Purely for medicinal purposes...

 In my youth, my parents always slept in on weekends, while I was required to rise early, to fetch in the paper, I was allowed to read it, and on Sundays, I burrowed into Leon Gellert's humorous column in the Sunday Herald, and learned some unusual phrases. With Gellert, any spirituous consumption always featured (for medicinal purposes only), and I made that phrase my own, no doubt confusing a few adults, given that I did this from age six.

Right now, I am revising a history of quack medicine called Not Your Usual Treatments, and the phrase bobbed up, unbidden, as I waded into this little historical vignette:

William Hogarth, ‘Gin Lane’, showing the harm alcohol could do. Top left, a woman is pawning her possessions so she can buy gin.

A recipe for curing swetty feet. One ounce of salts desolved in a pint of boyling water, then add the quantity of gin, for to make it pleasant to drink, then drink a wine glass full when required.

According to my notes, that advice came from the notebook of Police Constable Lewis Jones, who was stationed at Gorseinon, near Swansea in Wales in 1859. Personally, I would have left out the salts, and saved time by not diluting the gin. Some medical experts felt that alcohol was bad, others swore by it.

Frederic Skey (1798–1872) was a proud surgeon and a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1867, he published some lectures to students in which he urged the use of alcohol, in moderation, though his idea of moderation would probably take his patients to a point where they would not be legally allowed to drive in most jurisdictions.

… I am of opinion that for the purposes of health three or four glasses of wine is the maximum quantity that, taken at any one time, can be serviceable. All beyond this, answers the purpose of luxury and nothing more, and is more or less injurious.”*

A couple of pages later, he expressed his pleasure at the fourfold increase in the consumption of wine and brandy in the London Hospitals over the previous forty years. He told how, in 1848, the treasurer at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital commented on the quantity of wine Skey ordered for his patients. It was too great an expense, the treasurer complained, adding that they bought three pipes of wine each year.

Skey reacted as only an old-style alpha male God-surgeon would. He replied sternly that he hoped to raise the level to 13 pipes a year, and in 1867 he reported with some glee that a new treasurer had recently confirmed that they had reached that level. Skey then offered a case study and an example.

A man with hydrothorax had a pulse of 130 after having six pints (about 3 litres) of fluid drained from his chest. Skey prescribed one ounce of brandy in the same amount of water, every three hours, and the following day, the man’s pulse was 90. He concluded triumphantly that “If this treatment was not sound, it ought to have proved fatal.”

He cited a former colleague, the late Mr Jones of Jersey, who had cut off 25 diseased joints without losing a single patient. Jones always gave each patient on whom he operated at least a pint of port wine on each of the two days following the operation, a practice he adopted after seeing Skey’s success with similar treatments.

It is not a coincidence that many of Australia’s earliest vineyards were established by doctors, Dr Hardy, Dr Lindeman and Dr Penfold among them. Mind you, plenty of people argued that used the right way, water could achieve useful cures as well.

Most doctors favoured alcoholic drinks as solvents and “vehicles”, a word we have already seen used by Robert Boyle to mean something which carries the dose. One example is chalybeate wine, which a 1747 recipe says is made by adding four ounces of iron filings, a half ounce each of cinnamon and mace to two quarts of Rhenish wine. This was left to stand for a month and used as appropriate.

Colin Mackenzie suggested that a pregnant patient suffering hysteria or fainting should be placed in a horizontal position in the open air, and when she recovers a little, be given a glass of wine in a little cold water.

One big alcohol problem in the 19th and 20th centuries was that “tonics” were on sale, mainly to women, and these were quite alcoholic. More importantly, they carried no warnings about the alcohol content, nor indeed, was there anything about any other drugs that might be in the bottle.

In 1913, a British doctor was reported as saying that a number of “… cases of inebriety owed their origin to indulgence in some form or other of medicated or tonic wine.” Here is an example from Women's Weekly, of an advertisement for an Australian tonic, which was on sale at least into the 1960s: depending on the source you consult, Wincarnis contained somewhere between 14% and 17% alcohol.

