Dr Alana Skuse

speaker

639 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 8 May

Dr Alana Skuse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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You're Dead to Me · Renaissance Medicine: healthcare and disease in early modern England · 6 Feb 2026 podcast

And then you can dry out the toad and you can make it into pills or you can just hang it around your neck.

And because of the badness that's then in the toad, this concentrated rage that's inside the toad, it kind of draws out the plague.

Yes, he is a clever chap.

Before this point, you talked about Galen and blood and the Galenic theory of blood is that you make blood mostly in your liver and then the heart like adds oxygen into the blood.

And then it kind of goes around the body, but it sort of just sloshes around the body.

William Harvey, he measured how much blood you could pump out of the heart.

And he worked out for that to be true, you'd have to be making enormous quantities of blood from your liver every day, like multiples of what you weigh.

So he's like, OK, that can't be true.

So he gets ligatures and he puts them around people's arms.

Yeah.

And then he looks at what happens to the arm.

And if you have the ligature really tight, the arm will go cold.

But if you have the ligature a bit looser, the arm will go hot and fat because the arteries are further down in the body than the veins.

So from there, and using various weird experiments on animals...

he works out that the blood does in fact go round and round the body.

It's not completely like we would understand it now, but he's pretty close.

Yeah, I love the blood transfusions they do at this time because they're just wild.

Christopher Wren works out that you can basically transfuse various substances.

into people's veins using a quill and like a sheep's bladder or something and i've seen the bit of apparatus that he makes in a museum it is incredible that they ever managed to get anything into people's bodies but anyway he starts putting various things in he's like what happens if you give them opium or wine you know these various things who is he doing this on just not volunteers surely this

Volunteers is a strong word.

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