go with god and good luck

when she takes him to his first parade/festival in pittsburgh it was definitely an overwhelming experience but so affirming for him. obviously victoria, cassie, mel, dana, emma, and rabbot (basically everyone) comes as a group or together.

dennis picked the costumes... he had them planned out before he even asked. he was prepared to use his secret weapon (his puppy dog eyes) to get his way.

trinity is thrilled when they walk in: dennis as spiderman, jack as deadpool, and robby (who was the hardest to convince) as wolverine.

Dennis: stop sending me these whilst im at work just because its your day off

Jack: its my day off though or my Jack off day

Jack: do you get it

Jack: Jack off

Jack: because my name is Jack

But in places where big pools weren't feasible, they did everything in their power to reduce the amount of fuel required for the production of salt, because fuel takes a lot of time and effort to collect and drives up costs.

Enter the graduation tower!

The idea is that you take some source of salty water, pump it up to the top of a wooden tower filled with brushwood (typically blackthorn), then let it trickle down, which greatly increases evaporation by maximizing surface area and exposing the water to the wind along the way. When the saltwater reaches the bottom, it's saltier than it was, and you can send it through again until it's reached the point of saturation. If you do this with ocean water, you can reduce the amount of fuel needed by a factor of ten.

Plus it looks and sounds awesome - these were sometimes called thorn towers.

And at the start of the 20th century, when other forms of salt production had skyrocketed in efficiency, the graduation towers began to be used for healthcare, because as you might imagine, the air next to the graduation tower is very salty, more than it is next to the seaside. From what I can find it seems like the main thing it does is thin mucus, though there are a lot of other health claims.

reblogged from [op] — on graduation towers, salt, fuel, and the Bad-prefix town

Yes, all of this is correct and I want to add a thing, which is that the fuel side of the salt industry is genuinely the part of the story that breaks open if you push on it. Salt-making in pre-modern Europe was, for most of the medieval and early modern period, the single largest industrial consumer of firewood on the continent. The salt-makers ate forests. They ate forests at a rate that beat shipbuilding, beat iron smelting, beat glass furnaces, beat domestic heating in any one region you'd care to name. The salt pans of Lüneburg — which produced something like 40,000 tonnes of salt a year at peak in the 16th century — went through fuel at a pace that essentially deforested an enormous radius around the town and then kept going, importing wood from further and further out as the nearby supply collapsed.

The Bad Reichenhall saltworks in Bavaria, which are the oldest continuously operating inland salt works in Europe (first written mention 696 AD, when the Bavarian Duke Theodor II gave the bishop of Salzburg twenty brine pans), spent literal centuries chasing the forest line backwards into the Alps. By the early 19th century they had to commission a guy named Georg von Reichenbach to build a brine PIPELINE — like, a literal pumped pipeline (completed around 1816) going over Alpine elevation changes — to move the brine itself to where the wood still was, which is a kind of insane engineering project to undertake for what is, again, table salt.

(That's the kind of thing that drives the graduation-tower invention. Reichenbach's brine pipeline is from 1816. The graduation towers in Reichenhall are 16th century. The reason you build a graduation tower is exactly the same reason you eventually build a 20km brine pipeline: you've run out of nearby trees and the option of relocating the saltworks is off the table because the brine springs are where the brine springs are, geologically, and they're not moving.)

So when you say "fuel takes a lot of time and effort to collect, drives up costs," what's actually happening on the ground is that the salt industry is in a permanent slow-motion race against its own appetite. Every saltworks of any scale eats through the wood available within economic transport distance, and then it has to either (a) get more efficient, (b) reach further for wood, or (c) die. The graduation tower is option (a). The Reichenbach pipeline is a particularly insane version of (b). And there are SO MANY salt works that went with (c) — abandoned medieval salt towns are a thing, you can find them all over central Europe, places that had a brine spring and a thousand people and a church and then ran out of nearby wood and just… wound down.

A separate but related thing the OP isn't quite getting at: the demand side of pre-refrigeration salt economics is overwhelmingly about one particular preserved-fish trade, which is salted herring from the Baltic and the North Sea. The herring shoals would show up seasonally in massive numbers off Scania (now southern Sweden) and the Baltic coast, you'd haul them in by the millions, you'd salt them in barrels, and then you'd ship the barrels everywhere across northern Europe because they kept basically indefinitely and Catholic Europe needed protein on Fridays and during Lent and there were a LOT of Catholics and a LOT of Fridays.

