Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio Happy Friday.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about Rebecca Crumpler
Speaker 1: this week. Sure did a topic that turned out to be.
Speaker 2: Challenging. It a different way than I.
Speaker 1: Expected because of all the baby discussion. Well, there is
Speaker 1: a lot of baby discussion. Thank you for bearing with
Speaker 1: the baby discussion, Holly.
Speaker 2: I know it's not your favorite.
Speaker 1: It's not the talking. I mean again, we know I
Speaker 1: don't need to believe it, and I don't want anybody
Speaker 1: who has and loves babies to feel weird. I just
Speaker 1: like the discussion of baby care really squiggs me out.
Speaker 2: Not for you, No, No.
Speaker 1: What turned out to be challenging was the amount of
Speaker 1: information was fine, uh, but I kept finding like all
Speaker 1: the sources would say the same thing, and I would
Speaker 1: just sort of go, okay, but like, where is this
Speaker 1: coming from?
Speaker 2: Though?
Speaker 1: Like I kept seeing the same quote about the the
Speaker 1: sort of reluctance to allow her to graduate from medical school,
Speaker 1: which you can read as like I don't think she
Speaker 1: had a ton of formal education and she definitely had
Speaker 1: to take time off to care for her husband as
Speaker 1: he was dying, and so like, I can imagine that
Speaker 1: both of those things would have been caused for concern.
Speaker 1: I can also imagine racism being prominently involved in the
Speaker 1: decision making and how she was judged. But I just
Speaker 1: kept going, okay, like this is clearly quoting from something.
Speaker 2: What are we quoting from?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: This led me down.
Speaker 1: I find I found like a place that had the actual,
Speaker 1: like actual footnote of what, you know, what collection it
Speaker 1: was in. And then that was a whole other little
Speaker 1: rabbit hole because I did not write down who, like
Speaker 1: which which collection this was said to be a part of.
Speaker 1: But the university it was being held at is not
Speaker 1: there anymore. Oh, it was absorbed by Drexel University. I
Speaker 1: don't know if absorbed is the right. I did not
Speaker 1: look into like the details of like how these universities
Speaker 1: came under the same umbrella. But this is a thing
Speaker 1: that sort of led me to wish that I had
Speaker 1: a little time machine, because had things aligned differently while
Speaker 1: I was on that trip to Philadelphia to see the
Speaker 1: Marie Lawrence exhibit, I could have like extended my stay
Speaker 1: by a day and see if I could go and
Speaker 1: like get access to the actual file box of actual information,
Speaker 1: which is a collection of information that was compiled by
Speaker 1: somebody named Margaret Jaredo about I think specifically early black
Speaker 1: women doctors, like early black women in the medical profession.
Speaker 1: And I am very curious about what all else is
Speaker 1: in that collection, and you know, it could be a
Speaker 1: magic box of information and discovery. Uh, it does seem
Speaker 1: to be something that was compiled with a lot of
Speaker 1: care and attention and is now in the in the collection. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's there in the finding aid at Drexel University,
Speaker 1: but not at a time that I could have gotten
Speaker 1: to such a thing. And I was very late in
Speaker 1: the research process when I finally like actually penned down
Speaker 1: where we're quoting from on stuff something that I wanted
Speaker 1: to note, but that I didn't put in the actual
Speaker 1: episode because it's not directly related to her. So she
Speaker 1: was the first black woman known to have earned an
Speaker 1: MD in the United States. That is an achievement on
Speaker 1: its own, earning a medical degree in general. But this
Speaker 1: was also sort of at a very early time in
Speaker 1: the process of things like nursing and midwiffery and medicine
Speaker 1: becoming a lot more formalized and a lot more standardized,
Speaker 1: and really most of the time overseen by like a
Speaker 1: white medical establishment. So anyone who was not white and
Speaker 1: was wanting to be a nurse or a midwife or
Speaker 1: a doctor was like increasingly funneled into a pretty racist
Speaker 1: formalized system, which in a lot of care just wound
Speaker 1: up with people not having access to work that they
Speaker 1: had already been doing and had already been trained in. Right,
Speaker 1: So like people who had who had been working as
Speaker 1: nurses for many years, who had you know, learned to
Speaker 1: be nurses before there were formal nursing programs, like no
Speaker 1: longer being able to practice nurses after this became more
Speaker 1: formalized and standardized. And I feel like a lot of
Speaker 1: this is really complicated because, on the one hand, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of things that have gone on in
Speaker 1: the world of medicine, some of which we've talked about
Speaker 1: on the show before, that were like not evidence based,
Speaker 1: were not helping people in some cases, were harming people,
Speaker 1: and evolving into a more formalized profession did not totally
Speaker 1: get rid of that by any stretch of the imagination
Speaker 1: at all, but did sort of put some guardrails around that.
