Erin Manke (0:04)

Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Aaron Manke (0:12)

Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Erin Manke (0:36)

Wash your hands. It's a common refrain whether you're an elementary schooler in a classroom or an adult hard at work. When you're a child, you're told to wash your hands because the throw up germ lives between your fingers. When you're an adult, you're given the less fun version. You don't want to spread disease to yourself and others. Abrasive though it can be, this hand washing propaganda is actually the result of decades of hard won medical knowledge that represents a major public health breakthrough on par with vaccinations and fluoride. And as it so happens, we owe that breakthrough to one man who no one wanted to listen to. Ignaz Semmelweis was born in 1818 to a Jewish family in Hungary. By 1837, he was pursuing a career in the budding world of medicine. He traveled to Vienna, Austria to work at the hospital. Vienna General was one of the premier medical facilities in all of Europe. But being that Ignaz was both Jewish and Hungarian, he met with a lot of prejudice that limited the areas of medicine that he was allowed to work in. However, that prejudice set Ignaz on a fateful course. He landed in obstetrics, the area of medicine dealing with pregnancy and childbirth. This wasn't seen as a particularly desirable post back then. Childbirth had been the domain of female midwives for centuries. But Ignaz was determined to make the best of it. Upon his arrival at the maternity division, he soon learned of a disturbing trend. There were two wards under his purview, one where midwives delivered babies and one where doctors performed the deliveries. In the midwives ward, the mortality rate of the mothers was relatively low. In the doctor's ward, though, the mortality rate was shockingly high, potentially as much as 1 in 10 women. The women died of what was called childbed fever, a horrible affliction that saw the women develop fevers, terrible sores, and other symptoms that are just too gruesome to mention here. Needless to say, they died in a lot of pain. Ignaz was determined to find the cause of this affliction, and he went about it in a fairly scientific way for his time. He observed the conditions in both wards and tried to come up with as many differences as Possible. But many of these differences were superficial. In the midwives ward, for example, women gave birth on their side, while in the doctor's ward they gave birth on their backs. And when he asked the doctors to start changing the position of the women, he didn't notice any change in their mortality rate. He noticed that a priest in the doctor's ward would ring a bell that sometimes startled the women. Ignaz had the priest get rid of the bell, but he still didn't notice any change in the deaths. Finally, a somewhat morbid breakthrough came when Ignaz's friend and fellow Dr. Jakob Ka nicked himself while performing an autopsy. Within days he developed the same symptoms as the women and he eventually died. It was an almost sacrificial death because it led Ignaz to realize that the answer had been in front of him all along. The most important difference in the doctor's ward was that it had doctors. Doctors who performed autopsies and then carried particles from those dead corpses and passed them on to their pregnant patients. Ignaz immediately ordered the doctors in his division to start washing their hands and instruments after autopsies. His choice of cleaning solution was less scientific. He picked chlorine because that was what the janitors used. And that just so happened to be an excellent sterilizer. And wouldn't you know it, the mortality rate in the doctor's ward plummeted. Ignaz didn't have the words yet, but we know today that his corpse particles were bacteria. And childbed fever was sepsis, a form of infection that still affects tens of millions of people each year. Unfortunately, Ignaz's guidelines didn't stick. His doctors didn't like the idea that they were killing their patients. So they ignored his advice. Ignaz eventually left the hospital and ultimately ended up in an insane asylum, where some believe he died of the very infection he had worked to prevent. But in the decade following his death, scientists would start to observe and identify bacteria as the cause of infection. Ignaz Semmelweis discoveries taught us a very important lesson. Wash your hands. But his colleagues reactions taught us another one. Don't be afraid to admit when you're wrong. On the 21st of May of 1952, a large crowd gathered at Speke airport in Liverpool, England. They watched as a Dakota aircraft climbed into the sky. In the back of the plane sat a man, the main attraction for this event. A man with a pair of wings strapped to his back. Leo Valentin was a birdman. Not a superhero perhaps, but one whose sense of showmanship would not be out of place in A comic book. Between the years 1930 and 1960, there were 75 daredevils who earned the title Birdman for their attempts to fly. 72 of the 75 died while attempting their stunts. So it was not a pastime for the faint of heart. Born in 1919, Leo Valentin had been obsessed with flights ever since he was a child. But young Leo couldn't just get on a plane and see what it was like because commercial aircraft wasn't available yet to the public. The Wright brothers first flew in 1903, and aviation had a long way to go before the average person could board a plane. Leo, however, was undaunted. Driven by his passion for flight, he would join a regiment of French paratroopers at the outbreak of World War II. He would survive the war with his passion for flights intact. His greatest injury was a shattered arm during the invasion of occupied France. After he was discharged from military service, Leo resumed his intense study of aerodynamics. He would not, however, follow in the footsteps of Orville and Wilbur Wright. His goal was not to design an aircraft, but to become one himself. Flying as free as a bird, he experimented with delayed release parachutes, attempting his first free fall in 1948. This test was, in his mind, a success as he was able to free fall for about 1800ft before opening his chute and making a safe landing. He designed a pair of canvas wings in 1950, getting a step closer to achieving bird like flight. However, trial and error can be a risky thing when you're defying gravity. His first attempted flight with these wings was a near disaster. He jumped from a plane over a French village, only to realize that the canvas wings did not fully support his weight. Luckily, he had his parachute to fall back on should his wings fail. And fail they did, over and over again. He would abandon his early canvas designs for wings made of balsa wood, supported with an alloy frame. He flew this design successfully a number of times, drawing crowds of greater and greater size. And his reputation grew as a performer. He was called Valentin, the most daring man in the world. And whether he flew successfully or not, viewers would be in for a great show. So by the time he boarded that Dakota on May 21, Valentine had his routine down to a science. The plane would fly 9,000ft over the crowd and he would jump off, gliding majestically through the air, deploying his parachute at the last minute to land safely. A crowd of over 100,000 people watched eagerly as the aircraft climbed higher and higher. Leo steeled himself and prepared to jump backwards out of the plane, much like a scuba diver entering the water. But things went wrong. Almost immediately, one of his wings caught the airplane's door and splintered. When Leo exited the plane, he was in a tailspin, unable to stabilize himself or extend his wings to slow his fall. His parachute deployed and immediately caught in the shattered frame of his wingsuit. The most daring man in the world crashed into a nearby field, dying on impact. A gruesome end to Valentin's career and his life. While this may seem like no more than a tragic, inevitable downfall, Leo Valentin's death is not the end of his story. Today, skydiving is a safe and popular activity for thrill seekers, and the position you assume to control a freefall is known as the Valentine position. A fitting legacy, you might say, for a man who skydived into Brittany to fight the Nazis. Oh, and by the way, among the crowd at his final air show were some of the most famous people from Liverpool. Paul McCartney and George Harrison were there years before they would become world famous as members of the Beatles. Also nearby was a three year old boy who would remember the day for the rest of his life. In fact, his shock would eventually transform into a series of influential horror stories. His name was Clive Barker, the future author of the Books of Blood and director of Hellraiser, a man who Stephen King dubbed the future of horror back in the 1980s. It seems that in the attempt to live his dream, Leo Valentin became part of some of the world's most infamous nightmares.