Category: Absurdist, Unintentional

Disturbing and Disturbed Obstetrical Devices: Straps, Belts and Iron Bits

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1501

Where does a device like the one, below, belong, exactly? Where in the long rolls of intellectual history should it be found?

E.A. Agerton is actually Ella C. Agerton–it was easy for me to assume that the person Agerton was a man, because to my experience when I find such devices in the patent office archives they are usually made by men. What Ms. Agerton was attempting with this device is something I don’t understand, though she does make the following statement in her Patent Office record:

Here’s another, earlier version of this beast, displayed in practical use. I have to say that the drawing of the woman’s face is deeply disturbed:

I’ve also found quite by chance that the drawings of the faces of the women drawn as “patients” of these devices can be very unsettling, hardly faces at all, even though the representation of the rest of the body is functional. For example, the face of the woman below looks as though it is part of the furniture/device:

The drawings of faces can be so bad that I wonder if anyone can actually be that bad of an artist without trying to be.

None if this even reads comfortably; I don’t know what it would have been like to been trussed up in such a thing.

This leads to another uncomfortable image. At first glance I thought it was part of a delivery procedure, but it turns out that this was the rigging for a woman undergoing a gynecological examination. The woodcut appears in the first volume of Sammelband von 7 Kleinschriften zu gynakologischen Spezialthemen, 1858-1901, and more exactly in the contribution by Ludwig Neugebauer on an examination with a “speculum bivale l’ecarteur vaginal a trios branches…” published in 1884. I know that the prissy prejudices brought about with the coming of Queen Victoria in 1837 still had another 17 years to go at this point, which could explain why, perhaps, a doctor would want an aid in helping a woman maintain an examination position without him having to touch his patient, but, well, just look at the massiveness of the restraints! Also, the woman’s arms are *inside* the ropes—not down, not holding the ropes, but inside the binding, restrained. Either way, it isn’t good, treating the woman—in either case of pregnancy or obstetric examination—as the inferior vessel.

This is also part of a long history of the subjugation of women—the medical aspects of that indoctrination were perhaps somewhat more heinous than the social/legal/ethical/pedagogical/moral constituents. This illustration, even coming at the end of the Victorian era and approaching the dawn of encroaching bits of equality for (white) women, is a fair example of their subordinate status.

I just happened upon this picture during the course of my business day—a random image compiling these thoughts. If I were to try and choose another example of the medical aspect of the subjugation of woman I think that I would choose the story of the Chamberlen family. For several generations, beginning around 1680, this family of medical doctors practiced a secret—their secret—in delivering breeched babies. Breeched babies are those who were born feet first, which was usually a death sentence for both the child and the mother. Patriarch William Chamberlen invented a device that would greatly aid in delivering babies in this position—the forceps. And even though everyone today knows what these things are, the Chamberlens kept them a secret from the inquisitive medical world for more than a century. Their instrument was shrouded—literally!—in secret(s), used under cover, with ceremony, conveyed to the delivery area in a box and brought out with no witnesses. The Chamberlens felt their invention to be their own, for their own particular use and monetary gain, and the rest of the world be damned, and at least three generations (grandfather, father, son) kept the family secret. If their family could not be in charge of such a delivery then there would be no use of their extraordinary invention. This of course would save their income from being chipped away by other physicians or midwives or whatever competent person could be found to utilize the forceps—their economic gain coming at the cost of (savable but imperiled) pregnant women who would either pay the Chamberlens for aid in their breeched births or, well, probably die. To what degree this revolting behavior damaged other people can not be calculated. I’m not even sure about how to translate this into something more recognizable—would it be like Robert Koch keeping his isolation of Bacillus anthracis (1877), or tuberculosis bacillus (1882) a secret? Or Wilhelm Roentgen shrouding his discovery in secrecy somehow? (I know, I know, this is impossible.) Or isolating a secret, proprietary cure for cancer?

There is a large part of me that believes that if the Chamerlens had figured out something like this that affected only men, a silver bullet for something or other, that their secret wouldn’t stayed a secret for 100 hours, let alone 100 years.

