This is Improbable Too Read online

Goodall, Alexander (1932). ‘The Treatment of Pernicious Aaemia by Marmite’. The Lancet 220 (5693): 781–2.

  Wills, Lucy (1931). ‘Treatment of “Pernicious Anaemia of Pregnancy” and “Tropical Anaemia” with Special Reference to Yeast Extract as a Curative Agent’. British Medical Journal i: 1059–64.

  Wills, Lucy (1933). ‘The Nature of the Haemopoietic Factor in Marmite’. Lancet 1: 1283–6

  Davidson, Stanley (1932). ‘Marmite in Pernicious Anaemia’. The Lancet 220 (5695): 919–20.

  Rogers, Leonard (1932). ‘Marmite in Sprue’. The Lancet 219 (5669): 906.

  Vaughan, Janet M., and Donald Hunter (1932). ‘The Treatment by Marmite of Megalocytic Hyperchromic Anæmia: Occurring in Idiopathic Steatorrhoea (Coeliac Disease)’. The Lancet 219 (5668): 829–34.

  Humphrey, Beverley A., and George F. Humphrey (1948). ‘Studies in the Respiration of Paramecium caudatum’. Journal of Experimental Biology 25 (June): 123–34.

  Rozin, Paul, and Michael Siegal (2003). ‘Vegemite as a Marker of National Identity’. Gastronomica 3 (4): 63–7.

  van Asperen, P.P., and A. Chong (1985). ‘Vegemite Allergy?’. Medical Journal of Australia 142 (3): 236.

  Higson, Nigel (1989). ‘An Allergy to Marmite?’. British Medical Journal 298 (6667): 190.

  Mozart’s dark death

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has died a hundred deaths, more or less. Here’s a new one: darkness.

  Doctors over the years have resurrected the story of Mozart’s death again and again, each time proposing some alternative horrifying medical reason why the eighteenth century’s most celebrated and prolific composer keeled over at age thirty-five. One monograph suggests that Mozart died from too little sunlight.

  The researchers give us a simple theory. When exposed to sunlight, people’s skin naturally produces vitamin D. Mozart, towards the end of his life, was nearly as nocturnal as a vampire, so his skin probably produced very little of the vitamin. (The man failed to take any vitamin D supplements to counteract that deficiency. But that wasn’t Mozart’s fault. Only much later, in the 1920s, did scientists identify a clear link between vitamin D, sunlight and good health. Vitamin D supplements did not go on sale in Salzburg and Vienna, Mozart’s home towns, until many years after that.)

  Stefan Pilz (who, if he plays his cards right, will hereafter be known as ‘Vitamin’ Pilz) and William B. Grant published their report, called ‘Vitamin D Deficiency Contributed to Mozart’s Death’, in the journal Medical Problems of Performing Artists. Pilz is a physician/researcher at the Medical University of Graz, Austria. Grant is a California physicist whose background is in optical and laser remote sensing of the atmosphere, and atmospheric sciences.

  Pilz and Grant explain: ‘Mozart did much of his composing at night, so would have slept during much of the day. At the latitude of Vienna, 48º N, it is impossible to make vitamin D from solar ultraviolet-B irradiance for about six months of the year. Mozart died on 5 December 1791, two to three months into the vitamin D winter.’

  They acknowledge the existence of competing medical theories. They do not bother mentioning the possibility, depicted in Peter Shaffer’s 1969 play Amadeus, that a rival composer did him in. Other academic studies do examine the evidence for poisoning; most conclude that that evidence is lame.

  Rival doctors and historians have presented arguments, in medical and other academic journals, that Mozart perished from acute rheumatic fever, bacterial endocarditis, streptococcal septicemia, tuberculosis, cardiovascular disease, brain haemorrhage, hypertensive encephalopathy, congestive heart failure, uremia secondary to chronic kidney disease, pyelonephritis, congenital urinary tract anomaly with obstructive uropathy, bronchopneumonia, haemorrhagic shock, post-streptococcal Henoch-Schönlein purpura, polyarthritis, trichinellosis, amyloidosis and quite a few other unpleasantnesses.

  Other studies have tried to tease out biomedical causes for some of Mozart’s eccentric behaviour. Two of the more abstruse are by Benjamin Simkin. In 1999 he wrote about a concept called ‘Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcal infection’ (PANDAS). The study is called ‘Was PANDAS Associated with Mozart’s Personality Idiosyncrasies?’. It expanded on Simkin’s curse-filled 1992 monograph in the British Medical Journal called ‘Mozart’s Scatological Disorder’.

