Lázsló Almásy describes Darb el Arbeʿin, the slave caravan route 21st of July, 2010 POST·MERIDIEM 10:59

A few paragraphs from László Almásy’s book „Schwimmer in der Wüste“, from the description of the Darb el Arbeʿin درب الاربعون , the historical caravan route from the Sudan to the Nile valley:

„Die im Mittel- und Südsudan niedergelassenen arabischen Sklavenhändler trieben hier jedes Jahr ihre lebende Ware zu dem berühmten Sklavenmarkt in Assiut. Die unglücklichen Neger legten diese schreckliche Wüstenstrecke zu Fuß zurück, nur die Kinder und jungen Mädchen durften auf Kamelrücken reisen, da sie am Markt die höchsten Preise erzielten…

Fast unvorstellbar sind Leid und Qual einer solchen Sklavenkarawane, wenn sie sich auf den mehrere hundert Kilometer langen Wüstenstrecken von Brunnen zu Brunnen, von Oase zu Oase vorwärts wälzte. Die stärksten Männer trieb man in dem ‚Scheba‘, einem an ihrem Hals befestigen doppelten Gabelholz, das je zwei Menschen zusammenband, um sie so in ihrer Bewegungsfreiheit einzuschränken, damit sie ihre grausamen Wärter nicht angreifen konnten. Wer sich die Füße wundgetreten hatte, schleppte sich weiter, solange er konnte. Wenn er zusammensackte und ihn nicht einmal mehr die ‚Kurbasch‘, die aus Nilpferdleder gefertigte Peitsche, zum Aufstehen bewegen konnte, wurde er einfach zurückgelassen. Die die Karawanen begleitenden Geier bereiteten dem Unglücklichen bald ein Ende.

Gordon Pascha, den Ägyptens Vizekönig Ismail Khedive von 1874 bis 1879 in den Sudan sandte, um mit dem Sklavenhandel Schluß zu machen, teilt in seinem Bericht mit, daß von den 80 000 bis 100 000 Sklaven, die von Dar Fur jährlich nach Norden verschleppt wurden, nur rund 7 000 bis 8 000 lebend in Assiut ankamen.“

“Here, every year, the Arabic slave traders who had settled in southern and central Sudan drove their living wares to the famous slave market of Assiut. Of these slaves, only children and young women travelled by camel, since they fetched the best price at market; the rest of the unhappy blacks made their way [c. 900 km] by foot.

The suffering and torture of these slave caravans, tramping forward from watering hole to watering hole, from oasis to oasis, for hundreds of kilometres, are almost unimaginable. To make sure there was no chance of them attacking their guards, the strongest men were driven along while wearing the ‘sheba’, a wooden double-Y collar that bound two men together, limiting their movement. If a slaved damaged his foot, he kept moving forward, as long as he could. If he collapsed, not feeling the scourge of the ‘kurbash,’ the hippopotamus-leather whip, he was simply left there [to become one of the many camel and human skeletons that showed the route of the caravans, even when Almásy was travelling it]. The vultures accompanying the caravan ended things for the unlucky soul quick enough.

Gordon Pasha, sent to Sudan by the Egyptian viceroy Ismail Khedive from 1874 to 1879 to end the slave trade, reported that of the 80,000 to 100,000 slaves sent yearly from Darfur, only 7,000 to 8,000 made it alive to Assiut.”

Enkephalitis … Перельман is my homeboy … Obstipation 14th of June, 2010 POST·MERIDIEM 03:56

Minor language detail that I haven’t seen documented elsewhere, so I may as well write it up here. In English, in RCSI and as far as I can tell in the other medical schools in Ireland, the Greek root ‘ceph’ (from κεφαλή, ‘head’), is usually pronounced as /kɛf/. So ‘anencephaly’ is /ænənˈkɛfəlɪ/, ‘cephalosporin’ is /ˈkɛfælɔspoʊɹɪn/. One example of encephalitis written to reflect this spelling, by someone who’s apparently not a medic, is here; the original poster writes the word ‘enkephalitis’. The OED doesn’t list this pronunciation at all, so I’ve no idea of its age.

On another subject entirely, for any nerds who remain reading this, it occurred to me back in aught-six, after reading this, that the world needs a tshirt that says “Перельман is my homeboy”, in the same spirit as the comic’s “Knuth is my homeboy” shirt. All these years later, to that end, zazzle.ie have such a tshirt; surprisingly difficult to achieve, given most of the online tshirt templating places don’t accept Cyrillic text!

Word of the day: obstipation has nothing to do with fruit; instead, it means constipation that is so serious the patient can’t pass wind.

Afghan keyboard layouts for Windows XP, Vista, etc. 7th of June, 2010 POST·MERIDIEM 02:34

Michael Everson and Roozbeh Pournader wrote up a document back in 2003, describing the keyboard layouts that they proposed for Afghanistan under the aegis of the UN. In May this year, Michael Kaplan of Microsoft said that the data provided in that document didn’t help in providing those layouts on Windows; so to that end, I’ve put up those keyboard layouts in the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator format. They’re available here:

• Pashto: source, binary (suitable for install on a Windows machine).
• Dari (the Persian of Afghanistan): source, binary.
• Uzbek (in Arabic script): source, binary.

The files are all public domain.

