Category: Blank and Empty Things; A History of

The Sanctity of Sainted Truck Drivers, 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 1005

Every so often I meet a pamphlet that makes me want to travel back in time, even if that time was mostly a wispy bit of creative analogy. Men You Like to Meet (subtitled Stories of Highway Heroes), written and published by the American Trucking Association in 1942, is one such example: what a handsome truck! The driver greets you with his snappy brimmed cap in hand, neat jacket and a tie (!), looking like he takes his job seriously. (On the other hand, I take my job seriously, and I don’t wear a tie; I do know though that people take me more seriously the more clothing I wear.)

The Trucking Association wasted absolutely no time in this publication in telling he very many stories of the superb highway behavior of its members-it fills the publication with stories of heroism, courtesy, delightfulness, courage and general human respect with as much as could possibly fit in 23 pages including illustrations). Here, four women can do nothing with their tire but look at it, waiting for the knoght of the road to come and help them out.

(I’m not sure why this woman is unconscious and missing her shoes–the car seems to be only about half covered. I’m surprised that the trucker lost his hat, though he did have the presence of mind to make sure that the unconscious woman’s blouse covered her knees.)

Well. The roads were evidently filled with Good Trucking Samaritans, and the Trucking Association wanted the public to know that–especially when they were butting heads in D.C. with the railroads and battling a poor public image. I’m not saying that truckers weren’t/aren’t saints–I’m just saying that I like the idea of truckers with caps nd ties.

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Monetizing Madness

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 1004

Hail, horrors! hail
Infernal world! and thou profoundest hell,
Receive thy new possessor, one who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by place or tie.–Milton

I wonder when it was that people began to institutionally
capitalize the monetary value of madness?
People of course have been “mad” for as long as there have been people;
but the issue of centralizing them, of locating people with mental disorders,
or collecting folks who displayed far-ranging attributes of the norm, I think
is relatively recent. Certainly it is a
more modern invention of capitalizing on madness, as “hospitals for the insane”,
“institutions for the feeble-minded”, “lunatic asylums” and so on are mostly an
invention of the 17^th century.

In many instances these institutions were for-profit
ventures, and most of these were run for the benefit of making money more
helping the people who would be confined there.
It was certainly not pretty.

The conditions for being sent to one of these places varied
from country to country, region to region, judge to judge. Insanity was not a necessary condition,
either—many wives who stood in the way of mistresses wound up conveniently
out0of-the-way in mental institutions; it was also a way to gain control of a
relative’s estate.

The later may be true in the very celebrated case of William
Belcher, who spent seventeen years in a private asylum (from 1778 to 1795). Belcher wrote (as “a victim of the trade of
lunacy”) about his experience with vindictiveness and vitriol in his Address to Humanity: Containing a Letter to
Dr. Thomas Monro, a Receipt to Make a Lunatic and Seize his Estate, and a
Sketch of a True Smiling Hyena (1796, which can be seen in full here).

Another famous case was that of John Perceval, who recounted
his story in his 1838 book, A narrative of the treatment experienced by a
Gentleman during a state of mental derangement designed to explain the causes
and nature of insanity, and to expose the injudicious conduct pursued towards
many unfortunate sufferers under that calamity. Perceval did actually have some
sort of something going on, a suspension of his normal facilities, as he says
in the first lines of his book: ““In the year 1830, I was
unfortunately deprived of the use of my reason. This calamity befel me about
Christmas. I was then in Dublin.
The Almighty allowed my mind to become a ruin under sickness – delusions of a
religious nature and treatment contrary to nature. My soul survived that ruin.” But the base of it all was the seizure of his considerable property,
against which he could barely fight.
Perceval continued his fight against the lunacy trade for the rest of
his life (he died in 1876). As a matter of fact Perceval was one of the founders
of one of the first patients’-advocacy groups, the very bouncily-named Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society.

Evidently the was a
certain porosness to the definitions of “normalcy” and “lunacy”, the
distinctions between the two sometimes settled for a cool lump payment.