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JF Ptak

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Medicine, History of — Technology, History of — Women, History of
The Geology of Hair

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

“The geological formations of the globe already noted are catalogued thus: The Primary, or lower one, consists of rocks, bones or mired mules, gas-pipes, miners’ tools, antique statues minus the nose, Spanish doubloons and ancestors. The Secondary is largely made up of red worms and moles. The Tertiary comprises railway tracks, patent pavements, grass, snakes, mouldy boots, beer bottles, tomato cans, intoxicated citizens, garbage, anarchists, snap-dogs and fools“. (Ambrose Bierce, from the entry “Geology” in The Devil’s Dictionary.)

AS it turns out, the geology of replaced hair, of hair lost, hair forgotten, is rather sedimental. Its a surface category only, with so little underneath, so little actual “geology”, that the underneath part is almost on top. The only thing that seems to have any geological depth to it in the history of toupees is the part, which in most cases doesn’t even exist.

And of course the Trumpian Flip:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas
On the Use of Blood, Bone and Guts -and- the Man Who Painted Dead Chicken Feet

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post–possible revulsion factor

I was looking for something else–mortality rates in Canada for a post on the value of a dead human body in 1860–when I found this book on the use of discarded goods and raw byproduct, a sort of early recycling effort. The work was by Edwin Lankester, and it is called The Uses of Animals in Relation to the Industry of Man; Being a course of lectures delivered at the South Kensington Museum (published in London by Robert Hardwicke in 1860), and the initial data that caught my attention was this:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — History of Goodbye
The Steampunk God and the non-Computer Internet, 1865

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1521

In the weeks following Lincoln’s assassination (14 April 1865) the editors of Punch, or the London Charivari printed this arresting image of an imagined near-future:

And what the future holds is this: the automatic hydraulic teapot (already “sugared and milked”), automatic boot and clothes brushing, auto bread-cutting, carving, cork drawing, sweeping, letter writing, reading…”all done by machinery”. “We shall cook by machinery; we shall have our mashed potatoes by machinery.”

There is no specification about how all of this was going to happen–I’d be very interested about the automatic “letter writing and reading” would be, particularly when we read in the next paragraph, that “Mr. Babbage’s Calculator is a mere mechanical infant to our gradually matured inventions”. The article continues: “From thinking of machinery we shall at last arrive at thinking by machinery, and Man himself shall be, as presented in this initial etching, a mere machine.”

We see in the image that there are all manner of automatons pleasing the seated (mechanical) man, though they are all powered by steam, or friction, or by magnets, all existing power sources and almost everything being doable at that point in time.

And the detail:

And this:

There is a suggestion of a “Finding Fault Machine” but this goes barely beyond its mention–except to say that it would destroy something and become our next “Infernal Engine”. I initially liked the sound of the title of this machine, though it quickly started to seem like a god machine to me–something that could and would have the ability to find faults in things, and then, I guess “correct” them in some sort of Steampunk God way. I’m not very educated in the world of speculative/science fiction to determine how early people began to imagine constructing their own supreme deity, though it seems to me that this must be considered an early effort. I do have large doubt that the Steampunk God is what these folks were talking about since it would most probably be a blasphemy, but there is certainly room to reach that conclusion.

The idea of a popular machine that was somehow associated with either Babbage’s (1791-1871) difference engine or analytical engine (which was a programmable machine that would function with punch cards) and automated or mechanical reading and writing is very intriguing. It is unsure whether the editor was crediting the future with a machine that would provide the imagination behind writing, or provide an instrument that would record thoughts and creativity directly to some medium as they occurred, or what have you. It is an interesting idea left very open-ended to the reader, which remains so even to the modern eye, because what happens with statements like this is that they get back-filled with whatever current technology exists. In 1865, the other innovations depicted for the future were mainly driven by steam, and perhaps this automated writer/reader would be too, something very primitive by our standards today, perhaps some sort of small steam engine that would help dip a quill into an ink pot….or perhaps it was simply something as exotic as a pen with endless ink. But I think if you look hard enough at the statement it is possible to see something like an internet.

