Dalrymple In Praise of Folly

The Blind-spots of Our Mind
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78334-142-9
Verlag: Gibson Square
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Travelling to the hard-living Dylan Thomas's Boathouse in Laugharne, Wales, psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple considered along the way another foible - the folly of eminent people. Praised for their attainments in one area, high-achievers are more often than not prone to unexpected failings elsewhere. Enter a large cast of anti- and vivisectionists, surgeons, theologians, philosophers, admirals, judges, astrophysicists, Nazi-leaning homoeopaths, and writers such as D.H.?Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, P.G. Wodehouse, and Conan Doyle. In his pithy and amusing style, Dalrymple casts a sobering light on an insuppressible trait of ours - the fallibility of the human mind.

Theodore Dalrymple is a psychiatrist who acts as expert-witness in murder trials. After working as a doctor in Africa and the Gilbert Islands, he returned to Britain and has worked in prisons and hospitals in the East End of London, the Midlands, and Birmingham. He is a contributor to The Times, Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, Spectator, and the British Medical Journal. He is the author of several books, including the acclaimed Spoil Rotten, The Knife Went In, Litter, and the Pleasure of Thinking.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dalrymple, Theodore

Leseproben

4 Pain in the Room: Shocking Pink

There used to be a second-hand bookshop in Ludlow, but there is no longer. It was there that, a number of years before, I had bought the shocking-pink-covered refutation of Gibbon’s famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, the chapters in which he explained the rise of Christianity not by the workings of divine providence, but by operation of secular causes—not all of them flattering to the religious point of view. Second-hand bookshops can barely survive, however, in fashionable towns such as Ludlow. The rents are too high, and the general public, which has an infinite appetite for ornaments, alternative medicine and health- food products, has none at all for musty old books.

Nonetheless, there still is an antiquarian bookseller in Ludlow. By coincidence I had bought a book from him through the internet shortly before, and the friends whom we were visiting were friends of his. I had never met him and, Ludlow being small, he was but a short walk away. His business was entirely online, but he welcomed visitors such as I, whose main discretionary expenditure was on books.

He lived in a beautiful eighteenth-century house, wonderfully furnished. We discussed briefly the state of the trade—very bad and getting worse. The problem was that the last generation to be interested in old books was thinning out and was not being replaced by young people from a generation increasingly obsessed by electronic gadgetry and who regarded a page on a screen as a long text. Like Talleyrand before the French Revolution, we felt that no one who had not known the pleasures of the browse through antiquarian book shelves had known the full sweetness of life. Though I did not like to interrupt our nostalgia, the strange thing was that the price of old books was not falling. If fewer people were interested in them, surely their price should fall? This paradox, he pinned to the fact that the older book-loving generation may have reduced in size, but its economic power had increased compared to the young.

We went down into his capacious cellar where his books were ranged. He showed me a first edition in English, in pristine condition, of Newton’s , with the title , a marvellous book for those alive not only to its content (the greatest intellectual advance, said Einstein, that it has ever been given to one man to make) but to the physical beauty of early eighteenth century scientific illustration and diagrams. I hardly dared hold it for, not having been raised in the midst of precious objects, I have a habit of dropping or otherwise damaging the most valuable things out of sheer nervousness; besides which I did not want to give the impression that I might possibly buy such a book.

Left alone among the shelves, I was as happy as a bookworm. I can spend hours reading the first paragraphs of a thousand books, no matter how recondite their subject matter. I even relish books with titles such as or . The real bookworm, , must be under evolutionary threat, for its once ubiquitous habitat—mouldy, dark, dusty, dank, and neglected shelves, filled with old books whose paper has not been treated chemically has all but disappeared. When I find an old book with the neat little holes sometimes running through hundreds of pages made by bookworms—pinholed, as the booksellers say—I am filled with admiration for nature’s infinite devices.

Among the cheaper volumes was a biography of Stephen Hales, D.D., F.R.S., by A.E. Clark-Kennedy, published in 1929. Both subject and author were men of great stature—in Clark-Kennedy’s case physical as well as intellectual and moral—and this particular copy of his biography had an interesting biography of its own.

