December 17, 2014 • 32 mins
In 1925, a diphtheria outbreak in Nome, Alaska put a community in grave danger -- without the proper supplies to fight the disease. A daring sled-dog relay was mounted to deliver needed medicine to small community and their only doctor. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from housework
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcasts. I'm Tracy
and I'm Holly Frying. So today's episode is a listener
request from a whole lot of people, but I'm pretty
sure the first person to ask for it since you
(00:23):
and I came on the show, Holly was Emily and
a dog named Balto became famous for leading a team
of sled dogs in Nome, Alaska, in delivering desperately needed
life saving medicine to the city, which at that point
was completely ice bound. There's a statue of this dog
(00:44):
in New York City Central Park and another one in Anchorage,
near the starting line for the Iditarod. He was the
subject of a highly fictionalized animated film that came out
in and the dog himself was mounted by a taxi
or missed after his death and is now an exhibit
at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. But Balto was
(01:05):
just one of the lead dogs that relayed serum across
Alaska to no All. In all, there were more than
twenty mushers with more than twenty teams of dogs, and
they ran a six hundred and seventy four mile route,
which took them nearly five and a half days to finish.
And that is the story that we're going to tell today.
(01:25):
And as a fair warning, this is it's got some
very sad elements. The entire crisis in Nome, Alaska started
with the deaths of children from diphtheria. And if this
episode were made into a movie, which it has been,
as we just said, uh, the the website does the
Dog Died dot com would have the crying puppy because
(01:49):
not all of the dogs made it to the end unfortunately.
So if those things cause you distress, this is your
fair warning. Yeah. When Racy started researching this episode, she
shot me and I am and said will you be
able to handle this? So the answer is hopefully yeah. Well,
(02:10):
and because there's so much this this could have been
a multipart episode, but it is not. And uh, because
there's so much other stuff to talk about as as
part of this story. Fortunately, that is not the majority
of what we'll be talking about today. So we don't
hear much about DIP theory nowadays because in most of
the world it is prevented through vaccines. World Health Organization
(02:34):
member states reported fewer than five thousand cases, although there
were certainly some that existed outside that number that just
went unreported. Most of these were in developing nations and
in places where there's some sort of strain on the
health care infrastructure, such as wars or other strife going
on that are preventing vaccinations or health care from happening.
(02:55):
But this was not the case at all before a
vaccine against dip theory was developed in the nineteen twenties.
In nineteen twenty one, more than two hundred thousand people
got diphtheria and more than fifteen thousand people died of
it in the United States alone, and without treatment. The
mortality rate for dip theoria was up to fift and
(03:17):
it's a terrifying disease that often strikes children under the
age of ten. It starts with a sore throat in
a fever, just like numerous other relatively harmless illnesses, but
as it progresses, dip theoria produces toxins that cause a
membrane and sores to develop in the throat, and so
the throat slowly closes off until the patient can no
(03:39):
longer breathe. This is why the very dreadful nickname of
this disease is the strangling angel of children, and diphtheria
also affects other mucus membranes. It's not just the throat,
so even when doctors started intimating patients to maintain their airways,
sometimes the patients would still die as other parts of
(04:00):
their bodies shut down in the wake of the toxin.
The first effective treatment for dip theory was anti toxin,
which was developed in the eighteen nineties, and essentially doctors
figured out that the blood of animals that had been
exposed to dip theoria contained substances that prevented the toxin's effects.
Emil von Bearing won the Nobel Prize for this discovery
(04:22):
in nineteen o one. In five, when this story takes place,
there was already a vaccine for diphtheria in the United States.
It was a combination of serum toxin and anti toxin. Usually,
e children would be given a test called the Ship
test to see if they had already been exposed to
dip theorius at some point in their past. If not,
(04:43):
they'd be injected with a combination of toxin and anti toxin,
which gave them immunity for a few years. However, the
vaccine had not become widely used. Yeah, like many new
major medical developments, it just took a while for it
to catch on. And the ship test was a lot
like if anyone remembers getting a TV time test. Um.
(05:04):
I know a lot of us got them as children,
and teachers continue to get them because they're around children.
It was a lot like that. They would stick you
and if it turned red, then they knew that you
had been exposed. So now for a little context about Nome, Alaska.
The Native Alaska and New Piat people had lived in
northern Alaska for thousands of years, and then prospectors from
(05:26):
Europe and other parts of North America just flooded to
the area during a gold rush in the late eighteen nineties,
and the town's population just exploded. The promise of gold
as far as the eye could see did not turn
out to be true, though, so many of these people
moved on and left Nome. By the nine twenties, nost
population was left at only a couple of thousand, but
(05:48):
those who stayed and lived there built a close knit community.
Counting outlying villages and mining camps, there were probably about
ten thousand people in that area of Alaska, so it's
a pretty wide area we're looking at this point. Although
there were a number of marriages between the newcomers and
the Inupiak, in the two communities, things were largely segregated.
(06:11):
In the nineteen twenties, many of the Inupiak made their
homes at a camp along a stretch of waterfront that
was known as the sand Spit. And in g Nome
had exactly one doctor and his name was Dr. Curtis Welch.
He and four nurses staff to hospital that provided care
for Nome and the surrounding population. So all of those
(06:33):
people had five healthcare providers total. Yeah, and the hospital
was the most well equipped in all of northern Alaska.
But well equipped in this sentence is extremely relative. The
electricity was not particularly reliable, and the hospital didn't have
a lab or an incubator for growing cultures, so they
(06:53):
couldn't take a culture of a sample to figure out
whether anything particular is growing in it. They just did
not have the means to do that. And Gnome was
also completely ice bound for several months of the year,
so once the last supply ship for the season dropped
off its cargo, that was it. That's the end. Of
the the end of the supply line. Anything else would
have to come by the mail, which was carried across
(07:15):
Alaska by teams of sled dogs. So in the summer
of Nineto, Dr Welch had noticed that the hospital's supply
of dip diphtheria anti toxin had expired. He wrote to
Juno Alaska's who request more of it, but none of
it came on the last supply ship to stop in
Nome before the water froze completely over. Dr Welch hadn't
(07:40):
seen a confirmed case of diph theoria and all the
time that he had been working in Nome, so he
thought it would probably be okay. Unfortunately that changed pretty quickly.
But before we get into that part of the story,
do you want to take a word from a sponsor.
Let's do that. So to return to the world of Nome, Alaska.
