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The Cholera Riots (What the Conspiracy!)
28 Plays2 years ago
Josh elucidates M on the Cholera Riots.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Podcast Feedback Challenges
00:00:00
Speaker
So we've had a few comments on the podcast recently via the PodBen page. Did you know you can't respond to comments via the webpage? You have to use their app. That sounds stupid. It is.
Reflecting on Past Content and Growth
00:00:10
Speaker
Anyway, a few of those comments have been along the lines of first time listener, very confused caller. I think we might have to do the old prelimeries again. Well, that could go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes. I mean, yes. But also, we're not the people we were seven years ago.
00:00:27
Speaker
No, not after the Bishago incident.
Mind Control Chips and Fictional Politics
00:00:29
Speaker
So not sure which version of M you are, and why Charlton Heston isn't listed as the 40th President of the Reunited States. Well, you know, I can't say. Because of the mind control chip. Beep. So then, the usual? The usual. Right.
Conspiracy Theories: An Introduction
00:00:44
Speaker
The good doctor, now professor, M.R.X.Denteth, wrote their PhD on the philosophy of conspiracy theories and has two books, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories and Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously. Whilst Josh Addison, near Addison, like they thought Bivoubrox is just some guy, you know? Thus proving Scientologists to be right. My Douglas Adams really did have his finger on the zeitgeist.
00:01:07
Speaker
Anyway,
Defining Conspiracy Theories
00:01:08
Speaker
on this podcast we take it that all a conspiracy theory is is an explanation of an event which cites a conspiracy as a salient cause. Conspiracy theories are not inherently irrational or prima facie false, rather, like any theory, they have to be assessed on the evidence for or against them.
00:01:24
Speaker
Now, this is known as the thesis of particularism and seems to become kind of the standard view in philosophy. Well, the standard view amongst philosophers who write on conspiracy theories. So, this podcast treats particular conspiracy theories as theories worth investigating to see if they should be taken seriously and believed. Although there are a lot of theories we do think are actually silly and we'll poke fun at, but only because we think there are adequate grounds to not take them seriously.
00:01:53
Speaker
We also have a broad understanding of what counts as the topic of a conspiracy theory. It likes, for example, to talk about how the organization of a surprise birthday party is a conspiracy. And if they got all suspicious that their friends were arranging one, they'd be coming up with a conspiracy theory.
00:02:09
Speaker
Given no one has yet arranged that desired surprise birthday party, I'm beginning to think my suspicions are unwarranted. Or are they?
Humor and Awkward Jokes
00:02:18
Speaker
Precisely. And sometimes, of course, we like to introduce each other to conspiracy theories we think the other has never heard of, in order to see what we think of them. For example, this week Josh is going to tell me about...
00:02:33
Speaker
Ah, well, I'm going to see if you know about the time your mother and I made sweet, sweet love under a moonlit sky while you were sleeping beside us. I was like, you think you can fool me into revealing this week's what the conspiracy theory with this ruse? Shame on you. Shame. Shame. It was worth
Podcast Introduction and Humor
00:02:52
Speaker
a try. So was your mum.
00:03:03
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. N. Denton.
00:03:12
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison here in Auckland, New Zealand and in Zhuhai,
Personal Anecdotes and Humor
00:03:18
Speaker
China. It's associate professor of philosophy and convicted kelp rustler, Dr. M. R.X.Tentiff. I thought we were going to talk about that. Christen, just ask yourself, is do I mean rustling in the sense of rustling cattle or rustling as in making a rustling noise by walking or swimming through it? You never know. Well, I mean, I know and you know. The listeners, however,
00:03:41
Speaker
We'll never know. Or will they? No. I mean, there was that rumor about those court proceedings down in the Waikato. Well, that's what it was.
Russia-Ukraine Invasion Commentary
00:03:52
Speaker
I don't know. Anyway, enough speculation. It's a new week. Nothing horrible happened to me last Friday night, so that's an improvement on current events.
00:04:03
Speaker
who sings the friday night song last friday night uh katie perry katie perry all right so you're not living katie perry's ideal lifestyle it's a sad fact but yes it's true i'm not not living katie perry's life do we have anything to say at the start of this episode wackiness is definitely afoot we've got uh as we're recording russia appears to have just invaded ukraine so that's
00:04:29
Speaker
That's something. I believe technically Rush is calling it a peacekeeping mission. Although everyone else is going, that's not how peacekeeping works. No, that's when you roll into another country with lots and lots of tanks and guns and stuff. I guess it might be a PIECE keeping mission. Peacekeeping, we're going to take a piece of this and keep it.
00:04:53
Speaker
but the actual nomic hatcher they're using of peace, P-E-A-C-E. No, not so much. Actually, and even now I feel guilty about making a joke about peacekeeping, given actually just how bad things are in the Ukraine.
