The History of the History

History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts.

It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here.

Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.

I'm your host, Scott Rank.

Hi everyone, welcome back to our series on History's Most Insane Rillers.

In the last episode, we looked at the life of Ibrahim I, who basically grew up in a prison in the Imperial Herum of the Ottoman Empire, and at the end of his life in enemy faction, executed him.

Now we're going to look at someone who maybe has the most uplifting story of all the people in this series.

And that's British King George III.

Now he's infamous for going mad, but that doesn't come till much later on in his life, and that doesn't completely define the rest of his life either.

He also isn't remembered as poorly as people like Kalegula or Ibrahim or Charles the Mad.

But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Let's go back to the beginning of his story and see how it unfolds.

While British people have mixed feelings about King George, Americans, if they know how he went mad at the end of his life, might be tempted to feel a bit of shot and Freud.

This is a German origin term that means pleasure from another person's misery, which is fitting for how to describe someone feels about George III since he's also German origin.

The reason they might feel that is because George III was the villain of the American Revolution, and he spent the final years of his life in saying.

He experienced five extended bouts of madness in his life, but the final one lasting until his death in 1820.

These episodes consisted of anxiety, hallucinations, insomnia, and manic, and impressive episodes.

During this time, George suffered from poor medical care, designed to cure his madness, but it only worsened it.

Medicine was in a primitive state at this time, and its physicians didn't know that treatments such as blistering, binding him in a straight jacket, chaining him to a chair, or prescribing him high doses of arsenic would damage his mental state.

But by most accounts of his life, the shot and Freud is undeserved.

George is described by those who knew him as an unfailing gentleman.

Only in revisionist American popular accounts, which were written in the patriotic reconstruction period of the 1860s and 1870s, does the image of George as a villainous tyrant survive.

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