Your limb is torn off - now what?

Were you to be the unfortunate victim of a limb removal of any sort, you could take hope. Here in the 21st century, doctors have gotten pretty handy at reattaching arms and legs, replacing thumbs with toes, rebuilding breasts, all to great success thanks to microsurgery techniques.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the all New Toyota Corolla. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know front House, Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
Charles W Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should
know because Jerry's over there. Dame, are you doing, buddy?

(00:23):
Besides sick, I'm not sick. I'm just I've got a
little bit of a bug. But never well, no, do
you think that's the first step in Yeah, and being
sick is saying I'm sick. I definitely believe in psycho
semitic effects. Yea, you know the mine has an impact
on the body. Well, if you can be a hypochondria,
actually you can do the officer right, Yeah, yeah, you

(00:46):
can will yourself in not being sick. Anyway, people, the
show must go on. And I just want to point
out how dedicated my partner here is to his craft. Well,
I also want to say I want to promise that
it's not going to be like the great six weeks
on this of No. You know gets that was back
in the old days, the unhealthy days. I smoked and everything. Yeah,
your body didn't know how to heal, so it was

(01:06):
enjoying nicotine. Now I'm just like I'm I'm not getting sick.
I said it to myself last night, and here I
am better than you ever Josh two point oh, thank you.
All right, let's do this okay, ready, Yeah, I got
a story for you. I bet I know it. I'll
bet you. Yeah. Yeah. You saw. His name is Everett
Knowles Jr. But everybody called him Eddie two days in

(01:30):
a why I find the unwholesome. Yeah, And I didn't
know Eddie could be short forever it never heard that.
I don't think it is. I think he just didn't
like his name, Okay, because it seems like you should
call him every Yeah, heavy heavy Evie. Yeah, of the Biggie,
the big So he was a little e though he's
a little guy, tiny, like a little Elvis. That's right. Uh, well, Eddie,

(01:55):
we'll call him Eddie because that's what he preferred to
be called. Sure. He was walking home from school one
day in Somerville, Massachusetts, which is a suburb of Boston,
and he was walking along the railroad tracks and there
just happened to be a train loaded with gravel hauling
out of the area very slowly while he was walking

(02:16):
alongside and said, you know what, I'm just gonna have
a little thrill right now and grab onto this train.
And he did. He successfully grabbed onto the train, was
hanging with I believe his right arm. Yeah, and uh
was having the time of his life just dangling there
when he misjudged the distance between the train side of

(02:37):
the train and the side of a tunnel and he
was pulled into the tunnel support and smacked it and
hung on for a second before he was dropped off
of the train. The train kept going through the tunnel,
leaving Eddie kind of crumpled and in a little shivering

(02:57):
mass at the mouth of the tunnel. So he stands
up and he grabs his arm. He's like, oh, my
arm doesn't feel very good. And he starts walking toward town.
And apparently he walked about a hundred yards uphill when
some workers saw him and said, grab that kid, because
he was covered in blood, he was staggering, he looked

(03:18):
like he was out of he's clearly in shocks, and
they grabbed it, ran and got a woman. Because at
the time, this is nineteen sixty two, a woman was
the only one who could provide any kind of initial
emergency care um and a clerk at I believe some
sort of warehouse um came out and started to apply
pressure to this boy's wounds. But she had a little

(03:40):
bit of trouble when she tried to close the wound
with a tourniquet, she found that his arm wasn't attached
to his body any longer, and he's just kind of
holding it there. Very Luckily he was wearing a jacket,
or else his arm would have been back at the
mouth of the tunnel. Man. Can you imagine, like the
guy's holding his arm basically to keep it from falling

(04:02):
out of his jacket, although he didn't know that, you know, no,
he didn't. He was in shock. Luckily, he was still
lucid enough to like tell everybody who he was, where
he lived, and uh. They called the the hospital, and
the hospital scrambled some surgeons. But it wasn't until chuck
um he got to the hospital and they started cutting
his jacket off that they realized the extent of the damage.

