Dr. Holmes, Part 2

The brilliant Sherlock Holmes is certainly the most famous detective, for that matter character, in all of literature. The Guinness Book of World Records lists him as the “most portrayed movie character” of all time. Over 70 different actors have portrayed him in over 200 films. We are of course dazed by his wealth of knowledge and unequalled sleuthing skills, but we are mesmerized by his personality and presence—his self-absorption, his addiction, his passion and his egotism. “Excellent! I cried. Elementary, said he” is Watson’s correct account of that famous conversation with his friend, the one that lives on in movies in its misquoted form, “Elementary, my dear Watson”.

The real Dr. Holmes was the Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Harvard Medical School in 1847 when one month after Halloween the school was closed by a coroner’s jury. They spent the next week gathering evidence in the form of Dr. Parkman’s dismembered body. They found his jaw with its teeth and an identifying gold filling in the furnace of Dr. John Webster’s lab. Dr. Webster, a chemistry professor, was heavily in debt to the wealthy Parkman. In those days a professor was paid from the receipts of tickets bought by students to attend his lectures. Apparently, neither Dr. Webster nor his subject was too popular. His murder trial and the precedent it created in case law, however, were sensational. When Charles Dickens came to America he asked to tour the crime scene. The conviction on the basis of circumstantial evidence is part of American legal history.

Unlike the unfortunate Dr. Webster, Dr. Holmes was a masterful lecturer. His craft took root in his days as a Harvard undergrad where at 5’2” his sport was lively conversation. He joined the Hasty Pudding Club where he wrote and performed comedic poems and skits. His wit followed him into the lecture hall. He added spice to Anatomy and Physiology with puns and poetry in the form of mnemonic devices, at times of a ribald nature. When the four month term was over he would take his act on the road. Every city and most small towns had a lyceum. In the Age before movies and Comedy Theater, speakers like Holmes would tour the country and provide entertainment for the locals. His favorite topics were poetry, especially Byron, and homeopathy, a practice he railed against. “The causes of disease,” he said, “have been less earnestly studied in the eagerness of the search for remedies.”

Doctors in the 1800s still used bleeding and cure-all elixirs for any and all ailments. Holmes was schooled in Paris in the French methode expectante, a sort of therapeutic nihilism that instructed the physician not to do harm and to keep the patient going long enough to allow the body to heal itself. He was taught to observe. This training led him to collect hundreds of cases of postpartum infection into an historic paper, "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever". His claim that doctors and midwives spread infection to mothers giving birth was not accepted by mainstream medicine for another twelve years. His recommendations that practitioners involved in infection cases stay away from future deliveries saved many lives. His scientific method was a model, that when applied to other ailments, saved many more.

Holmes was an educator and an entertainer. He did not pretend to be a genius or scholar. “Nothing is so commonplace as to wish to be remarkable,” he said. He did not invent the use of ether in surgery but he came up with a name for it, anesthesia. He was no Keats, but his simple rhyme, “Old Ironsides” inspired mainstream America and helped save the USS Constitution from the scrapheap. His unwillingness to show proper reverence to religion or to take sides with “moral bullies” like the Abolitionists in the pre-Civil War years got him in trouble in the press. “I don’t want to be bullied into heaven by the pulpit—neither do I wish to be called hard names to make me better or more humane.” For a public figure, he was certainly naïve. He just preferred to see the good in people, humor in difficult situations and be a conciliator. Not surprisingly, University politics did not suit his temperament. Next week, his transition to 19th Century blogger.

The Real Dr. Holmes, Part 1

Barbara, Alison and I pulled off Route 7 just north of Great Barrington, MA on a brisk, clear New England morning. We parked the car at the base of Monument Mountain in front of a stand of red pines. Amid the pines stood our guide, grizzly gray beard, layered clothes, leather knife case attached to his belt. As he stood there silent, our senses sharpened and tuned into the autumnal Berkshire setting before us. I felt the soft cushion of pine needles under my hiking shoes. I smelled the air, heavy with pine, but also with the mustiness of fallen leaves. There was no mist and through the trees I could see the hint of a white faced cliff.

