Coming of Age

By: | March 30, 2016

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A few years ago, I joined a group of families on a backcountry kayaking trip in Alaska’s Prince William sound. A kid named Will was just about to turn 13, and I was there to watch him come of age. I’d known him as a strong little wild-haired monkey, but on this trip he became something else, turning into a new kind of person.

Will and I jumped to shore on a mangy, alder-and-spruce island. We were sent as scouts looking for two things, flat places to camp and cook, and bear scat. The bear scat we found looked old, no fresh kills or dark droppings of meat and berries. This was our spot.

Will was set for adventure. He would be our fire starter with his new knife, a magnesium rod, flint, and some dryer lint brought from home. His dad had given him four dry matches and no more. He’d been watching survivor shows on TV. He had a knack for this outdoors stuff.

Will and I found a few options for clearings, then circled back to each other. “This look good to you?” I asked. The straggle-haired boy nodded eagerly: “Yeah.” Continue reading →

Meet My New Favorite Television Show

By: | March 29, 2016

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I am a very selective television watcher. This doesn’t mean that I only watch the best shows, in fact quite the opposite. I’ve never seen Breaking Bad or The Sopranos or Orange is the New Black. My boyfriend has, I think, almost come to terms with the fact that I will probably never finish The Wire. (Before you rage-close this tab, let me be clear, I have watched two and a half seasons. It is very clearly a great show. But watching it makes me stressed out and unhappy, two things I try to avoid in my life if I can.) I also can’t watch shows that involve a lot of tension or awkward humor, so nearly every modern comedy is off the books, as are any shows that are scary or just unpleasant (looking at you The Bachelor).

But we have cable (mostly to watch sports) and I do have some favorite shows. The programs in my sweet spot are low-stakes, but relatively fast moving “reality” television. Cooking contest shows like Chopped, house-hunting and remodeling shows like House Hunters and Property Brothers. There’s always just a tiny bit of tension, but you know that in the end everybody will get an open floorpan or a weird ice cream and be happy. And in the spirit of sharing things we love, I am going to now tell you about my new favorite television show: Forged in Fire. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Hidden Rites of Spring

By: | March 28, 2016

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On Easter Sunday, between watching videos of puppies frolicking with bunnies and helping neighbor kids hunt for backyard eggs, I spent some time puzzling over the crypto-pagan religious festivals of the first month of spring. The connection, for instance, between chocolate eggs and the resurrection of Jesus Christ; fertility rituals and Virginia ham. And how a triangular cookie — spilling forth fruit, no less — came to symbolize the shriveled ears of a Persian villain named Haman.

I started with Easter, a word used only among English speakers*, mentioned only once in the King James Bible. This is because William Tyndale, when he rebelliously translated the Bible into English during the early 16th Century, used the word ester in one instance, instead of the Hebrew pesach. That wasn’t what got him burned at the stake, specifically, but it sure didn’t help. Eostre, as we already knew from the Venerable Bede in the 8th century, was the Germanic name of a pagan goddess associated with the month we now call April.

That Tyndale’s mistake not only never got edited out, but became, in some countries, the accepted name for the Christians’ most significant spring festival, brought about one of the more bizarre heortological mashups in all of history: A fertility rite organized around a newly dead man emerging from his tomb. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 26, 2016

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March 21 – 25, 2016

It’s Outmoded Diseases Week at LWON, those diseases that we once read about but we never hear about anyone getting anymore. (Not that we don’t still worry about them during late-night WebMD searches.)

On Monday, Ann kicked things off with neurasthenia, which “occurs in intellectuals with refined nervous systems and in masters of men and captains of industry under great nervous strain and in women whose naturally sensitive nervous systems are burdened with the necessity of reproduction and overwhelmed by education.” One of the suggested treatments is to take a rugged or calm vacation–which doesn’t work, except when it does.

Then Cassie covers spermatorrhea, the excessive loss of semen, a diagnosis that may have terrified the young men of Victorian England.

But women are not immune to outmoded diseases. Jenny gives us an entertaining history of female hysteria, including an illustration of “the purifying douche of all purifying douches”.

Guest Jennie Dusheck brings us pleurisy. This one’s not quite so outmoded as we would hope, because Jennie got it.

And on Friday, Craig recounts the story of a scientist who was studying ancient dire wolves with osteomyelitis, a bone infection. “She called me during her research to say that she was starting to feel the pain of the specimens she was studying. . . Animals had suffered long ago, and she could sense it. She dreamed she looked down and instead of seeing her feet, she saw paws treading the earth.

Then she got the disease.”

—

Image from Wellcome Library, London via Wikimedia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outmoded Diseases: An X-File for Osteomyelitis

By: | March 25, 2016

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I won’t use her name. How she got the disease no one knows. Her leg was cut off at the knee to stop the infection from spreading, and her name is omitted because she is a respected scientist. What happened in her case verges beyond science.

