The Horrible History of Gonorrhoea
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Hello, my lovely Betwixtas. It's me, Kate Lister. This is Betwixt the Sheets. I am me, you are you, and I bet you know what's coming next. Here it is, the fair dues warning. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adult things in an adult way covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. We are actually talking today about the history of gonorrhea. Okay, so it's a spicy one, but really,

Right, on with the show. ♪

A battle is burning, literally burning, across the world. The enemy has brought down many armies, indiscriminately scandalised communities for centuries and generally wrought havoc. And now it's getting even stronger to the one weapon we have that can defeat it. That's right, it's gonorrhoea.

What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful dance. Goodness, I have nothing to do with it, Jerry.

Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Cases of the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea are surging across the world. In Europe, there has been an increase of more than 300% since 2014. And to make that even scarier, gonorrhea

Gonorrhea is now becoming antibiotic resistant. There's only one antibiotic left that works and that's starting to fail us. That is some scary shit right there. But when was gonorrhea first recorded? How long has it been with us? Why do we call it the clap? And what bonkers treatments have been used to try and get rid of it over the years? Well, we are going to find out today with returning guest and all-round badass Kat Erdman.

Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Kat Irving. How are you doing? I'm very well. How are you, Kate? I am very well.

I am doing fabulously. The last time I saw you, we bumped into each other in an airport, didn't we? Yeah, Naples airport, ungodly hour in the morning. I was so tired that day. I half thought that you might have been some kind of sleep deprived hallucination just wandering through the airport. I don't think I'd done anything to my hair or sort of like, you know, wash makeup out of my face at that point. So, you know, it wasn't a good time for me. You looked fabulous to me, but...

Had I been a bit more all together and not running empty, I might well have sat you down and spoken to you about the very topic we're talking about today, which is the history of gonorrhea. Just for our listeners, just tell us about some of the work that you do so they know who you are because it's so interesting and so fabulous. Well, I

I am a human remains conservator. I work at Surgeons Hall Museums in Edinburgh, where I look after a collection of about 10,000 human remains, which ranges from full skeletons down to teeny tiny ear ossicles and literally everything in between. And a lot of these show various types of diseases.

And that's how I became very, very interested in a lot of different types of pathologies and how it presents itself on the body. It's an amazing museum. We were doing some filming up there with History Hit and it was all they could do to actually get me in front of the camera and actually do the proper work.

work because I was just running around. I just wanted to look at everything. I was like, there's a leg over here with a bullet in it. Somebody's ear is, oh my God, it's absolutely wild. But we're talking about gonorrhea today. So I suppose the first thing I should ask you is a really starter question. What is it? What is gonorrhea? Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease.

It's been around for a long time. I mean, there are thought that there's a mention of gonorrhea in the Bible. And the Lord spake unto Moses and to Aaron saying, speak to the children of Israel and say to them, when a man hath a running issue out of his flesh because of his issue, he is unclean. And so some people have suggested that the running issue is gonorrhea, because one of the symptoms of gonorrhea in a man is

is that you produce pus out of your penis. So they thought that that's what they were talking about here. Wow. And Galen...

a doctor from about 200 AD. He actually gives us the term gonorrhea and he says it's an involuntary escape of semen. So he's describing the pus. Okay. Gonorrhea actually means flow of seed. Nice. Nice. Now we've spoken to one another about syphilis on a few occasions and I remember everything that you said, but I definitely remember when you said it's a spirochete and

And the actual bacteria that causes it is quite pretty. What is gonorrhoea? Is that a spirochete as well? It's not a spirochete. It is a bacteria, but it doesn't have that pretty shape. Of course, you only find out at the end of the 19th century about the bacteria itself. So, you know, at this point, they've got no idea what's actually causing it. In fact...

These things that they're describing as gonorrhea, possibly in the Bible, possibly by Galen, they may actually be something else. So whatever, it's old, it's sexually transmitted. Can women get it too? How does it present in women? Women get it too. Sometimes you will get a discharge as a woman. Not always. So it doesn't tend to be as obvious. For women, the things tend to be a bit less...

