50 Book Challenge - Disease / Medical History 2021

1) Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney
2) Pox: An American History by Michael Willrich
3) Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill by Robert Whitaker
4) Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 by Elizabeth A. Fenn
5) The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
6) The Day of St. Anthony's Fire by John G. Fuller
7) Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentlemen Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail by Stephen R. Bown
8) Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky
9) Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher by Brandy Schillace
10) Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death--An Exploration of the Haunting Science of Forensic Ecology by Jessica Snyder Sachs
11) Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries by Molly Crosby
12) Grave Desire by Steve Finbow
13) Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky
14) Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire by William Rosen
15) The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford
16) Ship of Death: A Voyage That Changed the Atlantic World by Billy Smith
17) Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi
18) A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane by Roy Porter
19) Surgeons At The Bailey: English Forensic Medicine to 1878 by Thomas Rogers Forbes
20) The Great Influenza by John M. Barry
21) Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon by Druin Burch
22) The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
23) Black Death by Philip Ziegler
24) The Medical Detective by Sandra Hempel
25) Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health by Judith Walzer Leavitt
26) The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris
27) Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik
28) Grave Matters by Mark Harris
29) Rest in Pieces by Bess Lovejoy
30) The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase
31) The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
32) Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan
33) Father of Forensics by Colin Evans
34) The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
35) Bedlam: London and Its Mad by Catharine Arnold
36) Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery by Michael Bliss
37) The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness by John Waller
38) The Great Plague by Walter George Bell
39) Plagues and People by William H. McNeill
40) Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad Doctors & Lunatics by Roy Porter
41) The Mesmerist: The Society Doctor Who Held Victorian London Spellbound by Wendy Moore
42) Bring Out Your Dead by J. H. Powell
43) Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America by Courtney Thompson
44) The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean
45) The Invention of Miracles by Katie Booth
46) An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine by Howard Markel
47) The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: And Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine by Thomas Morris
48) The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe by Robert S. Gottfried
49) The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager
50) The Speckled Monster: a Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox by Jennifer Lee Carrell

Finished reading Mad in America by Robert Whitaker
Pages: 291
Words: The White Shirts by Ellen Field, The Bell Jar, Beyond Bedlam by Dorothy Dundas, armamentarium, Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears by Janet Gotkin
Notes: Too many for here.
Rating: 5 out of 5

Finished reading The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Sarah Cahalan
Pages: 297
Words: A Blighted Life, The Prisoners Hidden Life, "chemotherapy treatment": a now out-dated term for psycho-pharmacological treatment, Soteria: the Greek goddess of safety and salvation;
Notes: "Lady Rosina: British writer whose feminist views estranged her from her husband, writer Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (creator of the 'it was a dark and stormy night...) He tried to have her committed but thanks to her own celebrity and pressure from the press, she emerged 3 weeks later."

"Elizabeth Packard was committed to Jacksonville Insane Asylum by her Presbyterian minister husband for being a spiritualist. She was there for 3 years then locked in a room by her husband. She dropped a note out of the window to a friend who required she be able to defend her sanity in court. She succeeded and Illinois passed the "Bill for the Protection of Personal Liberty."

"1973: American Psychiatric Association issues the 'Goldwater Rule' named for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater who was labeled mentally unfit to serve by various psychiatrists. An ethical principle banning psychiatrists from making armchair diagnoses of public figures they have not examined."

"One of the board members who helped mold Soteria House...was David Rosenhan, in the success of his ground-breaking study whose theories questioned the powers of traditional psychiatry and its hospitals."

"Electroshock therapy is not called electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) and is deployed today for patients who are "treatment resistant," the third of people with depression who don't respond to meds...The procedure...is paired with an immobilizing agent to temper any body movements and with general anesthesia so that the patient is unconscious for the duration of the procedure."

"The DSM-III introduced "axes." Axis I was devoted to disorders such as anxiety, anorexia, schizophrenia, and major depression. These were different from the personality disorders and developmental disorders in Axis II, described as "conditions and patterns of behavior that are defined as enduring, inflexible, and maladaptive." The third axis was devoted to "physical" disorders, like cirrhosis of the liver, pneumonia, encephalitis, and brain tumors."
"One 2004 study showed that black men and women were four times more likely to receive a schizophrenia diagnosis than white patients in state hospitals."

- author mentions "Mad in America" on page 274
Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading A Social History of Madness by Roy Porter
Pages: 291
Words: The Bastilles of England, palaver
Notes: "Society has progressively defined itself as rational and normal, and by doing so has sanctioned the stigmatizing and exclusion of "outsider"...of "penalizing despair."

"People believed themselves to be persecuted by Mesmerism, the very instrument which has often been hailed as the forerunner" of Freud's use of hypnotism.

Romanticism: the link between madness and artistic genius. "Sometimes what is stress is that madness...or great torment...is the anvil of art. Sometimes the message is the a Promethean one that madness is the price to be paid for creation."

At Endenich asylum..."Robert Schumann was isolated, rejected, dejected...he took his own life in the only way possible: he starved himself to death. He died on 29 July 1856. Alone."

"In an age which was seeing the relentless destruction of the country folk and countryside by agricultural capitalism and enclosure...when men of letters were deploring the evils of towns, industry and commerce, a rustic genius such as Clare was an endangered species."

"Methodistically mad" became something of a catchphrase amongst those who...were commonly thrown into fits...and sometimes driven to suicide...by religious hysteria."

"William Cowper suffered five distinct severe breakdowns, during some of which he tried to take his own life. The first came early in his twenties; the last set in when he was sixty-three and dogged him to the end of his days."

"William Cowper bought laudanum, but when on several occasions he attempted to swallow the lethal drug, he became paralyzed thanks to the intervention of an 'invisible hand.'...Abandoning poison, he decided to throw himself into the Thames. He arrived however at low water, and found himself observed by lightermen. He changed his mind, decided to hang himself, rushed home and strung himself up by his garter. As he lapsed into unconsciousness...the sash snapped."

"Many more women than men end up today under psychiatric care and in psychiatric institutions...this may be because what is still an essentially patriarchal society places women under special strains, or at least uses psychiatry as a legitimizing authority to bring the sex to heel."

Act of Queen Anne 12 (1714): Addressing itself only to vagrants, it had empowered justices to put pauper lunatics under confinement

"On one occasion, Cruden, recently released from a madhouse, witnessed Laurence Sterne, who had recently put his wife in one, received by George III, soon destined for insanity himself."

"On 3 January 1889, while walking the streets of Turin, he saw a horse being whipped by a cab-driver. He flung his arms round the animal's neck, collapsed and fell unconscious."

"Artaud looked to theatre as the great agency of destruction, purgation and rebirth...He would plague the bourgeoisie with theatre."

"Freud did not so much put an end to a conspiracy of silence about sex as make a very special type of contribution to an already widespread disturbance."

"Soul murder was a notion familiar in folklore which enjoyed wide cultural currency in the Romantic era...a sort of vampirism; it entailed the captivation of the will, and the possession of the spirit of another, in order to prolong and promote one's own existence."

"In 1812, when John Perceval was nine, his father, Spencer Perceval, the Tory Prime Minister of the day, was assassinated as he stepped inside the House of Commons."

Neurasthenia: "the American disease" Capitalism created pressures for all-American men tho seemed to be unable to meet the challenges of the market and therefore questioned their manhood and went mad from "failure"

"Clifford Beers' elder brother William, a businessman sustained terrible financial losses int he Depression. He became deeply depressed. Clifford advised him to get admitted as a voluntary patient to Bloomingdale Asylum. He did, but soon hanged himself...his favorite elder brother, George, also became profoundly depressed...and entered Austen Riggs Asylum, but committed suicide on the very day of his admission."
Rating: 3 out of 5

I love your yearly categories! I highly recommend The Ghost Map, it was excellent. I often think "I need to find another medical history book as good as The Ghost Map." I'll have to look over your list for inspiration now! Anything by Mary Roach is always informative and entertaining, also. Happy reading!

>5 arrianarose: Thank you! How kind! That's great to hear, I'll make sure I don't run out of time to read it this year. I'm powering through the "mental history" related books in this theme, and then I'll be moving onto diseases and plagues. And I enjoy Mary Roach too! I have Stiff, Spook and Gulp!

Finished reading Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics by Roy Porter
Pages: 282
Words: schirrous, sciolist, The English Malady, Sir Launcelot Greaves, Thomism, Pyrrhonism, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, Latitudinarians, Zoonomia,
Notes: Too many for here.
Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading Bedlam: London and Its Mad by Catharine Arnold
Pages: 277
Words: "The Life and Miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury", The Witch of Edmonton, "Treatise on Melancholie" by Timothy Bright; "Mystical Bedlam" by Thomas Adams; Brownists; Barrowists; monomachies; currantoes; Muggletonians; millenarist; Jack Sheppard; Analysis of Beauty; Chartists
Notes: Too many for here.
Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading The Mesmerist by Wendy Moore
Pages: 255
Words: glanders, Tolpuddle Martyrs,
Notes: Dr. John Elliotson was one of the first in Britain to use a stethoscope, the first to argue that hay fever was caused by grass pollen, and it is conceivable that he may have been gay.

