Rauwrtsch.

Check it out:

Mobs of angry white people, protesting for their right to [checks notes] get a haircut—in the middle of a pandemic—yelled at cops, shoved them, threw things at them, and were nowhere near being respectful or peaceful, but for some reason, police officers didn’t mace them, didn’t shoot rubber bullets at them, didn’t tear gas them, and didn’t kneel on their necks and choke them to death. Qwhite interesting how differently white people are treated even when they disrespect the police and even when they riot over things like [checks notes again] their sports team losing or hell, even winning a game.

“@campaignzero started the #8cantwait project which proves that together these eight policies can decrease police violence by 72%. Tell your mayors office to enact these clear demands by taking the #8cantwait pledge. This is an effort that will have a huge impact right now”

It would be a shame if the protesters noted that plainclothes cops can be identified a number of ways, such as wearing steel-toed boots; an armband or wristband of a particular color; driving white, black, or dark blue cars with concealed lights; or having the outline of cuffs visible in the back pocket or the bumps of an armor vest’s shoulder straps under their shirt.

It would be a shame if the protesters began making their signs out of inch-thick plywood to stop rubber bullets, forming a tight shield wall to prevent police from singling out and mobbing individual protesters. It would be a shame if the people behind the shield wall held up umbrellas so that tear gas canisters fired over the heads of the front line will be bounced away. It would be a shame if protesters began constructing improvised armor vests out of duct tape, hardback books, and ceramic tiles.

It would be a shame if protesters started wearing safety glasses, hard hats, respirators, and gardening gloves, all of which can be found at the same hardware stores as the plywood. It would be a shame if they started using traffic cones (the kind without the hole in the top) upside-down buckets, or other improvised lids to contain tear gas by placing them over the canisters.

It would be a shame if protesters learned that police scanners are legal to own in the US, allowing them to learn where police are moving and what routes they intend to take. It would be a shame if they discovered that these scanners can be used to send as well as receive, allowing them to flood the scanner frequencies with noise.

- the "all lives matter" crowd

- the “i don’t care about politics” crowd

- "blue lives matter" people

- "violence is never the answer” people

- "i don't see race/colour" people

THIS USER IS (NAIVELY) EXCITED ABOUT THE NEW PERCY JACKSON ADAPTATION

Tumblr has a feature hidden in their “Labs”, called “Reblog Graphs”.  It’s a neat little thing that lets you see how influential you are, and also which blogs have large followings.  It’s a great way to see why your post from three years ago is suddenly getting a thousand notes a day, too.

This is a graph of a couple hundred reblogs from a recent post somebody made.

The original post is the orange dot.  I’m the purple dot one generation away.  You can see how many people reblogged from me, but my following isn’t nearly as big as that large dot off to the right.

Only four people reblogged it from me, while that other person had a cluster of around a dozen.  But you can see that my overall influence was greater.  Their cluster died out quickly, while mine kept going and going.

You could say this post went viral.

That’s what I’m actually here to talk about today…

Let’s go back a slide and change the caption.

Now this isn’t a blog post we’re talking about, this is, say, a novel coronavirus that no one is immune to or something like that.  Now we’re not talking about reblogs, we’re talking about infections.

I know this Patient Zero, they’re a friend of mine.  We get together with another friend, whose sister works in a nursing home.

So now I’m infected.  And so’s that other friend, whose sister works in the nursing home.

And I infect four other people.

It’s just a slight cough, and I feel silly for staying home over just a slight cough, so I go into work.  Same goes for that sister who works in the nursing home.

It is week 1 of the pandemic.

It’s flu season, so none of my coworkers think twice about this fever and cough that they now have.  Meanwhile, over at the nursing home, people start noticing that the flu is especially bad this year.

It is week 2 of the pandemic.

The nursing home realizes they have a huge problem.  EMTs are taking several people to the hospital with trouble breathing every day.  Two have died.  And now Fire Station 27, the one near the nursing home, has several people who are sick.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling fine, and so are my coworkers who had the flu right after me.

And so on…

It is now week 9 of the pandemic.

Each of these circles represents another week in the spread of the virus, with more and more people infected.  You can see that the nursing home and the fire station in the upper right were contained by week 3, because they quarantined and stopped it.  That outbreak made the news.  But what didn’t make the news were all the people in the lower left, the ones who continue to spread it to one or two, maybe three people.  Once in a while, a large cluster flares up, but for the most part, it’s silent.