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Lonely Man-Rakers in a Dry Lake Bed, 1567

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 1001

This odd, semi-naïve “outsider-esque” map is found in George
Wernher’s (d. 1567) De admirandis Hungariae aquis hypomnemation depicts
an intermittent lake region of the Inner Carniola region of Slovenia—more precisely it shows the “disappearing” lake of Cirnitz,
which is near the town of Otokh. The map
(which is oriented west/east

at top/bottom) I think is showing the lake when it
is “disappeared”. What happens evidently
is that when the water table rises it causes the groundwater and underground streams
to also rise, seeping through the limestone lake bed and rising through caverns
and sink holes; it becomes a periodic lake, though the appearance and disappearance
of the water has been the subject of wide mytho-specuilation for the folks who have
lived in the region for the last few thousands years.

The towns of Otokh and Lipsse are shown as walled entities,
and according to some old gazetteers that I’ve consulted would actually be
surrounded by the lake from time to time.
To further enunciate this the cartographer seems to have included cultivated
lands around these towns–no doubt the resulting soil would’ve been rich I nutrients. Also the eight rivers that feed the lake are
shown here, ending at this time in small lakelets.

Although I liked the feel of this map it is not what
attracted me enough to write this post—the main point of interest is at the center
of the map. There, standing to the right
of the horse and rider is a man working with a rake.
These are the only two human figures in the
map, and one of them is holding a rake.
Probably the person, along with the horse-and-rider and the small lake-bed
bridge across one of the rivers were included to hammer home the point that the
lake was gone, and that someone might be farming it.

In any event, the stick person looks like a lonely figure.

I think that a good dictionary could be compiled of lonely
figures like this that appear as “fillers” in maps and prints. These people have made a number of appearances in this blog, such as

in the case of the first photograph of a human
being. Well, actually, it is the first photograph that just happens to capture
a human in the emulsion. Since the exposure time was so terribly long for
this image to be made, the moving people and horses and carriages on the
street, all of the city-life bits, were necessarily spectral, and mostly invisible, in the photograph. Only the
stationary

items were captured, and the only people captured here were two
figures in the foreground, doing something or other (shoe shine?) that made
them still for at least five minutes–long enough for their anonymous but
famous photonic impressions to be captured.

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The Big Lonesome: Masterpieces of Architectural Loneliness–Elevated Roadways

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 994

[This post part of a long and continuing series on Blank, Missing and Empty Things, #54]

If Edward Hopper was a practicing member of the American Institute of Steel Construction and was a civil engineer, he may have rendered his creations much in the same curious way as those seen below. I found these designs in an obscure publication, Prize Designs Submitted in the Elevated Highway Competition for 1938, and I found them to be utterly fantastic, lost bits of artistic expression and strong emotion sucked into a vortex of automotive steel and concrete. They are just superb examples of found art that seems to play utterly against the purpose of the object, and do seem masterpieces in an unusual (and instantly-created) genre of “Unintentionally Cross-Expressive Art”. They have a feel of Outsidery-Edwardy-Hoppery to them–they feel cold, a wet chill, with a coppery audio quality to them…images that make you want to go home and sit in a comfortable chair.

And not only are they lonesome; they are also foreboding:

Magnificent! And all once hidden away, but no longer.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Outsider Logic Department: the Fabulous Curative Necessity of Fatty Meats

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 989

[see also my related posts on Women Meat Pioneers and of course Meat String and Curled Hair]

I have a suspicion that the author of Eat
Meat for a Successful Life, G.H. Brinkler
(a “N.D.”, doctor of nauturopathy, from the American School
of Naturopathy and the tautologically-surprising “founder” of the “Brinkler
Club”) had a compromised and possibly antagonistic personal history with
vegetables. And water, as Mr. Brinkler
is also the originator of the “Brinkler
Waterless Way to Health”, and a man who claims not
to have drunk any water in 35 years.

Most humans don’t do so well without water after a few days, though there
are extreme cases where people have survived for several weeks without water.
To have survived 1,820 weeks seems pretty much to be well on its way to being a
vastly under-appreciated record of human endurance.