(08:00):
In December of Dr Weltch treated a child for a
sore throat, which he thought was probably Tom's elitis. And
part of this conclusion was because diphtheria is highly highly contagious,
and so he would expect that if he saw one
case of diphtheria, he would also see more of them,
and so Since there was only one child who got sick,
(08:22):
he did not think diphtheria was the cause. But then
more children did get sick and some of them did
not survive. He started to see the membranes and lesions
were that were the telltale signs of diphtheria. The first
case he was sure of with the diphtheria diagnosis was
a three year old named Billy Barnett. Dr Welch was
(08:43):
afraid that using expired anti toxin could just make the
boy worse, but Billy did die regardless. The next confirmed
case of diphtheria he encountered, Dr Welch did try the
anti toxin, but unfortunately that trial that child died also,
and so at this point uh Dr Welch was realizing
that the situation was quite serious. So on January two,
(09:06):
he sent this telegram to towns all over Alaska and
to Washington, d C. Quote, an epidemic of diphtheria is
almost inevitable here stop I am in urgent need of
one million units of diphtheria anti toxin. Stop mail is
only form of transportation. Stop I have made application to
Commissioner of Health of the Territories for anti toxin already.
(09:30):
He then called the town's leaders together to discuss what
to do. They acted immediately to implement a quarantine. All
the public gathering places were shut down and anyone who
was displaying symptoms of diphtheria was kept at home with
a quarantine sign posted on the door, and Dr Welch
and his nurses made daily rounds around Nome and through
(09:51):
the sand spit. They were tracking new cases, administering care
where they could, and they were comforting the families of
children who had died. Particular cularly important in this work
was head nurse Emily Morgan, who was born in Kansas
and had come to Alaska as part of a mission.
Even though he was still really worried about its efficacy,
Dr Welch did started using his limited supply of expired
(10:13):
anti toxin, and he knew that if the outbreak spread
at all, they were going to completely run out. So
basically the Nome area was brought to a standstill. On
top of the seriousness of the outbreak itself, the nineteen
eighteen influenza pandemic was still a very recent memory, and
as we talked about in our episode on that pandemic,
(10:35):
it had been absolutely devastating to the Alaska Native population.
They had no natural immunity to it whatsoever. The Alaska
Native population also had no natural immunity at all to diphtheria.
So Dr. Welch, his staff and everyone else knew that
without effective treatment, the Innupiac population would probably be destroyed. Fortunately,
(10:56):
the powers that be also recognized that this was a crisis.
Health personnel around Alaska and the Pacific Northwest started gathering
up all the anti tax and that they could find.
Mark Summer, who was the superintendent of the Territorial Board
of Health Alaska was not a state yet, concocted a
plan to get the anti taxin where it needed to go.
(11:17):
They would gather up all the anti toxin and send
it to Anchorage, Alaska, and then it would go by
train to Nanana, Alaska, and then a musher with a
team of dogs would set out from there while another
musher left from Nome. They would meet in the town
of Nulatto and then hand over the serum and go
back the way they came. And these names I looked
(11:39):
for pronunciations of they looked very obvious how they should
be pronounced, and I did not find audio files pronouncing
them so very much apologize if we have gotten any
of them wrong. So Leonard's to Paula was an experienced
musher and a three time winner of the All Alaska Sweepstakes,
which is a long distance dog sled race, and he
(11:59):
was elected to go from Nome to Nilatto and back.
Governor Scott Bone, who was an appointed official and not
an elected one at this point in Alaska's history, expanded
on the original plan by turning the dogs led delivery
into a relay, using many of the same mushers who
carried the mail. The total distance would be the same,
(12:20):
but since each musher and his dogs had less distance
to cover, they could easily make better time because they
could push themselves harder. They worked with Edward Wetsler, who
was the postal inspector, to put this plan into place,
and throughout all of these preparations and plans, there was
an entire second plan that was running in the background,
(12:41):
and that was to try to deliver the serum by air. However,
air travel in and around Alaska was in its infancy
at this point. The only airplanes available were of the
open cockpit variety, and they would have to be flown
in fifty degrees below zero temperatures in a blizzard. Uh,
they were water cooled and ssequently unreliable, and temperatures that
(13:01):
were that cold. Some of the people advocating for this
plan also wanted to kick start the air industry in Alaska,
so they definitely had an agenda behind pushing for the
air delivery. And the reason that we're not going to
go into all of that part of the story, which
is its own little encapsulated drama, is that this particular
event that we're talking about is really about the dog race. Yeah,
(13:24):
all of the resources that I read kind of had
this running parallel tangent of what was happening with the airplanes,
and basically there was continual talk about airplanes that did
not work out. So to sum all that up, before
we talk about the actual dog sled relay, let's take
another brief moment for a word from a sponsor. Yes please,
(13:44):
And now let's reach the conclusion of the Gnome Serium run.
The dog sled relay from Nanana to Gnome became known
as the Great Race of Mercy, and it got kind
of a rolling start when three hundred thousand units of
Syria from the Alaska Railroad hospital departed Anchorage by train.
(14:05):
They were packed in a cylinder and wrapped in a
quiote for insulation. Another million units were also on the
way from Seattle, but it was going to take a
lot longer for them to arrive. So in Casey's numbers
sound insane to you, Uh, it sounds like a lot
when we're talking about millions and three hundred thousands, But
a dose, a single dose actually included thousands of units,
(14:27):
so it wasn't single unit, single dose. So when we're
talking about all of these thousands, it's really not enough
dosage for a whole lot of people. So the weather
for this relay was horrible. A lot of the running
of the dogs took place in wide out blizzard conditions
with temperatures well below fifty degrees below zero. I cannot
(14:48):
even imagine how cold that is, knowing how much I
hate cold, you can bet I cannot imagine it either. Yeah,
I feel like the coldest I have personally experienced has
been like in the teens below zero, and that was
just a freak occurrence. It hurt me to be outside. Yeah,
(15:09):
it was utter misery the one time I've been in
that as well, So I can't imagine below. Yeah, So
a lot of the route was marked. It ran along
the Iditarod Trail, which was a marked and used trail.
Uh There were roadhouses that had been built by the
Northern Commercial Company along the way where people could rest
(15:30):
and take shelter the going. The going was still going
to be extremely rough for all of the men and
the dogs involved. Uh Musha Williams Shannon, also known as
wild Bill, and his lead dog Blackie, met the train
in Nanana and they hit the trail at nine pm
on January The going was immediately rough. There's a rule
(15:52):
of thumb called the rule of forties in the world
of sled dogs, and that rule is that you don't
run a dog team when it's colder than forty below
or warmer than forty above zero fahrenheit. The temperature as
wild Bill left the train station was at least fifty below,
but it really had no other choice. He had to
(16:14):
carry the serum fifty two miles to tal Avanna, where
he would pass it off to another musher named Edgar Kellen's.
