April 27, 2021 • 57 mins
Robert is joined by Courtney Kocak to discuss Dr. James Burt.
Footnotes:
- https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/11/us/charges-against-doctor-bring-ire-and-questions.html
- https://www.medicalbag.com/home/features/despicable-doctors/the-love-surgeon-was-nothing-but-a-brutal-butcher/
- http://www.patient-safety.com/burt.htm
- https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ohio-woman-writes-book-love-doctor-mutilated-sex/story?id=17897317
- https://sci-hub.do/10.1007/s10508-012-0030-8
- https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1991-08-25-9103030670-story.html
- https://www.newsweek.com/brief-history-sex-ed-america-81001
- https://red.library.usd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1118&context=honors-thesis
- https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-love-surgeon/9781978800953
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm, yeah, we is that it started? Have we have?
We have we opened the podcast yet? I mean yeah,
I if you did it, we're here. Robert Evans Champion
(00:22):
podcast opener, winner of the Nobel Prize for starting his
own podcast with a tonal grunting. Um. This is a
podcast about bad people, the worst in all of history.
And today we have a real, real doozy of a
son of a bitch to talk about. Uh, and to
(00:42):
talk about this this just exquisite asshole? Is Courtney Cozack. Courtney,
you are one of the hosts of Private Parts Unknown. Uh,
and you have a an essay collection coming out soon?
Is that correct? Uh? Well, I'm hoping to sell it.
It's been written, so that is the first step. Totally. Yeah.
(01:07):
It's about Hawking T shirts and the Girl's Gone Wild tour.
So spirit sounds that sounds like a life experience. Yeah, boy,
oh boy. I'm just gonna guess a lot of Keystone
Light involved in that tour. Good guess, I too, went
(01:29):
to college in the early coordinate. How do you feel
about obstetricians? Uh? Pretty good, pretty good, pretty good. Helpful people.
It can be helpful, people can't be can be helpful. People.
Keyword on this podcast, keyword? Uh yeah, how do you
(01:55):
feel about like like vaginas? It just as a just
as like a like a like in terms of the
way they're they're structured. I did previously tell Court that
I picked her for this episode specifically. I'm honored already.
Oh yeah, just wait, yeah, how do you feel about
(02:16):
vaginas like structurally, structurally? I don't have a problem with vaginas.
I feel like society maybe does, but society has some
issues with them. I think they're there, they seem they
seem fine. Um, but what if I were to tell
you the decades ago, some random dude with a medical
(02:36):
degree decided he'd figured out a better way to design vaginas,
And then what if I were to tell you that
he decided to test his theories by surgically altering the
vaginas of thousands of women without asking for their consent. No, No,
that's a bad one. Yeah, that is the story we're
going to tell today. It is the tale of Dr
(02:58):
James Burt, who sucked, and unless he's died by the
time this episode runs, still sucks. I think he's alive
in Florida is still which makes sense as to where
this guy would be. Um, he's really he hits the
he hits the defecta of of shitty American places because
he was he he did all of his crimes in
Ohio and then he fled to Florida when he got caught.
(03:20):
So it's a real perfect story. Oh my god, is
he still down in Florida redesigning vaginas? He is? No, no, no,
he is not allowed to do anything vaguely medical ever again.
Um but he Yeah, I mean that's broadly positive. He
didn't get the punishment that I think would have been fair. Um,
(03:42):
but he's he's, he's maybe still alive. It's kind of
hard to tell. He's he's kept a low profile since
getting caught. Um, well, getting caught is the wrong word,
because he wrote a book about what he was doing
and had no shame in it. And it's it's a
it's a tale, it's a tale. Are you ready to
hear the story of James doctor sorry, James Burton respectful? Yeah,
(04:05):
m D you know? Okay? So James Cared Burt Jr.
Was born on August twenty nine, nineteen twenty one, in Dayton, Ohio,
which is already one strike against him right. You know
he's coming coming out the bat committing a crime. Um,
the crime of being from Ohio. Uh now I I
(04:26):
yeah anyway. Um. James was one of two children born
to Benjamin and Stella. His dad worked in a manufacturing
company as a superintendent and his mom was a homemaker.
We have vanishingly little detail in his childhood, but we
can make some assumptions based on when and where he
grew up. He was likely raised in an environment of casual,
pervasive misogyny and male supremacy. Sex probably was not discussed
(04:49):
openly by his parents or in school. The first sex
ed in a major American city was implemented in Chicago
in nineteen thirteen, about eight years before James was born,
and program was so controversial that it was shuttered almost
immediately as a result of outcry from the Catholic Church.
They launched a massive protest campaign forced the Chicago Superintendent
(05:09):
of Schools, el A Young, to resign. Um. I was
gonna say, Midwest, I was like, that seems like a
very not happening. I mean it's simultaneously like yeah, it
makes sense that it would get shut down, but also
like good on you, Chica. They tried right, like they
tried before La or anywhere. You know, they gave it
a shot. Um didn't work, but you gotta give them.
(05:31):
You gotta give l a Young points for trying, at
least not the Catholic Church. Don't give the Catholic Church
points for a lot. I know we both thought of
things to say, but sometimes it's best not to make
those Catholic Church jokes throwing their dick around everywhere. That
did get them in a lot of trouble eventually, um,
(05:54):
but not enough. At the same time. Um, what we're
saying is sand O'Connor was right. So yeah, the federal
government would not take any kind of stance on the
matter of like whether or not sex said was a
good idea until nineteen eighteen. And what forced their hand
was the sheer devastating frequency of std S among American
soldiers during World War One. Like the government was like,
(06:17):
we don't we don't want any part in this, and
then our military readiness was compromised by fucking um had
to be dealt with just like, oh my god, we're
losing a lot of men from venereal disease. Dudes are Yeah,
they are leaping off of battleships and into the ocean
(06:38):
to quiet the crabs. We should probably say something, um.
The Chamberlain con Act was America's first federal law regarding
sex education, and it was passed to provide funding to
teach soldiers about syphilis and gonorrhea. This had the positive
impact of spurring large numbers of Americans to view sex
as a public health issue, which is broadly speaking, an
(07:01):
improvement from where things were. It also inspired school districts
around the nation to copy the military and hosting sex
ed programs in secondary schools. And this was a thoroughly
mixed bag, um, because they weren't teaching how to have
healthy sex. They weren't teaching about how sex can function
in a relationship. They weren't like it was just purely
trying to scare kids about v D, you know, Like
(07:23):
that was the whole all of sex. That was just
trying to frighten children about the fact that their their
genitals were going to rot off if they had sex.
Was everyone still on the abstinence only Like was that
happening in this era? I think that attitude was so
pervasive that they didn't have an abstinence only movement. It
was just assumed that, like, yeah, it's bad to funk
before marriage, and obviously all of the men are. But like,
(07:45):
I don't even think there was a movement because it
was so such a pervasive, like accepted thing. Yeah, Throughout
the nineteen twenties, when James Burt was a little kid,
sex ed grew increasingly common. When he was in school,
he probably watched a film called The Gift of Life
from the terrifyingly named American Social Hygiene Association, which is
(08:07):
that's a nightmare organization name right there. Uh. The movie
warned children about the quote solitary vice, which was masturbation,
and cautioned, masturbation may seriously hinder a boy's progress towards
vigorous manhood. It is a selfish, childish, stupid habit. Interesting
word choice with the vigorous love that vigorous. Also, don't
(08:32):
you think masturbation that would help prevent d D? I
don't you know? We talk about this and the Kellogg
episodes which you're airing the week we record this, But like,
there was a widespread belief that it would kill you,
that like, it would drive you insane and you would die.
Not totally wrong, but I mean it depends on how
(08:54):
you do it, I guess. But yeah, you'll also noticed
that they specifically say, like masturbation is the thing that
that boys do that is bad for them. This is
because even discussing even even to like even discussing female
sexuality in order to like discourage masturbation was kind of
too risque, you know, like acknowledging that it happened would
be a bridge too far for these people. Now, thanks
(09:15):
to an English teacher named Lucy Curtis, a number of
secondary school teachers in the twenties and thirties also attempted
to teach sex and through English literature, which allowed them
to avoid talking directly about biology. Instead, they would draw
comparisons to health lessons sex health lessons from passages and
classical works. Miss Curtis advised teachers quote, read to them
Lancelot's wild passionate quest for the Holy Grail, and they
(09:39):
will enter into the bitter experience of a soul which
has rendered itself incapable of receiving the full spiritual blessing
through the sea sin of yielding to impair desire. So,
like you've got a teacher about fucking have them read
King Arthur's tales. They'll understand that the Holy Grail is sex. Yeah,
that'll work. That's why the Crucible stopped generation from fucking
(10:01):
um um so. In the nineteen thirties, when James Burt
was a teenager and had his adolescence, sex ed grew
increasingly formal. The U s Department of Education started publishing
materials to train teachers during this period. Most of these
early classes focused entirely on warning children against masturbation and
scaring them with exaggerated stories of the dangers of STDs.
(10:25):
Female masturbation was seldom discussed. Even teaching about the negatives
of sex could be dangerous. In nineteen thirty three, when
Mexico's socialist government proposed compulsory sex ed for public schools,
Mexico City erupted into riots. Um So, there were riots
in a few countries about the concept of teaching sex said.
That wasn't just don't yeah people, people murdered each other
(10:48):
over this stuff. Good ship and of course Mexico City,
the Catholic Church was behind that one too. Yeah. Now,
the most influential progressive voice on sex said during James's
teen years would have been Margaret Sanger, who is a
very problematic figure on her own. Um was a big eugenicist,
but Sanger also made huge waves for arguing that sex
for the sake of pleasure was acceptable, and she did
(11:10):
this by urging people to use birth control. Right. She
had other motives for it, but the mere fact that
you're saying birth control is the option and not abstinence
means that you're acknowledging people can have sex and it's
it's okay, you know. Um. So, that was a big
deal for a lot of folks. It was the sign
of kind of a shifting in the winds um. Now, again,
there were major eugenicist implications for a lot of her beliefs,
but the positive angle of it is that she was
(11:31):
increasingly pushing forward a conversation that said it's okay if
married wo men and women have sex for fun, um,
you know, which is something. In nineteen thirty six, Sanger
helped push forward a Supreme Court case that overturned the
Comstock Law, which had ruled both birth control devices and
information about birth control obscene and thus illegal. Um So,
(11:52):
like talking about birth control was illegal because it was
it was pornography. Basically, Oh my god, that's so fucked up.
That's like the Instagram advertising policy of President present day. Yeah. Yeah,
the Comstock law was that for everything, and Sanger helps
overturn at the Supreme Court is like, oh, you know.
It turns out the First Amendment means you can talk
about condoms, which is fun um. I mean, it's a
(12:17):
good law to overturn because it sucked. By the time
James Burt was seventeen or eighteen, he would have been
able to finally receive sex set information that wasn't entirely
focused around syphilis or the evils of whacking it. James
graduated in nineteen thirty nine and went to Auburn University,
where he met his future wife, Lucretia Perry. He received
his undergraduate degree after a transfer from Alabama Polytechnic Institute
(12:40):
in nineteen forty two. He next attended medical school, and
he married Lucretia in the early nineteen forties before graduating
with his medical degree in nineteen forty five. I haven't
found good information on what precisely inspired James to get
into medicine, but based on his later actions, we can
safely assume that he found himself gravitating most to the
subject of rep deductive and sexual health. We know he
(13:02):
paid close attention to developing sex research of the day.
He would have followed the developing work of a sex
science pioneer named Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey was a former biologist
who had gone from studying wasps to studying human sex
after he started teaching a course on marriage for Indiana
University and realized that there was basically zero good research
documenting the sex lives of normal humans. And Kinsey is
(13:24):
a controversial figure. Two. There's some good criticisms of the guy. Um,
but his research is like I love that. That gets
you a little bit hard, Robert, You're like, yeah, there's
some there's some stuff about that guy too. There's there
we might talk about. There's some like weird weird ship
with Kinsey. Um, like genital torture stuff that. Why, yeah,
(13:46):
there's some weird ship with Kinsey. I'm not gonna I'm
not competent at the moment to talk about it. Um.