The reverend Stephen Hales was one of those many Church-of-England clergymen who saw in the regularities of the physical world proof of divine providence. By investigating those regularities with painstaking experimentation such clergymen thought that they were performing a religious duty. There are still scientists who believe that uncovering the intricacies of the universe can only increase admiration for, divine wisdom. While there is a great deal of what used, in the eighteenth century, to be called ‘natural evil’ in the world, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and horrible parasitism, occasionally, most often following the first glass of wine after a busy day, I almost share in these clergymen’s oceanic feelings of universal wellbeing. All is right with the world, even if it’s wrong, in the words of Alexander Pope in , 1734:

Safe in the hand of one disposing Pow’r,

Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good:

And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

The reverend Hales was a great scientist with a wide range of interests and a long list of achievements. In those days science could still be done in rectories and he discovered a great deal about the physiology of plants. But from a doctor’s point of view his experiments on the ventilation of ships and prisons in order to reduce gaol fever, and on the circulation of the blood, are what lend him immortality. It was natural for people, including Hales, to have supposed that the epidemics of typhus that killed so many prisoners and sailors arose from the stale and foetid air they breathed in the overcrowded and ill-ventilated spaces in which they were kept. On the assumption that the disease was spread by the air, Hales invented a system of ventilation of Newgate Prison that seemed to reduce the death rate from ‘gaol fever’ very considerably. According to Hales:

‘In the year 1749, of 200 men but one died, and he of the small-pox. And in the year 1750, of 240 who were there three months, but two died. In the year 1751, none died; And, in the year 1752, only one old person died. Whereas, before the ventilators were put up, there often died 50 or 100 of the infectious gaol-distemper.’

In actual fact, typhus is spread by body lice. There were many instances where prisoners spread the disease to the judges in court, whose robes, presumably, were splendidly adapted to harbour lice, and who subsequently died of the same disease as the accused whom they were trying. It is difficult to imagine, the cause of gaol fever being what it was, how Hales’s ventilators could have done much to prevent its spread. Freshening the air, however desirable in itself, would not have reduced the number of body lice harboured by the inmates, which is a consequence of dirt and overcrowding. If Hales’s figures for the deaths in Newgate are accurate, he provides a better explanation for the reduced mortality in the subsequent lines:

‘And what contributes the more to the present healthiness of the place, is that Mr Hayward, the Master of the Prison, continues with the same care and zeal to keep it clean.’

Hales is best-known for having been the first man to have measured blood pressure. He did so to refute the prevalent theory of the time that blood was propelled round the body by the contraction of the muscles through which the blood ran. He wanted to demonstrate that it was propelled instead by the force of the contraction of the heart. The description of his experiment to prove it, published in his book , is alarming:

‘I laid a common field gate on the ground, with some straw upon it, on which a white mare was cast on her right side, and in that posture bound fast to the gate.... Then laying open the left jugular vein, I fixed to that part of it which comes from the head, a glass tube, which was four feet and 2 inches long. The blood rose in it, in 3 or 4 seconds of time about a foot, and then was stationary for 2 or 3 seconds; then in 3 or 4 seconds more, it rose sometimes gradually, and sometimes with an unequally accelerated motion, 9 inches or more, on small strainings of the mare: then upon greater strainings.’

Hales realised that there was a possible objection to his experiment, namely that ‘a considerable stream of blood was for a time stopped’ by the blood in the tubes he had affixed to the mare’s arteries and veins. To meet what he called this ‘inconvenience,’ he says:

‘I fixed tubes laterally to the jugular veins and arteries of dog no 13… having laid the vein or artery bare, I drew a linen cloth under it, to wipe it very dry; and then placed under it one of the above-mentioned slit pieces of wood, laying the vein or artery in its cavity, which was covered with pitch, that was at that instant afresh melted with a small warm iron rod; then pouring the pitch, not very hot, over the vein or artery, I immediately put on the other half of the split wood, which had the hole bored thro’ it, and tied them fast together: then entering the slender point of a knife into the above-mentioned hole.’

Hales discovered many things about blood pressure and the circulation, for example that the pressure was higher the larger the animal, and much lower in veins than in arteries; he discovered that the speed of the pulse is inversely proportionate to the size of the animal; that the blood pressure was at its maximum during systole (contraction of the heart’s largest chambers); that blood loss reduces the blood pressure, and increases the rate of the pulse to compensate; and in general that the state of the circulation depended on many...