We've got a great new episode today, and in addition, I'm excited to announce a new high school

that we are launching in the fall of 2025 in Tempe, Arizona. More on that at the end of the

episode, but just to let you know that we are searching for a school leader,

and if you know someone who might be a good candidate, definitely spread the word.

My father is a gastroenterologist, and he loved to talk about his work.

So more often than not, when I was a kid, dinner conversation centered on bodily functions,

and you wouldn't believe the things that will go wrong with my father's patients.

So for me, talking with today's guest, Elsa Richardson, reminds me a lot of my childhood.

Elsa is a medical historian at the University of Strathclyde, whose most recent book is entitled

Rumbles, A Curious History of the Gut.

I wouldn't like to have had surgery before the invention of anesthetic, and there's

certainly many modern medical discoveries that I'm very thankful for.

However, there are things that I think that we in the history of Western medicine have left behind

that I think perhaps there is a call for us to rediscover.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

As extreme as the conditions my father's patients had to endure, none of them experienced

anything like a man named Alexis St. Martin, which is where my conversation with Elsa

Richardson begins.

So Alexis St. Martin had the unfortunate luck of being shot through the stomach. So he was in a kind of general store,

out in the wild, and he was shot with a musket through the stomach. We're in the middle of the

19th century here. He was not expected to survive this. It was quite catastrophic. And astonishingly,

Alexis St. Martin survived. But he had what was basically

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