Six Impossible Episodes: Listener Requests III

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey E. V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It's time for six Impossible Episodes.
This is when I round up six topics that, for

(00:21):
one reason or another, they don't really work as a
full episode. Sometimes it's just a lack of information. We
will not know a ton about a particular person or thing.
For two of today's topics, we do have quite a
bit of information, but a lot of that is visual.
This is an audio podcast, we would be describing visual

(00:43):
things at length, and I don't think that would work
out very well for what we do. This is actually
our third installment of six Impossible Episodes that has been
devoted entirely to listener requests, and I've been hanging on
to a lot of these requests for months years. So
first up, from listener Tina, we have Nellie Cashman. Nellie

(01:06):
Cashman was born to a Catholic family in Ireland in
eighteen forty four or eighteen forty five. Her parents were
Patrick and Fanny o'cassane. Their family name was anglicized at
some point later on and she was christened with the
name Ellen. It might be possible to do a whole
episode about her because there is a lot of information

(01:27):
available about her life, but some of what's around is
really contradictory or possibly apocryphal. Her life also followed a
pattern as she moved from place to place, so parts
of it would start to really feel a bit repetitive.
Nellie was born right at the start of the Great
Famine in Ireland. We have a two part episode on

(01:49):
this that came out in twenty thirteen. But essentially a
lot of people in Ireland were tenant farmers and they
were subsisting mostly on potatoes, as in getting about eighty
percent of their daily calories from their potato crops. Anything
else they grew or raised was to sell, not to eat.

(02:10):
Starting in eighteen forty five, a blight killed the potato
crop and that went on multiple years in a row,
leaving these farmers and their families without their biggest food source.
The British government was also in control of Ireland and
took a very lais a fair approach to the situation,
and also continued to export those other foods which might

(02:33):
have been used to help people make up for the
loss of their potato crop. This was a catastrophe. More
than a million people died of hunger or disease because
of it. The famine also led to a huge wave
of emigration out of Ireland, including Nelly's family. She, her mother,
and her sister Fanny, were in Boston by about eighteen fifty.

(02:57):
From there they went to San Francisco, where Fans and
he later married another Irish immigrant named Tom Cunningham. After
Fanny's death in eighteen eighty four, Nellie took over the
care of Fanny's five children. As far as we know,
Nellie herself never got married. Much later, on the Phoenix Daily,
Harold carried a report that she was going to marry

(03:19):
a man named Mike Sullivan, but there's no record anywhere
else of this person or of a marriage between them.
A couple of sources used in this episode quote her
as saying that she did not have time for marriage,
and that quote men are a nuisance anyhow, now, aren't
they They're just little boys grown up as quotable a

(03:42):
quote as that is. Neither of the sources that included
it cited where this might have come from, and my
attempts to find it in newspapers of the day were unsuccessful.
By eighteen seventy two, Nellie was making her living by
following discoveries of silver and gold, opening boarding houses and restaurants,
and provisioning and providing loans to people who hoped to

(04:06):
strike it rich. Also known as grubstaking. Nellie also staked
mining claims of her own in some of the places
where she lived, going out into remote areas in sturdy
boots and trousers. It's much easier to find newspaper quotes
of her describing the uselessness of skirts while doing this
kind of work, but surviving portraits of her generally show

(04:28):
her in the long skirts that were common for women
of the day. Yeah, this is where she had the
similar pattern as she moved from place to place, She'd
follow the gold or silver strike, stay there until it
started to be played out, and then move on to
the next thing. Gold and silver Russias took her so
many places. There was pH Nevada, Cassiir in Northern British Columbia, Canada, Tombstone, Arizona, Kingston,

(04:54):
New Mexico, various parts of Alaska and Canada. During the
Klondike gold Rush, he was a successful business woman and
sometimes also a successful prospector and minor, and sometimes she
was one of the only women in the area where
she was living. Her business and mining successes funded an
array of religious and charitable efforts in the various places

