Good evening!
Welcome to QI.
Tonight we are sawing bones and de-oiling snakes
in a show all about quackery.
Joining me on Queasy Street
are the miraculous and rejuvenating
Claudia Winkleman.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Guaranteed to take years off your life,
it's Victoria Coren Mitchell.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Good for anything that ails you,
it's Stephen K Amos.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
And the late Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
And their buzzers don't sound well at all.
Claudia goes...
VIOLENT SNEEZE
Wow. I like!
Victoria goes...
WOMAN CRIES OUT IN PAIN
It's someone literally dying.
Stephen goes...
COUGHING
COUGHING DIES DOWN
COUGHING CONTINUES LOUDLY
It's my dad's car.
And Alan goes...
BREAKING WIND AND SQUELCHING
Anybody else feel the need for a mop?
I've given you all some quack medicines.
I would like you to persuade me to buy them.
So, we're going to start with Stephen.
What is your quack medicine?
It's a jar of...
..Princess Lotus Blossom's Vital Sparks.
Marvellous. And what do you suppose it does?
The lotus blossoms, of course,
one of the most famous flowering flowers, er... Hm.
I love a flowering flower. Don't you?
..from Japan. Yes. Obviously, it gives you vital sparks, energy.
Right. Basically, a modern-day superhero supplement.
Right. Yeah.
There is a wave of superhero films at the moment.
We should all embrace those. Yeah. Right.
One of the biggest ones for me last year was, of course, Black Panther.
The Black Panther gets his superpowers by consuming
a special herb. OK.
Why don't we just go the whole hog
and just call him "Ganjaman"?
These were actually sold at the World Fair in 1904
by somebody pretending to be Princess Lotus Blossom
and she was trying to give men a vital spark.
What might be the idea behind the pill that men might want to...?
Oh! Like a...
..prop to action?
Yes, exactly that.
She was actually a woman called Violet McNeal.
She was from the Midwest and she had nothing to do
with being a princess but she claimed to be Chinese.
And does anybody know why she could claim to be Chinese
and nobody would know? She used to put on a bit of
what they used to call "yellowface".
STEPHEN SNORTS
I know! That's what it was called - it was called "yellowface".
Because the Americans had banned all Chinese people in 1882,
so people didn't know what a Chinese person looked like.
They just banned them? They just banned them.
The Chinese Exclusion Act. It's a pretty clear name for an act,
isn't it? They just got rid of them. On what grounds?
Well, that there were too many of them working
and what they wanted to do was to have jobs for, you know,
"Americans", who were not Chinese.
And so they got rid of them.
In fact, they got rid of them until 1943,
when they allowed in 105.
That was... That's extraordinary!
Yeah. So they didn't know if she was Chinese?
No, they didn't know she wasn't Chinese. She was this woman from the Midwest.
FAUX AMERICAN ACCENT: "Hell, that's Violet!
"She ain't Chinese! That's Violet!
"Violet, what are you doing?!"
They're basically boiled sweets,
but she told everybody that this was something that had
come from a pouch in the turtle brain called the "Quali Quah".
FAUX AMERICAN ACCENT: "Violet, where'd you get them pills?"
There it is, the Quali Quah.
And she would say, "A man who takes these pills will shout out,
"'Pong-Woo-Kee!'" -
which is, she claimed, Chinese for "Eureka".
So, are these from that era?
If I take a couple, will the desk rise?
You might just...
You might just come through it, like that.
Like that tunnelling thing, you know, in Thunderbirds.
I suddenly really want them to work, actually.
Right, let's try another one. Alan, you've got some medicine.
What have you got?
Oh, well, it's Dr Brinkley's Formula 1020.
And what do you think's in it?
I think something drawn from an animal of some sort.
A bodily fluid.
Hm. And then you add it to your own self.
Cheaply priced and almost odourless.
I'm describing myself there.
It was a distillation of goat glands.
Oh, for God's sake! What?! Yeah.
Well, it wasn't actually, it was just coloured water.
The temptation to fire it at the audience is almost...
Oh! Oh!
LAUGHTER
I'm glad I was looking at you. I would have thought it was Stephen.
APPLAUSE AND LAUGHTER
He promoted this as a distillation
that would cure anything from emphysema to flatulence.
What?! Which is quite a range, isn't it, of diseases? Yes.
So, I was quite close! "Cure anything", a cure-all?
Yes, but he also looked part goat, I think.
Yes! Goatee. Yes, exactly.
And goats were a big thing for him because,
after the coloured water,
he thought, "Something more significant is needed."
And he started transplanting goats' testicles into men's scrotums
as a... Wait a min... Yeah?
You can't put a goat's testicle into a man's scrotum.
Well, as they discovered. And, God knows, I've tried.