We started off on our trail, in skiing terms a blue slope. It rose gently, winding around the side of the mountain instead of attacking it head on in double black diamond fashion. It was one of several trails used over the years by Mohegan Indians, loggers, horse drawn wagons, charcoal makers and local pleasure seekers. The most famous of those pleasure seekers was a group in 1850 that included Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. The outing that August morning made such an impression on the adventurers that five out of ten of them wrote about it in letters or journals, preserving the day in history and giving us, 159 years later, an accurate account of their actions and impressions.

Herman Melville was in the process of writing a nautical adventure. The inspiration for the book came from the profile of Mt. Greylock, a whale shaped mount to the north of Great Barrington. He was behind schedule with his editor who was encouraging him to befriend Hawthorne, a shy New England author who had just completed The Scarlett Letter. The two of them hit it off so well, that according to Melville, the advice and encouragement he got from Hawthorne that day put him back on track, and shaped the rest of Moby Dick. The odd man out was a third author, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. He however, brought the champagne, and was happy to pass it among his comrades. It seems that the good doctor kept a healthy dose in reserve for himself, and when the group reached Squaw’s Peak, he acted like the Harvard undergrad he once was, leaning out over the cliff’s edge, scaring his friends. We climbed that peak and I can tell you, it’s a long way down from the top.

Most of us know the name, Oliver Wendell Holmes from the doctor’s son, OWH, Jr., the “Great Dissenter” who served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. Holmes, Sr., though, is the one who intrigues me. He did more than just hang out on that limb. He was a great American in his own right. His medical writings presaged the discoveries of Pasteur in germ theory. As Dean of the Harvard Medical School he challenged the white establishment by admitting 3 black students. He was a poet, inventor and leading thinker of his time. Next week I will tell you more about his life and explore my growing kinship with him. I hope he will inspire you as he did another physician and author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose brilliant detective, Sherlock Holmes, was modeled after the real Dr. Holmes.

http://www.thetrustees.org/what-we-care-about/history-culture/hawthorne-melville.html

Take That!

William Safire died last month. He was best known as a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, the one who armed Nixon’s attack dog VP, Spiro T. Agnew, with alliterative phrases like “nattering nabobs of negativism”. I’m sure it delighted him, a man that boasted about being a college dropout that he could send us all hunting frantically for our dictionaries in order to understand the insults hurled our way. Though I now know that a nabob is a person of wealth or influence (initially a Mogul governor), I still see one as a bobblehead doll that somehow nods “no” when jiggled. If such a doll did exist, I would have one made of me, just to send to college with my kids. Whenever that devil would pop up over their left shoulder trying to lead them astray, they could consult me with a mere tap of the bobblehead and get my counsel, “NO. NO. NO”.

I used to look forward every Sunday to Safire’s New York Times Magazine column “On Language”. It was unique and clever, only at times espousing his conservative political views, but always letting the reader know who was right—he was. I asked him once to help me find the origins of the phrase “I keep the ends out for the tie that binds” from Johnny Cash’s “I Walk The Line”, but he never wrote back. Now I’ll never know.

George Carlin died one year ago. He was my other favorite word maven. He was also self-educated, a New York high school dropout and, like Safire, proud of it. Many of his stand-up routines revolved around words and their meanings. Most were crack-a-smile humorous like “If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?” Others were more over the edge like his “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television”. That one got him arrested many times but never convicted. You can read the routine on line as it is quoted in the Supreme Court Decision of FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION v. PACIFICA FOUNDATION, 438 U.S. 726, 98 S.Ct. 3026 (1978). Read it at http://www.georgecarlin.com/.

Do you remember who was the first host on Saturday Night Live? It was George Carlin. He came back from the future in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and down from heaven in “Dogma”. “Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.” That attitude probably led him to be the original conductor on “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”. He inspired the likes of Richard Pryor and Howard Stern but was able to calm his demons early in his mid-life and never burn out (up?) or become ugly. Without him and Safire my Sunday night forecast is “dark,” but like George knew, “turning to widely scattered light in the morning”.

Before I sign off I’d like to leave you with a word and a phrase. The word is tennis. It is derived from the French “tenys” meaning “take this” or “take that”. The origins of our modern game of tennis are in a 14th Century game played by French monks. Apparently the game involved a lively repartee and, a la Monty Python’s medieval knights, the monks would often hurl insults at each other along with the ball. Ergo, “take that”.

