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In the wake of the nuclear attacks on Japan, the official Allied line was that radiation sickness was not a danger. Yet, as Steve O’Hagan reveals, the first western journalist to witness the effects on the people of Hiroshima told a very different story
At 6am on 2 September 1945, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett boarded a crowded train heading south-west from the wreckage of war-ravaged Tokyo. He was disobeying strict orders that no westerners should venture outside the Japanese capital – and, though he did not yet realise it, he was undertaking the most momentous journey of his life. The Second World War had ended. However, Japan had not formally surrendered, and American occupation was still to come. Japan’s cities lay in ruins, and Burchett couldn’t even be sure that the train line to his destination, over 400 miles away, was intact. He was also alone and in great danger – hence the Colt .45 pistol in his suitcase. Resentment towards the Allies ran high. Crammed around Burchett in his carriage were Japanese Army officers bearing samurai swords. Although he spoke almost no Japanese, Burchett could feel the animosity in the soldiers’ venomous stares. Also among the passengers was an American priest, who nervously warned Burchett that one wrong move could cost them their lives. Should they smile or shake hands, it could be taken by the Japanese officers as a sign of gloating over the Japanese surrender to the Allies that was being formalised later that day. Burchett later recalled glancing nervously at the soldiers: their hands seemed to toy with the hilts of their swords. As the train plunged in and out of long, dark tunnels, he was convinced that he could hear the sound of steel being unsheathed from scabbards. Thankfully, the assault he feared never came. But even as the train reached its destination some 20 hours after setting out, his tension did not abate. He was arriving in Hiroshima – the city that, four weeks earlier, had been nigh obliterated by the world’s first ever nuclear bomb attack. In one of the 20th century’s most remarkable feats of investigative reporting, Burchett was about to become the first western journalist to bear witness to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. A scramble to control the narrative about the reality of the deadly nature of nuclear fallout had begun. Reputational risk Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima presented the US with a public relations dilemma. What story should the country tell the world about unleashing this terrifyingly powerful experimental weapon on a densely populated city? The ‘leaders of the free world’ did not want to be seen as having become monsters while defeating the evils of fascism. As Henry Stimson, US secretary of war between 1940 and 1945, put it, the authorities didn’t want to “get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities”. Read more | How Nazi secrets triggered the ultimate moral dilemma – and led to Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb No one is sure exactly how many were killed in the attack. The city of Hiroshima initially estimated that 42,000 people died, from a population of around 350,000. A year later this number was revised up to 100,000. More recent estimates suggest that, by the end of 1945, up to 140,000 may have died from the immediate and long-term effects of the bomb. The vast majority were civilians. So when President Harry S Truman made radio addresses announcing the dropping of the bomb, he sought to establish the official narrative. First, he referred to Hiroshima not as a city full of civilians but as a “military base”. Second, the weapon was portrayed solely in terms of its explosive potential, with “more power than 20,000 tons of TNT”. Crucially, there was no mention of the potential dangers of radiation, which the Americans expected – or, perhaps more accurately, hoped – would not be an issue. Three days later, a New York Times article quoted Manhattan Project scientist Robert Oppenheimer saying: “There is every reason to believe that there was no appreciable radioactivity on the ground at Hiroshima and what little there was decayed very rapidly.” In the weeks that followed the bombing, this was the accepted narrative – until, that is, the previously little-known journalist Wilfred Burchett intervened. Born in 1911, Burchett grew up in the Australian Outback in Victoria, and left school at the age of 15 after his father’s business failed. He spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s as an itinerant labourer. A self-taught linguist with a burning interest in the outside world, he travelled to London in 1937, where he married a Jewish refugee from Germany and worked for a travel agency arranging for German Jews to emigrate to destinations such as Palestine. Front-line reporting Returning to Australia, Burchett forged a career as a journalist. After Japan entered the Second World War in 1941, he filed stories from the Burmese and Chinese fronts. He then joined the US Marines on their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific in 1944, reporting for the UK’s Daily Express. When Japan accepted defeat following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Burchett was due to be part of the official press corps covering the final act of the Second World War: the signing of ceremonial surrender documents aboard the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. However, as some 600 correspondents gathered for the event, Burchett was not among them. Feigning illness to slip away from his US military chaperone, he set out on his illicit and perilous journey to Hiroshima. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/British-Newspaper-Archives-AtomicPlagueDailyExpresswebready-ba8b67e.jpg" width="1500" height="1189" alt="A picture of a newspaper article from the Daily Express newspaper, with the headline THE ATOMIC PLAGUE" title="Burchett’s report on the impacts of radiation sickness in Hiroshima appeared in the Daily Express in 1945. It contradicted the official US narrative about the bomb (Image by British Newspaper Archives)" /> Upon arrival, Burchett was astonished by the sheer physical destruction wreaked upon the city: almost 70 per cent of its buildings had been wrecked. “There was nothing but awful devastation and desolation,” he wrote later, likening what he saw to “some death-stricken other planet”. He was guided by a local journalist to a hospital. “If the evidence of the material destruction of the city had been horrifying,” Burchett wrote, “the effects on humans as I saw them inside the hospital wards was a thousand times more so.” Patients – often whole families – were laid out on filthy tatami mats among the rubble of the damaged facility. Burchett saw how, four weeks after the attack, people were being treated not only for the horrendous effects of the blast but also for something else more mysterious, more sinister. Victims suffered a raft of perplexing symptoms: fever, diarrhoea, hair loss, hideous marks on the skin, bleeding from the mouth and other orifices. We now recognise these as markers of the advanced stages of radiation sickness, but the local doctors at the time had no idea what they were seeing. Many believed that the bomb had released poisonous gases from the ground. Burchett immediately understood that what he was witnessing was not just a visual manifestation of the end of the Second World War but the fate of inhabitants of hundreds of cities worldwide should there be another global conflict. “If that does not make a journalist want to shape history in the right direction, what does?” he wrote. In a state of near shock, Burchett sat on a concrete block among the ruins outside the hospital and tapped out his story on his battered typewriter. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-92425109webready-9744727.jpg" width="3888" height="2592" alt="A black and white photograph of lots of people laying on the floor. One man is standing up, watching over the sick people laying down" title="Tens of thousands who survived the blast over Hiroshima suffered symptoms that mystified doctors who’d never seen the effects of radiation (Image by Getty Images)" /> Three days later, on Wednesday 5 September, Britain awoke to an apocalyptic front cover on the Daily Express. “The Atomic Plague” was the main splash, then: “Doctors fall as they work.” (In the haste to get the story published, authorship was wrongly attributed to “Peter” Burchett.) Read more | Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict" Burchett’s searing reportage painted a terrifyingly vivid picture: “Hiroshima… looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence… It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.” The focus of his piece was, though, on the “uncanny after-effects” from which “people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly” weeks after the attack. The words he chose to describe this sinister malaise – “Atomic Plague” – suggested that the bomb dropped by the US was on a par with a chemical or biological weapon, both outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Initiating global opposition Also striking was the polemical strap-line to Burchett’s article: “I write this as a warning to the world.” With these words, he arguably initiated the global opposition to nuclear weapons that persists to this day. His article travelled rapidly around the globe after the Express released the text free to the international press – but this was not the story that the US military wanted the world to read. US authorities immediately moved to shut down Burchett’s narrative. Press conferences were held at which his claims of “atomic plague” were refuted, and military officials accused Burchett of having “fallen victim to Japanese propaganda”. Hiroshima was declared out of bounds to the media, and any reports of radiation sickness were censored. Burchett’s press accreditation was rescinded and he was encouraged to leave Japan. In the American press, stories sympathetic to the official line quoted Manhattan Project officials minimising the reports of radiation sickness. “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin,” ran one piece in the New York Times on 13 September. General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, testified to the Senate in November 1945 that scientists believed radiation sickness “is a very pleasant way to die”. In this way, Burchett’s warning to the world was to a large extent successfully suppressed in the months following its publication. But nobody could stop the truth radiating out from Ground Zero forever. In the years that followed, more information about the effects of radiation exposure emerged. In August 1946, the New Yorker ran its now famous John Hersey-penned Hiroshima issue (published as a book later that year), which opened millions of eyes to the horrors of what had happened. In 1954, the crew of a Japanese fishing trawler were poisoned by radioactivity from a US thermonuclear bomb test, with one man dying. And victims in Hiroshima continued to die young as the years ticked by. Nonetheless, it would take decades for the US to accept the full reality of radiation sickness – even after it afflicted American citizens: it wasn’t until the 1980s that US veterans of atomic tests received any compensation. No such compensation has ever come the way of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wilfred Burchett died in 1983, at the age of 72. By then, his scoop from the ruins of Hiroshima was largely forgotten in the west. But not in the city itself. Over the course of his life, Burchett returned several times to Hiroshima, where he was welcomed and feted by the Hibakusha – the survivors of the world’s first nuclear attacks. For them, there could be no forgetting. Steve O’Hagan is a documentary film and radio producer. His Archive on 4: Exposing Hiroshima programme about Wilfred Burchett’s reporting is available now on BBC Sounds This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
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Give away your worries, like an ancient Mesopotamian
What can we learn about managing worrying from the people of ancient Assyria and Babylonia? Dr Selena Wisnom offers some Near Eastern wisdom to Dave Musgrove
Do you worry about things? Do you wake up in the middle of the night, sweating about what might happen to you, to your family, to the world in general? I do. If you do too, rest assured you’re not alone. It’s a natural human trait, and it’s something people have been doing for millennia. In evolutionary terms, I imagine it’s something to do with forcing our minds to think about the things we ought to be doing next to keep ourselves alive, and keep us out of dangerous situations. It’s counterproductive, of course, to worry yourself into a state of paralysis – that’s when worrying goes wrong. Are there any lessons we can take from history that can help us worry productively? I went to the Assyria Galleries in the British Museum late one Friday afternoon to reflect on this. They are well worth a visit, whether you’re a worrier or not. Turn left at the main entrance and you’re straight into them. I wanted to go there because Dr Selena Wisnom, an expert on the history and heritage of ancient Mesopotamia and author of the excellent new book The Library of Ancient Wisdom (Penguin, 2025), had told me these people were worriers of renown: “They worry so much that they invent an entire branch of scholarship devoted to it. This is worrying on a kind of national cosmic scale.” This organised worrying was called ‘lamentation’. It wasn’t just a private matter – it was ritualised, institutionalised and shared across the whole society. We know they worried and lamented because they wrote about it. I wanted to get up close and personal with some ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform script. There is a lot of cuneiform script on display in the British Museum. I can’t read it – and there aren’t many people who can – but I figured it would be instructive just to look at it, and think a bit about the people who carved it. Hands and minds of the Mesopotamians Cuneiform is the writing system that they used in Mesopotamia. It was invented in the mid-fourth millennium BC and used for millennia afterwards, although it evolved on the way. It was basically a system of signs inscribed on clay tablets, produced by pressing a wedge into a piece of clay to make a three-dimensional impression. So when you’re looking at a cuneiform inscription, you’re looking at the hands and minds of the people who made them. By studying those cuneiform writings, Assyriologists like Wisnom have been able to understand a great deal about life in ancient Mesopotamia, and research how these people saw their world. It was a world, as Wisnom explained to me, that was full of worry and worriers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Alamy-2F61XHP-Astronomical-calendar--5c0dfc4.jpg" width="761" height="558" alt="A photograph of a beige-coloured stone tablet. On the left of the scene are three small figures with their hands aloft; on the right is a large seated figure on a throne. There are several lines of cuneiform writing towards the top of the scene" title="Ancient Astronomical Calendar" /> Let’s take a moment for a quick recap on where and when we’re talking about. Mesopotamia is a geographical term – it means between the rivers, and the rivers in question are the Tigris and Euphrates, so broadly where modern Iraq, north-east Syria and part of south-east Turkey are today. Mesopotamia was a focus for ancient civilisations from the fourth millennium BC onwards and Assyria and Babylonia were two of those civilisations, Assyria to the north and Babylonia to the south. Relations between these two kingdoms in the first millennium BC were, in Wisnom’s words, “tense”. Her book focuses on the time of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, who reigned in the mid-seventh century BC from his splendid capital at Nineveh. His brother was king of Babylon, and as is so often the way, the siblings fell out and went to war. The upshot was an Assyrian victory over Babylon. However, a few decades after Ashurbanipal’s death, revenge was served when the Babylonians and their allies descended on Nineveh and reduced this mighty city to rubble in 612 BC. Its remains are now to be found on the outskirts of Mosul. Read more | Your guide to the ancient city of Babylon Why burning a library was good news for historians The destruction of Nineveh included the burning of the great library of Ashurbanipal – the library of ancient wisdom in Wisnom’s book title. You might imagine that a raging fire in a great library would be a Very Bad Thing for later historians. However, because the ancient Mesopotamians used clay tablets, the conflagration acted like a giant kiln and fired the tablets, making them more likely to survive for posterity. Crushed and forgotten though these tablets were, their subsequent rediscovery in the 19th century provides a huge source of material for us to understand how these people saw the world around them. Quite a lot of the writings in Ashurbanipal’s library have found their way to the British Museum, along with reliefs, sculptures and statues as well. And that’s how we know what the Babylonians and the Assyrians worried about, and how they coped with these worries. To understand the central role of worry in ancient Mesopotamia, you’ve got to appreciate the scale and sophistication of these civilisations. Assyria was one of the great powers of the ancient world, known