Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Descartes' Cure for Constipation

What follows is a remedy that René Descartes apparently used and recorded in July, 1628, in order to relieve a trouble du transit intestinal. I have often said, only half-jokingly, that an alternative history of philosophy could be written by focusing upon the preoccupations of the canonical thinkers throughout history with the state of their own bowels, from the Pythagorean interdiction on beans to Nietzsche's claim (which I endorse) that "you will understand the origin of the German spirit—from distressed intestines." In such a history, Descartes' recipe would stand as a particularly important bit of evidence: the only reason we have it is because another philosopher, G. W. Leibniz, transcribed it nearly 50 years later, when Descartes' literary executor, Claude Clerselier, gave the German philosopher one day, February 24, 1676, to look through Descartes' manuscripts and to transcribe whatever interested him. Ponder that fact for a moment: Leibniz had a single day to copy out whatever he could find of interest in the Nachlass of the greatest philosopher of his era, and this remedy against constipation made the list. Clearly he was operating with a different understanding of the scope of the discipline than we are.

(Query to neo-Latinists: I'm not sure how to translate the phrase 'italicae nucis testae inditae'. Surely he's talking about some sort of nut-shaped clay vessels, rather than nuts themselves?)

A particularly difficult evacuation of the lower intestine after a number of meals was brought about in this way: Equal parts bull's gall, unsalted butter, black hellebore, extract of diacolocynthide, diagridion, and sapphron, reduced into a single mass and heated over a flame until they have attained the consistency of honey, inserted into Italian terracotta vessels and applied to the navel. And this cataplasm is then fastened so that it does not fall; and two cataplasms of clay, filled with these potions, are applied the one after the other, one per day. The first days nothing was felt by the patient, other than agitations and murmurs; the third day, the desired evacuation arrived with great pain, but the normal excretion did not follow the very hard excrements until the abdomen of a freshly slaughtered calf, covered in aged oil sifted after cooking and heated up, was applied to the patient's stomach, and until the anus was probed by fingers covered with bile and butter. 

[Alvi egrestio difficillima post menses aliquot sic provocata. Fellis taurini recentis, butyri insulsi, hellebori nigri, extracti diacolocynthidis, diagridii & croci partes aequales, in unam massam redactae, & igni ad mellis consistentiam decoctae, italicae nucis testae inditae, umbilico impositae sunt. Ligataque fuit mox ne caderet, & binae testae, diebus singulis, potionibus intus assumtis, sic repleta impositae sunt. Primis diebus, nihil praeter fluctuationes & murmura a patiente sentiebantur; tertia die, cum immensis doloribus supervenit egerendi desiderium; at induratis excrementis non successit excretio, donec vituli abdomen recens, cum oleo antiquo ad ignem cribratum & calens, ventriculo induceretur, digitis que felle & butyro inunctis anus sollicitaretur] (AT XI 644).

What Would Baudrillard Say?

It appears that one of the better selling items in the bookstore of the Centre Pompidou is a box set of postcards featuring images from the popular website, Stuff On My Cat, whose slogan, apparently, is "Cats + Stuff = Awesome."

This item sits on the display tables alongside books showcasing the work of Duane Hanson, Jeff Koons, and Maurizio Cattelan. I flipped through these books last night, as my wife searched for something or other in the important tomes lining the walls. I laughed at Michael Jackson and Bubbles, again; I marvelled, again, at how corpulent Americans are, according to Duane Hanson, and how much they like yard sales and barbecues. So far, the usual museum-bookstore routine. But then I picked up the Stuff On My Cat cards and was, for the first time since entering what can only be called the flagship bookstore of the contemporary artworld, genuinely transfixed. Those cats had beer cans on them! They were wearing baseball caps and trousers! Afro wigs! Potted plants! The slogan had it just right: cats, in combination with stuff, make an awesome spectacle.

But then I had this saddening realization: I didn't have to come here to do this. I could have stayed back in the apartment in Montmartre and puttered around on the internet as I usually do. I could have kept my distance from Paris altogether. 

