Monday, May 19, 2008

Ada Lovelace's paralysis, quirks of In Our Time, and the odd beliefs of UK historians

The UK historians often featured on In Our Time are quite entertaining, but they have two common weaknesses.

One is a quite shaky knowledge of science and medicine. I suspect it's the fashion for certain UK academics to know nothing of the past 100 years of science, but it can be a bit annoying.

The other is a fondness for startling off-the-cuff remarks. For example, during a discussion of the peculiar persistence of the Galenic humoral theory [1] one scholar mentioned that medieval scholars couldn't do arithmetic -- so they weren't able to measure the futility of Humoral therapies. The introduction of Indian Maths enabled calculation, and finally ended one set of quackeries. (Though many others thrive today -- despite numeracy!)

I'm doing some expansion here. The original comment was about four words.

This weakness for cryptic but startling statements is somewhat endearing. Yes, the premise may be debatable, but it's interesting.

Today, I swear, I heard a guest proclaim that Ada Lovelace [1] was completely paralyzed for three years due to measles, but then recovered. This turns out be an example of both of the IOT historian weaknesses.

Measles can have some extremely nasty neurologic complications, but I don't recall reversible paralysis being among them (nor do my online references [2]). I also think it unlikely that she could have survived very long in early 19th century with complete paralysis.

The Ada Lovelace paralysis story turns out to be a bit of a mystery to the net. Quick searches found varying mentions of the degree of her paralysis, from legs alone to total paralysis. Wikipedia had the most suggestive explanation ...

Ada Lovelace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

...In June 1829, she was paralyzed after a bout of the "measles". Lady Byron subjected the girl to continuous bed rest for nearly a year, which may have extended her period of disability. By 1831 she was able to walk with crutches...

So she was sick with something (measles, polio?), but her disability may have been the product of her eccentric/mentally ill mother's induced bed rest.

Now here's the interesting bit. You don't have to be a genius to figure out that the original story doesn't make sense. So how does it manage to survive in the minds of preeminent UK historians? Don't they ever get comments from their physician friends after public lectures?

[1] Link is to archive site. Google sends us to the iPlayer beat site which doesn't keep these episodes.

[2] Years ago MD Consult was a great source of medical references, but publisher fights tore it apart. Progress is not linear.

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