I have mentioned before the long-standing medical trope of first blaming the victim of an illness before identifying its real causes. To cholera (blamed on loose morals), drug addictions (blamed on weakness of will), stomach ulcers (blamed on a personal inability to handle stress), chronic fatigue syndrome (blamed on laziness), and repetitive strain injury (blamed on deception, or even self-deception), we may soon be able to add obesity and schizophrenia.
The contemporary developed world obesity epidemic has always struck me as being too widespread and occurring too fast to be due simply to a lack of self-discipline by lots of individuals. Current medical advice is for individuals to eat less and exercise more, advice given despite the experimental evidence showing that increasing exercise actually may increase weight (on average), rather than reducing it. And advice given despite the fact – known for at least 150 years, since the work of Claude Bertrand – that our bodies are complex adaptive systems, whose properties do not conform to simple linear models; for example, eating less may lead the body to retain more of the nutrients of the food ingested, because of a body-weight set-point effect, and thus not lead to much weight loss at all. We already have evidence that appetite may have genetic determinants. Now, it seems that the obesity epidemic may have environmental or social causes, since as well as humans in the developed world putting on weight, so too have animals. The animal species studied include not only pets and zoo animals (whose diets may have been influenced directly by human feeding), but also wild animals living near humans.
And schizophrenia, which once was blamed on poor parenting by the mothers of patients, and later on the patient’s genes (and who, Mothers, gave them those?), may in fact be caused by a virus – a retrovirus, present in our and our ancestors’ DNA for some 60 million years. It turns out this is the same retrovirus that is believed by some scientists to cause Multiple Sclerosis. A virus as cause could explain why there is a persistent, and statistically significant, effect on the incidence of schizophrenia arising from the season of birth of the patient. Neither genes nor a mother’s parenting style would be expected to be influenced by the season of birth, but virus lifecycles, activations, durations and diffusions, certainly are.
The standard line initially of the medical panjandrums on RSI was that this medical condition only seemed to affect office workers, and not others who worked a lot with their hands, such as musicians. The implication of such a statement was that the causes of RSI could not be some objective condition, outside of the patient, and so must be internal, either psychosomatic or actually knowingly invented. Yet, musicians for at least a couple of centuries have been suffering from RSI (or closely-related conditions), as anyone who asked them would know.
When the medical profession is ready to apologize to us all for wrongly accusing us of moral failings, weakness of will, or malfeasance, I’ll be here ready and waiting. I’m not, however, holding my breath.
Author Archive for peter
Page 51 of 85
Syntax Attacks
Thanks to the ever-watchful Normblog, I encounter an article by Colin Tatz inveighing against talk about sport. Norm is right to call Tatz to account for writing nonsense – talk about sport is just as meaningful as talk about politics, history, religion, nuclear deterrence, genocide, or any other real-world human activity. Tatz says:
Sport is international phatic but also a crucial Australian (male) vehicle. It enables not just short, passing greetings but allows for what may seem like deep, passionate and meaningful conversations but which in the end are unmemorable, empty, producing nothing and enhancing no one.
Unmemorable?! Really? What Australian could forget Norman May’s shouted “Gold! Gold for Australia! Gold!” commentary at the end of the men’s 400-metre swimming medley at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Only a churlish gradgrind could fail to be enhanced by hearing this. And what Australian of a certain age could forget the inimitable footie commentary of Rex Mossop, including, for example, such statements as, “That’s the second consecutive time he’s done that in a row one straight after the other.” Mossop’s heat-of-the-moment sporting talk was commemorated with his many winning places in playwright Alex Buzo’s Australian Indoor Tautology Pennant, an annual competition held, as I recall, in Wagga Wagga, Gin Gin and Woy Woy (although not in Woop Woop or in The Never Never), before moving internationally to exotic locations such as Pago Pago, Xai Xai and Baden Baden. Unmemorable, Mr Tatz? Enhancing no one? Really? To be clear, these are not memorable sporting events, but memorable sporting commentary. And all I’ve mentioned so far is sporting talk, not the great writers on baseball, on golf, on cricket, on swimming, . . .
But as well as misunderstanding what talk about sport is about and why it is meaningful, Tatz is wrong on another score. He says:
But why so much natter and clatter about sport? Eco’s answer is that sport “is the maximum aberration of ‘phatic’ speech”, which is really a negation of speech.
Phatic speech is meaningless speech, as in “G’day, how’s it going?” or “have a nice day” or “catch you later” — small talk phrases intended to produce a sense of sociability, sometimes uttered in the hope that it will lead to further and more real intercourse, but human enough even if the converse goes no further.