(04:24):
This kid's arm was torn clean off. But the operative
word is clean, yeah, right. Because Eddie Everett Noels Jr.
Of Somerville, mass On what May two became the first
recipient of a full successful limb reattachments, first human recipient. Yeah,

(04:47):
it's a good point. They had done that before dogs successfully,
and they had they had done all the different surgeries
that are required to reattach a limb, but they had
never done all of them at once, like they'd reattach
the nerves, they'd reattach bone, they've reattached blood vessels, but
they had never had a full amputation and a human

(05:08):
being successfully reattached. And um. From what I read, the
doctor was I don't know about excited, but they had
been looking for a case. I was because they thought, like,
I think we can do this. We just need the
right case right exactly, you know. And he called his
buddy and he's like, I think we got one. Getting there,
they got the They like you said, they'd successfully reattached
artery's nerves, bone, that kind of thing, but never all,

(05:30):
never the whole shebang. So they said, well, we know
how to do this if somebody will just come along
and present us with an arm pulled cleanly off, especially
twelve year old, because that definitely worked at his advantage. Apparently,
an artery when severed will plug itself up, especially in
younger kids that plugging is way more successful and happens

(05:51):
more quickly. So this kid just basically presented like the
perfect case. The main artery, I guess his brachial artery
leading out of his shoulder was a full like two
inches out of the wounds. So like they had a
lot to work with, and work they did. Uh. Yeah,
and they the arm was on ice and they began
working immediately. This is mass general, by the way, and um.

(06:14):
They started with the arteries and veins, and then the
nurse felt well, they all sort of sold color and
they described as a glow kind of came back into
the arm. This kid hopped the train, had his arm
pulled up, and within two and a half hours they
had gotten circulation back. Yeah. And the nurse scrabbed the
hand and said, hey, it's warm. That's good thinking warm.

(06:35):
She shook it, made it do the metal sign. Everybody
in the operating theories laughing. Uh. The bone and the
muscle and the nerve and the skin. Um happened in
in later surgeries, and the I think the nerve. They
made a pretty important decision at the time was to
wait on that altogether, uh, and let it heal some
more first, which is as it turns out, actually, as

(06:58):
it turns out, most of this was sort of how
they do it today, Like they perfected the process from
that point through the seventies and in the eighties is
when they really started like humming with limb reattachment. The
only difference that I saw was and we'll get into
it a little more, but um. They reattached the arteries
first to get circulation, I guess, to keep from more

(07:20):
and more tissue dying. Um. And then they reattached the
bone by driving a screw and using a hammer. They
nailed the screw into the marrow, and then reattached the
arm bone. What is that femur? Now? Femurs in the leg?
You think I would have looked this up already. Yeah,

(07:40):
the upper arm bone. Then they drove that into the
other end of the screw. Normally now though they do
they retach the bone for supervide stability, so when you
reattach the arteries and veins and stuff, they won't pull away. Yeah,
and he uh, it was a success story because he
ended up he was uh, he couldn't use that hand

(08:01):
as his dominant hand any longer, which just said because
he was a good picture. Yeah, but he um was
able to eventually get enough use out of it to where,
uh they said about like a left hander would have
use of his right hand. So he just sort of
had to switch that up. But for nineteen two that's
pretty successful, especially considering in nineteen sixty was the very

(08:25):
first microsurgery performed just two years previously at the University
of Vermont. Oh yeah, go catamounts. But um, so microsurgery,
that's really what we're talking about here. It's the use
of a microscope to perform surgery. And when you're attaching,
you're essentially sewing together little nerves and blood vessels like

(08:50):
a millimeter in diameter. You need a microscope and a tiny,
tiny little needle, right, and you're using tiny, tiny little
sutra thread, which is about is is is big as
a hair. That's the stuff you're using to to suiture
these blood vessels back together. It's not no and it's
an extremely involved um surgery, as you can imagine, but

(09:12):
it's step by step. It's like, first you do the
blood vessels, then you do the arteries um and you
do muscles, ligaments, tendons, all this stuff, and you're doing
it in this this process, but each each surgery, each
part of the procedure is like an enormous surgery in
and of itself. So like um, a limbery attachment, which

