SCARLATINA ANGINOSA OR THE SCARLET FEVER1asScarlatina, isan infection caused not by a virus but by one or another of the hemoglobin-liberating bacteria, typically Streptococcus pyogenes

SCARLATINA ANGINOSA OR THE SCARLET FEVER1

An infectious virus, according to Peter Medewar, is apiece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news. This iswhat the virus carried by the female Culicidae Aëdes aegyptimosquito, causing what was known as black vomit, the

American plague, yellow jacket, bronze John, dockfever, stranger’s fever (now standardized as the“yellow fever”) actually looks like, Disney-colorizedfor your entertainment:

And this is what the infectious virus causing Rubeola,the incredibly deadly and devastating German measles,looks like, likewise Disney-colorized for yourentertainment:

Most infectious viruses have fewer than 10 genes,although the virus that caused the small pox was thebiggie exception, having from 200 to 400 genes:

Then, of course, there is the influenza, which existsin various forms as different sorts of this virus mutateand migrate from time to time from other species intohumans — beginning with an “A” variety that made theleap from wild ducks to domesticated ducks circa 2500BCE.

(And then there is our little friend the coma bacillusVibrio cholerae, that occasionally makes its way from our

1. Did Thoreau himself ever have the scarlet fever?

2 Copyright Austin Meredith

SCARLATINA ANGINOSA THE SCARLET FEVER

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privies into our water supplies and causes us to comedown with the “Asiatic cholera.”)

On the other hand, the scarlet fever, also referred toas Scarlatina, is an infection caused not by a virus butby one or another of the hemoglobin-liberatingbacteria, typically Streptococcus pyogenes. What did theinsightful Herman Melville and little ward-of-the-stateLaura Bridgman have in common? —their eyes had beendamaged by scarlet fever.

TB, referred to in the 19th Century by such terms asphthisis, is an infection caused by the bacillusMycobacterium tuberculosis which contains 4,411,529 codedaminos in the about 4,000 genes of its genome.

A common error nowadays is to presume that tuberculosisaffected only the lungs. It did not then and it does notnow. It can settle in just about any part of the body,causing abscesses and crippling the bones and causingatrophy of the musculature. Humans can contract a humanform of tuberculosis or a bovine form. One of thechallenges of the 19th Century was to put a number ofapparently quite different ailments together, and cometo recognize that they were in fact not differentdiseases, but various forms taken by TB.

COMPARING 19TH-CENTURY WITH 21ST-CENTURY TERMINOLOGY:Lung Sickness, Consumption = tuberculosisGalloping Consumption = pulmonary tuberculosisPhthisis Pulmonalis = wasting away of a body partPott’s Disease = tuberculosis of the spinal vertebrae

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/T/HDT.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/explanation.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/ActiveIndex.pdf

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3

THE SCARLET FEVER SCARLATINA ANGINOSA

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Scrofula = tuberculosis of lymph nodes or glands of neck

Bubonic plague is caused by the bacillus Yersina pestis isan infection which is transmitted from rats to humansby the rat flea Xenopsylla cheopsis.

Malaria is a relapsing infection characterized bychills and fever, caused by various protozoa of thegenus Plasmodium introduced into the bloodstream ofreptiles, of birds, and of mammals such as humankind bythe Culicidae Anopheles mosquito.

(HINT: If you ever want to “go there,” click on one ofthese icons. Fear not, these are mere virtual viruses.)

According to Jared Diamond, native American populationswere more affected by the germs of the Europeanintrusives simply because they had had lesser contactwith the domesticated species and their diseases:






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“The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history –small pox, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera– are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.... [They] evolved out of diseases of Eurasian herd animals that became domesticated. Whereas many such animals existed in Eurasia, only five animals of any sort became domesticated in the Americas [due to the] ... paucity of wild starting material.” — Jared Diamond, GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL:

THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES(NY: W.W. Norton, 1997, pages 196ff






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At about this point, Zacharius Jensen of the Netherlands constructed a compound microscope with a converging objective lens and a diverging eye lens.This 1st microscope left a lot to the imagination:

1590

HISTORY OF OPTICS






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There were among the Massachusett epidemics of what is likely to have been measles or scarlet fever.