Conspiracy Theory Guessing Game
00:05:06
Speaker
Well, it's not good, and I expect in the coming weeks we'll probably have plenty to say about it. Well, I think we're going to mention it a little bit in the bonus episode this week, but maybe we best put it to one side for now.
00:05:20
Speaker
Now, do I have a conspiracy theory for you? Yes. Good. Yes, I do. Good. I feel as though I need to be part of that particular part of the conversation. So it's another What the Conspiracy episode, and it's my turn to present something to Ian. So unless there's anything else we want to say right up the top, shall we get straight into it? Indeed. Let's build the fortress around my heart.
00:05:47
Speaker
It's time to play What The Conspiracy And then build a little birdhouse in your soul
00:05:59
Speaker
Well, I mean, I am your only friend. It's true, my eye can't remember how that bit of start goes. Doesn't matter. I'm your only friend. I'm not your only friend, but I am a little glowing friend. But really, I'm not actually your friend at all. I mean, I couldn't sing the entire song if you really wanted me to. You kind of died. I know you could. But anyway, that's not what we're here for today. Today, I'm going to tell you about the conspiracy theory. No, we're going to do the three questions we've kind of been left without doing. Yeah. Yeah.
00:06:28
Speaker
No. So where do you think the events of this relation to this conspiracy theory occurred? When do you think they occurred? And what is it all about? What's your prediction? All right, I'm going where the moon? When the 1860s
00:06:49
Speaker
and want going to be about the fact that the sky isn't real so it's going to be massive forgery slash hoaxery set in the in the middle of the 19th century on the lunar surface or even beneath the moon but it's going to be very definitely not moon adjacent it's going to be moon centric
Cholera Outbreak Theories
00:07:12
Speaker
Well, I cannot tell you how disappointed I am in your answers just now, because I thought this one was going to be a given. The where, you see. The where is all over the world. So all you needed to do was pick a location anywhere on planet Earth and you would have been right. And yet, for once, you decided to go off world. So let this be a lesson.
00:07:34
Speaker
let this be a lesson to you. No, no, no, but it won't be a lesson to you. Next time you're leading me into a trap of saying something I know, and it's going to be a Martian-based conspiracy theory of some kind. No, I've read your book, you magnificent bastard. Yes. Just not this particular book. I promise nothing. Right, right. So when? The when continues to this very day. But when did it start? I mean, was I right about 19th century or does it go...
00:08:03
Speaker
We'll get to that. Actually, I thought it might be fun to have a bit more of a guessing game at the start of this episode. I'll give you some more clues and see if you can tell me what this conspiracy theory is going to be about. So it's in the world of disease, the world of pandemic.
00:08:18
Speaker
Now this pandemic that I'm thinking of that is going to be about, it started with an outbreak in Asia and has since spread all around the world in a series of waves causing millions of deaths. Now the authorities tried to enact measures to slow the spread of this pandemic, but the science was a little inexact, at least at the beginning, and a lot of their measures were opposed by business interests.
00:08:42
Speaker
And then people rebelled against the medical establishment and the state in their measures to control this pandemic, citing a bunch of conspiracy theories about the authorities' true motives and accusing doctors of being in the state's pocket.
Doctors and Cholera Conspiracies
00:08:56
Speaker
And as your final clue, this disease starts with the letter C.
00:09:00
Speaker
What am I talking about? Is it crapping? Did somehow crapping start in Asia and it's some kind of parasite in the bowel which wouldn't normally cause any issue for a human being but due to some kind of mutation forces human beings to remove excrement
00:09:20
Speaker
in kind of log-like or drippy structures is crapping somehow a disease and for some reason big business, particularly big plumbing, has been against the idea of doing anything about it because they've managed to make so much money out of big crap.
00:09:39
Speaker
That would have made for a much more interesting episode, definitely, but that is not actually true. Although crapping plays a large part in the spread of this disease. So it could be a waterborne disease with John Snow in London and all that rigmarole. That very disease. We're talking about cholera. That starts with C and that rhymes with T and that stands for trouble. Or the other one. I can't remember how the song goes. Anyway.
00:10:05
Speaker
So yes, cholera. I'm going to talk about the cholera riots of the 1800s. So you're actually pretty bang on with the date, although the range is a fairly wide range. So cholera. Interesting disease. You've probably, if you've been listening, heard people drawing equivalents between the current COVID pandemic and the cholera.
00:10:30
Speaker
epidemics of previous years. But what I didn't know until I saw someone mention and looked into it was that we've got protests going on in New Zealand here at the moment.
Cholera and Climate Connections
00:10:41
Speaker
People have been camped out in front of Parliament House for over two weeks now, having got there, sort of being inspired by the convoy that happened in Canada and so on. But the anti-colour stuff got quite hairy, as we will see.
