What’s Scarier, Haunted Houses or Haunted People?

Vera Farmiga in The Conjuring. Warner Bros.

Halloween season is the perfect time to watch horror movies, and a reliable standby of the genre is the haunted house story. Recent examples range from the understated (The Woman in Black ) to the sensationalized (The Conjuring ) to the crassly commercial (Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones ). Such tales of domestic tranquility disrupted by malevolent spirits have been popular for over two centuries, tracing their lineage back to The Castle of Otranto , generally regarded as the first gothic novel.

“It specifically foregrounds the importance of the home, especially the ancestral home, the home with a certain amount of history to it,” says horror author and English professor John Langan. “Which does seem to have become one of the requirements for a haunted house setting.”

Later books and films have largely followed that lead, featuring houses whose dark histories are replete with slaughtered children and desecrated burial grounds. The idea that locations resonate with their collected history is one that appeals to South African author Lauren Beukes. Her new novel Broken Monsters is set amidst the blighted urban landscape of modern-day Detroit.

“You step into these places and there’s a vacancy,” she says. “And it’s what you bring to that vacancy—whether it’s your own baggage and malaise and malevolence and psychology, or whether there’s something there waiting to feed into it, is what makes it so interesting. And that dynamic of what rushes in to fill the vacuum is really the haunting.”

But author Grady Hendrix says that in his experience it’s not so much places that are haunted but people. His work with a parapsychology group taught him that pretty much everywhere feels haunted to someone.

“There were haunted novelty supply warehouses and medical record filing facilities and gardens and sidewalks and barns,” he says. “They were really subjective, very emotional experiences, like they were just for them.”

He points to The Amityville Horror as another example of haunted people. America’s most famously haunted house has been the subject of countless investigations, but in all that time no one ever saw the real horror, the abuse of the children living there, a tragic situation highlighted in the recent documentary My Amityville Horror .

“No one ever stopped to listen to them, no one ever did anything for those kids,” says Hendrix. “It was the people, it wasn’t the house.”

Listen to our complete discussion of haunted houses in Episode 121 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast—featuring Langan, Beukes, Hendrix, and David Barr Kirtley—above, and check out some highlights from the discussion below.

John Langan on materialism:

“One of Marx’s critiques of capitalism is that in capitalism things become more real than people are, and he talks about these moments where an object ‘hails’ you, as he puts it, the object gives you reality. I guess we would think about it in status terms—I’ve got my sports car, or whatever it is, and that makes me real, having this thing. … In The Amityville Horror you’re buying that house, you’re buying that house and it’s all full of horrible things. Oh my god, think about the money! Think about the bills! … And I do think the economics of haunted house stories are kind of interesting. You don’t see a lot of haunted house stories that are about a haunted shack or a haunted double-wide trailer or something like that. It’s almost as if it has to be opulent to be haunted.”

Grady Hendrix on rational explanations:

“There was a guy I knew a long time ago named Bill Roll who did a lot of research on electromagnetics and haunted houses and things like that, and a British TV crew brought him over to London to do a show. There was a guy who was living in SoHo over there, which had just been built up, and his house was an old warehouse, and they were like, ‘Look, even in this modern flat with all these modern appliances this guy’s got a ghost, and he hears children calling his name, and he feels cold spots, and his bed shakes at night.’ And so when they got there Bill Roll was looking at it, and he’s like, ‘Well, actually where the guy’s bed is … there’s the electrical transformer for the neighborhood right on the other side of that wall. … Can we just move his bed to the other side of the loft and see if this stuff persists?’ And none of it persisted. It all went away. And the TV crew was so pissed off.”

Lauren Beukes on haunted places:

“I think what’s also interesting is looking at the psychogeographies. … There are really horrible things that happen in the world all the time, or good things—I went to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for forty years, and stepping into that cell, this tiny cell where he spent so much of his life, is very poignant. There’s something powerful there. And that’s powerful good, because good came out of it, but if you go to horrible places where bad things happened, these layers of history endure, and I think that we are haunted by the past in the way that we make mistakes over and over again, and that we have to acknowledge that, and that that kind of echoes into personal hauntings and things that we’ve done in our own lives.”