Speaker 1: But then just also let to like a lot of
Speaker 1: loss of community knowledge. We did a whole episode that
Speaker 1: you researched about the Flexner Report that was a report
Speaker 1: into the status of medical education that in the aftermath
Speaker 1: that led to a lot of the schools that were
Speaker 1: training black doctors being shut down, and they're just like,
Speaker 1: weren't any anymore. So it's like simultaneously she broke a
Speaker 1: lot of ground and achieved a lot of firsts and
Speaker 1: then clearly worked in a very needed role in her community.
Speaker 1: As the world was changing in this way that kind
Speaker 1: of forced everyone who wasn't white into the margins as
Speaker 1: these institutions became more formalized and standardized that associated with
Speaker 1: like universities and colleges rather than learning doing as someone's apprentice,
Speaker 1: if that makes sense. So yeah, I feel like there
Speaker 1: are complicated things around all of that. Well, and the
Speaker 1: hard part, right is that when we're looking at I mean,
Speaker 1: it is hard enough when scenarios like that play out
Speaker 1: in the modern world to tease apart all of the
Speaker 1: moving parts that are going on, and like when there
Speaker 1: are scenarios where racism or bias is driving the bus
Speaker 1: in terms of how a decision has gotten made versus
Speaker 1: those occasions when there actually is like a problem of
Speaker 1: the knowledge that isn't maybe accurate or correct. That's hard
Speaker 1: enough if it plays out today. So when we're looking
Speaker 1: back at stuff like this, it's like you really have
Speaker 1: to have no assumptions of accuracy of almost anything you
Speaker 1: look at, because everybody who wrote a piece of paper
Speaker 1: about it had unconscious bias, right, because we all do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but we weren't even aware of the concept of unconscious mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like it gets very very tricky.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so much baby talk. Also, apparently I should
Speaker 1: be you know, as a woman of a certain age,
Speaker 1: I should be avoiding excitement. Yeah, I got to the
Speaker 1: So I love reading her book. There are things in
Speaker 1: it where I'm like, yeah, absolutely, we need better ventilation
Speaker 1: and buildings. That's that's certainly true. But like, for example,
Speaker 1: the parts where she was talking about basically people working
Speaker 1: themselves to death to make ends meet did kind of
Speaker 1: come off as sort of saying you should not do that,
Speaker 1: when it's like, okay, but with what resources? Right? How?
Speaker 1: How how does the family eat them? Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: advice about menopause, I was like, you're not I'm not
Speaker 1: giving up spices right, not a thing I would ever
Speaker 1: be willing to do as I approach the age of fifty.
Speaker 2: So yeah, her.
