Big Shots

That any considerable degree of protection against influenza was conferred by the vaccine seems unlikely.

— Jordan & Sharp

In November 1918, as the Spanish flu swept through American towns and cities, epidemiologists raced to confirm that the Pfeiffer bacillus vaccine—the state of the art at the time—really worked.

Most doctors had their doubts.

Lacking standards for what constituted a valid clinical trial, physicians couldn't say whether the Pfeiffer bacillus vaccine did any good.

Most trials in 1918 were ridden with faults, doctors knew. 

Selection bias in both experimental and control groups was common. So were sloppy vaccine mixing, patient observation, and data collection.

Determined to test the Pfeiffer bacillus vaccine rigorously, two University of Chicago scientists, E.O. Jordan and W. B. Sharp, took the unprecedented step of injecting the vaccine into more than 5,000 inmates of two Illinois mental hospitals.

Jordan and Sharp chose the hospitals because, relative to outside populations, the inmates had been spared exposure to the Spanish flu, and because none of the inmates had participated in a previous vaccine trial.

Based on their willingness to be jabbed, the hospital inmates—including many young children—were divided into experimental and control groups and given three shots in the course of three weeks. 

Half the shots contained the vaccine; half contained water.

To supplement the trial, Jordan and Sharp also inoculated over 500 residents—all children—at a school for the blind and a school for the deaf, under the same precise conditions.

Trial-participants at the hospitals and schools were then observed for six months, to see how many would come down with the Spanish flu.

Just about all did, prompting Jordan and Sharp to conclude that, despite enthusiastic claims by its proponents, the Pfeiffer bacillus vaccine was a bust.

Without an effective vaccine against the Spanish flu, medical and public health professionals across the US turned to other measures to combat the disease. 

Quarantines, school closures, bans on public gatherings, and mandatory mask-wearing became common in the winter and spring of 1919. 

By Easter, with 675,000 Americans dead, the disease had run its course.

No one knew why.

"Herd immunity" was suggested, although Jordan and Sharp were doubtful.

It was not until 1942 that epidemiologists Thomas Francis and Jonas Salk discovered a vaccine against the Spanish flu. 

They found that by injecting people with a half-dead virus, they could create immunity.

Like Jordan and Sharp, they tested their vaccine on psychiatric patients, inoculating 8,000 inmates at Michigan mental hospitals. 

Unlike Jordan and Sharp's, Francis and Salk's vaccine worked, increasing immunity 85%.

Thank goodness we don't have to wait two decades for an effective Covid-19 vaccine to appear. It's here. 

I received my first dose yesterday.

Too bad big shots don't get it.

Magic Mushrooms

Our parents read us stories like Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz and are suddenly saying, "Why are you taking drugs?" Well, hello!

— Grace Slick

Pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins have discovered psilocybin cures depression.

They treated 24 people with a history of depression by giving them two doses of psilocybin, the psychoactive component in magic mushrooms, two weeks apart.

Each treatment lasted five hours, during which the subject laid on a couch wearing eye shades and headphones that played music.

Of the 24 people, 12 were no longer depressed after a month and four showed a 70% reduction in symptoms.

Psychiatrist Alan Davis said “the magnitude of the effect we saw was about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants on the market.”

He added that, since most other treatments for depression take weeks or months to work and may have undesirable effects, the findings "could be a game changer."

UPDATE, MARCH 18, 2021: Oregon announced the formation of a Psilocybin Advisory Board this week, according to The New York Times. The board will oversee the therapeutic use of psychedelic mushrooms in licensed facilities.

Sunday Painters

If people call me a Sunday painter
I'm a Sunday painter who paints every day of the week.

— L. S. Lowry

Thanks to the critics, Winston Churchill and Bob Dylan share the label "Sunday painter."

A label neither deserves.

Lacking degrees from accredited art schools, both took up painting in their late 30s, when they were already celebrities. Both sought a new field that challenged them afresh, because celebrity had failed them. Both were determined to succeed.

If those are shortcomings, tell me where to sign up. 

No one who studies painting in earnest wants to be called a Sunday painter—a hobbyist, a dabbler, a dilettante, a wanna-be. 

Even if useful, in a world of ready critics and trolls the label can lacerate the very thickest of skins.

Fortunately, like Churchill and Dylan, the late-blooming painters I've encountered aren't put off by critics and labels. 

And, like Churchill and Dylan, the late-bloomers I've met have these things in common: they're self-confident, having already flourished in another career; they so love what they're doing, they can't be deterred; and they're vigilantly self-critical.

These late-bloomers also share what developmental psychologist Carol Dweck calls the "growth mindset," the belief that competence in any endeavor increases with effort and repetition.

There are Sunday painters, to be sure; unabashed optimists who are blind to their faults, deaf to advice, blissfully ignorant and content with gaucheness.

They're in it for fun, not to sweat over details.

And, more often than not, they'll move on once another "bright and shiny object" crosses the path.

The rest will keep trying and failing and trying and failing... until one day they don't.