(09:34):
is called um replantation. I thought it was gonna be
called like limbery or something. Some people call it that.
I'm a limist, the saucy. Your doctors call it limbery.
But um, it usually is like as on a whole.
The replantation surgery can last like an entire day. Yeah,
it's it's intensive. Um And I read too that it

(09:55):
uh the whole micro surgery. The concept of using a
microscope for surgery was not accepted at first, Like the
doctors and surgeons were like, now, like you, we can't
do that. We have to look with our eyes. And
so it had to be perfected sort of on the
fringe by doctor by surgeons who are willing to like
accept this might be the future and experiment in their basements.

(10:16):
I guess so on hapless victim maybe or dogs. Yeah,
I didn't get the and I didn't look it up,
but I didn't get the impression from this article one
way or the other how dogs lost their limbs to
begin with, Like, was it accidental? And they're like, Okay,
well this we'll reattach it. Or were they cutting dogs
limbs off and then reattaching them, because I'm guessing it

(10:38):
was probably the latter in it. Probably Yeah, I mean
we've talked plenty about that kind of topic, because I mean,
think about it. Why would dogs limbs be pulled off
in any more frequency than humans limbs and hence present
more cases to practice on. I think they were cutting
off dogs limbs and then reattaching, which is messed up. Yeah,

(10:59):
it is. So you were talking about microsurgery. What I
saw was replacing toes for thumbs got big sixties. That
was a big one. So you had a thumb on
your foot or a big toe on your hands, big
toe on your hand, because apparently fifty to sevent of
all the utility in your hand is in your thumb,

(11:20):
and if you're missing a thumb, you might as well
just not have your hand. You don't need a big
toe quite as much. You can use a cane or
something like that thanks to your new toe thumb and
um that that became perfected in the sixties toethumb. That's
a good band name. And then uh in the seventies,
um free flat tissue transfer became a big thing, which

(11:43):
is basically going to a part of your body, harvesting
an area of your body like under your thigh, your
abdomen um I think you're back, lower back, and then
just basically taking the gap and sewing it back together. Right. Yeah,
so you have a scar, but you also have a

(12:03):
portion of your body that's diminished in size um, and
then taking that and using it to basically do what
we understand is a skin graft, which which requires microsurgery
as well. Um, it's just basically taking this part here
and putting it back over here where there's a bunch
of damage and reattaching all of the nerves and the
blood vessels and everything. Yeah, I saw when I was
looking up photos of this kind of thing, I came

(12:27):
across something that I had never seen before. And I
didn't I didn't get the story, but you could almost.
I mean I sort of gathered what was going on
just from the photo series. But someone was degloved on
the on their fingers basically from like the hand knuckles forward,
all the fingers had no skin, and they, from the

(12:51):
looks of it, they inserted it into an arm like
into a bicep the fingers and like they live there
for a while, like inserted under the skin of the arm,
and that that skin. They later would remove the fingers
and it came off as like a big flat skin

(13:12):
graph like sticking your hand in an envelope and uh,
eventually formed like webbed fingers and then fingers. That is crazy,
but like, I don't know, man, I just saw these photos.
I should have done. I mean, it doesn't really have
anything do with this, but it was just remarkable. They
see someone with their fingers stuck in their bicep under

(13:32):
the skin. Like, I'm having trouble visualizing this. I need
to see these photos. Yeah, I'll take about the show
out to you. Yeah, if you want to see some
really gross stuff, you can just google. Um. Microsurgery or
replantation is another one. Yeah. Man, it's but amazing like
that they can. And I looked at so many of them.
I kind of got to that point where I was like, well,

(13:53):
this isn't gross. This is what the body looks like
without skin sometimes, and which is gross. Nuts. I wouldn't
grossed out bodies without skin or gross, I don't think so.
I think it's the beauty inside you couldn't desensitize my friend. Well,
before we get any further, Chuck, let's do a message break,
because I got some good stuff coming up. So Chuck,

