Episode 02: Why Do We Get Hiccups?
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2015
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hiccups are an annoyance that we all deal with, but don't usually give much thought to. In this episode of Origin Stories, independent producer Ben Nimkin brings us the remarkable story of Charles Osborne, a man who holds the Guiness World Record for the longest attack of the hiccups. He had them for 68 years!
We'll hear from the doctor who treated him, and researchers who are exploring the biology and the surprisingly deep evolutionary history of the hiccup.
Origin Stories is a production of The Leakey Foundation. A nonprofit organization with a mission to increase scientific knowledge, education, and public understanding of human origins, evolution, behavior, and survival. Since 1968, The Leakey Foundation has been awarding grants to scientists investigating the big questions about what makes us human.
We're sponsored with a grant from Wells Fargo Bank. Adept Word Management provides transcripts.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson. Today's story is from |
| 0:10.3 | producer Ben Nimkin, and it's about something we've all experienced, but don't usually think much |
| 0:15.8 | about. Hi, Ben. Hey, Meredith. So why hiccups? Yeah, so my girlfriend, Anna, pretty much always gets the hiccups when she goes outside on a winter day. |
| 0:26.6 | That's pretty weird. |
| 0:27.8 | I know, right? |
| 0:28.6 | And they totally drive her crazy because hiccups are annoying and they're also super wacky and they don't seem to serve any purpose. |
| 0:37.2 | And it got me thinking, you know, |
| 0:38.8 | there's something else going on here. You know, there needs to be some reason for humans to have |
| 0:43.1 | hiccups. And it turns out there is a reason, an ancient reason. There's a lot more to the hiccup |
| 0:49.7 | than you'd think. For most of us, it's a temporary annoyance, gone in a few minutes, but some people |
| 0:56.2 | aren't so lucky. Charles Osborne was a farmer living in Iowa, 28 years old, five feet four inches |
| 1:03.3 | tall, and pretty muscular. And one day in 1922, he was feeling pretty sure of himself, and he lifted |
| 1:09.6 | up a 350-pound pig for slaughter. But the pig got the best of himself, and he lifted up a 350-pound pig for slaughter. |
| 1:13.0 | But the pig got the best of him, and he fell to the ground. |
| 1:16.9 | Osborne picked himself up, dusted himself off, and got back to work. |
| 1:21.1 | But a little while later, he began to hiccup. |
| 1:23.7 | His hiccups continued for several days, then months, then decades. |
| 1:28.3 | Charles Osborne, yeah, well, to me he was Charlie. |
| 1:31.3 | That's Charlie Osborne's doctor, Terry Anthony. |
| 1:34.3 | Osborne traveled as far as Alaska to try to get treatment for his hiccups. |
| 1:39.3 | A friend even fired a shotgun right behind Osborne to try to scare the hiccups out of him. Fifty years into his bout of hiccups, he sought the help of Dr. Anthony. |
| 1:48.0 | Anthony specializes in neuroanatomy. |
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