the (sic) Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl

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The Book of the Week is “the [sic] Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl, How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis” by Arthur Allen, published in 2014. This disorganized story presented horribly confusing time frames, alternating between scenes of the main characters, with a large amount of historical context thrown in– which made the book’s title misleading, besides. But it provided information on a lesser-known aspect of WWII: the evolution of the typhus vaccine that saved countless lives.

Anyway, in 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire drafted the two doctors described in the story, as medics for the Kaiser’s army. Dr. Rudolf Weigl was born in 1883 in what is currently Czech Republic. Dr. Ludwik Fleck was born in 1896, and was Czech, Austrian and Polish. They both lived in the city of Lviv (aka Lwow or Lemberg) for a significant period in their lives. Weigl studied typhus there at the Polish National Health Institute of Hygiene (PZH).

Fleck opined that the contradictory medical journals of the 1930’s weren’t particularly useful, so doctors needed to use their personal smarts when diagnosing patients. Patients could be carriers of an illness, but not have symptoms themselves. For decades, Weigl was experimenting nonstop by breeding body lice (rather than head lice) as the spreaders of typhus– that fed on human blood. The guts of those lice were then injected with typhus-contaminated blood solution. He developed a vaccine that worked better than the competition’s.

Later on, during WWII, the German military ordered Weigl to refine the vaccine (because different strains of typhus appeared) to protect its soldiers. Fleck’s immediate boss was a spy for the SS (Security Service) who ordered him to do medical research that minimized the possibility that Aryans would contract a disease such as typhus, in the name of creating a master race. His ultimate boss was Heinrich Himmler.

Beginning in autumn 1939, new Soviet bosses imposed their will on Fleck and Weigl. Fleck previously had a private medical lab, but he was named head of the microbiology department of the new Ukrainian Medical Institute, led Lviv’s Sanitation and Bacteriological Laboratory, and conducted research at the new Mother and Child Hospital.

Weigl received and took the savvy advice that he should avoid joining the Communist Party, because inevitably, eventually, Stalin would turn against him and he would be thrown in the gulag, or worse. He also heeded the warning that he should engage in corruption only insofar as it helped him survive. Excessive corruption would get him in trouble. Different armies took over certain territories in Eastern Europe during the war years.

Beginning in summer 1941, fearing for his and his family’s life, Weigl cooperated with the Nazis rather than the SS and local German leaders in Lviv. His reasoning for insisting on keeping his private lab was that, if the Nazis killed him, he’d be viewed as a martyr. He let a German VIP help him supervise the research, though. He saved hundreds to thousands of lives of Jews of Polish origin. Their false identity papers allowed them to be hired as medical guinea pigs by having body lice feed on their blood.

Starting in the early 1940’s, the Nazis needed medical doctors who happened to be Jewish, so they spared them, but they compelled them to commit atrocities doing research. During wartime typhus epidemics, deaths of Polish and Soviet Jews were significantly higher than those of people of other ethnicities due to anti-Semitism. For, the Nazis ordered medical doctors to refrain from treating Jews in their quarantined ghettos. The SS needed the Jews’ slave labor in factories to further the war effort, so the Jews weren’t confined to the ghettos. They therefore spread typhus, anyway.

Through the years, the constantly-improved vaccines developed by Weigl were used (and spread far and wide in black markets) in Ethiopia, Manchuria, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. Britain, however, decided to take steps to kill the lice rather than muck about with a typhus vaccine.

Read the book to learn how American soldiers fared during times of typhus epidemics; plus much more about vaccines other than Weigl’s, about the Soviets on the Eastern Front, the history of Buchenwald, the adventures of Fleck and his family at Auschwitz, the fates of the people associated with different vaccines, and other ways various peoples combated typhus.

The Longest Race

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The Book of the Week is “The Longest Race, Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team” by Kara Goucher with Mary Pilon, published in 2023.

Born in 1978, the author grew up in New Jersey and the Duluth, Minnesota area. Goucher became a professional runner. Like many of her fellow athletes, the author– who experienced an early childhood trauma– found at a young age that competing in footraces is cathartic.

Goucher focused on her training and reaching the finish-line first, rather than getting all worked up about the numerous stressful situations she endured in everyday living. However, she rationalized away some of the wrongs committed against her, because speaking out against them would ruin her career, her marriage, her friendships, etc.

In the United States, the way runners go professional is to convince a corporate, non-governmental sponsor to pay them to race. Goucher and her husband both signed contracts with Nike, the monster-sized corporation best known for making athletic shoes. The company provided her and her fellow runners in her working group with the best, cutting-edge scientifically and technologically advanced resources for winning races.

However, the Gouchers’ status with Nike was as independent contractors, so they had less legal recourse than that of employees with regard to any illegal goings-on in their field of work. Their coach and immediate boss was the celebrity runner Alberto Salazar. In the single-digit 2000’s, he led the “Oregon Project” which was an attempt to help Americans win races again around the world; their victories had been woefully plummeting for years.