Dr. James' Powder was comprised of antimony and calcium phosphate. The first ingredient is toxic while the second is useless.

Introduced into the West in 1810 by Louis Berlioz, acupuncture was first promoted in Britain by James Churchill in 1821.

Unlike Oxford and Cambridge, London University became the only institution in England where Catholics, Quakers, Jews and those of other faiths or none could study medicine.

The poet Percy Shelley was mesmerized several times in an effort to stem the pain from his kidney stones...

Elliotson was Dickens' family doctor. A few years later, in 1841, Elliotson would become godfather to Dickens' second son Walter...Dickens introduced mesmerism into both Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

A rare and controversial diagnosis "folie a deux" was first names by two Frenchmen in 1877. It occurs when two individuals, usually closely related, share identical delusions and exhibit similar behavior. Usually the more passive partner mimics the symptoms of the dominant person who has a genuine psychotic condition. When the pair are separated, the symptoms generally disappear. However in some cases, both people mimic each other in a mutually dependent cycle. In certain cases the symptoms may be shared among three or more people.

The Scottish naval surgeon James Lind is credited with conducting the first randomized controlled trial in 1747, when he chose 12 sailors suffering from scurvy and assigned them to take different substances including cider, sea water, lemons, oranges and a paste made up of garlic, radish and mustard seed. He found the two sailors who ate the lemons and oranges were recovered in 6 days, while the others languished on, but it would still take 50 years more before lemon juice was routinely issued to the navy.

Lady Byron, the long-suffering widow of the late poet, was a fervent disciple of mesmerism. Her daughter, the gifted mathematician Ada, Countess of Lovelace, remained a skeptic.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky
Pages: 322
Words: None.
Notes: Too many for here.
Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean
Pages: 355
Words: kuru, Capgras Syndrome, Cotard Syndrome, beriberi disease, Korsakoff Syndrome
Notes: "In fact, our vision is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all...Experiments have even proved that if you artifically stabilize an image on the retina with a combination of special contact lenses and micro electronics, the image will vanish."
Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading Anatomy of Addiction by Howard Markel
Pages: 248
Words: None.
Notes: The earliest use of the word "addiction" appears in the statutes of Roman law. In antiquity, "addiction" typically referred to the bond of servitude that lenders imposed upon delinquent debtors or convicted aggressors. Such individuals were mandated to be "addicted" to the service of the person to whom they owed restitution."

"Dermatologists of the late 19th century were also known as syphilologists because their practice centered on treating the rashes and skin lesions associated with this particular STD."

""Fleischl-Marxow...at the age of 25, while conducting anatomical pathology research under the great Carl von Rokitansky, he accidentally nicked his right thumb with a scalpel he was applying to a cadaver. What began as an annoying wound rapidly progressed into a raging infection that ultimately led to an amputation...The wound never properly healed, resulting in a tangle of red, heaped, fragile and easily irritated scar, or granulation, tissue. 19th century surgeons applied a descriptive bit of clinical nomenclature to this condition: "proud flesh." Healthy skin had a difficult time filling in the ends of the opening of the incision line, setting up a vicious cycle of skin ulceration, infection and more surgery...Despite a series of operations by the great Billroth to revise the wound and remove the nerve fibers nestled within, the lesions had a life of their own and kept growing back, enlarging and multiplying, leading only to more pain and ultimately Fleischl-Marxow's demise in 1891 at the age of 45."

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher by Brandy Schillace
Pages: 320
Words: Ischemic time: the vital, adrenaline soaked minutes between removing an organ and reestablishing blood to its tissues; Anastomosis: A connection b/w two things that are normally diverging or branching, such as between blood vessels. Such a connection may be acquired or innate; natural or artificial.
Notes: "Krushchev obscured the name of Sputnik's chief designer so that he (and the Soviet Union) could marshal the credit, though it's largely accepted that the satellite was designed by Sergei Korolev."
"Vladimir Bekhterev believed in phrenology and that one could "reveal the nature of genius and talent" by creating a pantheon of brains to study and dissect...In an unguarded moment he diagnosed Stalin as paranoid rather than outstanding. He soon died of "food poisoning" and German neuroscientist Oskar Vogt received the directorship of the Institute of the Brain and had the honor of dissecting Lenin's brain."

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death by Jessica Snyder Sachs
Pages: 240
Words: dendrochronology
Notes: None

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading An Organ of Murder by Courtney E. Thompson Snyder Sachs
Pages: 163
Words: None
Notes: None

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading Digging Up the Dead by Druin Burch
Pages: 304
Words: None
Notes: None

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading Invention of Miracles by Katie Booth
Pages: 312
Words: phonautograph, Visible Speech
Notes: "The deaf, at that moment in time, were not imagined to have access to the complexities of language, and by extension, complexities of thought."

"Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins Institute for the Blind was married to Julia Ward, poetess and composer for the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The Perkins Institute is famous for being the school that Helen Keller was enrolled in and placed under the tutelage of Anne Sullivan. And as a final note, it was Alexander Graham Bell who recommended the Institute to the Kellers.

"...ASL was widely considered a language that made the deaf less than human...a rudimentary language for rudimentary beings."

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading The Medical Detective by Sandra Hempel
Pages: 304
Words: morxi: "an Indian term for cholera or "the cholera passion"
Notes: "In ancient Greek, the term cholera referred to any severe vomiting and diarrhea but in the 19th c. 'Asian' and 'Indian' cholera and 'cholera morbus' were used to describe it."

"While the use of either in surgery was revolutionary in the mid-19th c., the preparation itself - a distillation of sulfuric acid and alcohol - had been discovered as long ago as the 13th c. by the the Spanish chemist Ramundas Lullius, who named it sweet vitriol. It was another 300 years before the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus discovered its sleep inducing powers."

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris
Pages: 234
Words: erysipelas, pyemia, pythogenesis, matrons, medics and maladies; shattered nerves
Notes: "Erysipelas was one of the four major infections that plagued hospitals in the 19th century. The other three were hospital gangrene, septicemia and pyemia...The increase in infection and a separation brought on by the big four later became known as 'hospitalism."

Rating: 5 out of 5

Finished reading The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: And Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine by Thomas Morris
Pages: 368
Words: stercoraceous, attenuated, naphtha: a flammable hydrocarbon mixture; meteorism (aka typmanites), dyspnoea: difficulty in breathing; scarification: a mild form of bloodletting by means of superficial scratches; spicules: sharp splinters; Bheestie: in colonial India a domestic servant whose job it was to keep the household supplied with water; tumefied: swollen; canouse: fleshy; scarff skin: an archaic term for the outermost layer of skin. To burn the scarff skin implies the formation of a blister; sphacelated: gangrenous; axilla: armpit; guttatin: drop by drop;
Notes: "In the late 18th c. physicians of the period distinguished between eight types of enemas or clusters: purgative, emetic, tonic, exciting, diffusible, narcotic, laxative and emollient or softening."

"Sugar was generally sold in conical loaves in the 18th century and would have to be broken down and powdered by hand before use. It may seem strange to put it into a wound, but it was often used in such scenarios, and still a common remedy in many developing countries."

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Finished reading The Black Death by Philip Ziegler
Pages: 279
Words: gavocciolo, becchini, katastasis, The Black Death and Men of Learning, chiliastic; Lollards; Beghards; Cellites; meretricious; mulcted; Polychronicon; Grey Friars' Chronicle; halmote
Notes: Too many for here.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading The Black Death by Robert Gottfried
Pages: 163
Words: Antonine Plague; oratores, bellatores, laboratores, agricolae, rusticae, heriots: death duties by tenants heirs to their lords; demesnes; Nuova Cronica by Giovanni Villani
Notes: Too many for here.

Constantinople: late 1347
Alexandria + Messina: Autumn 1347
Cairo, Tunis, Pistoia + Orvieto: Spring 1348
Antioch, Paris, Melcombe Regis: Late 1348
Damascus + Ireland: Early 1349
Russia: Late Autumn 1350 or early 1351

Rating: 5 out of 5

Finished reading Rats by Robert Sullivan
Pages: 219
Words: neophobic
Notes: "The brown rat (rattus norvegius) did not appear in Europe until the beginning of the 18th century. There are accounts of brown rats crossing the Volga River in hordes in 1727, and more reports of brown rats proceeding across Russia to the Baltic Sea. Brown rats were reported in Prussia, France and Italy in 1750. They were reported in Norway in 1768 and in Sweden in 1790. Brown rats are thought to have been brought by ship from Russia to Copenhagen in 1716, and to Norway from Russia in 1768. Spain did not have brown rats until 1880. They arrived in England in 1728."

