Speaker 1: Hmm, yeah, we is that it started? Have we have?
Speaker 1: We have we opened the podcast yet? I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: I if you did it, we're here. Robert Evans Champion
Speaker 1: podcast opener, winner of the Nobel Prize for starting his
Speaker 1: own podcast with a tonal grunting. Um. This is a
Speaker 1: podcast about bad people, the worst in all of history.
Speaker 1: And today we have a real, real doozy of a
Speaker 1: son of a bitch to talk about. Uh, and to
Speaker 1: talk about this this just exquisite asshole? Is Courtney Cozack. Courtney,
Speaker 1: you are one of the hosts of Private Parts Unknown. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you have a an essay collection coming out soon?
Speaker 1: Is that correct? Uh? Well, I'm hoping to sell it.
Speaker 1: It's been written, so that is the first step. Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's about Hawking T shirts and the Girl's Gone Wild tour.
Speaker 1: So spirit sounds that sounds like a life experience. Yeah, boy,
Speaker 1: oh boy. I'm just gonna guess a lot of Keystone
Speaker 1: Light involved in that tour. Good guess, I too, went
Speaker 1: to college in the early coordinate. How do you feel
Speaker 1: about obstetricians? Uh? Pretty good, pretty good, pretty good. Helpful people.
Speaker 1: It can be helpful, people can't be can be helpful. People.
Speaker 1: Keyword on this podcast, keyword? Uh yeah, how do you
Speaker 1: feel about like like vaginas? It just as a just
Speaker 1: as like a like a like in terms of the
Speaker 1: way they're they're structured. I did previously tell Court that
Speaker 1: I picked her for this episode specifically. I'm honored already.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, just wait, yeah, how do you feel about
Speaker 1: vaginas like structurally, structurally? I don't have a problem with vaginas.
Speaker 1: I feel like society maybe does, but society has some
Speaker 1: issues with them. I think they're there, they seem they
Speaker 1: seem fine. Um, but what if I were to tell
Speaker 1: you the decades ago, some random dude with a medical
Speaker 1: degree decided he'd figured out a better way to design vaginas,
Speaker 1: And then what if I were to tell you that
Speaker 1: he decided to test his theories by surgically altering the
Speaker 1: vaginas of thousands of women without asking for their consent. No, No,
Speaker 1: that's a bad one. Yeah, that is the story we're
Speaker 1: going to tell today. It is the tale of Dr
Speaker 1: James Burt, who sucked, and unless he's died by the
Speaker 1: time this episode runs, still sucks. I think he's alive
Speaker 1: in Florida is still which makes sense as to where
Speaker 1: this guy would be. Um, he's really he hits the
Speaker 1: he hits the defecta of of shitty American places because
Speaker 1: he was he he did all of his crimes in
Speaker 1: Ohio and then he fled to Florida when he got caught.
Speaker 1: So it's a real perfect story. Oh my god, is
Speaker 1: he still down in Florida redesigning vaginas? He is? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: he is not allowed to do anything vaguely medical ever again.
Speaker 1: Um but he Yeah, I mean that's broadly positive. He
Speaker 1: didn't get the punishment that I think would have been fair. Um,
Speaker 1: but he's he's, he's maybe still alive. It's kind of
Speaker 1: hard to tell. He's he's kept a low profile since
Speaker 1: getting caught. Um, well, getting caught is the wrong word,
Speaker 1: because he wrote a book about what he was doing
Speaker 1: and had no shame in it. And it's it's a
Speaker 1: it's a tale, it's a tale. Are you ready to
Speaker 1: hear the story of James doctor sorry, James Burton respectful? Yeah,
Speaker 1: m D you know? Okay? So James Cared Burt Jr.
Speaker 1: Was born on August twenty nine, nineteen twenty one, in Dayton, Ohio,
Speaker 1: which is already one strike against him right. You know
Speaker 1: he's coming coming out the bat committing a crime. Um,
Speaker 1: the crime of being from Ohio. Uh now I I
Speaker 1: yeah anyway. Um. James was one of two children born
Speaker 1: to Benjamin and Stella. His dad worked in a manufacturing
Speaker 1: company as a superintendent and his mom was a homemaker.
Speaker 1: We have vanishingly little detail in his childhood, but we
Speaker 1: can make some assumptions based on when and where he
Speaker 1: grew up. He was likely raised in an environment of casual,
Speaker 1: pervasive misogyny and male supremacy. Sex probably was not discussed
Speaker 1: openly by his parents or in school. The first sex
Speaker 1: ed in a major American city was implemented in Chicago
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirteen, about eight years before James was born,
Speaker 1: and program was so controversial that it was shuttered almost
Speaker 1: immediately as a result of outcry from the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1: They launched a massive protest campaign forced the Chicago Superintendent
Speaker 1: of Schools, el A Young, to resign. Um. I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, Midwest, I was like, that seems like a
Speaker 1: very not happening. I mean it's simultaneously like yeah, it
Speaker 1: makes sense that it would get shut down, but also
Speaker 1: like good on you, Chica. They tried right, like they
Speaker 1: tried before La or anywhere. You know, they gave it
Speaker 1: a shot. Um didn't work, but you gotta give them.
Speaker 1: You gotta give l a Young points for trying, at
Speaker 1: least not the Catholic Church. Don't give the Catholic Church
Speaker 1: points for a lot. I know we both thought of
Speaker 1: things to say, but sometimes it's best not to make
Speaker 1: those Catholic Church jokes throwing their dick around everywhere. That
Speaker 1: did get them in a lot of trouble eventually, um,
Speaker 1: but not enough. At the same time. Um, what we're
Speaker 1: saying is sand O'Connor was right. So yeah, the federal
Speaker 1: government would not take any kind of stance on the
Speaker 1: matter of like whether or not sex said was a
Speaker 1: good idea until nineteen eighteen. And what forced their hand
Speaker 1: was the sheer devastating frequency of std S among American
Speaker 1: soldiers during World War One. Like the government was like,
Speaker 1: we don't we don't want any part in this, and
Speaker 1: then our military readiness was compromised by fucking um had
Speaker 1: to be dealt with just like, oh my god, we're
Speaker 1: losing a lot of men from venereal disease. Dudes are Yeah,
Speaker 1: they are leaping off of battleships and into the ocean
Speaker 1: to quiet the crabs. We should probably say something, um.
Speaker 1: The Chamberlain con Act was America's first federal law regarding
Speaker 1: sex education, and it was passed to provide funding to
Speaker 1: teach soldiers about syphilis and gonorrhea. This had the positive
Speaker 1: impact of spurring large numbers of Americans to view sex
Speaker 1: as a public health issue, which is broadly speaking, an
Speaker 1: improvement from where things were. It also inspired school districts
Speaker 1: around the nation to copy the military and hosting sex
Speaker 1: ed programs in secondary schools. And this was a thoroughly
Speaker 1: mixed bag, um, because they weren't teaching how to have
Speaker 1: healthy sex. They weren't teaching about how sex can function
Speaker 1: in a relationship. They weren't like it was just purely
Speaker 1: trying to scare kids about v D, you know, Like
Speaker 1: that was the whole all of sex. That was just
Speaker 1: trying to frighten children about the fact that their their
Speaker 1: genitals were going to rot off if they had sex.
