Drunken Man Research Articles

ROBERT BURTON ON MATERNAL IMPRESSIONS (1621)

Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), one of the two books favored above all others by Sir William Osler, has ironically become one of the great entertainments among English writings. The irony, however, is accidental, because Burton, a joyful pessimist, wrote what has been called "undeniably one of the oddest, wittiest, and most learned books in English literature."1 Osler described the Anatomy as "the greatest medical treatise written by a layman."2 An example of Burton's views on the importance of maternal impressions, which would have been thoroughly approved of by the learned physicians of his day, follows:3 If she be over-dull, heavy, angry, peevish, discontented and melancholy, not only at the time of conception, but even all the while she carries the child in her womb, her son will be so likewise affected, and worse, as Lemnius adds, if she grieve over much, be disquieted, or by any casualty be affrighted and terrified by some fearful object heard or seen, she endangers her child, and spoils the temperature [temperament] of it; for the strange imagination of a woman works effectually upon her infant, that...she leaves a mark upon it, which is most especially seen in such as prodigiously long for such and such meats; the child will love those meats... and be addicted to like humours. If a great-bellied woman see a hare, her child will often have an hare-lip, as we call it. Garcaeus hath a memorable example of one Thomas Nichell, born in the city of Brandenburg, 1551, "that went reeling and staggering all the days of his life, as if he would fall to the ground, because his mother being great with child saw a drunken man reeling in the street."

The salvation of a drunk

This article examines a spectacular cultural event—the religious conversion of a drunken man at a Pentecostal worship service in Bermuda. The statements and actions of the congregation reveal both an empirical awareness of the man's profuse vomiting and a religious understanding of his symptoms as the manifestation of a dramatic struggle between Jesus and Satan. The playful aspects of Pentecostal ritual throw light on how these two orders of meaning are phenomenologically related and provide the basis of a hermeneutic analysis that allows generalization and comparison.

Wilkes Booth Came to Washington , and: The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (review)

BOOK REVIEWS183 Sherman and the Burning of Columbia. By Marion Brunson Lucas. (College Station: Texas A and M University Press, 1976. Pp. 188. $10.95.) On February 17, 1865, the Federal army of General William Tecumseh Sherman occupied Columbia, South Carolina. By the next morning approximately one-third of the city lay in smouldering ruins, a great fire having raged uncontrolled throughout the night. The origin of the fire has been the subject of considerable controversy from the day it occurred. Confederates blamed Sherman and his drunken men for the holocoust. Sherman in turn accused Confederate General Wade Hampton, whose cavalry withdrew from the capital city shortly before the arrival of the Federal troops. Professor Marion Lucas has with scholarly detachment attempted to find out what really happened and why. After examining all available material on the subject, he concluded that the destruction of Columbia was not the result of a single act or events of a single day. Neither was it the work of an individual or a group. Instead it was the "culmination of eight days of riots, robbery, pillage, confusion and fires, all of which were the byproducts of war. The event was surrounded by coincidence, misjudgment, and accident" (p. 163). It is impossible, he maintains, to determine with certainty the origin of the fire. "The most probable explanation was that it began from the burning cotton on Richardson street" (p. 165). Columbia at this time was a virtual firetrap because of the hundreds of cotton bales in her streets. Some of these had been ignited before Sherman arrived and a high wind spread the flamable substance over the city. Also, poorly disciplined Federal troops, many of whom were intoxicated, became incendiaries . This splendid little volume should put to rest forever the question of who burned the capital city of South Carolina. The author has presented a convincing case that the tragic events of February 17 were "an accident of war" with both Confederates and Federals sharing the responsibility for what happened. John G. Barrett Virginia Military Institute Wilkes Booth Came to Washington. By Larry Starkey. (New York: Random House, 1976. Pp. xiii, 209. $7.95.) The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age. By Charles E. Rosenberg. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968. Pp. xvii, 289. Paper, $4.95.) There once was a happy time when Americans regarded political assassination as an exotic custom practiced in despotisms but 184CIVIL WAR history unthinkable in a popular republic such as ours. Time and sad experience have modified this naive view, and today assassination is not only an ever-present possibility, it has also become a flourishing sub-genre of the publishing industry. With an eye to recent events, the publisher's blurb for Wilkes Booth Came to Washington boldly promises fresh revelations of conspiracy and of "the Government's century-old cover-up." The author, more modestly, admits that he has "no startling new information " nor any "hitherto-undisclosed revelations" to offer. He has, instead, a theory. John Wilkes Booth, a "very decent and young man who felt obligated to do what he believed a patriot should do," was part of a Confederate cabal headquartered in Montreal which intended to precipitate a war between the United States and Great Britain. Booth's mission was to assassinate President Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward and then flee to Canada. The Canadian government would refuse to extradite the murderer, forcing an enraged United States to invade its northern neighbor which would, in turn, bring Great Britain and France into the war on the side of the Confederacy. Only the accident of Booth's broken leg, which kept him from escaping to his intended destination, prevented this scheme from being carried out. This is an interesting speculation, but a trifle thin to support an entire book. Starkey, consequently, is compelled to pad out the volume with irrelevant digressions, imaginary conversations and gratuitous excursions into tangential topics. He could instead, one supposes, offer proof for his theory but such proof, he sadly confesses , is lacking. Also conspicuously lacking is adequate documentation for such facts as Starkey does assert. The reader must take his claims...

Secret camera—the photography of Horace Engle

Abstract Snap-shooting became practical with the appearance of the commercial dry plate, but serious photographers continued to use the tripod as the camera support of choice. The user of a hand-held camera was something of an adventurer, like the early 20th century news photographer, Jimmy Hare, who, his biographer claims", was one of the first, if not the first, to use a camera hand-held. The event occurred in England in 1882 at a celebration of the centenary of free ballooning. Hare's attempt to use a tripod-mounted camera for a picture of an ascension was thwarted by the unpredicatable movements of spectators and balloon. In the words of Cecil Carnes: 'The huge bag was duly inflated, but the moment it left the ground Jimmy's troubles began. With its first sensation of buoyancy, the balloon began to lurch hither and yon with the stability of a drunken man on stilts. As he tried vainly to keep it in focus long enough to make the exposure, Jimmy's camera spun on its tripod as weirdly as the gas bag itself, and whenever he thought he had it quiet for a second, the excited spectators in front of him would get their silly fat heads bobbing up and down before the lens.

Sample Remuneration Survey

'He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp–posts – for support rather than illumination' (Andrew Lang). The country has continued to suffer from a very high rate of inflation since the sample salary survey conducted by The Institute of Physics at the beginning of 1975 (see Physics Bulletin May 1975 p208).

Drinking Patterns and Attitudes of Irish, Jewish and White Protestant American Men

Questionnaires were mailed to 2,160 persons selected from the Oakland, Calif., telephone directory; 1,212 (58%) were completed and returned and of these 224 Irish, 187 Jewish and 344 White Protestant questionnaires were selected for analysis. Of the 187 Jews, 52% had completed college and 52% had incomes of $10,000 or more, compared with 37 and 39% of the White Protestants and 28 and 35% of the Irish. The hypothesis to be tested was that the custom of frequent excessive drinking provides more fertile ground for the development of alcoholism than if drunkenness is rare. Daily drinking was reported by 36% of the Irish, 26% of the White Protestants and 18% of the Jews; drinking 3 or more drinks at a time 4 or more evenings a week was reported by 17%, 13% and 3%, respectively; and intoxication at least once in the last few months by 32%, 22% and 13%. Among those drinking 3 or more drinks at least 3 times a week, 52% of the Irish and 50% of the Jews report having been intoxicated, suggesting that among those who drink frequent substantial amounts a risk of problem drinking exists independently of cultural identity. Among the Irish, 50% were either abstainers (9%) or in the 2 highest drinking categories, whereas only 20% of the Jews were abstainers (4%) or in the highest drinking categories, suggesting a lack of uniformity in Irish drinking customs. Among the Irish, religion did not make a significant difference in drinking patterns: 26% of the Irish Catholics with Catholic wives and 26% of the Irish Protestants with Protestant wives reported recent intoxication. The Irish more consistently reported recent intoxication than either Protestants or Jews of the same education, income and age. Fewer first generation Irish (20%) and Jews (4%) reported intoxication than second (25 and 14%) or third generation (32 and 24%). But ethnic differences were not so apparent among the younger respondents with at least 1 parent born in the U. S. A.; all seem to be allowed to drink heavily; whereas in older respondents ethnicity was influential regardless of generation in U. S. A. Little differences in drinking patterns were found between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews, although more Jews with no affiliation had been intoxicated (17%) than Reform (11%) or Conservative (12%). True—false answers to questions on attitudes toward drunkenness elicited surprisingly few differences: 45% of the Irish, 51% of the Protestants and 55% of the Jews regarded “drunks” as perfectly harmless, while 69, 75 and 61% thought the drunken man a disgusting sight. This apparent similarity might be a result of different definitions of drunkenness; in a further study of attitudes in a different sample (22 Jews, 75 Protestants and 69 Irish) using an open-ended questionnaire, fewer Jews (5%) than Protestants (9%) or Irish (8%) were sympathetic toward intoxicated persons, more Jews (65 vs. 44 and 36%) definitely disapproved, but fewer Jews (15 vs. 17 and 17%) expressed strong disapproval. Evidently Jews are less likely to approve and more likely to disapprove mildly of drunkenness than Irish and Protestants, but are also in general less likely to express intolerance.

The Nature of the Gerund and Participle

THE GERUND and the participle are related through membership in a class of verbs which is not limited by person, number, and mood. Thus they are called 'infinites.' They were originally distinguished by the fact that the gerund was a verbal noun, ending in -ing, and, until about I25o, -ung, and the participle a verbal adjective, ending in -ende, -inde, -ynde, -ande. The suffix distinctions have gradually disappeared. There is less distinction in the parts of speech. Their similarities have increased. This paper will be confined to a statement regarding these similarities. It will not deal with historical development, nor with dissimilarity. It will deal with the functions, the characteristics, and the forms of the gerund and the participle, and will lead toward a conclusion regarding classification and nomenclature. A common function of the participle is indicated in the expressions 'a grasping nature,' 'the breaking waves,' 'his laughing eyes.' The fiunction is that of an adjective, the sense is that of a verb. Sometimes, at the moment of use, the verb sense has lessened, and the word seems almost a pure adjective, as in the expressions 'she had polished manners' and 'informed persons do not hold such views.' In the case of perfect participles, where the old -en form is used, the sense of verbness has almost entirely disappeared and the participle is thought of as purely adjectival: 'a cloven hoof; 'a graven image'; 'a drunken man.' Other perfect endings which seem to impart almost a pure adjective use are seen in the statements 'a clean-shaved face' and 'the wind-swept plains.' Thus, it is evident that the ending -ing lends a greater verb sense than the endings -en, -ed, -t (as in burnt), and an irregular like swept. The ending -ed seems to have more verb sense than the ending -en. The expression 'a cleanshaved face' has more verbness than 'a clean-shaven face.' 'A wind-swept hill' has a surprisingly small amount of verb action. The expression is mostly adjectival. But in 'the running water' there is action, and the action is continuing. Completedness and passivity tend to remove the verb sense from a participle. Sometimes it is the nature of the use and not the ending or the form of the word that increases or lessens its verb sense. 'The split wood' has more of the verb in it than 'a split personality' has. This is probably due to a semantic change. Thus, it is apparent from the above instances that when endings other than -ing are employed, the participle loses its verb sense and becomes almost a pure adjective, and gets further away from the gerund.

Discussion on "Sampling inspection and quality control" at the London Section of the Institution

ME. W. PUCKBY (Chairman) : It has been said that statistics to the engineer are like a lamp-post to a drunken man, for support rather than illumination, and I feel that the illumination arising out of Dr. Dudding's most interesting talk will begin to dawn on us more in a few days' time, when we have had an opportunity of thinking more fully about this matter than we have been able to do at the moment. With that object in view, the Institution is most anxious to give the fullest publicity to this very interesting lecture, and to give all its members and others interested a full opportunity of weighing up the pros and cons and attempting, we hope, to put into practice some of the theoretical points which have been brought forward.

The Problem of the Random Walk

THIS problem, proposed by Prof. Karl Pearson in the current number of NATURE, is the same as that of the composition of n iso-periodic vibrations of unit amplitude and of phases distributed at random, considered in Phil. Mag., x., p. 73, 1880; xlvii., p. 246, 1899; (“Scientific Papers,” i., p. 491, iv., p. 370). If n be very great, the probability sought is In the warm summer months of 1905, Karl Pearson was perplexed by the problem of the random walk. He appealed to the readers of Nature for a solution as the problem was - as it still is - “of considerable interest”. The random walk, also known as the drunkard’s walk, is central to probability theory and still occupies the mathematical mind today. Among Pearson’s respondents was Lord Rayleigh, whose assistance led Pearson to conclude that “the most probable place to find a drunken man who is at all capable of keeping on his feet is somewhere near his starting point!”.

THE FATTY AND FIBROID DEGENERATIONS.

ALCOHOL A CAUSE OF FATTY DEGENERATION. The use of alcohol is so common that this subject would not be well treated were not an allusion made to the effect of alcohol in producing fatty degeneration. Systemic writers so put it, and there is good reason, for alcohol is CHO while fat is CHO in varied proportion. Both are hydrocarbons and convertible with very little change in proportion. Alcohol acutely produces what fatty and fibrous degeneration produce chronically. Drunkenness may well sometimes be called acute locomotor ataxy, and insanity, acute softening of the brain, acute paralysis and want of coordination. The mental vagaries of a drunken man are like those of people paralyzed more or less, so much so that people paralyzed from fatty brain degeneration have been mistaken and locked up as drunkards. Some years ago a Mayor of a New Hampshire city was found in the Boston and Lowell