Grass Makes Girls

I did not wonder when I was told that this region was called the England of Pennsylvania.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

After decades living in and around Washington, DC, my wife and I are still getting used to new stomping grounds.

We're both delighted those grounds are within the Brandywine Valley.

It's crazy, but most natives I've met, with the exception of a few Dupont descendants, wonder aloud why anyone with any sense would choose to live in the area on purpose.

Our reply would be complex, but front and center is the wish to live our remaining days as country squires, lolling in pastoral torpor.

Gas is cheap, the hospitals are good, and there are also excellent eateries all around.

But most of all the place is pretty—not in DC's stately, Beaux-Arts way, but in a quiet, Arcadian manner. 

It's like a pleasant parcel of rural England was picked up by a tornado and dropped on the doorstep of Philadelphia.

And, believe it or not, the grass is also greener.

I'm not the first to note that fact.

On September 18, 1862, the physician, poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes received a telegram stating that his son, Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had been shot through the neck the day before at the Battle of Antietam in Maryland.

Holmes immediately left his Boston home by train, heading for Maryland in search of his son, one of Antietam's 23,000 "maimed pilgrims."

Holmes arrived at the battlefield four days later, only to be told his son was nowhere to be found. 

Absent evidence, Holmes guessed his son might be in Philadelphia, resting in the Walnut Street mansion of a friend named Charlie.

Reaching Philadelphia, Holmes indeed found the mansion packed with wounded soldiers, none of whom were his son. 

He decided to go back to Maryland to search all the field hospitals, and asked Charlie to join him.

"I must have a companion in my search, partly to help me look about, and partly because I was getting nervous and felt lonely," Holmes said.

The two men promptly left Philadelphia on a train bound for Harrisburg. It took them through the Brandywine Valley, which Holmes described in detail:

"By and by the glorious valley which stretches along through Chester and Lancaster Counties opened upon us. Much as I had heard of the fertile regions of Pennsylvania, the vast scale and the uniform luxuriance of this region astonished me.

"The grazing pastures were so green, the fields were under such perfect culture, the cattle looked so sleek, the houses were so comfortable, the barns so ample, the fences so well kept, that I did not wonder, when I was told that this region was called the 'England of Pennsylvania.'

"The people whom we saw were, like the cattle, well nourished; the young women looked round and wholesome.

“'Grass makes girls,' I said to my companion.

Two days later, Holmes found his wounded son, safely aboard a train parked in the Harrisburg railroad station. He took him home to recuperate in Boston.

Atonement

Slavery is the next thing to hell.

— Harriet Tubman

My teachers, the Jesuits, have vowed to raise $100 million to benefit descendants of the slaves they once owned, according to The New York Times.

The pledge represents the largest effort by the Catholic Church to atone for buying, selling and enslaving Blacks, church historians told The Times.

Jesuits in America relied on slave labor for more than three centuries to sustain themselves, and sold slaves to finance the operation of schools, including Georgetown University, the nation’s first Catholic college.

“This is an opportunity for Jesuits to begin a very serious process of truth and reconciliation,” said the Rev. Timothy Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. 

“Our shameful history of Jesuit slaveholding in the United States has been taken off the dusty shelf, and it can never be put back.”

The Jesuits have already contributed $15 million toward the $100 million pledge, and have hired professionals fundraisers to bring in the $85 million balance during the next five years.

The money will be disbursed in the form of scholarships, cash payouts to the old and infirm, and grants to organizations devoted to racial reconciliation.

In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the Jesuits believed slaves, though humans, were valuable assets. Buying and selling them was considered moral.

But some Jesuits objected.

Fr. Antonio Viera, for example, argued that anyone who enslaved others "enslaved his own soul," and that anyone who sold slaves "sold his own soul.

"The price for which they are sold is sin," Viera said.

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.