SGU Episode 357

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, you're escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, today is Tueday, May 15th 2012 and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson...

R: Hello everyone.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey Guys.

S: Evan Burnstein...

E: Top of the evening to you.

S: And we have a special guest rogue with us this evening, the Bad Astronomer himself, Phil Plait...

PP: Hey, hey. You know...

R: Wow! For the first time ever.

PP: I was going to say...

S: Finally we got you on the show.

PP: This is like the 300th time I've been on this show I don't think I'm special anymore.

R: Awww... you'll always be special to us.

PP: Oh thank you, Rebecca.

J: God! Alright, can we please start with the science? Let's go...

This Day in Skepticism (00:51)

R: You know what, Phil? If you were to die I would put your head in a device that maintained your life somehow. Much like the one that was Patendend... Patented.

J: Patendend.

S: Patendend.

R: It's a hard word to say

B: Paten-tated.

R: On May 19th 1987, a device for perfusing an animal head from Chet Flemming. Chet created a machine, or at least the drawings for a machine, which he called a cabinet, that wouldand I quote, "Provide physical and biochemical support for an animal's head which has been discorporated. (i.e. severed from its body). The device can be used to supply a discorped head with oxygenated blood and nutrients by means of tubes connected to arteries which pass through the neck." And there's al sorts of interesting little tubes and stuff in the drawings that provide for waste disposal and all that stuff.

B: Oxygenation, yeah.

R: Yeah, 1987, that was the year that the Futurama head in a jar became... well not a reality but... ah...

PP: A drawing.

S: A fiction.

E: A living breathing concept.

R: A slightly less implausible reality.

PP: So this guy had a drawing and Futurama is basically all drawings so I don't really think that's a step forward.

R: That's a good point.

S: In this guy's diagram it has the animal head which looks suspiciously like a human head.

R: It could be a chimp.

PP: Is it Richard Nixon?

S: It could be a chimp.

R: It's from the back so it's hard to tell.

S: I don't know, those ears are awfully humanoid.

J: But why? All kidding aside, and the Futurama thing, why the hell would you want to do that?

S: I think this actually a script for a horror movie.

E: Real horror show.

R: Jay, aren't you the one who is having his head frozen?

J: Oh my god. Yeah, because I want it in a box? No.

B: Cabinet. Cabinet.

S: Well, Jay, what if that's all they can do when they thaw out your head it's just going to be in a cabinet attached to tubes. Iit's not going to be actually attached to a robot or a flesh body, it's just going to be a head in a box.

J: Then I would tell them to kill me.

R: You'd still take it.

J: I would say melt my head down for spare parts.

R: No, come one, head in a box, they could put a monitor in there. You could still watch TV.

PP: What happens to the body? Does he talk about that? Do you become one of the headless monks from Doctor Who.

R: If he had plans for the body they're in another patent I haven't found yet.

E: That's a different category.

J: They have a cabinet that keeps a body alive without a head.

R: Oh yeah, I think Dr Caligari actually patented that. That'a a german expressionist joke there, thank you.

News Items

Ghost Box (03:34)

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/ghost-box/

Mayan Calendar (11:06)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18018343

Electricity from Viruses (17:52)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18018343

UK Libel Law Update (23:13)

http://skepchick.org/2012/05/uk-parliament-will-tackle-libel-reform/

Science or Fiction (60:09)

Iszi Lawrence: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious and I challenge my panel of skeptics (and Phil) to sniff out the fake. And you all can play along at home. We have a theme this week because I couldn't find jack for news items this weeks So I had to go to a theme. The theme is, this as about actually a very interesting character that I've been interested in for a while, Florence Nightingale.

PP: She was the mother in the Brady Bunch, right?

S: That's right. So see how much you guys know about Florence Nightingale. All right, here we go. Item number one. In 1860 Florence Nightingale founded the first secular nursing school, essentially establishing the modern nursing profession. Item number two. An early believer in the benefits of sanitation, Nightingale's policies during the Crimean war quickly dropped the death rate in British Army hospitals from a high of 42% to as low as 2.2%. And item number three. Nightingale suffered from a mystery chronic illness and lived as an invalid from 1857 to the end of her life in 1910 at the age of 90. Phil, as our guest, you get to go first this week.

PP: All right, so let's see, we've got her establishing a secular nursing school, and I've got to say I know very little about Florence Nightingale except they named a bird after her, so um that may not be true... so if you'd said that I'd probably say that one's the fake one. But the establishing the modern nursing profession sounds legit. An early believer in sanitation. I'm not really buying that she dropped the death rate that much. And the chronic illness is just a coin flip for me. So I'm going to say number two is the fiction.

S: The uh, the sanitation.

PP: Yeah.

S: OK, Bob?

B: First secular nursing school. Yeah, I mean I can't think of anything out of whack with that one. The third one, the mystery chronic illness, I mean that is a hell of a long chronic illness, from 1857 to 1910. Wow, yeah that one, that's possible sure, like Phil said, a coin flip. It's the second one that I'm having trouble swallowing, that's such a huge drop, 42%, 2.2$ and you say here British Army hospitals, so multiple hospitals. I would think that they just could not ignore that kind of a drop and just kind of like abandon it, if they even did. Yeah, I'll have to go, I'm going to go, I'm going to do a GWP here and I'll go with Phil, uh it just seems like too much of a drop, because I think that would have been too early, you know far too early in, you know the benefits of sanitation. So yeah, I'll say that one's fake. Dammit.

S: OK, Rebecca?

R: Yeah, that's the, I do know that Nightingale was a huge proponent of sanitation, and that she did have some huge successes I think in her life with establishing sort of sanitation routines in her hospitals but yeah, that's a huge, that's a big drop. And also I'm not sure that she would have been able to institute all those policies during the Crimean War. I guess what I'm stuck on is whether or not she would have been that in control of that many hospitals in order to create that kind of drastic difference and be credited with it, even if that drop did happen, which I'm not convinced it did because it's a huge drop. So yeah, I'm going to have to go with that one as well as being the fiction.

S: OK, Evan?

E: Well, I'll agree, I think perhaps the issue with the Crimean War one is that she probably did have some kind of affect, maybe it wasn't as dramatic as it says here, but was more like it was a piece of the puzzle, not the only reason or even the primary reason, I'll bet you there were other reasons for it as well, other people of less notoriety working on the same issues perhaps because this was a pretty significant war. Whereas the other ones, the first secular nursing school, establishing the modern nursing profession, I seem to recall this somewhere, I can't exactly say where, somewhere in my reading over the last 20 years or so. And then the chronic illness that she suffered from, a mystery chronic illness. See, I don't see any issue with that, I have no reason to think that that one would be fiction, it seems pretty straight forward, I'll have to go with the crowd.

S: And, Jay.

J: So I'm it, hey? Well, everyone had something intelligent to say, I think it makes a lot of sense to say that 2 is fake because you know, 42% down to a 2.2% drop is so dramatically significant. I'm going to go with the group and say that that's the fake.

S: OK. So you all agree on number 2 so we'll take these in order I guess, we'll start with number one. In 1864 Florence Nightingale founded the first secular nursing school, essentially establishing the modern nursing profession. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. That is absolutely true, she really did, I remember growing up you hear the name Florence Nightingale, it's like iconic but I always heard and just thought of her as just a particularly compassionate nurse, when in fact she really established the modern nursing profession in terms of a lot of the, not only the role of nurses but the discipline and the dedication to the quality of care and the quality of life of their patients and sanitation, cleanliness, nutrition, you know a lot of things. She was a massive advocate for proper nursing prior to her, you know it really wasn't a profession like it is today, it was more run by churches and religious institutions and they were female volunteers who just helped, not that there wasn't any knowledge before her, but I mean she really did bring it together into a profession. Let's go on to number two, an early believer in the benefits of sanitation, Nightingale's policies during the Crimean War quickly dropped the death rate in British Army hospitals from a high of 42% to as low as 2.2%. You guys all think this one is the fiction. Let me first say that everything you said about this item is wrong.