Phatic communications are about establishing and maintaining relationships between people. Such a purpose is the very essence of speech communication, not its negation. Tatz, I fear, has fallen into the trap of so many computer scientists – to focus on the syntax of messages, and completely ignore their semantics and pragmatics. The syntax of messages concerns their surface form, their logical structure, their obedience (or not) to rules which determine whether they are legal and well-formed statements (or not) in the language they purport to arise from. The semantics of utterances concerns their truth or falsity, in so far they describe real objects in some world (perhaps the one we all live in, or some past, future or imagined world), while their pragmatics concerns those aspects of their meaning unrelated to their truth status (for example, who has power to revoke or retract them).
I have discussed this syntax-is-all-there-is mistake before. I believe the root causes of this mistaken view are two-fold: the mis-guided focus of philosophers these last two centuries on propositions to the exclusion of other types of utterances and statements (of which profound error Terry Eagleton has shown himself guilty), and the mis-guided view that we now live in some form of Information Society, a view which wrongly focuses attention on the information transferred by utterances to the exclusion of any other functions that utterances may serve or any other things we agents (people and machines) may be doing and aiming to do when we talk. If you don’t believe me about the potentially complex functionality of utterances, even when viewed as nothing more than the communication of factual propositions, then read this simple example.
If communications were only about the transfer of explicit information, then life would be immensely less interesting. It would also not be human life, for we would be no more intelligent than desktop computers passing HTTP requests and responses to one another.
Distributed cognition
Some excerpts from an ethnographic study of the operations of a Wall Street financial trading firm, bearing on distributed cognition and joint-action planning:
This emphasis on cooperative interaction underscores that the cognitive tasks of the arbitrage trader are not those of some isolated contemplative, pondering mathematical equations and connected only to to a screen-world. Cognition at International Securities is a distributed cognition. The formulas of new trading patterns are formulated in association with other traders. Truly innovative ideas, as one senior trader observed, are slowly developed through successions of discreet one-to-one conversations.
. . .
An idea is given form by trying it out, testing it on others, talking about it with the “math guys,” who, significantly, are not kept apart (as in some other trading rooms), and discussing its technical intricacies with the programmers (also immediately present).” (p. 265)
The trading room thus shows a particular instance of Castell’s paradox: As more information flows through networked connectivity, the more important become the kinds of interactions grounded in a physical locale. New information technologies, Castells (2000) argues, create the possibility for social interaction without physical contiguity. The downside is that such interactions can become repititive and programmed in advance. Given this change, Castells argues that as distanced, purposeful, machine-like interactions multiply, the value of less-directd, spontaneous, and unexpected interactions that take place in physical contiguity will become greater (see also Thrift 1994; Brown and Duguid 2000; Grabhar 2002). Thus, for example, as surgical techniques develop together with telecommunications technology, the surgeons who are intervening remotely on patients in distant locations are disproportionately clustering in two or three neighbourhoods of Manhattan where they can socialize with each other and learn about new techniques, etc.” (p. 266)
“One examplary passage from our field notes finds a senior trader formulating an arbitrageur’s version of Castell’s paradox:
“It’s hard to say what percentage of time people spend on the phone vs. talking to others in the room. But I can tell you the more electronic the market goes, the more time people spend communicating with others inside the room.” (p. 267)
Of the four statistical arbitrage robots, a senior trader observed:
“We don’t encourage the four traders in statistical arb to talk to each other. They sit apart in the room. The reason is that we have to keep diversity. We could really hammered if the different robots would have the same P&L [profit and loss] patterns and the same risk profiles.” (p. 283)
References:
Daniel Beunza and David Stark [2008]: Tools of the trade: the socio-technology of arbitrage in a Wall Street trading room. In: Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedborg (Editors): Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Chapter 8, pp. 253-290.
M. Castells [1996]: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Blackwell, Second Edition.
Anti-depressant
‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.’ “
Merlyn speaking to Wart in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone.
Good decisions
Which decisions are good decisions?
Since 1945, mainstream economists have arrogated the word “rational” to describe a mode of decision-making which they consider to be best. This method, called maximum-expected utility (MEU) decision-making, assumes that the decision-maker has only a finite set of possible action-options and that she knows what these are, that she knows the possible consequences of each of these actions and can quantify (or at least can estimate) these consequences, and can do so on a single, common, numerical scale of value (the payoffs), that she knows a finite and complete collection of uncertain events that are possible and which may impact the consequences and their values, and knows (or at least can estimate) the probabilities of these uncertain events, again on a common numerical scale of uncertainty. The MEU decision procedure is then to quantify the consequences of each action-option, weighting them by the relative likelihood of their arising according to their probabilities of the uncertain events which influence them.
The decision-maker then selects that action-option which has the maximum expected consequential value, ie the consequential value weighted by the probabilities of the uncertain events. Such decision-making, in an abuse of language that cries out for a criminal charges, is then called rational by economists. Bayesian statistician Dennis Lindley even wrote a book about MEU which included the stunningly-arrogant sentence, “The main conclusion [of this book] is that there is essentially only one way to reach a decision sensibly.”
