Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
From Romeo and Juliet, Act III Scene 2, by William Shakespeare.
Follow @telescoperIt looks set to be the proverbial wet weekend here in Cardiff and I’m waiting for a pause in the rain before going out to do my Saturday shopping. Having done the crossword already, I should be cleaning the house but instead I thought I’d post a quick comment about the fascinating book I’ve just finished reading.
The Knife Man, by Wendy Moore, is an account of “The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery”. It’s a measure of my ignorance about medical history that I didn’t even know who John Hunter was when I started reading this, although I had heard of the Hunterian Museum without realising who it was named after.
I won’t give a lengthy account of Hunter’s biography; that’s done very well elsewhere on the net and indeed in the book, which I thoroughly recommend. It is worth emphasizing, however, what a remarkable man he was. Born in Scotland in 1728, he didn’t go to University and received no formal medical training. He went to London in 1748 in order to become assistant to his brother William, a noted surgeon at the time. John’s primary rsponsibility was to help with the dissection of human cadavers during William’s anatomy classes. He soon became fascinated by anatomy and himself became extremely adept at dissection. He received some medical training in London, had a spell as an army surgeon and eventually set up a private medical practice in London at which he ran his own anatomy classes for paying students. He became one of the top surgeons in London and attended to the needs of many prominent Georgian figures, including King George III.
But, as impressive as it was, his medical career wasn’t the most remarkable thing about Hunter’s life. His interests extended far beyond human anatomy and from an early age he was an avid collector of all sorts of animals, alive and dead. As he became wealthier through his medical practice and lectures he spent increasing amounts of cash on acquiring rare specimens, which he usually dissected in order to understand them better. He also collected specimens of diseased human organs, bones, and fossils. There was a very dark side to this work too. The grisly business of acquiring fresh human human corpses led him to make connections with graverobbers. Worse, he also experimented on human specimens, usually members of London’s poor. He did pay them for their pains, but that’s hardly the point.
Hunter’s studies led him to conclude – years before Darwin – that species were not fixed and immutable but that animal populations altered over time, with some creatures becoming extinct. Although he doesn’t seem to have used the word “evolution”, his work in this area was certainly heading in that direction. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767.
Above all I think what stands out about Hunter was that he pioneered the use of the scientific method in the field of medicine. His lack of formal training meant that he wasn’t steeped in the dogma or orthodox medicine which had led to many bizarre and/or dangerous practices. One wonders what chain of reasoning had led doctors to suppose that pumping tobacco smoke into a patient’s anus using specially constructed bellows could possibly have any therapeutic value!
Hunter learned primarily from experience. He knew, for example, that major surgery in Georgian times was very likely to kill the patient. There were no anaesthetics, so death by shock was a strong possibility. Loss of blood was a danger, too, unless the operation was completed extremely quickly. Moreover, doctors at the time – Hunter included – had no idea about how infections were spread and surgeons would often operate with instruments encrusted with the blood of previous victim. In the (unlikely) event of a patient surviving the agony of, say, an amputation, they would probably die of some form of infection within a few days anyway. Hunter’s policy in the light of all this was to refuse to operate unless the situation was truly desperate.
For example, when Hunter was an army surgeon, the prevailing attitude to gunshot wounds was that the bullet had to be removed at all costs. Moreover, it was believed that gunpowder was poisonous, so entry wounds were usually “enlarged” to remove tissue that had been blackened or burnt. One day, a group of British soldiers had come under fire and several had been badly injured. They escaped the ambush and holed up in a farmhouse, where they were found a few days later. One had two bullets in his thigh, another had one in his chest. However, although seriously ill, all were still alive. Hunter knew that if men in that condition had been brought into his field hospital and operated on in the usual manner, they would all almost certainly have died. After this experience Hunter was extremely reluctant to operate at all on battlefield injuries unless they were immediately life-threatening, and often decided to let nature take its course with flesh wounds.
