Scarlet Fever

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. So some
of my friends kids got scarlet fever late last year,

(00:21):
and their response to this was kind of like, what
is this the nineteenth century? And I remember having a
really similar feeling when I got scarlet fever as a
kid back in the nineteen eighties, because I really associated
scarlet fever with old timey children's books to me, like
The Velveteen Rabbit and Little Women, and this sort of

(00:44):
response to scarlet fever of like, what century is it
that's not unique to me or my friends. When I
started working on this episode, the very initial research just
turned up a ton of news articles going back many years,
all of them reporting on scarlet fever outbreaks, and all
of this with a tone of like the return of

(01:06):
an old disease. Um They all made it sound like
this was like a unique thing, and it was really
just year after year after year, a new headline of
a new scarlet fever outbreak with a new like an
old disease has returned. So scarlet fever is caused by
Group A Streptococcus, and over the last few months there's

(01:27):
been a big spike in Group A Strep infections in
many parts of the world, sometimes causing relatively minor illnesses,
but also sometimes much more dangerous and even deadly invasive infections,
usually in places where people have prompt access to medical care.
Scarlet fever specifically is pretty treatable with antibiotics, but in

(01:51):
the middle of the nineteenth century it was the leading
cause of death in children in some parts of the world.
A lot of times antibiotic get the credit from turning
that trend around, but it wasn't just because of antibiotics,
which is one of several kind of mysteries about this disease.
Scarlet fever usually starts with symptoms like a fever, sore throat, headache,

(02:14):
and sometimes nausea or vomiting. A rash usually forms a
day or two after the fever starts. The appearance and
texture of this rash can vary based on a person's
skin color. At least in the US and Europe, most
descriptions and pictures of this are of white children and
people with lighter skin. The rash is red and bumpy

(02:34):
and often has this texture that's described as sand papery.
In people with brown or black skin, the rash is
often the same color as the skin or slightly darker,
and while it's usually still raised in bumpy, it sometimes
doesn't have quite the same texture. Scarlet fever can also
cause something called strawberry tone that's a white coating that

(02:55):
can progress to a red, bumpy appearance. If you google this,
which I'm not necessarily recommending that you do, it's obvious
why they call it that. If left untreated, scarlet fever
and other strep infections can cause some really serious complications,
including organ damage and an inflammatory disease called rheumatic fever.

(03:16):
There's also a possible connection between strap infections and autoimmune
disease and neurological disorders and children. And again, they're also
invasive strep infections that themselves can be like really dangerous.
Streptococcus bacteria can cause a wide range of diseases, and
while strep is believed to have been one of the
most frequent causes of infectious diseases in prehistoric times, it's

(03:40):
not clear when exactly it started causing scarlet fever. This
is because strep only causes scarlet fever when it's been
infected with a bacteria phage. That's a virus that infects bacteria.
The bacteria phage causes the bacteria to produce a toxin,
and scarlet fever is the body's response to that toxin.
It's likely that there were strains of Streptococcus present in

(04:02):
much of the world prior to the fifteenth century, but
that scarlet fever specifically was introduced to some places during colonization,
including the America's, Australia and New Zealand. Scarlet fever is
most common in children, and there are just a lot
of childhood diseases that can cause similar symptoms, so a

(04:23):
lot of the time it's not really possible to tell
whether an early medical text or other writing is referencing
scarlet fever or some other disease that causes some combination
of like a fever, sore throat, rash, and other symptoms.
There are references to various childhood fevers and rashes and
medical texts from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia

(04:43):
going all the way back to Hippocrates and the fourth
century BC. We don't really have a way of knowing
whether any of them were talking about scarlet fever, or
even if scarlet fever really existed. Yet, accounts describing scarlet
fever as a distinct illness started to develop in the
sixteenth century. Jovanni Philippo Ingrassias was a physician born in Sicily,

(05:06):
and in fifteen fifty three he described an illness that
he called rosalia. He specified that this was not the
same thing as chicken pox or measles, and that it
involved quote numerous spots, large and small, fiery and red
of universal distribution, so that the whole body appeared to
be on fire. In fifteen sixty five, Dutch physician Johann