So a bit less showy, shall we say. So you might feel a sort of pain during sex. You might get pain in the bottom of your abdomen. Sometimes you have difficulty peeing, but less commonly than in men. And of course, in the long term, it can cause things like pelvic inflammatory disease, which can then affect your fertility, but not things that are quite so...

obvious as in men. So it can cause pelvic inflammatory disease. Is this a disease that will clear up of its own accord without, I'm presuming that the course of treatment now is an antibiotic, but if you don't have that, as they didn't in the past, is it something that will run its course and go away? Or is it like syphilis? Once it's there, it's fucking there. It's not like syphilis. You know, it's not as bad as syphilis. And later on, we can talk about some of the ways that it presents in Surgeon's Hall's collection, which is different to syphilis.

But in the long term, you know, if it doesn't clear up, if you don't have treatment, it will clear up. You know, it's infection. It's not getting deep inside you like syphilis does. But in women, as I say, pelvic inflammatory disease, it can cause long term problems with, you know, sort of periods, things like that.

your fertility. In men, it can cause something called stricture of the urethra. Well, it's basically scarring along the urethra, which can cause problems with peeing. And obviously, if you have problems with peeing, then that can have other backup issues, literally backup issues, because urine isn't coming out the bladder. So you can get bladder stones. You know, there are possibilities if it's really severe that your bladder will actually burst.

Oh, that's horrible. Is gonorrhea one of the ones that makes it sting to pee? Or is that something else? Yes, it will sting to pee. As I say, it doesn't happen in all cases, but a lot of cases you do get that. Women less so, but sometimes.

And it's still with us today, isn't it? Gonorrhea, it's still very common. It's still very common and it's getting worse. Really? Yeah. Cases are on the rise. In 2023, they had the highest recorded numbers of gonorrhea cases since records began in 1918. And that's incredible because one of the problems is that...

that while we can treat it with antibiotics now, it's becoming very, very, very antibiotic resistant. I've heard of that. Yeah, there was a case in Leeds of antibiotic. They call it super gonorrhea, didn't they? Yes, and that's become increasingly prevalent. So a lot of the antibiotic things like penicillin that were used to treat gonorrhea

don't do anything now. You know, they're not having the same effect. And one of the things with that is that gonorrhea has kind of had a little bit of relationship with other bacteria in the throat. So they've passed some of their resistant genes over. So, yeah, we're getting more and more antibiotic resistance in gonorrhea. Shit. Oh, yeah. Wrap up, everybody. Wrap up.

It is one of the oldest recognised sexually transmitted diseases, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, the first real mention, you know, I've said about some of those ancient things. In 1161 in England, you actually get laws which are passed to stop the spread of the perilous infirmity of burning. So again, that's gonorrhea in law in 1161.

France passes similar laws a bit later. What kind of things were these laws stopping people doing? Well, that's quite interesting because it seems very vague what's going on. Just stop doing it. Yeah, yeah, effectively. We're recognising it's coming from sex, largely that they're blaming the women for it. I was just about to ask you that, yeah. Yeah, of course. And especially once you get into World War I and World War II, it's all terrible women that are causing our good soul...

being able to fight. Again, syphilis and gonorrhea, the same thing throughout history. It's women's fault. It's women's fault. So they have this idea. I'm not sure if this is the idea. Did they understand that it can be spread by both men and women? Or did they just have this idea of it's the women who... I'm trying to understand what the joined up thinking is

this? Did they think that only women could spread it? Or like, what was that? Yeah, I mean, I think there was something because women weren't showing symptoms in the same way that men were, you know, they would sometimes have difficulty with peeing and things like that. But it's not as obvious, you know, the things that are going on, they

They could often attribute it to other things. It's not like all of a sudden you have sex and then you've got a big swollen pussy penis. So, which that seemed very much like, oh, well, you went to this woman and then this is the problem. So there was definitely...

they could see something going on there. And you can see this throughout the entire history of sexually transmitted infections, that they are blaming badly behaved women. And I've often looked at it and thought, like, there's always a rationale, even if it's a bonkers one, even if it's deeply misogynistic and completely off the chart. There's some way that they've rationalised this. And I think it's just that they blame women more for it. But like, as you've just said, maybe if they're not as symptomatic, that would actually make a bit more sense.

wouldn't it? Alright, so let's talk treatment then. So you've got gonorrhea. Give me some of the names for it as well. This is the one that's known as the clap, isn't it? The clap, yeah. And there are a couple of theories about why it's known as the clap. I bet all of them are horrible.