On his way to tal Havanna, wild Bill realized that
he was getting hypothermia. He started taking steps to try
to keep himself warm. He was moving his arms around,
he was jogging beside the dog sled, doing anything he
could think of to try to keep his body temperature up.
(16:35):
But by the time he got to a roadhouse in Minto,
his face had become so frostbitten that his skin had
turned black, and four of his dogs had blood around
their mouths. He thought himself out, and he thought the
serum by the fire. It was a comparatively warm fifty
ish degrees in the roadhouse, and he tried to get
everything working again before moving on. I will pause to say,
(16:58):
as I was reading an account of this, I was
sort of imagining him walking into a place that's what
I think of is warm, which is like between sixty
eight and seventy two degrees in the winter. And so
learning that this warm place he had gotten to take
refuge was only fifty degrees kind of made my heart
hurt a little bit. So before a while Bill continued
(17:22):
on on his leg of the relay. He had to
unhook three of his dogs from the harnesses they were
suffering from a condition that mushers called lung scorching, which
actually has more to do with the effect of really
cold air on their lung tissue, and he left them
behind to return for them later, but unfortunately they didn't survive.
(17:43):
At about the same time, Leonard Suppala and his lead
dog Togo left no and they were on route to
the rendezvous point to pick up the serum. His planned
route was around three hundred and fifteen miles each way,
and it included one of the most dangerous parts of
the route, the North Norton Sound. He set off with
his dogs, harnessing more than he needed so he could
(18:04):
leave some at roadhouses along the way so that he
could trade them out on the way back. Norton Sound
was for the most part frozen over at this point,
but the currents under the ice meant that the surface
of the sound was constantly shifting and rebuilding itself. Entire
chunks of the sound could break off and float away,
and big chasms in the ice could open unexpectedly. So
(18:28):
Paula had to cross over this twice, once in each direction.
I mean, he could if he really wanted to go
around parts of it, but that was going to add
a significant amount of time to the journey. Meanwhile, the
inbound serum shipment continued to pass from Musher to musher,
some of them completing their leg of the journey more
easily than others. While all of this was happening, things
(18:52):
and Nome got a lot worse. The disease was just
spreading really quickly. People were extremely ill and alarmingly. One
of the new cases was someone who had been working
in a neighboring town shortly before she developed symptoms. So
Dr Welch was terrified that the outbreak was going to
spread beyond Gnome and into the outlying community. Because of
(19:15):
the worsening conditions in Nome, there was another change of plans,
which was the addition of more mushers to the relay
in the hopes that they would be able to get
the serum to Nome just a little bit faster. The
trouble was there was no way to reach so Paula.
Much of his route didn't go past roadhouses that were
equipped with telegraphs or telephones, so everyone just had to
(19:36):
hope that someone would be able to flag him down
at the handoff point. And meanwhile, the relay continued. On
its third day, Charlie Evans around it arrived at his
rendezvous point with two of his dogs dead in the basket.
They had both died of exposure. So Paula found musher
Henry Ivanov. Not long after he made his first crossing
(19:58):
of the Norton Sound. Even if dogs were fighting after
having gotten wind of a reindeer, and at first Sapaula
thought he was just another musher. He didn't think that
he had time to stop and help. As he was
racing by, even Off yelled that he had the serum.
Fortunately Sapaula heard him. He stopped his team, he turned
them around, loaded the serum into his sled, and after
(20:21):
learning that his plan was no longer to go all
the way back to Nome, but to hand his cargo
off to other measures, he continued the relay to Nome
without otherwise stopping to take much of a breath there.
So Paula handed the serum off to Charlie Olsen in
Golovin in Bluff Olson handed it off to Gunner Cosin,
(20:41):
who whose lead dog was Balto, the famous name that
we've all heard. Balto was actually one of Leonard's to
Paula's dogs, So Paula had loaned some of his dogs
to Cosson, although he had said specifically that Balto was
not cut out to be a lead dog. At this point,
the weather had been come so bad that Dr Welch
(21:02):
tried to call a halt to the relay. The blizzard
was causing complete white out conditions and the temperature was
about seventy degrees below zero, so Casan put off his
departure for about three hours. He was hoping that the
snow would subside and maybe it would warm up a
little bit, but it didn't, and eventually he got to
the point that he was like, if I don't go now,
(21:23):
I'm going to be stranded here and not able to
make it through. And because of the complete white out
conditions and drifts that blocked the trail, Casan wound up
relying on balto to find the way for much of
his leg of the relay, and then when he reached
his handoff point at Solomon, he didn't stop. His reasoning
(21:43):
for not stopping was that his eyelashes were literally frozen
shut with all of the snow and ice, and he
physically could not see that he was at the handoff point.
He was right relying completely on balto to lead this
lead the team of sled dogs in these treacherous conditions.
Um sled dogs as I have learned from researching this
they're actually pretty amazing creatures. And lead sled dogs, Uh,
(22:08):
there are amazing, amazing stories of just feats of heroism,
which is kind of anthropomorphizing, but I don't know how
to describe it. On the part of lead sled dogs
sort of taking charge when they're they're human riding in
the sled, uh would have made a treacherous or deadly
decision because I also didn't stop at the next rendezvous point.
(22:32):
When he got there, the musher who was supposed to
take over was asleep, and because I thought that it
would take longer to wake him up and get his
dogs into their harnesses than it would take for him
to just continue on with his own tiring team. Later on,
when Balso became a famous household name, there were people
who accused him of just having been a glory hound
and having bypassed the last hand off on purpose. I
(22:56):
don't even know how to respond to that, Like, you
have to be a really serious glory having to put
yourself at that level of risk. I think the whole
thing was nearly for not And on that final leg,
the winds were so incredibly fierce that at one point
they blew the sled completely over, and the serum was
actually knocked out, so Cassan's fingers were frost bitten by
(23:17):
the time he found it and actually was able to
get it maneuvered back into the sled. Finally, the anti
toxin reached gnome on February second, at five o'clock in
the morning. They had taken more than twenty mushers, including
both Alaska natives and non natives, and more than a
fifty dogs, and they had been running for more than
(23:38):
five days and seven hours. The normal time for the
mail to be taken over this route was between fifteen
and twenty days. The serum was actually frozen when it arrived,
but after being thought out, it fortunately worked. Dr Welch
and his nurses started giving the serum to the sickest patients.
