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Brussels

Monday, September 14th, 2015

We are here in Brussels staying in a business hotel near the center city. Not far is The Grand Place, where the Hotel de Ville and the Guildhalls are located.

At the beginning of the 13th century, three indoor markets were built on the northern edge of the Grand Place; a meat market, a bread market and a cloth market.[3] These buildings, which belonged to the Duke of Brabant, allowed the wares to be showcased even in bad weather, but also allowed the Dukes to keep track of the storage and sale of goods, in order to collect taxes. Other buildings, made of wood or stone, enclosed the Grand Place.

It has been destroyed in several wars since then and always rebuilt.

The Hotel de Ville is the town hall and dominates the square.

Here we stand in the Grand Square. It was raining and the rain stopped for a hour or so, then resumed.

The “Museum” which began as the “Bread house” and then became the palace is now partially covered by plastic cloths as work seems to be going on. We were there on a Monday so the museums were all closed. We walked about and Jill found a Starbucks coffee place so she was content.

We did quite a bit of walking and found The Black Tower, which is the only remaining remnant of the city wall.

The Black Tower is near the St Catherine’s Church and was on our walk. Naturally, any visit to Brussels must include Manneken Pis, the statue of the small boy urinating. Why this is an attraction, I:m not sure but it was surrounded by Chinese tourists snapping their pictures with it. We of course, had to follow suit.

Today we go to Waterloo Battlefield.

Tags:History
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The Medical History of the American Civil War IV

Friday, September 4th, 2015

More of the series on my lecture on the Civil War.

The Ambulance Corps were organized and the photo shows one group during the war.

The next Army Surgeon General was Letterman who changed Tripler’s organization and built larger hospitals and worked on sanitation projects that had been ignored by the early medical services. Disease was a greater risk to soldiers than wounds and had been since Classical Greece. When large numbers often were accumulated without proper sanitation, disease was rampant. Florence Nightingale was one of the first to realize the importance of cleanliness.

One of the greatest medical pioneers of the Civil War was John Shaw Billings who designed hospitals, including The Johns Hopkins Medical Center. He was never Surgeon General but he did organize what became the Public Health Service.

One of Letterman’s new hospitals was this one which was constructed in time for the battle of Gettysburg.

One of the brilliant surgeons who joined up and contributed was this man, John H. Brinton. Typically, he was dismissed by the politicians around Lincoln because McClellan had appointed him.

The most common medical problem was chronic diarrhea.

27,558 Union soldiers died of chronic diarrhea. Without bacteriology, still unknown in 1865, it is impossible to trace the causes.

Typhoid fever killed another 27,056 soldiers.

In the Boer War, in 1899 to 1902, typhoid fever killed thousands of British troops.

of the British Force of 556 653 men who served in the Anglo-Boer War, 57 684 contracted typhoid, 8 225 of whom died, while 7 582 were killed in action.(11) As had been the experience in America, the disease was found to be one which occurred in static camps.

This occurred years after infectious diseases had been identified and the cause of illnesses had been described.

The First Word War was the first war in which more men died of wounds than of disease.

This slide, from the “Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, shows the seasonal nature of the disease. The nutritional aspects are seen in the incidence during the siege of Atlanta.

One example of another page of the History. There were over a million cases of acute diarrhea during the war. “Colored Troops” only appeared after 1863.

Diseases were classified according to the medical knowledge of the time. “Miasma” were those which we now know to be infectious. Malaria, for example, mean “Bad Air” in Latin.

Tuberculosis was a severe chronic disease which would not be curable until Streptomycin came along in 1946. There were two forms, “consumption” which was the pulmonary form, was not known to be contagious. “Scrofula” is the cervical lymph node form and is associated with milk from infected cows. This was the form studied by Louis Pasteur who recognized that it was transmissible and that heating milk prevented it.

Treatment of disease was as primitive as one might expect although quinine was known and used by the Union Army. The blockade of the South prevented its use there. Vaccination was widely practiced and opium was used for pain. There was anesthesia since 1846 and chloroform was more common than ether.

Malaria was widespread in the US at the time. Mosquitoes were vaguely known to be associated. Mosquito nets were used although the mechanism was not well understood.

Tags:health care, History
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The Medical History of the American Civil War III

Friday, September 4th, 2015

This continues the series from a lecture I have given a few times.

William W Keen was a student when he first served as an Army surgeon at Bull Run. That experience changed the Army medical services and gave a great deal of power to the volunteer organizations.

