Dr Jenner's Dead Cut

In the summer of 1808, the already famous Gloucestershire doctor, Edward Jenner, was in London, having a miserable time. The inventor of vaccine inoculation against smallpox was stuck in the City, waiting on the interminable bureaucracy of Parliament to finalise the details for the National Vaccine Establishment. He had many enemies: anti-vaccination pamphleteers who thought his ideas were eyewash; other vaccinators who coveted his glory; and personal nemeses who seemed to block his every move. Holed up in a place he abhorred, Jenner appealed to his friends for succour, but found them wanting. He perceived his opponents, ‘by the most abominable falsities’, endeavouring ‘to ruin my private character’. So much he could bear, ‘but when I find that no friend has step’d forth even to hold an Umbrella over my head it makes me feel miserable’. He went home at the end of the year, only to find out that events had unfolded to his distaste. The new Establishment was to nourish his enemies, and to dishonour Jenner himself. In desperation, he solicited advice: ‘I may most piteously exclaim, what shall I do?’ he asked Thomas Pruen. Pruen’s reply was dismissive: ‘I am sorry for your situation, but can afford you no kind of assistance’. Jenner felt this as a ‘dead Cut’ and told Pruen so:

Dr Jenner's Lancet, Science Museum London, Wellcome Images

What if a Man had met with an old Friend who had tumbled into a Cellar or any other kind of pit & had broke his bones & had pass’d by heedless of his moanings, saying I am sorry for you but cannot stay to help you out, because I have a pressing engagement, that I must attend to in another quarter? Would this have been balsam to his Wounds or a Caustic?

A month later, after some cooling off and some mollifying correspondence, Jenner announced that ‘the Cut is heald’.

Until recently, such talk would have been filed under metaphor and left at that. Jenner was miserable, but not in pain. The ‘cut’ wasn’t real. Recent studies on the ways in which pain experience is managed by the brain have begun to change our approach, casting new light on the affective pain utterances of historical actors. We’re now in a position to say, at least tentatively, that Jenner’s misery hurt.

How so? The turn towards affect in both historical studies and the neurosciences has foregrounded the importance of emotions in giving meaning to, or in defining, painful experiences. In fact, without stimulation of the affective centres of the brain, there is no experience, only pain. On the one hand, studies of people with the rare condition of pain asymbolia have found that without affective involvement, pain is meaningless. People with this condition are fully able to sense pain, but completely unable to interpret it. Bodily injury elicits no fear, no anxiety, no compulsion to flee or fight. A hand is put into the flame and it burns, but there is no reason to withdraw it. On the other hand, there are people who have no bodily injury whatsoever, but who feel the effects of, for example, social exclusion, as physical pain. Brain imaging has discovered that brain activity in affective centres under such conditions accords with what you would expect to see in a person suffering a physical injury. In sum, physical pain requires an emotional component in order to be experienced as pain, while certain ‘negative’ emotions are experienced physically as painful.

What’s the point? The science of pain is finally catching up with what sufferers have known all along: when they communicate that their body is in pain, they’re not making it up. But the specifics of the communication are contextually grounded, culturally formed. To take such utterances seriously is to entertain new potentialities in the history of experience. Much of the emotional suffering of the historical record – hysteria, melancholia, nostalgia, for example (to all of which Dr Jenner was prone) – has been under-treated by the history of medicine, in accord with twentieth-century medicine’s dualistic predilections, where pain is physical and suffering is only emotional or psychological. To enter into the historical experiences and meanings of suffering is to open up the possibility of understanding and interpreting the emotional and physical worlds of historical actors. Both the history of the body and the history of mentalités become united in a monistic history of experience that sets out to understand the dynamic relationship among emotions, their expression, bodily sensations and bodily practices.

This post first appeared on Emotions in Dialogue. You can pre-order Edward Jenner here and here. 

Historical Heroes: Edward Jenner

Goodness, it’s been a while. For anybody wondering where I’ve been, I promise I’ve not been idle. On the contrary, expect to see three books from this author in the next year. Better still, expect them to not be too big a burden on your pocket books. Covering a range of subjects, they nevertheless speak to a number of the themes that have cropped up on this site over the years. I’ll keep you updated, okay? First up, a short biography of the father of the vaccine, Edward Jenner. Here’s a taste of what you can expect.

Edward Jenner, a country surgeon from Gloucestershire, England, was incurably curious. Mentored by the great surgeon, collector and experimenter, John Hunter, Jenner learned to see about him a natural world to be conquered, controlled, brought under the command of the human intellect. Such was the peculiar genius of Enlightenment science and medicine.

