Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (41 page)

THE STORY:
A medical school student prepares to work on a cadaver during her gross anatomy laboratory. She lifts the cover off of the body...and discovers that the cadaver is an ex-boyfriend.

THE TRUTH:
Finding out that the cadaver assigned to you is a friend, relative or loved one is a fear as old as medical school anatomy classes themselves. Tales of such a thing happening have been traced back hundreds of years. One version, involving the English novelist Laurence Sterne, dates back to 1768.

Note:
It actually did happen at least once. In 1982, a student at the University of Alabama School of Medicine learned that the body of her great aunt was one of the nine cadavers assigned to her anatomy class. The state anatomy board replaced it with another body.

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“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
—Henry Adams

Here’s more on the history of aspirin. The first part of the story is on
page 60
.

M
ID-LIFE CRISIS

In 1950, aspirin earned a place in the
Guinness Book of World Records
as the world’s best-selling painkiller. But if the medical community had paid attention to Dr. Lawrence Craven, an ear-nose-throat specialist, in 1948, aspirin would have been recognized as much more than that.

Dr. Craven had noticed that when he performed tonsillectomies, patients who took aspirin bled more than the ones who didn’t. He suspected the aspirin was inhibiting the ability of blood to clot, something that might be useful in preventing strokes and heart attacks—both of which can be caused by excessive clotting of the blood.

Craven decided to test his theory. He put 400 of his male patients on aspirin, then watched them over several years to see how many had heart attacks. Not one did, so Craven expanded his research. He began following the histories of 8,000 regular aspirin-takers, to see if any of
them
had a heart attack. None of them did, either.

Dr. Craven published his findings in a medical journal. But nobody listened. “The medical community shunned his findings,” says Dr. Steven Weisman. “He wasn’t a cardiologist, he wasn’t in the academic community and he was publishing in a lesser-known journal.”

ASPIRIN SCIENCE

The biggest problem was that as late as 1970 nobody had any idea how aspirin worked. That year John Vane, a researcher with London’s Royal College of Surgeons, discovered what Dr. Craven had known intuitively—that aspirin blocks an enzyme that causes blood platelets to stick together, which is what happens when blood clots.
By inhibiting clotting, aspirin helps to prevent strokes, heart attacks, and other cardiovascular ailments.

Not long afterwards, researchers in Sweden discovered that aspirin also blocks the production of
prostaglandins
, hormonelike chemicals that affect digestion, reproduction, circulation, and the immune system. Excess levels of prostaglandins can cause headaches, fevers, blood clots, and a host of other problems. Scientists quickly began to discover that aspirin’s ability to block the prostaglandin production makes it an effective treatment for many of these problems.

WONDER DRUG

For the first time in 70 years, researchers were beginning to understand aspirin’s potential beyond reducing pain, fever and inflammation. Thousands of studies have since been conducted to test aspirin’s effectiveness against a number diseases, and many more are planned.

The results have been astounding. In 1980, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended aspirin to reduce the risk of stroke in men experiencing stroke symptoms. In 1985, it recommended aspirin to heart attack patients as a means of reducing the risk of second heart attacks. One 1988 heart attack study was so successful that researchers shut it down five years early so that the test subjects who weren’t taking aspirin could begin to take it. In 1996, the FDA recommended administering aspirin
during
heart attacks as a means of lowering the risk of death.

And that’s only the beginning. Aspirin is believed to lower the risk of colon cancer by as much as 32%, and scientists are also exploring aspirin’s ability to slow the progression of Alzheimers disease, cataracts, diabetes, numerous other forms of cancer, and even HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“No little white pill does everything, that’s for sure,” says the University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Garret Fitzgerald, one of the world’s top aspirin experts. “But the strength of the evidence for aspirin working where it has been shown to work is probably greater than the strength of the evidence for any drug for human disease.”

Bathroom Reader Warning:
Aspirin isn’t for everyone. Consult a doctor before taking aspirin regularly. Aspirin is still an acid, and it can irritate the lining of the stomach and cause pain, internal bleeding and ulcers. “‘An aspirin a day’ does not apply to everyone,” says Dr. Paul Pedersen, a doctor of internal medicine. “It’s not like apples.”

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Also:
In 1986, scientists established a link between aspirin and Reye’s syndrome, a rare but sometimes fatal disease that strikes children suffering from acute viral infections like influenza and chicken pox.

ASPIRIN FACTS

• Americans take an estimated 80 million aspirin a day—about the same amount as the rest of the world combined. 30-50% of them are taken as preventative medicine for cardiac disease.

• How you take aspirin depends on where you live: Americans prefer pills; the English like powders that dissolve in water; Italians like fizzy aspirin drinks, and the French like aspirin suppositories.

• Roughly 6% of Americans cannot take straight aspirin because it irritates their stomachs. That’s where coated or “buffered” aspirin comes in—each pill is treated with a special, slow-to-dissolve coating that prevents the aspirin from being absorbed by the body until it has left the stomach and gone into the intestines.

