HeyJaredSoothing History for Sleep
Close your eyes and slip into a stranger past. Soothing History for Sleep blends soft storytelling with outrageous, surprising, and often bizarre moments from history.
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- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 13
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 6, 2026
Latest episodes
The Strange World of Traveling Medicine Shows (opens the original)
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Around nineteen hundred, a traveling medicine show could begin with something very plain: a form for booking a hall or a lot. From that practical piece of paper came broadsides, tickets, entertainers, songs, sales appeals, pamphlets, and bottles carrying promises of relief. This episode follows a carefully limited reconstruction of one representative American stop, while keeping the surviving evidence in view. It considers how entertainment helped promoters gather an audience, how printed materi
How Cities Smelled Before Modern Sanitation (opens the original)
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In June of eighteen fifty-eight, members of Parliament met beside the Thames at Westminster while the polluted river had become an unavoidable public nuisance. Benjamin Disraeli described it in the House of Commons as “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors.” His words belonged to a political debate about London’s drainage, but they also point toward a larger history of household vessels, cesspits, carts, horses, markets, drains, rivers, sewers, and the people whose work
The Strange History of Plague Doctors (opens the original)
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The familiar plague doctor, with a long birdlike beak, dark clothing, glass eye pieces, gloves, and staff, is often placed in the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Yet the surviving record tells a quieter and more complicated story. Municipal plague physicians were real. Cities hired them to visit infected households, examine patients, report cases, work in isolation hospitals, and accept restrictions that separated them from ordinary life. But the famous beaked costume appears securely onl
How People Went to the Bathroom in the Ancient World (opens the original)
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Ancient bathrooms did not look the same from one city, century, or household to another. This calm social-history episode follows the evidence from Mesopotamian household drains and uncertain Egyptian settlement remains to Greek chamber pots, Hellenistic built-in toilets, Roman cesspits, public latrines, sewers, and urine collection. Along the way, it separates popular stories from what archaeology and ancient texts can really show. Marble seats at Ostia, pits beneath Pompeian properties, clay v
The Bizarre Medical Treatments of Ancient Egypt (opens the original)
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In April eighteen eighty-nine, papyri recovered from the ancient Egyptian settlement of Lahun included a worn and repaired medical manuscript from the Middle Kingdom, dating roughly from eighteen fifty to seventeen hundred before the common era. Its instructions concern women’s pain, fertility, conception, pregnancy-related symptoms, fumigation, oils, massage, and substances whose names can still be difficult to translate. This episode follows that fragile document into the wider world of ancien
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