Books and Stuff

Mari did a book report on Abraham Lincoln. In the course of her reading, she came across a reference to Lincoln's Mother dying of the "milk sick." I Googled the phrase, and found the following quote:

a grim mystery that went by various names, from “puking fever” to “river sickness” to “fall
poison.” Later, it became known as the “milk sick.”

In short, it's a condition brought on by livestock eating white snakeroot plants, which then creates a toxin that can have dire effects on humans. It can kill a previously healthy adult in as little as three days, or as long as two weeks. Cattle affected by the toxin are known to have the trembles. The toxin can be carried in milk, butter, cheese, or meat.

A physician described the course of the illness: “When the individual is about to be taken down, he feels weary, trembles more or less under exertion, and often experiences pain, numbness and slight cramps.” Nausea soon follows, then “a feeling of depression and burning at the pit of the stomach,” then retching, twitching, and tossing side to side. Before long, the patient becomes “deathly pale and shrunk up,” listless and indifferent, and lies, between fits of retching, in a “mild coma.”

Each perennial herb is about 2-4 feet tall; the leaves are opposite, simple, toothed, three-nerved; the heads have 8-30 small white flowers without ray flowers

The plant grows throughout the east central and northeastern United States, occuring primarily in rich, well-shaded forest soils or at the interface between forests and croplands.

I found references on the web to white snake root being used as a medicinal herb and used for tea in the late 19th century!

I found on the web a document written in 1906 which described how the milk sick affected settlers in northern Ohio in the second half of the 19th century. It mentions how people recognized that it most affected livestock allowed to roam in the woods, but not all woods, and some people thought it was caused by water.

The 1906 document mentions a northern Ohio sheep herder who discovered that when sheep new to the region were released in his pasture, they grazed on the white snake root, developed the trembles and died. Other sheep which he had owned for some time and which were used to the region, avoided the white snake root plants. The sheep herder then embarked on a campaign to destroy the noxious plant.

In another time, the story of the white snakeroot could only be explained as a curse or blight on a region. - something akin to magic. Some time ago Arthur C. Clarke made the observation that any sufficiently advanced technology will be explained as magic by those less technologically advanced.

This evening I picked up volume 56 of Britannica's Great Books of the Western World, Natural Science: Selections from the Twentieth Century and was presented with this list of names:

• Henri Poincare
• Max Planck
• Alfred North Whitehead
• Albert Einstein
• Sir Arthur Eddington
• Niels Bohr
• G. H. Hardy
• Werner heisenberg
• Erwin Schrodinger
• Theoddosius Dobzhansky
• C. H. Waddington

I was shamed to realize I couldn't form even as much as a single sentence about more than half the names on this list! How many names do you recognize? Can you even identify the areas in which they worked?

How can it be that we daily use the fruits of the technologies made possible by the work of these guys, and we can't even name the fields in which they worked. The Nobel prize winners were announced in October, and are you able to name even one. I can't. Kitty couldn't give me a name, but she could identify the research which was honored with an award.

We live in a country that is prosperous, has universal education, and more media outlets than can be counted, yet I doubt even 10% of the US population knows what the Bessemer process does. And yet that process is integral to materials that are fundamental to our quality of life. Fundamental, yet unrecognized.

The Federal Communications Commission requires TV stations to broadcast a minimum amount of programming for children, yet doesn't address adult educational needs. The History Channel, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic channels do a great job with presenting program length educational materials. But adult curiosity could be stimulated by 1 or 2 minutes spots about science, people, or history on other, entertainment oriented channels. Where is that programming? I know some public radio and TV stations air such items. But every station should as well.

As a society we too often communicate to kids that school is something you have to attend rather than assuming kids want to. Too often we celebrate graduating high school with the feeling that you're now out of school, rather than now being able to learn different materials. And too often a college education is pursued for its vocational benefit rather than furthering the development of a human being!

There are bright spots of information. The previously mentioned Discovery, History, and National Geographic channels. Wikipedia. But much more needs to be done.

On the way home from Mari's first soccer game a couple of weeks ago we were in the van when Mari started naming all the American Presidents. In short order this morphed into trying to name them in order, then that morphed into naming the Presidents who had the same last name as other Presidents. It is embarrassing to admit how few Presidents I can name.

Once we got home I started reading some encyclopedia articles about Adams, Madison, Monroe, and JQ Adams. This prompted me to make a list of all the Presidents, and then calculate the length of their lives, their lifespan after being President, and their age when they became President. I turned this info into a chart.

A tidbit I picked up was that one of the Adams had a wife who developed breast cancer. Her treatment included a mastectomy, performed without the aid of anesthesia! Her cancer later reappeared and she died.

Another tidbit I picked up was that the description of the Louisianna area that Jefferson's representatives negotiated to buy from France included this phrase, "the island of New Orleans."

A few days later I bought a book written by Max Skidmore, a UMKC professor, about the lives of the Presidents after they left office. While I haven't finished it yet, it is proving very interesting. Skidmore makes the point, that my Presidents' chart supports, that our current Presidents are surviving much longer after their term in office than most of the 19th century Presidents. Because this is a relatively recent phenomonon, these Presidents don't have many examples of what they should be/could be doing with the rest of their lives.

Project Gutenberg is a fabulous project that actually delivers on the promise of computers and digitalization. Thousands of books are available, and they're books you want to read. I've found many authors, Isabella Bird and Theodore Roosevelt to name two, that I enjoy reading or want to read.