5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (12 page)

3

Brad Pitt: ichthyophobia (fear of sharks, even on dry land).

4

Nicolae Ceau¸sescu, Benito Mussolini, Marlene Dietrich: bacillophobia (fear of germs). The Romanian dictator Ceau¸sescu and his wife Elena went on staged

“walkabouts” which required them to shake a few hands and kiss small children. The secret police selected a few volunteers beforehand and had them locked up for weeks and regularly disinfected in readiness for the big day.

Mussolini adopted the Roman-style straight-arm fascist salute because he couldn’t bear the idea of shaking hands with people. Marlene Dietrich’s obsession with germs led her to be known by Hollywood insiders as “the Queen of Ajax.”

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[Ten Phobias of the Famous]

5

Alfred Hitchcock: ovophobia (fear of eggs).

6

Frederick the Great, Natalie Wood: hydrophobia (fear of water). The king of Prussia was so terrified of water that he could not wash himself and his servants had to rub him down with dry towels. Natalie Wood fell off a yacht and drowned in 1981.

7

George Bernard Shaw: coitophobia (fear of sex). Shaw lost his virginity to a much older woman at the age of twenty-nine. He was so shocked by the experience that he didn’t bother to try it again for another fifteen years.

8

Maximilian Robespierre: hematophobia (fear of blood).

The French revolutionary kept the guillotine in the Place de la Revolution in Paris in almost continuous use.

Robespierre himself, however, was extremely squeamish and couldn’t bring himself to even look at the bloodstains on the street cobbles.

9

Robert Schumann, German composer: metallophobia (fear of metal). He especially disliked keys. (But not, apparently, the key of E-flat major, in which he wrote his Symphony No. 3.)

10

Queen Christina of Sweden—entomophobia (fear of insects). The mentally unbalanced seventeenth-century monarch had a miniature four-inch cannon built in perfect working order so that she could spend most of her time firing tiny cannonballs at the fleas in her bedroom.

121

10

The Wonder of You:

Ten Facts about

the Human Condition

1

The human body comprises enough fat to make seven bars of soap, enough iron to make a medium-sized nail, enough potassium to explode a toy cannon, enough lime to whitewash a small chicken house, enough sugar to fill a jam jar, and enough sulfur to rid a dog of fleas.

2

A complete skeleton is worth between $5,000 and $7,500

to a medical student; your skull alone would fetch only about $450.

3

Your mouth produces about one quart of saliva per day.

4

Demodox folliculorum
has eight stumpy legs and a tail, is about a third of millimeter long, and loves nothing more than to recline in the warm, oily pits of your hair follicles. Most adults have this mite, usually on the head and especially in eyelashes, and often in nipples.

5

You have approximately 4,000 wax glands in each ear.

6

The average adult stool weighs about four ounces. About half of the bulk of your feces comprises the dead bodies of bacteria that live inside your intestines.

7

The average male foot exudes half a pint of sweat each day.

8

If it weren’t for the slimy mucous that clings to and lines the walls of your gut, your stomach would readily digest itself.

9

The average person will pass about 11,000 gallons of urine in a lifetime.

10

A man weighing 200 pounds would provide enough meat to feed 100 cannibals in one sitting.

122

Twelve 12

Historic Operations

1658: Thomas Hollier, a London surgeon specializing in lithotomy, removes a bladder stone “as big as a tennis ball” from the young Samuel Pepys. The diarist recovers, but complains afterward that he often passes “gravel” in his urine, which he tries to cure by drinking turpentine.

1667: A pioneer attempt at blood transfusion is made as members of the Royal Society in England, unaware that blood-type compatibility is important, gather to witness the transfusion of twelve ounces of sheep’s blood into the unfortunate Reverend Arthur Coga. Samuel Pepys, still sore from his encounter with Thomas Hollier (see above), records in his diary: “The patient speaks well, saying that he finds himself much better, as a new man . . . but he is cracked a little in his head.” Reverend Coga dies soon afterward.

1686: King Louis XIV of France undergoes an operation for anal fistulas. Twice he is sliced open without any form of anesthetic, but the word from the palace of Versailles is that he endured the operation heroically. A group of French nuns at the cloister of Saint-Cyr hear of his recovery and celebrate by writing a song called “Dieu Sauvez le Roi.” A traveling Englishman hears the tune, copies it down, and when he gets home translates it into

“God Save the King.”

1745: Proving that the only two qualifications for a good surgeon that matter are fast hands and an iron stomach, royal surgeon William Cheselden arms his assistant with
123

[Twelve Historic Operations]

a watch and removes a kidney stone in under sixty seconds, but throws up after the operation.

1797: Admiral Horatio Nelson has his right arm amputated, without anesthetic, on board the
Theseus
on July 25.

Nelson is so upset by the feel of the cold scalpel against his flesh that he orders that all amputations performed on ships under his command should be done with warm knives. After the arm is removed he is left alone to recover with an opium pill and a shot of rum, the start of a lifelong opium addiction.

1805: Napoleon’s head surgeon, Dominique Larrey, sets a new record by amputating a leg in less than fifteen seconds.

1821: King George IV has a sebaceous cyst removed from his head, entirely without the aid of anesthetic, and casually asks the surgeon, Astley Cooper, “So, what do you call these tumors?” As mark of the patient’s gratitude, plain Astley became Sir Astley.

1842: The Scottish surgeon and part-time body snatcher Robert Lister, described as “the finest surgeon in Europe,” sets a personal best for a leg amputation at twenty-eight seconds. While achieving this record, he accidentally cuts off two of his assistant’s fingers and the patient’s left testicle.

1846: The first amputation carried out under anesthetic is performed at Massachusetts General Hospital when twenty-one-year-old Alice Mohan is parted from her right leg. The operation is performed by Dr. George
124

[Twelve Historic Operations]

Haywood, assisted by Andrew Morton and his new invention, the ether inhaler. When the young woman regains consciousness, Haywood, understandably pleased with his efforts, plucks the leg from the sawdust where it lies and waves it triumphantly under her nose, saying,

“It’s all done, Alice.” There is no record of her reply.

1846: The famous English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel accidentally swallows a gold half-sovereign, which sticks in his windpipe. After vomit-inducing drugs fail to dislodge it, surgeons try unsuccessfully to remove the coin via a tracheotomy. The coin is finally expelled by a more basic method: The engineer has himself strapped to a hinged table, tilted to a 45-degree angle, then thumped hard in the back. Much to Brunel’s relief the coin shoots forward and hits his teeth.

1881: President James Garfield, shot by the assassin Charles Guiteau, is attended by the first of sixteen doctors, Willard Bliss, who jabs a finger into the wound, then inserts a nonsterile probe to find the bullet. Bliss fails to find the slug, but he does so much damage with his probe that it misleads everyone into concluding that the missile had penetrated the president’s liver and therefore surgery is useless. An army surgeon general sticks his unwashed finger into the wound, followed by the navy surgeon general who probes with his finger so deeply that he punctures the president’s liver. Alexander Graham Bell is called in with a metal detector to locate the offending missile and, after several passes, Bell announces that he has located the bullet. Doctors decide to cut Garfield
125

[Twelve Historic Operations]

open to remove it. What Bell’s equipment had actually located, however, is the metal spring under the mattress; the bullet remains undetected. The deep and by now infected wound causes Garfield to have a fatal heart attack. The president’s autopsy confirms that the bullet had lodged some way from the spine and that Garfield would have survived if the doctors had only left him alone.

1887: Queen Victoria has a particularly nasty axillary abscess drained at the age of fifty-one. When she comes around from the chloroform, she opens her eyes and remarks, “A most unpleasant task, Professor Lister, most pleasantly performed,” once again proving that royal patients are not only a lot braver than the rest of us when they have to go under the scalpel, but that their breeding makes them far more courteous.