for its military strength, monumental architecture and extensive bureaucracy. The Babylonians were renowned for their scholarship and cosmopolitan culture. Babylon became a centre of religious ritual, law and intellectual life. Assyrian and Babylonian fortunes rose and fell turn-by-turn over the centuries. As Wisnom notes in her book, “Assyrian culture owes so much to the Babylonians that the two can be difficult to disentangle.” She likes to use the term Mesopotamian to refer to aspects of their culture that are shared, as well as relating to earlier Sumerian texts. “They were guardians of knowledge stretching back a thousand years before them,” she says, inheriting and preserving earlier Sumerian and Akkadian traditions. Flood, fire, famine and fear This long historical memory brought with it an equally enduring awareness of the risk of natural disaster. Flood, fire and famine were things they knew and feared. They also knew that the way to avoid catastrophe was to keep their gods happy. They had a pantheon of gods who were active in daily life. Mesopotamian gods, says Wisnom, “behave much like human beings do… they have strong personalities, they can be persuaded, they can be tricked. They do things, they care, they intervene, and people are really trying to get their attention and call them over to their side.” “They had ways to address it,” says Wisnom. “They had prayers. They had rituals. They might go to the exorcist to help them go through a very elaborate procedure where they give voice to all of that and express it.” In a society where fear of the gods was interwoven with daily life, ritualised expressions of worry were not eccentric – they were essential. I don’t want to give you the impression that these people were superstitious bumpkins though. These were advanced societies – pioneers of writing, architecture, mathematics, and astronomy – but their cultural sophistication did not free them from fear. Quite the opposite. WATCH | Dr Selena Wisnom on ancient anxiety View Green Video on the source website Lament, and let the Gods know you’re there They believed the world was sustained by divine order, and that disorder – famine, floods, illness, invasion – meant that something had gone wrong in the human relationship with the gods. Misfortune wasn’t random: it was a message. And so they acted, regularly and ritually, to express their anxieties and try to restore divine favour. “They lament to the gods in the temples every single day,” says Wisnom. “They have people whose job it is to sing in front of the gods four times a day, these very, very long litanies, bewailing all of the potential things that could go wrong to the city.” These professional lamenters were essentially state-appointed national worriers. Their job was to imagine worst-case scenarios in elaborate poetic form, and recite them in public ceremonies, even when no immediate crisis was at hand. “If you make it clear to the gods that you know they could do all these terrible things to you,” says Wisnom, “then they won’t feel the need to do it.” It was an act of pre-emptive humility – ritualised worrying in the hope of divine mercy. In order to know what you need the gods to do on your behalf in the future, you need to know what’s coming your way. One of the ways the Assyrians and Babylonians dealt with their worries about the future was by attempting to predict it. They developed highly sophisticated systems of divination, which were treated not as superstition but as a vital form of scholarship. Their premise was simple but profound: if misfortune is a message from the gods, it must be possible to read the signs in advance. This approach took many forms. Celestial omens were especially important. The movement of stars and planets, eclipses, and unusual celestial events were meticulously recorded and interpreted. The Assyrians and Babylonians were very proficient at studying the stars. Wisnom notes that Mesopotamian astronomers could “predict the movements of any star or planet to an accuracy of four minutes on any day, past or future,” using only naked-eye observations and mathematical ingenuity. The wisdom of sheep entrails But divination didn’t stop at the sky. The Assyrians also practised extispicy – the reading of entrails – as a means of answering specific questions posed to the gods. “It was one of the most important ways for kings to receive divine guidance,” says Wisnom. Priests would sacrifice a sheep, examine its liver and other organs, and interpret the shape, texture, and marks according to detailed manuals. The process was collaborative, peer-reviewed and surprisingly scientific in its approach. Other forms of divination included dream interpretation, reading smoke patterns, and interpreting odd occurrences in the natural world – like a pig dancing in a town square or a goat giving birth to a two-headed kid. Any anomaly might hold a message. I’m reading this as a response to uncertainty. I’ve locked in my mortgage rate because I didn’t know if the interest rate was going to spiral upwards, so I’ve listened to the predictions of financial experts and acted accordingly. That means I don’t need to worry about it because I actually can’t do anything about it. If you believe that you can get divine guidance from the stars or a sheep’s liver, then you too can get certainty about the future, and I guess, reduce anxiety. Managed risk it’s called, I think. Read more | Ashurbanipal 'the Great', the Lion of Assyria The people in Nineveh and other cities across the Mesopotamian world had a lot to worry about. Their world was full of unseen dangers. They had demons, witches and ghosts to contend with. Malevolent forces could afflict individuals or communities, and their symptoms – physical, mental or social – had to be interpreted and treated. Demons were blamed for sleeplessness and depression. Others, like Lamashtu, threatened pregnant women and infants. Even King Ashurbanipal’s grandfather Sennacherib was said to have been afflicted by a demon that left him “so miserable his advisors were afraid to speak to him”. Witchcraft, too, was taken seriously. If someone suffered from unexplained weight loss, dizziness, or persistent anxiety, a diagnosis of witchcraft might follow. “Witchcraft is actually a diagnosable disease like anything else,” says Dr Wisnom. Treatment came through rituals. Figurines were made and destroyed; incantations were recited; offerings were made to the gods. Exorcists – far from being theatrical performers – were highly trained specialists who used a combination of ritual, medical knowledge and divine petition to help patients. “The exorcist is more like a lawyer than a magician,” Wisnom explains. “He pleads with the gods to change their verdict.” Putting worries in a pot I suppose the point is that these people didn’t worry in silence. They worried very publicly, loudly and regularly. Anxiety was given a voice, a schedule and, often, a proxy. “They assigned worrying to professionals and fixed times of day,” Wisnom notes. “It’s not actually that different from what the NHS suggests that we do.” The NHS’s Every Mind Matters platform offers guidance on how to manage persistent worry using self-help CBT techniques. These include identifying whether a worry is hypothetical or practical, writing worries down to gain distance from them, and allocating a set time each day to process them – techniques that echo the Assyrian practice of ritualising anxiety through structured lamentation. As the NHS explains, “If you find that you’re constantly worrying, it can help to give yourself a set time to do it – and then let those worries go the rest of the day.” I’m thinking that the ancient Mesopotamians would likely have approved. There was also no shame in acknowledging emotional distress. Letters from royal scholars, priests and even kings include candid confessions of despair, hopelessness and guilt. Ashurbanipal himself once wrote: “I did absolutely everything right… and yet still I’m constantly depressed.