This is why Lüneburg, an otherwise unremarkable town in Lower Saxony, becomes one of the wealthiest cities in medieval Germany. It sits on a colossal salt deposit. Lübeck, which is the actual port city, controls the trade route. Lüneburg salt goes to Lübeck. Lübeck ships it to Scania. The fishermen salt the herring. The herring goes back through Lübeck and out to Cologne and Bruges and Bergen and Novgorod and everywhere. The whole Hanseatic League is, to a pretty significant degree, a salt-and-fish cartel running on a single chemical transformation: chloride ion plus protein equals food that doesn't rot.

Lüneburg's salt works, the Saline Lüneburg, was the largest industrial operation in medieval Europe by some metrics. Over a thousand years of continuous operation, depending on which century of monastic-era boiling you want to start counting from. The town minted its own coins, kept its own army, negotiated as a peer with kings.

And the buildings in Lüneburg today lean.

They lean because the salt mine ran underneath the town for centuries and the ground gave out. Subsidence. The medieval city center is gorgeous and it is also visibly buckled — gabled facades that slump in the middle, towers that aren't quite vertical, doorways that aren't quite square. The whole town is sitting on a thousand years of hollowed-out salt and gradually settling into the cavity. Which, like, what a perfect physical record of where the wealth came from — the town that the salt built is collapsing into the hole the salt left behind.

The fuel problem is what kills Lüneburg, eventually. Well, the fuel problem and competition from French and Portuguese sea salt, which the Hanseatic League couldn't keep out forever, because solar-evaporated sea salt produced in places like Setúbal didn't need fuel AT ALL, which meant it could be made cheaper than anything you could boil in Lower Saxony no matter how much your graduation towers helped. By the 16th and 17th centuries the Atlantic sea salt is coming in by the shipload and the boiled-brine economies of northern Europe are in slow decline. Not gone — Lüneburg keeps boiling salt until 1980, which is its own incredible story — but no longer dominant.

(The 1980 closure date for Saline Lüneburg, by the way. Eight hundred and some years of continuous industrial salt production at one site, finally shut down inside the lifetimes of people still walking around there. We tend to think of medieval industries as having ended at some clean historical break point and they basically never did — most of them limped along for centuries in increasingly marginal forms until something specific finally killed them in living memory.)

OK so the OP's actual question, which is about the second life of graduation towers as healthcare facilities. This is also where it gets more interesting than "they noticed the air was nice."

The 19th century in Germany is the absolute peak of a particular institutional form, which is the spa town — the Kurbad or Bad — and the political-economic role of the spa town is to take a body of bourgeois and aristocratic visitors with non-specific health complaints (stomach troubles, "nerves," respiratory issues, gout, syphilis they can't talk about) and give them a structured environment with a doctor's supervision, a mineral water source, a set of physical activities, a defined social calendar, and — crucially — a duration of stay measured in WEEKS rather than days. Six weeks at the spa was the normal prescription. You'd go through a full season of treatment.

The German spa towns — and there are dozens of them, the "Bad" prefix means they're officially recognized as one — are basically nineteenth-century wellness corporations operating under royal patent. The Prussian state regulates which springs count, which doctors can practice there, what claims can be made, who can build a hotel, what the bathing schedules look like. It's a real industry. It supports its own architecture (the neoclassical Kurhaus, the colonnaded pump room), its own medical literature, its own social rituals (the daily walk, the brine inhalation, the regulated diet), and its own resort towns that are economically dependent on the annual influx of Berlin civil servants and their wives coming to take the cure.

So when a salt-works town like Bad Reichenhall or Bad Kissingen finds itself with obsolete industrial infrastructure in the 1850s-1890s — when modern salt mining and solar evaporation and rail freight have made the local salt-boiling business uneconomical — what they have on hand is (a) a town with the existing infrastructure for visitors, because saltworks workers needed places to live and eat, (b) a brine source still flowing, (c) a giant wooden structure that produces salty air, and (d) a state apparatus actively LOOKING for new spa towns to certify, because the Prussian and Bavarian and Saxon governments understood that spa tourism was a significant source of regional revenue and tax base.

The standard story you'll see about this is "they noticed the workers were healthier and started inviting visitors." What actually happened: the salt economy died, the town needed a new economy, the spa-town industrial pattern was the obvious one to pivot into, and the graduation tower was the asset that justified the pivot. Same with every Bad-prefix town in Germany. The brine spring became "healing waters." The wooden tower for industrial concentration became an "open-air inhalation chamber." The salt-boiling house became a thermal bath. The salt master's office became a doctor's consulting room. The entire former salt industry got rebadged as health infrastructure within about a generation, because there was a state-backed industry actively seeking exactly that kind of asset and the towns with the assets were happy to oblige.

