Morning, suburbs, waiting room, waiting. Reading things. Reddit question:
That’s a great question. I had a brief period of belief in spontaneous consumption, but it was that window in your adolescence when you’ll read a book of strange tales, and believe them all. Except for the one about the werewolf. Never believed in those.
The accounts were always convincing, because they happened in England, and the bobbies were alarmed, and the experts were called, and the country’s leading authority on unexplained phenomena was baffled, etc. I’m sure they were all made up. Is there a Wiki page on it?
Yes. States at the start it’s a pseudoscientific thing.
It’s never these things that get you, of course. No one really dies of spontaneous combustion in quicksand. It’s something else. That’s why I’m not particularly nervous about being here at the Eye Center, getting tested for glaucoma, because this isn’t a Worst Possible Verdict type of place. Unless of course they discover you have Eyebola. Right now I have numbed eyeballs, and they feel gluey and useless. I am also at the total mercy of the gynocracy that runs this place. Front desk, techs, docs - not a single male in the space.
Oh, there’s one. A tech. Had to be one or two; interest in eyeballs cannot be an exclusively female concern. Especially with all that talk about the Male Gaze, right?
The male patients are mostly older and girthy and speak with a weariness, or that exaggerated old-guy ha-ha jauntiness that goes with the nondescript striped polo shirt, the baggy jeans, the white tennis shoes, the grey hair, maybe the baseball cap. Stooped with a bit of a harried-hurried monkey posture. A plentiful Midwestern archetype.
LATER
I have completed three sections of ocular investigation, each of which involved flashing lights of some kind. This machine was interesting.
It tests your peripheral vision. You see a light, you click a button. Three minutes with each eye. Some lights are brighter than others. Sometimes you click because maybe you saw something, and it had been a while since you clicked. I became convinced there was a sound cue in the machine - it made a distinct little grunt every time there was a light, it seemed. But I couldn’t click after I heard the grunt, because that would skew the results.
It’s become harder and harder to see in the last ten minutes, as the numbing glue and the dilation drops have reduced my vision to a blurry field of beige. This is like going in to have your knee examined, and the first thing they do is strike it with a baseball bat.
LATER
Into a room for more dilation drops. I said that if I was any more dilated we’d start to talk about crowning. Then another inscrutable machine that made me look at a star while a line scanned down, then the doctor came in and looked at my eyes through another machine while she read off some numbers and evaluations.
Bottom line: the pressure reading that had triggered the screening was well within tolerances and probably due to my cornea thickness, which was also within normal range but a bit towards the thick end, which most likely explained everything. No sign of glaucoma. Hurrah! I left wearing my sunglasses, of course, since I was dilated. When I removed the glasses outside it was like GROUND FARGIN’ ZERO MY GOD THE LIGHT.
LATER: Hours later, everything still fuzzy from the drops. There is absolutely no clearer sign that one should nap, and so I will.
Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started next year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.
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So! How do we get from here . . . |
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. . . to there? |
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Random prompt: Florida, 1927 leads immediately, for reasons of no importance, to a paper in Memphis in 1918. (Okay, there was an obit for a lady whose last name was Florida. Someone had clipped it, and that sent it into the database of things to be returned first.) This ad caught my eye:
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Won’t gripe! We know what it does, because of the LAX suffix |
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It’s improved calomel, you say? What’s that? Dictionary definition: “a white powder used as a purgative and a fungicide." Hoo-boy. So that’s really going to blast the tubes clear. “Purgative” was also a “cathartic,” which is amusing; when someone says today that an experience was cathartic, they usually mean emotional, not in the sense of having every scrap of stuff in your intestines violently evacuated.
Now it gets interesting.
The substance later known as calomel was first documented in ancient Persia by medical historian Rhazes in year 850.
Interesting fellow. Early Persian doctor and philosopher.
Only a few of the compounds he mentioned could be positively identified as calomel, as not every alchemist disclosed what compounds they used in their drugs. Calomel first entered Western medical literature in 1608, when Oswald Croll wrote about its preparation in his Tyroncium Chemicum.
