Sunday Summary, Dec. 17, 2023

Things that interested me on Substack

Dr. Charles Knowlton, c. 1845

I think each week, I'll try to post a "Sunday Summary" noting things that caught my attention on Substack.

In a comment to one of my posts, my friend Patrick McNamara posted some links to resources that relate to the book we're currently discussing in the Obsidian Book Club, David Graeber's Debt. These included John Mavrick’s Substack (https://substack.com/@johnmavrick), which I will check out this week.

Dec. 16: Racket News. Matt Taibbi offered a retrospective a year after the Munk Debate in which he and Douglas Murray destroyed Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg on a resolution against trusting the mainstream media. I watched this debate -- actually it was my first exposure to Murray. Gladwell mortally embarrassed himself by being every bit as condescending as his worst critic would have predicted. Taibbi made sense and Murray went for blood. It was satisfying in the moment, but it leaves me wondering how someone who managed to write several bestsellers can now be SO out of touch. I've read some of Gladwell's stuff and it seemed a bit dumb and obvious, but innocuous. I wonder whether it's just that the stakes were so low, when something like The Tipping Point came out, that he managed to fly under the radar for most of his career.

Andrew Smith(Goatfury Writes) wrote about infant mortality and puerperal fever, which is a topic I've been interested in for several years. It took a long time for the medical profession to catch up with common sense. Dr. Charles Knowlton wrote a letter titled "Erysipelas and Puerperal Fever" to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, published March 6 1844, describing his suspicion that he had infected a patient and caused her death. The backlash was pretty intense and included statements such as "A Doctor's hands are clean!" Oliver Wendell Holmes had read his paper, "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement about a year earlier. I cover this in Chapter 43 of my Knowlton biography, An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy.

Dec. 13: Londonist posted a really interesting map of every location in London associated with Charles Dickens. I love historical maps, especially of London. I had a big (six by four foot) map I used to chart Charles Bradlaugh's locations (1833-1891). Interesting that Bradlaugh and Dickens were at the same place at the same time at least once, during a demonstration in support of the 1868 Reform Act. I was once going to write about that, in a historical novel I was contemplating. Bradlaugh and John Stuart Mill also shared the stage at at least one Land Reform League event.