The disease is osteomyelitis. It means, simply, bone infection. In X-rays, it appears as a haziness, as if the bone were vanishing. An infection can enter the bone through the bloodstream or migrate from nearby tissue. Though it is rare, it is not technically outmoded. It still occurs, but in the case of this story, it should have been outmoded by tens of thousands of years. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Outmoded Diseases: Pleurisy

By: | March 24, 2016

Have you ever read a book where someone had pleurisy, or gout, or hysteria, and wondered…how come I never hear about anybody getting that anymore? Well, you’re in luck: It’s Outmoded Diseases Week at LWON, and we’re going to tell you. About some of them, anyway.

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I stumbled into the commute van in the dark, feeling for where to put my pack. It was 5:56 am in late January. The van was habitually punctual and the other riders raised their eyebrows if it was two minutes late.

The last one in, I scrambled into my seat. But as I leaned against the seat back, a searing pain made me catch my breath. What? That was weird. I dropped my knapsack, heavy with papers and my work laptop and reached for the seatbelt to buckle myself in. Another stab of pain. I clenched my teeth and tried not to whimper. I must have pulled a muscle.

But the pain was in a strange place, on the left side of my back just behind my heart.

As the van lurched across an intersection and onto a dark freeway onramp, I tried breathing into the pain gently but firmly. Agonizing. I switched to taking lots of shallow breaths and trying not to move despite the bouncing van. Over the next 45 minutes of my ride to work I discovered that if I twisted to one side and wedged the painful spot firmly against the back of the seat, I could breathe with just minor pain, as long as I took tiny breaths.

The van jolted to a stop; I grabbed my pack, opened the door, and tumbled out into the cold dawn. As I walked up the sidewalk to my office, I shut my eyes against the pain. This was crazy. What had happened to me?

At work in a medical school communications office, I read about chest pain. I didn’t think I was having a heart attack. But it hurt every single time I took a breath. It turns out we breathe quite frequently. Oh, yes. And if you try not to breathe much, you will, willy nilly, suddenly find yourself taking a deep breath when you are thinking about something else, like where to break a paragraph.

I called Kaiser and made an appointment. Two buses and a four-block walk later, I arrived in the clinic dizzy and panting. All I could think about was breathing, and not in the Yoga or meditation way.

The 40-foot walk to the exam room winded me. Apparently intrigued, my doctor made me walk it again so she could watch me gasp. She frowned.

Probably not a heart attack, she said, but she was concerned and wanted me to get an X-ray and a blood test to rule out pulmonary embolism, heart attack, and pneumonia. She said she was leaning towards pleurisy.

Pleurisy? Wasn’t that one of those Victorian diseases people got in the 1880s, arms resting beautifully against moist foreheads? Continue reading →

Outmoded Diseases: Female Hysteria, an Incomplete but Entertaining History

By: | March 23, 2016

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Okay, ladies, it’s high time we ceased the knuckle biting and the swooning, the weeping and the throwing of things, and certainly the touching of our own private parts in lieu of honoring the phallus. Someone might think we’re hysterical.

For as long as men and women have coexisted, which is pretty much the whole time, men have wished they could “fix” the things we girls do that irritate or flummox them. Corralling many symptoms under one label makes that easier, or at least it did for the earliest physicians. We can thank Hippocrates (460-377 BC) for the term “hysteria” (from hystera, literally ‘uterus’)—which nicely summed up a whole host of issues that we’ve now separated out into mostly psychological and neurological disorders, including depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, asthma, PMS, horniness, and lack of horniness (aka, “the headache”).

I won’t try to shovel 4,000 years of thinking about female hysteria into this wandering text, but here are some of the best bits—gleaned from scholarly papers that you could have read instead of this, had you Googled “female hysteria” and done some intelligent clicking. (I’ve listed those excellent sources at the bottom with links, to give credit where it is due.) Continue reading →

Outmoded Diseases: Spermatorrhea

By: | March 22, 2016

Have you ever read a book where someone had pleurisy, or gout, or hysteria, and wondered…how come I never hear about anybody getting that anymore? Well, you’re in luck: It’s Outmoded Diseases Week at LWON, and we’re going to tell you. About some of them, anyway.

Representing_the_last_stage_of_mental_&_bodily_exhaustio_Wellcome_L0031938Gents, are you prone to fainting fits and epilepsy? Are you lacking “balmy and vital moisture”? Do you have weakness in the penis? Has your seed spawned sickly babes that either die quickly or always complain?

Then you might be suffering from spermatorrhea (or if you’re British, spermatorrhoea), the excessive involuntary loss of semen.

But losing semen is just the beginning. “In spermatorrhea, the body becomes a sieve, losing vitality from every orifice. Semen leaks away not only in ejaculations and nocturnal emissions but in urination; sweat oozes from every pore, creating the clammy palms of the self-abuser . . . Over and over again, doctors imagined the body as a leaking vessel,” writes Ellen Bayuk Rosenman in Body Doubles: The Spermatorrhea Panic. Continue reading →