• One of the remaining unsolved aspirin mysteries is why it only works on you when you’re sick. “If your body temperature is normal, it won’t lower it,” says Roger P. Maickel, a professor of pharmacology at Purdue University. “If you don’t have inflammation, it doesn’t have any antiarthritic effects on your joints. It’s beautifully simple to work with, yet the damn thing does everything.”

MIGRAINE MATERIAL

What did Felix Hoffman, inventor of aspirin, have to show for his work? Not much—aspirin made the Bayer family fabulously wealthy, and it earned Felix Hoffman’s supervisor, Heinrich Dreser, enough money to retire early. Hoffman was not so lucky—he was entitled to royalties on anything he invented that was patented, but since aspirin was never successfully patented in Germany, the really big bucks eluded him.

Here’s more info on animal-watching at the zoo, from
Beastly Behaviors,
by Janine
M.
Benyus

W
ATCHING ELEPHANTS

The typical elephant herd is made up of adult females and the young of both sexes. It is a very tight-knit group. In the wild, adult males wander by themselves or congregate in small bachelor groups. Bulls are extremely irritable, unpredictable, and dangerous when in “must” (heat). For this reason, many zoos refuse to keep them.

Behavior:
Elephants do most of their “talking” with their trunks. Here’s what the different trunk positions mean.

       
Position:
Hanging straight down.

       
What It Means:
The elephant has nothing in particular on its mind. This is how it holds its trunk while going about its normal, everyday business.

       
Position:
Held up in “tea spout” position (U-curve in the middle, pointed outward at the tip).

       
What It Means:
It’s the elephant’s sniffing position. Usually, an elephant’s first reaction to something new is to try to pick up its scent.

       
Position:
Hanging down with tip curled in.

       
What It Means:
Fear or submission.

       
Position:
Thrust straight outward.

       
What It Means:
Aggression. Threat. Elephants hold their trunks this way when they’re charging.

Behavior:
Touching each other’s trunk.

       
What It Means:
Greeting. Take note of the ears as one elephant approaches another. If they’re high and folded, it’s going to be a friendly encounter.

Behavior:
Flapping their ears.

       
What It Means:
The elephant is cooling itself. Its favorite way to beat the heat, though, is to roll in mud.

Behavior:
Trumpeting.

       
What It Means:
Excitement. Elephants get vocal only when they’re excited. Generally, the more excited they are—either with joy or anger—the longer and louder they’ll trumpet. At zoos, they’ll give a short, sharp toot when they’re impatient to be fed.

Behavior:
Bold trumpeting; lots of rubbing and bumping against each other. Could be accompanied by urinating and defecating.

       
What It Means:
The scene may sound and look scary, but it’s probably a celebration. Elephants reunited after a long separation can become very raucous. It’s just their way of telling each other, “It’s great to see you. I missed you.”

OTHER ANIMALS

DOLPHINS

Behavior:
Rubbing.

       
What It Means:
Affection. When you see dolphins nuzzling, you probably think they’re expressing care for one another. And you’re right. Dolphins use touch as a way to bond. They also use rubbing to remove social tensions, and parasites, such as barnacles, from each others’ skin. A dolphin may rub its body, fluke, or flippers against a neighboring dolphin. Or two dolphins may engage in a full-body rub or pat each other repeatedly in a “pat-a-cake” maneuver.

OSTRICHES

Behavior:
Pretending to feed.

       
What It Means:
Think of it as a way for a male and female to test their compatibility during a complicated courtship ritual. Together, the couple will peck at the ground. Though it might look like they’re feeding, they’re not. It’s more like a dance—with their goal being to move in unison.

The White House wasn’t always a national treasure. A number of presidents once seriously considered tearing it down or turning it into a museum and building a new residence somewhere else. But today, that’s unthinkable. Here’s why.

N
OT ENOUGH SPACE

At first, most Americans didn’t think there was anything particularly special about the White House. Few had ever seen it or had any idea what it looked like, and even the families who lived there found it completely inadequate.

When it was built, the White House was the largest house in the country (and it remained so until after the Civil War). But it served so many different purposes that little of it was available for First Families to actually live in. The first floor, or “State Floor,” was made up entirely of public rooms; and half of the second floor was taken up by the president’s offices, which where staffed by as many as 30 employees. The First Family had to get by with the eight—or fewer—second-floor rooms that were left.

By Lincoln’s time, the situation was intolerable. Kenneth Leish writes in
The White House
, “The lack of privacy was appalling. The White House was open to visitors daily, and office seekers, cranks, and the merely curious had no difficulty making their way upstairs from the official rooms on the first floor.”

THE LINCOLN WHITE HOUSE

Lincoln was so uncomfortable with the situation that he had a private corridor (since removed) constructed. This at least allowed him to get from the family quarters to his office without having to pass through the reception room, where throngs of strangers were usually waiting to see him.

He also received a $20,000 appropriation to improve the furnishings of the White House, which had become, as one visitor put it, “bare, worn and spoiled,” like “a deserted farmstead,” with holes in
the carpets and paint peeling off of the walls in the state rooms.