Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson,
Speaker 1: and this is our our what we're starting to refer
Speaker 1: to as casual Friday. Yeah, our little our little chat.
Speaker 1: Uh Yeah. So first we're gonna talk about the invention
Speaker 1: of aspirin because I did not realize I had long
Speaker 1: heard the stories of willow bark being chewed on by
Speaker 1: people in ancient times as a treatment for various maladies,
Speaker 1: but I didn't realize one. Admittedly, I am not a chemist,
Speaker 1: and my high school chemistry experience was, shall we say,
Speaker 1: less than stellar. The teacher was amazing, but I really
Speaker 1: struggled with it, and so like, I think she kind
Speaker 1: of just kept like passing me along just out of
Speaker 1: kindness because she's like, Holly's never gonna forget this um
Speaker 1: And she was amazing, and all of my best friends
Speaker 1: were really smart at it. So I felt like just
Speaker 1: the stupidest person on earth. But I did not really
Speaker 1: understand that salison and salacilic acid are two different things,
Speaker 1: because in a lot of casual literature that is not
Speaker 1: like a pure reviewed scientific journal thing they get used
Speaker 1: completely interchangeably. Yeah. Well, and the thing that our listeners
Speaker 1: will not know because they will have all been removed
Speaker 1: from what we recorded, I incorrectly call it salacillin. Every
Speaker 1: time I needed to say the words and I had
Speaker 1: to do it over. We always run into words like
Speaker 1: that for both of us. I feel like, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it's just probably a word that got in my
Speaker 1: head wrong at some point and sort of stuck there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I also, I was watching several chemistry videos UM trying
Speaker 1: to kind of wrap my brain around it, with mixed success,
Speaker 1: and I kept marveling because sometimes the way that chemists
Speaker 1: pronounced things are very different from the way I ever
Speaker 1: learned them. And then I think, probably these words are
Speaker 1: said so infrequently by the general public that nobody really
Speaker 1: gets too watted up about pronunciation. UM. Since most of
Speaker 1: that work is happening on paper and is being documented
Speaker 1: rather than just orally um shared by like in the
Speaker 1: scientific community, they probably don't get as as weird about it.
Speaker 1: Yet somehow that reminds me. I was I was taking
Speaker 1: some transit the other day, and I'm not going to
Speaker 1: name any names because I don't want to throw any
Speaker 1: brands under the bus. But there was just a billboard
Speaker 1: with a picture of the product and the name of
Speaker 1: the product underneath it, and then underneath that said it's
Speaker 1: pronounced and then rendering of a pronunciation that did not
Speaker 1: look like how you would say that. And I was like,
Speaker 1: for real, why you gotta name your product something that
Speaker 1: requires an explanation for how to pronounce it that is
Speaker 1: not tuitive based on how you spelled it. I would
Speaker 1: so love to be a fly on the wall in
Speaker 1: that marketing discussion where you know, there's some executive way
Speaker 1: up the food chain that like just decided this was
Speaker 1: the name, and then they're all like, well, how do
Speaker 1: we communicate this? We make it part of our brands,
Speaker 1: And eventually we were like, we're going to have to
Speaker 1: give a phonetic spelling. Yeah. Well, and and when um,
Speaker 1: when we were talking about where the name aspirin came
Speaker 1: from and how the letters correlated with things, and this
Speaker 1: the ending of I n being popular at the time,
Speaker 1: it made me just sort of dwell in my mind
Speaker 1: for a moment about like pharmaceutical naming today and how
Speaker 1: just bizarre and random some of it can seem like
Speaker 1: it it does not like a lot of the things
Speaker 1: when when you're watching TV and you're seeing the ads
Speaker 1: for for drugs, sometimes it's like, did you just put
Speaker 1: letters into a hopper pull them out one at a time.
Speaker 1: Out In this work, I did. I didn't end up
Speaker 1: using it as a source, but I did while working
Speaker 1: on this episode Stumble Across essentially like an article that
Speaker 1: was written by I think it was two experts on
Speaker 1: drug naming, and a lot of it was about like
Speaker 1: trying to separate yours from others and how sometimes that
Speaker 1: means that you have to do some things that are
Speaker 1: counter into Like is this how we get crazy medicine name?
Speaker 1: It's like people are just trying to be different. I
Speaker 1: feel like this reminds me, this is a big leap,
Speaker 1: but come with me of wedding dresses in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: where everyone wanted to wear white but also wanted to
Speaker 1: look very different, so some very crazy design started happening.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's kind of the same thing. Everybody
Speaker 1: wants to sound scientific, reliable, you know, like it comes
Speaker 1: from a place of great knowledge, but also different enough,
Speaker 1: and that's how you get some of the nutty brand
Speaker 1: names that we have for drugs. It is. My guests,
Speaker 1: some of them are pretty far afield. Yeah, I'm certainly
Speaker 1: very grateful that we figured out this whole as spring game.
