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Thursday, April 23, 2020

BIRTH | Shakespeare, April 23

William Shakespeare.
April 23, 2020—This is the day in 1564 we celebrate as the birthday of William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England.
William Shakespeare is long deceased and did not leave behind a library or personal papers, so we have to guess at his life story from public documents. They tell us that his father, John, was a glove-maker and alderman. 

He married Mary Arden, whose contribution to the family was a farm  inherited from her father. I have visited Mary Arden's farm and when I was there it was staffed by a loyal retinue of people reenacting the roles of farm and village dwellers of Shakespeare's day. However, I have to assume that the farm is closed today because of the horrible coronavirus.
John and Mary Shakespeare's son was baptized Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakespeare, William, son of John Shakespeare. The parents signed the baptismal register of the Church of the Holy Trinity on April 26. Babies were traditionally baptized on the first Sunday or holy feast day after their birth, but the Feast of St. Mark on April 25 was considered unlucky, so surely that's why April 26 was picked instead.
Shakespeare studied at the respected local grammar school, and married Anne Hathaway when he was 18 and she was 26 (and pregnant). Their daughter, Susanna, was born six months later and twins Hamnet and Judith followed two years later. Son Hamnet died at age 11, and Shakespeare began to write his tragedy Hamlet soon after. Here is a short (really short) summary of the play by the daughter of a friend: https://twitter.com/petridishes/status/1253385002303225857

Friday, April 17, 2020

HANDSHAKE | How COVID Killed a Grand Gesture

Tomb of the Verboten Handshake.
Epitaph by JT Marlin.
April 18, 2020–Before the arrival of Covid-19, the handshake was associated from the first extant written words with the idea of mutuality and peaceful intent. The Egyptian hieroglyphic of the extended hand is associated with giving. Handshaking seems to have been part of religious ritual in Babylon long before 850 BC, when the earliest recorded handshake partners were two kings—Assyria’s Shalmaneser III and Babylonia’s Marduk-Zakir-Shumi I.

Yet a few days ago, Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that when the plague of the coronavirus has passed, we should not only keep washing our hands, we should not go back to hand-shaking.

So the handshake is dangerous, now? What happened to its great reputation as the sign of friendship and gentlemanly mutual commitment? How did the royal handshake get and lose such a good name?

The two kings are displayed in about 850 BC, staff in the left hand and right hands clasped, on a bas-relief in sandstone on Shalmaneser's throne pedestal (see photo of detail at right). About 7 feet high, the relief was found in Nimrud and is in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.

Royal shake: Assyria's Shalmaneser III
 extends hand of friendship in c 850 BC
to Babylon's Marduk-Zakir-Shumi I.
Babylon was a good friend to Shalmaneser in his two-year war in the area. Shalmaneser later returned the favor to Marduk by defending himself against a rebellious younger brother.

In the United States, Quakers are credited with the spread of the handshake, as a mark of equality. The "gentlemen's agreement" was a hand-shaking ceremony associated with the signing of covenants of all kinds.

The handshake became a vehicle for transporting the Trojan Horses of droplets carrying the microscopic SARS-CoV2. In this way, Covid-19 destroyed the gentlemanly handshake's reputation and has made it verboten, even when neither side has symptoms of the disease, because the virus can be transferred by a carrier without symptoms.

Elbow-bumping or fist-bumping don't really work as a substitute for a handshake, because they both require two people to get close enough to each other for the virus to be transferred by droplets from the carrier. Social distancing requires a minimum distance between people of at least six feet (two meters), some say even more.

Asian bowing from six feet away, a practice made amusing in The Mikado, is looking a lot more sensible. We might now wonder why has it taken us so long to figure out the wisdom of that—along with, when a flu is about, regularly wearing a cloth face covering in public? We should have a public mourning of the end of the handshake... but not until the deadly disease that it has helped to spread has abated!

(Hat tip to RDA.)

Sunday, April 5, 2020

BIRTH | "Wash Your Hands" Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister (1827-1912)
April 5, 2020 – This day in 1827 was born Joseph Lister, the man who first preached "wash your hands, wash your hands" to prevent the spread of disease. He is called the father of antiseptic medicine and was born in Upton, England.

