Voracek’s other writings are, some of them, on duller topics. Here is a little list of representative titles, and of the journals in which they are published:
Digit Ratio (2D:4D), Lateral Preferences, and Performance in Fencing (Perceptual and Motor Skills)
Three-Dimensional Histomorphometric Analysis of Distraction Osteogenesis Using an Implanted Device for Mandibular Lengthening in Sheep (Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery)
Suicide and General Elections in Austria: Do Preceding Regional Suicide Rate Differentials Foreshadow Subsequent Voting Behavior Swings? (Journal of Affective Disorder)
Universal Sex Differences in the Desire for Sexual Variety: Tests from 52 Nations, 6 Continents, and 13 Islands (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)
Patterns and Universals of Mate Poaching Across 53 Nations: The Effects of Sex, Culture, and Personality on Romantically Attracting Another Person’s Partner (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)
“I Find You to Be Very Attractive...”: Biases in Compliance Estimates to Sexual Offers (Psicothema)
Sex and Side Differences in Relative Thumb Length (Journal of Hand Surgery)
There are more – over a hundred so far.
Partik, B. L., A. Stadler, S. Schamp, A. Koller, M. Voracek, G. Heinz, and T. H. Helbich (2002). ‘3D versus 2D ultrasound: Accuracy of Volume Measurement in Human Cadaver Kidneys.’ Investigative Radiology 37: 489–495.
Ploder, O., F. Kanz, U. Randl, W. Mayr, M. Voracek, and H. Plenk (2002). ‘Three-dimensional Histomorphometric Analysis of Distraction Osteogenesis Using an Implanted Device for Mandibular Lengthening in Sheep.’ Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 110: 130–37.
Mr Food Sex
The sexing of food owes much to a gentleman named Ernest Dichter. As a recent study puts it, ‘Dichter was a critical force in encouraging advertisers to promote a food’s sex.’ Many psychology and marketing books call Dichter ‘the father of motivation research’.
Today, the Ernest Dichter Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, promotes the name and fame of the master, who spent his professionally formative years in not-so-distant Vienna, a city that has long fetishized both sex and food. Dichter prospered, in later years, by advising food manufacturers to sex up their advertising.
Katherine Parkin, an assistant professor of history at Monmouth University in New Jersey, published a tribute to Dichterism in the Advertising and Society Review. She writes that Dichter encouraged his clients to ‘promote foods as feminine or masculine’, and that he ‘promoted a belief in the sexual qualities of various foods’.
Dichter’s pronouncements ranged ‘from his insights into Rice Krispies as a “bubbling, vivacious, young woman” to his advice on how to masculinize fish’.
He could see the hidden sexual potency in any food. Cake, for instance. Dichter wrote: ‘Perhaps the most typically feminine food is cake... [Wedding cake is] the symbol of the feminine organ. The act of cutting the first slice by the bride and bridegroom together clearly stands as a symbol of defloration.’ Furthermore, ‘women’s demand for moistness in a cake reinforced its feminine symbolism’. Women’s dislike of dry cake ‘may represent a projection onto the cake of the woman’s feelings about herself. She wants to be moist and fresh, dewy-eyed and moist-lipped, not a dried up, barren, old crone.’
Dichter recognized the public’s appetite for all things Freudian. He let it be known that for twenty years he had lived ‘across the street from Sigmund Freud’, and that he had taken a public speaking course taught by Freud’s daughter-in-law. Dichter took sex to be the key to selling all goods. He counselled car manufacturers that ‘a convertible was like a man’s mistress and a sedan was like a wife’.
Food, though, seems to have been his special passion. Parkin quotes a 1955 Dichter memo headlined ‘Creative Research Memo on the Sex of Rice’, which attributes a scientific basis to the sexing of food. It says: ‘In an experiment conducted by a famous surgeon, it was discovered that food has sex. While administering barium during the examination of the oesophagus, the good doctor found that, when he mentioned the word “salad” to his female patients, their oesophagi dilated, permitting the passage of the chalky compound. When the word “steak” was suggested to the male patients, their oesophagi reacted similarly.’
In later life, says Parkin, Ernest Dichter focused on food he took to be masculine. Wieners and luncheon meats fascinated him. ‘Men’, he wrote in 1968, ‘do not appear to be as “embarrassed” in eating wieners as women appear to be’.