Speaker 1: If I also didn't realize that, like to make it
Speaker 1: more palatable, and there are still people we should be
Speaker 1: clear that even in its its most easily digestible form,
Speaker 1: still can have trouble uh with their their g I
Speaker 1: tract from it and from anything. You know, different people
Speaker 1: are going to be sensitive to different things. But I
Speaker 1: didn't realize that your body is like doing such a
Speaker 1: big lift in terms of converting it from the stable
Speaker 1: thing that you can digest to the thing that actually
Speaker 1: delivers pain relief. Yeah, I'm learned. I'm learning, which is
Speaker 1: always the ideal. So our second episode this week, coming
Speaker 1: out on Christmas Day, was on the rock hewn churches
Speaker 1: in Ethiopia at the complex called La Labella, and I
Speaker 1: said this at the end of the show, but I
Speaker 1: want to say it again. Um. As I was working
Speaker 1: on this, there were times that I thought I wish
Speaker 1: us were a video podcast, which I don't really wish
Speaker 1: because that is so much more um labor involved than
Speaker 1: the podcast we currently have. But uh, man, it's hard
Speaker 1: to convey how amazing those churches were without looking at them,
Speaker 1: I say, we're they're still they still exist. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're spectacularly beautiful and just um brain breaking in terms
Speaker 1: of like how they were built. In some of the
Speaker 1: pictures that you will see, you will see folks sort
Speaker 1: of clustered around the edge of the rim of the
Speaker 1: trench that circles the churches, just with their feet dangling over.
Speaker 1: And I look at it and I'm like, man, I
Speaker 1: am terrified at the at the idea, because when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, I was really scared of heights, and
Speaker 1: that was something that I was able to move through
Speaker 1: in my young adult years. But still occasionally if I'm
Speaker 1: up in a high place, I get a little anxious
Speaker 1: about it. And just seeing sort of the people, some
Speaker 1: of whom had come on pilgrimage to, just sitting around
Speaker 1: the edge of this four story deep rock trench was
Speaker 1: I guess, both inspiring and terrifying. I can understand that.
Speaker 1: I think, Um, I'm more freaked out by the people
Speaker 1: standing around it. If they're sitting I feel way I
Speaker 1: think I would be able to sit there, but I
Speaker 1: would not be able to stand there and lean over
Speaker 1: and look down without panicking and probably causing my own fall. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sitting seems great though. Somehow that reminds me of when
Speaker 1: I was I was a youth. I don't remember exactly
Speaker 1: how old I was, but it was when Hallie's comet
Speaker 1: came through and my church that I was raised in
Speaker 1: organized a little trip up to a local mountaintop um
Speaker 1: to look at the comet. And this kid, who was
Speaker 1: about a year older than me, was so anxious about
Speaker 1: the other kids who were up there playing because they
Speaker 1: were younger kids also. And there was a hang gliding
Speaker 1: ramp and they were hanging around the edge of the
Speaker 1: ramp and and he was just so uh terrified that
Speaker 1: he was about to witness a tragedy. Um. So Yeah.
Speaker 1: The other thing that really struck me when I was
Speaker 1: doing research about this was how colorful and vibrant the
Speaker 1: stories that were part of it, that are part of
Speaker 1: the Ethiopian Orthodox religious tradition. I really loved the imagery
Speaker 1: of of King Lalibella being surrounded by bees. And I
Speaker 1: also really loved the whole story about mental act, the
Speaker 1: first going to visit Solomon and coming away with the
Speaker 1: ark of the Covenant. I kind of want to go
Speaker 1: see if I can find more accounts of how that
Speaker 1: might have gone down, because one of the things that
Speaker 1: I was listening to about it kind of described it
Speaker 1: as like that he was either given it or he
Speaker 1: just sort of removed it, Uh, the intent of that
Speaker 1: being a little less clear. And then as you said,
Speaker 1: it also reminded me of Indiana Jones as I was
Speaker 1: working on that. Yeah, don't don't open that arc That's
Speaker 1: what I know. Yeah, well, and it's it's treated in
Speaker 1: an incredibly sacred way. Um, all the arcs are. The
Speaker 1: story is that when the Ark of the Covenant was returned,
Speaker 1: it's been guarded by just one month um. And a
Speaker 1: lot of the replica arcs that are in uh the
Speaker 1: Lollibella complex are similarly like they're in a part of
Speaker 1: the monastery that only one person or like a very
Speaker 1: select few people are even allowed into the area where
Speaker 1: it is kept. So you can look at the UNESCO website,
Speaker 1: for example, they have lots and lots of pictures of
Speaker 1: what these churches look like. Stuff you missed in History
Speaker 1: Class is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
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