The phrase is: give and take. It’s a lot nicer than the in your face, “take that”. There are any number of aphorisms about giving, but my favorite came to me from my mother-in law, JoAnn, who died before Barbara and I met. She said that in every marriage if you’re not giving 95%, you’re not giving enough. Now, even though at times I choose to take it as “okay, I only have to do 5% of the work around here” or “if I’m giving 10% I’m exceeding my wife’s expectations by 100%,” I usually take the advice to heart and give it a try.

As we head off to a joyous family wedding my thoughts are with the soon to be married couple and my wish for them to choose and use their words wisely, often and with a sense of humor, and to give and take, always giving, always taking and never forgetting the flexible give and take.

Special thanks to Valerie Byrnes, a genius of bobblehead.

In-Goo We Trust, PLEASE!

Henny Youngman arrived early to the theater. He needed to go backstage to get ready for his act and asked a stagehand to find seats for his wife and friends. “Take my wife, please” was the innocent remark he made, but the stagehand thought it was a joke and laughed. Did Sadie blush? Did she laugh with the stagehand or cut Henny a dirty look and give it to him when they got back home? What about the friends? Did they laugh or were they embarrassed for poor Mrs. Youngman who said nothing but meekly allowed herself to be led to a seat? Maybe the remark wasn’t as innocent as Henny claims. In any event, he used the line in his act for the next 40+ years, along with many others, much worse, that would test the limits of any marriage. He and his wife stayed together until she died after over 60 years together.

Rodney Dangerfield and the mother of his two children had a much shorter and stormier marriage. He gave up on the comedy business in his twenties to work selling aluminum siding. He tried to provide for his young family but went broke anyway. He gave comedy a second go at 40, but by that time he and his wife were history. Despite the lousy marriage, Rodney’s jokes, unlike Henny’s , were not at the expense of his wife. His humor was self-deprecating. He was almost always the butt of his own wife jokes. “My wife likes to talk to me during sex. The other night she called me from the motel.”

Henny would work and then work some more—he was known to do a big show, then go to his hotel and try to find a bar mitzvah or some other private party to entertain for 15 minutes and 150 bucks. His credo was the Yiddish for “Get the cash”. Rodney was happy to make the bigger bucks too, but he would blow it on alcohol, drugs and women. His jokes were funny, but his big attraction was his persona. Of course he got “no respect” because after a cruel childhood of neglect and his struggles with marriage and career, he didn’t feel he deserved any. He fought depression and got high every day of his adult life. His trademark bug-eyed look of confusion, head to the side, hand pulling at his open collar and tie was born when he forgot his lines on stage at the Ed Sullivan Show. Ed thought it was brilliant and it was. We laugh at his discomfort like we laugh when Curley is hit by Moe or when Laurel cries at Hardy’s verbal abuse.

Many of us small folk try to get a laugh from time to time, not always with success and at times with unforeseen bad repercussions. A freshman at Tufts tried his hand at comedy and suffered for it at the clenched fists of every politically correct organization on campus including the school administration. It happened this year during a campaign for student office. A female student of Chinese ancestry put up a poster with her picture and the phrase, “Small stature, big ideas”. In-Goo Kwak, himself of Korean origin (but perhaps Daily Show suckling), put up a poster next to hers with his picture and his slogan, “Squinty eyes, big vision”. In-Goo apologized and avoided suspension. The student body was divided, but many rose in his defense and in an expression of anti-PC-ishness actually elected him to the school’s ethics board. Go figure. They like him. They like him.

If they like you, like they say in Chicago’s Razzle Dazzle that I referenced last week, you can “get away with murder”. Take Bill Clinton. He had W.C. Fields' smile and George Burns’ cigar, screwed around, lied to Congress, got impeached and rode it all the way to the bank. Now he goes around trying to act presidential. That makes me laugh. God forbid Hillary should ever try to tell a joke. She’s smart enough not to.