(23:58):
First ten percent of those three thousand units were used
up that first afternoon. A second and slightly less desperate
relay delivered those other million units of anti toxin later on,
after following the same basic route from Anchorage to nome H.
In spite of all of that effort to have some
(24:21):
delivered by air that never worked out, the quarantine Innome
was lifted on February one, At least six children died
in the epidemic. The numbers are not exact because Dr
Welch actually suspected some of the Alaska Native families did
not report their children's deaths to him. There were at
least twenty seven confirmed cases and at least eighty other
(24:42):
people known to have been exposed. Even though Leonard Soapala's
dog Togo led a team for the longest part of
the journey and some of really legitimately the most treacherous
miles of the journey, both those heroic run into Nome
became famous. Both eventually did die of old age, and
Togo was actually already twelve years old when he ran
(25:05):
the Serum Run. Sometimes people call the Serum Run the
inspiration for the Iditarod dog sled race, which is kind
of an oversimplification of the situation. And although the Serum
Run did go from Anchorage to Nome, which is also
where the Iditarod starts and ends, and both the Serum
Run and the Iditarod are tied to the Editorod trail,
(25:25):
which has existed for more than a hundred years, it's
not entirely accurate. Yeah, dog sled racing was really well
established in Alaska even before the Cerum run took place.
Uh As we said, Leonard Sappala had actually won several
long distance dog sled races. So this was a pastime
that already existed and not something that came about because
(25:45):
the cermon had happened. Later on, in nine five, the
Kelly Act was signed, and this allowed private aviation companies
to bid on mail delivery contracts in Alaska. And before
the Kelly Act, dogs and dog sleds were critical to
the Alaskan way of life and to moving people, male,
and basically anything else in the winter. By the time
(26:08):
the Iditarod started in nineteen seventy three, snowmobiles were overtaking
dog sled as a as a way to move around
in the wintertime. So while there are some ties to
the ceremonon, the Iditarode was also founded in part to
preserve that way of life, the way of life of
running with dog sleds, and to preserve the Iditarod trail itself.
(26:29):
Um not even just dog sleds. If if you look
at the history of northern Alaska, dogs go all the
way back to the first arrival of humans. They're like
all kinds of study about how humans could not have
survived in that part of Alaska for thousands of years
without dogs to help them, Like, there are so many
(26:51):
incredible dog stories. Uh. One of the books that I
read to research this episode is called The Cruelest Miles,
The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race
against an Epidemic, And I highly recommend it in part
because of all these amazing dog stories. Like I was
reading it on the airplane on the way back from
Thanksgiving and there were times in my jaw would literally
(27:11):
drop at a story of like, then, what happened with
a sled dog? Most of these stories were ancillary to
this specific story. They were sort of stories of things
these particular dogs had done at other points in their lives,
but super incredible. So I know there's a lot of
debate about the iditor rod uh as an event that
(27:32):
flood dogs themselves are amazing creatures. Um. And there's an
I Did It by two immunization campaign that is now
tied to the iditar rod. It's a program that stresses
the need for children to get their childhood immunizations for
diseases like the theoria by the time they're two years old,
so there are connections there, but that's a little a
(27:53):
little bit oversimplified to say we have the iditor rod
because of the nome serum run. I'm much more of
a cat person than a dog person. But all the
dog sled stories, like all these amazing stories about the
heroic acts of sled dogs made me really happy to
read about. I felt very sad for the dogs who
(28:14):
did not make it. They're incredible animals, they really are.
I am a dog incat person. So this is um
you know, as we said, it's up. Tracy warned me,
do you have listener mail that involves neither children nor
dogs being deceased? I do you have listener mail. I
don't think it actually references any any dead children or animals.
(28:37):
It's from Kathleen. Kathleen. Kathleen says, dear Holly and Tracy.
I was so excited to see that Sweden was the
topic of a new podcast, even more when I saw
that it was Queen Christina, someone who I have been
a fan of since I was a child. I'm an
American expatly living in Sweden, and Queen Christina had a
huge impact on the history of my former university Uppsala University,
(29:00):
the largest and oldest university in Scandinavia. In the six hundred,
Swedish medicine was well non existent. You could become a
Swedish doctor in about three months after passing a test
that had not changed in decades and which you could
purchase the answers for. Doctors would get hands on experience
on the battlefield training wounded soldiers. Thus the mortality rate
was incredibly high. Soldiers began opting to be sent to
(29:23):
the horse veterinarian on the battlefield instead of the human physician,
because the horse veterinarian had to pay for any horses
that he lost, so he had a two better survival
rate than the physician. I completely lied to you, Holly
about there being no dead animals in this email. Tracy
to return to the email. Obviously this was a problem,
(29:44):
so Queen Christina sponsored Professor o loss Rudebick to travel
to the Netherlands and learn modern medicine. He returned and
built an enormous anatomical theater in the university, where he
revolutionized medical education in Sweden. The university would get the
body of executed criminals on the condition that after the
dissection was done, the university would pay for the funerals
(30:06):
of the convicts. Rudbeck would cut open the bodies in
front of large, large audiences and lecture about the organs.
The organs were then placed in buckets and passed around
the crowd. The medical students at the time had to
be able to identify the organs by site such touch
and taste. The taste was because if you stuck your
hand into someone and touched an organ without seeing it,
(30:26):
you had to be able to identify it. The Anatomical Theater,
which is still standing today, helped modernize Swedish medical practices,
and it was all due to the fact that Rudbeck
had been sponsored by Queen Christina in the first place.
And then she suggests maybe doing an episode on him.
So thank you so much, Kathleen for sending that letter.
(30:48):
I always love hearing additional aspects of things that we've
talked about in episodes but didn't get time to delve
into or did not discover in our own research. And somehow,
as much as I get sensitive to the deaths of things,
like once you get into the medical stuff of like
analyzing it, i'd lose my my weird emotional part and
(31:09):
I just become fascinated well, and to be honest, I
often will pick the email to be read, and then
between when I pick it and when I actually read
it an hour and a half later, I have forgotten
its contents. So this is why it's not the first
time that I've said, oh, there's none of this in
this email. Oh wait there, Uh, it's because I'm getting old.
