@biomedicalephemera / biomedicalephemera.tumblr.com
It’s true: The Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) was believed to be either functionally or fully extinct in the wild, and multiple subspecies were believed to be extinct altogether, back in the mid-1900s.
My babies are back! <3 I saw the first honkers that weren’t over-winterers last week. Not super cool since, like, they’re not supposed to be back for another 3 weeks, but hey, new belligerent poop machines for me to watch, so...
Polyethylene wire, greatly enlarged. The Bell System technical journal. 1953.
Ray Alert says: “Radiation need not be feared, but it MUST command yoru respect.”
Health Physics. For your protection.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Oak Ridge Associated Universities Poster Collection. Originally published 1947 for Oak Ridge Laboratory.
CEMENT-DIPPED CONDOMS.
Even the crocodile-dung pessaries of the ancient Egyptians seem preferable. Rubber cement or not.
"I thought a thing like that could never happen to me..."
From a 1950s campaign aiming to bust the "nice girls don't get VD" myth.
While most WWII and earlier public service posters focused on the "don't get diseases from prostitutes" side of things, after the war ended, there were a growing number of men and women who weren't servicemembers or engaged in the sex trade who were coming down with STDs.
These days, syphilis is fairly uncommon. About 3500 cases are recorded per year in the US (mostly men who have sex with men), and during the primary stage, it's easily treatable with antibiotics.
Gonorrhea, though? Still going strong. Because of the continuously significant rate of infection over the years, there has been enough antibiotic treatment going on to create antibiotic-resistant Super Gonorrhea. It's a bad thing. Like all gonorrhea, it can cause permanent damage and sterility in all genders, but it's extremely difficult to treat.
Wrap it before you tap it. Don't get you some Super STDs.
As PSA as True as Ever
I'm Raymond Massey, and I have a special message for senior citizens.
Today's doctors, drugs, and medical devices truly work "medical miracles" for young and old alike.
But there are some as phoney as a three-dollar bill!
....
Investigate before you invest in health services or products. Help stamp out quackery!
Ways to Die: The Great Smog of London
Just Another Pea-Souper When it happened, it seemed almost normal - after all, dense, pea-soup fog often descended over London, and since the Industrial Revolution, that fog had often been riddled with coal dust and particulate matter from the factories. Charles Dickens was so familiar with it that "Pea Soupers" was even in his dictionary of city life. People had seen it all before. London was famous for its fog.
On December 5, 1952, an anticyclone descended upon Southern England, and the often-blustery city became almost windless. Combined with the atmospheric "cap" of warm air that the anticyclone provided, the chilly air of the city's fog was trapped in one place. It wasn't blown away, and it couldn't rise into the upper atmosphere. By that evening, visibility was down to five yards.
For four more days, conditions deteriorated, until you could not see your hand in front of your face. The buses that had been guided by police with torches came to a standstill by the evening of December 8. The wall of haze was penetrated only by the huge, snowflake-like chimney soot crystals. Apart from the London Underground, there was no transportation within the city. Even ambulances no longer went out, after a record number of collisions during the first night of blindness.
But there was no panic. Those who could stay inside, did. If you could make it to the chemists, you would buy a smog mask and remember not to wear your good clothing while you shuffled slowly and carefully down the street. By the morning of December 9, 1952, the atmospheric inversion lifted, and the smog began to rise. By the next day, the winds were back, sweeping away the rest of the pea-soup haze.
Unseen Deaths The toll that the smog took on the city was not realized until nearly three weeks after it occurred. Four thousand had died during those five days. Tens of thousands sought health care shortly after, for ongoing respiratory distress. The death toll in the city remained significantly elevated through Christmas, and people with ongoing health effects continued to die in the coming months and years, as a direct or indirect result of their exposure to The Great Smog. The final death toll is estimated at twelve thousand dead, and 25-40,000 with significant chronic health effects.