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Alamy-RK4BW4-King-1d84e3c.jpg" width="866" height="1190" alt="An Assyrian statue of Ashurbanipal from his royal palace in Nineveh. He once wrote: “I did absolutely everything right… and yet still I’m constantly depressed.” (Image by Alamy)" title="London, England / United Kingdom - 2019/01/28: Ancient Assyria statue of king Ashurbanipal from his royal palace in Nineveh at the archeologic exposit" /> Not so distant, not so weird If the scale and solemnity of Mesopotamian lamentation sounds distant and weird, hang on for a second to consider how we’ve reacted to disaster and threat in Britain in recent times. I’m reminded of an article that Professor Natalie Mears, a historian of early modern Britain, wrote for BBC History Magazine a few years ago about national days of prayer in Britain (if you’re a HistoryExtra member, you can read it in full here now). She notes that since 1535, there have been more than 500 such occasions in England and Wales alone. These were not mere religious observances – they were formal, state-sanctioned rituals in response to national anxiety. “There seem to have been two principal motivations for the country to come together in prayer: to seek God’s help in secular affairs, and to offer thanks for his intervention,” says Mears. So Charles II, in 1666, ordered a “day of solemn fasting and humiliation” after the Great Fire devastated the capital. But there were also days of thanksgiving when the nation had been delivered from disaster, such as after Trafalgar and Waterloo in the early 19th century. More recently, in May 1940, just days after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill approved a national day of prayer in response to the crisis unfolding in France. “People throughout Britain flocked to their local churches and chapels,” Mears writes. When news broke of the Dunkirk evacuation’s success five days later, many saw it as divine deliverance. How different is this national prayer for deliverance, and humiliation before God, from ancient Mesopotamian lamentation? Seems pretty similar to me. Would it even be going too far to suggest that the banging of pots and pans outside during Covid was the latest iteration of lamentation and thanksgiving in a more secular Britain? Were we trying to hammer away our worries about the pandemic, as much as say thanks to the NHS and first responders? Gods, demons and algorithms The Assyrian and Babylonian response to anxiety was, in many ways, deeply pragmatic. It acknowledged fear as part of life, and sought to engage with it openly and communally. There were specialists to diagnose it, rituals to manage it, and no expectation that individuals should bear it alone. Read more | A history of happiness: 5 life lessons from the past Their world may have been filled with gods and demons rather than algorithms and economic graphs, but the emotional terrain is familiar. They show us that naming our fears, expressing them in structured ways, and seeking support from others are timeless strategies for resilience. As Wisnom reflects: “Even the king of Assyria was admitting to feeling rubbish. Something we can all relate to.” The problem with this is in the practical application today. I’m not the king of Assyria, and nor are you, so we can’t instruct a temple of professional lamenters to take our worries off our shoulders. But maybe there is something basic here, in terms of personal delegation of worrying. “I do like the concept of delegating your worrying to somebody else or something else,” says Wisnom. “that’s something that I have in fact inadvertently tried myself. One night I was very worried about something. It was late at night. Nobody was awake so I called a friend in America because they are awake in America. He said to me ‘Don’t worry. I will hold your worries until morning,’ and it actually worked. I got back to sleep.” So if perhaps the method of delegation is a little alien when we compare ourselves to the ancient Mesopotamians, the underlying concept works. Delegate your worries to someone else, or something else, and you might find the demon within more manageable. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. 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Did Adolf Hitler really only have one testicle?
Although British soldiers in the Second World War sang about the Führer only having “one ball”, that did not necessarily make it anatomical fact. The discovery of medical records from his time in prison, however, paint a surprisingly complicated story
“Hitler has only got one ball, / Goring has two but very small, / Himmler is rather sim’lar, / But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.” This cheeky wartime ditty mocking the masculinity of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leadership, set to the jaunty tune of the Coloney Bogey March, was once a familiar favourite in schoolyards in Britain and beyond. The lyrics often change – in one variant, it is suggested in rhyme that the Fuhrer’s remaining testicle now resides as something of a war trophy in the Albert Hall – but where does this claim come from, and is there any truth to it? Is there any truth that Hitler had one testicle? On balance it seems unlikely that Hitler only had one testicle, but there are conflicting arguments on both sides. That said, there have been several stories that, if true, would mean the song was actually based on anatomical fact. According to one, Hitler lost a testicle during the First World War after being hit by shrapnel at the battle of the Somme in 1916; another says the injury occurred much earlier, in childhood, during an altercation with a goat. It all seems to be the stuff of hearsay. Although Hitler was wounded at the Somme, it was in the thigh rather than the groin. What’s more, that claim comes from many decades later from an unconfirmed source, a priest who supposedly took the confession of the German medic who treated Lance Corporal Hitler. Perhaps the single best piece of evidence that counters the claim that Hitler only had one testicle comes from the doctor who treated Hitler as a child, an Austrian Jew named Eduard Bloch who fled to the United States in 1940, insisted to American interrogators that the genitals of the future Fuhrer were “completely normal”. Still, the seemingly endless fascination with Hitler’s reproductive equipment and sexual proclivities has persisted over the decades. Years after the war, a new claim emerged that the Soviets had carried out an autopsy of Hitler after taking Berlin in 1945, in which they found he did indeed have a missing testicle. This is not widely accepted as credible, however. Read more | Did Hitler escape to Argentina after WW2? Was anything wrong with Hitler’s testicle? In 2015, a German researcher was able to study the medical records made during an examination of Hitler at Landsberg Prison. He was held there after the failure of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, the failed uprising he instigated in 1923. According to the notes written by Dr Josef Steiner Brin, Hitler was “healthy and strong”, but did have a “right-side cryptorchidism”, or an undescended right testicle. Read more | The history of the Hitler salute Where does the song “Hitler has only got one ball” come from? The song appeared in the early days of the Second World War. While its origins are unknown (over the years several people have claimed they wrote the lyrics to be used for propaganda purposes), it caught on with the British soldiers as a means of ridiculing Hitler. Crude and childish, it aimed to emasculate both the Nazi leader and his inner circle, by implying they were not full men. Singing about Hitler and co. not having the usual number of balls was to call them cowards too: “to have no balls” is another way to say someone has no courage or nerve. By bringing Hitler’s physical state into question, there may have been a further intention to the song in challenging the Nazis’ claims about a master race of perfect humans. When they were talking all the time about tall, muscular blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans, the song serves to illustrate how Hitler, and those around him, were far from meeting those standard themselves. Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Explore the course now
The Victorians’ cocaine habit: why 19th-century Britain couldn't get enough of the 'miracle' drug
In the 19th century, a magic new drug took the medical community by storm, riding a wave of scientific endeavour. But, writes Douglas Small, it wasn’t long before the dark side of this miraculous substance began to emerge