Ptomaine … Ponseti club-foot technique and the internet 1st of March, 2010 POST·MERIDIEM 10:18

An amusing bit of indignant commentary (after my own heart, I admit!) from James Murray in the OED here :

ptomaine (pt–, ˈtəʊmeɪaɪn, ˈtəʊmeɪn). Chem. 
[ad. It. ptomaina,  erroneously formed by Professor Selmi of Bologna, f. Gr. πτωμα fallen body, corpse; see –INE⁵.
As the Gr. combining stem is πτωματ–, the correct form of the word would be ptomatine. 
Prof. Selmi’s first paper in Annali di Chimica  (1876) LXII. 165, announced the body as ‘la potomaina  o prima alcaloide dei cadaveri’; but this was partly corrected in his work of 1878 to ptomaina;  it is to be regretted that the full correction to ptomatine  was not made at its reception into English, which would also have prevented the rise of the illiterate pronunciation (təʊˈmeɪn) like domain.  —J.A.H.M.]
The generic name of certain alkaloid bodies found in putrefying animal and vegetable matter, some of which are very poisonous.
1880 Year-bk. Pharmacy  40 The identification of these alkaloidal substances, or ptomaines,  is of great interest to toxicologists.
1881 Pharmaceutical Jrnl.  28 May 984/2 The discovery of Professor Selmi as to the formation of the poisonous alkaloids, which he calls ptomaïnes, in the human body after death.
1884 Athenæum  28 Apr. 534/3 These ‘cadaveric’ alkaloids, or ‘ptomaines’ as they have also been called. 1891 Lancet  3 Oct. 752 The chemical ferments produced in the system, the albumoses or ptomaines which may exercise so disastrous an influence.

And this is encouraging, an unequivocal instance where the internet has changed medical practice for the better:

Acceptance [of the Ponseti technique] by orthopaedic surgeons has been encouraged by parents who use the internet to seek out surgeons who use this technique. Parents prefer the more non-surgical approach and can become strong advocates for the technique.

There is an awful lot of decrying of haphazardly-informed patients with net connections in the literature from the first few years of the century, and this sort of thing is great to see.

The headline here is less encouraging, it seems to have been written by someone who didn’t quite read the article; ‘meritocracy is still elitist’ would have been a better phrasing. The article itself is interesting for its insights into Britain, if you’re lucky enough to be able to read the whole thing.

Rübezahl … Dublin’s wild west … Švejk … Skorzeny … This Lovely Life 3rd of February, 2010 POST·MERIDIEM 11:11

Maybe if I write something about Rübezahl, the bearded, male spirit of the Sudeten mountains, I won’t forget who he is a second time (he comes up in Švejk when describing one of the characters). Anyway, I think writing stuff here helps my memory, or at least my memory for non-medical things, so I will attempt not to leave it get remotely as long before I post something again. Also, this isn’t Фейсбук, and it’s good to do online things that are not Фейсбук.

So, I’m still in medical school, it’s still interesting, they’re going a little easier on us (or on me; many of the others in the class had more of a natural sciences background when starting), and we actually had a Christmas holiday worth the name this year, the exams were scheduled before it, not after it. I’m in Blanchardstown, a young suburb of Dublin with a well-furnished hospital, where we attend lectures and go on attachment to various teams, standing around while Actual Doctors solve people’s problems. Have started an application for the USMLE Step 1, intending to take it in early September, and if I can actually manage to register for it (there are, let’s say, local, under-communicated hurdles) I’ll have a very, umm, academic summer.

I read The Good Soldier Švejk, as mentioned above, in German translation by Grete Reiner, and the language was hard going; my German is from Berlin, and the book, very correctly, was translated into an Austrian German. I snorted, and laughed, and I’m glad I read it; I am certain, though, that I missed lots of what would have sent someone with a background closer to Hašek’s into paroxysms of laughter. I’m lucky enough to be able to read Flann O’Brien with that advantage, so I’m regretful that I can’t do it for this.

From Hašek to someone else born in Austria-Hungary, but who couldn’t be more different in allegiances and personality—I followed up Švejk with Otto Skorzeny’s autobiography. Skorzeny, before running a sheep farm in the Curragh, was an enthusiastic Nazi and an excellent soldier, most known for spiriting away Mussolini from the care of the government that succeeded his in Rome. His (Skorzeny’s) intelligence comes through in the text, but it’s clear that he’s doer, not a writer (or perhaps it’s clear that good editors wanted nothing to do with the book!), and he describes fighting a war in an engaged, committed way that no-one in Hašek’s book comes close to. It is a losing war, though, and the tone of the book reflects that in a way that none of the war memoirs in English I read as a teenager do (e.g. the various Colditz books, or Pierre Clostermann’s The Big Show ).

Of the various medical journal papers and columns that came up in my syndication reader over the last few months, this book review struck me, especially; there’s an awful lot of work done these days to keep alive premature babies, which is great when the child is healthy, but when all that work means a child survives who is not going to have any sort of quality of life, who is going to demand years of herculean committment from its parents eventually followed by dying young, and—most relevantly here—when their parents pleaded against the artificial resuscitation of their premature, very low birth-weight twins at their birth, the laws that forced that need some revision. Or maybe hard cases make bad law, but it does seem that the law was actually aimed at this case. Shhh, for a limited time only, the text of the BMJ article is here.

Word of the day: a carminative is an agent that promotes flatulence; the German is Karminativum, the Spanish carminativo.