Though it was not realized until long after the smog had passed, and the Clean Air Act of 1956 had gone into effect, there were more killers in the smog than were understood back then. The hidden killer was not the coal soot that fell like dark snowflakes, or the staining, acid-forming smoke from household chimneys. While those caused significant expenses and damages to buildings, and some deaths from outright hypoxia (lack of oxygen - in this case, from asthma or obstructive coughing fits) they were not the deadly, bronchiole-irritating, pus-causing killers that so many succumbed to.
The real culprits in many deaths, especially those caused by the strangling pus of bronchopneumonia, or acute purulent bronchitis, were the ultrafine particulate matter floating within the smoke. Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, heavy metal molecules, and more, were known to be components of smog, but prior to the 1960s, it was not realized how truly deadly these invisible particles were. While the body has many defenses against larger particulate, ultrafine particles can reach the deepest recesses of the lungs, and cause irritation of the bronchioles and alveolar sacs. These fill with fluid or pus, often allowing infection to take hold, and the victim is strangled from the inside.
A Slow Reform Despite the thousands of deaths that were brought to the attention of Parliament by the Ministry of Health, the government of England did not truly accept that there had been an environmental disaster right on their doorsteps, fearing the economic ramifications of any meaningful reform. They invented an "influenza epidemic" and claimed it spread during that time. Historical data and autopsy reports prove that no increase in deaths from influenza was concurrent with the Great Smog.
Despite reforms passed by the Clean Air Act of 1956, there was another deadly pea-souper, exactly one decade later, in early December 1962. Continued reform throughout the 1960s meant that no standout disasters were visible for all to see, but pollution in the city continued to kill hundreds every year, well into the 1970s.
The Continuing Fight for Clean Air While we may not have smoky coal or sooty buildings to contend with in the Americas or most of Europe, ultrafine particulate pollution (in the United States, caused primarily by automobiles) is still a major threat to health, and its invisible nature means that no major disasters like The Great Smog will come around to slap us in the face about its importance. But every year, thousands still die from the effects of living in areas where they cant escape the constant exhaust from vehicles. Millions more have chronic health effects due to the same toxins.
It might not seem like one person doing one thing can help much, but this Earth Day, take a walk instead of a drive. If you're going down the street, ride your bike, not your car. Not every trip has to be by foot, and sometimes a vehicle might be necessary, but why put more toxins and deadly fumes into the air (that you have to breathe, too!) than you absolutely have to?
We may not have the coal and diesel exhaust of 1950s London, but doesn't that make getting out of the car that much nicer? It's a beautiful world out there. Take it in, and help keep it that way.
More on The Great Smog:
Important People of Medicine: Virginia Apgar
If you've ever had, or been around a baby that was born in a hospital, Dr. Apgar's name probably sounds familiar. An anesthesiologist and teratologist (one who studies abnormalities of physical development), Virginia Apgar is most well-known for the "Apgar score" - a rating given to infants at 1 and 5 minutes after birth, which is often a determining factor in whether or not the baby needs to remain in the hospital after birth.
Dr. Apgar was the first female doctor to receive professorship at Columbia University medical school, and her work in teratology during the rubella pandemic of 1964-65 led to her outspoken advocacy for universal vaccination against that disease. Though it's often mild and annoying above all else in healthy people, when pregnant women contract rubella (also known as German measles), the rate of deformity and disability of their children skyrockets. It can even cause miscarriage.
Virginia Apgar also promoted universal Rh-testing among pregnant women. This test shows whether a woman has a different Rh blood type than her fetus, because if she does, she can develop antibodies that can cross the placenta and destroy fetal blood cells. This can cause fetal hydrops and high levels of neonatal mortality, but can be prevented by administering anti-RhD IgG injections to the mother during pregnancy, so that she does not develop a sensitivity (and subsequent antibodies) to her baby's blood type.