00:10:55
Speaker
So, a brief history of cholera, just so we know where we're at. Cholera as a disease has been around possibly for hundreds, possibly for thousands of years. There are reports from ancient Greece of people describing diseases whose symptoms sound an awful lot like cholera as we experience it today. I mean, these days we were a bit
00:11:16
Speaker
But more precise, apparently, cholera is defined as an infection caused by the Vibrio cholerae bacterium specifically. But diseases either caused by that particular bacterium or ones a lot like it have been around for a long time. But the actual worldwide pandemics didn't start until around the 1800s.
00:11:37
Speaker
And then we had multiple sort of waves of pandemic throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. So I've seen seven as the number of waves of cholera pandemic there have been, although I don't know, it sounds like it must have been a bit of crossover. They'll sort of, they'll flare up and then the cases will die off and then a few years later there'll be another flare up. So apparently the first cholera pandemic, the dates they give are 1817 to 1824.
00:12:04
Speaker
It started in the Bengal region near Kolkata and spread to India, China, Indonesia, and got about as far west as the Caspian Sea, but no further into Europe from there. Although that said, it was the 1800s, so British soldiers were everywhere. So lots of British soldiers fighting abroad caught or died of cholera. So people were paying attention to it right from the start, even though it hadn't spread that widely.
00:12:29
Speaker
And back then, the way pandemics tended to spread were via either trade or warfare. Those were the two main reasons for people to be traveling between countries a lot. So pilgrimages to and from the Ganges River were responsible for the initial spread in some of the cases, which worked out nicely for those of a more racist slash imperialist bent, being able to blame India for the origin of it.
00:12:58
Speaker
But as we'll see, it ended up going everywhere. The second pandemic, 1829 to 1837, cholera spread up to Russia and then to the rest of Europe. By the third pandemic, 1846 to 1860, it had reached the Americas and was basically a worldwide phenomenon since then. And there were subsequent waves. Apparently Russia tended to get particularly hit particularly hard as these waves come along. And then
John Snow and Cholera Discovery
00:13:21
Speaker
the seventh and latest pandemic
00:13:23
Speaker
Depending on who you talk to either ended sometime in the 70s or never ended and the current cholera pandemic is still ongoing. And do you remember when we talked about conspiracy theories around a modern cholera outbreak a few years ago? Very vaguely, very vaguely. It was a news article we mentioned back in episode 94
00:13:48
Speaker
which I thought might be interesting to recap. So in 2010 and 2011 there was a big cholera outbreak in Haiti which I don't think had experienced cholera up until that point. So it swept across the whole country and it looked a lot like it originated, was brought into the country at a UN peacekeeping base that had recently been set up there
00:14:13
Speaker
sort of tracing the cases back, it looked like those were the earliest ones were, and it seemed to have been a strain of cholera that came from Nepal, and some of the peacekeeping staff had recently been in Nepal, so it certainly looked like the outbreak was due to this UN peacekeeping base, but the CDC in America would never officially announce the source, the cause of the outbreak.
00:14:40
Speaker
and that's listed to this day, I believe, is unconfirmed. And it's thought that this was because the Obama administration at the time basically lent on them to not officially rule that it was the UN's fault, because they didn't want to set a precedent of UN peacekeeping forces being found liable of things like that, because of course the US has peacekeeping forces around the world and they didn't want them to be found liable of similar things.
00:15:07
Speaker
The interesting thing was that, I don't know if this is still the case, but at the time when we talked about it, the CDC Museum in their headquarters, wherever that is, had an interesting display in their museum where they had a map of the outbreak of the cholera epidemic in Haiti showing the various cases. Then right next to that, they had the history of cholera, the famous map made by John Snow of the cholera outbreak in London.
00:15:37
Speaker
And people sort of thought this might have been a bit of a coded message from the CDC. They're sort of like, right, we're not going to officially say where the outbreak in Haiti started. But by the way, here's this John Snow thing, which shows how you can pinpoint the source of an epidemic by looking at all the cases. And here's a map of all the cases in Haiti, just going to
00:15:58
Speaker
Just going to leave the two there, side by side. Makes you think. Makes you think. The museum is just asking questions, Josh. It's just asking questions. So yeah, so people did think that maybe this was the insane. Look, we're not allowed to say that it came from the UN peacekeeping base, but here's enough evidence that anyone can see it did.
00:16:22
Speaker
But yes, no, it was 1854 that John Snow made his discovery. He had been studying cholera in England between 1849 and 1854. And yeah, he basically, as I'm sure we've talked about this before, he, up until that point, the miasma theory of disease was the dominant one, the idea that diseases were spread basically by bad smells, which
00:16:48
Speaker
I think it's not a silly idea I suppose if you... Well I mean it's a classic case of confusing correlation with causation in that often where there were diseased areas there were bad smells due to the consequences of disease and it was then easy to go well people go into those areas they fall ill because they breathed in the miasma and then they fall ill causing miasma where they are so ipsophacto
00:17:16
Speaker
it's the smell which transmits the disease. And Jon Snow went, no, no, no, no, no, no. He had completely different ideas. Mmm. Yes,
Cholera Treatment Discussion
00:17:25
Speaker
I mean, in a lot of cases the miasma theory did well. It's like, you know, you get your rotten food and your decomposing bodies and everything away where we can't smell them. But unfortunately, in cases like cholera, which is spread by human waste and contaminated water supplies, often it'd be like, right, we have all this
00:17:41
Speaker
feces that stinks. We can't have that around. So if we dump it all into the tins, it'll be underwater and we won't be able to smell it. So it'll be and then contaminating water supplies. But on the miasma thing, so do you know why plague doctors didn't tend to succumb to the plague? Because they wore those cool long masks.
00:18:01
Speaker
Well, so it was thought that it was a mask with the posies inside so the reason why they had those long beaked masks was they could have a nice smelling posy near their nose to get rid of their miasma. But the other thing plague doctors wore were full length leather robes that basically meant that mites and microbes had a hell of a time actually getting anywhere near their skin. They were essentially wearing environmental protection suits
00:18:30
Speaker
wherever they went in to treat patients. So everyone assumed it was the Marx that was doing the job, but actually what was doing the job was the leather gimp outfit every doctor chose to walk. But yes, then old John Snow made his famous map of cases in an area of London and was able to pinpoint that the sort of the epicentre of it or whatever you call it was this water pump
00:18:56
Speaker
Apparently a woman had been disposing of the soiled nappies of an infected child, and next to where it had leached into the water, or whatever it was. The story always goes that so, you know, he saved, he stopped the epidemic by simply taking the handle off of the water pump, although apparently that's just a story, and it didn't quite happen like that.
00:19:19
Speaker
He basically said, okay, so it's not the air, it's the water. It's in the water, is how it's spreading. And then because microscopes were a thing back then, people would say, you know, so we were aware of these microscopic organisms that live in the water, and then eventually we were able to figure out, okay, yeah, it's these tiny things in the water is what's carrying the disease.
00:19:37
Speaker
And of course, the confounding thing about cholera is that the best curative for cholera is drinking uncontaminated water, because they knew that if someone had cholera, you could basically get rid of it if they drank a lot of water, apart from the few cases where they continue to drink water and then die.
Societal Impact of Cholera
00:19:59
Speaker
And it turns out
00:20:01
Speaker
The microscopic organisms in the water are doing an awful lot of the work there. You give them uncontaminated water and they're fine. But if you keep giving them the contaminated water, it kind of kills them. Yes, you know, that's how it kills you, basically through dehydration. I didn't realise you can turn blue from cholera. You get so dehydrated that your blood thickens and is unable to carry oxygen.
00:20:27
Speaker
So it is nasty stuff. An interesting little side note of climate. Climate and climate change can be a big factor in cholera outbreaks. And indeed it seems like the reason why this all started in the first place, I said the first pandemic started around 1817. 1815
00:20:46
Speaker
was the year of the Tambora eruption in Indonesia, which they said was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history, which I thought was Krakatoa. But I guess I'm getting that wrong. But at any rate, Krakatoa gets the best press. I mean, the PR agents for Krakatoa are amazing. But apparently the Tambora eruption blasted enough stuff into the atmosphere that it changed the global climate. 1816 was referred to as the year without a summer.
00:21:14
Speaker
And in 1816 and 1817 there was unseasonal, sort of weird weather and unseasonal storms and unseasonal flooding in Bengal. So, you know, flooding equals contaminated water equals cholera outbreaks. So that's how it seems to have all got started. But anyway, none of this has been overtly conspiratorial so far, except for the Haiti stuff that we talked about before.
00:21:36
Speaker
where it
Cholera Riots and Class Tensions
00:21:37
Speaker
gets interesting for our purposes is when we talk about the public reaction to a lot of this. So cholera riots were a thing. They were a sort of a documented phenomena throughout these outbreaks. When I've read about them, they've only talked about riots in Russia and riots in the United Kingdom. I assume there must have been some in other countries, but these were the ones that everyone seems to talk about.
00:22:02
Speaker
So, like I said, Russia got hit pretty hard by cholera, and riots in Russia started in the 1820s and 30s and pretty much continued all the way through the various waves of the pandemic. And they tended to take the form of sort of your working class revolts, working class uprisings.
00:22:22
Speaker
um and the because there did seem to be a quite a sort of a political dimension to it more so even than say like i haven't read about the sort of stuff happening with say the flu epidemic in in the early 1900s i i'm sure there would have been resistance to a lot of measures but the the level of rioting
00:22:39
Speaker
doesn't seem to be what's described here, and there seems to be a lot of sort of class warfare, because obviously cholera is spread by sort of dirty living conditions, which in the poor and the lower classes are the ones who were forced to live in dirtier conditions, therefore cholera hits them hardest.
