"The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery." By Wendy Moore.

Poem on the frontispiece:

I have made candles of infants fat
The Sextons have been my slaves
I have bottled babes unborn, and dried
Hearts and livers from rifled graves.

From "The Surgeon's Warning."
Robert Southey, Poems, 1799

John Hunter was the younger brother of famous anatomist/surgeon William Hunter. John was 10 years William's junior. William was a "sophisticated socialite" as well as an astute businessman, who had established a popular and profitable anatomy school in Covent Garden. William's anatomy school was the first of its kind in England.

John, born February 14, 1728, was the 10th child born to a struggling farm family who lived in the countryside south of Glasgow. Possibly dyslexic, he did not thrive on formal education, but his curiosity was most engaged by observations of the natural world.

When the 20-year-old John went to London to join his brother, Georgian medicine was a mix of quackery and misguided tradition. Medical treatments consisted mostly of physics and emetics, bloodletting, and opium. "Physicians" were too exalted to let blood or perform surgery themselves, so such distasteful operations were left to "surgeons" or barbers and barber-surgeons (hence the traditional red and white striped barber pole).

John's first job for William's school was to be put in charge of obtaining cadavers for dissection. Anatomists and their representatives would fight family members for possession of the corpses of executed criminals. There weren't enough criminals to supply the needs of William's school, hence John had to resort to body snatching--either himself with the help of students, or by employing professional "resurrectionists."

To take advantage of cooler winter weather (retarding decay), the autumn anatomy course started at the beginning of October. "The dissecting season" ended sometime in May.

In contrast to William's poised eloquence, John was awkward in formal situations. Eventually, however, he was to win students' admiration during Q & A sessions and after-class debates. John became fascinated with comparative anatomy, developing relationships with keepers of various menageries and animal dealers to purchase the corpses of any exotic animals that died in their keeping.

In order to further his experience as a surgeon, John joined the army as a battlefield surgeon, and shipped out for France in March of 1761. When he returned to London in April 1763, at the age of 35, he was unemployed and no longer needed at his brother's anatomy school. He also quarreled with William who had taken over John's anatomical preparations and declined to return them or relinquish credit for them. This was a perennial source of friction between the brothers.

John turned to the neglected field of dentistry to bring in income. Dentistry was scorned by most physicians and surgeons of the day as an occupation fit only for barbers, wig makers, or even black smiths. John used the opportunity to begin experimenting with primitive transplant surgery. He started by transplanting human teeth into the comb of a rooster, and eventually was able to transplant teeth from healthy (but poor) donors into the mouths of the wealthy. He also began to earn fees performing autopsies (the significance of which was beginning to be recognized).

He met his future wife, Anne, when he was called in to treat her for an infestation of roundworms.

In 1767, he was elected to the Royal Society.

His fascination with experimentation continued. He attempted to freeze and reanimate small animals, in hopes of making a fortune by "sending" frozen people into the future.

In attempting to resolve the issue of whether syphilis and gonorrhea were two distinct diseases, as opposed to variable manifestations of the same one, he inoculated himself with gonorrhea. Unfortunately he chose to inoculate himself with discharge from a patient who had both diseases. So his experiment gave misleading results as well as putting his life in danger. He treated himself with mercury, the treatment of the day, but it's not entirely clear that he was cured. He also delayed his marriage by several years in order to avoid infecting his wife.

He assisted an infertile couple by performing the earliest recorded case of artificial insemination.

In 1767, John examined the teeth of an elephant-like animal from North America (actually a mastodon). He correctly concluded that they did not belong to a modern elephant, but rather to a previously unknown, and probably extinct, species. This idea flew in the face of contemporary dogma that all species had been created by God and remained unchanged. His work in comparative anatomy led him to write about the "Great Chain of Being," and eventually to toy with ideas dangerously close to the concept of evolution.

Two close friends of Hunter's, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, accompanied James Cook on his "Voyage of Discovery," departing Plymouth England in August of 1768.

Hunter kept a large menagerie of domestic and exotic animals on his farm at Earl's Court, just outside London. He kept everything from observation hives of bees to zebras and leopards. An underground laboratory featured a large copper vat for boiling down remains to obtain skeletons. His comparative anatomy and physiology studies were initially aimed at furthering human medicine, but he also developed an interest in treating animal diseases. The Veterinary College of London opened in 1791, with Hunter's assistance and support.

He also collected abnormal specimens (human and animal): a stillborn anencephalic, a cyclopic pig, a bicephalic calf, and so on.

In the autumn of 1770, 21-year old Edward Jenner (who would later develop the first smallpox vaccine) became John Hunter's first house pupil at St. George's Hospital.

Cook's ship, Endeavor, returned in July 1771, with specimens of more than a thousand animal species previously unknown in Europe (and an even larger number of plant specimens). The most spectacular were the skull and skins and several kangaroos. Hunter was unable to classify them anatomically with any species he had previously encountered, and had to wait almost two decades to get his hands on an intact specimen.

In the summer of 1771, John Hunter married his fiancée of seven years, Anne Home. He was 43 to her 29. His brother William was excused from attending, due to his belief that marriage was incompatible with a career in anatomy. The year before, he had parted company with his former assistant, William Hewson, upon his marriage to Polly Stevenson. Polly Stevenson was the daughter of Benjamin Franklin's London landlady. She had a keen mind, and remained a close friend of Franklin's for life.

Hunter's new wife pursued her social life and raised their children surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of her husband's anatomical and physiological research. In one incident in 1772, a visiting explorer had returned from northern Canada with a family of Inuit. All came to dinner at the Hunters. The head of the Inuit family wandered about the house and grounds, only to stumble over a glass case full of human bones. He demanded to know if this were the fate of previous Inuit guests who had been killed and eaten. Hunter assured him that all the bones belonged to executed criminals (even though this wasn't strictly true).