(05:15):
where she lived. Nellie was a devout Catholic, and among
other things, she raised funds for Tombstone's first Catholic church
and a Catholic church and hospital in Alaska, and sometimes
she went to extreme efforts to help other people, like
over the winter of eighteen seventy four to eighteen seventy five,
she heard that miners who had decided to stay in

(05:37):
the Cassier Mountains rather than coming back to town were
starving and that they had started to develop scurvy. She
undertook a mission to take fresh vegetables and potatoes, which
contained vitamin C, to those stranded miners. Some of the
descriptions of this make it sound like she was the
one making the financial and logistical arrangements, but others she

(06:00):
undertook the mission herself when troops from the Canadian Army refused.
In this version, when the snow was too deep to
traverse with sled dogs, she and a group of men
she'd recruited, put on snow shoes and pulled the sleds themselves.
At one point during this journey, she was buried in
an avalanche in the night. After weeks of travel, she

(06:22):
successfully made it to the miners, who reportedly all survived
thanks to her efforts, and then afterwards she was known
as the Angel of the Kafar Mountains. Cashman's charitable efforts
also took her to places that other people simply would
not go. For example, in eighteen eighty three, six men
carried out a robbery in Bisbee, Arizona, during which they

(06:44):
killed five people. Afterward, one of the robbers was lynched
and the others were scheduled for a mass hanging. Cashman
seems to have been one of a very few people
who thought they deserved to be treated humanly, even after
having committed a heinous crime. She visited them in jail
and acted as their confessor and their spiritual counselor. When

(07:05):
she learned that local businessmen were building a grandstand for
the public to watch the hanging, she was appalled. She
hired some men to tear down the grandstand in the
middle of the night before the hanging. Took place on
August thirteenth, nineteen twelve. Cashman became the first woman known
to vote in Alaska. That was a year before non

(07:27):
indigenous women were legally given the right to do so there,
and we don't really know whether she knew that her
vote was actually illegal at the time. Nellie Cashman spent
much of the last years of her life in the
northern parts of Alaska and western Canada. In addition to mining,
she had a team of sled dogs, and at one
point she set a record as a mucher. She died

(07:49):
in Victoria, British Columbia, on January fourth, nineteen twenty five,
at the age of about eighty, at a hospital that
she had helped to fund. In nineteen ninety four, she
was featured on a US postage stamp in a series
called Legends of the West. In twenty fourteen, a monument
was erected in her honor in Middleton, Ireland. Moving on

(08:12):
from Nellie Cashman, next we have Ella of Salisbury, requested
by Josiah. The exact year of her birth is unclear,
but her parents were William, second Earl of Salisbury and
his wife Eleanor de Vitree. William died in eleven ninety six,
and most sources say that Ella was around nine years

(08:33):
old when this happened. Ella was her father's only heir,
and after his death she was considered a ward of
King Richard the First, but then she disappeared. Like a
lot of things about Ella's life, the circumstances around this
are vague, but it seems that she was taken to
Normandy and hidden there, possibly with her mother and possibly

(08:55):
sheltered by her mother's family. The two main possibilities for
what was going on here or that someone was imprisoning
her to try to get at her wealth, or that
someone was hiding her to protect her from that same thing.
A knight named William Talbot disguised himself as a pilgrim
to go to Normandy and retrieve Ella. He spent about

(09:17):
two years looking for her, finally found her and took
her back to the king. After this, Talbot became one
of the Salisbury family retainers. Eventually, Ella was married to
William Longspy, illegitimate son of King Henry the Second and
half brother to King's Richard and his successor, John Lackland.
William became the third Earl of Salisbury through this marriage,

(09:40):
which was probably arranged while Ella was still a child,
but not performed until she had come of age. Ella
and William had at least six children together. Some sources
say four sons and two daughters, others say four and four.
We know very little about her marriage or her family life,
but we do know that she and her husband laid