He was the Goat Gland Doctor
and you would select your goat
and the goat would then be castrated
and the testicles inserted into the patient's scrotum.
But no, no, that didn't happen. Yes!
No, it did happen.
And lots and lots of people did it
without checking whether he was medically qualified to do this.
Well, these people, were they maybe impotent and concerned
with whether they could or could not have kids?
A-ha! Ah!
Baby goats. Yeah. Yeah.
It's better when you explain it.
He went to something called Eclectical Medical College in
Kansas, but he didn't actually graduate, and anyway the college was
one of homoeopathy.
But he became unbelievably famous as the Goat Gland Doctor.
He started his own radio station in Kansas.
He became so popular that he paid for the town that he lived in to
have a second post office, to receive all the letters that he got.
He did kill hundreds of people...
And in the end, in 1939, he sued the American Medical Association.
Somebody had dared to say he was a fraud and he sued them for libel,
then when he gave evidence it was quite clear that he was a fraud
and he was stripped of his licence.
He died in poverty.
Don't feel bad for him. Big fan of Hitler.
Right. Yeah. Had a swimming pool decorated with miniature swastikas,
you know the kind.... Wow! Yeah. So...
When they castrate...
..sheep and goats... Yeah.
..then the testicles just drop off
and shrivel up in the sac, don't they?
Actually, that's not true,
because I have held a pair of ram's testicles and...
Ram's testicles? Yes, they weren't attached to the ram at the time.
I was making a series about the dictionary
and we were investigating the origins of the word "codswallop"...
Yep.
..because nobody quite knows where it comes from, and one theory was
that it's related to "cods", which is slang for "testicles".
And, you know, television being what it is,
apparently I had to explain this on camera
while holding a pair of ram's testicles.
So, as in "codpiece"? Yeah, cods, knackers, it's sort of common slang.
No! Yes.
And we went to a butcher's shop...
This is good!
No, but they're enormous!
Describe... Like that?
I mean...
Can I just say,
this is not the direction I thought this was going to go?
So, here's the thing, lots and lots of cures for virility, and I'm
just going to pass this on as a piece of general knowledge.
If you put Viagra into a vase of flowers, the flowers will stay
erect for a week longer than normal.
Right, Claudia, your medicine. Yes?
What are you going to sell to us?
OK. Let's come away, shall we, from virility?
Oh, this is excellent.
Theodore Roosevelt's Baldness Salve.
Ah! Yeah.
It might not be your head, just an area of your body where
you want some more hair! Forearms, legs...
"Hot, cool. Check me out!"
Yeah. You use this. Right.
I...I use this.
Yeah, before this, I didn't have hair and now...yeah.
Well, it was sold by something called the Scholder Institute
and it was sold as something that had been used
by both Roosevelt and Houdini.
As it happens, both of them had recently died just before this
product came out, so they couldn't say whether it was true or not.
You sent samples of your hair through the post
for an "individual diagnosis" by Professor Scholder
and he got his diagnosis from a Dominican friar.
It was rather a complicated process.
But a guy called Arthur J Cramp, who was a rather tenacious member
of the American Medical Association,
he sent in hairs from a fox fur coat,
from a Japanese wolf dog,
and then a woman with extremely long, lustrous hair,
and finally a piece of wrapping twine,
and each time he got the same response, which was that the hair
was severely undernourished and needed Dr Scholder's cure.
It's actually just Vaseline.
Yeah, but good. Good, excellent.
But I think I did... I mean, we all want some, right? Yes.
You've sold that to us.
People have asked me whether I have experienced hair loss
due to the fact that I'm wearing what is called a "do-rag".
I thought I'd wear it tonight... Right.
..to bring attention to the Great British public that that is
what this is. OK.
It's not a hat, it's not a hairnet.
It's a do-rag.
I get confused... People at the airport, immigration -
"Excuse me, sir, can you take off your...
"..bonnet?"
And I get quite defensive, I say, "It's actually a do-rag."
I long... It is a hat.
Yeah. I...
I mean, not to get too existential, but... Please do.
What is a hat?
Well, where do we draw the line?
A plastic bag?
If you put it on your head, it's a hat.
Right, Victoria. A cure, please.
Yes, OK. I have...
Oh! Tupperware.
Do-Nothing Mitchell's Rest Cure.
Yeah.
My guess is going to be that it's just fresh air in some way.
Well, it used to be known as Dr Diet And Dr Quiet.
And, actually, this guy...
That's him there holding a clinic, Dr Silas Mitchell.
He's not really a quack
but sometimes good doctors come up with kind of quacky ideas.
Look at the do-rags on them three!
Said no-one ever.
But what era is that? Turn of the 20th century.