What you might not see is how much of this graph rolls back up to me and my actions.

Fully 2/3 of the reblogs cases are the product of my infection.  If you take me out of the picture, it’s not just those four people I infected that don’t get it.  It’s the 7 people they infected.  And the people they infected.  And the people they infected.

Without me, it is over in Week 5.  My single infection in week 1 ended up causing this to run for another month.  If I’d stayed home that day instead of reblogging going to the office, it would’ve made a huge difference.  It doesn’t really matter who patient zero was, every person on this graph is essentially patient zero of their own outbreak.

This is why staying home when sick matters.  This is why hand-washing matters.  This is why social distancing matters.  This is why schools are closed and why large companies are having people work from home and why March Madness is canceled.

it always disappointed me that Monster Girls are an anime porn thing rather than something used to explore the way society and the media dehumanises women, but oh well

See, we have this concept called “bodily autonomy.” It’s this….cultural notion that a person’s control over their own body is above all important and must not be infringed upon. 

Like, we can’t even take LIFE SAVING organs from CORPSES unless the person whose corpse it is gave consent before their death. Even corpses get bodily autonomy. 

To tell people that they MUST sacrifice their bodily autonomy for 9 months against their will in an incredibly expensive, invasive, difficult process to save what YOU view as another human life (a debatable claim in the early stages of pregnancy when the VAST majority of abortions are performed) is desperately unethical. You can’t even ask people to sacrifice bodily autonomy to give up organs they aren’t using anymore after they have died. 

And here’s another point: When you say that “rape is the exception” you betray something FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN about your own argument.

Because a fetus produced from sexual assault is biologically NO DIFFERENT than a fetus produced from consensual sex. No difference at all.

If one is alive, so is the other. If one is a person, so is the other. If one has a soul, then so does the other. If one is a little blessing that happened for a reason and must be protected, then so is the other. 

When you say that “Rape is the exception” what you betray is this: It isn’t about a life. This isn’t about the little soul sitting inside some person’s womb, because if it was you wouldn’t care about HOW it got there, only that it is a little life that needs protecting.

When you say “rape is the exception” what you say is this: You are treating pregnancy as a punishment. You are PUNISHING people who have had CONSENSUAL SEX but don’t want to go through a pregnancy. People who DARED to have consensual sex without the goal of procreation in mind, and this is their “consequence.” 

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

M Y    T I M E    H A S    C O M E

You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.

STORY TIME

Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.

Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.

But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.

BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.

Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:

Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.

For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus. 

With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:

Garlic and cropleek (leek or onion, or another related plant) have been known to have antibacterial qualities for centuries.

Wine (alcohol) also has antibacterial qualities.

Bullocks gall (literally bile taken from a bull) is known to have detergent properties, and has long been used as an additive to soap for particularly tough stains.

A brazen vessel, or a vessel made of brass, contains a good amount of copper in it. And that copper, when left to sit around for, I don’t know, about nine days, would have plenty of time to react with the acids in the onion and garlic and the tartarates in the wine to create copper salts. 

Coppers salts, as it happens, are cytotoxic, meaning they kill everything: tissue and bacteria.

What an interesting find.

Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:

This recipe, which was over 1,000 years old when they tested it, worked.

It worked well.

It worked extremely well. 

So well, in fact, that (in a lab setting) they even got it to kill Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or as it’s more commonly known, MRSA. MRSA is a modern superbug that has built up a resistance to the antibiotic Methicillin. And this goddamn Anglo-Saxon witches’ brew freakin murdered it.

Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.

Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this. 

To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic. 

Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.

All that to say:  Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Further reading:

The 2015 Ancientbiotics report: A 1,000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity

NPR: ‘Ancientbiotics’ Researchers Look For Old Fixes To Modern Ailments

Mental Floss: 20 Anglo-Saxon Remedies from Bald’s Leechbook

Read a paper about how scholars are building on the work of the Ancientbiotics project to better understand how to apply ancient ideas effectively to modern medicine.

Look through Royal 12 D XVIII for yourself! Bald’s eyesalve recipe is on f. 12v and looks like this: