Thursday May 14, 2015

Listen
Play
0:00/ 0:00

Tamanrasset

On account of my knees
I thought a camel would be appropriate:
I could be helped on
and eventually off again.
Have you ever
got on a camel?
They go down for you
on their own padded knees
and close their eyes while they wait
for you to be set in place,
like priests waiting for all the communicants
to be done, in some high church.
Then they rise, tipping you,
heaving beneath you
but you don’t fall,
you are suddenly
feet up in the air,
carried forward on the long sway
of their stride.
They will carry you across deserts,
across days and datelines
until you arrive one far-off day
in the city of Tamanrasset
where you have been waiting all your life
to go.

“Tamanrasset” by Rosalind Brackenbury from Bonnard’s Dog. © Hanging Loose Press, 2015. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It was on this day in 1796 that the doctor Edward Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy with a vaccine for smallpox, the first safe vaccine ever developed.

Jenner was a country doctor and surgeon in the small town of Berkley, England, where he had lived for most of his life. The only time he’d ever been away from Berkley was when he studied for a few years at a hospital in London. It was there that he learned the basics of the scientific method, experimentation and careful observation. The job of a country doctor involved a fairly rudimentary treatment of injuries and illness, but Jenner thought he might be able to put the scientific method to some good use.

The most devastating disease in the world at the time was smallpox, a disease that caused boils to break out all over the body. It killed about one in every four adults who caught it, and one in every three children, and it was so contagious that most human beings in populous areas caught it at some point in their lives. During the 18th century alone, it killed about 60 million people.

In the mid-1700s, British doctors had imported a procedure from Asia in which healthy people were deliberately infected with smallpox through the skin, which brought on a milder form of the disease and then immunity. The procedure was called “inoculation,” after the horticultural term. Inoculation wasn’t practical, because inoculated patients could pass the disease onto others while they were showing symptoms, and some inoculated patients developed the more severe form of the disease and died.

Jenner wanted to develop a smallpox inoculation that wouldn’t harm anyone. He worked in a place with a lot of dairy farmers, and there was a rumor that milkmaids almost never caught smallpox. Jenner realized that the milkmaids had all suffered from a disease called cowpox, which they’d caught from the udders of cows. Jenner had a hunch that the infection of cowpox somehow helped the milkmaids develop immunity to smallpox.

Jenner decided to take some of the fluid from a cowpox sore and inject in into a healthy patient. There were no laws governing medical experimentation on human subjects at the time, but Jenner still had some reservations about trying his ideas out on a person. He mulled it over for years, and then finally decided to go ahead. On this day in 1796, he gathered some cowpox material from an infected milkmaid’s hand and injected it into the arm of an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps.

The boy developed a slight headache, and lost his appetite, but that was all. Six weeks later, Jenner inoculated the boy with smallpox, and the boy showed no symptoms. He had developed immunity from the cowpox.

Jenner submitted a paper about his new procedure to the prestigious Royal Society of London, but it was rejected. The president of the Society told Jenner that it was a mistake to risk his reputation by publishing something so controversial.

So Jenner published his ideas at his own expense in a 75-page book, which came out in 1798. The book was a sensation. The novelist Jane Austen noted in one of her letters that she’d been at a dinner party and everyone was talking about the “Jenner pamphlet.” The procedure eventually caught on, and it was called a “vaccine” after the Latin word for cow. It wasn’t perfect at first, because of poor sanitation and dirty needles, but it was the first time anyone had successfully prevented the infection of any contagious disease.

What made it so remarkable was that Jenner accomplished this before the causes of disease were even understood. It would be decades before anyone even knew about the existence of germs.

On this day in 1607, the London Company explorers from England landed in what would become Jamestown, Virginia, the first English settlement in the New World. The colony lay on the banks of the James River, 60 miles from the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.

It’s the birthday of nature writer Hal Borland (books by this author), born in Sterling, Nebraska (1900). He wrote that he grew up “in those years when the Old West was passing and the New West was emerging. It was a time when we still heard echoes and already saw shadows, on moonlit nights when the coyotes yapped on the hilltops, and on hot summer afternoons when mirages shimmered, dust devils spun across the flats, and towering cumulus clouds sailed like galleons across the vast blueness of the sky. Echoes of remembrance of what men once did there, and visions of what they would do together.”

Hal’s grandfather was a blacksmith, and his father a newspaperman. Hal followed in his father’s footsteps and moved all over the country working for local papers — he started out at his father’s paper in Flagler, Colorado, a town of 750 people, and he ended up at The New York Times in 1937. One day, he submitted a piece about the English oak tree to the editorial page, and it was accepted. After that, his nature editorials were a staple in the Times. He published one every week, and by the time he died in 1978 he had written 1,750 nature editorials — the last of them published the day before his death. Borland kept a New Yorker cartoon on his office wall showing a man brandishing a newspaper and shouting: “Here’s another of those crackpot editorials about the voices of frogs shattering the autumn stillness!”

Borland’s books include When the Legends Die (1963) and Sundial of the Seasons (1964).

And today is the birthday of travel writer and novelist Mary Morris (books by this author), born in Chicago (1947). She grew up on the north shore of Lake Michigan, in Highland Park, which was largely rural at that time. She spent her free time roaming the woods and horseback riding through the cornfields. On one outing, she rode her horse across Adlai Stevenson’s front yard. He came out and gave her a wave. She went to college at Tufts University and spent her junior year at a study-abroad program in Paris, which kindled her interest in travel. As the old song goes, “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” Morris went to graduate school first at Harvard, and then at Columbia, and although she often writes about the Midwest, she never returned to Illinois for any length of time. She lives in Brooklyn now, and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

She published her first collection of short stories, Vanishing Animals & Other Stories, in 1979. The Chicago Tribune called Morris “a marvelous storyteller — a budding Isaac Bashevis Singer, a young Doris Lessing, a talent to be watched and read.” The book won the Rome Prize. She’s written memoirs of her travels across China, Russia, Mexico, and California. In her most recent travel book, she wrote about her trip down the Mississippi River with two river pilots named Tom and Jerry, The River Queen (2007).

Morris’s latest book is a novel, The Jazz Palace (2015), which just came out last month. She returns to her Chicago roots in a novel set during the Jazz Age. She wrote dozens of versions of the book but no one was ever interested. She gave up in 2009, put the book in a box, and tried to forget about it. A few years later, she reread E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. “When I woke up the next morning [...] I knew exactly what was wrong with the novel [...] I knew exactly where the book ended, and I knew what I had to do to rewrite it [...] And so here we are.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®