Because, until the turn of the 20th century, I think the
distinction between doctors and quacks was quite moot.
Oh, yeah, but this guy, he's the father of neurology.
But he also came up with this idea,
women in particular,
that it was incredibly good for them to lie down,
do absolutely nothing for six weeks.
And they were not allowed to do anything except be spoon-fed,
maybe get up and go to the loo. They had to drink pint after pint of milk
and they were banned from reading and writing.
So, Virginia Woolf did the cure.
Her doctor prescribed it when she'd had a nervous breakdown.
She writes about it in Mrs Dalloway.
Charlotte Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper,
which is a book about a woman going mad because of this rest cure.
But it was particularly given to women
and it was thought that this would cure them of, I don't know,
the hysterical idea that they wanted to work.
Or read a book. Or read a book.
Think of all the laundry that's mounted up after six weeks.
But he was also a good doctor.
He coined the term "phantom limb syndrome".
He in fact was the first reported case of something called
"Mitchell's Disease". We've all been there.
Does anyone know where we get the word "quack" from? Ducks.
Extra point for Alan there. I think that's marvellous.
I feel like something's going to go off.
APPLAUSE
It's quack salve, it's somebody just bragging about their ointment.
There was a fantastic golden age in the United States of quackery,
it's pretty much post-Andrew Jackson.
He was the seventh president and he generally believed that the
common man knew more than experts.
He was the Michael Gove of his day, if you like.
All but three states repealed all their laws regarding medicine so
people were free to just go and sell whatever they liked at medicine
shows. I mean, Europe had them as well. We had what were called
mountebanks, who used to go and sell medicines, literally climbing
up onto a bench. It's Italian for mounting a bench.
Right, this next question makes me all of aquiver.
Why might you invest in a vibratory chair?
VICTORIA'S BUZZER: Oh! Perfect noise for it.
Because you're furnishing your vibratory?
Oh! I want a vibratory!
Yes!
It's a new room in Sexy Cluedo.
Go in there, you get beaten to death
by an Art Deco vibrator. Yes.
It's a good place to go if you're mixing something in a bowl.
Well, there is an entire museum in the United States
called the Museum Of Questionable Medical Devices.
It's in the Science Museum in Minnesota.
It was called the Battle Creek Vibratory Chair
and it's from 1900.
There it is there.
It shook the patient violently
to help waste pass through the intestines.
It also cured headaches, apparently.
It was installed in John Harvey Kellogg's sanatorium
in Battle Creek.
Kellogg...famous for?
Cornflakes. Cornflakes, absolutely.
He was an odd fellow.
He believed that all sex was bad.
I mean, everything. All sex? All sex, yeah.
He was married for a long time but it's said it was never consummated.
And he produced huge quantities of semen.
I can't look at that now!
"I just shook this in my chair."
Joking aside, vibrators were used as medical equipment... Yes.
..I think in the '20s. To temper the hysteria of women when they go
getting ideas, you calm them down with a vibrator.
And, you know, some doctors I think had queues around the block.
But that's again the border, isn't it, between quackery and medicine.
Because it's sort of a nonsense in a way, and yet...
Well worth doing the research. It is, yeah.
I'm not sure that isn't an urban myth. You think it's true,
though? Yes, I've been to a vibrator museum.
Where is there a vibrator museum? In Holland. I mean, genuinely, a woman
would go and see the doctor and the doctor would perform the exercise
for her. And, you know, nobody ever came out feeling worse.
ALAN MIMICS VIBRATOR BUZZ
You feeling better yet?
HE CONTINUES BUZZING
There's also, in this Museum Of Questionable Medical Devices,
there's a 1970s foot-operated breast-enlarging pump,
which looks completely...
There it is! Yeah.
Oh, is that so you can be discreet under the desk?
LAUGHTER
Psshhh!
Pfffft!
Do you mean, to pump milk out?
Nope! The idea was it would make your breasts larger
if you pumped at them.
I think one of the most horrible ads I've ever seen for a dubious
medical device is for Dr Scott's electric hairbrush, sold in the
1890s. Look at this. "Dr Scott's electric hairbrush will not save an
"Indian's scalp from his enemies, but it will preserve yours
"from dandruff, baldness..."
What I like is at the very bottom it just says, "Valuable book free."
It came with a compass, and the compass... A compass? Yes.
If you passed it over the brush, it jumped and it was supposed to show
that the brush was properly working. I mean, obviously it just showed it
had magnetised iron in it.
And then there was a guy who was the... I think he was the kind of
dean of gadget quacks, Albert Abrams, and he invented lots of
things but one of the things he invented was the Dynomizer.
And he claimed he could diagnose any known disease with a single drop of
a patient's blood or their handwriting,
or do it over the phone. Oh!
A blood sample was sent to him by a member of the American Medical
Association and got back a diagnosis that the patient had malaria,
diabetes, cancer and syphilis,
and in fact the blood had come from a rooster.
Now, to a different kind of quack.
What am I saying here?
SHE BLOWS A BIRD CALLER
Oh, adorable. Thank you.
I mean, "It's time for tea!
"Get all your mallard friends. I've laid out the area."
"But do not bring bread!"
Yes, no, bread is very bad for ducks, that's a very good point. Hm.
But you mentioned mallards.
Most ducks don't quack.
But it is predominately female mallards who make
this particular noise. And why do you think they make it?
Is it a duck rape alarm?
Because isn't that a famous...?
Consent is not big in the duck world. No, not at all.
They're nasty to each other sometimes, yeah. Yes.
And I think the mating thing is pretty horrible -
hashtag quack-quack.
They mate for life and they're in love.
I believe that. I saw it on a Valentine's card.
Oh, no, that's swans.
Yeah. Yes, the sex act is a forced one for ducks.
Yeah, and they chase them down and then they keep their face
out of the water by holding their neck up with their beak.
It's very unpleasant.
And then they impose themselves upon the female.
In the middle of Hampstead Heath!
It's not right.
So, the females give these bouts of loud monotonous quacks,
particularly during their pre-laying period. Why might they do that?
So, but is it because they're fertile?
It is because they're fertile but it isn't what you might think,
which is that they are looking for a mate.
Because they quite often will do it when the mate is right there.
Weirdly, we now think it's because they're drawing
the attention of any predatory mammals who might be in the area.
So, what they want to do is, if the predators come,
they think, "Not going to stay here and nest, it's not safe."
And so they're actually trying to attract the very thing
that might have a go at them.
Gosh, that's clever, isn't it? It is clever, isn't it? Yes.
Yes, like leaving your car doors unlocked
if you go to look round a house.
Yeah, exactly that, yeah.
Exactly.
OK, I hadn't thought of doing that, but that's very clever.
The other possibility, of course,
is that there's already a pair of ducks there
and they're sending out a message saying, "We've moved in.
"Don't any other ducks come, because this is our...this is our place.
"So go away." Now, let's all have a go. You've all got a duck caller.
There is a human sport of duck calling,
so trying to get the waterfowl to come in order to be shot,
and the best duck callers take part
in a World Championship Duck Calling Contest, which is in Arkansas
in every Thanksgiving.
Well, why don't we all go?
I don't know!
Why aren't we there? I know!
Let's see if we're good enough.
THEY BLOW ON THEIR BIRD CALLERS
LAUGHTER
Only one woman has ever won, and rather pleasingly, she won in
1955-56, she was called Pat Peacock. Brilliant.
The very first person who won didn't have a duck caller at all,
just made the sound with their own throat.
Victorian children used to make their bird callers
by cutting the larynx from a recently dead goose.
AUDIENCE: Urgh! Yeah. And blowing through it.
Oh, thank God television was invented. I know.
But look what they used to do if a child had no legs!
You just had to muck in.
Yeah.
Anyway, in 1850 there was a 12-year-old who accidentally
swallowed his goose's larynx that he was blowing through
and he started honking like a goose every...
..every time he breathed.
And there was a German doctor who eventually performed
a tracheotomy on him
and there's a medical paper entitled
On The Removal Of A Larynx Of A Goose From That Of A Child.
Mallards quack to check for predators
and avoid becoming a sitting duck.
AUDIENCE GROANS
Ugh!
Well, what would you have to do to find yourself
imprisoned in Reading for two years?
Oh, a sort of a BA in town planning or something like that.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
I've done... I've actually done shows in Reading, and for a laugh
I would just go, "Good evening, it's great to be here in REE-ding."
And I heard this woman say, "Oh, he's trying to say RED-ing!"
I'm like, "You know you're here for a comedy show?"
I thought I was going to be imprisoned because I couldn't
pronounce Reading correctly. I was on a bus not very long ago and
I was going past the pub and there was a sign outside. I thought it
said "REE-ding versus..."
And I couldn't read the bottom bit because there was somebody standing
in the way. And I thought, "Reading versus..." Colouring in.
Colouring in... Singing.
Yes. Anyway, it turned out to be football,
and it was Reading versus... Who would Reading play, darling?
Another team.
That's pretty much the amount of interest I paid to it, yeah.
So, come on, what would you have to do... Oscar Wilde, Reading Gaol?
It is not connected to Oscar Wilde.
There's a special quarantine centre there... Is there? ..in Reading.
Nits. No.
There is the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre in Reading,
part of the University of Reading.
There are lots of terrible diseases that chocolate can get.
Frosty pod, Witches' Broom.
