This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

A healthy diet is a deceptively complex concept. Many of us spend our entire lives trying to find combinations of foods that work for our specific lifestyles and metabolisms, calorie

counts, vitamins and fats, all the chemistry that goes

into food. We understand so much of it, and yet that makes it an incredibly daunting task to

optimize, and that's without even mentioning misinformation and quack medicine.

This may seem like a purely modern problem, and it is, don't get me wrong,

but like many parts of society, we have been struggling with diet almost as long as we've known

about different types of food groups, and when medical knowledge was in its infancy,

guesswork was all we had.

In New York in the middle of the 19th century, a man named James Caleb Jackson was suffering

from a series of untreatable health issues. He was likely someone that we would refer to today as

immunocompromised. An abolitionist newspaper man, his frequent sicknesses forced him to sell his share

in the newspaper, essentially taking retirement at the age of 36.

Things were not looking good for Jackson.

He visited doctors throughout his entire life, and none of them had been able to help him.

But he did survive, spoiler alert, and part of the reason why is that he finally found a

medicinal regimen that worked for him.

...