Some people think it's from the medieval red light district in Paris, which was called Le Clapier, which was rabbit holes from lots of small huts, which sex workers were working out of. So some people think that's why it's called the Clap. You know, you went to Le Clapier, you got this problem. That would make sense. Yeah. Yeah.

Some people think it's from the feeling that you got as you tried to pee. You know, you were trying to pee and you just got this kind of clapping sensation. Yeah, okay. But the one that does, even with the fact that I don't have a penis that makes me sort of squeeze my legs together a bit, is the idea that, you know, to get rid of that pus that you were producing in your penis, what you did, you clapped. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah.

You clap the penis in between your... Some people say closing a book on it. Kat, I'm not medical, but that's not going to work, is it? I feel that that's going to make things worse in many ways. Do you know who came up with that? That is the wife of somebody who's gone out and got a dose. And I totally read about this. This is what I've got to do. Put it in this book. Well, just do this. You'll be fine. You'll be okay after that. Oh!

Oh, that is brutal. All right, so the clap, how might you have treated it? What were some of the cures? Not that they were cures, but what would they have done for you? Well, for a long time, there was a lot of debate whether gonorrhea and syphilis were actually the same thing. A lot of treatments, a lot of early treatments were mercury, you know, as we talked about with syphilis. And obviously mercury has its own problems. Mm.

You know, and the Mary Rose, the ship, there are syringes that they think were for putting mercury into the penis of some of the sailors. Nice. That was one of the treatments. Another treatment was silver, particularly once they start to realise...

that syphilis and gonorrhea are actually different things they will tend to use mercury more for syphilis and silver for gonorrhea and at first it's silver nitrate and you could have this as a sort of solution you might drink it you might bathe your genitalia in it there was also

So a solid form of it and solid silver nitrate was often called lunar caustic. And that word caustic should give you the impression that this is not good. So lunar caustic would also be used for things like burning off warts. And you could introduce this into the urethra itself. So there's a lot of stuff going down urethras with injections. And that's going to get worse. Don't worry, Kate.

I'm endlessly fascinated by this one, and I'm pretty sure I've asked you this before, but Mercury was used for syphilis and gonorrhea for centuries, and obviously it doesn't work. We don't use it today. It doesn't work. But what did it do that made people think that it worked? Or was it just like they made a mistake for hundreds of years? Because I kind of think it must have done something that at least created the illusion it was helping somehow. Well, Mercury...

does have an antimicrobial effect. So if you got it at the right time, you might be able to kill those bacteria off. But there's also the fact that, like we talked about with syphilis, syphilis has...

a period where you have a chancre and the chancre will just go away of its own accord but that doesn't mean that the bacteria has gone away so you might put some of this mercury onto your chancre and then it disappears and you go oh well that's it that's it done put a mercury lotion on it and then that goes away oh I'm fine now and then you don't

associate the symptoms you get much later with what happened five years ago after you'd been having sex. Silver's a weird one, isn't it? Silver's really, really interesting because silver's actually become a bit of a kind of an alternative therapy again today. Has it?

Yeah, so since the 1990s there have been people who've been using colloidal silver for various things. Oh, this is ringing a bell actually. Yeah. I went to get some eye drops for my dog recently and we were in the car on the way back and my husband was looking at the bottle and he was saying, oh, these have got silver in them. And silver does have, again, an antimicrobial effect. It will kill bacteria to a certain extent. But one of the other things about silver is

is that you actually have no use for it in your body. You know, it's not a thing that your body uses. It's not a thing you take in. It's also not a thing that your body has any way of excreting. Right. You know, you have your pint of lager or whatever. Your body metabolizes that through your liver and you get rid of the waste products. Your body has ways of getting rid of most things.

Silver, it doesn't. The kidneys don't do anything, the liver don't do anything, so it builds up. And if you have a build-up of silver in your body, it deposits in various places and various membranes around the body, and it starts to take on a sort of slate grey, bluish appearance.

So if you have long-term chronic exposure to silver, it can actually turn you blue. That's not the desired effect, is it? No, and this is permanent. There's no way of getting rid of it. Blue forever. Blue forever. So we have a kidney here in Surgeon's Hall, which is from somebody. It just says that they had been taking silver medicinally for some time. I'm going to imagine that's some sort of sexually transmitted disease treatment, though we don't have that specified. Right.

But you can see it's got that bluish tinge to it. And if you go online, if you Google it, you will see people who have taken silver for the long term with blue skin. Was it just used to treat venereal disease or is silver being used to treat other stuff? It was used as a sort of a kind of generic treatment, but it really was thought to be the thing for gonorrhoea in the 19th century. In the late 19th century, a German scientist comes up with a new form of silver medicine, a silver protonate.

And that becomes the standard treatment for gonorrhoea until we get antibiotics being used widely in the 1940s. And a really, really interesting thing is that sexually transmitted diseases were a major problem with soldiers during both the First World War and the Second World War. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of man hours were lost because people had to be discharged. Again, double entendres there. Discharged because of having sexually transmitted diseases.

And one of the sort of prophylactic things they did during the Second World War, if there was sort of like anything that you'd done which might result in you having gonorrhoea, was that you would have this silver protein air injected into the urethra. And then you would have your entire penis and testicles covered in calomel lotion. Calomel contains mercury. And then you would wrap the whole thing

in wax paper, basically like baking paper. Whether or not this is having an effect, I mean, that's kind of second to the fact that everyone is going to know what you've been up to because you're going to have a crinkly cock.

As you move around, people are going to know. I read a description of how they treated, it was one of these, syphilis or gonorrhea or something, I think it was the First World War. I didn't read about the wax paper, that's new information. But it was that they basically filled the bladder

with disinfectant and water which they injected through the urethra as well. Yeah, they really liked it to be warm water as well, like sort of 50 degrees. So, you know, that's going to be an added level of discomfort. The greater quantity that you could get up there, the more successful they thought this treatment would be.

You can see now, because when you hear statistics like over 50% of men fighting on the front have to take time away for an STI, probably our friend gonorrhea or syphilis, you kind of think, why? What were they doing? And I guess it's because they were lying in hospital being subjected to this. Yeah. I mean, it's awful, isn't it? It feels like some form of torture in so many ways. I bet it was punitive as well on purpose, though. Yeah.

Yeah, I definitely think there was that element as well. It would have been done to humiliate people too, to stop them from doing it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you kind of think that, again, sort of the idea of having to go through this is going to put you off more, isn't it? It's going to kill any desire. I'll be back with Kat and Gonorrhea after this short break.

I'm Josie Santee, health coach, wellness editor, and host of the Every Girl podcast, where we cut through the noise with realistic, expert-backed advice to help you thrive in every category of life while still loving the person that you already are. And part of loving yourself is being really authentic to you, including the clothes you wear.

In partnership with Nordstrom, we're helping you update your spring wardrobe so your style is fit for your best self. Nordstrom brings you the season's most wanted brands like Skims, Mango, Free People, and Princess Polly, all under $100. From trending sneakers to beauty must-haves, we've curated the styles that you'll wear on repeat this spring. Free shipping, free returns, and in-store pickup make it easier than ever.

Shop now in stores and at Nordstrom.com. Our skin tells a story. Join me, Holly Frey, and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis. Along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it.

Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on Our Skin. Listen to Our Skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

When do we start getting antibiotics and penicillin and things that can actually tackle this properly? And how does that have any kind of impact on soldiers? Because that seems to have been a really, really big concern. And that's what was driving medical advancement, it seems to me, is nations around the world going, we've got to keep soldiers fighting fit. They can't be taking time off because they've got a droopy willy.

I mean, there were huge campaigns, as I said, trying to keep the soldiers away from dangerous women in scare quotes. Fast women, loose women. Yeah. But in the 1920s, Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin. But the problem at that point is, you know, they recognise its potential, but there isn't a way of mass producing it. Got this idea, but they don't really know what to do.

So it's only really in 1940s, you know, the beginning of the 1940s, they start to get methods of making more and more penicillin. So the very first uses of penicillin were actually to try and treat syphilis and gonorrhea for soldiers. And then after the war, when that's not the priority, it starts to get rolled out to the general public.