On a drab January day in 1890, journalist Marian von Glehn made her way through the "roar and rattle" of the City of London. Her destination, squeezed in among densely packed warehouses in the Moorfields district, was a massive, grubby, utilitarian building: the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital. Behind that unpromising facade, though, von Glehn was about to witness a miracle of modern medicine. Writing for The Leisure Hour magazine, she recounted seeing a small group of nervous patients gathering outside an operating theatre. Surrounded by powerful gas lamps, reflectors and rows of “coloured phials that would have delighted the eyes of a Dutch painter”, the hospital’s nurses began to drift quietly among their charges. Into the eyes of these patients, nurses dripped a “newly discovered... magic drug” – one that would “deaden and allay the pain” of imminent operations and “inspire their patients with courage and confidence”. The miraculous-seeming substance being administered was cocaine – and it soon captured the imagination of the Victorian public in a way that few other drugs have done, either before or since. Numb luck Cocaine was first isolated and extracted from the leaves of coca plants, traditionally cultivated on the slopes of the Andes, in 1855. It gained its well-known common name in 1860. However, the drug’s discovery initially passed largely unnoticed outside the specialised realms of organic chemistry. For the first few decades, one medical writer recounted, cocaine seemed to be nothing more than an “obscure [and] useless alkaloid”. Then, in 1884, cocaine came to the attention of medical professionals worldwide when Karl Koller, a trainee ophthalmologist in the eye surgery department of Vienna General Hospital, realised that applying the compound to the surface of the eye completely blocked any sensation of pain. That discovery heralded the advent of a completely new class of medications: local anaesthetics. For the first time it became possible to undertake pain-free operations without resorting to more dangerous – potentially fatal – general anaesthetics such as ether and chloroform. News of the breakthrough spread quickly. Henry Power, one of the presidents of the British Medical Association, announced excitedly to a meeting of members that: “In the discovery of cocaine, a new era seems to have dawned.” Across the Atlantic, the pioneering American neurologist Dr Leonard Corning told journalists that “Cocaine is almost as wonderful and important a discovery as electricity.” Amid the ballyhoo, the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital became the first institution in the UK to make use of the new drug, starting in the same year that Koller made his discovery. Marian von Glehn knew that a report on this still-novel anaesthetic would fascinate her readers. “Such are the wonderful properties of the newly discovered cocaine, that the operating theatre is robbed of half of its terrors,” she wrote. That was the theory. And von Glehn found proof of its effects when, in the children’s ward, she was cornered by a six-year-old girl – nicknamed ‘The Chattermag’ (‘chatterbox’) by hospital staff – who had recently undergone a cataract operation. The Chattermag was delighted to have remained awake throughout her surgery, even addressing the operating surgeon himself at a critical moment: “I say, Mr doctor, aren’t you a-cutting of that thing in my eye?” she said. “I know you’re a-cutting of it out, aren’t you? And it don’t hurt one bit, and I don’t mind one bit – you tell me when it’s out!” Magic drug Within a few months of Koller’s discovery, cocaine was established, in the words of one weekly paper, as “the magic drug which takes from the knife of surgery its pain”. Fired by such an apparently epochal breakthrough, the medical profession began hungrily searching for new ways to make use of the much-lauded substance. The Dublin Journal of Medical Science claimed that cocaine had “secured a place in therapeutics which can scarcely be paralleled in the history of any other drug”. The Chemist and Druggist reported that “Our medical journals – almost in every issue – note some new application of cocaine, and prognosticate an unlimited utility for it.” In short order, cocaine became accepted as “an absolute necessity in every surgery and dispensary”, and its uses became “almost indefinitely multiplied”. Aside from surgical applications – in a development that seems incredible from a modern perspective – cocaine became the basis for a multitude of home remedies and day-to-day medications. It was, according to some medical authorities, the very thing to cure a cold or flu. Dr David B Lees of St Mary’s Hospital in London advised that “a 4 per cent solution of hydrochlorate of cocaine applied to the nose by means of a camel’s hair brush gives instant relief, and [can] suffice to completely arrest a cold with- out the aid of any other remedy whatever”. By the 1890s, the pharmaceutical company Burroughs, Wellcome & Co had launched a portable cocaine nasal spray for colds and flu that was “so small as to be easily carried in the waistcoat pocket”. Homespun remedies The ‘Home Notes’ sections of newspapers and journals encouraged readers to make their own “cocainised snuffs”, reputedly excellent remedies for hay fever and headcolds. One recipe called for three grains of menthol, 50 grains each of coffee and powdered sugar, and a grain and a half of cocaine. Peppermint extract could be added according to the user’s taste. If making snuff seemed too much bother, cocaine lozenges promised to “promptly check all sea-sickness, and sickness during pregnancy”, while cocaine pastilles could alleviate a sore throat. “If you are a Singer, Speaker, Preacher or Teacher, clear your voice with Buxton’s Cocaine Pastilles,” suggested one advert for a product costing “1 shilling and 6 pence a box”. Coverdale’s famous Cocaine and Menthol – “The Magic Tooth- ache Reliever” – was a less-pricey option, retailing for 10 and a half pence a bottle (postage included). Less-reputable sellers of patent medicines were also quick to recommend cocaine as a cure for “nervous debility” and general “weakness”. Brown’s Medical Company, based in Brighton, supplied an “astonishing” herbal tonic for restoring “life and vigour”, made with cocaine, powdered jurubeba (a nightshade from Brazil) and ignatia, derived from the seeds of an Asian tree. The product was, the company claimed, suitable for “either sex” but was best used to counter problems euphemistically referred to as “lost manhood”. Intoxicating beauty As its applications multiplied, cocaine also played a foundational role in the Victorian beauty industry. Local anaesthesia made the new field of cosmetic surgery practical in a way it never had been before. As early as 1887, it was possible for those with a sadly unfashionable “tip-tilted” nose to have the organ numbed with cocaine and resculpted into the “desired aquiline shape”. Electrolysis and hair removal also experienced a boom thanks to the new pain-relieving drug. Women who coveted the fashionably rouged complexion of the day might have a “delicate rose colour” permanently tattooed into their cheeks – using pigment infused with cocaine to quell the pain – while men were offered a rugged-looking and never-fading tattooed suntan. Newspapers assured readers that the tattooing wasn’t in the least uncomfortable, claiming that some clients “indifferently read a book during the process”. In a more practical application, the New York Fire Department briefly considered issuing cocaine eye drops to its firemen to protect those delicate organs and keep them “free from pain in the midst of heavy smoke”. The idea, however, quickly ran aground on the objection that “the danger of men acquiring the cocaine habit is so great as to overshadow all other considerations”. Sherlock Holmes' dubious solution The fictional detective's cocaine usage identified him as a man at the cutting edge of science. It may seem surprising, but Sherlock Holmes was one of the 19th century’s most famous users of cocaine. The Sign of Four, the second of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, begins with the detective in his Baker Street rooms, injecting himself with a “7 per cent solution” of the drug. One evening paper observed, three years later in 1893, that “Many people derive their practical acquaintance with cocaine from the part it plays in the career of the renowned Sherlock Holmes.” Doyle had trained to be a doctor before turning to writing full-time, so was aware of cocaine’s reputation as a wonder drug. For many Victorians, cocaine wasn’t just a remarkable discovery; its almost unprecedented power to relieve pain seemed to symbolise the vast horizons of modern science and the incredible transformations that might yet come from scientific discoveries. For one journalist writing in Victoria’s golden jubilee year, 1887 – three years after Karl Koller discovered the drug’s anaesthetic properties – “the development of the marvellous cocaine” gave “practical” proof that “the years of Queen Victoria’s reign have been crowded with glorious life”. By giving Sherlock Holmes a cocaine habit, Doyle could quickly signal to readers that his hero was something new: a thoroughly specialised, scientific detective, working at the cutting edge of Victorian innovation. (Tellingly, though, cocaine use is absent from stories after 1904.) As Doyle described his hero in later years, “Sherlock is utterly inhuman, no heart, but with a beautifully logical intellect.” For Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes’s cocaine solution was a way to mark him out as the ideal problem-solver for the 19th century’s new “age of science”. This was far from an idle concern. Less than a year after Karl Koller’s transformative discovery of cocaine anaesthesia, the first reports of cocaine addiction began