“Hair of the dog” is an expression referring to the consumption of more alcohol as a hangover cure. The phrase originally referred to the medieval belief that a rabid dog bite should be treated by placing hair from the same dog in the infected wound.
Guardians of the Galaxy
NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection protects the Earth from alien microbes and safeguards the universe from human contamination. You may think astronauts are unlikely vectors of disease, but consider that human migration has been the major source of epidemics throughout history. European explorers took smallpox to the New World and brought back syphilis. Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World killed about 90% of Native Americans.
The writing was on the wallpaper
Napoleon Bonaparte’s death sparked controversy. In one popular theory, he was poisoned by his wallpaper. During Napoleon’s exile in St. Helena, the French Emperor was surrounded by walls painted bright green (his favourite colour). Scheele’s green, to be precise. The artificial colourant invented by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, turned wallpaper attractively green while leaking arsenic vapours into the atmosphere. Napoleon’s body was well preserved, an effect seen in arsenic poisoning, and samples of his hair were highly contaminated with arsenic. Although his death was reported as a consequence of stomach cancer, arsenic exposure is known to increase the risk of developing such cancer. To what extent can we implicate the wallpaper in Napoleon’s death? We may never know. As Napoleon once said himself: “What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon.”
Oscar Wilde would leave less doubt regarding the role of wallpaper in his own demise. Wilde’s famous last words were: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.’
My body is temple
My body is a temple. It requires frequent animal sacrifice.
But why are the sides of my head called temples? The part of the skull, marked by the temporal bone and covered by the temporalis muscle, is called the temple. Hairs on the temple turn conspicuously grey with ageing. The names temporal and temporalis come from the Latin word tempus, which means “time”, and greying of hair marks temporal progression, i.e., the passage of time.
The internet loves drugs.
Marijuana was the first product sold online. Students from Stanford University in California sold marijuana to students at MIT in Massachusetts in 1972 before eBay or Amazon even existed.
The world’s first webcam was developed to track the inventor’s constant supply of caffeine. Researchers at the University of Cambridge wanted to keep track of the coffee pot in their main computer lab (the Trojan room). They set up a Philips camera to take pictures of the pot three times a minute. The images from the camera would then be sent to their internal computer network. It was not an official research project but merely a lazy attempt to avoid walking to the coffee pot to find it empty.
Ghosts are spineless
The first chiropractor was a Canadian who claimed to have learnt chiropractic from the ghost of a dead medical doctor.
Daniel David Palmer or D.D. Palmer founded chiropractic. He was born in Ontario before emigrating to the United States, where he practised magnetic healing.
Palmer was also a spiritualist who attended séances. During his conversations with the dead, Palmer claims to have made contact with the spirit of Dr Jim Atkinson. The deceased medical doctor, who died 50 years earlier, informed Palmer that 95% of all disease was due to “subluxations” (when one or more bones of the spine move out of position and interfere with the nervous flow). The other 5% of disease occurred when joints outside of the vertebral column were displaced.
Palmer considered his knowledge from the afterlife as a kind of religion. In 1911, he wrote that chiropractic needed a ‘religious head’ and went on to name himself alongside Christ and Mohamed.
Instead of calling himself the messiah or a prophet, he called himself a doctor. The use of this undeserved title got him thrown in jail.
How to make insulin: Just add water buffalo
Eva Saxl (and her husband Viktor) fled from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1940. Shortly after settling in Shanghai, China, she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Things got worse for her during the Japanese occupation of China in 1941 when pharmacies in Shanghai shut down. Without legal access to medication, Eva was forced to depend on black market insulin and was facing a death sentence. After one of her friends died from contaminated black market variety insulin, she took the drastic step of attempting to manufacture her own.
She got her hands on a copy of “Beckman’s Internal Medicine”, which described the methods of Dr Frederick Banting and Charles Best as they extracted insulin from the pancreases of dogs, calves, and cows in 1921. With animal parts hard to come by, the Saxls knitted and sold stockings to buy water buffalo pancreases. Despite lacking chemistry or medical background, the self-taught Eva set up a small basement laboratory and started to extract insulin from pancreases of water buffaloes. Rabbits were used to test the newly-manufactured insulin. These rabbits were starved for twenty-four hours and given insulin to look for signs of hypoglycaemic shock. Eva eventually tested the insulin on herself, and it worked.