B/w January of 1959 and June 1960, 1,025 rat bites were reported in New York, twice as many as reported in the next ten largest U.S. cities combined.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill
Pages: 295
Words: O'nyong nyong fever; lassa fever; hesychasm; Brethren of the Common Life;
Notes: "The blood fluke causes schistosomiasis. The flukes life cycle involves mollusks and men as alternate host and the organism moves from one to the other through water in tiny free swimming forms it peaks in childhood and persists in less acute form thereafter. Ancient Egyptian irrigators suffered from infection as early as 1200 BC and probably long before then."

"In western Africa, when agriculture began to spread into rain forest environments...clearings multiples breeding places for a kind of mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, that feeds by preference on human blood...a weed species that proliferates enormously in the gashes human agriculture creates in this environment. This leads to sickle cell adaptation."

"Measles with rinderpest and/or canine distemper, smallpox and cowpox, and influenza is shared with hogs. We share 26 with poultry, 32 with rats, 35 with horses, 42 with pig, 46 with sheep and goats, 50 with cattle and 65 with dog."

"Malaria, although occurring occasionally in Northern China, is a modern health problem only in the South. Dengue fever, which is closely related to yellow fever though not as lethal in modern times, also affects southern parts of China. Like malaria, dengue fever may have been present from time immemorial, lying in wait for immigrants from more northerly climes among whom prior exposure had not built up any sort of natural resistance."

"Hippocrates records an epidemic of mumps on the island of Thasos, and tertian and quartan malaria."

"Those who drink stagnant water have always large stiff spleens and hard, thing, hot stomachs, whlie their shoulders, collar bones and faces are emaciated; the fact is that their flesh dissolves to feed the spleen" - Hippocrates

"Gregory of Tours, mentions an epidemic in southern France in the year 580 that involved skin rashes of some sort."

"Learned discussion of plague has, unfortunately, been clouded by uncritical acceptance of biblical references to epidemics as cases of plague. The term "plague" came naturally to the translators of the King James Bible, since in their day the only epidemic disease that retained its terrors was bubonic plague...19th c. scholars accepted the idea that the "plague of the Philistines" was bubonic, though the Hebrew word to used to describe the affliction has no assignable meaning whatever."

"In Japan in 861-62 the "coughing violence" hit and recurred again in 872 and in 920-23 with heavy loss."

"Pasteurella pestis invaded China in 1331, either spreading from the old natural focus in Yunnan-Burma, or from the rodents of the Manchurian Mongolian steppe. The infection must then have traveled the caravan routes of Asia during the next 15 years before reaching the Crimea in 1346; whereupon the bacillus took ship and proceeded to penetrate almost all of Europe and the Near East along routes radiating inland from seaports."

"In 1771 plague in Moscow killed 56,672 persons in a single season, a total not far short of that in London in 1666."

"The most notable phenomenon was the decline in the incidence of leprosy, which had been a significant disease in medieval Europe up to the time of the Black Death. Hansen's disease appears to have established itself in Europe and the Mediterranean coastlands in the 6th century...by the 3th c. one estimate puts their number in all of Christendom at 19,000."

"Yaws is a disease which medieval doctors would have classed as leprosy. It results from the infection by a spirochete which is indistinguishable from the organism that causes syphilis.

"Amerindians soaked kernels in lime solution, which broke down some of the molecules of the maize in a way that allowed human digestion to synthesize needed vitamins that are absent from the maize itself. Without such treatment, a diet of maize leads to niacin deficiency. Amerindians escaped pellagra by soaking maize and by supplementing their diet with beans."

"In 1903 a South American tribe, the Cayapo, accepted a missionary - a single priest - who bent every effort to safeguard his flock. When he arrived the tribe was b/w 6000-8000, yet only 500 survived in 1918. By 1927 only 27 were alive and in 1950 two or three individuals tracing descent to the Cayapo still existed."

In 1942-43 the Alcan highway exposed a remote Indian community in Alaska to measles, German measles, dysentery, whopping cough, mumps, meningitis and catarrhal jaundice in a single year. Yet thanks to modern hospitals, only 7 of 130 individuals died. A little more than a century before in 1837, the Mandan tribe copped up in two defended camps by their Sioux enemies when epidemic broke out. As a results their numbers were reduced from about 2000 to a mere 30-40 survivors in a matter of weeks; and those were captured by enemies."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading The Barbary Plague by Marilyn Chase
Pages: 216
Words: lazaretto, bumpkin; serum sickness; Haffkinization: Vaccination for plague, named after Russian scientist Waldemar Haffkine. It used a small amount of bacteria to arouse an immune reaction. The trouble was, it also provoked severe side effects, ranging from pain and swelling to fever and malaise and, occasionally, death. When it worked, its protection was short-lived.
Notes: "One Italian apothecary named Gentile da Foligno crafted fanciful remedies from gemstones - including amethyst amulets and potions of powdered emerald."

"San Francisco's mayorJames Duval Phelan...was an archenemy of Chinese immigration...Phelan viewed Asian workers as a threat to the sons of the Golden State, even though many were native-born San Franciscans. Phelan would later run for the U.S. Senate under the slogan "Keep California White."

"When young men of Chinatown offered to join the army...the locan press mocked their offer with cartoons. When elders shipped their bones home for burial in China, they were hit with a ten dollar bone tax."

"The CA State Health Board ordered the city to restore the quarantine and threatened to quarantine the entire city...the state board wasn't admitting plague, it was trying to limit the damage from negative publicity and shield trade and tourism."

"The quarantine was enlarged and zigzagged to exempt white institutions. Politicians and white businessmen were advocating the total destruction of Chinatown by fire."

"Second quarantine caused a food shortage in Chinatown. There was nothing to buy and no money to buy it. The city dangled food relief as an incentive to the Chinese to move to the detention centers."

"After the quarantine was lifted, for good reason, Kinyoun issues a travel ban, warning all nearby states but President McKinley overruled it. Governor Gage then accuses Kinyoun of startingthe catastrophe himself (the catastrophe that Gage was believed didn't exist) by spilling imported cultures of bubonic plague."

"Kinyoun proposed making it a felony for newspapers to publish "any false report on the presence of bubonic plague."

"Because of the blatant racism and disregard for basic human rights and decency, the Chinese began hiding their dead."

"Next Governor Gage came after H.A.L. Ryfkogel, hiring a detective agency to follow him and accuse him off inoculating Chinese corpses with plague to create a fake crisis."

"Once investigative doctor Mark White had it right: I do not think the Chinese here very different from the Human Race elsewhere." By treating people with respect, public health goals can be far more readily attained." Where Joseph Kinyoun and Joseph White had seen the Chinese as liars, Rupert Blue and Mark White saw instead a people driven by fear to evasion and from evasion into further danger. Blue quickly disinfected a plague house, isolate only the patient's family, and reopen the pace in a few days so life could return to normal."

"A friend of Presidency Roosevelt's had an interest in the Stearn Company's Electric Rat and Roach Paste which accidentally poisoned San Francisco children. Blue turned them down."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading Justinian's Flea by William Rosen
Pages: 324
Words: heriots: death duties paid by tenants' heirs to their lords; neoplatonism; iastrophists;
Notes: "To prevent disturbances, the civic authorities which controlled retail prices for pork, beef, and wine, directed the 100 public bakeries of Constantinople to provide 2 lb free bread to each of 80,000 residents daily."

"Justinian regarded anything that threatened the unity of the Empire as an affront against reason and Faith alike and the most persuasive explanation was his dual inheritance: that which had been rendered both on to Caesar and to God."

"That same year Belisarius' wife Antonina developed a passionate infatuation with her adopted son Theodocious, which she apparently consummated at every opportunity. When she returned with Belisarius from Africa, so careless was she that her chambermaid Macedonia informed Belisarius for his wife's infidelities. The results as reported by Procopius were predictable. After the general learned of the affair, he sent soldiers to kill Theodocius. After the soldiers lost their quarry, Belisarius flew into a fury against Antonina. After his fury was diverted by his wife's allure, he revealed the name of his informant. Antonina cut out Macedonia's tongue, chopped the rest of her into small pieces and threw them into the Mediterranean."

"The loss of the contents of The Great Library of Alexandria is the object of a startling number of myths. The earliest lays the responsibility at the feet of the legions of Julius Caesar, the latest not only false but libelous, blames the fire on the Islamic invaders of the 7th century."

"...thousands of citizens of Constantinople...leapt into the sea in the hope of ending their suffering..."

