Soothing History for Sleep podcast artwork
Health & Fitness

Soothing History for Sleep

by Forbidden Knowledge Network

Chart positions today · United Kingdom

Not on the United Kingdom charts we track today.

If you like Soothing History for Sleep, try…

Latest episodes

  • What It Was Like to Be a Saloon Worker in the Wild West

    October 19, 2026 · 36 min

    In the mining towns of Virginia City, Nevada, and Tombstone, Arizona Territory, a saloon was not one single kind of workplace. It might offer drinks, meals, games, reading material, music, or a place for business meetings. Its workers and…

  • The Strange History of Bedbugs

    October 12, 2026 · 36 min

    In January of seventeen thirty-four, an Admiralty record noted that a state room aboard the Royal Navy yacht Charlotte had been painted green in an effort to discourage bedbugs. The record does not say whether the paint worked, but it…

  • The Dirty Jobs of Ancient Rome

    October 5, 2026 · 27 min

    In first-century Pompeii, clean clothing, fresh bread, and reliable water depended on work that often remains visible only through altered rooms, basins, mills, pipes, inscriptions, and official texts. This calm documentary follows the…

  • The Strange World of Traveling Medicine Shows

    September 28, 2026 · 30 min

    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…

  • How Cities Smelled Before Modern Sanitation

    September 20, 2026 · 37 min

    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…

Show 7 more episodesShow fewer episodes
  • The Strange History of Plague Doctors

    September 13, 2026 · 34 min

    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…

  • How People Went to the Bathroom in the Ancient World

    September 7, 2026 · 32 min

    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…

  • The Bizarre Medical Treatments of Ancient Egypt

    August 31, 2026 · 33 min

    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…

  • The Horrifying World of Medieval Dentistry

    August 24, 2026 · 30 min

    In a quiet medieval town, a toothache could turn a sleepless night into a difficult search for relief. This episode follows the ordinary path from the first pulse of pain to household remedies, learned medicine, prayers, barber-surgeons…

  • Inside the Lives of Roman Prostitutes

    August 17, 2026 · 32 min

    Before sunrise, a Roman street begins to stir. Bakers prepare bread, water is carried through narrow lanes, and shutters remain closed above small shops and rented rooms. In these ordinary neighborhoods lived women whom Roman writers might…

  • Drugs and Visions in the Ancient World

    August 10, 2026 · 35 min

    A calm documentary history of intoxicating, medicinal, and potentially psychoactive substances in ancient societies, moving across Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Levant, Central Asia, and the Eurasian steppe. The episode follows poppy and opium…

  • A Day at the Roman Colosseum

    August 3, 2026 · 34 min

    A quiet documentary sleep episode follows one imagined day of public games at Rome’s Flavian Amphitheatre in the late first or early second century of the common era. Grounded in archaeological evidence, ancient texts, inscriptions, and…

Full episode archive on Apple Podcasts →

About the show

Soothing History for Sleep explores the strange, intimate, uncomfortable, and often surprising realities of everyday life in the past. From ancient sex and marriage to medieval medicine, bizarre hygiene, dangerous beauty, forgotten drugs, disease, survival, work, food, and private customs, each episode reveals what life was really like for ordinary people throughout history. Calm, carefully researched narration turns even history’s strangest subjects into relaxing stories designed for sleep. Bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/theforbiddenknowledgenetwork