Salazar did boost Kara’s confidence and helped her perform better than she thought she could. But, his behavior and many of his training practices were inappropriate and illegal. He and his colleagues (an alleged psychotherapist and medical doctor) wielded a lot of power over the Gouchers, who owed their careers to their sponsor. Salazar’s underlings hewed to his training methods through fear and force. “He [Salazar] got testy when called out for having a third drink. I could only guess how he would react to being called out about sexual harassment.”

As a female, Kara had to deal with Nike’s double standard of suspending her pay when she ran an insufficient number of races in a specified time period pursuant to her contract. Male runners were punished this way when they got caught in doping scandals or had injuries. She was subject to those same conditions, but she couldn’t race because she was pregnant. In connection with exploring her career options, Kara wrote, “… I found myself again and again in rooms of male executives explaining women’s running to me. There seemed to be more interest in how I would look on a poster than in how the sport could evolve.”

Fighting “City Hall” in so many different areas of life is difficult. Anyone who attempted to do so in professional running in the single-digit 2000’s would have to deal with Nike. It held a near-monopoly with overwhelming power and influence over regulators. Whistleblowers would suffer doxing and death threats.

BUT, it is an age-old truism that when more and more courageous people come forward with firsthand information about wrongdoing by an institution or a particularly powerful individual– the less the harm that will be done in the future because the collective mood of the community will shift against the wrongdoer. Eventually.

Read the book to learn lots of additional details of the Gouchers’ experiences in their professional running careers– their trials, tribulations and triumphs.

one THOUSAND wells (sic)

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The Book of the Week is “one THOUSAND wells (sic), How an Audacious Goal Taught Me to Love the World Instead of Save It” by Jena Lee Nardella, published in 2015.

Born in the early 1980’s, the American author– raised in a strict Christian household– became an idealist, passionate about helping the downtrodden. By her teens, she was volunteering at a Colorado Springs homeless shelter. She worked at an orphanage in Tijuana. In college, she got to meet and work with the Christian music-band, Jars of Clay.

Together with other groups over the course of a decade, the do-gooders who formed a humanitarian organization in 2005 called Blood: Water Mission, would bring uncontaminated blood (for medical purposes) and water (for basic drinking and cleaning) to various underprivileged communities in Kenya, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Uganda, and other African countries. They would help them with the three major components of improving Africans’ health: clean water, hygiene and sanitation.

One of the first of many, many things the author learned in her quest to save lives, was that most Americans’ first impulse is to throw money at a complex problem to solve it. They mean well, but their white-savior-complex is a wrong-headed approach. As she gained experience in providing international aid to poverty-stricken, poorly-educated rural communities, the author saw how villagers were initially skeptical about aid workers’ promises; in the past, so many aid workers had failed to follow up or do anything.

The author’s group eventually elicited a grateful, cooperative response because an educator involved the villagers in raising their own standards of living. A few different aid groups who handled various aspects of a water project, did what they said they would do.

If their projects succeeded, women and children (before school– if they were lucky enough to attend) wouldn’t have to spend hours every day trekking on foot to a water-well or river (which might be used by hundreds of households, and was usually polluted with germs and who knows what else) located many kilometers from their living areas. Blood: Water completed one specific project in Rwanda that allowed eighteen hundred villagers to partake of clean water. Such a basic victory produced a great ripple effect in the community. School attendance soared because:

  • kids were neither fatigued by water-fetching nor plagued by water-borne illnesses (and all the people by other illnesses, for that matter) anymore;
  • villagers were neither sickened by, nor dying from the water they used; and
  • villagers had more time on their hands.

However, the author had rude awakenings on various fronts– a water project that failed, fund-raising struggles, and an episode of corruption by a local male aid-coordinator. She was also forced to do some soul-searching on her religious beliefs. She finally had to accept that it is better to have unanswered questions than unquestioned answers.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details about all of the above.

Gynecologist Reflections

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The Book of the Week is “Gynecologist Reflections” by Robert A. Siegel, published in 2017. As is well known, until about the 1970’s, an American medical doctor was a trusted family friend, a generalist. The author started medical school at the dawn of that decade, and ultimately chose obstetrics and gynecology as his specialty. In this poorly edited volume, the author detailed his memorable patient-cases inside America’s changing medical industry amid changing cultural and economic times.

During his training, the author was required to perform abortions; if he didn’t, he’d be fired. Another medical institution wouldn’t accept him and he wouldn’t become a physician. He acknowledged the very emotionally charged, controversial nature of the procedure, and controversial nature of not only when life begins, but when it ends.

The author’s generation of medical interns was still male-dominated. According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, Bibliography and an index), most of the interns were brainwashed into thinking that working around the clock, saving lives on eight hours of sleep a week, was a macho thing to do. Of course, in the next few decades, American medicine became an increasingly litigious line of work and its trainees rebelled against the abusive hierarchy.

After about a decade, the author was able to make a living as a solo practitioner treating private patients. But his dedication to his work (which often involved emergencies) still left him severely sleep-deprived and very stressed. He admitted to coming quite close to making a medical mistake that would have resulted in a patient’s kidney failure. Fortunately, his assistant asked him a simple question about the task at hand.