Activated by local talk of the powers of a minor disease contracted from the udders of cows, Jenner set about experimenting with cowpox to see if it really did protect a person from the deadly ravages of smallpox. Jenner’s innovation was, first, to infect a person with cowpox from the pustules of another person who already had the disease. This would prove that cowpox was transferable among humans. This he managed to do in 1796: the first vaccination, from vacca, the Latin for cow. His second innovation was to test the power of the vaccine by attempting to give the vaccinated person the smallpox. Lest that sound horrific, keep in mind that until Jenner pioneered a safe way to protect people from the smallpox, most children had been deliberately infected with the ‘speckled monster’ itself, in the hope that they would get away with a light dose of the dreadful disease. Often, those hopes had been dashed.

Jenner had essentially pioneered the clinical trial. While there was still a way to go before the vaccine was fully understood, Jenner’s experimental spirit and his indefatigable campaign to promote his discovery had a substantial impact. Despite fierce resistance in England that would outlast his own life, Jenner’s vaccine quickly made its way around the world, going viral courtesy of empires French, Spanish and British. Death rates from smallpox rapidly tumbled. Jenner is estimated to have saved some ten million lives. This medical victory came despite repeated attacks on the Jenner’s honour, his intellect, and his humanity from his own countrymen.

In 1980, after a concerted global campaign to spread the vaccine Jenner had devised to every corner of the world, the World Health Organisation declared smallpox extinct. It is, to this date, the only human disease to have been completely eliminated from the globe. Is that not the most heroic conclusion to a most heroic career?

Edward Jenner is published in the Pocket Giants series by The History Press this November. It is available for pre-order here and here.

Doping for Dopes

If it is true that cheats do not prosper, for a good while it must have felt to the cheats that they’d gotten away with a blinder. This has been a horrible period for sports fans, all of whom must now wonder, when they watch their heroes, whether what they see is real. If matches aren’t fixed for international gambling syndicates then all the athletes are on drugs, right? Hardly a sport has been left untouched by a tidal wave of scandals and suspicions, and somehow the honest professional, and even more so the amateur enthusiast, have been lost in the fray. The good guy can only take so much before the cracks start to appear. The cri de coeur happened today.

This morning Tony Thompson the boxer told the BBC that doping should be legalised. “I think they should allow doping, period, because for me it’s like the gun law… Only the good guys are listening. It leaves the good guys without the guns.” This is the age-old cry of the unjustly treated. Life-long believers in fair play and justice, they ultimately grow weary of losing to the cheat, or of competing on a distinctly uneven playing surface. It is like the dueller, having agreed the terms of engagement with his foe, turning up sword in hand only to find a pistol pointing at him through the murky dawn. It is a mismatch of epic proportions. The bullet wins every time. The virtuous fencer might be forgiven for thinking it were better had he too gone ballistic.

I wouldn’t forgive him. I’d pity him, but that would be just another kick to the puppy. I understand the plight of these fellows, but no upstanding man could endorse the institutionalisation of sport’s greatest wrong in order to level down to the moral poison of the fakes. If there were no honour in sport, and if everyone was hepped up steroids, then I’d sooner watch robot wars. There’d be no real difference. Sport, if it is to mean anything, has to be about the testing of the limits of being human, which is both good to do and good to watch. There can be no spirit of emulation if we cannot be certain that the spectacle is, essentially, a purely human one.

Tony Thompson has forgotten that sport isn’t simply about this competitor or that team. The public cares not a fig for how much money a man might win, but only that he might win fair and square. And if cheating is rife, then the fair man does not advocate that everyone should cheat. The fair man, believing in the true spirit of competition, sticks to his guns (or his weapon of choice). For that man knows that when he wins he will draw satisfaction from having won fairly. I have no idea what satisfaction the cheat derives from his own rocket-propelled ‘victory’. Money, fame and power are all ephemeral. They are the chimeras of our age. They have never been in the past and should not now be the reasons for sporting endeavour. I hope the good guys keep poking at this sore until the boil is well and truly lanced.

Is Sport Dead? Or, the Lie Detector

Years ago I found the single-best golf membership in the world. At Ampleforth College, a sort of Catholic Eton on the edge of the North York Moors, there is a challenging little golf course primarily for the use of the pupils. There’s also a private members roll, and on enquiry I discovered that the subscription rate for students (as I then was) ran at only £50 for the year. Who could refuse? I sent in my form, and wrote to the secretary asking if he required proof of my student status. The reply was just what you might have expected: ‘The last time I looked’, he said, ‘golf was an honourable game. No proof will be required.’