Electricity was an absorbing interest in 18th century Britain, stirred up by Ben Franklin's 1751 paper arguing that lightning was an electrical force, and experiment with kite and key the following year. In the 1740s, invention of the Leyden jar, an early type of battery, contributed to the fashion for electrical experiments and "therapies." In 1772, electric eels from Surinam were seen in London for the first time; John Hunter was the recipient of four of them for dissection.

In 1777, a popular reverend was hung for forgery. John Hunter and his team stood by in hopes of successful reviving him. In those days, hang knots did not break the neck, but relied upon strangulation. Hanging was not an exact art, and it was not unheard of for "executed" felons to revive. Since their sentence had been carried out, they were then set free--unless of course, they had the bad luck to be dissected in the interim. 19th century records note that 10 out of 36 bodies dissected after hanging between 1812 and 1830 had beating hearts--which did not stop the proceedings.

Practitioners of the day recommended bloodletting and tobacco vapor enemas for reviving drowning victims. Hunter, on the other hand, recommended introducing air into the victim's lungs, in combination with holding stimulating vapors to the nose and or rubbing the skin with essential oils. And finally, the administration of electric shocks, with the aim of restarting the heart. This idea had first been suggested by Benjamin Franklin, who had never tried to put it into practice. Dr. Hunter and his team did all they could to try to revive the Reverend Dodd, but the delay in obtaining the body was too great for any real chance of success.

John and William had a final falling out in 1780, right in front of the assembled Royal Society. John publicly accused William of having plagiarized his work on the structure of the placenta. These charges with were more or less true, as William had appropriated John's anatomical preparations as his own. The brothers were also divided philosophically: William remained faithful to the traditional view of the origin of life and immutable species, while John attempted to grabble with increasing evidence for changes in species over time.

John Hunter was widely known to covet the skeletal remains of the celebrated "Irish giant," Charles Byrne, long before the man's death. Byrne was 7 ft, 8 inches tall, and John wanted the addition to his collection of human and animal specimens of developmental abnormalities. Hunter even offered to pay Byrne for his body, in advance of his death, and hired an agent to follow Byrne around London. Far from agreeing, Byrne made his friends promise to seal him in a lead coffin and drop his body out at sea--out of the anatomist's reach. When Byrne died, his friends kept watch over his body for several days, charging the public to view the giant casket. Unbeknownst to them, Hunter had bribed the undertaker, who swapped the body for a load of paving stones. John kept the body hidden for several years, to avoid public upset of the manner of acquisition.

William died in 1783, at the age of 65. John did not attend the funeral, and was not named in William's will.

John himself was suffering from angina, but there was little the medicine of the day could offer him. Around this time (1785) Benjamin Franklin, who was living in France, was suffering with a bladder stone. A team headed by Hunter advised him to avoid surgery at his age, instead relying on control of the symptoms--in particular, opium to control the pain. Franklin returned home in 1786 and was active for several more years before dying in 1790 at the age of 84, and quite dependent on opium.

Hunter's museum on Leicester Square opened in 1788.

Hunter died in 1792. Completely in character, he had a fatal heart attack during an argument with his colleagues at St. George's Hospital. All his worldly wealth was tied up in his collection, leaving his family nothing but debts. He had thought the sale of his collection to the government would provide an income for his family. However, his plan suffered from bad timing. In the midst of war with France, the British government had no money to spare for natural history. John's 51-year-old widow had to support herself as a "ladies chaperone" for the daughters of an army surgeon.

Tragically, many of his papers and unpublished manuscripts fell into hostile hands, and were destroyed. In 1859, his remains were moved to Westminster Abbey where he was reinterred with a second funeral, and a plaque from the Royal College of Surgeons.

"Living Dangerously; The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong," by Mark Cotta Vaz.

If someone had made up Merian Cooper as a fictional character, he would be completely unbelievable and pulpy. Just from the jacket notes:

-- Bomber pilot in WWI
-- Helped found the Kosciuszko Squadron in battle-torn Poland (after the war)
-- Was captured and held prisoner by the Russians
-- Escaped with the help of a beautiful spy
-- Began making documentary films about life in little known parts of the world
-- In Hollywood, he made King Kong, brought Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers together as a team, and arranged Katherine Hepburn's first screen test.
-- In WWII, he served with General Claire Chennault in China

Random notes from the book:

"Murderers' Island" -- Described by Captain Salisbury of the Wisdom II. In the Andaman Islands, the British maintained a colony of some 10,000 convicted murderers--surrounded by a jungle "populated by a mysterious, feared tribe of black pygmies that hunted with bow and arrow, Stone Age style."

The documentary film Grass about the nomadic Bakhtiari tribe of southern Persia, and their seasonal migration to the mountains--a trek involving 50,000 people and a half-million animals.

When filming Chang in "Siam", he found he could predict the behavior of the native cast and wildlife by the phases of the moon. He had a life-long fascination with aviation and rocketry, and believed that man would eventually colonize space.

Willis O'Brien, was the pioneer in stop-motion animation who did the special effects for King Kong. "Obie" was born in Oakland California in 1886. He had been a cowboy, a freight-train brakeman, a surveyor, and a prizefighter.

With the buzz about the Jackson remake of Kong, a 2004 reunion was planned for three legendary members of the Los Angeles Science Fiction League: Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury, and Forrest Ackerman. The "Brown Room" on the 3rd floor of Clifton's cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles.

"Imaginary Weapons; A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld," by Sharon Weinberger.

