and healing. His name is loca.
And it's interesting to see. I could go on this topic forever. But the parallels between Catholicism and voodoo are actually incredibly extreme. Because when people were brought here to America, they weren't allowed to necessarily practice their religion, so they started practicing Catholicism, but it was really voodoo. So everyone, a lot of the major loas actually have like counterpart sync saints and Catholicism. So they actually become very intertwined.
And the tradition is rich with herbalism, rituals and sophisticated understanding of community health.
And the voodoo doll is kind of what people associate when they think of Vodou.
But I'm going to use this as a time to discuss how misconceptions of cultural tools have defined them differently as items in society. So from my experiences when I was speaking with people in New Orleans about the voodoo doll, I was told that the voodoo doll was an early form of patient chart. So it started out as a way for practitioners to mark these dolls with pins to indicate where someone's experiencing pain.
So I would put the pins in the doll's head to say, this person has head pain.
And depending on how extreme the pain was, I would put in that number of pins to mark it as extreme or maybe just a light headache. So I'll put one. So it was a very early form of patient chart.
And according to these claims, when outsiders came in without any context for this practice, they witnessed the healers inserting pins into human figures and esteemed the worst. And all of a sudden, now there's this malicious image of a voodoo doll being used to curse people. And that's not actually where the intent for it started. And so a new and much more sinister rationale is put behind the dolls, and it spread like wildfire through our media now through television and movies. And it has a wildly different idea of what a voodoo doll is culturally than what it started as.
And now practitioners don't actually use them anymore in that tradition because it has such a sinister reputation behind it, because it was misunderstood. So I just thought that was fascinating.
[00:28:29] Speaker E: All right.
[00:28:30] Speaker D: And then moving up to almost modern times, into the Victorian era, it's another era that probably most people have some understanding of just because it's been so recent. It has some, like, clearly mythological origins.
But these are people that lived just over 100 years ago. And this was a time when bloodletting, draining blood from patients to restore their balance, their four humors, was practiced. That was a practice that goes back all the way from ancient Egypt. So it lasted all the way up through the Victorian area.
They used maggots as a form of wound therapy. So they would place maggots on infected tissue that would consume all the necrotic cells and bacteria. It sounds horrifically medieval, but fascinatingly, it's still FDA approved, and it's used as a last resort today. So there are specific types of maggots that are considered medical devices, and they are specifically FDA approved for wound debris. Yeah.
[00:29:31] Speaker C: What would it take for me to get one of those?
[00:29:33] Speaker D: You have to fail a lot of antibiotics on your way to Losing the limb, probably.
So yeah, it will still be used occasionally today for infecting that don't respond to antibiotics because they markedly will only clean, they will only consume the dead tissue and they actually their own antimicrobial that will keep the healthy tissue healthy.
And epilepsy was another disease condition, a neurological condition caused by repeated abnormal electronic activity in your brain that causes just repeated seizures. That's something that obviously humans have been dealing with since there's been humans. But in Victorian era this was regularly interpreted in kind of their mindset as demonic possession.
You can see how that might look like that is a very startling thing to see somebody in a full seizure.
But unfortunately a lot of these patients would be sent to asylums instead of receiving treatment.
The parallel deprition, exorcism traditions wasn't coincidental. It was their operating framework at the time. So it was the mythology, not the neurology doing the diagnosing in these cases.
Also, another thing to note here would be there's actually a certain type of seizures, temporal lobe epilepsy, so the side piece of your brain or your temporal legs. But seizure activity there kind of famously within medicine can actually cause a sense of religious connection, connectedness. So whatever part of that brain is, whatever circuitry there, it can actually make you feel like you're having a profound religious experience. So again, that would fit in with the demonic possession framework of viewing the world.
[00:31:14] Speaker C: And it's also interesting, I have to say, because we've talk to a lot of people, even modernly, that believe in demonic possession. And that's something that the Catholic Church even today still has a department that deals with exorcisms. And there's, if you read Ed and Lorraine Warren's book, the main book that they have their friend write about them, they actually have a section on how to tell if someone is having seizures or demonically possessed. That is still a conversation that we're having today.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: All right.
[00:31:48] Speaker C: We tend to think of mythology as something ancient civilizations believed in before they knew better. But mythology is not in the past at all. It is the vocabulary of your body. Your Achilles tendon is named after a Trojan war hero whose mother dipped him in the river Styx to make him invulnerable and held him by the heels so he could only be hurt by his heels.
And most of you know this.
But what you may not have considered is that every time a physician says Achilles attended, they're actually invoking a 3,000 year old myth as a diagnostic term.
[00:32:22] Speaker D: I took Bradford.
