YouSaid · the spoken record

Simon Schama

lines on the record: 36
first: 2023-10-22
most recent: 2023-10-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Which is set in a violent cholera epidemic. And there is also, oh yeah, I mean, Boccaccios de Cameron, which I read, young lady, yeah, I read that during when COVID hit. It's an incredible thing to read. It begins with an absolute terrifying description of the plague in Florence. Thucydides, in his history, the plague in Athens, we don't quite know what kind of plague it was, where society just comes apart massively. Oh, the Italian Ipromesis, Manzoni's book, which all Italian school children are forced to read and hate it, but it's actually a great novel about the nun of Monza and Star. That again towards the end of the book of what's it translated as the betrothed, I suppose, that has an extraordinary description of the plague hitting Milan in the 16th century. So that's your reading list. It's the most depressing reading list”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is, well, you know, of course, there's communities plague, and there is, of course, we forget that Daniel Defoe, a Journal of Plague here, is a novel, in fact. He's, I think, the first novel, isn't it? It's before Gulliver and Panic there. But Journals of Plaguey are written by Defoe, was written at the time of this drive for statistics. And there was actually a man called John Grant G R-A-U-N-T, who did a lot of extraordinary statistical work based on the mortality bills during the Great Plagues of the 17th century. So it was very interesting that Defoe, who was so many things in so many different ways, propagandist, fiction writer, you know, decided to do that. The one I rather love, but it's really pretty terrifying book, is a French book, but it has been translated called Horseman on the Roof by Jean-Jacques.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The texture and the extraordinary sort of substrator that Rembrandt lies on. I wanted to see how old-fashioned pigments would behave on canvas and also how acid would work on an etching plate and so on. So I think really I'm a terrible, you know, I'm not a really practical person. The only really detailed practical thing I do is cook. I'm obsessive, compulsive, cook. But it is that sort of figuring out the chemistry of everything, really. Even if I, and I'm hoping.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, and because every lunch really have got this right, Jenny, and say yes, no. And so I needed to really do that before I even made a move about thinking about the cultural and social history, which is, or the relationship between Hafkin or Yassin or Gati and the people around them. But it was interesting, actually, Jinny said to me, and I said something of the kind. I'm having a wonderful time, but I am essentially such a kind of novice at this. And so that was excellent. She said, well, when you were writing your book about remember, you collected, which I did, 17th century pigments. Actually, the idea that you can cinnabar is actually very dangerous. And I made my own tin lead white, actually, also quite dangerous if you were small children around. But I absolutely wanted to describe the kind of innards of the Jewish bride in particular.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, I had to do macrobiology for dummies. There's no doubt. But I thought, for example, when Hafkin first demonstrates the cholera vaccine in Paris in that summer in July 1892, fortunately, Haki not only is watching it and is going to be vaccinated himself, but he writes a very, very detailed account of the scientific process which produces a stable, vital, in other words, pretty so-called exaltaeas said, an intensifying. So I needed to understand, I felt I absolutely needed to understand, as it were, the nuts and bolts of the experimental process. That's why, you know, the answer to people who want to do this is marry a scientist.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a lot of folklore. I'm not saying it's wrong at all. But that could indeed have happened. This story is about the opposite happening is that the vaccines actually being created in India itself.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shocking, terrifying, awful defanatory thing to say. So it's part of a larger question, really. How do you disabuse and disenchant people, really, of something? You just really have to keep at it. You have to fly the banner of knowledge as often and as clearly and as demonstratively as it takes. And I think also it helps in the case of, I mean, terrible things have happened. For example, the rate of child vaccination against measles and mumps has catastrophically fallen as a result of the so-called health freedom movement. In both this country and America, which is an awful thing. So I suppose you just have to kind of raise your voice and try not to make people who are gripped by vaccination conspiracy theories not talk down to them, to actually take time to try and persuade them, not make them feel like wicked or idiotic people really.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By explanation, really, and the reason why I'm pausing and stumbling and sighing and all the rest of it is, of course, I live most of the time in America. And what's extremely dispiriting, there's a chapter at the end which deals with the demonization of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who presided over the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. And he is being, you know, I mean, it's a Republican thing in Congress now to want to criminally prosecute him. It's extraordinary for what they say completely wrongly providing money to the Institute of Virology in Wuhan and thereby causing a lab leak, one very right-wing television commentator called Taka Carlson said, oh, so the man who is supposed to have saved us from COVID turns out having created COVID in the first place.