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ETYMOLOGY (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)
Sad that in those days nobody realized the hazard to kids tubercular teachers were. I worked a year in a Tb San.I'll never forget one old lady with just an occasional slight cough but a Gaffky 13 on her sputum smear.
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I think it's interesting that this whole topic (once we left why are sperm whales called that, and got onto sexual anatomy of whales) is a YART*-- and not even that old a one.. February or another one of those dreary winter months had a discussion about penil bones..(when a whale gets a boner, it is with the help of a 6 foot (2 m.) or longer bone.) Max as i recall, found a site that had a store just a hop skip and jump from where i work that was selling them, bones that is, not just whale bones, but all sorts of them...and someone also found a Yahoo link to a icelancic museum devoted to penises of the animal kingdom.. my link no longer works or i'd post it.. somehow it did end up on my favorites list..
I guess this is subject, not withstanding Milo's sensabilities, that comes up now and again, and no ever complains...
YART is short hand for yet another rehashed topic
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Dear of troy: I do not feel obliged to apologise for posting about why sperm whales are so called. The discussion about whales was long ago enough that I was surprised to find I had posted on it a bit less than six months ago And there are quite a few members who have joined since then. And in all that long whale thread, I found no mention of the "sperm" question. A plague on all those who use the term "YART", the board is so dead these days what difference does a repeat make?
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Dear Dr Bill, i wasn't complaining, just commenting that somehow, again and again, anatomy, especially sexual anatomy comes up as a topic, and it takes a long while for it to be called a yart.
i would also speculate, that what ever people in the past new about whales, they were perfectly happy "beliveing" that the sourse of oil was a teste, and not a brain case.
oil executives "believe" that oil can be pumped with out any enviromental damage.. and tobacco company executives "believe" that cigarette don't cause cancer or other health problems.. and lots of people "believed" that you could just keep investing in any dot com that came down the pike and make a fortune..
Usually, there is a reason for people to believe what they do, nowdays, its almost always an economic reason, but what ever the reason, whalers might have believed the brain case wasn't-- but was something else..
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Dear of troy: maybe the whalers had "sex on the brain" but the whales did not. I still cannot imagine the old timers who knew all the essential facts of life could repeat such a bit of idiocy. Not like the veteran Navy guys telling new recruits that Asiatic vulvas are ninety degrees rotated.
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I find it hard to believe that even in the Middle Ages people were ignorant enough to think any animal had it sex glands in its headIt does seem weird. However, as I suggested earlier, it does appear to be connected to "metaphysical" viewpoints of the body (Galen's humours and whatnot), which were still prevalent in 15th C, probably later: In the Galenic model, both men and women were believed to have "seminal vessels" that carried sperm to its point of exit; at the end of the fifteenth century, Jacopo Berengario da Carpi affirmed that these vessels must be longer in the male because male semen was "thicker." How male sperm was generated was a source of some speculation. Did it come directly from the brain via the spinal cord? Was it concocted from purified blood? "The semen is a superfluous nourishment of the body, a material pure and separate from the principle members necessary for generation," wrote Alessandro Benedetti in 1497. " It is believed on the authority of Galen that it is drawn from the brain." http://www.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/femalebodypages/genitalia.html (scroll down the page, or do a Find on "brain") If you have a well-established but incorrect underlying theory, the conclusions reached in theoretical areas are bound to be a mite unusual. "Sperm in the brain" is quite at home when set alongside a belief in personality being dictated by imbalances of blood (sanguine), phlegm (phlegmatic), yellow bile (choleric) and black bile (melancholic).
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Dear Fishonabike: Whalers did not read Galen or any other Medieval authorities. But they knew how eunuchs and oxen were created.
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Whalers did not read Galen or any other Medieval authorities. No Bill, but they were treated by doctors that did have indirect reference to Galen & co, and who would have physiological explanations to suit. It was a powerful paradigm that encompassed animal as well as human physiology. People were still being treated by being bled (of excess internal fluids) right up to the 19th C, I believe. They would doubtless ask the doctor what he thought he was doing, and word would get around.
But they knew how eunuchs and oxen were created. Galen & co. were well aware of the existence of testes and the effects of castration. They just explained these facts in a way we now find unbelievable.
It's fairly hard to believe that the world was thought of as flat, and that the stars were meant to be fixed lights in huge rotating crystal spheres, that made sweet music as they revolved. But everything's straightforward in hindsight. These ideas fitted well with the generally accepted knowledge of their time, and were adopted by all who had an interest (or needed to have an interest - sailors, for instance).
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You know, this is making the "it just looks like sperm" theory look more and more likely.
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Bill, you would have been around when Galen was trotting out his pet theories. What say you?
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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