(This is the same move you see at basically every other obsolete extractive site in 19th century Europe, by the way. The mines became "deep mineral spas." The iron springs became "ferruginous tonic waters." The coal towns with bad ventilation became respiratory wellness destinations. The waste heat from blast furnaces became "warm springs." The 19th century basically inherited the entire pre-industrial extractive infrastructure of central Europe and figured out how to monetize the byproducts as health goods. You can read this charitably as adaptive reuse or cynically as a kind of medical-tourism asset stripping. Both readings are correct.)

The Polish ones at Ciechocinek and Inowrocław are an interesting variant on this because Poland during the 19th century is partitioned and doesn't have a German-style coordinated state spa industry — Ciechocinek's spa development happens under Russian rule, starting in the 1830s, and the graduation tower there gets built on a much larger scale than the German ones precisely because it's being designed FROM THE START as a spa attraction rather than an industrial facility that pivoted. The Ciechocinek towers are like 1,700 meters long, which is on an order beyond any of the German ones, and they're built that way because the brine concentration is a secondary concern; the primary function is to produce a long impressive promenade-able salt-fog environment for the visiting bourgeoisie of Warsaw and Łódź to walk along on doctor's orders.

(Bad Salzuflen in Germany also has a 300m+ tower for similar reasons. The really big towers are post-industrial. The original 16th-17th century graduation towers were smaller and uglier, built as industrial equipment with no thought given to how they looked.)

The mucus thing is real, by the way. Inhaling fine-particle salt mist does thin respiratory mucus, which can provide genuine relief for people with chronic obstructive conditions, asthma, post-viral congestion, and so on. There's a study from the Paracelsus Private Medical University in Salzburg that worked with the Bad Reichenhall clinic showing measurable effects. So the wellness claims aren't ALL bullshit. But the historical structure of the claim is interesting because what got medicalized was a thing that happened to exist because of an entirely different economic process, and the medicalization was driven by the need to find a use for the existing infrastructure, and the population that benefited was very specifically the population that could afford a six-week stay at a Kurbad in the 1880s.

The contemporary version is mostly Polish and German pensioners and people on insurance-subsidized rehabilitation stays. The economic model is national health insurance plus aging-population wellness tourism. The structural pattern hasn't changed since 1880 — find a state-backed reimbursement scheme for non-specific health-adjacent activities, locate it in a town that needs revenue, build the patient flow around the legacy industrial infrastructure of a vanished extractive economy. The asset that was originally a 17th century answer to "how do we boil less wood" became a 19th century answer to "what do we tell the bourgeoisie they need" and then a 21st century answer to "how does a small Saxon town stay solvent."

Same as it ever was.

The thorn trees, incidentally, get replaced every 5-10 years as they get encrusted with mineral deposits — the calcium and magnesium and iron compounds that aren't sodium chloride precipitate onto the wood as the brine concentrates, and the encrustation eventually clogs the airflow and reduces evaporation efficiency. The replaced thorn bundles are full of a hard greyish-white mineral concretion the Germans call "Dornstein" or thornstone, which is one of those gorgeous accidental side products that nobody knew they were making until they were stuck with tons of it. The thornstone has some use as a soil amendment but mostly it just piles up around the saltworks as a kind of geological record of which minerals were in the brine and how dry the summers were when the bundles were last replaced.

If you ever go to Bad Kösen there's a thornstone exhibit. It looks like coral.

One day while lounging on the couch, wrapped up in each other, Jack tells Robby that his family called him "rabbit" growing up. Robby thinks that’s funny because his grandma called him "Mishka" (aka little bear). 

From then on, whenever they see a rabbit or a bear out and about, they snap a pic and send it to each other. They never realized how often they came across rabbits and bears until they started doing this. 

Robby’s at a book store, eyes roving over spines, searching for a particular title. He pauses and smiles to himself as his eyes land on a book with an illustrated rabbit on its cover. He automatically reaches into his pocket to pull out his phone.

Jack's doing their weekly grocery shop. He turns down the coffee/tea aisle and spots the bear shaped honey bottle. A wry grin spreads across his face. He’s already composing the text in his mind as he reaches for his cell.

Grace was put into coma by the people who cared about him. They (especially Yáo being Yáo) probably double-triple-quadruple checked everything. They watched him sleep for those first few days — I doubt they went into coma immediately after leaving Earth's orbit. They probably talked to him, assuring him that he'll be okay.