An amazing story of the Pentagon's pet fringe-science projects. The book focuses on the elusive hafnium isomer bomb, but also touches on efforts to develop an antimatter weapon and the use of psychics to influence enemy troops. Altogether, these projects start to make rumors about the "Philadelphia project" look realistic.

At least it's not just the U.S. who specializes in the ridiculous. One Russian scientist complained about a group from St. Petersburg who claimed to have "triggered" an isomer of tellurium with X-rays: "the details of work were without doubts invented by authors who proved 'too incompetent' to even bother to invent something plausible."

"Beginning in the 1970s, the intelligence community began hiring psychics to describe objects in remote locations. ... The central figure in the U.S. psychics program was...Hal Puthoff, who convinced intelligence officials that psychic phenomena could be proved. Recounted in...Nick Cook's...The Hunt For Zero Point, the CIA's obsession with psychics...emerged from paranoid fears of Russian superiority." Such were the frontlines of the cold war.

When the author was researching this book, she interviewed the Air Force scientist in charge of funding basic physics, Forrest "Jack" Agee. Agee suggested she speak with someone named Hill Roberts, a scientist at SRS Technologies in Huntsville Alabama. Roberts supposedly knew a lot about isomers. When she Googled Hill Roberts in combination with "hafnium-178," she was directed to a web site belonging to an organization called "Lord I Believe." Halfnium-178 was considered to be proof of an intelligent designer, and Roberts was a proponent of something called "Christian Evidences."

A chemist and physicist named Irving Langmur gave a talk in 1953 in which he provided definitions for "pathological science," or, "the science of things that aren't so":

· Pseudoscience - the attempt to dress up non-scientific ideas as science.

· Junk science - shoddy techniques or poor methods used to promulgate a desired conclusion.

· Pathological science - any scientific pursuit where the scientist involved would claim that the inability of others to reproduce their results was caused by some fundamental flaw in the others' work. Usually resulting from an otherwise good scientist reporting an exciting result too soon, thus raising the stakes too high.

"The Crackpot Index" as written by mathematical physicist John Baez. A "simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics."
* 20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel Prize
*20 points for bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule...
*20 points for each use of the phrase "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy."
* 40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a conspiracy to prevent your work form gaining its well-deserved fame...
*40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case.

Notes from "Drake's Fortune; The Fabulous True Story of the World's Greatest Confidence Artist" by Richard Rayner

Oscar Hartzell was born in 1876 on the Illinois prairie. Bankrupt after failing at both farming and ranching, Hartzell was taken in by a scam that promised investors a share in the long-lost fortune of Sir Francis Drake. Once he figured out the fraud, and how it worked, he conned the con artists out of their own con, and proceeded to make millions for himself. Though he was eventually tried and jailed for fraud, the scam--and some victims' belief in it--carried on for years.

In 1572, Francis Drake (not yet "Sir") stole a treasure worth 40,000 pounds sterling in Elizabethan money from a Spanish party transporting it across the Isthmus of Panama. Since Drake had done so well on this expedition, the Queen soon sanctioned another--and backed it financially herself, along with the Earl of Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham. It was this second voyage in which Drake circumnavigated the globe (the first Briton to do so). He careened somewhere along the Pacific coast of North America, claiming the land as "New Albion". On the voyage home, he captured a Spanish treasure ship. His return to England yielded a return for his investors of over 4,500%. The queen's share of the booty was 100,000 pounds sterling--an amount sufficient to stake England's growth into a colonial world power.

Drake became a very wealthy man as well as a baronet. He bought Buckland Abbey as his home, and applied for a coat of arms. He died at sea off Panama in 1596, on a late-in-life expedition to wrest yet more plunder from the Spanish on behalf of his queen. Despite having been married twice, Drake died without any children. So his estate passed to his brother and nephews.

Given his romantic history as a pirate, explorer, and hero of England's first major naval victory against the Spanish Armada, it wasn't long before rumors began to circulate about the validity of Drake's will. Fortune hunters abounded, and confidence schemes grew up around the legendary fortune. Fraudulent schemes surrounding the mythical fortune were documented as early as the late 1800s. In 1900, a gang of swindlers wrote to every Drake they could find in the new American telephone directories. Each Drake was personally informed that they were the true heirs of the estate, and that a modest legal fee could secure their claim. Many were taken in.

By 1909, a woman named Sudie Whittaker was the most successful Drake promoter in America. She claimed that her cousin, a Mr. George Drake of Roachport Missouri, was the true heir to the Drake fortune. She had an impressive genealogical document created to support her claim. As George Drake was a man of only modest means, he needed investors to help with the finances of pressing his claim. Sudie hooked up with a lawyer named Milo Lewis. Lewis's genuine law degree gave apparent validity to Sudie's sales performance, and he helped her keep the scam in a legal gray area.

Oscar Hartzell was originally a dupe, then was hired on as an assistant, but he gradually took over the scam to run as his own. At first he believed in the basic proposition of the Drake Estate, and was certain a genuine fortune could be obtained. The premise was plausible: some Americans had found themselves to be the legal heirs of distant relatives in the old country. There were lots of Drakes in the American Midwest--many of them descended from some obscure branch of Sir Francis's family.

Oscar Hartzell, Sudie Whittaker, and Milo Lewis traveled to London in 1916. When Lewis was disbarred back in the U.S. for bigamy, Hartzell seized his chance to take control over what he by then knew to be a complete scam. Hartzell was able to convince investors that Drake's fortune was real, and the plan to obtain it for American heirs a sound one, but that Lewis and Whittaker were crooks and not to be trusted. He announced that George Drake, and his heir, Ernest Drake, were not, in fact, the legitimate heirs to the Drake Estate. The Hartzell versus Lewis and Whittaker fight over control of the scam only served to heighten its credibility. After all, who would fight so hard over nothing?

