History

Happy May Day

by

I just watched a documentary on Stalin which showed a old Ukrainian woman telling the story of the horrors her family faced when Stalin pushed them onto the collectives, stole their grain and sold it abroad to fund his industrial dreams.

She said that their house had the only nearby well and neighbors came there to fetch water. No one had any food. Everyone was starving.

Her mother had three children. The youngest was a boy around five. He had taken ill so they had put him in the warmest place, a bunk bed over the stove. The mother had nothing to feed her children save a single turnip. She boiled it up and divided it between the two oldest children. The youngest child, smelling the turnip from his bed over the stove ask for some. The woman refused. The child climbed down from his sick bed, crying, grabbing at her skirts and begging for just a bite of turnip. Seeing this, the neighbors told the woman to give the starving child just a bite of turnip.

“No,” she said, “I have to save the food for my healthy children.”

Hearing this, the boy sagged. He gave up begging and weeping bitterly, struggled back into his bed. He cried until he died the next day.

When a child dies slowly, such as from starvation, they often begin to make a particular rhythmic, low, mewing cry in their final hours.

Read more

Col. Frederick Gustavus Burnaby

by

Col. Frederick Gustavus Burnaby

Col. Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, late of the Royal Horse Guards (the Blues), author of A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia and On Horseback Through Asia Minor. He was also a pioneering aeronaut, author of A Ride Across the Channel: and Other Adventures in the Air. Col. Burnaby met his death in the hand-to-hand fighting of the Battle of Abu Klea, 1885. Queen Victoria fainted when she heard of his death.

Captain Frederick Augustus Burnaby of the Royal Horse Guards was no ordinary officer. For a start he was a man of prodigious strength and stature. Standing six-foot-four in his stockinged feet, weighing fifteen stone, and possessing a 47 inch chest, he was reputed to be the strongest man in the British Army. Indeed, it was even said that he could carry a small pony under his arm. … Nor was this son of a country parson entirely brawn. He also displayed a remarkable gift for languages, being fluent in at least seven, including Russian, Turkish and Arabic. Finally, he was born with an insatiable appetite for adventure which he combined with a vigorous and colourful prose style. Inevitably, these two latter qualities brought him into contact with Fleet Street, with the result that during his generous annual leaves he served abroad on several occasions as a special correspondent of The Times and other journals … .

From The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk.

I am halfway through “A Ride to Khiva” and I am very grateful to Google Books, which provides full text, out-of-copyright books, at this point everything published before 1922. Through this wonderful service, I have been easily able to make the acquaintance of this extraordinary officer in his own prose, via Kindle.

One quote from the book. Burnaby is in St. Petersburg, and he sends a written request to the Russian Minister of War, Gen. Miliutin, asking his leave to travel across Russia and on to Khiva, which is (at that point) still beyond the Russian frontier. Miliutin responds in the negative, and offering as his explanation that he cannot answer for the security of travelers beyond the Tsar’s domains.

I should have much liked to have asked Gen. Miliutin one question, and to have heard his answer — not given solemnly as the Russian Chancellor makes his promises, but face to face, as a soldier — would he, when a captain, have turned his face homeward to St. Petersburg simply because he was told by a foreign government that it could not be responsible for his safety? I do not think so; and I have a far higher opinion of the Russian officers than to imagine that they would be deterred by such an argument if used to them under circumstances similar to those in which I found myself.

Burnaby, of course, goes anyway.

For further details, see The Life of Colonel Fred Burnaby By Thomas Wright (1908), and The True Blue: The Life and Adventures of Colonel Fred Burnaby, by Michael Alexander (1957).

Education and traditions.

by

In my years in medicine, which began in 1961 or even earlier with premed, I met a few very colorful teachers. From time to time, I would like to profile some of them lest they be forgotten as people and remain only an entry in a dusty bound volume in a library. One such was a neurosurgeon named Aidan Raney. When I began to do a little research on him, I found that Google searches turn up only his son, a very good cardiac surgeon in Newport Beach. I remember the son as a high school student I met once.

When I was a third year medical student, my medical school had a program in which students could spend a summer with private practice physicians to see what the life was like. I spent a summer with Aidan Raney. I wasn’t so much interested in neurosurgery but wanted to see more of it before I committed myself to a career. Doctor Raney had been the first neurosurgery resident at the new Los Angeles County Hospital after it opened in 1933. The old hospital, now torn down, had been in service since about 1913. The University of Southern California medical school, which had closed in 1920 as a consequence of the Flexner Report, reopened when the new hospital opened and graduated its first class in 1932.

Read more

The Erector Set

by

This is my maiden post as a new Chicago Boy so I thought I would recycle a post from my own blog that might be of interest.