William Hammond quickly replaced the incompetent surgeons who had been in place when the war began. He was competent but argumentative and clashed with Stanton who became Secretary of War.

Hammond met Jonathan Letterman. Hammond worked with Letterman and Rosecrans on the design of a new ambulance wagon.

The atmosphere in the upper levels of medical services was then one of internal strife and personal conflicts. Hammond—a tall and imposing young man[12]—was no man of intrigue, nor even, according to all accounts, a very flexible person. However, the situation offered him the possibility for advancement. When Finley, the 10th Surgeon General, was fired after an argument with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln, against Stanton’s advice and the normal rules of promotion, named the 34-year-old Hammond to succeed him with the rank of brigadier general. Hammond became Surgeon General of the Army on 25 April 1862, less than a year after rejoining the army.

Lincoln liked “Men who fight” and defended his choices but Hammond was just too hard headed.

On his initiative, Letterman’s ambulance system was thoroughly tested before being extended to the whole Union. Mortality decreased significantly. Efficiency increased, as Hammond promoted people on the basis of competence, not rank or connections, and his initiatives were positive and timely.

On 4 May 1863 Hammond banned the mercury compound calomel from army supplies, as he believed it to be neither safe nor effective (he was later proved correct). He thought it dangerous to make an already debilitated patient vomit. A “Calomel Rebellion” ensued, as many of his colleagues had no alternative treatments and resented the move as an infringement on their liberty of practice. Hammond’s arrogant nature did not help him solve the problem, and his relations with Secretary of War Stanton became strained. On 3 September 1863 he was sent on a protracted “inspection tour” to the South, which effectively removed him from office. Joseph Barnes, a friend of Stanton’s and his personal physician, became acting Surgeon General

Stanton later died of an asthma attack so his “personal physician” was important to him. Calomel was “The Blue Pill” that had been advocated by Benjamin Rush. It was an ancient remedy based on the success of mercury in the treatment of syphilis dating back to Paracelsus in the 14th century. Medicine until the 20th century was quite primitive and many remedies were tried for wildly inappropriate indications.

For example, a Van Gogh painting of his doctor shows evidence of digitalis intoxication which might have caused his death. Yellow vision is one indication of overdose of digitalis (sudden death is another) and a Van Gogh painting, Portrait of Dr. Gachet shows the characteristic yellow tint plus an example of the plant held by the doctor.

Anyway, Hammond was replaced after some of his innovations including evacuating the wounded from the Peninsula Campaign of McClellan. They were taken by ship back to large hospitals near DC.

Treatment of the wounded early in the war was primitive and would soon improve under Hammond’s reforms.

The volunteer organizations began to make their influence felt and the Army was unable to resist the reforms.

Tripler, for whom the great Army hospital in Hawaii is named, was chosen by McClellan to be the chief surgeon for the Army of the Potomac. His great innovation was the “Ambulance Corps.”

The “Ambulance Corps” restored the invention of Baron Larrey and began the reforms of the Union

To be continued

Tags:health care, History, medicine
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The Medical History of the American Civil War II

Friday, September 4th, 2015

This continues the story of medicine in the Civil War. Samuel Gross, a Professor of Surgery at Pennsylvania Hospital in 1860, realized that no textbook of military medicine and surgery existed so he wrote his own in 60 days. It is shown in this exhibit at the Warren Collection at Harvard’s medical library.

The Confederate Army also had no manual so the Gross manual was used by both sides in the war. It was quickly copied for Confederate Military surgeons. A copy of the manual, which was identical to the Union Army manual is preserved at Jefferson Medical College in digital form.

The first battle, famously, was at Fort Sumpter where the commanding office during the battle was actually the medical officer, Samuel Crawford.

The woeful state of the army medical department was recognized immediately and a volunteer organization quickly organized. The first was the US Sanitary Commission. It was rebuffed by the Army but quickly became very powerful. This was a people’s war and the Army was incompetent, as everyone knew.

Here is the cover of Gross’s book. It was used throughout the war, which had enormous influence on American and world Medicine. The book from which this lecture is taken was used by Theodore von Billroth to design the Prussian Army medical corps for the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The French had forgotten Baron Larrey’s lessons and suffered terribly.

The cover of the Confederate version of Gross’s textbook.

Joseph Woodward was an academic surgeon, such as it was known at the time.

“Woodward was the first scientist to establish photomicrography as a tool for both scientific and medical investigations.” According to an article in the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine:[2] “In addition to collecting specimens for the museum’s archive, he co-authored the definitive medical history of the Civil War in the 6-volume 1870 publication of the MSHWR.4 Woodward’s technique using aniline dyes for staining thin sections of tissue, along with his pioneering work in photomicroscopy, helped prepare the groundwork for modern surgical pathology.”

