Showing posts with label tls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tls. Show all posts
Monday, April 23, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Original text of Review of "Mortal Coil; A Brief History of Living Longer" by David Boyd Haycock for TLS
Submitted 31/01/09
There was quite a lot of editing on this, will try and put up the published text too.
Mortal Coil – A Short History of Living Longer.
David Boyd Haycock
Yale University Press,
2008.
In March 1626, Sir Francis Bacon stopped his carriage to stuff a
chicken with snow. In so doing, he contracted the bronchitis that
would kill him. This experiment was intended to investigate a
potential means of immortality. Bacon, four years earlier, had written
his History Naturall and Experimentall of Life and Death, intended as
manual of the prolongation of life. This age-old ambition assumed more
urgency in the early modern era, as humanists began to question the
received authority that three score and ten was the limit of human
existence. Reports, utterly unencumbered by any documentary evidence,
of centenarians such as Thomas Parr who died allegedly aged 152 in
1635, further encouraged efforts at life extension.
The biblical patriarchs provided most inspiration for would-be
immortalists. Genesis reported that Adam lived to 930, Noah to 950 and
Methuselah to 969. St Augustine and Flavius Josephus had robustly
defended the literal nature of these ages, and in the early modern era
they served as exemplars of human potential. Clearly something had
gone wrong since Genesis, and what becomes a familiar cast of villains
as Haycock's narrative progresses were indicted – faulty diet, alcohol
lack of moral fibre, excess emission of seminal fluid, and so on. Two
distinct approaches to longevity are evident throughout the book – one
of lifestyle modification and one of seeking an elixir of eternal
youth.
For eternal youth, rather than prolonged age per se, was and is the
dream. Aristotle has held that as one ages, the body's life-giving
heat gradually dries out the organs and the flesh. Heat was both
source of life and source of death. For early moderns, reconciling
this with the longevity of the patriarchs was a challenge. For some,
it lead into millennial despair – the world was growing old and
decrepit and humanity along with it. For others, it was a source of
optimism, suggesting that prolonged, vigorous life was possible. This
optimism, fed also by occasional cases like Parr's, survived into more
secular ages sceptical and then dismissive of scriptural authority.
Haycock traces this search from early modernity right up to the
present day. The potential immortality of the soul is outside his
scope. Dreams of longevity are closely linked with other utopian
dreams – witness the interest of such figures as Condorcet and William
Godwin. The cast of characters is huge, and range from figures central
to Western thought such as Descartes (who believed he could live for
five hundred years) to obscure charlatans and eccentrics. Despite
this, there is a pedestrian quality to the book. Some of the curiously
limits of the human imagination when it comes to possible means of
prolonging life. As Haycock describes yet another scheme for longer
life, usually consisting of a simple diet, celibacy, sleep, frugality
and refraining from anything that could be described as excitement,
one feels like one has been here before.
There are exceptions to this rule. Francis Bacon, in his complicated
scheme, encouraged consumption of rich fatty meats, sweat fruits and
honey. The idea that red wine bestows health is not a new one
conveniently discovered by French epidemiologists – in 1638 the London
physician Tobias Whitaker wrote The Tree of Humane Life hoping to
prove "the possibilitie of maintaining Life from infancy to extreame
old age without any sicknesse by the use of Wine." Cryogenics, based
on the idea of refrigerating the corpse for thawing out at a later
date when medical science has obligingly discovered how to reverse the
thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to.
The unintended consequences of the search for long life are often more
interesting than the search itself. Haycock traces the roots of the
Royal Society to Bacon's proposed establishment of Saloman's House, an
institution devoted to the long-term advancement of learning. Modern
endocrinology developed in part as a by product of the search for a
"magic bullet" of longevity. The early twentieth century attempts to
use testosterone to rejuvenate – such as Serge Voronoff's grafting of
monkey testes onto human ones, and Eugen Steinach's use of vasectomies
– attracted much public attention, and mockery. W.B. Yeats submitted
himself to Steinach's procedure followed by hormonal injections in
1934. Dublin wags dubbed him "the gland old man", perhaps confusing
Steinach and Voronoff.
In the final chapter, Haycock brings us to the contemporary world of
genomics and a modern medicine that has unravelled many of life's
secrets and , in the Western world anyway, can sometimes seem capable
of the miraculous. We meet Aubrey de Grey, celebrity posthumanist and
possessor of a beard of Dostoyevkesyian proportions (free of grey
hairs.) de Grey enthusiastically believes there is a human being
currently alive who will live a thousand years. This will be an
incremental process – as the centuries progress, means of prolonging
vigorous life for another twenty years or so will be discovered,
rather then there being one great discovery revealing the key to long
life. de Grey is far from a mainstream figure, and other
gerontologists are profoundly sceptical of the possibility and
desirability of such long life.
Fully engaging in these debates is outside Haycock's scope (and in a
footnote he intimates a belief that the danger of environmental
catastrophe far outweighs the problems of a vastly older population)
but one feels that if he had considered them more explicitly, the book
itself would possess more vigorous life. In the index we find a host
of eminent medical and philosophical names (almost all male, despite –
or maybe because of – the well known tendency for women to live longer
than men) but not that of Alois Alzheimer. All utopian dreams have
within them the stuff of nightmare, and long life is no different.
