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People called them murderers.

Ten years later, they were gods.

Today, no one knows their names.

A group of maverick surgeons who took on the medical establishment

who risked everything to invent open-heart surgery.

Welcome to the Wild West of American Medicine.

I'm Chris Pine, and this is Cardiac Cowboys.

If you like medical dramas, if you like heart-pounding thrillers, you will love cardiac

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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

And I'm Holly Fry.

A little more than a year ago, we did an episode on eponymous diseases, which I kind of thought might only be interesting to me, but we got some emails from folks in the audience who seem to really like it, so we are doing another one. Last time, we talked about three diseases that were all named for the place where a notable outbreak happened, which led to their being identified

and named. And today is really similar. These are named after places again. But this time,

these are all diseases that you get after being bitten by something, specifically mosquitoes and ticks.

And since both of those feed on blood, this also feels just a little bit like a precursor to October episodes.

The diseases that we are going to talk about are West Nile virus, Lyme disease,

and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. I was originally going to put them in chronological order,

...