Parkin, Katherine (2004). ‘The Sex of Food and Ernest Dichter: The Illusion of Inevitability.’ Advertising and Society Review 5 (2).
Eight
Exciting Injuries and Ills
In Brief
‘Taking Action on the Volume-Quality Relationship: How Long Can We Hide Our Heads in the Colostomy Bag?’
by Thomas J. Smith, Bruce E. Hillner, and Harry D. Bear (published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2003)
Some of what’s in this chapter: Misnomers of the mouth • The romance of proctology • Disco dangers • A huge Parisian tooth-yanker • Louis XIV’s missing teeth • Eat your mummy • Michael Jackson surgery • In pursuit of a wretched itch • Dr Bean’s fingernails • Tripping over a black cat • Unlubricated karaoke • The celebrated rectum of the Bishop of Durham
A Hot Potato
Dr Mahmood Bhutta’s greatest achievement – measuring the sound produced by a person with a hot potato in his mouth – has been overlooked in the flurry of attention given his newer study on whether sexual thoughts can trigger sneezing fits.
Bhutta practises surgery at Wexham Park Hospital, in Slough, UK. His paper, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine under the title ‘Sneezing Induced by Sexual Ideation or Orgasm: An Under-Reported Phenomenon’, has brought acclaim to Bhutta and to his co-author and fellow sneezing-induced-by-sexual-ideation-or-orgasm expert Dr Harold Maxwell, a retired honorary senior lecturer and consultant psychiatrist formerly at West Middlesex University Hospital, in Isleworth. The paper brought an elevated level of reportage to a phenomenon that had appeared in formal medical reports only a handful of times, in 1875, 1872, and 1972. Trolling through the ailment-infested chat rooms of the Internet, Bhutta and Maxwell unearthed seventeen new cases of people who say they sneeze immediately after thinking about sex, and three others who complain or brag that they sneeze after experiencing an orgasm.
Back in 2006, Bhutta worked in the department of ear, nose, and throat, head and neck surgery at the Royal Sussex county hospital in Brighton. He and fellow Royal Sussex ear-nose-and-throat, head-and-neck surgery specialists George A. Worley and Meredydd L. Harries examined the phenomenon (unrelated to sexual ideation, orgasm, or sneezing) known as ‘hot potato voice’.
The study ‘“Hot Potato Voice” in Peritonsillitis: A Misnomer’ appeared in the Journal of Voice. ‘Voice changes are a well-recognized symptom in patients suffering from peritonsillitis’, the authors explain in the report. ‘The voice is said to be thick and muffled and is described as a “hot potato voice”, because it is believed to resemble the voice of someone with a hot potato in his or her mouth. There have been very few studies analysing the profile and characteristics of the voice changes in tonsillitis or peritonsillitis and none that have compared these changes with those that occur with a hot potato in the oral cavity.’
To remedy this lack of knowledge, the three doctors recruited two sets of volunteers. The first group comprised ten hospital patients whose suffering related to their tonsils. Each volunteer pronounced three particular vowel sounds, which the doctors recorded and subsequently analysed using special software. The second group was ten healthy hospital staffers, ‘with each of these participants placing a British new potato of approximately 50 grams in their oral cavity, warmed by microwave to a “hot” but not uncomfortable temperature’.
The doctors detected unmistakable differences. The unique sound of someone burdened with an actual p
otato, they explain, ‘is related to interference with the anterior tongue function from the physical presence of the potato’.
Bhutta, Mahmood F., George A. Worley, and Meredydd L. Harries (2006). ‘“Hot Potato Voice” in Peritonsillitis: A Misnomer.’ Journal of Voice 20 (4): 616–22.
Bhutta, Mahmood F., and Harold Maxwell (2008). ‘Sneezing Induced by Sexual Ideation or Orgasm: An Under-Reported Phenomenon.’ Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 101: 587–91.
Deep, Dark Romance
Of all the romance books ever written, which has the most surprising depths?
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult? No. The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton? No.
The Romance of Pepperell, Being a Brief Account of the Career of Sir William Pepperell, Soldier, Pioneer, American Merchant and Developer of New England Industry, for Whom the Pepperell Manufacturing Company was Named, and the Towns of Saco and Biddeford in the State of Maine, wherein the First Manufacturing Unit of the Pepperell Company was Established? No.