So I got this problem. Every now and then I try to be funny. What could be wrong with that? Let me tell you. First, look at that picture—the stiff in the suit. Nothing funny about him. Second, you may not really like me. I act too serious and am one of those doctor types who knows a bit too much and does some uncomfortable sounding things. Third, maybe you’re not like Sadie, shy and totally devoted. As Carly Simon said, “You probably think this song is about you”. I know what Lenny Bruce would tell you…but I’m no Lenny Bruce. Friends, it’s not about you. If anyone is to be the butt around here, let it be me. Q: What’s a colonoscope? A: A medical instrument with an A-hole at both ends. ,PLEASE!

And All That Jazz

Thank you, friends, for your encouragement, support and critical comment on my new creative effort. The comments have been varied, from “WOW” to “Gotcha” (a clever play on my “I get you” plus “I’m wi’cha”), to “I don’t read blogs, take me off your list”. One professional media type liked my writing. Another former editor advised me to stick to topics in which I had some expertise—as in, who wants to hear about tennis from an over the hill suburban swim and tennis club weekend hacker? Once my dander got back down I got to thinking. Did my column reveal an obvious lack of expertise on tennis, or am I unqualified because I was never a tennis professional? Does having a father who loved to tell jokes and a Jewish mother give me the street cred to get up on stage and try my hand at a High Holiday, half asleep Jewish joke/holiday greeting or do we all have to stick to Seinfeld reruns? In this era of reality TV we see examples daily of delusional clowns who really think they have talent. As standout talent is rare, the major entertainment value of the shows is not in the discovery or display of real talent, but rather in the spectacle of us mortal folk reacting to harsh criticism and ridicule. It’s not easy. Still, I’m not delusional. Though I still fantasize about being a star professional baseball player (Sorry ladies, that’s what your men fantasize about too), I know the difference between a job and a hobby. I take a small measure of personal satisfaction in having more maturity and insight than say, Michael Jordan. He was the best basketball player ever and he left it all for what? Baseball. Then there’s A Rod. Now he’s got a real problem. You see, he’s already a baseball star. So what is he to do when he gets bored with his day job? You got it. He’s got to fantasize about sex. How else do you explain that Madonna thing?

So, there are jobs and there are hobbies. I’d like to be able to write about both, and maybe even about stuff I know nothing about. If I have fun writing it and you, the readers, are entertained, does it really matter if I’m no expert? If it does to you, don’t read the blog. I’d be happy to take you off the list.

Humor me a bit longer. I’ve still got this bug up my ass about expertise. What is it? Can it be objectified, rated, certified and licensed, and if so, who gets to do all that? Once the experts have spoken is there any voice left for us little people? Sorry. This is getting a bit heavy for this humble country doctor’s fledgling blog. I may be a gastroenterologist, but in my family I’m not even the most expert on bugs up the ass—that title would go to Lindsay, staff researcher for TV’s Monsters Inside Me.

Some random favorites and then I’ll sign off…

Wizard of Oz: They have one thing you haven't got: a diploma. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitartus Committiartum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of ThD.
Scarecrow: ThD?
Wizard of Oz: That's... Doctor of Thinkology.

D.A. Jim Trotter: Now, uh, Ms. Vito, being an expert on general automotive knowledge, can you tell me... what would the correct ignition timing be on a 1955 Bel Air Chevrolet, with a 327 cubic-inch engine and a four-barrel carburetor?
Mona Lisa Vito: It's a bullshit question.
D.A. Jim Trotter: Does that mean that you can't answer it?
Mona Lisa Vito: It's a bullshit question, it's impossible to answer.
D.A. Jim Trotter: Impossible because you don't know the answer!
Mona Lisa Vito: Nobody could answer that question!
D.A. Jim Trotter: Your Honor, I move to disqualify Ms. Vito as a "expert witness"!
Judge Chamberlain Haller: Can you answer the question?
Mona Lisa Vito: No, it is a trick question!
Judge Chamberlain Haller: Why is it a trick question?
Vinny Gambini: [to Bill] Watch this.
Mona Lisa Vito: 'Cause Chevy didn't make a 327 in '55, the 327 didn't come out till '62. And it wasn't offered in the Bel Air with a four-barrel carb till '64. However, in 1964, the correct ignition timing would be four degrees before top-dead-center.
D.A. Jim Trotter: Well... um... she's acceptable, Your Honor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn5-VN3SH1o&feature=fvw

“Long as you keep ‘em way off balance, how can they spot ya got no talents?” And all that jazz.