I had a happy two years in that honourable place, and in the adjacent pub. But I’m given to reflect on the diminution of that spirit of trust in sport in general. The influence of money has corrupted most of the pursuits we love, and the spectre of cheating lies in wait for those activities we cherish as sacred. Baseball has been disgraced; cricket is in the mire; athletics (track & field) has become the least trustworthy display of athleticism known to man; and cycling is a plain farce. I could go on.

Hogarth, Pit Ticket. The shadow of a dishonourable man hangs over the game cocks.

In times past the influence of money was perhaps just as prevalent, but the general sense of shame, or fear of disgrace, checked abuses. In the heady days of cockfighting, which before the 1830s was as popular and as monied as horse racing, those who made false bets were publicly exposed, suspended from the ceiling in a large basket, and alienated from the community until all debts were properly settled. The community regulated itself because the honour was the point of the activity. Winning was hollow unless winning was genuine. And when winning was genuine there was no shame in losing. The better man, or his cock, won, and hands were shaken.

The spirit of fair play is integral to sport, and that is contingent upon trust. Sport must be honourable or else it is not sport. With this in mind I viewed with some horror the latest developments at the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). The MCC is the home of cricket at Lord’s in London, and upholds everything good about the traditions of the sport. It is stuffy, conservative, and typically reactionary, but it is all these things in the best traditions of the English anti-revolutionary pace of reform.

Enter the Australian: Steve Waugh is a member of the MCC’s World Cricket Committee. He’s a former Australian captain, and a fabulously plucky character. And Steve Waugh is cheesed off. Fed up with being asked how many games he played in were fixed, Mr. Waugh decided to put himself through a lie-detector test. Naturally, he passed the test with flying colours, but in his report to the media he suggested that the polygraph ought to be taken up by the sport so that innocent men could prove their innocence and restore public confidence. The integrity of the sport, he seems to suggest, depends on honourable men being subjected to lie detection.

My strong feeling is that the fading integrity of the sport is killed outright by such a suggestion. If an innocent and honourable man truly is innocent and honourable, then I will take him at his word. If I am betrayed, no doubt it will come out in due course, and we will shake our heads. But the fundamental point is that we would be better to educate our youngsters to uphold the games they play in the right spirit so that such barbarisms as polygraphy are unnecessary. Doubtless, a return to the glory days of amateurism are not set to return, but that does not mean that we have to accept the notion that financial reward is the raison d’être of sport. Primarily, I expect sportsmen to be sportsmen because they fundamentally love their sport, and love the competition that comes with it. If we can instil this precept, we shall not have to worry so much about corruption.

If lie detectors are really thought necessary, then the sprit of sport is surely dead. I await the outcry of honourable men.

In Praise of the Egg

It is International Women’s Day. And Pancake Day! Rarely is one’s focus so tightly concentrated on the symbol of the ovum. It may seem difficult to celebrate the achievements of half the global population, but I suggest targeting your attention on the wonders of those women around you. I am blessed to be accompanied daily by women of exceptional intelligence and impeccable taste, and I salute them. To she who is most exceptional of all, I made a votive offering of my own famous pancakes. She is ascending to new heights of brilliance of late, and I count myself especially thankful for her, and for the opportunities that have been freely available to her. Onward!

Rembrandt, The Pancake Woman

Guttenberg Jokes No Longer About Steve!

What happens when an aristocrat, whose aristocracy has become practically meaningless, sees the need to acquire a professional qualification, but doesn’t see the real merit in earning one? Just ask Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, who was until today Germany’s Defence Minister.

Mr. (for he is no longer Dr.) von and zu Guttenberg had his past catch up with him in the last couple of weeks, as it was revealed that he had largely plagiarised his Ph.D thesis. Plagiarism is the cardinal sin of academic life, akin to incest or cannibalism in the social world, and it generally sinks the plagiarist into an irredeemably dishonourable position. Mr. Guttenberg copied, stole, and used public funds to have others do his work for him. All this, one presumes, because of Germany’s social reality that places the intellectual elite in a position of greater esteem than its old monied and plutocratic class. It was useful and desirable for this man of very old blue blood to gain this most modern title, which not too long ago might have been considered vulgar. The only trouble was that Mr. Guttenberg seems to have been incapable of actually achieving such a distinction, so in the best tradition of politicians, he found a way to get what he wanted despite the obvious barriers.

