Ink Bottle Research Articles

Teaching Plant Collecting in a Beginning Botany Course

Many high school and college graduates with an interest in plants have recently found themselves thrust suddenly into the midst of an entirely new plant environment. At home they knew most of the common plants about them, as quackgrass, spring beauties, sugar maples, and many others, but in their new locations they cannot even say with certainty that the palm which shades them. as they write letters home is a coconut palm. As for the branching tree against which they lean their rifles-well, they may have heard of banyans and seen pictures of multitrunked trees, but that was just a queer idea pictured in their botany textbooks years ago. Encouragingly, many of these erstwhile youngsters have a gnawing curiosity about these strange plants around them, and are burning with a desire to know their names. But there is no one at hand to tell them, and, so far as they know, there is no one on earth who can help theni out. If they do happen to recall some beloved teacher whom they think might know, how are they to convey an idea of each of these objects of curiosity, so that they will be recognized? In school they were taught to examine cross sections of leaves and stems or watch the sap' rise in a white geranium set in a bottle of green ink. If they advanced a little farther, perhaps they learned how to identify flowers with a specially prepared local spring flora or even struggled about a bit with Gray's Manual. But all they learned in two or three courses will not help them to identify a Polynesian chestnut (Inocarpus edulis) or a Portia tree (Thespesia populnea). Their problem, however, is very simple if they only knew it-namely, to send a properly prepared herbarium specimen to any of several institutions in this country for identification. The reason they do not know this solution is doubtless because they have never seen herbarium specimens nor been shown their significance and use, and, what is more important, they have never learned to prepare them. And that is the subject of this paper. With the development around the beginning of this century of several new branches of botany, such as cytology, ecology, genetics, and the like, beginninig botany courses became crowded. The naming of plants and the making of individual student herbaria, which were usually ilncluded in beginning courses before that time, were now omittel. Taxonomy was relegated to a minor place toward the end of the course, and the students departed without even carrying away a notebook full of dried specimens to gather dust and insects in the attic at home. The college herbarium, if indeed there was one, came to be looked upon by the students, and even most faculty members, as a mixed haystack, where old fogies were busy digging for new species and the adjacent libraries were merely places where these round-shouldered abnormalities hunted for prior names to replace the long known designations of even our familiar plants. The complacency and busy

Foreign Body (Bottle) in Rectum

The following case is considered of sufficient interest to merit addition to the increasing list of medical curiosities. The unusual nature of the foreign body stimulated our interest in searching the literature for similar oddities. The reader is referred to the appended bibliography for equally interesting cases. C. K., a white American sailor, aged 31, entered the accident ward, Jan. 24, 1943, complaining of pain in the lower abdomen, inability to have a bowel movement, and bleeding from the bowel on attempting defecation. On the preceding day he had drunk himself into an alcoholic coma and remembered no more until the morning of admission. At that time he made several attempts to satisfy an overwhelming desire to defecate but was unsuccessful. On “bearing down” he observed a trickle of blood from his rectum. Through self examination he felt a hard object inside the anal orifice. Through a rectal speculum the bottom of a bottle was seen approximately 3 cm. from the anal orifice. The abdomen was tender. Pain was aggravated by deep breathing, coughing, and sneezing. Roentgenographic examination showed the bottle to be in the sigmoid and iliac colon with its open end pointing upwards. Calculi were also noted in the gallbladder area. Under spinal anesthesia the bottle was extracted manually by Dr. J. Surver of the Department of Surgery. The anus was dilated and all of the fingers of one hand could be placed inside of the rectum to grasp the bottle and effect its removal. Following the “delivery” the abdomen remained tender for three days but there was no elevation of temperature or pulse rate. In a week all symptoms subsided and the patient was discharged. A review of the literature on foreign bodies in the rectum shows this to be the eighth recorded case in which a bottle was present (1, 2, 3, 4, 19). The most remarkable among the foreign bodies reported in the literature up to the present date are: a snuff-box (1); whiskey glasses (1, 5, 6, 7, 17, 18); a 30-cm. mortar pestle (1); ox horns (1, 8); electric light bulbs (9, 10); an ink bottle (11); a vaseline bottle (12); a cold cream jar and lemon (13); an apple (14); chicken bones (15); glass tube (16); portion of a broom handle (17); frozen pig's tail (1); tool box containing a piece of gun barrel, a screw driver, two hacksaws, a boring syringe, a file, several coins, thread and tallow (1). The tool box and its contents were removed from a prisoner who made his escape through death from obstipation. At autopsy the tool kit was found to have migrated into the transverse colon. Some of the methods of extracting these foreign bodies have been most ingenious. In the case of the pig's tail, held in the anus of a French prostitute by shortly cropped bristles, the passage of a lubricated hollow willow, into the anus around the foreign body, with subsequent removal of both willow and tail, speaks well for the ingenuity of 16th-century surgeons.

