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History Of Science & Medicine Episodes

Jan. 22, 2024

LSD, the CIA & the History of Psychedelic Science

In 1938, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally developed the potent psychedelic LSD, although it would be several years before Hofmann realized what he’d created. During the Cold War, the CIA launched a top-secret mind c…
Oct. 30, 2023

The History of the Nutrition Facts Label

If you go to a grocery store in the United States and pick up a box of cereal, you expect to find a white box on the back of the package with information in Helvetica Black about the food’s macronutrients (things like fat an…
Guest: Xaq Frolich
Dec. 19, 2022

Smallpox Inoculation & the American Revolution

In 1775, a smallpox outbreak struck the Continental Northern Army. With many of the soldiers too sick to fight, their attempted capture of Quebec on December 31, 1775, was a devastating failure, the first major defeat of the…
Sept. 12, 2022

Abortion in 18th Century New England

In 1742, in Pomfret, Connecticut, 19-year-old Sarah Grosvenor discovered she was pregnant, the result of a liaison with 27-year-old Amasa Sessions. Instead of marrying Sarah, Amasa provided her with a physician-prescribed ab…
Sept. 13, 2021

African American AIDS Activism

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), in 2018, 13% of the US population was Black and African American, but 42% of new HIV diagnoses in the US were from Black and African American people. Thi…
Guest: Dan Royles
Aug. 30, 2021

Phrenology & Crime in 19th Century America

In Nineteenth Century America there was a strong reformist push to know and improve the self. One key tactic Americans used to learn more about themselves was phrenological readings. They would pay practical phrenologists, l…
July 26, 2021

Mary Mallon (The Sad & Complicated Story of "Typhoid Mary")

Mary Mallon, known to history as Typhoid Mary, immigrated from Northern Ireland to New York City at age 15, around 1883. She found work as a cook, a well paying job for an immigrant woman and worked for number of different f…
Guest: Kari Nixon