But like Kinsey, there's there's some very there's some very
founded critiques of him. You also, if you're studying like
sex health, you have to talk about Kinsey because he
was the first person pushing this research and I'm gonna
quote from an honors thesis by Lauren Lavin for the
University of South Dakota here in Night. Soon after beginning
(14:10):
the Institute for Sex Research, Kinsey published one of the
most influential pieces of literature in American sex history, Sexual
Behavior of the Human Male. Five years later, in nineteen
fifty three, he published Sexual Behavior of the Human Female.
The books contained controversial information for the time, as they
detailed topics such as homosexuality, premarital sex, and even beast reality.
(14:30):
Yet this illicit information intrigued the public, and the books
quickly rose to the top of the New York Times
bestseller list. The most notably controversial information presented was the
occurrence of homosexuality in America. At this point, homosexual acts
were legal, yet Kinsey's reports detailed many people having homosexual encounters.
He estimated that ten percent of the population was homosexual.
(14:51):
This statistic, now known to be higher than the actual
presentage of four point five percent, was shocking to American citizens.
The books also contained innovative new measures for sex research.
The Kinsey scale scale, still used in sex research today,
is a graduated scale from zero to six that measures
the level of homosexual orientation in an individual, with zero
being entirely heterosexual and six being entirely homosexual. The scale
(15:13):
was an important finding in research as it provided the
basis for homosexual research in a reliable way to measure
homosexuality going forward. Um, and yeah, it's one of those things. Also,
I don't want to say that like four point five
percent is the definite percentage of homosexuality, Like, I don't
think we had a per perfect data on that now,
and Kinsey's data wasn't perfect, but he was the first
(15:34):
person who was studying this and not condemning it. Was
just like, this is the thing that people do. Let's
try to understand it, you know, which is you get
a lot of credit for that in my book. And
again like nineteen fifty two or forty eight, nineteen forty eight, sorry,
like that's that's he's very ahead of his time. Yeah. Um.
(15:55):
And he he also like started carrying out it wasn't
just like the thing that kind of first brought in
prominence was his these kind of frank discussions of homosexuality,
but he started also discussing just like heterosexual sex life
in a way that hadn't been before, where it was
just kind of trying to understand what people do and
not judging it, and not not approaching it from any
kind of moral or religious territory. Just just this is
(16:17):
the thing people do. Let's try to understand how common
different things are. When Kinsey's study went viral, James Burt
was working for the US Air Force Medical Corps, which
he joined to avoid getting drafted. He did a residency
next at a hospital in Chicago, and eventually wound up
performing his residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New
York City. He finally received his medical license in June
(16:39):
of nineteen fifty one from the state of Ohio and
moved back home to Dayton in the first of all
would become a major series of poor decisions. This is
a very anti Ohio podcast. I think we're open about that.
Have you ever been to Ohio Courtney first mistake? Oh yeah, yeah,
(17:00):
the one who Yeah, what a great response. I know
some lovely people from Ohio, people from everywhere. Yeah, but
should have been a lake is all I'll say. Um,
we got we don't have enough lakes and we have
(17:21):
too much Ohio. That's That's all I'll say. On the
James Burt started his own practice, which was focused on
gynecology and obstetrics, and he started his practice the year
before Kinsey wrote his book on female sexuality. Um Bert
was not board certified and gynecology or or in obstetrics,
but that was not a barrier to practicing in those
(17:42):
at the time. I don't know if it is today,
but at the time you could do. As long as
you were a doctor, you could. You could. You could
practice gynecology and obstetrics without being board certified in them. Um.
So he starts his practice and less than a year
later he and his wife separate. Uh and he files
for divorce. This was a fairly rare thing at the time,
although not as where she'd think. The divorce rate UM
(18:02):
in the nineteen fifties was about two point three people
for every thousand Americans compared to about three point nine
for every thousand Americans today. UM we're actually we've actually
been seeing divorce rates decline over the last decade or so.
We're at like the same level we were in nineteen
sixty eight. I think the reason for the divorce was
he just like I saw a lot of pussies this year.
(18:24):
We're gonna talk about that. Yeah. The James Bert's story
involves a lot of divorce. So the couple had two
sons and a daughter who seemed to have gone with
their mother. I don't think he kept the kids. I
haven't heard any sort of evidence that makes me believe
the kids stayed with him. We know very little about
their situation because again, he's divorcing her. In the early fifties,
(18:47):
women don't have a lot of illegal You can't have
a bank account as a woman. Um. So, yeah, we
know that Bert was the one who filed for divorce.
He claimed his wife was unhappy with his financial situation.
But this could very well be a lie because he
was making a lot of money at this point. He's
a doctor, you know, and he's throughout his career a
very successful one. Um. This could also be a lie
(19:09):
because in nineteen fifty three, a few months after he
filed for divorce, when the divorce was still pending, James
Burt traveled to Mexico, got a divorce in Mexico without
his wife's involvement, and immediately worried married his second wife, Jerry,
in Indiana. Oh shit, the first bitch just got a
letter in the mail, Like, Okay, we're done Mexican divorce.
(19:32):
It's taken too long in America. We're Mexico divorced and
just will come up later. But you can't do that.
If you're married in the United States and you file
for divorce and then just decided to go to Mexico
to get it doesn't count. Like, that's not the way
the law works, you know, Like, so he's this is
technically bigamy. He's still married to his first wife when
he marries his second wife. Uh. Sorry, that is fascinating.
(19:56):
Can you not, like if I get is that still
true today? If I get married in the United States,
can I only get divorced in the United States? I
don't know if you can only get divorced. But if
you start divorce proceedings here and then move to another
country without the consent of your spouse to get a divorce,
it doesn't count, right, Yeah, it seems like you would
definitely need consent. Yeah, I'm sure you could, Like if
you were like, oh, well, I've moved, I've since moved
(20:18):
to this other country, I'm going to initiate divorce proceedings
here instead of initiing them. I'm sure that would work,
but it does not work the way he did it,
because he was clearly just fleeing New Mexico to get
a piece of paper that said that he could get
another Like what he was doing was very deliberately shady,
you know. Um. So, Gary and James moved into a modern,
one story house with a swimming pool in a wealthy
(20:40):
suburban neighborhood of Dayton, which further under cuts his claim
that his wife was unhappy with their finances, because again,
he was making a lot of money. I think he
was just trying to say, like, she's a gold digger.
That's what we're splitting up, you know. And for things
that come later, I'm certain he's lying about this first divorce. Yeah.
So the couple had one child, and for a few
(21:01):
years seems things seemed to be relatively normal for the
young doctor in his growing family, But appearances were in
this case deceiving. A major part of James's job as
an obstetrician involved repairing apsotomy's. At the time, the vast
majority of women who birth children went through it. A
psotomy which is a surgical cut made at the opening
of the vagina to ease childbirth. This is not as
(21:22):
common today, but back in those days, doctors believed it
made the birth safer, it was easier on the child's
head um, and so it was the norm in some
hospitals of births included an a psotomy. Now things are different,
it's not it's still done sometimes, but it was just
like almost every doctor which just do it basically every time.
It was just kind of the standard thing is this
makes it safer for the baby, so we're just gonna
(21:44):
We're just gonna cut her open um. Now, it was
not strictly necessary and most births, and again there's a
lot of people who will say like this was an ningia,
and it was, you know, it was. It was like
unnecessary surgery for a lot of people who received it. Um.
At the time. The reason this, doctors would just do
this because doctors would not ask the mother before doing
this um and this was not just an apsiotomy thing.
(22:07):
At the time, consent was not a priority in medicine
for anyone, men or women. Your doctor told you what
you were going to get, and you would do it. Um.
Doctors were probably the most trusted people in the country
at this point. It was a different era and it
was just sort of the norm for a doctor to say,
this is what needs to happen, and for the patient
to just kind of let it happen. Um, And they
(22:28):
wouldn't tell you a lot of the time they were
like with an epsiotomy, they probably wouldn't say, here's what
will happen unless you specifically ask, Like it's just well,
you're going to get having a child, I'm gonna knock
you out with drugs and do what's necessary to get
the kid out, you know. But that's how it worked
at the time. We're gonna talk a lot about the
history of medical consent in this episode, Um, but it
was not a thing in the fifties, right, Like just
(22:50):
not a standard thing. A Psiotomies were so normal that
physicians often did not discuss it at all prior to
the birth. Um. This was despite the fact that many
women hated the operation, which was extremely painful and permanently
altered many people's ability to enjoy enjoy vaginal sex after childbirth.
Like most obstetricians, Dr Bert performed a lot of episiotomies
(23:11):
and then as a matter of course, he would carry
out a repair of the epsiotomy. Afterwards. You would try
to fix it, and there was like a saying that,
like you would give him an extra stitch, you know,
to tighten things up a bit more pleasurable. Um. And
the more he did, this patriarchy just inserting themselves at
every stage. Yeah yeah, let me yeah. And I'm bringing
(23:38):
all this up because James Burt is uniquely shitty among
obstetricians in this period. But like they're all doing some
shady stuff, like some stuff that we it wasn't shady
by the standards of the day, but now now you
you look at medical science in that period, you're like, okay,
if that's a little messed up. Um. Yeah. So the
more he repaired to psotomys, the more he started to
(24:01):
have ideas. And I'm gonnaquote from a write up on
the website medical Bag to explain how what he's started
with what happens when men have ideas do not recommend quote.
The doctor believed that women lost all are part of
their ability to have an orgasm following childbirth as a
result of their vagina becoming too loose post delivery, claiming
(24:22):
that women's vaginas were quote large enough to drive a
truck through sideways after childbirth. That's doctor Bird's writing on
the map, it's gonna get worse. It's gonna get worse
as it normally does, as it as it does ac
of the time on this show. Drive a truck through
(24:43):
d truck through sideways that study. No, no, but you
know what a lot of trucks because global capitalism is
heavily reliant upon semis in order to transport goods and
services across great distances. I mean, you really called that
(25:06):
ship together. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,
thank you. Would that be the products and services that
support this podcast? Absolutely is the products and services that
support this podcast. All Right, we're back, We're back, and
we're just not going to think too much about that
(25:28):
add transition. So yeah, Dr Burke decided to fix all that.
Between nineteen fifty four and nineteen sixty six, Bert began
experimenting on unknowing unconscious patients with his own variations of
the standard apsiotomy repair after childbirth. Known for his heavy
hand with anesthesia, Bert had human campuses on which to
experiment after delivery. He's a knock them out doctor, and
(25:51):
he just starts fiddling around in there, you know, just
kind of experimenting. Were these the days of operating theaters
or was that over? Was he like, come on in, boys,
she's totally knocked out, and I'm gonna try a few things.
He's on his own, I think. I think sometimes he
has nurses, but he's on his own. Um. Now. The
(26:11):
exact nature of the surgeries he carried out varied over time.
At first, he mostly focused on making the vaginal opening
tighter to try and make vaginas smaller and tighter and
improve the sexual experience of the husbands of his patients mainly.
But in the late nineteen fifties, Dr Burt started reading
the then newly published work of William Masters in Virginia Johnson.
Their work was groundbreaking for many reasons, but among them
(26:33):
was the scientific data it provided on the fact that
the clitter has played a key role in causing orgasms.
Dr Burt synthesized this finding with his own findings over
years of experimental epsiotomy repairs. The women he'd given his
modified surgery to, he claimed, told him their sexual experience
had improved after childbirth. James Burt began to develop his
own theories about human vaginas and sexual responsiveness. From a
(26:56):
book titled The Love surgeon by Sarah Rodriguez quote. Central
of Birt's ideas about female sexuality and the surgery he
was developing were his ideas about the role of the
clitteress in female orgasm. Prior to very recently, Bert wrote,
the medical consensus had been that that a vaginal orgasm
was mature, and orgasm from manipulation of the clitterest was immature,
(27:16):
and thus the ultimate return of the vagina to normal
by repair after childbirthing was completed seemed adequate. But this,
he noted, did not consider the role of the clitteress.
So in nineteen sixty three, nearly a decade into his
casual experimenting with vaginas, James Burt's second wife filed for divorce.
Since she is the one who filed, we're able to
(27:37):
look at this divorce through the lens of someone besides
Dr Burt. Gary reported that her husband had quote struck
and physically abused her from time to time. She yeah.
She asked that her husband be kept away from her
and that their mutually held assets be protected from him.
This was not an amicable divorce. James fought back, claiming
that he ought not have to pay his wife alimony because,
(27:57):
and this is just an incredible line of argument, he
divorced from his first wife still had not been legally
completed in the United States, and thus his marriage to
Gary had never been technically legal. So that's his his
defense to paying alimonious. Well, I got married to her illegally.