There was quite a lot of editing on this, will try and put up the published text too.
Mortal Coil – A Short History of Living Longer.
David Boyd Haycock
Yale University Press,
2008.
In March 1626, Sir Francis Bacon stopped his carriage to stuff a
chicken with snow. In so doing, he contracted the bronchitis that
would kill him. This experiment was intended to investigate a
potential means of immortality. Bacon, four years earlier, had written
his History Naturall and Experimentall of Life and Death, intended as
manual of the prolongation of life. This age-old ambition assumed more
urgency in the early modern era, as humanists began to question the
received authority that three score and ten was the limit of human
existence. Reports, utterly unencumbered by any documentary evidence,
of centenarians such as Thomas Parr who died allegedly aged 152 in
1635, further encouraged efforts at life extension.
The biblical patriarchs provided most inspiration for would-be
immortalists. Genesis reported that Adam lived to 930, Noah to 950 and
Methuselah to 969. St Augustine and Flavius Josephus had robustly
defended the literal nature of these ages, and in the early modern era
they served as exemplars of human potential. Clearly something had
gone wrong since Genesis, and what becomes a familiar cast of villains
as Haycock's narrative progresses were indicted – faulty diet, alcohol
lack of moral fibre, excess emission of seminal fluid, and so on. Two
distinct approaches to longevity are evident throughout the book – one
of lifestyle modification and one of seeking an elixir of eternal
youth.
For eternal youth, rather than prolonged age per se, was and is the
dream. Aristotle has held that as one ages, the body's life-giving
heat gradually dries out the organs and the flesh. Heat was both
source of life and source of death. For early moderns, reconciling
this with the longevity of the patriarchs was a challenge. For some,
it lead into millennial despair – the world was growing old and
decrepit and humanity along with it. For others, it was a source of
optimism, suggesting that prolonged, vigorous life was possible. This
optimism, fed also by occasional cases like Parr's, survived into more
secular ages sceptical and then dismissive of scriptural authority.
Haycock traces this search from early modernity right up to the
present day. The potential immortality of the soul is outside his
scope. Dreams of longevity are closely linked with other utopian
dreams – witness the interest of such figures as Condorcet and William
Godwin. The cast of characters is huge, and range from figures central
to Western thought such as Descartes (who believed he could live for
five hundred years) to obscure charlatans and eccentrics. Despite
this, there is a pedestrian quality to the book. Some of the curiously
limits of the human imagination when it comes to possible means of
prolonging life. As Haycock describes yet another scheme for longer
life, usually consisting of a simple diet, celibacy, sleep, frugality
and refraining from anything that could be described as excitement,
one feels like one has been here before.
There are exceptions to this rule. Francis Bacon, in his complicated
scheme, encouraged consumption of rich fatty meats, sweat fruits and
honey. The idea that red wine bestows health is not a new one
conveniently discovered by French epidemiologists – in 1638 the London
physician Tobias Whitaker wrote The Tree of Humane Life hoping to
prove "the possibilitie of maintaining Life from infancy to extreame
old age without any sicknesse by the use of Wine." Cryogenics, based
on the idea of refrigerating the corpse for thawing out at a later
date when medical science has obligingly discovered how to reverse the
thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to.
The unintended consequences of the search for long life are often more
interesting than the search itself. Haycock traces the roots of the
Royal Society to Bacon's proposed establishment of Saloman's House, an
institution devoted to the long-term advancement of learning. Modern
endocrinology developed in part as a by product of the search for a
"magic bullet" of longevity. The early twentieth century attempts to
use testosterone to rejuvenate – such as Serge Voronoff's grafting of
monkey testes onto human ones, and Eugen Steinach's use of vasectomies
– attracted much public attention, and mockery. W.B. Yeats submitted
himself to Steinach's procedure followed by hormonal injections in
1934. Dublin wags dubbed him "the gland old man", perhaps confusing
Steinach and Voronoff.
In the final chapter, Haycock brings us to the contemporary world of
genomics and a modern medicine that has unravelled many of life's
secrets and , in the Western world anyway, can sometimes seem capable
of the miraculous. We meet Aubrey de Grey, celebrity posthumanist and
possessor of a beard of Dostoyevkesyian proportions (free of grey
hairs.) de Grey enthusiastically believes there is a human being
currently alive who will live a thousand years. This will be an
incremental process – as the centuries progress, means of prolonging
vigorous life for another twenty years or so will be discovered,
rather then there being one great discovery revealing the key to long
life. de Grey is far from a mainstream figure, and other
gerontologists are profoundly sceptical of the possibility and
desirability of such long life.
Fully engaging in these debates is outside Haycock's scope (and in a
footnote he intimates a belief that the danger of environmental
catastrophe far outweighs the problems of a vastly older population)
but one feels that if he had considered them more explicitly, the book
itself would possess more vigorous life. In the index we find a host
of eminent medical and philosophical names (almost all male, despite –
or maybe because of – the well known tendency for women to live longer
than men) but not that of Alois Alzheimer. All utopian dreams have
within them the stuff of nightmare, and long life is no different.