"Another clinical tactic much in demand was the treatment of disease by the application of material that had been blessed by a saint, preferably a hermit. These literal "blessings" or eulogia, were frequently no more than dust or red clay that had been touched by a holy ascetic. Others included magical amulets and rings (frequently carrying the image of the biblical King Solomon."

"In very short order, the existing burial grounds were filled...so Justinian detailed a minister named Theodorus to find a solution...Eighty years after Constantine's death, when Alaric's Gots sacked Rome itself, the ministers of Theodosius began construction of an immense series of walls that would protect Constantinople...The Walls of Theodosius were 20-30 feet high. Every 180 feet a square tower 60 feet high was built from which Constantinople's bowmen could defend...The cemeteries at Sycae were likewise surrounded by such towers, and at Theodorus' direction, Justinian's troops removed the tops of dozens of the towers and filled them with the bodies of the dead."

As early as the plague of 251-266 Bishop Cyprian of Carthage would cheer the disease decimating his city with a "kill them all and let God sort them out" sermon: "How suitable, how necessary is this plague and pestilence... the just are called to refreshment, the unjust are carried off to torture."

"When this plague was passing from one land to another, many people saw shapes of bronze boats and (figures) sitting in them resembling people with their heads cut off. Holding staves, also of bronze, they moved along on the sea and could be seen going withhersoever they headed. These figures were seen everywhere in a frightening fashion, especially at night. Like flashing bronze and like fire did they appear, black people without heads sitting in a glistening boat and traveling swiftly on the sea, so that this sight almost caused the souls of the people who saw it to expire."- John of Ephesus

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading The Speckled Monster by Jennifer Lee Carrell
Pages: 400
Words: "engrafting" an early term for inoculation
Notes: "the purples" The rare but invariably fatal form of early hemorrhagic smallpox, which made its victims leak blood from every orifice while their bodies swelled beneath the skin, turning to dark purple until they died of heart failure - all before the telltale pocks ever broke out.

"In the 18th century, doctors distinguished 4 main types of smallpox, though they labeled them with different names and distributed them with different logic across the branches if the smallpox family tree. Everyone who dealt with it realized that the best of this bad disease was "distinct" or "discrete" smallpox, which presented a rash scattered thinly enough so that the pocks remained separate - or distinct - with patches of normal skin in between. In "confluent" smallpox, sometimes called "coherent," the rash was so dense that across much of the body - especially the face, hands, and forearms, where it was always thickest - the pocks ran together into one huge festering sore; little to no skin was left. The remaining two types - flat and hemorrhagic - were once often lumped together (sometimes with confluent) as "malignant smallpox." In "flat", "crystalline" or "warty" smallpox, the slow-growing blisters usually ran together, but never really rose above the skin and did not fill with the same kind of thick yellow pus found in discrete and confluent pocks. Instead, shallow ripples spread across the skin's surface, stretched over sores buries in its deepest levels; large strips of the top layer of skin, along with the delicate coverings of most mucous membranes (inner nose, mouth and throat, anus, vagina) eventually just sloughed off. Almost three quarters of these cases were children under 14."

"There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation. Every autumn in the month of September, when the great heat us abated, people send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the smallpox...They make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly 15 or 16 together), the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox and asks what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open the one that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch) and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell, and in this manner opens four or five veins. The Grecians have commonly the superstition o f opening one in the middle o the forehead, in each arm, and on the breast to mark the sign of the cross, but this has very ill effect, all those wounds leaving little scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious - who choose to have been in the legs or that part of the arm that is concealed."

Rating: 5 out of 5

Finished reading Bring Out Your Dead by J.H. Powell
Pages: 326
Words: cordwainer, turner, blackball maker, stevedore; "History of Yellow Fever" by John Lining of Charleston;
Notes: One paragraph recommended as a preventative against the sickness was diffusing tobacco smoke and sprinkling vinegar throughout the house, placing a tar rope in a room or carrying it around in the pocket and hanging a camphor bag about the neck. A second suggested that the fire company's engines to be exercised daily in flushing the streets which would relieve the sickness and at the same time keep the engines in working order. Many people began lightin gbonfires in front of their houses or at the corners of the streets to purify the air."

Vinegar of the Four Thieves: "Take of rue, wormwood and lavender of each one handful; put these all together with a gallon of the best vinegar into a stone pan, covered over with paste, and let them stand within the warmth of a fire to infuse for 8 days - then strain them off, and to every quart bottle put 3/4 of an ounce of camphor. Let the camphor be dissolved before it is put in the bottles. Rub the temples and loins with this preparation before going out in the morning, wash the mouth, and snuff up some of it into the nostrils, and carry a piece of sponge that has been dipped in it, in order to smell to pretty often." - This was the recipe said to have been discovered by four young men during the plague of Marseilles in 1720 and used by them with such success that they were able to move safely among the sick and dead and rob them while pretending to be nurses.

Dr. Bejmain Duffield recommended strewing fresh earth in a room to a depth of 2 inches and changing it every day. This could be supplemented by frequent warm baths and the Asiatic remedy of myrrh and black pepper.

"Contagion is the effluvia arising directly or originally from the body of a man under a particular disease and exciting the same kind of disease in the body of the person to whom they are applied." - Dr. Cullen of Edinburgh

"To astute to assign a local origin to the disease, which might harm Philadelphia's commerce, too wily to repeat that the consensus was that it had not been an imported one, the Governor spoke obliquely of the pestilence as "an infectious disorder; which, together with recent occurrences, that have increased our intercourse with the West Indies, and the influx of foreigners, must point out the necessity of more strongly guarding the public health, by legislative precautions."

The overseers and guardians of the poor occupied a curious position in the city government. They had originated as managers of the almshouse or betterment house. They had been incorporated in colonial days and given power to lay special taxes for the care of the indignant. By 1793 they were the only official agency dealing with the poor. During the yellow fever epidemic they had to hire carters for the transport of the sick, arrange for the burial of bodies, find medical and nursing assistance, and they were the liaison between the authorities and the needy. All of this with no money.

John Bill Ricketts, the celebrated equestrian was Philadelphia's favorite entertainer at the time. He had moved on to New York and left his circus at 12th and the High empty. The Guardians moved in to store the ill and dying poor. They were cared by no one. Encouraged by the Mayor, a lazaretto was found in "Bush Hill" the former home of Andrew Hamilton, the architect of Independence Hall.

Out of the Fellows, Kuhn, M'Ilvaine, Carson and Wistar catch yellow fever. Dr. Hutchinson becomes deathly ill...Dr. Adam Kuhn and Dr. Edward Stevens follow the method of a diet of ripe fruits, rich wines, camomile tea for nausea, laudenum, and dunking the patient in cool, not cold, water twice a day, and no purging or bleeding.

Dr Franklin gives Rush a description of yellow fever by John Mitchell from 1741 in Virginia. The document encouraged extreme purging...The strongest purge Rush had ever seen was Dr Thomas Young's "Ten and Ten" in the Revolutionary Army - 10 grains of calomel (mercury) and 10 of jalap. This Rush resolved to use but it was an enormous dose far stronger than medical men thought safe.

Alexander Hamilton came down with fever he was stricken on September 5th, Eliza soon after. He called Dr Stevens whom he had known from their common boyhood in the West Indies and praised the doctor's method to the papers.

Living with the Doctor in Philadelphia during the epidemic was his mother, his sister, Marcus a black servant, and Peter a mulatto boy of 11. Five pupils served him: Warner Washington, a relative of the president and Edward Fisher of VA; John Alston of SC, John Redman Coxe and John Stall of Philadelphia.

Warner hid his sickness from the doctor and on Sept 11, he died. John Stall dies on Sept 23, refusing to take Rush's mercury pills and purges. John Alston catches the disease from his sweetheart Ms Wilson and on Sept 24 dies.

"As soon as you feel pains in head or back, are nauseated or have chills and fever, take one of the powders (10 grains calomel, 15 jalap) in a little sugar and water, every 6 hours, until they produce four or five large evacuations from the bowels. Drink plenty of water or gruel, lie abed and sweat. After the bowels are thoroughly cleansed, if the pulse be full and tense, be bled of 8 or 10 oz from the arm - more if tension continues. Light diet, fresh air, continuously open bowels, blisters on sides, neck and head, cleanliness above all, should be your regimen."

Peter Helm offered his service as a Guardian to Bush Hill pesthouse. He was a devout member of the Moravian congregation. Stephen Girard assumed responsibility and expenses outside, Helm outside. Carriers in the city would put a patient in a box and convey him to Bush Hill, be left outside in a shallow hole (leaving them separate from other diseases persons) until a bed was made with fresh linen and taken inside.

Dr. Jean Deveze was a refugee from the West Indies and used the "French cure" of stimulants and quinine at Bush Hill, with Girard's support. He was born in Hautes Pyrénées in 1753, trained at Bordeaux, survived yellow fever in Santo Domingo, and was chief surgeon for the national troops of the Northern Province at Cap François. He caught it a second time and survived.