I was breaking we got married, so why would I
pay alimony? He's like, however, the paperwork lines up to
(28:18):
best serve me. Do we know if he did any
fucked up stuff to her vagina? We do not. She
had kids with him, so probably, But but I I
don't know. I I have not run into confirmation that also,
maybe not, because it is it is kind of uncommon
at least now. I assume it was then too for
(28:38):
doctors to you know, deliver their own children, right, Like
that's considered like maybe not the best idea. Um, so
maybe it was someone else who did it and he
didn't have a chance to get in there. Um. I
don't know. I haven't seen any sort of confirmation or
denial of that. But it was definitely not not a
friendly divorce. Uh. The judge was not convinced by this
(29:00):
line of argument, which is honestly kind of surprising for
the time UM, but he awarded Gary Alimonian child support
and their divorce was finalized in nineteen sixty six. That
same year, Masters and Johnson published a book Human Sexual Response,
which dedicated an entire chapter to the Clitterests, which they
labeled quote a unique organ in the total of human
anatomy because it's only purpose was sexual. They described it
(29:23):
as an organ system which is totally limited in physiologic
function to initiating or elevating levels of sexual tension um.
Which was a big finding at the time, and it
kind of like it went against a lot of the
existing ideas about female sexuality, which and often just sort
of seen that that it was like it was a
variant of male sexuality, right, Like female sexuality is just
(29:44):
kind of like a lesser version of male sexuality. Women
don't enjoy sex as much, like it's not as big
a deal for them. They're not sexual beings in the
way that men are. And the Masters and Johnson's research
kind of blows that out of the water because like
women are the only like, how have an entire organ
that's just dedicated to sexual responsiveness. UM. Yet it's pretty
(30:06):
it's it's great so this is like an important sort
of in the in the history of like understanding human sexuality.
This idea that like, no, no human beings are are
all sexual beings as opposed to like it's just just
people with you know, penises. Yeah, so outside of that, um,
yeah it. This was like a bombshell in medical science
(30:26):
at the time, and Dr Bert was as influenced by
this finding as everyone else. Unfortunately, he also fell into
a failure of deduction that similarly plagued Dr William Masters.
Both men were physicians, and as a result, they both
saw sex and issues with sex and strictly physical and
conventionally medical terms. The social aspects of sexual dysfunction, like
(30:47):
an equal power dynamics were abused within a relationship were
boiled out. It was just purely a matter of like, oh,
these are how the mechanics of sex working, Like, well,
it's not. It's not just a matter of hydraulics, you know,
there's a lot that goes on and insects um. Female
sexual problems then were blamed on purely physical matters. And
I'm gonna quote again from the Love Surgeon here. According
(31:07):
to Bert, he had not informed any of these women.
The women he had done surgery on that he had
done anything other than a standard of pasiotomy repair. The
combination of realizing the importance of the clitterest and sex
for women, and that the modification he had made to
a psiotomy repair was improving the sex lives of his
patients led Bert to conclude that women's bodies were not
anatomically ideal for heterosexual sex, for female bodies were pathological
(31:30):
when it came to heterosexual intercourse. Based on the research
of Masters and Johnson and the information about the improved
sex lives he stated he heard from his patients, Bert
decided the clitterest was too far from the opening of
the vagina for women to receive adequate stipulation from the
penis during heterosexual missionary position sex. So he's got notes
(31:53):
going a little bit of feedback for God or nature.
Who you didn't made this, don't worry, I got it
figured out. Yeah, that's amazing, Hubrist, Like that's a whole,
a whole another level, like it's it's it's something else. Um.
(32:14):
So yeah, he started to modify the again significant surgical
procedure he'd already been performing on his patients without consent
for more than a decade. Up to that point, he'd
mostly focused on making the vagina tighter. Now he started
building up skin tissue in order to move the vaginal
opening closer to the clitteress. This procedure also changed the
angle of the vaginal opening. Bert later bragged that under
(32:36):
what he started calling his love surgery, quote, yeah, just god,
the loot surgery, Like you just need to learn how
to eat a pussy and then this will all just go. No, No,
that's that is not at all acceptable to Dr James Burt.
(32:58):
It is it is. I mean it's a matter of
like there's a lot that we'll talk about this more.
There's a lot that's wrapped up in it. Part of
it is just this mix of men wanting to feel
like their sexual dynamos and also men not wanting to
do anything but missionary sex um. And so the whole,
the whole idea that Bird has is like, well, I'll
just make it easier for women to orgasm from from
(33:20):
purely missionary sex, and that will make men. That will
improve relationships because men will be sexual powerhouses. Then like that,
it's it's this idea of like, well, I shouldn't have
to learn to pleasure my partner. I'll alter her physiology.
Oh my god, just five surgeries later, it'll be perfect.
It was usually just one nine hour surgery. If that
(33:40):
makes it better. Um, so, yeah, he moved the vagina
towards the clitters. He also pulled a significant amount of
the labia minora into the vagina because he believes to
make it pretty. No, he thought it would cause greater
stimulation during vaginal sex. I say that he's doing all
these things, and he says he's getting feedback. He's not
(34:02):
telling these women what he's doing. So he's not being like,
so I did all this stuff to your bits, how
does it feel? He was just like, how sex after childbirth?
And they'd be all like, oh, it's a lot better
than it was, you know when I was pregnant. He'd
be like, oh, that means the surgery works. He's not
asking them how about this? How about He's not like
getting he's not even getting not that it would be
okay if he was, but he's not actually getting scientific
data on this. He's just being like, they say sex
(34:23):
is better, it must work. Like so he doesn't know.
He's saying that, I know my surgery is improving sex.
He doesn't know if it's number one. He doesn't actually
know that it's improving sex. They might just be like, yeah,
now that I don't have you know, I'm no longer pregnant,
I'm enjoying sex more, which which could make sense he's
he's not. He doesn't know if like, oh, is moving
the opening or moving the clitter iss or is moving
(34:46):
the laby manora, Like what is it that's improving things?
If any of it's having an m back because he's
not actually doing science. He's just kind of fussing around
down there. Did he get any complaints? We don't know yet.
He does this is the sixties and calling that love surgery,
but isn't telling any of his patients telling any of
(35:07):
his patients at this point. What he's doing his research
is hey, you were pregnant and now you're not sex. Yeah,
and it's self reported, so like if he did get
some complaints, he's probably not going to tell other people
about exactly. And also like no offense, but I'm not
out here like talking to my oh B being like
(35:28):
yeah sex great, well yeah, especially and and that's like
not in the sixties. And if you I'm sure someone
because some women. These women do later go to other
doctors to be like, what has happened to me? And
I'm gonna guess that happened at this period. But a
lot of those doctors are like, well, it's just pregnancy,
you know, pregnancy changes stuff down there. Leave, like, get
(35:50):
out of my office, you know, like there's nothing I
can do for you. This is just what happens. Yeah,
it's horrible. It's gonna get worse. Um, of course. Yeah.
In nineteen sixty seven, James Burt finally succeeded in getting
a legal divorce from his first wife so he could
marry his third wife, Linda. By this point, he was
(36:11):
one of the most successful and thus wealthiest obstetricians in Ohio.
He and his new wife bought property in El Salvador
and the Dominican Republic. I'm sure nothing shady with either
of those transactions. They also bought a condo in Veil, Colorado,
so they wouldn't have to spend as much time in
the blighted hellscape that is Ohio with Dayton. Within Dayton,
the Bird's gained a reputation for being ostentatious and somewhat kinky.
(36:34):
Rich people. They held huge pool parties that were swim
suit optional. James Burt wore gold chains and long fur
coats in the winter. On at least one occasion, he
wore a pink Saparti Safari suit at one of the
parties he threw. Not that I found. He was not
particularly social with or popular among his fellow doctors. One
(36:56):
of his colleagues bluntly stated that James didn't enjoy golf
because he quote preferred indoor games. And you can translate
that however you want. Yeah, so he's like a kind
of probably kind of like a swinger dude in this period.
I'm guessing a lot of key parties at the Bird residence,
you know. In nineteen seventy three, james third marriage fell
(37:16):
apart when Linda left her husband for a ski instructor
she'd met in Veil. Yeah, cut maybe so not not really,
because it's unclear if she left him before or after
he started living with a twenty one year old I
have every little bit of hope. He was forty six
(37:37):
at the time. In short order, he duly married this
much younger woman whose name was Joan, and they stayed
together for a while. To his credit, he did wait
until after he and his third wife had a legal
divorce to get married to his fourth wife, Joan and
James bought a yacht on Lake Erie. She wore diamonds constantly.
The couple did not grow any more popular among James's colleagues.
(37:59):
Walter Reeling Jr. A Dayton physician who worked near Dr Birt,
later claimed that other doctors and their spouses avoided the
birds at social gatherings in the seventies. No one, he claims,
wanted to sit at a table with them. Sarah Rodriguez
writes quote Partly this was because of the manner in
which the birds behaved at such dinners. Both Walter Reeling
and his wife's Susie Reeling recollected how Joan Burt, decked
(38:20):
out in furst, would be physically all over her husband
during medical society dinners, talking a lot and bragging about
how many orgasms she enjoyed. James Burt apparently did not
seek out friendships with other physicians, and Walter Reeling could
not recall a physician who sought out Bert's friendship. So
a lot of p d A that everyone finds kind
of creepy, right, sex positive here, But if you're like
(38:42):
sitting at a dinner talking about how often you orgasm,
like a professional dinner with your colleagues. Kind of weird,
kind of weird, kind of weird. That not the time
for that kind of conversation. You know, um, there aren't.
He's an ol B. This is related to work. Yeah,
Like he's like Jordan Belfort and like the Wolf of
(39:02):
Wall Street, the wife with the diamonds on the yacht
Strong Jordan Belfort energy that literally like dog come on bro.
By the mid nineteen seventies, Dr Bert had added yet
another step to his love surgery. Some of his patients
had complained of pain during sex after his operation. Decided
the yeah, oh yeah. Now, obviously it couldn't be that
(39:29):
his operation was a bad idea. It had to be
that there was yet another problem with female anatomy that
needed to be corrected. He decided the most likely culprit
was the pubo coxy g S muscle, which is a
constrictor muscle at the rear wall of the vagina that
supports the uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, bowl bladder, and vagina.
This is the organ that you control when you do
(39:49):
Keegel's right. That's that's the muscle that he decides as
the problem. It is extremely important. It provides control not
over just vaginal feeling, but urination and defication. It's a
very important muscle to to have James cut it because
he decided it was getting hit during penetrative intercourse and
causing pain which made it harder for his patients to orgasm. Again,
none of them told him to do this, nor was
(40:10):
he carrying out medical research to determine if the pubo
coxygenus muscle was in fact interfering with sexual pleasure. He
just sort of assumed it was the culprit and in
his words, decided to quote cut the damn muscle. Oh
my god, pretty bad, Like yeah, come really easy, but
cannot stop wetting myself everywhere. Yeah, which might have an
(40:35):
impact on I don't know a lot of things. Um,
it wasn't like he's not totally severing it, but he's
severing it enough that it it does cause problems within
continents and stuff for a lot of his patients. We'll
talk about that later. So later on, once knowledge of
his love surgery was public, many of his patients would
come forward with complaints that love surgery had made them incontinent.
(40:57):
We don't know what percentage of them suffered the way,
because in the mid seventies, he still was not telling
anyone what he was doing. This was now twenty years
into his experiments with love surgery. Yeah, so we we
don't know what percentage of his patients suffered in continence
as a result of the surgery because in the mid
nineteen seventies he still wasn't telling anyone what he was doing.
And this is now twenty years into his experimenting with
(41:18):
love surgery. Bert of course, claims to have heard almost
universally positive reports from his patients about their post childbirth
sex lives. By nineteen seventy five, he claims to have
performed his love surgery on more than four thousand women.
Oh my god. Yeah, that's some good ship. Um, it's not.
(41:39):
It's terrible. Uh, it's some bad ship. Yeah, that's a lot.
That's a lot of people getting surgery. That my hometown.
Yeah yeah, that is a town worth of that's most
of Ohio, I have to assume. Um, but you know
it isn't most of Ohio. I don't even know where
(42:03):
go ahead. I mean, Ohio does advertise on our shop.