(14:21):
we understand microsearcherry. Now it's frankensteiny in right. Yeah, you're
basically just sewing stuff together. Yeah, because I mean, like,
let's say you have a dead person who has a
great hand, and you have a live person who's got
a poor hand. You cut off the live person's hand,
cut off the dead person's hand and attached the live
or the dead person's hand and a live person. That's
that's Frankenstein and that's what they're doing. And it's pretty cool. Um,

(14:45):
But if this ever happens to you, if if say,
you have a poor hand in that it's no longer
attached to your wrist, han sucks, right, and it's all
crushed and damaged or whatever. No, no, no, let's say
it's intact. And you say, you know what, I think
through my shock that I might be a good candidate
for replantation of my hand. Yeah, what do you do? Well,

(15:08):
you want to call mine one one immediately, because that's
just the first thing you do. You get go ahead
and get folks on the way, or you can ask
someone with you to call nine one one. That's not
putting anyone out. Yeah, that's true. If you can't dial,
maybe you don't have hands, you can tell Sirie to
call nine one one. Yeah. I actually changed my series
to a dude, so it's not a her anymore, but

(15:29):
an englishman actually. Yeah, it's kind of fun, Reginald. I
don't know what his name is actually, but he'll say
stuff like, you know, I'll say call Josh and we'll
say ringing Josh. Oh yeah, instead of calling it. It's
classy kind of fun anyway. Um, you want to dial
mine one one, get them on the way, and then
immediately you want to just try and stabilize the patient.

(15:50):
You want to stop the bleeding, either with heavy pressure
or a tourniquet above the wound like a sixties female.
Yeah exactly. Uh. And once you get the patient, UM,
stabilize and they're not going to bleed out there in
the kitchen or wherever it is. Um, you want to
get the digit or the hand or the limb and
put it on ice, but not directly on ice. Put

(16:13):
it in a bag and then put that bag on ice. Yeah,
you want to pack pack it in ice, as much
ice as you can find, but you want to make
sure that in the bag that you put the hand
or the digit or whatever in there's no ice and
there's no water, because water causes it to shrivel, and
that means you won't be able to reattach it. Yeah,
and ice you can actually if I put if I

(16:34):
cut off my finger and I threw it in a
bucket of ice, it could actually get frostbite. Yeah, that's crazy,
That is crazy, but it's also pretty cool. And you
don't want frostbite on your because you know you won't
be able to use it anymore. Now. Frostbite is just
um dead tissue brought about by exposure to extreme cold.
That's right. So after the T shirt right there is

(16:56):
after you've got it on the ice, in the bag,
on the ice, you've call nine one one, you've got
the bleeding stopped. You want to cross whatever fingers you
have remaining and hope that you've got a good hospital
nearby with some surgeons that aren't doing much at the moment,
or who are willing to cancel their schedules and say
let's go do this. Yeah, get off the golf course.

(17:17):
So when you get to the hospital, there's some things
you can expect. If all of your surgeons have come
in from the golf course, they should be ready and
waiting for you. And um, like we said, first they're
going to reattach the bone to provide stability um for
the rest of the surgery. And there's probably still going
to be a little bit of a gap there because
they need to get in there. Um. And then they

(17:39):
start reattaching your your blood vessels. And just like with
Eddie Knowles, um, that just gets you know, the blood
flow going and essentially makes that limb alive once more well,
and it also keeps it from further dying. Um, because Chuck,
it turns out that like there is a a finite

(18:00):
amount of time, which is understandable, but we we are
aware of how much time a limb can just sit
around in the hot sun starting to go you know,
fit it. And there's so for example, um, if you
have a whole arm or a whole leg cut off,
remember death Proof, Yeah, that girl has her legs like

(18:21):
sticking out of the window and mad Mike is that
his name Russell when he hits him and her legs
goes Um, if she had survived and her leg just
laid there out at room temperature, Um, it could have
been good for six to twelve hours. I imagine you're
really pushing it at twelve hours. But if say you

