King Ferdinand’s Royal Rooster, Prehistoric Trees, Unusual Body Disposal Methods & Tobacco Smoke Enemas

This week on The Oddities Department, Gavin and Lindsay drag you through four exhibits that somehow connect royal anatomy, prehistoric swamp forests, death rituals, and one of the worst medical ideas humanity ever committed to paper.We start with King Ferdinand VII of Spain, a terrible ruler with an allegedly massive, malformed royal problem that required doctors, strategy, and possibly furniture. Then we travel back more than 300 million years to the Carboniferous Period, when trees refused to rot, oxygen levels went wild, and bugs grew large enough to make eye contact with your soul.From there, Lindsay builds Gavin a deeply cursed post-death menu featuring sky burial, Famadihana, mellification, and possibly the most annoying afterlife option of all: becoming glitter. Finally, Gavin closes the tour with the truly real history of tobacco smoke enemas, the 18th-century medical practice where doctors believed the cure for drowning, disease, and general inconvenience was blowing smoke directly up someone’s backside.This episode has everything: bizarre history, strange science, royal scandals, giant prehistoric insects, creative corpse disposal, questionable medicine, and enough wood jokes to get us escorted out of our own museum.Stay curious. Stay weird. And please… keep the tobacco out of your chocolate starfish.Topics include: King Ferdinand VII, Spanish royalty, bizarre medical history, Carboniferous Era trees, prehistoric insects, odd burial practices, sky burial, Famadihana, mellification, tobacco smoke enemas, weird history, strange science, and The Oddities Department.Send us Fan Mail