Syndicate and Hague

One of the great luxuries of having Wednesdays off for these few weeks in which I do not have to do homework for 3 classes is that I can sit and really listen to podcasts of shows I enjoy. Today was the most recent episode of Radiolab, “Diagnosis.”

I dig Radiolab. Actually, I just dig science shows in which they look at things from a variety of angles. Radiolab in particular, however, often leaves me in a state of rehashing and thinking about at least one element of the show.

This week, it was the part of the show on SIDS and how the doctors initially discovered a problem and diagnosed it with terrible consequences.

So this is the knowledge I came away from the show with: back in the early part of the 20th century, they started realizing that SIDS was a thing. A few thousand babies, otherwise healthy, would just die while sleeping and no one could figure it out. Stymied, the doctors decided to do what they do, and research (autopsy) the babies who died to see if there was some part of the anatomy that was different. What they discovered was that all these babies had enlarged thymuses, which they thought may be pressing on the trachea and suffocating them at night.

Score, right? Well. Their solution was to irradiate the throats of babies if parents were concerned about SIDS, which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths of people who got thyroid cancer. Oops. Sidenote: I guess radiation was all the rage back then. People could get x-rays of their feet at shoe stores and Marie Curie was plunging her own arms into radioactive things. That didn’t go so well for her, you know, though we gained a lot of knowledge from it.

That stuff is interesting in and of itself, but the show goes on to talk about why all these babies had enlarged thymuses. (You’re totally trying to guess right now, I know. I was too.)

They didn’t.

Going back to the old days of grave-robbing, you know that’s how our early doctors got bodies to study anatomy, the well-off folks started finding ways of warding off the grave-robbers. Complicated caskets, vaults, etc. The grave-robbers were stuck digging up poor people buried in sacks a few inches under the ground in paupers’ graves. Eventually, in a number of countries, any unclaimed poor person who died was automatically donated to science–essentially codifying the existing practice.

So take that knowledge (our doctors way back then were only looking at the anatomies of the poor) and combine it with the knowledge that nutritional deprivation and stress physically messes you up, and combine that with the knowledge that constant stress shrinks the thymus…and voila! Those babies didn’t have enlarged thymuses, they were the first healthy thymuses the doctors had ever seen.

Huh.

It’s no secret (or maybe it is for you, I don’t know) that a lot of our medical knowledge was built on the backs of the poor. A lot of it was also built on the back of slaves — horrible, unspeakable things were done to slaves in the name of medicine. If you want to hear about it (and I’m telling you, listening to this made me cry), SPH had Harriet A. Washington speaking on Medical Apartheid this past year and it was intense.

The irony of this for me was that because science so abused the poor, middle/upper-income children died. Because the burden of discovery was not shared across class lines (some lives and deaths are more sacred), doctors couldn’t diagnose problems that affected children regardless of class.