Arrears blogging: November 14 -- Our High-Strung Planet

One of the things about the science stuff in the Harvard Classics is that it's difficult for the non-scientist to figure out how outdated it is. Take Charles Lyell, giant of geology (apparently), and stimulator of Darwin. In today's reading he makes an argument that the geologic processes we've seen are the same ones that made the geologic world we dig into and puzzle about, or at least he appears to; it's pretty dense going:

The readiest way, perhaps, of persuading the reader that we may dispense with great and sudden revolutions in the geological order of events is by showing him how a regular and uninterrupted series of changes in the animate and inanimate world must give rise to such breaks in the sequence, and such unconformability of stratified rocks, as are usually thought to imply convulsions and catastrophes.

Do we believe this anymore? I mean we believe it in the sense that we don't believe that the fossil record is the way it is because of the Flood; but I think we have a better sense of all the catastrophes our poor planet has been through -- extinctions and the planet almost freezing to death and it's current incarnation of deciding that it would rather be Venus.

In fact, in the section of this reading where Lyell starts talking about why the fossil record is so random, you get the sense that Mother Earth is one of those unstable, ever-changable moms you read about in the My-Crazy-Family genre of memoir:

Forests may be as dense and lofty as those of Brazil, and may swarm with quadrupeds, birds, and insects, yet at the end of thousands of years one layer of black mould a few inches thick may be the sole representative of those myriads of trees, leaves, flowers, and fruits, those innumerable bones and skeletons of birds, quadrupeds, and reptiles, which tenanted the fertile region....

The sediment of the Rhone, for example, thrown into the Lake of Geneva, is now conveyed to a spot a mile and a half distant from that where it accumulated in the tenth century, and six miles from the point where the delta began originally to form. We may look forward to the period when this lake will be filled up, and then the distribution of the transported matter will be suddenly altered...

Rocks before concealed may have become exposed by denudation; volcanos may have burst out and covered the surface with scoriæ and lava...

Of course, being a Californian, I know that the earth cannot be propitiated. Geologists, taking the long view as they do, seem to be fairly cool about this. Maybe natural philosophy is the best one after all.

October 30: Puny humans, revisited

You people all look like ants...to the rocks! (In that case, admittedly, the photo should be shot from below.)

One way to sum up what I've learned this year is that the human heart never changes but the human brain is always learning. And how mind-blowing it must have been once Darwin's message was taken to heart. Before that, though, there was Charles Lyell's similarly mind-blowing revelations that the earth is a lot older than you think it is, and, in fact, doesn't particularly need you at all:

In the vast interval of time which may really have elapsed between the results of operations thus compared, the physical condition of the earth may, by slow and insensible modifications, have become entirely altered; one or more races of organic beings may have passed away, and yet have left behind, in the particular region under contemplation, no trace of their existence.

Not only might you and all your ilk pass away without anyone caring, but you (and most, if not all, of your ilk) aren't particularly good at figuring out what happened to you.

Even when they conceded that the earth had been peopled with animate beings at an earlier period than was at first supposed, they had no conception that the quantity of time bore so great a proportion to the historical era as is now generally conceded. How fatal every error as to the quantity of time must prove to the introduction of rational views concerning the state of things in former ages, may be conceived by supposing the annals of the civil and military transactions of a great nation to be perused under the impression that they occurred in a period of one hundred instead of two thousand years. Such a portion of history would immediately assume the air of a romance; the events would seem devoid of credibility, and inconsistent with the present course of human affairs....He who should study the monuments of the natural world under the influence of a similar infatuation, must draw a no less exaggerated picture of the energy and violence of causes, and must experience the same insurmountable difficulty in reconciling the former and present state of nature.

In other words, most all y'all are idiots.

I imagine that if we were fully sensible to the huge indifference of the earth we'd never get out of bed; so there's probably something to be said for our default setting denying this fact. Additionally, when we make man the measure of all things, it saves us many trips to Home Depot.

photo from flickr user Kaptain Kobold used with a Creative Commons license.

October 16: Not much to say

for once. And I have actual work reading to do (some producer has bought a book and wants to adapt it). So here are the links to Hippocrates' Oath and Law and you can talk among yourself. This is a good general rule of thumb, though:

But inexperience is a bad treasure, and a bad fund to those who possess it, whether in opinion or reality, being devoid of self-reliance and contentedness, and the nurse both of timidity and audacity. For timidity betrays a want of powers, and audacity a lack of skill.

I forget that recklessness is a part of inexperience, but, given some of the spec scripts I've read (and used to write), I really shouldn't.

As Hippocrates himself would say, Be Well.

September 28: This will be short

This will be short.

This will be short because I'm a dumb humanities major and I can't follow Pasteur's lecture on germ theory, with sentences like:

Whilst the microbe-producing pus, when acting alone, gives rise to a thick pus, white, or sometimes with a yellow or bluish tint, not putrid, diffused or enclosed by the so-called pyogenic membrane, not dangerous, especially if localized in cellular tissue, ready, if the expression may be used for rapid resorption; on the other hand the smallest abscess produced by this organism when associated with the septic vibrio takes on a thick gangrenous appearance, putrid, greenish and infiltrating the softened tissues.