Not much is made of this in history writing. A deadly killer is generally mentioned, in our history writing, as if it had been a mere nuisance. That isn’t due to our racism, for in fact we react in the same relaxed manner when white children are killed or maimed by measles and scarlet fever. To understand how we can be this way, let us attend to what Dr. William Simpson would point out in 1882 in regard to cholera, diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, and whooping cough:

It comes out, as a peculiar fact, that the most dreaded diseasesare the least fatal, and the least dreaded diseases are the mostfatal ... measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever are the mostserious, although it is usually considered they do little harm... their very frequency makes them less dreaded ... the diseasethat comes unexpectedly, and passes over quickly is looked uponwith greater feelings of terror than the disease which may bemore fatal, but more common.

When victims are cleanly dead and gone, in our eyes they no longer count for that much. (We’ll encounter this reaction in spades in 1918 when an entire American army, useless since WWI was over, while returning on ships from Europe, is devastated in transit by a flu epidemic and is then simply written off and forgotten about.)

1615






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There were among the Massachusett continued epidemics of what is likely to have been measles or scarlet fever.

Since virtually every village along this coast, within 30 miles of the ocean, all the way from Cape Cod up to the region of Portland, quickly fell victim of an epidemic, there has been much speculation that the epidemic was the small pox and that it had been carried to the natives by their contact with the French sailors, either the ones who had died in the vicinity of the waters of Boston Harbor or the ones who had survived and been enslaved by the native Americans. “They died in heaps, as they lay in their houses; and the living that were able to shift for themselves would run away.”

The First Comers, coming across these piles of bones later, would term the places “a new found Golgotha.” Even years after this epidemic, “Their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground, where their houses and dwelling had been.” Historians generally do not credit that the epidemic must have been carried by these crewmen, citing the possibility of rats from this or another ship, and yet the historical estimate is that something like 19 out of every 20 humans along this coast had died during this outbreak. Meanwhile, a native war in Maine was desolating that region as well, so as the Pilgrims would arrive, they

1616






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would discover that by means of a “wonderful plague” God had cleared a path for them.

The Wampanoag of Cape Cod, perhaps owing to their relative isolation along the coastline, escaped the devastating epidemics of what is likely to have been measles or scarlet fever among the Massachusett.

1617






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At this point, after the series of what is likely to have been measles or scarlet fever epidemics, fewer than 800 Massachusett were surviving. Their summer villages along the coast, such as were not deserted, were fairly large and boasted mid-sized longhouses:

(although, in their inland winter hunting camps, they lived in single-family wigwams quite a distance from one another).2

1620

2. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts derived its name from the designator for this “tribe” of native Americans, whose lives centered in the Great Blue Hill region just to the south of Boston Harbor. Although the term supposedly meant “at or about the Great Hill,” there are a number of conflicting interpretations. The Jesuit missionary Father Rasles presumed it to derive from the word Messatossec, “Great-Hills-Mouth”: mess meaning “great,” as chu or wad chu meaning “hill,” sac or saco meaning “mouth.” The Reverend John Cotton selected another variation: mos and wetuset meaning “Indian arrowhead,” descriptive of the native Americans hill home. Another explanation offered is that the word comes from massa meaning “great” and wachusett, “mountain-place.”






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At this point after the series of what is likely to have been measles or scarlet fever epidemics, the white intrusives on the Shawmut peninsula were able to count fewer than 500 surviving Massachusett natives — and the small pox would carry away many of these in 1633. Shortly afterward, the Reverend John Eliot would

begin his missionary work among the surviving few. The new converts would be gathered into 14 villages of “Praying Indians,” including the following, in which, subjected to strict Puritan rules of conduct, their tribal traditions would quickly disappear:

Job Nasutan, a Massachusett, would work with the Reverend Eliot to translate the BIBLE into Algonquin, and Crispus Attucks, who would be killed in the downtown brawl known as the Boston Massacre, would be born of a free black father and a Massachusett mother. Although there are now a few surviving individuals who are able to trace ancestry to the Massachusett, no organized group of the Massachusett is known to have survived into the 19th Century.