(05:29):
Bayer described something similar and added another detail, which was
a severe sore throat. Then, in fifteen seventy eight, Jehan
Cottier of Foatier described an illness causing quote general weariness, headache,
redness of the eyes, sore throat, and fever. Pepura appeared
on the second or third day, accompanied by delirium and

(05:50):
soreness of the throat. Purpura is a rash that's caused
by the breaking of small blood vessels underneath the skin.
In sixteen thirty five, German physician Daniel Center described an
epidemic in Wittenberg in which the skin later desquamated or peeled,
something that often happens in cases of scarlet fever. Center

(06:10):
also described other complications that can follow scarlet fever, including
a dem up fluid in the abdomen and arthritis. Scarlet
fever was showing up in writings outside of the medical
world as well. Samuel Peeps, who comes up so often
on the show when we're talking about this period of history,
wrote this in his diary on November tenth, sixteen sixty four.

(06:32):
Quote my little girly Susan is falling sick of the
measles we fear or at least of a scarlet fever.
This seemed to pass pretty quickly. The next day he wrote, quote,
our little girl is better than she was yesterday. Scarlet
Fever as a term was in common use in English
at this point, as was the name scarlett tina. The

(06:52):
first use of the term scarlettina in medical literature is
believed to be in sixteen seventy four. English physician Amas
Sydenham wrote Medical Observations on the History and Treatment of
Acute Diseases, which was published in Latin, and in it
he described febro scarlatina. This way, quote, Scarlet fever may

(07:13):
appear at any season. Nevertheless, it often breaks out towards
the end of summer, when it attacks whole families at once,
and more especially the infant part of them. The patient
feel rigors and shivering, just as they do in other fevers.
The symptoms, however, are moderate. Afterwards, however, the whole skin
becomes covered with small red maculae thicker than those of measles,

(07:37):
as well as broader and redder and less uniform. These
last for two or three days and then disappear. The
cuticle peels off and branny scales remain lying on the
surface like meal. They appear and disappear two or three times.
This was before the development of the germ theory of disease,

(07:57):
and Sydenham believed that this was caused by quote a
moderate effervescence of the blood, arising from the heat of
the preceding summer or from some other exciting cause. This
made him cautious of using blood letting or enemas to
treat the patient, which is something that would have happened
with other illnesses. He believed that the blood needed to

(08:18):
be left to its own regulation in cases of scarlet fever,
and that blood letting or animals could introduce particles into
the blood that were harmful to it. Instead, he said
it was quote sufficient for the patient to abstain wholly
from animal food and from fermented liquors, to keep always indoors,
and not to keep always in his bed. When the

(08:40):
desclamation is complete, and when the symptoms are departing, I
consider it proper to purge the patient with some mild
laxative accommodated to his age and strength. So at the
same time, he noted that if a child experienced seizures
or a coma, then they needed to be treated immediately
with a blister on the back of the neck and
a dose of opium tincture. Sydenham recommended repeating this every

(09:04):
night until the patient had recovered, and feeding them diluted milk,
but again not animal food. So these descriptions of this
illness don't sound really pleasant, and both Sydenham and Centered
described complications and more serious cases. But like none of
this sounds nearly as frightening as scarlet fever became in

(09:24):
the nineteenth century. Samuel Peeps made it sound like scarlet
fever was like a lesser illness than measles would have been.
Became much worse later on, and we'll get to that
after a sponsor break Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

(09:48):
scarlet fever epidemics occurred regularly in Europe, with the disease
often striking a particular place every four to six years.
That same general pattern seems to have been pres than
in other places. Also in the twenties and thirties, though,
the number of scarlet fever cases really started to rise
in a lot of places, and so did their severity.