I knew they did silly courses in Reading, I knew it.
Well, these are really serious, Alan, because they can destroy up to
40% of the crop every year, and so when cocoa plants are transported
from one country to another, it's very important to make sure that the
diseases are not moved with them, and so chocolate plants will spend
two years in Reading being... Relaxing. Relaxing...
Relaxing, hanging out. Being tested, hanging out. Yeah, yeah.
If they're healthy after two years, then they can go on to their
destination, but otherwise they are kept in quarantine.
Do you know why it's in Britain?
Is there some kind of...per capita thing where we're the biggest
chocolate consumers? No, it's really simple.
The weather's so bad that the diseases wouldn't possibly
survive. It is one of the major perks of living here.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
OK, why might you quarantine five million people?
Wales?
LAUGHTER
Five million people, largest quarantine in history.
I'm going to help you out, I'm going to tell you 1918.
Oh, is it the flu? Yes. Flu epidemic.
The whole of Australia was quarantined in 1918.
The flu epidemic, pandemic started in the USA and in Europe, and the
Australian government decided to quarantine the entire country.
All ships were intercepted, all forced to moor offshore and see if
any symptoms developed. The flu did eventually get through, but it
wasn't anywhere near as bad as it could have been.
I mean, still very bad, 40% of the country got flu, 15,000 people died.
However, if you put that against the rest of the world,
50 million to 100 million people died of the flu.
There were 500 million cases.
And, tragically, the celebrations at the end of the First World War
helped to spread it, because people who'd been keeping in their houses
suddenly came out to celebrate and then the flu was passed from
one person to another. Anybody know why it was called the Spanish flu?
Because it started in the United States and probably in France as
well. It's one of those weird things where the censors didn't want
anybody to write about the fact that there was a flu epidemic, because
they thought it would cause panic. But you could write about it being
in Spain, because Spain was neutral and not part of the war.
So we just blamed the Spanish.
"Not only not fighting, but now they've given us flu, the swines!"
That's a really good fact. Yeah. Thank you very much.
Yeah, I like that. Here's the thing about Australia,
they even quarantine rocks. Did you know this? I love this fact.
Yeah, they're called "sorry rocks". Aw! Lumps of Uluru, or Ayers Rock,
is sometimes taken by tourists, and then they feel really guilty about
it and they post them back to the park rangers. No!
Yeah, they get about one a day. Stop!
The largest ever returned weighed 32 kilos!
Somebody had taken a 32 kilo rock!
But, also, don't you find when you're on holiday,
you buy stuff that's inappropriate? Yeah. You go, "Oh, a Stetson. I'm going to live in a
"Stetson, because I'm in Texas." Yeah. And then you go home and you
go, "Why?" Yeah. But the worry is that there's a small threat of
pathogens being introduced through the rocks, and so they actually put
the rocks in a neutral area.
Would you like to meet Vomiting Larry?
No.
Yes. What? Have you got a thing about vomit?
I'm just closing my eyes. You continue.
No, we're not actually going to show vomit. OK.
We're just going to talk about it a lot.
Oh, I thought somebody called Larry was just going to come and be sick.
Yeah, it's going to be a volcano
or some kind of weird beetle... Of course. ..or something.
It's not a volcano, it is a humanoid simulated vomiting system
developed by a UK's Health and Safety Laboratory in Derbyshire
by researcher Dr Cat Makison Booth.
And there is Cat and there is Vomiting Larry. Sorry.
Hello. Sorry!
Sorry. It's fine.
Cat, I believe that Larry can vomit on command.
He can. But why would you invent such a thing?
So we're looking at infection transmission,
so we want to identify how far vomit spreads so that we can help
clear it all back up again and prevent transmission of fluid.
I kind of wish he was full, though, now,
so we could get Alan back for earlier on. Yes, for shooting you
with goat gland. Presumably, I'm going to guess,
it's further than we think the little pool of vomit...?
Yeah, it would kind of fill, with all the droplets and splash,
most of this bit of the studio.
No! Wow! Yeah, but you wouldn't be able to see it, so when you come to
clean up the main bulk, you'd stand in it, spread it everywhere.
So you're just carrying on spreading, even when you think
you've cleaned it all up? Yeah, yeah.
Can I...? Why is he called Larry?
Because the head of the system is called Airway Larry.
So it's for when medical students are practising laryngoscopies.
Yeah, obviously. So that's where the Larry came from. Oh!
Do the medical students not provide enough vomit? I mean...
But they can't do it on command, so, you know...
I think it has to be one, two, three, go. Yeah. Like that.
OK, so now, we can't have Larry actually vomit,
you'll be very pleased to know.
However... Vomit! Vomit! Vomit!
Come on, Laurence.
