This is the Technical Difficulties, we're playing Citation Needed.
Joining me today, he reads books you know, it’s Chris Joel.
“I am Kermit the Frog, and tonight, Matthew,
“I’m going to be that little flat guy from 'Frogger'!”
Everybody’s favourite Gary Brannan, Gary Brannan.
“Covered in resin and brimming with juicy seeds!”
And the bounciest man on the internet, Matt Gray.
Hello YouTube Studio 1!
In front of me I have an article from Wikipedia, and these folks can’t see it.
Every fact they get right is a point and a ding.
I was too quick on the ding there, sorry.
Yep, so was I.
You’re always too quick on the ding, Gary(!)
And there’s a special prize for particularly good answers, which is:
I just conducted that in Waltz time.
Today, we are talking about Benjamin Rush.
Huh. Is that what happens when the shop of Benjamins opened on Black Friday?
Yes. There’s a Benjamin Rush. Straight in.
Is it street slang for a drug? “I’ve got to get my Benjamin Rush on.”
People going round licking wax mannequins of Ben Franklin.
That's why I’m banned from Madame Tussauds now, obviously.
“Oh, Maggie. Oh, Maggie!”
You are surprisingly close with Benjamin Franklin, though.
Was he a friend of his?
I’ll give you a point, he was a founding father of the United States.
Okay, that shows poor history on my part.
Well, to be fair there were a lot of founding fathers.
I thought you were going to say there was a lot of Benjamins.
Both.
Franklin... yeah.
- No, that’s two, Tom. - That's two.
Counting two and saying "yes" doesn’t really make my point.
So this is America and it’s ancient history of America,
so I’m going to go 19... 20s.
And the wheel spins and lands on America.
Take that, the colonies!
Benjamin Rush, founding father of the United States.
Yep, and if this isn’t the most interesting thing on that man’s bio...
It is definitely not the most interesting thing on this man’s bio.
Was he in the band ‘Rush’?
A: no, they’re much later,
and B: no, they’re Canadian.
Benjamin Rush was a physician.
Was he an utter quack and a charlatan?
He was surprisingly forward thinking for his time.
Amputations!
Didn’t necessarily do them. That'd be forward thinking.
He was Surgeon-General in the continental army.
Oh, in an army, okay, fine.
Yes, you went for the sarky salute there, but yes.
You were right, you gave the man the due respect, yeah.
'Dew respect' is what you give wet grass on a morning.
S***, I wondered where you were going with that. Oh, my God.
First groan of the day!
So surgeon general and innovative, in some...
I can’t get away from operations, if it’s during the war.
There were some interesting prescriptions given by this man.
Okay, laudanum?
Why?
Painkiller.
Really?
Yes!
I don’t f***ing know, but you believed it!
He’s like, “Well I believe you!”
Some kind of painkiller or something like that, or antiseptic.
He gave supplies to a very famous expedition after the revolution.
Now, I know your American history is not great.
I know bugger-all about America.
Do the words 'Lewis and Clark' mean anything to you?
Yes, that's... Superman.
That was 'Lois and Clark', and that’s actually why they called it that.
- Really? - F***ing hell!
'Lois and Clark, the New Adventures of Superman' was a Lewis and Clark pun.
So was this an expedition to Krypton?
It was certainly an expedition to somewhere.
Was it a westward one?
Yes, it was.
“Westwood!”
Not Westwood!
Two Americans set off and discover South London.
It was a westward expedition. What were they hoping to find?
The Pacific.
Yes, absolutely right!
Yes, the Lewis and Clark expedition was trying to find --
and successfully found --
a route through to the Pacific through American territories.
Pimp My Horse And Cart.
It’s not the Westwood expedition!
And that’s just the horse.
Yeah, if it does that, don’t get behind it.
Wait until it stands up again!
Wicked horse!
Who here actually knows who Tim Westwood is?
You underestimate them!
For about half the audience, that’s just lost.
That expedition obviously had a lot of supplies
to get through all the way for months and months to the Pacific
and their doctor was Benjamin Rush
or at least their initial man who gave them the supplies.
What sort of thing do you give for a months-long expedition
through the wilderness in 1803?
Opiates.
Absolutely spot on.
I was going to say imodium.
Now, we’ll get back to you on there in a minute, Gary.
But I just want to point out that,
yes, Turkish opium, apparently.