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, such a good question. It's so important now. I'm pausing because it's so, you know, persuasion does work. I mean, the vaccination cowpox was successful through Jenna. And human inoculation, the inoculation that Mary Whitley Montague did becomes widely accepted by the sort of 1750s. And as I say, it's a whole other subject. Very clever family called the Suttons actually make it available to farmers and farm laborers, particularly in East Anglia, because they also make it, they offer terms which aren't exorbitant for these absurd preparations. And lotions and tonics, and so on. So it was possible, but mostly you have to do it by going”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hard for me to understand. I didn't go any further. But it was very, very, for an old person in Giza, you know, it was very exciting to feel I was actually, it was like mastering, trying to master a new language or something. So I thought, well, I might, this book might never happen or it won't, but wow, my learning something I really need to know about. So that keeps you up at night in a really good way, actually. Do you read at night under the sheets? I used to do that. Sketold off for that.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. What's your name Well, I tell you, John, that was one thing lockdown did. There was not a whole lot of gadding about my normal style of life, as Cavito knows. And so I read, I tell you, but you raised a very good point because one of the things which I didn't say was that the book I was working on about national sports and music and so on, I felt I kind of knew that stuff, not as much as I ought to do, but I felt I knew that stuff already. And I'm sure a lot of you felt this. I wanted to use the lockdown to learn something new. I wanted to go back to being a student, really. And again, it helped that my wife encouraged me and told me when I was being an idiot and didn't understand I started to subscribe to science and to the Lancet and things like that. And if there was something that was really obviously ridiculous.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would be, you know, as I said, my sense of imposter syndrome would be massively magnified if I even began to give you an authoritative response to that. What I would say to you, and it's genuinely very interesting question, is that what is very striking in the 18th century, dealing with smallpox, particularly the second generation, is that the issues actually, because they battle going on crucially, which I think you'll probably know about, about whether either play, but more particularly smallpox, is imminent inside the body. It's kind of waiting for something to trigger it, or whether it was conceivable that it was generated from Some sort of external organism. And the vast, the massive consensus laid down in particular by very, very popular medical writer called Thomas Sydenham in the late 17th century was that smallpox was”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“India is the only place he's remembered. I was astonished that he becomes very, having not been much interested in Judaism, he becomes very religious at this period. And he gives his papers. That's why the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. But it's extraordinary that he's not really known in Israel at all, actually, or pretty much anyway. I mean, wonderful people at the Welcome Collection knew about him a bit. But yeah, I...”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fine. And it was sort of heartbreaking really, in a way, not just about him, because there is a sense in his dark years that there is only so much science can do when you meet with these, as Ross shared this view, dug in numbskulls of official bureaucratic obscurantist reactionary do it by the book. You know, the computer says no. You know, that sort of thing. So it was moving for that reason.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's caught him in two modes. I hope you can see it. It's beautifully reproduced in the book. On the one hand, he's at work looking down very carefully because he was very nervous and anxious about this at the arm of the volunteer miner he's inoculating. On the other hand, he's looking directly back at us with this sort of serious upset, worried, slightly angry look. And I say in the, oh, we didn't do a little reading, did we? I say at the end of the book, we'll never know which came first, actually, whether or not he poses reluctantly for this official, this minds photographer, and then gets back to work, or whether he's working and doesn't want to be disturbed, and the photographer takes a picture of him in Media Race working. And then he reluctantly says,”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a very frosty resistance again by the official British medical authorities, but he goes to his old students in Calcutta and Bombay and gathers enough vaccination material, he's very concerned that it will go off, it'll expire, and he was very nervous about this. And the owners of the mines for selfish but rational reasons wanted the miners who hadn't fled to be inoculated against cholera. And the miners themselves were absolutely desperate to be inoculated against cholera. Again, it was cutting huge sway through their community. And we have this final photo of him as a vaccinator. And as you can see, it's a sort of double exposure. That's to say the inspector of the mines, medical inspector took the photo and was clearly not a hotshot photographer. I hadn't figured out shutter speed and things like that.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And his life as a great scientist was really over. This final photo, which I was so moved by, found again in the boxes of his papers in Jerusalem, is taken in 1908. And it's at a coal mine in Jaria, northeast of Calcutta, about 100, 200 kilometers north of Calcutta, northeast. And an outbreak of cholera, not plague, had broken out in June, I think it was 1908, and a terrible accounts of people dying on the road and wild dogs eating human remains and bringing pieces of arm and leg into people's houses. And no one being prepared to bury the dead. And Hafkim was so upset and distressed. He volunteered and he was met.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In St. Ermin's hotel, they led an incredible campaign to the Lancet, British Medical Journal, The Times. They gathered molecular biologists, microbiologists from America as well as from Britain, and led a storming campaign and eventually the government was forced to release all the documents which showed exactly what actually had happened in the Punjab village. And the government became very, then liberal government very shifty, but eventually it was a public vindication of Hafkin. But he was by then, he lost his, you know, he was given a job back in India. In 1988, but he was kept away from vaccines, he was no longer trusted. He wrote this heartbreaking letter saying it's just like it was before.