Politicians cheat and lie: it’s what they are for and we should not be surprised that they do it. The good ones simply don’t get caught. There is such a thing, however, even among the political movers and shakers, as honour among thieves. I come from a culture where a man caught red-handed must hold up his hands and say ‘it’s a fair cop’, and take the consequences. It is the natural result of getting caught. Once the game is up, the game is up. No one would want to heap dishonour upon dishonour. Yet Mr. Guttenberg chose to fall on his sword and resign only after he had been practically pushed onto his blade by the collective outcry of the German academic community. 

At first he and his Chancellor, who has never swerved in her public support of the guilty party, maintained a line of argument that disassociated the academic dishonour from the public role he held. Such pedantic demarcations do not wash, for public life is about character, and Mr. Guttenberg was found to be lacking in that department. Uncovered as a fraud, dishonoured, and soundly mocked for the pretentiousness of  his conspicuous blue-bloodedness, of course his position as a Minister was immediately untenable. He should have resigned at the earliest opportunity: it is the only way back from political scandal. Having failed to do this, he proved himself thoroughly unmanly into the bargain, and his career now lies in tatters. Mrs. Merkel has been embarrassed by association and looks a little less manly herself.

“But the lie was only this big...

There should be a lesson learned here. Politicians insult the intelligence of the voters all the time. They would do well to remember that it is better not to insult the intelligence of those voters who have actually made careers out of being intelligent. No other group is so motivated by the smell of blood in the water.

Cheats: Nobody Prospers

‘Not cricket’ is a phrase that goes beyond those cultures where the game is actually played. Even Americans understand that it refers to acts of impropriety that simply go beyond the pale. It stems from the traditional uprightness of the sport itself, its respected laws, and the sporting conduct of its practitioners. When John Major unwisely (at least as far as political expediency is concerned) told us to ‘get back to basics’ in the ‘90s, he exemplified the point by saying that it would be a good idea for people new to Britain to understand the laws of cricket, for therein the foundations of civil society lie exemplified. To Tom Brown, cricket was ‘more than a game’: it was ‘the Birthright of British boys, old and young, as trial by jury and habeas corpus are of British men’. The historical weight of this kind of symbolism makes it all the more galling that cricket is being besmirched by corruption and greed, and is taking place in an atmosphere of suspicion and bad blood. Cricket at the moment is, for want of a better term, ‘not cricket’.

In Pakistan, cricketers are the nation’s rock stars. At the top of their profession, these men are incredibly well paid and serve as the admired idols of millions. Amid Pakistan’s social, political and environmental catastrophes, the national cricket team has had the opportunity to represent the spirit, the pride, and the hope of a nation. The abject miseries of a people can be lifted by experiencing vicariously the successes of their brethren. The spirit of emulation – in diligence, perseverance, and skill – may foster better days. The charges before these young and privileged professionals, and the officials surrounding them, are grave. What shall we think if it transpires that they had not the strength of character to refuse the advances of bookmakers and the glistering prizes of corruption? It would be a disgrace. That the Pakistani Cricket Board throws stones from within its small glass house is shameless. That honourable men must consider defamation suits against dishonourable men within the world of cricket will do long-term damage to the game. And above all, that the people of Pakistan, in desperate times, may see their heroes on the make, will pour scorn on their own travails. A wounded nation can not be expected to endure these insults.

Although I am certain that the cancer will be cut out of the game, the recovery will be slow. It is not only the cheats who will not prosper. The honest are tainted by the misdeeds of their peers, and the public has had its trust shaken. Decisive action is necessary in order to demonstrate that the game values its integrity before all other considerations. I trust that the authorities will have the courage of their convictions.

Honour Bound?

I have of late been reading a book about Imperial German doctors and their prescriptions with regard to honour. I shall not trouble you with the details of this tome, but merely bring to your attention one of its observations, which seems particularly pertinent in the light of my recent post on la Gloire.

Honour, so says the author, referring to some esteemed theorists, used to be thought to fall somewhere between the law and the moral conscience:

While morality was empowered by the inner voice of the individual’s conscience, the law used external, physical force. The social demands of honour… were secured by internal as well as external means. Violations of honour had subjective, inner consequences and social, externally palpable ones. In this way, correct conduct could be guaranteed in areas which could not be reached by the law and in which conscience-based morality alone was not reliable (A-H Maehle, Doctors, Honour and the Law, 2009).

Among doctors, lawyers, academics and the like, on the one hand, and among such nebulous groups as gentlemen or the aristocracy, on the other, a breach of honour damaged the whole group, whose reputation as societal leaders and upstanding citizens was called into question by the misdeeds of an individual. The importance of restoring this jointly held and esteemed sense of honour accounts for duels, specialist courts and panels of arbitration, and private clubs and societies. A man would fight a duel to restore not only his own slighted reputation, but also that of his peers; a court specific to a respected profession could censure and publicly disown dishonourable miscreants; private societies could expel undesirable elements, thereby ensuring their collective honour stayed intact. The thread of civility by which society hangs, to which I referred yesterday, was duly reinforced by an understanding of the social importance of a shared code of honour.

To be sure, this still exists in some spheres today, although it is not called honour, and is not defended by duelling. But by and large we have lost sight of this middle step between the law and the conscience, this honorific superego. In countless ways we see that the morality of individuals is insufficiently developed to prevent them from acting without inhibitions, and that the law remains rightly disinterested, even if it is not uninterested, in moral matters. There is no extra check; no sense of being bound by common interest, or the common good.

La Gloire

… do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose? My life might have been passed in ease and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path. Oh, that some encouraging voice would answer in the affirmative! My courage and my resolution is firm; by my hopes fluctuate, and my spirits are often depressed. (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1831).

Of all the noble feelings which fill the human heart in the exciting tumult of battle, none, we must admit, are so powerful and constant as the soul’s thirst for honour and renown… Although other feelings may be more general in their influence, and many of them – such as love of country, fanaticism, revenge, enthusiasm of every kind – may seem to stand higher, the thirst for honour and renown still remains indispensible. Those other feelings may rouse the great masses in general, and excite them more powerfully, but they do not give the Leader a desire to will more than others, which is an essential requisite in his position if he is to make himself distinguished in it… It is through these aspirations we have been speaking of in Commanders, from the highest to the lowest, this sort of energy, this spirit of emulation, these incentives, that the action of armies is chiefly animated and made successful. And now as to that which specially concerns the head of all, we ask, has there ever been a great Commander destitute of the love of honour, or is such a character even conceivable? (Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832).*

Curious, these passages, in our world. Of course, Clausewitz was in deadly earnest, whereas Shelley at least sought to challenge such a notion; but it seems that the very subject makes us liable to squirm in our easy chairs. We are sorely lacking aspirational figures: our wars are only dimly connected to our sovereignty, and there is scarcely anything left intrepidly to discover (nothing particularly entices us to the microscope, much less to particle colliders under the Alps). Our idols of honour are as likely to be football professionals as anyone else, and I can think of nothing more damning to say of us than that. Yet I raise the subject because I believe it still to be worthy.

Much as I have previously extolled the virtues of work, of occupation, of indefatigability, and of resolution, I must stress that there should also be a point. What drives us to keep on, to continue when our spirits are depressed? What inspires us to create, to lead, to cut a swathe through the dross of life? It is, after a fashion, a love of honour. We may wish to cover ourselves in glory, but it would not be something we should wish to boast, for we do not live to be braggarts; we aim to wear it modestly, and inwardly strive to outdo ourselves. True honour is duly recognised by our peers and, we hope, by our descendents. In this, we achieve our immortality, for does not a man wish to live forever? We seek not wealth, nor luxury: honour is its own reward.

As a matter of reflection, therefore, I wonder if we can look ourselves in the eye and honestly proclaim that the point of what we do is bigger than ourselves. There is no glory in serving oneself. There is no honour in merely meeting our own desires. What is our greater contribution? What of us will be left when we are but dust and ashes? For what can we be honoured? Every man will perhaps have an idea of what he can do. No time like the present to start to do it.

*Von allen großartigen Gefühlen, die die menschliche Brust in dem heißen Drange des Kampfes erfüllen, ist, wir wollen es nur gestehen, keines so mächtig und konstant wie der Seelendurst nach Ruhm und Ehre… Alle anderen Gefühle, wieviel allgemeiner sie auch werden können, oder wieviel höher manche auch zu stehen scheinen, Vaterlandsliebe, Ideenfanatismus, Rache, Begeisterung jeder Art, sie machen den Ehrgeiz und die Ruhmbegierde nicht entbehrlich. Jene Gefühle können den ganzen Haufen im allgemeinen erregen und höherstimmen, aber geben dem Führer nicht das Verlangen, mehr zu wollen als die Gefährten, welches ein wesentliches Bedürfnis seiner Stelle ist, wenn er Vorzügliches darin leisten soll... Diese Bestrebungen aller Anführer aber, von dem höchsten bis zum geringsten, diese Art von Industrie, dieser Wetteifer, dieser Sporn sind es vorzüglich, welche die Wirksamkeit eines Heeres beleben und erfolgreich machen. Und was nun ganz besonders den höchsten betrifft, so fragen wir: hat es je einen großen Feldherrn ohne Ehrgeiz gegeben, oder ist eine solche Erscheinung auch nur denkbar?