Holly Tucker's Blog, page 56

The Lexicographer Who Lost His Words

By Sam Kean (Guest Contributor)

Samuel Johnson

Linguistic Loss

Ironically enough, the first noted lexicographer of the English language, Samuel Johnson, lost the ability to speak late in life. Like most people with aphasia, the neurological loss of speech, Johnson’s troubles arose after brain damage—in his case a stroke at around 3 a.m. on June 17th, 1783, while he was lying in bed in his Fleet Street home. Terrifyingly, Johnson woke up knowing what was happening—that something had gone awry in his brain—but he felt weak and tired and couldn’t do anything about it anyway. He had no choice but to lie there in the dark until morning, praying that his mental faculties weren’t disintegrating second by second.

Being Samuel Johnson, he devised an odd test for himself to bide the time: he composed (mentally) a quatrain in Latin, in which he asked the Lord to spare his intellect and reason—intellect and reason being the things he cared about most in life. It read:

Summe Pater, quodcunque tuum de corpore Numen

Hoc statuat, precibus Christus adesse velit;

Ingenio parcas, nec sit mihi culpa rogasse,

Qua solum potero parte, placere tibi.

(Translation: Almighty Father, whatever the Divine Will ordains concerning this body of mine, may Christ be willing to aid me with his prayers. And let it not be blameworthy on my part to implore that Thou spare my reason, by which faculty alone I shall be able to do Thy pleasure.)

Johnson wasn’t happy with his quatrain—a mediocre effort, he judged. But he took the fact that he could still compose verse—and especially the fact that he knew it was mediocre—as signs that God had spared his mind after all. (Over the next few weeks Johnson nevertheless seemed peeved with his maker about the whole incident, opening letters to friends with lines like, “Dear Sir: It has pleased God by a paralytick stroke in the night to deprive me of speech.”)

The Bigger Picture: Aphasia and Tourette Syndrome

Aphasia wasn’t the only neurological disorder Johnson suffered from. He almost certainly had Tourette syndrome and a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder as well. Symptoms of the former include his restless tics and repetitive gestures and his habit of making odd noises. Boswell records in Life of Samuel Johnson how Johnson “held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand. In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth; sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen.” Symptoms of mild OCD include his habit of collecting orange peels and his need to touch all the lampposts he passed during his strolls around London; if he missed one, “he would go back miles upon his way to repair an omission,” Boswell says.

But in some sense, those neurological “disorders” helped make Johnson who he was. A touch of OCD isn’t a bad thing in someone putting together a dictionary. As for Tourette syndrome, neurologists Oliver Sacks has observed, “One cannot avoid thinking that [Johnson’s] enormous spontaneity, antics, and lightning quick wit had an organic connection with his accelerated motor impulsive state.” Indeed, although he’s remembered as a translator and lexicographer (which Johnson famously defined as a “harmless drudge”), Johnson’s true métier was conversation, and without Boswell to chronicle all his one-offs and bon mots, few people would have heard of Johnson today.

And that’s what made the aphasia so cruel—it deprived Johnson of his greatest artistic medium. In fact, although he bragged in letters to friends of beating the stroke (which he called a palsy), in reality he lived only eighteen months afterward, and he struggled to speak for much of that time. His letters were notably different after his stroke as well: he made more mistakes and stopped using semicolons for some reason.

Still, even those late letters remain models of English prose, which in the end is probably the most remarkable thing about Johnson’s stroke. Because while his eloquence did diminish afterward, he remained far more articulate than your average schmo, since he started off on a much higher level. What seems like the same exact brain damage, then, will always affect two people differently, and deficits like aphasia are always relative.

 

Sam Kean is the New York Times bestselling author of The Disappearing Spoon and The Violinist’s Thumb. His new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, was released in May. He and his work have also been featured on NPR’s “Radiolab,” “All Things Considered,” and “Fresh Air.”