  From ‘Mozart’s Scatological Disorder’ (1992). The author goes on to inventory the scatological terms in Mozart’s letters, including ‘arse’, ‘muck’, ‘piddle or piss’ and ‘fart’.

  Grant, William B., and Stefan Pilz (2011). ‘Vitamin D Deficiency Contributed to Mozart’s Death’. Medical Problems of Performing Artists 26 (2): 117.

  Dawson, William J. (2010). ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Controversies Regarding His Illnesses and Death: A Bibliographic Review’. Medical Problems of Performing Artists 25 (2): 49.

  Zegers, Richard H.C., Andreas Weigl and Andrew Steptoe (2009). ‘The Death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: An Epidemiologic Perspective’. Annals of Internal Medicine 151 (4): 274–8.

  Simkin, Benjamin (1999). ‘Was PANDAS Associated with Mozart’s Personality Idiosyncrasies?’. Medical Problems of Performing Artists 14 (3): 113.

  — (1992). ‘Mozart’s Scatological Disorder’. British Medical Journal 305 (19 Dec): 1563.

  Research spotlight

  ‘Sunshine and Suicide Incidence’

  by Martin Voracek and Maryanne L. Fisher (published in Epidemiology, 2002)

  ‘Solar Eclipse and Suicide’

  by Martin Voracek, Maryanne L. Fisher and Gernot Sonneck (published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 2002)

  The problem of exploding pacemakers

  People muse that they will, come the day, ‘go out with a bang’. A little more often than you might expect, someone or other does exactly that, which is why there came into existence a study called ‘Pacemaker Explosions in Crematoria: Problems and Possible Solutions’. Christopher Gale, of St James’s University Hospital in Leeds, and Graham Mulley, of the General Infirmary at Leeds, published the report in 2002 in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

  The first crematorium pacemaker explosion on record happened in 1976 in Solihull, in the West Midlands. As pacemakers and cremations both became popular, Gale and Mulley explain, after-death explosions came to be expected.

  Table 1, showing responses from 188 crematoria staff who responded to the questionnaire.

  In the wake of the Solihull surprise, the British Medical Journal published an essay entitled ‘Hidden Hazards of Cremation’. It speaks of the incident, and speculates about even worse things. There are individuals, it points out, who, as a result of medical procedures, contain tiny amounts of radioactive substances: yttrium-90, iodine-131, gold-198, phosphorus-32 and their ilk. ‘There is a possibility’, the anonymous author confides, ‘that an explosion (or some other event) during the cremation of a radioactive corpse could produce a blow-back releasing radioactive smoke or fumes into the crematorium. This risk seems to be largely theoretical, but …’

  Soon, two questions were added to Form B of the government-mandated Cremation Act Certificate, which a physician fills out prior to a cremation. ‘Has a pacemaker or any radioactive material been inserted in the deceased (yes or no)?; (b) If so, has it been removed (yes or no)?’ (Form B, after being retooled, eventually came to the end of its own life, and was replaced in 2008.)

  Gale and Mulley surveyed the managers of all 241 cremation facilities in the UK, asking: ‘(1) Have you ever had personal experience of pacemaker explosions in crematoria? (2) What do you estimate is the frequency of pacemaker explosions in crematoria?’ About half the respondents admitted to ‘personal experience’ of pacemaker explosions. Gale and Mulley suspected that the actual numbers were more dire. ‘Staff may not wish to mention these events’, they write, ‘and their recall may not be accurate.’ Gale and Mulley also concluded that ‘crematoria staff rely on accurate and complete cremation forms’ – but that the information-gathering/reporting process could,
and often did, go astray.

  The pair published another report, two years later, to show that pacemakers themselves sometimes go astray. Called ‘A Migrating Pacemaker’, it tells how Dr Gale failed, using his medically trained hands and fingers, to find the pacemaker in a seventy-nine-year-old deceased man. The man’s medical records said there should be one.

  Gale got a hand-held metal detector, which showed that the pacemaker had moved elsewhere in the body. He concluded that medical devices don’t always stay exactly where surgeons originally placed them, and he recommends using hand-held metal detectors to ‘help prevent explosions in crematoria’.