I was gonna say, we could get an Ohio AD
and like, you could be factually wrong. And for the record,
if if there's an Ohio AD, don't listen to it,
do not move to Ohio and or any circumstances. Yeah,
no idea, get the like Ohio. You know your audience.
(42:24):
This is a firmly anti Ohio pun. You're wasting your
money here Ohio. I mean, less money for Ohio is
a win for the whole world. But still, I just
don't want anyone to move there. Anyway, here's the man,
(42:45):
all right, we're back. So yeah, Dr James Bird is
a liar obviously, so we should take his claims that
he performed to search around more than four thousand women
with a grain of salt, because there's not documentation of
this um. But he was one of the most, if
not the most popular obstetricians in Dayton in his day,
so he it's a lot. He experimented, probably in the
(43:05):
low probably at least a couple thousand. Four thousand's probably
an exaggeration. He's a narcissist, but two thousand's not out
of the not out of the possibility. You know, he's
been at it for a decade. Right, Yeah, he's he's
done this a lot. Um. And he was one of
the most successful obstetricians in the whole in the Midwest
at this point. And the average salary of a doctor
(43:26):
in this period is like sixty two thousand a year,
which is really good money. And you know, the nineteen
sixties seventies, he's making like four grand years. He's extremely successful. Um.
His office was on the top floor of a stylish
downtown building. He had eight exam rooms in a waiting
room which included a couch shaped like a woman's mouth.
A little bit creevy. Um. It must be said that
(43:49):
he was very popular with his patients. Dr Burt was charming, friendly,
and said to have exceptional bedside manner. He listened to
his patients in an era in which male doctors were
generally expected to ignore the complaints and fears of their
female patients. One nurse later recalled that he quote communicated
with women when a lot of doctors wouldn't. There were
(44:09):
a lot of physicians that were patting women on the
head and saying, now, sweetie, don't worry, I'll take care
of it. Um. And doctor Burt was not that kind.
He would he would explain to you what he was
He wouldn't tell you what he was actually doing, but
he would explain to you what he was claiming he
was going to do. He would make you feel good
about planning. Over all, the power he would make you
feel listened to before performing a surgery on you that
(44:31):
he did. You did not ask for um and did
not know was even a thing that could be done um.
Patients would often claim his office was a refuge. Doctor
Burt would listen to their fears about childbirth and sexual dysfunction,
which was not a subject most doctors would even broach.
Sarah Rodriguez writes, Bert seemed to sympathize with his patients.
Berts sympathetic ear perhaps appealed to many women as he
(44:52):
listened to their worries and fears about their upcoming labors
or hysterectomies, and he seems to have believed that he
was acting sympathetically toward them by performing love surge re
in addition to delivering their child or performing a hysterectomy.
In his view, but surgically altered their bodies to alleviate
their concerns and problems, all of which regardless of what
the women may have been telling or not telling him.
He felt, we're essentially about sex. Yeah, that's that's good stuff.
(45:18):
So Dr Bart of course performed his love surgery after
nearly every childbirth, even on women who never complained to
him about having sexual problems. He performed his love surgery
after vaginal hysterectomys too, and regularly when performing abdominal uterus suspension.
So he was just he he stopped just doing this
after a psiotomies, after you get a surgery, and you
get a surgery, and you get a surgery, and like
(45:42):
and like again, it's not an obie surgeon, right, Like
I feel like that needs to be stated over and
over again. That is not his Like he's not trained, Yeah,
I mean he's trained. He's not board certified, Like you
get training, I get like, he's he's not trained, Yeah,
he's This is not the thing he should be doing
at the time. It is not illegal for him to
(46:03):
be doing this, um, which is a fawt a flaw
and I think the medical system, what the hell. Yeah,
as a general rule, if a patient with a vagina
was unconscious in front of him, he would he would
he would do his love surgery like that that was
kind of his like, definitely man. One thing that endeared
(46:27):
him to his patients were his promises, what he was.
He was extremely popular during this period, Sophie. All you
have to do is listen to women. But he's yeah,
like he's he's meeting the lowest bar, which is he's
not like patting them on the head and saying they're
they're girl. This is like, this is adult time. Like
(46:47):
that's what a lot of male doctors do, and he doesn't.
He sits there and he listens and he takes it
seriously and then he does whatever it is he wants.
He's not he's a monster. I I hear you let me,
let me, let me cut you off? Like what the
yeah he's I mean yes, But like it is important
to the story that he's popular during this period. That's
part of why he gets so many women to experiment
on us. He's extremely successful. You can look up his face.
(47:13):
There's pictures of him. Um yeah, you know he's he's
like it's important that he was so endearing to his
patients because that's why they trusted him, and that's why
so few of them initially like recognized that something was
awry Um. He was very popular in part for his
promises of pain free childbirth, which he accomplished by giving
(47:34):
expectant mothers huge doses of drugs that rendered them unconscious
throughout the whole process. This was not uncommon for the time,
and it gave birth the ability to more easily do
whatever he wanted with his patients, who were again canvasses
to him. By this point, he had come to believe
that all female bodies needed fixing because they were badly
designed for heterosexual missionary position sex, which he considered the
(47:58):
only normal sex act. He believed he was justified in
performing his surgery on every vagina he got his hands
on because he did not see his surgery as elective. Instead,
he was correcting a malformation. He thought of it in
the same way as like a doctor who corrects a
cleft palette. Right, that's what's going on in this guy's
head um. Sometimes he would even light to his patients
(48:20):
for a chance to get in there and root around.
From the New York Times quote, Miss Phillips was one
of the many women who went to Dr Burt for
a relatively minor physical problem. She was told she needed
a hysterect to me because her Phillipian tubes were rotting.
Now she suffers chronic infections, extreme difficulty urinating, and excruciating
pain if she attempts intercourse. The strain officially eventually destroyed
(48:40):
her marriage. She said seven hours of surgery completely changed
her life. I feel like a freak, Miss Phillips said,
I can't date, I can't ride horses, I can't urinate.
She characterized surgery is a form of sexual abuse and
said he stole parts of my body, which is fair. Uh, yeah,
that is not There's no Joe even so, there's not
(49:02):
a joke. It's a nightmare. It's a horrible, horrible man
who did horrible things um in the in the name
of medicine to women who trusted him implicitly. Um trust
no one. Women trust no one. Certainly not a guynecologist
who wears fur coats. That's that's that's the that that
auto warrants side. Gynecologists who worked in and around doctor
(49:27):
Burt knew about his surgery and recognized it because they
would often examine his former patients. Joy Martin, who was
a woman he performed his surgery on after delivering her
son in nineteen said doctors would say Dr Burt's done
surgery on you, hasn't he? Um? Yeah, because like they
would see like she would go in with she went
in with complaints and was like what if it feels
(49:49):
like something's wrong, And they'd be like, oh, yeah, you
had Dr Burt. He switched the holes. They knew what
he was doing. Um. It is import won't to note
that while James Burt went much further than any of
his colleagues, he was not alone in his obsession with
making female bodies better suited for heterosexual intercourse. Joseph Dilley,
(50:11):
an early twentieth century obstitution who helped popularize the epsiotomy,
recommended this surgery and its subsequent repair because it could
tighten the vagina and quote restore women to virginal conditions.
In the nineteen seventies, author and childbirth experts Suzanne Arms
would argue that the real reason for this procedure was
to increase the ability of husbands to enjoy sex after childbirth.
(50:33):
In other words, Dr Burton his colleagues frame their various
tightening surgeries is being done for women, but their real
purpose was to make things more enjoyable for men. By
the mid nineteen seventies, public discussion of loose post childbirth
vaginas had become common and in popular culture. In nineteen
seventy four and his best selling book How to Get
More out of Sex, psychiatrist David Reuben urged mothers to
(50:54):
get vaginal tightening surgery, calling it a simple procedure that
could make a woman to forty almost the same sexually
as a girl of eighteen. That's pretty problematic. Yeah, yeah,
like on the news, where where is that? Um? Yeah,
that is a book How to Get More out of
(51:15):
Sex by psychiatrist David Ruben. Like that's a mainstream pop
psychiatrist being like, get tightened up so you'll be like
a teenager. Men love teenagers. You know. It's pretty bad. Um.
He claimed surgery could turn back the clock and turn
post birth vaginas from the Carl's bad caverns and back
(51:36):
into and I'm so sorry that I had to read
this and back back into the Penis's little grotto of pleasure.
Oh my fucking god, David Reuben. Everybody, Um, pretty bad,
pretty bad, bad and bad. So divorce rates started to
(52:02):
raise during the nineteen seventies, and in nineteen seventy six,
a Cosmopolitan article noted that popular myth blamed some of
this on loose vaginas. It argued that one way to
keep a couple from splitting up was to quote tighten
up the vagina in order to enhance the pleasure of intercourse.
This article also explicitly urged women to get surgery, saying
that while keegels could help, they were unlikely to go
(52:24):
far enough. You wouldn't hesitate to go to a doctor
for surgery and a faulty appendix. So why hesitate when
the happiness of your sexual life maybe at steak God,
it's pretty bad now. I want to note that an
awful lot of mother's got variations on this surgery on
their own recognisance and had wonderful experiences. Um, it's still
(52:47):
not an uncommon thing to do after childbirth today, and
I'm not condemning the practice, just pointing out the extremely
sexist way in which it was presented and in which
men tended to urge it, because that's important context for
why Dr Burt didn't really think he was doing anything
people would have issues with. By the late nineteen seventies,
he'd started circumcising his patients clitterests in order to expose
(53:08):
more of the organ and make it more easily stimulated
by sexual intercourse. From the love surgeon quote, doctors understood
the sexual nature of the clitteress and it's importance to
female sexual pleasure, and thus some blamed the clitter is
for a woman's failure to orgasm with her husband. The
removal of the clatoral hood was an attempt to fix
this concern. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, at a
(53:29):
time when the espousal of female orgasm during marital sex
was increasingly seen as an important component of a healthy marriage,
physicians performed female circumcision to help married women who wanted
or whose husbands wanted their wives to have orgasms during
vaginal sex. This is also very important. Without understanding this,
it might actually look like Dr burt By performing love
surgery was showing more care for the sex lives of
(53:52):
his patients than the men urging them to tighten up
to avoid divorce. His surgery was focused on giving women
more orgasms, but for a profile only selfish reason, so
their husbands would feel like they were good at sex
without needing to do full play or God forbid, perform
oral sex. See, all of the improvements Dr Burt made
weren't actually correcting deficiencies in the vagina. They were correcting
(54:15):
deficiencies with standard missionary sex. Many women, maybe even most women,
won't regularly organized orgasm from simple missionary sex alone. This
is why four play and oral sex and other fucking
positions are good things to try. Dr Burt thought thought
all of that was abnormal and thus bad. Right, the
whole goal is for them to come from this, right,
(54:36):
from the kind of sex that lazy men in the
sixties most want to give them. How's he going to
be a missionary style swinger though, that's what I don't
know that he was a swinger. I'm guessing right. Maybe
he was not. Um, Okay, those people should have exposed
him to some more positions, that's all. Yeah. He seems
like the kind of guy who was bad enough at
(54:56):
sex that he had to perform a legal surgery in
order to please somebody. You know. Um, it's not great. Um,
it's not great. I love I love when men are
like no, no, no, no, no, it's not me. It's
not me. It has to be there and stroke it
(55:17):
this way. Jesus Christ Man, there's not a whole family
of tools that have been invented to aid me in
this endeavor. Um, there's not a whole wide variety of
things like if if, if I can't please you in
the laziest way possible, it's time for serious, multi hour
long surgery. By the mid nineteen seventies, James Burtt felt
(55:39):
that he had finally perfected his surgery. He was ready
to share it with the world, So in nineteen seventy,
he and his wife Joan co authored Yeah, they wrote
a book. They wrote a book. Joan was fully drinking
the coid, but because she was sucking five years younger. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's not great. Um. The book was titled I
(56:02):
Apologize for This Too, Surgery of Love. Now. This was
not a medical manual. It was more of a pop
medical text that functioned primarily as an advertisement for his
love surgery. It is I feel comfortable saying one of
the most offensive documents ever published. In part two, we'll
talk about what it said, but that is going to
(56:24):
be the end of the episode for today. Courtney, how
are you, how are you feeling shook? One word? Just
this is this is a whole this is these sucks.