 

 

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The Lexicographer Who Lost His Words + Book Give-Away

By Sam Kean (Guest Contributor)

Samuel Johnson

Linguistic Loss

Ironically enough, the first noted lexicographer of the English language, Samuel Johnson, lost the ability to speak late in life. Like most people with aphasia, the neurological loss of speech, Johnson’s troubles arose after brain damage—in his case a stroke at around 3 a.m. on June 17th, 1783, while he was lying in bed in his Fleet Street home. Terrifyingly, Johnson woke up knowing what was happening—that something had gone awry in his brain—but he felt weak and tired and couldn’t do anything about it anyway. He had no choice but to lie there in the dark until morning, praying that his mental faculties weren’t disintegrating second by second.

Being Samuel Johnson, he devised an odd test for himself to bide the time: he composed (mentally) a quatrain in Latin, in which he asked the Lord to spare his intellect and reason—intellect and reason being the things he cared about most in life. It read:

Summe Pater, quodcunque tuum de corpore Numen

Hoc statuat, precibus Christus adesse velit;

Ingenio parcas, nec sit mihi culpa rogasse,

Qua solum potero parte, placere tibi.

(Translation: Almighty Father, whatever the Divine Will ordains concerning this body of mine, may Christ be willing to aid me with his prayers. And let it not be blameworthy on my part to implore that Thou spare my reason, by which faculty alone I shall be able to do Thy pleasure.)

Johnson wasn’t happy with his quatrain—a mediocre effort, he judged. But he took the fact that he could still compose verse—and especially the fact that he knew it was mediocre—as signs that God had spared his mind after all. (Over the next few weeks Johnson nevertheless seemed peeved with his maker about the whole incident, opening letters to friends with lines like, “Dear Sir: It has pleased God by a paralytick stroke in the night to deprive me of speech.”)

The Bigger Picture: Aphasia and Tourette Syndrome

Aphasia wasn’t the only neurological disorder Johnson suffered from. He almost certainly had Tourette syndrome and a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder as well. Symptoms of the former include his restless tics and repetitive gestures and his habit of making odd noises. Boswell records in Life of Samuel Johnson how Johnson “held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand. In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth; sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen.” Symptoms of mild OCD include his habit of collecting orange peels and his need to touch all the lampposts he passed during his strolls around London; if he missed one, “he would go back miles upon his way to repair an omission,” Boswell says.

But in some sense, those neurological “disorders” helped make Johnson who he was. A touch of OCD isn’t a bad thing in someone putting together a dictionary. As for Tourette syndrome, neurologists Oliver Sacks has observed, “One cannot avoid thinking that [Johnson’s] enormous spontaneity, antics, and lightning quick wit had an organic connection with his accelerated motor impulsive state.” Indeed, although he’s remembered as a translator and lexicographer (which Johnson famously defined as a “harmless drudge”), Johnson’s true métier was conversation, and without Boswell to chronicle all his one-offs and bon mots, few people would have heard of Johnson today.

And that’s what made the aphasia so cruel—it deprived Johnson of his greatest artistic medium. In fact, although he bragged in letters to friends of beating the stroke (which he called a palsy), in reality he lived only eighteen months afterward, and he struggled to speak for much of that time. His letters were notably different after his stroke as well: he made more mistakes and stopped using semicolons for some reason.

Still, even those late letters remain models of English prose, which in the end is probably the most remarkable thing about Johnson’s stroke. Because while his eloquence did diminish afterward, he remained far more articulate than your average schmo, since he started off on a much higher level. What seems like the same exact brain damage, then, will always affect two people differently, and deficits like aphasia are always relative.

 

Sam Kean is the New York Times bestselling author of The Disappearing Spoon and The Violinist’s Thumb. His new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, was released in May. He and his work have also been featured on NPR’s “Radiolab,” “All Things Considered,” and “Fresh Air.”