(10:11):
There are several possible explanations for why, and it's possible
that all of them played some kind of role. Nineteenth
Century urbanization led to more people living in closer quarters,
often without sufficient facilities for hygiene, which made it easier
for a contagious illness like scarlet fever to spread, but

(10:31):
that can't account for everything, since scarlet fever cases started
increasing before this trend really started to escalate. Some researchers
have found a correlation between scarlet fever and wheat prices.
When wheat prices rose, there was an increase in scarlet
fever three years later, as though malnutrition during pregnancy might

(10:52):
make children more susceptible to it. This is a correlation,
though it's not necessarily a cause and effect situation, and
it is also possible that a more virulent form of
the disease evolved, which allowed it to spread more easily
and cause wars illnesses. Scarlet fever was also introduced into
parts of the world that had never encountered it before

(11:13):
during the nineteenth century. The first case of scarlet fever
and the Archipelago of Madeira, was reported in eighteen o six.
They reached South America in eighteen twenty nine, Greenland in
eighteen forty seven, and both Australia and New Zealand in
eighteen forty eight. Although scarlet fever had been reported in
the northeastern United States for centuries, the first case reported

(11:36):
in California wasn't until eighteen forty nine. Some sources will
describe the nineteenth century spread of scarlet fever as a pandemic,
stretching from about eighteen twenty five to eighteen eighty five.
Death rates could really vary from place to place and
from one outbreak to the next. In places that had
no experience with scarlet fever, The mortality rate was often

(11:59):
particular really high. As we said a moment ago, the
first cases reported in New Zealand were in eighty eight,
and in Auckland that year, one out of every eight
people who contracted scarlet fever died. The vast majority of
cases and deaths were in children between the ages of
two and ten, and no one over the age of
forty seemed to catch it at all. The worst cases

(12:21):
seemed to be encrowded or badly ventilated homes. There's not
a ton of exact data, though, especially in the earlier
decades of the eighteen hundreds, a lot of places didn't
have formal departments of health or public health services. Widespread
outbreaks of scarlet fever and other contagious diseases were part
of the motivation for those to be established. In some places,

(12:45):
there were laws in place to try to control the
spread of infectious diseases, and a lot of those laws
traced back to things like the Black Death of the
fourteenth century. But a lot of the time there just
wasn't a more systematic tracking of diseases and they're spread. However,
it's generally agreed that by eighteen forty, scarlet fever was

(13:06):
a leading cause of childhood death in the United States
and parts of Europe, possibly the leading cause of death
and children during widespread outbreaks throughout the nineteenth century, scarlet
fever was terrifying. Communities often used isolation and quarantine to
try to control the diseases spread, along with things like

(13:27):
canceling school and public gatherings, recommending the deletion and disinfection procedures,
and urging people to keep children at home and away
from other people, especially other children. The increasing spread of
scarlet fever also led to researchers learning more about it.
English physician Richard Bright made the connection between streptococcus infections

(13:50):
and kidney disease in eighteen thirty six. Bright was one
of the first people to describe nephritis or kidney inflammation,
which came to be known as Bright's disease, and he
wrote of it, quote Scarlatina has apparently laid the foundation
for the future mischief, so Scarlatina later causing nephritis, although

(14:10):
his next sentence went on to say, quote exertion and
childish plays has done the same. So some questions about
don't let your kids play too hard? Yeah, they might
have kidney disease. Later, although people didn't know exactly what
caused scarlet fever yet, they did know that it spread
easily from person to person, so much so that people

(14:32):
thought that the disease could linger on things like clothing, bedding,
and toys for a long period of time. And in
eighteen sixty seven, Dr Michael Taylor, who was a local
physician in northwestern England, connected a scarlet fever outbreak to milk.
At this point, Louis Pester had done groundbreaking work on
what would come to be known as pasteurization, but he

(14:54):
was doing this work in the context of fermentation, the
idea that milk should be pasteurized that was still decades away.
Taylor knew about the work of Dr John Snow, who
had identified a water pump as the source of a
cholera outbreak in eighteen fifty four. Taylor had thought that
if water could carry a disease, then surely milk could

(15:16):
as well, and he had later traced a typhoid outbreak
to contaminated milk. In eighteen sixty seven, people started reporting
cases of scarlet fever in and around the town of Penrith,
which had not seen a case of scarlet fever in
more than a year. It turned out that the people
who got sick had all bought milk from the same

