00:00:30.000Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast. My name is
00:00:44.680Anne Foster. And before we get into today's episode, I have late breaking news about the
00:00:49.660next Vulgar History in person meetup. I am going to be in Fort Myers, Florida, and I have time to
00:00:57.140have a meetup on Friday, February 7th. That's in like two weeks. So if you're there, Fort Myers,
00:01:03.380Florida, a place I have never been before, but where I will be attending a wedding,
00:01:08.080but I have time to meet up with the Tits of Brigade on Friday, February 7th. So fill out
00:01:12.400the form at vulgarhistory.com slash meet up so we can make a plan and figure out where and when we
00:01:17.720can meet. If anyone out there lives in or near Fort Myers, Florida, again, a city I've never
00:01:23.380been to. And getting into today's episode, so we're talking with author Sarika Davis. Her new
00:01:29.740book is called Humans, A Monstrous History. And so she is a historian of science. And this book
00:01:37.060really connects in really interesting ways here and there with last week's episode where we were
00:01:43.060talking about with Helen King about her book, The Immaculate Forms, A History of the Female Body in
00:01:50.080four parts. Because at times, women's bodies have been seen and discussed and treated as monstrous.
00:01:57.260Sureka also looks at lots of other monster myths from different legends, stories from various
00:02:03.980cultures. A lot of it is from the Western world, but also the Americas are involved. There's stuff
00:02:10.120in there about the Islamic world and about Japan and lots of places. And she connects it all in
00:02:14.660really fun ways to modern pop culture like she mentioned star trek is in here spider-man like
00:02:21.020aliens wall-e like it's really really fascinating the way that she makes it's such a fun readable
00:02:26.660book and throughout reading the book i was just like the leo pointing dot gif like so many things
00:02:33.860come up in this book that we've talked about before on vulgar history she mentions um mary
00:02:39.000toft is mentioned mary shelley is mentioned because of frankenstein she mentions pedro
00:02:43.860Gonsalves, who was the man who he had a condition where he was all covered in hair. And then he had
00:02:49.600a daughter, Antoinette, who's all covered in hair. And that was when I interviewed Molly Greeley
00:02:53.580about her novel Marvelous. We talked about that history. This book also talks about John Knox
00:02:59.720comes up. Catherine de' Medici is involved. And then also in the book, she quotes from two people,
00:03:06.260at least two people who we've had on the show before. Friend of the podcast, Kit Hamm is quoted
00:03:10.140from their work, as well as Greta LaFleur is quoted. And then at the back in the acknowledgements,
00:03:14.860one of the people she thanks, who is one of her good friends, is Booker History past guest,
00:03:20.180Leah Redmond Chang. So I was just like, this book is so connected to this podcast. I was just really
00:03:26.420vibing with it. So I feel like you're really going to enjoy the book. And right now, you're
00:03:31.040going to, I think, really enjoy this conversation with author Sareka Davis.
00:03:34.420so we are joined today by sarika davis author most recently of humans a monstrous history
00:03:46.620welcome sarika thank you for having me on can you explain and i'm sure you've been doing a lot
00:03:53.660of interviews explaining this what your book is about humans a monstrous history is what i call
00:04:01.060a history of humanity told through monsters and monster making. And what I mean by that is
00:04:08.000the idea of what human means has a history. It's never been an uncontested thing, you know,
00:04:16.040who is and isn't human. It's never been universal. It's always been changing.
00:04:21.160And, you know, that idea of kind of human is something that people have always consciously
00:04:26.980or unconsciously defined in relation to a whole bunch of other things. Where does the human body
00:04:32.740end and other kinds of beings begin? Where does the environment begin? Where's the boundary between
00:04:39.140humans and animals? What about humans and machines or gods or say extraterrestrials?
00:04:47.380So there's a history of how people have thought about where human ends and all of those external
00:04:53.220beings begin. And you can start that in antiquity. But there's also a history of how people have
00:04:58.900defined various categories of humanity, male and female, for example, you know, different
00:05:07.600ethnicities and religious groups. And what all of these categories have lying between them,
00:05:16.280sometimes invisibly, are monsters. And what I mean by that is anytime you have categories,
00:05:23.220Anybody who messes them up is a category breaker, so it's possible to trace who has been defined as being on the margins and turning nice, tidy little separate things into some kind of blended category.