He sucks. And also do have to be so careful
who you entrust your pussy too? And I feel like
(56:45):
that still stands today forever. Yeah it does. You want
to plug any um? I have a podcast about sex. Uh.
We talk about pleasurable sex on my podcast Private Parts Unknown.
So you need a little pick me up after this,
(57:08):
go check it out. Check out, check that out, and
check out I don't know the history of surgical abuse
and problems with consent and medicine. Check that out on
our next episode actually podcast M M
Hmm, yeah, we is that it started? Have we have?
We have we opened the podcast yet? I mean yeah,
I if you did it, we're here. Robert Evans Champion
(00:22):
podcast opener, winner of the Nobel Prize for starting his
own podcast with a tonal grunting. Um. This is a
podcast about bad people, the worst in all of history.
And today we have a real, real doozy of a
son of a bitch to talk about. Uh, and to
(00:42):
talk about this this just exquisite asshole? Is Courtney Cozack. Courtney,
you are one of the hosts of Private Parts Unknown. Uh,
and you have a an essay collection coming out soon?
Is that correct? Uh? Well, I'm hoping to sell it.
It's been written, so that is the first step. Totally. Yeah.
(01:07):
It's about Hawking T shirts and the Girl's Gone Wild tour.
So spirit sounds that sounds like a life experience. Yeah, boy,
oh boy. I'm just gonna guess a lot of Keystone
Light involved in that tour. Good guess, I too, went
(01:29):
to college in the early coordinate. How do you feel
about obstetricians? Uh? Pretty good, pretty good, pretty good. Helpful people.
It can be helpful, people can't be can be helpful. People.
Keyword on this podcast, keyword? Uh yeah, how do you
(01:55):
feel about like like vaginas? It just as a just
as like a like a like in terms of the
way they're they're structured. I did previously tell Court that
I picked her for this episode specifically. I'm honored already.
Oh yeah, just wait, yeah, how do you feel about
(02:16):
vaginas like structurally, structurally? I don't have a problem with vaginas.
I feel like society maybe does, but society has some
issues with them. I think they're there, they seem they
seem fine. Um, but what if I were to tell
you the decades ago, some random dude with a medical
(02:36):
degree decided he'd figured out a better way to design vaginas,
And then what if I were to tell you that
he decided to test his theories by surgically altering the
vaginas of thousands of women without asking for their consent. No, No,
that's a bad one. Yeah, that is the story we're
going to tell today. It is the tale of Dr
(02:58):
James Burt, who sucked, and unless he's died by the
time this episode runs, still sucks. I think he's alive
in Florida is still which makes sense as to where
this guy would be. Um, he's really he hits the
he hits the defecta of of shitty American places because
he was he he did all of his crimes in
Ohio and then he fled to Florida when he got caught.
(03:20):
So it's a real perfect story. Oh my god, is
he still down in Florida redesigning vaginas? He is? No, no, no,
he is not allowed to do anything vaguely medical ever again.
Um but he Yeah, I mean that's broadly positive. He
didn't get the punishment that I think would have been fair. Um,
(03:42):
but he's he's, he's maybe still alive. It's kind of
hard to tell. He's he's kept a low profile since
getting caught. Um, well, getting caught is the wrong word,
because he wrote a book about what he was doing
and had no shame in it. And it's it's a
it's a tale, it's a tale. Are you ready to
hear the story of James doctor sorry, James Burton respectful? Yeah,
(04:05):
m D you know? Okay? So James Cared Burt Jr.
Was born on August twenty nine, nineteen twenty one, in Dayton, Ohio,
which is already one strike against him right. You know
he's coming coming out the bat committing a crime. Um,
the crime of being from Ohio. Uh now I I
(04:26):
yeah anyway. Um. James was one of two children born
to Benjamin and Stella. His dad worked in a manufacturing
company as a superintendent and his mom was a homemaker.
We have vanishingly little detail in his childhood, but we
can make some assumptions based on when and where he
grew up. He was likely raised in an environment of casual,
pervasive misogyny and male supremacy. Sex probably was not discussed
(04:49):
openly by his parents or in school. The first sex
ed in a major American city was implemented in Chicago
in nineteen thirteen, about eight years before James was born,
and program was so controversial that it was shuttered almost
immediately as a result of outcry from the Catholic Church.
They launched a massive protest campaign forced the Chicago Superintendent
(05:09):
of Schools, el A Young, to resign. Um. I was
gonna say, Midwest, I was like, that seems like a
very not happening. I mean it's simultaneously like yeah, it
makes sense that it would get shut down, but also
like good on you, Chica. They tried right, like they
tried before La or anywhere. You know, they gave it
a shot. Um didn't work, but you gotta give them.
(05:31):
You gotta give l a Young points for trying, at
least not the Catholic Church. Don't give the Catholic Church
points for a lot. I know we both thought of
things to say, but sometimes it's best not to make
those Catholic Church jokes throwing their dick around everywhere. That
did get them in a lot of trouble eventually, um,
(05:54):
but not enough. At the same time. Um, what we're
saying is sand O'Connor was right. So yeah, the federal
government would not take any kind of stance on the
matter of like whether or not sex said was a
good idea until nineteen eighteen. And what forced their hand
was the sheer devastating frequency of std S among American
soldiers during World War One. Like the government was like,
(06:17):
we don't we don't want any part in this, and
then our military readiness was compromised by fucking um had
to be dealt with just like, oh my god, we're
losing a lot of men from venereal disease. Dudes are Yeah,
they are leaping off of battleships and into the ocean
(06:38):
to quiet the crabs. We should probably say something, um.
The Chamberlain con Act was America's first federal law regarding
sex education, and it was passed to provide funding to
teach soldiers about syphilis and gonorrhea. This had the positive
impact of spurring large numbers of Americans to view sex
as a public health issue, which is broadly speaking, an
(07:01):
improvement from where things were. It also inspired school districts
around the nation to copy the military and hosting sex
ed programs in secondary schools. And this was a thoroughly
mixed bag, um, because they weren't teaching how to have
healthy sex. They weren't teaching about how sex can function
in a relationship. They weren't like it was just purely
trying to scare kids about v D, you know, Like
(07:23):
that was the whole all of sex. That was just
trying to frighten children about the fact that their their
genitals were going to rot off if they had sex.
Was everyone still on the abstinence only Like was that
happening in this era? I think that attitude was so
pervasive that they didn't have an abstinence only movement. It
was just assumed that, like, yeah, it's bad to funk
before marriage, and obviously all of the men are. But like,
(07:45):
I don't even think there was a movement because it
was so such a pervasive, like accepted thing. Yeah, Throughout
the nineteen twenties, when James Burt was a little kid,
sex ed grew increasingly common. When he was in school,
he probably watched a film called The Gift of Life
from the terrifyingly named American Social Hygiene Association, which is
(08:07):
that's a nightmare organization name right there. Uh. The movie
warned children about the quote solitary vice, which was masturbation,
and cautioned, masturbation may seriously hinder a boy's progress towards
vigorous manhood. It is a selfish, childish, stupid habit. Interesting
word choice with the vigorous love that vigorous. Also, don't
(08:32):
you think masturbation that would help prevent d D? I
don't you know? We talk about this and the Kellogg
episodes which you're airing the week we record this, But like,
there was a widespread belief that it would kill you,
that like, it would drive you insane and you would die.
Not totally wrong, but I mean it depends on how
(08:54):
you do it, I guess. But yeah, you'll also noticed
that they specifically say, like masturbation is the thing that
that boys do that is bad for them. This is
because even discussing even even to like even discussing female
sexuality in order to like discourage masturbation was kind of
too risque, you know, like acknowledging that it happened would
be a bridge too far for these people. Now, thanks
(09:15):
to an English teacher named Lucy Curtis, a number of
secondary school teachers in the twenties and thirties also attempted
to teach sex and through English literature, which allowed them
to avoid talking directly about biology. Instead, they would draw
comparisons to health lessons sex health lessons from passages and
classical works. Miss Curtis advised teachers quote, read to them
Lancelot's wild passionate quest for the Holy Grail, and they
(09:39):
will enter into the bitter experience of a soul which
has rendered itself incapable of receiving the full spiritual blessing
through the sea sin of yielding to impair desire. So,
like you've got a teacher about fucking have them read
King Arthur's tales. They'll understand that the Holy Grail is sex. Yeah,
that'll work. That's why the Crucible stopped generation from fucking
(10:01):
um um so. In the nineteen thirties, when James Burt
was a teenager and had his adolescence, sex ed grew
increasingly formal. The U s Department of Education started publishing
materials to train teachers during this period. Most of these
early classes focused entirely on warning children against masturbation and
scaring them with exaggerated stories of the dangers of STDs.
(10:25):
Female masturbation was seldom discussed. Even teaching about the negatives
of sex could be dangerous. In nineteen thirty three, when
Mexico's socialist government proposed compulsory sex ed for public schools,
Mexico City erupted into riots. Um So, there were riots
in a few countries about the concept of teaching sex said.
That wasn't just don't yeah people, people murdered each other
(10:48):
over this stuff. Good ship and of course Mexico City,
the Catholic Church was behind that one too. Yeah. Now,
the most influential progressive voice on sex said during James's
teen years would have been Margaret Sanger, who is a
very problematic figure on her own. Um was a big eugenicist,
but Sanger also made huge waves for arguing that sex
for the sake of pleasure was acceptable, and she did
(11:10):
this by urging people to use birth control. Right. She
had other motives for it, but the mere fact that
you're saying birth control is the option and not abstinence
means that you're acknowledging people can have sex and it's
it's okay, you know. Um. So, that was a big
deal for a lot of folks. It was the sign
of kind of a shifting in the winds um. Now, again,
there were major eugenicist implications for a lot of her beliefs,
but the positive angle of it is that she was
(11:31):
increasingly pushing forward a conversation that said it's okay if
married wo men and women have sex for fun, um,
you know, which is something. In nineteen thirty six, Sanger
helped push forward a Supreme Court case that overturned the
Comstock Law, which had ruled both birth control devices and
information about birth control obscene and thus illegal. Um So,
(11:52):
like talking about birth control was illegal because it was
it was pornography. Basically, Oh my god, that's so fucked up.
That's like the Instagram advertising policy of President present day. Yeah. Yeah,
the Comstock law was that for everything, and Sanger helps
overturn at the Supreme Court is like, oh, you know.
It turns out the First Amendment means you can talk
about condoms, which is fun um. I mean, it's a
(12:17):
good law to overturn because it sucked. By the time
James Burt was seventeen or eighteen, he would have been
able to finally receive sex set information that wasn't entirely
focused around syphilis or the evils of whacking it. James
graduated in nineteen thirty nine and went to Auburn University,
where he met his future wife, Lucretia Perry. He received
his undergraduate degree after a transfer from Alabama Polytechnic Institute
(12:40):
in nineteen forty two. He next attended medical school, and
he married Lucretia in the early nineteen forties before graduating
with his medical degree in nineteen forty five. I haven't
found good information on what precisely inspired James to get
into medicine, but based on his later actions, we can
safely assume that he found himself gravitating most to the
subject of rep deductive and sexual health. We know he
(13:02):
paid close attention to developing sex research of the day.
He would have followed the developing work of a sex
science pioneer named Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey was a former biologist
who had gone from studying wasps to studying human sex
after he started teaching a course on marriage for Indiana
University and realized that there was basically zero good research
documenting the sex lives of normal humans. And Kinsey is
(13:24):
a controversial figure. Two. There's some good criticisms of the guy. Um,
but his research is like I love that. That gets
you a little bit hard, Robert, You're like, yeah, there's
some there's some stuff about that guy too. There's there
we might talk about. There's some like weird weird ship
with Kinsey. Um, like genital torture stuff that. Why, yeah,
(13:46):
there's some weird ship with Kinsey. I'm not gonna I'm
not competent at the moment to talk about it. Um.
But like Kinsey, there's there's some very there's some very
founded critiques of him. You also, if you're studying like
sex health, you have to talk about Kinsey because he
was the first person pushing this research and I'm gonna
quote from an honors thesis by Lauren Lavin for the
University of South Dakota here in Night. Soon after beginning
(14:10):
the Institute for Sex Research, Kinsey published one of the
most influential pieces of literature in American sex history, Sexual
Behavior of the Human Male. Five years later, in nineteen
fifty three, he published Sexual Behavior of the Human Female.
The books contained controversial information for the time, as they
detailed topics such as homosexuality, premarital sex, and even beast reality.
(14:30):
Yet this illicit information intrigued the public, and the books
quickly rose to the top of the New York Times
bestseller list. The most notably controversial information presented was the
occurrence of homosexuality in America. At this point, homosexual acts
were legal, yet Kinsey's reports detailed many people having homosexual encounters.
He estimated that ten percent of the population was homosexual.
(14:51):
This statistic, now known to be higher than the actual
presentage of four point five percent, was shocking to American citizens.
The books also contained innovative new measures for sex research.
The Kinsey scale scale, still used in sex research today,
is a graduated scale from zero to six that measures
the level of homosexual orientation in an individual, with zero
being entirely heterosexual and six being entirely homosexual. The scale
(15:13):
was an important finding in research as it provided the
basis for homosexual research in a reliable way to measure
homosexuality going forward. Um, and yeah, it's one of those things. Also,
I don't want to say that like four point five
percent is the definite percentage of homosexuality, Like, I don't
think we had a per perfect data on that now,
and Kinsey's data wasn't perfect, but he was the first
(15:34):
person who was studying this and not condemning it. Was
just like, this is the thing that people do. Let's
try to understand it, you know, which is you get
a lot of credit for that in my book. And
again like nineteen fifty two or forty eight, nineteen forty eight, sorry,
like that's that's he's very ahead of his time. Yeah. Um.
(15:55):
And he he also like started carrying out it wasn't
just like the thing that kind of first brought in
prominence was his these kind of frank discussions of homosexuality,
but he started also discussing just like heterosexual sex life
in a way that hadn't been before, where it was
just kind of trying to understand what people do and
not judging it, and not not approaching it from any
kind of moral or religious territory. Just just this is
(16:17):
the thing people do. Let's try to understand how common
different things are. When Kinsey's study went viral, James Burt
was working for the US Air Force Medical Corps, which
he joined to avoid getting drafted. He did a residency
next at a hospital in Chicago, and eventually wound up
performing his residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New
York City. He finally received his medical license in June
(16:39):
of nineteen fifty one from the state of Ohio and
moved back home to Dayton in the first of all
would become a major series of poor decisions. This is
a very anti Ohio podcast. I think we're open about that.
Have you ever been to Ohio Courtney first mistake? Oh yeah, yeah,
(17:00):
the one who Yeah, what a great response. I know
some lovely people from Ohio, people from everywhere. Yeah, but
should have been a lake is all I'll say. Um,
we got we don't have enough lakes and we have
(17:21):
too much Ohio. That's That's all I'll say. On the
James Burt started his own practice, which was focused on
gynecology and obstetrics, and he started his practice the year
before Kinsey wrote his book on female sexuality. Um Bert
was not board certified and gynecology or or in obstetrics,
but that was not a barrier to practicing in those
(17:42):
at the time. I don't know if it is today,
but at the time you could do. As long as
you were a doctor, you could. You could. You could
practice gynecology and obstetrics without being board certified in them. Um.
So he starts his practice and less than a year
later he and his wife separate. Uh and he files
for divorce. This was a fairly rare thing at the time,
although not as where she'd think. The divorce rate UM
(18:02):
in the nineteen fifties was about two point three people
for every thousand Americans compared to about three point nine
for every thousand Americans today. UM we're actually we've actually
been seeing divorce rates decline over the last decade or so.
We're at like the same level we were in nineteen
sixty eight. I think the reason for the divorce was
he just like I saw a lot of pussies this year.
(18:24):
We're gonna talk about that. Yeah. The James Bert's story
involves a lot of divorce. So the couple had two
sons and a daughter who seemed to have gone with
their mother. I don't think he kept the kids. I
haven't heard any sort of evidence that makes me believe
the kids stayed with him. We know very little about
their situation because again, he's divorcing her. In the early fifties,
(18:47):
women don't have a lot of illegal You can't have
a bank account as a woman. Um. So, yeah, we
know that Bert was the one who filed for divorce.
He claimed his wife was unhappy with his financial situation.
But this could very well be a lie because he
was making a lot of money at this point. He's
a doctor, you know, and he's throughout his career a
very successful one. Um. This could also be a lie
(19:09):
because in nineteen fifty three, a few months after he
filed for divorce, when the divorce was still pending, James
Burt traveled to Mexico, got a divorce in Mexico without
his wife's involvement, and immediately worried married his second wife, Jerry,
in Indiana. Oh shit, the first bitch just got a
letter in the mail, Like, Okay, we're done Mexican divorce.
(19:32):
It's taken too long in America. We're Mexico divorced and
just will come up later. But you can't do that.
If you're married in the United States and you file
for divorce and then just decided to go to Mexico
to get it doesn't count. Like, that's not the way
the law works, you know, Like, so he's this is
technically bigamy. He's still married to his first wife when
he marries his second wife. Uh. Sorry, that is fascinating.
(19:56):
Can you not, like if I get is that still
true today? If I get married in the United States,
can I only get divorced in the United States? I
don't know if you can only get divorced. But if
you start divorce proceedings here and then move to another
country without the consent of your spouse to get a divorce,
it doesn't count, right, Yeah, it seems like you would
definitely need consent. Yeah, I'm sure you could, Like if
you were like, oh, well, I've moved, I've since moved
(20:18):
to this other country, I'm going to initiate divorce proceedings
here instead of initiing them. I'm sure that would work,
but it does not work the way he did it,
because he was clearly just fleeing New Mexico to get
a piece of paper that said that he could get
another Like what he was doing was very deliberately shady,
you know. Um. So, Gary and James moved into a modern,
one story house with a swimming pool in a wealthy
(20:40):
suburban neighborhood of Dayton, which further under cuts his claim
that his wife was unhappy with their finances, because again,
he was making a lot of money. I think he
was just trying to say, like, she's a gold digger.
That's what we're splitting up, you know. And for things
that come later, I'm certain he's lying about this first divorce. Yeah.
So the couple had one child, and for a few
(21:01):
years seems things seemed to be relatively normal for the
young doctor in his growing family, But appearances were in
this case deceiving. A major part of James's job as
an obstetrician involved repairing apsotomy's. At the time, the vast
majority of women who birth children went through it. A
psotomy which is a surgical cut made at the opening
of the vagina to ease childbirth. This is not as
(21:22):
common today, but back in those days, doctors believed it
made the birth safer, it was easier on the child's
head um, and so it was the norm in some
hospitals of births included an a psotomy. Now things are different,
it's not it's still done sometimes, but it was just
like almost every doctor which just do it basically every time.
It was just kind of the standard thing is this
makes it safer for the baby, so we're just gonna
(21:44):
We're just gonna cut her open um. Now, it was
not strictly necessary and most births, and again there's a
lot of people who will say like this was an ningia,
and it was, you know, it was. It was like
unnecessary surgery for a lot of people who received it. Um.
At the time. The reason this, doctors would just do
this because doctors would not ask the mother before doing
this um and this was not just an apsiotomy thing.
(22:07):
At the time, consent was not a priority in medicine
for anyone, men or women. Your doctor told you what
you were going to get, and you would do it. Um.
Doctors were probably the most trusted people in the country
at this point. It was a different era and it
was just sort of the norm for a doctor to say,
this is what needs to happen, and for the patient
to just kind of let it happen. Um, And they
(22:28):
wouldn't tell you a lot of the time they were
like with an epsiotomy, they probably wouldn't say, here's what
will happen unless you specifically ask, Like it's just well,
you're going to get having a child, I'm gonna knock
you out with drugs and do what's necessary to get
the kid out, you know. But that's how it worked
at the time. We're gonna talk a lot about the
history of medical consent in this episode, Um, but it
was not a thing in the fifties, right, Like just
(22:50):
not a standard thing. A Psiotomies were so normal that
physicians often did not discuss it at all prior to
the birth. Um. This was despite the fact that many
women hated the operation, which was extremely painful and permanently
altered many people's ability to enjoy enjoy vaginal sex after childbirth.
Like most obstetricians, Dr Bert performed a lot of episiotomies
(23:11):
and then as a matter of course, he would carry
out a repair of the epsiotomy. Afterwards. You would try
to fix it, and there was like a saying that,
like you would give him an extra stitch, you know,
to tighten things up a bit more pleasurable. Um. And
the more he did, this patriarchy just inserting themselves at
every stage. Yeah yeah, let me yeah. And I'm bringing
(23:38):
all this up because James Burt is uniquely shitty among
obstetricians in this period. But like they're all doing some
shady stuff, like some stuff that we it wasn't shady
by the standards of the day, but now now you
you look at medical science in that period, you're like, okay,
if that's a little messed up. Um. Yeah. So the
more he repaired to psotomys, the more he started to
(24:01):
have ideas. And I'm gonnaquote from a write up on
the website medical Bag to explain how what he's started
with what happens when men have ideas do not recommend quote.
The doctor believed that women lost all are part of
their ability to have an orgasm following childbirth as a
result of their vagina becoming too loose post delivery, claiming
(24:22):
that women's vaginas were quote large enough to drive a
truck through sideways after childbirth. That's doctor Bird's writing on
the map, it's gonna get worse. It's gonna get worse
as it normally does, as it as it does ac
of the time on this show. Drive a truck through
(24:43):
d truck through sideways that study. No, no, but you
know what a lot of trucks because global capitalism is
heavily reliant upon semis in order to transport goods and
services across great distances. I mean, you really called that
(25:06):
ship together. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,
thank you. Would that be the products and services that
support this podcast? Absolutely is the products and services that
support this podcast. All Right, we're back, We're back, and
we're just not going to think too much about that
(25:28):
add transition. So yeah, Dr Burke decided to fix all that.
Between nineteen fifty four and nineteen sixty six, Bert began
experimenting on unknowing unconscious patients with his own variations of
the standard apsiotomy repair after childbirth. Known for his heavy
hand with anesthesia, Bert had human campuses on which to
experiment after delivery. He's a knock them out doctor, and
(25:51):
he just starts fiddling around in there, you know, just
kind of experimenting. Were these the days of operating theaters
or was that over? Was he like, come on in, boys,
she's totally knocked out, and I'm gonna try a few things.
He's on his own, I think. I think sometimes he
has nurses, but he's on his own. Um. Now. The
(26:11):
exact nature of the surgeries he carried out varied over time.
At first, he mostly focused on making the vaginal opening
tighter to try and make vaginas smaller and tighter and
improve the sexual experience of the husbands of his patients mainly.
But in the late nineteen fifties, Dr Burt started reading
the then newly published work of William Masters in Virginia Johnson.
Their work was groundbreaking for many reasons, but among them
(26:33):
was the scientific data it provided on the fact that
the clitter has played a key role in causing orgasms.
Dr Burt synthesized this finding with his own findings over
years of experimental epsiotomy repairs. The women he'd given his
modified surgery to, he claimed, told him their sexual experience
had improved after childbirth. James Burt began to develop his
own theories about human vaginas and sexual responsiveness. From a
(26:56):
book titled The Love surgeon by Sarah Rodriguez quote. Central
of Birt's ideas about female sexuality and the surgery he
was developing were his ideas about the role of the
clitteress in female orgasm. Prior to very recently, Bert wrote,
the medical consensus had been that that a vaginal orgasm
was mature, and orgasm from manipulation of the clitterest was immature,
(27:16):
and thus the ultimate return of the vagina to normal
by repair after childbirthing was completed seemed adequate. But this,
he noted, did not consider the role of the clitteress.
So in nineteen sixty three, nearly a decade into his
casual experimenting with vaginas, James Burt's second wife filed for divorce.
Since she is the one who filed, we're able to
(27:37):
look at this divorce through the lens of someone besides
Dr Burt. Gary reported that her husband had quote struck
and physically abused her from time to time. She yeah.
She asked that her husband be kept away from her
and that their mutually held assets be protected from him.
This was not an amicable divorce. James fought back, claiming
that he ought not have to pay his wife alimony because,
(27:57):
and this is just an incredible line of argument, he
divorced from his first wife still had not been legally
completed in the United States, and thus his marriage to
Gary had never been technically legal. So that's his his
defense to paying alimonious. Well, I got married to her illegally.