Though Dr. Apgar never married or had children of her own, she saved the lives of countless babies and streamlined many medical considerations of neonatal care, resulting in more effective medical treatment. She studied and promoted the prevention of premature births and causes of fetal deformity. She worked for March of Dimes and taught thousands of students. Her influence in the obstetrics and neonatology fields cannot be overstated.
Regarding the question I got about tattoo artists around the same time as Sailor Jerry (Norman Keith Collins)...
It was not uncommon to see members of the Navy tattooed heavily tattooed, especially after WWII, on the West Coast.
The Australian R.M. Reynolds is the tattoo artist who, along with "Sailor Jerry", influenced the majority of the tattoo world, well through the 1980s, and again with those who crave the "vintage" and "historical"-type tattoo designs. Both R.M. Reynolds and Norman Keith Collins were heavily influenced by the tattoo culture of South-East Asia, and throughout their career, would often take the designs of one another and make them their own. Ed Hardy and Rollo banks took over for "Sailor Jerry" in the United States, but in Australia and the rest of the world, R.M. Reynolds' designs had been so widely seen and copied, that his legacy was carried on without any one designated "heir".
This plastic doll in its own model iron lung was made in order to show child polio patients and their family the treatment the child would receive. An iron lung assists a patient whose breathing muscles have been paralysed by disease. Although the heyday of the iron lung was during the 1930s, 40s and 50s, some elderly polio survivors are still using them. The teaching doll was used at the Lord Mayor Treloar Orthopaedic Hospital in Alton, Hampshire, England. Founded in 1908, the hospital was originally opened to provide specialised treatment for children with orthopaedic conditions, mainly caused by tuberculosis and, later, polio. The hospital combined treatment of the physically disabled with education and schooling.
Credits: Science Museum London
Barbie: Iron Lung edition.
Because Mother's Day
Coffee trees developed caffeine as an insecticide, to kill off bugs that would eat its berries and fail to spread its seeds. Yes, it's a deadly poison, but for tiny bugs. It takes at least as much coffee as crazy-face above is drinking to kill off us giant primates. Why Coffee is the greatest addiction (in every sense).
Though maybe my mom should drink slightly less coffee. Maybe. LIFE Magazine, Feb 2, 1953.
Terrible photos of a vintage anesthesia cart
The local miscellaneous surplus store has an old anesthesia cart for sale. It says "for human use only" on the side. They also sell blow-guns, hemostats, lab coats, gauze, and everything you'd need for a testing lab.
But no, my partner won't let me become a mad scientist and dart people to do unethical testing. He says the neighbors would hear the screaming. :(
"That's what the anesthesia cart is for!" "...no, they would hear MY screaming."
ETA:
Look carefully at this fish. It may bring you good fortune!
No, no, coelacanths aren’t the fish of Yeh-Shen, but they were referred to as the “Wish Fish” in many telegrams between JLB Smith and his colleagues in Grahamstown and back in England - though there had been reports of a “foul-tasting, oily, hideous fish” going around for decades, it seemed that since the first specimen was recovered intact, all of the reports evaporated like magic. No one heard of any new “uglyfish” caught by locals, no one caught any in the tedious trawling missions sent out by Rhodes University, nothing.
The first report of a new intact Coelacanth that had been caught by a local who had seen a reward poster happened at a most inopportune time: two days before Christmas Eve! Oh, it may seem like the perfect Christmas gift to Smith, looking back, but at the time it was a disaster. The fish had been caught out on the Cape, the other side of the country! And to make things worse, the next day was a Sunday, followed by Christmas Eve, Christmas, and Boxing Day. There would be no way Smith could get to the fish in time to preserve it for science, because, as one visiting Portuguese friend once noted to him:
You may talk of Russia and the Iron Curtain, but it is nothing to South Africa on a Sunday or a holiday. That is an Iron Curtain. It shuts down, boom, boom, everything like that, and everything is dead!
A Sunday followed by three Bank Holidays was the worst possible outcome, especially since the trawler that the fish had come in on had to ship out again the day after Boxing Day.