The Knife Man contains many more examples of Hunter’s pionering use of empirical evidence in medicine and, as such, is well worth reading by anyone interested in the scientific method. It also provides a fascinating insight into life in Georgian London. Notable characters appear in extremely unexpected ways in Hunter’s story:
I could give more examples, but that’s 1000 words, and it’s now sunny outside, so you’ll have to go and read the book, which I recommend heartily. However, I really should point out that it’s not for the squeamish. The primitive surgical procedures deployed in the 18th Century are described in excrutiating detail and parts of the book make for very uncomfortable reading. If you don’t think you can cope with a detailed account of an operation, without anaesthetic, to remove stone from a patient’s bladder, then perhaps this isn’t a book for you!
Follow @telescoper Time will say nothing but I told you so,
News International knows the price to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when Murdoch flaunts his dough,
If we should care what other papers say,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I hate you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from Wapping when they blow,
The Press Commission doesn’t know which way;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the readers really want it so,
The tabloids seriously intend to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose the hacks all get up and go,
And all the Brooks and Coulsons run away?
Will time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
(with apologies to W.H. Auden)
Follow @telescoperPoets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one – million – year – old light. A vast pattern – of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
Follow @telescoperAll day the rain has filled the apple-trees,
And stilled the orchard grasses of their mirth,
Turning these acres green and silvered seas
That drowned the summer musics of the earth.
Now that this clearer twilight takes the hill,
This thin, belated radiance, moving by,
Bird-calls return, and odours, rainy still,
And colours glinting through the earth and sky.
Here where I watch the robins from the lane,
That pirouette and preen among the leaves,
These swift, wet-winged arrivals in the rain
Have spilled a wisdom from their dripping eaves,–
And beauty still is more than daily bread,
For fevered minds, and hearts discomforted.
by David Morton (1886-1957)
Follow @telescoperA poet once said, ‘The whole universe is in a glass of wine.’ We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!
Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
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Why do I make no poems? Good my friend
Now is there silence through the summer woods,
In whose green depths and lawny solitudes
The light is dreaming; voicings clear ascend
Now from no hollow where glad rivulets wend,
But murmurings low of inarticulate moods,
Softer than stir of unfledged cushat broods,
Breathe, till o’er drowsed the heavy flower-heads bend.
Now sleep the crystal and heart-charmed waves
Round white, sunstricken rocks the noontide long,
Or ‘mid the coolness of dim lighted caves
Sway in a trance of vague deliciousness;
And I,–I am too deep in joy’s excess
For the imperfect impulse of a song.
by Edward Dowden (1843-1913)
Follow @telescoperJust stumbled across this excellent documentary about the great Sidney Bechet and couldn’t resist posting it alongside the poem by Philip Larkin that follows it, which is called For Sidney Bechet. Watching great jazz musicians play, including the rare clips of Bechet shown in the video, the thought always comes into my mind that if you took the instrument away from them, it would just carry on playing by itself…
That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes
Like New Orleans reflected on the water,
And in all ears appropriate falsehood wakes,
Building for some a legendary Quarter
Of balconies, flower-baskets and quadrilles,
Everyone making love and going shares
Oh, play that thing! Mute glorious Storyvilles
Others may license, grouping around their chairs
Sporting-house girls like circus tigers (priced
Far above rubies) to pretend their fads,
While scholars manqués nod around unnoticed
Wrapped up in personnels like old plaids.
On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City
Is where your speech alone is understood,
And greeted as the natural noise of good,
Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity.
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night ’tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning, my pilot, sits;
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in Heaven’s blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.
The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead;
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardors of rest and of love,
And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of Heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,
As still as a brooding dove.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,
May have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees,
When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,
Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.
I bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone,
And the Moon’s with a girdle of pearl;
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,–
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-colored bow;
The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove,
While the moist Earth was laughing below.
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).
Follow @telescoperI’ve been travelling more than usual recently and have been taking the opportunity to catch up with a stack of books I bought but haven’t had time to read. The latest is a hefty tome by Judith Flanders, entitled The Invention of Murder, a detailed, scholarly, meticulously researched but highly readable discussion of “how the Victorians revelled in death and detection”.