1629

• Cowate• Magaehnak• Natick• Pequimmit• Punkapog• Titicut• Wannamanhut






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The actual John Eliot was not a stud but a butterball.



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Doctor Thomas Sydenham described the recognition characteristics of scarlet fever:3

The 1st microscope having come along in 1590 and the 1st glimpse of microorganisms having been obtained in 1676, in this year improvements in precision allowed for the 1st time bacteria to be viewed.

1676

3. What Dr. Sydenham called squamulae here, we would call scales. Although microorganisms were being inspected by means of a microscope during this year for the very 1st time, no microorganism so small as a bacterium could conceivably have been viewed with the apparatuses available. What we know now that they didn’t know then is that this “scarlet” fever was resulting from the multiplication of one of these infinitesimally smaller creatures, a bacterium of the Streptococcus pyogenes variety, which produces a streptolysin O, erythrogenic exotoxin of protein nature. At some point along the way we became aware that the damage due to the toxins of this infection becomes visible between about the 2d to the 7th day after exposure, as a fever, sore throat, headache, and, in children, vomiting, and that then, 2 to 3 days after first symptoms, the skin of the neck, the armpits and the groin reddens and the characteristic rash begins to make its appearance. The face becomes flushed but there is a pale tinge around the lips. The tongue is coated and had a deeply inflamed edge. The throat also appears inflamed and red spots may be noticed upon the palate. After 4 days the white coating of the tongue disappears, leaving what is known as “strawberry” tongue: a swollen, deeply injected surface with prominent papillæ. The spots and fever last about 7 days and in about one case in three are followed by the peeling off of portions of the skin. The glands of the neck may become tender to the touch. Effective treatment in the 19th Century amounted to immediate isolation, bed rest, and consumption of adequate fluids, for none of the other treatments attempted during that period, such as camphor, turned out to be of practical value. It was noted in this period, however, that this was an infection which seldom repeated itself, that the individual who had had scarlet fever in childhood appeared to develop a protective immunity. There was argument, therefore, in regard to the wisdom of exposing one’s children deliberately to this infection. Since the Streptococcus pyogenes is gram-positive, there would be no effective treatment possible for this order of infection until the introduction of penicillin, produced in very small amounts, in 1928, and then the mass-production of penicillin by Pfizer in 1944.

1683

The skin is marked with small, red spots, morefrequent, more diffuse, and more red than in measles.These last two or three days. They then disappear,leaving the skin covered with brawny squamulae, as ifpowdered with meal.






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Lydia Jackson, just at the point at which she had become the very most eligible marriage material, during this year or early in the following year, had a severe attack of the scarlet fever with lasting consequences either for her health or for her hypochondria.

Spring: An attack of scarlet fever caused damage to Herman Melvill’s eyes that would bring increasing problems in later years. At age seven, according to his father “very backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension” due to this damage, yet “of a docile and amiable disposition,” Herman would enter the New-York Male High School.4

1821

1826

4. Then Melville’s father’s felt and fur import business would go bankrupt and the family would relocate from Manhattan “Island of the Hills” upstate to Albany, New York.






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January: Little Laura Dewey Bridgman and her two sisters came down with the scarlet fever.

Her sisters died. Laura’s ears and eyes suppurated and her senses of hearing and of sight were eliminated. Her sense of smell, also, was almost entirely removed. The microorganisms in question had themselves a good meal and were ready to move on, leaving behind a little girl who would always need to wear a ribbon across what was left of her eyes, to protect the sensitivities of others:

Attending the 12th Church on Chambers Street in Boston with friends, Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, who had herself in 1821 or early 1822 been a victim of the scarlet fever, heard Waldo Emerson preach.

1832






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May 16, Saturday: Mrs. Felicia Hemans, the immensely popular British romantic poet who had for many years been issuing one or more books of poetry per year, died in Dublin, Ireland at the age of 42, reportedly of tuberculosis complicated by scarlet fever.

The Reverend Henry C. Wright went to the downtown Boston office of the Garrisonians (this may have happened on the 16th, or it may have happened on the 18th), waited around until someone showed up, and asked to sign up for membership in the antislavery crusade.