But the main story here of course is the meat, with the waterless bit woven
through it like heart-ending marbling in a butt chop. Meat, as we are told by Mr. Brinkler, is
pretty much a “natural fixer” for just about anything. Lazy in the morning? A pound of pork on the broiler will cure
that. Sexual inadequacy? Solved with meat (ingestion). Poor memory?–the answer: meat, and lots of it. And not only just meat;
it definitely needs to be not lean. Big fatty meats are the greatest source of the
desired “muscle food”; lean meats, unfortunately, are only “nerve foods”. Somehow
the meat mixed with the waterless way induces the “nerve-ends” into a “more
natural” and strengthened existence.

The Brinkler follower should also chew their meat less. “The masticating fad might result in tiring
the jaws and gross undernourishment”.

I could go on and pull further quotes out of context from this piece, but
that would be mean. The pamphlet (1934) I have is the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy, and I suspect that there may not have been many copies other than mine. I think that all the
man was trying to do was sell broilers.

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“Women are Human, too”: Human Resource Workbook for Females, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 988

In the history of archaic thought it doesn’t take very much at all to reach
the uncomfortable bits in the sulfurously tangled history of the subjugation
of women. But it is most interesting when you find the points at which the “backward-looking”
archaic parts are actually somewhat forward-looking for their time.

Such is the case with this odd and interesting little pamphlet, Women in Men’s Clothing, published by
the Vultee Aircraft Corporation, and published in 1943—it can be simultaneously
awkward as a broken product of its time and oddly, slightly, futuristic (with a grudging and clawing recognition of women as possible equals as members of the work force). Overall the publication looks pretty painful from today’s perch, but when you look a little past the winces you can see a little bit of recognition for women in general; at least this is far forward from anything that might’ve been published slightly before the war.

The pamphlet was intended as a human resources tool for managers and
supervisors in an aircraft production facility where women had been sought and
recruited to fill the very many vacancies brought on by the war. (Millions of women entered the workforce for the
first time between 1942-1945; millions of them exited too once the servicemen
returned from active duty to reclaim their jobs.) For most industrial supervisors, the prospect
of women in the workforce was not a welcomed one, and many had never before needed to think of such a diversified workplace. This slight publication translated the idea of “women/”wimmin” for these
men.

The “translation” of the understanding of women from home to the workforce doesn’t go very far to advancing the understanding of women at work–they’re pretty much the same (dogmatic, condescending, sexist, domineering).

All of that is pretty well summed up by the first picture in this series–the asterisked “equality” between men and women. I must admit that I don’t think I’ve ever seen this “equals, but” label before, or at least so deep into the century.

And of course “women are Human, too” needs very little comment…as is the case for most of the images in the pamphlet.

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Human Experimentation on Children in an Orphanage: the Borden Company, 1924

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 980

Nothing
quite makes a profound statement like simplicity—the same sentiment applies
to the incredible, or impossible, or
inconceivable statement as well. For
example, Gertrude Gates Mudge’s “An Interesting Experiment with Malnourished
Children” (The Nation’s Health, August 15, 1922) seems quite an
exclamation without an ounce of emphasis in sight, a vast oversight of decency
compounded in its inelegant simplicity. Evidently acceptable (at some level) in
its own time, the announcement today seems criminal.

The
world is full of such pronouncements—perhaps they’re the very bones on which we
all walk. I was drawn to this subject
this morning, finding a bit of undoubtedly long-lost historical reporting on
medical experimentation which (in its second paragraph) makes the following
overwhelming understatement: “an institution is a perfect ‘human laboratory’
for experimentation”. It comes from a
small pamphlet published in 1924 by the Borden Company called The Catonsville Experiment It seems that Borden (a famous and large
dairy company) was trying to experiment with children to determine the
effectiveness of their new sweetened condensed milk over “regular” milk. They attempted experimentation in public
schools, but could only statistically control for milk intake at the school
itself, finding it “impossible to have
complete control over the rest of the childrens (sic) diets”. In the free school situation the Borden
company could also not control for exercise, sleep and “health concerns”.

That
is when the idea struck the Borden Nutrition Department to conduct their study
in an orphanage. Borden’s aim was to test the healthy effectiveness of their sweetened
condensed milk, and to also show that “no abnormalities in physical growth,
bone development, blood count, and kidney function would result from such an
experiment”. What this means is that
there events were a possibility, but it was worth it to Borden to test their
hypothesis out on actual human children.