Hartzell found another confederate in London--an American lawyer named Arthur Sylvester Welch--who helped him invent a new twist on the old scheme. Rather than selling shares, they requested donations. They reckoned "donations" were safer from the law than "investments." Donators were promised a full refund, plus 6% compound interest, plus a discretionary bonus promised to be in the neighborhood of 1,000 to 1. Hartzell recruited local agents to canvass for donations, and demanded his own share of $2,500/week (more like $25,000 in today's terms). He then returned to England where he remained for the next eleven years.

Hartzell grew more and more inventive. Sir Francis Drake, it seemed, had had a third and secret marriage, resulting in a son. This son was Drake's true heir, and his descendent was declared to be a Colonel Drexel Drake living in London. Colonel Drexel Drake did not exist, but this did not stop Hartzell from claiming to be engaged to marry the colonel's (also nonexistent) niece. On the occasion of their fictitious engagement, the Colonel had signed over all interest in the Drake fortune to none other than Oscar Hartzell. Hartzell claimed he was also going to seek restitution from the British government, with interest, as Queen Elizabeth had originally grabbed more than her fair share of the treasure. Drake's secret 3rd wife had been Queen Elizabeth I herself. The current king was planning to sign over monies and properties to Hartzell, but was delayed by illness. The new Lord Chancellor reviewed the papers and found a small clerical error. There was panic at the Bank of England over the billions soon to be leaving British shores for America.

Cons of all kinds flourished in the boom of the 1920ies: scammers sold shares in the League of Nations, or in fictitious gold and platinum mines, land speculation, or fraudulent oil well ventures. People believed because there were so many true reports of others getting rich quick and they didn't want to be left behind. In the Midwest, the Drake Estate became a craze.

The 1929 stock-market crash put an end to most of the swindles that had been popular during the decade, but not the Drake scam. Somehow the faith of the Midwesterners in Hartzell was confirmed by the failure of Wall Street. Hartzell turned these details to his advantage: fear of the Drake Estate settlement had paralyzed financial institutions and caused the depression.

A scholarly article by John Maynard Keynes used an example of the original Drake fortune and how its investment by Queen Elizabeth I had led directly to England's becoming a world power. He meant it as an example of the power of compound interest over time, but "the Drakers" took it as validation.

Still living in England, Hartzell fell under the influence of a medium or fortune-teller, a Mrs. Nina St. John Montague. At the same time back home, he became the subject of a major investigation by U.S. postal inspector, John Sparks. Mail fraud cases were divided into "land swindles, oil well swindles, fake dog pedigree swindles, bogus work-at-home schemes, and bogus literary agencies; there were fake diploma rackets, astrology rackets, and fake prize contests. And so on...--including the category of genealogical swindles.

In January of 1933, Hartzell was deported from England, and returned (traveling in first class on a luxury ocean liner) to the U.S.. He was arrested as soon as the ship docked, and taken to Iowa to stand trial. The authorities wanted him, but the crowds of duped investors who gathered to cheer him on continued to believe in the Drake Estate as their way out. Oscar Hartzell had achieved the status of folk hero.

People attributed major diplomatic, political, and financial developments on the world stage to the imminent settlement of the Drake Estate. It was even claimed that all territory north of the Rio Grande and west of the Mississippi river would be included in the final settlement--based on the claim that Francis Drake had landed in what is now California and laid claim to the region. On the witness stand at Hartzell's fraud trial, one believer said, "Our deal is the cause of the depression, having tied up the finances of the whole world."

Hartzell was sentenced to 10 years in Leavenworth prison plus a $2,000 fine. When his appeals were finally exhausted in January of 1935, he was taken to prison. But Oscar's imprisonment barely made a dent in the continued progress of the scheme. People chose to believe that his imprisonment was unjust, or that it was a fake and he wasn't really in Leavenworth at all.

When the infamous "Drake Plaque" was discovered in Northern California the late 1930ies, it seemed to lend credence to the suggestion that California might be part of the Drake Estate. The plaque was an elaborate practical joke, but was widely considered to be a genuine artifact of Drake's visit to the west coast. People wrote to the State Department, to enquire if the plaque were connected with shares they'd bought in the Drake Estate deal. Californians had been buying these shares from a resurfaced Sudie Whittaker.

Hartzell assured the prison psychiatrists that the estate would be settled any day, and his innocence proven. He claimed he would officially be given the name "Sir Francis Drake." He was eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Hartzell died in prison of throat cancer in 1943. But the legacy of the Drake Estate scam lives on in descendents such as the well-known internet "Nigerian scam".

The term "confidence man" was coined in 1848. Before then, the typical term for that sort of swindle was "diddling"--after a character named "Jeremy Diddler" in long-forgotten eponymous play. The art of the con man is to present the unreal as if it were truth. There has to be a certain plausibility to the tale, and delays and obstacles lend to the credibility as well as providing additional opportunities to ask for more money. Such swindles play upon greed, and the hope of something for nothing.

Back in 1591-1592, Robert Greene (who was also Shakespeare's first critic) wrote two pamphlets about "cony-catchers." "A Notable Discovery of Cosenage" was the longer of the two, in which the author detailed the methods of "the Fetcher, the Shifter, the Ruffler, the Prigger, the Cross-Biter, the nip, the Foist, and the Deceipts of their Doxies."

“Strange Angel; The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons” by George Pendle.

John Parsons, rocketry pioneer, died in an explosion at his Pasadena home in 1952. He was 37 years old. Parsons had been affiliated with Caltech, was one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and was deeply involved in a leadership role with the cult society, “Ordo Templi Orientis” (OTO).

Parsons came to believe that rocketry and magic were two sides of the same coin: intellectual challenges to be conquered by a keen and open mind.

