Cajamarca and the End of the Inka Empire

The Battle of Cajamarca, also known as the Massacre of Cajamarca, ultimately led to the end of the Inka Empire. But it might have gone much differently had the Inka not just been through a massive epidemic and a civil war. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Before we get started, we have a couple
of live shows to announce. First April, we will be
at Universal Fan Con in Baltimore, Maryland. Our exact schedule
for that show is still in the works, but this
will include a live show, and our listeners can get
discounted tickets using the offer code History. And for all

(00:20):
the folks who have asked us to do a show
in the Boston area, of which there have been many,
we are finally on the way with the show in
Quincy at Adams National Historical Park on Sunday, July eight
at two pm. That one is an outdoor show. It
will happen rain or shine. And we also have more
appearances that will be announcing soon, as well as more

(00:41):
details about both of these shows, and we will put
that all at our website also at miss in history
dot com. Welcome to Steph you missed in History class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome them
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we

(01:04):
are going to talk about a pivotal moment in South
American history, which is the Battle of Caha Marca, which
is sometimes probably more accurately known as the massacre at
Caha Marca. This ultimately led to the end of the
Inca Empire, and, like a lot of the history of
Spanish conquest in the America's, a lot of times this

(01:24):
is boiled down to an image of very heavily armed
conquistadors sweeping through indigenous armies that were a lot larger
in number but not nearly as well armored and armed.
And while there is some truth to that image, this
whole thing might have gone much differently had the Inca
not just been through a massive epidemic and a civil war.

(01:45):
So today we're going to talk about the Inca Empire
before the arrival of Francisco Pizarro and how his conquest
of the Inca was about a whole lot more than
just the one battle the way that it's often described.
Before the growth of the Inca Empire, South America was
already home to a huge range of indigenous peoples and
cultures by the twelve hundreds, One of these was the

(02:08):
Kingdom of Cuzco, ruled by a leader known as the
Sapa Inca, which in the Quechua language roughly means the
only Inca. This title was hereditary, and the Sapa Inca
was considered to be a divine being. In fourteen thirty eight,
a man named Pacha Kuti became the Sapa Inca, and
he started an aggressive political and military expansion of what

(02:31):
had been the Kingdom of Cuzco. Soon, instead of being
one of many individual kingdoms, the city of Cuzco was
the capital of a much greater empire. Within a hundred years.
That empire stretched about three thousand miles or forty hundred
kilometers down the western coast of South America. This long

(02:51):
but narrow stretch of territory was huge. It was home
to about ten million people living in eighty different provinces,
which were arranged into or quarters. These were connected by
a network of twenty thousand miles or forty kilometers of roads,
which converged on the capital of Cuzco. Relay runners carried

(03:11):
messages along these roads, covering hundreds of miles a day.
The empire was also diverse. The land itself included parts
of the Andes Mountains, valleys, plains, tropical jungles, dense forests,
and a desert coast. Depending on where they were living,
the people might work mining gems and precious minerals, raising

(03:31):
llamas and alpacas, growing crops, making ceramics or textiles, all
kinds of other things. Many of these skills, crafts, and
forms of art had come from the various indigenous peoples
that were conquered or otherwise absorbed by the Inca Empire,
rather than something that the Inca brought with them from Cuzco.
The empire's people were also diverse. Many of the people

(03:55):
living in the empire weren't ethnically Inca, but sent their
leaders to be educated in Cusco. Although Quechua was the
primary language, at least two hundred other languages were spoken
as well. The Inca religion had its own pantheon and practices,
which included the use of oracles, ancestor worship, the care

(04:15):
of the mummies of previous Inca leaders, and, on particularly
disastrous occasions like massive earthquakes or the death of an emperor,
the sacrifice of children. But at the same time, when
other indigenous peoples were absorbed into the Inca Empire by
whatever means, they usually added Inca beliefs and practices into

