In 1962, a college student answers an ad: “Mortuary Assistant required”

http://laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/my-first-mistake

by Petiver • 11 years ago

277 94 11 years ago

wwweston• 11 years ago

"The black lungs of heavy smokers I would weigh once, then squeeze under cold running water for fifteen minutes until they became baby pink and tripelike, and then weigh again: the difference in the two figures, often a couple of pounds or more, was the weight of the tar and nicotine that quite possibly was the killer."

A few pounds? If you'd asked me, I would have guessed the weight of lung-accumulated smoking gunk would be an order of magnitude smaller.

(Also, not a bad hack for measuring some of the effects of smoking.)

It wasn't only smoking that lacquered up one's innards with tar. Living in the London of the day was none too healthy, either.

Hmmm. Wonder how long I should continue to live in LA?

InclinedPlane4• 11 years ago

Modern LA is orders of magnitude safer than London in the '60s and earlier. Those conditions would have been comparable to some parts of China today.

windlep• 11 years ago

"I can't trust air I can't see", was my favorite line of my grandfathers, who lived in LA for the past 60 years. He always mentioned how incredibly clear and clean the air is now compared to a few decades ago (where I live in Northern California now, even the Bay Area seems polluted and smoggy most days).

seanmcdirmid• 11 years ago

Hmmm. Wonder how long I should continue to live in Beijing?

:( (today is a clean air day, but my wife and I had this argument already once this week)

javert• 11 years ago

What exactly did they do to clean up the air in London? I mean, just pass regulations that factories have to be further from the city, or what?

akgerber• 11 years ago

Pittsburgh was a city of coal-heated homes and coke-powered blast furnaces set in river valleys, and in the '60s and earlier was dark at noon: http://www.buzzfeed.com/kevintang/stunning-photos-of-pittsbu...

Many of the older brick-and-stone buildings are still covered in black stains.

DanBC6• 11 years ago

I've seen estimates that say one pack of cigarretes per day over a year equals about one cup of tar in the lungs.

Here's a video showing extraction of tar from 400 cigarettes.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_csz2dPjyAw

Not all of that tar stays in the lungs - some is breathed out; some is worked out by cillia (and sometimes swallowed, increasing the risk of cancer of the kidney, bladder, and penis).

Modern London pollution is bad and we need to work to reduce it - people still die from the pollution - but the London peasoupers were catastrophic. The US EPA has a great page about London smog, which has a long history: http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/londons-historic-pea-soupers

Early on, no one had the scientific tools to correlate smog with adverse health effects, but complaints about the smoky air as an annoyance date back to at least 1272, when King Edward I, on the urging of important noblemen and clerics, banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death.

snogglethorpe2• 11 years ago

banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death

This is very interesting... a somewhat longer description that google turned up: http://www.planetgreen.org/2012/03/edward-i-environmentalist...

riffraff2• 11 years ago

I've seen estimates that say one pack of cigarretes per day equals about one cup of tar in the lungs.

over what period?

riffraff2• 11 years ago

if it's normal for you to drive around without worrying about smog limiting your visibility, than probably it's not as bad as old London[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

zhte415• 11 years ago

A link to the Wikipedia article on 'Pea Soup', the kind of smog prevalent in London in the 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

"The result was that visibility could be down to a metre or so in the daytime. Walking out of doors became a matter of shuffling one’s feet to feel for road curbs, etc."

And form the article, based in 1962 (though things were surely better by then overall):

"More than once the bus I rode to work had to be led by a policeman walking on the road with a red flashlight, so thick were the greasy, sulfur-dioxide-laden pea-soup fogs that in 1962 were so bad as to send people by the hundreds to hospitals some days."

LA, Beijing... if not good, probably a lot better than this era and location.

derekp7• 11 years ago

A lot of people think of lungs as if they are big bags, but in reality they are more like a sponge. So if you could imagine what the accumulation would be like in a kitchen sponge, that is kind of what it is like in the lungs.

11thEarlOfMar• 11 years ago

The worst job I've had was called 'putting up hay'. It amounted to climbing into the loft of a very dust-laden barn with 3 or 4 of my college buddies, catching hay bales as they spat out of the hay elevator, and running them over to stack in uniform 3-d arrays. After a couple of hours, our employer called us down for rejuvenation with Coke-a-cola and glazed donuts, and we'd blow what seemed like pounds of dusty mucous out of our noses and then head back up into the loft.

$5/hour seemed like a lot of money at the time...

aklemm• 11 years ago

Hah, I got the same pay for that, but didn't hate the job so much. We got beer after, so that may be why.

te_platt• 11 years ago

Reminds me of tagging along with my older brothers to mow lawns. After a few hours of weeding and taking my turn at the push mower they would take me to get a Slurpee. My own Slurpee that I didn't have to share!

Later in high school doing construction work for my dad digging ditches with a pick and shovel, he would walk by and casually ask if I was feeling motivated to do well in school.

madengr• 11 years ago

Yep, as a teenager I cleaned out urethane spray booths and other shit jobs no one else would do. That motivated me to do quite quite well in electrical engineering.

lifeisstillgood• 11 years ago

Whilst a mask seems a good idea, I presume that the organic material that built up in your lungs would be broken down and washed out by the lungs natural processes within a few days or weeks?