We at Wonders & Marvels have three (3) copies of THE TALE OF THE DUELING NEUROSURGEONS as our giveaway this week. To enter, simply join our mailing list by 11:59 p.m. EST Friday June 13, 2014. Existing subscribers are already entered!

(Sorry: At this time we can only ship books within the U.S.)

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Medical instruments as bling?

by Helen King (Regular Contributor)

If you freeze at the sight of a medical instrument, you are not alone. Historically, physicians have tried various methods to reduce the fear induced in the patient by seeing what is coming their way.For women, possibly the most scary of all is the obstetrics forceps … if there was ever an instrument to strike terror into the heart, surely it must be this. In the eighteenth century, the man-midwife William Smellie, aware

of the effect on a woman in labor of hearing that metallic clanking sound, experimented with leather coverings for the blades, to muffle the noise. Not a good idea, in terms of cross-infection, and his rival Thomas Burton noted that the leather would ‘corrupt and stink’ – but of course germ theory was not accepted for another hundred years or so.

Smellie argued for the antiquity of the forceps, tracing their history back to the Arabs, and proposing that in the medieval Arab world they had been used to extract live babies. In the nineteenth century, Sir James Young Simpson too discussed the history of the forceps in his lectures, also emphasizing how far back their use went, but claiming that the earliest ones were ‘instruments of a fatal nature’. Both men talked about the range of designs that had been used. And in their own practice, both  tried out ones with straight blades, curved blades, long handles and short handles. Having your own preferred type of forceps was part of the theatrical side of medicine.

Simpson warned his pupils that they must always tell the patient’s family if they were about to use forceps, otherwise they’d be blamed if something went wrong. But what about telling the patient herself? Well, he suggested, it all depends on her temperament. Most women, he argued, are fine about it, and some even ask for forceps if they have needed them before. He went on:

“You will then in most cases tell the patient, but explain to her that it is not a cutting instrument, and if she wish to see it I should have no objection in allowing it, and have done so frequently: in France they have now an advantage over us in this respect, that they have most of their instruments gilded, which renders their appearance somewhat less formidable and more agreeable. I used to know an old practitioner who prided himself upon having a good leg of his own and was in the habit of showing it off by grasping his thigh with the forceps when exhibiting their mode of action to the patient”.

While this image of the demonstration of the forceps on the physician’s thigh is one that I find difficult to erase from my mind, that comment on the appealingly gilded French instruments to me recalls a much earlier practitioner: the second-century Galen, who wrote in Greek and worked at Rome. Galen was very attached to his medical instruments, and mentions the wax molds for instruments he had designed himself, which were lost in a fire that destroyed the warehouse where he stored them in Rome. In his treatise On Prognosis he condemned his peers who used silver for their medical instruments; it’s just too flashy. This seems to be a deliberate reference to an even earlier comment on the materials for medical instruments; in the Hippocratic treatise The Doctor, bronze is recommended as the best material for surgical instruments, but in other areas of medicine the anonymous writer said ‘it seems to me tasteless ornamentation to have all one’s equipment in bronze’.

Bronze was seen as ‘going too far’ for most purposes; then silver came into fashion; and finally, gold. In the interests of impressing, or reassuring, the patient, medical instruments could be a form of bling.

 

References:

Notes of a Series of Lectures on Natural and Morbid Parturition delivered by Professor Simpson (Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh: Ed. 1843-4)

Galen, On Prognosis: edition and translation by V. Nutton: Galen On Prognosis, Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, V.8.1, 1979

Helen King, Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynecology, Ashgate, 2007

Give-Away Winners: THE LOST ART OF DRESS

The Lost Art of Dress

We’re thrilled to announce that, through the magic of Random Number Generator, we’ve selected the five winners of last week’s book give-away for The Lost Art of Dress! Congratulations to our five winners; you will be hearing from us this week with details.

