THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Thursday, December 13, 2018 | A17

DesperateRemediesThe Mystery of the Exploding TeethBy Thomas Morris(Dutton, 351 pages, $26)

BOOKSHELF | By Adrian Woolfson

OPINION

A n international consortium of molecular biologistsrecently synthesized a number of baker’s-yeastchromosomes from scratch. Before long they will

have completed the entire set of 16 chromosomes. In the process, they also streamlined the chromosomes’ design. Regions that these biologists reasoned were unnecessary for healthy function were deleted. Some genes were relocated to an artificial 17th chromosome, sites were introduced to allow chromosomal reshuffling and the genetic code was modified. Remarkably, the remodeled synthetic chromosomes appear to function perfectly.

With this proof of concept in place, the next step maybe to synthesize a human genome from scratch, eventually enabling us to permanently fix some of the broken genes that cause human diseases. The related ethical issues would be considerable, but nevertheless tractable. More important, it would mark the apotheosis of the molecular paradigm of modern medicine, dispelling any vestiges of metaphysics from the

philosophy of medicineand precisely definingthe causal structure ofhuman existence.

But things were notalways so. In “TheMystery of theExploding Teeth andOther Curiosities Fromthe History of Medicine,”Thomas Morris takes adelightful romp through amyriad of entertaining,arcane and obscuremedical anecdotes pluckedfrom 18th- and 19th-

century newspapers,journals and textbooks. He

reminds us that just a few hundredyears ago our knowledge of causality in

clinical medicine was painfully inadequate. Our ability to remedy the malfunctions of the human body, in a manner free of pain, was correspondingly rudimentary.

Using a panoply of colorful examples, the author artfully illustrates the frustrations, uncertainty, poorly founded confidence and frequent futility of medical practice in the prescientific age. Employing a consistently light and humorous touch, he effortlessly navigates a cornucopia of fascinating, esoteric and obscure patient histories.

The carefully selected vignettes demonstrate the befuddled mindset of the well-intentioned physicians who were forced to contend with the vagaries of damaged and failing human flesh without the benefit of anesthesia, and armed with little more than the fanciful theories of Galen (a second-century Greek who attributed disease to imbalances of the four “humors”: blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile) and an elementary knowledge of human anatomy.

Yet despite their lack of mechanistic understanding, these individuals showed leaps of ingenuity no less startling than those of today’s physicians and genome rewriters. To avoid subjecting himself to the dangers of 18th-century surgery to remove a bladder stone, Mr. Morris tells us, the French-born surgeon Claude Martin fashioned an instrument out of a knitting needle and a whalebone handle, which he then inserted through his urethra and used to manually file away the stone.

Mr. Morris also recounts the fate of the 57-year-old Earl of Kent who, in 1702, was given laxatives and a vomit-inducing solution made from camel’s urine and the toxic metal antimony, had snuff stuffed into both nostrils, was subjected to blood-letting and a tobacco-smoke enema, before finally being wrapped in the bowels of a freshly slaughtered sheep—all in an attempt to resuscitate him from cardiac arrest. Needless to say, he did not survive.

Other such treatments in history included cigaretteslaced with mercury or arsenic, port-wine enemas, the excreta of chameleons and Indian river snakes, and the gastric juices of crows.

Mr. Morris documents an especially intriguing 19th-century therapy (the “Pigeon’s-Rump Cure”) used to treat convulsions in infants. A pigeon’s rump would be held up against the child’s exposed bottom; the bird would then begin gasping for air. While the child gradually recovered, the same could not be said of the pigeon. One doctor’s conclusion at the time was that, despite the clear success of the treatment, “experiments with other poultry” were necessary.

One thing that hasn’t changed with the passage of time is human irrationality and our apparently limitless ingenuity when it comes to identifying novel ways of harming ourselves. Mr. Morris tells us, for example, of the young sailor who, in order to impress his friends, in June 1799 swallowed a penknife. His knife-swallowing habit proved hard to give up, and led to his eventual demise. Another unfortunate individual’s case is described in the section titled “The Boy Who Got His Wick Stuck in a Candlestick.” Yet another patient compulsively swallowed needles. This continuity of human folly across the centuries is simultaneously surprising and reassuring.