00:05:43.320So the history told through monster making stories about, you know, who or what was threatening the boundary between human and non-human or between groups of humans who supposedly deserve different kinds of rights, whether they were women or enslaved people or, you know, people who were framed as having bodies that were so atypical that, for example, they would be performing.
00:06:13.320their strangeness as it were at fairs. Yeah. And so there's so many examples in your book.
00:06:20.840What I want to say is when I was reading it, I just thought I read it all at once. And I was
00:06:25.480like, I don't know if this is ideal. I think you need to read this, think about it, come back the
00:06:30.120next day. Cause there's so many, there's so much new information in here. Cause you're talking about
00:06:34.340so many different cultures and time periods, some of which I was familiar with, some of which I
00:06:40.180wasn't familiar with. How did you go about researching so many different time periods?
00:06:48.140In a way, I started with my first book, which was about European ideas about peoples of the
00:06:55.240Americas and the ways in which European mapmakers and geographers had looked at writing about
00:07:02.560peoples of, you know, Brazil and Mexico coming back, you know, from European borders of exploration.
00:07:09.420and framed some of these people as kind of monsters in some way.
00:07:14.880And that was actually a story that goes back to ancient Greece and Rome.
00:07:20.340There were kind of theories of understanding the relationship between bodies and nature
00:07:28.420Move somebody to a different climate and their temperament, their constitution will change.
00:07:35.460so you know if you have a medical system in your you know in your culture whereby bodies and minds
00:07:43.540are affected by geography and also at the edges of habitable climates there are what were called
00:07:51.760you know monstrous peoples then once you're traveling everywhere that does beg the question
00:07:57.140where's the boundary between human space and monster space and so there i was thinking i was
00:08:02.640writing a dissertation and then a first book on the 16th century, Europeans making sense of what
00:08:10.640they saw in the Americas. But that actually was a story that had a 1500 year backstory.
00:08:17.640So some of the homework for the new book happened then. And then it was a case of trying to figure
00:08:26.880out what the big story was going to be. And this for me, in a way, is a story I've been figuring
00:08:32.600out since I was a child watching, you know, Star Trek. And so, you know, the beings in the universe
00:08:40.400is, you know, one of the things that comes out of Star Trek. Oh my goodness, are there, you know,
00:08:46.280things that live in space and don't need air and they travel at the speed of light? Is it possible
00:08:53.220to be telepathic? So that kind of range of taxonomy of ways of being a sentient being was
00:09:00.580something that I guess I'd been thinking about for a long time. And when I sat down to devise
00:09:06.740this book, the original structure was not that different from this one, because I thought, well,
00:09:11.420where are the boundaries between human and monstrous? Well, they happen in a variety of
00:09:17.700places from Earth to outer space. So the general structure of talking about ecology, animals,
00:09:26.460different kinds of human groups and then things like machines and the supernatural
00:09:32.300that overarching structure was quite straightforward and of course I missed a bit
00:09:36.360in the middle I I used to be a history professor and I used to teach a course on monsters from
00:09:42.320antiquity to about 1800 before Frankenstein and that was a sort of kind of Europe and European
00:09:50.140America's kind of course so there was all of this homework that got done along the way coming to this
00:09:56.460book. And with this book, I did think, you know, this is an opportunity to talk about monster
00:10:02.000making all over the world. And in the early drafts, there was a fair amount of all over the
00:10:08.300world and I wanted to put more all over the world in. But I quickly realized that it's kind of hard
00:10:14.920to have any kind of through line if you're everywhere. And also everywhere is a fiction.
00:10:20.600books that claim to cover like the world's thinking usually talk primarily about maybe five
00:10:28.280different kinds of thought that is doesn't actually cover every square mile so that's also a fiction
00:10:34.280you know oh we're gonna have china we're gonna have india we're gonna have the islamic world
00:10:38.660you know it's still like five or ten right yeah yeah and you know so i thought well i'd like that
00:10:45.920to be more of a more of a through line while also giving a sense of the kind of variety so
00:10:52.540for each chapter i thought about what the what the range of ways there were for um imagining
00:10:59.960the boundary between the human and that particular thematic like animals and i go from the micro with
00:11:07.020the microbiome you know up to the macro i think about the soul and then i you know selected most
00:11:13.860of my examples from Europe and the Americas in order to tell a story that had some kind of
00:11:20.100through line and one that that was also a story about how the how the world as it's set up today
00:11:29.040with you know a lot of you know global institutions that are you know Eurocentric how that came to be
00:11:37.260And so, you know, a lot of my examples from around the world are also ones that help to talk about that interaction between Europe and the wider world.
