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DISGUST PROTOCOL
The rat-catcher’s art
England’s professional rat-catching community produced at least two instructive books during the Victorian years.
Studies in the Art of Rat-Catching, by Henry C. Barkley, went on sale in London in 1896. Avowedly educational, it’s also a rambling entertainment that finishes up with this jolly sentiment: ‘I have heard from half a dozen head-masters of schools that they find the art of rat-catching is so distasteful to their scholars, and so much above their intellect, and so fatiguing an exercise to the youthful mind, that they feel obliged to abandon the study of it and replace it once more by those easier and pleasanter subjects, Latin and Greek.’
Two years later, Ike Matthews, in Manchester, published his Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-Catcher After 25 Years’ Experience. It is a more scholarly trove of professional knowledge about rat catchers and about economics.
High standards, Matthews maintains, are essential on the job. ‘I maintain that it is a profession, and one that requires much learning and courage. I have found this out when I have been under a warehouse floor, where a lot of Rats were in the traps, and I could not get one man out of 50 to come under the floor and hold the candle for me, not to mention helping me to take the live Rats out of the traps.’
The learned know that some risks are less dire than the public believes: ‘a good many people seem to think that if a man puts his hand into a bagful of Rats they will bite him, but I can assure you that a child could do the same thing and not be bitten. Should there be only two or three in the bag, then they will bite, but not in the event of there being a good number.’
One must acquire social skills to handle the occasional awkward moments. The rat catcher ‘sometimes experiences difficulties in travelling on the railway’, writes Matthews. ‘I have often entered an empty third-class carriage, sent my dog under the seat, and put the Rat cage there also. The carriage would fill with passengers, and upon reaching my destination I would take from under the seat my cage full of live Rats, to the amusement of some and the disgust of others.
‘I have also entered a railway carriage with my cage of rats when there were passengers in, one or two of whom would generally object to live Rats being in the same compartment.’
The professional, Matthews, explains, ‘has always one resource open to him when he has finished a job according to contract (catching say 40 or 50 Rats), should there be a dispute about the price and the people decline to pay the bill, then he has the expedient of letting the Rats at liberty again in the place where he had caught them. Most people will pay the price you send in rather than have the Rats turned loose again.’
Barkley, Henry C. (1896). Studies in the Art of Rat-Catching. London: John Murray.
Matthews, Ike (1898). Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-Catcher After 25 Years’ Experience. Manchester: The Friendly Societies’ Printing Company.
May we recommend
‘Determination of Favorite Components of Garbage by Dogs’
by Bonnie V. Beaver, Margaret Fischer and Charles E. Atkinson (published in Applied Behaviour Science, 1992)
The authors, at Texas A&M University and E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Orange, Texas, report: ‘This study was to determine which commonly found household garbage odors would be the most attractive to dogs. Thirteen items were tested as fresh odors or were aged for 72 h before testing. Each of the 325 paired odor combinations was tested on 12 dogs. Fresh odors were preferred to aged ones, and meat odors were chosen more often than non-meat odors. Fried liver with onions and baked chicken were the top ranking fresh and old odors. Liver was the highest ranking raw meat.’
An improbable innovation
‘Odor Testing Apparatus’
a/k/a cat-box-smell testing chambers, by Henry E. Lowe (US patent no. 4,411,156, granted 1983)
The apparatus in action
The art of unbuilding
The engineers who designed and built the very tallest, most skyscraping skyscrapers said very little about whether – let alone how – someone could safely disassemble such a colossus, should the need arise. About the only person who thought about it long and hard was the writer and illustrator David Macauley. Decades ago, Macauley published a children’s book called Unbuilding. It explains, in words and highly detailed drawings, how to carefully, lovingly take apart the Empire State Building.
In the race to build ever-taller buildings, a problem lurks. These towers are so costly, and the real estate market unpredictable enough, that some of them could become financial failures. To simply abandon something nearly a quarter of a mile tall (the Empire State Building), then let it rot and crumble, would be unneighbourly on a grand scale.
Indeed, how would one disassemble one of the tallest skyscrapers without risking huge damage to its neighbourhood? And how would this work financially, if the tower needed to be disassembled because the owners ran out of money?
David Macauley tells how, if you have the money, to unbuild in a way that is ‘practical and safe’. You take the building down ‘floor by floor in the reverse order in which it had been built’.
These days, architecturally, things are looking up. The tallest building, currently the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 829.8 metres (2,722 feet) high is more than twice the height of the Empire State Building. In August 2011, the architecture firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill announced plans to erect something even taller, the 1,000-metre-tall Kingdom Tower, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Financially … well, it’s a thrilling time for new skyscraper-owners, and perhaps soon for their neighbours.
The book Unbuilding, published in 1980, is a fantasy about the future. In it, the ‘Greater Riyadh Institute of Petroleum’ needs a new headquarters. A Saudi Arabian prince decides, for symbolic purposes, to purchase the Empire State Building, and move it from New York City to Riyadh. (He chooses, on the basis of cost, to transport only those ‘portions of the building necessary to recreate its appearance’, and build everything else.)