There
were 60 children in the “experiment”, divided into two groups, one of which was
the control. All facts of the lives of
the children were controlled from March 15, 1924 though November 30, 1924—play,
regulated sunshine, sleep, schooling, rest, and of course food intake. Medical tests were conducted (frequencies not
specified), including general overall medical evaluations as well as blood and
urine tests—there were (at least) 18 sets of x-rays over 270 days.
Psychological and intellectual tests were also conducted, with the children
measured over dozens of different categories, including 14 classroom
activities.

The
Borden Company published the results of all of these experiments in this small
pamphlet, with one large (and impressive) folding diagram outlining some of the
medical results (shown below).

There
were also two photographs of the test subjects.
Undoubtedly they were not intended to look as though they were trophies,
but that is the general feeling I get when looking at the photographs.

The
bottom line was that Borden found their own product to be safe, and to not cause
kidney, liver or bone damage. Which was
good news to the children who were their test subjects.

Remarkably
Borden published these results two months after the test ended, evidently
without any assumption whatsoever that if there were to be negative effects
that they would occur immediately, and that a longitudinal study was wholly
unnecessary. Once the experiment ended, so too did the nee for testing their
short-term hypothesis of damage to the children.

I
wonder about what the effects of the 18 rounds of x-rays in 270 days were on these children, over time.

No doubt that in the dark history of human experimentation the Borden exploit would find itself in somewhat mild company–this of course hardly relieves them of their gross injustice of subjecting children to this sort of control and possible danger just so that the company could sell a milk product. It is an action that makes me think more of Lizzie (“I gave my mother forty whacks…”) when I think of Borden than Elsie the Cow. After a long run of financial successes, including being one of the leading dairy companies in America (and the owner/producer of Elmer’s and Krazy Glue, among many other diversified things), the Borden Company was completely and totally divested in 2005.

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Alpha and Omega Department, #3

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

Sometimes the beginnings and ends of things show up in unexpected places. Penzias and Wilson at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, discovered that the reason for the “interference” readings that they were receiving in their instrument was not due to pigeon poop, but was actually the remnant radiation of the Big Bang. And it didn’t look like much, but the stuff that caused the end of the great American Western frontier was found in simple lines: ribbons of steel for the railroads, on the one hand; and twisted bits of sharp metal wrapped around wire, the barbed wire fence ultimately and very cheaply closing off the vast land into manageable parcels, on the other. Stories like these are legion.

It is infrequent to find the two combined though in a simple, single photograph. This is the case, for me, in this small (1-inch tall) image found in an obscure publication called The Kentucky Mountain Echo, a True story of the Mountains, published in 1929. The small, delicate pamphlet seemed the physical opposite of the stories that it told, rocky and rough bits of life from the Kentucky mountains, hardscrabble farms, luscious woods and company coal mining towns.

The Rev. Bud Eversole is pictured here–along with his dog–at the spot in his farm in which he was taken by the guiding light, the holy spirit; an invincible vision took hold of him and never let go. Rev. Eversole continued to work his farm and taught the scriptures for free for many years afterwords as a roving minister. He marked the spot of his conversion with a pole; he also determined that the pole would mark his grave, the ultimate place of rest for him at the very spot where he was “born”.

For all that it symbolizes, the image looks pervasively unsettled to me–Rev. Eversole (I have no idea if that was his real name or if it was a post-conversion creation) looks like he is waiting for something, anything, even for the late afternoon sun to just hurry up and warm his back. This area of his farm just looks a mess, not like a small farm kept between and along rolling hills (no treat, that). The Rev. doesn’t tell me much, except that he was obliged to allow his dog in the photo, and took off his broad-brimmed hat to have his picture made. Perhaps that is all that he wanted to say.

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Hiding Diseases: Plague and Smallpox

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 936

“Ring
around the rosies, a pocket full of posies,

Ashes,
ashes, well all fall down.”

This
old nursery rhyme has more to do with plague than a skipping-and-falling song, more
like the Tom Wait’s version of the “Dwarf’s Marching Song” (“Heigh Ho”, see
below) than anything that could ever be dreampt of in a Disney film. It was the
mater-of-fact way of dealing with the vast death brought on by the various
Plagues: saying a round of rosaries to
try and invoke divine intervention to keep the disease away from the prayer-mender;
posies as a fragrant flower to mask the stench of those actually afflicted with
the disease; and then of course the ashes from the piles of burnt corpses of
Plague victims, fallen down to death.