Rational? This method is not even feasible, let alone sensible or good!
First, where do all these numbers come from? With the explicit assumptions that I have listed, economists are assuming that the decision-maker has some form of perfect knowledge. Well, no one making any real-world decisions has that much knowledge. Of course, economists often respond, estimates can be used when the knowledge is missing. But whose estimates? Sourced from where? Updated when? Anyone with any corporate or public policy experience knows straight away that consensus on such numbers for any half-way important problem will be hard to find. Worse than that, any consensus achieved should immediately be suspected and interrogated, since it may be evidence of groupthink. There simply is no certainty about the future, and if a group of people all do agree on what it holds, down to quantified probabilities and payoffs, they deserve the comeuppance they are likely to get!
Second, the MEU principle simply averages across uncertain events. What of action-options with potentially catastrophic outcomes? Their small likelihood of occurrence may mean they disappear in the averaging process, but no real-world decision-maker – at least, none with any experience or common sense – would risk a catastrophic outcome, despite their estimated low probabilities. Wall Street trading firms have off-street (and often off-city) backup IT systems, and sometimes even entire backup trading floors, ready for those rare events.
Third, look at all the assumptions not made explicit in this framework. There is no mention of the time allowed for the decision, so apparently the decision-maker has infinities of time available. No mention is made of the processing or memory resources available for making the decision, so she has infinities of world also. That makes a change from most real-world decisions: what a pleasant utopia this MEU-land must be. Nothing is said – at least nothing explicit – about taking into account the historical or other contexts of the decision, such as past decisions by this or related decision-makers, technology standards, legacy systems, organization policies and constraints, legal, regulatory or ethical constraints, or the strategies of the company or the society in which the decision-maker sits. How could a decision procedure which ignores such issues be considered, even for a moment, rational? I think only an academic could ignore context in this way; no business person I know would do so, since certain unemployment would be the result. And how could members of an academic discipline purporting to be a social science accept and disseminate a decision-making framework which ignores such social, contextual features?
And do the selected action-options just execute themselves? Nothing is said in this framework about consultation with stakeholders during the decision-process, so presumably the decision-maker has no one to report to, no board members or stockholders or division presidents or ward chairmen or electors to manage or inform or liaise with or mollify or reward or appease or seek re-election from, no technical departments to seek feasibility approval from, no implementation staff to motivate or inspire, no regulators or ethicists or corporate counsel to seek legal approval from, no funders or investors to raise finance from, no suppliers to convince to accept orders with, no distribution channels to persuade to schedule throughput with, no competitors to second-guess or outwit, and no actual, self-immolating protesters outside one’s office window to avert one’s eyes from and feel guilt about for years afterward.*
For many complex decisions, the ultimate success or failure of the decision can depend significantly on the degree to which those having to execute the decision also support it. Consequently, the choice of a specific action-option (and the logical reasoning process used to select it) may be far less important for success of the decision than that key stakeholders feel that they have been consulted appropriately during the reasoning process. In other words, the quality of the decision may depend much more on how and with who the decision-maker reasons than on the particular conclusion she reaches. Arguably this is true of almost all significant corporate strategy decisions and major public policy decisions: There is ultimately no point sending your military to prop up an anti-communist regime in South-East Asia, for example, if your own soldiers come to feel they should not be there (as I discuss here, regarding another decision to go to war).
Mainstream economists have a long way to go before they will have a theory of good decision-making. In the meantime, it would behoove them to show some humility when criticizing the decision-making processes of human beings.**
Notes and Bibliography:
Oskar Lange [1945-46]: The scope and method of economics. The Review of Economic Studies, 13 (1): 19-32.
Dennis Lindley [1985]: Making Decisions. Second Edition. London, UK: John Wiley and Sons.
L James Savage [1950]: The Foundations of Statistics. New York, NY, USA: Wiley.
* I’m sure Robert McNamara, statistician and decision-theory whizz kid, never considered the reactions of self-immolating protesters when making decisions early in his career, but having seen one outside his office window late in his time as Secretary of Defense he seems to have done so subsequently.
** Three-toed sloth comments dialogically and amusingly on MEU theory here.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
Non-Australians are often unaware how fearful Australians were of being invaded by Japanese Imperial Forces during World War II. Australians had good reason to be fearful, since Japanese aircraft ran nearly 100 bombing raids on northern Australian towns and settlements, Japanese submarines planted mines in Sydney Harbour, submarines launched bombardments on both Sydney and Newcastle, and they harassed East Coast merchant shipping. The Japanese regime even printed special banknotes for use as currency in an occupied Australia. As a result, preparing for an invasion, Australian home forces were deployed, among other activities, in building tank traps – concrete pyramids intended to impede the advance of any invading tanks – on the main roads as far south as northern New South Wales (some 1500 miles down the east coast). The photo above shows an anti-tank trap at Paddy’s Flat near Jenny Lind Creek, Tabulam, northern NSW. A key election issue in the 1943 Federal Election was whether the Opposition parties, when previously in Government at the start of the war, had approved a plan to abandon the entire north of Australia above Brisbane to the invaders.