  Gale, Christopher P., and Graham P. Mulley (2002). ‘Pacemaker Explosions in Crematoria: Problems and Possible Solutions’. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95 (7): 353–5.

  — (2005). ‘A Migrating Pacemaker’. Postgraduate Medical Journal 81: 198–9.

  n.a. (1977). ‘Hidden Hazards of Cremation’. British Medical Journal 2 (24 Dec): 1620–1.

  In brief

  ‘Airbag Deployment and Eye Perforation by a Tobacco Pipe’

  by F.H. Walz, M. Mackay and B. Gloor (published in the Journal of Trauma, 1995)

  The rattling tale of Patient X

  The self-inflicted snake/electroshock saga of Patient X turned out, twenty-one years after it entered the public record, to have an earlier chapter that had not made it into print.

  That’s Patient X, the former US marine who suffered a bite from his pet rattlesnake. Patient X, the man who immediately after the bite insisted that a neighbour attach car spark plug wires to his lip, and that the neighbour rev up the car engine to 3,000 rpm, repeatedly, for about five minutes. Patient X, the bloated, blackened, corpse-like individual, who subsequently was helicoptered to a hospital where Dr Richard C. Dart and Dr Richard A. Gustafson saved his life and took photographs of him.

  Patient X, who featured in the treatise called ‘Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation’, which Dart and Gustafson published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine in 1991, in consequence of which the three men shared the Ig Nobel Prize in medicine in 1994.

  Though rattlesnake bites can be deadly, there is a standard, reliable treatment – injection with a substance called ‘antivenin’. Patient X preferred an alternative treatment. The medical report explains: ‘Based on their understanding of an article in an outdoorsman’s magazine, the patient and his neighbour had previously established a plan to use electric shock treatment if either was envenomated.’

  One day while Patient X was playing with his snake, the serpent embedded its fangs into Patient X’s upper lip. The neighbour sprang into action. As per their agreement, he laid Patient X on the ground next to the car, and affixed a spark plug wire to the stricken fellow’s lip with a small metal clip. The rest you know, at least in outline.

  Gustafson eventually went to work for a US Defense Department official agency involved in ‘countering weapons of mass destruction’. In 2012 he told me about a conversation he had with Patient X, but did not mention in the medical report: ‘I started off by telling Patient X, who was a US marine, that I had been an active duty Navy corpsman. Therefore, I was asking Patient X about his medical history and got around to asking him if he had ever been envenomed by a snake before and if so what treatment did he receive. He said that he had been “bitten” a couple years ago on Okinawa. I then asked him if it had been a Habu, a type of cobra common to Okinawa, and he said yes. I then asked if he had been bitten on his middle finger of his left hand, up in the northern training area, and helicoptered down to Lester Naval hospital to the ER [emergency room]. He said hesitantly “yes”. I then informed Patient X that I was the corpsman who was assigned to his care, to monitor his condition for the six hours he was in the ER, prior to being admitted to the hospital as an in-patient.’

  Dart, Richard, and Richard Gustafson (1991). ‘Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation’. Annals of Emergency Medicine 20 (6): 659–61.

  Research spotlight

  ‘The RaTio of 2nd to 4th Digit Length: A New Predictor of Disease Predisposition?’

  by John T. Manning and Peter E. Bundred (published in Medical Hypotheses, 2000)

  Professor Manning hypothesizes: ‘The ratio between the length of the 2nd and 4th digits is: (a) fixed in utero; (b) lower in men than in women; (c) negatively related to testosterone and sperm counts; and (d) positively related to oestrogen concentrations. Prenatal levels of testosterone and oestrogen have been implicated in infertility, autism, dyslexia, migraine, stammering, immune dysfunction, myocardial infarction and breast cancer. We suggest that 2D:4D ratio is predictive of these diseases.’

  Signalling a grave attraction

  Gábor Horváth, head of the Environmental Optics Laboratory at Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary, solves mysteries about light and about living creatures. Among these, he discovered that white horses attract fewer flies. He and five colleagues wrote a study called ‘An Unexpected Advantage of Whiteness in Horses: The Most Horsefly-proof Horse Has a Depolarizing White Coat’, which they published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

  The researchers experimented with a small number of sticky horses and a large number of horseflies (of the variety called tabanids). The horses were sticky because the scientists had coated them with ‘a transparent, odourless and colourless insect monitoring glue [called] Babolna Bio mouse trap’.

