{"id":15691,"date":"2014-10-10T16:03:22","date_gmt":"2014-10-11T00:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/?p=15691"},"modified":"2014-10-26T20:30:20","modified_gmt":"2014-10-27T04:30:20","slug":"science-sleuths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/?p=15691","title":{"rendered":"Science Sleuths"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Ebola, global warming, heat death, yadayadayada, it seems as if even day a new type of medical or environmental horror is attacking us from the headlines. The Vallows are sciencey people, engineers, doctors and research scientists and me, a cartoonist who likes to read about stuff, particularly if there is an element of MYSTERY afoot. Germs and detectives might not seem like they’re connected. But their link, as a certain fictitious sleuth might say, is elementary. Here are some books I have read recently that you may ALSO enjoy!<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Spitting Blood: <\/strong>The History of Tuberculosis by Helen\u00a0Bynum<\/p>\n

I have always been fascinated by the romantic “wasting” disease. It started as a kid when I read the story of Poe’s child bride’s death by consumption. She is entertaining guests in the parlor on the harp (or was it a piano?), and suddenly starts spitting up blood. She spends the next months growing paler and more wan and more beautiful, glowing <\/em>with the disease.\u00a0During the Romantic <\/em>Age, TB was called “consumption,” from the Latin,\u00a0consumere<\/em>, to waste away and for a brief period, became a stylish mark of tragic beauty. The pale and wan English poets, like Keats and Shelley, symbolized the melancholy ideal of the romantic and consumptive youth of the 19th century, such as Mimi, in Puccini’s\u00a0La Boh\u00e8me. <\/em>Romantics began to believe consumption was associated with gifted and talented people; Thoreau, dead at 45; Chopin, 39; and Robert Louis Stevenson, 34.\u00a0It was the professional and popular opinion then, before the discovery of germs, that consumption was a constitutional trait.<\/p>\n

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Reading Spitting Blood, it is difficult to accept the atrocious toll this ancient disease still takes on human life, despite several centuries of concerted scientific effort. Bynum castigates the “casual disregard” we have shown this deadly condition. Each year, almost 9 million new TB infections take place and some 1.4 million deaths.\u00a0George Orwell’s’ battle with pulmonary tuberculosis ended when he \u201cdrowned in his own blood” after a severe lung hemorrhage in 1950, aged 46.\u00a0Tuberculosis kills the young, and the disease is an important reason why many nations remain mired in poverty.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the major conclusion of Bynum’s investigation is that TB is not simply an infectious disease \u2013 it is a social disease. It attacks the poor, the underprivileged and the vulnerable. There really isn’t anything romantic about it at all.<\/p>\n

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Spillover:<\/strong> Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic\u00a0by David Quammen<\/p>\n

A Sprawling detective story with a vast host of murderers; viruses, bacteria and single-celled organisms which infect other animals, but every so often make the jump \u2013 spill over \u2013 to us humans. Each chapter follows the quest to track down a new villain. An international team of hero detectives – scientists – \u00a0slave away in the field and in labs, uncovering the traces which will lead them to the killers (too often the BAT), often getting jabbed with infected needles themselves.<\/p>\n

An opening chapter almost had me put Spillover away: about a horrific virus that was particularly upsetting to me, which lays waste to horses (<\/em>and\u00a0humans), eventually leading us to fckng FLYING FOXES aka GIANT FCKNG BATS. The Ebola virus emerges through a grim tale with piles of dead apes<\/em> in the forest, consumption of rotting bushmeat, sorcery and Rosicrucianism. Quammen doesn’t sensationalize this stuff because he doesn’t need to, it is horrific enough. He promises to tell us the “complicated story”, not the dramatic one. Quammen wants you to understand and wants you to be invested.\u00a0His writing style is morbidly entertaining\u00a0and doesn\u2019t mind repeating himself (he admits it outright, repeatedly). Still, a consummate piece of science writing that you’re likely to imbibe some extremely complex concepts without realizing it.<\/p>\n

Quammen writes: “We are \u201ctearing ecosystems apart,\u201d and animals and humans are rubbing shoulders in novel, unexpected ways. The steady drip of animal microbes spilling over into people quickens. less public health warning than ecological affirmation: these crossovers force us to uphold.\u00a0People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses,\u201d Quammen writes. \u201cWe\u2019re all in this together.\u201d \u00a0Stop taking antibiotics for viruses and get your flu shots, folks! And remember: “The duck is the Trojan horse.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Advice For a Young Investigator <\/strong>by Santiago Ramon Y Cajal, Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson<\/p>\n

Santiago Ramon y Cajal was a mythic figure in science, hailed as the father of modern anatomy and neurobiology, and largely responsible for the modern conception of the HUMAN BRAIN. Before Cajal, <\/strong>the scientific community viewed the nervous system as a continuous strand. Cajal argued that any attempt to operate on one<\/em> part of the brain would disable the rest of it, like pulling out a bulb from those old-fashioned \u00a0kinds of strands of Christmas tree lights. Cajal laid the foundation for much of what we now know about how the brain works.<\/p>\n