126

Ten

10

Health Problems That

Helped Napoleon Meet

His Waterloo

1

Nausea

2

Pituitary dysplasia

3

Prolapsed hemorrhoids

4

Constipation

5

Syphilis

6

Chronic fatigue

7

Peptic ulcer

8

Dysuria (difficult or painful urination)

9

Abdominal cramps

10

Anorexia

127

Of

10

Lice and Men:

Ten Great Unwashed

1

SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI St. Francis listed personal filthiness among the insignia of piety, in line with the early teachings of the Christian Church, which held that dirtiness was next to godliness and that bathing was an evil, ungodly vanity punishable by an eternity in hell. One fourth-century Christian pilgrim boasted that she hadn’t washed her face for eighteen years. St.

Anthony never washed his feet, St. Abraham didn’t wash his hands or feet for fifty years, and St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body except her fingertips.

2

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN The German composer

had such a disregard for personal cleanliness that his friends had to take away his dirty clothes and wash them while he slept.

3

CHAIRMAN MAO The Chinese Communist leader never took a bath or brushed his teeth—the latter on the grounds that tigers never brushed their teeth either. He achieved an epic personal hygiene problem that grew steadily worse as the years went by; the septuagenarian having several young concubines rub his body down with hot towels, instead of bathing.

4

RAMASUBBA SITHARANJAN The Bombay religious mystic eschewed personal hygiene as proof of his faith to his followers and claimed to have not brushed his teeth, bathed, or shaved in sixty-five years.

5

CZAR PETER THE GREAT Renowned throughout

Europe for his lack of personal hygiene, he was
128

[Ten Great Unwashed]

incredibly smelly even by eighteenth-century standards and was blissfully unaware of rudimentary table manners or even basic potty training. When the Czar and his courtiers visited London, onlookers noted that they intermittently dripped pearls and lice as they walked.

6

KING FREDERICK THE GREAT His clothes

remained unchanged for years and he shuffled in rags around his palace, which was, in places, ankle-deep in excrement provided by his pack of beloved Italian greyhounds. When he died, the shirt on his back was so rotten with sweat that his valet had to dress him in one of his own shirts for the burial.

7

KING LOUIS XIV The king was an enthusiastic lover, but his advances were a trying time for his mistresses.

When his doctor persuaded him to bathe for medical reasons, the French king tried to get out of it by feigning a terrible headache and vowed never to repeat the experience. He took only three baths in his lifetime, each of them under protest.

8

GENGHIS KHAN The Mongol ruler’s warriors were a superstitious bunch who believed that washing was a sacrilege. There was also a more practical reason for the lax approach to ablutions: The thick crust of dirt that covered their bodies throughout their lives helped them withstand temperatures as low as minus 43° F. Khan’s men used their lack of hygiene as a weapon of psychological warfare: Their enemies could smell the
129

[Ten Great Unwashed]

festering Mongol hordes long before they could see them, and were often paralyzed with fear by the time they arrived.

9

THE ELEVENTH DUKE OF NORFOLK Renowned

as one of the richest and smelliest men in England, the

“Dirty Duke” never once voluntarily bathed in his entire life: When his servants found it impossible to occupy the same room with him, they got their aristocrat employer blind drunk and quickly bathed him before he regained consciousness.

10

KING HENRI IV The French king was known,

unusually for the time, for being a stickler for changing his shirts regularly, but still went around his court

“smelling like carrion.” When his fiancée, Marie de Médicis, met him for the first time, the stench almost made her faint.

130

Ten

10

Dangerous Doctors

1

GALEN The third-century Greek anatomist, personal physician to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, killed more people than any other man in medical history. For more than one thousand years Galen was acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church to be the world’s only official authority on human anatomy. The Church was not in the least concerned that Galen had never actually seen the inside of the human body, or that his one hundred or so medical textbooks were wild guesswork based on his observations of dead pigs and dogs. Thanks to Galen, generations of medical students learned that the brain was a large clot of phlegm, that the heart had two chambers, that the best way to cure a headache was to cut holes in the skull, that the quickest way to cure a cough was to amputate the uvula at the back of the patient’s palate, and that postoperative wounds should be dressed with pigeon’s blood.