Dirty Sexy History

In the first episode of our Halloween series, Jess talks about 11th century ideas of witchcraft in penitential literature and reads some of her favorite “women’s vices” from Burchard’s Decretum

So you think kink is modern? In Regency London, dominatrix Theresa Berkley opened a multistory sex dungeon and became a self-made millionaire. More on Theresa and the English Vice today on DSH

In the second episode of our Halloween series, we’re picking up where we left off last week with a look at the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German handbook for the identification of witches.

Gabrielle Falloppia is credited with inventing the condom. He didn’t, but he did discover the fallopian tubes, all while battling academic rivals, accusations of heresy, a syphilis epidemic, and the pirates who kidnapped his boyfriend. He has been accused of vivisecting the criminals given to him by the Medicis—that is, dissecting them while they were alive—but he didn’t do that. To be clear, he *did* kill them...just not in that way. It’s all in a day’s work for legendary anatomist Gabrielle Falloppia. Our guest today is medical doctor and historian Dr Michael Stolberg, retired chair of the history of medicine at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Dr Stolberg’s new book is Gabrielle Falloppia 1522/23-1562: The Life and Work of a Renaissance Anatomist, and it’s out now from Routledge.

Strikes have been in the news more and more lately, but what is a Labor Union and why should we care? Unions have gotten us many of the rights we take for granted today: the eight-hour workday, safer working conditions, better wages, and benefits. Women have played a huge part in this, from teenage girls in the first picket lines, to Mother Jones and Lucy Parsons, to the Uprising of the 20,000 and beyond. This week, we’re talking to journalist and organizer Kim Kelly about the American Labor Movement and what history can teach us about how to change the world today.