Philadelphia Zoo

This guide to the Philadelphia Zoo starts in 1901, when animals kept dying with no explanation and surgeon Charles B. Penrose funded something no zoo had tried before: a pathology lab dedicated to cutting open every animal that died and finding out why. You'll hear what Doctor Herbert Fox found in his first two years of dissections, including a disease also spreading through the city's crowded tenements, and the handful of deaths that stumped him completely. It follows the guesswork forward into the 1930s, when researcher Ellen Corsen White turned the zoo's kitchen into a laboratory of its own.