The author emerges as equal measures social historianand voyeur. Little attempt is made to connect the various incidents into a substantial overview, in the manner of the greats of the genre such as the British medical historian Roy Porter. Indeed, the material, although both fascinating and entertaining, is left displayed naked on the dissection table in a somewhat disjointed and frivolous manner that is ultimately disappointing. It nevertheless provides a curious window into a vitalistic era of medical practice that, fortunately for us all, has been eclipsed by the significant advances of contemporary molecular medicine.

Dr. Woolfson is the author of “Life Without Genes” and“An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Genetics.”

Treatments of old for common health ills included tobacco-smoke enemas, arsenic cigarettes—and the ‘Pigeon’s-Rump Cure.’

Check Your Progressive Privilege

P rogressives are con-stantly checking their“white privilege,” but

what about ideological privi-lege? Particularly for women,the prevailing assumption isthat you aren’t normal unlessyou’re a liberal Democrat.Conservative women aren’tonly left out, but increasinglystigmatized.

Women’s magazines andnews outlets depict women whovote Republican as deviants. Vogue headlined a postelectioncommentary “Why Do White Women Keep Voting for the GOP and Against Their Own In-terests?” The Guardian asked: “Half of White Women Continueto Vote Republican. What’s Wrong with Them?” The latterarticle asserted that “white women vote for Republicans for

the same reason that white mendo: because they are racist.” Barbra Streisand claimed “a lotof women vote the way their husbands vote; they don’t be-lieve enough in their own thoughts.” Hillary Clinton, Mi-chelle Obama and Madeleine Al-bright have all expressed simi-lar sentiments in public.

Progressive women seetheir intellectual and politicalleaders glamorized in glossymagazine photo spreads andcelebrated on daytime TV talkshows. Conservative femalepolicy makers are invisible, ifthey’re lucky. Glamour’s 2018

Women of the Year includedgun-control activists and anti-Trump celebrities, along withCalifornia Sen. Kamala Harris.No recognizably conservativewoman made the cut.

Progressive women enjoythe benefit of the doubt whenthey say insensitive or preju-diced things. Mrs. Clinton re-cently joked that two blackmen “look alike.” No conserva-tive could get away with sucha remark.

College administrators toutthe value of diversity. Yet theNational Association of Schol-ars “could not find a single Re-publican with an exclusive ap-pointment to fields like genderstudies” among 8,688 tenure-track professors at 51 top lib-eral-arts colleges.

Far-left activists nextmonth march on Washingtonagain under the banner “the

Women’s March.” The mediawill present them as simply“women”—as if women withother views don’t exist.

Rooting out bigotry isn’teasy. The first step is to recog-nize the prejudiced messagesthat make their way into thepublic square. A truly fair andinclusive society would in-clude positive, aspirational im-ages of conservative and liber-tarian women as well asliberal ones. It wouldn’t mar-ginalize women for their ideol-ogy or politics any more thanit would exclude women basedon race, age, looks or sexualorientation.

Once woke to progressiveprivilege, we can make stridestoward a fairer, more inclusiveculture for all women.

Ms. Lukas is president of In-dependent Women’s Forum.

By Carrie Lukas

Conservative women have been left out and stigmatized too long.

In one state and for one can-didate, the 2018 midtermelection isn’t over.

Georgia Democratic guber-natorial hopeful Stacey Abramslost to Republican Brian Kempby 54,723 votes, 50.2% to48.8%. Turnout was 3.9 million,the biggest ever in a PeachState governor’s race.

But Ms. Abrams insists she“cannot concede” that the out-come “is right, true or proper.”At issue is what she calls Mr.Kemp’s “appalling” actions asGeorgia’s secretary of state.She asserts his objective wasthe “suppression of the peo-ple’s democratic right to vote,”in a “deliberate and inten-tional” effort that left the elec-tion “rotten and rigged.”

Because “democracy failedin Georgia,” Ms. Abrams hasfiled a lawsuit. She’s seeking todo more than overturn statelaws: She wants to brand Mr.Kemp a racist election thiefand discredit his tenure asgovernor.

Ms. Abrams has claimedthat Mr. Kemp unlawfullypurged 1.5 million voters fromthe rolls, put 53,000 new regis-trations on hold, created longpolling lines on Election Day,and misplaced provisional bal-lots. She says her “accusationsare based entirely on evi-dence.” Let’s take a look.