00:22:57
Speaker
And so you get the sort of the class warfare where the upper classes will say, oh, it's those dirty, poor people. It's all their fault. The disease is spreading. And then the lower class is like, no, it's not our fault. And it's you're the ones who are making life difficult for us and so on and so forth. So
00:23:13
Speaker
In Russia, in particular at the start of things, people would look at efforts that the state made, things like quarantines and armed cordons to stop people moving between regions to stop the spread of the disease. People looked at this as just being sort of a plot to repress the poor, to the extent that in some cases
00:23:33
Speaker
Rumors would spread that the disease had been unleashed on purpose as a bit of population control. The population control conspiracy theories were going back then, the idea that the poor, fewer poor people means less money required in whatever state welfare and so on was around then.
00:23:58
Speaker
And so there was this sort of class warfare population control type conspiracy theories which resulted in fairly major riots. So
UK Cholera Riots Analysis
00:24:09
Speaker
one of the most notorious ones that I've seen written about in a bunch of places happened in St Petersburg in 1831.
00:24:15
Speaker
demonstrators gathered in Sennaya Square, riot had sacked the main cholera hospital and went as far as murdering several of the doctors inside. So I got this from a paper, the St Petersburg cholera riot of 1831 water pollution and social tension by Alexei Krakovsky published in Arcadia 2013 and his abstract he says
00:24:41
Speaker
As protest turned into riot, the inflamed crowd started to sack the city's main cholera hospital, beat the market's sanitary inspectors, whom they accused of having spread the disease, and called for the death of all doctors in the city, whom they blamed for having poisoned the poor's wells. The administration was forced to send in military troops, however the riot was only halted when Sir Nicholas I appeared in the market square and ordered the crowd to fall on their knees and take their hats off in deference to him.
00:25:07
Speaker
Nicholas would later consider the suppression of the cholera riot to be one of the most important episodes of his life. Well, I mean, they all bowed down before him. It must have been in the... Yes, I almost stopped the riot, just by walking... Bow down peasants! I mean, there was probably the threat of violence behind it, which if you don't bow down, you do realise you're going to an idiot.
00:25:26
Speaker
Yes, the army was there. And in other countries, people sort of saw what was happening in Russia and saw discontent and sort of tried to not go the way Russia went. In particular, people in other countries were worried about, again, this sort of working class revolt. We don't want the poor's getting all up in arms and upsetting the apple cart.
00:25:49
Speaker
which is why in the UK where there were nevertheless a whole lot of riots 72 riots according to one thing I read were known of
00:26:02
Speaker
To begin with, apparently, the politicians, when discussing, when coming up with responses to the disease, completely ignored the doctors. And then when things were going well, started to listen to the doctors. And then when things were going well, basically shoved the doctors to the front. Said, yeah, you guys tell everyone what to do. We'll listen to you. And you tell all the people what they should be doing. And basically let the doctors take the brunt of most of the public's ire.
00:26:29
Speaker
because they were afraid that if the state stepped in, and especially if they started bringing in the army and stuff, then things would go the way of Russia. Whereas instead, they merely went after a whole bunch of doctors and smashed up hospitals and stuff.
00:26:47
Speaker
Interestingly,
Body-Snatching Fears and Cholera
00:26:48
Speaker
we know, apparently we know exactly when Cholera entered the UK. There was a ship from Russia, went into, I didn't write it down, I think it was Liverpool. And people were like, should this be quarantined? But now the local industry, local businesses were like, no, no, no, we need the stuff on that ship so that our businesses can continue to make money. So let that ship in. And Cholera came with it.
00:27:13
Speaker
shades of Samoa during the flu epidemic in the early 1900s. There was one particular ship there that was like, this really should be quarantined, but the governor, a British guy, said, no, no, no, it'll be fine. Let them in. Long story short, 20% of Samoa died. So, yeah. Anyway, almost a colorist. So, economists don't make good epidemiologists.
00:27:40
Speaker
You'd almost think that, wouldn't you? You'd almost think that. You might think that. Now, an interesting complication in the UK. So, like I said, it arrived in, cholera arrived in England, sort of the early 1830s around there. As it happened in 1828, there had been the widely publicized Burke and Hare murders, which I'm assuming you've heard of.
00:28:09
Speaker
I know my Birkin here. Tell us a bit about Birkin here then. Well, they were grave robbers, weren't they? No, they were worse than grave robbers. Right, well, no, right. Yeah, so I was going to go. So they started off as mere grave robbers because it had been for a long period of time a prohibition.
00:28:27
Speaker
on using cadavers in medical research, which meant there was kind of a black market of if people wanted to kind of practice their surgery skills or get to know bodies better, to be better doctors, you kind of had to either do what they did in vast parts of Europe, which was basically work on pigs, which were taken to be the closest analog to the human being. So the hypothesis of the other white meat goes back a long time.
00:28:57
Speaker
or get a grave robber to get a recently deceased person, drag them to your table and then you could practice your surgery skills upon them. And this was a kind of a loud
Burke and Hare Murders
00:29:09
Speaker
thing. People knew grave robbing resurrection men or resurrection men. So it was kind of allowed in that kind of wanted doctors to practice on human bodies rather than pigs if they were your doctor.