  The scientists brought those horses – one black, one brown, one white – to a grassy field in the town of Szokolya, Hungary. Every other day, they collected and counted the flies that had become attached to the sticky horses.

  The results, tallied over fifty-four summer days: the sticky brown horse Babolna-Bio-mouse-trapped fifteen times as many flies as the sticky white horse. And the black horse, poor thing, trapped a whopping, buzzing twenty-five times as many flies as the white one.

  The differences, say the scientists, come from the way light bounces off horsehair. Polarized light – light that’s all vibrating in the same direction – attracts horseflies. When that light reflects off dark fur, it stays polarized. But when polarized light glances off white fur, it becomes less polarized, which, to a horsefly, is not so attractive.

  At the very end of the report, Horváth alludes coquettishly to another of his experiments, one he has not yet written up. It’s a case of animal and animal on animal: ‘When white cattle egrets, for example, are sitting on the back of dark-coated cattle and pecking blood-sucking tabanids away from the cattle, tabanids blending in colour with that of their hosts’ fur might derive greater protection owing to camouflage.’

  Indeed, Gábor Horváth has tackled other colourful questions. He and several collaborators reported that red cars attract insects. Details are in the report ‘Why Do Red and Dark-coloured Cars Lure Aquatic Insects?: The Attraction of Water Insects to Car Paintwork Explained by Reflection-polarization Signals’, also published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

  Horváth’s team likewise discovered that black gravestones attract dragonflies. Read about that in a paper called ‘Ecological Traps for Dragonflies in a Cemetery: The Attraction of Sympetrum species (Odonata: Libellulidae) by Horizontally Polarizing Black Grave-stones’, published in the journal Freshwater Biology.

  Not all Gábor Horváths are equally colourful in their scientific writings. Across town, at Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE), associate professor of electrical engineering Gábor Horváth can boast an impressive array of published research work. But to non-specialists most of it looks comparatively unspectacular – the one slight exception being his monograph entitled ‘A Sparse Robust Model for a Linz-Donawitz Steel Converter’.

  Horváth, Gábor, Miklós Blahó, György Kriska, Ramón Hegedüs, Baláz Gerics, Róbert Farkas and Susanne Åkesson (2010). ‘An Unexpected Advantage of Whiteness in Horses: The Most Horsefly-proof Horse Has a Depolarizing White Coat’. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277 (1688): 1643–50
.

  Kriska, György, Zoltán Csabai, Pál Boda, Péter Malik and Gábor Horváth (2006). ‘Why Do Red and Dark-coloured Cars Lure Aquatic Insects?: The Attraction of Water Insects to Car Paintwork Explained by Reflection-polarization Signals’. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 273 (1594): 1667–71.

  Horváth, Gábor, Péter Malik, György Kriska and Hansruedi Wildermuth (2007). ‘Ecological Traps for Dragonflies in a Cemetery: The Attraction of Sympetrum species (Odonata: Libellulidae) by Horizontally Polarizing Black Grave-stones’. Freshwater Biology 52 (9): 1700–9.

  Valyon, József, and Gábor Horváth (2008). ‘A Sparse Robust Model for a Linz-Donawitz Steel Converter’. IEEE Transacations on Instrumentation and Measurement 58 (8): 2611–7.

  Uranium is for the birds

  Depleted uranium should, perhaps, be the ammunition of choice for duck hunters. That’s the conclusion of a study called ‘Response of American Black Ducks to Dietary Uranium: A Proposed Substitute for Lead Shot’.

  Published in 1983 in the Journal of Wildlife Management, the recommendation has not been much disputed. The study’s authors, biologists Susan Haseltine and Louis Sileo, were based at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland.

  Lead shot is dangerous for ducks, especially if it hits them. When it doesn’t hit a duck (or hit another hunter, as sometimes happens), the shot falls into the wetlands. The lead leaches into the muck, slowly poisoning whichever ducks have managed to avoid being shot.

  In many hunting areas, lead shot is verboten. At the time of the study, steel was being touted as the best alternative to lead. But Haseltine and Sileo pointed out its drawbacks. They wrote that ‘Steel shot shells are more expensive than lead shot shells when purchased in a retail outlet; they cannot be used in all guns and have not been well received by some hunters who question their performance on ducks and geese.’