Here’s the title page of his “Magnum Opus,” as the entry calls it. They were so keen on discovering the rules of the universe, sorting and categorizing. As we are today.
Makes sense:
More on the chemical:
It was not called calomel until 1655, when the name was created by Théodore de Mayerne, who had published its preparation and formula in “Pharmacopoeia Londinensis" in 1618.
By the 19th century, calomel was viewed as a panacea, or miracle drug, and was used against almost every disease, including syphilis, bronchitis, cholera, ingrown toenails, teething, gout, tuberculosis, influenza, and cancer.
I suppose when you have a limited number of efficacious compounds, you tend to go off-label whenever you wish.
During the 18th and early 19th centuries pharmacists used it sparingly; but by the late 1840s, it was being prescribed in heroic doses —due in part to the research of Benjamin Rush, who coined the term "heroic dose" to mean about 20 grains taken four times daily.
About Rush, his page says:
In 1803, Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis to Philadelphia to prepare for the Lewis and Clark Expedition under the tutelage of Rush, who taught Lewis about frontier illnesses and the performance of bloodletting. Rush provided the corps with a medical kit that included:
• fifty dozen of Dr. Rush's Bilious Pills, laxatives containing more than 50% mercury, which have since colloquially been referred to as “thunderclappers.” Their meat-rich diet and lack of clean water during the expedition gave the men cause to use them frequently. Although their efficacy is questionable, their high mercury content provided an excellent tracer by which archaeologists have been able to track the corps' actual route to the Pacific.
They traced their bowel movements?
Also re: the heroic doses: “This stance was supported by Dr. Samuel Cartwright, who believed that large doses were “gentlest” on the body.
Now, there’s two Sam Cartwrights. The linked document says “do you mean the physician?” And I thought, yes, and clicked.
Drapetomania, a supposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. This hypothesis centered around the belief that slavery was such an improvement upon the lives of slaves that only those suffering from some form of mental illness would wish to escape.
Cartwright specifically cited the tendency of slaves to flee the plantations that held them. Since slaves happy with their condition would not want to leave, he inferred that such people had to be sick, impervious to the natural order of things.
You have to be kidding me. Anyway, it was linked to DROMOMANIA, the desire to just start walking.
Drapetomania. a supposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. This hypothesis centered around the belief that slavery was such an improvement upon the lives of slaves that only those suffering from some form of mental illness would wish to escape.
Cartwright specifically cited the tendency of slaves to flee the plantations that held them. Since slaves happy with their condition would not want to leave, he inferred that such people had to be sick, impervious to the natural order of things.
You have to be kidding me. Anyway, it was linked to DROMOMANIA, the desire to just start walking.
Many cases of dromomania have been described. The most famous case was that of Jean-Albert Dadas, a gas-fitter from Bordeaux, France. Dadas would suddenly set out on foot and reach cities as far away as Prague, Vienna or Moscow with no memory of his travels. A medical student, Philippe Tissié, wrote about Dadas in his doctoral dissertation in 1887.
Jean-Martin Charcot presented a similar case he called automatisme ambulatoire, French for "ambulatory automatism", or "walking around without being in control of one's own actions.
The term has fallen out of favor. No one diagnoses it anymore. But “In a 1977 book, cultural theorist Paul Virilio criticized modernity for acculturating people to become insanely addicted to pursuing the future and unable to stop, which he characterized as “dromomania”.
Virilio, it seems, was full of BS, babbling pseudo-science to back up his “philosophy of speed.” Says one critique:
This paragraph — which in the French original is a single 193-word sentence, whose "poetry" is unfortunately not fully captured by the translation — is the most perfect example of diarrhea of the pen that we have ever encountered. And as far as we can see, it means precisely nothing.
Diarrhea of the pen? Well, that brings us right back around to Discolax, and a good sign we should stop.
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