“Will my appetite never return?” Women whose daily housework takes heavy toll of their energy should eat well and should enjoy their food. Only in this way can vital good health be maintained — health to complete the hardest day’s work without tiring, health to enjoy leisure hours. By enriching the blood and renewing tissues you will fully regain your appetite. No more pleasant or more effective way to “tone” up your system, to induce sleep and to make work a pleasure than by relying on the curative properties of Wincarnis. Get a bottle from your chemist today. Prices: 4/3 pints, 7/3 quarts. Over 20,000 Recommendations from Medical men. WINCARNIS must do you good! **

——————————————————

*    “… I am of opinion that for the purposes of health three or four glasses…”, F. C. Skey, FRS, Hysteria: remote causes of disease in general treatment by tonic agency, 1867, 15.

**    “Women whose daily housework takes heavy toll of their energy should eat well…”, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 18 May 1935, 46S, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/51757935   

They saw the difference.

My recent silence has been because I have been selecting a wide range, 140,000 words to complete this book. My cover illustration, if you can't work it out, is one of Charles Babbage's difference engines. (My covers never end up going on the book, but because I've done a passable job, the designers make an effort.)

I'm fairly happy with the text, and it's being shared with friends this weekend. In a week or so, I will start pitching it to a couple of print publishers, getting in before Christmas. A social history involves looking mainly at why people did things, but adding something of how they did it. 

Why is this necessary? Because the fun bits are the background gossip, like my story of how Darwin was inspired by a false belief and the way Becquerel found radioactivity because the weather was bad. Again, most of us have no idea what Heinrich Hertz was up to when he discovered radio waves, or what Balmer was doing when he explained the lines that show up in the spectrum.

I mentioned Balmer six years back, when I wrote about the fraudulent work of Dulong and Petit, but I never dealt with it here, so here's a taster for you.

Balmer’s lines

Do you remember the spectroscope/spectrograph in chapter 1? By the mid-1880s, spectroscopy had come a long way. The lines in the absorption spectrum had been pinned down, one by one, so the exact wavelengths of the hydrogen lines could be identified. That left a major puzzle: why did the lines appear where they did in the spectrum?

Johann Balmer set out to make sense of a jumble of numbers. In this, he was like Bode, or Dulong and Petit with their mathematical rule tying specific heats and atomic weights together, or even Maria Goeppert Mayer (next), who found certain ‘magic numbers’ of neutrons and protons that were associated with very stable nuclei.

In the real world, laws do not leap out at you. They usually start when somebody goes data-snooping. That means making lists of measurements, and poring over them to see if there is any pattern to offer a hint about a rule lying beneath the measurements.

Balmer found a relationship linking four of the hydrogen lines in the visible spectrum. He decided there should be another hydrogen line, right on the edge of the ultraviolet, a line of which he had no knowledge. He checked, and the line was there, as predicted, so Balmer’s rather odd little equation was confirmed. Score one point to data-snooping.

Balmer had some trouble reconciling the values reported by different observers. With hindsight, probably the observers were looking at stars with differing degrees of red shift? As we will see later, the red shift was important, once people detected it and chased it down. To find his formula, Balmer found a common factor, deduced from Anders Ångström’s measurements on the first four hydrogen lines, which gave him a value, b = 3645.6x10^-7mm. Here, in translation, is his explanation of how b fits in:

The wavelengths of the first four hydrogen lines are obtained by multiplying the fundamental number b = 3645.6 in succession by the coefficients 9/5; 4/3; 25/21 and 9/8. At first sight, these coefficients do not form a regular series; but if we multiply the numerical values in the second and the fourth numbers by 4, we see a consistent regularity appearing [the series becomes 9/5, 16/12, 25/21, 36/32] and the coefficients have for numerators the numbers 3², 4², 5² and 6² and for denominators a number that is less by 4 [than the numerator].

For several reasons it seems to me probable that the four coefficients which have just been given belong to two series, so that the second series includes again the terms of the first series; and so I am able to present the formula for the coefficients in the more general form m²/(m²-n²), in which m and n are whole numbers.

That is to say, the wavelengths of the hydrogen lines are given by l=b(m²/(m²-n²)). Now back to Balmer:

For n=1 we obtain the series 4/3, 9/8, 16/15, 25/24 etc., for n=2 the series 9/5, 16/12, 25/21, 36/32, 49/45, 64/60, 81/77, 100/96 etc. In this second series the second term is already in the first series but in a reduced form.