Original text of review submitted to TLS of "Take Me To The Source" by Rupert Wright and "The Blue Death" by Dr Robert D Morris
Submitted on 02/07/08
ake me to the source: In search of water. Rupert Wright
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster and the Water We Drink. Dr Robert D Morris
Thales of Miletus, the earliest identifiable philosopher and scientist (in a fairly loose sense of both terms) held that "everything is water." That this is the first philosophical and first scientific statement is no accident; water is central to human existence. In the West, however, the words of Jake Gittes in "Chinatown" are apt – "I turned on the faucet, it came out hot and cold, I didn't think there was a thing to it. "Rupert Wright, who has previously written books about life in the Languedoc region, begins his discursive, digressive, suitably elusive book with the sudden cessation of water supply in his French home. When he bought the place, the fact that it came with its own water supply was another romantic touch. Only when it stopped did he realise that there was indeed "a thing to it."
Wright has written an entertaining tour of the world of water, if such a tautology is possible in a world that is mainly water. From the gigantic excavation of a third water supply tunnel for New York, happening almost invisibly to passers-by in Midtown Manhattan, to a sommelier instructing bored Parisians in the appreciation of spring and mineral water, to the hunger-striking Bishop of Barra in Brazil trying to stop the damming of the São Francisco River, humanity's relationship with water is by turns inspiring, absurd, and tragic.
Water policy is steadfastly unsexy. All over the world, Wright notices, oil ministers are Harvard-educated, Rolex-wearing, Armani-clad; water ministers wear cheap suits and use their mobile phones to tell the time. Wright is no reflex contrarian, but his scepticism about some of the received wisdom about water and water policy is bracing. One truism of bien pensant opinion he seems wearied by is the wars of the coming century will be a fought over water, a notion he imagines Flaubert consigning to a contemporary Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues. Only one war, he writes, has ever definitively been fought over water – "more have been fought over salt." Water has been a tool of war rather than a cause of war, and the need for water drives co-operation as much as competition (Europe's oldest law court the Tribunal de las Aguas de la Vega de Valencia, consists of eight magistrates who have convened every Thursday at midday since the Tenth Century to ensure the fair distribution of Turia River water.)
Wright is much more interested in how writers and artists have described and depicted water. Poetry flows throughout. He is particularly enraptured by the single flowing sentence that is Bloom's reflection on water in Ulysses. That dry systemiser Stephen Dedalus disliked bathing and suspects 'aquacities of thought and language'; hydrophilic Bloom boils the kettle and embarks on an epic sentence of reverie and connection about water. Three other texts especially inspire Wright - John Cheever's "The Swimmer", Roger Deakin's "Waterlog" and Charles Sprawson's "Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero" and he has something of the ruminative charm of Deakin and the digressive erudition of Sprawson.
No mention of Ulysses in Dr Robert D. Morris' "The Blue Death" (Morris, incidentally, uses his professional title on the book's cover.) While Rupert Wright does not gloss over the lethality of water-borne infections and the mass misery and death that can be caused by consuming water, Morris, a public health physician and water researcher, focuses exclusively on water-borne threats. Water, as a substance itself, is not centre stage – indeed is hardly mentioned. An aside that "safe water is not an end, but a process, an ongoing struggle in which improvement is always possible and often necessary. Purity, it turns out, is fleeting" is the closest we come to the philosophical reflections of Wright.
He begins with the tale of John Snow and the Broad Street pump. Snow is to epidemiologists what Indiana Jones is to archaeologists, and Morris lays of the suspense a little thick: "Snow felt he was finally closing in on the proof that might muffle his critics. The ground itself would need to shake to divert his attention from the task at hand. He would soon discover that an epidemiological earthquake like no other had its epicenter on the north side of the Thames." We move on to the battles over cholera of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur ("like seasoned gunfighters, they would meet in the streets of Alexandria with test tubes blazing until only one man was standing.")
The tone shifts suddenly halfway through. Morris is no longer describing the heroic age of epidemiology and public health, but is centre stage. A meta-analysis he performs linking long-term consumption of chlorinated water with cancer earns him the suspicion of the water treatment industry and, it seems from his own account, the Environmental Protection Agency. Again we are reminded that water is "unsexy" – public attention, for Big Water, means bad news. Outbreaks of cryptosporidium in Milwaukee in 1993 and E. coli 0157:H7 in Canada in 2000 illustrate the weaknesses of water processing systems that have changed little in a hundred years. Morris is no neutral in these matters, and closes the book with an eight point plan for ensuring safe water (step 7, by the way, involves the universal use of point-of-use filtration for drinking water.)