For those who did not win, the book is available in stores and at Amazon.com. Be sure to sign up for our email list to get updates on the latest news and to be entered into future drawings!

 

Cabinet of Curiosities, vol. i

Welcome to our first ever CABINET OF CURIOSITIES – a weekly collection of the compelling news and discussions that caught our attention this week in the world of history and historical studies!

This week was the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion at Normandy. 93 year old Xenia, OH veteran Jim Martin marked the event by parachuting again to the same site. Meanwhile, women’s efforts are also gaining recognition.

Did you ever wonder what kinds of jobs people had in the Middle Ages?  (Hint: there were more options than just the “Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick Maker” in the old nursery song).

Meet six women who have freshly returned from adventures in the American Southwest. Their HerStory Tour tracked down the tales of real women of the past.

Curious about the intersection of social media and history scholarship, one #Twitterstorian crowd-sourced and Storyfied the answers he got. Do you agree?

Always game for mystery and conspiracy, we learned more this week about how historians perceive and discuss the elusive Illuminati.

What did you learn this week? Be sure to share your favorites in the Comments section below.

And, if you like what you learn from Wonders & Marvels, be sure to sign up for our email list and get posts delivered to your inbox As they Happen, Weekly, Monthly (you’re the boss on this!).

 

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Cabinet of Curiosities

Welcome to our first ever CABINET OF CURIOSITIES – a weekly collection of the compelling news and discussions that caught our attention this week in the world of history and historical studies!

This week was the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion at Normandy. 93 year old Xenia, OH veteran Jim Martin marked the event by parachuting again to the same site. Meanwhile, women’s efforts are also gaining recognition.

Did you ever wonder what kinds of jobs people had in the Middle Ages?  (Hint: there were more options than just the “Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick Maker” in the old nursery song).

Meet six women who have freshly returned from adventures in the American Southwest. Their HerStory Tour tracked down the tales of real women of the past.

Curious about the intersection of social media and history scholarship, one #Twitterstorian crowd-sourced and Storyfied the answers he got. Do you agree?

Always game for mystery and conspiracy, we learned more this week about how historians perceive and discuss the elusive Illuminati.

What did you learn this week? Be sure to share your favorites in the Comments section below.

And, if you like what you learn from Wonders & Marvels, be sure to sign up for our email list and get posts delivered to your inbox As they Happen, Weekly, Monthly (you’re the boss on this!).

 

 

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Editor’s Corner: Big Changes Ahead!

It’s hard to believe that Wonders & Marvels is almost 6 years old. In just a few months, we’ll be hitting our 1000th post, too!

W&M began as a tiny sandbox for stories related to my research and teaching in the history of medicine. To my delight, it has morphed into a “Community for Curious Minds who Love History, its Odd Stories, and Good Reads” with a robust readership and a strong email list.

A New Managing Editor

The biggest news is that I have brought on Miranda Garno Nesler as Managing Editor. With Miranda’s help, we will be exploring the full potential for W&M as a home base for researchers and readers of history.  You’ll have a chance to get to know Miranda in the days to come.

A New Design

Our regulars might already be able to see some changes in the design. This allows us to highlight better our wonderful group of Regular Contributors, whose always smart work never ceases to amaze and delight.  Hats off to Amy and Susan Sumy Designs.  I just wouldn’t know what we would do without them these past 4 years.

A New Schedule

We also going to be increasing the number of posts on the site from a few a week, or even a month. Our aim to have at least one a day.

So you know what to expect, here’s a peek at our weekly editorial calendar:

Mondays and Wednesdays:  Posts from our amazing team of Monthly Contributors
Tuesdays:  A selection of Guest Posts from handpicked authors–paired with great book giveaways.
Thursdays: Throw-back Thursdays: A Trip Through Our Archives
Fridays:  Editor’s Corner.  A weekly update of life at W&M and beyond
Saturdays:  Cabinet of Curiosities: A Social Media Round-up

Tell Us What You Think!

