About a year ago I sat down with James Fell and had an “I really need to do something else with my life” conversation.
Not something like finding a real job outside of arguing with strangers on the internet, don’t be daft. But I needed to change what I was doing here. I started writing a daily column that wasn’t focused on debunking at all- this column, to be exact. Telling new tales of science history, my life of yelling at people for being wrong on the internet could surely be left behind.
Old habits, y’all.
Today’s Moment of Science… My favorite accidental debunkings from a year of scientific folklore.
Flimflam! Hogwash! And snake oil- wait, not so fast. Oil derived from the Chinese water snake was used as a somewhat effective muscle rub, at least before Bayer conveniently started selling heroin in the Sears catalog. Brought over to the US by Chinese immigrants in the mid-1800s, it suffered only from guilt by association with useless knock-offs extracted from rattlesnake or whatever unsuspecting snake happened to be kicking around the old west. The original snake oil deserves better than what we’ve done to it, etymologically speaking.
Wash your damn hands, plague rats, Ignaz Semmelweis didn’t get beaten to death in an insane asylum for you to ignore his advice- except that’s not quite what happened. Semmelweis figured out that scrubbing the death off your paws between an autopsy and frigging anything else was a solid idea. Though he was able to implement the new hygiene protocols in his hospital, success was limited elsewhere. He wasn’t a great communicator, berating colleagues, insinuating they were murderers for not taking his advice. Though it makes for a more compelling story to say “they sent him to the loony bin for suggesting handwashing,” the pioneering doctor was reportedly suffering with symptoms resembling dementia or late stage syphilis when he was institutionalized.
Speaking of handwashing, we’ve accused people of acting like Typhoid Mary plenty of times through the pandemic, which I rate as lacking context. Mary Mallon was a poor Irish immigrant in a time when the very idea of an asymptomatic carrier was barely understood by doctors. True, she evaded prosecution and continued cooking after being ordered not to; she wasn’t entirely innocent here. But it’s just a tad suspicious that she was also the only asymptomatic carrier who was ever jailed. It’s likely we only remember her because she spread the virus to the wealthy people for whom she worked as a private chef. Asymptomatic carrier Tony Labella sickened over twice as many people as Mallon, but he’s a footnote in history because those people were children at an orphanage in New Jersey, so.
If you’re following covid safety protocols you’ve possibly been called a lemming because of course lemmings are mindless followers, even jumping to their doom, right? Fortunately that’s just one of many unrealistic expectations the Disney corporation sold us. The Norwegian lemming is a pretty good swimmer, and they’re known to take a high dive to start a journey to scout for more resources. Sometimes they’ll just stroll into the water from the shore, but that wasn’t as good of a visual for Disney’s purposes. When they made the “documentary” White Wilderness, they hurled a bunch of lemmings (of a different species, from a different continent) off a cliff for dramatic effect, perpetuating the myth. In reality, rather than a meek follower, the lemming has been referred to as a “bloodthirsty hairy berserker.” Fear the lemming.
Oh, and remember Koko the gorilla who could use sign language and was friends with Robin Williams? Koko couldn’t goddamn talk, and no article has garnered me more hate mail than one about the non-existent sign language skills of a dead gorilla.
It’s been an interesting year of writing about nuclear fuckery, adorable floofs, deadly outbreaks, chemical monsters, mother fuckers, Australia, and everything else I throw in the giant pile labeled “there was an incident.”
I’ll probably have a book out soon.
This has been your Moment of Science, looking forward to another year of tricking you into learning about science by saying ‘fuck’ as much as legally possible.
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Missed you!