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broken, he was in utter disgrace until a man called Ronald Ross, I hesitated because I thought, this is going to be a spoiler and you want to find out. But extraordinary man who was responsible for making the demonstrator the connection between Anopheles, mosquitoes and malaria called Ronald Ross, was approached by William Simpson, who saw in that photo of Hafgin inoculating the Indians in the Calcutta Busti. And Ross, who was a maverick himself and had fought against the medical establishment in India, knew something was really a terrible miscarriage of medical justice, hence being like Jofys. Ross and Simpson together Hafkim was so overwhelmed, very emotionally grateful living in his little room.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To leave, he came to London to sort of because there were two things, I know I'm going on a bit, but he knew without knowing, without getting the report of what had actually happened. He knew there was something very fishy about he could not possibly have been responsible because actually for, in other words, contaminating the batch at source, at its production source, because it got two or three weeks before it got to the point at least. And if the growth of toxin had started in Bombay, a very strong odour, an unmistakable head snapping odour would have escaped, and that had not been the case. The officer administrator of the vaccine said there was no odor. So it made kind of no sense to him. But there were two commissions of inquiry, both of which blamed him. And his career was completely...”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Band, neck around it. And Hafkin had prepared a little blue book telling people absolutely how to work in the field with a plague vaccine. And what would happen if by any chance there be the remotest possibility of contamination and what you had to do was pass the contaminated object or the bottle head through flame, through a spirit flame, very high spirit flame. But this particular preparer did not do that. He just washed it in a solution of carbolic acid, which did not do the trick. None of this was known at the time of this catastrophe. And he was immediately suspended from his job. He was then fired. This happened in 1902. He was fired officially in 1900, end of 1903. He was made”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He very evidently is. 17 people die of tetanus poisoning from a single contaminated batch coming out of Perl, coming out in Malkawal indeed, as Kavita says in the Punjab. And sort of feel people are, it eventually turns out to be the case that what had happened in Bref, as the French say, is that actually one of the preparers of the vaccine in the village, and they were always done because it was done in rural Hafkin did not want this to be, he wanted vaccination for everybody, for very poor people. So it was done in open fields, and this was done in open field. And a preparer of the vaccine had actually dropped the forceps which was used to remove the stopper, which had an Indian rubber.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he is just, yeah, yeah, he is a, he's both a hero and a terrible dandy in a way. So he is dressed up to the nines. But one, this figure he can just see behind the figure in the pith helmet is an extraordinary woman who you'll have to read the book called Alice Courthorn, who is, again, absolutely remarkable woman doctor on first generations. Extraordinary how these very brave, determined, brilliantly clever women actually were determined to go into the heart of sickness and poverty. And Alice holds the records. Hafkin tells us that no one came close. She works in a very badly infected town called Dabanga in Bihar. And she vaccinates a thousand people a day. And we have a, it's a little blurry. But it's a wonderful photo. There's Alice in her vaccination buggy.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's really remember that first photograph taken by Angelina Ackland, he is enormously appreciated in Britain and one of the people who's the biggest fan is Lord Lister, it's Joseph Lister. So on the strength of that, even though the India Medical Service is extremely uncomfortable with him, they do let him set up, oh, there he is. So there he is. That's just an extraordinary photo. I mean, that is not in the kind of album of Imperial. There he is on a street vaccinating again someone who's come forward as a volunteer. I mean, they've asked him, you know, they haven't...”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gets equipment and supplies and trains people, and then we're now sorry back with cholera in 189, late 1893, 1894 and early, early 1895. He undertakes extraordinary kind of odyssey of thousands of miles, by train, by boat, by horse, by mule, vaccinating only volunteers, but also, very importantly, vaccinating comparative trials, so hospitals, prisons, barracks where every other person is vaccinated. This is not without its suffering, because particularly during the plain vaccine, if you are number two in the row and you are not going to be vaccinated, so a comparative trial would be tested, you're pretty upset. There were moments where Hafkin thinks, I have to go back and vaccinate. Everybody that happens particularly at a particular prison. So it is just astonishing.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amount of disinfection because this is a bacillus which is carried by a flea as Yasanga discovered in Hong Kong and is on the bodies of rats and the rats will simply leave in very large numbers and go somewhere else and carry the disease with them. And there is vaccination which Hafkien develops and creates in India. And he's just given no money, he's given no lab space. The only person who comes to his aid, apart from William Simpson you see there in the middle, and his eager Indian assistants who are kind of minor Indian medical officials in Calcutta. Apart from those is Hankin, who is allowed to have a medical establishment in Agra. And sokien”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There you can see actually a scene from an extraordinary album called The Plague Visitation Album. And you can see a column of Sikh soldiers on the right. There are authorized magistrates on the left. And their job is really to go around the houses. This is in Mumbai and Bombay. And if somebody was being hidden or discovered to have been infected with bubonic plague, you lime washed and disinfected the house, or you might just tear it down altogether. You might sort of flatten it. This is called letting air in. It's a fairly terminal way of letting air in. And so to actually say, if you will be prepared to learn the elements, rudiments of microbiology, you'll know in the case of bubonic plague in particular.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of noise coming from overeducated lawyers and professors and writers. The Indian masses know, not interested in political rights, they're interested in a better material life. And whatever you want to say about the Raj, it looks after the material and physical needs of Indians. And it says this as people are dropping dead in millions from terrible famines and are not being looked after very well when an epidemic of cholera and then another huge wave”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredible imperialist game of actually whether one empire or another empire deals better with this misfortune that your imperial copybook is blotted by outbreaks of epidemics. In the 1890s we're not quite at the viceroyalty of Curzon, but we're nearly there. The Indian nationalist movement is beginning in a very sort of almost demure, careful, gradualist, constitutionalist way in India. And there's a huge pushback against it, particularly conservative viceroys at the end of the day. And what they're saying is that nationalism is just, India nationalism is just a lot.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was led by Dufferin. He was led by Daffrin to believe Dufferin provides, and he's, you know, the prior viceroy. So there's a big fancy letter. He goes to India in 1893. And there's a big fancy letter saying this man will change everything in India. And he absolutely ignored or worst. Indian medical service, the IMS, does not want to know about microbiology. It had not happened in Britain yet. There was a tremendous amount of nose holding. The choices of microbiological research were Robert Koch in Berlin or Louis Pasteur in Paris. And there is sort of what was extraordinary and depressing and goes back to what I was saying earlier about stroking my chin in a broody way about how nationalism had overcome a sensible response to the COVID pandemic. What's going on is the kind of...”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. That's a man called William Simpson behind him, who's a very early champion of both Hafkin and of cholera vaccination.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comparative trials. Trial of a population, half of whom have got taken the vaccine and half of whom not, but who otherwise live in identical living conditions, otherwise the comparative trials obviously won't work too many independent variables. You've got to go to Asia where cholera is endemic in some places, so that word, but epidemic in other places. And so he then makes the trip to India and his life and really the whole world of microbiology kind of changes as a result of that. And there's a wonderful photograph.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the people who then gets injected is a young Englishman called Ernest Hanbury Hankin, who is an extremely interested in his own right. We don't have time to talk about him. But the crucial thing is that Hankin knows the British ambassador, who'd been Viceroy of India. The British ambassador in Paris is a man called Viscount Dufferin, complicated figure, some swayed from liberalism to conservatism. But what Dufferin, and particularly again another very important woman, his wife, Harriet Dufferin, who'd started a fund prodded by Queen Victoria to create Indian women doctors because both Muslims and Hindus in India are extremely reluctant to have male doctors examine them, put it mildly. The duffering connection makes Hefkin realize that to test the cholera vaccine with randomized”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, a so-called attenuated dose to kind of kick start your immune system because Hafki and unlike much of the medical and epidemiological world, he's in a pasteur institute. He's with Matchikov, understood there was such a thing as the immune system. And so the attenuated dose kick starts and then it prepares you for the second dose of the live vaccine, which is much fiercer. And he rounds up some of his Russian French friends, some at the Institute, some not, who then submit themselves to the cholera vaccine. And it works, it works. They have a fever, a mild fever. They have a little diarrhea, nothing very much swelling, but actually it works as a viable vaccine.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where he did some monumental work. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is a photograph. I'm showing you a photograph actually taken at the height of his fame. He's briefly famous. This is taken in 1899 in a chilly summer in Oxford by another wonderful woman who occurs very fleetingly in a book called Angelina Ackland, who was a really pioneering photographer. She actually is the first person to develop a form of colour photography anywhere, I think, actually, but certainly in Britain. And he does, after many, many a lengthy process, manage to produce a viable vaccine against cholera, which he tests always, as he does on himself first, alive vaccine, a live vaccine. And you get a double dose of, I think you still do actually, of a cholera vaccine.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Senior Producer Connor Boyle. We rejoin our conversation today with the award-winning historian, Simon Shama. If you haven't caught the first part, hop back to the previous episode to get up to speed before enjoying this one. Shama joined us earlier this year to discuss his latest book, Foreign Bodies, Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations. He was in conversation with Kavita Puri, author of Partition Voices, and if you want to hear more from Intelligence Squared, do sign up to our newsletter on intelligence squared.com and you'll hear all the news about upcoming events with the likes of Nick Cave, Gillian Tet, Mary Beard and Rory Stewart before anyone else. Now let's rejoin Kavita Puri and Simon Shama in conversation.”
2023-10-22 · Intelligence Squared · Simon Schama on Pandemics and the Health of Nations, Part Two · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT