While reading about something totally unrelated I came across a brief history of Walter Jackson Freeman II and the lobotomy. I was telling people at work all the fascinating facts; the guy who invented this form of brain damage won the Nobel prize for doing so, that the surgery was done with no anaethetic but with a hammer, that many patients died. They sat and believed all this. But they all went searching google because they couldn’t believe that Dr Freeman called his personal van the lobotomobile. Too good to be true, eh?
Surely there must be more equally fascinating snippets of information.
A duck’s quack does not echo.
BUSTED
When examined by an audio-expert, it was found that the echo was “swallowed” by the original quack, due to the very similar acoustic structure between the quack and the echo. Because of this, it may be difficult to tell where the quack ends and the echo begins.
I’ve read about him a few times over the years. If you really go digging you can find videos of the surgeries being done. They aren’t for the faint of heart.
The experiments of Donald Ewen Cameron were quite something. I remember reading of a woman seeing him for a mild case of post natal depression and ending up having multiple EST, being given huge doses of
LSD and then being kept in an induced sleep for months to test his theories.
On a lighter note, there’s the Barbados v Grenada Caribbean Cup soccer match from 1994 when, for reasons explained here Grenada were trying to score a goal at either end of the pitch while Barbados were trying to stop them.
…and he was born in the 1700s. Man born in the 18th century has children in the 19th century who have children born in the 20th century who are alive in the 21st. Two successive generations of men who’ve been able to say “Yeah, dad was born the century before last”. :eek:
Trading scuttlebutt by the office water cooler is rooted in history. On sailing ships of the 19th century and before, the scuttlebutt (a barrel with a hole at the bottom) was the water cooler.