(31:31):
If you would like to write to us, we're a
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(31:51):
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(32:13):
episodes and other cool stuff, so you can do all
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to have works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from housework
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcasts. I'm Tracy
and I'm Holly Frying. So today's episode is a listener
request from a whole lot of people, but I'm pretty
sure the first person to ask for it since you
(00:23):
and I came on the show, Holly was Emily and
a dog named Balto became famous for leading a team
of sled dogs in Nome, Alaska, in delivering desperately needed
life saving medicine to the city, which at that point
was completely ice bound. There's a statue of this dog
(00:44):
in New York City Central Park and another one in Anchorage,
near the starting line for the Iditarod. He was the
subject of a highly fictionalized animated film that came out
in and the dog himself was mounted by a taxi
or missed after his death and is now an exhibit
at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. But Balto was
(01:05):
just one of the lead dogs that relayed serum across
Alaska to no All. In all, there were more than
twenty mushers with more than twenty teams of dogs, and
they ran a six hundred and seventy four mile route,
which took them nearly five and a half days to finish.
And that is the story that we're going to tell today.
(01:25):
And as a fair warning, this is it's got some
very sad elements. The entire crisis in Nome, Alaska started
with the deaths of children from diphtheria. And if this
episode were made into a movie, which it has been,
as we just said, uh, the the website does the
Dog Died dot com would have the crying puppy because
(01:49):
not all of the dogs made it to the end unfortunately.
So if those things cause you distress, this is your
fair warning. Yeah. When Racy started researching this episode, she
shot me and I am and said will you be
able to handle this? So the answer is hopefully yeah. Well,
(02:10):
and because there's so much this this could have been
a multipart episode, but it is not. And uh, because
there's so much other stuff to talk about as as
part of this story. Fortunately, that is not the majority
of what we'll be talking about today. So we don't
hear much about DIP theory nowadays because in most of
the world it is prevented through vaccines. World Health Organization
(02:34):
member states reported fewer than five thousand cases, although there
were certainly some that existed outside that number that just
went unreported. Most of these were in developing nations and
in places where there's some sort of strain on the
health care infrastructure, such as wars or other strife going
on that are preventing vaccinations or health care from happening.
(02:55):
But this was not the case at all before a
vaccine against dip theory was developed in the nineteen twenties.
In nineteen twenty one, more than two hundred thousand people
got diphtheria and more than fifteen thousand people died of
it in the United States alone, and without treatment. The
mortality rate for dip theoria was up to fift and
(03:17):
it's a terrifying disease that often strikes children under the
age of ten. It starts with a sore throat in
a fever, just like numerous other relatively harmless illnesses, but
as it progresses, dip theoria produces toxins that cause a
membrane and sores to develop in the throat, and so
the throat slowly closes off until the patient can no
(03:39):
longer breathe. This is why the very dreadful nickname of
this disease is the strangling angel of children, and diphtheria
also affects other mucus membranes. It's not just the throat,
so even when doctors started intimating patients to maintain their airways,
sometimes the patients would still die as other parts of
(04:00):
their bodies shut down in the wake of the toxin.
The first effective treatment for dip theory was anti toxin,
which was developed in the eighteen nineties, and essentially doctors
figured out that the blood of animals that had been
exposed to dip theoria contained substances that prevented the toxin's effects.
Emil von Bearing won the Nobel Prize for this discovery
(04:22):
in nineteen o one. In five, when this story takes place,
there was already a vaccine for diphtheria in the United States.
It was a combination of serum toxin and anti toxin. Usually,
e children would be given a test called the Ship
test to see if they had already been exposed to
dip theorius at some point in their past. If not,
(04:43):
they'd be injected with a combination of toxin and anti toxin,
which gave them immunity for a few years. However, the
vaccine had not become widely used. Yeah, like many new
major medical developments, it just took a while for it
to catch on. And the ship test was a lot
like if anyone remembers getting a TV time test. Um.
(05:04):
I know a lot of us got them as children,
and teachers continue to get them because they're around children.
It was a lot like that. They would stick you
and if it turned red, then they knew that you
had been exposed. So now for a little context about Nome, Alaska.
The Native Alaska and New Piat people had lived in
northern Alaska for thousands of years, and then prospectors from
(05:26):
Europe and other parts of North America just flooded to
the area during a gold rush in the late eighteen nineties,
and the town's population just exploded. The promise of gold
as far as the eye could see did not turn
out to be true, though, so many of these people
moved on and left Nome. By the nine twenties, nost
population was left at only a couple of thousand, but
(05:48):
those who stayed and lived there built a close knit community.
Counting outlying villages and mining camps, there were probably about
ten thousand people in that area of Alaska, so it's
a pretty wide area we're looking at this point. Although
there were a number of marriages between the newcomers and
the Inupiak, in the two communities, things were largely segregated.
(06:11):
In the nineteen twenties, many of the Inupiak made their
homes at a camp along a stretch of waterfront that
was known as the sand Spit. And in g Nome
had exactly one doctor and his name was Dr. Curtis Welch.
He and four nurses staff to hospital that provided care
for Nome and the surrounding population. So all of those
(06:33):
people had five healthcare providers total. Yeah, and the hospital
was the most well equipped in all of northern Alaska.
But well equipped in this sentence is extremely relative. The
electricity was not particularly reliable, and the hospital didn't have
a lab or an incubator for growing cultures, so they
(06:53):
couldn't take a culture of a sample to figure out
whether anything particular is growing in it. They just did
not have the means to do that. And Gnome was
also completely ice bound for several months of the year,
so once the last supply ship for the season dropped
off its cargo, that was it. That's the end. Of
the the end of the supply line. Anything else would
have to come by the mail, which was carried across
(07:15):
Alaska by teams of sled dogs. So in the summer
of Nineto, Dr Welch had noticed that the hospital's supply
of dip diphtheria anti toxin had expired. He wrote to
Juno Alaska's who request more of it, but none of
it came on the last supply ship to stop in
Nome before the water froze completely over. Dr Welch hadn't
(07:40):
seen a confirmed case of diph theoria and all the
time that he had been working in Nome, so he
thought it would probably be okay. Unfortunately that changed pretty quickly.
But before we get into that part of the story,
do you want to take a word from a sponsor.
Let's do that. So to return to the world of Nome, Alaska.