No, none of those books approach the depths of Charles Elton Blanchard’s 1938 thriller, The Romance of Proctology.
Blanchard was a proctologist by trade and by temperament. He wrote some twenty books on the subject. The Romance of Proctology is his masterpiece.
Later authors were inspired by Blanchard’s élan. Emilio de los Ríos Magriñá, for one, is notable for his Color Atlas of Anorectal Diseases, published in 1980. But as its title implies, the book lacks romance.
Blanchard pours on the romance. His opening sentence is an irresistible come-on: ‘No one knows who was the first doctor to examine the rectal orifice of the human frame.’
The reader grows all quivery as Blanchard shows us history’s parade of charismatic proctologists, heroic actions, and frightening tools of the trade.
‘These pioneers were earnest seekers after proctological truth’, he writes in introducing Dr William Allingham of London. ‘Allingham believed in the value of linear cauterization using the Paquelin cautery for proctidentia recti. He claims he was the first (and possibly the last) to insert the whole hand into the rectum.’
The seventeenth-century physician Morgani receives special praise. Blanchard speaks of him on our behalf: ‘We are thankful to Morgani that in the midst of all his many researches he, of all the great names at Padua, looked into the human rectum, discovered and named its crypts and pillars.’
‘It is strange’, Blanchard reminds us, ‘how immortality in medicine is often gained by some very minor contribution. Morgani is remembered by the crypts and columns of the rectal outlet. Hilton by his “white line” which is seldom white in the living subject.’ He is writing about John Hilton of Guy’s Hospital, London – the John Hilton who was known as ‘anatomical John’ and who was made surgeon to Queen Victoria. Blanchard’s reverence for him is nearly boundless: ‘I would rather drop one tear on the grave of John Hilton than to place a costly wreath on the tomb of Napoleon.’
Blanchard tips his cap, too, to Dr Joseph M. Mathews of Louisville, Kentucky, of whom he writes: ‘Dr Mathews was much like Dr Allingham, jovial, talkative and yet rather sure of his opinions being right. He much preferred to be called “Rectal Specialist” than by any other high-sounding name. To him should go much credit for making proctology a specialty.’
There are, of course, many biological romance books. Anyone who enjoys Blanchard’s The Romance of Proctology can seek delight also in A. Radclyffe Dugmore’s The Romance of the Beaver, published in 1914.
Blanchard, Charles Elton (1938). The Romance of Proctology. Youngstown, Ohio: Medical Success Press.
Neuhauser, D. (2006). ‘Advertising, Ethics and the Competitive Practice of Medicine: Charles Elton Blanchard MD.’ Quality and Safety in Health Care 15: 74–75.
Catching Disco Fever
However serious researchers were about discotheques, most of them kept quiet about it for a long time. Then a glorious decade gave birth to two pools of disco studies. One describes injuries, illnesses, and other ills that should or could be blamed on discos and disco music. The other tells about a world of exciting disco-inspired and disco-enabled – in short, disco-fuelled – investigations.
A lone, curious voice, that of M. S. Swani of Birmingham, UK, sounded perhaps the first interested cry. In a letter dated 30 November 1974 published in the British Medical Journal, Dr Swani wrote: ‘Early deafness in young people as a result of exposure to excessive noise in “discos” must now be assuming epidemic proportions. The importance of this problem has been brought especially to my mind because an 18-year-old medical secretary, who has worked for me, has now been found to be suffering from this condition. If every general practitioner in the country had one such new case a year there would be 20,000 new cases in the country annually.’
Discos became popular in the 1960s and wildly so in the 1970s, but almost no formal disco-themed studies appeared until 1980. Thereafter, disco scholarship flourished.
One stream of reports, perhaps an indirect result of Swani’s secretary’s what-what-what-ing to her frustrated boss, explained that people who spend too much time listening to much-too-loud music become hard of hearing.