Speaker 1: Was everyone still on the abstinence only Like was that
Speaker 1: happening in this era? I think that attitude was so
Speaker 1: pervasive that they didn't have an abstinence only movement. It
Speaker 1: was just assumed that, like, yeah, it's bad to funk
Speaker 1: before marriage, and obviously all of the men are. But like,
Speaker 1: I don't even think there was a movement because it
Speaker 1: was so such a pervasive, like accepted thing. Yeah, Throughout
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, when James Burt was a little kid,
Speaker 1: sex ed grew increasingly common. When he was in school,
Speaker 1: he probably watched a film called The Gift of Life
Speaker 1: from the terrifyingly named American Social Hygiene Association, which is
Speaker 1: that's a nightmare organization name right there. Uh. The movie
Speaker 1: warned children about the quote solitary vice, which was masturbation,
Speaker 1: and cautioned, masturbation may seriously hinder a boy's progress towards
Speaker 1: vigorous manhood. It is a selfish, childish, stupid habit. Interesting
Speaker 1: word choice with the vigorous love that vigorous. Also, don't
Speaker 1: you think masturbation that would help prevent d D? I
Speaker 1: don't you know? We talk about this and the Kellogg
Speaker 1: episodes which you're airing the week we record this, But like,
Speaker 1: there was a widespread belief that it would kill you,
Speaker 1: that like, it would drive you insane and you would die.
Speaker 1: Not totally wrong, but I mean it depends on how
Speaker 1: you do it, I guess. But yeah, you'll also noticed
Speaker 1: that they specifically say, like masturbation is the thing that
Speaker 1: that boys do that is bad for them. This is
Speaker 1: because even discussing even even to like even discussing female
Speaker 1: sexuality in order to like discourage masturbation was kind of
Speaker 1: too risque, you know, like acknowledging that it happened would
Speaker 1: be a bridge too far for these people. Now, thanks
Speaker 1: to an English teacher named Lucy Curtis, a number of
Speaker 1: secondary school teachers in the twenties and thirties also attempted
Speaker 1: to teach sex and through English literature, which allowed them
Speaker 1: to avoid talking directly about biology. Instead, they would draw
Speaker 1: comparisons to health lessons sex health lessons from passages and
Speaker 1: classical works. Miss Curtis advised teachers quote, read to them
Speaker 1: Lancelot's wild passionate quest for the Holy Grail, and they
Speaker 1: will enter into the bitter experience of a soul which
Speaker 1: has rendered itself incapable of receiving the full spiritual blessing
Speaker 1: through the sea sin of yielding to impair desire. So,
Speaker 1: like you've got a teacher about fucking have them read
Speaker 1: King Arthur's tales. They'll understand that the Holy Grail is sex. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that'll work. That's why the Crucible stopped generation from fucking
Speaker 1: um um so. In the nineteen thirties, when James Burt
Speaker 1: was a teenager and had his adolescence, sex ed grew
Speaker 1: increasingly formal. The U s Department of Education started publishing
Speaker 1: materials to train teachers during this period. Most of these
Speaker 1: early classes focused entirely on warning children against masturbation and
Speaker 1: scaring them with exaggerated stories of the dangers of STDs.
Speaker 1: Female masturbation was seldom discussed. Even teaching about the negatives
Speaker 1: of sex could be dangerous. In nineteen thirty three, when
Speaker 1: Mexico's socialist government proposed compulsory sex ed for public schools,
Speaker 1: Mexico City erupted into riots. Um So, there were riots
Speaker 1: in a few countries about the concept of teaching sex said.
Speaker 1: That wasn't just don't yeah people, people murdered each other
Speaker 1: over this stuff. Good ship and of course Mexico City,
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church was behind that one too. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: the most influential progressive voice on sex said during James's
Speaker 1: teen years would have been Margaret Sanger, who is a
Speaker 1: very problematic figure on her own. Um was a big eugenicist,
Speaker 1: but Sanger also made huge waves for arguing that sex
Speaker 1: for the sake of pleasure was acceptable, and she did
Speaker 1: this by urging people to use birth control. Right. She
Speaker 1: had other motives for it, but the mere fact that
Speaker 1: you're saying birth control is the option and not abstinence
Speaker 1: means that you're acknowledging people can have sex and it's
Speaker 1: it's okay, you know. Um. So, that was a big
Speaker 1: deal for a lot of folks. It was the sign
Speaker 1: of kind of a shifting in the winds um. Now, again,
Speaker 1: there were major eugenicist implications for a lot of her beliefs,
Speaker 1: but the positive angle of it is that she was
Speaker 1: increasingly pushing forward a conversation that said it's okay if
Speaker 1: married wo men and women have sex for fun, um,
Speaker 1: you know, which is something. In nineteen thirty six, Sanger
Speaker 1: helped push forward a Supreme Court case that overturned the
Speaker 1: Comstock Law, which had ruled both birth control devices and
Speaker 1: information about birth control obscene and thus illegal. Um So,
Speaker 1: like talking about birth control was illegal because it was
Speaker 1: it was pornography. Basically, Oh my god, that's so fucked up.
Speaker 1: That's like the Instagram advertising policy of President present day. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Comstock law was that for everything, and Sanger helps
Speaker 1: overturn at the Supreme Court is like, oh, you know.
Speaker 1: It turns out the First Amendment means you can talk
Speaker 1: about condoms, which is fun um. I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: good law to overturn because it sucked. By the time
Speaker 1: James Burt was seventeen or eighteen, he would have been
Speaker 1: able to finally receive sex set information that wasn't entirely
Speaker 1: focused around syphilis or the evils of whacking it. James
Speaker 1: graduated in nineteen thirty nine and went to Auburn University,
Speaker 1: where he met his future wife, Lucretia Perry. He received
Speaker 1: his undergraduate degree after a transfer from Alabama Polytechnic Institute
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty two. He next attended medical school, and
Speaker 1: he married Lucretia in the early nineteen forties before graduating
Speaker 1: with his medical degree in nineteen forty five. I haven't
Speaker 1: found good information on what precisely inspired James to get
Speaker 1: into medicine, but based on his later actions, we can
Speaker 1: safely assume that he found himself gravitating most to the
Speaker 1: subject of rep deductive and sexual health. We know he
Speaker 1: paid close attention to developing sex research of the day.
Speaker 1: He would have followed the developing work of a sex
Speaker 1: science pioneer named Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey was a former biologist
Speaker 1: who had gone from studying wasps to studying human sex
Speaker 1: after he started teaching a course on marriage for Indiana
Speaker 1: University and realized that there was basically zero good research
Speaker 1: documenting the sex lives of normal humans. And Kinsey is
Speaker 1: a controversial figure. Two. There's some good criticisms of the guy. Um,
Speaker 1: but his research is like I love that. That gets
Speaker 1: you a little bit hard, Robert, You're like, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: some there's some stuff about that guy too. There's there
Speaker 1: we might talk about. There's some like weird weird ship
Speaker 1: with Kinsey. Um, like genital torture stuff that. Why, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some weird ship with Kinsey. I'm not gonna I'm
Speaker 1: not competent at the moment to talk about it. Um.
Speaker 1: But like Kinsey, there's there's some very there's some very
Speaker 1: founded critiques of him. You also, if you're studying like
Speaker 1: sex health, you have to talk about Kinsey because he
Speaker 1: was the first person pushing this research and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from an honors thesis by Lauren Lavin for the
Speaker 1: University of South Dakota here in Night. Soon after beginning
Speaker 1: the Institute for Sex Research, Kinsey published one of the
Speaker 1: most influential pieces of literature in American sex history, Sexual
Speaker 1: Behavior of the Human Male. Five years later, in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three, he published Sexual Behavior of the Human Female.
Speaker 1: The books contained controversial information for the time, as they
Speaker 1: detailed topics such as homosexuality, premarital sex, and even beast reality.
Speaker 1: Yet this illicit information intrigued the public, and the books
Speaker 1: quickly rose to the top of the New York Times
Speaker 1: bestseller list. The most notably controversial information presented was the
Speaker 1: occurrence of homosexuality in America. At this point, homosexual acts
Speaker 1: were legal, yet Kinsey's reports detailed many people having homosexual encounters.
Speaker 1: He estimated that ten percent of the population was homosexual.
Speaker 1: This statistic, now known to be higher than the actual
Speaker 1: presentage of four point five percent, was shocking to American citizens.