Several members of my family fought to defend Australia and the region from Japanese imperialism and fascism, and some died in that defence. Growing up with relatives, family friends, and acquaintances who’d been prisoners of war of the Japanese military perhaps gives one an acute sense of the myriad war crimes committed by those forces during that war, and of the many longer-term physical and psychological consequences of those crimes. Unlike former POWs of the Wehrmacht, most former POWs of the Japanese military refused to speak of their prison-camp experiences, so horrific and unspeakable were they, and many survivors found themselves unable to cope with everyday life when the war ended.
In the week of Remembrance Day, I wanted to honour those members of my family who fell fighting in that war, or afterwards from its traumas:
Con Hanley (1885-1944), Charles B. McBurney (1890-1943), Cecil C. Sexton (1915-1942), and Ron M. Hanley (1918-1946).
Philosophy as a creative art
I quoted poet Don Paterson on what he saw as Shakespeare’s use of the act of poetry-writing to learn what he intended to say in the poem being written. And now, here is poet and philosopher George Santayana writing to William James in the same vein on philosophy:
If philosophy were the attempt to solve a given problem, I should see reason to be discouraged about its success; but it strikes me that it is [page-break] rather an attempt to express a half-undiscovered reality, just as art is, and that two different renderings, if they are expressive, far from cancelling each other add to each other’s value . . . I confess I do not see why we should be so vehemently curious about the absolute truth, which is not to be made or altered by our discovery of it. But philosophy seems to me to be its own reward, and its justification lies in the delight and dignity of the art itself.” [Letter to William James, 1887-12-15, quoted in Kirkwood 1961, pp. 43-44.]
Reference:
M. M. Kirkwood [1961]: Santayana: Saint of the Imagination. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Hardy on the Tripos
Lest anyone think I’m uniquely deranged for my criticisms of the Cambridge University Mathematics Tripos examination, particularly during the 18th- and 19th-centuries, here is GH Hardy – perhaps Britain’s greatest 20th century pure mathematician – speaking in his Presidential Address to the Mathematics Association in 1926:
My own contribution to the discussion consisted merely in an expression of my feeling that the best thing that could happen to English mathematics, and to Cambridge mathematics in particular, would be that the Mathematical Tripos should be abolished. I stated this on the spur of the moment, but it is my considered opinion, and I propose to defend it at length to-day. And I am particularly anxious that you should understand quite clearly that I mean exactly what I say; that by “abolished” I mean “abolished”, and not “reformed”; that if I were prepared to co-operate, as in fact I have co-operated in the past, in “reforming” the Tripos, it would be because I could see no chance of any more revolutionary change; and that my “reforms” would be directed deliberately towards destroying the traditions of the examination and so preparing the way for its extinction.” [p. 134]
. . .
“I suppose that it would be generally agreed that Cambridge mathematics, during the last hundred years, has been dominated by the Mathematical Tripos in a way in which no first-rate subject in any other first-rate university [page-break] has ever been dominated by an examination. It would be easy for me, were the fact disputed, to justify my assertion by a detailed account of the history of the Tripos, but this is unnecessary, since you can find an excellent account, written by a man who was very much more in sympathy with the Tripos than I am, in Mr. Rouse Ball’s History of Mathematics in Cambridge. I must, however, call your attention to certain rather melancholy reflections which the history of Cambridge mathematics suggests. You will understand that when I speak of mathematics I mean primarily pure mathematics, not that I think that anything which I say about pure mathematics is not to a great extent true of applied mathematics also, but merely because I do not want to criticise where my competence as a critic is doubtful.
Mathematics at Cambridge challenges criticism by the highest standards. England is a first-rate country, and there is no particular reason for supposing that the English have less natural talent for mathematics than any other race; and if there is any first-rate mathematics in England, it is in Cambridge that it may be expected to be found. We are therefore entitled to judge Cambridge mathematics by the standards that would be appropriate in Paris or Gottingen or Berlin. If we apply these standards, what are the results? I will state them, not perhaps exactly as they would have occurred to me spontaneously – though the verdict is one which, in its essentials, I find myself unable to dispute – but as they were stated to me by an outspoken foreign friend.
In the first place, about Newton there is no question; it is granted that he stands with Archimedes or with Gauss. Since Newton, England has produced no mathematician of the very highest rank. There have been English mathematicians, for example Cayley, who stood well in the front rank of the mathematicians of their time, but their number has been quite extraordinarily small; where France or Germany produces twenty or thirty, England produces two or three. There has been no country, of first-rate status and high intellectual tradition, whose standard has been so low; and no first-rate subject, except music, in which England has occupied so consistently humiliating a position. And what have been the peculiar characteristics of such English mathematics as there has been? Occasional flashes of insight, isolated achievements sufficient to show that the ability is really there, but, for the most part, amateurism, ignorance, incompetence, and triviality. It is indeed a rather cruel judgment, but it is one which any competent critic, surveying the evidence dispassionately, will find it uncommonly difficult to dispute.
I hope that you will understand that I do not necessarily endorse my friend’s judgment in every particular. He was a mathematician whose competence nobody could question, and whom nobody could accuse of any prejudice against England, Englishmen, or English mathematicians; but he was also, of course, a man developing a thesis, and he may have exaggerated a little in the enthusiasm of the moment or from curiosity to see how I should reply. Let us assume that it is an exaggerated judgment, or one rhetorically expressed. It is, at any rate, not a ridiculous judgment, and it is serious enough that such a condemnation, from any competent critic, should not be ridiculous. It is inevitable that we should ask whether, if such a judgment can really embody any sort of approximation to the truth, some share of the responsibility must not be laid on the Mathematical Tripos and the grip which it has admittedly exerted on English mathematics.
I am anxious not to fall into exaggeration in my turn and use extravagant language about the damage which the Tripos may have done, and it would no doubt be an extravagance to suggest that the most ruthless of examinations could destroy a whole side of the intellectual life of a nation. On the [page-break] other hand it is really rather difficult to exaggerate the hold which the Tripos has exercised on Cambridge mathematical life, and the most cursory survey of the history of Cambridge mathematics makes one thing quite clear; the reputation of the Tripos, and the reputation of Cambridge mathematics stand in correlation with one another, and the correlation is large and negative. As one has developed, so has the other declined. As, through the early and middle nineteenth century, the traditions of the Tripos strengthened, and its importance in the eyes of the public grew greater and greater, so did the external reputation of Cambridge as a centre of mathematical learning steadily decay. When, in the years perhaps between 1880 and 1890, the Tripos stood, in difficulty, complexity, and notoriety, at the zenith of its reputation, English mathematics was somewhere near its lowest ebb. If, during the last forty years, there has been an obvious revival, the fortunes of the Tripos have experienced an equally obvious decline.” [pp. 135-137]
. . .
“It has often been said that Tripos mathematics was a collection of elaborate futilities, and the accusation is broadly true. My own opinion is that this is the inevitable result, in a mathematical examination, of high standards and traditions. The examiner is not allowed to content himself with testing the competence and the knowledge of the candidates; his instructions are to provide a test of more than that, of initiative, imagination, and even of some sort of originality. And as there is only one test of originality in mathematics, namely the accomplishment of original work, and as it is useless to ask a youth of twenty-two to perform original research under examination conditions, the examination necessarily degenerates into a kind of game, and instruction for it into initiation into a series of stunts and tricks. It was in any case certainly true, at the time of which I am speaking, that an undergraduate might study mathematics diligently throughout the whole of his career, and attain the very highest honours in the examination, without having acquired, and indeed without having encountered, any knowledge at all of any of the ideas which dominate modern mathematical thought. His ignorance of analysis would have been practically complete. About geometry I speak with less confidence, but I am sure that such knowledge as he possessed would have been exceedingly one-sided, and that there would have been whole fields of geometrical knowledge, and those perhaps the most fruitful and fascinating of all, of which he would have known absolutely nothing. A mathematical physicist, I may be told, would on the contrary have received an appropriate and an excellent education. It is possible; it would no doubt be very impertinent for me to deny it. Yet I do remember Mr. Bertrand Russell telling me that he studied electricity at Trinity for three years, and that at the end of them he had never heard of Maxwell’s equations; and I have also been told by friends whom I believe to be competent that Maxwell’s equations are really rather important in physics. And when I think of this I begin to wonder whether the teaching of applied mathematics was really quite so perfect as I have sometimes been led to suppose.” [p. 138]
. . .
“I shall judge the Tripos by its real or apparent influence on English mathematics. I have already told you that in my judgment this influence has in the past been bad, that the Tripos has done negligible good and by no means negligible harm, and that, so far from being the great glory of Cambridge mathematics, it has gone a very long way towards strangling its development.” [p. 141]
Reference:
G. H. Hardy [1926/1948]: Presidential Address: The Case against the Mathematical Tripos. The Mathematical Gazette, 32 (300): 134-145 (July 1948).
