2005-09-15 - 4:12 a.m.
I'm currently reading John M. Barry's book The Great Influenza, about the 1918 flu, and enjoying it greatly. The reviewer statements on the back include
"Spellbinding... compelling and scary!", "Terrifying!", "Fascinating!", and "Sobering!". I have decided that if I am ever reviewed like a book, this is how I'd like to be described as well.
I enjoy learning about the history of medicine (which is inextricably linked
with the history of so many other things), but there are always little details in books like these that make laugh, and then I acquire the reputation for being morbid.
For instance, in the discussion of the history of Johns Hopkins, the book mentions "In just its first year, 26 investigators not on the Hopkins faculty used the laboratories. Welch's young assistant William Councilman kept them supplied with organs by riding his tricycle to other hospitals, retrieving the organs, and carrying them back in buckets suspended from the handlebars."
And I'm thinking, tricycle? Just how young was this young assistant?
Also, in the discussion of how the Rockefeller Institute became Army Auxiliary Laboratory during WWI, they say "Nearly all research shifted to something war-related, or to instruction. Alexis Carrel, a Nobel laureate in 1912 who pioneered the surgical reattachment of limbs and organ transplantation - he kept part of a chicken heart alive for 32 years - taught surgical techniques to hundreds of newly militarized physicians."
And I'm immediately lost to whatever the rest of the paragraph is talking about, because I'm thinking, "Part of a chicken heart? What part? Why 32 years? Where did he keep it?"
This is probably another sign that I'm not an intellectual at heart.