Speaker 1: The books also contained innovative new measures for sex research.
Speaker 1: The Kinsey scale scale, still used in sex research today,
Speaker 1: is a graduated scale from zero to six that measures
Speaker 1: the level of homosexual orientation in an individual, with zero
Speaker 1: being entirely heterosexual and six being entirely homosexual. The scale
Speaker 1: was an important finding in research as it provided the
Speaker 1: basis for homosexual research in a reliable way to measure
Speaker 1: homosexuality going forward. Um, and yeah, it's one of those things. Also,
Speaker 1: I don't want to say that like four point five
Speaker 1: percent is the definite percentage of homosexuality, Like, I don't
Speaker 1: think we had a per perfect data on that now,
Speaker 1: and Kinsey's data wasn't perfect, but he was the first
Speaker 1: person who was studying this and not condemning it. Was
Speaker 1: just like, this is the thing that people do. Let's
Speaker 1: try to understand it, you know, which is you get
Speaker 1: a lot of credit for that in my book. And
Speaker 1: again like nineteen fifty two or forty eight, nineteen forty eight, sorry,
Speaker 1: like that's that's he's very ahead of his time. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And he he also like started carrying out it wasn't
Speaker 1: just like the thing that kind of first brought in
Speaker 1: prominence was his these kind of frank discussions of homosexuality,
Speaker 1: but he started also discussing just like heterosexual sex life
Speaker 1: in a way that hadn't been before, where it was
Speaker 1: just kind of trying to understand what people do and
Speaker 1: not judging it, and not not approaching it from any
Speaker 1: kind of moral or religious territory. Just just this is
Speaker 1: the thing people do. Let's try to understand how common
Speaker 1: different things are. When Kinsey's study went viral, James Burt
Speaker 1: was working for the US Air Force Medical Corps, which
Speaker 1: he joined to avoid getting drafted. He did a residency
Speaker 1: next at a hospital in Chicago, and eventually wound up
Speaker 1: performing his residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New
Speaker 1: York City. He finally received his medical license in June
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty one from the state of Ohio and
Speaker 1: moved back home to Dayton in the first of all
Speaker 1: would become a major series of poor decisions. This is
Speaker 1: a very anti Ohio podcast. I think we're open about that.
Speaker 1: Have you ever been to Ohio Courtney first mistake? Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the one who Yeah, what a great response. I know
Speaker 1: some lovely people from Ohio, people from everywhere. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: should have been a lake is all I'll say. Um,
Speaker 1: we got we don't have enough lakes and we have
Speaker 1: too much Ohio. That's That's all I'll say. On the
Speaker 1: James Burt started his own practice, which was focused on
Speaker 1: gynecology and obstetrics, and he started his practice the year
Speaker 1: before Kinsey wrote his book on female sexuality. Um Bert
Speaker 1: was not board certified and gynecology or or in obstetrics,
Speaker 1: but that was not a barrier to practicing in those
Speaker 1: at the time. I don't know if it is today,
Speaker 1: but at the time you could do. As long as
Speaker 1: you were a doctor, you could. You could. You could
Speaker 1: practice gynecology and obstetrics without being board certified in them. Um.
Speaker 1: So he starts his practice and less than a year
Speaker 1: later he and his wife separate. Uh and he files
Speaker 1: for divorce. This was a fairly rare thing at the time,
Speaker 1: although not as where she'd think. The divorce rate UM
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties was about two point three people
Speaker 1: for every thousand Americans compared to about three point nine
Speaker 1: for every thousand Americans today. UM we're actually we've actually
Speaker 1: been seeing divorce rates decline over the last decade or so.
Speaker 1: We're at like the same level we were in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight. I think the reason for the divorce was
Speaker 1: he just like I saw a lot of pussies this year.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about that. Yeah. The James Bert's story
Speaker 1: involves a lot of divorce. So the couple had two
Speaker 1: sons and a daughter who seemed to have gone with
Speaker 1: their mother. I don't think he kept the kids. I
Speaker 1: haven't heard any sort of evidence that makes me believe
Speaker 1: the kids stayed with him. We know very little about
Speaker 1: their situation because again, he's divorcing her. In the early fifties,
Speaker 1: women don't have a lot of illegal You can't have
Speaker 1: a bank account as a woman. Um. So, yeah, we
Speaker 1: know that Bert was the one who filed for divorce.
Speaker 1: He claimed his wife was unhappy with his financial situation.
Speaker 1: But this could very well be a lie because he
Speaker 1: was making a lot of money at this point. He's
Speaker 1: a doctor, you know, and he's throughout his career a
Speaker 1: very successful one. Um. This could also be a lie
Speaker 1: because in nineteen fifty three, a few months after he
Speaker 1: filed for divorce, when the divorce was still pending, James
Speaker 1: Burt traveled to Mexico, got a divorce in Mexico without
Speaker 1: his wife's involvement, and immediately worried married his second wife, Jerry,
Speaker 1: in Indiana. Oh shit, the first bitch just got a
Speaker 1: letter in the mail, Like, Okay, we're done Mexican divorce.
Speaker 1: It's taken too long in America. We're Mexico divorced and
Speaker 1: just will come up later. But you can't do that.
Speaker 1: If you're married in the United States and you file
Speaker 1: for divorce and then just decided to go to Mexico
Speaker 1: to get it doesn't count. Like, that's not the way
Speaker 1: the law works, you know, Like, so he's this is
Speaker 1: technically bigamy. He's still married to his first wife when
Speaker 1: he marries his second wife. Uh. Sorry, that is fascinating.
Speaker 1: Can you not, like if I get is that still
Speaker 1: true today? If I get married in the United States,
Speaker 1: can I only get divorced in the United States? I
Speaker 1: don't know if you can only get divorced. But if
Speaker 1: you start divorce proceedings here and then move to another
Speaker 1: country without the consent of your spouse to get a divorce,
Speaker 1: it doesn't count, right, Yeah, it seems like you would
Speaker 1: definitely need consent. Yeah, I'm sure you could, Like if
Speaker 1: you were like, oh, well, I've moved, I've since moved
Speaker 1: to this other country, I'm going to initiate divorce proceedings
Speaker 1: here instead of initiing them. I'm sure that would work,
Speaker 1: but it does not work the way he did it,
Speaker 1: because he was clearly just fleeing New Mexico to get
Speaker 1: a piece of paper that said that he could get
Speaker 1: another Like what he was doing was very deliberately shady,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. So, Gary and James moved into a modern,
Speaker 1: one story house with a swimming pool in a wealthy
Speaker 1: suburban neighborhood of Dayton, which further under cuts his claim
Speaker 1: that his wife was unhappy with their finances, because again,
Speaker 1: he was making a lot of money. I think he
Speaker 1: was just trying to say, like, she's a gold digger.
Speaker 1: That's what we're splitting up, you know. And for things
Speaker 1: that come later, I'm certain he's lying about this first divorce. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the couple had one child, and for a few
Speaker 1: years seems things seemed to be relatively normal for the
Speaker 1: young doctor in his growing family, But appearances were in
Speaker 1: this case deceiving. A major part of James's job as
Speaker 1: an obstetrician involved repairing apsotomy's. At the time, the vast
Speaker 1: majority of women who birth children went through it. A
Speaker 1: psotomy which is a surgical cut made at the opening
Speaker 1: of the vagina to ease childbirth. This is not as
Speaker 1: common today, but back in those days, doctors believed it
Speaker 1: made the birth safer, it was easier on the child's
Speaker 1: head um, and so it was the norm in some
Speaker 1: hospitals of births included an a psotomy. Now things are different,
Speaker 1: it's not it's still done sometimes, but it was just
Speaker 1: like almost every doctor which just do it basically every time.