This, I think, raises a real problem for pre-internet institutions like the Centre Pompidou (whose edifice always makes me think of Duran Duran): there is simply no good reason to believe that one can find between its walls more creativity than what spontaneously bubbles up online. Who can really say they prefer Joseph Beuys to Tadjik Jimmy? I think until the 1990s it was possible to build buildings that house physical objects that are the product of some sort of human creativity, if not the same sort on which the Renaissance masters drew, and to call these buildings cultural institutions and to designate the objects inside of them as somehow special and, finally, to convince people to go to these buildings and to pay to be allowed inside. But the time for that is over, and the Centre Pompidou looks sadder than ever.

Apparently when it was built it was supposed to 'turn the museum inside out', and to symbolize this in its very architecture. There was supposed to be an 'effet Beaubourg', Jean Baudrillard declaimed, that would transform museum-going from an activity of the elite to an activity of the masses. Now the masses can go pick up a box-set of Stuff On My Cat postcards at the Beaubourg's bookstore, or they can stay home and get their dose of LOL-kitty cheer electronically. Meanwhile, the oil paintings over at the Musée d'Orsay still yield up details when studied closely that are not apparent in electronic reproduction.

Paul Robeson: Communist

How nice it would be if there still were communists on the American political scene. Among other things, this might make it vastly easier to get across to the Tea Partiers who is and who is not one.

Fortunately, the historical record, now kept by YouTube, leaves us fragments of the not-so-distant past in which the label 'communist' actually meant something in America, and something quite distinct from 'liberal'.

The contrast offered by this recording is so simple it might be made into a slogan and put on a cardboard sign: Paul Robeson: communist. Barack Obama: not a communist. To facilitate comprehension, we could ask for help in misspelling the words.

We might also recruit Paul Hogan to make a YouTube clip in which he contrasts Obama ("That's not a knife") with Robeson ("This is a knife") in his caricatured outback accent. Even the most xenophobic of Tea Partiers still get a kick out of folksy Australians.

In any case we will need to get creative in our response, and we will certainly need to stop playing along with the Tea Partiers' strictly non-denoting use of words.

Friday Symptoms #3

Causes of Death in the City of London, 1647-1660

Abortive and Stil-born; Aged; Ague and Fever; Apoplex and Suddenly; Bleach; Blasted; Bleeding; Bloody Flux, Scouring and Flux; Burnt and Scalded; Calenture; Cancer, Gangrene and Fistula; Wolf; Canker, Sore-mouth and Thrush; Child-bed; Chrisoms and Infants; Colick and Wind; Cold and Cough; Consumption and Cough; Convulsion; Cramp; Cut of the Stone; Dropsie and Tympany; Drowned; Excessive drinking; Executed; Fainted in a Bath; Falling-Sickness; Flox and small Pox; Found dead in the Streets; French-Pox; Frighted; Gout; Grief; Hanged, and made-away themselves; Head-Ach; Jaundice; Jaw-faln; Impostume; Itch; Killed by several Accidents; King's Evil; Lethargy; Leprosie; Liver-grown, Spleen and Rickets; Lunatick; Meagrom; Measles; Mother; Murdered; Overlaid and starved at Nurse; Palsie; Plague in the Guts; Pleurisie; Poisoned; Purples and Spotted Fever; Quinsie and Sore-throat; Rickets; Mother, rising of the Lights; Rupture; Scal'd head; Scurvy; Smothered and stifled; Sores, Ulcers, broken and bruised Limbs; Shot; Spleen; Shingles; Starved; Stitch; Stone and Strangury; Sciatica; Stopping of the Stomach; Surfet; Swine-Pox; Teeth and Worms; Tissick; Thrush; Vomiting; Worms; Wen; Suddenly.

(from William Petty, Natural and political observations, mentioned in a following index, and made upon the bills of mortality by John Graunt, citizen of London; with reference to the government, religion, trade, growth, ayr, diseases, and the several changes of the said city., London: Printed by Tho. Roycroft, for John Martin, James Allestry, and Tho. Dicas ..., 1662).

Friday Symptoms, #2

Lâtah

There is no doubt that there is a hereditary tendency to lâtah in almost every Malay. They themselves give a very wide definition to the term, including all, from those who are absolutely automatic to suggestion, to those of a more markedly excitable temperament. Most Malays take very little notice of mild cases-- they are so common, they do not tend to become more severe, they do not, as a rule, interfere with health, and usually very little with business. There is no tendency for the condition to degenerate into insanity-- an orang lâtah (lâtah man) never becomes an orang gila (lunatic).