These
two images show different aspects of segregating—if not hiding—disease. The first is a propagandistic portrayal of a
man dying of the Plague. This snippet of
plaguaganda was an ars morendi
published in the 1460’s, and depicts a not-gruesome portrayal of what was
generally a very gruesome death. The
inflicted lies there in bed, with sheets
and a pillow, looking faint and removed in the retiring Victorian fashion
(removed 400 years), surrounded by images of his faith/belief.

I
suspect that anyone who knew anything about the Plague knew that this scene
wouldn’t be truthful, necessarily, but I guess if it could even momentarily confuse
the viewer into thinking that the visitation of Death could be so composed in
the face of this horrendous disease, I guess that’s the hope you hang
onto. There is a minor battle between
the possible claimants of the soul of The Sick, but that would be going on
anyway whether the coming death was relatively peaceful, or not. There wasn’t
much to be done—as the feeble attempts of preventing the disease would
indicate, what with choices like urine baths, bleeding, leeching, bell ringing,
pus-sucking, rotten animal corpse talismans, incense burning being some of the
preventative choices—so like a belief in Heaven or Nirvana or whatever, the hopeful
consolation of a possibly decent dying could keep people from running
amok.

The
second shows the hospital hulk Castalia, “one of the old Hospital Boats superseded
by land hospitals in 1904”, which was more a floating street than a hospital. It was a complex of five buildings nested on the
hulk of the double-hulled paddle steamer Castalia—appropriately named, as it refers
to the Delphian fountain that Apollo fabricated
from the nymph “Castalia” and alludes to the possibility of rejuvenation and
cleanliness, or health, perhaps). The
hospital held hundreds of smallpox patients, sent there by the Metropolitan
Asylum Board in an effort to stem the flow of the disease and infection rates
from the rest of the population of London. Smallpox
was still a vast killer in mid-/late-Victorian England, and given the information
available at the time this was a good social inoculation by distance and
segregation. (It is interesting to note
that out-of-service de-masted, defrocked and striped ships of the line were
used to house prisoners (though generally prisoners of war); in particular,
those kept in the East River housing American soldiers inflicted vast death
tolls via maltreatment and urgently hideous living conditions.) This really doesn’t fit with the
propagandist/suppressing model of the above, and its removal did prevent the
contagion from spreading, but, well, it does look like the Asylum Board was trying to hide the sick.

Notes:

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Three Map Fits: a Color Map with Color and No Map, a Color Map in Black & White; AND a Black & White Map in White (only).

JF Ptak Science Books Post 934

This confusing title is accurate without very much grant in license and tells a short and true story of three fitful maps, two of which are beautiful and one just so-so.



The first map fit is featured in a beautiful pamphlet called A Century of Progress Colors and was issued by the Textile Color Card Association of the USA.(The title being a small play on the 1933 world’s fair in Chicago called “A Century of Progress”. The Textile Color Card Association was created to standardize color nomenclature and composition in industrial colors (and is still in existence.)  The map distributed the major pavilions at the fair by their dominating colors, naming those colors in the unusually-sequenced double-page key on the following pages (below¹). I can certainly appreciate the effort and the beautiful design it produced, but as a map of the fair it leaves much (if not everything) to be desired.

The second map fit belongs to a small pamphlet published by Albert Coble called Games of Colors, Kindergarten and Primary Exercises. Its actually an enterprising little book about reaching into the minds of little ones and explaining how colors are put together and how they relate to one another. It is unfortunate that the drawings used to illustrate the color map part of the pamphlet were done in black and white. Which is a little on the self-defeating side.

But the finest fit of the three fits is fit number three, which is the map of the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits.

But the map that I think I love the most illustrates Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits, and occurs in the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit¹. It is simply magnificent.

Then, of course, there is this:

Notes:

1. The key:

2. The fit begins so:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one look in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when the found it to be
A map they could all understand.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
“They are merely conventional signs!

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!”

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