HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-09-04T09:27:38.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: After Hiroshima: the atomic plague
items: How much do you know about the history of disease?
items: Give away your worries, like an ancient Mesopotamian
items: Did Adolf Hitler really only have one testicle?
items: The Victorians’ cocaine habit: why 19th-century Britain couldn't get enough of the 'miracle' drug
items: A history of happiness: 5 life lessons from the past
items: Blue Fugates: the rare blood disorder that turned the ‘Blue People of Kentucky’ blue
items: How medicine became a moneymaker
items: Women's bodies: an unreliable history
items: Secret forceps & pig bladders: medical objects through time

After Hiroshima: the atomic plague
type: item
date: 2025-09-08T08:00:06.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: A big day in history
subject: Death
subject: Hiroshima
description: 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
encoded: 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 contr…

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How much do you know about the history of disease?
type: item
date: 2025-07-07T07:00:55.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: From the Broadstreet pump to "lock hospitals", test your knowledge on the history of disease...
encoded: View Riddle on the source website

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Give away your worries, like an ancient Mesopotamian
type: item
date: 2025-06-07T08:30:06.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: 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
encoded: 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 aft…

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Did Adolf Hitler really only have one testicle?
type: item
date: 2025-05-07T08:22:54.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Evergreen
description: 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
encoded: “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 fou…

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The Victorians’ cocaine habit: why 19th-century Britain couldn't get enough of the 'miracle' drug
type: item
date: 2025-03-20T15:45:56.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: 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
encoded: 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 under…

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A history of happiness: 5 life lessons from the past
type: item
date: 2025-03-07T13:32:18.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: What can history teach us about how to find joy? Katie Barclay shares five lessons from the past about the pursuit of happiness
encoded: 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 wea…

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Blue Fugates: the rare blood disorder that turned the ‘Blue People of Kentucky’ blue
type: item
date: 2025-02-24T08:37:41.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Evergreen
description: 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
encoded: 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…

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How medicine became a moneymaker
type: item
date: 2025-01-30T07:30:47.000Z
creator: Ellie Cawthorne
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: 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
encoded: 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

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Women's bodies: an unreliable history
type: item
date: 2025-01-20T08:00:45.000Z
creator: Lauren Good
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Professor Helen King explores the ever-changing cultural history of women's bodies
encoded: 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

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Secret forceps & pig bladders: medical objects through time
type: item
date: 2025-01-10T07:00:43.000Z
creator: Lauren Good
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Carol Cooper explores the history of medicine through a series of pivotal objects – from the bonesaw to the heart-lung machine
encoded: 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

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