Parsons grew up in a wealthy Pasadena home, but his family became impoverished by the depression and unable to send him to college. As a boy he became fascinated with pulp publications such as Weird Tales and the new Amazing Stories. Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories was the first publication devoted to what Gernsback called “scientifiction.”

In middle school, at age 12, he met his life-long friend and colleague, Edward Forman. Both boys were dyslexic, and though Parsons could read well, his handwriting and spelling were always poor. The two also shared an interest in explosives and rocketry and began experimenting almost immediately.

In 1932, at age 18, having not yet finished high school, Parsons went to work to support his family. He found a part-time job with Hercules Powder Company in Los Angles. It was hog heaven for an explosives freak.

In 1933-34 he tried enrolling in Pasadena Junior College, but had to drop out after just one term. Hercules, however, was impressed with him, and transferred him to full-time work at their main explosives manufacturing plant in Pinole, on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. The work was physically demanding as well as dangerous. He was offered a place at Stanford University, but couldn’t afford the tuition, so he returned to Pasadena where he could live at home. In his time at Hercules, he’d gained a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of explosives, and was considered to have an instinctive “global” grasp of chemical theory.

In 1935, the 20-year old Jack Parsons and 22-year old Ed Forman started hanging around at Caltech. There they met graduate student Frank Malina, then 22 years old. The Rocket Research Group (aka "The Suicide Squad) soon acquired an additional member, Apollo (Amo) Smith, a master's student at Caltech. The group started conducting test firings in 1936, in a remote part of the still wild Arroyo Seco.

By 1937 Fascism was a rising force in Europe, and the conflict between Fascism and Communism was erupting into open warfare in Spain. European Jews immigrated to the US in increasing numbers. Some who had been banned from teaching in Nazi Germany found a home at Caltech.

Communism had an intellectual appeal, especially to left-leaning students. It was not illegal to be a member of the communist party at the time, but it was frowned upon, and most people kept their affiliation secret for fear of job repercussions. Parsons never officially joined the party, and eventually stopped going to the meetings, but Frank Malina did, as did Tsien (a Chinese member of “The Suicide Squad”).

In 1934, Hugo Gernsback, founding editor of Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories launched the Science Fiction League. The Los Angeles chapter (LASFL) met on the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of each month at Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown LA. Parsons never joined the league, but he did attend and speak upon occasion, impressing, among other people attending a 1938 lecture, an 18-year old Ray Bradbury.

Parsons had been attracted to the writings of English writer and magician Aleister Crowley for some time. Eventually he was introduced to a group which practiced what they called “The Gnostic mass of the Church of Thelema”, which had been created by Crowley. Crowley defined “magick” as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”

Mystical societies had become very popular in late 19th century Britain, and Crowley joined one of the more influential ones: The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. But Crowley chaffed under the hierarchy that worked to slow his advancement, and instead chose to develop his own religion, or law, of “Thelema” (from the Greek word for law). It’s central doctrine was of total self-fulfillment, expressed as, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” In 1912, Crowley joined and eventually took over a “quasi-Masonic” organization called the Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO. The one thing he kept from the original OTO’s ritual was the use of sex as a component of working magic.

The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer was first published in 1890, as a study of mythologies and belief systems of the world’s cultures. Frazer was an anthropologist and fellow of Trinity College. Parsons was fascinated by this book that treated “magic not as blasphemy or heresy but as a legitimate (if flawed) system of thought.” The book highlighted the similarities between the rites, superstitions, and magic of primitive and pagan cultures and those of Christianity and orthodox religion. While Frazer did not believe in magic, he did see intellectual similarities between the pursuit of magic and the pursuit of science. To Frazer, “acts of magic were the logical precursors to scientific experiment, for as with science ‘the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely.’…Magic, with its unshakeable belief in cause and effect, made it ‘the bastard sister of science.’ Parsons would always treat magic as such, seeing it as a strictly literal branch of learning--one that could be mastered by concentrated scientific application.”

In the early 1940ies Parsons invented a solid, castable rocket fuel made from black tar and potassium perchlorate. He is believed to have gotten the idea from Greek Fire—a terrifying flaming liquid weapon recorded in Sparta as early as 429 B.C.. It was reputed to be inextinguishable and burned even on water. The exact nature of its composition remained secret and was eventually lost. Naturally occurring asphalt (black tar) was one of the possible ingredients postulated. Parsons invention was one of “the most important discoveries in the long history of solid rockets.”

In 1942 Parsons bought a decaying Pasadena mansion and moved in with his wife Helen, her young half-sister Betty (who was Parsons’ mistress), and several of his OTO friends (including Wilfred Smith who was Helen’s lover). In this environment, Parsons created for himself an idyllic lifestyle. Fencing, womanizing, magick, drinking…all his favorite activities were freely available. Parsons was also using drugs by this time: home-brewed absinthe, marijuana, cocaine, and amphetamines.

Parsons also became a regular guest of the Mañana Literary Society, a group of SF authors who met at the Laurel Canyon home of writer Robert Heinlein. Anthony Boucher, Cleve Cartmill, Jack Williamson, and L. Ron Hubbard were among those Parsons met at the Mañana Society.

During the years of WWII, the “Air Corps Jet Propulsion Research Project,” which had been funding the Suicide Squad’s research, reformulated into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or JPL. The budget swelled and the staff mushroomed. JPL was the fully-funded military concern, while Aerojet was the business side of the operation. Parsons and Forman were bought out in 1944, and Parsons was pretty much set adrift after that.

After the war ended, nuclear physicist Robert Cornog (who had discovered tritium while at UC Berkeley) moved into Parsons’ mansion, as did L. Ron Hubbard. Parsons and Hubbard became friends and rivals. Hubbard stole Parsons' girlfriend, Betty, who he eventually married.