to appear in the press. In December 1885, a reporter for the Chicago Herald made his way through the cold and crowded city streets towards a “handsome” five-storey building on West Madison Street. The Washingtonian Home for Inebriates (a 19th-century term for those suffering from alcohol or drug addiction) could house 100 patients, but the reporter had come to see one man in particular. Dr Charles Bradley may not have been the world’s first cocaine addict, but he was the first to catch the public eye. Swept up in the excitement following the discovery of cocaine anaesthesia, he had begun taking the drug experimentally. Quickly losing control of his new habit, he had fallen into a “sad” and “piteous” state. His medical practice faded away to nothing, he became violent to his friends, wife and children, and he was consumed by alternately paranoid and grandiose fantasies. In the courtroom where he was committed to the Home for Inebriates, Bradley became suddenly frantic and rushed at the bench. “In an agony of despair,” he begged the judge “as a man and by God Almighty” to “try the cocaine” so that he might understand how wonderful it really was. Bradley struggled with his addiction for some years. By 1887, after a long interval of “acute mania, convulsions, and every dis- tressing phase of violent insanity”, he was reported to have been “nursed back to mental and physical vigour”. Despite his travails, though, he still believed in the benefits of cocaine. “With all your experience with cocaine, how do you regard it?” a reporter asked Bradley. “I think it is a grand drug, with remarkable properties,” he replied. “Scientists are only in the experimental stage with it.” When news of Bradley’s affliction broke – alerting the world to the problem of cocaine addiction – the British Medical Journal poetically noted that “this sweet rose of our therapeutic bouquet has its bitter thorn”. Bradley’s conflicting experiences reflected those of the Victorian medical profession more widely, and the question of how to balance the drug’s revolutionary uses in local anaesthesia with the threat of addiction began to come to the fore. Druggist’s Circular summed up the growing concerns: “Cocaine is one of the greatest blessings to mankind. But there is a dark side to the picture. It makes a good servant, but a poor master.” Master and servant Towards the end of the 19th century, doctors and journalists alike became increasingly vocal about how easily cocaine might “master” an unwary user. Jocelynne Joye, one of the star journalists of The Outlook magazine, cautioned her female readers about the dangers of becoming dependent on “stimulants” to get through the social season. She described a recent encounter at a fashionable party: “A lady was heard to offer a friend a tabloid from a small silver box – just as one might offer a cigarette to another – with the words, ‘Do have one dear – they’re only cocaine. Personally, I don’t know how I should get through the day without them’.” Health and medicine columnists echoed such sentiments. The well-known medical author William Gordon Stables cautioned his readers that, as powerful and effective as cocaine-based medicines were, “I almost dread recommending them, so terrible in its effects is the cocaine habit.” The summer of 1889 brought cocaine’s first celebrity casualty when Aristides ‘Jacques’ Damala, husband of the world-famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, succumbed to “overdoses of morphia and cocaine” in his hotel room on the Boulevard Pereire in Paris. A far more dramatic tragedy struck the small town of Manchester, Connecticut in 1896. Workers from the local silk mills often suffered from asthma and catarrh caused by the fine dust produced by processing raw silk. Seeking relief, many turned to a cocaine snuff sold by a local chemist. According to reports, the recipe was actually weaker than those regularly printed in newspapers, but strong enough to cause terrible problems for its users. By the time the issue was reported in newspapers, more than 40 people had become addicted to the mixture. Responding to growing concerns about addiction, Irish psychiatrist Conolly Norman observed that “Cocaine is probably the most agreeable of all narcotics, and therefore the most dangerous.” Yet, strange as it might seem today, such accounts of the dangers and harmful effects of cocaine did little to blunt popular enthusiasm for the drug. Among commentators who were aware of the potential addictiveness of cocaine in the late 19th century, the general attitude was that those who became addicted represented a relatively small number of tragic individuals, and that the benefits of cocaine as a therapy and as a ‘prestige’ drug for the medical profession needed to be balanced against that. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/02/2RGDYDC-3491ed5.jpg" width="5000" height="3331" alt="A British army dispensary on the western front during the First World War, when concerns about national health and morale prompted legislation to limit sales of cocaine. (Photo by Alamy)" title="A British camp with an open air medical dispensary on the Western Front during World War One." /> It was only in the wake of the First World War, and increased anxieties about national health and civilian morale, that legislation was introduced to limit the sale of cocaine in the UK. From 1884, doctors, journalists and legislators had wrestled with a dilemma: how to balance the promise of cocaine with its perils. The drug provides an object lesson in how scientific research can capture our imaginations and excite us with fresh possibilities – but also expose us to new and terrible risks. Douglas Small is a historian of medicine based in the UK, and the author of Cocaine, Literature, and Culture, 1876–1930 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
A history of happiness: 5 life lessons from the past
What can history teach us about how to find joy? Katie Barclay shares five lessons from the past about the pursuit of happiness
1. Don’t bank on money alone The subject of whether wealth can bring true happiness has been passionately debated across the centuries. Money can’t buy you happiness, it’s often said. But did our ancestors agree? That depends on who you ask, and on how we define and measure happiness – something that has varied across time, cultures and languages. Is it just a state of mind, describing the way we feel? Or does happiness require us to be healthy, wealthy and wise? Interestingly, research has shown that wealth is actually a pretty good predictor of happiness, but throughout history people have cautioned against relying on material accumulation to achieve a blissful life. Historical studies of happiness have often been guided by the ancient Greek term eudaimonia, meaning the condition of living well – and societies and individuals able to live well enjoy more opportunities for happiness. Many ancient Greeks were, though, sceptical of the idea that happiness was achievable in this life, associating that state solely with the afterlife. In a (likely fictional) conversation in the sixth century BC, the legendarily wealthy Lydian king Croesus asked Athenian lawmaker Solon whether he had met anyone better off than him. Solon listed several men who lived honourable and sacrificial lives, dying for their people. When Croesus asked whether his own eudaimonia – his economic success and luxurious lifestyle – meant nothing, Solon replied that you could not judge whether a person was happy until they had ended their life well, emphasising virtuous living over material pleasures. The philosopher Democritus similarly argued that “both happiness and misfortune pertain to the soul. Happiness does not reside in cattle or gold,” advising people to put aside their worldly concerns. In contrast, 18th-century American revolutionaries placed the “pursuit of Happiness” at the heart of their vision for a new nation, writing it into the Declaration of Independence. With the rapid growth in wealth and available consumables, new pleasures could soon be purchased. Rich furnishings and cloths made homes warm and comfortable; food technologies that added salt, sugar and flavourings heightened the delights of eating; cheap clothing created new desires and fuelled aspirations. Deadly sins? Not everyone was happy about this shift in emphasis – and greed, gluttony and other excesses were deemed sins in many religions. But 18th-century philosophers such as Adam Smith encouraged people to worry less about the morality of luxury and instead embrace the benefits of trade and consumption. “Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences and amusements of human life,” Smith argued. He thought that the ability to buy consumables was a good measure of wider social happiness. The following century, Karl Marx argued that