(15:37):
milk dealer whose child had gotten scarlet fever and died.
In eighteen seventy four, Theodore bill Roth of Austria identified
and named the Streptococcus bacterium, which he had found in
infected wounds and in a case of a skin infection
called arisipelas. He had observed quote small organisms as found

(15:58):
in either isolated or arranged pairs, sometimes in chains, and
he named them for the Greek terms strepto or chain,
and caucus or berry. Five years later, Louis Pester isolated
the same organism in the uterus and bloodstream of a
number of patients with child bed fever. Then, in eighteen

(16:18):
eighty four, microbiologists Friedrich Julius Rosenbach refined the organism's name
to Streptococcus pyogenes, with pyogenes from Greek words meaning pus forming.
It did not take long for the connection to be
made between Streptococcus pyogenes and scarlet fever. In eighteen eighty seven,

(16:39):
Dr Emmanuel Klan published a report in the Proceedings of
the Royal Society of London, saying that he had identified
the Streptococcus organism in both people with acute scarletina in
London and cows at a milk farm in Hendon, so
he believed that the milk from the Hendon farm had
caused the scarlet fever outbreak in London. This report was

(17:02):
the result of years of work. Klein was a bacteriologist
who had been born in Hungary and studied in Austria
before moving to England to work as a researcher at
the Brown Institution of the University of London. His scarlet
fever research had included post mortem examinations of children who
had died of it, and he had spotted similar pathological

(17:23):
changes in cows that he examined at the Hendon farm.
This wasn't just a matter of observing the similarities in
the sick cows and the sick children. He followed the
criteria that at that point had been outlined by Robert Coke,
now known as Coke's postulates, to show that the same
bacteria were causing both the illness and the cows, and

(17:45):
in the people who had drank their milk. He also
had shown that the bacteria he cultured from the sick
cows could grow and survive and basically thrive in milk.
He called this organism Micrococcus scarlet tena. Although it was
indistinguishable from the one previously named Streptococcus pogenes. This was

(18:07):
an important discovery, although he was using a different name
for it. Klein was the first person to connect Streptococcus
pyogenes to scarlet fever, but his results were not widely accepted.
Since Michael Taylor's discovery in eighteen sixty seven, there had
been other scarlet fever outbreaks traced to milk, and most
of the time milk from the affected dairy had been destroyed,

(18:31):
but most people had thought these outbreaks had a human source,
like a child who lived on the farm, or a
dairy worker, or a delivery worker who had cared for
a child with scarlet fever, or someone who had it themselves.
Taylor had showed that the cows could carry the disease,
which could mean that destroying the milk was not enough
to stop an outbreak, that the cows themselves might have

(18:53):
to be culled. Destroying potentially contaminated milk was a financial
hardship for dairy farm but destroying their cows was far worse,
and people resisted the idea that cows could be a
source of infection. Although a few people had tried applying
Louis Pasteur's heat treatment process to milk, almost twenty more

(19:14):
years passed before German agricultural chemists Franz Vum Suckslet suggested
that milk be routinely treated with pasteurization, and a big
reason for that was that so many diseases were being
transmitted through milk, not just scarlet fever, but also typhoid,
diphtherory a, tuberculosis, and various gastro intestinal illnesses. It still

(19:37):
took a while for pasteurization to catch on, though there
were concerns that pasteurizing milk destroyed the nutrients in it,
or affected the flavor, or made it harder to digest.
But by that point, scarlet fever rates were on the decline,
and we'll talk more about that after a sponsor break.

(20:03):
Although the number of scarlet fever cases was declining at
the end of the nineteenth century and the disease didn't
seem to be as deadly as it had been in
the early twentieth century, it was still seen as a
major public health concern. In England. For example, isolation hospitals
were established for people with contagious illnesses who could not

(20:24):
effectively be isolated at home. During outbreaks of scarlet fever,
there could be house to house visits to find sick
people so they could be isolated in the hospital. Unfortunately,
it is really not clear how much or whether this
really helped slow the spread of the disease. And also
people with different contagious diseases were all being housed in

(20:45):
the same hospitals, and the sled people to say that
the isolation hospital was where you went when you caught
one disease, so that you could come out with all
the rest. Welcome to Petri dish Arms. You'll get a
bed at probably seven different things. It's no good. Other
efforts to control the spread of scarlet fever also did