Subversives

I don't know what they have to say;
It makes no difference anyway;
Whatever it is, I'm against it.

— Groucho Marx

"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous," historian Henry Steele Commager observed. "They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive."

But all subversives aren't alike.  

Some enrage; others merely entertain.

Karl Marx did the former; Groucho Marx, the latter.

Challenging the status quo—as Karl did—rattles its guardians to no end; saying something delightfully pointless—as Groucho did—does, too.

It's mostly a matter of degree.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, when subversion could get you imprisoned or hanged, rich Europeans clandestinely collected the subversive writings of hacks, including snarky religious tracts, satires of court life, erotic books and pamphlets, and manuals of the occult. 

Living under an authoritarian church and state, the European elites thought that collecting the writings of witty upstarts was chic—a titliating form of entertainment; an urbane, but harmless, hobby. 

Then along came the sincerely subversive Condorcet to inflame the French Revolution and put a damper on the elites' collecting.

The 19th century saw the comparably cantankerous Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzshe attack church and state from their wholly new and explosive vantage points. These philosophers produced subversive ideas that shook society in the 20th century, and today inform the "woke" movement. 

Guardians of the status quo were not amused—and still aren't.

But, whether critics or clowns, subversives contribute to our wellbeing by making our efforts to conform to authority bearable, says political scientist John Christian Larsen.

Subversives act as steam valves to reduce pressure on our psyches.

"Letting off steam might be more important in social life than we’ve recognized," Larsen says. 

"Suppressing what we really think is widely understood to be bad for our emotional health. People who have had to hide their thoughts in order to appear as conformists to the prevailing orthodoxies have often developed deep psychological problems, which in turn can lead to ‘explosions’. 

"Meanwhile, if people can express themselves, even only clandestinely, they might be relieved of this pressure."

Reading and Survival

The man who can read and remember and ponder the big realities is a man keyed to survival of the species.

— John D. MacDonald

Worse than threatening democracy, illiterates threaten our species.

A fictional character aboard a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale concluded that 34 years ago.

In 1985, the National Endowment for the Arts asked the prolific paperback mystery writer John D. MacDonald ("John D" to his millions of fans) to contribute an essay promoting literacy.

John D described the 30-page result, Reading for Survival, as a "bad-tempered mouse of 7,200 words" that portrayed "the terrible isolation of the non-reader, his life without meaning because he cannot comprehend the world in which he lives."

The essay depicts a deskside conversation between John D's two best-known fictional characters, the freelance crimefighter Travis McGee and his brainy sidekick Ludweg Meyer.

Meyer does most of the talking. He theorizes that the human brain evolved into a warehouse of memories, because memories allowed prehistoric man to cope with the environment.

McGee responds, “Man learned and remembered everything he had to know about survival in his world. Then he invented so many tricks and tools, he had to invent writing. More stuff got written down than any man could possibly remember. Or use. Books are artificial memory. And it’s there when you want it. But for just surviving, you don’t need the books. Not any more.”

Meyer counters, no; books are essential. 

"The world is huge and monstrously complicated," he tells McGee. "Like our ancestors of fifty thousand years ago, if we—as a species rather than an individual—are uniformed, or careless, or indifferent to the facts, then survival as a species is in serious doubt.”

McGee doubts anyone could possibly comprehend today's complex environment.

"How do we relate to reality?" Meyer replies. "How do we begin to comprehend it? By using that same marvelous brain our ancestor used. By the exercise of memory. How do we take stock of these memories? By reading, Travis. Reading!"

Non-readers, Meyer continues, threaten the whole human species' survival. They're flat-footed and incompetent and, worse, give birth to more non-readers, who "become a new generation of illiterates, of victims." 

Non-readers' ignorance creates immanent risks, too, Meyer adds, because it makes them gullible. "Their basic lack of education, of reading, of being able to comprehend the great truths of reality has left empty places in their heads, into which great mischief has crept."

"And you have a cure for all this, of course," McGee teases.

Meyer's only solution (true to form) is to drink away their sorrows. "Let us trudge back toward home, and stop at the bar at the Seaview for something tall and cold, with rum in it," he says.

Flash forward three decades and our need to drink rum is only stronger.

The Pew Research Center says the population of non-readers in America is growing. Right now, one in four Americans doesn't read a single book—or even a part of a book— annually. That's up from one in five 10 years ago. No surprise, most of these non-readers are poorly educated and broke.

But not all. 

A lot of educated and well-off Americans have become non-readers, too, says Adam Garfinkle in National Affairs. Thanks to their "always on" digital devices, they are unable to read analytically. They have, for all purposes, given up "deep reading."

"Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans, in ways both physiological and cultural," Garfinkle says.

"If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists. Fully immerse yourself in digital 'life,' and timelines will flatten into unconnected dots, rendering a person present-oriented and unable to either remember or plan well. That permanently 'zoned out' person will become easy prey for the next demagogue with an attractive promise and a mesmerizing spectacle."

John D. was right—more than he dreamed. Our nation of one-time readers is going full zombie.

As a species, we may be doomed.