Yeah. And it works, doesn't it? It is the much fabled silver bullet. And when you think of what people have been going through before, I mean, you know, just to go back briefly to the horrendous description of young lads lying in hospital beds, having their bladders filled full of disinfectant and then...

wrapped in wax paper and chamomile lotion and like the idea that you can just take a pill it must be amazing yeah I mean you said silver bullet it's better than that silver bullet that you had the opportunity to stick up your knob and burn things out so it's definitely

It's definitely, definitely the improvement. And how long does it last? Because I often think, like, maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but it seems like there was this brief period of about 10 years when...

HIV hadn't arrived. All STIs could be treated effectively with a dose of antibiotics. The pill turns up. So now you can have, there must have been just like a brief period where it was like, oh my God, we can, we can just fuck each other. This is amazing. Yeah. Doesn't last. How long until they start noticing antibiotic resistance coming through?

Antibiotic resistance really starts to become a problem by the time you get into the end of the 20th century. So they're starting to get less and less antibiotics which have the potential to sort it out. And at first that's not too much of a problem because you're getting less STIs in general because there's no treatment for HIV AIDS. So people are being a wee bit more careful with things. So the spread of STIs does drop significantly.

But, you know, now we've got good treatments for HIV and AIDS. We've got PrEP, things like that. People start to be a bit less cautious and that's driving this rise with gonorrhea and syphilis. And largely, well, it's not a favourite fact because it's not a good thing, but one of the demographics seeing the largest spike in it are the over 60s. Yeah. I mean, that's it, isn't it? You know, at that point, you don't have to worry about the pregnancy thing. So you can ignore it. Yeah.

I think that's it. So in your specimen collection in Edinburgh, what items have you got? You said that you've got blue kidneys. What else have you got that is from the history of gonorrhea? Give us a horrible description. Yeah, well, it's really interesting because obviously, you know, you've came up here and I've shown you some of the remains that we have, which shows syphilis here.

And syphilis looks horrific and you can see it on almost every part of the body. You know, we've got sort of palates, you know, in the mouth where they've got holes and we've got big swollen bones. We've got skulls with huge ulcers, things like that. It's horrific and really dramatic on the body. What we have with gonorrhoea is shelf upon shelf upon shelf of P.

with strictures. What's a stricture, Kat? Tell us what a stricture is. A stricture is this kind of narrowing of the urethra that stops you being able to pee. And it's effectively kind of scar tissue building up because of the infection. And we have a doctor called Charles Bell. He was an Edinburgh boy, but he ended up doing a lot of his work down in London. And he became really, really

really interested in stricture of the penis. So a lot of the examples, and as I said, we have a lot, I think it's something like 47. It's a lot of penises in jars. It's amazing. Yeah, just as I say, just shelves of them. It feels like they go, you know, it's just you're just confronted with a wall of them and one particular portion of the store. He's really interested in this condition. In fact, he writes a book about it.

A treatise is on diseases of the urethra, the vesica urinaria, which is the bladder, the prostate and the rectum. And when it comes to stricture of the penis, he says the most common cause is gonorrhoea. Though he does say that there might be a few other things that causes it, you know, if you have injury to the penis or something like that.

This book's also got some really horrific chapter titles. There's one of them which is symptoms to be dreaded as indicating a bursting of the urethra. Oh my God. And effectively, what he says is that things you really need to be worried about in case your urethra is going to burst is, you know, if you try really hard to pee and only a few drops come out, if the urine feels scalding hot.

And then he says, if you put your legs together and you feel like there's a tumour there, even though there isn't a tumour, this is the point when you've got to be worried about your urethra bursting. And what would they do for that? What would Dr. Bell have done for that? Well, your typical instrument in your fight against the urethral stricture is something called a bougie. Doesn't sound good. It's not.

It takes its name from a pot in Algeria, and this pot was known for producing a really fine wax. I knew it. And so bougie is actually the French word for candle. And so...

One of the main ways that you get this instrument is from a thread that's been dipped in some wax to make a sort of rod which you can adjust the thickness of, which would also be a little bit flexible. So you can probably see literally where this is going. So this would be something that you can take various thicknesses and introduce them up to try and clear any blockages. And would that work? Well, I mean...

Well, I mean, you know, you can push things out of the way. You can get something so that the urine can actually flow. But of course, there is the possibility that as you're doing that, you're causing more scar tissue to

which is then going to cause further problems down the line. And of course with this bougie you could wrap it in linen so that you could then soak this in medicine and I'm going to again use scare coats for medicine so that you can then stick that up to deliver the medicine to the correct place. The common medicine that was used was something called caustic and

And again, this was something that you would literally burn the stricture away with. And this could be a lunar caustic that we talked before, or it could be basically potassium hydroxide. Oh!

Which is a very strong alkaline. So again, literally burning away anything that's going to stop that urine from getting out. See, I thought that when we were going to come and talk about gonorrhea, it would be like, yeah, it gives you a bit of a delay or maybe there's a bit of discharge. But the long-term effect of this is incredibly serious. That is grim. Which brings me to talk about, we've got to talk about the future of gonorrhea then, because it's becoming antibiotic-free.

As you said, I think, well, you can tell me, but is there only one type of antibiotic that is now effective against gonorrhea? Well, that's exactly it. There's only one type of antibiotic that can be used. And even that is starting to have limited effects with certain cases. So there is a possibility that in the not too distant future, we may have no treatment whatsoever. Like nothing at all. Yeah. And we may be going back to these times of having to

catheterise people, things like that, if there are problems. I mean, there must be people researching this, researching antibiotic resistance. Yeah, I mean, there's hope now that we can maybe find a vaccine. You give it to everyone at a certain age in school and we'll all be OK. So that would be a great, great thing. That would be, wouldn't it? But we are actually facing a future where there might be no treatment and this disease can be doing...

horrible things that it's done in the past once more. So let everybody wrap up, make sure that you're wearing condoms and just behave yourselves. As a final question, Kat, what do you think we have got to learn from the history of gonorrhea that is useful for us going forward? Oh, well, you know, I mean, I think the idea is don't blame women for everything. That's a good one when you're

that has been a common thing. There's an interesting story, which I think is quite nice about gonorrhea, about John Hunter, the surgeon. He thinks that syphilis and gonorrhea are the same thing. So he experiments. He gets some gonorrhea pus and he introduces it onto a penis of somebody who doesn't have either syphilis or gonorrhea. One on the foreskin, one on the glands. He thinks that where you're infected, that's what's going to affect whether you get syphilis or gonorrhea. And?

And he discovers that the result is you get both. So he thinks this is proving that they're the same thing. It turns out that the person likely just had both diseases. Oh, God. Of course, there is the question as well. Did he actually do this to his own penis? It sounds like something he would do. The amount that I know about this man. Yeah. So there's a chance that he did give himself both syphilis and gonorrhea. So again, I think the idea of being slightly careful about

about your scientific experiments is a good lesson when you're looking at gonorrhoea. Kat, you have been horrifying, but marvellous as always. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? You can find me on Blue Sky Instagram as anatomicalkat.

And you can find links from there to my website. And go and see the museum collection because it is just, it's just absolutely mind blowing. But don't do it when you've got a hangover. That is not a good place to be. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us. You've been fabulous. Thank you. It's a pleasure as always to talk to you, Kate.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Kat for joining me. And for those of you that are still listening to this, well done for getting through that. If you were impressed by what you heard, then maybe you could like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If there's another subject you'd like us to explore or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com.

This podcast was edited by Tom DeLarge and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets for History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

I'm Josie Santee, health coach, wellness editor, and host of the Every Girl podcast, where we cut through the noise with realistic, expert-backed advice to help you thrive in every category of life while still loving the person that you already are. And part of loving yourself is being really authentic to you, including the clothes you wear.

In partnership with Nordstrom, we're helping you update your spring wardrobe so your style is fit for your best self. Nordstrom brings you the season's most wanted brands like Skims, Mango, Free People, and Princess Polly, all under $100. From trending sneakers to beauty must-haves, we've curated the styles that you'll wear on repeat this spring. Free shipping, free returns, and in-store pickup make it easier than ever.

Shop now in stores and at Nordstrom.com.