(10:02):
some of the foundation stones for the Salisbury Cathedral when
construction began in twelve twenty. Her husband, William, was part
of various military campaigns on behalf of the king, and
at one point he was believed to have been lost
at sea. Another man came and tried to marry Ella,
but she refused him. William then did die at Salisbury

(10:24):
Castle on March seventh, twelve twenty sixth, and he was
buried in the cathedral. It is possible that he had
been poisoned by one of his enemies. His tomb was
reportedly opened in the late eighteenth century and the body
of a rat was found inside his skull that showed
evidence of arsenic poisoning. I love that imagery as much

(10:48):
as I hate anybody to be poisoned with arsnik. After
her husband's death, Ella was Countess of Salisbury in her
own right. She never remarried, which some sources attribute to
her devotion to her late husband. Others suggest that she
wanted her oldest son to become the Earl of Salisbury
and she knew that if she remarried that title would

(11:09):
pass instead to her husband. After being widowed, she had
to surrender Salisbury Castle, but otherwise she retained all of
her wealth and served as Sheriff of Wiltshire. Yeah A
lot of sources describe her as really like one of
the most powerful women in England in the thirteenth century.
In twelve thirty, she founded two monasteries in one day.

(11:32):
One was for the Carthusian Order and was known as
Hinton Charterhouse. Her husband had actually founded a charterhouse for
this religious community in Gloucestershire, but the monks had come
to Ella saying that this wasn't sufficient to their needs,
and then she resettled them on land that she controlled.
The other was a house of Augustinian Canonis's at Laycock, Wiltshire. Eventually,

(11:55):
Ella decided to pursue a life of religious devotion and
she gave up her her title enjoined this community herself.
In twelve thirty seven, when this became Laycock Abbey, she
became its first abbess, serving in that role for twenty
years and continuing to live there after retiring. She died
on August twenty fourth, twelve sixty one, and was buried

(12:17):
at the abbey she helped to establish. After the dissolution
of the monasteries, this church was demolished and her tomb
was moved to the abbey's cloisters. As I said earlier,
she was really an unusually powerful woman for the time
when she lived, and I do wish we knew more
about her, Like I want a fuller sense of who
she was as a person than we have from these

(12:39):
sketchy outlines. We're going to take us quick sponsor break
and come back with two more. Now we will move
on to two people who we have lots of information about,
but so much of that information is mostly visual. The

(13:03):
verst is Charles Harris, known as Teeny, which was requested
by Virginia. Teeny Harris was a photographer whose work forms
a tremendously important record of Pittsburgh's black community from the
nineteen thirties to the nineteen seventies. I think we may
have read a listener mail about him at some point,
maybe even the male that came from Virginia, because I

(13:25):
have a vague memory of really gushing over how beautiful
his photographs were, because they are truly stunning. Charles Harris
was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in nineteen oh eight. He
went to school until about the eighth grade and eventually
developed an interest in photography. He was mostly self taught,
and he became really good at it. His first professional

(13:48):
job as a photographer was at a black owned magazine
called Flash. After that, he became a photographer for the
Pittsburgh Courier, which was one of the United States major
black newspapers. He also had his own studio, Harris Studio
in Pittsburgh's Hill District, where he did portraits and other photography.
In spite of the fact that he had very little

(14:10):
formal training in photography, he earned the nickname one Shot
for how efficient he was at it. His enormous collection
of negatives, prints and other material is now part of
the collection at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
And when we say enormous, this is at least seventy
thousand images and there's a whole additional story behind this collection.