capitalism encouraged people to hoard money rather than enjoy the fullness of life: “The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence etc, the more you save... The less you are, the less you give expression to your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the more you store up of your estranged life.” Capitalism, then, alienated people from their desires, reducing the possibility of a flourishing and happy life. 2. Adopt a healthy attitude Being in good physical health and living moderately have almost universally been seen as positives. Healthy living has long been thought to contribute to happiness. Advice for good health has remained remarkably consistent across the ages, often based on the second century physician Galen’s six ‘non-naturals’. People should drink water and eat nutritiously, take exercise and rest, breathe good air, sleep, manage bodily evacuations, and control the passions. Moderation was typically key: too much of a good thing was thought to have detrimental health impacts, so the history of health advice is typically also a story of self-control. Emotions such as happiness had a complicated role in the history of healthy moderation. How much happiness was too much? And when did such feelings themselves impact health? Laurent Joubert, a scholar at the University of Montpellier in the 16th century, wrote a leading treatise on laughter. He argued that “because being joyful and ready to laugh indicates a good nature and purity of blood, it thus contributes to the health of the body and of the mind”. His colleagues thought that laughter was an important counterpoint to labour, refreshing men after a long day’s work and the serious business of study and contemplation, and allowing women to express their ‘natural’ gaiety. Scottish doctor George Cheyne was more ambivalent in his writing on the functioning of the nervous system a century later. “Sudden Gust of Joy or Grief, Pleasure or Pain, stimulate and spur the Nervous Fibres, and the Coats of the Animal Tubes,” he argued, “thus both sudden Joy and Grief, make us breath short and quick, and make our Pulse small and frequent.” If these passions were sustained, over time they would “wear out, waste, and destroy the Nervous System”. To maintain health, people were urged to control their passions, experiencing happiness in small doses. A calm equilibrium might be preferable. Pleasure gardens How should one achieve a healthy life? Advice suggesting good air, rest and exercise pointed to rural living. The Athenian philosopher Epicurus established a school in his garden, which became a long-lasting symbol of a hedonistic life without pain. There he could concentrate on pleasure, the life of the mind and friendship. This choice of location was controversial because it rejected the social obligations of participating in political and civic life. Nature was also a prominent source of happiness for the Romantics of the 19th century. William Wordsworth, for example, described the “bliss of solitude” that “my heart with pleasure fills” in his poem on walking among daffodils. Read more | Jane Austen's tips for “health and happiness” 3. Play happy families Good relations were commended as key to happiness in religion and law. The role of families and strong social networks in maintaining happiness was emphasised to early modern Catholics, who were directed to view the Holy Family as a model to emulate. Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, “joyfully aided in childbirth, made peace, reconciled with love, [and] cleaned eyes with [her] medicinal and healing virtue”, preached the Franciscan Juan de Alvarado to his Mexican audience in 1736. Families who behaved similarly would enter into “happinesses without scarcity and happinesses that reaches the peak of good fortune”, claimed another Spanish-Mexican preacher, Iván Díaz de Arce, a century earlier. Early modern Protestants placed similar emphasis on the pleasures of family. In 1693, English minister Thomas Whitaker proclaimed that “dutiful, obedient Children” were “the Joy and Crown of their parents”. Some argued that, because children were naturally “inclined to Joy”, they offered an example of the ideal human condition. And the French mystic Pierre Poiret Naudé (1646–1719) thought that children showed the “final and perfective facultie of our Souls, which in effect were made for nothing else but to solace themselves in joy, in pleasure and contentment”. In other words, children provided a model for happiness. The happy family only grew in political importance, and in the 19th century the state was called on to ensure its maintenance. Seduction suits, in which men sued the lovers of their wives or daughters for their “corruption”, were available in law because the happy family was central to national security. In 1831, Irish barrister Charles Phillips explained in court that, before she eloped with her lover, one Mrs Guthrie had been the “organ and ornament” of her husband’s happiness. Phillips encouraged jurors to order significant compensation to reflect the “religion defiled, morals insulted, law despised, public order foully violated, and individual happiness wantonly wounded”. Joy in dark times Not all families were equally entitled to show happiness. Displays of joy by black families were used by some American anti-abolitionists to justify slavery and contest the political rights of the black population – if people were happy while enslaved, they did not need freedom. They were thus discouraged from behaving cheerfully in public. In 1931, American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston argued that to deny joy was destructive for black families: “Though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going.” Hurston recognised that the expression of happiness, particularly within families and communities, was an important way through which people found the strength to survive. Later civil rights activists positioned joy as a political emotion that allowed black people living in a racist society to rejuvenate and find strength. 4. Find faith and fortune Major religions decree that living a virtuous life is the route to happiness. Throughout history, not every society has been convinced that happiness is within human control. Indeed, the modern English word derives from hap or happ, meaning fortune or luck in Middle English and Old Norse. Notably, the etymological link between luck and happiness can be found in most Indo-European languages, as well as further afield. The Chinese character for happiness is also that used to denote good fortune. In Korean, which long used the Chinese writing system, that character (bok) is pronounced very like the word for bat (obok); pictures of bats appear on many charms and gifts, representing both happiness and fortune. Achieving happiness was ultimately in the hands of the gods – but, with some luck, individuals might be able to attract their attention and solicit joy. Happiness has sometimes been construed as a form of blessing or even a reward for a life well lived. Most of the major religions have advocated pathways by which their adherents could live virtuously and, thus, might hope to achieve happiness. Buddhists promote the performance of good deeds, including giving generously and associating with wise people, as key to living happily. The highest form of happiness, however, is not an emotion at all. According to the canonical religious texts compiled in the fourth to fifth centuries, nirvana was a form of enlightenment marked by an absence of feeling. Happiness could easily become unhappiness, so reaching a state of nirvana meant moving beyond the possibility of suffering. Piety before pleasure Early Islamic texts promoted balance and self-control as central to a piety that should be practised in everyday life. Happiness was not a goal in itself, but was one of the emotions that contributed to virtuous living. Good Muslims should “rejoice” in “God’s favour and in His mercy” rather than in “what they have accumulated”, warned the Qur’an. Expressions of pleasure could also be immoral, and those who laughed at Muslim believers were considered sinners. On Earth, happiness might lead one away from God, as well as towards him. Ultimately, however, the afterlife was a place of complete satisfaction where “believers rejoice in what God has given them”. Virtuous living could be accompanied by joy but, just as importantly, it brought God’s favour in eternity. 