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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series on the theme of licking with the tongue. In part one of this series, we talked about the role of licking in ancient Egyptian magic, which spans everything from the blessed licks and lapse of the cow goddess Hathor to the sorceress violence of the crocodile

who licks off the protective spells of the dead. And that discussion led to some diversions to talk about

things like the adaptive function of the snake's forked tongue, licking the air, and the role that plays in chemo sensation, and research about when children acquire a disgust reaction to contamination of food surfaces by licking.

After that, we took a hard pivot into Candyland and talked about the frankly shocking amount of research that has gone into the question, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop, which is a deep rabbit hole that becomes more philosophically interesting that the longer you gaze into it.

Yeah, I keep thinking about those tootsie roll experiments. I think pretty much most, if not all of them, were, I think, at least on some level and at some phase approached

with a fair amount of wit and whimsy. But you get the sense that, like, once these

scientific minds started digging into it, like, it just becomes irresistible. It's just,

you've got to follow it through and put in the work. So we're back today to talk about licking some more. And I promised

that in today's episode, we would talk about wound licking behavior in animals. So I think that's

where we want to start. First of all, just, Rob, I've got a few photos for you to look at in the

outline here that are various statues of a Catholic saint known as, and I'm a little confused about how to pronounce this guy's name because it's spelled different ways in different languages. I believe it's St. Roke or St. Rock, sometimes spelled R-O-C-H, sometimes spelled R-O-C-K or R-C-K-E, or R-O-C-H-E.

Anyway, a Catholic saint, widely associated with hospitals and with the Black Death.

I was looking at a gallery page about him and some artworks of him from the Met Museum, which are pointing out that very often depictions of this saint, he is shown with his left hand touching a sore on his thigh, which that explains why so many of the images of this saint, he looks like literally like he's trying to show a little leg like he's lifting something up he's like hey have a look at my thigh here yeah in many cases too or in some depictions it's like he's wearing shorts uh so with like both legs on full display yeah into these leggy outfits often also he has a dog beside him and both the showing of the sore on his leg there's

like a sore on his thigh showing this bulge or sore on his thigh and the dog beside him

connect to this legend about the saint that he at one point was was traveling uh i think he was

on a pilgrimage and he became very ill i don't know if he got the plague or some other illness. The boil or the bulge would sort of connect to the idea that he got bubonic plague. But he fell ill and he collapsed somewhere. But then he was miraculously healed by a dog,

a dog that brought him bread and licked his wounds.

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