00:29:25
Speaker
But Burke and Hare, they worked out that actually the number of fresh corpses which are useful for a doctor to practice their cadaver skills on, fairly limited. It'd be much better if there was a bigger pool of recently deceased people of the type that doctors wanted. Because doctors wanted old people and young people, they wanted men, they wanted
00:29:52
Speaker
They wanted women, and what they typically didn't want were people who had died in the advanced stages of disease. They wanted fresh bodies that they could look at. And Burke and Hare provided, and they provided by going, you know, what's the quickest way to the grave? Spot of the old murder. So Burke and Hare would just start killing people willy-nally to satisfy the backlog of orders they had.
00:30:18
Speaker
They sure did. Yeah, I don't know if they robbed any graves as such. The story I read, it started, one of them had a lodger who died of natural causes, and they're like, oh, what are we going to do with this dead guy? We could sell him to a doctor, I suppose. And then, oh, turns out there's money in selling corpses to doctors. How
00:30:38
Speaker
couldn't we get our hands on some more corpses and yes as you as you say yeah i've always assumed they started off as i'll put in scare quotes legitimate grave robbers and then moved on to the more illegitimate activity murder but yes you may well be right they may well have done one one partial sale of a recently deceased person they didn't actually kill and then went oh uh
00:31:05
Speaker
That was good money. We should do this again. But I don't know that many people who have died recently.
Impact of Burke and Hare on Cholera Fears
00:31:12
Speaker
But I do know people who could die very soon.
00:31:22
Speaker
16 people, apparently, were charged with killing. Like I said, this was 1828, so when cholera came around, this was a massive case, widely publicised, and this was fresh in people's minds when a whole lot of people started dying of this new disease.
00:31:37
Speaker
And so you started getting riots against the medical establishment, and these would be accompanied by conspiracy theories that cholera had been started basically as a body-snatching scheme, that doctors were deliberately spreading this disease so they would have a nice supply of corpses to use for their anatomy lectures.
00:32:00
Speaker
A lot in Scotland, because the Birkenhaers were in Edinburgh, Birkenhaers were selling their corpses to a Dr Robert Knox, who gave anatomy lectures and dissected corpses as part of them. So in 1831 in Aberdeen, Boxing Day 1831,
00:32:18
Speaker
There was a riot in Aberdeen. Birkin here had become sort of so well known that Birkin had become a verb. Birkin is a verb to me. It's not hearing. It's interesting. I'm not hearing, no, unfortunately, Birk. You can Birk but you can't hear.
00:32:37
Speaker
I should point out, when I talked about the example, I talked about grave robbing supplying a black market of corpses. Of course, they were legitimate cadaver dissections going on, but there was also a substantial black market of doctors who wanted bodies to practice on. And that was a tightly controlled market.
00:32:59
Speaker
So, yeah, apparently the crowds shouted down with the Birking Shop, referring to the hospital, claiming this was just a place with their snatching bodies. So there was a big right there, but according to Wikipedia,
00:33:14
Speaker
three men were brought to trial for riotous behaviour and sentenced to jail in Aberdeen for 12 months, with the judge placing the blame on the medical profession for its gross negligence in dealing with the disease. So right from the start, people were blaming the doctors, I think, at not doing a better job of stopping this disease when they weren't outright blaming them for it.
Financial Motivations Behind Cholera Theories
00:33:36
Speaker
So moving around the British Isles in Liverpool, apparently there were more riots in Liverpool than anywhere else. What do we have? Between 29th of May and 10th of June 1832, eight major street riots occurred with other smaller ones and usually they were aimed at the medical establishment.
00:33:56
Speaker
So there was a perception among the public that cholera victims were being taken to the hospital so that doctors could kill them and then use them for anatomical dissections. They said, yeah, in Liverpool as well, people shouted, bring out to the burkas.
00:34:15
Speaker
And apparently there had been other cases. 1826, 33 bodies had been discovered on the Liverpool docks about to be shipped off for dissection. Another surgeon, William Gill, had been found of using a, this is your black market grave robbing stuff. So it had happened a bunch and that was definitely on people's minds when a whole lot of extra deaths happened to be happening.
00:34:40
Speaker
um and yeah so the theme we see all the way through this is is doctors really bore the brunt of the public's displeasure especially in the British Isles and it seems like the state didn't mind as much as they might have if they'd been sort of um railing against the authorities in general um so yeah
00:35:00
Speaker
turning to get back to the main conspiracy theory theme. There were a bunch of them in Glasgow. People believe that the academic measure was much like in Russia was a bit of a population control. There were rumours that the collar had been introduced to deliberately sort of weed out the weaker members of the herd to make the working classes more productive.