[00:32:23] Speaker C: I know. Well, I gotta Put Bradford in there. None of these great. By the way, Troy,
[00:32:31] Speaker D: another one of my personal favorites. There's a real medical machine called Ondine's.
The clinical name is Central hypoventilation syndrome. So it's a condition where your autonomic nervous system in your brain stem that regulates your autonomic breathing. So breathing, without thinking about breathing, fails.
Obviously, this is a particular problem when you are sleeping, since you are not there to tell yourself to breathe while you are asleep.
These patients, they can be very rarely genetic, but can also be acquired from anything. That kind of stroke ingests the wrong spot in the brain stem can actually cause this problem.
There are these patients that unfortunately have this are essentially required to have mechanical ventilation, certainly while they're sleeping, if not at all times during the day. But when this was discovered, the physician who discovered it happened to know of the lore of Ondine, who was a wilderness in German mythology, who had cursed her unfaithful husband so that he would have to consciously will every breath he took for the rest of his life. So if he fell asleep and stopped thinking about breathing, he would die.
The real syndrome became related to this mythology. And I learned in medical school, not diet scars.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:33:53] Speaker D: Clinical name is much less appealing.
[00:33:59] Speaker C: And mythological language isn't the only place this shows up in modern medicine.
Consider the architecture. Many of the largest hospital systems in the United States are owned by Catholic organizations. And that means that when you enter a hospital, it has its CT scanners and its robot surgery scanning. And you can also find a chapel. Most hospitals do have a chapel in them, designated as a sacred space for people to pray over the sick.
[00:34:30] Speaker D: And it's not all just looking forward from where we come from.
A lot of our modern research, we are looking at extracting DNA samples from prehistoric human remains as a way to develop new antibiotics, new antivirals, new actually mining the immune strategies of our ancient forebears to fight against current bacteria and develop modern drugs. So we are literally mining our ancestors for modern medical answers.
[00:34:59] Speaker C: And my favorite example of some of the new research they've done, I think it was last year, was they extracted or took peptides and proteins that were taken from letters rich written by Vlad the Impaler, the historical Vlad Dracula, and revealed evidence that he might actually have hemolacria, which is a condition that caused the eyes to weep bloody tears.
So the very symptoms that may have given rise to Vlad Dracula's vampire myth actually could be related to a documented medical condition. And we're just now finding this out due to DNA and peptide obstruction.
I missed him. There he is.
But yeah, Fascinating.
So every civilization we've talked about tonight, from prehistoric shamans to Victorian physicians, asks the same two questions I brought up earlier.
What makes us sick? And what does the sacred have to say about it? And the answers have changed and the vocabulary has changed and, and the tools have changed, but the conversation has never stopped. We've come to believe, writing this book together, that mythology does not disappear when science advances at all. It just transforms. It becomes a metaphor, it becomes nomenclature, but it becomes the words we carve into the architecture of our hospital. It becomes the symbols we stitch on our uniforms, sometimes accidentally, like the caduceus.
It becomes the name of the diseases that we use, the names of our attendants and the names of our gods. So we're still the ancient people we've been talking about. We just now have better instruments in science and sometimes a better understanding of things.
[00:36:48] Speaker D: And from a medical standpoint, we'll disclose saying the further we got into researching this, the more humbling it became. Everything from ancient fish oil, aspirin from Willow Barr. The craniotomy being literally a prehistoric surgical procedure. Dietary management of diabetes well before we understood the pathology underlying it. Maggot therapy. These aren't accidents. They're observations made by people who are watching the world just as closely as we do now. They simply organize their observations inside a mythological framework instead of our scientific one. That framework was different, but their curiosity was identical. So the history of medicine is not a story of ignorance giving way to knowledge. It's a story of knowledge taking different shapes across time. And that should humble us about what we think right now and where we're going in the future.
So I just wanted to thank everybody for your time and attention.
[00:37:55] Speaker C: Give some time for questions.
[00:37:58] Speaker D: I have a question.
[00:37:59] Speaker A: Yes?
[00:38:01] Speaker D: How could the Egyptians.
[00:38:02] Speaker A: Michael.
That's all right. I'm good.
How could the Egyptians find a gland
[00:38:07] Speaker D: in the middle of a brain?
Yeah, well, they, I believe, were practicing cadavers at that point. So actually cutting corpses open and discovering
[00:38:24] Speaker E: a lot of anatomy.
[00:38:25] Speaker D: A lot of the anatomy, a lot of our modern anatomy still has ancient Greek roots and ancient Latin roots. So they were some of the first anatomists and they did a lot of
[00:38:35] Speaker C: it off and they still do that today because you had to cut apart a human body and get the head pies.
[00:38:45] Speaker D: Charlee has a follow up question.