Speaker 1: It was just kind of the standard thing is this
Speaker 1: makes it safer for the baby, so we're just gonna
Speaker 1: We're just gonna cut her open um. Now, it was
Speaker 1: not strictly necessary and most births, and again there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who will say like this was an ningia,
Speaker 1: and it was, you know, it was. It was like
Speaker 1: unnecessary surgery for a lot of people who received it. Um.
Speaker 1: At the time. The reason this, doctors would just do
Speaker 1: this because doctors would not ask the mother before doing
Speaker 1: this um and this was not just an apsiotomy thing.
Speaker 1: At the time, consent was not a priority in medicine
Speaker 1: for anyone, men or women. Your doctor told you what
Speaker 1: you were going to get, and you would do it. Um.
Speaker 1: Doctors were probably the most trusted people in the country
Speaker 1: at this point. It was a different era and it
Speaker 1: was just sort of the norm for a doctor to say,
Speaker 1: this is what needs to happen, and for the patient
Speaker 1: to just kind of let it happen. Um, And they
Speaker 1: wouldn't tell you a lot of the time they were
Speaker 1: like with an epsiotomy, they probably wouldn't say, here's what
Speaker 1: will happen unless you specifically ask, Like it's just well,
Speaker 1: you're going to get having a child, I'm gonna knock
Speaker 1: you out with drugs and do what's necessary to get
Speaker 1: the kid out, you know. But that's how it worked
Speaker 1: at the time. We're gonna talk a lot about the
Speaker 1: history of medical consent in this episode, Um, but it
Speaker 1: was not a thing in the fifties, right, Like just
Speaker 1: not a standard thing. A Psiotomies were so normal that
Speaker 1: physicians often did not discuss it at all prior to
Speaker 1: the birth. Um. This was despite the fact that many
Speaker 1: women hated the operation, which was extremely painful and permanently
Speaker 1: altered many people's ability to enjoy enjoy vaginal sex after childbirth.
Speaker 1: Like most obstetricians, Dr Bert performed a lot of episiotomies
Speaker 1: and then as a matter of course, he would carry
Speaker 1: out a repair of the epsiotomy. Afterwards. You would try
Speaker 1: to fix it, and there was like a saying that,
Speaker 1: like you would give him an extra stitch, you know,
Speaker 1: to tighten things up a bit more pleasurable. Um. And
Speaker 1: the more he did, this patriarchy just inserting themselves at
Speaker 1: every stage. Yeah yeah, let me yeah. And I'm bringing
Speaker 1: all this up because James Burt is uniquely shitty among
Speaker 1: obstetricians in this period. But like they're all doing some
Speaker 1: shady stuff, like some stuff that we it wasn't shady
Speaker 1: by the standards of the day, but now now you
Speaker 1: you look at medical science in that period, you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: if that's a little messed up. Um. Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: more he repaired to psotomys, the more he started to
Speaker 1: have ideas. And I'm gonnaquote from a write up on
Speaker 1: the website medical Bag to explain how what he's started
Speaker 1: with what happens when men have ideas do not recommend quote.
Speaker 1: The doctor believed that women lost all are part of
Speaker 1: their ability to have an orgasm following childbirth as a
Speaker 1: result of their vagina becoming too loose post delivery, claiming
Speaker 1: that women's vaginas were quote large enough to drive a
Speaker 1: truck through sideways after childbirth. That's doctor Bird's writing on
Speaker 1: the map, it's gonna get worse. It's gonna get worse
Speaker 1: as it normally does, as it as it does ac
Speaker 1: of the time on this show. Drive a truck through
Speaker 1: d truck through sideways that study. No, no, but you
Speaker 1: know what a lot of trucks because global capitalism is
Speaker 1: heavily reliant upon semis in order to transport goods and
Speaker 1: services across great distances. I mean, you really called that
Speaker 1: ship together. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. Would that be the products and services that
Speaker 1: support this podcast? Absolutely is the products and services that
Speaker 1: support this podcast. All Right, we're back, We're back, and
Speaker 1: we're just not going to think too much about that
Speaker 1: add transition. So yeah, Dr Burke decided to fix all that.
Speaker 1: Between nineteen fifty four and nineteen sixty six, Bert began
Speaker 1: experimenting on unknowing unconscious patients with his own variations of
Speaker 1: the standard apsiotomy repair after childbirth. Known for his heavy
Speaker 1: hand with anesthesia, Bert had human campuses on which to
Speaker 1: experiment after delivery. He's a knock them out doctor, and
Speaker 1: he just starts fiddling around in there, you know, just
Speaker 1: kind of experimenting. Were these the days of operating theaters
Speaker 1: or was that over? Was he like, come on in, boys,
Speaker 1: she's totally knocked out, and I'm gonna try a few things.
Speaker 1: He's on his own, I think. I think sometimes he
Speaker 1: has nurses, but he's on his own. Um. Now. The
Speaker 1: exact nature of the surgeries he carried out varied over time.
Speaker 1: At first, he mostly focused on making the vaginal opening
Speaker 1: tighter to try and make vaginas smaller and tighter and
Speaker 1: improve the sexual experience of the husbands of his patients mainly.
Speaker 1: But in the late nineteen fifties, Dr Burt started reading
Speaker 1: the then newly published work of William Masters in Virginia Johnson.
Speaker 1: Their work was groundbreaking for many reasons, but among them
Speaker 1: was the scientific data it provided on the fact that
Speaker 1: the clitter has played a key role in causing orgasms.
Speaker 1: Dr Burt synthesized this finding with his own findings over
Speaker 1: years of experimental epsiotomy repairs. The women he'd given his
Speaker 1: modified surgery to, he claimed, told him their sexual experience
Speaker 1: had improved after childbirth. James Burt began to develop his
Speaker 1: own theories about human vaginas and sexual responsiveness. From a
Speaker 1: book titled The Love surgeon by Sarah Rodriguez quote. Central
Speaker 1: of Birt's ideas about female sexuality and the surgery he
Speaker 1: was developing were his ideas about the role of the
Speaker 1: clitteress in female orgasm. Prior to very recently, Bert wrote,
Speaker 1: the medical consensus had been that that a vaginal orgasm
Speaker 1: was mature, and orgasm from manipulation of the clitterest was immature,
Speaker 1: and thus the ultimate return of the vagina to normal
Speaker 1: by repair after childbirthing was completed seemed adequate. But this,
Speaker 1: he noted, did not consider the role of the clitteress.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen sixty three, nearly a decade into his
Speaker 1: casual experimenting with vaginas, James Burt's second wife filed for divorce.
Speaker 1: Since she is the one who filed, we're able to
Speaker 1: look at this divorce through the lens of someone besides
Speaker 1: Dr Burt. Gary reported that her husband had quote struck
Speaker 1: and physically abused her from time to time. She yeah.
Speaker 1: She asked that her husband be kept away from her
Speaker 1: and that their mutually held assets be protected from him.
Speaker 1: This was not an amicable divorce. James fought back, claiming
Speaker 1: that he ought not have to pay his wife alimony because,
Speaker 1: and this is just an incredible line of argument, he
Speaker 1: divorced from his first wife still had not been legally
Speaker 1: completed in the United States, and thus his marriage to
Speaker 1: Gary had never been technically legal. So that's his his
Speaker 1: defense to paying alimonious. Well, I got married to her illegally.