Ilyukhina's coma procedure was probably supervised by Yáo. He made sure that everything was in order, but — he is just one man and he is not a doctor. There was much more room for mistakes.

When Yáo went to sleep, he was alone. He had to rely on the technology completely.

Okay so I was thinking, because of the nature of their shifts, Robby and Jack probably rely on text or leaving each other notes to communicate, especially when their sleep schedules are exact opposites. For things not as urgent, they probably prefer the analog way of writing things down.

For Jack, I’m picturing him writing on post-it notes and sticking them on the fridge, on their bedroom door, etc., for Robby to find when he wakes up. He probably has a stack of post-its on his night stand to write things down before he heads off for his shift.

For Robby though, he’s grabbing whatever pieces of paper he could find to scribble on, not caring what shapes or form they are in, as long as he can get the messages across. He would be putting pieces of tape on them so that he can slap these notes on random surfaces in their home for Jack to come across, a gift of pleasant surprises.

****************************************************

“What’s with the necklaces always peeking underneath your shirt, Dr. Robby?” Santos asks in the midst of handoff between day and night shift. With a sigh, Robby thinks leave it up to Trinity to ask the personal questions. He always admired her honestly and straightforwardness, he would never tell her that, though, because it would only make her already bad bedside manner worse. Yet, her personality out of the hospital was infectious, even if now Robby was stuttering trying to find an answer.

To many, the Magen of David he wore around his neck wasn’t a secret. In fact, during outings with coworkers after long shifts, he often allowed the chain onto the front his shirt rather then keeping it hidden underneath. But, to those who looked hard enough, a silver ball chain could be seen on his neck, peeking out of any shirt he wore.

It was in 2013 when he first started wearing the secret chain, a gift from his now husband whom no one — besides Dana and Lena — knows is Jack.

Before gay marriage was legalized in the state of Pennsylvania and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was still in place, Robby and Jack had grown used to keeping their relationship a secret. There wasn’t any bad intent behind it, but when you are with someone for over 25 years, and more then half of those years you were practically forced to keep it on the down low, it becomes instinct.

The two of them are more then content with how their relationship works, often finding that the absence of prying eyes on their relationships makes both of them more comfortable.

Yet, after Jack came back from deployment, missing a leg and parts of himself he never got back, he put his dog tags into Robby’s palm, giving him the option to either wear them, store them somewhere, or get rid of them.

Robby, forever enamored by his partners bravery and strength, wore them. And, Jacks selling point was that it was the next best thing he could give Robby that wasn’t a ring given that it was 2013 and legally they couldn’t get married. A year later, Robby was the one to officially propose, and Jack pulled out a ring, complained that he wanted to be the one to propose, and quickly slid the ring onto the chain that Robby rarely takes off as it made a distinct cling once it hit the metal.

And that was that. They told very few people, and many just assumed they were extremely close friends — Jack got a good chuckle out of that from time to time.

But now, standing in the heart of the ED, staring at Santos who is looking back with pure curiosity and interest, Robby wants to shout his love from the roof top. He could easily tug the chain from underneath his shirt, display the tags and ring for everyone to see and leave it at that. However, he doesn’t know if Jack wants that.

So, with a quick turn of his, he finds Jack who, of course, heard Santos’ question and was already looking at Robby with a fond expression as he knows exactly what is underneath his shirt. With a small nod and smile as confirmation, Robby smiles back, mouths “I love you,” and loops his finger around the cold silver and brings it up over the neckline of his shirt.

With the eye contact and the dog tags, no one even has to wait for Robby to say anything. The small crowd that has formed as day shift does charts and night shift looks at the board is now looking at both Robby and Jack with their mouths agape. It isn’t until Dana snorts and rolls her eyes that people seem to unfreeze themselves.

“They were no where near subtle, how did no one figure it out?” Dana comments with a fond smile looking at her two boys who have been through thick and thin with each other.

But now he's started dating Robby he really wants it to work because he's not felt this way about someone before. He's scared his true self will scare him off so he tries to keep it hidden. He keeps his distance and tries desperately to be casual. Restricting his contact to two or three messages a day, only spending one night a week at Robby's, being overly professional at work. He's convinced with this precautions in place he won't send Robby running.

Robby is so confused as to why his boyfriend barely wants to spend time with him. When they were just friends Dennis was so attentive and a constant presence. He'd send morning and goodnight texts, make sure their lunch breaks aligned at least three times a week, always looking for any excuse to spend time at Robby's. Now he's practically vanished.

