The Magic Machine

Undiscovered

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Wnyc, Society & Culture, 805813, Science, History, Friday, Studios

4.6 • 768 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2018

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a critical care doctor, Jessica Zitter has seen plenty of “Hail Mary” attempts to save dying patients go bad—attempts where doctors try interventions that don’t change the outcome, but do lead to more patient suffering. It’s left her distrustful of flashy medical technology and a culture that insists that more treatment is always better. But when a new patient goes into cardiac arrest, the case doesn’t play out the way Jessica expected. She finds herself fighting for hours to revive him—and reaching for a game-changing technology that uncomfortably blurs the lines between life and death.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listener supported WNYC Studios.
0:07.0	This is undiscovered.
0:13.0	It's 9.30 on an April morning in Amsterdam, year 1769, and two men are dragging a woman out of a canal.
0:30.8	She's soaking, and she might be dead.
0:33.7	Her name is Anne Wartman, or it was. She's not breathing.
0:38.3	She doesn't have a pulse.
0:39.5	Her skins turned a weird, speckily blue color.
0:43.2	But the two men seemed curiously undisturbed by all of this.
0:46.5	Yeah, for these guys, and slack of pulse?
0:49.5	It's not a tragedy.
0:51.2	It's a challenge.
0:52.7	Well, the important thing to know is back in the 1760s, there was a lot
0:56.3	of interest in Amsterdam in trying to bring back the recently dead. That is Dr. David Casseret.
1:03.1	He writes about Ann Wartman and his book Shocked. And he explains a lot of people were drowning
1:08.3	in Amsterdam's canals around this time. This was not just Anne
1:11.5	Wartman's problem. And it got to be so bad that saving drowning victims became like a thing.
1:17.8	Like it was a hobby. It was so much of a thing. People were actually papering Amsterdam with these
1:22.2	instructional pamphlets, you know, how to bring a drowning victim back to life. Because they might look dead?
1:28.7	Like they're speckley and blue.
1:30.8	Yes.
1:31.3	But with the latest science and technology, anything was possible.
1:35.8	And so these two men, they are not about to give up on Anne Wartman.
	...

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