The Saxls continued to produce and distribute insulin in the Shanghai Ghetto, helping hundreds of diabetics to survive between 1941 and 1945.
The Saxls emigrated to the United States after World War II.
People who believe in homeopathy are highly dilutional
Samuel Hahnemann was the founder of the branch of alternative medicine called homeopathy. He was born in Germany at a time when medication did more harm to patients than good. Bloodletting and imprecise–often toxic–doses of drugs left many patients worse off. Hahnemann, who was a medical doctor, became disillusioned with contemporary treatments.
During his work, he learnt of an effective treatment for malaria: quinine (derived from the bark of the cinchona tree)*. Hahnemann, who did not have malaria, took quinine in self-experimentation and experienced fever just like patients who suffered from malaria. From that observation, he reasoned that all ailments could be cured by drugs which produced similar symptoms to the disease. He concocted the homeopathic principle of ‘like cures like’.
Hahnemann then decided that drugs should be given in tiny doses. According to him, the smaller the dose, the better the effect because when you reduce the material dose, you increase its ‘spiritual’ quality. While diluting the active ingredient away, Hahnemann suggested vigorously shaking the preparation to release the ‘vital force’ of the medicine.
The orthodox medical community largely ignored Hahnemann at first. Surely, they thought, the public could not be stupid enough to buy into such kookiness. At this point, I would like to remind the reader how stupid the average person is. Now consider that half of all people are even stupider than that.
Hahnemann’s odd beliefs extended to his theories regarding the causes of diseases. At first, he blamed everything on coffee in an 1803 essay. He later changed his mind when he concluded that all illnesses are caused by ‘the itch’ (psora*). Despite psora theory, he advised homeopathic physicians not to concern themselves with causation but focus on treating symptoms instead. Homeopathic medicine, he believed, would bring the internal ‘itch’ to the surface so that it could be expelled.
Hahnemann is long dead, but his ideas remain stubbornly alive today in the form of alternative medicine. Indeed, one could argue, his approach was more ‘natural’ in some sense. Because his treatment effectively did nothing, people would either die or get better as a natural progression of the disease.
*The word malaria originates from the Latin words malus aria (through the contracted Italian mala aria) which means “bad or evil air” because it was originally thought that this disease was caused by breathing the bad air that came from the swamps. It was also called “swamp fever”.
*On a side note, psora is Latin for itch, which is where we get the word psoriasis.
One of my testicles hangs lower than the other two
The 29th Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded this week and, thanks to the painstaking work of researchers, we now know the following:
- The left testicle is warmer than the right in clothed men but cooler than the contralateral side when naked. This study was conducted on the ‘packages’ of 11 French postmen. Heated pants for men have not taken off as a contraceptive method.
- An Iranian engineer has invented a nappy-changing machine.
- A typical five-year-old child produces half a litre (500 ml) of saliva in one day.
- Romania has the dirtiest money. Romanian banknotes hold onto bacteria the longest, while Croatian money is the cleanest. MRSA sticks to the US Dollar, and both VRE and MRSA cling to the Canadian Dollar. The Euro retains E.coli, and Indian Rupees breed VRE.
- It is more pleasurable to scratch an itch on one’s ankles than the back and forearm.
Medication and Moon Rocks
When the Apollo 11 mission set off for the moon, what medicines did they pack in their first aid kit?
The command module’s medical kit contained:
60 antibiotics; 12 antiemetics; 18 painkillers; 60 decongestants; 24 antidiarrhoeals; 72 aspirins; 21 sleeping aids; 12 stimulants; three injectable pain relievers; three motion sickness injectors, one bottle of ‘first aid ointment’; two bottles of eye drops; and three decongestant nasal sprays.
The lunar landing module contained:
4 stimulants; 8 antidiarrhoeals (the lunar module did not have a toilet); 2 sleeping pills; 4 painkillers; 12 aspirins; and a bottle of eye drops.
By comparison, the International Space Station’s medicine kit contains 190 different medications along with advanced diagnostic and resuscitation equipment.
Links:
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/spaceflight/space-medicine/evolution-medical-kits-mercury-iss/
Head Over Heals 