[00:38:47] Speaker C: This is exactly my question.
[00:38:48] Speaker A: Coincidentally, it doesn't show up on the table.
[00:38:54] Speaker C: My question is how did they have a notion of what it did?
[00:38:59] Speaker D: Yeah, so I Think they would have a notion of what it did based on damage like people. So that's still kind of how we know early on.
Even a lot of our modern understanding, at least before we like, you know, get a deep understanding, is looking at people that are injured in those areas, not by accident, and seeing what deficit they have and then studying it later. So, you know, we use obviously animal models a lot of time now to do it in a controlled way. So we'll purposely lesion a brain now to see what the deficit would be. But the way to do that ethically, you know, to some degree on humans is just to find people that have had that trauma happen and over, you know, if you have millions of people over a few hundred years, you can find a few of them enough to have some understanding. So they wouldn't be able to tell you, you know, oh, this is melatonin regulate, you know, regulating your circadian rhythm. But, you know, a person damaged in this way is going to have some deficit to their sleep cycle that, you know, this has something to do with sleep regulatory. This has something to do with how they're perceiving our sleep wake cycle.
[00:40:09] Speaker A: Question in the back.
[00:40:11] Speaker E: Great talk.
Question about. So I like to think about dividing medicine into pharmaceutical medicine and surgical medicine. And pharmaceutical medicine is kind of only existed for 200 years, whereas surgical mechanism as you're describing has been around for thousands of years. But it seems like you jumped from ancient Egypt and Mayan to Victorian times.
Like what was, what were the surgeons that were doing autopsies and cadavers doing all of that time? For example, ACL tears only described in like the mid-1800s. But I'm sure people were having ACL tears in ancient Egypt as well.
How come they like the people that the surgeons that were doing the autopsies weren't like, hey, the ACL is not there thoughts about that?
[00:41:04] Speaker D: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think, Sorry, you know, my understanding of it is there obviously between different cultures at that time too. There's not a lot of cross talk. So, you know, one society might know in the minds is not going to get translated to miscellaneous Victorian drums. So there's not that benefit of a collaborative, scientific, worldwide network to understand all the anatomy.
So as far as formalized like surgical procedure procedures, I don't think there was a lot of that kind of development. I think there was a lot of naming of anatomy, knowing what the tendon was. That stuff kind of got named at least what we know like by the western medicine standards through that like last few hundred years. But understanding kind of what the ACL does and why we needed to repair, I think that'd be pretty modern. So I don't think there were at least that I could find. There wasn't a lot of real advancement in how to repair that stuff. I mean, going back just like, you know, maybe 150 years ago. I mean, I think a lot of the stuff was just kind of amputation.
No, amputation for limb type problems.
[00:42:23] Speaker C: So
[00:42:26] Speaker A: right here, just real quick, I mean, people like Leonardo da Vinci and others did a lot of study on the human body and learned a lot about it.
And you've done a very good job of tracing the human history of all of that. But going back to ancient times to now, is there one thing about the human body that we still don't totally understand that we wish we did, based on the fact that dissection and X rays and other devices don't really tell us that we wish we knew?
[00:43:02] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:43:03] Speaker D: I think there's still a great deal. I'll show my bias here as a neuroradiologist. But the most interesting part of the human body to me is the brain. And it's, I think, still the area that we just have, you know, not a deep understanding of. We understand the macro structure quite well. You know, we, we understand that if you take out this lobe of the brain, you're going to have this. How does that work? Yeah, but we don't exactly, we don't have a deep understanding of the connectome.
So you might not, if you've heard of that term before, where we had the big project to unwind our DNA code just in late 1990s to 2000s. The modern kind of equivalent project that is still going out is to actually map the connection network of a human brain, which is a way, way, way bigger project. I forget what the number is, but there's trillion, you know, there's trillion. There might be a few billion neurons, but they make any number of connections to other ones. So the order of magnitude of connectiveness is just an astronomical number. So how those connections work, I mean, that is what likely gives us consciousness, gives us thought.
So we have an understanding of the macro structure. But yeah, that, like you're saying that that connectedness, that underpinning, we don't have a deep understanding of.
[00:44:19] Speaker A: Well, other than saying, okay, now we got it. Is there any benefit to really, really knowing it to that depth?
[00:44:27] Speaker D: Yeah, I think there are a lot of diseases there that I would think probably most deeply about, would Be like kind of like the psychiatric set of diseases. These are clearly real diseases. But what the underpinning of those diseases are, they don't show up on an MRI scan. You know, I can't look at your brain MRI and say this person's gonna have schizophrenia. There's some light things in you. They might have some brain loss, like atrophy in a certain region, but there's nothing that's going to like diagnose depression or anxiety or schizophrenia. Those are probably connection related problems. Just kind of. The brain is wired in a maladaptive way. So understanding those connections at that level might lead us to be able to do something about it.