00:11:49.760So it's sort of a, it's a trans-regional book that traces various, I think, mysteries.
00:11:59.100I hope your readers feel a sense of cliffhangers as they go through the chapters.
00:12:02.900um and but it's you know each chapter could have been a book and i guess that's something that
00:12:10.560you know authors often feel when they finish the books yeah i love that you mentioned just now um
00:12:17.080star trek because in this book i want listeners to know that you're explaining all this history
00:12:22.380but you're also tying in contemporary examples pop culture examples the first time you mentioned
00:12:27.640the Ferengi on Deep Space Nine. I was just like, Oh my God, I was excited. I'm a Star Trek fan.
00:12:33.400Um, and I, I do love that you do talk in this about, um, outer space and aliens and things
00:12:41.160like that, because that's not, I've never before read about what did people in the 17th century
00:12:47.140imagine outer space was like, which brings us to one of the examples, which was, uh, Margaret
00:12:52.440cavendish can you just briefly explain who she was i'd never heard of her sure uh so margaret
00:12:59.100cavendish was an english aristocrat who lived in you know the 17th century the first three0.84
00:13:05.840half of the 17th century um thereabouts and uh you know so she was a teenager when the english
00:13:13.540civil war broke out and her family were royalists they were loyal to the crown and um the crown
00:13:21.880You know, ended up escaping to Oxford where she became a lady of waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria, who was the queen of French descent who had married Charles I, who had got his head chopped off.
00:13:35.940So Margaret Kamenich is this young woman who lived in this very tumultuous time.
00:13:40.880She ended up, you know, kind of escaping to France with the queen because it wasn't safe for them in England.
00:13:48.960and she became a self-taught polymath she you know being a woman she didn't have you know1.00
00:13:58.320the kind of uh fancy education and you know going to oxford kind of life she would have had1.00
00:14:05.460had she been you know an aristocratic boy child but she taught herself she read when she was in
00:14:12.060france she met her you know husband william cavendish who become the first duke of newcastle
00:14:17.700who was supportive of his wife's interests.
00:14:21.520And, you know, I guess, you know, today she, you know,
00:14:25.800she might, you know, we might call her a content creator today
00:14:28.700or a hustler because she wrote in so many different forms.0.97
00:14:33.560She wrote plays, she wrote poetry,0.81
00:14:36.840she wrote philosophical treatises about science,
00:14:40.640about atoms, about the nature of matter and souls.
00:14:44.380um she uh and you know she wrote you know work of science fiction a work of which you know like
00:14:53.240in star trek she you know used her imagination to kind of imagine another world in which life
00:14:59.860unfolded quite differently and um you know as as a woman who was uh very learned and who you know
00:15:09.820actually wrote and published stuff, which is seen as a bit gauche for a woman to do.
00:15:14.940There were people who thought she was a real weirdo. They called her Mad Madge. The diarist1.00
00:15:21.780Samuel Pepys called her mad. She was a ridiculous woman. And he said her husband was really foolish1.00
00:15:28.620to let her write. And so, you know, you could say that, you know, Margaret Cavendish was0.97
00:15:36.900was monstrified by some of her peers. She was not behaving, you know, in a gender-appropriate way.
00:15:45.540And what she does in her sci-fi novel, you know, description of a world called a blazing world,0.64
00:15:51.980because its stars were so bright and blazing. It's this, you know, extraordinary story in which she
00:15:58.880imagines another kind of world for a woman protagonist.