As the world confronts the pandemic COVID-19 disease, the importance of antiseptic hygiene is becoming widely known as a life-and-death daily matter. Soap and hot water, over a vigorous 20 seconds.

The theory behind this was first outlined in an article on antisepsis published in 1867. It outlines the discovery of antiseptic surgery in the august British journal The Lancet.

The author was Joseph Lister, or Lord Joseph Lister of Lyme Regis (1827-1912). His contribution to surgical methods is so fundamental he is also referred to as the Father of Modern Surgery. He would be Dr. Lister in the United States, but British surgeons like to acknowledge barbers as their professional ancestors by calling themselves just "Mr."

Born in 1827, Joseph Lister attended University College Hospital for his training, the only place he could go as a non-conforming Quaker. He became a professor of surgery at Glasgow University in 1860. In 1861 he was appointed to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, which had just built a new surgical wing to reduce the high 45-50 postsurgical mortality rate (operation successful, patient died).

The theory at the time was that putrefaction following an operation because of a miasma in the air. But Lister noted that the mortality rate from "ward fever" didn’t drop in the new Glasgow infirmary building. Lister theorized that the infection was caused not by a miasma but by an invisible dust, like pollen. Since the new building didn't improve the post-operative mortality rate,  he thought the solution might be to put a barrier between the patient and the surrounding air.

Lister moved to Edinburgh in 1869, marrying the daughter of an Edinburgh professorial colleague, James Syme, bringing with him the putrefaction puzzle. Why didn't the Glasgow hospital building's cleanliness help reduce post-operative mortality? Lister read Louis Pasteur's study of the cause of fermentation in beer and milk (the first pasteurization test had been completed in 1862) and speculated that this might be the cause of wound putrefaction.

Authorities in nearby Carlisle were using creosote to clean bad-smelling sewage because it reduced the odor. They discovered it also reduced disease amongst cattle and humans. Lister applied Pasteur's study as an explanation of carbolic acid's effectiveness in stopping the putrefaction. He experimented with dressings soaked in carbolic acid to cover wounds. The outcome was that the rate of infection was vastly reduced. He experimented with hand-washing, sterilizing instruments and spraying carbolic in the operating theater. He developed a carbolic spray. His antiseptic treatment of wounds improved surgery survival rates. His first article appeared in The Lancet in March 1867, soon before his 40th birthday. The last of his six articles appeared in July.

Between 1864 and 1866, before the use of antiseptic treatment, 46 percent of Lister’s surgical patients died. In contrast, from 1867 to 1870, only 15 percent died, and he eventually got the mortality rate down to 5 percent. Yet Lister was initially a prophet without honor in his own country. His idea of invisible germs was mocked. His work was accepted in Germany, where it was seen to work, but it was ridiculed in London.

To be fair to the European medical profession (h/t to E.P.), Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis was the first to preach handwashing, based on his obstetric work in the 1840s when he noticed that the patients managed by doctors did much worse than those managed by midwives despite the doctors being more scientific and carrying out post-mortems on the mothers that died. He decided the doctors were carrying something lethal on their hands from the dead to the living and, sensibly enough, recommended they wash whatever it is off their hands.

Doctors didn't want to believe that they had been violating their Hippocratic oath by carrying illness from one patient to another and they dismissed Semmelweis as crazy (he did spend time in a mental institution), so it is fair to give Lister the credit for being the first not only to preach handwashing but to get others to listen. To answer his London critics, Lister put his head on the mouth of the British medical lion and accepted a post as Professor of Clinical Surgery at King's College Hospital in 1877.

Lister's breakthrough in convincing the English medical establishment of his theories occurred when he performed a successful "open" operation for fracture of the patella (kneecap). The patient, Francis Smith, had fractured his patella a fortnight earlier. Lister wired together the separated fragments of his bone, a complicated process that showed how the antiseptic system “had removed for ever the threat of hospital disease”. Smith survived the operation and walked out of the hospital 3 months later. Lister’s fame spread.

Many people came to the hospital to watch him operate, and notices requesting no smoking in the hospital had to be posted in three different languages. In 1883, Lister was made a Baronet. In 1897 he was the first surgeon to become a peer, the 1st Baron Lister of Lyme Regis.