Part One: The Bastard Who Invented Homeopathy | BEHIND THE BASTARDS 

A fun little side story about homeopathy that I always enjoyed. The famed logician of the Victorian era, George Boole, who is the namesake of "boolean" algebra in computer science, was returning home from a lecture when it began to rain. The wet and cold sent him into a fever which left him bed ridden. His wife, being a proponent of homeopathy, began a treatment over the next few days that included drenching the fevered George with buckets of cold water. Can you guess what happened? That's right! He died.

It is truly amazing to see how much this guy did to advance medical science, simply by accident. Got doctors to question if it was a good idea to poison people, got them to at least consider listening to their patients and consider their symptoms (still working on that,) the first double-blind study... it's amazing.

Now I want to listen to all the other iHeartRadio shows to find the one where Sophie bursts in in the middle of an episode going "GIVE ME THE MACHETE"

Sophie sounds like she is absolutely *jonesing* for the podcasting machete.

This podcast is ridiculously under rated

that little "fuck yeah! (high five)" when sophie got the machete... oh they're really so special

An hour of silence might be a good description of homeopathy ... the "pet rocks" of medicine.

A stopped clock is right twice a day but a clock that's two minutes slow never is.

"nonsense water" is my new fave

As a brit, these pronunciations are causing me massive psychic damage

Sidenote: The real life scenario that sets up The Lord of the Flies... has actually happened and resulted in the kids quickly developing an egalitarian practice and taking care of an injured kid until they were rescued.

Always love an American trying to say Gloucester. It's actually pronounced 'Wymondham'...

It's interesting how relatively often "like cures like" is actually true (or at least appears to be superficially true if you don't know what's medically happening inside the body). With a lot of types of ADHD and ADHD medication, for example, stimulants (that make NTs jittery/energized/unable to relax/anxious) can make people with ADHD calmer and make our brains work better, to the extent that sometimes we go to sleep (the theory I've heard for why this works is that while stimulants cause NT brains to release too much dopamine and adrenaline, they cause ADHD brains to release the right amount, or closer to the right amount than usual, since ADHD brains tend to release too little dopamine and similar hormones/neurotransmitters, and have trouble regulating release-reuptake cycles like the one that controls dopamine in the brain). I've taken a dose of Ritalin to try to stay awake and do homework a little longer, and then fallen asleep a few minutes after taking it anyway. "Like cures like" (or appears to); stimulants can treat hyperactivity (or in some cases the type of ADHD that's inattentive/would previously have been considered ADD, because not all ADHD includes hyperactivity, paradoxically, but yeah). Or for example, with diseases like cancer (where the problem is basically unregulated cell growth), or autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis (where the problem is the body's immune system cells targeting its own tissue and systems; the nervous system, with MS), a remedy that kills some of the cells in the patient's body, and is poison to a healthy person, can actually have a positive effect. Again, broadly: "like cures like" (or appears to); poison seems to cure attacks on the body from mysterious wasting diseases that kind of resemble poisoning symptoms (to an observer at that time). That's not how you cure most things, but it's interesting that he came to that conclusion.

So you're telling me there is a knife out there I can use to cut both other knives AND electricity?

This just hits different than i suppose it would have when originally aired 😂

Honestly, the witchcraft he learned was probably closer to modern medicine than humorism (what passed for medicine at the time) is, considering that, historically, medicine was one of the many roles religious leaders played in their communities. Also most modern medicine originated in the Congo, and definitely would have been considered witchcraft at the time.

What's the name of the knife? Gerber what?

I believe the river in Cleveland caught on fire a total of 12 times. It's one of the driving reasons the EPA was formed.

34:00 that is just the far too common correlation causation conflation, the fact that the idea seems to sometimes work is just coincidence and more often then not is ineffective or actively detrimental. It might be a reflexive conclusion, but it should be actively suppressed.

If you hide a bag of marijuana where your airbag was, what happens if you crash your car? Does it just blast weed directly into your face?

Didn’t that cat killing kid have a basic instinct fetish?

🥰🔪

That bit a about beating Trump by electing another old fart... Oh boy, if only they knew.

Love this show; you're like the Frasier and Roz of our era. I guess that makes Billy "Mad Dog" or something, idk.