[00:45:13] Speaker A: Well, that's the key. Can you do anything about it?
[00:45:15] Speaker D: Can you do anything about it? That's hard to say. Particularly before, before we even know what
[00:45:19] Speaker C: we're trying to do, and we've talked a little bit about that too, that we don't even have an agreed upon definition for what consciousness is.
So we don't. Things like consciousness, free will, those are in the world of philosophy, not even actually defined in a way that people can even have a real conversation about it. Because I see it as this and you see it as this. And we're having a conversation and it doesn't match.
[00:45:45] Speaker D: We disagree about the consciousness.
[00:45:48] Speaker C: We do.
[00:45:50] Speaker D: Question right here.
[00:45:51] Speaker E: Okay, so you said that mythology is
[00:45:54] Speaker C: the operating system of a society.
[00:45:56] Speaker D: Right.
[00:45:56] Speaker E: It's the way a culture collectively understands the world.
What would you say is the mythology of our society, if there is one.
[00:46:03] Speaker C: Oh, that's good.
[00:46:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:08] Speaker C: I think we are moving more into kind of understanding science, but I think we're heavily still very religious. We're defined by Christianity. I mean that's, there are several different major religions out there even still today. But at least in our western world, we are very defined by Christianity, the belief in a single God.
And that's kind of ingrained in our, in our medicine like we've talked about. It's ingrained in how we live our daily lives. And even people in the very science based side of the world will. Sometimes you find yourself using terminology, you're like, oh, that's such a blessing, or that's this.
And a lot of that verbiage comes from Christianity. So I think we're still very intertwined into a single religion, believing now into a single God, despite the fact that we are much more advancing in the science world.
So I think we're pretty, we're pretty balanced. But there's, there's a lot of Christianity kind of defining our culture in our medicine and our science and everything we do.
[00:47:18] Speaker D: And I think to go back to the previous question, I think by not having a deep understanding of what gives rise to consciousness, free thought, free will, that's just an area where you can kind of mythologize still. You know, we don't understand that. So kind of legends, lore, mythology can be put in that, you know, placed over that while we don't have a deep understanding of it.
[00:47:43] Speaker C: Yeah, it comes from almost a fear of not having control. Like people used Ouija boards, people used well before that runestones as a way to try to grasp at control when there is none. So there are just things in this world that we have no control over, we have no understanding over. So we're going to come up with something that fills in those blanks in order to define society. So right now that, that hole that we're trying to fill in, a lot of times it's, it's either science based or it's religion.
[00:48:22] Speaker E: Close to my mouth, I just have more of a follow up question to that.
Christianity, you call it a Catholicism, I guess.
But would the expansion of religion and mythology strengthen your publication? In other words, you have Hinduism, Islamic religions, Judaism that actually prevailed. Her standing?
[00:48:51] Speaker C: Yes, it just depends on. Christianity is our western world. But every civilization has their religion that they're going to and they're believing in. So that's kind of, it's just more regionally based. But either way I think it's. We're still very much the ancient people trying to rely on some kind of outside force to give us reason to understand how the world works when they're in.
[00:49:18] Speaker A: Final question on your. How you feel the blanks.
[00:49:20] Speaker D: Yeah. So the western world is featured here pretty well. And maybe your next book will be looking at the eastern world and how they have developed their own notions of medicine and mythology. Clearly the Chinese have an amazing history that.
Do you know, has anyone done something similar that you're doing?
I couldn't find something that's that similar. But like yes, the eastern world would be fascinating that we, when we were kind of forming, you know, like let's, you know, how do we want to organize it? We want to organize it by, you know, time period or region or culture.
That is a area kind of have me mapped it out that I don't have a deep knowledge of. But it's fascinating because it spans an enormous amount of time. I mean it spans essentially the same, you know, same amount of time, but is a completely different mythology. And you're going to expect to find completely different, you know, trains of thought and completely different, you know, completely different form of medicine and understanding the human body because you're starting from a different framework.
So I think it would be fascinating to parallel those side by side. I would hope when we get this island running, that will have kind of all of it, you know, or a big chunk of it in there from kind of both the Western and eastern sides of the world. But I expect that they're going to be quite different in there. Both, obviously their mythology is quite different, but I expect that that framework will lead to kind of different understanding of a different thing, different parts of human health as well.
[00:51:04] Speaker C: And so expansive. Is it two books? Is it one with Western, one with Eastern? Is it this chunk of time in the world? This chunk of time in the world? We're still mapping that out.