The “History” is “The Medical and Surgery History of the War of the Rebellion” of which there are six existing full copies. I found one copy in the USC Medical Library and asked the library staff, who had no idea of its value, to place it in a locked collection room. It would be like finding a copy of “De Revolutionibus” on the shelves of an open university library.

The design of Union Army Hospitals was entrusted to Frederick Olmsted, who had designed New York City’s Central Park. He was, after the war, very involved in establishing The National Park Service.

The first battle of the war illustrated the appalling condition of the medical services of both sides. There were no ambulances and the wounded and to walk back to Washington City, as DC was known then.

A famous American surgeon, who would write one of the world’s great medical textbooks, William W Keen acted as a young army surgeon at the battle.

He studied at Brown University, where he graduated in 1859. He graduated in medicine from Jefferson Medical College in 1862. During the American Civil War, he worked for the U.S. Army as a surgeon. After the war, he spent two years studying in Paris and Berlin.

His “An American Textbook of Surgery” was a hugely influential text and the 1905 edition had a chapter on brain surgery by Harvey Cushing and a chapter on “Appendicitis,” the first use of the term in medical literature, written by John B Murphy, who was the first advocate of early appendectomy for appendicitis.

To be continued.

Tags:health care, History
Posted in History, medical history, medicine, military | 1 Comment »

Planning a trip to Greece

Saturday, June 20th, 2015

I have been a student of Greek history for many years. When I was a medical student and later a surgery resident, I kept a copy of J.B.Bury’s “History of Greece to the Death of Alexander on my bedside table as reading material for relaxation. I have read it several times.

Another source of pleasure has been the novels of Mary Renault, the pen name of Eileen Mary Challans. Sh wrote a series of historical novels which won awards and which provided a more intimate view of Greek society in the classical era. Some of her novels provide a more sympathetic view of homosexuality than I have found anywhere else but that is not the attraction. Her history sounded like something written by one who lived it.

Another favorite novelist is Helen MacInnes who wrote novels of adventure set in and after World War II. Two of them were about places in Greece and one of those, Mykonos, is a favorite spot.

Her novel describes this harbor and, while a new cruise ship terminal has replaced some of her story, the harbor looks just as she described it.

The story, titled “The Double Image” describes a tiny square in the town that sounds exactly like this one looks.

We are looking forward to this trip with some trepidation, however. Why ? Because Greece may be heading into serious trouble.

Since December, Greeks have been preparing for a weekend such as this, pulling more than 30 billion euros out of banks. Week after week, the Bank of Greece borrowed banknotes from the rest of the continent to replenish this hoarding of the one asset Greeks still trust — cold, hard cash. Its liabilities to the rest of the euro area for the excess physical cash it has to put into circulation quadrupled between December and April, the last month for which there’s available data.

In November of 2012, there was rioting in Athens and it was about proposed austerity.

On the same day that Greece’s parliament passed harsh new austerity measures as part of a multi-billion euro rescue package, workers cleared wreckage from burned-out buildings damaged during a round of intense riots the day before.

The unpopular bailout deal requires dramatic cuts in wages, pensions and jobs, according to Reuters, and Sunday’s protests saw the worst violence in Athens in years.

Since those riots, a new radical leftist government has been elected that has vowed to defy the EU and austerity.

Greece’s new leftist government opened talks on its bailout with European partners on Friday by flatly refusing to extend the program or to cooperate with the international inspectors overseeing it.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ government also sacked the heads of the state privatization agency after halting a series of state asset sales.

The politically unpopular policy of privatization to help cut debt is one of the conditions of Greece’s 240-billion-euro bailout that has imposed years of harsh austerity on Greece.

Now, the moment of truth approaches and what will happen ?

Everything comes together on Monday [Monday June 22 !]. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, back from a visit with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, will spend his weekend coming up with a proposal to take to a Monday showdown with euro-area leaders.
A deal there is key. The bailout agreement that’s kept Greece from defaulting expires June 30. That’s the day Greece owes about 1.5 billion euros to the International Monetary Fund.
In an interview published Saturday in Brussels-based l’Echo newspaper, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis warned that the ruling Syriza party could be replaced by neo-Nazis if Greece ends up defaulting and leaving the euro.

This may be standard leftist scare tactics but what will happen ? We have planned the trip to anticipate potential trouble in Athens. I have been to Athens before and have been to the Acropolis and the Parthenon.