Samuel Benge, umbrella maker, assumed the task of carrying the sick and burying the dead. He was the only member of the committee who had a perfect record of attendance at all 46 meetings.

Henry DeForest was a cabinet maker, now to become food administrator for the whole city and receiver of properties, a sort of quartermaster general. He attended 44 of the 46 committee meetings.

Andrew Adgare was Philadelphia's premiere music master, founder of a free school of music called the Uranian Academy. He is remembered for the Grand Concert of Sacred Music he conducted in 1786 for the benefit of the medical institutions of the city, the greatest aggregation of singers and musicians that had ever been gathered together in America.

Daniel Offley contacts the disease while making rounds visiting nurses and collecting children, as a member of the Orphan Committee. His nurse at one point fell asleep and he did not have food or water for many hours. On October 12 he died.

Dr. Rush's sister died of yellow fever on October 1. On October 10-15 Rush suffers from the disease and stress.

John Todd, Jr. was a promising Quaker attorney, who moved his young wife Dolley Payne, their 2 children, and his mother in law to Grays Ferry to avoid yellow fever. In early October his parents died and he died shortly after in Dolley's arms. Dolley, after losing the baby and recovering from fever, is introduced by Aaron Burr to James Madison.

James Wilson, Guardian of the Poor, would die 3 days after being admitted to Bush Hill. Jacob Tomkins, Jr his colleague also dies of fever.

Altogether the Committee had spent $37,647.19., in deficit even after donations, that they couldn't pay Mary Seville, the matron of Bush Hill. On Nov 5 Rush resigns from the College of Physicians.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Finished reading The Great Mortality by John Kelly
Pages: 303
Words: mistral, sirocco, rakematiz
Notes: "Petrarch's muse, Laura, was married to Chevalier Hugh de Sade who was thew ancestor to Petrarch's biographer Abbe J.F.X. de Sade, who was the uncle of the Marquis de Sade. The Pont d'Avignon has borne the de Sade family coat of arms since 1177."

"On May 22, 1382, 37 years after being declared innocent of the murder of her husband Andreas (for her rumored lover Luigi), agents of the Hungarian Crown slipped into the chapel where Joanna, then on her fourth husband, was kneeling in prayer and strangled her to death. Another account has Joanna being poisoned; a third smothered by a pillow; a fourth, starving herself to death."

"A small landmark in the physician's climb to professional dominance was the 1322 trial of a Parisian healer named Jacqueline Felicie. Despite a lack of formal training, Mme Felicie had several former patients came forward to testify on her behalf, including a John of St. Omar, who told the bishop's court that during a recent illness, she had visited him several times and refused payment until he had been cured. On Nov 2, Felicie was convicted of violating an ordinance that prohibited unlicensed healers from visiting, prescribing medications, or performing other duties for a patient, except under the guidance of a university-trained and licensed physician."

"A physician named John Colle noted that the attendants of latrines and those who serve hospitals are nearly all to be considered immune...One of the most surreal images to emerge from the Black Death is of knots if people crouched at the edge of municipal latrines inhaling the noxious fumes."

"William Sigge stripped lead from one dead neighbor's roof, stole pots and pans from another dead neighbor's cottage, and altered the boundary of a third dead neighbor's farm, so as to extend his own property...Catherine Bugsey preyed on the dead by stealing clothing from plague victims. When arrested in her latest acquisition, a leather jerkin, Catherine was the picture of health."

"At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, Church authorities decreed that "Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off...from other people through the character of their dress." From this measure emerged the yellow badge of the French Crown, which became the yellow star of the Nazi state....In Pisa, students celebrated the Feast of St. Catherine by capturing the fattest Jew they could find and making the local Jewish community pay his weight in sweets."

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading Surgeons at the Bailey English Forensic Medicine to 1878 by Thomas Forbes
Pages: 352
Words: Bamberger Code of 1507, Caroline Code of 1533, "How to Make Reports, and to Embalme the Dead (1634); ecchymoses, "An Essay into the Operation of Poisonous Agents Upon the Living Body"; On Poisons; A Treatise on Poisons; hair-guard: a watch chain made of hair; "cut with and stick to the regulars": keeping the money; "hook it": run away, escape; Treatise on Madness; "On Madness" by John Johnstone; Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind; naptha; malingering
Notes: Too many for here.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Finished reading Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 by Elizabeth Fenn
Pages: 384
Words: internecine, ayuntamiento
Notes: Too many for here.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney
Pages: 291
Words: Cough of Perinthus; St. Pantaleon
Notes: Leo Szilard fell sick with flu and was granted leave to return home to Budapest. While in the hospital ward, he received a latter from his captain informing him that the rest of his regiment had been killed at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto on the Italian Front. Szilard later moved to America and became one of the men behind the atom bomb.

Two dark spots would appear on the cheekbones and within a few hours it covered the face. This was called heliotrope cyanosis. "Blue darkened to black. Black first appeared at the extremities, stole up the limbs and eventually infused the abdomen and torso. As long as your were conscious, you watched death enter at your fingertips and fill you up." One side effect was permanent discolored vision, resulting in a forever "washed out" view.

In Zamora, Spain, when influenza hit, Bishop Antonio Alvaro y Ballano preached contempt for modern science, believing it led to a rejection of God and atheism. As the already underfunded health system broke down, the Bishop encouraged mass church attendance to pray "for our sins and ingratitude." Hundreds of people lined up to kiss relics and in the end, Zamora suffered worse than any other Spanish city.

"Spain was neutral in the war, and its press was not censored. As news of the disruption traveled abroad, British and French who were ignorant of the ravages of the flu started calling it "the Spanish flu." Spaniards called it "Naples Soldier" for a song from the hit show in Madrid at the time of the flu, The Song of Forgetting." The Poles called it the Bolshevik Disease, the Persians blamed the British, and the Japanese blamed it on their wrestlers: after it broke out at a sumo tournament, they dubbed it "sumo flu."

"The British colonial authorities had long taken a laissez-faire attitude to indigenous health in that country...In 1897 the head of the Pune Plague Committee, Walter Charles Rand, was murdered by three local brothers, the Chapekars, who were hanged for their crime (today a monument in the city honors them as freedom fighters.)

"In the 1830s, cholera was blamed on poor Irish immigrants. Towards the end of that century, TB became known as the "Jewish disease" or the "tailor's disease." And when polio broke out in the East Coast cities in 1916, the Italians were blamed. "

"Black wedding": or shvartze khasen, an ancient Jewish ritual for warding off epidemics that involved marrying two of the most unfortunate of society in a cemetery.

"Inflammation on a massive scale occurred in 1918 - red, engorged lungs that were hard to the touch. In the 1940s, immunologists believed this was a "cytokine storm," an overzealous, second-line immune response that ultimately caused more damage than the virus it intended to destroy."

"The Mormons keep detailed records of their family trees which they store millions of scrolls of microfilm in a vault in Granite Mountain, close to Salt Lake City. The vault, built in 1965, is protected by a 13-tonne steel door designed to withstand a nuclear explosion."

"One other neurological condition has been associated with the Spanish fly, and that is encephalitis lethargica, or "Sleeping Sickness." EL washed over the world in a wave between 1917-1925, peaking in 1921. It came on with flu-like symptoms and overwhelming sleepiness."

"The island nation of Vanuatu is home to over 130 local languages in addition to English, French and the national language of Bislama, making it the most linguistically dense country in the world. Parts of the archipelago experiences 90% mortality during the Spanish flu, and that epidemic - along with smallpox and leprosy that swept over the island s in the early 1900s - pushed around 20 local languages to extinction."

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky
Pages: 288
Words: nolo contendere
Notes: "Fred Snite, Jr. came down with polio in 1936. He had just turned 25. He would be permanently confined to an iron lung, In 1939 he married Teresa Larkin and they had three children. Over time his health troubles mounted and he died in 1954 at age 43."

"The first recorded polio epidemic in the U.S. occurred in Otter Valley near Rutland, Vermont in 1894. Thanks to the efforts of Charles Calverley, a young country doctor with an interest in public health, every case was recorded: 123 in all - listed by sex, age, symptoms, apparent cause and final result. 50 were permanently paralyzed and 18 died."

"In 1918 FDR suffered from influenza, resulting in double pneumonia. Three years later he contracted polio and his legs were paralyzed."

"Eddie Cantor came up with a slogan for the National Foundation's 1938 fundraising campaign. He called it "March of Dimes" and suggested people send their dimes directly to the President at the White House. Cantor went first using his radio show to launch the project. The Lone Ranger later made his own appeal, followed by Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee and Edgar Bergen."

