
In 1962, a college student answers an ad: “Mortuary Assistant required” - Petiver
http://laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/my-first-mistake
======
wwweston
>"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?

~~~
InclinedPlane
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.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
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)

~~~
InclinedPlane
I posted a link to this in another post, but here's a chart showing how bad
the pollution in London during the great smog of 1952 was: [http://www.st-
andrews.ac.uk/~dib2/atmos/london.jpeg](http://www.st-
andrews.ac.uk/~dib2/atmos/london.jpeg)

Notice that SO2 and smoke particles are measured in units of _milligrams_ per
m^3 (today such measurements are in micrograms per m^3). To put Beijing's air
in the context of this graph, the smoke particles in Beijing on a bad air day
will go up to 0.2 to 0.8 mg/m^3 and SO2 will spike up to 0.3 for short
periods. Compared to the Great Smog of 1952, Beijing's air isn't nearly as
bad, but it's still incredibly bad. The Great Smog killed 0.03% of the
population of London _per day_. Beijing's air regularly gets to around 1/4 the
amount of smoke in the air as during the Great Smog.

~~~
keithpeter
Liverpool area, early 60s: we had those thick yellow fogs less often than in
London, but with added ingredients from the chemical works up the estuary.

My grandfather would be hospitalised in the winter months with bronchitis - on
one occasion spending time in an oxygen tent to aid his breathing. Our teacher
at school suggested we breathe through handkerchiefs on the way to school if
there was a fog. Impressive quantities of tar.

Much better now.

------
DanBC
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](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.

~~~
ramblerman
> 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.

~~~
DanBC
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.

~~~
ramblerman
First point is very valid and one I hadn't considered

Second is the one I was arguing against. I certainly don't doubt they did
sincerely feel a lot of upset. I suppose I still think it shouldn't matter. It
would in that regard have been better had they just never found out.

~~~
jokr004
I see where you're coming from with your argument, and certainly I have no
qualms about the use of my organs after I die, but not everyone shares that
belief and personally I don't think it's right to just disregard that. Sure,
it might have been better if the families never found out, but it would have
been best if the families wishes (no matter how irrational) were respected
from the get-go.

~~~
Retra
Disregarding irrational beliefs is the first step to making good decisions.

~~~
tinco
Without irrational beliefs there is no meaning to life.

~~~
Retra
I don't see how that is even a remotely justifiable belief.

~~~
tinco
So give me a rational meaning to life :)

------
niels_olson
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
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.

~~~
saalweachter
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".

~~~
jokr004
Cancer isn't the only smoking related illness, I wonder what it would do for
someone with emphysema or the like..

------
michaelgrafl
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.

~~~
hessenwolf
And really just flesh-hacker in an engineering accent.

------
11thEarlOfMar
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...

~~~
te_platt
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
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.

------
ghshephard
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._

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

------
nekopa
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.

------
DiabloD3
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.

~~~
xtrumanx
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.

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

~~~
kindlez
Try our platform: [http://snapzu.com](http://snapzu.com)

We have tons of differentiating features from reddit and HN.

~~~
malnourish
I checked it out, very interesting. The front page was very different than
what I was expecting -- I like that. Would it be possible to get an invite
directly from you, or should I request one via the site?

~~~
kindlez
Of course! I don't think HN has a PM option so I'll just post a few for anyone
to grab, first come first serve:

SPZU-AI1ABLII8IIZP

SPZU-0KUXJ0U86OA7W

SPZU-QNOKQG5Y4U1G3

SPZU-GQI7XVHO2ZSOA

SPZU-6TBV5ATE15JWH

SPZU-WW5ICQ53ZBB4O

SPZU-34MFZ049TSKT9

SPZU-T7G36FFZRYC1G

EDIT: I exchanged the old used codes for new fresh ones.

~~~
pests
Really interesting.

I'd like to check it out but all the invites seem to be gone. I guess I'll
wait for a real invite.

------
Sukotto
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...](http://laphamsquarterly.org/travel/take-nothing-leave-nothing)

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

~~~
zem
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.

------
dbbolton
>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](http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_en.html#/search=Fleischhacker)

~~~
detaro
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.

~~~
dbbolton
To clarify, _Fleischhacker_ is a legitimate translation of "butcher", but only
in a figurative sense:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slaughterer#Translations](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.

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

------
shiggerino
>"I also had a girlfriend [in Canada]"

Yeah, right!

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

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

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