(14:34):
In nineteen eighty six, Harris signed an agreement with a
photo dealer named Dennis Morgan, who paid him three thousand
dollars and promised that he would also pay him royalties
on his work, and then Morgan took almost all of
Harris's archive. Shortly before his death, Harris filed suit to
try to get this archive back. He kept saying he

(14:56):
just wanted his negatives, but this case had not concluded
by the time Harris died, which was on June twelfth,
nineteen ninety eight, at the age of eighty nine. Eventually,
a jury ruled that Morgan had breached his contract with
Harris and ordered him to pay four point three million
dollars in actual and punitive damages. The Harris family ultimately

(15:19):
dropped their monetary claim so they could instead get Harris's archive,
which is what he had always wanted. The Carnegie Museum
purchased this collection in two thousand and one and started
the decades long process of conserving and preserving it. A
lot of this material had just been stored in a
basement without any sleeves around the negatives, so those negatives

(15:43):
had to be very carefully separated from one another before
they could be digitized. The very thought of that just
made my entire back like tents up. Today, those seventy
thousand images are available for browsing at the Carnegie Museum
of Art website. The Charles Teeny Harris Archive Gallery also

(16:03):
opened at the museum on November two of this year.
There are photos of life in predominantly black neighborhoods around
Pittsburgh and famous people of the day, including Ray, Charles,
Louis Armstrong, and Harry Belafonte. And there are self portraits
of Harris showing him as a very dapper and stylish
man today. One of teeny Harris's cameras is in the

(16:27):
collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History
and Culture. A historical marker was also placed outside of
the home where he used to live. That was in
September of this year, just a couple of months ago,
and some of his descendants were there at the ceremony.
Our other largely visual topic is Scottish knitter and writer

(16:48):
Jane Gagain requested by Anne. She was born Jane Allison
on March twenty sixth, eighteen oh four and was the
fifth of twelve children born to James Allison and Elizabeth
mc claren. James was a tailor and clothier and was
a Burgess of Edinburgh and contractor in ordinary to King
William the Fourth in Scotland. On November sixteenth, eighteen twenty three,

(17:12):
Jane married a merchant named John James Gogain. They went
on to have nine children together, although three of those
died in infancy. They lived in Edinburgh and they eventually
moved into lodgings that were above John James's warehouse. Jane
helped expand her husband's business into a thriving haberdashery firm
which brought in laces and other goods from France. They

(17:35):
made a couple of moves over the years as they
were able to afford bigger, better locations, and John James
also became a braid manufacturer. Eventually they expanded into selling
stationery and Jane started creating patterns. In the mid eighteen thirties.
When this was happening, hand knitting and crocheng were becoming

(17:55):
popular hobbies for middle and upper class women as well
as for royalty. The Gogain's shop in Edinburgh became a
really central location for this flourishing craft, Jane started making
custom patterns to order, printing her first three patterns in
eighteen thirty six. Soon she was expanding this into whole books,

(18:16):
starting with The Lady's Assistant for Executing Useful and fancy
Designs in Knitting, netting and crochet Work in eighteen forty.
She was hugely influential with these patterns. Among other things,
she devised a system of notations with abbreviations and figures
that was one of the precursors to what's used in

(18:38):
these kinds of patterns today. Jane Gogain's books were very successful.
She had lots of advanced subscribers, including Dowager Queen Adelaide,
wife of King William the Fourth. Her miniature Knitting, Netting
and Crochet book, which came out in eighteen forty three,
sold twenty three thousand copies in just three years. There

(19:00):
were also additional volumes of The Ladies Assistant and other
books included The Knitter's Friend, being a selection of receipts
for the most useful and saleable articles, Missus Gogain's Crochet
Doily Book, and Missus Gogain's Knit Polka Book. In her
introduction to The Knitter's Friend, Gogain wrote about how gratified
she was that her books had quote been the means

(19:22):
of affording a genteel and easy source of livelihood to
many industrious females, both in the humble and middle ranks
of life. You can find scans of a lot of
these books online today. Yeah, if we tried to read
the huge amount of information she left behind, we would
mostly be reading off knitting and crochet patterns. I also

(19:45):
want to point out that she spelled the word Douley
in her book titled d Apostrophe O y L E Y,
which led me to go look up the etymology of
Doiley because I was like, there has to be a
story for why this says that was named after a person.
So I'm not sure how she got to the d
apostrophe O, but I do love it. Ultimately, Jane's work