Turkish!
Not opiates, it’s Turkish opium, what was that for?
Making sure you have a lovely time, darling(!)
You know what, I’m going to give you a point, nervousness.
What, to incite it?
“I don’t think we’re panicking enough
“about when we’re going to get there, hand me the opium!”
Why aren't all expeditions done on opiates? Strong opiates!
Ranulph Fiennes, off his tits at the North Pole, I’d gladly watch that.
Have you read any Hunter S Thompson?
The International Space Station!
“To Mars, on smack!”
Do they rate their expedition by which drug they’re using?
“This feels more like an LSD trip to me, but I don’t know.”
Trip! Trip!
Only manage one orbit, then lose interest.
Turkish opium, absolutely right.
You mentioned a fairly obvious joke here for something you’d give for it.
- Imodium! - Yes.
Did they have problems of the bum?
"Their meat rich diet and lack of clean water gave them cause to use…"
Cork and a rubber mallet!
It’s the phrase 'rubber mallet' that got me.
Well, you’ll not get it in far enough on your own.
Can't reach round, you need the leverage.
You’re not going to use wood, are you?
You want that soft return on it. ...I would imagine.
And you’re not going to use Timmy Mallett either, so...
[Timmy Mallett noise]
That’s one for the ’80s kids in the studio(!)
I thought that was the noise if you forgot to put the cork in.
They weren’t called 'Imodium', it was…
'Ye Imodium.'
…fifty dozen of Dr Rush’s Bilious Pills.
I’d still take those now, they sound reassuringly competent.
"I’m off for a Bilious."
They also had sort of a weather-ish name,
something that might cause a rumbling.
A 'Thunder Plunderer'.
I’m going to give you the point, they were 'Thunder Clappers'.
I’m going to call them all that now anyway!
A brace of Thunder Clappers, no less.
What did those contain?
Because it won’t be senna, then, or anything like that.
No, I mean, bear in mind…
What bungs you up? There was a lady I used to know…
It wasn’t necessarily designed to bung you up.
Rush believed, as you would at the time,
in certain theories of medicine. What might that…
Purging and things like that.
Oh, humours!
No, not humours. Surely not humours?
A little bit late for humours,
but it was certainly bleeding or anything like that.
So leeches?
Stick a leech on your arse and you get a colostomy bag!
Oh, the poor leech!
Two leeches in a pond, one goes on the king’s wound,
the other one is going to be stuck up your bum as a colostomy leech.
We’ve started plumbing depths very quickly here, I’ll be honest.
It’s like the Human Centipede! The Leech. Sorry.
It does say here: "Even in Rush’s day and location,
"many physicians had abandoned on scientific grounds that remedy."
Rush just kinda kept going.
He believed in something called Heroic Medicine.
Does anyone want to…
I know where this is going.
Anyone tell me what that is?
I don’t want any doctor with that kind of heroic mindset,
thank you very much. Who might kick my door in
and slam a leech down my throat and go,
“You’re saved!” and then leave.
Flashheart as your doctor.
“I’ve got a syringe! And it's as hot as my pants!"
Is it basically when the time comes, you say,
“I’m going outside now, I may be some time,”
and then just find a tree.
Is this Greek influenced,
as in hero in Greek mythology or something like that?
Absolutely right.
Essentially purging, vomiting, sweating and blistering.
Saturday night out, really.
Given all that, what would you put in Dr Rush’s Bilious Thunder Clappers?
Anything to do all those at once,
and by God would you thunder clap while that happened.
This is not something that you even want to touch these days.
Was it poison to force it out quicker?
Yes, I’ll give you the point but it’s…
Mercury.
-- F*** me! -- Not only that.
Absolutely spot on, they were 50% mercury pills.
What was the other 50%?
Er... pill.
Are you okay there Gary?
I am such a t***.
Actually, the correct answer would probably have been -
if we weren’t being nobs about this -
chalk or something like that, wouldn’t it?
- Yes. - Nothing that’s going to kill you,
but chalk will bung you up more.
Not if you combine it with mercury it won't.
You’re right. Because chalk in flour was a thing and that would bung you up horribly.
There was an interesting side effect for archaeologists. I mean other than…
Shining bits?
- I didn't... no...! - A shining trail of breadcrumbs!
Behave(!) Ooh, no.
Because mercury is silver and shiny, isn’t it?