(04:35):
their own existing religions, rather than abandoning their previous practices
and replacing them. In spite of its huge size and
diverse geography and population, the Inca Empire was efficient, orderly,
and very wealthy. Like the ancient Romans, the Inca were
highly effective administrators. The roads and the structures and cities

(04:56):
they connected were extensively planned to take advantage of every rething,
from the shape of the land to water resources to
religious symbolism. They included incredible feats of engineering like the
city of Machu Picchu. Lying along that huge network of
roads were strategically placed storehouses to keep the runners and
the military supplied. Scrupulous records were kept using collections of

(05:20):
knotted multicolored chords called keepu and making and using keep
who was a specialized job that involved years of training.
The empire's wealth was also tightly connected to its labor,
because for the most part, that was what the empire taxed.
Rather than taxing money or goods, the Inca Empire had
no centralized currency or concept of a market. Instead, the

(05:44):
state used a labor tax called mita. The state would
essentially requisition labor to do something like build a building
and irrigation system or a set of terraces to make
planting possible, and mountainous terrain the province would provide that labor,
rotating through its populations. The same people weren't disproportionately the
ones serving out the tax, and this wasn't just about

(06:07):
manual labor. The meta also applied to agricultural labor and
to specialist labor like creating elaborate tapestries. Sometimes you will
see this system described as forced labor, and while it
is true that this wasn't voluntary, it was generally viewed
among the Inca as part of a reciprocal relationship. People
were working for the empire a certain number of days

(06:29):
per year, and in exchange, they were getting whatever tools, clothing, food,
and resources they needed to do the work. When it
came to things like irrigation systems and new homes, they
were also getting the benefit of the thing that they
were building. And underlying all of it was the idea
that the empire would take care of the people in
the event of something like a war or a famine.

(06:52):
There were definitely cases where the tax was used mostly
or exclusively to the benefit of a wealthy leader who
wanted something, but it is a lot more nuanced than
simply calling it forced labor, and since folks are also
likely to ask. While the Inca did make a practice
of using prisoners of war as servants and other labor,
that practice did not seem to extend to the idea

(07:14):
that they were actual property. So you could probably describe
the prisoners of war as slaves, but it wasn't chattel
slavery as we saw in like other parts of the
America's after this point, and this part of the America's
really after this point. Ruling over and leading this empire

(07:35):
was a layered network of nobility at the top where
the emperor and his immediate family, and this top layer
could be quite large, since Inca emperors often had multiple
wives and concubines, with children by most or all of
them to increase their chances of having a suitable air.
The next wrung down were descendants of previous Inca kings

(07:55):
who were not as closely related to the current emperor,
and then came the more distant relatives, and the last
were people who weren't related to the current or past
emperors but were important in some other way, like people
from families that were particularly wealthy or had a lot
of political pull for whatever reason. Keeping such a massive,

(08:17):
diverse empire going meant that the emperor typically spent a
lot of time traveling from one part of the empire
to another. He basically had to make very charismatic personal
appearances to reinforce the idea that he was a hereditary
ruler with a divine mandate. The emperor's relatives and other
trusted leaders also acted as surrogates and the empire's various

(08:38):
provinces when the emperor could not personally be there. It
also required a huge military. Because much of the empire's
expansion had happened through military conquest, there were ongoing uprisings
from those previously conquered peoples. All able men had military
training in the Sapa Inca had a huge army at

(08:58):
his command, which could increased it any time. Through the
meta texts. In the fifteenth century, the Inca had what
was almost certainly the largest military in the America's This massive, complex,
diverse empire reached the peak of its size and power
less than a hundred years after Pachacuti became Sapa Inca

(09:20):
of what was back then just the Kingdom of Cuzco.
But in the fifteen twenties, two events happened in quick
succession that set the stage for the empire's fall. The
first was a huge epidemic which struck between fifteen twenty
five and fifteen It may have been smallpox, the momps,
or both. Whatever it was, it had been introduced to