New Yorkers are at first outraged at the thought of losing their most beloved building. But after the Prince Ali offers the city new parks, museums, and other compensation, nearly everyone agrees to let him take the Empire State Building.
The book at this point has a passage that reads very differently than it did in 1980: ‘One desperate but clever preservationist suggested that the twin towers of the World Trade Center be offered instead – both for the price of the Empire State. In declining the offer Ali suggested that he would be willing to consider pulling them down as a goodwill gesture. With this final show of generosity all remaining resistance crumbled.’
Macauley, David (1980). Unbuilding. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
In brief
‘The Exploding Toilet and Other Emergency Room Folklore’
by Robert D. Slay (published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine, 1986)
How to remove the unmentionable, digitally
Nurses, among the most respected persons in our society, must acquire some skills that non-medical people find embarrassing, disgusting and maybe even childish. Such knowledge can be difficult to obtain from the standard medical books and journals. A monograph called ‘How to Perform a Digital Removal of Faeces’ aims to remedy one such gap in the literature.
Gaye Kyle, a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Health and Human Science at Thames Valley University in Slough, researched the subject in depth. She published her findings in the journal Continence Essentials.
There exists an official document that purports to provide the digital-removal information a nurse needs to know. But Kyle finds that document wanting. She complains that ‘The publication of “Digital Rectal Examination and Manual Removal of Faeces – Guidance for Nurses by the Royal College of Nursing” addressed many issues concerning the professional and legal aspects of the manual (digital) removal of faeces. However, the document did no
t give detailed guidance on how to actually carry out the procedure.’
Kyle is can do when it comes to how to. What must be discussed, she discusses, prissy diplomatic mincing be damned. ‘Digital removal of faeces is a procedure that many healthcare workers are not confident about performing’, she writes. ‘However, in some patients it is a necessary part of their routine bowel care.’
Some aspects of the situation strike her as dangerous and ludicrous. ‘Some nurses are actively refusing to undertake digital removal of faeces on spinal cord injury patients either because they have not been trained or, even more alarmingly, because they think they are not allowed to perform the procedure at all.’
Kyle uses plain language to describe the entire procedure, listing twenty-five distinct, specific actions. These range from the philosophical to the hands-in. For each action, she states a rationale, removing the guesswork that would stymie many a novice or unconfident health care professional.
Why should one ensure privacy? ‘To help the patient relax and minimise embarrassment’.
Why should one ‘place water-based lubricating gel on gloved index finger … for patients receiving this procedure on a regular basis’? The reason is practical and also common-sensical: ‘To facilitate easier insertion of index finger’.
Kyle explicates technical minutiae, but only when and where such is needed to provide a clear, unambiguous understanding. ‘Gently rotate the finger 6–8 times in a clockwise motion and withdraw’, she directs, then goes on to tell how many times the rotation may be repeated, and how many or few minutes should be allowed between each round of stimulation.
Gaye Kyle has given us a case study in the way vital knowledge can remain hidden and difficult to get at, especially when it pertains to matters or matter that can remain hidden and difficult to get at.
Kyle, Gaye (2008). ‘How to Perform a Digital Removal of Faeces’. Continence Essentials 1: 126–30.
Irwin, Karen (2008). ‘Digital Rectal Examination & Manual Removal of Faeces’. NHS Primary Care Trust Bolton, February, http://www.docstoc.com/docs/71006826/Digital-Rectal-Examination-_-Manual-Removal-of-Faeces.
May we recommend
‘Colonic Gas Explosion: Is a Fire Extinguisher Necessary?’
by J.H. Bond and M.D. Levitt (published in Gastroenterology, 1979)
Nine
Stuff in the Air (and Elsewhere)
May we recommend
‘Rectal Impalement by Pirate Ship: A Case Report’
by M. Bemelman and E.R. Hammacher (published in Injury Extra, 2005)
Some of what’s in this chapter: Greetings with potent bugs • Mighty (Marm- and Vege-) mites for mighty few nations • Mozart killer notions • Sudden late pacemaker boom • Too-close look at a pipe • A surprise for the self-auto-shocked snakebit marine • Dragonflies on a black gravestone • U for the ducks • Pop-up pop-off procedure, for bears • The further adventures of Troy Hurtubise • Upside-down sunken-dinosaur scheme • Approaches to parachuting • Insurance for clowns • The tragedy of pizza delivery • Cadaverine and putrescine up your nose • Crimefighting with dolls • Brain extraction on the quick • Dead mules in a literary niche
A handy guide to pathogens
How many pathogens per handshake? Is it dangerous to shake hands at a school graduation?
Dr David Bishai and a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, did a small experiment. They wanted to gauge whether the people most at peril should worry about it.
Their report, ‘Quantifying School Officials’ Exposure to Bacterial Pathogens at Graduation Ceremonies Using Repeated Observational Measures’, was published in the Journal of School Nursing. ‘This study was designed to measure the degree to which principals and deans are potentially exposed to the risk of pathogen acquisition as part of their occupational duties to shake hands.’
The write-up has some small human touches.
