According to the author, the actual origin of the popular drink of gin-and-tonic actually got kickstarted with the disease malaria and its not-very-tasty medicine, quinine.
In the early days of the British Raj, there was a big public health problem with malaria, and quinine was a main staple of malaria prevention and treatment. Dobson reports that the British people would add quinine to Indian tonic water (to make it taste better?) and that led to the basis of a gin-and-tonic.
(Something similar happened in the States as well: during the U.S. Civil War, every Union soldier in the malarial zone was given a daily dose of quinine sulphate dissolved in whisky. Huh.)
Unrelated random fact: One famous smallpox survivor was Queen Elizabeth I who contracted the disease in 1592. Her penchant for wearing her face covered in white lead and vinegar is thought to have been her strategy to cover up her smallpox facial scars. They are also thought to have been the reason why she didn’t want to get married as she didn’t want to show anyone her scarred skin. (Poor thing.)
Stalin had smallpox as well, btw, but he had all his photos touched up to hide that. (Remind you of any other orange-colored world leader who would also probably do that?) President Lincoln survived the same disease. And so did Pocahantas (who died in 1616 on a visit to England, possibly of smallpox.)
Moving on to polio and its history of vaccination: I didn’t know this, but in 1955, Cutter Laboratories (a U.S. company and one manufacturer of the then-recently licensed Salk vaccine), distributed faulty serum. A total of 200,000 people were inoculated with this serum which then turned out to contain “virulent non-attenuated polio virus”. Seventy thousand people became ill; 200 children were left paralyzed and ten died. (I’m wondering if this is controversy is somehow related to the ferocious antivaxxers of today? Vaccinate your kids, folks.)
So, by now, you might have surmised that I may have enjoyed this gruesome but straightforward book. I really did (and so much so that I’m going to keep this copy to read at another time).
However, there was one (easily preventable) thing that kept popping up – poor production work with the graphics.
Whoever the poor soul was who added the graphic elements to one of the later proofs kept overlaying their image outlines so that the rest of the image field would cover up one end of some of the paragraphs which meant that there were whole sections of text where you had to sort of guess what it was trying to say.
I don’t want to seem too judge-y. It’s an easy thing to miss, in general, but proofreading/editing should have happened. I would have thought that if you had a well-written serious tome about public health hazards from the past, the least you could do would be to check for that novice error. (Maybe it was an intern. It’s intern season…) š
If I had been Dobson, I would have been disappointed in the final product (if she ever saw it): her research, her words, probably her collection of illustrations – and then there is that?
That aside, the book did have some lovely qualities: glossy pages, plenty of high-res graphics, loads of historical ephemera and lots of intriguing sidebars with fascinating bits and pieces about whatever disease was the topic for that section.
Ghoulish but fascinating. Highly recommended.
Just FYI: Other medical history (or medical-related) reads for JOMP include:
Now, there is a dismal solitudeā¦ shops are shutā¦ people rare, very few walk aboutā¦ and there is a deep silence in almost every place. If any voice can be heard, it is the groans of the dying, and the funeral knell of them that are ready to be carried to their graves.
Thomas Vincent, describing the Great Plague of London, 1665-1666.
Seeing as we are in the midst of this current pandemic, what better time (thought I) than to read more about other diseases that have occurred throughout history. So, shopping my TBR shelves, I found this bookā¦
This title was written by Mary Dobson, a medical historian who was director of the Wellcombe Unit for the History of Medicine and a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. (Thus, she knows her facts and there are a lot of them. Sheās also, pleasingly, a very good writer.)
As the bookās subtitle tells you, the contents cover health emergencies over the years, ranging from syphilis to schistosomiasis (due to parasitic worms in tropical aquatic snails) to SARS and bird flu.
It was really interesting to read that Dobson, a scholar of medical history, also mentions the then-current widespread concern for another modern flu pandemic, perhaps from animal vectors (and this was when the book was published in 2007, 13 years ago). And yet the Orange Goblin disbanded the U.S. Pandemic Taskforce last year since āwe didnāt need it anymore.ā <smh>
[Aside: I am so curious to read the not-yet-published NF account of this particular current-day pandemic. You know there are gonna be a few titles out there that will cover it.]
Back to the book: the chapters are divided into Bacterial Diseases, Parasitic Diseases, Viral Diseases and Lifestyle Diseases, and each chapter (and disease) goes into depth (including pretty detailed timelines) to cover the basic history of the topic for that section.Ā It was absolutely fascinating for me.
Since I am a medical history nerd, I thought it might be best to approach this using bullet points. Here we go:
Quarantines first started when the Black Death arrived at a Venetian colony called Ragusa. The inhabitants detained travelers from an infected nearby island for thirty days (orĀ trente giorni). This time period proved not quite long enough so they increased the time period to forty days (orĀ quaranti giorni) ā thus, the word āquarantineā. Now you knowā¦ šĀ
Speaking of plague, you may remember that 17th-century physicians had the wearing-a-mask activity and social-distancing down to a scienceā¦ They would also stuff herbs down the beak to help cover up the smell of rotting flesh. (See pic below.)Ā Luckily, we don’t need that just yet. š
And OMG. I was thoroughly grossed out by the discussion of human worm infestations. One rather ethically-dubious experiment concerns two criminals who had been both condemned to death in the mid-19th-century. A researcher called Friedreich KĆ¼chenmeister fed the prisoners some pig meat with worm larvae inside it, and once the men had been put to death, scientists recovered adult tapeworms from their innards, one measuring 1.5m (or about 5ft) long. Euuugh.Ā Ā (One good thing about worms: they have potential to treat human illness as a form of biotherapy, but youād have to (heavily) sedate me long-term for that procedure if the worms are alive when theyāre put in me.)Ā
The word āvaccinationā originates from Latin āvaccaā (which means the word for ācowā). Pasteur gave the procedure that name in honor of earlier researcher, Edward Jenner (1749-1823) who came up the idea of inoculating healthy people with cowpox to give them immunity to the more virulent and fatal smallpox, a big problem at the time.Ā
Interesting note about Edward Jenner: in 1821, he became the physician extraordinary for King George IV.
Speaking of smallpox, why is it called āsmallā pox? Possibly to differentiate it from syphilis, another disease with pustules and called the āgreat poxā.Ā
And there is more really interesting info, naturally, in this read but I donāt want to wear out my welcome with you. (You might not be quite so taken with medical history as I am!) š
So – expect Part Two in an upcoming blog post, and in case youāre not sure, I really enjoyed this particular read!Ā
One of the 17th-century physicians wearing the plague-avoidance outfit of the time. Not such a far remove from the mask and glove requirements of the current day. š
Iāve been reading quite a bit since the COVID thing started (although not as much as I had anticipated seeing as I have all this time available), but the pace is picking up (in between jigsaws!), and Iām planning on reading more now that school is finished and the grades are in. Phew.
In the past few weeks, Iāve read a mix of books, a couple of them really excellent and one just meh, but all of them off the TBR. (Go me.)
The ājust mehā one was āHome Life Oneā, the first of four volumes and a collection of newspaper columns from an English journo (?) named Alice Thomas Ellis. (See top pic.) She wrote columns on domestic life, I suppose youād call it, and they were published in The Spectator, a British magazine that runs conservative (I think).
I must have read someone somewhere online praising these offerings and rushed out to order it, but the columns didnāt seem to hit the same high notes for me. I think some of this was because I just worked my way through the collection, one after the other, and I now doubt the wisdom of reading the book that way since it all got pretty same-y after a while. Maybe I should remember that next time I choose a similar book. The content was also a little dated (but that’s hardly the author’s fault!) Moving onā¦
The good reads: a Canadian novel called āBirdieā by Tracey Lindberg (2015). Selected as a 2016 CANADA READS title, I picked this book up on a trip to Vancouver last year as one written by an aboriginal native author. This was a really good read, although it covers some heavy-duty topics as part of the plot: sexual abuse, mental illness, native rightsā¦
Kudos to the author, though, as this book reads smoothly and although the characters (one in particular) undergoes some hellish experiences, itās written in a manner that itās not too much for you as a reader (although it might be triggering for some people). Good book; off the TBR; native author about native characters: win-win-win.