My grandson’s birthday was two weeks ago, and his father’s is next weekend. I thought I would give him (the grandson) a toy that I was sure he had never heard of, an Erector Set. I have a medical connection, as well as a childhood connection, with this toy, now largely forgotten. I had Lionel trains when I was a child in Chicago and eventually had HO gauge trains, as well. When I had sons old enough to play with trains, I built an elaborate train set in my garage. Then I learned that southern California is not the place for toy trains. The boys were outdoors all the time and the train set gathered dust.

Few kids today will have the chance to enjoy the Erector Set. Like so many cold climate toys, it is never seen in southern California. I wonder how many sets are sold in Chicago ? There   is still a small source for this toy; but the glory days of the Erector Set were long ago. The toy was invented by A.C. Gilbert; in 1913. The story is interesting. Gilbert was a Yale Medical School graduate and had also won a gold medal, for the pole vault, in the 1908 Olympic Games. He built a new design bamboo pole that he used in his winning vault and he sold these, as well as other toys.

Like many residents of New Haven, Connecticut, he often took the train to New York City; and on one trip in 1911 he was inspired with what would be the most popular of his dozens of inventions.

Watching out the train window as some workmen positioned and riveted the steel beams of an electrical power-line tower, Gilbert decided to create a children’s construction kit: not just a toy, but an assemblage of metal beams with evenly spaced holes for bolts to pass through, screws, bolts, pulleys, gears and eventually even engines. A British toy company called Meccano Company was then selling a similar kit, but Gilbert’s Erector set was more realistic and had a number of technical advantages — most notably, steel beams that were not flat but bent lengthwise at a 90-degree angle, so that four of them nested side-to-side formed a very sturdy, square, hollow support beam.

Gilbert began selling the “Mysto Erector Structural Steel Builder” in 1913, backed by the first major American ad campaign for a toy. The Erector set quickly became one of the most popular toys of all time: living rooms across the country were transformed into miniature metropoles, filled with skyscrapers, bridges and railways. Those kids who already owned a set would beg Santa annually for an upgrade, aiming for the elusive “No. 12 1/2” deluxe kit that came with blueprints for the “Mysterious Walking Giant” robot. It is difficult for anyone under the age of 35 today to appreciate just how popular the Erector set was for over half a century.

Now, it happens that I have a personal connection to the Erector Set. In the early 1970s, a patient was referred to me with an esophageal stricture. He was in his 90s and had been told he was too old for a major operation like that. He and his wife had emigrated from England in 1913 and he was looking for a job as an engineer, when he met A.C. Gilbert, who was having trouble selling his new toy. Gilbert had invented the Erector Set and had built a few samples of what could be constructed using the new kit of materials but the set consisted of lots of perforated metal pieces and machine screws and nuts. The challenge was to design structures that children, with some parental help perhaps, could build. I had a set at the age of six and spent hours with it.

Gilbert needed someone to build sample structures using the set and write instructions on how to build them. He took the job and spent years working on new designs and instruction books. The first Christmas after he began work for Gilbert, the giant New York City department stores, Macy’s and Gimbel’s, wanted sample structures to help sell the toys. My patient built a huge suspension bridge for one store, that crossed over the cash registers, which in those days were arranged like the check-out lines in today’s supermarkets. The bridge was over 20 feet long. As soon as the other store saw his bridge, they wanted one just like it. He built another and the toy’s popularity took off. For years, he worked for Gilbert although, when I knew him, he had been retired to San Clemente for years.

He and his wife were in good health with the exception of this stricture that was so tight that he could only swallow liquids. It was a consequence of esophageal reflux and the scarring that chronic reflux produces.   He was very lucky that it had not developed a cancer.   He subsisted on apple sauce and other pureed food that would not pass through the stricture until he jumped up and down while standing against the wall. Every few mouthfuls, he had to stand up and jump until the food went down. He had been told he was too old to have it fixed, or even dilated, and his only option was some sort of feeding tube. Needless to say, he was skinny and the operation seemed to be feasible to me. Larry Mathis, a long time GP surgeon in San Clemente was his GP and Larry and I decided to try to fix his stricture. At surgery, his esophagus, just above the stomach where most benign strictures occur, was so tight that it split when I tried to dilate it from below with my finger. There is a procedure called a Thal Patch(pdf). It is used to close esophageal perforations such as traumatic tears and ruptures, like the Boerhaave’s Syndrome. In this case, I had created the hole in the esophagus by tearing open the stricture. I made a Thal patch from his stomach and closed the hole without recreating the narrow section. The surgery worked and he recovered very well. He hadn’t been able to eat solids in over five years. As a reward, he told me his story.

A few years later, he presented with symptoms of acute cholecystitis but at surgery I found a cancer of the colon next to the gallbladder. About   a year later he died of the cancer, having nearly reached the age of 100.

A.C. Gilbert also invented a number of other toys that were Christmas traditions for half a century. They included chemistry sets, physics sets and even a nuclear radioactivity set that included a Geiger counter. I had several of these, including the radioactive set. Those were the days before TV when children played with educational toys and were not so self-conscious about it. Today, the ATF would probably raid the basement of a child who had one of those sets.