And there were 19th-century something-like-an-internet things being imagined, if you can imagine the internet as an entity not created by a computer network, since the “computer” as we know it would not exist for these inventive folks (below) for another 50 or 75 years.

Edison’s was there, of course, imaging a communication device that would show live-action events in which two remote parties could see and talk to one another. A version of his Telephonoscope: appeared in Punch’s Almanack for 1879 and was aimed at the imagination and experience of only the classes of leisure and privilege:

There is also a device like this that appears in Albert Robida’s Le Vingtieme Siecle: la Vie Electrique (1890) , which is an odd but very nicely illustrated look into the future of 1955–most of which has come to pass.

Another sort of live-action and direct communication device was depicted in Camille Flammarion’s La Fin du Monde (1893):

I think though that the most interesting part of Punch’s view of the future must lie in the possible creation of the creator of the universe.

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JF Ptak

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Computer Tech/History — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Technology, History of
Facial Fat and Breast Support

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Posts

I didn’t quite know what to do with this bugger, but it seems so special in and of itself that I thought it deserved to stand alone. I have seen other things like this, as in the post made two days ago on the history of enormous bras, that used stone-age implements in the patent (see below).

This toupee adherer, the thing to which a toupee would be attached, also served as a facial splint–a splint for face fat, the device described as being capable of pulling back the looseness of age.

It seems as though waking up in the morning au natural might be a bit of a shock.

Here’s another prehistoric bit, this on breast support:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Patents — Technology, History of
Shooting Dodos, Square Holes/Round Bits, the non-Future of Movies, and the Race Where Everyone Wins

JF Science Books Post 1519

In a world where everyone wins and no one loses, why can’t we cut a square hole with a round bit. Or vice versa? Well, we can of course, its all just a matter of perspective. The image (below) that started this thought thread down the rabbit hole is of a member of Great Britain’s ruling class, Sir William Houghton, appeared in Punch magazine in 1890 as an illustration in a debate over hunting rights for hares and other small critters, in what seems to have been an attempt to further control the access of the wide working class to certain freedoms. To be honest I haven’t looked at this debate, and I’m not sure why the liberal Sir William is shooting Dodos as rabbits, but the image–independent of what it was intended to represent–seems to be the inside-out, or the reverse-inside-out of what had been the situation with the bird. It would look “wrong” even if you didn’t know the history of the flightless and basically defenseless creature being hunted to extinction, standing in the place of the rabbit. It has an oddness to it, like a very high-pitched tone that floats above a piece of music, a slightly pungent odor coming from a nicely-executed painting. Perhaps it is the the sense of expectation being thrown off just a bit with something like the unexpected-expected.

And then of course there’s the rabbit hole connection. And Alice. And the Dodo.

From Report of Debate on Hares Preservation Bill, June 26.—”They (the other Members of Parliament) could not go out and kill 300 Dodos,”—but evidently he (Sir W.V. HARCOURT) could, and here he is—caught in the act… [He reminds me of a peeing stallion–one of the most majestic poses a horse can strike]

Lewis Carroll’s Alice gets right down to business in her adventures in Wonderland, right from chapter one (“Down the Rabbit Hole”), only a few hundred words into the story¹–down she goes. In one very memorable scene (in a book composed of memorable scenes) Alice meets a Dodo bird (which scholars say is a play on the stuttering Carroll’s real name, Dodgson, or Do-do-ogson), and <things happen> after which the Dodo suggests a “Caucus Race”, being a play on the legislative process in which the Dodo-shooting Sir William participated above.

The deal with the Caucus Race was that there was no set course, necessarily, for any one racer–everyone would run their own course as they chose; so in a self-defined course with no competitors and no rules, racing a race that the race liked, it would be hard to lose. Carroll writes:

“First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn’t matter,’ it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,’ but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!’ and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?’

“This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.”

The rabbit hole was made by the cylindrically-gifted rabbit, though in Carroll’s world the rabbit could’ve been a square, a cube or cube²-something. Or of course the rabbit could’ve made a square hole, or square-squared hole, which probably would’ve been more to Carroll’s taste, approaching a very early thought on square². But people in the three-dimensional world had been working on making square holes with round bits, though coming a bit after Carroll’s time, as in this example:

The device at the bottom of the drill was made to follow and then restrict its cutting motion to that of a square, the device (considerably less wide than the diameter of the bit) cutting and scraping the round hole into a square. Which in its own way reminds me of a motion picture depicted on a polygon, in a movie theatre for example, which began in a somewhat different way, filmed on a circular surface, or at least in one aspect of it. Auguste and Louis Lumiere began the new mass-medium, illustrated here from their Nouvel Appareil Photographique Panoramique Reversible le Photorama (which was printed in Lyon in 1895/6)

The Lumieres claim for “first” as cinematographers is better understood in terms of the motion pictures being a new mass medium. Whereas other inventors and experimenters were earlier–like chronophotography devices constructed by Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey and Ottomar Anschütz, which all produced forms of moving pictures in the decade prior to the Lumieres, but were decidedly not for public consumption. The work of these men, as with that of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope (1891), was intended for scientific and academic consumption; or with the case for Edison, at least, for the amusement of the wealthy classes, as well as for educating the children of the rich. There were certainly others who worked in this area in the 1890’s, but none really fashioned an interest to their invention for the use of one-and-all as did the Lumieres.

Which gets us back to our square rabbit hole. Soon after the Lumiere’s introduced their fabulous new invention, they decided that there was no future whatsoever in the motion picture as a new medium, and abandoned it. They undoubtedly felt a little bit like the square peg in the round hole of the needs of art, and moved on.

___________

Notes:

1. “There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, `Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat- pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.”–Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.

It is highly probable that no artist who ever depicted a Dodo actually saw one.

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JF Ptak

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Anticipation, History of — Outsider Logic — Perception — Perspective
Half-a-Hell Alphabet: U.S. Gazetteer and American “Hell” Lust, “B” to “U”

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1517 (With thanks to Dick Carlson for prompting this skip-along)

[Hell of Botticelli]

In spite of the nature of the name,”Hell” appears in frothy, popular abundance in the U.S. Gazetteer. I suspect that most of the naming was crustily done, and perhaps some were made in spite or jest–but a fair number of them must have been named for the sake of accuracy. Mostly the names are for geographical bits like a canyon, or swamp, bend, landing, gap, lake, creek, neck, pond, bar, gate, hill, basin or pool–the vast majority of them having to do with water more so than flat-out heat or desert. Hell doesn’t always stand alone: there are Upper and Lower Hells, Screaming Hells, Merry Hells, and of course Whole- and Half-Hells.

There’s a peculiar minority that give Hell as the name to uncommon places, like a cemetery; but what I don’t really understand are the few that reach down low, like Hell Street School (Mahoning County, Ohio) and (though less so) the Hell Creek School (Garfield County, Montana). At least “creek” gives a watery lessening to the firey name–Hell Street, like Hell’s Kitchen, just doesn’t sound so great.

There are Hells aplenty in the Gazetteer, Old Hell and New Hell, Hell for Certain and Hell for Sure–I wonder now how many other places in the United States are named for the things that one must do to gain admittance to the Lake of Fire?

And so:

Bar, Old Hell.

Bay, Hell Hole Bay Wilderness (Berkeley County, SC)

Canyon, Hell. (Millard County, CT)

Cat, Hell Cat Bay (Putnam County, FL)

Creek, Hell (Roswell County, KS)

For Certain Creek, Hell (Leslie County, KY)

For Sure Lake, Hell. (Fresno, CA)

Gap, Hell. (Goshen, NY)

Gate, Hell. (NYC)

Hole, Hell (El Dorado County, CA)

Hollow, Hell. (New London County, CT)

Landing, Little Hell (Martin County, SC)

Lower Hell Hole (Placer County, CA)

Neck, Hell. (Glouchester county, VA)