(Plus – look at the fantastic artwork on the cover: It’s a detail from Modern Girl, Traditional Mind Set by George Littlechild (2010), an author/artist of the Cree Nation, same as Lindberg.)
The other excellent read was just a cheapie bargain book from the sales shelves at B&N (when it was open), but despite the price, it was soooo good (if you like this sort of thing). Iām going to do a more thorough review in the next few days as Iād like to chat about it more in-depth, but suffice to say, I loved it. Stay tuned.
And then a good friend of mine happened to ask me to be an early reader for her second novel ā which I loved. If anyone is an agent (or knows one), please let me know. Iād love to hook my writing friend up with someone who knows what they’re doing in the publishing world. Other people need to read her work ā itās good!!
After having had a three-month book-buying ban (which ended on May 01), there has been a lack of incoming titles to the JOMP TBR. However, it doesn’t mean that I couldn’t accept a lovely literary present from a friend and it also meant that I could order books which arrived after that arbitrary date.
And thus, we have the following new titles to gloat over:
Part of our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library – Wayne A. Wiegand. NF. I’ve been discovering pod casts on my daily work-out walks (since the gym is closed), and one of my favs is the one called “The Librarian is In” from the NYPL team. The cast features Frank and Rhonda (it was Gwen), and it’s just a funny and bright discussion about the wide variety of books that they have both picked up over the previous month. (I think it’s monthly.) Anyway, the guys were talking about the history of African-American libraries in the US and mentioned this title so off I toddled online and bought it. Basically, it’s about what it says in the subtitle: the history of American public libraries. <Rubs hands with glee>
The Secret Life of Cows – Rosamund Young. NF. My kind mum sent me a copy of this and I haven’t got around to reading this yet (although it’s short). I really wanted to get established in my head as a vegan eater before I could read about how lovely cows are, so now I’m definitely eating that way, I can read about cow sweetnesses. š
The Best American Travel Writing 2019 – Alexandra Fuller (ed.). NF. I thoroughly enjoyed my read of the travel writing the other day and so procured this volume, hoping for a similar experience. š
And then a friend popped by (social distancing-wise) and dropped off a lovely art book called “Boundless Books: 50 literary classics transformed into works of art” by Postertext. A fabulous book to look at, it has lots of real classic books included, but by reducing the actual text of the books to a tiny size, the company has created art. Take a look here:
(Above) This is the actual text from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, but see how each word has been shrunk to create more different art? And, even better, the book includes its own magnifying glass so you can actually read these tiny words. Here’s another page:
Here is the entirety of Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet”. Clever, right?
So, I’ve been looking at this, drawing dragons for a 4yo friend who lives next door, doing jigsaw puzzles and — deep breath – completing final grades for my students. I’m hoping that’s complete now, but we’ll see who is happy with their grade and who is not. š
Travel writing at its bestā¦ relates a journey of discovery that is frequently risky and sometimes grim and often pure horror, with a happy ending: to hell and back. The traveler ends up at home and seizes your wrist with his skinny hand and holds you with his glittering eye and relates his spellbinding tale.ā
Paul Theroux, Introduction.
Seeing as we have been rather stuck at home, I thought that now would be a really good time to read some travel writing and, having had some success with this series in the past, found an old volume on the old TBR shelves. I did have some hesitation seeing the editor was Paul Theroux (only because Iāve heard of his reputation as a rather grumpy writer), but pulled it down nevertheless, primarily because it was what I had. š
In actuality, despite my initial reservations, this turned out to be a really good read. As with any kind of writing collection chosen by whoever is the editor, there are going to be hits and misses but this compilation was mostly hits, which made it fun to read.
(The only slightly eye-wincing moment was when I saw that Paul Therouxās eldest son, Marcel, was also selected as part of this collection of American Travel Writing. One, the optics donāt look that great for a father to choose his own sonās writing for inclusion in a project such as this, and is M.T.ās writing so much more superior than anyone elseās who was up for submission? Oh, and the gender split of authors was a bit eye-watering. This then leads on to related question: how many of these selectees are POC?)
Looking through the index, the selected writing travels far and wide: from Siberia to the U.S. and parts in between, the quality of writing and its content was enjoyable. In fact, it was a really good read overall and actually hit the sweet spot for reading in a pandemic. Plus it fit really well with my COVID reading style which seems to be rather a scattershot approach at the moment. Plus it was a TBR.
Excellent writing came from Peter Hessler (who I adore anyway), Susan Orleans, and 24 other authors, with a gender break-up of five female authors (and 19 males). Grumble, grouse, but this lack of gender balance is a common characteristic for these editions (especially when they are edited by males). Is it really so hard to find someone who is a strong writer and is not a typical white male? Hmm.
Moving onā¦ The majority of these reads did exactly what they said on the tin: excellent writing combined with strong descriptions and interesting narratives of places off the beaten track.
Despite its weaknesses (see above), I actually really enjoyed this volume and have just realized that I havenāt bought the 2019 volume just yet (edited by Alexandra Fuller – Hey! A woman slipped into the mix. I’m a bit behind with the book-buying.) This year’s volume (2020) will be edited by Robert McFarlane, another white male Oxbridge fellow, I see (with gritted teeth)ā¦
Still, fingers are crossed to a more balanced gender breakdown inside both of these…
In the end, I am happy to have read this volume and able to travel outside my home, even if it was only in my mind. Along those same lines, I did just go to the grocery store, which counts as adventurous travel in this day and age. š
Iāve finally found my reading mojo and so have been finishing a few titles which I thought I would review. Iāll start off with this one…
Angle of Repose ā Wallace Stegner (1971, Pulitzer Prize winner).
I do love some Stegner every now and then ā typically very well written with true-to-life characters about whom you end up caring for the duration of the read.
This one, Angle of Repose, has elderly protagonist Lyman Ward researching the life of his grandparents who had both gone to the American West as part of the pioneering mining-for-gold industry.
Ward is trying to understand his grandparents via these old papers (including letters and diaries) which he has gathered from a local library, and interestingly, this novel is written as a mix of both a straightforward narrative looking back in time (from Lyman to the grandparents) and also as an epistolary novel (in that Stegner includes some slightly-fictionalized diary entries and letters from his grandmother character).
So, this is the plot and the reader tracks along with Lyman as he ploughs through all this historical paperwork from his family. The reason why Lyman is doing this is fairly hidden until the last third of the novel, but this doesnāt detract from the overall enjoyment of the book but does clarify a lot of whatās come before when you do learn this. (So, hold tight if you read this. Patience, my friend. It pays off.)
The novel switches back and forth between his grandparentsā lives and times and Lymanās current life, where he is now an elderly retired history professor who lives by himself and whose son believes that Lyman should really be living in an assisted living home. The old man is helped by various assistants who come in, and his observations about these people are sharp as a tack, so heās obviously still got his intellect. Itās his physical body that is failing him, so itās rather a race against time in some ways.
What was really so interesting about this novel was the actual story of how Stegner obtained and then utilized the background materials for the historical underpinnings of the story. Let me tell you ā itās a corkerā¦
You may (or may not!) have heard of a real-life American woman called Mary Hallock Foote who was a nineteenth-century writer and illustrator of pioneer life in the West. She has left behind a bounty of handwritten materials about the early mining life for many Victorian pioneers, and she had the industry connections as well since her husband had been the mine superintendent for some time. Stegnerās two main grandparent characters closely mirror this same lifestyle in the book, although they are not portrayed in a very flattering manner (especially the grandmother).
Stegner, as a real-life English professor at Stanford University, included one of Footeās stories in his American Literature class that he was teaching in 1946, and a grad student in that same class decided to write his dissertation on Foote. The grad student had learned that Foote had a granddaughter who was living quite close and so this student visited the family with the dual intention of both asking the family for the collection of papers to be donated to Stanford Library and also for using them for his academic work.
The family gave the grad student permission to use the papers with the understanding that he (the grad student) would publish from their content and also supply the family with typed transcriptions of the actual letters. Years passed with no dissertation, but when the grad student gave up that goal, he passed the transcriptions on to Stegner who took them with him to read over a faculty summer.