Is it horrifically dangerous to do archaeological excavations
on burial sites from these people where they died along the way?
'Cos their bodies and skeletons are going to be full of quicksilver mercury.
If you touch it with bare hands it will seep into your skin
and also give you the heaving s***s?
As we archaeologists call it.
That’s a man who looks through archives for a living, there.
It’s true, there’s certain things I have to be careful with, if it's been...
Black Death, 'yersinia pestis', is very, very contagious.
If you discover a black death burial site
you have to immediately run away lest you get ill.
Because a lot of people got buried in lead coffins.
And of course lead, the body just corrodes in it
and just turns into a bit of a sludge,
but the disease persists within and it is very persistent
hence why it kills a quarter of the population if it gets out.
So, there are certain plague burials where you just run a mile
if you think it’s black death.
So that could happen with a quicksilver-imbued skeleton.
Ha, not so stupid now!
I like the idea you run a mile,
thus spreading black death for a mile. That's...
How do you think it worked in the first place?
They were able to trace the expedition a century or more later
by the trail of mercury they left behind.
- By their middens. - Mercury breadcrumbs.
What other reforms did he try and bring through?
Mobile phone.
Yes, it’s a telegraph that you have to wire up as you go behind you.
That’s pretty much how they lay telegraphs, yes.
...fair.
Did he introduce 'Hungry Hungry Hippos'?
To medicine? What is the function of 'Hungry Hungry Hippos' in medicine?
"He who winneth the most pills liveth the longest."
Whoa, competitive. Wow.
So what you’re saying is the modern American medical system
is entirely based on 'Hungry Hungry Hippos'.
Who has the most gets the best care.
Yes. Satire.
Was he against lobotomies?
It’s not actually medical reform.
So it could have been 'Hungry Hungry Hippos'.
Bearing in mind he was a founding father,
he was also a politician, and it says here,
'educator, social reformer and humanitarian'.
Slavery.
Yes, he was anti-slavery.
But pro-mercury.
Yes! Yes...
I didn’t realise there was anyone anti-slavery that early.
Yes, they fought a civil war over it.
Did they?
One of the arguments of the American Revolution was, "do we allow slavery?"
It’s like having a major royal sat next to me! “Really?”
“How very interesting!”
There are actually some interesting headings here,
because we have anti-slavery,
and then capital punishment, which he was also against,
they just haven’t put the word 'anti' in the title.
That’s one hell of a relative.
Auntie Capital Punishment...!
Morning! Whoomph.
Yeah, along with 'Uncle Pillory'...
and 'Cousin Swift-Kick-in-the-Bollocks'.
These things work on a kind of bilateral thing,
so either massively for or massively against.
Mmm. Place your bets now.
- Okay. - Going full Banzai on us!
He’s been anti-slavery, anti-capital punishment,
got to be pro-purging so I’m going go…
Not in like the movie of The Purge sense,
just to be clear here,
because you brought that in from nowhere.
Pro-purgatives... I’m going to say he was pro-ladies.
Correct.
Flip a coin! One or the other!
He was instrumental to the founding of the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia.
Fillies in Philly?
Yes, he proposed, er, a...
You t***.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, that’s genius.
The first chartered women’s institution of higher education in Philadelphia.
What did he think women should be trained in?
Kung fu!
Not exactly.
Driving a steam engine. Building wardrobes.
That thing where you balance a golf ball on the end of the golf club
and then you hoy it up and then hit it.
Scuba diving. We can go all day.
Precision cake throwing.
Slightly closer.
Those John Virgo trick shots where you get a snooker ball
to go into a little wine cooler thing.
That bit from 'Full Metal Jacket',
where he’s obsessively stripping the rifle and chanting to himself.
Is it something like etiquette for the ladies?
Not quite that far.
Good housekeeping.
No, it wasn’t quite that.
Armed combat.
I started there.
Okay, here’s a line, here’s armed combat, here’s etiquette...
About here.
Oh! Oh! Nice combat.
- Unarmed combat! - "I'm terribly sorry." Boompf!
Witty repartee! Biting and scathing comebacks, but politely,
so the fellow doesn’t notice it’s happened.
He just, about two days later, wakes up in the middle of the night
with a growing sense of ennui
and realised he missed his chance forever.
Sorry, got autobiographical there. Back in the room.
Coquettish waving of fans to avoid embarrassment.