PHENOL POISONING FROM INK

E. M., a girl, aged 18, a shoe worker, was brought to us, July 10, with multiple second degree burns on her face, neck and breasts. The patient stated that her work was the numbering and lettering of pieces of leather used in the manufacture of shoes. In opening a bottle of the marking ink, she splashed a liberal quantity over her body. Water and a common alkali soap were used in an attempt to remove the ink stains. When seen by us, the patient, in addition to extensive burns over the major portion of her face, neck and chest, was depressed, weak and suffering from a headache, and presented an increased heart rate with a feeble pulse. Her condition of collapse was out of proportion to the extent of external injury. An odor of phenol (carbolic acid) was present on the patient's clothing, and it was established that this

3. German Retrospect.

Dr. H. Lissauer (“Archiv. für Psychiatrie,” xxi. Band, 1 Heft) details a case of soul-blindness (Seelenblindheit), and then sets himself to clear up our conception of what this deficiency really is. It is through the hope of this latter promise being fulfilled that I have pored through the fifty pages of the “Archiv.,” and after performing such a task one feels reluctant to admit that his labour has been in vain. Munk, whose experiments first led to the conception of soul-blindness, believes that the power of receiving the impression from visual images as well as the seat of the memory of these images is located in the occipital lobe. Reinhard thinks that the perception of space and form is dependent upon the integrity of the superficial layer of the visual zone. Wilbrand assigns to one spot in the cortex the recognition of optical images, and to an adjoining part of the cortex the memory of such images. In the published cases describing the results following injury to the occipital lobe, there is noted a loss of visual power, but it is not clearly defined what this loss consists in. The case described by Lissauer was a man 80 years of age, of a neurotic constitution, but good general health considering his age. He had suffered for two years from attacks of giddiness, and sometimes fell on the ground. The intelligence seemed on the whole to be well preserved, though there was some loss of memory, and in relating old stories he confused the sequence of time. There was presbyopia and complete right-sided hemiopia. The parting line of vision lay a little to the right of the fixation point, so that central vision was preserved in both eyes. The sense of colours remained good, and he could write quite well, but he had in great part lost the faculty of recognizing objects by sight, though when he was allowed to use his other senses he soon made them out. The vision of stereoscopic objects was destroyed, but when one needle was laid upon another he could tell which was the nearest to him, and he generally took the measure of objects correctly. The power of reading was nearly destroyed; he could not even read what he had written a short time before, and the capacity for drawing known objects was much impaired. The old man was interested in his own case, and readily lent himself to inquiries and experiments, the results of which are given in detail. For example, a candle was held before him; he said it was a drawing pencil, and at last made it out correctly. A clothes brush being shown to him, he said it was a cat, and it being objected that it was too small for a cat, he said it was an artificial cat. He then pointed out where the head, tail, and four paws were; but on touching it he at once said that it was a clothes brush. On being shown a cow and calf, he said it was a young and old animal; then he said “cattle.” On being asked, Where is the head? he pointed to the hinder part of the cow. On being asked where the horns were, he indicated them correctly. On being shown a coffee mill, he said it was an ink bottle; but when the handle was turned he immediately recognized it. Being shown a picture of the Emperor William, he said it is “our Kaiser, the old one.” He also recognized at once a picture of Napoleon.