Scarlet Fever

Holly and Tracy talk about how frequently the U.S. Post Office has stopped criminals, and about E. Virgil Neal using his intellect for shady business dealings.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 

In the early 20th century, Neal's company Force of Life was investigated for fraud. But somehow, Neal managed to get through the scandal and went on to found a cosmetics company that became very successful. Research: “Can’t Find E. Virgil Neal.” New York Times. January 15, 1906. ... Show More

E. Virgil Neal’s career started out with writing successful textbooks, but then took a turn into being a stage hypnotist and then a series of dicey mail-order businesses. Research: “Can’t Find E. Virgil Neal.” New York Times. January 15, 1906. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/tim ... Show More

In the early 19th century, a strange new illness, seemingly unknown to medicine, ravaged settler communities in the American Middle West. As fierce debates about this new disease, now called milk sickness, raged – was it from toxic swamp gasses? arsenic in the soil? infectious mi ... Show More

August 27, 1900. Dr. Jesse Lazear, a U.S. Army surgeon, walks into Las Animas Hospital Yellow Fever ward in Havana Cuba, toting a brood of mosquitos. He has the system down: remove the cotton stopper that keeps the mosquito penned in its glass vial, turn the vial over, and seal i ... Show More

<p>From Acts of Parliament to unethical clinical studies to legendary symphonies (possibly) - syphilis has stained many different areas of history.</p><p>To find out what this disease is, what it does to the body and how treatments of it and the people who have it have changed, K ... Show More

Tuberculosis – otherwise known as the ‘Great White Plague’ – was a scourge on society and killed countless sufferers. Rhiannon Davies spoke to Maria Smilios to find out about the little-known story of the black nurses of New York’s Seaview Hospital who helped fight the disease – ... Show More

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intravenous or IV fluids are a ubiquitous treatment in medicine, and one of the most cost-effective treatments that we have, costing less than a cup of coffee in the developing world. But it wasn't always this way. In this episode, called Salt W ... Show More

Beginning in 1485, a mysterious disease swept in waves across England. No one was sure how it spread, no treatment existed, and the disease took the name of its most memorable symptom. The English sweating sickness seemed to have a taste for the wealthy, and the bulk of fatalitie ... Show More

Welcome to the eighteenth century, at a point when Europe is going through another major smallpox outbreak, a disease that by this point has been plaguing populations around the globe for centuries. Peter will discover why milkmaids may be to central to the story of vaccination, ... Show More

In the 1970s and '80s, thousands of haemophiliacs in the UK were infected with HIV and hepatitis C through blood products known to be contaminated. In a recent piece, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithewaite outlines the magnitude of the scandal, exacerbated by carelessness, corporate gre ... Show More

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The southern United States was hit by a dramatic epidemic of a mysterious disease called pellagra in the early twentieth century. This episode discusses the cultural and scientific sources of the outbreak -- from the cotton fields of the south, ... Show More