Philip Bethge

Tag: medicine

  • Modern Day Flintstones: A Stone Age Subculture Takes Shape

    A modern-day Stone Age subculture is developing in the United States, where wannabe cavemen mimic their distant ancestors. They eat lots of meat, bathe in icy water and run around barefoot. Some researchers say people led healthier lives in pre-historic times.

    By Philip Bethge

    John Durant greets the hunter-gatherers of New York once a month in his apartment on the Upper East Side. They eat homemade beef jerky, huddle around the hearth and swap recipes for carpaccio with vegetables or roasted wild boar.

    Often enough, the host will deliberately skip a few meals the next day. After all, didn’t his earliest ancestors starve a little between hunts? Instead of eating, Durant prefers to run barefoot across Brooklyn Bridge. In the winter, he takes part in the Coney Island Polar Bear swim in the icy Atlantic.

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  • Chaos in the Doctor’s Office: Panic in Germany as Swine Flu Spreads

    Fear of swine flu is running rampant in Germany as the number of reported cases — and deaths — continues to grow. Doctors’ offices are inundated by people wanting to get the vaccine, which is in short supply. But health professionals are divided over how dangerous the virus really is.

    Death from swine flu comes unexpectedly, as was the case with six-year-old Kharra Skye Davis from Hot Springs, Arkansas, who spent 20 hours fighting for her life, and with Kyree James Gamble, 5, from Littlestown, Pennsylvania. Both were healthy children, and both lost their lives before they had truly begun.

    In the case of Kharra, who died in September, the cause of death was respiratory failure. The little girl had attended a birthday party, and by that evening she had a fever of 40.5 degrees Celsius (105 degrees Fahrenheit). Kharra quickly developed pneumonia, and by the next day … More

  • Who Needs Berlitz? British Savant Learns German in a Week

    Is it possible to learn German in just days? Linguistic savant Daniel Tammet managed to do so in the course of a week. Using his own special technique, the 30-year-old, who has a mild form of autism, has learned to speak more than 10 languages.

    Daniel Tammet likes the German language. It’s “like a clean room with good sharp corners, tidy and straightforward,” he says, yet at the same time it’s “poetic, transparent and elegant.”

    “Take, for example, words like bisschen (a little bit) or Löffelchen (a small spoon),” he adds. “I like this diminutive chen ending.”

    Or the word Gras, for grass: “I like that the first letter fits — for me words with ‘G’ are green,” says the young British man, before offering his signature thin smile. It’s a Thursday in Hamburg’s Hotel Wedina, and 30-year-old Tammet has four more days. By Monday, he plans to have learned enough German — after only a week’s training — to appear on the German television talk show “Beckmann” and speak fluently about brain research, autism and his new book.

    Tammet is a savant. As a child he had epileptic seizures. Doctors later diagnosed him with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. He mastered the world of emotions only through hard training.

    Numbers and foreign words, on the other hand, come to him naturally. He sees colors and shapes where most people see only plain words and numbers. He’s memorized the number pi to 22,514 digits. He knows instantly that January 10, 2017, will be a Tuesday. And he’s a fleet-footed traveler in the rocky terrain of languages.

    (—> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

    Tammet can speak Romanian, Gaelic, Welsh and seven other languages. He learned Icelandic in a week for a TV documentary, at the end of which he gave a live interview on television. He felt somewhat nervous, but was able to speak quite fluently with the show’s host. He even dared to make a joke in Icelandic, which is generally dreaded for its complexity. He still speaks the language today.

    And last week, Tammet took a linguistic stroll through German’s convoluted sentences, had picnics in the genitive case and roamed through the language’s myriad plural forms. He did bring some rudimentary school German along for the journey. Nonetheless, his coaches were stunned.

    “It’s fascinating how he learns, especially because it’s almost impossible to comprehend,” said language coach Christiane Spies, who assisted Tammet the entire week. “I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

    Tammet first begins learning a language by reading for hours, especially children’s books. He murmurs the words quietly to himself, appearing calm and highly concentrated. At 1 p.m. on the dot he gets edgy — that’s lunchtime.

    In the afternoon, Tammet and Spies stroll through Hamburg, chatting about the history of the Hanseatic League, visiting museums and galleries. “He needs an incredible amount of fodder,” says Spies, “otherwise he gets bored quickly.” Tammet immediately links new words with ones he already knows: What is that called in other languages? Which expressions are similar?

    “Wolle” (wool), “Baumwolle” (cotton) and “Wolle spinnen” (to spin wool), he notes them all down in his small handwriting. That’s how it goes the whole time. Occasionally he pauses, apparently listening to his thoughts. “It doesn’t seem as though the learning process is an effort for him,” Spies says. But how is that possible?

    Tammet tries to explain it himself: “I learn new languages intuitively, like a child.” Grammar doesn’t interest him. Instead, he lets himself be carried along by the language, looking for patterns in the mess of sentences he hears, tying words together into related groups. “Small, round things often start with ‘Kn’ in German,” he says, pointing out Knoblauch (garlic), Knopf (button) and Knospe (bud). Then there are the long, thin things that often begin with “Str,” like Strand (beach), Strasse (street) and Strahlen (rays).

    “I try to develop a feeling of how each particular language works,” he says, adding that he’s helped in this pursuit by the fact that regions in his brain are connected in unusual ways. Most humans think in isolated categories, but for Tammet everything is networked. “When I think about words,” he says, “I take information from everywhere in my brain.” Emotions, colors and shapes all connect themselves with the words, allowing him to learn with incredible speed.

    Do his talents make Tammet unapproachably eccentric? His shyness is noticeable. And yet, in an almost uncanny way, he’s very likeable. He speaks in a soft, warm voice and, unexpectedly, maintains constant eye contact.

    Tammet wants to explain and make understandable to others the way that he sees the world. He wants to impart fun in learning, joy in numbers, words and thoughts. “I hope my experiences can help people to discover and develop their own talents,” he says. He adds, “Love is an accurate description of what I feel for languages.”

    “His nature is really touching,” says Spies, the language coach, “both his way of learning and the person as a whole.”

    “How small does a spoon have to be in order to be a ‘Löffelchen‘,” Tammet wants to know. How small must it be to receive that German diminutive “-chen“? A teaspoon isn’t small enough. Instead his eye lights on a tiny spoon in a salt shaker.

    So small. It’s certainly worth a -chen.

    (—> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

  • The Healing Power of Death

    Were Europeans once cannibals? Research shows that up until the end of the 18th century, medicine routinely included stomach-churning ingredients like human flesh and blood.

    By Philip Bethge

    According to the recipe, the meat was to be cut into small pieces or slices, sprinkled with “myrrh and at least a little bit of aloe” and then soaked in spirits of wine for a few days.

    Finally, it was to be hung up “in a very dry and shady place.” In the end, the recipe notes, it would be “similar to smoke-cured meat” and would be without “any stench.”

    Johann Schröder, a German pharmacologist, wrote these words in the 17th century. But the meat to which he was referring was not cured ham or beef tenderloin. The instructions specifically called for the “cadaver of a reddish man … of around 24 years old,” who had been “dead of a violent death but not an illness” and then laid out “exposed to the moon rays for one day and one night” with, he noted, “a clear sky.”

    In 16th- and 17th-century Europe, recipes for remedies like this, which provided instructions on how to process human bodies, were almost as common as the use of herbs, roots and bark. Medical historian Richard Sugg of Britain’s Durham University, who is currently writing a book on the subject says that cadaver parts and blood were standard fare, available in every pharmacy. He even describes supply bottlenecks from the glory days of “medicinal cannibalism.” Sugg is convinced that avid cannibalism was not only found within the New World, but also in Europe.