Speaker 1: I was breaking we got married, so why would I
Speaker 1: pay alimony? He's like, however, the paperwork lines up to
Speaker 1: best serve me. Do we know if he did any
Speaker 1: fucked up stuff to her vagina? We do not. She
Speaker 1: had kids with him, so probably, But but I I
Speaker 1: don't know. I I have not run into confirmation that also,
Speaker 1: maybe not, because it is it is kind of uncommon
Speaker 1: at least now. I assume it was then too for
Speaker 1: doctors to you know, deliver their own children, right, Like
Speaker 1: that's considered like maybe not the best idea. Um, so
Speaker 1: maybe it was someone else who did it and he
Speaker 1: didn't have a chance to get in there. Um. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I haven't seen any sort of confirmation or
Speaker 1: denial of that. But it was definitely not not a
Speaker 1: friendly divorce. Uh. The judge was not convinced by this
Speaker 1: line of argument, which is honestly kind of surprising for
Speaker 1: the time UM, but he awarded Gary Alimonian child support
Speaker 1: and their divorce was finalized in nineteen sixty six. That
Speaker 1: same year, Masters and Johnson published a book Human Sexual Response,
Speaker 1: which dedicated an entire chapter to the Clitterests, which they
Speaker 1: labeled quote a unique organ in the total of human
Speaker 1: anatomy because it's only purpose was sexual. They described it
Speaker 1: as an organ system which is totally limited in physiologic
Speaker 1: function to initiating or elevating levels of sexual tension um.
Speaker 1: Which was a big finding at the time, and it
Speaker 1: kind of like it went against a lot of the
Speaker 1: existing ideas about female sexuality, which and often just sort
Speaker 1: of seen that that it was like it was a
Speaker 1: variant of male sexuality, right, Like female sexuality is just
Speaker 1: kind of like a lesser version of male sexuality. Women
Speaker 1: don't enjoy sex as much, like it's not as big
Speaker 1: a deal for them. They're not sexual beings in the
Speaker 1: way that men are. And the Masters and Johnson's research
Speaker 1: kind of blows that out of the water because like
Speaker 1: women are the only like, how have an entire organ
Speaker 1: that's just dedicated to sexual responsiveness. UM. Yet it's pretty
Speaker 1: it's it's great so this is like an important sort
Speaker 1: of in the in the history of like understanding human sexuality.
Speaker 1: This idea that like, no, no human beings are are
Speaker 1: all sexual beings as opposed to like it's just just
Speaker 1: people with you know, penises. Yeah, so outside of that, um,
Speaker 1: yeah it. This was like a bombshell in medical science
Speaker 1: at the time, and Dr Bert was as influenced by
Speaker 1: this finding as everyone else. Unfortunately, he also fell into
Speaker 1: a failure of deduction that similarly plagued Dr William Masters.
Speaker 1: Both men were physicians, and as a result, they both
Speaker 1: saw sex and issues with sex and strictly physical and
Speaker 1: conventionally medical terms. The social aspects of sexual dysfunction, like
Speaker 1: an equal power dynamics were abused within a relationship were
Speaker 1: boiled out. It was just purely a matter of like, oh,
Speaker 1: these are how the mechanics of sex working, Like, well,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not just a matter of hydraulics, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot that goes on and insects um. Female
Speaker 1: sexual problems then were blamed on purely physical matters. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote again from the Love Surgeon here. According
Speaker 1: to Bert, he had not informed any of these women.
Speaker 1: The women he had done surgery on that he had
Speaker 1: done anything other than a standard of pasiotomy repair. The
Speaker 1: combination of realizing the importance of the clitterest and sex
Speaker 1: for women, and that the modification he had made to
Speaker 1: a psiotomy repair was improving the sex lives of his
Speaker 1: patients led Bert to conclude that women's bodies were not
Speaker 1: anatomically ideal for heterosexual sex, for female bodies were pathological
Speaker 1: when it came to heterosexual intercourse. Based on the research
Speaker 1: of Masters and Johnson and the information about the improved
Speaker 1: sex lives he stated he heard from his patients, Bert
Speaker 1: decided the clitterest was too far from the opening of
Speaker 1: the vagina for women to receive adequate stipulation from the
Speaker 1: penis during heterosexual missionary position sex. So he's got notes
Speaker 1: going a little bit of feedback for God or nature.
Speaker 1: Who you didn't made this, don't worry, I got it
Speaker 1: figured out. Yeah, that's amazing, Hubrist, Like that's a whole,
Speaker 1: a whole another level, like it's it's it's something else. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, he started to modify the again significant surgical
Speaker 1: procedure he'd already been performing on his patients without consent
Speaker 1: for more than a decade. Up to that point, he'd
Speaker 1: mostly focused on making the vagina tighter. Now he started
Speaker 1: building up skin tissue in order to move the vaginal
Speaker 1: opening closer to the clitteress. This procedure also changed the
Speaker 1: angle of the vaginal opening. Bert later bragged that under
Speaker 1: what he started calling his love surgery, quote, yeah, just god,
Speaker 1: the loot surgery, Like you just need to learn how
Speaker 1: to eat a pussy and then this will all just go. No, No,
Speaker 1: that's that is not at all acceptable to Dr James Burt.
Speaker 1: It is it is. I mean it's a matter of
Speaker 1: like there's a lot that we'll talk about this more.
Speaker 1: There's a lot that's wrapped up in it. Part of
Speaker 1: it is just this mix of men wanting to feel
Speaker 1: like their sexual dynamos and also men not wanting to
Speaker 1: do anything but missionary sex um. And so the whole,
Speaker 1: the whole idea that Bird has is like, well, I'll
Speaker 1: just make it easier for women to orgasm from from
Speaker 1: purely missionary sex, and that will make men. That will
Speaker 1: improve relationships because men will be sexual powerhouses. Then like that,
Speaker 1: it's it's this idea of like, well, I shouldn't have
Speaker 1: to learn to pleasure my partner. I'll alter her physiology.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, just five surgeries later, it'll be perfect.
Speaker 1: It was usually just one nine hour surgery. If that
Speaker 1: makes it better. Um, so, yeah, he moved the vagina
Speaker 1: towards the clitters. He also pulled a significant amount of
Speaker 1: the labia minora into the vagina because he believes to
Speaker 1: make it pretty. No, he thought it would cause greater
Speaker 1: stimulation during vaginal sex. I say that he's doing all
Speaker 1: these things, and he says he's getting feedback. He's not
Speaker 1: telling these women what he's doing. So he's not being like,
Speaker 1: so I did all this stuff to your bits, how
Speaker 1: does it feel? He was just like, how sex after childbirth?
Speaker 1: And they'd be all like, oh, it's a lot better
Speaker 1: than it was, you know when I was pregnant. He'd
Speaker 1: be like, oh, that means the surgery works. He's not
Speaker 1: asking them how about this? How about He's not like
Speaker 1: getting he's not even getting not that it would be
Speaker 1: okay if he was, but he's not actually getting scientific
Speaker 1: data on this. He's just being like, they say sex
Speaker 1: is better, it must work. Like so he doesn't know.
Speaker 1: He's saying that, I know my surgery is improving sex.
Speaker 1: He doesn't know if it's number one. He doesn't actually
Speaker 1: know that it's improving sex. They might just be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: now that I don't have you know, I'm no longer pregnant,
Speaker 1: I'm enjoying sex more, which which could make sense he's
Speaker 1: he's not. He doesn't know if like, oh, is moving
Speaker 1: the opening or moving the clitter iss or is moving
Speaker 1: the laby manora, Like what is it that's improving things?
Speaker 1: If any of it's having an m back because he's
Speaker 1: not actually doing science. He's just kind of fussing around
Speaker 1: down there. Did he get any complaints? We don't know yet.
