Tag Archives: Medicine

Barbarian Days

23 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in Biography, Sports

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“Things changed after that between me and Mark… I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology — in finding a cure — but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. ‘The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,’ Mark told me. ‘I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit — in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.’ Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.”

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From the eighth chapter (“Against Dereliction”) of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

The chapter opens with Conrad, writing in The Mirror of the Sea: “The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by too much adulation.”

Keep going:

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Mark Twain’s Hilarious, Furious Letter to an Idiot

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by in History, Humor

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Mark Twain

Here’s the story: in the winter of 1905, Mark Twain received a package and handwritten letter from a “doctor” out of California named J.H. Todd. After a cursory look at the items, Twain recognized that Todd was nothing more than a salesman peddling a rather deceptive snake oil — a cure-all pompously called The Elixir of Life — which purported to, among other things, instantly “cure all ailments of the human, animal, and fowl.” Such patent ridiculousness would not have ruffled the feathers of the otherwise unfazed Twain, except for the lingering presence of three relevant facts. Twain’s wife had died suddenly while on vacation the previous year; moreover, meningitis and diphtheria, which the Elixir proudly claimed to cure, had previously taken the lives of Twain’s daughter and 19-month-old son. With these memories now triggered in his mind, Twain sat down to pen a screed against charlatanism. Here’s his customer service complaint for the ages:

Nov. 20. 1905

J. H. Todd
1212 Webster St.
San Francisco, Cal.

Dear Sir,

Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me. A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.

Adieu, adieu, adieu!

Mark Twain

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Check out Twain’s original letter. See the Elixir’s actual two-page product label.