    In fact, there are countless sources that describe the morbid practices of early European healers. The Romans drank the blood of gladiators as a remedy against epilepsy. But it was not until the Renaissance that the use of cadaver parts in medicine became more commonplace. At first, powders made from shredded Egyptian mummies were sold as an “elixir of life,” says Sugg. In the early 17th century, healers turned their attention to the mortal remains of people who had been executed or even the corpses of beggars and lepers.

    Paracelsus, the German-Swiss physician, was one of the most vehement proponents of body-stripping, which eventually gained popularity at even the highest levels of society. British King Charles II paid 6,000 pounds for a recipe to distill human skull. The regent applied the resulting distillate, which entered the history of medicine as “the king’s drops,” almost daily.

    Scholars and noblemen, as well as ordinary people, swore by the healing powers of death. US anthropologist Beth Conklin, for example, quoting a 19th-century source, writes that in Denmark epileptics were reported to stand around the scaffold in crowds, cup in hand, ready to drink the red blood as it flows from the still quavering body. Skulls were used as medicine, as was the moss that tended to sprout from them. It was believed to staunch bleeding.

    Human fat was supposed to alleviate rheumatism and arthritis, while a paste made from corpses was believed to help against contusions. Sugg even attributes religious significance to human flesh. For some Protestants, he writes, it served as a sort of substitute for the Eucharist, or the tasting of the body of Christ in Holy Communion. Some monks even cooked “a marmalade of sorts” from the blood of the dead.

    “It was about the intrinsic vitality of the human organism,” says the historian. The assumption was that all organisms have a predetermined life span. If a body died in an unnatural way, the remainder of that person’s life could be harvested, as it were — hence the preference for the executed.

    The practice was not always a success. In 1492, when Pope Innocent VIII was on his deathbed, his doctors bled three boys and had the pope drink their blood. The boys died, and so did the pope.

    Was all of this cannibalism? Sugg has no doubt that it was. Like the cannibals of the New World, the Europeans were fundamentally interested in the consumption of vital energy. For anthropologist Conklin, the European form of cannibalism is especially remarkable. Outside Europe, she notes, the person who was eating almost always had a relationship with the person who was eaten. Europe’s cannibalism, on the other hand, was “distinctly asocial,” Conklin writes, adding that human body parts were treated as merchandise: bought and sold for a profit.

    By the end of the 18th century, however, the appeal had worn off. “With the Enlightenment, physicians sought to shed their superstitious past,” says Sugg. In 1782, for example, William Black, a physician, wrote that he welcomed the demise of “loathsome and insignificant” medicines, like “dead men’s skulls pulverized.” These, and “a farrago of such feculence,” had fortunately disappeared from the pharmacies, Black remarked.

    An era had come to an end, and with it the interest in recipes like those of Briton John Keogh. The preacher, who died in 1754, recommended pulverized human heart for “dizziness.” Keogh even provided a dose and instructions for use: “A dram in the morning — on an empty stomach.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

    –> read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

     

  • ‘Little Princess’ and the Bird Flu Mysteries: Tracking the Spread of Avian Influenza

    When bird flu reached Turkey, experts thought it was carried from Russia by migrating geese or ducks. So when wild birds migrate to Germany this spring, will they bring the disease with them? Not necessarily, say scientists.

    Michael Kaatz, who works for a stork reserve in the eastern German city of Loburg, can see the headlines now: “Little Princess Brings Bird Flu to Germany.” Right now, the stork “Little Princess,” the reserve’s pride and joy, is probably flying over Botswana. But soon enough she will be traveling on to South Africa, where she will spend the winter. And, more importantly, at the end of February, the celebrity stork will begin the trek home. Kaatz, who for the past few years has been using a satellite to track her migration routes, will be closely watching where she flies.

    According to Kaatz, the stork will stop over in Turkey before it gets back home to Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany. And in Turkey, of course, bird flu is rife. Which  means that Little Princess, who will be flying with several thousand other white storks on the way back to Germany, will be closely watched by virus experts. … More