Balmer compared the first four hydrogen lines as measured by Ångström with calculated values. In Ångström units (10^–10 metres), the values for the lines are:

Alpha line: Balmer: 6562.08, Ångström: 6562.10, difference: +0.02

Beta line: Balmer: 4860.8, Ångström: 4860.74, difference: -0.06

Gamma line: Balmer: 4340, Ångström: 4340.1, difference: +0.1

Delta line: Balmer: 4101.3, Ångström: 4101.2, difference: -0.1

Clearly, the model is a very close fit to reality, but Balmer went looking for his fifth hydrogen line: this was the acid test. He calculated that it would be at 49/45x3645.6 = 3969.65 Ångström units.

I knew nothing of such a fifth line, which must lie within the visible part of the spectrum...and I was compelled to assume that the temperature relations were not favourable to the development of this line or that the formula was not generally applicable.

On reference to Professor Hagenbach he informed me that many more hydrogen lines are known which have been measured by Vogel and by Huggins...[and] he was kind enough to make a comparison of the wave lengths thus determined...

There was something going on here. This sort of close fit has to have a reason behind it, but for the time being, all people could do was look out for a cause.

In time, they would find it, and so did Maria Goeppert-Mayer, but while that's what comes next in the book.

 

The unsung heroes of SARS

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it...

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

On February 28, 2003, the Vietnam French Hospital of Hanoi, a private hospital of about 60 beds, contacted the Hanoi office of the World Health Organisation. They reported a patient with an unusual influenza-like virus, and hospital officials suspected an avian influenza virus.

They asked if someone from the WHO could take a closer look at the case, and Dr Carlo Urbani, a specialist in infectious diseases, answered that call. In 1999, Dr Urbani was president of MSF-Italy (the Italian branch of Médecins sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, usually referred to as MSF) and he was a member of the delegation in Oslo, Norway that accepted the Nobel Peace Prize that year.

Urbani’s courage in dealing with the new disease seems not to have been given proper recognition, but I would like to list him here as one of the heroes of 21^st century medicine.

The patient he was asked to look at was the first case of the first recorded outbreak of SARS, and due to the actions that were taken by the MSF volunteers, quite deliberately and selflessly, Urbani and several other unnamed health workers died.

That was the cost: the benefit was that the outbreak in Vietnam was the first to be brought under control, after just 63 cases and five deaths.

Urbani concluded that the small private hospital was facing something unusual, and for the next several days, he worked at the hospital, documenting findings, arranging for samples to be sent for testing, and reinforcing infection control.

The hospital established an isolation ward that was kept under guard. Urbani worked directly with the medical staff of the hospital to strengthen morale and to keep fear in check as SARS revealed itself to be both contagious and virulent. Of the first 60 patients with SARS, more than half were health care workers.

The heroism came when many of the staff members made the difficult decision to quarantine themselves. To protect their families and community, some health care workers put themselves at great personal risk, deciding to sleep in the hospital and effectively sealing themselves off from the outside world.

In some ways, say MSF people who briefed me on this at the time, the SARS outbreak in Hanoi is a story of what can go right, of public health coming before politics. First-line health care providers quickly alerted the WHO of an atypical pneumonia.

Dr Urbani recognised the severity of the public health threat. Immediately, the WHO requested an emergency meeting on Sunday, March 9, with the Vice Minister of Health of Vietnam.

By March 19, a team of MSF workers was in place. Additional specialists from the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) arrived on the scene, and MSF provided staff members as well as infection-control suits and kits that were previously stocked for outbreaks of Ebola virus.

On March 11, Urbani began to experience symptoms during a flight to Bangkok. On his arrival, he told a colleague from the CDC who greeted him at the airport not to approach him.

They sat down at a distance from each other, in silence, waiting for an ambulance to assemble protective gear. He fought SARS for the next 18 days in a makeshift isolation room in a Bangkok hospital. Carlo Urbani died on March 29, 2003.

His decisive and determined intervention bought precious time and saved lives. Although he would be gratified that so much was accomplished to beat SARS in such a short time, he would certainly point out that the other diseases he worked with—such as the human immunodeficiency virus and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, which kill millions of people each year—deserve to be treated with similar urgency. Such a man would undoubtedly have pointed to his colleagues who also died in the battle.

The MSF is a volunteer organisation, but needs funds to operate, and welcomes donations. Yes, that’s a hint.

The SARS case

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it...

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

This news story was mostly written in the first few weeks of the SARS outbreak. I have left it as I wrote it, at a time when we had no idea what the future would be. It was a scary time.

SARS is the abbreviation for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. It is still a comparatively new disease in human beings, first recognised in late February, 2003, in Hanoi, Vietnam. It is caused by a coronavirus, either one that arose from several other coronaviruses recombining, or more probably, an unknown coronavirus that made the transfer from an animal host to humans.