First, removing names fromthe registration rolls: The 1993National Voter RegistrationAct, passed by a Democratic

The Cynicism of Georgia’s Stacey AbramsCongress and signed by Presi-dent Clinton, requires states tokeep voter lists “accurate andcurrent” by identifying per-sons who died or moved, using“uniform, nondiscriminatory”procedures.

Georgia’s law to complywith the federal act is similarto Ohio’s, which the U.S. Su-preme Court upheld this year.It works like this: If the U.S.Postal Service’s change-of-ad-dress list shows a Georgiavoter has moved or is no lon-ger at his address of record,

the state sends him a postage-paid confirmation reply card. Itthere’s no response for 30days, the voter is considered“inactive,” but can still vote ifhe wants. If he doesn’t turn outin the next two federal elec-tions, he is removed from therolls. The removal process cantake as long as seven years.And about the impact of thoseremovals: While Mr. Kemp wasSecretary of State, the numberof Georgians registered to voterose from 5.8 million before hetook office in 2010 to 6.9 mil-lion this year.

Then there’s the charge ofholding up registration appli-cations. This involves the

state’s “exact match” law,which requires the last name,first initial, date of birth andother simple information onvoter-registration applicationsmatch the information in theSocial Security database or theGeorgia driver’s-license file. Ifthey don’t match, the prospec-tive voter is notified onlineand by mail, and given 26months to correct any discrep-ancy. Meanwhile, he can voteby presenting a valid ID that is“a substantial match” with hisapplication. The 11th U.S. Cir-cuit Court of Appeals recentlyupheld a similar law in Florida.Moreover, local electionboards in Georgia’s 159 coun-ties check registration formsagainst the databases. The sec-retary of state’s office is only abackstop.

Ms. Abrams herself may beresponsible for many of the botched voter applications. Be-fore running for governor, she led a $12.5 million registration drive that paid her $442,000 over three years for serving asits part-time leader. Despite ample resources, Ms. Abrams’sefforts relied on paper forms, not online registration or elec-tronic forms. As a result, manyapplications contained mistakesor fraudulent signatures.

Ms. Abrams’s complaintsabout long lines at pollingplaces and mishandled provi-sional ballots are also mis-placed. County electionboards, not the secretary ofstate, decide on poll closures,set the number of voting ma-

chines, and handle provisionalballots. These local officialsare in many cases Democrats,and Ms. Abrams carried thethree Atlanta-area counties—Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb—withthe most closures, the largestnumbers of machines with-drawn from service, and thebulk of provisional-ballotproblems.

As a rising star on the Dem-ocratic left, Ms. Abrams drewmillions in donations from theSoros family and billionairehedge-funder Tom Steyer, aswell as campaign appearancesby Oprah Winfrey, BarackObama and many of the party’s2020 presidential hopefuls.She lost anyway.

Ms. Abrams now cynicallyclaims she’s a victim of elec-tion fraud motivated by big-otry. Even in this ugly periodof American politics, trying touse defeat in a close electionto create racial resentmentstands out as dangerous andcorrosive. Ms. Abrams’s suit,Fair Fight Action v. Crittenden,is unlikely to have a happyending. And damaging thestate’s reputation won’t helpher win future races, no matterhow much she says she lovesGeorgia and wants to serve it.Sometimes you should exitgracefully.

Mr. Rove helped organizethe political-action committeeAmerican Crossroads and isthe author of “The Triumph ofWilliam McKinley” (Simon &Schuster, 2015).

The Democratic gubernatorial loser goes to court with bogus racism charges.

By Karl Rove

Maybe DonaldTrump shouldexport redMAGA caps toFrance andthe UnitedK i n g d o m .Make FranceGreat Again.Ditto England.

The photosthis week of a

shell-shocked Emmanuel Ma-cron and beyond-beleagueredTheresa May show what aheavy lift renewed greatnesshas become for once-great na-tions. How come?

With all due respect to theglories of 18th-century France,the only measure of greatnessthat concerns us now is theperiod after the devastation of

World War II. Europeans re-built their economies fromrubble and did so quickly. Atthe same time, they erected awelfare system to ensure so-cial well-being, an Enlighten-ment idea.

