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Snippets

Like many of us, I have had a lot of insect bites. Most are only aggravating—the itching of mosquito bites. But sometimes they are more serious. I got what I thought was a wasp bite on a sandal-shod foot. It felt as if a cigarette was being put out on me. The calf ballooned. The doctor gave me an antibiotic that in due course brought back my lovely looking leg which — in days of yore — drew compliments. Years later I got a bite on my elbow, which did not seem to be anything important. But I developed a fever and soon the temperature was hitting levels that I had seldom had. The elbow became more and more tender, and when it was bumped and I let out a little scream, I finally went to the doctor, who again prescribed an antibiotic. This time it did not work, and I went back to the doctor. He said he was sending me to the hospital. I needed an antibiotic that had to be injected for several days in a row or delivered by an IV drip. He could not do it because his office was closing for summer vacation. I said that I did not want to go to the hospital. The spouse, who was with me, spoke up, “Couldn’t I inject him?” The doctor looked askance, but the spouse told him that she had gone to medical school and had gotten a Ph.D. She continued that she ran a research lab and regularly injected animals. He did not ask with what. He did say, “Maybe it’s possible.” The spouse: “Where does the injection go?” The doctor: “In the ass.” Saucers. The spouse’s eyes became as big as saucers. “Ohhhhhh, I can do that,” she convincingly said, and the doctor consented. She injected me over the next few days, and I got better. The injections hurt, but not much. When they were through, the spouse said, “That was FUN.”

A character in Death Comes for the Fat Man by Reginald Hill gives marital advice: “Never give your wife a surprise she doesn’t know about.”

Our president said recently that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war hero and continued, “I guess I am, too.” His act of martial bravery in his estimation was ordering the bombing of Iran. In the eyes of many including the prosecutors of the International Criminal Court, Netanyahu is a war criminal for Israel’s actions in Gaza. And Trump, who has supported those actions?

A recent article in The New Yorker by David K. Kirkpatrick quotes an ethics expert who says that “when it comes to using his public office to amass personal profits, Trump is a unicorn—no one else even comes close.” Another presidential observer concludes that the Trumps “have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House.” But while Trump’s monetization of public office may far outstrip all others, other presidents have benefited from their presidential actions, including our first chief executive. The Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania sought to prevent taxes on whiskey. George Washington personally led troops to suppress the insurrection. Easterners, including the first president, had long speculated in western lands. Land values soared after Washington’s actions; properties were sold; and profits were taken. Brady J. Crytzer in his book The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis states, “Later, when speaking of the insurrection in terms of his personal wealth, the president admitted, ‘this event having happened at the time it did was fortunate.’”

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Chasing Waterfalls (continued)

I came to the art gallery on our trip searching for waterfalls to look at art from the Depression, but to my surprise, I found myself thinking about economics and the future of the country. Also to my surprise, I found myself thinking about a disease that ravaged the world throughout most of our history.

The art gallery displaying WPA paintings in Mt. Morris, New York, was in a building that had once been part of a tuberculosis sanitarium. That disease, in earlier times called consumption, was a common disease throughout most of history. In the nineteenth and twentieth century it was often associated with artists. John Keats died from it when he was twenty-five. Franz Kafka died from TB when he was forty. The deaths of Amedeo Modigliani and Aubrey Beardsley were caused or hastened by tuberculosis. The disease, however, was not limited to the creative but widespread in all classes of society. And it was a killer; two-thirds who got the active form died from it. One in every four or five deaths in England and France in 1900 were from TB.

Until the late nineteenth century, it was believed that TB was hereditary. Something in the biological makeup of a person produced the disease. However, in 1882 the German doctor and microbiologist Robert Koch discovered it was caused by a bacillus and that it was contagious. This led to movements to limit the contagion in various ways such as posters warnin against the kissing of infants and laws against spitting. (When I moved to New York, the subways still had signs stating that spitting was prohibited. I did not notice when they came down.)

The sanitarium movement also began. It was believed that TB sufferers would best recover if they were removed from the general population to a place with healthy air, nutritious food, and the opportunity for exercise, which generally meant walking. Hundreds of sanitariums, often on mountains, hills, or in a desert, were established. Stays often lasted many years, and perhaps each facility developed its own society and culture akin to the one created in the maddening and marvelous novel Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

Still the hardships of the sanitariums were real. Families may have been allowed to visit, but for the most part the inmates were cut off most of the time from friends and relatives, and their access to constructive and meaningful activity was limited. Not surprisingly, even though the amount of money spent on them was enormous, the quality of the facilities varied, and they probably did little good. As with many medical treatments over the ages, no evidence shows that sanitarium stays were efficacious in the treatment of TB. A lot of money was spent and a lot of lives were disrupted with nothing to show for it. Instead, tuberculosis only waned in this country when antibiotics found in the 1940s were shown to attack the bacillus. The later discovery of a vaccine further controlled the disease. By 1971, when the Mt. Morris sanitarium closed, most such TB facilities were shutting down.

Some of the institutions have been torn down. Some are just decaying hulks. Many like the one in Mt. Morris have been repurposed. Indeed, the building and grounds that once held hundreds of patients and medical personnel now makes a lovely campus for county offices.

I have heard that many of the old sanitariums are haunted. I did not gain any firsthand knowledge of ghosts in Mt. Morris. But we were still expecting more firsthand knowledge of waterfalls as our trip continued. . . .

(continued sporadically)