Grady Hendrix on labyrinths:

“Haunted houses are designed to produce one effect, and that’s the labyrinth. … It’s circuitous, and it takes you to the middle, and it’s almost like spinning someone around in blind man’s bluff. It’s designed to disorient you, and make you forget about your daily life, and cut you off from your day-to-day life. … Whether it’s the Overlook Hotel or in The Haunting of Hill House where they can never quite go to the same room by the same route. … That was one of the interesting things about writing a haunted house book set in an Ikea, because at Ikea the route you take is specifically designed to produce something called ‘the Gruen transfer,’ which is you disorient people when they come into a space—it’s the reason casinos have densely patterned carpets and no clocks—because what happens when people get disoriented in a new space is they walk slower, they pay more attention to their surroundings, and they’re a lot more suggestible. So labyrinths are what haunted houses are, they’re designed to disorient you.”

The Tragic Medical History Behind That Crazy Knick Finale

Mary Cybulski/Cinemax

[Spoiler alert: The following piece contains spoilers for The Knick season finale, "Crutchfield." Stop here if you haven't seen it. You've been warned.]

There were about a bajillion “Oh, crap!” moments on The Knick finale last night. (OK, like, five.) Of those, the two most intense draw on actual medical procedures even more tragic than what went down on the show. Removing teeth to treat insanity? That actually happened. Using heroin to treat cocaine addiction? That’s not far from the truth.

The first, and more ghastly, was the “treatment” for madness administered to Dr. Everett Gallinger’s wife, Eleanor (Maya Kazan). In the episode, her doctor—played by John Hodgman—removes her teeth because he believes “all mental disorders stem from disease and infection polluting the brain” and those infections are carried in the teeth.

That practice, and its practitioner, are based on the treatments of Dr. Henry Cotton, who ran the Trenton State Hospital mental asylum in New Jersey in the early 20th century. When Stanley Burns, The Knick‘s technical adviser, told the show’s creators about Cotton, they “fell in love with the story” and wrote it into the finale. “You see that very well illustrated and portrayed when he removes the teeth of Gallinger’s wife,” Burns says. “Then, of course, they mention my favorite part of the story which is quite sad and pathetic, which is that he removed the teeth of his children.”

Oh, yeah. That. Hodgman’s character mentions in the show that he “removed my own children’s teeth as a preventative measure.” This also is true; Cotton extracted the teeth of two of his sons. The thing that makes it even more tragic, according to Burns, is that both later committed suicide as adults.

Cotton’s practices were later investigated by Dr. Phyllis Greenacre, who found that—as a Telegraph piece noted—”the chief clinical effect of his operations was the death of his patients.” Her report was suppressed by his mentor, Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Dr. Adolf Meyer, even though he’d requested the evaluation. Cotton was diagnosed with a heart condition and angina in 1928 and had several teeth removed as a treatment. He died of a heart attack in 1933.

Treating Cocaine Addiction With Heroin

Later in the episode, Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen), who has been a cocaine addict almost from the start of the season, is sent away for treatment—which, ominously, involves dosing him with heroin. To understand what’s happening to Thackery, it might help to remember his character’s addiction is loosely based on the life of Johns Hopkins physician William Halsted—one of the founders of modern surgery, and a doctor who became an “accidental addict” after trying the newly-discovered anethetic. “Doctors practiced on themselves,” Burns says, explaining why so many doctors became drug users. “In those days when cocaine came out, for instance, doctors experimented with it.”

Those who have been watching The Knick all season may recognize Halsted, or at least his name. He’s a character on the show, and the guy who introduced Thackery’s mentor Dr. J.M. Christiansen (Matt Frewer) to the performance benefits of cocaine. Similar to Thackery’s arc this season, the real Halstead developed a habit so bad that at one point he published a medical paper full of so much nonsense it largely ended his career as a doctor in New York. His addiction was treated with morphine and, as a New York Times review of Halsted’s biography noted, he found himself “in the grips of a double-barreled addiction.”

Does that mean Thackery faces same fate in Season 2? Only The Knick‘s showrunners know. But it may not be all bad. Evan as Halsted battled dueling addictions, he enjoyed a successful run as one of four founding physicians at Johns Hopkins, where he eventually became chief of surgery.

And because you’re wondering, yes, the assurances Thackery received that his heroin came from Bayer are true. The drug manufacturer offered heroin commercially starting in 1898 and, as Burns notes, the show wouldn’t name-drop Bayer without fact-checking. “Of course,” he says. “You wouldn’t want to use a drug company’s name in vain.”

Snapchat Ads Are Heading Your Way Starting This Weekend

WIRED

It’s happened to Twitter. And Tumblr. And Instagram. And now, Snapchat’s day has finally come.

