I have a confession. Sometimes I am not productive as I should be because my curiosity gets the better of me. I need to look something up, and in the course of researching it, I read some other tangental tidbit, which cause me to look something else up, and then down the rabbit hole I go. Case in point was today. I have a project at work that involves a database of environmental contaminants. The short version is, these contaminants are in the database under numerous synonyms, including synonyms that are insanely obscure and uncommon, or perhaps they were common a hundred years ago, but certainly not today. All the contaminants are in the database associated with their CAS Registry Numbers, so it is clear what the chemical is. [A CAS Registry Number is like a Social Security number for a chemical. It is specific to a chemical or a specific type of mixture of chemicals.] Many of these synonyms I have never heard of before. One synonym for nitrobenzene was oil of mirbane. I had to look this one up for pure curiosity reasons. After much searching, I have yet to find out the etymology of oil of mirbane or simply the word mirbane. [@vonOberst on Twitter suggested thusly “Mirer is a candle in French. Bane is “fatal”…maybe someone tried to make a candly from nitrobenze crystals?” For the non-chemists, nitrobenzene is among other things, explosive, so a candle made from it would definitely be a fatal candle, and I find this idea disturbing and amazing. If anyone knows the etymology I would seriously love to know from where this name came.]
Anyway, in the course of searching for the origins of oil of mirbane, I came across a British Medical Journal memoranda from Jan 27, 1912 (1(2665): 183) about someone who was accidentally poisoned with it. The article didn’t get me to a better understanding of that name, but it was an interesting article, and I became interested in these old memoranda and the way they were written, diagnosis, and treatment. So then I had to read a few more in this volume, and now reading old medical journal memoranda is going to become my new hobby. They are fascinating. However, I need to share part of my favorite one from that volume, “A supposed case of heat-stroke: remarkable recovery.” This report is completely fascinating, and I would really love to know from what this patient was suffering. I have no medical training, but this does not sound like heat stroke as it has been described to me in first aid training. The case as described.
“A man, aged 53, was crossing a road during one of the hottest days of last summer, when he suddenly found himself on the ground, with a “horse’s hoof right on top of him”; this was his description of what happened. He picked himself up and ran across the road to his son, who was waiting for him on the pavement, and who brushed the dust off his clothes.He complained of no pain or discomfort of any kind, but his son took him into a chemist’s shop, where he was given a dose of sal-volatile. He then went home by train (a distance of eight miles), sat down and made a good tea, feeling quite well all the time. Towards the end of this meal he became a “little queer,” went upstairs and felt very ill indeed, and remembered nothing afterwards. This attack came on about five hours after he had fallen down in the road.”
Read the whole article. It is not long and is truly fascinating. Included is the information that the doctor examined him and found no injury, which kind of calls into the question the idea of a horse hoof on him. I am not sure what I love the most about this article, but the pure Britishness of it is definitely part of it. I adore the details that the son helped brush dust off the man, which makes me wonder what the son was doing when the man fell down in the road or whatever he did. Also, of course the man went home and made a good tea. The man recovered after his attack over the three days, then he got worse. Part of the treatment that was given to him when he fell unconscious was withdrawal of cerebrospinal fluid. It never states why. The patient got better after that, then got worse, then they removed more cerebrospinal fluid, and he got better again. Evidently his “heat stroke” was cured by removing cerebrospinal fluid. Is this still something done for heat stroke? How exactly does removing cerebrospinal fluid help heat stroke or anything? I actually would like to know why this was done, or what the theory was back then (or now?!).
Thus now, I reading these old medical memoranda is going to be my new thing during my free time. The article before the heat stroke memoranda describes two children suffering from tetanus infections who were treated unsuccessfully with magnesium sulfate injected into their cerebrospinal fluid. One of the children was also given strychnine. This makes me all the more thankful for tetanus vaccines, even if they do hurt.