See? Two nights in a row.

 It's like a trend or something.

In my quest to loosen up my pen and get the creative juices pumping, I want to record for posterity a couple of objects that have helped me through the pandemic. I'll do one a day for a couple of days. 

The first object made absolutely no material difference to my health in the pandemic, but it served the purpose of a talisman or good luck charm or similar psychological crutch. It was my little bottle of hand sanitizer:

 

Behold its glory.

I think I got this at Walmart during my first pre-pandemic freak-out. I bought about three 32oz bottles of hand sanitizer and a tiny, portable one that I would refill. To get you in the sort of mindset I was in--my weirdness manifests in strange ways-- I got it in my mind that I needed a funnel to fill the little bottle, so I headed off to the automotive section to find the right one. It was completely unnecessary. Who thinks, damn it, I need a funnel for this apocalypse? A similar buy was a big thing of instant coffee. My reasoning went: I'm addicted to Diet Pepsi, and it's probably because of the caffeine. When I quit drinking coffee, I had headaches for a few weeks. I must never have another headache. Therefore, I must buy a buttload of instant coffee to somehow step down if I need to. Never touched it. This bottle was with me whenever I went anywhere, which was mostly nowhere with occasional runs to the grocery store. You can see that the printing has rubbed off it has been toted around so much. Whenever I touched anything, I gave myself a little squirt of sanitizer; it was like I was training for the OCD Olympics. It turns out that COVID-19 doesn't spread by fomites, but handwashing stations and handwipes remain everywhere. Hygiene theater, they call it. 

B 

I'm back...

Not much has happened since I last posted in December 2019. Perhaps that's why the blog has been lying fallow for two years, the sheer uneventfulness of it all. 

The pandemic blew up in our face just a few months later. I was worried. I had been listening to the BBC and they were doing a good job reporting on the "flu" in Wuhan, as was STAT news. And I had an inkling. This is not one of those retrofitted memories that one makes up after the fact. I was freaking out long before the coronavirus made it to the neighborhood and I have the gallons of hand sanitizer to prove it. I made night runs to Wal-Mart weeks before the lockdown. I had already trained my students on all of the online tools that we would be using for the rest of the semester and had essentially excused them from attending in class a week before the school closed. I never lacked toilet paper and I never lacked Diet Pepsi--at least not until they ran out of it all over South Jersey this fall. Believe me, I checked. 

I had purchased gloves and goggles and alcohol wipes and even had a box or two of facemasks before they disappeared, the last ones in the local CVS, if I remember correctly. The lockdown, when it hit, was very intense; it was a hard year and a half. Eve and I did--and are doing--our absolute best to keep our distance from the rest of the world during this ongoing public health emergency. After the first three or four months, I had dreams of hugging people. 

Right after the virus appeared in China, I finished my tenure file and submitted it. As the months of lockdown dragged on and as my colleagues and I worked from home, the file made its way up through the layers of the university bureaucracy, and I believe tenure was voted on by the Board in April 2020. I am glad I had already finished the file before the end of the world. I'm not sure how I would have coped if I had to complete the file under lockdown. Truth be told, I think the jury is still out on how well I coped anyway. 

This site is my New Year's Resolution. Just typing more. That would be nice. 

 

That car's not right...

Today was going to be productive. I was going to go down to campus after breakfast, do a little work, and then find a stretch of beach to walk along. Well, that didn't happen. After I pulled out of my parking spot the brakes were not right. The pedal gave no resistance, I only realized that down the road a bit, so I coasted into nearby Tweeville (not its actual name), which is a mall of antique stores which are in turn made from authentic antique buildings shipped in from the . This is all a few blocks down from me. There's an excellent bakery there, so I at least coasted into a place where I could get breakfast while I planned my next move.

Inside, I recognized two of the patrons at a table in the back, an elderly couple (ages 95 and 93) who my students have been interviewing. The fellow was a paratrooper in the Philippines in WWII (wow!), so he has been interviewed for the USAHEC veterans oral history program that my students participate in as part of an independent study. One of my students will be interviewing the couple, who have been married 75 years, about the history of Atlantic City, and I'm hoping she'll get a publishable article out of it. I met them at this bakery earlier this year, and my students and I will be taking them out for breakfast next Sunday anyway. I know their great-grandson, a former student of mine. When I first met them, in fact, I had a photo of their great-great-grandson on my phone that my student had sent me. I of course shared it with them.

After breakfast, I checked the brake fluid in my car and found the reservoir to be bone dry. I schlepped across the street to a dollar store to get some and very quickly the car started to feel more normal. But my morning was thrown off, and I was not so keen to take the car all the way to campus. As a consequence, I was at home all day.

Not a thunderingly interesting post, I'll admit, so here's a report of a Philadelphia goldfish dealer who found a "Jersey Devil" among his stock. This seems to be an early "scientists baffled"-themed story.

Source: The Libby Herald, 17 Aug 1911, Chronicling America

RJB

Running for Office...

Today was one for the books. Jeff van Drew, my local representative, has apparently decided to leave the Democratic party and join the Republicans. I voted for him. I may have even donated to his campaign. I met him a few weeks ago at an event for veterans on my campus, and I asked him about the impeachment. I wanted to know if he he was open minded about voting to impeach if it came to that, and he said that there would have to be something big and new to come out of the now-recent round of hearings. He said he thought that the country was too divided and that next year's election would settle things. I take it by the current reports that he found the new evidence not substantial enough to justify a vote to impeach.

