Don’t Drill A Hole In Your Head

I love podcasts.  At a wedding a few days ago, it was only through my habitual fondness for podcasts, I suspect, that I was able to win the marriage-based quiz.  Win, as in 3/10 was a winning score.  (There was no prize, and one of the questions had a massively waffly answer so laced with subjective philosophy that I personally think doesn’t even count.  Competitive?  Moi?)

I listen as I cook, when doing the laundry, while fixing my endlessly tattered clothes, on long journeys and when heading to bed.  I do not use podcasts to educate myself – for that there are books, with footnotes that I can cross-reference, and more pages than can be aptly summarised in 45 minutes of chit-chat.  I do not use podcasts to provide facts, for the above reason.  I don’t even believe everything I can hear, but rather use them as a hopping off point for investigating whole worlds of awesome that hadn’t even occurred to me as being a thing.  As in… an actual thing that there might be something to know about.  As in the kind of thing from which one day, whole novels might spring or ideas might be born or might just be, pure and simple totally frickin’ awesome.

My new favourite podcast is Sawbones.

Partially because of the whole ideas stuff, but because of the totally frickin’ awesome.

It describes itself as ‘A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine’ which I first read as a ‘Martial Tour’ which would have been quite different but potentially just as fun.  It has a fairly sensible standard setup… Ignorant-Yet-Enthusiastic-Husband-Host turns round at the start of every episode and says something along the lines of, ‘so!  Tapeworms sounds like a great weight-loss idea, I’ll try it!’ at which point Long-Suffering-Physician-Wife-Host replies, ‘ah, now, yeah, before you do that, lemme just tell you a bit about….’ and from there, joy ensues.

There’s so much to love in it.  For a start, there’s the hosts.  Podcasts often depend on a good relationship between hosts to bump things along – marriage suits this just fine.  Then there’s the history.  Sawbones looks at the history of medicine through the eyes of truly absurd things humanity has tried to do to itself for a few thousand years to cure its own physical conditions.  From pigeon poo to cure baldness, through to drinking liquid poo to prove that cholera was spread by dirtiness, not bacteria… mankind has done some fairly spectacular things, and the history of medicine is replete with some incredible characters, reigning from the brilliant to the insane, but always – always! – somehow referencing Galen.  The hosts go to some length not to grind any axes, save for the most sacred axe of all – sensible testing and the scientific method, before which all else is merely anecdote and silliness.

Sometimes they take requests, so if anyone with connections ever reads this, my requests are asthma, skincare and baths, please.  Asthma because, you know… I’ve got it… and I’m sure humanity has done some spectacularly stupid things to cure it, if only evidenced by the way my Dad would occasionally see a microscopically enhanced picture of a dustmite and exclaim, ‘Daughter!  You’re about to die from your asthma unless we move to an ocean island immediately!’ and he loved his scientific good sense.  As for skincare… I’ve always been a bit plagued by acne, and seen a hundred different cures recommended, while Elizabeth I of England was big on her lead make-up; what other glorious skincare tips has humanity churned out down the centuries?  Finally… baths.  Sometimes they’ve been evil, sometimes they’ve been sacred, sometimes you’ve gotta have a cold one, sometimes you’ve gotta have a Roman one… I guess I could say hygiene in general, but I dunno, I’d be curious to hear more about that one.  Please.  If… anyone’s reading… out there… at all…..

Sometimes disgusting, often delightful, Sawbones is one of the few things that I really look forward to listening to every week.  Go listen.  And if you don’t go listen, then at least remember the most important bit of advice they ever gave from the very first episode on the history of trepanation… don’t drill a hole in your head…