Cue Robby spiralling because now he thinks Dennis never wanted more than friendship but felt he couldn't say no because at the end of the day Robby's his boss. It was Robby who suggested the first date, it was Robby who initiated the first kiss, it was Robby who wanted to become exclusive. Poor Dennis was just dragged along for the ride.

Eventually Robby tries to talk to Dennis, he's sure if they talk properly they can at least go back to being friends. He misses having Dennis around so he'd go back to what they had before if he had to. He asks him if he thinks it’s working between them or if maybe they were better as friends. Dennis panics and tries to work out what 'crazy boyfriend' shit he's done to push Robby away.

"Is it because I left my toothbrush at your house?"

"No, I didn't even notice."

"Were the home cooked packed lunches too much?"

"No, I loved those."

"Is it because I started using your aftershave?"

"No, I liked that."

Suddenly Dennis' heart drops, the list on his phone. Alphabetised baby names, each one ending with Robinavitch.

"Have you been on my phone?"

Now it's Robby's turn to panic, why would Dennis be so scared of him going on his phone. Unless there are messages on there that Dennis would rather he not sees.

"No, why? Are you seeing someone else?"

"As if! I'm far too in love with you to date anybody else."

Dennis realised what he's said, he's done it again and come on too strong. He's just about to apologise when suddenly he's being scooped up into Robby's arms as he whispers over and over how much he loves Dennis too.

****************************************************

- both of them didn’t think the other was the hand holding type so they didn’t hold hands early onto their relationship. turns out, both of them we’re stupid and sucked at communicating because they both love holding each others hands. it wasn’t until they were walking in a park together where there hands brushed and jack decided to just try and held robby’s hand - they now hold hands anytime they are walking side by side outside of work.

- robby was so touch starved before they got together. before they got together, he would get startled before jack hugged him or put a hand on his shoulder. the minute they made it official, jack didn’t hold back given that he loves physical touch. robby has become so accustomed to it that anytime he sees jack (besides at work) he gives him a full on hug.

In any case, he notices when Robby starts giving people stuff. Not really big stuff, but Robby likes his things. He keeps them close and hates even losing a pen. It's a funny hypocritical thing, Dennis thinks, given how many times the man has stolen his notebook.

Back home, Dennis would have been called a slacker for not doing anything for such a long time. Four in the morning was a normal time to wake up then. Especially during the summer. Dennis wasn't sure if it was habit that woke him, or the nightmare he'd been having.

patient care and patient advocacy are extremely important to him personally, but nothing gets as much brownie points in his book as skills. that's what got his respect and attention with baran, when she pulled off that slash trake, leaving him starry-eyed. that's what draws him to trinity and victoria, because they're both quick thinking and innovative. that's what got a temporary good moment between him and langdon, an impressive procedure.

it's so interesting. I can't quite verbalize all my thoughts on it but there's something so. he tends to critique patient care and advocacy when anyone but himself does it. he fights against it when baran is trying to stand up for the incarcerated patient. he has a poor mentorship with samira, who focuses specifically on patient care. the times he does clash with trinity are specifically patient advocacy driven moments. (even though he praises this trait in her to baran.)

I think it's partially because fighting for patients and caring about patients is what is actively killing him. "leeching a part of his soul." he puts too much of himself into it and he's so completely burnt out. running test after test with nick bradley even though there was no hope, using blood bag after blood bag on leah even though it was too late, keeping adamson on ECMO for seventeen days because he can't let go. he lets the patients affect him on a bone deep level, he's all or nothing in his empathy and struggles to compartmentalize.

so, it's a trigger for him. it's not just that samira reflects him as a whole, because several other characters reflect him. trinity reflects him a hell of a lot, with their similar senses of humor, their capabilities to handle a trauma and be quick on their feet, the version of himself he probably likes a lot more. the competent version of himself. patient care makes him feel helpless. traumas make him feel in control.

so samira holds a mirror to a source of pain. and hurt people hurt people. I didn't even mean for this post to delve into that dynamic but I do think it's notable.

it's also notable that his workstyle as an attending is heavily influenced by covid. in covid, after adamson died, a mentor, a father figure, a guiding light, robby had to step up and shoulder brand new responsibilities. they were all looking to him in a time that was so extreme, filled with grief and death and chaos. he had to force himself through his. workhorse himself through this. you can't care about patients personal lives, you have to just care about if they get to live at all.