Perhaps a doctor could clarify?

chrissyb• 11 years ago

Not a doctor but.. You're falling for a bit of a naturalistic fallacy here. Just as Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral however inhaling its dust can come with very serious health problems, so can hay contain mould which can also cause serious lung disease. http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/diseases/farmers_lung.html

beat• 11 years ago

I got $5.35 working at a plastics factory, making house siding and PVC pipe. I still have a scar from slashing a finger open with a hacksaw while we were starting up a siding line... basically, I would cut semi-molten PVC siding that was moving about a foot a second, because it was still too warped to make it into the cooling tanks, much less the cutters. Had to keep cutting, too, despite my injury.

The factory and manufacturing work that everyone seems to miss these days is profoundly unsafe.

chiph2• 11 years ago

I worked at a supermarket in the late 70's as my high-school job, and we didn't compress + band the cardboard boxes -- we burned them in an incinerator out back. Every so often it needed to have the ash cleaned out, so the male employees would take turns with a shovel and the ash buckets. You'd blow grey mucous out your nose for a couple of days afterwards, because masks were for sissies.

Not-so-fun story time: The stock guys left a can of Lysol aerosol in one of the boxes, and when I tossed it in the resulting fireball burned some of my hair off. Occupational safety? What's that?

DiabloD3• 11 years ago

Its stories like this why I come to HN. HN may have started as interesting stuff for the Silicon Valley VC circuit, but you can't survive on a diet of just high risk investing weirdness.

xtrumanx2• 11 years ago

You don't have to come to HN exclusively. I like the idea of HN or any other website being focused on single-theme. If I want to read about startups and tech I come to HN. If I want to read about something else, I go else where.

I enjoyed this post very much but I would be very sad if posts like these became more frequent over here as I wouldn't have a good source of startups and tech anymore.

onion2k• 11 years ago

This sort of article, with its's well written, amusing, compellingly "human" narrative is precisely how startups should be writing their blogs. It's exactly the sort of thing founders should be reading to learn the subtle and nuanced art of writing. It's very relevant to HN; not in content perhaps, but definitely in style.

malnourish3• 11 years ago

The thing is, aside from reddit (and perhaps Digg) what sites are "like" this, but not focused on tech?

dang2• 11 years ago

I think we can promise you that HN won't soon lack for articles about startups. Or Rust.

So your enjoyment of this delightfully written article (good taste, I must say!) can be apprehension-free.

DanBC6• 11 years ago

Techcrunch would be a source of tech and startups?

HN has since almost forever been about more than Tech and startups. Here's the guidelines from 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

dang2• 11 years ago

HN may have started as interesting stuff for the Silicon Valley VC circuit

Oh, no no no. It started as a way for pg to read more interesting things, literally about anything. Byzantine coins and cat prints in medieval manuscripts are two that I recall from years past. The site has always been for intellectual diversity above all else. Keeping that going is the thing we care about most.

In other words this article is 100% certified original Hacker News, and it warms my heart (freshly grateful to still be attached to the rest of my body) to see it at #1.

aaronbrethorst• 11 years ago

And Erlang. You mustn't forget about Erlang. Lots and lots of Erlang.

nekopa• 11 years ago

This takes me back to a time when I was 17, and I applied for a job at a funeral home in London- it was offering a ridiculously high salary. It was my first time having an interview where one person sits off to the side and watches you, which I found quite unnerving. I was woefully unprepared for the interview, but it was going really well until the one question I hadn't thought about came up:

"So how do you feel about bodies?"

Me: "Umm, they're great! I mean, ahhh, well, um, could you define what exactly you mean by bodies?"

I didn't get the position.

bdamm2• 11 years ago

A girlfriend of mine once had this job, she said it was a dead end career.

ARCarr• 11 years ago

Weird, seems to me like everybody could see their future in it.

bdamm2• 11 years ago

Ok, joke aside, the article was well written and as you say it must have been quite an experience to observe death so personally.

dbbolton2• 11 years ago

On the other hand, the pathologist assigned to work on the bodies I would prepare was a German, and she was named Fleishhacker, which sounded to Mr. Utton as though it should mean butcher, but actually didn't.

It actually does though: http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_en.html#/search=Fleischhacker

detaro• 11 years ago

Yeah. One never would translate butcher to "Fleischhacker", since that word isn't really used outside of last names, but it clearly means a butcher.

dbbolton2• 11 years ago

To clarify, Fleischhacker is a legitimate translation of "butcher", but only in a figurative sense: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slaughterer#Translations

I'm guessing that the original author was saying that it doesn't literally refer to a person who cuts meat for a living (like Metzger), which is true. However, it's still a sort of funny name for a person in that profession to have.

ghshephard• 11 years ago

We really need to appreciate how lucky we are:

More than once the bus I rode to work had to be led by a policeman walking on the road with a red flashlight, so thick were the greasy, sulfur-dioxide-laden pea-soup fogs that in 1962 were so bad as to send people by the hundreds to hospitals some days. One Monday, after a weekend of especially thick smog, I arrived to find no fewer than thirty bodies waiting for their preparation, all of them felled by respiratory complaints.

InclinedPlane4• 11 years ago

The pH of London air was sometimes as low as 1.4 back then. People were basically breathing sulfuric acid.

michaelgrafl• 11 years ago

German native speaker here. Fleischhacker actually does mean butcher. It's just that most Germans would call a butcher a "Metzger" I guess. Us Austrians tend to call it a "Fleischhauer".

To be honest though, I think the term Fleischhacker is used more often to describe a foul playing soccer player than a butcher.

hessenwolf2• 11 years ago

And really just flesh-hacker in an engineering accent.

niels_olson• 11 years ago

I just finished my rotation at the medical examiner's office. The "couple of pounds" of tar in the lungs was probably more mucus than anything. Also, they may well have been washing out the congestion caused by respiratory depression. But it's quite unlikely that it was "tar", though I'm sure plenty of black carbon, or "anthracotic pigment" came out too.

I say this because a smoker who dies of, say, a sudden massive heart attack, doesn't have especially heavy lungs. The heaviness comes from other, secondary issues.

Also, I had never heard of this before. We mainly just weighed the lungs and then examined them under the microscope.

mathgenius• 11 years ago

Yeah, this made me wonder, in lieu of a lung transplant, what if they just took out a smoker's lung and gave it a good wash and then stuck it back in again? It sounds like you are saying that alot of other things go wrong with such a lung, not just a buildup of tar.

cmdrfred• 11 years ago

With things like the davinci system I don't even think you would have to take the lung out.

saalweachter• 11 years ago

At the very least, once the carcinogens have done their job and induced a cancer washing them out would be a bit of "shutting the barn door after the cows have run away".

logfromblammo• 11 years ago

Or leave it in and use a splash of perfluorocarbon to prophylactically rinse it out a bit, once every couple of years or so.

Even if the breathing liquid does not dissolve all the lung crud directly, the mechanical action of filling and draining the alveoli might clear some of it out or thin it enough for the cilia to move it.

DanBC6• 11 years ago

I was a bit surprised to see this admission:

In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I was also persuaded to commit a series of small crimes during my sojourn at the hospital, and which I hope I can safely confess at this remove of half a century. I stole pituitary glands. About a hundred of them over the months. A research hospital had need of them—pituitaries produce a multitude of hormones, including the one that makes us grow, and I proved myself quite adept at finding them: a quick probe inside the base of the brain with my fingers, and the pea-sized gland would pop out of its cavity like a snail out of its shell. Each time I collected a jar full, a furtive man in a white coat would come around to collect them, handing over a five-pound note in exchange. If ever I felt squeamish, the man reassured me that those to whom the glands belonged would be unlikely to feel the loss, nor to complain.

There was a big scandal in England over the unauthorised removal of organs. Partly this was because doctors weren't explaining properly what they were doing to people who had no understanding of what was involved - "Can we remove some tissue?" instead of "can we take the heart of your dead child?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alder_Hey_organs_scandal

The Alder Hey organs scandal involved the unauthorised removal, retention, and disposal of human tissue, including children’s organs, during the period 1988 to 1995. During this period organs were retained in more than 2,000 pots [this is a UK term of art for plastic formalin-filled containers of various sizes which are used to store tissues in pathology labs] containing body parts from around 850 infants. These were later uncovered at Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool, during a public inquiry into the organ retention scandal.

This was discovered by people investigating another scandal - the Bristol Heart Scandal.

And it's not as if the science was any good. A lot of it was low quality; partly because the documentation of the organ origins was so poor.

Dick van Velzen did great harm and mostly got away with it.

ramblerman2• 11 years ago

Dick van Velzen did great harm

Whilst I agree he comitted a crime, his subjects were all dead anyways. I don't see the great harm myself tbh.

DanBC6• 11 years ago

His science was lousy; he caused many people to withdraw consent for tissue donation for scientific reasons.

His subjects were dead but those subjects had relatives and many of them expressed considerable distress. I don't particularly understand that upset by I recognise that they were not lying, they did sincerely feel a lot of upset.

solarmist2• 11 years ago

Is this what inspired the organ donation skit in Montey Python's The Meaning of Life?

lanaius• 11 years ago

The Meaning of Life was released in 1983.

shiggerino2• 11 years ago

"I also had a girlfriend [in Canada]"

Yeah, right!

Sukotto• 11 years ago

I quite liked this other article of his on being banned from ever returning to the remote island of Tristan da Cunha.

http://laphamsquarterly.org/travel/take-nothing-leave-nothin...

beefman• 11 years ago

I read this article twice and am completely at a loss for what hurtful secret was revealed! Do you know?

zem• 11 years ago

the islanders considered the story of hagan and booy scandalous in a "skeletons in the family closet" sort of way, and his book essentially dug up the old scandal again.

shiggerino2• 11 years ago

I can't help but speculate whether Frau Fleischhacker was a concentration camp alumna.

In 1962, a college student answers an ad: “Mortuary Assistant required”

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