I was breaking we got married, so why would I
pay alimony? He's like, however, the paperwork lines up to
(28:18):
best serve me. Do we know if he did any
fucked up stuff to her vagina? We do not. She
had kids with him, so probably, But but I I
don't know. I I have not run into confirmation that also,
maybe not, because it is it is kind of uncommon
at least now. I assume it was then too for
(28:38):
doctors to you know, deliver their own children, right, Like
that's considered like maybe not the best idea. Um, so
maybe it was someone else who did it and he
didn't have a chance to get in there. Um. I
don't know. I haven't seen any sort of confirmation or
denial of that. But it was definitely not not a
friendly divorce. Uh. The judge was not convinced by this
(29:00):
line of argument, which is honestly kind of surprising for
the time UM, but he awarded Gary Alimonian child support
and their divorce was finalized in nineteen sixty six. That
same year, Masters and Johnson published a book Human Sexual Response,
which dedicated an entire chapter to the Clitterests, which they
labeled quote a unique organ in the total of human
anatomy because it's only purpose was sexual. They described it
(29:23):
as an organ system which is totally limited in physiologic
function to initiating or elevating levels of sexual tension um.
Which was a big finding at the time, and it
kind of like it went against a lot of the
existing ideas about female sexuality, which and often just sort
of seen that that it was like it was a
variant of male sexuality, right, Like female sexuality is just
(29:44):
kind of like a lesser version of male sexuality. Women
don't enjoy sex as much, like it's not as big
a deal for them. They're not sexual beings in the
way that men are. And the Masters and Johnson's research
kind of blows that out of the water because like
women are the only like, how have an entire organ
that's just dedicated to sexual responsiveness. UM. Yet it's pretty
(30:06):
it's it's great so this is like an important sort
of in the in the history of like understanding human sexuality.
This idea that like, no, no human beings are are
all sexual beings as opposed to like it's just just
people with you know, penises. Yeah, so outside of that, um,
yeah it. This was like a bombshell in medical science
(30:26):
at the time, and Dr Bert was as influenced by
this finding as everyone else. Unfortunately, he also fell into
a failure of deduction that similarly plagued Dr William Masters.
Both men were physicians, and as a result, they both
saw sex and issues with sex and strictly physical and
conventionally medical terms. The social aspects of sexual dysfunction, like
(30:47):
an equal power dynamics were abused within a relationship were
boiled out. It was just purely a matter of like, oh,
these are how the mechanics of sex working, Like, well,
it's not. It's not just a matter of hydraulics, you know,
there's a lot that goes on and insects um. Female
sexual problems then were blamed on purely physical matters. And
I'm gonna quote again from the Love Surgeon here. According
(31:07):
to Bert, he had not informed any of these women.
The women he had done surgery on that he had
done anything other than a standard of pasiotomy repair. The
combination of realizing the importance of the clitterest and sex
for women, and that the modification he had made to
a psiotomy repair was improving the sex lives of his
patients led Bert to conclude that women's bodies were not
anatomically ideal for heterosexual sex, for female bodies were pathological
(31:30):
when it came to heterosexual intercourse. Based on the research
of Masters and Johnson and the information about the improved
sex lives he stated he heard from his patients, Bert
decided the clitterest was too far from the opening of
the vagina for women to receive adequate stipulation from the
penis during heterosexual missionary position sex. So he's got notes
(31:53):
going a little bit of feedback for God or nature.
Who you didn't made this, don't worry, I got it
figured out. Yeah, that's amazing, Hubrist, Like that's a whole,
a whole another level, like it's it's it's something else. Um.
(32:14):
So yeah, he started to modify the again significant surgical
procedure he'd already been performing on his patients without consent
for more than a decade. Up to that point, he'd
mostly focused on making the vagina tighter. Now he started
building up skin tissue in order to move the vaginal
opening closer to the clitteress. This procedure also changed the
angle of the vaginal opening. Bert later bragged that under
(32:36):
what he started calling his love surgery, quote, yeah, just god,
the loot surgery, Like you just need to learn how
to eat a pussy and then this will all just go. No, No,
that's that is not at all acceptable to Dr James Burt.
(32:58):
It is it is. I mean it's a matter of
like there's a lot that we'll talk about this more.
There's a lot that's wrapped up in it. Part of
it is just this mix of men wanting to feel
like their sexual dynamos and also men not wanting to
do anything but missionary sex um. And so the whole,
the whole idea that Bird has is like, well, I'll
just make it easier for women to orgasm from from
(33:20):
purely missionary sex, and that will make men. That will
improve relationships because men will be sexual powerhouses. Then like that,
it's it's this idea of like, well, I shouldn't have
to learn to pleasure my partner. I'll alter her physiology.
Oh my god, just five surgeries later, it'll be perfect.
It was usually just one nine hour surgery. If that
(33:40):
makes it better. Um, so, yeah, he moved the vagina
towards the clitters. He also pulled a significant amount of
the labia minora into the vagina because he believes to
make it pretty. No, he thought it would cause greater
stimulation during vaginal sex. I say that he's doing all
these things, and he says he's getting feedback. He's not
(34:02):
telling these women what he's doing. So he's not being like,
so I did all this stuff to your bits, how
does it feel? He was just like, how sex after childbirth?
And they'd be all like, oh, it's a lot better
than it was, you know when I was pregnant. He'd
be like, oh, that means the surgery works. He's not
asking them how about this? How about He's not like
getting he's not even getting not that it would be
okay if he was, but he's not actually getting scientific
data on this. He's just being like, they say sex
(34:23):
is better, it must work. Like so he doesn't know.
He's saying that, I know my surgery is improving sex.
He doesn't know if it's number one. He doesn't actually
know that it's improving sex. They might just be like, yeah,
now that I don't have you know, I'm no longer pregnant,
I'm enjoying sex more, which which could make sense he's
he's not. He doesn't know if like, oh, is moving
the opening or moving the clitter iss or is moving
(34:46):
the laby manora, Like what is it that's improving things?
If any of it's having an m back because he's
not actually doing science. He's just kind of fussing around
down there. Did he get any complaints? We don't know yet.
He does this is the sixties and calling that love surgery,
but isn't telling any of his patients telling any of
(35:07):
his patients at this point. What he's doing his research
is hey, you were pregnant and now you're not sex. Yeah,
and it's self reported, so like if he did get
some complaints, he's probably not going to tell other people
about exactly. And also like no offense, but I'm not
out here like talking to my oh B being like
(35:28):
yeah sex great, well yeah, especially and and that's like
not in the sixties. And if you I'm sure someone
because some women. These women do later go to other
doctors to be like, what has happened to me? And
I'm gonna guess that happened at this period. But a
lot of those doctors are like, well, it's just pregnancy,
you know, pregnancy changes stuff down there. Leave, like, get
(35:50):
out of my office, you know, like there's nothing I
can do for you. This is just what happens. Yeah,
it's horrible. It's gonna get worse. Um, of course. Yeah.
In nineteen sixty seven, James Burt finally succeeded in getting
a legal divorce from his first wife so he could
marry his third wife, Linda. By this point, he was
(36:11):
one of the most successful and thus wealthiest obstetricians in Ohio.
He and his new wife bought property in El Salvador
and the Dominican Republic. I'm sure nothing shady with either
of those transactions. They also bought a condo in Veil, Colorado,
so they wouldn't have to spend as much time in
the blighted hellscape that is Ohio with Dayton. Within Dayton,
the Bird's gained a reputation for being ostentatious and somewhat kinky.
(36:34):
Rich people. They held huge pool parties that were swim
suit optional. James Burt wore gold chains and long fur
coats in the winter. On at least one occasion, he
wore a pink Saparti Safari suit at one of the
parties he threw. Not that I found. He was not
particularly social with or popular among his fellow doctors. One
(36:56):
of his colleagues bluntly stated that James didn't enjoy golf
because he quote preferred indoor games. And you can translate
that however you want. Yeah, so he's like a kind
of probably kind of like a swinger dude in this period.
I'm guessing a lot of key parties at the Bird residence,
you know. In nineteen seventy three, james third marriage fell
(37:16):
apart when Linda left her husband for a ski instructor
she'd met in Veil. Yeah, cut maybe so not not really,
because it's unclear if she left him before or after
he started living with a twenty one year old I
have every little bit of hope. He was forty six
(37:37):
at the time. In short order, he duly married this
much younger woman whose name was Joan, and they stayed
together for a while. To his credit, he did wait
until after he and his third wife had a legal
divorce to get married to his fourth wife, Joan and
James bought a yacht on Lake Erie. She wore diamonds constantly.
The couple did not grow any more popular among James's colleagues.
(37:59):
Walter Reeling Jr. A Dayton physician who worked near Dr Birt,
later claimed that other doctors and their spouses avoided the
birds at social gatherings in the seventies. No one, he claims,
wanted to sit at a table with them. Sarah Rodriguez
writes quote Partly this was because of the manner in
which the birds behaved at such dinners. Both Walter Reeling
and his wife's Susie Reeling recollected how Joan Burt, decked
(38:20):
out in furst, would be physically all over her husband
during medical society dinners, talking a lot and bragging about
how many orgasms she enjoyed. James Burt apparently did not
seek out friendships with other physicians, and Walter Reeling could
not recall a physician who sought out Bert's friendship. So
a lot of p d A that everyone finds kind
of creepy, right, sex positive here, But if you're like
(38:42):
sitting at a dinner talking about how often you orgasm,
like a professional dinner with your colleagues. Kind of weird,
kind of weird, kind of weird. That not the time
for that kind of conversation. You know, um, there aren't.
He's an ol B. This is related to work. Yeah,
Like he's like Jordan Belfort and like the Wolf of
(39:02):
Wall Street, the wife with the diamonds on the yacht
Strong Jordan Belfort energy that literally like dog come on bro.
By the mid nineteen seventies, Dr Bert had added yet
another step to his love surgery. Some of his patients
had complained of pain during sex after his operation. Decided
the yeah, oh yeah. Now, obviously it couldn't be that
(39:29):
his operation was a bad idea. It had to be
that there was yet another problem with female anatomy that
needed to be corrected. He decided the most likely culprit
was the pubo coxy g S muscle, which is a
constrictor muscle at the rear wall of the vagina that
supports the uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, bowl bladder, and vagina.
This is the organ that you control when you do
(39:49):
Keegel's right. That's that's the muscle that he decides as
the problem. It is extremely important. It provides control not
over just vaginal feeling, but urination and defication. It's a
very important muscle to to have James cut it because
he decided it was getting hit during penetrative intercourse and
causing pain which made it harder for his patients to orgasm. Again,
none of them told him to do this, nor was
(40:10):
he carrying out medical research to determine if the pubo
coxygenus muscle was in fact interfering with sexual pleasure. He
just sort of assumed it was the culprit and in
his words, decided to quote cut the damn muscle. Oh
my god, pretty bad, Like yeah, come really easy, but
cannot stop wetting myself everywhere. Yeah, which might have an
(40:35):
impact on I don't know a lot of things. Um,
it wasn't like he's not totally severing it, but he's
severing it enough that it it does cause problems within
continents and stuff for a lot of his patients. We'll
talk about that later. So later on, once knowledge of
his love surgery was public, many of his patients would
come forward with complaints that love surgery had made them incontinent.
(40:57):
We don't know what percentage of them suffered the way,
because in the mid seventies, he still was not telling
anyone what he was doing. This was now twenty years
into his experiments with love surgery. Yeah, so we we
don't know what percentage of his patients suffered in continence
as a result of the surgery because in the mid
nineteen seventies he still wasn't telling anyone what he was doing.
And this is now twenty years into his experimenting with
(41:18):
love surgery. Bert of course, claims to have heard almost
universally positive reports from his patients about their post childbirth
sex lives. By nineteen seventy five, he claims to have
performed his love surgery on more than four thousand women.
Oh my god. Yeah, that's some good ship. Um, it's not.
(41:39):
It's terrible. Uh, it's some bad ship. Yeah, that's a lot.
That's a lot of people getting surgery. That my hometown.
Yeah yeah, that is a town worth of that's most
of Ohio, I have to assume. Um, but you know
it isn't most of Ohio. I don't even know where
(42:03):
go ahead. I mean, Ohio does advertise on our shop.
I was gonna say, we could get an Ohio AD
and like, you could be factually wrong. And for the record,
if if there's an Ohio AD, don't listen to it,
do not move to Ohio and or any circumstances. Yeah,
no idea, get the like Ohio. You know your audience.
(42:24):
This is a firmly anti Ohio pun. You're wasting your
money here Ohio. I mean, less money for Ohio is
a win for the whole world. But still, I just
don't want anyone to move there. Anyway, here's the man,
(42:45):
all right, we're back. So yeah, Dr James Bird is
a liar obviously, so we should take his claims that
he performed to search around more than four thousand women
with a grain of salt, because there's not documentation of
this um. But he was one of the most, if
not the most popular obstetricians in Dayton in his day,
so he it's a lot. He experimented, probably in the
(43:05):
low probably at least a couple thousand. Four thousand's probably
an exaggeration. He's a narcissist, but two thousand's not out
of the not out of the possibility. You know, he's
been at it for a decade. Right, Yeah, he's he's
done this a lot. Um. And he was one of
the most successful obstetricians in the whole in the Midwest
at this point. And the average salary of a doctor
(43:26):
in this period is like sixty two thousand a year,
which is really good money. And you know, the nineteen
sixties seventies, he's making like four grand years. He's extremely successful. Um.
His office was on the top floor of a stylish
downtown building. He had eight exam rooms in a waiting
room which included a couch shaped like a woman's mouth.
A little bit creevy. Um. It must be said that
(43:49):
he was very popular with his patients. Dr Burt was charming, friendly,
and said to have exceptional bedside manner. He listened to
his patients in an era in which male doctors were
generally expected to ignore the complaints and fears of their
female patients. One nurse later recalled that he quote communicated
with women when a lot of doctors wouldn't. There were
(44:09):
a lot of physicians that were patting women on the
head and saying, now, sweetie, don't worry, I'll take care
of it. Um. And doctor Burt was not that kind.
He would he would explain to you what he was
He wouldn't tell you what he was actually doing, but
he would explain to you what he was claiming he
was going to do. He would make you feel good
about planning. Over all, the power he would make you
feel listened to before performing a surgery on you that
(44:31):
he did. You did not ask for um and did
not know was even a thing that could be done um.
Patients would often claim his office was a refuge. Doctor
Burt would listen to their fears about childbirth and sexual dysfunction,
which was not a subject most doctors would even broach.
Sarah Rodriguez writes, Bert seemed to sympathize with his patients.
Berts sympathetic ear perhaps appealed to many women as he
(44:52):
listened to their worries and fears about their upcoming labors
or hysterectomies, and he seems to have believed that he
was acting sympathetically toward them by performing love surge re
in addition to delivering their child or performing a hysterectomy.
In his view, but surgically altered their bodies to alleviate
their concerns and problems, all of which regardless of what
the women may have been telling or not telling him.
He felt, we're essentially about sex. Yeah, that's that's good stuff.
(45:18):
So Dr Bart of course performed his love surgery after
nearly every childbirth, even on women who never complained to
him about having sexual problems. He performed his love surgery
after vaginal hysterectomys too, and regularly when performing abdominal uterus suspension.
So he was just he he stopped just doing this
after a psiotomies, after you get a surgery, and you
get a surgery, and you get a surgery, and like
(45:42):
and like again, it's not an obie surgeon, right, Like
I feel like that needs to be stated over and
over again. That is not his Like he's not trained, Yeah,
I mean he's trained. He's not board certified, Like you
get training, I get like, he's he's not trained, Yeah,
he's This is not the thing he should be doing
at the time. It is not illegal for him to
(46:03):
be doing this, um, which is a fawt a flaw
and I think the medical system, what the hell. Yeah,
as a general rule, if a patient with a vagina
was unconscious in front of him, he would he would
he would do his love surgery like that that was
kind of his like, definitely man. One thing that endeared
(46:27):
him to his patients were his promises, what he was.
He was extremely popular during this period, Sophie. All you
have to do is listen to women. But he's yeah,
like he's he's meeting the lowest bar, which is he's
not like patting them on the head and saying they're
they're girl. This is like, this is adult time. Like
(46:47):
that's what a lot of male doctors do, and he doesn't.
He sits there and he listens and he takes it
seriously and then he does whatever it is he wants.
He's not he's a monster. I I hear you let me,
let me, let me cut you off? Like what the
yeah he's I mean yes, But like it is important
to the story that he's popular during this period. That's
part of why he gets so many women to experiment
on us. He's extremely successful. You can look up his face.
(47:13):
There's pictures of him. Um yeah, you know he's he's
like it's important that he was so endearing to his
patients because that's why they trusted him, and that's why
so few of them initially like recognized that something was
awry Um. He was very popular in part for his
promises of pain free childbirth, which he accomplished by giving
(47:34):
expectant mothers huge doses of drugs that rendered them unconscious
throughout the whole process. This was not uncommon for the time,
and it gave birth the ability to more easily do
whatever he wanted with his patients, who were again canvasses
to him. By this point, he had come to believe
that all female bodies needed fixing because they were badly
designed for heterosexual missionary position sex, which he considered the
(47:58):
only normal sex act. He believed he was justified in
performing his surgery on every vagina he got his hands
on because he did not see his surgery as elective. Instead,
he was correcting a malformation. He thought of it in
the same way as like a doctor who corrects a
cleft palette. Right, that's what's going on in this guy's
head um. Sometimes he would even light to his patients
(48:20):
for a chance to get in there and root around.
From the New York Times quote, Miss Phillips was one
of the many women who went to Dr Burt for
a relatively minor physical problem. She was told she needed
a hysterect to me because her Phillipian tubes were rotting.
Now she suffers chronic infections, extreme difficulty urinating, and excruciating
pain if she attempts intercourse. The strain officially eventually destroyed
(48:40):
her marriage. She said seven hours of surgery completely changed
her life. I feel like a freak, Miss Phillips said,
I can't date, I can't ride horses, I can't urinate.
She characterized surgery is a form of sexual abuse and
said he stole parts of my body, which is fair. Uh, yeah,
that is not There's no Joe even so, there's not
(49:02):
a joke. It's a nightmare. It's a horrible, horrible man
who did horrible things um in the in the name
of medicine to women who trusted him implicitly. Um trust
no one. Women trust no one. Certainly not a guynecologist
who wears fur coats. That's that's that's the that that
auto warrants side. Gynecologists who worked in and around doctor
(49:27):
Burt knew about his surgery and recognized it because they
would often examine his former patients. Joy Martin, who was
a woman he performed his surgery on after delivering her
son in nineteen said doctors would say Dr Burt's done
surgery on you, hasn't he? Um? Yeah, because like they
would see like she would go in with she went
in with complaints and was like what if it feels
(49:49):
like something's wrong, And they'd be like, oh, yeah, you
had Dr Burt. He switched the holes. They knew what
he was doing. Um. It is import won't to note
that while James Burt went much further than any of
his colleagues, he was not alone in his obsession with
making female bodies better suited for heterosexual intercourse. Joseph Dilley,
(50:11):
an early twentieth century obstitution who helped popularize the epsiotomy,
recommended this surgery and its subsequent repair because it could
tighten the vagina and quote restore women to virginal conditions.
In the nineteen seventies, author and childbirth experts Suzanne Arms
would argue that the real reason for this procedure was
to increase the ability of husbands to enjoy sex after childbirth.
(50:33):
In other words, Dr Burton his colleagues frame their various
tightening surgeries is being done for women, but their real
purpose was to make things more enjoyable for men. By
the mid nineteen seventies, public discussion of loose post childbirth
vaginas had become common and in popular culture. In nineteen
seventy four and his best selling book How to Get
More out of Sex, psychiatrist David Reuben urged mothers to
(50:54):
get vaginal tightening surgery, calling it a simple procedure that
could make a woman to forty almost the same sexually
as a girl of eighteen. That's pretty problematic. Yeah, yeah,
like on the news, where where is that? Um? Yeah,
that is a book How to Get More out of
(51:15):
Sex by psychiatrist David Ruben. Like that's a mainstream pop
psychiatrist being like, get tightened up so you'll be like
a teenager. Men love teenagers. You know. It's pretty bad. Um.
He claimed surgery could turn back the clock and turn
post birth vaginas from the Carl's bad caverns and back
(51:36):
into and I'm so sorry that I had to read
this and back back into the Penis's little grotto of pleasure.
Oh my fucking god, David Reuben. Everybody, Um, pretty bad,
pretty bad, bad and bad. So divorce rates started to
(52:02):
raise during the nineteen seventies, and in nineteen seventy six,
a Cosmopolitan article noted that popular myth blamed some of
this on loose vaginas. It argued that one way to
keep a couple from splitting up was to quote tighten
up the vagina in order to enhance the pleasure of intercourse.
This article also explicitly urged women to get surgery, saying
that while keegels could help, they were unlikely to go
(52:24):
far enough. You wouldn't hesitate to go to a doctor
for surgery and a faulty appendix. So why hesitate when
the happiness of your sexual life maybe at steak God,
it's pretty bad now. I want to note that an
awful lot of mother's got variations on this surgery on
their own recognisance and had wonderful experiences. Um, it's still
(52:47):
not an uncommon thing to do after childbirth today, and
I'm not condemning the practice, just pointing out the extremely
sexist way in which it was presented and in which
men tended to urge it, because that's important context for
why Dr Burt didn't really think he was doing anything
people would have issues with. By the late nineteen seventies,
he'd started circumcising his patients clitterests in order to expose
(53:08):
more of the organ and make it more easily stimulated
by sexual intercourse. From the love surgeon quote, doctors understood
the sexual nature of the clitteress and it's importance to
female sexual pleasure, and thus some blamed the clitter is
for a woman's failure to orgasm with her husband. The
removal of the clatoral hood was an attempt to fix
this concern. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, at a
(53:29):
time when the espousal of female orgasm during marital sex
was increasingly seen as an important component of a healthy marriage,
physicians performed female circumcision to help married women who wanted
or whose husbands wanted their wives to have orgasms during
vaginal sex. This is also very important. Without understanding this,
it might actually look like Dr burt By performing love
surgery was showing more care for the sex lives of
(53:52):
his patients than the men urging them to tighten up
to avoid divorce. His surgery was focused on giving women
more orgasms, but for a profile only selfish reason, so
their husbands would feel like they were good at sex
without needing to do full play or God forbid, perform
oral sex. See, all of the improvements Dr Burt made
weren't actually correcting deficiencies in the vagina. They were correcting
(54:15):
deficiencies with standard missionary sex. Many women, maybe even most women,
won't regularly organized orgasm from simple missionary sex alone. This
is why four play and oral sex and other fucking
positions are good things to try. Dr Burt thought thought
all of that was abnormal and thus bad. Right, the
whole goal is for them to come from this, right,
(54:36):
from the kind of sex that lazy men in the
sixties most want to give them. How's he going to
be a missionary style swinger though, that's what I don't
know that he was a swinger. I'm guessing right. Maybe
he was not. Um, Okay, those people should have exposed
him to some more positions, that's all. Yeah. He seems
like the kind of guy who was bad enough at
(54:56):
sex that he had to perform a legal surgery in
order to please somebody. You know. Um, it's not great. Um,
it's not great. I love I love when men are
like no, no, no, no, no, it's not me. It's
not me. It has to be there and stroke it
(55:17):
this way. Jesus Christ Man, there's not a whole family
of tools that have been invented to aid me in
this endeavor. Um, there's not a whole wide variety of
things like if if, if I can't please you in
the laziest way possible, it's time for serious, multi hour
long surgery. By the mid nineteen seventies, James Burtt felt
(55:39):
that he had finally perfected his surgery. He was ready
to share it with the world, So in nineteen seventy,
he and his wife Joan co authored Yeah, they wrote
a book. They wrote a book. Joan was fully drinking
the coid, but because she was sucking five years younger. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's not great. Um. The book was titled I
(56:02):
Apologize for This Too, Surgery of Love. Now. This was
not a medical manual. It was more of a pop
medical text that functioned primarily as an advertisement for his
love surgery. It is I feel comfortable saying one of
the most offensive documents ever published. In part two, we'll
talk about what it said, but that is going to
(56:24):
be the end of the episode for today. Courtney, how
are you, how are you feeling shook? One word? Just
this is this is a whole this is these sucks.
He sucks. And also do have to be so careful
who you entrust your pussy too? And I feel like
(56:45):
that still stands today forever. Yeah it does. You want
to plug any um? I have a podcast about sex. Uh.
We talk about pleasurable sex on my podcast Private Parts Unknown.
So you need a little pick me up after this,
(57:08):
go check it out. Check out, check that out, and
check out I don't know the history of surgical abuse
and problems with consent and medicine. Check that out on
our next episode actually podcast M M
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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