Santayana and chemistry
The philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952), whom I have written about before, was fortunate to have two families, one Spanish and one American. His mother was a widow when she married his father, and his parents later preferred to live in different countries – the USA and Spain, respectively. Santayana spent part of his childhood with each, and accordingly grew up knowing his Bostonian step-family and their cousins, relatives of his mother’s first husband, the American Sturgis family. Among these relatives, his step-cousin Susan Sturgis (1846-1923) is mentioned briefly in Santayana’s 1944 autobiography (page 80). (See Footnote #1 below.)
Susan Sturgis was married twice, the second time in 1876 to Henry Bigelow Williams (1844-1912), a widower and property developer. In 1890, Williams commissioned a stained glass window from Louis Tiffany for the All Souls Unitarian Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts (pictured below), to commemorate his first wife, Sarah Louisa Frothingham (1851-1871).
The first marriage of Susan Sturgis was in 1867, to Henry Horton McBurney (1843-1875). McBurney’s younger brother, Charles Heber McBurney (1845-1913) went on to fame as a surgeon, developer of the procedure for diagnosis of appendicitis and removal of the appendix. The normal place of incision for an appendectomy is known to every medical student still as McBurney’s Point. The portrait below of Charles Heber McBurney was painted in 1911 by Ellen Emmet Rand (1875-1941), and is still in the possession of the McBurney family. (The painting is copyright Gerard McBurney 2013. As Ellen Emmet married William Blanchard Rand in 1911, this is possibly the first painting she signed with her married name.)
Charles H. McBurney was also a member of the medical team which treated US President William McKinley following his assassination. He and his wife, Margaret Willoughby Weston (1846-1909), had two sons, Henry and Malcolm, and a daughter, Alice. The younger son, Malcolm, also became a doctor and married, having a daughter, but he died young. Alice McBurney married Austen Fox Riggs (1876-1940), a protege of her father, Charles, and a pioneer of psychiatry. He founded what is now the Austen Riggs Centre in Stockbridge, MA, in 1907. They had two children, one of whom, Benjamin Riggs (c.1914-1992), was also a distinguished psychiatrist, as well as a musician, sailor, and boat builder.
The elder son of Charles and Margaret, Henry McBurney (1874-1956), was an engineer whose own son, Charles Brian Montagu McBurney (1914-1979), became a famous Cambridge University archaeologist. CBM’s children are the composer Gerard McBurney, the actor/director Simon McBurney OBE, and the art-historian, Henrietta Ryan FLS, FSA. CBM’s sister, Daphne (1912-1997), married Richard Farmer. Their four children were Angela Farmer, a yoga specialist, David Farmer FRS, a distinguished oceanographer, whose daughter Delphine Farmer, is a chemist, Michael Farmer, painting conservator, and Henry Farmer, an IT specialist, whose son, Olivier Farmer, is a psychiatrist.
Henry H. and Charles H. had three sisters, Jane McBurney (born 1835 or 1836), Mary McBurney (1839- ), Almeria McBurney (who died young), and another brother, John Wayland McBurney (1848-1885). They were born in Roxbury, MA, to Charles McBurney and Rosina Horton; Charles senior (1803 Ireland – Boston 1880) was initially a saddler and harness maker in Tremont Row, Boston – the image above shows a label from a trunk he made. Later, he was a pioneer of the rubber industry, for example, receiving a patent in 1858 for elastic pipe, and was a partner in the Boston Belting Company. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Charles junior pioneered the use of rubber gloves by medical staff during surgery.
All three boys graduated from Harvard (Henry in 1862, Charles in 1866, and John in 1869). John married Louisa Eldridge in 1878, and they had a daughter, May (or Mary) Ruth McBurney (1879-1947). May married William Howard Gardiner Jr. (1875-1952) in 1918, and on her death left an endowment to Harvard University to establish the Gardiner Professor in Oceanic History and Affairs to honour her husband. John worked for his father’s company and later in his own brokerage firm, Barnes, McBurney & Co; he died of tuberculosis.
Mary (or Mamie) McBurney married Dr Barthold Schlesinger (1828-1905), who was born in Germany of a Jewish ethnic background, and immigrated to the USA possibly in 1840, becoming a citizen in 1858. For many years, from at least 1855, he was a director of a steel company, Naylor and Co, the US subsidiary of leading steel firm Naylor Vickers, of Sheffield, UK. Barthold’s brother, Sebastian Benson Schlesinger (1837-1917), was also a director of Naylor & Co from 1855 to at least 1885; he was also a composer, mostly it seems of lieder and piano music; some of his music has been performed at the London Proms. At the time, Naylor Vickers were renowned for their manufacture of church bells, but in the 20th century, under the name of Vickers, they became a leading British aerospace and defence engineering firm; the last independent part of Vickers was bought by Rolls-Royce in 1999.