I do know that it's gross.

This will be short because, other than wondering why this reading is later than the reading from Lister, who based his discovery on Pasteur's after all, I don't have anything else to say (also, this is a good reading for fans of the word "putrid," which who isn't?)

This will also be short because it is all glorious and temperate and Californian outside, with nice autumn light (I wish the Lawrence Weschler article "L.A. Glows" were online, because I could link to it), and I'm going out to enjoy it.

This will be short because I deserve to write a short one. Dammit.

And, finally, this will be short because I am short.

Photo by Flickr user JenWaller used with a Creative Commons license.

August 19: 16th-century dudes part III: Parè

Buffoon -- prescription strength.

This, too, is the face of the 16th-century:

I found him in a high fever, his eyes deep sunken, with a moribund and yellowish face, his tongue dry and parched, and the whole body much wasted and lean, the voice low as of a man very near death: and I found his thigh much inflamed, suppurating, and ulcerated, discharging a greenish and very offensive sanies. I probed it with a silver probe, wherewith I found a large cavity in the middle of the thigh, and others round the knee, sanious and cuniculate: also several scales of bone, some loose, others not. The leg was greatly swelled, and imbued with a pituitous humor … and bent and drawn back. There was a large bedsore...

We're reading the journal of ace French surgeon Ambroise Parè, who's been summoned to treat a nobleman wounded after one of the interminable wars of religion that makes humanity so delightful. (A non-nobleman, of course, probably would have been dead already.)

I must ask the reader to click on the link for once, because the long paragraph where Parè lays out his plan of attack to cure the Marquis d'Auret is like a "House," where House is confined only to home remedies, and should be read in its entirety. All right, here's an excerpt:

Moreover, we must allow him to smell flowers of henbane and water-lilies, bruised with vinegar and rose-water, with a little camphor, all wrapped in a handkerchief, to be held some time to his nose...

You can see why they call it the medical "art." Later, after the Marquis is recovering, Parè prescribes a buffoon to keep his spirits up. That seems French to me, somehow. Also this:

And the peasants in the villages through which we passed, knowing it was M. le Marquis, fought who should carry him, and would have us drink with them; but it was only beer. Yet I believe if they had possessed wine, even hippocras, they would have given it to us with a will.

"Only beer." Only beer. I begin to see the passions of the wars of religion.

July 27: The Halls of Medicine, or, Against Nostalgia

"The Gross Clinic"! Eakins! Culture up your Sunday!

I think you need to be a bit of an antiquarian for a project like this to be appealing, although my suspicion is that the culture trapped between the covers of the Classics was, in 1908 (or even 1930, which is my edition), a usable past and not just a curio like it is now. There have been, like, two or three modernities since then, and so an interest in Plutarch et al. is now as eccentric as a straw boater.

But of course drinking in a love of the past can quickly turn into a bender of nostalgia, which has always seemed to me to be a decadent and narcotic emotion. Today's reading, Joseph Lister on the antiseptic principle brings us a little cure for it:

I left behind me in Glasgow a boy, thirteen years of age, who, between three and four weeks previously, met with a most severe injury to the left arm, which he got entangled in a machine at a fair. There was a wound six inches long and three inches broad, and the skin was very extensively undermined beyond its limits, while the soft parts were generally so much lacerated that a pair of dressing forceps introduced at the wound and pushed directly inwards appeared beneath the skin at the opposite aspect of the limb.

The 1867-era language (this is an extremely polysyllabic selection today) helpfully puts a little bit of a screen over how gross that is. Or this:

In April last, a volunteer was discharging a rifle when it burst, and blew back the thumb with its metacarpal bone, so that it could be bent back as on a hinge at the trapezial joint, which had evidently been opened, while all the soft parts between the metacarpal bones of the thumb and forefinger were torn through. I need not insist before my present audience on the ugly character of such an injury.

No, you needn't. Lister's point is, before is invention of antiseptic bandaging, these people would have been prime suspects for raging infections, which, in a hospital, have a cascading effect:

Previously to its [antiseptics] introduction the two large wards in which most of my cases of accident and of operation are treated were among the unhealthiest in the whole surgical division of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, in consequence apparently of those wards being unfavorably placed with reference to the supply of fresh air; and I have felt ashamed when recording the results of my practice, to have so often to allude to hospital gangrene or pyæmia.

"Hospital gangrene" -- so common it had a name. (And, in fact, hospitals are still dandy places to catch infections, but that's a consequence of our eternal arms race against tiny microbes. At least hospitals aren't miasmas, as before.)

Out of which I draw the following two obvious conclusions: 1) While some things never change in human affairs, some things do. Perhaps infection once seemed as inevitable as nuclear weapons do today. It doesn't do to be to pessimistic. 2) Not to get too Julian Simon, but Lister was inspired by Pasteur's work, and, having invented away to keep people around longer, no doubt helped springboard more useful inventions. In some ways the cause of our current environmental fix -- billions and billions of people around -- could also be the solution to it, if the billions are sufficiently inventive.

