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Sometime we forgot how much civilization has advanced in 90 years. What was common becomes weird.
Of course, at my age I still recall childhood polio as a danger.
Original ad here.
A study recently published in the journal
Pediatric Obesity has found that when parents go to the doctor, they don't like the doctor to tell them that their little angel is "fat, chubby, overweight or obese." Instead, they prefer it if doctors use non-medical euphemisms such as, "Your kid is large," or "Your kid is gaining too much weight." And the problem is that if the parents feel offended, they often stop listening to the doctor altogether, which results in their large child growing even larger. Link:
eurekalert
The Encyclopedia of Surgery explains:
In corneal transplant, also known as keratoplasty, a patient's damaged cornea is replaced by the cornea from the eye of a human cadaver. This is the most common type of human transplant surgery and has the highest success rate...
the eye is held open with a speculum. A laser is used to make an initial cut in the existing cornea. The surgeon uses scissors to remove it, and a donor cornea is placed. It is stitched with very fine sutures.
Image via
reddit.
I just read an advance copy of
Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough by John J. Ross, M.D. It examines some of the literary greats (Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, etc.) from the viewpoint of a doctor, diagnosing what medical problems they may have suffered from (they tended to be a sickly bunch), and also discussing what medical "cures" doctors of the time subjected them to. It's good stuff that I imagine will appeal to many WU readers.
For instance, Jonathan Swift suffered from bouts of dizziness and deafness. Here's Ross on how 18th Century medicine treated him:
Swift took a variety of useless medication for his 'giddiness.' These included asafoetida, the herb so foul-smelling that it is known as devil's dung, as well as 'nasty steel drops' (a crude iron supplement). Swift also took something that he called 'a vomit.' This vile treatment was based on the ancient Galenic theory of ridding the body of evil humours. It could have been one of many drugs, ranging from the merely unpleasant (ipecac) to the potentially toxic (arsenic or antimony). Had Swift taken arsenic or antimony only rarely, he probably would not have had long-term side effects, as most of the dose would have quickly left the body in the urine and from both ends of the gastrointestinal tract. His doctor pal John Arbuthnot prescribed confection of alkermes (a scarlet syrup in which the active ingredient was crushed parasitic insects), the vigorous laxative castor oil, and cinnabar of antimony (mercuric sulphide). Swift thought the cinnabar helped. This is just possible: some mercury compounds are mild diuretics.
Science Daily reports that progress has been made on the problem of how to anesthetize a hippopotamus:
for a variety of reasons it has proven difficult to anaesthetize hippopotamuses. The thick skin and the dense subcutaneous tissue make it difficult to introduce sufficient amounts of anesthetics and opioid-based anesthetics often cause breathing irregularities and occasionally even death. In addition, the level of anesthesia is only rarely sufficient to enable surgery to be undertaken: few vets wish to be around when a drugged hippopotamus starts to wake up.
The solution involves "a new anesthetic protocol based on the use of two non-opiate drugs." This protocol was experimentally tested on 10 hippos, all of which "recovered rapidly and completely from the procedure and showed no lasting after-effects."
The interesting detail left out of the
Science Daily article, but which can be found in the original article in the
Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, is that all 10 hippos were castrated while asleep. If they had woken up while that was happening, I'm sure they really would have been angry!
Back in the day, the only medicine a real man needed was pure malt whiskey running through his veins. From the
Chicago Tribune, Jan 18, 1908.