Beginning this weekend, the ephemeral messaging app will start rolling out paid advertisements for the first time. The startup announced the news on its blog Friday afternoon, admitting that the introduction of advertisements on the app was bound to “feel a little weird at first.” But the post attempts to assure users that they’re not obligated to actually interact with the ads—at all. Instead, they’ll show up in users’ “Recent Updates” feeds, where they can decide to watch the ads or not. After 24 hours, they’ll disappear completely.

“We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication—things like Snaps or Chats,” the post reads. “That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted.”

The move has been rumored for some time, as Snapchat has faced pressure to prove that it’s actually worth that $10 billion valuation. And the company admitted as much in the post. “We need to make money,” the blog reads. “Advertising allows us to support our service while delivering neat content to Snapchatters.”

Snapchat is undoubtedly aware of the risks. Users of any social media platform have historically revolted the minute branded content starts appearing where their friends’ photos used to be. And yet, despite it, many of these brands survive because even though users don’t like the ads, per se, they don’t hate them enough to ditch the app that all their friends are using. Even Facebook, which has all but buried posts from normal people under heaps of branded content, still boasts one billion users and counting.

Snapchat has clearly decided that it’s now big enough to risk pissing some people off. It’s even more daring, considering the startup is still recovering from the so-called “Snappening,” in which hundreds of thousands of users photos were leaked after a third-party app that apps onto Snapchat to save photos was hacked. The company’s leaders are either very sure of their users’ allegiance or very naive to their mistrust.

Still, even if users stick with Snapchat, that’s no guarantee they’ll actually look at the ads the company serves them. After all, we all know what TV watchers did when given the option to watch commercials or fast forward through them with a DVR. Snapchat ads could meet the same fate, and if they do, advertisers will likely press the company to make the ads more visible.

In the meantime, though, Snapchat promises its ads will be unintrusive, optional, and most importantly, untargeted. Time will tell if that’s a promise Snapchat can actually keep.

Gadget Lab Podcast: Did You Hear That Apple Had an Event This Week?

The iPad Air 2 is demonstrated at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Apple unveiled the thinner iPad with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand. Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP

New Apple hardware was released this week. Maybe you heard about it. The hosts, joined this week by Gadget Labber Tim Moynihan, sat down to record the show just a couple of hours after the big announcements from Cupertino. Up for debate: the iPad’s importance, both as a consumer product and as a cultural force, now that the design is pretty much baked and we’re only seeing small improvements to its functionality. Also, the trio discusses iPad etiquette (Mat takes pictures with his), and Apple’s newfound sense of humor that came across in Thursday’s presentation. It’s not all Apple this week, though. Other topics: new Nexus hardware, the Whisper location-tracking controversy, the mysteries of Minecraft , and the awesomeness of Carcassonne . Lastly, you’ve heard the one about trying to get a Nobel Prize through airport security—but wait until you hear Tim’s tale of trying to explain to TSA agents why he’s carrying an Internet of Things hub that looks like a bowling pin with a creepy smiley face on it.

Programming notes: A few F-bombs get dropped in this one near the end, so wake the kids. Also, the WIRED offices are currently undergoing some light construction (we’re remodeling). So during the podcast, you’ll hear background banging noises, some concrete polishing, and the occasional barking dog.

Listen to this week’s episode or subscribe in iTunes.

Send the hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds (Mat Honan is @mat, Michael Calore is @snackfight, and Tim Moynihan is @aperobot) or to the main hotline at @GadgetLab.

Game|Life Podcast: Software Sales Slump and Bayonetta Makes a Comeback

Bayonetta 2. Nintendo

The NPD Group has released (some tiny amount of) data on the game industry’s September sales, and it’s not all good news, as we discuss on this week’s Game|Life podcast.

While hardware sales are up considerably over last year (thanks to the availability of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), sales of new physical software took a big 35 percent hit versus last year. While NPD did point out that September 2013 was boosted considerably by the release of Grand Theft Auto V, this past month saw the release of Destiny.

I’ve been playing some Bayonetta 2 and have some brief thoughts on the range of review scores that we’ve seen (coupled with a memory about the last time I actually got annoyed at someone else’s game review, 10 years ago), a few early thoughts on Fantasy Life, the new Level-5 RPG for 3DS that Nintendo is about to publish here in the U.S., and Bo talks more about Shadow of Mordor.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: "http://ift.tt/11Fyr45"​]

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Cops Need a Warrant to Grab Your Cell Tower Data, Florida Court Rules

The top of a cell phone tower. Getty Images

Americans may have a Florida drug dealer to thank for expanding our right to privacy.