Around the world, doctors published reports raising other medical questions. Among the titles: ‘Effect of Discotheque Environment on Epileptic Children’ (UK, 1981); ‘Acute Central Cervical Cord Injury Due to Disco Dancing’ (Ireland, 1983); ‘The Dyspeptic Disco Dancer’, (Hong Kong, 1988); ‘Disco Fever: Epidemic Meningococcal Disease in Northeastern Argentina Associated with Disco Patronage’ (Argentina, 1988); and ‘Valsalva Retinopathy Associated with Vigorous Dancing in a Discotheque’ (Israel, 2007). Roller disco inspired its own sub-genre, with such titles as: ‘Roller Disco Neuropathy’ (USA, 1981); and ‘The Roller Discotheque – A Quickstep to the Hospital? An Analysis of 196 Accidents’ (Germany, 1985).
But it wasn’t just doctors. Disco opened exciting new worlds for everybody. I will mention just two of the studies that appeared in that breakthrough year, 1980. Margaret Doyle Pappalardo wrote her doctoral thesis, at Boston University in Massachusetts, on ‘The Effects of Discotheque Dancing on Selected Physiological and Psychological Parameters of College Students’, while graduate student, Bruce Taylor, at the University of Bergen, sought not the side-effects of disco, but its heart.
Taylor’s thesis, called ‘Shake, Slow, and Selection: An Aspect of the Tradition Process Reflected by Discotheque Dances in Bergen, Norway’, appeared in the journal Ethnomusicology. He interviewed patrons near the dance floor. ‘According to them’, Taylor wrote, ‘the most important principle is to follow the rhythm and the beat, but variation is also necessary, and a good dancer is interested in the dance as well as in his partner ... Conversations between strangers are begun, personal contact is achieved, and many of the guests who arrived alone are actively interested in leaving for home with a new acquaintance of the opposite sex.’
Even doctors manage, sometimes, to find some delight in disco, especially in describing its effects and after-effects. That seems evident in the phrasing of a case report called ‘The University Rollerdisco: An Unusual Cause of a Major Incident’, which appeared in the journal Injury Extra.
The co-authors play the role of raconteurs rather than traditional, stuffy medicos: ‘Rollerdiscos are associated with a high incidence of injury, as is binge drinking. On Valentine’s evening 2008, Liverpool University combined these two venerable pastimes at a student event, without informing local health services. Subsequently, emergency services were overwhelmed with Rollerdisco casualties and a “major incident” ... The event itself consisted of a newly laminated hall for roller skating, alcoholic drink promotions and a 1980s themed dress code. Certainly the Accident and Emergency Department became a colourful place with variously injured patients in flamboyant dress and in a generally “exuberant” mood. In all, eight patients were admitted (one patient for every 17 min of the disco).’
Swani, M. S. (1974). ‘Disco Deafness.’ British Medical Journal 4 (5943): 532.
Peck, R. J., Karen Ng, and Arthur Li (1988). ‘The Dyspeptic Disco Dancer.’ British Journal of Radiology 61 (725): 417–18.
Dewitt, L. D., and H. S. Greenberg (1981). ‘Roller Disco Neuropathy.’ Journal of the American Medical Association 246 (8): 836.
Redmond, J., A. Thompson, and M. Hutchinson (1983). ‘Acute Central Cervical Cord Injury Due to Disco Dancing.’ British Medical Journal 286 (6379): 1704.
Dörner, A., H. J. Kahl, and K. H. Jungbluth (1985). ‘The Roller Discotheque: A Quickstep to the Hospital? An Analysis of 196 Accidents.’ Unfallchirurgie 11 (4): 181–86.
Bar-Sela, S. M., and J. Moisseiev (2007). ‘Valsalva Retinopathy Associated with Vigorous Dancing in a Discotheque.’ Ophthalmic Surgery, Lasers & Imaging 38 (1): 69–71.
Cookson, Susan Temporado, José L. Corrales, José O. Lotero, Mabel Regueira, Norma Binsztein, Michael W. Reeves, Gloria Ajello, and William R. Jarvis (1998). ‘Disco Fever: Epidemic Meningococcal Disease in Northeastern Argentina Associated With Disco Patronage.’ Journal of Infectious Diseases 178 (1): 266–69.
Pappalardo, Margaret Doyle (1980). ‘The Effects of Discotheque Dancing on Selected Physiological and Psychological Parameters of College Students.’ PhD thesis, Boston University School of Education.
Taylor, Bruce H. (1980). ‘Shake, Slow, and Selection: An Aspect of the Tradition Process Reflected by Discotheque Dances in Bergen, Norway.’ Ethnomusicology 24 (1): 75–84.
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