(08:00):
In December of Dr Weltch treated a child for a
sore throat, which he thought was probably Tom's elitis. And
part of this conclusion was because diphtheria is highly highly contagious,
and so he would expect that if he saw one
case of diphtheria, he would also see more of them,
and so Since there was only one child who got sick,
(08:22):
he did not think diphtheria was the cause. But then
more children did get sick and some of them did
not survive. He started to see the membranes and lesions
were that were the telltale signs of diphtheria. The first
case he was sure of with the diphtheria diagnosis was
a three year old named Billy Barnett. Dr Welch was
(08:43):
afraid that using expired anti toxin could just make the
boy worse, but Billy did die regardless. The next confirmed
case of diphtheria he encountered, Dr Welch did try the
anti toxin, but unfortunately that trial that child died also,
and so at this point uh Dr Welch was realizing
that the situation was quite serious. So on January two,
(09:06):
he sent this telegram to towns all over Alaska and
to Washington, d C. Quote, an epidemic of diphtheria is
almost inevitable here stop I am in urgent need of
one million units of diphtheria anti toxin. Stop mail is
only form of transportation. Stop I have made application to
Commissioner of Health of the Territories for anti toxin already.
(09:30):
He then called the town's leaders together to discuss what
to do. They acted immediately to implement a quarantine. All
the public gathering places were shut down and anyone who
was displaying symptoms of diphtheria was kept at home with
a quarantine sign posted on the door, and Dr Welch
and his nurses made daily rounds around Nome and through
(09:51):
the sand spit. They were tracking new cases, administering care
where they could, and they were comforting the families of
children who had died. Particular cularly important in this work
was head nurse Emily Morgan, who was born in Kansas
and had come to Alaska as part of a mission.
Even though he was still really worried about its efficacy,
Dr Welch did started using his limited supply of expired
(10:13):
anti toxin, and he knew that if the outbreak spread
at all, they were going to completely run out. So
basically the Nome area was brought to a standstill. On
top of the seriousness of the outbreak itself, the nineteen
eighteen influenza pandemic was still a very recent memory, and
as we talked about in our episode on that pandemic,
(10:35):
it had been absolutely devastating to the Alaska Native population.
They had no natural immunity to it whatsoever. The Alaska
Native population also had no natural immunity at all to diphtheria.
So Dr. Welch, his staff and everyone else knew that
without effective treatment, the Innupiac population would probably be destroyed. Fortunately,
(10:56):
the powers that be also recognized that this was a crisis.
Health personnel around Alaska and the Pacific Northwest started gathering
up all the anti tax and that they could find.
Mark Summer, who was the superintendent of the Territorial Board
of Health Alaska was not a state yet, concocted a
plan to get the anti taxin where it needed to go.
(11:17):
They would gather up all the anti toxin and send
it to Anchorage, Alaska, and then it would go by
train to Nanana, Alaska, and then a musher with a
team of dogs would set out from there while another
musher left from Nome. They would meet in the town
of Nulatto and then hand over the serum and go
back the way they came. And these names I looked
(11:39):
for pronunciations of they looked very obvious how they should
be pronounced, and I did not find audio files pronouncing
them so very much apologize if we have gotten any
of them wrong. So Leonard's to Paula was an experienced
musher and a three time winner of the All Alaska Sweepstakes,
which is a long distance dog sled race, and he
(11:59):
was elected to go from Nome to Nilatto and back.
Governor Scott Bone, who was an appointed official and not
an elected one at this point in Alaska's history, expanded
on the original plan by turning the dogs led delivery
into a relay, using many of the same mushers who
carried the mail. The total distance would be the same,
(12:20):
but since each musher and his dogs had less distance
to cover, they could easily make better time because they
could push themselves harder. They worked with Edward Wetsler, who
was the postal inspector, to put this plan into place,
and throughout all of these preparations and plans, there was
an entire second plan that was running in the background,
(12:41):
and that was to try to deliver the serum by air. However,
air travel in and around Alaska was in its infancy
at this point. The only airplanes available were of the
open cockpit variety, and they would have to be flown
in fifty degrees below zero temperatures in a blizzard. Uh,
they were water cooled and ssequently unreliable, and temperatures that
(13:01):
were that cold. Some of the people advocating for this
plan also wanted to kick start the air industry in Alaska,
so they definitely had an agenda behind pushing for the
air delivery. And the reason that we're not going to
go into all of that part of the story, which
is its own little encapsulated drama, is that this particular
event that we're talking about is really about the dog race. Yeah,
(13:24):
all of the resources that I read kind of had
this running parallel tangent of what was happening with the airplanes,
and basically there was continual talk about airplanes that did
not work out. So to sum all that up, before
we talk about the actual dog sled relay, let's take
another brief moment for a word from a sponsor. Yes please,
(13:44):
And now let's reach the conclusion of the Gnome Serium run.
The dog sled relay from Nanana to Gnome became known
as the Great Race of Mercy, and it got kind
of a rolling start when three hundred thousand units of
Syria from the Alaska Railroad hospital departed Anchorage by train.
(14:05):
They were packed in a cylinder and wrapped in a
quiote for insulation. Another million units were also on the
way from Seattle, but it was going to take a
lot longer for them to arrive. So in Casey's numbers
sound insane to you, Uh, it sounds like a lot
when we're talking about millions and three hundred thousands, But
a dose, a single dose actually included thousands of units,
(14:27):
so it wasn't single unit, single dose. So when we're
talking about all of these thousands, it's really not enough
dosage for a whole lot of people. So the weather
for this relay was horrible. A lot of the running
of the dogs took place in wide out blizzard conditions
with temperatures well below fifty degrees below zero. I cannot
(14:48):
even imagine how cold that is, knowing how much I
hate cold, you can bet I cannot imagine it either. Yeah,
I feel like the coldest I have personally experienced has
been like in the teens below zero, and that was
just a freak occurrence. It hurt me to be outside. Yeah,
(15:09):
it was utter misery the one time I've been in
that as well, So I can't imagine below. Yeah, So
a lot of the route was marked. It ran along
the Iditarod Trail, which was a marked and used trail.
Uh There were roadhouses that had been built by the
Northern Commercial Company along the way where people could rest
(15:30):
and take shelter the going. The going was still going
to be extremely rough for all of the men and
the dogs involved. Uh Musha Williams Shannon, also known as
wild Bill, and his lead dog Blackie, met the train
in Nanana and they hit the trail at nine pm
on January The going was immediately rough. There's a rule
(15:52):
of thumb called the rule of forties in the world
of sled dogs, and that rule is that you don't
run a dog team when it's colder than forty below
or warmer than forty above zero fahrenheit. The temperature as
wild Bill left the train station was at least fifty below,
but it really had no other choice. He had to
(16:14):
carry the serum fifty two miles to tal Avanna, where
he would pass it off to another musher named Edgar Kellen's.
On his way to tal Havanna, wild Bill realized that
he was getting hypothermia. He started taking steps to try
to keep himself warm. He was moving his arms around,
he was jogging beside the dog sled, doing anything he
could think of to try to keep his body temperature up.
(16:35):
But by the time he got to a roadhouse in Minto,
his face had become so frostbitten that his skin had
turned black, and four of his dogs had blood around
their mouths. He thought himself out, and he thought the
serum by the fire. It was a comparatively warm fifty
ish degrees in the roadhouse, and he tried to get
everything working again before moving on. I will pause to say,
(16:58):
as I was reading an account of this, I was
sort of imagining him walking into a place that's what
I think of is warm, which is like between sixty
eight and seventy two degrees in the winter. And so
learning that this warm place he had gotten to take
refuge was only fifty degrees kind of made my heart
hurt a little bit. So before a while Bill continued
(17:22):
on on his leg of the relay. He had to
unhook three of his dogs from the harnesses they were
suffering from a condition that mushers called lung scorching, which
actually has more to do with the effect of really
cold air on their lung tissue, and he left them
behind to return for them later, but unfortunately they didn't survive.
(17:43):
At about the same time, Leonard Suppala and his lead
dog Togo left no and they were on route to
the rendezvous point to pick up the serum. His planned
route was around three hundred and fifteen miles each way,
and it included one of the most dangerous parts of
the route, the North Norton Sound. He set off with
his dogs, harnessing more than he needed so he could
(18:04):
leave some at roadhouses along the way so that he
could trade them out on the way back. Norton Sound
was for the most part frozen over at this point,
but the currents under the ice meant that the surface
of the sound was constantly shifting and rebuilding itself. Entire
chunks of the sound could break off and float away,
and big chasms in the ice could open unexpectedly. So
(18:28):
Paula had to cross over this twice, once in each direction.
I mean, he could if he really wanted to go
around parts of it, but that was going to add
a significant amount of time to the journey. Meanwhile, the
inbound serum shipment continued to pass from Musher to musher,
some of them completing their leg of the journey more
easily than others. While all of this was happening, things
(18:52):
and Nome got a lot worse. The disease was just
spreading really quickly. People were extremely ill and alarmingly. One
of the new cases was someone who had been working
in a neighboring town shortly before she developed symptoms. So
Dr Welch was terrified that the outbreak was going to
spread beyond Gnome and into the outlying community. Because of
(19:15):
the worsening conditions in Nome, there was another change of plans,
which was the addition of more mushers to the relay
in the hopes that they would be able to get
the serum to Nome just a little bit faster. The
trouble was there was no way to reach so Paula.
Much of his route didn't go past roadhouses that were
equipped with telegraphs or telephones, so everyone just had to
(19:36):
hope that someone would be able to flag him down
at the handoff point. And meanwhile, the relay continued. On
its third day, Charlie Evans around it arrived at his
rendezvous point with two of his dogs dead in the basket.
They had both died of exposure. So Paula found musher
Henry Ivanov. Not long after he made his first crossing
(19:58):
of the Norton Sound. Even if dogs were fighting after
having gotten wind of a reindeer, and at first Sapaula
thought he was just another musher. He didn't think that
he had time to stop and help. As he was
racing by, even Off yelled that he had the serum.
Fortunately Sapaula heard him. He stopped his team, he turned
them around, loaded the serum into his sled, and after
(20:21):
learning that his plan was no longer to go all
the way back to Nome, but to hand his cargo
off to other measures, he continued the relay to Nome
without otherwise stopping to take much of a breath there.
So Paula handed the serum off to Charlie Olsen in
Golovin in Bluff Olson handed it off to Gunner Cosin,
(20:41):
who whose lead dog was Balto, the famous name that
we've all heard. Balto was actually one of Leonard's to
Paula's dogs, So Paula had loaned some of his dogs
to Cosson, although he had said specifically that Balto was
not cut out to be a lead dog. At this point,
the weather had been come so bad that Dr Welch
(21:02):
tried to call a halt to the relay. The blizzard
was causing complete white out conditions and the temperature was
about seventy degrees below zero, so Casan put off his
departure for about three hours. He was hoping that the
snow would subside and maybe it would warm up a
little bit, but it didn't, and eventually he got to
the point that he was like, if I don't go now,
(21:23):
I'm going to be stranded here and not able to
make it through. And because of the complete white out
conditions and drifts that blocked the trail, Casan wound up
relying on balto to find the way for much of
his leg of the relay, and then when he reached
his handoff point at Solomon, he didn't stop. His reasoning
(21:43):
for not stopping was that his eyelashes were literally frozen
shut with all of the snow and ice, and he
physically could not see that he was at the handoff point.
He was right relying completely on balto to lead this
lead the team of sled dogs in these treacherous conditions.
Um sled dogs as I have learned from researching this
they're actually pretty amazing creatures. And lead sled dogs, Uh,
(22:08):
there are amazing, amazing stories of just feats of heroism,
which is kind of anthropomorphizing, but I don't know how
to describe it. On the part of lead sled dogs
sort of taking charge when they're they're human riding in
the sled, uh would have made a treacherous or deadly
decision because I also didn't stop at the next rendezvous point.
(22:32):
When he got there, the musher who was supposed to
take over was asleep, and because I thought that it
would take longer to wake him up and get his
dogs into their harnesses than it would take for him
to just continue on with his own tiring team. Later on,
when Balso became a famous household name, there were people
who accused him of just having been a glory hound
and having bypassed the last hand off on purpose. I
(22:56):
don't even know how to respond to that, Like, you
have to be a really serious glory having to put
yourself at that level of risk. I think the whole
thing was nearly for not And on that final leg,
the winds were so incredibly fierce that at one point
they blew the sled completely over, and the serum was
actually knocked out, so Cassan's fingers were frost bitten by
(23:17):
the time he found it and actually was able to
get it maneuvered back into the sled. Finally, the anti
toxin reached gnome on February second, at five o'clock in
the morning. They had taken more than twenty mushers, including
both Alaska natives and non natives, and more than a
fifty dogs, and they had been running for more than
(23:38):
five days and seven hours. The normal time for the
mail to be taken over this route was between fifteen
and twenty days. The serum was actually frozen when it arrived,
but after being thought out, it fortunately worked. Dr Welch
and his nurses started giving the serum to the sickest patients.
(23:58):
First ten percent of those three thousand units were used
up that first afternoon. A second and slightly less desperate
relay delivered those other million units of anti toxin later on,
after following the same basic route from Anchorage to nome H.