Speaker 1: Her book is so clearly influenced by, you know, her
Speaker 1: own experience of many years of working with babies and
Speaker 1: mothers especially, And then also occasionally I would read something
Speaker 1: a goo, oh no, that's we know today, that's not
Speaker 1: how that works. Yeah, yeah, I mean I also write
Speaker 1: like it's there's a little bit of relief, is not it,
Speaker 1: But there's a little bit of like, oh. We often
Speaker 1: talk about how things you think are very much part
Speaker 1: of the modern world have actually been playing out forever
Speaker 1: and ever and ever, and it's like, this is like,
Speaker 1: you know, more than one hundred and twenty thirty years ago,
Speaker 1: and yet there was already this idea that people work
Speaker 1: too much, which we are still constantly discussing culturally, like
Speaker 1: about how unhealthy it is to work too much. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, on the one hand, it stinks that
Speaker 1: we still haven't figured this biz out, and on the
Speaker 1: other hand, it's oddly reassuring that this has always been
Speaker 1: a problem and we've for the most part managed to
Speaker 1: endure at least one To look at the whole of
Speaker 1: humanity but also I think we should all not work
Speaker 1: as much. But again, oh, yes, we also all need
Speaker 1: to eat and have the necessities that enable us to live.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I had some similar thoughts about her feelings about children
Speaker 1: who were, in her mind, too young to be going
Speaker 1: to school because of the health effects of that, and
Speaker 1: I was like, man, this is a debate that we're
Speaker 1: still having about. Like I know so many parents of
Speaker 1: little kids who are like, yes, school starts, and it's
Speaker 1: just like continual illness. Yeah, but like the benefit of
Speaker 1: being in school, Like there's a whole different benefit involving
Speaker 1: like learning and socialization with your peers and all of
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. And like, I don't know all
Speaker 1: of those decisions, I am not remotely qualified to weigh
Speaker 1: in on. But I was like, yeah, I still see
Speaker 1: this these conversations happening today about like kids in school
Speaker 1: and daycare and getting sick. But like, then there's a
Speaker 1: different benefit to being in school besides the illness part. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And to further complicated, there is no one right answer
Speaker 1: for all kids either, right, right, Some kids will do
Speaker 1: better going earlier, some kids will do better going later.
Speaker 1: And so when everybody's trying to make a blanket regulation set.
Speaker 1: It's like it doesn't really work the complexities of human
Speaker 1: life as mirrored throughout history. So yeah, I am glad
Speaker 1: that I finally got to do the episode on her.
Speaker 1: Do you still kind of wish the order had been
Speaker 1: magically slightly different? And I had known that there was
Speaker 1: a need to maybe go to a university library in
Speaker 1: Philadelphia while I was there. I mean we could always
Speaker 1: have a follow up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but then I would have to go back to Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: Okay, it is. It was a fun trip. I've said
Speaker 1: that last time. I definitely enjoyed it. This week we
Speaker 1: talked about Measles. We've talked before about how I loved
Speaker 1: the podcast Saw Bones. Yeah, they did an episode on measles.
Speaker 1: I am pretty sure in twenty fifteen, as the Disneyland
Speaker 1: outbreak was happening. Oh yeah, but it had a very
Speaker 1: similar like there's a bunch of measles outbreaks happening kind
Speaker 1: of introductory material. Uh, I feel a little I don't
Speaker 1: feel exactly the same about Measles in terms of conversations
Speaker 1: about it recently. Is it did about scarlet fever? Because
Speaker 1: with scarlet fever, a lot of people when scarlet fever
Speaker 1: comes up, it feels like an old timey Victorian era
Speaker 1: not around any more disease, which that's not the case.
Speaker 1: We talked about that in that whole episode. Even though
Speaker 1: I don't think I personally know anyone who has had
Speaker 1: the measles, measles doesn't strike me in quite that way,
Speaker 1: just because there have been so many outbreaks, Like the
Speaker 1: number of outbreaks have increased recently, But when I was born,
Speaker 1: people were recommended to get one dose of vaccine, and
Speaker 1: then the recommendation was increased to a second dose that
Speaker 1: some time later. I didn't look up the exact but
Speaker 1: like there was a recommendation for people to have a
Speaker 1: second dose, in part because like it just increases the
Speaker 1: efficacy a little bit more, hoping to cut down on
Speaker 1: the number of outbreaks. So this recommendation for the second
Speaker 1: dose happened in nineteen eighty nine. I got that second
Speaker 1: dose when I was in my early teen years because
Speaker 1: we were going to go visit my grandmother and there
Speaker 1: was an active outbreak happening in the town where she lived.