This isn’t just one of those “true crime” shockers – although there is plenty of shocking material in it, as will become obvious – it’s about the insight that crime gives into how society works. Murder casts a particularly garish and disturbing light on Victorian culture, as it was in that period that violent crime became a form of entertainment, which it remains today with shows like CSI.
High profile murders spawned a host of bizarre cultural phenomena in the Victorian age, including stage melodramas and puppet shows in which crimes were re-enacted for the public, cheap publications called penny-dreadfuls, and the infamous “broadsides” -cheap unregulated newspapers which were the ultimate in gutter-press, reporting the gory details in grotesquely lurid details. The detective story had its birth in this era too, fuelling public fascination with crime and detection. And then of course there were the public hangings, regularly attended by tens of thousands of people. These grisly spectacles carried on until 1868, after which time they were held inside prisons out of the public gaze. Crowds still gathered even then, to watch the black flag being hoisted to indicate the end of a life.
Rather than going through the whole book systematically, I thought I’d just pass on a few things that particularly struck me as I read it. You can read a review of the whole volume here.
One was the fact that many Victorian trials were farcical. There was little understanding of what to do with physical evidence, so more often than not the prosecution relied on allegations about the character of the defendant to get a conviction. If you were poor you had no access to legal counsel and, since you belonged to a demonized underclass, pretty much doomed if committed to trial. The same went if you were “foreign”, especially if that meant “Irish” and especially if you were also catholic. Judges routinely summed up the evidence in an outrageously biased way; the defence were allowed no summing up at all, regardless of whether the defendant could afford a lawyer. There were few restrictions on press reporting of trials, with the result that newspapers openly presented views of guilt or innocence before trial in a manner that was grossly prejudicial; among the worst offenders were the Times and the Observer, papers which we now consider to be “quality”. Juries typically took 10 minutes or less to reach a verdict and the time between sentencing to death and execution was usually 48 hours, so there was no time for an appeal.
The public executioner for much of the Victorian period was a man called William Calcraft. I don’t know if he was incompetent or just plain cruel, but he favoured the so-called “short drop” which meant death by strangulation rather than by a broken neck. Often the victim – and I use the word advisedly because for me such an execution is also murder – took several minutes to die in agony. One description in the book tells of a woman – convicted on the scantiest of evidence – so terrified by the gallows that she was unable to stand and had to be put on a chair to be hanged. The hangman miscalculated the drop and she took four minutes to die. How any human being could bear to watch such an event is beyond me, but thousands did.
Over and over again there are stark examples of the grinding poverty that reigned during the Victorian era. The underclass lived in filthy overcrowded and dangerous slums, in conditions too miserable to be imagined. Poor single women often had little choice but to turn to prostitution. Annie Chapman, for example, was murdered by Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel in September 1888. On her last night she had no money to pay for a bed in a lodging house, so had gone onto the street to earn some cash. After her death her belongings were itemized: apart from the clothes she had been wearing, her worldly goods consisted of two combs and a used envelope.
And then there were the children. Infant mortality was high and working class children in the Victorian era died so often of neglect that society had largely become hardened to the idea of killing a child. One example is the particularly appalling murder of a young girl called Fanny Adams in 1867:
Fanny’s head was perched on two hop poles, while on the ground was one of her legs, still with its stocking and boot on. Her right arm, then a hand, then her torso were found nearby. Her other foot, and left arm, were in the next field. Her intestines had been removed, and were not found until the next day, together with her heart.
Almost immediately the phrase “Fanny Adams” became popular slang for a cheap type of chopped meat you could buy in tins, thence it passed into navy slang as “Sweet Fanny Adams”, meaning “nothing at all” and remains in use to this day, sometimes abbreviated to “Sweet FA”. Nothing at all, it seems, was the value of an innocent child’s life.
Today it sounds unbelievably cruel that people could make a joke about such a terrible crime, but I guess that just tells you how brutal life was. I’d always thought “Fanny Adams” was a euphemism for “Fuck All” but its origin is clearly far darker. I’ll never been able to use that expression again without thinking of its origin and, perhaps, after reading this, neither will you…
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In the Dark 