10/8/22
Newsletter121
The Crack of Dawn
Getting cadavers so that medical students can learn anatomy and practice surgery has always been a difficult task. There were no medical schools in America until the mid-1800s primarily because the Puritans and Quakers who started this country wouldn’t even consider the idea of letting their dead be “defiled.” In 1881 France took the first crack at building the Panama Canal, which theoretically didn’t seem like that big of a deal – it’s only 50 miles long – compared to the recently completed Suez Canal that was 120 miles long. The difference being that the Suez Canal is located in a completely flat open area; the Panama Canal is across 50 miles of the densest, most insect-ridden jungle on the planet. Immediately, due to venomous snakes, insects, and spiders, yellow fever, malaria, and other tropical diseases, they began losing native workers at a rate was over 200 per month. The ground was so swampy they couldn’t bury the bodies and didn’t know what to do with them. Then someone had the brilliant idea: let’s sell the corpses to medical schools all over the world. So, as barrels of rum were imported and consumed, they would then stuff cadavers into the barrels and ship them back out. In the eight years the French worked on the canal, before giving up, the only income they ever produced was from selling thousands of cadavers. The Americans took over the building of the canal in 1904, at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt, and it was completed in 1914.
Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest U.S. president ever at 42 years old, as well as the most prolific, having written 28 books. His first book, The Naval War of 1812, was published in 1882 when he was 24. He might very well have been the smartest president, too. He was also from an exceptionally wealthy family that manufactured plate glass at the time when buildings were just getting bigger and bigger. He had everything going for him; what could possibly go wrong? At the age of 25, when Teddy had just entered politics as an assemblyman, both his mother and his wife died on the same day in the same house. Teddy gave up politics and decided to go west and become a cowboy. Luckily for him, having long fantasized about being a cowboy, he had tailor-made buckskin outfits, Colt pistols with engraved handles, and a Winchester rifle with a stock decorated in mother of pearl by Tiffany. Believing that his public life was over, Teddy spent the next couple of years ranching in North Dakota. But Teddy was wrong, his public life was not over. In the next 20 years Teddy would be: Police Chief of NYC, Governor of NY, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the rough riding hero of the Spanish-American War, Vice-President, then the youngest president. It’s good he didn’t give up.
Good day to one and all.