Published on 12, July, 2020
What is your specialist subject, the thing that makes you feel happiest and eager learning about? That makes life feel better?
I think mine mine is Ancient Civilizations. I’m listening to lots of different Books on Audible. Lots of Great Courses, which are amazing, as they are university level lectures presented by doctors who are absolutely passionate about their subjects. I’m listening to one about Mesoamerica another about Native Americans and an audio book about Ancient African Kingdoms. No one I know cares about any of these though. Nobody ever talks to me about their academic passions. I have no clue if I’m on any spectrum but all the people I have known in the past who said they had Asperger’s were much more cerebral than the average person.
Mine's medical history. The bit I like best is the 19th century, because there were loads of developments around public health and hospital hygiene, but I like Ancient Egyptian medicine as well, and I'm also interested in the bubonic plague because it had such a massive effect on so many other historical events.
Oh wow, fascinating. They used to do public autopsies didn’t they? Also there were lots of grave robbers because that’s where Mary Shelley got the inspiration for Frankenstein. It was the rats that spread the plague wasn’t it? I love seeing rats in the park by me. There are loads. I feel like they’re still taboo. Although I didn’t like it when we had one in the kitchen once. I watched a film called Willard once and his friends are the rats in the basement. I heard something interesting on the Native American’s great courses lectures that the British or Danish can’t remember which used biological warfare on them by giving gifts of clothing infected with small pox. I didn’t know diseases could be used as weapons before. Very interesting.
They did do public autopsies, and rats did spread the plague, yes- via their fleas. There was person to person transmission as well, I think, because it tended to make people quite... oozy.
There's a lot of stuff in medical history that makes for pretty grim reading, actually. But a big part of why I like it so much is that there are so many stories about how people fixed things too. Joseph Bazalgette's new sewers that sorted out the Great Stink of 1858 is a favourite of mine!