Through an agonizing maze of run-arounds and unreachable telegraph lines, Smith and his team did eventually manage to stall the trawler one day, and alert the Prime Minister on Boxing Day that they (the Grahamstown team) had secured a coelacanth. Though by many he was considered an antagonist to the sciences, and doubly so to an extremely English center such as existed in Grahamstown, he saw the magnitude of this news, and saw what a boon it would be to South Africa to be able to announce it as soon as possible. With direct orders from the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense procured a light airplane that could take Smith where he needed to go to retrieve the fish, and Smith’s team made preparations to announce everything on 27 December.
The Search Beneath the Sea: The Story of the Coelacanth. J. L. B. Smith, 1956.
The first well-preserved coelacanth, shortly after catch
Though the coelacanth was confirmed as not extinct by Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer in 1938, the first specimen suitable for complete study and display was not caught until 1952. There were even more troubles getting to and preserving this fish than Latimer had with hers, but this time around, the resources and transportation to get to it in time were available. Well, sort of. The Prime Minister of South Africa himself had to get involved in order to have this newly-extant species preserved!
The Search Beneath the Sea: The Story of the Coelacanth. J.L.B. Smith, 1952.
Latimeria chalumnae - Coelacanth
The coelacanth was assumed extinct until 1938, since fossils of it had been found long before, yet hadn’t ever been caught by anyone who recognized it (it was known as the “gombessa” by the Comoro Islands fishermen, and was considered a worthless fish to be disgarded, as it tasted awful). It’s thought to have evolved over 400 million years ago, and were originally assumed to have gone extinct in the Late Cretaceous period.
The Search Beneath the Sea: The Story of the Coelacanth. J.L.B. Smith, 1956.
Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer
Curator of the Natural History museum in East London, South Africa, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was the first person to discover (in a meaningful way) that the coelacanth wasn’t extinct, but was simply the vile-tasting “gombessa” that had been thrown away for decades.
While collecting specimens and samples for the East London museum, Ms. Latimer let it be known to the local fishermen that she was highly interested in any “unusual” or rare fish that they might haul aboard. In 1938, Capt. Henrik Goosen phoned her to come down to the dock, where she encountered a five-foot long oddity, which she describes:
“I picked away at the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen. It was five foot[feet] long, a pale mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots; it had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over. It was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy dog tail.”
She hauled it back to the museum in a taxi (which she notes the cabbie was none too happy about, even when she gave a generous tip - I can’t imagine any taxi driver wanting fish slime on their seats!), and discovered that she could not find the fish in any of the books available to her. She was eager to preserve the specimen, and since the museum had no preservation facilities, she (in another taxi) took it down to the morgue, which wouldn’t have it. She then attempted to contact James [JLB] Smith at Rhodes, but he was out on holiday.
In the end, knowing that it could possibly end up being of dubious scientific value, she reluctantly ended up having the fish skinned and taxidermied. Luckily, the external anatomy of the coelacanth is so different from anything else in the sea, JLB Smith was able to positively identify the specimen:
“There was not a shadow of a doubt,” he said. “It could have been one of those creatures of 200 million years ago come alive again.”
Still, the taxidermy work had removed both the gill plates and the ossicles, which were needed for absolute confirmation that this was the fish of fossils. Now known as Latimeria chalumnae after his friend and the river it was discovered in, the discovery was announced to much excitement in the scientific community and local population. The fact that there was no complete positive proof that this fish was the fish of fossils still made many icthyologists doubtful about the specimen, but JLB Smith was absolutely determined to find proof of its identity.
And thus began the search for the Lazarus fish…
The Search Beneath the Sea: The Story of the Coelacanth. J. L. B. Smith, 1956.
"The Pharmacist of the Future as Visualized by J. Lewis Cobb"
If your pharmacist is not emitting alpha particles from his radio antenna whilst combining glowing liquids, he is clearly not a truly modern pharmacist.
