Bad Science Page 7

  Most true it is, I dare to say,

  E'er since the Days of Eve,

  The weakest Woman sometimes may

  The wisest Man deceive.

  Mary Toft was released from prison after four months, and returned to obscurity, passing away in 1763. Despite the abuse of her reproductive parts, she actually did give birth one more time after her release, to a very human baby boy. Records do not indicate whether this child was named Hopalong.

  Inconceivable Conception

  In 1750, Abraham Johnson sent a report to the British Royal Society entitled Lucina Sine Concubitu: A Treatise Humbly Addressed to The Royal Society. The society received many papers, but this one surely caught their eye, as the translation of the title is “Pregnancy Without Intercourse.”

  The title page further explains the content: “In which is proved, by most IncontestableEvidence, drawn from Reason and Practice, that a Woman may conceiveand be brought to bed, without any Commerce with Man.”

  Within the text, the author states that this is possible, due to “floating animalcula,” or microscopic human forms floating about in the air, just looking for a sleeping woman to impregnate. These animacula were observed by using “a wonderful, cylindrical, catoptrical, rotundo-concavo-convex machine.”

  Going beyond the mere scientific importance of the discovery of these tiny human forms, Johnson says that this knowledge will help restore the honor of women who have some explaining to do, e.g., those wives who became pregnant while their husbands were away. He also came up with a method to prove his theory of animacula—stop all sex for one year by royal decree and then see how many women still get pregnant!

  Where could such a bizarre idea originate? Did Johnson just pull his theory of floating animacula out of thin air? Actually, no, it was based upon a long-standing misconception of conception.

  Homunculi in sperm as drawn

  by N. Hartsoecker in 1695.

  In the 17th century, when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek examined fresh sperm through his microscope, he thought he saw tiny, complete human forms within the head of the sperm. This “discovery” reinforced the idea that women were just incubators for the male “seed.” Called homunculi—meaning little humans—the concept of “preformation” of a baby within the sperm spoke as much to the lowly perception of women as it did to the primitive level of scientific thought.

  For example, such a theory shouldn’t have lasted more than a minute when considering the fact that children resemble their mothers as much as their fathers. However, to explain away this obvious refutation of the concept of homunculi, learned men concluded that the developing baby could “absorb” some of its mother’s characteristics. (Another desperate and pathetic use of the age-old practice of molding the “facts” to fit your theory!) This theory persisted for generations, but not everyone agreed with it. In fact, some found it the perfect fodder for satire.

  Lucina Sine Concubitu was actually just such a piece of satire, written by Sir John Hill, who led an interesting life. Hill was a botanist who compiled the massive 26-volumes of The Vegetable System. Obtaining a medical degree in Edinburgh, he was also an editor and author who managed to offend just about every major literary figure of his time.

  Hill expected that his work would give him entry into the British Royal Society, but he may have offended some scientists, as well, as his admission was denied. Perhaps this professional snubbing was, in part, motivation for targeting the society with his treatise on the nature of pregnancy without sex. Whatever the motivation, however, it stands as a great work of satire.

  Of course, ignorance being what it is, some people actually believed it and promoted the idea of floating animacula. Among those proponents were no doubt some of those wives who had some explaining to do…

  Back in the Saddle Again

  The future didn’t seem to be too bright for the nine children born to a poor saddle maker in Edinburgh in the mid-18th century, but one of those children was determined to make a name for himself, and in the most extraordinary way.

  James Graham was born in 1745, and despite his family’s circumstances, he attended medical school. While he left school before he got his degree, it didn’t stop him from calling himself a doctor and attracting a clientele of the rich and famous. His specialty? Sex therapy, by means of employing the miraculous powers of electricity. In short, he helped couples get back in the saddle again.

  Before embarking on that particular career path, however, he embarked on a ship to the United States. As the young “Dr.” Graham was already pretending to be a physician, it was a small step to proclaiming himself a specialist. He traveled around the country for a while, but decided to set up his practice in Philadelphia as an eye specialist.

  It was a fortuitous choice of cities, as Graham’s own eyes were opened by the experiments going on at the time on electricity. While later in life he claimed to have learned the secrets of the powers of electricity from none other than Ben Franklin himself, Franklin wasn’t even in Philadelphia when Graham was there. It is possible Graham had attended some electrical experiments conducted by one of Franklin’s associates, but that doesn’t make as good a story. And let’s face it, if you are lying about everything else, why nitpick about something as trivial as being personally acquainted with one of the most famous men in history?

  So, what did Dr. Graham, eye specialist, and Ben’s new BFF, decide to do with electricity? Did he want to use it to cure hideous diseases and maladies that strike mankind? Not quite. The idea these electrical experiments inspired was this: Graham was “suddenly struck with the thought that the pleasure of the venereal act might be exalted or rendered more intense if performed under the glowing, accelerating and most genial influences of that Heaven-born, all-animating element or principle, the electrical or concocted fire.”