It took Europe’s leadersabout 40 years to see that wel-fare spending was eroding thegrowth of their postwar econo-mies. So in 1992 they producedthe Maastricht Treaty, whichboth mandated measures offiscal discipline on profligatemembers—not least France—and created an institutioncalled the European Union. Thefiscal discipline largely failed,but the rules-making institu-tions of the EU flourished.

It is possible to draw astraight line from Maastricht

The Global Swampto the mayhem this week inLondon over Brexit and inParis over gasoline prices.

By now, a commentators’consensus has emerged thatthe cause of these troubles isthe people living in cities,towns and villages across Eu-rope who feel the past 25years have benefited everyoneexcept them.

This global revelation sankin, of course, only when thereviled Donald Trump suc-ceeded to the U.S. presidencyafter appealing to these pre-sumably forgotten men andwomen.

What are known as “the po-litical elites” aren’t happy withany of this. They believe thatthe postwar political and eco-nomic institutions created bypeople like them producedwidespread well-being—whichwas true for a while—and thatthe path forward now requiresgiving them a chance to fixthings for the forgotten.

They flatter themselves.The hero of global eco-

nomic growth the past quar-ter-century isn’t them. It’s themicrochip.

Every historic burst ofprogress since the IndustrialRevolution has depended oninnovation, and I don’t meanpolitical innovation. Thathasn’t happened since JohnLocke.

The microchip—it is a ba-nality to point out—has beena historic multiplier of pro-ductive possibilities. Newideas about what, where andhow to do business explodedeverywhere, leading to morenew ideas, which created theglobal economy, a fantasticachievement for a tiny elec-tronic device.

Some people, however, be-lieve they came up losers inthis economic revolution, andthey are in revolt.

Let us segue to another tru-ism today among the commen-tariat—that the economic and social damage endured by thisdiscontented working class is mainly the result of the finan-cial crisis of 2008. And let us assume there is something to this point.

Some day a young, politi-cally neutral economist will doa comparison of the U.S. econ-omy from 2009 to 2016 and from 2017 through midyear 2018.

A short version of this com-parison is a question: How didthe U.S. economy go from anOK condition in January 2017to an intense, nationwide la-bor shortage and rising wagesless than 18 months later?

The “sugar high” explana-tion is partisan obtuseness.Something more economicallyinteresting had to have hap-pened.

The answer likely lies in de-ciphering the effects of theTrump administration’s abruptunwinding of the Obama era’seconomic regulations.

The Obama years don’tnecessarily bring into ques-tion the idea of regulation it-self but of hyper-regulation.They overdid it, suddenly lay-ering rules across the entireU.S. industrial landscape. The

economy gagged. Against the backdrop this

week of Paris in flames andLondon’s Brexit struggles, ourinterest isn’t so much in theObama regulations themselvesas in the state of mind thatproduced so many of them.

Presumably each Obamaregulator assumed that individ-ually he or she was doing good.It wouldn’t have occurred to any of them that in the aggre-gate they and their rules wereanesthetizing a fundamentallyhealthy economy.

This is the mandarin mind-set that has prevailed in thenations of Europe for nearly70 years and in the EuropeanCommission for 25. They builta welfare and regulatorystructure piece by incrementalpiece until the U.K., France,Spain and Italy choked. Ger-many unilaterally reformed it-self in the early 2000s, andgrew.

This is the mind-set thatdrove so many Brits to Brexit.It is the mind-set Mr. Macronwas trying to undo with re-forms of the French labor sys-tem until he himself suc-cumbed with a gas tax on themiddle class in the name ofsaving the planet.

This is the global swamp.Oddly, the U.S. in the third

year of the Trump presidencymay be remembered for tryingto manage the economythrough tariffs, quotas and theforced immobility of labor andbusiness. Meanwhile, the post-Obama Democrats, laughably,want “socialism.”

But that astonishing,bursting economic resurrec-tion of the first two Trumpyears should stand as a casestudy of the good that canhappen when a nation’s lead-ers choose microchips overmandarins.

Write henninger@wsj.com.

Donald Trump should export MAGA caps to Macron’s France and May’s England.

WONDER LANDBy Daniel Henninger

Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, Dec. 1.

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