A few years pass and Stegner comes up with the book idea (very influenced by the transcript materials and also by some of the people he knows), and thus Angle of Repose is scribed. By this time, Stegner is familiar with one of Footeās granddaughters and it is she who gave Stegner the go-ahead to use the family paperwork however he wished.
The trouble arrived when the rest of the Foote relatives found this out and learned that the plot was very heavily based on Footeās own life and times, and when you look at the parallels, itās obvious.
The Foote family had believed that Stegner would follow Footeās history more closely and give her credit where credit was due. Instead, Stegner really carbon-copies the Foote life but with his own characters and in doing so, ends up being accused of plagiarism. (The bookās introduction states that just over 10 percent of the actual novel uses Footeās letters in toto but with no credit to the original author.)
Stegner does give his thanks and credit to a J.M. at the start of the novel, writing:
āMy thanks for J.M. and her sister for the loan of their ancestors. Though I have used many details of their lives and characters, I have not hesitated to warp both personalities and events to fictional needs. This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history.ā
So, it seems to me that both parties were working under varying definitions of what a novel is (or āshould beā) and exactly how much Stegner relied on the papers. Perhaps itās more of a communication problem than anything, because I canāt see this misunderstanding happening nowadays since a legal representative would more than likely be present in a similar situation.
In the end, Stegner stuck to his guns saying his novel was ābasedā on the historical papers, but how much is too much? Needless to say, the Pulitzer committee gave him the prize in 1971 (which probably did not help things between Stegner and the family!)
A number of years later (and before the bookās publication), a scholar received funding to publish Footeās actual reminiscences and although this was great news for the Foote family, it put Stegner on tricky ground since it would be apparently obvious upon whom his novelās main protagonist was based upon.
To his credit, Stegner got in touch with the family and offered to change character names and action in the novel (to protect the anonymity of Foote as author), but the family member didnāt want that nor did she want to read the manuscript. So, the printing went aheadā¦
Another issue that cropped up was that some thought that Stegner co-opted the life of the Victorian female writer. As a privileged white male who worked in a university, there was some umbrage about thisā¦
As for what I thought about the book: I thought it was a really solid straight-forward read. It kept my interest throughout (although there was some wandering in the middle third of the novel), and I did become attached to the central characters (even if I didnāt particularly like them as people).
I can see why the Foote family was disenchanted with Stegnerās portrayal: the grandma in the book is petulant and immature throughout her ENTIRE life on earth, holding her husband responsible for taking her away from her cultured East Coast friends and the letters which are quoted provide evidence of her small-mindedness and resentment (that NEVER goes away).
I suppose in Victorian times, marital separation (let alone divorce) was very frowned upon but the couple were out West where laws only played a secondary role in life, so why didnāt she just up-sticks and move back East? And her husband was portrayed as a big dreamer in business without the skills to follow through on his ideas, but Heavens to Betsy ā leave him. Instead, there are years of moaning and complaining about the life they lead (which, TBH, does sound hard), but then again, no one has a gun to his (or her) head.
Apart from the niggling irritation with the couple, the actual writing and descriptions of the Western mining camps and their inhabitants was lovely. Stegner was a great writer ā I have no doubts about that.
I do wonder what he was thinking when he took this Victorian figure, unknown but hallowed by her immediate family, and then twisted her story very slightly (and not always in a positive light). I suppose he thought that heād given the family the chance to review the manuscript and they had chosen not to, so it was a done deal.
But donāt let all this drama overshadow the fact that Angle of Repose is truly a good novel. Think of it as an interesting sideline.
And, I learned that the phrase āAngle of Reposeā is from physics and is the actual angle at which material, when itās piled up in a cone shape, actually stops moving ā it reposes. Imagine a pile of sugar ā the angle at which it settles and finally stops moving ā thatās the angle of repose.
The title (and its meaning) also opens up another can of worms, as the grandparents live an itinerant life moving from mine to mine — so do they actually reach their own āAngle of Reposeā? Youāll have to read to see.