The first recorded case was in November 2002, when a businessman from the city of Foshan in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong (formerly Canton) may have been the first victim. Guangdong Province, an agricultural area with a population of 75 million, has thousands of farms with large and small animals, a subtropical climate, and rainfall of about 2 metres (80 inches) per year.

(The problem was later shown not to involve farm animals. It took seven years to show, in 2013, that initial suspicions were correct: the SARS virus transferred to humans from horseshoe bats.)

A physician from Guangdong Province became ill in February 2003 while staying on the ninth floor of a hotel in Hong Kong. Twelve guests later became infected, including at least seven who stayed in rooms on the ninth floor. These hotel guests subsequently became the index patients who transported the disease to Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, Ireland, and the United States.

The severity of the disease, combined with its rapid spread along international air-travel routes, prompted WHO to set up a network of scientists from 11 laboratories around the world to try to identify the causal agent and develop a diagnostic test.

In a remarkably short period of time, the coronavirus was identified as the likely cause of SARS, and within days, a number of the strains of the virus had been sequenced, a major triumph for international collaboration in a world increasingly riven by violence and war.

Results of work in the different labs were shared in real time via a secure web site, on which microscopy pictures, protocols for testing, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primer sequences were also posted. Findings were discussed in daily teleconferences. Progress was aided through sharing between laboratories of samples and test materials.

The network identified a coronavirus, consistently detected in samples of SARS patients from several countries, and conclusively named it as the causative agent of SARS. They added that the strain was unlike any other known member of the genus coronavirus.

The main observation from the sequencing was that the virus was not mutating rapidly. That was taken to indicate that the human immune system was having little effect on the virus, as any immune challenge would favour more rapid selection of mutant forms.

Coronaviruses are found everywhere and cause illness in many animals, including pigs, cattle, dogs, cats, and chickens. They have been associated with upper respiratory infections and sometimes pneumonia in humans.

Genetic changes occur frequently, and the closeness of humans to animals in rural southern China may have caused a recombinant animal virus to become an accidental tourist, crossing species to humans and leading to an epidemic among highly mobile and susceptible populations globally. Different viruses in this group cause devastating epizootics (animal epidemics) of respiratory or enteric (gut) disease in livestock and poultry.

Comparison of isolates of the coronavirus from infected patients and from the natural host could reveal how the virus jumped to humans. If they could find how it jumped to humans, researchers would have tried to discover if the coronavirus had an original host. If there was no animal reservoir, there would be a better chance of eliminating the virus from humans, but in either case, it was important to identify the source.

In May 2003, it appeared that the probable reservoir was civet cats, bred and sold for eating, a delicacy in southern China. This might have explained the lower mortality rates in China, if many of the potential victims have already encountered a similar virus.

By late May, reports were coming in that some of those engaged in breeding civet cats appeared to have antibodies to a SARS-like coronavirus, but there were odd inconsistencies in the official data released by Chinese authorities.

It is possible that the Chinese authorities may have been lying, engaging in a massive cover-up. As the disease outbreak fizzled out, Singapore and Canada had the disease under control, showing that it could be blocked and stopped, but cases were multiplying in Taiwan, which was showing a mortality pattern more like that seen in Canada (16.4%), Hong Kong (15%) and Singapore (14.1%).

By May 22, Taiwan’s mortality rate was 12.4%, and this was expected to increase, because there was a ‘lag effect’ as the outbreak was controlled. In the final lag phase, old cases are still dying while no new cases are added. One of the puzzles was the low mortality reported from China other than Taiwan, where the figure, by May 22, 2003, had only reached 5.7%, up from 4.8% in mid-May.

We will never know, now, but significantly for the cover-up advocates, in China alone, there was no final upward jump in mortality as the disease fizzled out. The easiest explanation is that somebody was fabricating the statistics.

*

So how does SARS spread? Large-droplet transmission seems to be important in the spread of SARS, suggesting a requirement for intimate contact with a patient. Against that, the unusually rapid transmission suggests that airborne transmission through droplet nuclei, less than 10 micrometres in diameter can occur.

Such droplet nuclei, which are key in the transmission of influenza, measles, and tuberculosis, allow the organisms to reach the alveoli of the lungs of contacts directly. Alternatively, viral contamination of the water supply or contacted surfaces might be important in some places.