In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:

7th day 15th [sic] Spent this day in much sweetness of feeling & in resting after our journey, finding our new acquaintance highly interesting & affectionately disposed towards us. —

1835

1842

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS






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January 22, Saturday: Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, in speaking in his own defense on the charge that he had a “monomania” in regard to the abuse of Americans of color, and in attempting to preserve his chairmanship over the House’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, made the tactical error of including one of his forbidden attacks upon the institution of human slavery.

Ellen Emerson began to show symptoms of scarlet fever.

Henry Thoreau, who had held John Thoreau, Jr. in his arms as he gasped and heaved, began himself to have symptoms of lockjaw. Perhaps one of the things he was remembering was that this had almost happened at age 3 or 4, when he had chopped his own toe with a dirty hatchet: how easy it would have been for him to have completed his earthly career at that early point!

5

5. See the screens for 1820-1821, for my son Guy Duramen Meredith's cartoon of that event.






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January 24, Monday: During the course of this morning, after the doctor and the Thoreau family had given up hope, it became apparent that Henry Thoreau’s symptoms were a sympathetic reaction rather than the result of an infection. His paralysis although life threatening was sympathetic, and although it left him in a weakened condition for a number of months, he did gradually recover and gradually resume various work activities, chopping wood, etc. On his walk he found a tree in the stripped forest that had retained all its leaves, to rustle sere and tattered in the winter gusts. Investigating, he found that it had been blasted by lightning that summer, and sympathetically noted that it had been unable to summon adequate life energy to cast them off.

6

In his childhood, Henry Thoreau, terrified at thunderstorms, had taken refuge in his father’s bedroom. William Blake had said a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. Can you see this lightning-blasted tree, and why this lightning-blasted man noticed it? But enough about Thoreau and his sympathies, for on this evening Wallie Emerson, age 5, began to have symptoms of scarlet fever.

This was the day on which Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts was presenting a petition that the federal union be dissolved.

Waldo Emerson had returned to Concord from his 8th and final lecture on “The Times” at the Masonic Temple in Boston, and, in a letter to his brother, he wrote:

6. Huntington Library Manuscript 13182, I, 25, quoted in Johnson 1987, page 74.

The injured man with querulous tone resisting his age & destiny is like a treestruck by lightning, which rustles its sere leaves the winter through, not havingvigor enough to cast them off.

My pleasure in getting home on Saturday night at the end of my task was somewhat checked by finding that Henry Thoreau who had been at his father’s since the death of his brother was ill & threatened with lockjaw! his brothers disease. It is strange — unaccountable — yet the symptoms seemed precise & on the increase. You may judge we were all alarmed & I not the least who have the highest hopes of this youth. This morning his affection be it what it may, is relieved essentially, & what is best, his own feeling of better health established.




Thoreau, Huntington Library Manuscript 13182, I, 25, quoted in Johnson 1987, p.74.



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January 27, Thursday: Wallie Emerson, Waldo Jr., died at 8:15PM of scarlet fever.

When one of the girls of the Alcott family came to the door to ask how little Wallie was doing, his father faced her there.

The next day Waldo Emerson entered in his journal:

Child, he is dead.

Yesterday night at 15 minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life.

On Sunday I carried him to see the new church & organ. & on Sunday we shall lay his sweet body in the ground.






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And thus from the pages of Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN:

It had been just prior to this difficult month of January 1842 that Emerson had read his lecture “THE TRANSCENDENTALIST” at the Masonic Hall in Boston:

… It was late when she came back, and no one saw her creep upstairs and shut herself into her mother’s room. Half an hour after, Jo went to ‘Mother’s closet’ for something, and there found little Beth sitting on the medicine chest, looking very grave, with red eyes and a camphor bottle in her hand.

“Christopher Columbus! What’s the matter?” cried Jo, as Beth put out her hand as if to warn her off, and asked quickly,—

“You’ve had scarlet fever, haven’t you?”

“Years ago, when Meg did. Why?”

“Then I’ll tell you — oh, Jo, the baby’s dead!”WALLIE

“The Transcendentalist”

Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures arebetter or worse reflectors.






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March 15, Monday: At 3PM, Dr. Huntington arrived at the Alcott home and the family held final rites over the body of Elizabeth Sewall Alcott.