We do have a film of Larry.
We're going to have the film without sound,
but if any of you lovely people would like to join in and create
the sounds that you imagine Larry might make, then help yourselves.
Why, of course. Yeah, let's have a look.
You only have to ask once! Here we go.
ALAN: Urrrgh!
LAUGHTER
Urrgh, God, I'm dying!
Arrrrrgh!
It's coming out of my arse as well!
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
You know when you're being sick
and you can't turn round quick enough,
because you know it's going to...?
"Oh, no, oh, no! No!"
Pffft!
"Argh, argh, God! Flush it, flush it, flush it!"
Cat, I'm so sorry, darling.
The norovirus, presumably one of the things that you've been
looking at, is that right?
Yeah, that's the key thing we're looking at. So it's really infectious,
can be infected with ten viruses
and you can have kind of a thousand million in a litre of fluid.
So, highly transmissible. Wow! It's like the Ferrari of the virus world,
isn't it? Definitely. This is actually the norovirus here.
Oh. I mean, it looks like candied popcorn.
But it's actually the norovirus. Yeah. Well, thank you so much
for bringing Larry in. Dr Cat Makison Booth.
Here's a thing, they found the world's oldest vomit.
They found it in Peterborough. What?!
Just round the back of the Wetherspoons. Yes.
Can you guess how old it is? 4,000 years.
No. A little bit older than that. Is it a fossil? It is a fossil?
Yeah. Millions of years. 160 million years, and it
was this creature here, an ichthyosaur.
So that's an ancient marine reptile.
And this is where vomit becomes exciting. This is where it is
actually scientifically very exciting. Best sentence I've ever
heard. I know. We now know that ichthyosaurs behaved much as
sperm whales do today. They would eat shellfish whole and then they
would vomit up the indigestible shells because that would otherwise
rip their intestines.
So we've learned a huge amount just from that.
It's a funny thing, vomit, there's an extraordinary story. You remember
Ted Hughes, the poet? There's a story that a woman who met him found
him so physically attractive at a party that she had to leave
and vomit. No! I know. Is that one of his stories? Yeah.
LAUGHTER
"She was quite overcome by my attractiveness.
"The woman over there who threw up."
Ted, Ted, come here... LAUGHTER
I had a really good... I went to a really good party and on the way
home, I was on the tube, and you know those old litter boxes?
And I had one of those, like... HE RETCHES
I was like, "It's coming! It's coming!"
HE RETCHES "It's coming!
"Oooooh!" And everything came out, but there was no bottom on the bin.
Oh!
Filled my shoes.
I love the things that scientists discover.
Apparently they only discovered that flu can travel between different
species after a ferret sneezed in a scientist's face.
1933.
Now, here's another question to make you queasy.
What happened when Michelangelo took his socks off?
Oh, don't say some of his foot came away.
Oh, no. Oh!
Apparently, he didn't wash,
but his skin used to come off if he took his clothes off.
So, this is thought to be a portrait of him by Raphael.
It's sort of having a go at him. Raphael was a kind of young buck
and Michelangelo was quite old by then.
And he has Michelangelo playing Heraclitus, sort of the weeping,
grumpy philosopher, because Michelangelo was incredibly grumpy.
But according to Michelangelo's biographer, "He wore stockings
"of dog skin constantly for months together,
"so that when he took them off,
"the skin of the leg often came away with them."
AUDIENCE GROANS I know. He was very busy.
I mean, he was incredibly busy. How long did the Sistine ceiling take?
Well, it took years and years and years, and he wrote that he
constantly had his "beard to heaven".
He used to talk about, "the brush is always above my face, my haunches
"are grinding into my gut, and my poor arse strains
"to work as a counterweight."
Actually, there's a really fascinating thing
about Michelangelo that they've fairly recently discovered,
that you can probably tell a Michelangelo sculpture.
So, if you take something like the Rothschild Bronzes,
there are three ways, in fact, the experts now say
you can find that it's a Michelangelo.
The first thing is that the first and second toes are splayed
in the figure. And he always depicts the abdomen as not having a six-pack
but an eight-pack.
And he gives his sculptures unruly pubic hair.
And the suggestion is that one of his favourite models must
have had all of those attributes.
The toes and the eight-pack and the unruly pubic hair.
I wouldn't say that's unruly.
Well, it's not had a comb, has it?
I like that that's now what we're all looking at.
Yeah.
It was what we were all looking at anyway.
I'll tell you what, the Milk Tray man's let himself go.
Michelangelo used to get his marble from the Carrara quarries in
Tuscany. He used to visit the quarry and pick the exact piece of marble
that he wanted. And David - that was discarded, nobody wanted...
That's absolutely right. In fact, you should have an extra point for
that, because it had been discarded by two previous artists. Yes.