Old Hell Bight (Wayne County, GA)

Pocosin, Hell. (Onslow County, NC)

Point, Hell (Burke County, GA)

Pond, Little Hell. (Burke County, GA)

Screaming Hell Pond (Fayette County, WVa)

Swamp, Half-Hell (Brunswick County, NC–I believe this one)

Tank, Little Hell (Jeff Davis County, TX)

and of course

Upper Hell for Certain School, (Leslie County, KY)

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Alphabets
Darwin, the Movie “Tremors” and the Attack of Giant, Human-Heritage-Eating Worms, 1881

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1517

In the last year or so of his life, Mr. Darwin (who died 19 April 1882, aged 73) published a work that was somewhat outside his main thrust in publishing for the preceding 25 years or so–a work that proved to be quite popular, evidently selling at a better clip than the Origin of Species of 1859.

This was a book on mould, and earthworms.

The formation of vegetable mould, through the action of worms, published in London (in October) by John Murray in 1881, actually went through a number of printings, with more than 7,000 copies sold by the end of 1882. It is a delightful book, and I can well picture the Old Man at Downs, studying the Worm Stone, thinking deeply about these little dirt-eating bits of nature, thinking about their actions on the landscape and what it meant over Very Long Periods of Time. The book of course is a tour de force, a lovely piece of thinking. It was also the target of this popular, anti-intellectual stab at the man’s work, a cartoon appearing in the satirical Punch magazine for 1881, decrying The Descent of Man for bringing the lofty human down to less lofty heights, and then stating that Darwin’s newest reached even lower and into the very muck. Well that certainly wasn’t the reach of this work, which was a pretty straightforward affair hailing back to Darwin’s early interests in geology, returning to a subject of moulds which he had published on in 1839 and 1840. Punch did take a stab at Darwin, trying to open up a hole into which the man might follow his worms, but of course that dog just wouldn’t hunt.

Formation... is just a very smart book, with fantastic observations and ideas. And it hasn’t much to do with getting Man muddy. Or dirty, for that matter.

On the other hand….

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Biology — History of Holes
A Terribly Short Illustrated Note on the History of Pocket Protectors

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

In a flexible spirit of fun, and since this blog is after all is spawned from a science bookseller site, I offer the following few examples of pocket protectors culled from reports of the U.S. Patent Office.

1890’s

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Absurdist, Unintentional
Discovering RED in Advertising, 1942: Candy as Food and Cigarettes as Tasty

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Part of the luxury of doing what I do is that I can down to the basement and pull out a giant bound volume of Life magazine from a long wall’s worth of Life magazines and browse/graze away–a much easier thing to do with the volume in hand than it is to do online at the Life site. (Let me tell you that there is simply no comparison, and that you retain far more leafing through the volumes than scrolling down the monitor–try it out at the library next time.) For this particular volume–part of 1942–there was a growing realization that there was an awful lot of the color red being used in the advertisements, as though it had just been “discovered”. And there was a lot of it being used to sell candy, cigarettes and, of course, meat.

This ad for Camel cigs is one with a minimal amount of red, though the use of it seems judicious and expansive to the major points of the message. Odd that the idea of “taste” appears almost as a secondary item of attention, and that the thrust of the copy is that lots of doctors happen to smoke Camel, without mentioning why. Well, the ad implies smoothness of smoke to the throat and the “T” section, for taste and easy impact on the throat, but the overwhelming message to me seems to be the smoking doctors giving an Rx to the cigarette.

On the other end of the attack to the human body was the notion that candy=food, an interesting way of moving a heart-busting luxury product, all wrapped in red outlining a white heart, evoking Valentine’s Day and love, though this was love for candy itself, as the ad appeared in June.

The Meat Team–not a particular type pf meat; just meat, a red advertisement putting the “eat” in “meat”. Red was also used for SPAM, which is a very democratic type of meat byproduct.

Another boost to candy as a food.

I’m probably all wrong on this, but that was the sense-impression I got from leafing through six inches of Life magazine for 1942.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas