Dope

As my readers can plainly see, the contest for renaming the Remora category on this site fell still-born from the press -- not that Limited Inc is greatly surprised, since falling still born from the press does seem to be the fate attaching to every post I've written on this site, from July onwards.

We are not amused; because we are, in our own humble opinion, amusing. Although can we trust our own own humble opinion? because we also firmly believe the great intellects of the past pale in relation to our merest subclause. It has been pointed out to us that we suffer from egomania.

Alas, today we suffer from a physical, rather than metaphysical, ailment. Fever racks my bones. Mysterious aches are playing the boogie woogie on my spinal column. Luckily we were visited a friend of mine, mentioned in previous posts, who plays a role in my life similar to Scheherazade -- not that I am planning on beheading her. No, the deal with this woman is that she can tell me 1001 stories in one night. I was hoping she would come by, and so when she did, I had a Proustian moment, the invalid's feverish hope realized in an entrance. She bore healthful gifts -- chicken soup, grapefruit, and water. This friend sets great store by water, so I even drank it: of course, Limited Inc is always reminded of the great W.C. Fields joke about not drinking water, because fish fuck in it. The problem with modern water is that fish don't fuck in it. Often, instead, they suffocate in it, in great Dead Zones, or are poisoned by run-off, or invaded by parasites suddenly endemic to artificially warmed currents. But that is for another day.

I've always been a hypochondriac. But my hypochondria takes the form of imagining strange and obsolete diseases, like Gout, or Dropsy, that I might have. Today I was thinking I had pellagra. Since I don't know what pellagra is, I decided to check out a helpful site, and get the scoop.

... And what a scoop. Here are the symptoms of pellagra, just in case you were thinking you had it too:

"In the United States, pellagra has often been called the disease of the four D's -- dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death.'

The NIH site celebrates one of those pioneering doctors whose fictional analogues haunt the pages of Balzac and Zola -- medicine was, after all, positivism on the grass-roots level. And science, of course, required a view of the human body at odds with ten thousand years of doctrine. For ten thousand years, the human body was subject to witchcraft. It was subject to analogy. It was subject to the universal idea of eternal life -- a view of the body that is hard for today's average Joe to envision, in spite of the light sprinkling of out of body death experiences that Readers Digest eagerly purveys.

But let's cut to the chase -- the doctor, Joseph Goldberger, has quite a story.

""Bored and intellectually restless in private practice in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the young, shy physician joined the United States Marine Hospital Service, (later the U.S. Public Health Service or PHS) in 1899 at the beginning rank of Assistant Surgeon earning an annual salary of $1,600. Ironically, the immigrant from central Europe began his public health service career inspecting immigrants in the port of New York. However, it was not long before his epidemiological skills earned Goldberger the reputation of a tenacious and clever epidemic fighter.


Between 1902 and 1906, Goldberger heroically battled epidemic diseases. He fought yellow fever in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Mississippi, and Louisiana, contracting the disease himself His efforts earned him a promotion to the rank of Passed Assistant Surgeon in 1904 and later, an introduction to Mary Farrar, grandniece of Varina Davis, the widow of Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. In 1906, the immigrant Jewish physician from New York's Lower East Side married the daughter of a wealthy and socially prominent Episcopalian attorney from New Orleans over the religious objections of both families."

Wow, Jeff Davis' grandniece. The bones of that old racist must have been rattling in his grave.

Once in the South, Goldberger decided to track down the Pellagra germ. But he soon grew convinced that the germ theory, which was to that time what the genetic theory of disease is to ours, was wrong in this case. He got the governor of Mississippi to give him twelve healthy prisoners. Hey, they were promised freedom, if they only ate a very restricted diet. They soon came down with pellagra. So Goldberger triumphed, right? Oh no, he was attacked as a fraud for years. And in the twenties, his predictions about an epidemic of pellagra in the poor South were greeted as a slander on Southern manhood.
The South, as we know, has a higher percentage of meatheads in it than other parts of the country. And before the peanut gallerys starts lofting shells at me, remember: Limited Inc is from Georgia.

Ironically, Goldberger never isolated the vitamin that was deficient in pellagra cases. It was niacin, Vitamin B.
So I don't think I have pellagra -- I ate my cornflakes this morning.
A question hangs here, though -- what about those prisoners? Did the good guv'nah of Mississippi give them their freedom, as the guys in O brother where art thou, or did he renege. Or did they even survive that last D -- it's a killer.