It’s one of the ways you can plead insanity. The original legal standard was that you had to be so insane as to not know the difference between right and wrong. After a while the definition was expanded to include those crazies who knew what they were doing was wrong, but had — you guessed it — an irresistible impulse to do it anyway.
Category Archives: Science
A 19th century hero
I love being married to a high school social studies teacher.
Have you ever heard of Dr. John Snow, the father of public health? There was a cholera outbreak in London, ca. 1850. Cholera outbreaks were common in those days because of overcrowded living conditions and poor sanitation. This is pre-Pasteur. They didn’t know about microbes. They thought diseases were caused by miasmas, or poorly balanced bodily humours, or an angry God. But Dr. John Snow took it upon himself to go out into the field and do some research. He tracked down every case of cholera he could find, and figured out where the victim was when he or she first got sick. It turned out there was a huge cluster around the pump on Broad Street. Dr. Snow didn’t know that cholera is caused by water-borne bacteria. But he knew there was something wrong with the water from that pump. So he immediately went to the parish council and told them to take the handle off the pump. Even though he couldn’t explain why, he managed to persuade them to do it. And the epidemic ended.
An author in the news
I wasn’t completely surprised to learn that Agatha Christie is the most-translated author in the world. But guess who comes in at number 2? Jules Verne.
There’s an interesting article about Verne in the March Smithsonian magazine. It turns out his novels were badly bowdlerized in Victorian-era translations, and the movies only made things worse. (Please click on the link if you don’t know the hilarious etymology of the word.) According to the article, Journey to the Center of the Earth “remains one of the liveliest introductions to earth science, fossil biology and evolution in literature.” Furthermore, it was published only five years after Darwin’s Origin of Species came out. How cool is THAT? The article calls him a writer of “scientific” — not “science” — fiction. And there are new translations now. Wonder if I can persuade the book group to read it next?
An old literary flame
Fifty years ago this week a press conference was held announcing the discovery of the polio vaccine. The press conference was held here in Ann Arbor, and the anniversary is getting a lot of attention in our local paper. An article I read in yesterday’s paper about Doctors Salk and Francis reminded me of a novel I adored as a teenager: Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis. It’s a very romantic story of an idealistic young doctor who works in various different settings, getting progressively more and more jaded, until finally he chucks everything and decides to follow his heart and his ideals. He ends up living in a little shack in the woods (or something) doing “pure” research. Despite the book being sexist, and full of slang like “keen!” and “swell!”, teenage Bookworm fell head-over-heels for Martin Arrowsmith. Frankly, I think the story of the polio vaccine is quite romantic, too.
A strange thing I noticed
Out of the whole world of bloggers only ten people, including me, listed “human evolution” as one of their interests.
I realize I lead a somewhat insulated life here in my liberal, highly-educated, supposedly-most-bookstores-per-capita university town. When Bush won the election I said wonderingly to my husband, “Who are these people that voted for him?” “Well, you know, honey,” he gently replied, “more than half the people in this country don’t believe in evolution.”