  [Author’s Note: For those of limited vocabulary or imagination, the Oxford English Dictionary defines venereal (derived from Venus) as: “Of or pertaining to, associated or connected with sexual desire or intercourse.”]

  In other words, he planned to literally put a spark back in the lives of wealthy Europeans with, shall we say, flagging libidos.

  [Author’s Note: If I have to explain that you might as well skip ahead to the next story.]

  In 1775, Graham returned to Europe and traveled about with his electrical “cures.” He made some important connections with influential people, and he was emboldened by his success to open the magnificent Temple of Health in London in 1780. He spared no expense in the lavish décor, and even had scantily clad women, such as “Vestina, Goddess of Health,” on display.

  Visitors to the temple paid exorbitant entrance fees to attend Graham’s lectures, listen to music, inhale the incense and perfumes that wafted through the building (early aromatherapy), examine electrical apparatus, and, of course, ogle the half-naked women. The showpiece, however, was unquestionably the Celestial Bed, a massive 12-foot by 9-foot tilting bed with mirrors on a suspended canopy, and charged with electricity generated by a man turning a crank in the next room. The bed was guaranteed to make the infertile fruitful and the impotent rise to the occasion—and stay risen for quite a while.

  Graham wrote about his miraculous Celestial Bed, that “They all found that the pleasure was rendered not only infinitely more intense, but at the same time, infinitely more durable.” And “When they were merry over a glass, they talked not as other men might have done, of the happy minute or of the critical moment - no! - they talked comparatively of the critical hour.”

  So, what did this 18th century version of Viagra cost? The happy—and rich—couples would shell out 50 pounds for a single night in the Celestial Bed—today’s equivalent of thousands of dollars. Money came streaming into the Temple of Health and Graham’s pockets. However, upkeep on the Temple was high, and when the novelty of his electric treatments waned, so did Graham’s fortunes.

  Forced into bankruptcy, Graham lost his Temple and Celestial Bed, and went back to Edinburgh in 1784
. He then abandoned electricity in favor of dirt, and began promoting the miracle health effects of mud. He claimed that people could absorb all the nutrients they needed if they buried themselves up to their necks in mud, and he even went so far as to say he was immersed in dirt for two weeks with no food and felt fine afterward. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for the public, this practice did not catch on. Neither did the religion Graham founded, or his habit of taking his clothes off in public to give to the poor (a practice for which he was arrested).

  Despite Graham’s belief that “earthbathing” was the key to a long life, he passed away at the age of only forty-nine, but what a half-century of life he had! Perhaps in retrospect with today’s posh, expensive spas that offer mud baths and all manner of bizarre treatments, Graham was not a quack, just a man ahead of his time? Considering even now how many “little blue pills” and “male enhancement” products are on the market, wouldn’t electrical stimulation still find buyers today?

  Quack or not, it takes a gullible and desperate public to fall for such schemes, and if Graham was alive today and built another Celestial Bed, there would be a waiting list as big as the male ego.

  Childbed Fever

  While introducing new ideas is rarely easy, few scientists have had such a difficult career and tragic end as Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. For starters, he was Hungarian, which in elitist Vienna in the 1840s placed one very low on the social ladder. Secondly, he was attempting to prove something that would cast the medical establishment in a very bad light. In fact, it was a fatal light.

  Semmelweis maintained that the manner in which doctors conducted examinations of women was the cause of the extremely high death rate amongst new mothers. In other words, he was saying that even the most eminent physicians had the death of thousands of women on their dirty hands—an accusation that was obviously resented.

  And let’s face it, he was dealing with a segment of the population that wasn’t too highly regarded—women, and poor women and prostitutes, at that. The all-male medical establishment looked down upon obstetrics and felt that delivery should be consigned to midwives. And if a lot of women died giving birth, well, so be it, that’s their lot in life. One Professor Dietl so eloquently expressed this resigned attitude to a high mortality rate when he wrote, “The physician should be judged by the extent of his knowledge and not by the number of his cures. It is the investigator, not the healer, that is to be appreciated in the physician.”

  A remarkable statement, indeed! It’s like the old joke about the operation being a success, but the patient died. Only this was no laughing matter. Why should a physician bother himself with such trivial things like cures and healing?

  So, what was the problem that too many pregnant women faced? Childbed fever, otherwise known as puerperal fever, which was an infection that ravaged the bodies of women who had just given birth. Most “lying-in” hospitals where expectant mothers went to deliver could anticipate mortality rates of anywhere from about ten percent to thirty percent. (In Lombardy, Italy in one year in the 1770s the town did have a perfect record—a perfectly awful record—as not one woman who gave birth in any of their hospitals survived!) Many women preferred to take their chances having a baby out in the streets rather than face such odds.

  If you figure that one in every three women giving birth would die, you can see that the probability was very slim that any woman would live long enough to actually raise a few children. Of course, the physicians were curious as to the cause of these infections, and in their infinite wisdom came up with all kinds of ridiculous theories from changes in the weather, to strange “miasmas” (bad air), to unknown cosmic influences. The true and deadly answer, unfortunately, was literally at their fingertips.