Cajal talks about science as a superior form of human evaluation and the limitations of subjective reasoning, and \u00a0provides insights into his unconventional investigative process.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/em>The Logic of Scientific Discovery <\/strong>by Karl Popper\u00a0 (German:\u00a0Logik der Forschung<\/em>,which, literally means “The Logic of Research”). <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>Popper argues that science should adopt a methodology based on\u00a0falsifiability, because no number of experiments can ever prove a theory, but a single experiment can contradict one. Popper holds that empirical theories are characterized by falsifiability. This book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as\u00a0the now legendary doctrine of ‘falsificationism’ electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. Popper has a straightforward, lucid writing style, as a book on epistemology needs to be easy to read and understandable.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>“The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis”<\/strong><\/p>\n

A \u00a0real-life medical detective story highlighting a pair of unlikely heroes who crossed paths in Berlin in 1890 and forever changed the landscapes of medicine and literature.<\/p>\n

Before Robert Koch discovered the cause of tuberculosis, he was a provincial German physician (think CHARLES BOVARY), with the dream of becoming a famous scientist.<\/p>\n

Before Arthur Conan Doyle got rich with Sherlock Holmes, he was a small-town English physician with dreams of becoming a famous writer. The idea of scientific detective work inspired Doyle to give up medicine and pursue literature full-time, and Sherlock Holmes\u2014with his signature \u201cscience of deduction\u201d technique\u2014was born.<\/p>\n

Their two narratives are weaved through a history of medical best practices, a period marked by improved hygienic practices and the possibility of new vaccines. It’s a page turner, that takes place in the final decades of the 19th century when\u00a0tuberculosis was an incurable scourge that killed indiscriminately and ravaged populations; for decades, it was the leading cause of death in Europe and the United States. The origin of the disease was a complete mystery, as was its uncanny ability to travel from one person to another. The age of electricity was dawning. And in laboratories and on imaginary London streets, men armed with microscopes and the power of observation first used science to tackle the twin scourges of crime and disease.<\/p>\n

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Genius on the Edge: the bizarre double life of r. William Stewart Halstead<\/strong> by Gerald Imber<\/p>\n

Born in New York City the same year as Cajal, William Stewart Halsted didn’t decide to study medicine until he was a senior at Yale, a choice that profoundly affected the surgical field. The book very <\/em>realistically portrays the agony of operations a century ago when the mortality rate was as high as 99 percent. Today it’s 1 percent, in part because of Halsted, whose genius often came from common sense like washing your fckng hands<\/em> and wearing scrubs.<\/p>\n

There are so many salacious and entertaining bits in Halstead’s life that makes this a real page turner. There is the implied possibly that he is gay, the whole Jekyll and Hyde part of his personality thing, his drug addictions and his mysterious, unexplained disappearances. The gay thing is barely substantiated, mostly stuff like his marriage at age 40 to a <\/span>plain woman <\/em>who w<\/span>ore masculine clothing<\/em> <\/em>and that<\/em> she and Halsted had separate bedrooms.\u00a0His\u00a0obsession with improving anesthesia led to self-experimentation which led to a cocaine dependence. The Jekyll and Hyde simile is quite salacious. In the hospital, with nurses, staff and co-workers, Halsted was stiff, painfully shy, reclusive, unapproachable, severe, sarcastic, sometimes cruel. But with his close friends, at his club after his afternoon drugs, his charm and \u00a0humor shine through. His cocaine habit was “cured” with a lasting heroin addiction. Despite this, Halsted never lost his humor, famously observing: “Surgery would be delightful if you did not have to operate.”<\/span><\/p>\n

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Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery <\/strong>by Michael Bliss<\/p>\n

Without the influence of Cajal and Halsted, the career of Harvey Cushing, one of America\u2019s first neurosurgeons, might not have been possible. And without Cushing, many modern careers would not exist. In this biography, Michael Bliss describes a genius with relentless ambition, a mentor and tormentor, a perfectionist who often forgot the line between confidence and arrogance.<\/p>\n

Bliss details Cushing’s obsession with improving all aspects of surgical care, as well as clinical diagnostic methods.\u00a0Dr. Cushing was performing brain surgery during the earliest days of brain surgery, when doctors had no imaging tools to locate a\u00a0tumor or proper lighting to illuminate the surgical field; when everyone was filthy, when anesthesia was rudimentary and sometimes not used at all; when\u00a0antibiotics did not exist to fend off potential infections. Some patients survived the procedure \u2014 more often if Dr. Cushing was by their side. Dr. Cushing also discovered that pituitary tumors could lead to vast changes in the body. Cushing\u2019s disease and Cushing\u2019s syndrome \u2014 two illnesses linked to hormones gone awry \u2014 are named for his discoveries.<\/p>\n

Dr. \u00a0Cushing collected cancerous brains which were later donated to Yale on his death in 1939 \u2014 along with meticulous medical records, before-and-after photographs of patients, and anatomical illustrations. (Dr. Cushing was also an accomplished artist.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ebola, global warming, heat death, yadayadayada, it seems as if even day a new type of medical or environmental horror is attacking us from the headlines. The Vallows are sciencey people, engineers, doctors and research scientists and me, a cartoonist … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15691"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15797,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15691\/revisions\/15797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}