00:16:05.320I was really caught by that example in your book of Margaret Cavendish, because you also
00:16:10.320mentioned Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. And I think, at least in the circles that I operate in
00:16:15.940online, people are often being like, you know, science fiction was invented by a teenage girl,
00:16:21.620like Frankenstein. People are always coming up to the defense of Mary Shelley and letting people
00:16:25.660know that like this teenage girl wrote this book that was so important and then i thought yeah but
00:16:31.020like 150 years earlier this woman kind of invented yeah star trek like fiction so i think margaret
00:16:39.060cavendish she deserves to be known as well she she does um the you know the the book doesn't read
00:16:47.660really like an action novel you know it's not very readable today and probably now all margaret
00:16:53.640Cavendish scholars will hate me, it's compelling but a difficult read.
00:17:36.360She's in her cabin, men freeze to death.
00:17:39.200Eventually, you know, even through like the cold and the snow, the flesh starts putrefying and she realizes she can't sit in the cabin anymore.
00:17:47.160This all happens in a very deadpan, not exciting way in my view, but it's like, oh my God, what a plot.
00:17:54.680And she goes out on deck and sees that there are these bears who are standing like men.
00:18:02.440So what's happened is that the North Pole, our Earth, touches another Earth, another dimension.
00:18:08.640And if you go to the North Pole, where you end up is not in the other half of our world, but in their world.
00:18:14.060and um you know it turns out that there are all kinds of animals that just walk on their
00:18:19.740hind legs and speak not in english uh she meets bear men who who rescue her they bury the men's
00:18:27.920corpses and boats and carry her there's a lot of language of oh and they carefully carried the
00:18:34.880woman you know to you know this the capital city where the you know emperor emperor married her
00:19:12.020And Margaret Cavendish really goes to town on what it would be like to be a woman who is able to have extensive conversations about physics, about mechanics, about biology, about even monsters, about alchemy and chemistry.
00:19:30.280And, you know, she has audiences with all of these different animals that have different expertise.
00:19:35.340You know, there are kind of ape men who are chemists, bird men who are astronomers, which I think is kind of cute because, of course, birds know something about the sky and so on.
00:19:49.780And she develops her own kind of ninja intellectual skills, eventually saves her world from danger by inventing some special weapon.0.66
00:20:02.900And, you know, she talks, finally, in the third section of the book, she talks through a portal with the author, so the Duchess of Newcastle.
00:20:13.920And so Margaret Cavendish gives herself, you know, a role in this book as the person who becomes the scribe of the woman heroine who, you know, ran off to this amazing city, having started off as a kidnap victim.
00:20:36.900And here and there, Lady Margaret Cavendish says, I wasn't able to be a conqueror. I couldn't be Alexander or Caesar because I'm a woman. So I have imagined this world where that's possible.
00:20:57.320So she's, you know, imagined a world in which, you know, it's the kind of women who are the heroines and who tell that story and have a, you know, happily ever after life.
00:21:10.700I don't know if you're familiar with a book that, I don't know if it's, I interviewed this author last week and it, there's a lot, there's some beautiful overlap between her work and your work that I thought like these two books would read really well together.
00:21:24.260Helen King's book, Immaculate Forms, A History of the Female Body in Four Parts.
00:21:29.560Oh, great. Thank you. I've seen some of the media for that. I'm writing that down.
00:21:37.000So I read her book last week and interviewed her and I'm interviewing you.
00:21:41.140And you both have a similar concept at one point in both of your books where you talk about how
00:21:46.240in much of Western history, the female body was seen as monstrous.
00:21:53.080and something to fear and something to tame and something to be concerned about.
00:21:59.120And now we're seeing a similar thing about trans people1.00
00:22:03.200and how that's the new sort of monstrous thing.1.00
00:22:08.620Yeah. Can you talk a bit about just what you say about that in your book?
00:22:32.240And all monsters, I say somewhere, you know, something like, you know,
00:22:37.100monsters are works of imagination, but all of them are real.
00:22:40.780Monsters are imaginary, but all of them are real.
00:22:42.920And it's because a monster is actually a label.
00:22:45.880And it's an observer who has decided these are a bunch of normal categories, quote unquote normal, and here's someone who doesn't fit. And that means by my definition, they're a monster. They are failing to fit a category.
00:23:03.760And of course, people who challenge categories were often seen and still are as threats, threats to the self. And, you know, I think the word monster may feel kind of strong to, you know, 21st century person coming across this today.
00:23:23.880what do I really mean? What does this mean for people's lives? It means that people
00:23:28.920got treated differently. They lost their right to bodily autonomy, to privacy, to dignity.
00:23:38.620For example, there's this little girl called Antoinette Gonsalves, who in the mid-16th century
00:23:44.820was examined by a physician all over her body because she was unusually hairy. She was one of
00:23:53.640a small family of people who were all, most of whom had a lot of hair, you know, all over
00:24:02.020their, most of their faces and bodies.
00:24:05.260And, you know, these, you know, every so often there was in the sources, there is in the
00:24:10.280sources, you know, accounts of people who saw or inspected the bodies of, you know,
00:24:17.140these, you know, children or people who were too hairy or of people who were intersex.
00:24:22.120And at the Royal Society, the premier scientific institution in England in the 17th century, there would be people who kind of physicians of the natural society would talk about having inspected.
00:24:40.160And this was a situation that sometimes, you know, you know, parents who were kind of very poor and had, you know, they can atypically embody children, you know, sometimes, you know, children with, you know, without, you know, hands or with, you know, what today, you know, might be called kind of Siamese twins.
00:25:04.520um these you know children would be shown for money and in some cases you know kind of adults
00:25:14.480who were you know intersex were coerced into being being shown both at popular affairs and in
00:25:23.520scientific settings but you know where you know woman ends and man ends and what that leaves in
00:25:33.300between there has always been a continuum um it's what scientists will tell you today the fact that
00:25:42.220there aren't that that the fact that the continuum isn't even doesn't mean that there isn't one um
00:25:50.700in early christianity uh christian thinkers debated whether the original human being
00:26:27.840not even in the west and not in other places either but that deciding that certain groups
00:26:37.300are threats is something that over time we've seen move from homophobia through to now the
00:26:44.640anti-trans movement and those fears also look very like the kind of monstrification language
00:26:54.260Jews at times against women, at times against Jews. But, you know, there is still that question
00:27:03.400of, all right, so you've declared that trans people are a problem. How are you going to
00:27:08.340identify one? What's it going to take? You know, does every school child whose birth certificate
00:27:16.860says, girl, are they going to have to show, you know, their private parts before they can do
00:27:22.540pee or be on a sports team is you know is that really where you know the future of humanity
00:27:31.360wants to head and it's something about and you talk about this in your book as well
00:27:35.800the the concept of a monster it's a way to it can be a way to unite people against a common
00:27:43.720enemy or just honorable group yeah just and it's a way to and we see that this playing out a lot
00:27:51.280right now in in the uk and in the u.s and lots of places like immigrants or like when it's a way to
00:28:00.760unite disparate groups by inventing a boogeyman and saying like everything that you're upset with0.95
00:28:08.560everything that's wrong with your life it's because of this group rather than it's it's
00:28:13.400because of what the government has done rather it's because of what capitalism has done and so
00:28:17.920it's a way to sort of divert people's attention. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, um, I guess that
00:28:26.240kind of striking example of that is, is, um, the laws that were called the black codes in the
00:28:33.32017th century, you know, European colonies in the Americas. And, you know, there was a point when,
00:28:41.020And plantation workers were comprised of poor indentured servants from Europe, so white-presenting servants, and enslaved Africans who were brought over forcibly.
00:28:57.720And what you see developing is these kind of different councils in different places, you know, in Barbados and Jamaica.
00:29:06.440They wrote laws to define enslaved Africans as a legal category and what they called white Christian servants as a different category.
00:29:19.180So you had black slaves and white Christian servants and different laws applied to them.
00:29:26.400And so immediately you were kind of undercutting worker solidarity.0.71
00:29:32.660There would be different punishments. There'd be rewards for capturing an enslaved person who escaped. And it was also a form of monstrification. So if you declared that one group was chattel property for life, they were never going to stop living property.
00:30:01.560They've declared that an enslaved African is enslaved for life.0.75
00:30:08.100Then there were laws about any children of enslaved women and laws that decreed that the child would have the same condition as the mother effectively decreed that enslavers who had children with enslaved women,0.52
00:30:30.140um their children basically became objects so they you know insulators love property more than
00:30:37.680they loved their own children or i mean you know it's kind of an unthinkable kind of thing for us
00:30:43.100today but that treating yeah it's like the legal definition of some humans as not human yeah yeah
00:30:52.720and also disappearing the continuum you know there's no multiracial you know it's like and0.74
00:30:58.720And that's a kind of monster-making process to define, to erase that continuum, to create penalties for anyone being in that continuum.0.98
00:31:11.640The South African comedian Trevor Noah talks about this.0.99
00:31:15.000I mean, the title of his autobiography is Born a Crime, because it was illegal to have mixed-race children when he was born.
00:31:24.120He was hidden away in his early childhood.
00:31:26.680that's that's an illustration in like living yeah absolutely yeah and i mean to me just over
00:31:34.760and over in your book i was thinking like whenever and everything you just described as well
00:31:38.780there is a um defense that's like well this is the natural state of things and so these laws are just
00:31:46.640to ensure that things are kept in this proper way but it's like well if it's the natural state then
00:31:50.420you wouldn't need a law because people wouldn't be doing this people like if you have to make a
00:31:56.680law to enforce behavior then it's clearly not a natural thing exactly and it's clearly also not a
00:32:04.720you know oh the law is coming now so what's been going on since the beginning of time yeah
00:32:10.580um you also mentioned in your book on this podcast i did a whole series about mary queen of
00:32:17.680scots and in that um john knox emerged as quite a villain um amongst myself and the listeners he is
00:32:27.140we uh we we make fun of john knox a lot and i was really excited in your book you talk about
00:32:34.240john knox in an unflattering way so i was like oh one of us great um but you talk about because i
00:32:41.720was like oh that's right because his book it's called um the first blast of the trumpet against
00:32:46.460the monstrous regiment of women so he is like monsters of course yeah can you explain about
00:32:51.900him and his deal yeah so um this is a kind of weird and creepy deal so so he um
00:33:00.280knox was um really angry that there was a catholic um on the throne in in england so mary the first
00:33:09.640um who um was was also you know married to to a kind of spanish king like oh my god even even
00:33:17.900uh worse um but so he he wrote this pamphlet that he initially published anonymously saying
00:33:27.900and the the thrust of the the pamphlet was that it is really bad to have a kingdom ruled by a woman
00:33:35.600He used words like abominable and monster over and over again. It was against nature that a woman was ruling. But what he was actually cross about was that Mary wasn't an Anglican.1.00
00:33:50.940But the way he wanted to destabilize Mary, I mean, the way that his tactic was actually to leverage the kind of misogyny of the moment by saying that, well, actually, it would be perfectly patriotic to rebel against the monstrous regiment of a woman monarch.0.58
00:34:18.660because a woman at the head of the body politic is like a monstrous birth.
00:40:36.040I kind of read more of the material than I could actually kind of bring myself to inflict on unsuspecting readers.
00:40:45.300But so this kind of woman would keep providing Mary Toft with rabbits whenever a doctor came to examine her.1.00
00:40:52.640And Mary, with a sleight of hand, would produce rabbits.0.95
00:40:57.280But then she became like really upset and just blamed people around her for having encouraged her at this kind of moment of trauma and grief to be involved in a confidence trick.
00:41:15.200Part of one of the reasons why I started this podcast is just to share stories with people who wanted to hear them rather than inflecting them on my friends all the time.
00:41:22.320um and the mary toff story when i tell that to somebody often they're just like they don't
00:41:27.600understand well how why was that the plan why would that make the money like it's such a weird
00:41:34.500thing to do to be like oh i just gave birth to dead rabbit parts like understandably people today
00:41:40.200are like how is that gonna why would anyone be excited about that but people like you're like
00:41:45.980about the gonsalves family and just like people with like birth differences were brought to dinner
00:41:50.880parties and display like people at that time, like in England at the time, were just like so
00:41:56.080interested in, in the body and things that seemed unnatural and things that were unusual. Like
00:42:02.900that's where, um, Kings and Queens would hot, would be excited. They would find like,
00:42:09.440like a little person and be like, Oh great. I'm going to add them to my household. Like just1.00
00:42:13.620people were really excited about differences in, in a monster way, not in like a, Oh,
00:42:19.640let's embrace these people but more just like oh a monster great like for my collection yes yes
00:42:25.520exactly yeah um it was a you know i guess it was kind of voyeuristic um it's also a form of
00:42:33.580entertainment um and you know in the 19th century there were all kinds of um you know
00:42:40.800fairs and exhibitions at which not only can individuals who are unusually embodied like
00:42:46.840People who were very tall and called them giants or were called giants would just be intense and people paid money to go and see them.
