For Halloween this year, we have a special treat for you. Medical historian Suzie Edge’s hobby is telling her hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok the true health histories of famous people throughout history – from Jonathan Swift’s syphilis, to the time, hundreds of years ago, that angry Dutch rioters killed and partially ate their prime minister.
And she’s got a new book out called Vital Organs, which I had a chance to sit down and talk to her about. It zeroes in on, you guessed it, the stories of specific body parts in history. From Napoleon’s penis to the surprisingly fashionable fistula surgery King Louis XIV received. And even the research ethics of some of the earliest cases of medical miracles, like Alexis St. Martin, who lived for decades after an accident left his stomach partially open to the world.
One word of caution: this is an interview about the human body, and also the things that can go wrong with it. So as you might guess, you may find sections of it gory, gruesome, or otherwise difficult. And that’s completely understandable. If that’s not your thing, please come back to us for the weekly show on Friday! But if you’re game…continue on.
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Transcript
Christie Taylor: My first question for you is really, just, ‘Why write a book about all of these, sort of, famous organs throughout history?’
Suzie Edge: I’ve been collecting these stories of body parts for as long as I’ve been studying anatomy and physiology. I have to be really careful how I say that. I have to say, ‘Stories of’, and not just, ‘Collecting body parts’, I get funny looks for that. Yes, I’ve just been fascinated by the human body for as long as I can remember and, you know, I studied anatomy and physiology early on, and molecular biology, before I became a doctor and those historical stories have always stayed with me. And I love to think of people in that way, in terms of their bodies, because it makes them more real to me. Often, when we’re reading history, we’re talking about what people did, what people even wrote or what people said. When you think about them in terms of body parts, or ailments, or, you know, it really makes them come alive to me in that way. And I was writing my first book, which was all about the deaths of the kings and queens in England and Scotland. And as I was doing so, lots of stories were coming up of other monarchs around the world or other characters around the world and I just couldn’t let them go. I had to bring them together as well.
Christie Taylor: You have quite a few stories of, particularly royalty’s, various gruesome, at times, ailments. Are they just more widely written about? In terms of, is it easier to understand, like, Kaiser Wilhelm’s medical history than ordinary people off the street at that time?