This, of course, means that someone needs to run against him as a Democrat. I toyed for about 5 minutes with the idea of throwing my hat into the ring. I was running through possible slogans in my head: "No, Jeff, we really meant blue" was my favorite. Most of them, however, had expletives in them (e.g. "Don't be a dick"), and hence, I won't be running for office any time soon (though, let's face it, swearing is small potatoes compared to the type of shit the head of state gets away with). This frustration comes on the heels of the conservative win in the UK general election, so my exasperation with the ineffectiveness of the forces for good is pretty acute. 

I would not be the craziest person to run for office, however. In 1932, the quack John Brinkley, who claimed that transplanting goat testicles into men had health benefits, ran for governor of Kansas:

Source:  Indianapolis Times (9 June 1932) at Chronicling America

There was also Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Louisiana politician whose Hadacol Caravans, a medicine show, toured with top Hollywood talent. (When asked what his medicine was good for, LeBlanc once replied, "It was good for five million dollars for me last year.")

Ignatius Donnelly was another goofball who actually made it to the House of Representatives. He was a crank in many fields. To archaeology, classical and biblical studies, he popularized the idea that the Atlantis was consumed by the Noachian flood. To literary studies, he discovered if you wrapped the text of the plays of Shakespeare around a cylinder, you learned that they were actually written by Francis Bacon. 

One day, I'll probably run for something, just to have done it. For now, however, I'm working on other things.

End of Semester Review

It's been a good semester, all things considered.

I reached a few personal/professional milestones. I finally taught my class on the history of alternative medicine. At my school, we have a very well-defined set of criteria we have to meet in order to get tenure. We draw up a faculty plan that meets the programmatic expectations for Teaching, Research, and Service, and then we basically check our goals off the list over our first 9 semesters. Teaching the History of Health Fraud, a freshman seminar, was the last teaching item on my list.

Another milestone was the last of the peer-reviewed publications I needed for tenure. This was an article that came out of the WWII class I taught last year. The article was accepted with some minor revisions in mid-November. In the summer, I answered a call for papers about a special journal issue on War and Conflict in Autobiographical and Documentary Narratives. My dissertation was on WWII veterans writings, both memoir and fiction, so I felt I could contribute. The article is called, "A Conspicuous Absence: Combat Veterans and America's Memory of World War II." This was the only component of my tenure file that was in any question, mostly because the review process is out of my hands. This was a huge relief for me. I still have to to write up my tenure file for review in mid February. I have excellent support from my program and am not worried about that aspect of the process. My program values scholarship of engagement, and my work in skepticism, giving talks around the country, podcasting, writing the occasional blog entry on conspiracy theory for Skeptical Inquirer's blog--that sort of thing--has been counted together as the equivalent of a publication. The other required publication was kind of a surprise. I had written an article with Mike Jarsulic for Skeptical Inquirer about the quackbuster Arthur J. Cramp. Every item in the tenure file is backed by evidence, and when I included this article and supporting documentation, I honestly considered it as being part of my scholarship of engagement. The committee, however, noted the work that went into it, the fact that it relied on funded, original archival research, and the fact that there are few academic journals that specialize in the critical appraisal of bullshit, I received the wonderful surprise in my committee letter that they considered it a scholarly publication. So, that's all three publications in the can with a few months to spare.

The health fraud seminar was superb. My students were great. They kept up with the reading, which was considerable. They were smart and funny and their final projects were great. I think that it has the possibility of becoming an upper-level general studies course down the line. We came nowhere near close to covering everything that I had hoped to at the beginning of the semester, however, adjusting the pacing and revising the syllabus will bring a number of changes. I was really impressed how well the students handled the primary documents of colonial and early America. We started with Benjamin Rush and the standard practice of medicine at the time. Then we looked at the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia from a variety of perspectives. (Honestly, there is easily a whole class in that topic alone.) We read some of Rush's letters to his wife, the contemporary publications of his fellow doctors as the medical community publicly fought over the best way to handle the crisis, and the experiences of the black community as they managed the chaos. An unexpectedly fun day was when I was showing students a couple of slides, maps of the city at the time of the plague. On a hunch I brought up Google maps and showed how closely the old city plan maps onto the current plan, and that you could pinpoint the location of the waterfront slums Rush thought the disease originated in if you noticed that a side street making a little bootleg in an otherwise regular city plan appeared on both maps. I felt like Stewart Ainsworth, I tell you.

We looked at black herbalist from 19th century New Jersey (James Still), and we read foundational texts of the Thomsonian movement and the eclectics, phrenology, mesmerism, homeopathy, and chiropractic. We looked at the history of a variety of patent medicines, problems with regulation of drugs in the early 20th century, and then we hit the biggest wall, a book about John R. Brinkley, the goat gland doctor of Milford, KS. It changed the pace of the class for a few weeks. By the time we finished, it was time to start the final project, and so a lot went unsaid about modern regulation. Still, it was a hell of fun a semester.

I'll be teaching 2 sections of my war class in the Spring and a section of science and pseudoscience. Books are ordered. Teaching assistants have been lined up. It should be another fun and rewarding semester.

RJB

The Last Line is the Kicker

From the Perth Amboy Evening News of December 6, 1911 comes a story that makes you wonder... hell, it just makes you wonder.

A delightful diddy....

I am currently teaching my first class about American quackery. It's a seminar-style history course for first-year students. I've been soaking in ye olde quackeries for months now. I was prepping for a discussion of homeopathy's origins, and I thought I would peruse the Library of Congress' Chronicling America site for mentions of it, to give a sense of how it was treated. I came across a funny little poem on the front page of the Lewistown Gazette on November 10th, 1849:

So far, the students would understand "allopathy" and "Thomsopathy." I'm not going to show them this until... I'm totally going to turn this into a quiz. "Tell me which school of medicine is being described...." I have a fun job. 

RJB