A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine
August 10, 2013 1:55 PM   Subscribe

Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband Justin welcome you to Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine. Every Friday, they dig through the annals of medical history to uncover all the odd, weird, wrong, dumb and just gross ways we've tried to fix people over the years. posted by pjern (8 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've really been enjoying this show the last few weeks.
posted by atrazine at 2:01 PM on August 10, 2013


The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco by Eric Burns, p. 6:
...the Aztecs and Incas were among those who practiced the rectal application of tobacco smoke. Where they got the idea, no one can say. Why anyone would endure such a treatment is an even greater puzzle. Nor can he who did the applying have been eager for the business. The Jivaros of eastern Ecuador even tended to their children in this manner, rolling them over onto their sides and anally inserting a syringe that was made of a hen's bladder.

...

As civilization advanced, the use of tobacco enemas declined... for some reason, tobacco enemas made a comeback in eighteenth century Europe, where they were utilized "to resuscitate people in a state of suspended animation, or apparently drowned persons."
While searching for a citation for that I came across a book called Stuck Up!: 100 Objects Inserted and Ingested in Places They Shouldn't Be.
posted by XMLicious at 2:16 PM on August 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


All of those treatments have something in common: they were all the state-of-the-art medical technology in their day. Enjoy your next trip to the doctor!
posted by dr_dank at 2:22 PM on August 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


Justin McElroy is one of the three brothers from My Brother, My Brother and Me, a podcast which has taken over my life as of late (and deserves its own FPP, really.) If you like Yahoo! Answers questions about horses and ghosts I highly recommend you give it a listen.
posted by Hey Dean Yeager! at 2:42 PM on August 10, 2013 [3 favorites]


MBMBAM is great of course, as well as Justin's appearances on the Bombcast. Justin and Sydnee have also had two hilarious previous podcasts, Losing the Sheen and The Satellite Dish. Sawbones just might be my favorite of the McElroy podcasting subempire though.
posted by kmz at 2:59 PM on August 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


I love MBMB&M too. The first listen results in questioning your sanity due spending an hour listening to fratty bros swear enthusiastically. Listening longer yields the realization that they are neither fratty nor bros. They do like to swear. It's really great and super entertaining.
posted by Keith Talent at 6:42 PM on August 10, 2013


I wish I enjoyed this more. I feel like it's a lot of reactions from Justin, over and over again, to weird medical facts. Losing the Sheen was absolutely fantastic, and The Satellite Dish was the best TV podcast I've ever listened to. I wish they had kept that up.

I don't know the details, but I think there was some weird dumb internet threat thing that drove Sydnee off for a while; I'm at least glad to have her back podcasting.
posted by graventy at 8:26 AM on August 11, 2013


I've really enjoyed Sawbones, I just wonder how many episode topics there can be (and if they can ever work in a Modelland reference). Then again, judging from all the questionable medical devices on Oddities, it could be forever.
posted by drezdn at 5:12 PM on August 15, 2013


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