(18:44):
have somebody who's like this leg needs to be put
on ice and does everything right, it could stay refrigerated
for four days and still be reattached. Yeah. Um. They
point out though in this article, ideally you're having that
surgery that day, but if you within hours, uh, within minutes,
they're talking. Ideally, Basically, the sooner the better. It's as
soon as they're ready to go, you should be ready

(19:07):
to go as well. But you're right, Um, if that
is not the case and you have uh some good
refrigeration going on, you can last for about four days. Yeah.
And apparently it's not even necessarily the skin tissue that
um that leads to problems and reattachment after being exposed
or room temperature. It's muscle degradation. Oh yeah, interesting. Uh,

(19:28):
So you you get there, you're getting your surgery done. Um,
you probably are going to expect to go through that
first long surgery phone reattachment, blood vessel, maybe some muscle
fiber and then sure, and then they'll say we'll put
the nerves off for later. Um, and then later on
down the road will be a skin graft of some kind,

(19:49):
like a UM free flap surgery like I was talking about.
And the free uh refers to the the free like
this part of this issue from your body has been
removed the donor site. Oh, it's not the cost of
the surgery, it's it's been cut free, right, And then
you have makes sense and then um, it really is

(20:13):
simpler than you think. It's reattaching, and hopefully everything takes
and you fight the infection off and you start the
rehab process, which um, it takes a long time, and
it's it's grueling and not fun. Uh. It can be
weird at first, uh, they point out in the article,
And be weird to look down and see your army attached.

(20:33):
But I imagine no weirder than looking down and seeing
your arm not attached. You know, it'd probably be a
comfort to see it reattached, But you're a jerk if
you're like, oh, it's kind of crooked. Yeah, but apparently
sometimes it can feel a little different, and uh, that
can be a little strange and off putting. It's not like, oh,

(20:53):
I'm just like I was before, right, you know, better
than ever? Um and Tom wrote this one my good
friend time chief. He said. He also talked about something
called cross transfer. This was mind blowing, which is basically
like if if just re plantation is Frankensteinian, this is
even more so. Yeah, I didn't quite get the purpose

(21:16):
of the hand. Uh, Basically, you're getting a a left
hand on your right arm. Let's say, so your thumb
and your pinkie would be in weird places, right, your
palms still facing the right direction, but switched. Yeah, yeah,
but what's what's the point of that if you have
a bad hand and a good hand. I don't know
if that's they only had like a left hand available

(21:38):
at the time. I don't know that one. I got
the other one where basically they take your lower leg
beneath your knee. So like if your upper leg is
damaged and your lower leg is fine, let's just say
your upper leg is wasted for whatever reason, but your
lower leg is fine. They'll cut it off the lower
leg and basically turn it around right, and then your

(22:00):
knee becomes locked. Your calf muscles then serve the function
that your thigh muscles used to and your knee joint
is now in your ankle, then you also are going
to be wearing a prosthetic obviously because you have no
thime muscles um, and you're turned around foot which is
now backwards. Is extra support for that prosthetic foot or

(22:22):
leg or limb? Wow, it's pretty cool. It's basically saying like,
how can we take this and use it to even
better utility now that its original purpose has been destroyed? Yeah,
it's pretty cool. Yeah. I tried to find photos of
a cross transferred hand, but I couldn't find any photos,
and weirdly, pictures of Madonna kept popping up. Does she

(22:43):
have something? I don't know, dude, Like I tried all
sorts of Google searches and she images of work kept
popping up, So I don't know. Maybe she's got two
left feet or something. She does not? What was that
in uh Waiting for Guffman? Uh? He literally had two
left feet. It's kind of a dumb joke, wasn't I

(23:04):
thought it was? Yeah, So, Josh, that's one way we
talked about microsurgery. But there's perhaps another even better way
which will cover right after this message break. All right,
so we've discussed how you can have surgery, but there

(23:26):
may be an actual way to regrow things. Yeah, this
is far, by far the more prefable of the two. Yeah,
like fingers, but not like you know, you can't lose
a whole finger and regrow. It's got to be above
the bone. Like let's say you get the tip of
your finger, like your fingernail cut off and you can't
find it. And even better, this just involves like dumping