Police departments around the country have been collecting phone metadata from telecoms and using a sophisticated spy tool to track people through their mobile phones—often without obtaining a warrant. But a new ruling out of Florida has curbed the activity in that state, on constitutional grounds. It raises hope among civil liberties advocates that other jurisdictions around the country may follow suit.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled Thursday that obtaining cell phone location data to track a person’s location or movement in real time constitutes a Fourth Amendment search and therefore requires a court-ordered warrant.

The case specifically involves cell tower data for a convicted drug dealer that police obtained from a telecom without a warrant. But the way the ruling is written (.pdf), it would also cover the use of so-called “stingrays”—sophisticated technology law enforcement agencies use to locate and track people in the field without assistance from telecoms. Agencies around the country, including in Florida, have been using the technology to track suspects—sometimes without obtaining a court order, other times deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of the devices to track suspects, telling judges the information came from “confidential” sources rather than disclose their use of stingrays. The new ruling would require them to obtain a warrant or stop using the devices.

The American Civil Liberties Union calls the Florida ruling “a resounding defense” of the public’s right to privacy.

“Following people’s movements by secretly turning their cell phones into tracking devices can reveal extremely sensitive details of our lives, like where we go to the doctor or psychiatrist, where we spend the night, and who our friends are,” said Nate Freed Wessler, an attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “Police are now on notice that they need to get a warrant from a judge before tracking cell phones, whether using information from the service provider or their own ‘Stingray’ cell phone tracking equipment.”

The ruling constitutes the first time that a state court has reached this finding under the Fourth Amendment. It comes at a timely moment when federal courts of appeal in other jurisdictions are in the midst of taking up the question of cell tower data, Wessler told WIRED. Even if other jurisdictions rule differently, the Florida case makes it more likely that the issue will one day get to the U.S. Supreme Court. If it does, civil liberties advocates hope that the federal court would rule as it did on the use of GPS tracking devices used by police, determining that it constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. Though the court in that case fell short of ruling that the use of GPS devices requires a warrant, law enforcement agencies around the country have changed their practices as a result of the ruling.

The American Civil Liberties Union calls the Florida ruling “a resounding defense” of the public’s right to privacy.

Stingrays are equally as invasive as GPS trackers, if not more so since GPS trackers are generally used on vehicles traveling public roads. Stingrays, however, can track the mobile phone wherever it goes—inside an apartment building and even down to the exact apartment where a person resides.

The stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers, simulate a cellphone tower and trick any nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thereby revealing their location. When mobile phones connect to the stingray, the device can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic data, as well as information that points to the phone’s location. By moving the stingray around, authorities can triangulate the phone’s location with greater precision than they can using data obtained from a fixed tower location and from telecoms.

The Justice Department has long asserted that law enforcement agencies don’t need a probable-cause warrant to use stingrays because they don’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages. Instead, authorities say, they operate like pen-register and trap-and-trace systems, collecting the equivalent of header information. A pen register system records the phone numbers that a person dials, while a trap-and-trace system records the phone numbers of incoming calls to that phone.

The ACLU and others argue, however, that stingrays are more invasive than a trap-and-trace and should require a warrant. By not seeking a warrant to use them, police in Florida have been able to not only conceal from judges and defendant’s their use of the devices but also prevent the public from learning how the secretive technology is employed.

With regard to the Florida drug case—involving cell tower data obtained from a telecom—the ruling is significant for another reason in that the court rejected arguments that a user has no expectation of privacy in data collected by a telecom.

The government argued in the case that they had a right to obtain the data without a warrant because it carried no special protection under the so-called third-party doctrine. Under this argument the government asserts that information a person provides to a third-party—in this case the telecom—carries no expectation of privacy. When a mobile user’s phone pings nearby cell towers, the user is willingly providing the cell tower, and telecom, with their location information, the government argued.

But the judges rejected this argument out of hand.

“Simply because the cell phone user knows or should know that his cell phone gives off signals that enable the service provider to detect its location for call routing purposes, and which enable cell phone applications to operate for navigation, weather reporting, and other purposes, does not mean that the user is consenting to use of that location information by third parties for any other unrelated purposes,” the judges wrote. “While a person may voluntarily convey personal information to a business or other entity for personal purposes, such disclosure cannot reasonably be considered to be disclosure for all purposes to third parties not involved in that transaction.”