Annie much more photogenic than I am and this was taken when she was 14 and standing on the Acropolis.

The plan is to fly to Athens and then spend only two nights there. I have planned a side trip to another place described in one of Helen MacInnes’ novels, Decision at Delphi, which is set soon after World War II and describes Sicily as well as Athens and Delphi. Delphi is quite high in the mountains north of Athens and involves some climbing so we will spend most of that time in the Delphi Museum.

Important finds included sculptures from the Temple of Zeus, the Nike of Paeonius, the Hermes of Praxiteles and many bronzes. In total 14,000 objects were recorded. The finds were displayed in a museum on the site.

Today, the Museum contains treasures from those excavations.

The museum itself.

And the interior with the exhibits. The trip can be made in a day and I have made arrangements.

On the way to Delphi, I want to make a short side trip to see the Lion of Chaeronea. This statue was erected over the common grave of the Sacred Band of Thebes. This was a unit of sworn lovers, probably all homosexual but in the fashion of classical Greece in which women were closely held in harem-like seclusion and men tended to adopt a pattern of an older man with a younger boy which might be merely sexual or it might be a sort of apprenticeship in arms. The Sacred Band had never been defeated in battle until that day, August 2, 338 BC. On that day, the Sacred Band was annihilated by the army of Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. The Band was buried in common grave and the lion statue erected over their grave. It was found by British tourists around 1900 and excavated and restored. Beneath the site were found the skeletons of nearly 300 men.

The battle,according to accounts which survived, was won when the Macedonians’ right flank conducted a sudden retreat, drawing the Athenians out of line. The Sacred Band was destroyed holding the line. I want to see their grave.

After that day trip, we plan to fly to Thessaloniki, a city east and north of Athens to visit the tomb of Philip II, the father of Alexander and winner of the battle of Chaeronea.

The remains in the tomb have recently been confirmed as those of Philip II

The tomb, itself, is well preserved and restored. The town of Vergina is near Thessaloniki and too far from Athens to drive in a day.

From Thessaloniki, we will fly to Crete and spend a few days near the Palace of Knossos and its museum.

The museum and the palace ruins should keep us busy for five days, then we fly back to Athens for one night and catch our flight to London and home the next day.

Or so the plan goes.

Tags:History, Travel
Posted in Europe, financial, personal, politics | 1 Comment »

Another D-Day anniversary.

Saturday, June 6th, 2015

I have posted a few photos from our trips to Normandy in years past. I haven’t been back since then but have been reading about it. Here is SLA Marshall’s description of the first wave at Normandy.

It was very nearly a disaster for the whole invasion although Utah and the British and Canadian beaches were far less dangerous for the troops. One reason was the geography.

Utah Beach was nearly flat and there was no bluff as there was at Omaha. The problem at Utah was that the country behind the beach was low and the Airborne drop was to secure the causeways that controlled access to the dry ground beyond the fields flooded by the Germans. Sante Mere-Eglise was the center of the Airborne mission.

It is much more quiet today although the famous parachute still hangs from the church roof.

(more…)

Tags:History
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Memorial Day

Sunday, May 24th, 2015

Another Memorial Day is coming upon us and we are sinking slowly into the morass that Barack Obama has created. I am frankly surprised that a community organizer can do this much harm.

Anyway, memories of better times beckon.

That was 1944 and I was welcoming home my cousin Arthur G Kerrison who was home on leave. He was a bombardier with the 301st Bomb Group, 352nd Squadron in North Africa.

Here is another photo of him.

This one is with his sister, Marion, and yours truly about 1943 or early 1944 since it seems to be in front of the house we moved from in November 1944. “Bud” as he was known in the family, completed his training at Roswell, NM and went over seas to join the 15th Air Force in North Africa. His first mission was in June of 1943 over Leghorn Italy. His 50th was in January 1944. He must have been home after he completed his missions.

My own service was at home in California with the 146th Air Transport Command and I saw no combat. The worst danger was the drive to Van Nuys Airport.

I did try to teach the girls about the history of war and its cost in France in 2006.

There they are at Utah Beach.

And at Omaha Beach

And in the US military cemetery above Omaha Beach.

This is me wearing the medals that were sent to me by a member of Bud’s squadron who was shot down before I received them.

Please remember them. We owe them our freedom.

Tags:History
Posted in military, personal | 3 Comments »

Nature and Nurture.

Wednesday, January 21st, 2015

I have long been a fan of Steven Pinker’s books.