The evidence is that close contact is generally required for infection to take place. As one expert put it, “You only get it by coming face to face with someone with the virus. You won’t pick it up in the street.”

The infection rates per capita were far lower, for example, than for normal influenza, and there was an age bias in the death figures. The fatality rate was 13.2% for patients under the age of 60, but as high as 43.3% for those over the age of 60, according to an article in The Lancet at the time.

So next time there's an outbreak of anything in China, be worried.

Fast transport and slow deaths

The factors that influence the spread and/or limitations of disease can often be quite unexpected, and in some cases, the causes remain unknown.

The delivery of tea to England by fast ship may have kept the English drinking tea, which constrained them to boil their water to make the tea, which killed the bacteria that caused cholera and other diseases. On the other hand, fast transport also caused some curious outbreaks of disease.

Airport malaria is a known phenomenon today, where people close to airports may very occasionally catch malaria when an infected mosquito emerges from an aircraft and draws blood from somebody before it dies. That sort of thing was far less likely in the days of steamships, but not impossible, even with a sailing ship like the barque Hecla, which once carried yellow fever to Wales.

Hecla reached Swansea with a cargo of copper ore from Cuba on 8 September 1865, and did not raise the quarantine flag. The ship had left one crewman, dead of yellow fever in Cuba, and she was under-crewed due to three deaths at sea that were put down to yellow fever.

Another sailor, James Saunders, died just after landing, and doctors judged this to be yellow fever, so his body was immediately buried in a tar sheet, his house was cleared and disinfected with lime wash and chloride of lime, and his clothing and bedding were destroyed.

Nobody had any idea that the disease was spread by mosquito bites, so the ship’s water supply, almost certainly complete with mosquitoes in all stages of life, was left unexamined. The ship’s owners resisted moving the ship, and while it was disinfected, though it later moved after locals intimated that it might mysteriously catch fire. This removal would have had no effect on the mosquitoes, though the fire would have curtailed the outbreak.

Before the outbreak ran its course, at least 27 people fell ill with yellow fever and 15 of them died, while there were a few other “possibles”, but how did a tropical disease reach Wales? Yellow fever and its mosquitoes had travelled from Africa to the Caribbean with African slave ships and been established there, but non-tropical Wales was safe from any permanent threat from yellow fever, back then.

The ship travelled in warm weather that let the mosquitoes survive, and it arrived in warm weather, which allowed the mosquitoes to spread, briefly into parts of Swansea. Still, in these days of global warming and climate change, who can say what the future might hold?

*

In China in the late 19th century, political unrest was common, but new technology brought hope to some of China’s urban poor. They could take steam trains into rural areas to shoot, kill and skin ground rodents, and take the skins back to the city for sale. In an age before plastics, skins were always saleable, and if the local people had silly traditions, like not shooting a sick-looking animal, the city slickers saw those animals as fair and easy game.

Bubonic plague is a disease that harms rodents, fleas and humans. A flea bites an infected mammal, gets an infection that blocks its bloodsucking apparatus, so the next time it tries to feed, some of the plague bacteria “blow back” into the new food source, and so the disease spreads. When a host dies, fleas move to any other warm body—like the person skinning the old rodent host.

The hunters caught fast steam trains back to the city before they fell ill, and from there, bubonic plague infected rats in the city, either from the hunters or from fleas that were still in the fur of the skins. Over time, some of the rats found their way onto fast steam ships that went around the world from Chinese ports.

In earlier times, plague usually killed the rats before sailing ships reached port, but steamships bustled from port to port, and sooner or later, some of the rats made it to the other end, found their way ashore to die, and shared their fleas and their ills. Indian ports were hit, along with those in Sydney, San Francisco, Madagascar, Paraguay, South Africa and more. In every port, people died because of fast ships.

*

There is fairly wide agreement that the spread of HIV was brought about by long-haul truck drivers in Africa making use of prostitutes along the way, followed by an entry into the more general population of the western world, thanks to jet aircraft. The world got lucky with SARS, as my next two posts will explain.

Setting a thief to catch a thief

I've been seriously busy, so here's a piece I prepared earlier.

When I was overseas ten years back, I had fun, but I was also working — gathering information for writing projects in hand, but I ended up in London the day that England was eliminated from the World Cup. It was a hot day, I was in Earl's Court in a pub with a stuffed kangaroo, and firm intentions of making the British Library on the Monday. I never made it, but that was another story.