00:35:28
Speaker
Also in Glasgow, a doctor was chased through the streets and pelted with various projectiles by, quote, an immense crowd of mothers, specifically, who believed this doctor had buried a 14-year-old alive. I'm not quite sure what that has to do with cholera, but that's what people said. Crowd in Edinburgh chanted, kill the doctors.
00:35:50
Speaker
In this case, this was, again, during parallels to events today, wasn't so much out of a particular conspiracy theory, but they were angry that over the loss of funeral rites for their family members, they restricted how you were able to throw funerals for people because their corpses were still infectious.
00:36:14
Speaker
And there was even a sort of financial angle to some of the conspiracy theories. We have records from a doctor in the town of Belly Shannon in Ireland who was harassed by crowds. And according to him, the crowds believed that he was to be given 10 guineas a day for spreading the cholera epidemic and that he would be given five pounds for every person he killed and had been instructed to poison people without mercy.
00:36:42
Speaker
There's
Historical and Modern Conspiracy Parallels
00:36:43
Speaker
quite a lot of similarity with theories we're hearing around COVID-19, isn't there? With the idea that doctors are being paid to overinflate numbers, doctors are being paid to diagnose people with particular melodies, doctors are being paid to make people just disappear by marking down a COVID death. It seems like this...
00:37:09
Speaker
Is history repeating? Well, yeah, it's surprising how few new ideas there are. And then a final angle to all of this, when people weren't rioting and blaming doctors for all the death and disease, before events got too bad in certain places, you got a bit of cholera denialism as well. The term cholera humbug apparently was widely, it sounds like this was more of an American thing, I think probably before cholera arrived in America that widely.
00:37:38
Speaker
But The New York Times apparently published an anonymous letter which accused doctors of being paid 20 guineas a day to whip up, quote, cholera phobia.
00:37:50
Speaker
So in this case, we have again, conspiracy theories around the idea that that collar is not that not that big of a deal, and people are in fact being paid to whip it up to make it sound much worse than it is. Again, I assume basically with the same sort of angles that you see today that people want people people saying all the state or the medical establishment, whatever want you to believe that this disease is a big horrible thing so that we all you'll be good little citizens and do everything they say.
00:38:21
Speaker
So all in all, it is, yeah, quite surprising to see just how similar the sorts of things people said about cholera are to the sorts of things people say about Covid today. Although, as far as I'm aware, the protests around the world have been less full on rioty and more sort of civil disobedience, general dickishness, I suppose.
00:38:45
Speaker
Although that actually does make an interesting point, because people talk about, oh no, we're in an unprecedented health crisis now. Look at the riots we're getting, as in the protests in Canada, the attempted protest in France, the protest back home. This is a terrible thing we've never seen before, and yet just a cursory glance at history goes actually
00:39:06
Speaker
It could be worse. They could be dragging doctors from their homes and killing them, which admittedly could start to happen very soon given things going on back home. But
00:39:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's not as if this is a new type of crisis that we're seeing here. And in fact, it seems that we might be, I mean, this is a weird thing to say, we might be treating the COVID-19 stuff more sensibly than people treated things like cholera in the past, which is a weird thing to say, but at the same time,
00:39:41
Speaker
Yes, more sensible is a highly relative term, but yes, I think you're right. Like I said, because I decided I heard about these cholera riots and it would be an interesting thing to look into, I didn't really do any research into the Spanish flu pandemic because I'd be interested to see if there were similar things there. For instance, I have not read anything about cholera riots and for them to say, and of course, similar things happened during the Spanish flu.
00:40:11
Speaker
So it doesn't sound like things got as bad in that particular pandemic, although as I said, I think Spanish flu was spread more widely and was less discriminating in terms of class, different sort of social strata being affected. And there was also a war going on. Yeah.
00:40:37
Speaker
And of course, and especially in the UK, had the misfortune of all this happening when there was a lot of possibly paranoia within society around the dodgy things doctors get up to in terms of swiping corpses and doing illicit things. And that basically brings you to the end of my tale of the cholera riots.
00:41:01
Speaker
interesting
Cholera's Historical Impact
00:41:02
Speaker
interesting little slice of history. An area mention of the zoot suit riots which I was I was just waiting for zoot suit riots reference. Well they may have happened during maybe the fifth or sixth cholera pandemic but I didn't really get that far. Is that when Napoleon came back to control France? I don't know. Yeah.
00:41:24
Speaker
Well, I mean, they basically, these cholera was a thing for pretty much the entirety of the 19th century and well into the 20th, so... I was making a joke about whichever glorious French revolution it was that was bifurcated by Napoleon going, by the way, I'm Emperor again!
00:41:44
Speaker
I'd better send in a much more French accent. As you know, I can only do a Belgian accent. No, obviously. Yes,
Episode Wrap-Up and Future Content
00:41:52
Speaker
no, you've proven that time and time again. And that's basically all I had to say.