Wright writes ruminatively, philosophically, sub specie aeternis,, while Morris is the researcher in the arena of current controversy and impatient with the slow pace of change. Wright is amusedly tolerant of bottled water and its attendant absurdities; Morris is angered by a fad whereby more water is used to produce the bottle than goes inside. Both aim to reveal the truth about the ubiquitous and invisible substance that we are learning not to take quite so much for granted – water is everywhere, water is eternal, water is indestructible, and water is scarce, fleeting, and fragile.
ake me to the source: In search of water. Rupert Wright
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster and the Water We Drink. Dr Robert D Morris
Thales of Miletus, the earliest identifiable philosopher and scientist (in a fairly loose sense of both terms) held that "everything is water." That this is the first philosophical and first scientific statement is no accident; water is central to human existence. In the West, however, the words of Jake Gittes in "Chinatown" are apt – "I turned on the faucet, it came out hot and cold, I didn't think there was a thing to it. "Rupert Wright, who has previously written books about life in the Languedoc region, begins his discursive, digressive, suitably elusive book with the sudden cessation of water supply in his French home. When he bought the place, the fact that it came with its own water supply was another romantic touch. Only when it stopped did he realise that there was indeed "a thing to it."
Wright has written an entertaining tour of the world of water, if such a tautology is possible in a world that is mainly water. From the gigantic excavation of a third water supply tunnel for New York, happening almost invisibly to passers-by in Midtown Manhattan, to a sommelier instructing bored Parisians in the appreciation of spring and mineral water, to the hunger-striking Bishop of Barra in Brazil trying to stop the damming of the São Francisco River, humanity's relationship with water is by turns inspiring, absurd, and tragic.
Water policy is steadfastly unsexy. All over the world, Wright notices, oil ministers are Harvard-educated, Rolex-wearing, Armani-clad; water ministers wear cheap suits and use their mobile phones to tell the time. Wright is no reflex contrarian, but his scepticism about some of the received wisdom about water and water policy is bracing. One truism of bien pensant opinion he seems wearied by is the wars of the coming century will be a fought over water, a notion he imagines Flaubert consigning to a contemporary Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues. Only one war, he writes, has ever definitively been fought over water – "more have been fought over salt." Water has been a tool of war rather than a cause of war, and the need for water drives co-operation as much as competition (Europe's oldest law court the Tribunal de las Aguas de la Vega de Valencia, consists of eight magistrates who have convened every Thursday at midday since the Tenth Century to ensure the fair distribution of Turia River water.)
Wright is much more interested in how writers and artists have described and depicted water. Poetry flows throughout. He is particularly enraptured by the single flowing sentence that is Bloom's reflection on water in Ulysses. That dry systemiser Stephen Dedalus disliked bathing and suspects 'aquacities of thought and language'; hydrophilic Bloom boils the kettle and embarks on an epic sentence of reverie and connection about water. Three other texts especially inspire Wright - John Cheever's "The Swimmer", Roger Deakin's "Waterlog" and Charles Sprawson's "Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero" and he has something of the ruminative charm of Deakin and the digressive erudition of Sprawson.
No mention of Ulysses in Dr Robert D. Morris' "The Blue Death" (Morris, incidentally, uses his professional title on the book's cover.) While Rupert Wright does not gloss over the lethality of water-borne infections and the mass misery and death that can be caused by consuming water, Morris, a public health physician and water researcher, focuses exclusively on water-borne threats. Water, as a substance itself, is not centre stage – indeed is hardly mentioned. An aside that "safe water is not an end, but a process, an ongoing struggle in which improvement is always possible and often necessary. Purity, it turns out, is fleeting" is the closest we come to the philosophical reflections of Wright.
He begins with the tale of John Snow and the Broad Street pump. Snow is to epidemiologists what Indiana Jones is to archaeologists, and Morris lays of the suspense a little thick: "Snow felt he was finally closing in on the proof that might muffle his critics. The ground itself would need to shake to divert his attention from the task at hand. He would soon discover that an epidemiological earthquake like no other had its epicenter on the north side of the Thames." We move on to the battles over cholera of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur ("like seasoned gunfighters, they would meet in the streets of Alexandria with test tubes blazing until only one man was standing.")
The tone shifts suddenly halfway through. Morris is no longer describing the heroic age of epidemiology and public health, but is centre stage. A meta-analysis he performs linking long-term consumption of chlorinated water with cancer earns him the suspicion of the water treatment industry and, it seems from his own account, the Environmental Protection Agency. Again we are reminded that water is "unsexy" – public attention, for Big Water, means bad news. Outbreaks of cryptosporidium in Milwaukee in 1993 and E. coli 0157:H7 in Canada in 2000 illustrate the weaknesses of water processing systems that have changed little in a hundred years. Morris is no neutral in these matters, and closes the book with an eight point plan for ensuring safe water (step 7, by the way, involves the universal use of point-of-use filtration for drinking water.)
Wright writes ruminatively, philosophically, sub specie aeternis,, while Morris is the researcher in the arena of current controversy and impatient with the slow pace of change. Wright is amusedly tolerant of bottled water and its attendant absurdities; Morris is angered by a fad whereby more water is used to produce the bottle than goes inside. Both aim to reveal the truth about the ubiquitous and invisible substance that we are learning not to take quite so much for granted – water is everywhere, water is eternal, water is indestructible, and water is scarce, fleeting, and fragile.
Original TLS review of "MAD DOGS AND ENGLIGHMEN: RABIES IN BRITAIN, 1830-2000" by Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys
As prior, this is the original review I submitted on 03/07/08.
Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain 1830-2000
Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys
Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 2007
1830 saw the publication of the veterinarian William Youatt's pamphlet On Canine Madness, firmly stating that rabies was a specific and contagious disease spread only by the bite of an infected animal. 1830 also saw a "great and almost universal alarm" about rabies that lead one correspondent of the then Home Secretary, Robert Peel, to characterise the summer weeks as an "'Era Of Canine Madness.'"
Tensions between the nascent veterinary profession and the more established medical profession, and the plethora of lay remedies – every town and district had its own remedy – complicated official responses. Youatt and other progressive veterinarians and doctors were at odds with the prevailing medical orthodoxy on rabies. A distinction was drawn between rabies in dogs and hydrophobia in humans, and much debate was concerned with clarifying the nature of the disease. For much of the period covered by this book, there were many forms of rabies described by many different authorities with different interests – zymotic rabies, epizootic rabies, furious rabies, dumb rabies, laboratory rabies, street rabies. The authors deliberately do not describe what rabies is, to allow the reader to share something of the historical discoveries and controversies, none of which are as clear-cut even in retrospect as a simple medically triumphalist account.
The nineteenth-century battle between the germ theory and the theory of spontaneous generation of disease was fought over rabies as much as any other condition. This debate was not purely medical, with the developing animal welfare movement generally arguing the case of spontaneous generation, with the mistreatment of dogs being a prime factor. The authors show how concerns about the mistreatment of dogs reflected concerns about wider social demoralisation and fear of the working class. Muzzling regulations – including those of the 1890s which were associated with the successful eradication of the disease – generally excluded the sporting dogs of the hunting set.
It is the nature of dramatic medical advances that they become mythologized. Louis Pasteur's 1885 announcement that he had successfully developed a rabies vaccine was cornerstone of the mythic view of Pasteur as a dedicated, devoutly Catholic benefactor of mankind, as exemplified by the Paul Mona in the 1937 film The Story of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur became a hate figure for antivivisectionists – who saw him as "the assumed god of biological science" – and was accused of creating a different form of "laboratory rabies" for the purposes of self-promotion.
The muzzling programme of the 1890s (as authors point out the other associated factors, especially improved care of dogs, aided eradication) was most strongly associated with Walter Long, president of the Board of Agriculture from 1895 to 1900, and later a severe chief secretary for Ireland and architect of the Government of Ireland Act.) Long received far more hate mail about the muzzling than any of his controversial involvements in Irish affairs. As well as antagonising animal welfare movements (then as now, the authors observe, the RSPCA generally kept to the official line while more militant groups vigorously opposed the new regulations) the muzzle was linked in feminist discourse to such traditionalistic, misogynistic (and possibly apocryphal) instruments of punishment as the "Gossip's bridle."
Links between feminism, animal welfare and a variety of spiritualist movements were complex. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to be entered on the General Medical Council's register in 1859, illustrates these links well – she argued that women in medicine should use the power of "spiritual maternity" to heal society, while rejecting the excessively materialist germ theory, animal experimentation and Pasteur's treatments. The new generation of female doctors tended to reject Blackwell's beliefs.
The authors situate rabies in its wider social and political contexts, especially that of literature. Works such Richard Blackmore's 1872 novel The Maid of Sker – which Blackmore himself regarded as superior to Lorna Doone - Wuthering Heights, and The Hound of the Baskervilles were all informed by different interpretations of rabies.
The quality of rabies fiction diminished over the years. In the 1970s, a subgenre of Europhobic rabies-based horror fiction emerged. These were literal scare stories such as David Ann's The Day of the Mad Dogs, in which two tourists foolishly smuggle a stray from France. The virus mutates into an air-borne form. "The first victim of this new rabies, Lillian Shaw, a vivisectionist scientist, was gripped by a violent erotic mania and went on a hysterical rampage, seducing and sadistically killing men around her." W. Harris' Saliva focused on the emergence of a new strain of rabies amongst badgers that during World War II developed a taste for the flesh of dead soldiers. This form of rabies becomes a sexually transmitted disease. The story is set among "the political and diplomatic circles of Europe, where the disease spread among politicians who indulged their sexual appetites to stave off the boredom of life in Brussels." There is a sexualised intensity to this Europhobia that suggests that perhaps other anxieties are at play.
Britain's rabies-free status informed portrayals of Fortress Britain, an island nation free from continental contagion. Norman Tebbit announced in 1992 that "the blessing of insularity has long protected us against rabid dogs and foreign dictators alike." At European Community summits, the need to exclude rabies was often "the sole, and assumed to be unanswerable, illustration to Britain's claim for exceptions for rules that suited the rest of Europe." The institutions of rabies-free Britain must be inherently stronger than continental institutions. New Labour changed that, adopting Passports for Pets – a phrase originated by Screaming Lord Sutch's Monster Raving Loony Party – in 2000. This might be read as marking a end to the era of British exclusivity – although the bureaucratic and veterinary requirements for a pet passports are far from trivial and perhaps make it less of a populist programme, and less of a liberation for pets and pet owners, than one might think.
The book is a trove of fascinating material on a very diverse range of topics – the development of animal welfare, the professionalisation of veterinary medicine, British suspicion of foreign medicine, the tension between medical research and anti-vivisectionism, among many others – which is crisply and compellingly written.
Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain 1830-2000
Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys
Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 2007
1830 saw the publication of the veterinarian William Youatt's pamphlet On Canine Madness, firmly stating that rabies was a specific and contagious disease spread only by the bite of an infected animal. 1830 also saw a "great and almost universal alarm" about rabies that lead one correspondent of the then Home Secretary, Robert Peel, to characterise the summer weeks as an "'Era Of Canine Madness.'"
Tensions between the nascent veterinary profession and the more established medical profession, and the plethora of lay remedies – every town and district had its own remedy – complicated official responses. Youatt and other progressive veterinarians and doctors were at odds with the prevailing medical orthodoxy on rabies. A distinction was drawn between rabies in dogs and hydrophobia in humans, and much debate was concerned with clarifying the nature of the disease. For much of the period covered by this book, there were many forms of rabies described by many different authorities with different interests – zymotic rabies, epizootic rabies, furious rabies, dumb rabies, laboratory rabies, street rabies. The authors deliberately do not describe what rabies is, to allow the reader to share something of the historical discoveries and controversies, none of which are as clear-cut even in retrospect as a simple medically triumphalist account.
The nineteenth-century battle between the germ theory and the theory of spontaneous generation of disease was fought over rabies as much as any other condition. This debate was not purely medical, with the developing animal welfare movement generally arguing the case of spontaneous generation, with the mistreatment of dogs being a prime factor. The authors show how concerns about the mistreatment of dogs reflected concerns about wider social demoralisation and fear of the working class. Muzzling regulations – including those of the 1890s which were associated with the successful eradication of the disease – generally excluded the sporting dogs of the hunting set.
It is the nature of dramatic medical advances that they become mythologized. Louis Pasteur's 1885 announcement that he had successfully developed a rabies vaccine was cornerstone of the mythic view of Pasteur as a dedicated, devoutly Catholic benefactor of mankind, as exemplified by the Paul Mona in the 1937 film The Story of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur became a hate figure for antivivisectionists – who saw him as "the assumed god of biological science" – and was accused of creating a different form of "laboratory rabies" for the purposes of self-promotion.
The muzzling programme of the 1890s (as authors point out the other associated factors, especially improved care of dogs, aided eradication) was most strongly associated with Walter Long, president of the Board of Agriculture from 1895 to 1900, and later a severe chief secretary for Ireland and architect of the Government of Ireland Act.) Long received far more hate mail about the muzzling than any of his controversial involvements in Irish affairs. As well as antagonising animal welfare movements (then as now, the authors observe, the RSPCA generally kept to the official line while more militant groups vigorously opposed the new regulations) the muzzle was linked in feminist discourse to such traditionalistic, misogynistic (and possibly apocryphal) instruments of punishment as the "Gossip's bridle."
Links between feminism, animal welfare and a variety of spiritualist movements were complex. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to be entered on the General Medical Council's register in 1859, illustrates these links well – she argued that women in medicine should use the power of "spiritual maternity" to heal society, while rejecting the excessively materialist germ theory, animal experimentation and Pasteur's treatments. The new generation of female doctors tended to reject Blackwell's beliefs.
The authors situate rabies in its wider social and political contexts, especially that of literature. Works such Richard Blackmore's 1872 novel The Maid of Sker – which Blackmore himself regarded as superior to Lorna Doone - Wuthering Heights, and The Hound of the Baskervilles were all informed by different interpretations of rabies.
The quality of rabies fiction diminished over the years. In the 1970s, a subgenre of Europhobic rabies-based horror fiction emerged. These were literal scare stories such as David Ann's The Day of the Mad Dogs, in which two tourists foolishly smuggle a stray from France. The virus mutates into an air-borne form. "The first victim of this new rabies, Lillian Shaw, a vivisectionist scientist, was gripped by a violent erotic mania and went on a hysterical rampage, seducing and sadistically killing men around her." W. Harris' Saliva focused on the emergence of a new strain of rabies amongst badgers that during World War II developed a taste for the flesh of dead soldiers. This form of rabies becomes a sexually transmitted disease. The story is set among "the political and diplomatic circles of Europe, where the disease spread among politicians who indulged their sexual appetites to stave off the boredom of life in Brussels." There is a sexualised intensity to this Europhobia that suggests that perhaps other anxieties are at play.
Britain's rabies-free status informed portrayals of Fortress Britain, an island nation free from continental contagion. Norman Tebbit announced in 1992 that "the blessing of insularity has long protected us against rabid dogs and foreign dictators alike." At European Community summits, the need to exclude rabies was often "the sole, and assumed to be unanswerable, illustration to Britain's claim for exceptions for rules that suited the rest of Europe." The institutions of rabies-free Britain must be inherently stronger than continental institutions. New Labour changed that, adopting Passports for Pets – a phrase originated by Screaming Lord Sutch's Monster Raving Loony Party – in 2000. This might be read as marking a end to the era of British exclusivity – although the bureaucratic and veterinary requirements for a pet passports are far from trivial and perhaps make it less of a populist programme, and less of a liberation for pets and pet owners, than one might think.