The drug dealer in question, essentially, did not consent to give his location to police just by possessing and using a cell phone.

What’s Scarier, Haunted Houses or Haunted People?

Vera Farmiga in The Conjuring. Warner Bros.

Halloween season is the perfect time to watch horror movies, and a reliable standby of the genre is the haunted house story. Recent examples range from the understated (The Woman in Black ) to the sensationalized (The Conjuring ) to the crassly commercial (Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones ). Such tales of domestic tranquility disrupted by malevolent spirits have been popular for over two centuries, tracing their lineage back to The Castle of Otranto , generally regarded as the first gothic novel.

“It specifically foregrounds the importance of the home, especially the ancestral home, the home with a certain amount of history to it,” says horror author and English professor John Langan. “Which does seem to have become one of the requirements for a haunted house setting.”

Later books and films have largely followed that lead, featuring houses whose dark histories are replete with slaughtered children and desecrated burial grounds. The idea that locations resonate with their collected history is one that appeals to South African author Lauren Beukes. Her new novel Broken Monsters is set amidst the blighted urban landscape of modern-day Detroit.

“You step into these places and there’s a vacancy,” she says. “And it’s what you bring to that vacancy—whether it’s your own baggage and malaise and malevolence and psychology, or whether there’s something there waiting to feed into it, is what makes it so interesting. And that dynamic of what rushes in to fill the vacuum is really the haunting.”

But author Grady Hendrix says that in his experience it’s not so much places that are haunted but people. His work with a parapsychology group taught him that pretty much everywhere feels haunted to someone.

“There were haunted novelty supply warehouses and medical record filing facilities and gardens and sidewalks and barns,” he says. “They were really subjective, very emotional experiences, like they were just for them.”

He points to The Amityville Horror as another example of haunted people. America’s most famously haunted house has been the subject of countless investigations, but in all that time no one ever saw the real horror, the abuse of the children living there, a tragic situation highlighted in the recent documentary My Amityville Horror .

“No one ever stopped to listen to them, no one ever did anything for those kids,” says Hendrix. “It was the people, it wasn’t the house.”

Listen to our complete discussion of haunted houses in Episode 121 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast—featuring Langan, Beukes, Hendrix, and David Barr Kirtley—above, and check out some highlights from the discussion below.

John Langan on materialism:

“One of Marx’s critiques of capitalism is that in capitalism things become more real than people are, and he talks about these moments where an object ‘hails’ you, as he puts it, the object gives you reality. I guess we would think about it in status terms—I’ve got my sports car, or whatever it is, and that makes me real, having this thing. … In The Amityville Horror you’re buying that house, you’re buying that house and it’s all full of horrible things. Oh my god, think about the money! Think about the bills! … And I do think the economics of haunted house stories are kind of interesting. You don’t see a lot of haunted house stories that are about a haunted shack or a haunted double-wide trailer or something like that. It’s almost as if it has to be opulent to be haunted.”

Grady Hendrix on rational explanations:

“There was a guy I knew a long time ago named Bill Roll who did a lot of research on electromagnetics and haunted houses and things like that, and a British TV crew brought him over to London to do a show. There was a guy who was living in SoHo over there, which had just been built up, and his house was an old warehouse, and they were like, ‘Look, even in this modern flat with all these modern appliances this guy’s got a ghost, and he hears children calling his name, and he feels cold spots, and his bed shakes at night.’ And so when they got there Bill Roll was looking at it, and he’s like, ‘Well, actually where the guy’s bed is … there’s the electrical transformer for the neighborhood right on the other side of that wall. … Can we just move his bed to the other side of the loft and see if this stuff persists?’ And none of it persisted. It all went away. And the TV crew was so pissed off.”

Lauren Beukes on haunted places:

“I think what’s also interesting is looking at the psychogeographies. … There are really horrible things that happen in the world all the time, or good things—I went to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for forty years, and stepping into that cell, this tiny cell where he spent so much of his life, is very poignant. There’s something powerful there. And that’s powerful good, because good came out of it, but if you go to horrible places where bad things happened, these layers of history endure, and I think that we are haunted by the past in the way that we make mistakes over and over again, and that we have to acknowledge that, and that that kind of echoes into personal hauntings and things that we’ve done in our own lives.”