5. Harness the power of words Nothing beats curling up with a good book for sparking delight. The life of the mind – thinking and learn- ing – has long been viewed as a pleasure, so of course reading has an important role in the pursuit of happiness. The 14th-century writer and Bishop of Durham, Richard de Bury, thought that “nothing... compared” to a library, and that any “follower of truth, of happiness, of wisdom, of science, or even of the faith, must of necessity make himself a lover of books”. Around the turn of the 18th century, English theatre critic Jeremy Collier wrote that books “help us to forget the crossness of men and things; compose our cares and our passions; and lay our disappointments asleep”. And, according to his biographer Sir George Trevelyan, historian Thomas Macaulay believed that reading was “a main element of happiness in one of the happiest lives”. Let’s be other people Books offer the reader the chance to enter into new worlds and to imagine themselves as other people, both of which were seen as contributing to the value of reading and to the joys of a life of the mind. The 17th-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza rejected a life limited to basic survival or necessities, arguing: “When we say... that the best state is one where men pass their lives harmoniously, I mean that they pass a human life, one defined not merely by the circulation of blood... but mostly by reason, the true virtue and life of the mind.” To live a full and happy life, individuals need to be provided with the opportunity to think, read, fantasise and aspire. In the 1940s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow took up these ideas in his famous “hierarchy of needs”. Maslow was part of the ‘positive psychology’ movement that wished to move the field beyond thinking merely about mental illness, instead working towards supporting optimum wellbeing. Maslow thought that happiness could not be achieved if basic needs such as food, housing and family were not met. But to be truly satisfied, he believed, people also needed to fulfil their potential – and that meant attending to their desires, aspirations and fantasies. Happy individuals, he observed, were “lusty animals, hearty in their appetites, and enjoying themselves mightily”, able to move beyond themselves to help others, “capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification” than most. To achieve this state, however, required a deep awareness of one’s values, dreams and place in the world – and, therefore, an active life of the mind. Listen | The history of happiness in an episode of Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3 Katie Barclay is professor and ARC Future Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney and co-editor of The Routledge History of Happiness (Routledge, 2024)
Blue Fugates: the rare blood disorder that turned the ‘Blue People of Kentucky’ blue
The name sounds like an old folk legend, or the title of a sci-fi story, but for the generations of isolated families in eastern Kentucky, the phrase ‘feeling blue’ had a very literal meaning
Anyone who strayed into the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly around an area known as Troublesome Creek, might have come across a close-knit cluster of families. Here, there would have been plenty of people with surnames like Fugate, Smith, Combs, Ritchie and Stacy. Not that they would not have been difficult to spot: as their nickname the ‘Blue People of Kentucky’ suggests, there was a good chance they had blue skin. Who were the Blue People of Kentucky? The origins of the Blue People of Kentucky go back to 1820, when a French immigrant named Martin Fugate came to the United States. Settling at Troublesome Creek, he married an American woman, Elizabeth Smith, and together they had seven children. Imagine their shock, however, when four of them were born blue. There were no obvious health concerns and, otherwise, they developed normally. Yet they remained head-to-toe indigo for the rest of their lives. That could have been the end of the story, were it not for the remoteness of the region. It did not exactly attract a diverse wave of settlers willing to make the difficult journey and endure the inhospitality there once they did. That meant that marriage and inbreeding between a small number of families became common practice. Considering the shallow gene pool, it might come as no surprise that each new generation welcomed more blue members. Read more | Why were people of noble birth said to be ‘blue blooded’? It was only in 1960 – 140 years after Martin Fugate came to the US – that the strange condition became the subject of medical investigation. That was thanks to the efforts of a young haematologist at the University of Kentucky, Dr Madison Cawein, and a nurse named Ruth Pendergrass. The problem would be to find one of the Blue People, with Troublesome Creek many hours away from Cawein’s base at the university. Then one day out of the blue, as it were, two blue-skinned siblings, Rachel and Patrick Ritchie, just happened to walk into the heart clinic where Pendergrass worked. Why were the Blue People of Kentucky blue? Since the blue-tinged families had no health issues – and had relatives who had lived to ripe old ages – Cawein suspected a rare blood disorder called methemoglobinemia, which affects how oxygen gets around the body. Essentially, there is not enough of a particular enzyme that turns methaemoglobin into oxygen-carrying haemoglobin. By the slimmest of chances, both Martin Fugate and Elizabeth Smith carried the recessive gene. The average person has less than one per cent of methaemoglobin in their blood; the Blue People of Kentucky had between 10 and 20 per cent. While not enough to be harmful, the disorder turned their blood a deep brown colour and gave their skin its blueish hue. The decades of inbreeding then let the disorder flourish. Oddly enough, the treatment that Cawein devised to get rid of the blue skin was to put blue dye into the body. Within a matter of minutes of injecting Methylene Blue, which balanced out the methaemoglobin, the Ritchies’ skin began to turn pink. Tablets were then sufficient to keep the blue tinge at bay. Who was the last Blue Person of Kentucky? Gradually, the Blue People clan diminished, although there was one last appearance in 1975 when Benjamin ‘Benjy’ Stacy’ was born with purplish skin. The boy, doctors were relieved to find out, was a descendent of Martin Fugate, and his skin eventually turned to a regular colour. That said, whenever Benjy got upset, angry or cold, his lips and digits would temporarily turn blue – a remaining link to his peculiar family heritage.
Karen Bloom Gevirtz explores how medicine has been transformed over the past 500 years – from the sharing of domestic recipes to a full-blown moneymaking industry
How did we go from sharing homegrown cures free of charge to buying medicine from strangers on the open market? This transition is more complex than you might think, and it's something that Karen Bloom Gevirtz explores in her book The Apothecary's Wife. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, Karen revisits some traditional remedies, explores women's overlooked role in medical history, and considers the lessons that modern pharmaceuticals could learn from the past. Karen Bloom Gevirtz is the author of The Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity (Apollo, 2024) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon <a href="https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=historyextra-279136&awinmid=3787&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-apothecarys-wife%2Fkaren-bloom-gevirtz%2F9781803286990%23%3A%7E%3Atext%3DA%2520revelatory%2520history%2520of%2520medicine%2Cwho%2520brought%2520about%2520this%2520transformation.#:~:text=A%20revelatory%20history%20of%20medicine,who%20brought%20about%20this%20transformation." rel="sponsored" target="_blank">Buy now on Waterstones
Professor Helen King explores the ever-changing cultural history of women's bodies
The history of women's bodies is far from simple. Female anatomy and the ideas surrounding it – from breastfeeding to virginity – still cause contention today. From the surprising original Pandora myth to intact hymens being used as evidence in the court of law, Professor Helen King takes Lauren Good on a journey through the ever-changing cultural history of women's bodies. Helen King is the author of Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the History of Women's Bodies (Profile Books, 2024). Buy it now from Waterstones
Secret forceps & pig bladders: medical objects through time
Carol Cooper explores the history of medicine through a series of pivotal objects – from the bonesaw to the heart-lung machine
What was it like to undergo an operation in a world with no anaesthetic? How was the stethoscope invented? And when did surgeons first operate on a human heart? Talking to Lauren Good, Dr Carol Cooper explores the history of medicine through 12 pivotal objects – from the bone saw to the heart-lung machine. Carol Cooper is the author of The History of Medicine in Twelve Objects (Quarto Publishing PLC, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon