Matt Kaplan
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Oh, oh my God, Neil, they were importing 15 to 20,000 of the little suckers a year into Paris alone back in those days.
So, I mean, there was an enormous demand for leeches and being told, look, that's not helping, didn't go very far.
People weren't ready to hear it.
So you are talking about Ignaz Semmelweis.
Let us go back to the 1840s.
In early 1800s, Maria Theresa, who was the Empress of the Habsburg Empire, she had a whopping, I want to say it was 16 children?
I mean, she had lots of kids.
And she was uncommon amongst emperors in that she actually really cared about a lot of her subjects.
And there was a massive problem back in the day was that women would get pregnant and they had no money to take care of the children.
So they would throw their children into the river when they were born.
And Maria Teresa thought this was terrible.
They had established drop boxes.