1956 was a year of discovery. Shopping malls were invented, as was Plato, shipping containers, fiber optics and the patent for the first implantable artificial heart.

And don't forget the most groundbreaking discovery of them all, the cause of the common cold.

That's right. Although cold symptoms have been a part of our lives since ancient times.

Even mentioned in Egyptian scrolls from the 16th century B.C.

we didn't actually know about rhinoviruses until just 68 years ago. That's thousands of years of uncertainty. Years

filled with, let's just say, other explanations. Take for example, the Kase Nokami, these are invisible Japanese wind spirits that have one

hobby and one hobby only, inflicting suffering on human beings.

They can control the winds and can doom a sailing ship or a

farmer's crop with a single exhale. But if they breathe on you, oh, then you're

really in trouble. Kase no kami exhale thick yellow clouds that are dripping with disease,

and any human who inhales it grows ill.

When you think about it, the Japanese weren't far off.

At its basic level a virus is an invisible airborne threat, isn't it?

In fact, to this day, the Japanese word for the common cold just so happens to be kazi. Oh and one more thing. Try reversing

the sounds. That's right kamikaze, as in kamikaze pilots who reigned death from the air during World War II.

Kamikaze by the way literally translates into spirit wind.

Today we tend to think of medicine and magic as polar opposites, science versus superstition,

but go ahead, take a scalpel to medical history and peel back the skin.

I bet you'll be surprised by what you find, because beneath the surface

is a whole skeleton of folk tales.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is LORE. If your appendix burst, you aren't going to pay a visit to a local tarot reader, right? Of course not. You'd go to the doctor.

But the truth is that wasn't always the way people saw things. In fact, for much of human history,

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