R: That means we got it right.

B: Yeah, it does.

S: But it's still the fiction.

B: Yay!

E: All right!

J: Sweet!

S: This is the most massively you have all been correct for the wrong reasons and I, this is what I suspected was going to happen, I debated with myself whether to put the actual percentages in there...

J: Uh huh.

B: Come on.

S: Because it kind of made it easy. There is actually a belief, and you will read this on a lot of sites, that Nightingale dropped the death rate in British Army hospitals from 42% to 2% and those figures are correct, they did drop during the Crimean War from a high of 42% to as low as 2% but Nightingale doesn't get the credit for that although a lot of people do give it to her only because she's the most famous person associated with the British Army hospitals during that war. And Rebecca, she absolutely did have the authority to dramatically control and essentially the secretary of war who was a personal friend of her said you can do whatever you want, you have any resources you want, you're in charge. And she really had a tremendous amount of authority. It's questionable how much credit she should get for the drop, but here's the sequence of events that occurred. When Nightingale brought her little army of nurses into the hospitals in the Crimean War, the British Army hospitals, the conditions were deplorable. The soldiers were in their own, in their uniforms, they did not have clean clothes or hospital clothes to wear, their nutrition was horrible, they had really no good food to eat, no fresh water, they were not being cleaned, their wounds were dirty, they were really completely scandalous and deplorable conditions. And Nightingale immediately became an advocate for massively changing the conditions, and she did have a huge effect and instituted a nutrition program and a laundry and a lot of basic things that you associate with a modern hospital she initiated. But the one thing she, although she advocated for cleanliness she didn't think that the high death rate among the soldiers was due to...

B: Oh no.

S: ...was due to infection, she thought it was due to poor nutrition. In fact, after she and her nurses started working at the hospitals, the death rate went up although that had nothing to do with her, it had just to do with the war progressing and the hospitals getting overwhelmed and then epidemics started to break out, of Cholera and Typhoid etc. Then the army did bring in a sanitation unit and measures to increase the sanitation in the hospitals and the death rate dropped from a high of 42% to around 2% which is dramatic and incredible, and certainly Nightingale was, you know her advocacy was probably part of that, but that wasn't really, she refused to take credit for it because she really didn't do it, and the death rate didn't drop just because of her policies, it actually was increasing after what she was doing, but again not as a result of it just it was kind of incidental. But that myth is repeated in many online histories of Nightingale, that the death rate plummeted as a direct result of her ministrations, where in fact she, it was after she returned to England from the Crimean War, and she looked over her statistics, because she kept really good records, did she see the connection to infection and sanitation. And this is around the same time that Ignaz Semmelweis was advocating for sanitation in hospitals and showing that instituting hand washing, you know, physicians shouldn't be going from the morgue to the delivery room without washing their hands, because that was literally what was happening, the death rates from hospital-acquired infections plummeted. And Nightingale later came to accept that as part of, as good hospital and nursing practice but she was not an early believer in the benefits of sanitation, she learned that lesson after sort of looking over the statistics that she had gathered during the Crimean War. I figured that's what, those numbers would be so dramatic that would make you think that would make you think that the item was fiction but for the wrong reason. Anyway, let's move on to number three, Nightingale suffered from a mystery chronic illness and lived as an invalid from 1857 to the end of her life in 1910 at the age of 90. That one is science. There's, I could not find any definitive answer as to what the illness was, there are some historians speculate in fact that it was psychosomatic. Others have speculated that she was faking it deliberately just as a way of gaining privacy because she was already famous at that point in time and she wanted to work and write her books and she didn't want to be bothered by people so she kind of used it as a way of titrating her own visitors and keeping the public at bay.

R: I had no idea that you could titrate people.

S: Yeah, sure. She could choose who to see and who not to see and just would blame her illness whenever she didn't want to see somebody. But she also might have, in the 1800s, could have had some chronic illness, who knows, that made life miserable for her. A very humble person, by reports, it's hard to know how much of this is really historically accurate, but multiple reports that I read indicated that while during the Crimean War which is really where she became famous, that she was working 20 hour days. That just really her work ethic was incredible. She, do you know what her nickname was during that time?

J: Worky McWorkerson.

E: (laughs)

PP: All day and Nightingale.

S: Oh that's pretty good!

E: Nice, Phil!

J: That's good Phil, nice.

E: Not bad.

S: Good one.

E: Not bad.

S: No, the lady of the lamp, because she would make her evening rounds with a lamp.

R: Oh yeah.

PP: Oh right.

S: That became her sort of symbol.

J: Was it a lava lamp?

S: No, it was probably a torch lamp, you know.

E: Whale oil.

S: Yeah. You know a really very interesting historical figure, had a profound effect, again I don't, I don't really think that most people know what a profound effect she had on nursing, they know she's a famous nurse but didn't realise what she actually accomplished during her lifetime was actually amazing.

E: She's rolling over in her grave about that whole therapeutic touch thing.

S: Oh my god, you'd hope. But good job everyone, you guys came to the right answer.

R: Thank you. That's what really matters.

PP: That may be the first time I got it right.

B: Hah.

PP: Oh, whenever I'm on to do this I get it wrong. I don't know, I can't remember.

E: All right then, it's the first time.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (74:03)

S: All right, Jay you got a quote for us?

J: All right, I've got a quote from a man named Benjamin Graham, and the quote was sent in by a listener named Holly from Minnesota, thanks for the quote Holly. And the quote is:

You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.

J: Benjamin Graham!

E: Inventor of delicious crackers.

J: Influential economist and professional investor, Graham is considered the first proponent of value investing which means you know you want to earn money, so you buy things of value.

S: Hmm, really? Someone had to come up with that?

PP: Wow.

R: Good description.

(laughter)

S: OK.

B: Someone's got to be the first.

Announcements (74:44)

R: Steve, a quick announcement. Because we've recorded so many shows leading up to and during NECSS, we missed what I originally said would be the deadline for the magnetic poetry contest, so let's extend it to June 1st.

S: June 1st.

R: If anyone wants to send in a work of art using their magnet, their word magnets for skeptics which you can get on skepticalrobot.com, you can still send that to us through our email, info@theskepticsguide.org. And the winner will get a t-shirt.

S: Phil, what have you got coming up?

PP: I'm giving a bunch of public talks, and I'll be putting those up on the blog. Dragon Con for sure, probably Comicon. And you know, I'll throw in a plug. My wife and I have started a company called science getaways, and you can find that at sciencegetaways.com where we are taking vacation packages and adding science! So our first one is in September and it's going to be at a luxury ranch basically in the Rocky Mountains. And it's going to be, it's a dude ranch.

J: Dude!

E: (laughs)

PP: All inclusive dude ranch. But yeah, it's great. Think City Slickers except totally different. And we'll have a geologist, a biologist and me, so we'll be having some talks and then hikes and star gazing and all kinds of stuff. It's going to be awesome.

S: Cool!

PP: I've been out to this place and it's beautiful and the food is fantastic.

S: And if there's anyone out there who doesn't know, Phil writes a very popular blog called bad astronomy, you can find him at discovermagazine.com/badastronomy and is a frequent flyer among several podcasts including Big Picture Science, you're on there once a month with Seth who was just on our show recently, great guy.

PP: No way, yeah.

S: And occasionally you'll find him on the Skeptics' Guide podcast, every now and then, occasionally.

(laughter)

S: Well Phil, thanks so much for joining us this week.

PP: It was great as always, thanks to all you guys.

R: Thanks Phil.

B: Thanks Phil.

E: Thank you doctor.

R: Thanks Steve.

S: Thank you, and may I thank of you for joining me as well.

E: Thank you Steve.

J: Doctor.

S: Doctor.

E: Doctor, doctor.

S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.