In spite of all of that effort to have some
(24:21):
delivered by air that never worked out, the quarantine Innome
was lifted on February one, At least six children died
in the epidemic. The numbers are not exact because Dr
Welch actually suspected some of the Alaska Native families did
not report their children's deaths to him. There were at
least twenty seven confirmed cases and at least eighty other
(24:42):
people known to have been exposed. Even though Leonard Soapala's
dog Togo led a team for the longest part of
the journey and some of really legitimately the most treacherous
miles of the journey, both those heroic run into Nome
became famous. Both eventually did die of old age, and
Togo was actually already twelve years old when he ran
(25:05):
the Serum Run. Sometimes people call the Serum Run the
inspiration for the Iditarod dog sled race, which is kind
of an oversimplification of the situation. And although the Serum
Run did go from Anchorage to Nome, which is also
where the Iditarod starts and ends, and both the Serum
Run and the Iditarod are tied to the Editorod trail,
(25:25):
which has existed for more than a hundred years, it's
not entirely accurate. Yeah, dog sled racing was really well
established in Alaska even before the Cerum run took place.
Uh As we said, Leonard Sappala had actually won several
long distance dog sled races. So this was a pastime
that already existed and not something that came about because
(25:45):
the cermon had happened. Later on, in nine five, the
Kelly Act was signed, and this allowed private aviation companies
to bid on mail delivery contracts in Alaska. And before
the Kelly Act, dogs and dog sleds were critical to
the Alaskan way of life and to moving people, male,
and basically anything else in the winter. By the time
(26:08):
the Iditarod started in nineteen seventy three, snowmobiles were overtaking
dog sled as a as a way to move around
in the wintertime. So while there are some ties to
the ceremonon, the Iditarode was also founded in part to
preserve that way of life, the way of life of
running with dog sleds, and to preserve the Iditarod trail itself.
(26:29):
Um not even just dog sleds. If if you look
at the history of northern Alaska, dogs go all the
way back to the first arrival of humans. They're like
all kinds of study about how humans could not have
survived in that part of Alaska for thousands of years
without dogs to help them, Like, there are so many
(26:51):
incredible dog stories. Uh. One of the books that I
read to research this episode is called The Cruelest Miles,
The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race
against an Epidemic, And I highly recommend it in part
because of all these amazing dog stories. Like I was
reading it on the airplane on the way back from
Thanksgiving and there were times in my jaw would literally
(27:11):
drop at a story of like, then, what happened with
a sled dog? Most of these stories were ancillary to
this specific story. They were sort of stories of things
these particular dogs had done at other points in their lives,
but super incredible. So I know there's a lot of
debate about the iditor rod uh as an event that
(27:32):
flood dogs themselves are amazing creatures. Um. And there's an
I Did It by two immunization campaign that is now
tied to the iditar rod. It's a program that stresses
the need for children to get their childhood immunizations for
diseases like the theoria by the time they're two years old,
so there are connections there, but that's a little a
(27:53):
little bit oversimplified to say we have the iditor rod
because of the nome serum run. I'm much more of
a cat person than a dog person. But all the
dog sled stories, like all these amazing stories about the
heroic acts of sled dogs made me really happy to
read about. I felt very sad for the dogs who
(28:14):
did not make it. They're incredible animals, they really are.
I am a dog incat person. So this is um
you know, as we said, it's up. Tracy warned me,
do you have listener mail that involves neither children nor
dogs being deceased? I do you have listener mail. I
don't think it actually references any any dead children or animals.
(28:37):
It's from Kathleen. Kathleen. Kathleen says, dear Holly and Tracy.
I was so excited to see that Sweden was the
topic of a new podcast, even more when I saw
that it was Queen Christina, someone who I have been
a fan of since I was a child. I'm an
American expatly living in Sweden, and Queen Christina had a
huge impact on the history of my former university Uppsala University,
(29:00):
the largest and oldest university in Scandinavia. In the six hundred,
Swedish medicine was well non existent. You could become a
Swedish doctor in about three months after passing a test
that had not changed in decades and which you could
purchase the answers for. Doctors would get hands on experience
on the battlefield training wounded soldiers. Thus the mortality rate
was incredibly high. Soldiers began opting to be sent to
(29:23):
the horse veterinarian on the battlefield instead of the human physician,
because the horse veterinarian had to pay for any horses
that he lost, so he had a two better survival
rate than the physician. I completely lied to you, Holly
about there being no dead animals in this email. Tracy
to return to the email. Obviously this was a problem,
(29:44):
so Queen Christina sponsored Professor o loss Rudebick to travel
to the Netherlands and learn modern medicine. He returned and
built an enormous anatomical theater in the university, where he
revolutionized medical education in Sweden. The university would get the
body of executed criminals on the condition that after the
dissection was done, the university would pay for the funerals
(30:06):
of the convicts. Rudbeck would cut open the bodies in
front of large, large audiences and lecture about the organs.
The organs were then placed in buckets and passed around
the crowd. The medical students at the time had to
be able to identify the organs by site such touch
and taste. The taste was because if you stuck your
hand into someone and touched an organ without seeing it,
(30:26):
you had to be able to identify it. The Anatomical Theater,
which is still standing today, helped modernize Swedish medical practices,
and it was all due to the fact that Rudbeck
had been sponsored by Queen Christina in the first place.
And then she suggests maybe doing an episode on him.
So thank you so much, Kathleen for sending that letter.
(30:48):
I always love hearing additional aspects of things that we've
talked about in episodes but didn't get time to delve
into or did not discover in our own research. And somehow,
as much as I get sensitive to the deaths of things,
like once you get into the medical stuff of like
analyzing it, i'd lose my my weird emotional part and
(31:09):
I just become fascinated well, and to be honest, I
often will pick the email to be read, and then
between when I pick it and when I actually read
it an hour and a half later, I have forgotten
its contents. So this is why it's not the first
time that I've said, oh, there's none of this in
this email. Oh wait there, Uh, it's because I'm getting old.
(31:31):
If you would like to write to us, we're a
history podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also
on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history
and on Twitter at missed in History. Our tumbler is
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're on
Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed in History. We
have a spread shirt store we can buy all kinds
of stuff with our logo on it. It is missed
(31:51):
in History dot spreadshirt dot com. And if you would
like to learn more about what we've talked about today,
you can come to our parent company's website, which is
how stuffworks dot com. Put the word I did a
ride into the search bar and you will find how
the I did a rode works. You can also come
to our website, which is missed in history dot com
to find show notes for all of the episodes. Holly
and I have done an archive of all of our
(32:13):
episodes and other cool stuff, so you can do all
that and a whole lot more at how stuff works
dot com or missed in history dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has
to have works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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