Sunday, though, was a different matter, and I met both my goals. I had some unfinished business in Chelsea, left over from 1993. Then, I had failed to see inside Carlyle's house or the Chelsea Physic Garden, though I found a rare statue of William Huskisson, the first man to be run over by a train. So I went back to Chelsea, knowing that this time I would see all three — if I could find Mr. Huskisson.

I took off across-country (as much as one can in built-up London), passing Chelsea Pensioners and other curiosities, following a set of signs to Carlyle's House that were surely created to confuse potential German paratroopers in World War II, but I eventually got there, just after they opened.

I told the lady I wanted to see the chair, assuming she would know that I mean the one that Jenny sat in before jumping up to kiss Leigh Hunt. If that means nothing, it's a reference to a poem that Leigh Hunt wrote:

Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.

Apparently only a few people recall the story, but the guardian knew it, and we admired the chair, which regrettably, I could not photograph, due to some grotesque administrator with mad notions about copyright. I looked around, recalled the venomous comment that "it was good of God to allow Mr and Mrs Carlyle to marry, thus making only two people unhappy, not four" and chided myself for recollecting it. The stern guardian announced that she had to go upstairs for a minute or two, and would I keep an eye on things? I assented, but what I did or did not do immediately after is not about to be disclosed.

Then I took me off to the Chelsea Physic Garden (http://www.chelseaphysicgarden.co.uk/) which was created as a place where doctors and others (physicians as they were dubbed then) could come to see the plants that were of known or assumed medicinal value.

After hearing an interview that Robyn Williams played on ABC Radio National's The Science Show, I knew that there were some beds of poisonous plants, and I had a professional interest in those.

Poison is a funny thing: people are scared of it, and when I say I am interested in poisons, people look at me oddly. I feel a bit like Jo in Little Women, whose enthusiasms led her into deep waters:

"Eager to find material for stories, and bent on making them original in plot, if not masterly in execution, she searched newspapers for accidents, incidents, and crimes. She excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons."

Jo, of course, is a slightly disguised Louisa May Alcott, so it probably happened just as she said — I can certainly believe it. But like Jo, my interest is benign, because I am interested in the good poisons, like antibiotics, disinfectants and other medical objects that are more lethal to the bugs than they are to us.

So I rolled into the garden, looked at the map, and asked where the poison beds were. I got one of those looks, until I explained that I am an Australian botanist who writes (among other things) about poisons. The guide took her finger off the panic button, and showed me where to find the carefully unmarked bed.

It was pretty standard fare, but I went away satisfied, having seen a couple of plants in the flesh, as it were, that I had only known from illustrations, as well as nodding to quite a few old friends.

The point (which I always get to) was that I know and knew that poisons are used to fight many things. I know also that sterile maggots are sometimes used to clean up necrotic tissue around wounds, and that we use leeches still. I have even heard of people taking worms to treat Crohn's disease, and I know about a 19th century man who used bacteria against cancer — I will get to him some other time.

Most of the 19th century pharmacopoeia contained mercury, arsenic or some other virulent element, and even today, most medicines are dangerous in large doses (mind you, 200 kg of potatoes or a hundred cups of coffee will also kill you — they key is the dosage).

But people taking bacteria to eliminate parasites sounded like a new one, so when I heard about this, I went burrowing. And found the lead was a bit wrong. My informant had also missed that the bacterium is one that is well-known around the traps, because a toxin from the bacterium is used in many pest-resistant plant species, like GM cotton.

According to a report a few years back in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (I never throw old notes away), bacterial proteins were being used to counteract hookworm. A protein produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, given orally to laboratory hamsters infected with hookworms was as effective in eliminating the parasites, curing anaemia and restoring weight gain in the hamsters as one of the drugs currently recommended to treat infections in humans.

The protein, called Cry5B, targets both developing, or larval, stages and adult parasites, as well as impairs the excretion of eggs by female worms, said the researchers at Yale and UCSD.

I call it nifty.

There may be a small delay in transmission

I went to the ophthalmologist to say I needed new glasses, because I could no longer read 4-point type, not even in bright sun.

Now I know enough physics to know that the reason for using bright light is that the pupils constrict, and this makes focusing easier.

Given that, I should have realised that this was not just a matter of new spectacles. He knew what the problem was, of course, because he is used to seeing it, and he had diagnostic scans up on his screen.

I have been growing cataracts, a milkiness of the lens that can only get worse. So to cut a long story short, I had the first eye done today, and I will have the second done in three weeks.