That's a little more portentous than I like to be, so here's a picture of a straw boater:

June 3: I think I remember how this works

Not William Harvey.

The first words I come back to in my green-bound book are:

WHEN I first gave my mind to vivisections...

Vivisections? Why didn't you say so? William Harvey talks about the circulation of the blood today. I'm still tired from my trip so I'm just going to use bullet points as my medium-of-opining:

• Granted, I have a most interesting man in the world level thirst for 17th-century prose, but I really think they should let some of the schoolkids read this. I just have a feeling they'd like hearing about Harvey's love of getting his hands dirty:

Experimenting with a pigeon upon one occasion, after the heart had wholly ceased to pulsate, and the auricles too had become motionless, I kept my finger wetted with saliva and warm for a short time upon the heart, and observed that under the influence of this fomentation it recovered new strength and life...

(Emphasis added in the hope that you will go, "Ew! Gross!") I think what I like about it is the DIY culture of it. No grant proposals in those days -- all you need is some translucent shrimp:

this creature, placed in a little water, has frequently afforded myself and particular friends an opportunity of observing the motions of the heart with the greatest distinctness, the external parts of the body presenting no obstacle to our view, but the heart being perceived as though it had been seen through a window.

I like the "particular friends." You don't ask just anybody over for shrimp-viewing.

• I had no idea when Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood. (SPOILER: this treatise was published in 1628.) I think I had him confused with Edward Jenner, the vaccination dude. And Joseph Lister is someone else entirely. I am pretty sure about King Gillette and the safety razor, however.

• Which says to me that the history of science ought to be better taught, i.e. taught at all. Of course to me, who likes history better than science, that seems interesting. Probably to most students it would seem like making broccoli seem interesting by mixing it with mashed beets.

• And finally, do not read this passage without brushing up on what auricles are and what they do. Harvey assumes that you are a keen student of auricles.

UPDATE:  In an e-mail my father adds:   "I am reminded of all the gruesome , but what must have been interesting, experiments conducted regularly that Pepys attends at Gresham College e.g. giving a dog a potion made from tobacco to see its reaction -- I think it died. The curiosity and investigative factors commingling. Later when there was a universal fascination with electricity sparked by Franklin's experiments and observations, I remember reading about someone suspending an orphan by the living room chandelier to demonstrate to the assembled company after dinner some amazing property of electricity and passing a electrical charge throught the child. I think the orphan was not immediately harmed but no one was around to assay the long term effects."

May 14: Tumours on the Axilla and other delightful tales of vaccination

You know what our problem is -- not just us a blog-readers, we have our own burdens, but us as a species? Edward Jenner knows:

THE DEVIATION of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indulgences of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarised himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates.

To get the obligatory stuff out of the way: "familiarization with animals." Heh heh.

Not that I agree that, you know, yogurt is such an "indulgence of luxury," but you get the point. All civilization, to Jenner, is in some sense unnatural. (Note the 1798-style atheism where he questions whether the beasts of the field were intended for us.) I happen to agree, which is why I'm always skeptical of the anti-modern idea that there is some order of life X (where our world is not equal to X) that is "natural." It's tempting, I know, but you see a lot more people leaving their simple farms for modern fleshpots than the other way round; Mexico's not the one with the immigration problem. Not that McDonald's is the peak of civilization either, of course -- but when you have so many people alive on the earth as we do, some are going to try to improve Concentrated Solar Power and others are going to open McDonaldses.

And why do we have so many people on the earth? Because of Edward Jenner and his cockamamie notion of vaccination. Here he tells his own story, and its interesting to note that the first part of his hypothesis was all wrong, as a footnote tells us ("Jenner’s conclusion that “grease” and cow-pox were the same disease has since been proved erroneous"). So great oaks from invalid acorns grow.

What's interesting in this excerpt is Jenner's thoroughness. We are given twelve (out of twenty-three) case studies, each trying to prove a different facet of Jenner's hypothesis -- want a guy who had cowpox 53 years before Jenner tries to infect him with smallpox? Try Case III.
Want to know if smallpox makes you immune from cowpox? Try Case VII. Etc.

The other thing of note, of course, is how gross people must have looked in the old days:

William Stinchcomb was a fellow servant with Nichols at Mr. Bromedge’s farm at the time the cattle had the cow-pox, and he was, unfortunately, infected by them. His left hand was very severely affected with several corroding ulcers, and a tumour of considerable size appeared in the axilla of that side. His right hand had only one small tumour upon it, and no tumour discovered itself in the corresponding axilla.

You don't see guys like that on The Tudors, I'll tell you that much.

PS -- I also note that this is the first time I've cracked Volume 38 ("Harvey Jenner Lister Pasteur"), yet I've had to read Burns four bloody times already. It's a wonder scientists don't blow up the world out of spite.