Speaker 1: So my mom took me to the pediatrician to get
Speaker 1: dose number two of MMR vaccine, and that led to
Speaker 1: an awkward conversation because generally, again I'm not a doctor,
Speaker 1: not medical advice. It is not advised though, for people
Speaker 1: to get the MMR vaccine during pregnancy of the potential
Speaker 1: for congenital rebella syndrome. So my mom takes me to
Speaker 1: the pediatrician and I'm what fourteen or fifteen maybe, and
Speaker 1: the nurse asks me if I am on my period,
Speaker 1: and I say no, And the nurse says, then I
Speaker 1: can't give you the vaccine.
Speaker 2: In case you're pregnant, And I was.
Speaker 1: Like, no, unpossible, but like, what a weird jump. Well,
Speaker 1: and they I understand the motivation, and I understand that
Speaker 1: people's experiences happen at different times in their life, right,
Speaker 1: But for me, at the age of fifteen, it was
Speaker 1: not possible for me to have been pregnant. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean my jump is like, why did she go right
Speaker 1: there instead of are you sexually active? Yeah? But to
Speaker 1: me that would have been in the more suitable question.
Speaker 1: I don't know if there was like a medical like
Speaker 1: if that was the sort of guidelines for how to
Speaker 1: talk to people about it, but like, I think my
Speaker 1: mom might have even warned me that this conversation might
Speaker 1: happen but anyway, they did, though, give me my second
Speaker 1: measles other sense, I guess it was MMR at that point,
Speaker 1: after some conversation with my mom, I don't remember mine,
Speaker 1: so I'm presuming I got it when I was little.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's the first dose is.
Speaker 1: Small children, not tiny tiny babies, because people have antibodies
Speaker 1: from in utero, and I feel like it's some amount
Speaker 1: of time later that the second dose is recommended. Again,
Speaker 1: I did not look all this up. I'm not a doctor.
Speaker 1: It's more about my awkward experience at the doctor's office,
Speaker 1: as you know, an awkward fourteen or fifteen year old.
Speaker 1: Another thing, whenever I'm working on this podcast and I'm
Speaker 1: getting to read old, old documents that are scans of
Speaker 1: things that are very old, and they have the long
Speaker 1: s's in them that look like f's. That led to
Speaker 1: some hilarity with this episode because there was some stuff
Speaker 1: that I was wanting to look at that was very
Speaker 1: long that I knew there was a section of that
Speaker 1: was about measles specifically, but like, there wasn't a table
Speaker 1: of contents that could or an index, Like there wasn't
Speaker 1: a way that might guide me to that page. So
Speaker 1: I was having to use the text search function, and
Speaker 1: you know, with the long s's that looked like f's,
Speaker 1: any kind of ocr that might have gone through there
Speaker 1: to make it a machine readable document probably a little
Speaker 1: off with the s's that look like f's. And so
Speaker 1: what I discovered was that anytime I was trying to
Speaker 1: look at these old documents, I needed to look for
Speaker 1: me folsm A f l e s in case it
Speaker 1: saw that, uh that s as an F. But I
Speaker 1: also needed to look for mealies because some of them
Speaker 1: had turned U m e A s l e S
Speaker 1: into m e A l i e s. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: And that just became my I would look for both,
Speaker 1: even though even if like even if me even if
Speaker 1: mefals brought up results right away, I'd be like, let
Speaker 1: me just check see if meales is in this one too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was tricky.
Speaker 1: I forgot my level of iron about the Lancet paper
Speaker 1: until we were talking about it, and it was like
Speaker 1: the way a sense memory will come back and you're
Speaker 1: just ready to spit nails all over again. I was
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it wasn't just inaccurate, like
Speaker 1: the way that it was described for a long time
Speaker 1: was inaccurate and it was like fraudulent. Well, and I
Speaker 1: still see people today who don't either don't know that
Speaker 1: it was retracted or don't accept that as valid, still
Speaker 1: trying to make that case that vaccines cause autism, and
Speaker 1: I become so angry, so angry. I have layers of anger.
Speaker 1: A lot of people in my life are like, Hey,
Speaker 1: what you're telling me when you say this about vaccines
Speaker 1: and autism is that you would rather have your child die.
Speaker 1: And that is an unacceptable thing to say in a
Speaker 1: number of ways. So yeah, yeah, I was not totally
Speaker 1: like I didn't have the exact timeline in my head
Speaker 1: of like when the paper came out, when that paper
Speaker 1: got like so much traction, a lot of it being
Speaker 1: like sort of celebrity endorsements of this paper.
Speaker 2: Almost I didn't.
Speaker 1: Realize that that was like two years before the United
Speaker 1: States was declared measles free. And I had this moment
Speaker 1: where I like silently gave thanks that that still happened
Speaker 1: in the face of like such a big setback to
Speaker 1: vaccine campaigns. Yeah, because it did, like it led to
Speaker 1: people refusing a.
Speaker 2: Lot of vaccines.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of vaccines, like based on this paper
Speaker 1: that was fraudulent, as we keep saying. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I am glad to be vaccinated for measles, so that
Speaker 1: when I come back from a place where there's a
Speaker 1: measles outbreak happening, I'm not like, uh oh, I did
Speaker 1: not pass through either of the airports that had the warnings,
Speaker 1: and I did not go to the daycare in Philadelphia
Speaker 1: where a lot of the cases were. You didn't go
Speaker 1: to Disneyland in the twenty teens Disneyland outbreak. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: I'm not a parent, so obviously I'm not an expert.
Speaker 1: But I often see in disney parks or even places
Speaker 1: like movie theaters people who come in with a baby
Speaker 1: that is obviously in the category of newborn. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm always like, should you be out among the
Speaker 1: unwashed masses? Like I don't the immunity of that infant
Speaker 1: is not solidified yet. Yeah, is this really the smartest
Speaker 1: thing to do? But again, I'm not a parent, and
Speaker 1: that is also informed by my own bias of I'm
Speaker 1: afraid of babies.
Speaker 2: So yeah, there's so.
Speaker 1: I don't remember the age that the first dose of
Speaker 1: MMR vaccine, but.
Speaker 2: It might be like a year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I have I recently on a trip to
Speaker 1: Disney World, saw a very tiny baby that was not
Speaker 1: a year by any means, Like I would be shocked
Speaker 1: if it was more than a couple months. And I
Speaker 1: was just like, did you book this trip not knowing
Speaker 1: that you were expecting and then you decided to go anyway?
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't know what happened. I don't.
Speaker 2: I'm scared.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's not my business. I try not to
Speaker 1: be judging, but I'm also like, I don't know if
Speaker 1: this is safe, and I get, you know, like contact anxiety.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: We had one trip to Disney in Orlando when I
Speaker 1: was a child, which was a road trip taken by
Speaker 1: my whole extended family on my dad's side and my
Speaker 1: mom's for when we were old enough to do that
Speaker 1: was we can all walk, that's smart. And there was
Speaker 1: still debate about like were we going to be old
Speaker 1: enough to remember the trip because like my mom was like,
Speaker 1: this is probably the only time we're going to do this.
Speaker 1: I don't want my children to go and be so
Speaker 1: young that they don't remember this one once in a
Speaker 1: lifetime for our family thing. So I was so I
Speaker 1: guess I was five and my brother was three and
Speaker 1: a half. We did not go in my family. No,
Speaker 1: I was in No. No, that was a vacation was
Speaker 1: for going to visit other relatives and revisit all of
Speaker 1: your grudges. That was who vacation was for in my
Speaker 1: family growing up, which is probably why I go to
Speaker 1: Dissy World all the time now because yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: get this in my formative years that I wanted it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah. So you know, if you're preparing for
Speaker 1: a vacation with your family, I hope those preparations are
Speaker 1: going great. I know a lot of folks who were
Speaker 1: about to go on the same trip in a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks and they are all having the pre vacation
Speaker 1: anxiety of getting everything done before you can go. So
Speaker 1: if that's on your life plan coming up, I hope
Speaker 1: it's going well. If you're not getting to take a vacation,
Speaker 1: I hope you at least get to have a nap.
Speaker 1: We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We
Speaker 1: will have a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff You
Speaker 1: Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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