Mary and Barthold Schlesinger appear to have had at least five children, Mary (1859- , married in 1894 to Arthur Perrin, 1857- ), Barthold (1873- ), Helen (1874- , married in 1901 to James Alfred Parker, 1869- ), Leonora (1878- , married in 1902 to James Lovell Little, c. 1875- ), and Marion (1880- , married in 1905 to Jasper Whiting, 1868- ). The Schlesingers owned an estate of 28 acres at Brookline, Boston, called Southwood. In 1879, they commissioned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead (1822-1903), the designer of Central Park in New York and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, to design the gardens of Southwood; some 19 acres of this estate now comprises the Holy Transfiguration Monastery, of the Greek Orthodox Church of North America. The Schlesingers were lovers of art and music, and kept a house in Paris for many years. An 1873 portrait of Barthold Schlesinger by William Morris Hunt (1824-1879) hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
While a student at Harvard, Henry H. McBurney was a prominent rower. After graduation, he spent 2 years in Europe, working in the laboratories of two of the 19th century’s greatest chemists: Adolphe Wurtz in Paris and Robert Bunsen in Heidelberg. Presumably, even Harvard graduates did not get to spend time working with famous chemists without at least strong letters of recommendation from their professors, so Henry McBurney must have been better than average as a chemistry student. He returned to Massachusetts to work in the then company, Boston Elastic Fabric Company, of his father, and then, from November 1866, as partner for another firm, Campbell, Whittier, and Co. From what I can discover, this company was a leading engineering firm, building in 1866 the world’s first cog locomotive, for example, and, from 1867, manufacturing and selling an early commercial elevator.
Henry H. and Susan S. McBurney had three children: Mary McBurney (1867- , in 1889 married Frederick Parker), Thomas Curtis McBurney (1870-1874), and Margaret McBurney (1873-, in 1892 married Henry Remsen Whitehouse). Mary McBurney and Frederick Parker had five children: Frederic Parker (1890-), Elizabeth Parker (1891-), Henry McBurney Parker (1893-), Thomas Parker (1898.04.20-1898.08.30), and Mary Parker (1899-). Margaret McBurney and Henry Whitehouse had a daughter, Beatrix Whitehouse (1893-). The name “Thomas” seems to have been ill-fated in this extended family.
HH died suddenly in Bournemouth, England, in 1875, after suffering from a lung disease. As with any early death, I wonder what he could have achieved in life had he lived longer.
POSTSCRIPT (Added 2011-11-21): Henry H. McBurney’s visit to the Heidelberg chemistry lab of Robert Bunsen is mentioned in an account published in 1899 by American chemist, Henry Carrington Bolton, who also worked with Bunsen, and indeed with Wurtz. Bolton refers to McBurney as “Harry McBurney, of Boston” (p. 869).
POSTSCRIPT 2 (Added 2012-10-09): According to the 1912 Harvard Class Report for the Class of 1862 (see Ware 1912), Henry H. McBurney spent the year from September 1862 in Paris with Wurtz and the following year in Heidelberg with Bunsen. He therefore presumably just missed meeting Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1841-1880), son of composer Felix, who graduated in chemistry from Heidelberg in 1863. PM-B went on to co-found the chemicals firm Agfa, an acronym for Aktien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation. I wonder if Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy ever returned to visit Bunsen in the year that Henry McBurney was there.
POSTSCRIPT 3 (Added 2013-01-20): I am most grateful to Gerard McBurney for the portrait of Charles H. McBurney, and for additional information on the family. I am also grateful to Henrietta McBurney Ryan for information. All mistakes and omissions, however, are my own.
NOTE: If you know more about any of the people mentioned in this post or their families, I would welcome hearing from you. Email: peter [at] vukutu.com
References:
Henry Carrington Bolton [1899]: Reminiscences of Bunsen and the Heidelberg Laboratory, 1863-1865. Science, New Series Volume X (259): 865-870. 15 December 1899. Available here.
George Santayana [1944]: Persons and Places: The Background of My Life. (London, UK: Constable.) (New York, USA: Charles Scribner’s Sons.)
Charles Pickard Ware (Editor) [1912]: 1862 – Class Report – 1912. Class of Sixty-Two. Harvard University. Fiftieth Anniversary. Cambridge, MA, USA, Available here.
