Helluva twist
CHARLES DICKENS and his writings are still being âinterrogatedâ (thatâs the word in use) by scholars, at least one of whom is almost electrified by what might be there.
Jeremy Parrott, an antiquarian bookseller and a stalwart of the Dickens Society, says he has identified a supply of electricity that flows, in a literary way, through the people in Dickensâs novel David Copperfield. Parrott announced his discovery in the March issue of the Societyâs Dickens Quarterly, with a jolting 27 pages of facts â and perhaps some conjectures â all wired together with the title .
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The Dickens Society encourages research into almost anything to do with Dickens. Founded in 1970, its list of past presidents flaunts many names that are Dickensian or near-Dickensian, among them Graham Storey, George Worth, Susan Shatto and Sally Ledger. Parrott, though neither a past nor a present president, is of equally Dickensian nominative distinction.
His paper âinterrogates two key namesâ â David Copperfield and Uriah Heep â âand discloses some previously unsuspected motivations behind their creationâ. Copperfield is the bookâs youthful hero, Heep his nemesis. Parrott says that the name Copperfield is ânot merely metallic but electricalâ and deduces that the name David was inspired by Humphry Davy, the scientist widely credited as inventing the field of electrochemistry. In the novel, the first time the hero is given a name, that name is âMaster Davyâ. That is Parrottâs big clue.
Parrott gives his own readers â us â a detective thrill ride. He says the name Uriah Heep links to then-contemporary science âin previously unsuspected waysâ. Whatâs more (and here is the thrill part), Parrott explains that other characters use the words âcadaverousâ and âmonsterâ to describe Heep, which links Heep to the âelectrically-sparked monsterâ in Mary Shelleyâs Frankenstein.
In his conclusion, Parrott hurls at us, his readers, a literary lightning bolt: âCoupling David Copperfield with that âmonster in the garb of manâ Uriah Heep, some 30 years after the first appearance in print of Frankensteinâs electrically-sparked monster, empowered Dickens to create, through his alter ego DC, a character who can plausibly be viewed as the first android in literatureâ.
Catatonia from Catalonia
Inspiration about medical knowledge can come from almost anywhere. Musical inspiration about the aetiology of pneumonia comes, for some people, from the song by Hal David and Burt Bacharach. Some people call it . David died in 2012, Bacharach in February this year, neither from pneumonia:
âWhat do you get when you kiss a guy?
You get enough germs to catch pneumonia.
After you do, heâll never phone ya.
Iâll never fall in love again.â
But what of other medical conditions? What about, say, catatonia? Inspiration about the clinical aspects of catatonia comes, for Feedback, from a recent primer in the journal Medicina ClĂnica, called . Jorge Cuevas-Esteban, David Sanagustin and MarĂa Iglesias-GonzĂĄlez, who wrote it, are based in the Catalonia region of Spain. The following lyrics, Feedbackâs tribute to their writings, can be sung to the same tune:
âWhere are the folks who write the facts â
The medical facts of catatonia?
All of them work in Catalonia,
In Barcelona, north-east Spain.â
Unmasked advice
Imagine a restaurant host saying: âWelcome, diners! Tonightâs 78-course roast beef dinner includes generous portions of rotten meat, cardboard and solids that we are unable to identify. We are commendable for including (rather than excluding!) these ingredients and for telling you that we include them. We did a vast amount of careful work.â
As you digest that, consider the Cochrane Report that led to misleading public outcries, such as this one in The : âthe verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bustâ. The report appraises the major precautions against covid-19 infection. â that is, it gathers lots of numbers crunched by lots of earlier studies.
When the planet seeks the answer to an urgent, yes-or-no question about saving lives, a meticulously researched study from a respected source gets attention. But when researchers donât yet have much of an answer, they can mask that void by amassing copious tangential details.
Good scientists spell out the limitations of what they know. This Cochrane meta-analysis is painstakingly honest to the point of near self-destruction. It mentions that most of the reports it analysed are from long before the arrival of covid-19. And it says: âThe high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions.â It confides that âthe low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effectâ.
The report ends with a veiled plea for someone, anyone, to do âlarge, well-designedâ studies âaddressing the effectivenessâ of advice about wearing masks.
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