Grady Hendrix on labyrinths:

“Haunted houses are designed to produce one effect, and that’s the labyrinth. … It’s circuitous, and it takes you to the middle, and it’s almost like spinning someone around in blind man’s bluff. It’s designed to disorient you, and make you forget about your daily life, and cut you off from your day-to-day life. … Whether it’s the Overlook Hotel or in The Haunting of Hill House where they can never quite go to the same room by the same route. … That was one of the interesting things about writing a haunted house book set in an Ikea, because at Ikea the route you take is specifically designed to produce something called ‘the Gruen transfer,’ which is you disorient people when they come into a space—it’s the reason casinos have densely patterned carpets and no clocks—because what happens when people get disoriented in a new space is they walk slower, they pay more attention to their surroundings, and they’re a lot more suggestible. So labyrinths are what haunted houses are, they’re designed to disorient you.”

The Tragic Medical History Behind That Crazy Knick Finale

Mary Cybulski/Cinemax

[Spoiler alert: The following piece contains spoilers for The Knick season finale, "Crutchfield." Stop here if you haven't seen it. You've been warned.]

There were about a bajillion “Oh, crap!” moments on The Knick finale last night. (OK, like, five.) Of those, the two most intense draw on actual medical procedures even more tragic than what went down on the show. Removing teeth to treat insanity? That actually happened. Using heroin to treat cocaine addiction? That’s not far from the truth.

The first, and more ghastly, was the “treatment” for madness administered to Dr. Everett Gallinger’s wife, Eleanor (Maya Kazan). In the episode, her doctor—played by John Hodgman—removes her teeth because he believes “all mental disorders stem from disease and infection polluting the brain” and those infections are carried in the teeth.

That practice, and its practitioner, are based on the treatments of Dr. Henry Cotton, who ran the Trenton State Hospital mental asylum in New Jersey in the early 20th century. When Stanley Burns, The Knick‘s technical adviser, told the show’s creators about Cotton, they “fell in love with the story” and wrote it into the finale. “You see that very well illustrated and portrayed when he removes the teeth of Gallinger’s wife,” Burns says. “Then, of course, they mention my favorite part of the story which is quite sad and pathetic, which is that he removed the teeth of his children.”

Oh, yeah. That. Hodgman’s character mentions in the show that he “removed my own children’s teeth as a preventative measure.” This also is true; Cotton extracted the teeth of two of his sons. The thing that makes it even more tragic, according to Burns, is that both later committed suicide as adults.

Cotton’s practices were later investigated by Dr. Phyllis Greenacre, who found that—as a Telegraph piece noted—”the chief clinical effect of his operations was the death of his patients.” Her report was suppressed by his mentor, Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Dr. Adolf Meyer, even though he’d requested the evaluation. Cotton was diagnosed with a heart condition and angina in 1928 and had several teeth removed as a treatment. He died of a heart attack in 1933.

Treating Cocaine Addiction With Heroin

Later in the episode, Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen), who has been a cocaine addict almost from the start of the season, is sent away for treatment—which, ominously, involves dosing him with heroin. To understand what’s happening to Thackery, it might help to remember his character’s addiction is loosely based on the life of Johns Hopkins physician William Halsted—one of the founders of modern surgery, and a doctor who became an “accidental addict” after trying the newly-discovered anethetic. “Doctors practiced on themselves,” Burns says, explaining why so many doctors became drug users. “In those days when cocaine came out, for instance, doctors experimented with it.”

Those who have been watching The Knick all season may recognize Halsted, or at least his name. He’s a character on the show, and the guy who introduced Thackery’s mentor Dr. J.M. Christiansen (Matt Frewer) to the performance benefits of cocaine. Similar to Thackery’s arc this season, the real Halstead developed a habit so bad that at one point he published a medical paper full of so much nonsense it largely ended his career as a doctor in New York. His addiction was treated with morphine and, as a New York Times review of Halsted’s biography noted, he found himself “in the grips of a double-barreled addiction.”

Does that mean Thackery faces same fate in Season 2? Only The Knick‘s showrunners know. But it may not be all bad. Evan as Halsted battled dueling addictions, he enjoyed a successful run as one of four founding physicians at Johns Hopkins, where he eventually became chief of surgery.

And because you’re wondering, yes, the assurances Thackery received that his heroin came from Bayer are true. The drug manufacturer offered heroin commercially starting in 1898 and, as Burns notes, the show wouldn’t name-drop Bayer without fact-checking. “Of course,” he says. “You wouldn’t want to use a drug company’s name in vain.”