"The first poster children were "The Miracle of Hickory," 454 patients were treated by the National Foundation. Two-thirds recovered but parents were warned that "beautiful, lively, active or smart" children were more susceptible to polio. But polio was a "visible" disease, with no descrimination towards race, household, or economic status."

"Poster children were fair-skinned to be sure to gain the public's sympathy. Blacks and immigrants were falsely yet widely-believed to be less susceptible to polio. Ironically, Jonas Salk was the son of poor Russian Jewish immigrants."

"The day after his graduation Salk married Donna Lindsay. Her father Elmer agreed to thew marriage on two conditions: first the ceremony must wait until Salk could properly be listed as doctor on the wedding invitation, and second, the groom must have a middle name. The couple chose "Edward" a favorite of British royalty."

"In 1883, a popular guide book of cities described Pittsburgh as the 'Great Furnace' of America...six decades later Pittsburgh remained one of the bleakest cities. In the 1940s when describing their city, local newspapers were fond of quoting the writer James Parton, who had passed through almost 80 years before: "Pittsburgh," he wrote, "is hell with the lid taken off." In 1947, the year that Salk arrived, Pittsburgh suffered two coal strikes, a 3-month electrical worker strike, and a 27-day power strike - the nation's first ever - that shut down the city."

"Isabel Morgan joined the Rockefeller Institute in 1938 before joining the Johns Hopkins group in 1944. There she began a series of experiments to immunize monkeys against polio with a killed-virus vaccine. She grew the polio virus in nervous tissue before inactivating it with formaldehyde. Her vaccinated monkeys were able to withstand a series of intracerebral injections containing high concentrations of live polio virus. But at the very height of her career Morgan married and left to start a family. It certainly is possible she would have beaten Salk to the polio vaccine."

"In 1950 Hilary Koprowski tested his live virus vaccine on children. The site was Letchworth Village, a nearby state institution for the feeble-minded and epileptic. His contact there was George Jervis and it is not clear whether Jervis got consent from the children's parents. Two of his "volunteers" were so helpless they had to be fed the vaccine through stomach tubes."

"Basil O'Conner's daughter Bettyann contracted polio at 30 and was almost completely paralyzed on her left side. Her husband and son suffered milder cases of polio at the same time. Following months of rehabilitation, she regained movement everywhere except in her abdomen."

"After announcing his killed-virus vaccine, Salk convinced authorities at two local institutions: the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children and the Polk School for the Retarded and Feeble-Minded to supply him with "volunteers." The Polk School contained patients with IQ scores under 50, many of whom were long-term wards of the state. The state of Pennsylvania agreed to the project. The first to be vaccinated was Bill Kirkpatrick, a 16 year old, who had contracted polio, at D.T. Watson."

"The year 1952 was the worst polio year on record with more than 57,000 cases nationwide. 21,000 victims suffered permanent paralysis and about 3,000 died."

"The first to announce the vaccine success to the world was Dave Garroway, host of NBC's Today Show on April 12, 1955."

"When the National Foundations distributed millions of vaccine doses to first and second grade children free of charge, the American Medical Association raised the spectre of "socialized medicine." It had done so previously in helping defeat a plan for national health insurance in 1948. It was not about to endorse a vaccination program intended to exclude both the profit motive and the family physician. The model of low-cost immunization for the masses didn't have a chance."

"Fear had given way to complacency, leading some to worry that Americans, seeing polio as fully defeated, would forget how the war had been won. 'Our main problem is not that anything is wrong with the vaccine, but that something is wrong with the people who won't take it." - Thomas Rivers

Rating: 5 out of 5

Finished reading Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia by Steve Finbow
Words: None.
Notes: Dr. Anil Aggrawal's 10-Tier Classification of Necrophilia.

"The wives of men of rank when they die are not given at once to be embalmed, nor such women as are very beautiful or of greater regard than others, but on the third or fourth day after their death (and not before) they are delivered to the embalmers. They do so about this matter in order that the embalmers may not abuse their women..." - Herodotus

"Every piece of meat, every torso, every skull testified to their inadequacy, their loneliness...By keeping the bodies..they triumphed over loneliness, no longer having to fantasize alone...having to hide the spectacle of their desires. To kill was to vanquish the invisible force, to release the compulsion..."

In Greek mythology, Dimoetes was married to Evopis, daughter of his brother Troezen. Evopis was in love with her own brother and upon discovering this, Dimoetes reported the matter to Troezen. Evopis cursed Dimoetes and hanged herself. Later, Dimoetes found the corpse of a beautiful woman along the seashore, and was overcome with lust. The corpse, however, soon began to rot so he interred her in an opulent tomb. Unable to overcome his passion, he killed himself with his own sword.

"In 29 CE, after sentencing his second wife Mariamne the Hasmonean to death for alleged adultery and conspiracy to murder, the repentant yet delirious and psychotic Herod had his wife embalmed in honey and stored in his palace for the next 7 years."

When the playwright William Congreve died in 1729, his mistress Henrietta Godolphin, 2nd Duchess of Marlborough, had a realistic mannequin made, dressed it in Congreve's clothes, fitted his death mask to it and slept with it, finally taking it to her grave in 1733...Sir John Price had his first wife's body embalmed and placed in his bed. He, her corpse, and his second wife slept together. When his second wide died and he, too, had her embalmed and placed next to his first corpse bride, his third wife asked that he bury the bodies.

Rating: 1 1/2 out of 5

Finished reading Typhoid Mary by Judith Leavitt
Words: Fetich: the common practice of fumigating with steam or formaldehyde the rooms in which the sick had suffered or died.
Notes: "No other typhoid carrier was as isolated as she was, in 1922 6 carriers absconded from the city list."

"Alphonse Cotil, a bakery and restaurant owner, defied department rules because officials were "annoying" him. A judge found him guilty but suspended his sentence after he promised to work by telephone. At the same time, Mallon was being held on North Brother Island...Soper himself admitted that she was held without being given a hearing."

"The health dept keep a list of typhoid carriers and kept an individual card for each carrier. Health officers tried to keep in close contact with these carriers, required them too submit to lab analysis on a regular basis, and insisted that they not handle any food."

"In his study of 1,004 NYC carriers, Stephen Friedman similarly concluded: Most carriers lived with the restriction imposed on them... These restrictions required the carrier to practice good hygiene in his toilet habits, and to keep the Health Dept informed as to his address and place of employment. Carriers are forbidden to work as food handlers, nurses or teachers. Thus being declared a carrier sometimes meant economic hardship for that individual."

"In 1910 a new health commissioner Ernst Lederle finally decided to let her go... Mallon signed an affidavit swearing to give up cooking and Lederle helped her find employment in a laundry. The department tracked her for a while as they did other carriers but in time Mallon disappeared. In early 1915 an outbreak of typhoid fever occurred at the Sloan Maternity Hospital. 25 doctors and nurses and hospital staff were stricken and two died. Investigation of this outbreak uncovered a Mrs. Brown, a new cook who had been employed in the hospital for 3 months before the outbreak. Both S. Josephine Baker and George Sober claimed to have played a role in identifying Mrs. Brown as Mary Mallon."

"In the case of Tony Labella, he absconded and carried the infection across state lines, and still was not as isolated as Mary the second time."

"No family for whom Mallon worked brought suit or entered the legal debate in any way. The victims were not the subject of the legal discussions, nor did they seek revenge."

1905 Supreme Court Decision: Jacobson vs Massachusetts. That case involved a Mass citizen, Henning Jacobson, who didn't want to submit to a vaccination against smallpox. Jacobson argued that the ruling violated his individual rights. Justice Harlan and six of his colleagues on the Supreme Court thought otherwise: "The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, holy freed from restraint..."

"Given the universality of the arguments raised in court what happened to Mary Mallon as a healthy carrier should have been typical and precedent-setting but was not. Her case was not published in the legal journals and it was not cited as a president in other cases concerning typhoid carriers."

"Expectations and prejudices about Mary mallon's social position her Irish immigrant status her job as a domestic servant her femaleness all contributed to defining her as dangerous in the eyes of those who pursued her."

Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5

Finished reading The American Way of Death Revisited By Jessica Mitford
Words: Death to Dust
Notes: Too many for here.
Rating: 5 out of 5

Finished reading Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial by Mark Harris
Words: formalin, Caring for the Dead, CRD: Cremated Remains Disposer,
Notes: "A body can be held in a refrigeration unit until the viewing, slowing decay at the fraction of the cost of embalming."

"The average American funeral costs $10,000, accounting for one of the single most expensive purchases a family will make in its lifetime."

"They could've gone online, ordered the very same casket for overnight delivery for 25% less. By law Fielding would have been required to accept it and without charging a handling fee."

"The funeral director will insist on embalming for any open casket...The funeral trade has christened this a 'memory picture' and insists it's necessary."

"A final twist of her head, 15 degrees to the right, ensures that mourners will see her face, not just its profile, when they approach the casket. The angle also keeps Jenny from looking like she's staring fixedly at the ceiling, an unappealing position dubbed 'stargazing."

"Instead of opening and cleaning out the abdomen, embalmers learned to siphon out its contaminants through a single, small hole. The tool they designed specially for this purpose is a long, hollow needle called a trocar."

"A funeral home is under no legal obligation to handle funeral arrangements for an unembalmed body, and may refuse to do so unless the burial/cremation occurs within a short period following the death and no viewing take place."

"The embalming of a single individual can lead to 120 gallons of untreated 'funeral waste" the mortician sent directly down the sink, 3 pounds of embalming fluid alone. The flow might also have carried down the drain pathogens of any disease the body might have unknowingly harbored, perhaps TB...20 years ago the director might have been allowed to discharge into a septic system."

"Batesville Casket Company is the world's largest manufacture of caskets"

"When the funeral director locks the casket for the final time...sealing the lid can transform a natural, inevitable decay into a gruesome process and the corpse into a stew...Unlike their oxygen-fueled aerobic counterparts, anaerobic bacteria attack the body's organic matter by putrefying it...the buildup of methane has can cause exploding caskets."

"In older cemeteries, arsenic may be the the longest-enduring contaminant...By 1910 enough embalmers had themselves perished from the preservatives that the government banned the use of arsenic."

"Traditionally after death, the women of the community gathered to wash and dress the body (within 2 hrs after death), sometimes enshrouding it in a gownlike cloth quickly sewn for the occasion, or, if poor, in a plain winding sheet (today one would pack it with dry ice, lasts with out melting. 60-80 lbs.) Pressing down gently on the lower abdomen will release any waste that might otherwise appear later when the muscles in the bladder and bowel relax. A family called the local cabinetmaker to fashion a coffin, usually from pine into the 20th century, the family might purchase a coffin read-made at the furniture store and transport it home themselves. If the funeral wasn't held in the home, the pallbearers carried the coffin to the church, and after the service, carried to the cemetery and lowered into the hole at the family had dug themselves."

"The first metal coffin was fashioned from cook-stove manufacturers and was made to appeal to the refined aesthetics of the 19th c. In the 1850s, manufacturers consequently altered the coffin's form, trimming and straightening the sides to create the nondescript rectangular box that's common today. The re-formed coffin was christened casket, a word that referred then specifically to a jewelry box."

"At the time of the Civil War, only anatomists embalmed the dead, and then only those bodies bound for use in medical research...Abraham Lincoln was embalmed to make that two week journey to Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. His funeral train was stopped at a dozen Northern cities along the way, where it was transported to central locations and opened to the public view."

"Cardiac pacemakers, prostheses, glass, silicon implants or radioactive cancer "seeds", mercury in dental fillings, zinc, plastic and fiberglass in coffins must be removed before cremation."

"Early Christians adopted the Hebrew tradition of burial (and took inspiration from Christ's entombment) and came to view cremation as a pagan practice that desecrated the physical creation of the Maker. In 789, Charlemagne enforced that view by law, declaring cremation a crime punishable by death."

"In the U.S. the first cremation occurred in 1876 in a homemade coal-fired retort in Washington, PA...Fueled by 40 bushels of a dirty coal residue, the cremation took almost 10 hours...The Catholic Church which officially banned cremation in 1886, eventually came around to the practice, if reluctantly. It wasn't until 1963 that the Holy See finally approved cremation for Catholics; it another 34 years for it to allow U.S. priests to officiate at funeral Masses where cremated remains were present."

"EPA regulation permits burial at sea, but requires that bodies be taken out at least 3 miles and then consigned at least 600 feet deep. In addition, families need to ensure that the body sinks by enclosing it in a metal casket punched with holes and weighted with concrete."

"After a family has chosen from a list of upcoming deployment site,s it's invited to participate in the actual casting of its reef ball, to physically add and mix the ashes of its loved one into the concrete slurry that fills out a module. A month later, the family comes to a 'viewing' of its cured module, and on the following day, board a charter boat to watch it be 'buried' at sea."

"All states except New York, Connecticut, Nebraska, Indiana, Michigan, Utah and Louisiana permit families to care for their own dead at home."

"Federal law requires that funeral directors accept third party caskets. For a time, directors tried to recoup the loss by charging families an extra handling fee. In 1994, the FTC deemed the fee unlawful and banned it."

"Ramsey Creek Preserve is the first modern woodland burial ground in the U.S...In the 1600s, British Quakers often chose to be buried in their gardens, sans grave markers, preferring a simple return there than to the crowded churchyard."

Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading Rest in Pieces by Bess Lovejoy
Pages: 352
Words: None
Notes: None
Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading The Day of St. Anthony's Fire by John G. Fuller
Pages: 301
Words: pantagruelian
Notes: "On August 5th, M. Monier was having difficulty working the batter for the bread. The flour shipped to him by the Union Meuniere was grayish in color, somewhat sticky with an oily texture. By contract the Union authorities must take five samples of any flour to be analyzed. No provisions were made about what bakers should do in the interim. Bakers were not allowed to shut down without permission, so Monier had no choice but to blend it with better stocks."

"Starting on Friday, August 15, 1951, it took less than a day for symptoms to being showing. Abdominal pain, insomnia without exhaustion, weakness, shivering, then low blood pressure, aching joints, euphoria, dilated pupils, an odor of mice and urine, increased saliva until finally tetanus-like convulsions, suicidal compulsions, gangrene, vivid hallucinations and cardiac arrest. By Sunday, a town meeting was called because 280 people were ill."

"The ripples of laughter from the groups were forced, high-pitched and eerie. The whole scene...was most unnatural. The people were standing in ghostly silhouette under the trees. Others were walking at random, very quickly, along the streets without destination, speaking to no one."

"Joseph Puche believed he could fly and jumped right out of a hospital window, breaking both his legs. Before the doctors could hold him, he got up and ran 50m on broken legs, screaming in agony. It took 8 men to bring him back."

"A husband and wife chased each other with knives; there was a woman who was certain her three children were hanging from the rafters to be made into sausages, another believed there was fire coming from her fingers; and one man saw a snarling tiger in his room."

"Actually the moments of calm were as terrifying as the waves of psychosis, because the victim, in a fully rational state, would like in desperate wait for the next attack to come, anticipating it, dreading it, knowing it was impossible to fend off."

"Among the most severe epidemics were those in Wurttemberg in 1735, Gatinais in 1674 and Lucerne, Bern and Zurich in the same era. The epidemics seemed to occur after years of considerable rainfall and were due mainly to the negligence of farmers who permitted diseased grain to be mixed in with the ordinary grain."

"Up north a local baker, M. Bruere, had taken his own grain to the miller to exchange it for some supplied by the cooperative. The wheat that M. Bruere brought was of bad quality but Bruere kept insisting that the miller, M. Maillet and his assistant M. Bertrand take it. Maillet did and worked it into the good flour to be shipped out to Pont-Saint-Esprit."

"On Sept 1, 1951, the formal charges against M. Maillet and M. Bruere: 1) for supplying food that was dangerous to public health (2) sale of flour containing a high proportion of seconary cereals (3) lack of proper records and receipts (4) involuntary homicide and injuries. Union Meuniere dismissed the police and medical experts, refusing to accept ergot as the cause."

"The village forms the Association for the Defense of Victims of the Poisonous Bread of Pont-Saint-Esprit. Victims still suffer relapses, face serious debt after 50 days of being unable to work and crippling side effects. M. Dalequis loses sight in one eye, M. Carle is unable to walk with stability and Emile is thin, weak with no front teeth. After delay and deflection, it takes 10 years for Union Meuniere to pay the civil damages."

"In this particular strain of ergot contained a deadly, concentrated, mutated form of LSD-25. Before the discovery of LSD-25, 1 to 1000 quantity was clearly considered a mild dose of ergot."

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik
Pages: 236
Words: Booke of St. Albans, Illness as a Metaphor, cynocephali
Notes: Too many for here.
Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading A Time of Dance, A Time to Die by John Waller
Pages: 214
Words: Ship of Fools, The Book of a Hundred Chapters, lavolta, choreomania, chrism, Schwortag
Notes: Too many for here.
Rating: 2 out of 5

Finished Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries by Molly Crosby
Pages: 229
Words: None.
Notes: Too many for here.
Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
Pages: 228
Words: Pure-finders: collectors of dog feces (called pure). Sold to tanners, which used the feces to rid their leather goods of the lime they had soaked in fire weeks to remove animal hair; Bone-pickers: foraged for any carcasses, sold goods to bone boilers; Sewer-hunters: slogged through London's sewers, occasionally incinerated by their kerosene lamps and a dense methane pocket; Tosher: wore oversized coats with large pockets which they filled with bits of copper from the Thames; Mud-larks: often children, picked up what the toshers left behind; Night-soil men: hired by city landlords to remove the night soil from the overflowing cesspools of their buildings. Also called rakers and gong-fermors.
Notes: Fact check: pg 6 "Netherlands has the highest population density of any country in the world." It's the highest in the EU, in the world is Monaco

"Most historical events are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk...not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity. And of course, if they do recognize they are living through historical crisis, it's often too late - because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying."