Footnotes:
1. Santayana writes as follows about Susan Sturgis Williams (Santayana 1944, page 74 in the US edition):
Nothing withered, however, about their sister Susie, one of the five Susie Sturgises of that epoch, all handsome women, but none more agreeably handsome than this one, called Susie Mac-Burney and Susie Williams successively after her two husbands. When I knew her best she was a woman between fifty and sixty, stout, placid, intelligent, without an affectation or a prejudice, adding a grain of malice to the Sturgis affability, without meaning or doing the least unkindness. I felt that she had something of the Spanish feeling, So Catholic or so Moorish, that nothing in this world is of terrible importance. Everything happens, and we had better take it all as easily or as resignedly as possible. But this without a shadow of religion. Morally, therefore, she may not have been complete; but physically and socially she was completeness itself, and friendliness and understanding. She was not awed by Boston. Her first marriage was disapproved, her husband being an outsider and considered unreliable; but she weathered whatever domestic storms may have ensued, and didn’t mind. Her second husband was like her father, a man with a checkered business career; but he too survived all storms, and seemed the healthier and happier for them. They appeared to be well enough off. In her motherliness there was something queenly, she moved well, she spoke well, and her freedom from prejudice never descended to vulgarity or loss of dignity. Her mother’s modest solid nature had excluded in her the worst of her father’s foibles, while the Sturgis warmth and amiability had been added to make her a charming woman.”
POST MOST RECENTLY UPDATED: 2013-03-26.
Herbert Hoover, zombie
I posted last week on Robert Skidelsky’s criticisms of the current British Government’s deflationary economic policy for lacking any rational theoretical underpinning. Two Nobelistas have now joined the fray. Here is Joe Stiglitz, writing about the apparent belief in a Confidence Fairy:
There is a shortage of aggregate demand – the demand for goods and services that generates jobs. Cutbacks in government spending will mean lower output and higher unemployment, unless something else fills the gap. Monetary policy won’t. Short-term interest rates can’t go any lower, and quantitative easing is not likely to substantially reduce the long-term interest rates government pays – and is even less likely to lead to substantial increases either in consumption or investment. If only one country does it, it might hope to gain an advantage through the weakening of its currency; but if anything the US is more likely to succeed in weakening its currency against sterling through its aggressive quantitative easing, worsening Britain’s trade position.
Of course if Britain succeeds in getting the world to believe that its economic policies are among the worst – an admittedly fierce contest at the moment – its currency may decline, but this is hardly the road to a recovery. Besides, in the malaise into which the global economy is sinking, the challenge will be to maintain exports; they can’t be relied on as a substitute for domestic demand. The few instances where small countries managed to grow in the face of austerity were those where their trading partners were experiencing a boom.
. . . .
Britain is embarking on a highly risky experiment. More likely than not, it will add one more data point to the well- established result that austerity in the midst of a downturn lowers GDP and increases unemployment, and excessive austerity can have long-lasting effects.
If Britain were wealthier, or if the prospects of success were greater, it might be a risk worth taking. But it is a gamble with almost no potential upside. Austerity is a gamble which Britain can ill afford.
And here is Paul Krugman, accusing the British Government of being dedicated followers of fashion:
In the spring of 2010, fiscal austerity became fashionable. I use the term advisedly: the sudden consensus among Very Serious People that everyone must balance budgets now now now wasn’t based on any kind of careful analysis. It was more like a fad, something everyone professed to believe because that was what the in-crowd was saying.
. . . .
But trendy fashion, almost by definition, isn’t sensible — and the British government seems determined to ignore the lessons of history.
Both the new British budget announced on Wednesday and the rhetoric that accompanied the announcement might have come straight from the desk of Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary who told President Herbert Hoover to fight the Depression by liquidating the farmers, liquidating the workers, and driving down wages. Or if you prefer more British precedents, it echoes the Snowden budget of 1931, which tried to restore confidence but ended up deepening the economic crisis.
The British government’s plan is bold, say the pundits — and so it is. But it boldly goes in exactly the wrong direction. It would cut government employment by 490,000 workers — the equivalent of almost three million layoffs in the United States — at a time when the private sector is in no position to provide alternative employment. It would slash spending at a time when private demand isn’t at all ready to take up the slack.
Why is the British government doing this? The real reason has a lot to do with ideology: the Tories are using the deficit as an excuse to downsize the welfare state. But the official rationale is that there is no alternative.
Indeed, there has been a noticeable change in the rhetoric of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron over the past few weeks — a shift from hope to fear. In his speech announcing the budget plan, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, seemed to have given up on the confidence fairy — that is, on claims that the plan would have positive effects on employment and growth.
Instead, it was all about the apocalypse looming if Britain failed to go down this route. Never mind that British debt as a percentage of national income is actually below its historical average; never mind that British interest rates stayed low even as the nation’s budget deficit soared, reflecting the belief of investors that the country can and will get its finances under control. Britain, declared Mr. Osborne, was on the “brink of bankruptcy.”
What happens now? Maybe Britain will get lucky, and something will come along to rescue the economy. But the best guess is that Britain in 2011 will look like Britain in 1931, or the United States in 1937, or Japan in 1997. That is, premature fiscal austerity will lead to a renewed economic slump. As always, those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Pity for all of us here, there’s no there there in current UK economic policy.