(21:08):
not help. A nineteen fifteen article in the American Journal
of Nursing described it this way quote, it seems to
cling to whatever object it encounters. In no other disease
has the infection been apparently conveyed with such frequency by
objects which have come in contact with those ill as clothes, books, toys,
and the like. This article recommended that quote all hangings, carpets,

(21:31):
and upholstered furniture are to be taken from the room
before the patient is brought in. The furniture left should
be of a kind readily cleansed. There should be no
such fancied attempts at purifying the air as by hanging
up sheets wet with disinfectants. Such measures are not only
useless but tend to give a false sense of security.

(21:51):
Needless to say, the patients should be provided with bedclothing,
nightgown towels, eating utensils, and drinking vessels for his ex
elusive use. Yeah, that's it. Is no longer believed that
scarlet fever is just transmitted readily and for a long
period of time, and things like curtains. Uh. This article

(22:12):
also recommended disinfecting anything that the sick person had used
using either a five percent solution of carbolic acid or
a two percent solution of creosol, and anything that had
been used for coughing or sneezing into was to be burned. Also,
the recommended treatment for patients themselves was at least three
weeks in bed, even if they only had a mild case.

(22:36):
Around this same time, people were making more discoveries about
scarlet fever, something that really escalated during the nineteen teens
and twenties. In nineteen fifteen, English bacteriologist Frederick William Twart
and his brother were using colonies of bacteria as part
of an effort to find a way to grow smallpox
vaccine in a lab. Towart discovered areas where the bacteria

(22:58):
couldn't grow and found that a substance from these areas
was capable of passing through a porcelain filter that trapped
most bacteria. He published an article in The Lancet about
what he described as a filter passing virus that attacked bacteria.
His work didn't get a lot of attention, but this
was the first known description of a bacteria phage. French

(23:20):
microbiologist Felix Derell made the same discovery independently of tort
about two years later. In the nineteen twenties, husband and
wife researchers George and Gladys Dick made a series of
discoveries about scarlet fever and its cause. While working in Chicago.
They confirmed the link between the disease and Streptococcus bacteria,

(23:42):
and they identified a toxin produced by the bacteria that
was the cause of scarlet fever. They also developed a
skin test known as the Dick test to show whether
a person was susceptible to scarlet fever or not. They
were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the
sore in ninety five. In ninety six and ninety seven,

(24:05):
two different pairs of researchers discovered a bacteria phage that
could change a non toxogenic strain of Strep into a
toxogenic one. In other words, to turn a variety of Strep.
That did not cause scarlet fever into one that did.
Various researchers started trying to develop an inoculation for scarlet
fever using either the bacteria or various modifications of the

(24:28):
toxin that it produced. In nine, American microbiologist Rebecca craig
Hill Lancefield developed a system for classifying Strep. Bacteria into
groups based on the antigens found on the bacteria. Initially,
she proposed two groups, the group A and Group B.
As we said earlier, scarlet fever is group A. Today

(24:49):
there are many more groups. She was also one of
the first people to demonstrate that Strep. Infections could lead
to rheumatic fever. The first sulfa drugs were developed in
the nineteen thirties, and we're used as a treatment for
strep infections, including scarlet fever. But the big medical breakthrough
was penicillin. We did a whole episode on penicillin's development

(25:12):
back in September. Today, penicillin and amoxicillin are the antibiotics
most often used to treat scarlet fever, with other antibiotics
recommended for people who are allergic to those. Today, in
most children, scarlet fever clears up quickly as long as
antibiotic treatment begins promptly. Yeah, that made the myxicillen shortages

(25:33):
that were happening at the end of last year in
a lot of places particularly scary for folks. So penicillin
is often credited with turning scarlet fever from a terrifying
and deadly disease to one that's considered to be a
relatively mild childhood illness most of the time. As we
said earlier, though deaths from scarlet fever were becoming less

(25:54):
and less common decades before penicillin was introduced. We don't
totally know why. Starting in the nineteen eighties, though, the
opposite started to happen, as invasive strep infections started to
become more common in spite of the existence of antibiotics
to treat them. Scarlet fever specifically started to become more

