Saturday, March 4, 2017

We watched The Exorcist! (and so far, no demons) - Episode 143

Abby, Ami, and Debbie talk about watching The Exorcist. The scariest thing in the film was brain imaging before CT scan, which...holy shit guys! Apparently this movie was made just one year before CT scans came along. Neurologists really did perform direct carotid puncture to inject dyes into the circulation to image the brain back then, and they really did something called pneumoencephalography. They injected air into the CSF via spinal, which would rise (as air tends to do) and make the brain more visible via X-ray. As a person who performs modern spinals, Abby comments that this would produce the mother of all headaches and possibly brain damage. A truly horrifying film.

Check out this episode!

1 comment:

  1. Just started listening to the podcast - love it, and thanks for doing it. Recovering Catholic here, but from group that was more fundy than some so a lot of parallels to SDA (but you had it worse!). Had to write now since you watched the Exorcist - quite the 70's time capsule. The young priest at the very end (as well as piano player during pee scene) was my AP English teacher at a Jesuit H.S. in the 80's (only priest actor who was actually a priest). He had a lot of stories on that one! Didn't come out like he expected - he always referred to it derisively as 'that pornographic horror film', but he clearly loved the notoriety. And yes, the Jesuits were/are the progressive order in the Church, though that is all relative. Thanks again for all you do! Tim