I have read many of them, beginning probably with his books on speech as he is a linguist first. This was probably the first as I was intrigued by his theories about irregular verbs and how children learn language.

He points out, for example, how normal construction in archaic forms such as “Wend, went and wended” have become “Go, went, gone.”
The child makes an error he or she may not understand that “Goed” is not a used form for past tense, whereas “Wend” is an archaic form whose past tense has been substituted. The child is using language rules but they don’t account for irregular verbs. He continues with this thought in The Language Instinct, which came later. Here he makes explicit that this is how the mind works. One review on Amazon makes the point:

For the educated layperson, this book is the most fascinating and engaging introduction to linguistics I have come across. I know some college students who had received xeroxed handouts of one chapter from this book, and these were students who were just bored of reading handouts week after week… but after reading just a few paragraphs from The Language Instinct, they were hooked, fascinated, and really wanted to read the whole book (and did). I wish I had come across such a book years ago…

Now, this is interesting but Pinker has gotten into politics inadvertently by emphasizing the role of genetics in language and behavior. I read The Blank Slate when it came out ten years ago and loved it.

(more…)

Tags:Democrats, History, politics, science
Posted in education, media, politics, racism, social issues | 2 Comments »

The “Islamic State” or barbarians as it should be better known.

Friday, December 26th, 2014

The Washington Post is worried that the “Islamic State is failing as a state.”

Services are collapsing, prices are soaring, and medicines are scarce in towns and cities across the “caliphate” proclaimed in Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State, residents say, belying the group’s boasts that it is delivering a model form of governance for Muslims.

The Muslims have never been much at governing. In the early days after Muhammed and his nomadic warriors conquered much of the Middle East, the people pretty much governed themselves as the Arabs were better at fighting than governing.

The “Golden Age of Islam was from the rule of Harun al Rashid to the Mongol conquest, in 1260 to 1300. The Sack of Baghdad, which ended the “Golden Age, occurred in 1258.

Although the Abbasids had failed to prepare for the invasion, the Caliph believed that Baghdad could not fall to invading forces and refused to surrender. Hulagu subsequently besieged the city, which surrendered after 12 days. During the next week, the Mongols sacked Baghdad, committing numerous atrocities and destroying the Abbasids’ vast libraries, including the House of Wisdom. The Mongols executed Al-Musta’sim and massacred many residents of the city, which was left greatly depopulated.

The Golden Age of Islam had been chiefly carried out by Christians and recent converts (mostly involuntary) who translated Greek classics into Arabic. It was mostly a fiction created in the 19th century.

The metaphor of a golden age begins to be applied in 19th-century literature about Islamic history, in the context of the western cultural fashion of Orientalism. The author of a Handbook for Travelers in Syria and Palestine in 1868 observed that the most beautiful mosques of Damascus were “like Mohammedanism itself, now rapidly decaying” and relics of “the golden age of Islam”

(more…)

Tags:al qeada, History, Islam, Palestinians, terrorism
Posted in corruption, History, iraq, middle east, military, religion, terrorism | 2 Comments »

War Movies.

Tuesday, November 11th, 2014

Veterans Day seems to be a good day to consider war movies. We saw the movie Fury last night and it was technically pretty good. A couple of folks on veteran sites complained about the haircuts but I don’t know if they would have been different in April 1945 in guys who had been fighting all the way from the Normandy beaches. I objected a bit to the tank they used as it looked like the Sherman Firefly that the British used. However, the movie web site says it was an M4 A2E8 which does look like the Firefly.

The combat scenes were intense and looked authentic to me. They even had a Tiger I from a museum in Britain. Most tanks that I see in Movies, including Patton, are not authentic Shermans.

The tactics looked pretty good as they showed that Shermans had to get around the Tiger Tank to attack the rear where the armor was thinner. The Russians used the same tactics with their T 34 which was the best tank of the war.

The story was about the same plot as Saving Private Ryan although some of the objectionable lines, like saving Ryan was “the only good thing that will come out of this war,” as if Hitler was not a good reason. The plot device is basically the same with the new guy as an innocent who survives and the experienced guys all get killed.

(more…)

Tags:History
Posted in History, military | 2 Comments »

A Brief History…

Posts Tagged ‘History’

Brussels

The Medical History of the American Civil War IV

The Medical History of the American Civil War III

The Medical History of the American Civil War II

Planning a trip to Greece

Another D-Day anniversary.

Memorial Day

The “Islamic State” or barbarians as it should be better known.

War Movies.

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