(26:15):
prevalent in a lot of parts of the world starting
in about two thousand and eight. Increased rates of scarlet
fever were first reported in parts of Asia, and then
in the UK and other parts of Europe, and then
in the US. The UK, for example, saw a sudden
spike in scarlet fever cases starting in twenty and soon
the rate of scarlet fever was higher there than it

(26:37):
had been in almost fifty years. At first, it seemed
like this wasn't leading to a similar increase in fatalities,
but a year later invasive strep infections started to increase
there as well. Worldwide, there was a fivefold increase in
the number of scarlet fever cases between twenty eleven and
with a drop in twenty after the start of the

(26:59):
COVID nineteen pandemic and a lot of places, the general
trend of when scarlet fever cases are the highest was
like sort of nearing its end when the COVID nineteen
pandemic really started. Although health officials thought there might be
some more dangerous strain of Strep bacteria that was causing

(27:20):
this increase, some whole genome sequencing of samples from a
lot of different sick children found that there was not
one strain that was responsible for most of the illnesses.
Some researchers have suggested that the bacteria may have started
producing a more aggressive form of the toxin that causes
the disease. It's also not clear what has caused this

(27:40):
most recent spike in scarlet fever cases that started towards
the end of in the northern hemisphere. Scarlet fever cases
usually peak in the late winter or early spring, so
this outbreak happened out of season. At this point, this
is all really speculative, with some of those speculations being
more based less than others, like the measures put in

(28:02):
place to try to control the spread of the COVID
nineteen pandemic lead to people not being exposed to other diseases.
It's also possible that kids who might have gotten strip
or scarlet fever over the last couple of years didn't
and are instead just getting it now. But there have
also been totally baseless claims pointing to either COVID nineteen

(28:22):
vaccines or the flu vaccine is somehow causing a rise
in strep infections. There is no credible evidence for either.
They were not doctors, so we cannot possibly comment on
every conceivable thing that has been postulated about the spike
and scarlet fever cases. Like it does seem possible that
it is an extension of the spike that was happening

(28:45):
before the pandemic started, that kind of paused during the
pandemic peak when so many places were taking a lot
of mitigation measures. As we said at the top of
the show, though a lot of folks experience with scarlet
fever is not from their own illnes us or the
illness of their children. It's literature. So we'll close out
with just a few of the most famous examples. First,

(29:07):
there is Little Women by L. M. Alcott, in which
Beth gets scarlet fever and is extremely sick. She dies
years later, and while the book doesn't give a specific cause,
it's usually interpreted that she had developed rheumatic fever after
that scarlet fever case. Alcott's real life sister, Elizabeth Sewell Alcott,

(29:27):
died at the age of twenty two, two years after
having had scarlet fever, and then Alcott published Little Women
ten years later in eighteen sixty eight. Another past podcast
subject with a scarlet fever connection is Laura Ingalls Wilder,
whose real sister Mary became blind after what the family
described as brain fever, probably some form of meningitis or encephalitis.

(29:51):
In the book The Shores of Silver Lake, set in
eighteen seventy nine, the fictional version of Mary becomes blind
after she and the rest of the family contracts scarlet fever.
And yet another example that incorporates both fiction and reality.
Several of the von Trapp family contracted scarlet fever in
the early nineteen twenties, and their mother, Agatha, contracted it

(30:13):
while caring for them and died in nineteen twenty two.
This led to a young woman named Maria being hired
from a convent to work as a tutor with the
convalescing children, and the family later became a performing group
called the trap Family Singers, that, of course inspired the
musical The Sound of Music. Lastly, of course, there's The

(30:33):
Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real by Marjorie Williams,
which was published in nineteen two, and in this book,
a little boy gets a velveteen rabbit as a Christmas present,
and then there's a whole story about how nursery magic
can make a toy real through the strength of a
child's love. This little boy then gets scarlet fever and
it's very sick for a long time, and once he's better,

(30:54):
there's a plan to take him to the seaside while
his room is disinfected, and all of his toys and
books and everything he has played with is going to
be burned, which, as we talked about it is a
real thing that people would do. So the doctor then
describes the velveteen rabbit as quote, a mass of scarlet
fever germs. Fortunately, the nursery magic fairy appears and makes

(31:16):
the velveteen rabbit real, so he is not burned. But honestly,
this story is kind of horrifying. It's the meanest thing ever.
I remembered it being sad from like my own childhood,
Like I remembered feeling sad about it. And I'm pretty
sure I have like a copy of the book with
its original illustrations and all that, like in the house somewhere,
but I read it at my desk while working on

(31:40):
this episode, and I mean maybe it was my emotional
state that there was a lot of just weeping over
this story, and I was like, why did they give
this to children? I will tell you a velveteen rabbit
story on Friday. Okay, that'll be great. We can talk

(32:00):
more about our literature experiences with scarlet fever. So if
anybody's kids have had scarlet fever, I hope everybody has
recovered nicely and you were able to find some of moscilling,
because I know that was tough for a while. Um,
and now I have some listener mail. This listener mail
is from Aaron, and Aaron wrote hello ladies while I

(32:21):
typically and went to skip out before listener emails. I
was at work the other day and happens to catch
your correction about the Marx Brothers versus the Three Stooges.
Imagine my surprise and delight at your defense of the
Stooges as I was currently restocking the gift shop at
the only Three Stooges museum in the country. The Stoogeum
located just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When people find out

(32:44):
where I work, they are usually astonished that such a
place exists and are intrigued to find out more. We
house the largest collection of stooge Bilia or maybe stooge
abilia in the world, where there were three floors, ten
thousand square feet exhibit space and well over ten thousand
items on display. This doesn't even include our research library,

(33:06):
photo and document archives, film vault in additional storage spaces
for objects not on display. I was so touched when
Tracy talked about the students having intelligence and meaning behind
all the slapstick. I'm gonna pause the conversation and say,
I want to credit Holly for being part of that
conversation too and bringing nuance I had and necessarily thought about.

(33:27):
Uh so, And then the email goes on to say,
because that is what my coworker and I try to
express when educating the public about our collection. Not only
were the three Stooges, in their various iterations, masters of
comedic timing and among the hardest working entertainers of their day,
They're over fifty year career can stand as a microcosm
of the modern entertainment industry, from vaudeville through early films,

(33:49):
the studio system in the dawn of television to the
start of marketing to children and onward. The Stooges were
never looked on with much respect, but I think that
their lives and careers fast dating one and would be
a great podcast subject. There's even a bit of scandal.
Did Stooge founder Ted Healy get murdered? The jury is
still out on that one. Just a quick plug in

(34:10):
the museum and its founder Gary lassen Or in the
process of publishing a book about the stooges lengthy touring
career called A Tour de Farce, which is a great title.
It chronicles forty years and thousands of three Stooges live
appearances throughout the US and abroad, and contains never before
seeing photos and stories. Thanks for granting me that little boost,

(34:31):
and if you guys are ever interested in doing a
podcast about the Stooges, feel free to reach out. We
love to help with research. Thanks again for your defense
of who we affectionately call the boys in Stooge. We
trust Aaron ps. We get emails all the time of
people mixing up the Marx Brothers and the Stooges. Someone
even tried to donate a picture of the Marx Brothers
to our collection once I found this email. Very delightful obviously, um,

(34:58):
and I also will reiterate I feel like, based on
my limited experience, that a lot of people, whether confusion
or misremembering or whatever, uh, mix up the Marx Brothers
and the Three Stooges, and that Three Stooges folks seem
to have a lot more humor about this than Marx

(35:18):
Brothers folks do. Um. That is just my impression based
on emails and looking at stuff on the internet. So
thank you so much. I did not know that museum existed.
I've been to Philadelphia a couple of times. Not sure
exactly how far outside of Philadelphia it is, but man,
I'm glad to know that's a thing. Yeah. Same, It
just went on my list of places I must visit.

(35:39):
Yeah yeah. So, if you would like to send us
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that I heart radio dot com and we're all over
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(36:03):
production of I Heart Radio For more podcasts from I
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