The book is a trove of fascinating material on a very diverse range of topics – the development of animal welfare, the professionalisation of veterinary medicine, British suspicion of foreign medicine, the tension between medical research and anti-vivisectionism, among many others – which is crisply and compellingly written.
Original review for TLS of Rose Shapiro's "Suckers: How Alternative Medicine is Making Fools of Us All" (original text)
The TLS later published this, I will try and use Lexis/Nexis to get the final text.
Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools Of Us All by Rose Shapiro – Harvill Secker 2008
In the UK, £4.5 billion is spent each year on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (often usefully abbreviated to CAM). CAM is a broad term. As Rose Shapiro observes towards the end of this astringent book, these treatments are on a continuum, with some herbal remedies and relaxation techniques being incorporated into the mainstream. Somewhere beyond these therapies are the likes of acupuncture – with some possible efficacy for pain and nausea – and further along we get to the bulk of CAM "therapies", of which Shapiro gives many lengthy and non-exhaustive lists – from ear candling to Bach flower remedies and from homeopathy to cranial osteopathy – all of which are unproven and with a theoretical basis positively antithetical to physiological, biochemical, chemical and anatomical knowledge.
CAM therapies and have recurrent features, and their pioneers and proponents have recurrent tendencies. Emblematic is the life of Daniel David Palmer, inventor-prophet of chiropractic. Canadian-born, in the 1890s Palmer had established a magnetic healing practice in Iowa and styled himself "Doctor" (despite their disdain for the medical establishment, CAM practitioners seem keen to claim the title and trappings of the profession) and decided that there must a single cure for all diseases, another familiar theme.
In the world of CAM, anecdotal experience trumps repeatable scientific study. Palmer claimed to have restored a local janitor's hearing by manipulating his spine (a claim disputed by the janitor's family) thereby discovering "subluxations"- a borrowing from orthodox medicine which in chiropractic refers to any spinal deviation, the supposed cause of 95% of disease. Palmer lost control of chiropractic, the idea for which had been revealed to him during a séance, to his less mystical and savvier son B J Palmer, who realised that the real money was in training further chiropractors. Much entertaining brouhaha ensued, with the elder Palmer dying after being hit by a car whilst protesting at the annual jamboree held by his son's school of chiropractic (internecine feuding, no surprise with so many "discovering" the cure to all disease , seems another feature of the CAM landscape).
Shapiro wittily illustrates other CAM traits, the misuse of scientific-sounding words like "quantum" and "paradigm", the paranoid stance towards conventional medicine which is in conspiratorial cahoots to suppress the hugely profitable CAM, the paradox that CAM practitioners stress the timeless, ancient qualities of their remedies while often trying to cloak it in the terminology of state-of-the-art technology. She has read widely, yet there is little evidence of original research or observation. There is not much here that not covered in more depth in other popular books, or even more pertinently websites such as Stephen Barrett's quackwatch.com. Shapiro takes Barrett's impatient, take-no-prisoners approach, which plays well with fellow sceptics but does little to convert the undecided. There is more of a UK focus than in other books on the subject, with issues such as availability on the NHS and should B.Sc. degrees in CAM practices (Bachelor of Science without the science, as one critic points out) be offered discussed.
The "therapies" are so many fish in a barrel, and Shapiro does her debunking work with glee. And yet there is a sameness to it all, a sense of missing the wider point. The post-industrial West is a world with unprecedently high life expectancy and freedom from serious life-shortening disease. This is also s world where "Dr" Gillian McKeith markets a snack bar listing "Unconditional Love" as an ingredient. Why are the legions of educated, high-disposable-income middle-aged, middle-class women– identified by Shapiro as the key consumers of complementary/alternative medicine – so keen to abandon critical thinking when it comes to their health? Shapiro makes some unexceptional observations about CAM offering these women some control and power over their lives, but does not explore these issues in depth.
Why do the majority of the headaches, back aches, fatigue and non-specific pain that comes the way of general practitioners have no physically identifiable cause? Why has having an illness become somehow desirable; why for instance are the "ME lobby" so vehement in their insistence that the condition has a purely physical cause? The World Health Organisation has defined health as "a stage of complete physical, social and mental well being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity", a statement of awesome fatuity which renders health unattainable in this world. And if health is considered a right, and not a blessing or or what the Stoics would have called a "preferred indifferent" (to be desired, but out of one's control and therefore not should try and view with indifference) - its unattainability becomes unbearable.
We are often told that CAM is a reaction to authoritarian, impersonal mainstream medicine. The irony is that there are few graduates from medical schools nowadays who fit the paternalistic stereotype. Medical students are taught to beware personal authority and experience and to follow the impersonal calculus of evidence-based medicine. As Shapiro writes, it is mainstream medicine that suggests a holistic, biopsychosocial approach to ME, and it is the alternative medical world that promotes a unitary physical cause. The cult of personality of the trust-me-I'm-a-doctor archetype is more likely to be found in the world of CAM
Shapiro quotes Richard Dawkins' observation "either it is true that a medicine works or it isn't – it cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some 'alternative' sense." The contemporary sense of what health is renders this commonsensical statement – which perhaps could be the epigraph of Shapiro's book – unworkable. What does it mean anymore for a medicine to "work"? CAM promises panaceas where mainstream medicine is humble and promises palliation. If health is promoted as complete well-being, we should not be surprised if the public falls for the deceptive and unlimited promises of completely unproven therapies.
Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools Of Us All by Rose Shapiro – Harvill Secker 2008
In the UK, £4.5 billion is spent each year on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (often usefully abbreviated to CAM). CAM is a broad term. As Rose Shapiro observes towards the end of this astringent book, these treatments are on a continuum, with some herbal remedies and relaxation techniques being incorporated into the mainstream. Somewhere beyond these therapies are the likes of acupuncture – with some possible efficacy for pain and nausea – and further along we get to the bulk of CAM "therapies", of which Shapiro gives many lengthy and non-exhaustive lists – from ear candling to Bach flower remedies and from homeopathy to cranial osteopathy – all of which are unproven and with a theoretical basis positively antithetical to physiological, biochemical, chemical and anatomical knowledge.
CAM therapies and have recurrent features, and their pioneers and proponents have recurrent tendencies. Emblematic is the life of Daniel David Palmer, inventor-prophet of chiropractic. Canadian-born, in the 1890s Palmer had established a magnetic healing practice in Iowa and styled himself "Doctor" (despite their disdain for the medical establishment, CAM practitioners seem keen to claim the title and trappings of the profession) and decided that there must a single cure for all diseases, another familiar theme.
In the world of CAM, anecdotal experience trumps repeatable scientific study. Palmer claimed to have restored a local janitor's hearing by manipulating his spine (a claim disputed by the janitor's family) thereby discovering "subluxations"- a borrowing from orthodox medicine which in chiropractic refers to any spinal deviation, the supposed cause of 95% of disease. Palmer lost control of chiropractic, the idea for which had been revealed to him during a séance, to his less mystical and savvier son B J Palmer, who realised that the real money was in training further chiropractors. Much entertaining brouhaha ensued, with the elder Palmer dying after being hit by a car whilst protesting at the annual jamboree held by his son's school of chiropractic (internecine feuding, no surprise with so many "discovering" the cure to all disease , seems another feature of the CAM landscape).
Shapiro wittily illustrates other CAM traits, the misuse of scientific-sounding words like "quantum" and "paradigm", the paranoid stance towards conventional medicine which is in conspiratorial cahoots to suppress the hugely profitable CAM, the paradox that CAM practitioners stress the timeless, ancient qualities of their remedies while often trying to cloak it in the terminology of state-of-the-art technology. She has read widely, yet there is little evidence of original research or observation. There is not much here that not covered in more depth in other popular books, or even more pertinently websites such as Stephen Barrett's quackwatch.com. Shapiro takes Barrett's impatient, take-no-prisoners approach, which plays well with fellow sceptics but does little to convert the undecided. There is more of a UK focus than in other books on the subject, with issues such as availability on the NHS and should B.Sc. degrees in CAM practices (Bachelor of Science without the science, as one critic points out) be offered discussed.
The "therapies" are so many fish in a barrel, and Shapiro does her debunking work with glee. And yet there is a sameness to it all, a sense of missing the wider point. The post-industrial West is a world with unprecedently high life expectancy and freedom from serious life-shortening disease. This is also s world where "Dr" Gillian McKeith markets a snack bar listing "Unconditional Love" as an ingredient. Why are the legions of educated, high-disposable-income middle-aged, middle-class women– identified by Shapiro as the key consumers of complementary/alternative medicine – so keen to abandon critical thinking when it comes to their health? Shapiro makes some unexceptional observations about CAM offering these women some control and power over their lives, but does not explore these issues in depth.
Why do the majority of the headaches, back aches, fatigue and non-specific pain that comes the way of general practitioners have no physically identifiable cause? Why has having an illness become somehow desirable; why for instance are the "ME lobby" so vehement in their insistence that the condition has a purely physical cause? The World Health Organisation has defined health as "a stage of complete physical, social and mental well being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity", a statement of awesome fatuity which renders health unattainable in this world. And if health is considered a right, and not a blessing or or what the Stoics would have called a "preferred indifferent" (to be desired, but out of one's control and therefore not should try and view with indifference) - its unattainability becomes unbearable.
We are often told that CAM is a reaction to authoritarian, impersonal mainstream medicine. The irony is that there are few graduates from medical schools nowadays who fit the paternalistic stereotype. Medical students are taught to beware personal authority and experience and to follow the impersonal calculus of evidence-based medicine. As Shapiro writes, it is mainstream medicine that suggests a holistic, biopsychosocial approach to ME, and it is the alternative medical world that promotes a unitary physical cause. The cult of personality of the trust-me-I'm-a-doctor archetype is more likely to be found in the world of CAM
Shapiro quotes Richard Dawkins' observation "either it is true that a medicine works or it isn't – it cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some 'alternative' sense." The contemporary sense of what health is renders this commonsensical statement – which perhaps could be the epigraph of Shapiro's book – unworkable. What does it mean anymore for a medicine to "work"? CAM promises panaceas where mainstream medicine is humble and promises palliation. If health is promoted as complete well-being, we should not be surprised if the public falls for the deceptive and unlimited promises of completely unproven therapies.
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