This is a labor of love.  And lots of hard work.  We’d love to hear your thoughts on the new ideas.  We’d love to hear from you by email [holly.tucker/wondersandmarvels.com], the contact form, or in the comments!

                       Onward! Back to the Past!

                       Holly Tucker, Editor-in-Chief

P.S.:

If you’re new to W&M, be sure to join our email list! It takes just a second to let us know that you’d like history’s most marvelous tales in your mailbox: daily, weekly, or monthly. You decide!

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Monkeys with Guns

By Adrienne Mayor (Wonders & Marvels contributor)

Armed and dangerous! Not a phrase that leaps to mind to describe monkeys, except in  science fiction fantasies. Indeed, to promote the movie “Rise of Planet of the Apes” (2011), 20th-Century Fox created a YouTube video that quickly went viral, showing  a chimpanzee terrorizing African soldiers with an AK-47. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhxqIITtTtU

As bizarre as the notion of employing monkeys as soldiers seems, the possibility has occurred to military commanders seeking secret weapons and surprise tactics. Monkeys’ intelligence, physical agility, ability to emulate humans, and capability to manipulate simple mechanisms means that they are easily trained to play a role in warfare.

Who were the first monkeys to see action in war? Before the invention of gun powder fire-arms in China (ca 13th century), a 9th century Chinese chronicle (“Yu-yang-tsah-tsu” by Twan Ching-Shih) describes annual battles between soldiers of Po-mi-lan and 300,000 giant rock-throwing apes who came down from the high craggy mountains of the west to ravage crops every spring.

The earliest documented case of gun-toting monkeys appears in a Chinese account of 1610 (“Wu-tsah-tsu” by Sie Chung-Ghi). It  describes General Tseh-ki-Kwang’s campaign against Japanese marauders in the 16th century. Capturing a troop of monkeys from Mount Shi-Chu in Fu-Tsing, he and his men trained the simian recruits to shoot fire-arms (or at least aim). When the general sent the monkey militia to the front and gave the order to fire, the terror-stricken Japanese raiders fled. Then the human soldiers hiding in ambush leaped up and slew them all.

In 2003, during the Iraq War, President George W. Bush turned down Morocco’s offer of 2,000 monkeys from the Atlas Mountains trained to deactivate and detonate land mines. In ancient times no one expressed qualms about “weaponizing” animals out of sympathy for the creatures. But today, these controversial examples open discussion of the ethics of forcing animal “volunteers,” from dogs to dolphins, to perform violent or dangerous acts in wars perpetrated by humans.

 

Adrienne Mayor is a Research Scholar in Classics and History of Science, Stanford University. She is the author of “Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World” (2009);  “The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myths in Greek and Roman Times” (2011); and “The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy,” a nonfiction finalist for the 2009 National Book Award.

This post first appeared at Wonders & Marvels on 6 May, 2012.

The Lost Art of Dress

By Linda Przybyszewski (Guest Contributor)

Your tax dollars paid for the publication of Children’s Rompers. At least they did if you were paying taxes in 1927, which was when the Bureau of Home Economics, housed at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, came out with the pamphlet. None of that may make sense at first reading, so let me explain.

The Bureau of Home Economics was created in 1923 as a way to serve farm women just as the U.S. Department of Agriculture had long been serving farmers. The Bureau contained several divisions, including one devoted to Textiles and Clothing, which did everything from testing fabrics for durability to trying to create standardized sizes in ready-to-wear. Its first head was Ruth O’Brien, a chemist who specialized in textile dyes. The Bureau actually became the largest employer of women scientists in the country. O’Brien had no luck with standardized sizes because it turns out that people would rather believe that they wear a size 8 than a size 12, so manufacturers just took a given size and give it a smaller number. She had better luck with children’s rompers.