In another instance, the doctor bragged about saving the lives of a woman and her later prematurely-delivered baby who were in a serious car accident. He got all the kudos, but explained that the surgical team, the technology and the hospital were just as responsible for the positive outcome.

The doctor also recounted a legal case of an acquaintance of his (who was also a doctor). The acquaintance gave verbal instructions, which the mother of the patient (a young child who apparently died through no fault of the doctor’s) failed to follow. He wrote, “You should have seen this lady. She was reeking of alcohol but we weren’t allowed to say that in court…” The initial jury-award unexpectedly, outrageously exceeded his malpractice insurance coverage.

Read the book to learn about: hemorrhages, caesarean sections, hysterectomies, OB-GYN screening tools, etc., plus the sociological aspects of the doctor’s practice, and biographical info on him– including how he almost died at a young age (hint: he led an unhealthy lifestyle to say the least– “Two days before my double by-pass was scheduled, I signed myself out [of the hospital] against medical advice.” Exhibiting arrogance and a feeling of invincibility, no doubt.).

After A Stroke

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The Book of the Week is “After A Stroke, 300 Tips for Making Life Easier” by Cleo Hutton, published in 2005. The author of this short paperback had a stroke in 1992, but gives many tips that are still relevant to recovery from an event that adversely affects the brain, and therefore, specific body functions– that commonly impair one side of the body.

In recent decades, a huge amount of attention has been paid, and money spent on research for: raising awareness of stroke prevention and symptoms, treatment, and the introduction of products to make activities of daily living easier for stroke patients.

The author briefly discussed the neurological effects of a stroke, which are on a continuum; every patient is different. She explained that “constraint-induced therapy” helps a patient’s brain transmit messages through alternate neurological routes through the unaffected side of the body.

The author listed the common frustrations and situations recoverers might encounter:

  • feeling overwhelmed by everyday decisions, such as product-selections while shopping (in the United States, especially!);
  • loquaciousness upon regaining the ability to speak;
  • linguistic impairments such as usage of expletives in speech due to groping for the correct word– even for patients who wouldn’t normally utter them, or inability to understand idioms;
  • personality change;
  • seeing specific items in certain situations that prompts crying or laughing at inappropriate times due to damage to the visual association cortex.

The author recommended keeping aspirin in the freezer to help keep it fresh, if one is taking it.

Read the book to learn a slew of other useful tips for facilitating dealing with: the emotional problems arising from bodily impairments, getting around, communicating, cooking, eating, taking care of the home and one’s body, etc., etc, etc.

Black Box Thinking

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The Book of the Week is “Black Box Thinking, Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes– But Some Do” by Matthew Syed, published in 2015. This volume attempted to answer the question: “How does failure-denial become so deeply entrenched in human minds and systems?”

The author described two ways of thinking:

1. Some people believe their abilities are fixed, so they won’t improve with practice. They have fear of failure, and make excuses and / or blame others for their failures.

2. Other people believe they can get better with practice, and they are honest about admitting they have made errors. They learn from them. Success is achieved only through trial and error, hard work and persistence.

Number 1 above is also described in the following quote from Bertrand Russell: “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.” Yet another way of putting it is “hubris syndrome.”

Two of America’s recent presidents– George W. Bush and Donald Trump– were this kind of thinker. According to the author’s thesis, they succeeded against the odds (if success is defined as getting elected president), considering that they were blind to their own character flaws.

BUT– their common beginnings saw them through: They both began with the special advantages of inheriting money, mentors, lawyers, and valuable career and political contacts. They proceeded to fail upwards until they reached their peak “Peter principle” level, kind of like the joke: How do you make a small fortune in Israel? Answer: Come with a large one.

The author drew parallels between the topic-areas of aviation and healthcare delivery. These involve life-and-death scenarios when things go extremely wrong. However, that is where the similarities stop. People who have shaped the evolution of aviation have built up a knowledge-base that has served to produce lower and lower death tolls when catastrophes have occurred; powerful, influential people working in healthcare have been stubbornly resistant to adopting measures that would result in a drastic reduction in unnecessary deaths.

The author cited real-life examples from Great Britain and the United States. But there are other major reasons why his comparison is mostly invalid. These involve lawsuits, unions, government regulations and the political climate at the time of the disasters, and the following:

Obviously, workers in aviation have more of an incentive to improve safety, because in a disaster, many more people might die all at once in a plane crash, compared to the one patient on an operating table or examination table. Even if members of the flight crew survive a disaster, their careers are likely over. Even when doctors are at fault, they usually continue their careers.

The author discussed the pros and cons of just-culture versus blame-culture. He described the latter thusly: “It may be intellectually satisfying to have a culprit, someone to hang their disaster on. And it certainly makes life simple.”

The author recounted how a public-relations campaign can fool even intelligent people into believing a particular method of crime-prevention among young people, works wonders. The only way to debunk such a myth is through numerous Randomized Control Trials.

Read the book to learn about additional concepts surrounding psychological self-deceptions that humans employ in order to avoid admitting failures: cognitive dissonance, narrative fallacy, top-down versus bottom-up product development, various biases, and others.