Snow built his argument for the waterborne theory 5 years before the Broad Street outbreak. At that time, cholera killed 12 people living in slum conditions in the Surrey Building in Horseleydown. Meanwhile in nearby squalid Trescott's Court, only one person contacted cholera. This was because, as Snow suspected, they got their water from different sources, disproving the prevailing miasma theory entirely...What John Snow didn't know was that murky, cloudy or filthy water doesn't mean there's cholera. Upon first examination of the Broad Street pump, the water was actually clear and he was stunned.

Three related developments had triggered an unprecedented intensification of the energy flowing through the capital. First the "improvements" of agrarian capitalism (mass privatization), second the energy unleashed by coal and steam, and third, the dramatic increase of portability of that energy thanks to the railway system.

Despite being a miasmatist, William Farr was the closest thing to an ally in the existing medical establishment. After the 1849 outbreak he began tabulating cholera deaths by elevation and indeed the numbers seem to show that higher ground was safer ground. This was a classic case of correlation being mistaken for causation. They were safer because they tended to have cleaner water not because they had less miasma or smog. But Farr was intrigued enough to track one additional variable in his weekly reports of the cholera victims: their water supplier. Snow went even further. He made the effort to visit each home in the area and ask the occupants himself where they got their water.

The disease invariably began with the expulsion of fluids from the small intestine and all other symptoms followed that initial loss of water. For Snow, the unaffected respiratory system suggested that cholera was ingested, not inhaled. Some mix of rational observation and his own social awareness led Snow to seek external causes, not internal ones. The poor weren't dying from moral failings. But he never would have proved his theory without the population density of industrial London or his own working class upbringing.

Of the 83 deaths recorded on Farr's list, 73 were in houses that were closer to the Broad Street pump than to any other public water source. Of those 73, 61 were habitual drinkers of Broad Street water. Only 6 of the dead weed definitely not drinkers.

But ironically, their local knowledge of Broad Street made it hard for them to gauge the true extent of the tragedy. There were at least twice as many Soho residents suffering in the local hospital as there were people dying in the dark of their homes. By Sept 4 there were more than 120 cholera patients that overwhelmed the staff at Middlesex Hospital, where Florence Nightingale observed that a disproportionate number were prostitutes.

St Bartholomew's Hospital had received the most cholera patients - almost 200 in the first days of the outbreak...Nearly 700 people living within 250 yards of the Broad Street pump died in the period of less than 2 weeks.

Whitehead's account of the devastation at Peter Street exposed the fallacy of the sanitary hypothesis and "fear kills" theory. He tabulated the ratio of deaths on upper and lower floors to demonstrate that the cholera had attacked both classes equally...The widows that gathered during the pumps removal weren't morally superior to the dead or sturdier constitutions. They were old and infirm and didn't have anyone to fetch water for them.

The walls of the cesspool at the base of 40 Broad were lined with bricks so decayed that they could be lifted out and on the other side swampy, filthy, saturated soil...Sarah Lewis' husband Thomas died of cholera 11 days after the pump handle's removal. When he was ill, Sarah emptied the buckets into the cesspool all over again. If Snow hadn't removed the handle there would've been a second outbreak.

Snow was the first to apply the mathematical tool, the Voronoi diagram, to disease mapping.

By 1868 the pumping station at Abbey Mills was finally completed, which meant the northern branch of the grand sewer system was fully operational. By the mid 1870s, the entire system was online. Sewage continued to be pumped into the eastern end of the Thames until 1887, when the city began dumping waste into the open sea.

One such outbreak hit Chicago in 1885 after a heavy storm flushed the sewage collecting in the Chicago River far enough into Lake Michigan that it reached the intake system for the city's drinking water. 10% of the city's population died in the outbreak of cholera and typhoid and the deaths ultimately led to the city's epic effort to reverse the flow of the Chicago River, sending the sewage away from the water supply.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Finished reading The Demon Under the Microscope by Thomas Hager
Pages: 307
Words: Gasbrand: gas gangrene (German); Dakin-Carrel Treatment
Notes: None.
Rating: 3 out of 5

Finished reading The Father of Forensics: How Sir Bernard Spilsbury Invented Modern CSI by Colin Evans
Pages: 308
Words: Gasbrand: gas gangrene (German); Dakin-Carrel Treatment; sal volatile
Notes: "In his desperation to destroy every body fiber, the killer had mistakenly doused the remains with slaked lime. Unlike quicklime, which destroys human residue, slaked lime actually tends to preserve or mummify flesh. Without this blunder, the remains, after months in the ground, would have been an unidentifiable goo."

"Hyoscine, or scopolamine, is a vegetable alkaloid found in the leaves and seeds of henbane, a botanical relative of the deadly nightshade. The drug acts as a depressant on the central nervous system and is used medicinally in minute doses to treat travel sickness and for preoperative examination of the eye. A quarter of a grain may prove fatal, producing convulsions, hallucinations, unconsciousness and death through respiratory failure."

"As far back as 1820, French dermatologist Marie-Guillaume-Alphonse Devergie had devised ways of rubbing or beating the skin so that any scars present would show up as areas of paleness on the reddened surface. This had inspired him to study the physiological differences between scars from diseases and scars caused by injuries..."

"Arthur Newton had first sprung to notoriety in the sensational Cleveland Street homosexual scandal of 1888, which led him being jailed for six weeks for having 'conspired to defeat the ends of justice. Seven years later he figured prominently in the trials of Oscar Wilde."

Lord George Sanger was a flamboyant 83 year old circus performer. A fight broke out between ex-employee Herbert Cooper and members of Sanger's family. George joined in but suffered a deadly head wound. Cooper fled and was found two days later, on the railroad tracks between Highgate and Crouch End, decapitated.

"The Washing Away of Wrongs, published in 1248, is generally considered to be the first recorded application of medical knowledge to the solution of crime."

Galen believed that the victim died from swallowing too much water which excessively distended the stomach. This was corrected by Dutch anatomist Franciscus Sylvius, who believed it was due to the penetration of water into the lungs. He was declared a lunatic until pathologist Giovanni Battista Morgagni later in the 17th c. who proved Franciscus correct.

Anserina Cutis: "goose-skin" is a roughening of the skin resulting from rigor or the erector pilae muscles, and is found most prominently on the thighs. Associated with drowning.

"The vagus nerve is the longest and most complex of the cranial nerves and runs from the brain, through the face and thorax, to the abdomen. It can be astonishingly lethal. Sudden and unexpected vagal inhibition can kill. A sudden rush of water into nasal passages can induce this effect. Death usually occurs when people jump feet first into swimming pools or rivers, thereby facilitating the sudden ingress of water to the nose. A recognized side effect is cadaveric spasm - a kind of instant rigor."

"Out of a population of 4.5 million, almost 10% of Australians volunteered and of these, 324,000 would see active service overseas in the Great War."

"The first great toxicological breakthrough came in the late 18th c. when a chemist named Johann Metzger discovered that if substances containing arsenic were heated and a cold plate held over the vapors, a white layer of arsenious oxide would form on the plate...In 1836 London chemist James Marsh devised a means of detecting even the smallest quantity of arsenic. He allowed the vapors to rise up to the cold metal plate - with most of the gases escaping into this air - the process took place in a sealed U-shaped tube that forced the vapors to exit via a small nozzle. The sample was dropped onto a zinc plate covered with dilute sulfuric acid to produce hydrogen. Any arsenine gas was then heated as it passed along a glass tube, condensing when it reached a cold part of the tube to form the 'arsenic mirror."

"Because arsenic gets into hair via sweat and other secretions and binds strongly to keratin molecules, it provides an identifiable record of contamination. It traces of arsenic are found two inches along a hair, then it is a powerful argument for saying that a person ingested arsenic some four moths previously. Similarly with fingernails."

"Herbert Amstrong, on May 31, 1922 earned the dubious distinction of being the only British lawyer ever to be hanged for murder."

"As the trap was sprung, Mahon tried to jump clear and instead of falling cleanly into the pit, swung pendulum-like, striking his back and snapping his spine in two. That alone would have killed him, but half a second later his neck was also broken by the jerk of the rope, hence the comment about being 'double-hanged.'

Scotland Yard's Murder Bag: rubber gloves, a hand lens, a tape measure, a straightedge ruler, swabs, sample bags, forceps, scissors, a scalpel and other instruments that might be called for.

Rating: 3 out of 5