(20:06):
making these pattern books seems to have overshadowed her husband's businesses,
and they started to struggle. He was listed as bankrupt
at two different points in eighteen forty three and eighteen
fifty two. They eventually separated, and in eighteen forty nine
they signed an agreement specifying that she would keep all
the proceeds from the books and their copyrights. Apparently he

(20:30):
cut her out of his will. I have thoughts and feelings.
Jane Gagain died on May twentieth, eighteen sixty, reportedly of tuberculosis.
Her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes
her as living in a tenement with her two daughters.
Now the tenement doesn't have quite the same connotations of

(20:51):
poverty in Scotland as it does in the US. That
same entry lists her wealth at the time of her
death as eight hundred and twenty two pounds thirteen shillings
five and a half pence. The National Archives Historical Currency
Converter puts that as being worth a little more than
forty eight thousand pounds in twenty seventeen. That was the

(21:12):
year that the converter listed twenty seventeen. Specifically, we'll have
our last two stories after another quick sponsor break. Next
up is Edward A. Carter Junior, requested by Lisa, who

(21:33):
heard about him from her father. Edward Carter Junior was
born on May twenty sixth, nineteen sixteen, in Los Angeles.
His parents were missionaries, and when he was a child
they moved to India to start a church, and then
after that they went to China. From his early years
he was fascinated with soldiers, and while they were living
in China, he was sent to a military school, which

(21:54):
seems to have really suited his temperament. Various descriptions of
Carter's early life are sketchy and a little contradictory on
the details, but it seems like he had a rocky
relationship with his parents. When he was about fifteen, he
ran away to join the Chinese National Revolutionary Army, which
was fighting against Imperial Japan. His father eventually tracked him

(22:18):
down and he was expelled from the army when his
commanding officers realized how young he was. The descriptions of
what was going on in his family life that I
read among different sources were wildly different from one another,
which is why I have not tried to get in
the detail on that. Carter did not give up on
military service, though he tried to join the US Army

(22:39):
at the age of eighteen and was rejected. He briefly
served in the Merchant Marine, and then he joined the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was one of the American volunteer
units that fought against Francisco Franco's forces during the Spanish
Civil War. As Franco's forces closed in on victory in
that war, Carter had to escaped to France. Back in

(23:02):
the United States, he met Mildred Hoover, and in nineteen
forty they got married. In nineteen forty one, he successfully
enlisted in the US Army to serve in World War II.
After his service in China and Spain, he was already
an experienced soldier, unlike virtually all of the other new recruits,
and he was promoted several times. But as we've talked

(23:25):
about on the show before, during World War II, the
US Army was racially segregated, and overwhelmingly all black units
were assigned to things like manual labor. Carter was sent
to Europe in nineteen forty four with a unit that
was going to be doing supply transport. He kept trying
to get assigned to combat duty, though, and that became

(23:46):
possible after the Allies faced enormous losses during the Battle
of the Bulge. At that point, the Army could no
longer afford to keep black soldiers out of combat roles.
The Army got thousands of black volunteers to go into combat,
but they were accepted only if they gave up whatever
rank they had earned and went back to being privates.

(24:09):
Carter did exactly that, but by this point he had
proven himself to be immensely capable. Not long after joining
the first Infantry Company, Provisional Seventh Army Negro Company, he
was quickly promoted back to sergeant and made a squad leader.
His unit became part of a big push into Germany.

(24:29):
They needed to cross the Rhine River, but most of
the bridges in the area had been destroyed. As they
were approaching the one bridge they believed was still intact,
they came under small arms and bazooka fire from a warehouse.
Carter volunteered to take three men to try to get
to the warehouse, which was in the middle of a
large field. This involved their crossing about one hundred and

(24:53):
fifty yards of open space that had almost nowhere to
take cover. They came under fire right away. One of
the other men was killed instantly. Carter sent the other
two men back to the road embankment, where everyone else
was sheltering. One of those two men was killed and
the other badly injured. On the way back to that embankment,

(25:15):
Carter himself was shot five times and took shrapnel wounds.
As he tried to get to the warehouse, he stopped
to take some wound tablets. These were antibiotic tablets that
were distributed to soldiers to try to prevent infection, and
as he took a drink from his canteen to wash
them down, the Germans shot it out of his hand.