The team recruited officials who had leading roles in graduation ceremonies at elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools in the state of Maryland. Fourteen authority figures agreed to be the subjects of the experiment. Beforehand, each of the fourteen washed with an alcohol-based sanitizer. Then, and afterwards when all the handshaking was done, ‘each of the participant’s hands was set on a clean drape and swabbed from the base of the thumb to the side of index finger and then around the edges of the other fingers to account for all possible areas for hand contamination during a handshake’.
The risk is pretty small, the results imply. Only two of the fourteen school officials had pathogenic bacteria on hand post-graduation – and only one of those was on the right, shaking hand. Twirling the numbers for perspective, the study explains there is a ‘0.019% probability of acquiring a pathogen per handshake’.
The researchers point out many reasons why their study is just a preliminary, quick sketch of the story. They examined only a few school officials, and tested for only two kinds of pathogens. Medical science is not clear yet on the prevalence of those pathogens on people’s hands in general. Nor is it clear that the microbes’ mere presence on the outside (rather than inside) of the body is indicative of danger.
And school graduations are just a sliver of the human experience: ‘Graduates may have a different level of infectiousness from other members of the community with whom one might shake hands, making our results less useful to politicians, business executives and clergy.’
Bishai, David, Liang Liu, Stephanie Shiau, Harrison Wang, Cindy Tsai, Margaret Liao, Shivaani Prakash and Tracy Howard (2011). ‘Quantifying School Officials’ Exposure to Bacterial Pathogens at Graduation Ceremonies Using Repeated Observational Measures’. Journal of School Nursing 27 (3): 219–24.
More than just a condiment
Marmite, the born-in-Britain foodstuff with a powerful taste and a whiff-of-superhero-comic-book name, is more than just a condiment. Marmite, together with its younger, Australian-borne kinsman Vegemite, is an ongoing biomedical experiment.
Streaky dabs of information appear here and there, spread thin, on the pages of medical journals dating back as far as 1931.
The 1930s were a sort of golden period for Marmite. A steady diet of Marmite reports oozed deliciously from several medical journals. Likely many physicians ingested them whilst munching Marmite on toast.
Dr Alexander Goodall of the Royal Informary of Edinburgh regaled readers of The Lancet with a case report called ‘The Treatment of Pernicious Anæmia by Marmite’. Goodall told how a British Medical Journal article, published the previous year, had inspired him and benefited his patients: ‘The publication by Lucy Wills of a series of cases of “pernicious anaemia of pregnancy” and “tropical anaemia” successfully treated by marmite raises many questions of importance … Since the publication of Wills’s paper I have treated all my “maintenance” cases with marmite. Without exception these have done well.’
Two weeks later, also in The Lancet, Stanley Davidson of the University of Aberdeen disagreed. ‘It would be very unwise at the present stage’, he wrote, ‘to suggest that marmite can replace liver and hog’s stomach preparations’.
Lancet readers also got to learn about ‘Marmite in Sprue’, ‘The Treatment by Marmite of Megalocytic Hyperchromic Anaemia: Occurring in Idiopathic Steatorrhœa’, and ‘The Nature of the Hæmopoietic Factor in Marmite’.
Vegemite starred quietly in a 1948 monograph in the Journal of Experimental Biology entitled ‘Studies in the Respiration of Paramecium caudatum’. Beverley Humphrey and George Humphrey of the University of Sydney described how they grew and nurtured their microbes: ‘The culture medium consisted of 5 milliliters of Osterhout solution and 5 milliliters of 20% Vegemite suspension in 1 liter of distilled water. The Vegemite is a yeast concentrate manufactured by the Kraft-Walker Cheese Co. Pty. Ltd., Australia, and served to support a rich bacterial flora upon which the Protozoa fed.’ Humphrey and Humphrey’s Vegemite adventure contributed, they said, to ‘the slow advance of our knowledge of the nutr
ition of most types of Protozoa’.
A 2003 paper called ‘Vegemite as a Marker of National Identity’, published in the journal Gastronomica, contributed to the slow advance of knowledge of native Australians’ liking for the food stuff. Paul Rozin and Michael Siegal surveyed a few hundred students at the University of Queensland, yielding up a table of numbers contrasting their relative (and in many cases relatively large) enjoyment of that substance in comparison with coffee and other common foods. The numbers indicate that Vegemite and carrots enjoyed about equal favour, not as high as chocolate but towering far above sardines or Marmite.
Table 1 from ‘Vegemite as a Marker of National Identity’
In a very few cases, researchers thought they could see hints of a darker side to Vegemite and Marmite.
A 1985 report called ‘Vegemite Allergy?’, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, told of a fifteen-year old girl with asthma: ‘She has noted over the last 2–3 years that ingestion of Vegemite, white wine or beer seems to induce wheezing within a short period of time.’ The doctors concluded that hers was a ‘suspicious theory’.
Four years later, Dr Nigel Higson of Hove issued a bitter warning in the British Medical Journal under the headline ‘An Allergy to Marmite?’. Higson wrote: ‘Some health visitors advise mothers to put Marmite on their nipples to break the child’s breast feeding habit; in a susceptible child this action might possibly be fatal.’
This is Improbable Too Page 22
