Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that believes laughter is the best medicine… if these are the only other options.

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that if you take the thread out of a sewing machine it becomes a stabbing machine.

And it’s time for another…

Tawdry Tales of Terrible Triage, The Twofer!

When last we spoke of yee-oldie medicine it was pre-plague, when we could still get together. Now, having quarantined for what feels like forever, we might have some idea of the kind of desperation that drives someone to wear pigeons in the hope that they’re healing power will at least get you to a Chipoltey and back in one piece.

Sadly, no such luck.

If Covid doesn’t get you one of its mutant spawn might! But enough about Jubilee, it’s round two for medieval (-ish) medical nonsense—and this time, it’s personal! We’re gonna find out if Shea knows enough about yee-oldie doctor’n to be proclaimed If True Studio’s new resident on call.

If you were a dirty, dirty villager in the before-times, you were probably worried about Yee-Oldie European Super-death. Or as you lay people may know it, Yersinia pestis—and boy-howdy was it a pest. By the end of the second plague it had killed nearly a third of Europe.

And yeah, I said “second.” Turns out that It’s had three noteworthy runs.

The first known as the Plague of Justinian, affected the Sassanid empire (that’s Neo-Persian, or the last Persian imperial dynasty) and their, apparently, enemies the Byzantines. The initial outbreak killed an estimated 25 million and over the course of two more centuries of recurrences, another 25.

The second was the Black Death which ran wild through Europe on flee-covered rats, rather than the noxious odors they attributed it to but refused to really do anything about until August of 1858…

And the third was in China. It had moved around the Southwest for some time before infecting Guangzhou (aka Canton), a water source for nearby Hong Kong. It killed 20,000 people becoming known as the 1894 Hong Kong plague. From there it spread to ports around the world as a proper pandemic infecting people globally with icky Black Death, but also a ton of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian bigotry including the Geary Act.

Closing on that nightmare (... in 19-fucking-43) and given what you’ve learned about the plague, if you wanted to avoid the Black Death’s fated grasp, where was the best place to keep your farts?

Yep, that’s right, a mason jar.

Physicians, using the world as loosely as it’s ever been used, would tell people to trap their terrible tushy turbulence. The goal here wasn’t to stave off the lingering effects of an all boiled-cabbage and sadness diet but to build up one's stockpiles of PPE. That’s right, in the event of a Black Death incursion these life-saving jars of your own literal farts were to be used as a breathing apparatus, not unlike airplane masks or cartoonishly holding an upside down canoe on the ocean floor. Because… “it’s sterile to your own body” or something I’m sure.

I did have to do a little Googly-Googly on this because… ya know… but it turns out, from reputable sources, that it was basically one of many smell-based Hail Mary’s. Later called the “therapeutic stink” the idea was that if you had a face full of this, or roses if you were a money-having person, you could avoid the stink of death.

David Havilland, author of Why You Should Store Your Farts in a Jar & Other Oddball or Gross Maladies, Afflictions, Remedies and Cures, first explained to AOL News in 2011....