Several impulses promoted the project. First, the home economists wanted to create simplified clothing that children could don and remove themselves. “Self-help” clothing would teach children to master basic hand skills and teach them to take initiative. Second, they worried that tight clothing hampered health and easy movement. Third, they wanted to change children’s clothing for reasons of hygiene. Traditional long skirts dragged in the dirt and might bring home diseases. Bare and translucent clothing exposed children to sunlight, which was called “a tonic and disinfectant in one” by scientists who reported that sunlight allowed the body to create vitamin D and killed off certain kinds of bacteria.

So the home economics designed clothing without hooks, snaps, or bows in favor of loops, tabs, and big buttons. They made up models and went to orphanages around Washington, DC and had the children try out bibs, sun-suits, sun-dresses, and rompers in the name of domestic science. When the pamphlet came out, the Bureau also sent out large posters with pictures and sewing patterns to the land-grant colleges around the country which ran public outreach programs called “extension” programs. By 1930, O’Brien reported that there was “a noticeable effect on children’s clothing throughout the country.” The children’s style revolution was complete.

 

Linda Przybyszewski is an award-winning historian and teacher who earned a Ph.D. at Stanford University and currently teaches at the University of Notre Dame. Trained as a legal historian, she has spoken at the United States Supreme Court. More recently, her research has taken a turn towards her first love: dressmaking. 

 

The Lost Art of Dress + Book Giveaway

By Linda Przybyszewski (Guest Contributor)

Children’s Rompers

Your tax dollars paid for the publication of Children’s Rompers. At least they did if you were paying taxes in 1927, which was when the Bureau of Home Economics, housed at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, came out with the pamphlet. None of that may make sense at first reading, so let me explain.

The Bureau of Home Economics was created in 1923 as a way to serve farm women just as the U.S. Department of Agriculture had long been serving farmers. The Bureau contained several divisions, including one devoted to Textiles and Clothing, which did everything from testing fabrics for durability to trying to create standardized sizes in ready-to-wear. Its first head was Ruth O’Brien, a chemist who specialized in textile dyes. The Bureau actually became the largest employer of women scientists in the country. O’Brien had no luck with standardized sizes because it turns out that people would rather believe that they wear a size 8 than a size 12, so manufacturers just took a given size and give it a smaller number. She had better luck with children’s rompers.

Several impulses promoted the project. First, the home economists wanted to create simplified clothing that children could don and remove themselves. “Self-help” clothing would teach children to master basic hand skills and teach them to take initiative. Second, they worried that tight clothing hampered health and easy movement. Third, they wanted to change children’s clothing for reasons of hygiene. Traditional long skirts dragged in the dirt and might bring home diseases. Bare and translucent clothing exposed children to sunlight, which was called “a tonic and disinfectant in one” by scientists who reported that sunlight allowed the body to create vitamin D and killed off certain kinds of bacteria.

So the home economics designed clothing without hooks, snaps, or bows in favor of loops, tabs, and big buttons. They made up models and went to orphanages around Washington, DC and had the children try out bibs, sun-suits, sun-dresses, and rompers in the name of domestic science. When the pamphlet came out, the Bureau also sent out large posters with pictures and sewing patterns to the land-grant colleges around the country which ran public outreach programs called “extension” programs. By 1930, O’Brien reported that there was “a noticeable effect on children’s clothing throughout the country.” The children’s style revolution was complete.

 

Linda Przybyszewski is an award-winning historian and teacher who earned a Ph.D. at Stanford University and currently teaches at the University of Notre Dame. Trained as a legal historian, she has spoken at the United States Supreme Court. More recently, her research has taken a turn towards her first love: dressmaking. 

The Lost Art of Dress

 

We at Wonders & Marvels have five (5) copies of The Lost Art of Dress as our giveaway this week. To enter, simply join our email list by 11:59 p.m. EST Friday, June 6, 2014.
Existing subscribers: you’re already entered!
Good luck! (Sorry, at this time, books can only be shipped in the U.S.)