At Abba Alcott’s urgent request, the Reverend Dr. Frederic Huntington read the King’s Chapel Burial Service. After the closing prayer, “Mr. and Mrs. Emerson and Ellen Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, John Bridge Pratt, his sister [Caroline Pratt] and mother, and others,” (such as Dr. Josiah Bartlett, and since it would be he who would tend Louisa May Alcott in 1863 during her mercury-induced delusions, we may infer that it was he who had been looking in on Elizabeth during her final illness) helped deposit the

1858






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remains in the Alcott family’s new plot at Sleepy Hollow.

Amy Belding Brown has been told that she was one of the first people to be buried in this new cemetery.

BRONSON ALCOTT

LIDIAN EMERSON

WALDO EMERSON






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Thomas Wakley, the doctor who had founded the international medical journal The Lancet, died of tuberculosis while on a rest cure in the mild climate of Madeira.

During this year for the 1st time a linkage would be being made, by Louis Pasteur, between specific germs and specific diseases.

Was Henry Thoreau giving off the feverish redness associated with the terminal stage of tuberculosis, which Walt Whitman described in his poetry as “this hectic glow”?7

1862

7. Warner, John Harley. THE THERAPEUTIC PERSPECTIVE: MEDICAL PRACTICE, KNOWLEDGE, AND IDENTITY IN AMERICA,1820-1885. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1986

TBSMALL POX

MALARIA

SCARLET FEVER

YELLOW FEVER

ASSLEY

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Before the Civil War era, American medicine got involved in a self-defined systemof medical practice and rigorously stemmed efforts to introduce European(especially French) ideas about the nature of disease, treatment, etc. The Americanstyle was to see each patient as an individual, requiring individual therapy.In general the approach was interventionist — the doctor always did something,especially, he found which fluids were in excess (blood, crap, etc.), and bled,purged. This early work was “rationalism” as opposed to foreign “empiricism.”Until the 1860s, disease-specific treatment was professionally illegitimate(with the one exception that doctors did treat malaria with quinine, since itworked so well).

Despite the apparent silliness of the American approach, and even though Europeanmedicine was, we now know, on the right path as far as identifying symptoms anddiseases and then treating all patients the same way, it wasn’t until late in thecentury that the treatments were reliable.

There’s some slight of hand in all this — if there is a consistent, rational wayto treat an identifiable disease, then anyone can be a doctor. Later in the century,much of the aggressive bleeding and purging was replaced with opiates (at theirhigh mark in the 1850s). Also, medical education began to become professionalized,rather than just having the faculty chat about cases, and doctors actuallyconducted physiological experiments, laboratories, and exams (you need astethoscope to listen to the heart).









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THE MEDICAL APPLICATION OF ELECTRICITY, BY WILLIAM F. CHANNING, M.D. SIXTH AND ENLARGED EDITION (Published by Thomas Hall, Electrician, and Manufacturer of Electro Medical Instruments, No. 13 Bromfield Street, Boston, Mass.)8

During this year the 1st usage of surgical disinfectant was beginning to reduce the death rate from major surgery from 45% toward 15% (another source uses the date 1861 instead of 1865, and claims that the statistic is a reduction of mortality rate from 18% to 1.2% — and I have no idea how to resolve the discrepancy between these two very specific and definitive assertions).

1865

8. This procedure was performed upon me at about the age of 12 (which would have been in about 1949) in a private residence in Wabash, Indiana — the big difference being that the black medical apparatus box utilized had been one that the practitioner had just plugged into a wall socket (to do so he needed to unplug a standing lamp). I was taken there by my mother but the procedure was not performed on her, only on me. The practitioner, whom I was informed was a doctor, handed me a naked wire to hold tightly in my hands and then rubbed my forehead with a ring on his finger, a ring to the underside of which, inside his palm, he had attached a wire. He instructed me to keep talking continuously, and rubbed the ring back and forth across my forehead. I remember how the ring bounced and vibrated against my skull.

DR. CHANNING’S CURE




http://books.google.com/books?id=C5OdD6MJloEC&source=gbs_navlinks_s



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The French army surgeon Jean-Antoine Villemin demonstrated by experiments upon animals that tuberculosis was a contagious infection, but many medics were incredulous because they knew that the disease tended to run in families and presumed therefore that the disease was a disease of heredity.