Parsons immersed himself in the practice of Enochian magic, with a goal of summoning an “Elemental mate”. The rituals he performed took and exhausting two hours and involved recitation as well as “focused masturbation” (a form of sympathetic magic as he tried to “fertilize” magical symbols drawn on paper “tablets” strewn around the floor). When Parsons met the woman who was to become his second wife (Marjorie "Candy" Cameron), he believed his magic had, indeed, summoned her.

Hubbard “helped” Parsons with his magical “workings” and eventually they formed a business partnership along with Betty. It was a highly uneven partnership with Parsons contributing most of the money which Hubbard and Betty soon absconded with.

Hubbard wrote an article about “Dianetics” for the May 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. According to Hubbard, Dianetics is a form of psychotherapy, which can eventually optimize the potential of the human brain. Like Thelema, Hubbard’s Scientology preaches “that man is an immortal spiritual being, that his capabilities are unlimited, and that his spiritual salvation depends upon his attainment of a ‘brotherhood of the universe’.”

By the late 1940ies, anticommunist feelings ran high, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities was in full swing. Frank Malina left the U.S. in 1946 because he was afraid of the FBI. Robert Cornog lost his security clearance, and was effectively unable to continue working in an industry that dealt largely with classified government contracts. Parsons was investigated, listed as an “Undesirable Employee for National Defense Work,” and consequently lost his job with North American Aviation. Later on he was able to have his security clearance reviewed and restored, and he did return to work with Hughes Aircraft Company.

SF writer L. Sprague de Camp sought a meeting with Parsons—the scientist-magician—as part of his research for a book on magic and the occult. He declared Parsons “an authentic mad genius.”

Parsons' troubles with the FBI were not over, and he became the focus of yet another investigation. No charges were filed, but he once again lost his security clearance.

He and Candy rented the old coach house of a former Pasadena estate, and Parsons set up a laboratory on the ground floor. He was apparently making drugs and absinthe, as well as explosives. He found occasional work in the movie special effects industry, and it was a special effects project he was working on when the explosion that killed him occurred.

Parsons first wife, Helen, had married Wilfred Smith (who had been Parsons’ original guide into the occult world). Helen established Thelema Publications, and continued to publish Alister Crowley’s work. The OTO was revived in the 1970ies, and has become an international organization with thousands of members.

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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

“It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science.” Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough.

"Starvation Heights" by Gregg Olsen


In September 1910 wealthy English sisters Claire and Dora Williamson first learned of "Dr." Linda Burfield Hazard and her fasting cure. They were staying at the Empress hotel in Victoria, Vancouver Island. The hotel was 2 years old.

The sisters saw "Dr." Hazard's advertisement in a Seattle newspaper. Claire wrote away for her book: Fasting for the Cure of Disease. Claire's letter mentioned health problems of Dora's. When the book arrived, it contained a brochure advertising the "Hazard Institute of natural therapeutics" in Olalla, Washington. The sisters decided they had to go as sort of a spa holiday.

At first, the facility in Olalla was not ready, so the sisters began their "treatment" at a hotel in Seattle. After weeks of fasting and daily enemas, first in Seattle then after transfer to the facility at Olalla, Claire Williamson died.

The Williamson sisters' uncle and former nurse were shown an embalmed body that they knew was not Claire. Dr Hazard claimed that Claire had died of the ailments she had sought treatment for. In reality these were nothing more than a vaguely nervous stomach and pains in her knees, but Hazard claimed that Claire had been at death's door. The truth was that Claire had died of starvation.

After encountering "Claire's body", the nurse went out to Olalla to find Dora in a state near death. The surviving sister alternated between begging to leave and claiming the fasting treatment was healing her. In the sisters' state of weakness and complete dependence, Hazard had either tricked or forged Claire's agreement to will most of her estate to Hazard, as well as to declare Dora mentally incompetent and a ward of Hazard. If the nurse had not come and gotten her away from "Wilderness Heights" (Hazard's grandiose name for her facility), Dora too would have died.

The British Vice Consul, Lucian Agazziz, helped the women bring a criminal case against Linda Hazard, as well as suing her for return of Claire's property. Claire Williamson was far from the only "patient" of Linda Hazard's who had died under questionable circumstances. In the case of Claire Williamson, Linda Hazard was found guilty of manslaughter. The front page story in all the papers was about how Linda Hazard had sold Claire Williamson's teeth after her death.

Linda Hazard served less than two years in prison. She and her husband Sam then moved to New Zealand for several years where business was brisk. In 1920 they were able to return to Olalla and buy Wilderness Heights out right, and finally build the grand sanitarium she'd always wanted. She continued to have trouble with the law, and more patients died. Eventually the sanitarium burned to the ground, with hints of an insurance scam.

Linda's last trial for practicing medicine without a license was two years before her death. And indeed she fasted herself to death in 1938. Her husband Samuel outlived her by eight years.

Hazard did have her friends and supporters. Several of these were heavily into spiritualism and theosophy. She also found support from many members of "Home Colony" - an anarchist colony on the Key Peninsula. Linda's husband, Sam Hazard, was an alcoholic who tried to conceal his habit by buying bottles of high alcohol-content extracts - particularly vanilla. Apparently this was not a tremendously unusual problem. When Linda married Sam Hazard she knew he was already married to another woman. She had stood by him during his trial for bigamy and waited for his release from prison. Its less clear if she knew about yet another wife (his first) and the mounting debts and fraud that drove him out of West Point in disgrace.

For pictures and discussion of Olalla today, click here.

"River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West." by Rebecca Solnit.

In 1872 Edward Muybridge took the first photographs of a horse in motion. The horse, named Occident, belonged to Leland Stanford, and was one of the fastest trotting horses in the country. The photographs were commissioned to reveal whether a trotting horse ever has all four feet off the ground at the same time. During the decade that followed, Muybridge developed camera shutters that could make exposures of a fraction of a second for the first time. To go along with it, he made film that was fast enough to capture images in such a brief time. The stop motion effect was used to dissect rapid movements into a series of still photographs. Muybridge also developed the zootrope, which makes a series of spring images seen through a slot appear to be a single image in motion. In other words, his work provided the elements that eventually became moving pictures.

Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in a town called Kingston-upon-Thames (just upriver from London). Over the course of his adult life, he changed his first name to Eadward, and his last name first to Muygrige, and later to Muybridge.

He arrived in San Francisco in the autumn of 1855, when that city was the capital of the gold rush--and a place where people found it easy and attractive to reinvent themselves.

Photographic negatives were made on glass plates, which were in themselves valuable. Photographers sometimes scraped and reused them. "...many negatives of the Civil War were recycled into greenhouse plates without being scraped, their images of the harvest of death gradually fading away to let more and more light in on the orchids or cucumbers beneath." Upon his death, William Ruofson's (Muybridge's dealer of the mid-1870s) negatives, including those of Muybridge's wife, Flora, were sold to author Joaquin Miller to make a greenhouse.

The wet-plate photographic process used in the 1860s and 70s required that the negative be made, exposed, and developed in quick succession. Muybridge sometimes had as many as 4 assistants with him when he traveled, as well as a pack train to transport gear and chemicals. A dark tent or wagon was required. Inside the tent, a glass plate was turned into a negative by the application of collodion, a volatile syrup of gun cotton and ether. The coated plate was then dipped into a bath of silver nitrate, drained and placed in a light-excluding holder to be placed in the camera. The photograph had to be taken before the emulsion dried and the photograph developed immediately. The entire process took a fast photographer around half an hour. There were no shutters or light meters--exposure was accomplished by removing the lens cap for an interval of a few seconds to several minutes, the time based on the experience and intuition of the photographer.

The US Army hired Muybridge to document the Modoc wars in photographs. For the Modoc, the Tule Lake region was the center of the world, and the army was determined to displace them from it. In 1873 they fought hard among natural labyrinth of the Lava Bed Stronghold.

The Modocs were involved with a version of the Ghost Dance, and danced in the belief that it would bring back their dead. The author, Solnit, describes the Ghost Dance as a technology, and finds parallels in the spiritualist movement that began in the 1840s and reached a peak in the U.S. in the years after the Civil War. "To propose annihilating the inexorable march of history and the irreversibility of death was to propose a technology as ambitious as a moon walk or a gene splice."

For more about Muybridge and examples of his work click here.

"Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World." by Adrienne Mayor.

As the title says, the book discusses the use of poisoned weapons, incendiary devices, poison gas, and contagion as weapons of war in the ancient world: Greece, Rome, the Middle East, China, India, Africa, and Central and South America.

Poison for arrows could be derived from poisonous snakes or plants. Poisoned weapons were discussed in The Iliad and The Odyssey, as well as in Virgil's Aeneid. Odysseus, himself, was killed by the son he had with the sorceress, Circe. Telegonus mistook his father for an enemy and ran him through with a spear tipped with the poisonous spine of a stingray. Ancient writings from India, as well as the Mediterranean area, give detailed descriptions of poisonous animals, plants, insects, and minerals, along with descriptions of symptoms and antidotes and remedies. Hellbore and wolfbane were two of the most commonly mentioned plant poisons. Others were henbane, hemlock, nightshade (belladonna, also know as "strychnos" by the Romans) and yew. The sap, flowers, and nectar of rhododendrons contain neurotoxins, and honey made by bees from rhododendron nectar was also poisonous.

South American rainforest tribes use the deadly poison from "poison arrow" frogs to treat arrows and blowgun darts. Two micrograms of the frog toxin are lethal to humans. South American natives also used the plant toxins strychnine or curare (an alkaloid that causes fatal paralysis). A pinprick from a curare-coated dart can bring down a human or a large animal.

In the old world, a variety of poisonous beetles were also used to make weapons. Marine animals such as jellyfish, urchins and stingrays may also have been part of the bio-arsenal. There is archeological evidence of stingray spine spear points from Central and South America. Live insects, such as angry bees, or poisonous animals, such as scorpions, could also be deployed against the enemy in catapulted sealed jars or bombs.

Collecting the materials and preparing these poisons was incredibly dangerous, and therefore usually the province of shamans or wizard-priests--the process cloaked in ritual and arcane learning. Manufacture of the dreaded scythicon, the poison used by the Scythian archers had a complicated series of steps. First a poisonous viper was killed and its body left to decompose. Then the preparer drew blood from a human, and separated the serum. The serum was mixed with animal dung human feces and left to putrefy. The two components were mixed together to produce a foul smelling, toxic soup, laden with dangerous bacteria. If a victim didn't die immediately from the wound or the poison, gangrene and tetanus would inevitably set in. To ensure delivery and hamper removal of contaminated arrow points, barbs and double tips were used.

Particularly in siege warfare, poisoning or simply cutting off a water supply was a common tactic. Tossing animal or human carcasses into wells or rivers to contaminate the water supply is an age-old practice, used in countless conflicts around the globe. A fleeing army or populace might contaminate or poison food, wine, or water left behind to incapacitate their pursuers.

Germ warfare is often considered to have begun in 1346, when the Mongols catapulted corpses of their own plague victims into Kaffa, a Genoese fortress on the Black Sea. This act may have introduced the black plague into Europe. Long before the concept of germ theory was understood, enough was known about the spread of contagion to facilitate deliberate infection--and certainly the accusation was frequently made.

