Frontier Surgeon or Ferdinand and Hermann’s Excellent Frontier Adventure

The practice of medicine in these United (and for the period 1861-1865, somewhat disunited) States was for most of the 19th century a pretty hit or miss proposition, both in practice and by training. That many sensible people possessed pretty extensive kits of medicines – the modern equivalents of which are administered as prescriptions or under the care of a licensed medical professional – might tend to indicate that the qualifications required to hang out a shingle and practice medicine were so sketchy as to be well within the grasp of any intelligent and well-read amateur, and that many a citizen was of the opinion that they couldn’t possibly do any worse with a D-I-Y approach. Such was the truly dreadful state of affairs generally when it came to medicine in most places and in all but the last quarter of the 19th century – they may have been better off having a go on their own at that.

Most doctors trained as apprentices to a doctor with a current practice. There were some formal schools of medicine in the United States, but their output did not exactly dazzle with brilliance. Successful surgeons of the time possessed two basic skill sets; speed and a couple of strong assistants to hold the patient down, until he was done cutting and stitching. Most of the truly skilled doctors and surgeons had their training somewhere else – like Europe.

But in San Antonio, from 1850 on – there was a doctor-surgeon in practice, who ventured upon such daring medical remedies as to make him a legend. His patients traveled sometimes hundreds of miles to take advantage of his skill …

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The Art Of Hipgnosis

I was having a drink one night reading an article about someone’s “favorite things” and they mentioned an out-of-print book from the ’70s about the firm Hipgnosis that designed iconic album covers. Literally 5 or so clicks later I ordered it from my iPhone through Amazon and it recently arrived (amazing what the Internet can do).

Hipgnosis was the name of the now-defunct firm that produced all the record covers that you have in your collection from the era when a record cover was a work of art, something to look at for hours on end while the music played over your stereo (or headphones). Wikipedia has a good summary of the firm here and also the main designer (Storm Thogerson) here who even today still creates great CD Covers (it doesn’t sound the same, I admit) for bands like Muse. Here is a great site (non official) of Hipgnosis material, as well.

I was very impressed with these record covers growing up. At that time the internet didn’t exist so unless you went to a show and saw the band “in the flesh” or read a music magazine (which I never paid for) at a magazine stand you didn’t know much about the band “behind the music” so these iconic images helped you to imagine what the band stood for. Plus Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and similar artists never really toured the states when I was at an age to afford to attend shows so their “message” came through on album covers, posters, and sleeves.

Some of the album art that Hipgnosis made from the ’70s era is from great bands and albums like “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway”, the Pink Floyd classics, and the Led Zeppelin era, as well as the Peter Gabriel unnamed solo albums. These bands seemed to stand well with the images.

I am a huge Michael Schenker / UFO fan and loved their covers, too, except I didn’t really understand them (especially “Force It” with the gleaming bathroom appliances). Obsession with the “ball bearing” images didn’t make the book but it also was iconic.

Then you get the more obscure bands like Montrose (Sammy Hagar’s band before he went solo) with their “arty” covers. Some of the band covers are hilarious when juxtaposition-ed against the fact that much of the underlying music was awful. Obviously these images were damn racy in the day; when I bought the book there were photocopies from a xerox machine inside the book of some of the racier album covers involving human body parts. These photocopies were likely 15 years old (nowadays way racier stuff is everywhere in the internet).

I also like the logos (in the collage) and the inside sleeve from “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”. Hipgnosis really did outstanding work and I highly recommend the book if you can find it. The book is organized in a somewhat “cheeky” fashion (they are British, after all) with the famous “Flying Pig” over the power station for “Animals” filed under the category “Fiascos”.

Cross posted at LITGM

One of my Least-Favorite Politicians

…out of a wide range of potential choices, is Rep Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). I first became aware of this reprehensible individual after seeing the incredibly arrogant letter that she wrote to Kathleen Fasanella (of the blog Fashion Incubator) in response to Kathleen’s attempts to call attention to the harm being done to many small manufacturers by the ill-thought-out CPSIA legislation.

There are lots of reasons to dislike Schakowsky (see this, for example)—another such reason made its appearance Wednesday with her assertion, in an attempt to defend Obama’s suppression of the Keystone Pipeline project, that “Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs, and investing in green technologies will produce that and more.”

Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs?

There is of course a huge difference between a project funded with private money that will act to reduce America’s energy costs and increase its industrial competitiveness, and one funded with taxpayer money (much of it undoubtedly going to politically-well-connected corporations) which would quite likely act to increase America’s energy costs and thereby reduce its industrial competitivness. Perusal of Schakowsky’s bio reveals no experience at all working in the private sector, of course.

Whatever one thinks of the Pipeline and of various “alternative energy” options, surely it should be obvious to all that this CongressCreature’s cavalier dismissal of twenty thousand jobs should be considered unacceptable arrogance on the part of any American officeholder. It is a level of arrogance that, unfortunately, has become far too common among the government classes.

WBEZ: Chicago-area firms looking to veterans to help with NATO, G-8 security

Some private security firms around Chicago are looking to beef up their ranks with Iraq and Afghanistan war vets ahead of two world summits that are expected to bring multitudes of protesters to the city this spring.

The article states that the security firms are interested in hiring veterans because they are likely to show “better restraint” if the protests turn violent. Interesting.

And I really hope any protests don’t turn violent.

Update: Thanks to Carl Prine’s Line of Departure for highlighting the above article/ad and mentioning this blog-within-a-blog. Second City Cop has a post on the topic and lots on the upcoming summit, too. Just keep scrolling.