The Tsarevitch Nicholas, presumptive heir to the throne ofRussia, was receiving treatment for consumption in Nice.His mother visited him there on several occasions, and in 1865the Tsar Alexander II came to receive his last words and to orderthe return of his body to Russia on board the frigate AlexanderNevsky.

— René and Jean Dubos: THE WHITE PLAGUE

In England in this year there was a short-lived enthusiasm that an effusion of the root of the American pitcher plant could be used as a treatment for the small pox. This, however, proved to be about as accurate as the old attempts at fortifying the blood by dressing the victim in red bedclothing, covering the sickbed with red-died blankets, and putting red-died curtains in the windows. Meanwhile, in France, drawing on his experiences with the army, Doctor Jean-Antoine Villemin (1827-1892) was informing the Academy of Medicine that tuberculosis might be a transmissible disease resembling the small pox rather than a hereditary disorder or a form of cancer. Louis Pasteur was at this point publishing his “germ theory” of disease. In the New World, the

city of Seattle, named after Headman Seattle (See-Ahth of the Susquamish), was simultaneously making it illegal for persons of native ancestry to reside within its limits. Would this have been related in any way to the development of germ theory in France, or is it merely a coincidence that these developments were occurring in the same Year of Our Lord?

Dr. William Simpson explained why it is that we react in such a relaxed manner when our children fall victim to deadly killers such as cholera, diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhoid fever, typhus, and whooping cough. When victims are cleanly dead and gone, they no longer count for that much:

1882






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It comes out, as a peculiar fact, that the most dreaded diseasesare the least fatal, and the least dreaded diseases are the mostfatal ... measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever are the mostserious, although it is usually considered they do little harm... their very frequency makes them less dreaded ... the diseasethat comes unexpectedly, and passes over quickly is looked uponwith greater feelings of terror than the disease which may bemore fatal, but more common.

(We’ll encounter this reaction in spades in 1918 when an entire American army, useless since WWI was over, while returning on ships from Europe, is devastated in transit by a flu epidemic — and is then simply written off and forgotten about.)

Discovery of the 1st virus.

Although the tuberculosis mortality rate in Massachusetts had fallen from the 368 deaths per 100,000 of 1865 to 190 per 100,000, TB was still a major health problem, far exceeding in its death rate the death rate from the scarlet fever, the small pox, typhus, and diphtheria.

August: A mold “penicillin” capable of secreting a chemical which defended it against growing bacteria landed on a Petri dish in a laboratory, and was noticed just as the researcher was sterilizing this equipment for reuse. After development and production, in 1942 this mold would initiate roughly half a century of “Pax Antibiotica,” although its discoverer Alexander Fleming would warn in 1945 that that situation of security simply could not last. With the discovery of penicillin came the 1st effective treatment for scarlet fever.

1892

20TH CENTURY

1900

1928






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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <[email protected]>.

Prepared: May 6, 2013

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST




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Well, tomorrow is such and such a date and so it began on that date in like 8000BC? Why 8000BC, because it was the beginning of the current interglacial -- or what?

Bearing in mind that this is America, "where everything belongs," the primary intent of such a notice is to prevent some person or corporate entity from misappropriating the materials and sequestering them as property for censorship or for profit.



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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request wehave pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out ofthe shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). Whatthese chronological lists are: they are research reportscompiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data moduleswhich we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining.To respond to such a request for information, we merely push abutton.






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Commonly, the first output of the program has obviousdeficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modulesstored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, andthen we need to punch that button again and do a recompile ofthe chronology — but there is nothing here that remotelyresembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know andlove. As the contents of this originating contexture improve,and as the programming improves, and as funding becomesavailable (to date no funding whatever has been needed in thecreation of this facility, the entire operation being run outof pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweakingand recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation ofa generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward andupward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place your requests with <[email protected]>.Arrgh.




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Documents

SCARLATINA ANGINOSA OR THE SCARLET FEVER1asScarlatina, isan infection caused not by a virus but by one or another of the hemoglobin-liberating bacteria, typically Streptococcus pyogenes