Until I take the patch off tomorrow, wearing glasses is hard, so I may not be at the keyboard as much. Then again, perhaps I will drift back, because there's a list of things I must not do, like gardening, leaping, jumping and stuff.  Bang go most of my hobbies.

The only consolation is that I have a great pic for Talk Like a Pirate Day, coming up next month.

They say that getting old is a pain in the proverbial.  But as the clever ones say, the alternative is worse.

Anyhow, please make allowance for gaps, if they happen between now and Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Dealing with drowning

This is a small taster for a new book which I have been working on for some time. The state of the print-publishing market is such that I have decided to switch to e-book format, because this lets me pull off a few tricks with the text that I can't do in a mere-smear print book, mainly in terms of providing external links.

The title will be Not Your Usual Treatments, and it deals with quack remedies and also with some oddities that we would now consider as quack remedies, though they were once main-stream medicine. There are also a few treatments that were once denounced as quack or worse, which later became mainstream.

Anyhow, here is a small taster: I will do a couple more in the next week or two.

Methods for dealing with drowning were a little primitive, but apparently, as long as the man in charge wore a top hat, the patient was in safe hands. [Scientific American]

Drowning was almost as great a fear in the late 19th century as the fear of being buried alive, and there were many inventions, from floating suits to lifeboats and worse, intended to prevent this fate. The treatments for drowning were a little primitive:

 [Accidental hanging] The remedies for this accident are the same as in drowning, with the addition of taking away a small quantity of blood, by cupping glasses, from the neck, or by opening the jugular vein.

[i]

Curiously, tobacco, that enemy of breathing, was seen as the perfect remedy for drowning, though with a slight twist, according to William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, 1790. It was an old practice to force tobacco smoke up the rectum of constipated people, and surgeons usually had a device for this purpose, a sort of bellows arrangement called a clyster or sometimes a glyster.

In the 18th century, the clyster was used to revive somebody who appeared to be drowned. At first, this was for iatrogenic drowning, which was caused by enthusiastic use of immersion therapy (iatrogenic means doctor-caused), but William Buchan chose not to mention the origins of the practice. Still, he explained what to do when there was no clyster available.

There are various pieces of apparatus contrived for this purpose which may be used when at hand; but where these cannot be obtained, the business may be done by a common tobacco pipe. The bowl of the pipe must be filled with tobacco well kindled, and, after the small tube has been introduced into the fundament, the smoke may be forced up by blowing through an empty pipe, the mouth of which is applied close to that of the other. This may also be done in the following manner: A common clyster-pipe with a bag mounted upon it may be introduced into the fundament, and the mouth of the bag may be applied round the small end of a tobacco-pipe in the bowl of which tobacco is to be kindled, and the smoke blown up as directed above.

[ii]

To be fair, Buchan also recommended a variant on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, just a page earlier: “To renew the breathing a strong person may blow his own breath into the patient’s mouth with all the force he can, holding his nostrils at the same time.”

Then again, near-drowning could offer some real benefits. In 1750, a writer using the name ‘Philanthropos’ reported in the Gentleman’s Magazine on the 1741 case of a “mad cow”, bitten by a mad dog in St Lucy’s Parish, Barbados. The owner, Hurdiss Jordan, regarded the cow as a favourite, so he had the animal tipped over on a dung heap where slaves held her while Jordan poured a pail of cold water down her throat. The cow recovered, and near-drowning was added to the list of potential treatments for rabies. I will stay with rabies and mad dogs for now, and come back to immersion therapy in the section on water cures in chapter 6.

[And that's where I stop.]

Weird enough to interest you?  Stay watching!

 

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The references: Here are two samples of the sorts of links I will be providing:

Buchan, William, Domestic Medicine, 11^th edition. London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1790, https://books.google.com.au/books?id=SGYFAAAAQAAJ

 

Mackenzie, Colin, Mackenzie’s Ten Thousand Receipts in all of the useful and domestic arts. Philadelphia: T. Ellwood Zell and Co., 1867, https://books.google.com.au/books?id=pP-nXEWI_HkC

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[i] “[Accidental hanging] The remedies for this accident…”, Mackenzie’s Ten Thousand Receipts in all of the useful and domestic arts, 1867, 151.

[ii] “There are various pieces of apparatus contrived for this purpose…”, William Buchan, Domestic Medicine, 610 – 11.