Just when I’d lost all hope for science, along came this:
(Click on image for a larger and much better copy.)
Now you’re thinking, “Har, har, what an immature comic. Nothing so stupid as that ever happened.”
But there you’d be wrong, my friend. First, it actually did happen. Second, it was brilliant science of the good old fashioned kind. (As for whether my rendition is immature, we’ll pass over that subject.)
Pernicious anemia is a sickness caused by loss of gastric parietal cells, and subsequent inability to absorb vitamin B12. For the whole story, ready the Wikipedia article on pernicious anemia1. To make a long story short, part of the process of coming to an understanding of the sickness involved this:
The British physician Thomas Addison first described the disease in 1849, from which it acquired the common name of Addison’s anemia. In 1907, Richard Clarke Cabot reported on a series of 1200 patients with PA. Their average survival was between one and three years. Dr. William Bosworth Castle performed an experiment whereby he ingested raw hamburger meat and regurgitated it after an hour, and subsequently fed it to a group of ten patients. A control group were fed untreated raw hamburger meat. The former group showed a disease response whereas the latter group did not. This was not a sustainable practice, but it demonstrated the existence of an ‘intrinsic factor’ from gastric juice.
There you have it: Eating raw hamburger and then vomiting it back up to feed to someone else–all in the name of science. Vomiting is bad enough, but can you imagine eating raw hamburger? It’s so slimy and sticky, I don’t think I’d be able to wait an hour before it came spewing back up. Yes sir, back in the good old days you had to be a real man if you wanted to be a scientist.
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(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pernicious_anemia
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