(25:36):
Carter wound up lying in the field, playing dead for
about two hours. When German soldiers came out of the
warehouse to investigate, he killed six of them, captured two more,
and used the two he had captured as a shield
to get back to his unit. He spoke German and
he interrogated them on the way back to the road embankment.

(25:58):
When they got there, he refused any medical treatment until
he had finished his interrogation and was able to pass
on all of the information he had gathered, information that
greatly assisted his unit in getting to the bridge they
needed to cross. Eventually, he was sent to the hospital,
and when he was recovered enough to leave, he returned

(26:18):
to service and trained other soldiers until the end of
the war. He was recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross,
which was at the time the highest honor of the
army was awarding to black soldiers. Back in the United
States after the war, Carter initially got a hero's welcome,
but unbeknownst to him, Army intelligence had started a file

(26:39):
on him in nineteen forty two due to suspicions that
he might be a Communist. Even though he was fighting
against Japan while in China and was fighting against fascists
in Spain, there were concerns that he might have been
serving alongside communists. The fact that he could speak Hindi

(27:00):
and Mandarin because of where he'd lived before that also
raised eyebrows. His attendance at a star studded welcome home
dinner for veterans was also held against him, since a
lot of those same Hollywood stars were suspected of being Communists.
All commanding officers had to file reports on him, and

(27:20):
his family members and neighbors were also targeted with investigations.
As all this was going on, Carter re enlisted in
nineteen forty six, but when that enlistment was up, his
next attempt to re enlist was denied with no explanation.
He thought there might be racial discrimination at work, so
he went to the NAACP and the ACLU. The ACLU

(27:45):
said he might be suspected as a communist, and he
started trying and failing to clear his name. Eventually, he
asked the ACLU to return his Distinguished Service Cross to
the Army. He died of lung cancer on January thirtieth,
nineteen sixty three. In the nineteen nineties, the US Army
started examining service records from World War II, including the

(28:09):
records of black soldiers who had been awarded the Distinguished
Service Cross and not the Medal of Honor, which is
the United States Armed Forces highest military decoration. After this investigation,
President Bill Clinton presented the Medal of Honor to Carter
and to six other black men who had earned it
during their service but had only been given a lesser award.

(28:34):
All but one of those recognitions was posthumous. The next day,
Carter's remains were moved to Arlington National Cemetery. It was
clear that racial bias was involved in black men not
being awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II,
but that didn't explain Carter's other experiences with being kept
out of the Army. Later on, his daughter in law, Aileen,

(28:57):
wife of his son Edward Carter the Third, put in
requests about his service under the Freedom of Information Act.
That's when all that scrutiny came to light, and the
fact that Carter had been kept out of the Army
even though there was no evidence that he had any
ties to communism. Allen Carter also wrote a book about
Carter and his service. After the family's advocacy, in nineteen

(29:22):
ninety nine, Edward Carter Junior was formally exonerated of all suspicion.
President Clinton and the US Army Vice Chief of Staff
John Keene issued a formal apology to the family and
to the nation. Carter was also posthumously awarded other medals
that he had been eligible for during his service but
had not received, including the Army Good Conduct Medal, the

(29:44):
Army of Occupation Medal, and the American Campaign Medal. Lastly,
we have someone whose story is short, and that's because
her life was tragically short. That's Alice Augusta Ball, requested
by Angela and many other listeners. She was born in
Seattle on July twenty fourth, eighteen ninety two, one of

