Category: Vignettes at Large
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The Manneken Pis: Still peeing after all these years
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Belgium’s culture of excretion goes back centuries.”1– Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, art historian and professor at the University of Paris Artists in the low countries did not hesitate to depict human bodily functions. The great Netherlandish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569) had scenes of defecation in his paintings2 in the sixteenth century. The…
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Whale tales: Old and new
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Oh, are you from Wales? Do you know a fella named Jonah? He used to live in whales for a while.”– Groucho Marx The biblical story of the prophet Jonah and the whale is well known. Jonah does not want to accept a mission God has given him. He flees, boards a…
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Medical misinformation and “The Bellman’s Fallacy” in the Internet Era
Edward TaborBethesda, Maryland, United States “The Bellman’s Fallacy” is a form of biased thinking in which something is believed to be true because it has been repeatedly stated. Its name comes from the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” who says, “What I tell you three times is true.”1 Based on this…
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Pharaoh’s proctologist: The Shepherd of the Rectum
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Ancient Egyptian medicine was based on religion, magic, and specific conceptions of human anatomy and physiology. The human body was believed to contain twenty-two “channels” (called metu) that carried blood, air, water, urine, mucus, semen, and bodily waste. These channels were arteries, veins, tendons, and nerves.1 A blockage in any channel could…
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Look what they’ve done to my brain: Einstein’s last wish ignored
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “…his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.”– Bob Dylan, “License to Kill” Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is considered to be one of the most influential scientists of all time. His childhood, though, was not very promising. He did not speak until he was three years old. There is also reason to believe…
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What can the candiru (Vandellia cirrhosa) do?
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “[N]o one has stepped forward to observe the candiru’s life cycle in situ.”– William Burroughs, Naked Lunch Humans, like other animals, are subject to infections, infestations, colonization, and invasion by a wide variety of organisms. We are preyed on by viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoans, worms, and insects. We may be eaten by…
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Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, 1919–1933
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Per scientiam ad justitiam” (Justice through science)– Motto engraved over the entrance to the Institute for Sexual Sciences Paragraph 175 (§175) of the German Penal Code, adopted in 1871, criminalized male homosexual activity, making it punishable by imprisonment and loss of civil rights. In addition, the enormous social stigma attached to being…
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Last rites x2
Hugh Tunstall-PedoeDundee, Scotland, United Kingdom In the late 1960s, I was non-resident neurology house physician in a hospital in central London when we admitted a prominent citizen as a private patient. He was suffering from a catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage—he was moribund, but the decision was taken to perform cerebral angiography (it was before the days…
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“Brace, brace, brace!”—“Are we all going to die?”
Hugh Tunstall-PedoeDundee, Scotland, United Kingdom Flying to and from Scotland as an airline passenger years ago sometimes involved small aircraft. The smallest from Edinburgh to Belfast at one time was so small that a hostess got on at departure, wriggled between the passengers handing out packages, and then squirmed back and disembarked. Perfectly proper, yet…
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The bicycle and the gene pool
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The most important event in recent human evolution was the invention of the bicycle.”1– Steve Jones, biologist The invention of a safe, reliable, and relatively cheap bicycle occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Called a “hugely disruptive technology,” the bicycle permitted the “masses to be mobile.”2 A bicycle was cheaper…