(23:47):
a magic powder on that that wound. So if you
if you have your finger cut off below the nail,
right below the nail, which happened to a guy in Cincinnati,
um in two thousand and five who owned a hobby op. Yeah.
I used to love those places. Man, I go in
and be like, I just want all the model airplanes
and everything. Yeah, Eddie's Trick Shop in Atlanta was my

(24:08):
go to, which I've just discovered still exists, um, not
too far from my house. Is it a magic shop?
It's it's like everything, Like they had models and had
magic kits, they had you know, Whoopie cushions was sort
of like a catch all. Yeah. I liked both of those,
but I never went to one that was the same anyway. Um,

(24:30):
this guy, this hobby shop owner, as far as we know,
he sold no magic items. Um, he was demonstrating why
a motor was very dangerous in an RC plane. He
did a good job, I guess, and cut his finger
off and uh, apparently his brother was had something to
do with finger with tissue regeneration and said he was

(24:51):
in the biz. Yeah. The guy went to the doctor
the hospital, and doctors like, we'll give you a skin
graft to just kind of cover this weirdness. But um,
you know, you lost your finger. T s. And the
guy's brother was like, don't get the skin grap just yet.
Come over, I'll give you a beer, and um, I'm
gonna put some I'm gonna put some something that's called

(25:12):
extracellular matrix on your wound and let's see what happens.
And they did yea, and magic happened. Then it regrew.
The guy not only regrew his finger, he regrew apparently
not the bone, but very surprisingly the nail bed and fingernail,
which apparently, like you don't grow a nail bed back,

(25:33):
like even if you cut off just the tip of
your finger like that nail beds never growing back. This
guy's nail bed grow back. That's awesome. Extracellular matrix is awesome. Um.
That's basically like the glue that holds ourselves together. And um,
not just us, plants and animals and trees and they
all have it uh in it. Uh, it's functions outside

(25:57):
the body cells. That's why it's called extra cellular obviously.
And it's collagen. We talked a lot about collagen, the
protein that's um, you know, super good for all kinds
of things, especially Yeah, like you know it's in skin
cream and stuff like that. Um. So typically what they
use is, uh, this was a powder from pig bladder.

(26:18):
But um, I've seen I saw a video on the
New York Times site that showed how they do it today.
And this is mainly for um like, uh, let's say
you got you didn't want a skin graft for some reason,
or it wasn't possible to get a skin graft, and
you've you've lost all the skin on your thigh. It
would get a pig bladder and they they spread it

(26:41):
out and they remove all the cells. Basically, Yeah, because
this stuff doesn't have pig cells, No, it doesn't have
just harvested from a pig body. Yeah, but they still
remove the cells and all the DNA with like a
chemical bath, and basically what's remaining is the matrix. And
it ended up drying it out and it looks like
and cut it into she and it looks like a
sheet of like parchment paper and then they will put

(27:04):
that on your leg and it immediately just starts going
to work. Yeah. They used to think that extracellular matrix
was just something that provided structure for cells to grow around,
like a fetal in the fetus. Yeah, because if you're
if you're in the fetus and like something happens, you
lose a toe. If you are a fetus, if you're
in the fetal position, uh, in the womb and you

(27:27):
lose a toe, that toes growing back. Yeah, you know,
you grow a vestigial tail that goes away. Your feet
and hands start out being web so you're growing a
lot of stuff and then getting rid of it. But
you can also regrows stuff that you're not supposed to
lose up to the age of about two, and then
I think the general ideas that the extra cebular matrix

(27:48):
just kind of goes dormant in humans, right, but they
thought that it was just structure, and then they realize
that no, this is actually creating some sort of signal
to the rest of the body to say, hey, don't
scar regrow instead, and it goes and recruits stem cells
and says, come over here, and let's rebuild this finger.

