Ep 186 Hypothermia Part 1: How it hurts

This Podcast Will Kill You

Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

Health & Fitness, Science

4.8 • 17.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For all our wondrous adaptations as a species - our big brains, our capacity for language, our opposable thumbs - we humans are not well-equipped to deal with the cold. Take us out of our insulated dwellings, take away our winter clothes, and things can get dicey fast. From frostbite to hypothermia, the cold can settle into our bones, leading us down a path where injury or death are possible outcomes. In this episode, we explore that path: how our meager cold-survival adaptations are vastly outshone by other animal species, the long and grim history of hypothermia in war, and what exactly is happening inside your body when your temperature drops. Tune in to this unexpectedly strange grab-bag of an episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is exactly right.
0:05.8	The cold was so intense.
0:08.9	One constantly found men who, overcome by the cold, had been forced to drop out and had fallen to the ground, too weak or too numb to stand.
0:19.2	Ought one to help them along, which practically meant carrying them,
0:23.0	they begged one to let them alone. There were bivouacs all along the road, ought one to take them to a
0:29.8	campfire? Once these poor wretches fell asleep, they were dead. If they resisted the craving for sleep,
0:36.7	another passerby would help them along
0:38.5	a little farther, thus prolonging their agony for a short while, but not saving them.
0:44.6	For in this condition, the drowsiness engendered by cold is irresistibly strong.
0:50.7	Sleep comes inevitably, and to sleep is to die.
0:54.9	I tried in vain to save a number of these unfortunates.
0:58.7	The only words they uttered were to beg me for the love of God to go away and let them sleep.
1:05.1	To hear them, one would have thought sleep was their salvation.
1:08.8	Unhappily, it was a poor wretch's last wish. But at least he ceased to
1:14.1	suffer, without pain or agony. Gratitude, and even a smile, was imprinted on his discolored lips.
1:22.4	What I have related about the effects of extreme cold and of this kind of death by freezing
1:27.2	is based on what I saw happen
1:29.6	to thousands of individuals.
1:32.2	The road was covered with their corpses.
1:47.0	The road was covered with their corpses. The The What? What, Erin, is that from?
2:25.4	That is from Napoleon's close advisor Armande Calancourt about the retreat from Moscow.
2:33.5	Oh, my gosh. And I'll talk a little bit more about it,
	...

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