(09:41):
the America's by the Europeans, and the indigenous population had
no natural immunity. People who became ill also experienced a
range of complications, including encephalitis, hemorrhagic diarrhea, and blindness. Emperor
Juana Kapak was campaigning near Quito and it's now Ecuador
when this epidemic struck. He died in fifty eight, as

(10:05):
did both of the governors that he had left behind
in the capital of Cuzco. Multiple important leaders in both
cities died as well. Juenna Capac named one of his
sons as his successor from his deathbed, but that son
died of the disease before he could even be informed,
and then Juenna Capac died before he could be informed

(10:26):
about his son's death. This led to a civil war,
which we'll talk about after a sponsor break. When both
Juenna Capac and his successor died in this epidemic that
interrupted the Inca Empire's line of succession, and then What

(10:46):
followed was a huge rivalry and outright civil war between
two of the emperor's surviving sons. His nineteen year old son, Juascar,
was back in Cuzco, where he had been spending his
time among the capital's Politically, he wasn't particularly experienced as
a leader, and he had his share of both supporters
and detractors thanks to all this political hob nobbing that

(11:09):
he had been doing. When the line of succession was interrupted,
he was chosen as his father's successor, largely thanks to
his mother's sizeable political pull in Cusco. Wascar's half brother, Ottawapa,
had been away with his father on military campaigns near Quito.
Ottawappa was about five years older than Huascar, and he

(11:30):
had extensive connections within his father's army, including to four
powerful generals who had been active parts of the military
campaigns Juena Capac had been pursuing. At first, it seemed
like Atawappa accepted his half brother's ascension to the throne.
He sent gifts to Wascar and Cuzco, but he didn't
go there himself. When a caravan bearing their father's body

(11:54):
arrived back in the capital, Wascar was outraged that Atawappa
was not with them. Huascar had some of his father's
surviving advisors who had made the journey killed, including torturing
some of them under the guise of finding out whether
Atahwappa was plotting against him. It wasn't unheard of at
all for newly installed emperors to have other possible heirs

(12:17):
killed to protect their own claim to the throne, but
Huascar's treatment of other nobility was alarming. There's some discrepancy
in the accounts here. Either Atawappa declared himself emperor from
Quito after learning about what his brother was doing, or
their father's former generals went to Otawapa after hearing what

(12:38):
Washcar was doing and told him that they would support
his claim to be emperor should he choose to make
that claim. Either way, what followed was a devastating civil
war that went on for nearly four years, causing extreme
disruption and loss of life, and an empire that was
barely out of a massive epidemic. Washcar mounted an army

(12:59):
and Attemp did to bring his brother back to Cuzco
by force, but Wascar's army lost every engagement it had
with Otawapa's. A lot of this was thanks to the
military tactics of the generals in charge, one of them, Chilcuchima,
had never been defeated. Eventually, Ottawallpa's army defeated Washcars and

(13:20):
Wascar was captured and confined to a cage in Ottawappa's
force embarked on the same sort of purge that Huascar
had tried before, including killing Washcar's wives, concubines, and children
in a number of gruesome ways. At this point, Ottawappa
was considered to be the emperor, but before he could
even get back to the capital of Cuzco, he encountered

(13:43):
Francisco Pizzaro. This happened in Caha Marco, which is a
city in the mountains northwest of Cusco, and that is
where Otawappa and his army were bivoaced at the end
of the civil war. We need to back up for
just a minute to talk about how Pizarro came to
be there. He just sprouted in the forest. Uh no,

(14:04):
uh so. Pizarro was born in Spain in fourteen seventy six,
and he traveled to the Americas in fifteen ten. While
serving as mayor of Panama City, he heard stories of
vast wealth to be found in South America. On November fourteenth,
four he embarked on the first of several small exploration
voyages from Panama in fifty seven. On one of these voyages,

(14:28):
his navigator Bartolomy Ruiz, spotted a large ocean vessel crewed
by about twenty indigenous people. They overtook that vessel, killed
most of the people aboard, and found that it was
filled with the exact sort of treasure that they heard
they might find in South America. This included a large
number of personal adornments made of silver and gold, precious gems, finally,

(14:50):
embroidered textiles, carved figurines, ornate eating and drinking vessels, and armor.
Having made this discovery, Pizarro wrote back to Spain to
get authorization to go on a larger expedition. He got
the authorization he wanted from the crown. He was to
conquer the area and make himself the governor. On December fifteen,

(15:12):
thirty he left Panama with a small force, intending to
do just that. They made their way slowly down the
western coast of South America, which at that point Spain
had not really explored. As they did so, they slowly
got information from the people they encountered about the epidemic
and the ongoing civil war. Pizarro and his translators gradually

(15:35):
pieced together that the Inca Emperor was the sole authority
over the empire, that people viewed him as a divine ruler,
and that they saw his surrogates in their local areas
as an extension of his own authority, not as an
authority in their own right. So Pizarro decided to do
the same thing that her non Cortes had done in
the conquest of the Aztec Empire and what's now Mexico.

(15:59):
Starting in fifteen nineteen, Cortes had captured the Aztec emperor,
markte Zuma the Second. According to Aztec accounts, Cortes and
his men killed the emperor, but according to Spanish accounts,
he died after being stoned and shot with arrows while
trying to speak to his own subjects. Pizarro reasoned that
if the Inca emperor was really the only source of

(16:22):
authority in the empire, then capturing him would allow him
to take it over, and he could replicate in South
America what Cortez had done in Mesoamerica. Pizarro and his
force of one d sixty eight, men took a treacherous
mountain road from the coast inland to Caha Marca. Under
normal circumstances, he would have encountered opposition at several points

(16:44):
along the road, but because of that epidemic and the
civil war, he faced no resistance. Once he and his
men got to the city, it was nearly empty, although
Ottawapa had an army of between forty thousand and eighty
thousand men nearby. There in the city, Pizarro and his
men laid a trap. They hid the men and their horses,
and they also had a couple of cannons in a

(17:06):
group of buildings around a square, and then he invited
Ottawapa to meet with him. The night before the meeting,
Otta Walpa and the people closest to him had held
a ceremonial dinner celebrating their victory over his half brother.
It was the sort of celebration that went late into
the night and involved heavy consumption of intoxicating beverages. But

(17:29):
Ottawapa doesn't seem to have been worried about whether he
or his attendants would be putting themselves in jeopardy if
they arrived to face Pizarro. Still recovering from the revelries
of the night before. After all, he was a divine emperor.
He expected Pizarro to see and acknowledge that fact, and
that was how he entered Caha Marca, carried on a

(17:50):
litter and accompanied by about seven thousand retainers, not at
the head of an armed fighting force. Once Ottawapa got
into Caha Marca on November seteenth, fifteen thirty two, a
Dominican friar named Vincente de Valverde approached him with an interpreter.
The friar talked to him about the superiority of the

(18:10):
Christian deity and delivered a document called the Requirement. This
is a document first drafted early in the sixteenth century
which representatives of Spain were supposed to read to native people's,
which reportedly gave Spain the moral, religious, and legal rights
to conquest. Spain's conquest of the America's was motivated by

(18:32):
both religion and search for territory and treasure, and the
Requirement neatly tied both of those ideas together. It essentially
explained that God had given the Americas to Spain through St.
Peter and the pontiffs that followed it. Allows the person
hearing it quote the time that shall be necessary to
understand and deliberate upon it, before going on to say quote.

(18:54):
But if you do not do this, and maliciously make
delay in it, I certify to you that, with the
help of go Odd, we shall powerfully enter into your country,
and shall make war against you in all ways and
manners that we can, and shall subject you to the
yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses.
We shall take you and your wives and your children,

(19:15):
and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall
sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command.
And we shall take away your goods, and shall do
you all the mischief and damage that we can, as
two vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive
their Lord, and resist and contradict him. And we protest
that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this

(19:38):
are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses or ours,
nor of these cavaliers who come with us. This is
like an incredibly messed up version of the Miranda Rights
for Spanish Conquest of the Americans. Like, yeah, oh, that's
a handy piece of paper and horrible both handy and horrible,

(19:59):
and though there was an an interpreter present in Caha Marca,
the requirement was also delivered, often in Spanish to people
who didn't speak Spanish, so they would get this sort
of lecture about uh, convert, submit or die and be
enslaved in a language that they did not understand, which
generally people found completely baffling. Uh. And if you do

(20:22):
not understand, it is your flight. But that's the part
that really is it's all your fault that we came
and did this to you. Yeah. And so eventually, I
mean this is this document was around for a while.
It was either drafted in fifteen ten or fifteen thirteen.
I found two different dates, both from reputable sources. It

(20:43):
was eventually abolished in fifteen fifty six. But that that
was that was what that was what they were basically
read their rights as conquered or vanquished people's. They're rights
which we have to put in scare quotes because aren't
rites at all. During all of this, the Friar had

(21:04):
a Bible, and there are multiple conflicting accounts of what
happened to it. The one thing they agree on is
that that Bible wound up on the ground. Francisco Dejrez,
who was one of Pizarro's personal secretaries, wrote that Ottawapa
asked to see the Bible and wasn't able to open
it after the friar handed it to him closed. He

(21:25):
said that Ottawapa finally got it opened quote and not
marveling at the letters or the paper like other Indians,
he threw it five or six paces from him, and
to the words the friar had said via the interpreter,
he responded with great arrogance. This idea that he was
supposed to marvel at the letters on the paper is
in European as in European accounts of uh showing writing

(21:50):
to indigenous people's like all over the world, and it
it really is a lot more about European perceptions of
how indigenous people we're supposed to behave like that the
idea of writing was this marvel um when meanwhile the
INCA had a system of keeping up with information that
was so complicated and we still don't know how it,

(22:12):
we still don't know how to read it. Anyway. That was,
of course, not the only account of what happened that day.
T two QC. Upon Qui, who was an Inca emperor
following the events that we're talking about here, said that
the day before, a group of Inca had offered some
of the Spanish a drink in a golden vessel, but
the Spanish had poured it out on the ground. His

(22:32):
account said that Ottawapa threw the Bible on the ground
to mirror the disrespect that the Inca had encountered from
the Spanish the day before. And there are numerous other
accounts of this as well. They all have their own
various nuances, but all of them end up with somebody
either throwing or dropping the Bible, and however it took place.

(22:53):
When that happened, Pizarro's men burst out of the buildings
where they had been hiding. They massacred nearly all of
Ottawallpa's retinue, most or all of whom were unarmed, and
they took Ottawallpa prisoner. Although Pizarro had been doing this
in the hope of just sort of now having the
Inca Empire, it did not have the immediate effect of

(23:14):
destroying the empire or putting it into the hands of Spain.
And we will talk more about that after another quick
sponsor break. When Bizaro's force of a hundred and sixty
eight men killed most of Ottawallpa's retinue. They did it
with almost no losses among their own force. There wasn't

(23:36):
really even any fighting, which is why a lot of
people call this the massacre at Caha Marca rather than
a battle. Ottawapa's capture led to kind of an odd stalemate.
The Spanish allowed him to continue acting as emperor while
he was captured, and the Inca continued to behave toward
him as they had before. Ottawallapa promised the Spanish that

(24:00):
he would provide them with vast amounts of silver, gold,
and other treasure if they would just allow him the
time to gather it. It's not clear whether he just
intended this as gifts as a show of goodwill. A
lot of times it's written about as him ransoming himself regardless, though,
with this offer of vast amounts of silver, gold, and
other treasure, the Spanish thought it would be in their

(24:22):
best interests to keep Ottawappa alive and to treat him
pretty well. Like he promised, he was now a source
of treasure. Meanwhile, Ottawappa ordered Wascar and any of his
remaining supporters to be killed to stop them from making
their own similar deal with Spain. After several months, during

(24:42):
which he got reinforcements for his fighting force, Pizarro declared
that Ottawaupa's ransom had been paid and ordered everything that
had been brought for it to be melted down. This
was a massive destruction of Inca artwork and artifacts, but
it didn't buy Otawappa's freedom. Since the ransom had been paid,
there was no longer any particular reason to treat him

(25:04):
all that well. At this point, he was just a prisoner.
The strife among Juenna Capac's sons also was not over.
Two young men arrived in Caha Marca and said that
they were the sons of Juenna Capac, and one of them,
to Pahuapa, said that he was Huascar's legitimate air Pizarro

(25:25):
kept this revelation secret from Ottawallapa, and he kept the
two men hidden in Caha Marca. What followed was an
attempt by Washcar's supporters to try to use Pizarro and
his fighting force to their own ends. One of Lascar's
former supporters went to Pizarro and claimed that Ottawallapa was
plotting against him. Including having a military force approaching Caha Marca.

(25:49):
Without really looking into that claim, Pizarro leveled that accusation
against Ottawallpa. He ordered a trial with the INCA leaders
who were in Caha Marca as witnesses. At Wappa denied
that there was any plot going on, and only afterward
did Pizarro send anybody to investigate whether there really was
a military force on the way, including sending two indigenous

(26:11):
men as scouts. Hernando de Soto was one of Pizarro's captains,
and he had become friendly with Ottawallpa during his captivity.
He offered to look into these reports for himself. On
July fift thirty three, the two men who had been
deployed as scouts came back and said that Ottawallpa's army
was three leagues away. Pizarro's response to this was to

(26:34):
convene a military tribunal to try Ottawallpa and execute him.
On that very same day, De Soto got back to
Cajamarca after all this was over and said that there
was no army. So this has apparently been a ploy
by Huascar's supporters to get rid of out Ottawallpa and
put their candidate on the throne, and with that to

(26:57):
Pahualpa was presented as Shuascar six sessor and the legitimate
heir to the throne. He was crowned and swore allegiance
to Spain. Pizarro clearly meant to use him as a
puppet emperor, but Tu Pahualpa's reign did not last for
very long. He Pizarro and retinue were en route from

(27:17):
Caha Marca to Cuzco when Tupahualpa died. There were rumors
among the Spanish that General chow Kuchima, believed to be
still loyal to Otawappa, had poisoned him. After to Pahualpa's death,
his supporters and chow Kuchima each put forth a different
man as who should be next in line for the throne,

(27:40):
and with the subject of who should be emperor still
in question, the procession faced military engagements at least four
times en route. At Cuzco, generals from Ottawappa's previous army
were trying to stop Pizarro from getting to Cuzco, while
Pizarro's army was trying to stop the attacking army before
it could get to Cuzco and possibly combined with the

(28:01):
units that were stationed there. Before they got to Cuzco,
to Pahualpa's brother, manco Inca presented himself as the legitimate
heir to the throne, and as with t Pahualpa, Pizarro
hoped to use him as a puppet, and at first
manco Inca did swear loyalty to Spain and he ordered
the execution of Calcuchima. Calcuchima was executed by burning at

(28:24):
the next town that they reached on the way to Cuzco.
An Inca force made a final attempt to block Pizarro
from entering Cuzco, but it ultimately withdrew. This left the
Spanish and manco Inca in control of the city and
the rest of the empire, but eventually he turned against Spain,
leading a series of rebellions for about a decade and

(28:47):
establishing a separate capital in Vilca Bamba before being killed.
Spain continued to try to install puppet emperors over the
Inca Empire over the next few decades, with varying a
ounce of success. The man who's considered to be the
last Inca emperor was tupac Amaru. He was executed in
Cusco on September seventy two, Roughly two hundred years later,

(29:13):
Jose Gabrielle Kondorconki would take the name tupac Amaru the
Second while leading another rebellion against Spain. So what's often
described as Pizarro and his force lay waste to the
Inca Empire was really more like the Inca Empire was
still reeling from an epidemic and a civil war, and
multiple political factions tried and failed to use Spain against

(29:36):
one another, and the Spanish presence in what's now Peru
had its own internal factions to deal with. Pizarro's faction
eventually prevailed, in part because he had a former partner,
Diego day Almagro. Killed Diego de Almagro's son, then killed
Pizarro on July fifty one, eight years to the day

(29:57):
after Ottawapa's execution. In spite of internal divisions, Spanish colonization
of the western coast of South America continued. After Pizarro's death,
Spain adopted the labor tax idea of Mita, but moved
it a lot closer to the idea of straight up
forced labor. We talk a lot more about this progression

(30:18):
in our previous episode about Tupaca Maru the Second, and
all of this together caused the indigenous population of this
part of South America to plummet. It didn't recover to
its fifteenth century levels for roughly five hundred years. A
lot of the keepho that we discussed earlier were destroyed before, during,
and after this time, and the ability to read them

(30:40):
has been lost. There are still people's in the Andes
who have keepos that are important to their own community
or history, and they know in a general sense what
the keep who says, but not how to actually read it.
Although the Inca Empire fell in the sixteenth century, there
are still people descended from Inca leaders living in this

(31:00):
part of South America today. Quechua and related languages are
still spoken as well, and the word Quechua is now
used to describe indigenous people's in Peru and neighboring countries.
If you want to hear about uh sort of more
about the time between then and now, that prior episode

(31:21):
in the archive about the Tupacamari Rebellion and tupac Amari
the Second is a good place to start. Do you
have some listener mail that hopefully involves less factioned in
fighting and torture and death hit. I mean, did we

(31:43):
talk about death and and terrible things so often on
this show? Uh? This is from Brittany. I don't think
I've read this already before. Ad I'm sorry, Brittany says, Hi,
Tracy and Holly writing in today to both the key
for all the wonderful podcast and to say just how
much the nine and one thousand episodes meant to me.

(32:06):
I'm a pediatric nurse who also happens to be pediatric
oncology certified. Hearing Sadiko Sasaki's story was thus deeply affecting,
It struck me how little has changed and the treatment
of pediatric leukemia in the last sixty three years. For example,
the drug mentioned in the episode, metatrec state, is still
the main chemotherapy used for our pediatric patients. There have

(32:29):
been three drugs ever approved specifically for the treatment of
pediatric cancer, and metatrec state was not one of them.
The first two were approved in the nineteen eighties and
the last one in Fortunately, we now have other therapies
like radiation surgery and stem sale transplants, to name a few,
that were not available to Sadiko Sasaki and others of

(32:51):
her generation. That greatly increased the survival rate, but we
still have a very long way to go anyway. Sorry
for the downer of an email A real as it
is a weird way of expressing my gratitude for the podcast,
but it seemed a good way of showing you how
you always make me think. Even when you discuss things
that I didn't miss in history class, you always have
a unique way of making me think about it. Thank

(33:11):
you for all that you do, Brittany. Thank you for
this email. Brittany, I actually didn't find it to be
a downer, um, largely because, like we said in that episode,
there was really so little that could be done at
all for set Eko Sasaki when she was diagnosed with leukemia,
and the survival rates today have come such a long

(33:32):
long way. I realized for a lot of people it
has lifelong effects on their health, even after having been
successfully treated. UM. But the fact that today that's it's
not an immediate Okay, We're gonna have to hospitalize you
for the next couple of years and that will be
the end. Like that, to me is a huge step forward.
If you would like to write to us about this

(33:53):
or any other podcast. We are at History podcast at
how stuff works dot com. We are also at Missed
in History all over social media. You you will find
us at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and pinterest. Uh. If you
come to our website, which is Missed in History dot com,
you will find the show notes for all the episodes
that Holly and I have ever worked on in a
searchable archive of all the episodes we have ever done.

(34:16):
And you can find our podcast and subscribe to it
on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and wherever else do you
find podcasts. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff Works dot com