(28:10):
This hobby shop accident was too ironic. Let's reward this
man with a regrum finger, and don't forget the nail bed.
That's what ex cell your matrix says to everything else. Yeah,
and it's uh, it's pretty cool. The problem with um,
why you can't normally just regrow a finger is because
when something like that happens, the trauma happens, your body

(28:31):
says it recognizes it, and the immune system kicks in
and it's gonna swell up and get inflamed and scar
tissue is gonna start to form, and extra cellular matrix
prevents the inflammation, prevents scar tissue from forming and basically
tells the body like, no, I'm just gonna grow like
normally r scar tissue, just regular old cells. But like

(28:53):
you said, after a certain age, it just goes away,
like we have the extra cellular matrix still, but it's
function or its ability to trigger regrowth is just becomes
dormant or something happens to it. And with this pick
ladder stuff, um, they're they're starting to wonder, is there

(29:14):
a way that we can just trigger this naturally in
the body. And if that's the case, then say hello
to regrowing a whole head. I mean, you never know,
because they pointed out that like deer can regrow antlers
and um, things like that, and they're so different than
us sellar cellularly right because as bone, cartilage, skin, um,

(29:37):
all those things are in your hand, your arm, your leg,
and you would need to regrow all those two for
something to really be considered regrown. You can't just regrow
the leg but not the bone. It'd still be impressive,
but you're like, it's kind of flopped in there. Have
you ever seen the picture that UFC fighter. He's like
kicking the guy and he breaks his own leg and

(30:00):
it's just like almost like a cartoon or mcgahey, Oh yeah,
well it's mcgahey. Yeah. Yeah, that's stuff. Um triggers the
old mirror neurons big time. Makes me weak. Uh So
that's basically it. I mean, they they've been experimenting with
war veterans, Iraqi war veterans. Uh. And actually the New

(30:21):
York Times video, I saw that it was a war
veteran who was having this done to his thigh. Yeah right,
I think it was skin and tendons and yeah, and
it was you know, it looked at an early but
it was functioning and that counts. You got anything else? No,
I think that's it. There's literally nothing else to say

(30:42):
about I agree, sir. All right. Uh well, then if
you want to learn more about replantation, you can type
that word into the search bar how stuff works dot
com and it'll bring up a couple of cool things
at the very least. Also, um, type in extracellular matrix,
which is pretty cool founding um, and that'll bring up
another article too. And uh, since I said those things,

(31:05):
it's time for listener. Now, that's right, I'm gonna call
this correction. You get these from time to time. We
like to read him from time to time. Hey, guys
and Jerry love the work you do. I love listening
to the show. I wanted to write in though, with
a correction regarding Lewis and Clark. I'm working towards my
PhD in art history, and i am particularly interested in

(31:29):
the history of medicine and disease. On the middle of
the show, Josh mentioned that the adventure party inadvertently discovered
syphilis had not been known to Europeans upen to that point.
This is actually not quite the case. Syphilis goes back
pretty far in European history. It was first documented in
the late fifteenth century after a conflict between France and Italy,
and remained an issue for europe peaking around the mid

(31:50):
nineteenth century. Nineteenth century. That yeah, he said, okay, Josh
did have part of it right though when he said
that the part do you blamed it on Native American groups?
Early on everyone wanted to blame the disease on everyone else.
No surprises here, But after that initial conflict, the French
referred to syphilis as the Neapolitan sickness, while the Italians

(32:13):
named it the French sickness, a trend that continued as
the stuff spread. You if you're interested, it's really fascinating stuff,
especially the cures that became popular. Mercury was a really
nasty one. History of Syphilis by Claude Katel is a
pretty good reference. He read a book called The History

(32:34):
of Syphilis somebody wrote a book called the History of Syphilis. Anyway,
just wanted and that was claude q u e accent
of good t e l. He's French. Isn't that what
that's called? I don't remember anymore. I don't either. Anybody
just wanted to work out. Yeah, that is from Catherine.

(32:57):
I'm sorry, Kathleen Pierce nice into disease. Thanks in paintings
about disease. I guess so thanks a lot for letting
us know that, Kathleen. I feel like I've been set straight. Uh.
If you want to set us straight, we like to
be corrected, right, Yeah, and nothing better. Uh. All you

(33:20):
have to do is tweet to us to initiate contact.
You can tweet to us using our handle s y
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(33:41):
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