00:42:56.200But also people from distant parts of the world, from Patagonia, from Southeast Asia, would be conned or kidnapped, coerced, and brought to be in scenes where, again, the fee-paying public in London could go to a venue and kind of be sort of a tourist.
00:43:26.200and look at what you could call just these human zoos.
00:43:31.500But there was this kind of veneer of education around these events as well.
00:43:36.960And there would be publications in the actual scientific media
00:48:34.660Hunter had Byrne's skeleton boiled in a kettle, which he later donated to the British Medical Association.
00:48:42.080And I ended up accidentally coming across a Charles Byrne skeleton when I was wandering around the Hunterian Museum in London about 10 years ago.
00:48:55.040And the first thing I saw was this very, very tall skeleton.
00:48:58.780And then there was a little label that said, you know, oh, this was his life.
00:49:04.180He didn't want to be displayed after his death.
00:49:07.060and so i was implicated in you know this um disavow so you know what was it about charles
00:49:17.080that meant you know what he wanted for you know his remains didn't matter he was somehow and it
00:49:26.160wasn't even as if the remains at that moment were being used only for quote-unquote science it was
00:49:32.960in a case, I didn't have to even pay money, I don't think, to go into that museum to see him.
00:49:39.280Bird skeleton has now come off display. I think it was a couple of years later when that happened
00:49:44.860and the museum reopened spring of 2023 and I went back and as they had promised, they did not
00:49:52.560put him back on display, nor did they bury him at sea. So his bones are still available for bona
00:50:00.360of finding his kind of medical searches yeah so there we are so even even after death the
00:50:08.540the exploitation there is a museum i'm just saying things off the top of my head i didn't
00:50:13.720research this before we talked but in the u.s there's a museum that recently i think they
00:50:20.300closed because there was such a fear yeah that had all these body parts and things and then it
00:50:27.820was like this isn't cool don't display this stuff and it was like a huge thing what was that do you
00:50:32.760know yes that was the motor museum in uh philadelphia which had a great many skeletons
00:50:40.960and specimens of body parts um if i remember correctly in you know in in jars i i've only
00:50:49.680being to it once um and you know but the you know many of those um many of those human remains were
00:50:59.260not obtained um in you know conditions where you know the people who were giving them up
00:51:07.760had much choice so there's that question of of of um what has been done to people's bodies or the
00:51:18.420bodies of their in their kin without consent and yet um i said was it called the morbid anatomy
00:51:27.240museum no that's a different museum in brooklyn uh and and yet it was also a place where you know
00:51:32.900for some people it was a place to go and see differently embodied people and differently
00:51:40.060able people rather than them their presence in the world never being um something that was
00:51:50.520recorded in museums so that was the you know controversy you know around the fact that they
00:51:58.040they closed to decide how to redisplay and what to redisplay i'm glad that you knew that i just
00:52:06.200it just occurred to me but you knew the museum name off the top of your head and i appreciate
00:52:09.680that so your book humans a monstrous history you've i i'm sure i've been talking to lots of
00:52:16.520people about this book and going and doing various events where can people uh keep up with you and
00:52:21.840know what events you're doing and and that sort of thing oh thanks for asking um i have a newsletter
00:52:28.200hosted by button down it's called notes from an everything historian it's totally free and you
00:52:35.700can even download a free extract from humans amongst history if you subscribe um i you know
00:52:43.120post my you know events there my most active social media channel by far is blue sky so do
00:52:50.880come and find me there and my website is serekadavis.org and that will you know help
00:52:59.380readers find all the places where I am and I will be on a book tour in the U.S. from the 1st of
00:53:10.760March to the 18th of April and I have a couple of events in London at the very end of April
00:53:19.060and there are a handful of online free Zoom book conversations and book lectures
00:53:27.060starting on february 19th um so do come and find me to learn more about them that's wonderful and
00:53:39.120i mean clearly just from this conversation you're you're so passionate about this topic and so
00:53:43.620knowledgeable about it i think it'll be great to to be able to share that with people and hopefully
00:53:47.660convince them all to read your book which i really really enjoy it and i really recommend