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Carpal Tunnel
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"To make a vaunt of being poor was another of the incidents of his splenetic state, I wonder how the association of the spleen with quick bad temper ever arose. I can't remember much of its actual functions besides its being a reservoir for red cells, which it can inject into circulation on demand. In chronic malaria it may become markedly enlarged, and a medical missionary who had lived in what is now called Myanmar told us that a common method of assassination there used to be a blow with a club just below or on the last rib on the left, causing rupture of the spleen. My daughter-in-law ruptured her spleen in an accident sliding on a sled, and has ever since had reduced tolerance of cold weather. But I have no reason to suppose that her consistently pleasant manner was result of having her spleen removed. If you want to read about the spleen,here is an article from the New England Journal of Medicine: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/317/25/1559
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old hand
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Dear Bill
Splenetic comes, if I am not misremembering, from the theory of humours, much popular in the middle ages and even into Shakespeare's time. After all, Ben Jonson wrote Every Man in his Humour around this very theory.
Splenetic, bilious (from bile), sanguine (from blood) and choleric (from choler - and I can't remember which organ this was associated with) were the four humours. Each was supposed to be perfectly balanced with the other in the body, in order to create a well-rounded personality. The theory was that an excess of any of these humours (liquids) would result in a character with a preponderance of whatever that humour created. A sanguine person was therefore cheery, on not serious about things. A choleric person was cold. A bilious person bitter, and a splenetic person, as you know, given to outbursts of rage.
Actually, the humours, and the emotions/characteristics associated with them, were subject to change over time, and the way in which we use the words today is not identical to the way in which Jonson used them, for instance.
I know I should have looked it up in order to provide you with authoritative stuff on this, but I'm lazy as a sloth - any decent google should provide you with enough reference material - "humours in Elizabethan literature" might be a good start.
cheer
the sunshine warrior
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Dear shanks: You make some good points. I was just thinking of organs. I wonder what the oldtimers thought of the thymus which seems related to some words about emotions. When I was in medical school, they were just beginning to realize it had a function (immunities)
The oldtimers had some really bizarre notions. On a totally different peculiarity of the old timers, it popped into my head to wonder how many million men rubbed their hands together to warm them, before Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, noticed that as long as a dull drill turned in a cannon being bored, the water in the cooling bath kept boiling away. So he became famous for discovering the mechanical equivalent of heat.
And the phlogiston theory flew out the window.
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old hand
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Doc
On the phlogiston theory, of course, we must not forget its interaction with the 'life force' theory. I presume many of the hand-rubbers expected that heat was coming into their hands from the life-forse activated within them by the exertion!
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Dear Shanks: Many aborigines make fires by friction of wood on wood. Any "life force" involved in that? I found a URl about "fire saw" and "bow drill": http://www.primitiveways.com/pt-questions_fire.htmlMy older brother in Boy Scouts, was quite proficient with the bow drill. He had a bow made from a curved sapling, strung with rawhide. The string was wrapped about a rod of yucca roughly octagonal cross section (to give bowstring good grip), the bottom end drilling into a red cedar board, with a notch to let hot charcoal resulting from friction, drop into tinder below. The top of the drill was held in a piece of soapstone the size of a pack of cards, with a socket ground in it. He could make a fire in less than a minute. The method must be very old. Of course, the pressure on the upper end of the drill had to be considerable, and the bow had to be moved back and forth rapidly.
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I've seen it done simply by rubbing the hands back and forth with a stick between them, the working end of the stick in a depression in a piece of wood with tinder in the depression. The key is to be very fast and to move qucikly back to the top of the stick after the hands make their way to the bottom of the stick.
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Dear Faldage: true, but doing it the hard way. In any event,
it shows how many men used the mechanical equivalent of heat without understanding the priniciple involved.
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the hard way
More I think about it the more I think it was from the movie Quest for Fire.
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Dear Faldage: I'll bet the movie faked it somehow, such as using some cellulose nitrate. Simply rubbing two sticks together lets most of the heat escape when hot areas move apart. The bow drill keeps the heated areas in continuous contact.
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Picture of Rumford standing in front of the fireplace he invented. http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/1800rumf.gifFrom Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey Chapter 20: An abbey! Yes, it was delightful to be really in an abbey! But she doubted, as she looked round the room, whether anything within her observation would have given her the consciousness. The furniture was in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste. The fireplace, where she had expected the ample width and ponderous carving of former times, was contracted to a Rumford, with slabs of plain though handsome marble, and ornaments over it of the prettiest English china. The windows, to which she looked with peculiar dependence, from having heard the general talk of his preserving them in their Gothic form with reverential care, were yet less what her fancy had portrayed. To be sure, the pointed arch was preserved — the form of them was Gothic — they might be even casements — but every pane was so large, so clear, so light! To an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone–work, for painted glass, dirt, and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.http://www.pemberley.com/etext/NA/chapter20.htmBingley
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