Indian and Persian lore contains tales of "poison maidens" sent among the enemy. A popular belief was that a lifelong regimen of ingesting poisons and venoms could produce a poisonous person--examples in fiction being Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Rappaccini's Daughter" and the story of the poison Sultan Mahmud Shah. Perhaps such stories were stimulated by the practices of the Psylli, the snake charmers of North Africa, or possibly a reference to venereal disease, small pox, or "typhoid Mary"-type carriers of disease.

Incendiary devices ranged from fire-arrows, fire ships, or catapulted firepots of sulphur and bitumen, to more diabolical weapons involving naphtha or burning mirrors such as the array attributed to Archimedes at Syracuse.

"Inside The Victorian Home: A Portrait of Victorian Life in Victorian England," by Judith Flanders.

The book focuses on Victorian life in middle class homes, and is structured by describing activities on a room-by-room basis. The work of servants is covered as well--not the teams of servants required to maintain a stately home, but the labors of a "maid of all work" in homes which could afford no more than one servant to help the mistress.

My comments here are largely on aspects of hygiene, health, science, and medicine, as those are the topics that particularly interest me. But the book also contains much information of interest on social mores and customs--marriage, mourning, child raising, social activities, and so on. The book is a great reference for writers interested in details of daily life for families of that era.

General

An emphasis on classification and record keeping was popular in all walks from household accounts to the Linnaean taxonomy (brought to London in 1790s). The register of births, deaths and marriages was set up in 1837. The census was instituted. The British museum began to create a catalog of all its collections.

In 1840, Sir Roland Hill pushed through establishment of the penny post. For the first time, letters were stamped or franked at the time of posting. Previously, postage had been paid by the recipient and varied with the weight of the post and distance carried.

Disease and medicine

Doctors preferred patients to be ignorant of medicine, as it rendered them more compliant.

Understanding of disease transmission, a drop in the real price of food, and (most importantly) improvements in sanitation led to a drop in childhood mortality. As late as 1899 more than 16% of children did not survive to their first birthday. By the time they reached age 5, 35 out of every 45 19th century children had survived smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, typhus, or enteric fever. Illnesses such as chicken pox and mumps were more dangerous than today, because of the drugs used to treat them. With the development of germ theory it became possible to differentiate between various diseases, but not necessarily to cure them.

Sometimes the medicines were worse than the illnesses. The ever-popular ipecac (a powdered root inducing vomiting) and calomel (a purgative consisting made of mercury chloride). Patent medicines such as "J. Collis Browne's Chlolodyne" contained not only opium, but also chloral hydrate and cannabis. Beecham's pills contained only aloes (a purgative) ginger and soap. But they were sold as a cure all for everything from scurvy to bad dreams.

There is one theory that Charles Darwin suffered from chronic arsenic poisoning due to the "Fowler's solution" he took to help his chronic dyspepsia.

Morphine, quinine, atropine, codeine, and iodine were isolated or discovered during the early part of the 19th century. Beginning in the 1820s, salicylic acid was produced from salicin, itself derived from willow bark. It was used to treat rheumatic fever and rheumatism. The synthetic version was produced by Bayer laboratories in 1897 and sold as aspirin from 1899 on. At the same time, Bayer was working on another promising discovery: a cough syrup made from the newly synthesized diacetylmorphine, sold under the brand name "heroin."

Household hazards

Painted walls were usually primed with two coats of lead paint: one red and one white. The topcoat was also mixed in a base of white lead. "Painters' colic" was a type of paralysis, when wet paint was absorbed through the skin. Many wallpapers were also dangerous, having colors made from poisonous materials. For example: green, lilac, pinks, some blues, and "French gray" had an arsenic base. In some wallpapers, concentrations of arsenious acid were as high as 59%. Vermillion was adulterated with red lead. Many other countries had banned these papers, but in the late 1880's they were still commonly used in Britain.

Clothing was also likely to be impregnated with arsenic.


Houses

The ideal in house design and use was for each room to have a distinct and separate purpose. Regularity of form was important--regularity and conformity were equated with respectability. The "pattern-book" house had a basement (with kitchen, scullery, and possibly breakfast room), ground floor* (dining room, morning room), first floor (drawing room), second floor (master bedroom, dressing room, second bedroom), half-landing (bathroom), top floor (2 or 3 bedrooms for servants and children).

*would be the first floor in American houses.


Kitchens

The closed range - the first improvement on cooking over an open fire appeared at the beginning of the 19th century but was not commonly in use for decades. Fueled by coke, for the first time, the ability to bake at home and have a continuous supply of hot water was available to the average (upper middle class, at least) person.

Of course the coal-fired ranges and fires were responsible for incredible dirt and dust as well as the famous London pea soup fogs.

Girls and women

At all social levels, girls were deliberately under-educated and expected to be subordinate to their brothers as well as their father. As women, they were expected to run a household, with or without servants, to perfection. Cleanliness and thrift were equated to virtue.

Women were expected to act as nurses for family members, but male doctors were beginning to take over in previously female roles such as childbirth attendant. Just as women were the nurses in the home, they also were subject to more illnesses than were men of the time. To some extent the causes were physical. For example, girls were often deliberately given protein-deficient diets, which was supposed alleviate symptoms of puberty. Also, women spent more time exposed to the indoor pollution of gas, coal dust, and toxic chemicals. They got little exercise and were compelled to wear constricting clothing (which limited the exercise they could take).

A state of illness or invalidism, however, also served as something of a welcome retreat from the demands of daily life. Invalids were waited on, cared for, and treated kindly in the home. For many women, a "sick headache" was the only way they could get a break and some privacy.