Speaker 1: He does this is the sixties and calling that love surgery,
Speaker 1: but isn't telling any of his patients telling any of
Speaker 1: his patients at this point. What he's doing his research
Speaker 1: is hey, you were pregnant and now you're not sex. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's self reported, so like if he did get
Speaker 1: some complaints, he's probably not going to tell other people
Speaker 1: about exactly. And also like no offense, but I'm not
Speaker 1: out here like talking to my oh B being like
Speaker 1: yeah sex great, well yeah, especially and and that's like
Speaker 1: not in the sixties. And if you I'm sure someone
Speaker 1: because some women. These women do later go to other
Speaker 1: doctors to be like, what has happened to me? And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess that happened at this period. But a
Speaker 1: lot of those doctors are like, well, it's just pregnancy,
Speaker 1: you know, pregnancy changes stuff down there. Leave, like, get
Speaker 1: out of my office, you know, like there's nothing I
Speaker 1: can do for you. This is just what happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's horrible. It's gonna get worse. Um, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty seven, James Burt finally succeeded in getting
Speaker 1: a legal divorce from his first wife so he could
Speaker 1: marry his third wife, Linda. By this point, he was
Speaker 1: one of the most successful and thus wealthiest obstetricians in Ohio.
Speaker 1: He and his new wife bought property in El Salvador
Speaker 1: and the Dominican Republic. I'm sure nothing shady with either
Speaker 1: of those transactions. They also bought a condo in Veil, Colorado,
Speaker 1: so they wouldn't have to spend as much time in
Speaker 1: the blighted hellscape that is Ohio with Dayton. Within Dayton,
Speaker 1: the Bird's gained a reputation for being ostentatious and somewhat kinky.
Speaker 1: Rich people. They held huge pool parties that were swim
Speaker 1: suit optional. James Burt wore gold chains and long fur
Speaker 1: coats in the winter. On at least one occasion, he
Speaker 1: wore a pink Saparti Safari suit at one of the
Speaker 1: parties he threw. Not that I found. He was not
Speaker 1: particularly social with or popular among his fellow doctors. One
Speaker 1: of his colleagues bluntly stated that James didn't enjoy golf
Speaker 1: because he quote preferred indoor games. And you can translate
Speaker 1: that however you want. Yeah, so he's like a kind
Speaker 1: of probably kind of like a swinger dude in this period.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing a lot of key parties at the Bird residence,
Speaker 1: you know. In nineteen seventy three, james third marriage fell
Speaker 1: apart when Linda left her husband for a ski instructor
Speaker 1: she'd met in Veil. Yeah, cut maybe so not not really,
Speaker 1: because it's unclear if she left him before or after
Speaker 1: he started living with a twenty one year old I
Speaker 1: have every little bit of hope. He was forty six
Speaker 1: at the time. In short order, he duly married this
Speaker 1: much younger woman whose name was Joan, and they stayed
Speaker 1: together for a while. To his credit, he did wait
Speaker 1: until after he and his third wife had a legal
Speaker 1: divorce to get married to his fourth wife, Joan and
Speaker 1: James bought a yacht on Lake Erie. She wore diamonds constantly.
Speaker 1: The couple did not grow any more popular among James's colleagues.
Speaker 1: Walter Reeling Jr. A Dayton physician who worked near Dr Birt,
Speaker 1: later claimed that other doctors and their spouses avoided the
Speaker 1: birds at social gatherings in the seventies. No one, he claims,
Speaker 1: wanted to sit at a table with them. Sarah Rodriguez
Speaker 1: writes quote Partly this was because of the manner in
Speaker 1: which the birds behaved at such dinners. Both Walter Reeling
Speaker 1: and his wife's Susie Reeling recollected how Joan Burt, decked
Speaker 1: out in furst, would be physically all over her husband
Speaker 1: during medical society dinners, talking a lot and bragging about
Speaker 1: how many orgasms she enjoyed. James Burt apparently did not
Speaker 1: seek out friendships with other physicians, and Walter Reeling could
Speaker 1: not recall a physician who sought out Bert's friendship. So
Speaker 1: a lot of p d A that everyone finds kind
Speaker 1: of creepy, right, sex positive here, But if you're like
Speaker 1: sitting at a dinner talking about how often you orgasm,
Speaker 1: like a professional dinner with your colleagues. Kind of weird,
Speaker 1: kind of weird, kind of weird. That not the time
Speaker 1: for that kind of conversation. You know, um, there aren't.
Speaker 1: He's an ol B. This is related to work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like he's like Jordan Belfort and like the Wolf of
Speaker 1: Wall Street, the wife with the diamonds on the yacht
Speaker 1: Strong Jordan Belfort energy that literally like dog come on bro.
Speaker 1: By the mid nineteen seventies, Dr Bert had added yet
Speaker 1: another step to his love surgery. Some of his patients
Speaker 1: had complained of pain during sex after his operation. Decided
Speaker 1: the yeah, oh yeah. Now, obviously it couldn't be that
Speaker 1: his operation was a bad idea. It had to be
Speaker 1: that there was yet another problem with female anatomy that
Speaker 1: needed to be corrected. He decided the most likely culprit
Speaker 1: was the pubo coxy g S muscle, which is a
Speaker 1: constrictor muscle at the rear wall of the vagina that
Speaker 1: supports the uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, bowl bladder, and vagina.
Speaker 1: This is the organ that you control when you do
Speaker 1: Keegel's right. That's that's the muscle that he decides as
Speaker 1: the problem. It is extremely important. It provides control not
Speaker 1: over just vaginal feeling, but urination and defication. It's a
Speaker 1: very important muscle to to have James cut it because
Speaker 1: he decided it was getting hit during penetrative intercourse and
Speaker 1: causing pain which made it harder for his patients to orgasm. Again,
Speaker 1: none of them told him to do this, nor was
Speaker 1: he carrying out medical research to determine if the pubo
Speaker 1: coxygenus muscle was in fact interfering with sexual pleasure. He
Speaker 1: just sort of assumed it was the culprit and in
Speaker 1: his words, decided to quote cut the damn muscle. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, pretty bad, Like yeah, come really easy, but
Speaker 1: cannot stop wetting myself everywhere. Yeah, which might have an
Speaker 1: impact on I don't know a lot of things. Um,
Speaker 1: it wasn't like he's not totally severing it, but he's
Speaker 1: severing it enough that it it does cause problems within
Speaker 1: continents and stuff for a lot of his patients. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about that later. So later on, once knowledge of
Speaker 1: his love surgery was public, many of his patients would
Speaker 1: come forward with complaints that love surgery had made them incontinent.
Speaker 1: We don't know what percentage of them suffered the way,
Speaker 1: because in the mid seventies, he still was not telling
Speaker 1: anyone what he was doing. This was now twenty years
Speaker 1: into his experiments with love surgery. Yeah, so we we
Speaker 1: don't know what percentage of his patients suffered in continence
Speaker 1: as a result of the surgery because in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies he still wasn't telling anyone what he was doing.
Speaker 1: And this is now twenty years into his experimenting with
Speaker 1: love surgery. Bert of course, claims to have heard almost
Speaker 1: universally positive reports from his patients about their post childbirth
Speaker 1: sex lives. By nineteen seventy five, he claims to have
Speaker 1: performed his love surgery on more than four thousand women.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Yeah, that's some good ship. Um, it's not.
Speaker 1: It's terrible. Uh, it's some bad ship. Yeah, that's a lot.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of people getting surgery. That my hometown.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, that is a town worth of that's most
Speaker 1: of Ohio, I have to assume. Um, but you know
Speaker 1: it isn't most of Ohio. I don't even know where
Speaker 1: go ahead. I mean, Ohio does advertise on our shop.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, we could get an Ohio AD
Speaker 1: and like, you could be factually wrong. And for the record,
Speaker 1: if if there's an Ohio AD, don't listen to it,
Speaker 1: do not move to Ohio and or any circumstances. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no idea, get the like Ohio. You know your audience.
Speaker 1: This is a firmly anti Ohio pun. You're wasting your
Speaker 1: money here Ohio. I mean, less money for Ohio is
Speaker 1: a win for the whole world. But still, I just
Speaker 1: don't want anyone to move there. Anyway, here's the man,
Speaker 1: all right, we're back. So yeah, Dr James Bird is
Speaker 1: a liar obviously, so we should take his claims that
Speaker 1: he performed to search around more than four thousand women
Speaker 1: with a grain of salt, because there's not documentation of
Speaker 1: this um. But he was one of the most, if
Speaker 1: not the most popular obstetricians in Dayton in his day,
Speaker 1: so he it's a lot. He experimented, probably in the
Speaker 1: low probably at least a couple thousand. Four thousand's probably
Speaker 1: an exaggeration. He's a narcissist, but two thousand's not out
Speaker 1: of the not out of the possibility. You know, he's
Speaker 1: been at it for a decade. Right, Yeah, he's he's
Speaker 1: done this a lot. Um. And he was one of
Speaker 1: the most successful obstetricians in the whole in the Midwest
Speaker 1: at this point. And the average salary of a doctor
Speaker 1: in this period is like sixty two thousand a year,
Speaker 1: which is really good money. And you know, the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties seventies, he's making like four grand years. He's extremely successful. Um.
Speaker 1: His office was on the top floor of a stylish
Speaker 1: downtown building. He had eight exam rooms in a waiting
Speaker 1: room which included a couch shaped like a woman's mouth.
Speaker 1: A little bit creevy. Um. It must be said that
Speaker 1: he was very popular with his patients. Dr Burt was charming, friendly,
Speaker 1: and said to have exceptional bedside manner. He listened to
Speaker 1: his patients in an era in which male doctors were
Speaker 1: generally expected to ignore the complaints and fears of their
Speaker 1: female patients. One nurse later recalled that he quote communicated
Speaker 1: with women when a lot of doctors wouldn't. There were
Speaker 1: a lot of physicians that were patting women on the
Speaker 1: head and saying, now, sweetie, don't worry, I'll take care
Speaker 1: of it. Um. And doctor Burt was not that kind.
Speaker 1: He would he would explain to you what he was
Speaker 1: He wouldn't tell you what he was actually doing, but
Speaker 1: he would explain to you what he was claiming he
Speaker 1: was going to do. He would make you feel good
Speaker 1: about planning. Over all, the power he would make you
Speaker 1: feel listened to before performing a surgery on you that
Speaker 1: he did. You did not ask for um and did
Speaker 1: not know was even a thing that could be done um.
Speaker 1: Patients would often claim his office was a refuge. Doctor
Speaker 1: Burt would listen to their fears about childbirth and sexual dysfunction,
Speaker 1: which was not a subject most doctors would even broach.
Speaker 1: Sarah Rodriguez writes, Bert seemed to sympathize with his patients.
Speaker 1: Berts sympathetic ear perhaps appealed to many women as he
Speaker 1: listened to their worries and fears about their upcoming labors
Speaker 1: or hysterectomies, and he seems to have believed that he
Speaker 1: was acting sympathetically toward them by performing love surge re
Speaker 1: in addition to delivering their child or performing a hysterectomy.
Speaker 1: In his view, but surgically altered their bodies to alleviate
Speaker 1: their concerns and problems, all of which regardless of what
Speaker 1: the women may have been telling or not telling him.
Speaker 1: He felt, we're essentially about sex. Yeah, that's that's good stuff.
Speaker 1: So Dr Bart of course performed his love surgery after
Speaker 1: nearly every childbirth, even on women who never complained to
Speaker 1: him about having sexual problems. He performed his love surgery
Speaker 1: after vaginal hysterectomys too, and regularly when performing abdominal uterus suspension.
Speaker 1: So he was just he he stopped just doing this
Speaker 1: after a psiotomies, after you get a surgery, and you
Speaker 1: get a surgery, and you get a surgery, and like
Speaker 1: and like again, it's not an obie surgeon, right, Like
Speaker 1: I feel like that needs to be stated over and
Speaker 1: over again. That is not his Like he's not trained, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean he's trained. He's not board certified, Like you
Speaker 1: get training, I get like, he's he's not trained, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's This is not the thing he should be doing
Speaker 1: at the time. It is not illegal for him to
Speaker 1: be doing this, um, which is a fawt a flaw
Speaker 1: and I think the medical system, what the hell. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as a general rule, if a patient with a vagina
Speaker 1: was unconscious in front of him, he would he would
Speaker 1: he would do his love surgery like that that was
Speaker 1: kind of his like, definitely man. One thing that endeared
Speaker 1: him to his patients were his promises, what he was.
Speaker 1: He was extremely popular during this period, Sophie. All you
Speaker 1: have to do is listen to women. But he's yeah,
Speaker 1: like he's he's meeting the lowest bar, which is he's
Speaker 1: not like patting them on the head and saying they're
Speaker 1: they're girl. This is like, this is adult time. Like
Speaker 1: that's what a lot of male doctors do, and he doesn't.
Speaker 1: He sits there and he listens and he takes it
Speaker 1: seriously and then he does whatever it is he wants.
Speaker 1: He's not he's a monster. I I hear you let me,
Speaker 1: let me, let me cut you off? Like what the
Speaker 1: yeah he's I mean yes, But like it is important
Speaker 1: to the story that he's popular during this period. That's
Speaker 1: part of why he gets so many women to experiment
Speaker 1: on us. He's extremely successful. You can look up his face.
Speaker 1: There's pictures of him. Um yeah, you know he's he's
Speaker 1: like it's important that he was so endearing to his
Speaker 1: patients because that's why they trusted him, and that's why
Speaker 1: so few of them initially like recognized that something was
Speaker 1: awry Um. He was very popular in part for his
Speaker 1: promises of pain free childbirth, which he accomplished by giving
Speaker 1: expectant mothers huge doses of drugs that rendered them unconscious
Speaker 1: throughout the whole process. This was not uncommon for the time,
Speaker 1: and it gave birth the ability to more easily do
Speaker 1: whatever he wanted with his patients, who were again canvasses
Speaker 1: to him. By this point, he had come to believe
Speaker 1: that all female bodies needed fixing because they were badly
Speaker 1: designed for heterosexual missionary position sex, which he considered the
Speaker 1: only normal sex act. He believed he was justified in
Speaker 1: performing his surgery on every vagina he got his hands
Speaker 1: on because he did not see his surgery as elective. Instead,
Speaker 1: he was correcting a malformation. He thought of it in
Speaker 1: the same way as like a doctor who corrects a
Speaker 1: cleft palette. Right, that's what's going on in this guy's
Speaker 1: head um. Sometimes he would even light to his patients
Speaker 1: for a chance to get in there and root around.
Speaker 1: From the New York Times quote, Miss Phillips was one
Speaker 1: of the many women who went to Dr Burt for
Speaker 1: a relatively minor physical problem. She was told she needed
Speaker 1: a hysterect to me because her Phillipian tubes were rotting.
Speaker 1: Now she suffers chronic infections, extreme difficulty urinating, and excruciating
Speaker 1: pain if she attempts intercourse. The strain officially eventually destroyed
Speaker 1: her marriage. She said seven hours of surgery completely changed
Speaker 1: her life. I feel like a freak, Miss Phillips said,
Speaker 1: I can't date, I can't ride horses, I can't urinate.
Speaker 1: She characterized surgery is a form of sexual abuse and
Speaker 1: said he stole parts of my body, which is fair. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is not There's no Joe even so, there's not
Speaker 1: a joke. It's a nightmare. It's a horrible, horrible man
Speaker 1: who did horrible things um in the in the name
Speaker 1: of medicine to women who trusted him implicitly. Um trust
Speaker 1: no one. Women trust no one. Certainly not a guynecologist
Speaker 1: who wears fur coats. That's that's that's the that that
Speaker 1: auto warrants side. Gynecologists who worked in and around doctor
Speaker 1: Burt knew about his surgery and recognized it because they
Speaker 1: would often examine his former patients. Joy Martin, who was
Speaker 1: a woman he performed his surgery on after delivering her
Speaker 1: son in nineteen said doctors would say Dr Burt's done
Speaker 1: surgery on you, hasn't he? Um? Yeah, because like they
Speaker 1: would see like she would go in with she went
Speaker 1: in with complaints and was like what if it feels
Speaker 1: like something's wrong, And they'd be like, oh, yeah, you
Speaker 1: had Dr Burt. He switched the holes. They knew what
Speaker 1: he was doing. Um. It is import won't to note
Speaker 1: that while James Burt went much further than any of
Speaker 1: his colleagues, he was not alone in his obsession with
Speaker 1: making female bodies better suited for heterosexual intercourse. Joseph Dilley,
Speaker 1: an early twentieth century obstitution who helped popularize the epsiotomy,
Speaker 1: recommended this surgery and its subsequent repair because it could
Speaker 1: tighten the vagina and quote restore women to virginal conditions.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies, author and childbirth experts Suzanne Arms
Speaker 1: would argue that the real reason for this procedure was
Speaker 1: to increase the ability of husbands to enjoy sex after childbirth.
Speaker 1: In other words, Dr Burton his colleagues frame their various
Speaker 1: tightening surgeries is being done for women, but their real
Speaker 1: purpose was to make things more enjoyable for men. By
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen seventies, public discussion of loose post childbirth
Speaker 1: vaginas had become common and in popular culture. In nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four and his best selling book How to Get
Speaker 1: More out of Sex, psychiatrist David Reuben urged mothers to
Speaker 1: get vaginal tightening surgery, calling it a simple procedure that
Speaker 1: could make a woman to forty almost the same sexually
Speaker 1: as a girl of eighteen. That's pretty problematic. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like on the news, where where is that? Um? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is a book How to Get More out of
Speaker 1: Sex by psychiatrist David Ruben. Like that's a mainstream pop
Speaker 1: psychiatrist being like, get tightened up so you'll be like
Speaker 1: a teenager. Men love teenagers. You know. It's pretty bad. Um.
Speaker 1: He claimed surgery could turn back the clock and turn
Speaker 1: post birth vaginas from the Carl's bad caverns and back
Speaker 1: into and I'm so sorry that I had to read
Speaker 1: this and back back into the Penis's little grotto of pleasure.
Speaker 1: Oh my fucking god, David Reuben. Everybody, Um, pretty bad,
Speaker 1: pretty bad, bad and bad. So divorce rates started to
Speaker 1: raise during the nineteen seventies, and in nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: a Cosmopolitan article noted that popular myth blamed some of
Speaker 1: this on loose vaginas. It argued that one way to
Speaker 1: keep a couple from splitting up was to quote tighten
Speaker 1: up the vagina in order to enhance the pleasure of intercourse.
Speaker 1: This article also explicitly urged women to get surgery, saying
Speaker 1: that while keegels could help, they were unlikely to go
Speaker 1: far enough. You wouldn't hesitate to go to a doctor
Speaker 1: for surgery and a faulty appendix. So why hesitate when
Speaker 1: the happiness of your sexual life maybe at steak God,
Speaker 1: it's pretty bad now. I want to note that an
Speaker 1: awful lot of mother's got variations on this surgery on
Speaker 1: their own recognisance and had wonderful experiences. Um, it's still
Speaker 1: not an uncommon thing to do after childbirth today, and
Speaker 1: I'm not condemning the practice, just pointing out the extremely
Speaker 1: sexist way in which it was presented and in which
Speaker 1: men tended to urge it, because that's important context for
Speaker 1: why Dr Burt didn't really think he was doing anything
Speaker 1: people would have issues with. By the late nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: he'd started circumcising his patients clitterests in order to expose
Speaker 1: more of the organ and make it more easily stimulated
Speaker 1: by sexual intercourse. From the love surgeon quote, doctors understood
Speaker 1: the sexual nature of the clitteress and it's importance to
Speaker 1: female sexual pleasure, and thus some blamed the clitter is
Speaker 1: for a woman's failure to orgasm with her husband. The
Speaker 1: removal of the clatoral hood was an attempt to fix
Speaker 1: this concern. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, at a
Speaker 1: time when the espousal of female orgasm during marital sex
Speaker 1: was increasingly seen as an important component of a healthy marriage,
Speaker 1: physicians performed female circumcision to help married women who wanted
Speaker 1: or whose husbands wanted their wives to have orgasms during
Speaker 1: vaginal sex. This is also very important. Without understanding this,
Speaker 1: it might actually look like Dr burt By performing love
Speaker 1: surgery was showing more care for the sex lives of
Speaker 1: his patients than the men urging them to tighten up
Speaker 1: to avoid divorce. His surgery was focused on giving women
Speaker 1: more orgasms, but for a profile only selfish reason, so
Speaker 1: their husbands would feel like they were good at sex
Speaker 1: without needing to do full play or God forbid, perform
Speaker 1: oral sex. See, all of the improvements Dr Burt made
Speaker 1: weren't actually correcting deficiencies in the vagina. They were correcting
Speaker 1: deficiencies with standard missionary sex. Many women, maybe even most women,
Speaker 1: won't regularly organized orgasm from simple missionary sex alone. This
Speaker 1: is why four play and oral sex and other fucking
Speaker 1: positions are good things to try. Dr Burt thought thought
Speaker 1: all of that was abnormal and thus bad. Right, the
Speaker 1: whole goal is for them to come from this, right,
Speaker 1: from the kind of sex that lazy men in the
Speaker 1: sixties most want to give them. How's he going to
Speaker 1: be a missionary style swinger though, that's what I don't
Speaker 1: know that he was a swinger. I'm guessing right. Maybe
Speaker 1: he was not. Um, Okay, those people should have exposed
Speaker 1: him to some more positions, that's all. Yeah. He seems
Speaker 1: like the kind of guy who was bad enough at
Speaker 1: sex that he had to perform a legal surgery in
Speaker 1: order to please somebody. You know. Um, it's not great. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not great. I love I love when men are
Speaker 1: like no, no, no, no, no, it's not me. It's
Speaker 1: not me. It has to be there and stroke it
Speaker 1: this way. Jesus Christ Man, there's not a whole family
Speaker 1: of tools that have been invented to aid me in
Speaker 1: this endeavor. Um, there's not a whole wide variety of
Speaker 1: things like if if, if I can't please you in
Speaker 1: the laziest way possible, it's time for serious, multi hour
Speaker 1: long surgery. By the mid nineteen seventies, James Burtt felt
Speaker 1: that he had finally perfected his surgery. He was ready
Speaker 1: to share it with the world, So in nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: he and his wife Joan co authored Yeah, they wrote
Speaker 1: a book. They wrote a book. Joan was fully drinking
Speaker 1: the coid, but because she was sucking five years younger. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's not great. Um. The book was titled I
Speaker 1: Apologize for This Too, Surgery of Love. Now. This was
Speaker 1: not a medical manual. It was more of a pop
Speaker 1: medical text that functioned primarily as an advertisement for his
Speaker 1: love surgery. It is I feel comfortable saying one of
Speaker 1: the most offensive documents ever published. In part two, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about what it said, but that is going to
Speaker 1: be the end of the episode for today. Courtney, how
Speaker 1: are you, how are you feeling shook? One word? Just
Speaker 1: this is this is a whole this is these sucks.
Speaker 1: He sucks. And also do have to be so careful
Speaker 1: who you entrust your pussy too? And I feel like
Speaker 1: that still stands today forever. Yeah it does. You want
Speaker 1: to plug any um? I have a podcast about sex. Uh.
Speaker 1: We talk about pleasurable sex on my podcast Private Parts Unknown.
Speaker 1: So you need a little pick me up after this,
Speaker 1: go check it out. Check out, check that out, and
Speaker 1: check out I don't know the history of surgical abuse
Speaker 1: and problems with consent and medicine. Check that out on
Speaker 1: our next episode actually podcast M M