  The hospital in which Semmelweis worked was the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, or General Hospital. Checking the hospital’s records, Semmelweis found that the mortality rate among women who had given birth there had started to climb after the facility became a teaching hospital in 1822. He also noticed that one of the wards was staffed only by midwives, and the mortality rate there was only two percent. What was the difference?

  Medical students who worked in the high death-rate ward often conducted post mortem examinations on cadavers, and then went straight to conducting internal examinations on women. Consequently, at one moment a student could be elbow-deep in a pus-ridden corpse that had been decimated by infection, and just a few minutes later, those same unwashed hands could be probing inside a woman who had just given birth. And what a surprise—a couple of days later that same woman would be stiff and cold on a slab with another medical student cutting her up. And so on, and so on…

  Although no one yet fully understood the concept of germs, Semmelweis saw a connection and ordered that everyone scrub their hands with a chlorine solution before examining patients. Soon after implementing the simple procedure, the death rate dropped from 13% to just over 2%. It was a brilliant success and should have meant that the lives of countless women would now be saved.

  Unfortunately, Semmelweis then made the wrong move, or more accurately, made no move at all. Having already withstood considerable harassment from Viennese physicians, he refused to publish his findings. Some colleagues did try to get the word out, but it wasn’t enough. When Semmelweis finally relented and did start publishing, the general reaction was just as he had expected—severe criticism.

  While many argued that his findings lacked any scientific basis (which they did to some extent as germs were as yet unknown), physicians should have let the results speak for themselves. Instead, these doctors were insulted by the allegations that their ignorance was killing their patients. Remarkably, some doctors even complained that it would simply be too much work if they had to wash their hands every time they were going to perform an examination. It was obviously much easier for them to just let the women die.

  There were those, however, who did see the light. Unfortunately though, for one German doctor the revelation came too late. He had recently delivered his niece’s baby—without washing his hands—and she subsequently died of childbed fever. Overcome with guilt, the doctor committed suicide.

  Semmelweis also struggled with intense feelings of guilt, knowing that he, too, had unwittingly caused the death of so many young women, but he did continue the fight. In 1861, he published his life’s work in combating childbed fever in Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers. It was not enthusiastically received by the medical community, and the book also suffered from being almost obsessively detailed, as well as containing many personal attacks against Semmelweis’ critics.

  Legend has it that so many years of struggling against ignorance and prejudice took its toll on the emotional and sensitive Semmelweis, resulting in a nervous breakdown in 1865. He was committed to an insane asylum, where ironically, he died two weeks later from an infection that had been transmitted from a cadaver he had dissected before entering the asylum. A bad enough end to be sure, but the truth is even worse.

  In 1963, Semmelweis’ remains were disinterred and an autopsy was performed. Documents concerning his life were also examined, and a very different picture of Semmelweis’ last years emerged. It appeared as though he was most likely suffering from early onset of Alzheimers (he was only 47 when he died). He was committed against his will, and his remains indicated that asylum guards had severely beaten him. He died as a result of the untreated injuries, and possible infection, from the beating. Thus was the cruel end for a man who devoted his life to trying to save the lives of others.

  In an obnoxious twist of irony in 1891, the people of Hungary—who once derided Sememlweis just as much as the Austrians—now realized that he had been right and wanted to bring their heroic countryman’s body back home. The people of Vienna—who made Semmelweis’ life hell—wanted to keep “their” hero’s remains in Vienna. The Hungarians prevailed, and he was giving a proper burial and a statue, all just a little too late.

  Granted, Semmelwei
s made mistakes and wasn’t the greatest communicator, but both his cause and conviction made him the ultimate victor—even when the world had all but washed their hands of him…

  A Stitch in Time

  They say a stitch in time saves nine, but will wire stitches in your penis save you from the evils of masturbation? Gentlemen, hold on to your family jewels because this is going to get ugly…

  Is there anyone who grew up in America who has not eaten Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, or at least heard of their many breakfast cereals? From Frosted Flakes to Fruit Loops, millions of children and adults start the day with a crunchy bowl of some type of cereal. But what on earth, you are probably asking, does a corn flake have to do with mutilating your body to prevent you from masturbating? Just this—both ideas sprang from the same fertile and bizarre mind.

  Dr. J.H. Kellogg was something of a health fanatic. He correctly

  believed that many diseases arose from improper diets. He therefore advocated vegetarian food, and thus invented the wholesome corn flake. He also maintained that the colon was the body’s main trouble spot and was a great advocate of frequent enemas to keep your pipes clean.

  However, above and beyond nutrition was a far greater danger lurking in the minds and pants of every boy and girl—the disease of masturbation, which, according to Kellogg, had profound “moral considerations” and could have the most dire “consequences to health of mind and body.”

  In 1892, Kellogg was the medical director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, and he published a book that included how to combat the dreaded practice of “self-abuse.” In Plain Facts for Young and Old: Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life, Kellogg describes several clever ideas to thwart young boys’ evil intents. For starters, “Covering the organs with a cage has been practiced with entire success.”