Linux good 🐧

I have NO bias... NO bias at all..........

In 1968, consumer activist Ralph Nader complained to the Washington Post about the bationwide practice of "giving Negroes 25 to 50 percent stronger [x-ray] doses than white patients." G.J. Tarleton, a professor of radiology at the predominantly Black Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, swiftly dismissed the claim as "a fantastic charge".

But California radiologic technicians conducting a 1966 survey revealed that 72 percent of the states X-ray technicians had opted on their own initiative to administer these higher X-ray exposures to Blacks because of their vague beliefs that African-Americans were physiologically different: "'Their bones are harder and denser'.... 'their skin is darker'.... 'their flesh is tougher'..."

Physicians from the Public Health Service and the American College of Radiology denied ever issuing such advisories to doctors, but it was technicians, not doctors, who were making the experimental adjustments without citing their actions in the official medical records.

Also, despite the denials, physicians were being taught to administer higher-than-indicated radiation doses to Blacks. For example, the 1963 edition of X-ray Technology, by Charles A. Jacobi and Don Q. Paris, a standard textbook, contained a charted recommendation that the standard radiation doses should be increased for Negro X-ray patients."

Now, unlike Michael Newton’s book of hope, I appreciate the clarity of this book’s title: Encyclopedia of Things that Never Where (1985). Stating that definitively really gets all that belief malarkey out of the way and lets us appreciate these things on their own imaginary terms (as Georgess McHargue encouraged us to do on Monday).

This book is more like a collection of several small topical encyclopedias, each discrete from the others and in their own alphabetical order. Nor do they necessarily make a perfect or intuitive sense all the way through. Things of the Cosmos is mostly gods of major mythologies, but also King Arthur and his knights. Things of the Ground and Underground collects faeries and tree spirits, but also the manticore, Minotaur and Sphinx. Things of Wonderland seems to imply things from literature, but really it collects all manner of fantastical places, from fiction, but also from legend. Things of Magic, Science and Invention could just as well have been called Things and left it at that; it collects notable items, from Thor’s hammer to Jekyll’s potion to the many unusual uses for nails. Things of Water, Sky and Air covers all the creatures not detailed in Earth chapter — Grendel is here, griffins, too, and all the sea serpents. Finally, Things of the Night details the undead and other creatures who hide from the sun, whether they go bump or not.