00:41:58
Speaker
in this episode of what the conspiracy and what the conspiracy it was well done Joshua well done to quote the blade runner you've done a man's job excellent um so i suppose we'll be wanting to record a bonus episode then
00:42:15
Speaker
We will indeed. And in that bonus episode, well, we've got breaking news with respect to what's going on in the Ukraine. News which is liable to be very inaccurate by the time we actually edit the podcast and upload it faster. The problem with breaking news is that the very second you've posted, actually there was a tweet earlier today was people saying, look,
00:42:39
Speaker
unless the news is several hours old and has been confirmed by multiple sources please don't spread news about what's going on in the Ukraine at the moment because emerging situations means a lot of misinformation is out there and it's probably not helping people in the Ukraine to be reading about things that may not possibly be true.
00:43:02
Speaker
Anyway, in our other bonus content we've got actually another reference to a previous episode of What The Conspiracy concerning Birdie Madoff's sister and her husband being found dead. That sounds interesting. We're going to reconfirm who Q was.
00:43:21
Speaker
at some stage during Q's lifespan. We're going to refer back to the previous episode where we had a brief mention of the Italian philosopher Agamben. He's been up to no good. And we'll also, as noted, talk about the Ukraine. And yeah, yeah. And yes, probably probably won't have much light
Controversial Documentary Discussion
00:43:48
Speaker
booty material there but it needs to be picked up. So that's all we have today. I see in our notes you have something about next week. So I was going to suggest that we watch a two-part documentary about how the Christchurch shootings were a false flag. Now I am told that in one of the parts
00:44:15
Speaker
there is a brief clip of the actual video shot by the terrorist in the mosque so it's a documentary which contains an element of snuff within it so I was going to broach the do we want to watch this and also if we do want to watch this do you want me to tell you what the time stamp is so you can skip
00:44:36
Speaker
over that. Are we allowed to watch this? So therein lies the issue. So between putting that note in the Google Doc and us having this podcast, I've been informed it's very likely that David Shanks, the chief censor of Altoro at New Zealand,
00:44:58
Speaker
is going to classify the document as the video as one that you need special permission to watch. So that would mean that you couldn't watch it without breaking the law. I, of course, living outside of Aotearoa, New Zealand would not be affected by David Shanks' decision.
00:45:20
Speaker
Also, David Shanks knows that I have watched the original terrorist video anyway, because it's part of my research at the time that the massacre occurred. I watched the video in question to verify some of the conspiracy theories, at least to point out that some of the conspiracy theories were bad.
00:45:37
Speaker
on the off chance that maybe they became narratives in the mainstream media. Luckily, they never did. But I've seen the entire snuff video shot by the terrorist, which means that once I never want to revisit it, I could watch a bit of a documentary work out the timestamps and then tell you, Josh, don't watch from this bit to that bit. There's a snuff film there. But at this
Closing Remarks and Support
00:46:01
Speaker
stage, you would not be able to watch it if David Shanks is going to classify the document.
00:46:07
Speaker
I could watch it over the weekend and we could make that the topic of next week's episode where you ask me questions about the documentary and I talk through it but my original plan of you also watching it is probably not going to work out unless you're really keen on breaking the law. I'm not particularly keen on breaking the law nor am I particularly keen
00:46:31
Speaker
seeing any of that video content so yes maybe maybe we'd best not or if you feel like doing it then yeah we can do my biggest issue is it's an hour and a half long hmm and who's got that kind of time for that kind of stuff
00:46:48
Speaker
Well, I mean, technically it is my job to study these things, so technically I do have the time. It's just whether I've got the inclination to watch a video on a topic which I am going, but wasn't a false flag. It just wasn't a false flag. Oh, well, maybe we'll, we will get back to you listeners probably next week when you listen to next week's episode and see what the topic of it is. So until then,
00:47:16
Speaker
I believe we are done. I should do the usual spiel of how if you want to hear that bonus episode that we just talked about, you'll need to be a patron. So if you are one, good for you. If you're not one, go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, and then you can become one. And if you don't want to become one anyway, but you've made it to the end of this episode, well, thanks for listening. You're our audience, and that is also nice and special.
00:47:41
Speaker
So my voice is starting to go a bit wobbly, which means I probably need to go and get a drink of water. Actually, sorry, actually, I almost forgot to say right at the start when I said nothing horrible happened to me last Friday. Earlier, I wasn't sure if we were going to be able to record this episode, because at the start of this week, I had some sort of a weird throat infection thing and lost my voice for a couple of days. So up until yesterday, I wasn't actually capable of speaking like this at all, let alone for 50 odd minutes of podcast recordings.
00:48:10
Speaker
Everything worked out okay there. Yay for Josh's biology. Yeah. But I think I need to go and have a good glass of water to refresh my vocal chords and then we can get on with a bonus episode. So until then, I'm just going to go and say goodbye. And I'm just going to go. Beep. Beep.
00:48:33
Speaker
You've been listening to Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Addison and Imdenter. If you'd like to help support us, please find details our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbin. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.