It has been suggested that the enervating climate of the Malay Peninsula and the archipelago is responsible for the condition. Even Europeans get 'jumpy' and intensely irritable after a few years there, and 'tropical neurasthenia', it is suggested, is the forerunner of what, in a few generations, would be lâtah. On the other hand, an almost identical affection, 'miryachit', occurs in Siberia, and 'Tourette's disease' and the 'jumping Frenchmen of Maine' will immediately occur to those acquainted with the varieties of spasmodic tic...

We come now to the question, What is the connexion, if any, between lâtah and amok? Here a recent experiment of Fletcher's may usefully be considered. Briefly it was as follows: a known lâtah in hospital was taken out of the ward into another room, where she was rendered lâtah. In the interval a dummy figure was put into the bed next hers. When she was brought back she was given a knife, and it was suggested that she should stab the apparently sleeping body. She acted on the suggestion instantly, and struck furiously at the figure. Immediately afterwards the suggestion was withdrawn, and she was horrified at her conduct. It was a correspondingly great relief, therefore, when the sheet was withdrawn and the dummy figure exposed to her eyes.

Suppose, now, that to a lâtah, consumed with a great anger or sorrow, brooding over his wrongs, such a suggestion were made, either by self-suggestion or accident. Owing to his condition, the suggestion would be stronger, more imperative, more lasting than usual. In such a case we would almost certainly get a typical amoker.

It will be obvious that the whole subject is intensely elusive. It is very difficult for the European to get behind the Oriental mind. There are almost no objective signs to go upon: the lâtah, and the amoker, except when under the influence of their affection, behaving like ordinary people, showing no stigmata of degeneracy, giving no signs of madness.

*
From The British Medical Journal, February 24, 1912, p. 438-9.

The Silly-How

Great conceits are raised of the involution or membranous covering, commonly called the Silly-how, that sometimes is found about the heads of children upon their birth, and is therefore preserved with great care, not only as medical in diseases, but effectual in success, concerning the Infant and others; which is surely no more than a continued superstition. For hereof we read in the life of Antoninus delivered by Spartianus, that children are born sometimes with this natural cap, which Midwives were wont to sell unto credulous Lawyers, who had an opinion it advantaged their promotion.

But to speak strictly, the effect is natural, and thus to be conceived: Animal conceptions have three teguments, or membranous films which cover them in the womb, that is, the Corion, Amnios, and Allantois... Now about the time when the Infant breaketh these coverings, it sometime carrieth with it about the head a part of the Amnios or nearest coat; which, saith Spiegelius, either proceedeth from the toughness of the membrane or weakness of the Infant that cannot get clear thereof. And therefore herein significations are naturall and concluding upon the Infant, but not to be extended unto magical signalities.

*

Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica or, Enquires into Very Many Received Tenents and Commonly Presumed Truths, London, 1658.

For an extensive treatment of the significance of the caul in early modern European folk culture, see Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, University of Chicago Press, 2004 (trans. of Storia notturna. Una decifrazione del sabba, Einaudi, 1989).

(Friday Symptoms #2)

Friday Symptoms #1

Clinical Lycanthropy. In the largest modern collection of cases of lycanthropy, Keck and colleagues uncovered the records of 12 American patients who had reported that they were a particular animal and had behaved in a manner reminiscent of that animal. Six patients were manic, 2 were depressed, 2 had schizophrenia, one had borderline personality disorder and one received the diagnosis of atypical psychosis. Two patients, one who claimed to be a Bengal Tiger and one who hopped around a ward like a rabbit admitted that their behaviour was under voluntary control after confrontation by their psychiatrists and were judged to have a factitious element to their accompanying psychiatric disorder. The lycanthropic behaviour was quite varied and 10 patients identified themselves as specific animals, most commonly wolves, dogs or cats. One case who identified himself as a gerbil had raised these animals as pets for many years. One patient believed himself to be a cat for more than 13 years but in all other cases the behaviour was transient and responded to antipsychotic medication. Symptoms associated with lycanthropy can occur in the absence of a full blown syndrome, as in the case reported by Buchanan of a depressed 60-year-old divorcee who barked, grimaced and growled but did not believe that she was transformed into an animal.

*

From T. A. Fahy, Lycanthropy: A Review, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 82, 1, (1989): 37-9.

See also P. E. Keck et al., Lycanthropy: Alive and Well in the Twentieth Century, Psychol Med 18 (1988): 113-20.