(30:05):
four children born to James Presley and Laura Louise Howard Ball.
James and Laura listed their race as black on census
and marriage records, but Alice's birth certificate listed her race
as white. Most accounts today described her as a black woman.
James was a newspaper editor and a lawyer, and Alice's

(30:26):
mother and grandfather were both photographers. Alice got an early
interest in chemistry through developing photographs. She graduated from Seattle
High School in nineteen ten and then went on to
turn a bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical chemistry in nineteen twelve
and then in pharmacy in nineteen fourteen. Both of those
were from the University of Washington. She was a very

(30:47):
good student. She co wrote a paper called Ben's Relations
and Ether Solution with her professor William Denn which was
published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in
October of nineteen fourteen. They also co authored another paper
called Colorometric Studies of Pickrate Solutions that would go on
to be published in nineteen seventeen. Ball was offered various

(31:10):
scholarships to pursue graduate study. She decided on the University
of Hawaii, which at the time was known as the
College of Hawaii. She and her family had briefly lived
in Hawaii when she was younger, with the hope that
the warm weather would help her grandfather's arthritis. In nineteen fifteen,
Alice Ball became the first woman and the first black

(31:32):
person to earn a master's degree in chemistry from the university.
She also taught at the university, making her the first
woman to be a chemistry instructor there. Her master's thesis
was on the chemical constituents of Piper methysticum or cava.
Not long after she graduated, doctor Harry T. Holman got
a copy of that thesis. He was a doctor at

(31:55):
the Leprosarium on the island of Molokai. We talked about
this leprosarium and the history of leprosy also called Hanson's
disease in Hawaii on a recent Saturday. Classic. Holman thought
that this research might make Ball a good candidate to
study the oil made from the seeds of the chalmugra tree,
and he asked her for help. Chalmugra oil had been

(32:17):
used as a treatment for Hanson's disease in China and India,
but it was known for being incredibly unpleasant. It was
extremely sticky when used topically and was so foul tasting
that people involuntarily threw it up when trying to take
it orally. It also could cause additional skin lesions when injected.
It's an addition to the lesions that were caused by

(32:39):
the disease. This oil did seem to have some efficacy,
at least in some people, but all of these side
effects were such an ordeal that a lot of patients
just refused to do it. Ball discovered how to create
an ester ethyl form of this oil, which made its
active components water soluble and injectable. These injections were active

(33:02):
against the bacteria that caused Hanson's disease, and this became
the first effective treatment for it. Although patients work considered
to be completely cured afterward, many had negative bacterial cultures
and stopped developing the lesions that are typical of the disease.
This became the preferred method of treatment until the development

(33:22):
of sulfa drugs in the nineteen thirties and forties. Alice
Ball was only twenty three years old when she did
this work, but tragically, Alice Ball died on December thirty,
first nineteen sixteen, at the age of only twenty four.
Her death certificate listed her cause of death as tuberculosis. However,

(33:43):
an article in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser said that she
died of exposure to chlorine gas after some kind of
workplace accident involving a gas masked demonstration. The college denied
that anything like this accident happened regardless. After her death,
Arthur L. Dean, who had been Ball's graduate advisor, continued

(34:06):
her work that on its own would have been reasonable,
but when he published his findings, he didn't credit her
or even mention her work. People started calling this method
the Dean method. In nineteen twenty two, Harry T. Holman
published a paper of his own in the Archives of
Dermatology and Siphilology, detailing how he had gone to Ball

(34:29):
for help and naming the process the Ball method. He
noted that using this method, seventy eight patients had recovered
and were able to be sent home from the leprosarium
on Molokai, but this journal wasn't as widely read as
Dean's publications, and Dean also eventually became president of the university,

(34:50):
so it wasn't until the nineteen seventies that people really
started to become more aware of Ball's contributions. There's the
chal Mugatry on the campus of the University Hawaii at Manila.
In two thousand, a plaque was placed there in honor
of Alice Ball, and in two thousand and seven, the
University of Hawaii Board of Regents also awarded her with

(35:11):
its Medal of Distinction. She is somebody that I have
also had on my list for an episode for a
really long time and just did not have enough information,
And every year or so I would circle back to
see if any more information had become available, and when
it became clear that that was probably not going to happen,
she became part of the Six Impossible episodes. Today, hooray,

(35:36):
I have some listener mail that is from Jenna and
this is a listener mail about a conversation that Holly
and I had in our behind the Scenes episode about
Horace Walpole, and Jenner wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I'm
writing with a quick answer to the question you may
not have seriously posed in the Horace Walpole Behind the

(35:56):
Scenes episode about whether this was the first novel to
be published without attribution, and with a framing device to
make it seem like a true story. I'm slowly finishing
up a master's degree in English literature, and the rise
of the English novel is one of the areas that's
really piqued my interest. I actually read The Castle of
a Toronto in one class on the subject. While Walpole's
version of this framing device is one of the more

(36:18):
elaborate I've seen, that kind of framing device was actually
fairly common in fiction at the time. Robinson Crusoe, for example,
begins with an unnamed editor saying he's put together the
book from Crusoe's writings and swearing to their truth. As
I understand, this was done at least early on, to
convince readers to pick up the book and offset the
stigma associated with fiction at the time. This stigma existed

(36:43):
for reasons ranging from viewing it as falsehood and therefore
inherently sinful, to viewing it as cheap slash lowbrow entertainment
for women and commoners. While I can't think of any
novels off the top of my head that use this
framing device while also leaving off the author, I'm sure
there were some. I hope this doesn't come across as
patronizing or lexury. I just get excited whenever I have

(37:04):
an excuse to talk about literature, especially the rise of
the novel in the English speaking world. There's so much
stuff we take for granted about fiction, especially literary fiction,
so it's interesting to think of a time when people
thought they needed excuses to write it. Fun fact, while
I don't have a PhD in missed in history, I
consider myself to have a master's degree. Since I listened
to all of the episodes you two have worked on.

(37:26):
I gave up after that, but I think it's still
a pretty cool achievement that others might want to join.
In Attached as pet tax is my many round panther
aria and in her aspect as a land seal, as
well as a few more normal picks. We've just moved,
so she's been rolling around on her new carpet like
there's no tomorrow, as well as a bit more clingy
than usual, which I find the opposite of a problem. Thanks,

(37:49):
as ever for all the work you do and making
stuff I missed in history class accessible and engaging, even
if I forget most of it. The second the episode
is over all the best. Jenna thank you so much, Jenna,
Holly and I. I also forget most of it the
second that the episode was over. Also, I did not
find this email as lectury or patronizing at all. I
know and informative. The frame stories I could think of

(38:13):
from like literary fiction of that era, were mostly from
things that were later than the Castle of Toronto. I
did not immediately think of anything earlier when we were
talking about that on the episode, so it is good
to know. I also really like this interest in the

(38:35):
rise of the novel in the English speaking world, in
part because when I was in college, I was required
to take either a class called the Art of the
Novel or Masterpieces in Drama. I don't know why I
remember this. I wanted to take the Art of the Novel,
but they were offered in alternate semesters, and the one

(38:57):
that was going to fit with my schedule was Masterpieces
in Drama. So I might have known this already, but
possibly not remembered it at all because college was more
than twenty years ago at this point. Yeah. For whatever reason, though,
I remember more about the class where we talked about
Castle of a Toronto than anything else from the entire time.
I love these kiddy cat pictures. Everybody who has a

(39:20):
black cat, I love them. I love ours. We just
got back from Iceland the day before yesterday, so mine
also are being extra clingy. I love it. I love
cleany cat time. Yeah, I've gotten my face licked off.
It's all good. Thanks so much Jenna for this email.

(39:40):
If you'd like to send us a note about this
or any other podcast or history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app and wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts.
Stuff you missed An History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

(40:02):
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