Agostino de Duccio and Antonio Rossellino, they both had tried, and
the trouble with it is that it's not actually very good marble.
And one of the reasons why we know this, there was a guy who
smashed a bit of David's toe off and they've now been able to analyse
the splinters from that. It was a guy called Piero Cannata.
But you're absolutely right that David is unfortunately made of not
such good stuff.
Now, Alan, why might I syphon four gallons of gas up your bottom?
How did you get a photograph of that, you swine?
I'm talking about hydrogen. Is it going to have an enema effect?
Is it a colon cleanser?
It is a... It is a medical thing, so... Is it flammable?
It is exactly flammable and that is why it matters.
Oh, ho, ho! Yeah. So... Boof!
This is not exactly... Wow!
Oh, are you actually going to do it? Yeah.
There was an American military surgeon who was called
Nicholas Senn, and he came up with a system for checking
whether you'd been shot in the guts.
So one of the things they would do is, they would pump hydrogen
up your backside and then set fire to the gas as it escaped
from the wound in your stomach.
So we're talking about the late 19th century.
It was a huge problem for surgeons
to work out whether a wounded patient had their intestinal canal
pierced by a bullet.
Can't you just put them under water, like an inner tube? Yes.
If you did the surgery and it wasn't necessary, it could kill somebody.
So they needed to work it out.
And so he came up with this system.
It was called rectal insufflation of hydrogen gas.
And it's a bit like a plumber looking for a leak in a gas pipe.
If it had gone in, it would escape through the hole.
And he did try it.
And if there was no hole, they would just explode.
Yes, well, he did try it on several dogs first,
to the point where their intestines ruptured. Oh, God!
I know.
HE HOWLS
Pfft! But then he decided to try it on himself
and he had his assistant pump six litres of gas up his bottom.
Can I just read this, cos it's awful?
"He found that the escape of air or gas from the rectum
"was prevented by an assistant pressing the margins of the anus
"firmly above the rectal tube."
He tried it on two patients. It never really caught on.
He's quite clear that the entire thing was devised
because he fancied his assistant.
Also, sometimes I think with these stories about research,
they just get to the end of a long day
and they think, let's see what happens if you stick a load of
hydrogen up their arse.
But there are lots of self-experimenters.
There was a guy called Dr Stubbins Ffirth and he was fascinated
by how yellow fever was transmitted,
but, I mean, he was slightly bonkers.
He wanted to prove it wasn't contagious, so he did things
like he dribbled infected patients' vomit into a cut on himself.
Oh! I know.
He put it into his own eyes and he tried frying the vomit from a yellow
fever patient and inhaling the fumes
and then he also sat in a vomit sauna.
Who knew there was such a thing. Wow.
It's another word for a night bus.
APPLAUSE
You know, he didn't catch it because you can only get it, of course,
if it goes straight into the bloodstream,
like, by a mosquito, which wasn't discovered
until six decades after he died.
He died when he was 36. It doesn't say of what.
Take your pick. Yeah.
And in 2004, there was a biologist called David Pritchard.
He allowed 50 bookworm larvae to burrow into his skin and
he wanted to see if the infestation could fight hay fever and asthma,
so he applied a dressing... Urgh! I know, it's horrible.
A dressing with pin-sized hookworm larvae.
They're like, sort of, maggots on the surface of meat
and he said the itch when they cross through your skin is indescribable!
But here is the thing, it worked.
That for some reason,
the worms somehow seem to switch off the immune system.
OK, so he didn't have hay fever but he had worms inside his arm!
That's not better!
I had pins and needles, I shot my foot off, so that worked.
Some people go a little bit too far, I agree.
I think that's enough from the ANALS of medical history.
AUDIENCE GROANS
It's time to move on to that sick puppy that is General Ignorance.
So, tell me, what's the technical name of the first patient
in a disease outbreak?
Keith.
Oh, the audience will know. Who... What is it?
AUDIENCE: Patient Zero.
KLAXON
Ha-ha-ha!
See, you fell into that trap immediately.
No, it's the Index Case, or Index Patient.
People do think that it's Patient Zero and actually it's based
on a mistake. The very first time that was given was to a man
called Gaetan Dugas and he was a French Canadian flight attendant,
who allegedly contracted HIV in Haiti.
And he spread it, allegedly, to lots of men during his lifetime.
And he wasn't referred to as Patient Zero, he was Patient O,
and the O stood for Outside California.
But people now think that it was Patient Zero.
While we are on the origins of disease,
can you name someone who had Lou Gehrig's disease?
Lou Gehrig.
No, it turns out he may not have had it.
He was a baseball player? He was a New York Yankees baseball player.
He died in 1941 and even though it's named after him,
the chances are he didn't have it.
It's most likely that he had some kind of brain trauma
brought on by the long-term effects...
Very, very tight cap. ..of concussion.
So Lou Gehrig's disease is actually motor neurone disease.
It's also known as ALS.
It's a specific disease which causes the death of neurones
controlling voluntary muscles. It became famous actually with
the ice bucket challenge.
There is £90 million in just one month with the ice bucket challenge.
Which is cleaner, the gents' or the ladies'?
CLAUDIA'S BUZZER Yeah?
I mean, I haven't used that enough. No. We all agree.
Yeah, that's a very good noise, isn't it?
Ladies'. KLAXON
I know!
I mean, come on!
So there was a study at the University of Arizona,
and apparently ladies' loos are germier.
Why might that be, do you think?
Cos we chat in there for quite a long time.
We spend longer in there, but also we take children in. Ah.
You know, crazy germ-carriers.
How are those two floating through the doors like that?
That is slightly disturbing, isn't it?
Women wash their hands a lot more than men.
Men less likely to wash their hands at sporting venues.
They had a study at Turner Field Baseball Stadium in Atlanta -
men wash their hands just 65% of the time
when they're at a sporting venue.
I don't know how this works. It says here the study involved
"researchers discreetly observing."
I would say it's considerably less than 65% of men...
Oh, would you say? ..wash their hands after they've had a wee
at the Arsenal.
I think there's about five of us who use those sinks.
In fact, at the old Wembley Stadium, you'd go to wash your hands
and then usually there'd be about six blokes pissing in the sink.
Either of you ladies think that it's worth putting down
toilet paper on the seat? No. No, why?
No, because you slide off, don't you?
I don't have the time. Yeah.
Can't go, "I'll be out in a minute,
"to have fun with my friends."
"Don't worry, we'll see
"the fireworks another time."
Every time I've ever used a public loo, I've always stood there going,
"What are they doing in there?!" That's that. Yeah.
Is that what it is? Yeah. It's that. Sort of crocheting their own seats?
No, but here's the good news - it's a complete waste of time.
The toilet seat is designed to not keep bacteria on it,
whereas toilet paper - unbelievably absorbent.
And squatting? Well, I'm more inclined to hover myself.
Yeah, so hovering, hmm, also a bad idea.
The pelvic floor muscles can't relax
and so your bladder doesn't fully empty.
It's also a waste of a superpower.
I mean, if you can hover... Yeah.
APPLAUSE
Apparently the only way you can get really,
really sick in a public lavatory is licking the toilet seat.
AUDIENCE GROANS
I'm just saying, that's what they've discovered. Ha! All been there.
It turns out that the gentlemen's lavs
are cleaner than the ladies', despite the smell.
After you've been drawn, hanged and quartered,
how many parts do you end up in?
Hmm, quartered would suggest, um, what, is it?
Is it four?
KLAXON No!
Five. It is five. Why is it five?
Do they put your head somewhere else? Head, yeah, absolutely.
So it's your head plus the four quarters of your body.
What used to happen sometimes is that the various body parts
could be spread all over the country.
So, William Wallace, after his execution, his four quarters
were sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Perth and Stirling.
But his head remained on London Bridge.
And there used to be a thing called the Keeper of the Heads.
So about 300 years, the London Bridge Gatehouse
was home to the Keeper of the Heads, and his job was to display
the traitors' heads to good effect. Take down the old ones.
You know, "Oh, that one's looking a bit tired.
"I'll take that one down." A bit maggoty.
But also some of them are higher than others.
If you had died as a rather senior nobleman,
your head on a pole would go higher. Quite right, that's quite right.
Yes, quite right, than a junior one.
"I hope you're going to put that in a very high..."
Everybody worried about being quartered because then you
couldn't have a Christian burial.
So, under the 1752 Murder Act and the 1832 Anatomy Act,
it ruled that criminals could be sentenced to
dissection as a punishment,
because it meant that you could no longer go to God at the very end.
That's really recent, isn't it, for that?
I mean, now, really they're not far off finding penicillin then.
No, I know. It's about the age of my house.
All of which brings us to the cruel and unusual punishment
of the scores.
Coming in first, with surgical precision, oh, my goodness,
with eight points, it's Stephen.
Oh, my goodness.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
In second place, it's Alan.
Seven actual points.
And in third place, with minus five, Victoria.
Minus six, it's Claudia.
But Claudia is not last. In last place, with minus ten,
it's the audience!
AUDIENCE CHEER
Which means I only have to thank Claudia, Stephen, Victoria and Alan.
And I leave you with this quirky quotation from George Carlin.
"Isn't it a bit unnerving
"that doctors call what they do 'practise'?"
Thank you and goodnight.