Moral essays, poetry and religious writings
and history, which you know presumably you didn’t, er…
He’s not a lady!
I don’t know if it's escaped your notice but…
What did he think women shouldn’t be pushed towards?
Kung Fu! Precision cake throwing! All the same jokes!
- The Bessemer steel process! - Let's move on!
Cliff edges!
Who’s he?
Rough, uncouth types.
Hey up.
Mathematics, logic, advanced science.
So ladies of the room, how many of you would not qualify?
Benjamin Rush is the father of…
Of his children!
…of American… something.
Baseball.
A discipline in... medicine, I guess.
Anaesthesia.
Bowel cleanage.
It’s nothing really to do with the body, as such.
So a medical process that’s not to do with the body?
Is it like blind testing or something like that,
actual research rather than just poking?
I mean it is to do with a bit of the body,
but you would say this was not a physical thing to fix these days.
This would be something else.
Psychiatry, mental health, something like that.
Yes, absolutely right, spot on with the word,
the father of American psychiatry.
What did he think was a good way to cure "insanity"?
That’s the phrasing they’ve used here.
Electroshock treatment.
No, too early for that, much too early for that.
I don’t think at this point Benjamin Franklin had been shocked by his kite yet.
“Look at the size of this kite!”
“I’m going to go flying in the rain right now while holding a brass key.”
A good hard slap to the face. “Sort yourself out, man!”
Remember what he already believed in.
Mercury?
Point. It was called 'calomel', if anyone knows that that is.
That’s dangerously close to 'caramel'
in a hilarious mix up in a chocolate factory, isn’t it?
Yes, it’s mercurous chloride. So, like, don’t eat Cadbury's Calomel.
How did he convince his patients who were suffering from,
and again I’m using the word here, "insanity", to eat mercury?
Wrap it in ham.
♪ Wrap it in ham... ♪
You’re close.
Wrap it in cheese.
Yeah, I’m going to give you the point,
"sprinkling a few grains of mercury daily on a piece of bread
"and then spreading a thin covering of butter over it."
He believed that mental illnesses were caused by disruptions of blood circulation.
So how might you get some more blood to the brain?
Did he throw people in cold water
or something like that to increase circulation?
That would be slightly more sensible than what we’ve got here.
Hang them upside down.
Yes, sleep them like a bat.
A powered warming hat!
"Sleep them like a bat..."
I'm gonna let that go by.
I’m going to give you a point,
it was a sensory deprivation head enclosure.
F*** off, no.
So a tin hat with no eye holes?
Are you saying he invented the bucket?
And the process of placing it on someone?
He also had a more physical way of getting blood to the brain.
Is it like when you’ve got an ice pop
and you’ve got the juice at the bottom and you want it to the top,
so you have to go fneeeeer with the leg
and it’s just forcing the blood up through the body?
Okay, I’m not going to give you a point but you are right.
Moving tourniquet is probably an easy way of describing that.
Not quite, it was a way…
Static tourniquet!
…to force blood up to the head.
Is it like that machine at the end of 'The Princess Bride',
where you put suction cups on it and it’s water powered
but instead of sucking life it just pulls the blood through you?
I’m going to give you the point, it’s…
A vacuum.
It’s not a vacuum or it’s not anything like that,
but it is a spinning machine…
Human centrifuge!
…that you strap someone to and spin them round like that
and that was how he thought you cured mental illnesses.
Oh, yes please!
Did it work?
No.
This strikes me as medicine in the form of a Shooting Stars end game.
He actually had a thing called the 'Moral Thermometer'.
And he was way off it.
The more blood you have in your brain, the better off you would be.
Is this like one of those love testers you get in bars,
you put your hand on it, if it's a warm hand,
but a cold hand: "moral turpitude, he must be hung!"
He was against the death penalty so there wasn’t...
"He must be roundly shunned."
"And put in a bucket."
At the end of the show, congratulations Gary, you win this week.
You win...
Brace yourselves.
You win an express trip to see the buttock cleavage of one of 'Tenacious D'.
Yep.
No!
It’s 'Jack Black’s Fast Track Ass Crack'. Do enjoy that.
With that, we say thank you to Chris Joel!
Bye then!
to Gary Brannan,
to Matt Gray.
I’ve been Tom Scott, we’ll see you next time.
Thank you, folks!
Ee, that were gradely.