Toilet Of The Week (10)

This week’s featured carsey is to be found in the tranquil surroundings of a municipal park in Uzuki in south-eastern Japan. It has a large loft space which has been home for Takashi Yamanouchi for the past three years. He was only flushed out of his gaff when an electrician called to make some repairs.

Takashi, rather like Ian Dury’s Old Man, was tidy in his digs, making himself at home with a gas stove and an electric heater. It is thought that he got in by climbing up on to one of the toilet stalls and squeezing through the maintenance hatch.

One curious feature of this story is that the authorities found around 500 plastic bottles filled with urine in Takashi’s living space. Didn’t he know where he was? Still, if you are caught short for accommodation in the area, you now know where to go.

Turning to the election, it is good to know that we have sorted out the status of beekeepers in the event that the Ukippers’ policy of banning the burqa in public is implemented. After all, if form is anything to go by, the Tories adopt their policies five years hence. Still, it gives an out for Moslem women. If the ban were ever enforced, they could wander around in a beekeeper’s hat and veil. Now that would be a sting in the tail!

Mollusc Of The Week

It’s enough to make you yearn for Brexit. There is another invader on the march from the continent, I read this week, which is determined to wreak havoc in our carefully tended borders. It is a super slug which goes by the name of Arion vulgaris or the Spanish slug.

They are larger than our native slugs, growing up to six inches long, produce more slime which makes them particularly unattractive to predators and they breed like rabbits. Traditional methods of controlling slug populations, slug pellets, seem to be useless. They can devour up to 20 pellets without any noticeable effect.

What does for them, though, is good old British beer, preferably home-brewed. Apparently, they can’t get enough of the stuff and drown in puddles of amber nectar. Seems a bit of a waste but if it is the only way to keep the invaders at bay, needs must.

What Is The Origin Of (125)?…

Skeleton in the cupboard

We use this phrase to indicate that someone has a deep, possibly disturbing or embarrassing, secret which they have been desperately trying to hide from the public domain. Across the pond, the usual version of this idiom substitutes closet for cupboard. The sense is quite clear – if you hide something away in a cupboard, there is always the danger that someone, perhaps unwittingly, will discover it. The secret is never quite safe.

But why a skeleton? One of the many problems with killing someone, so I’m told, is how to dispose of the body. It takes considerable time and nerve to chop a cadaver up into pieces that can be easily disposed of. Perhaps those murderers, pressed for time, resorted to dumping the body into a cupboard where, if undiscovered, over time it would decompose into a pile of bones. It is hard to imagine, though, even in times which we delude ourselves into thinking were much more lawless than our own, that this was a regular occurrence.

We have come across the grave robbers or resurrectionists on a number of occasions. They fuelled the medical profession’s thirst for human bodies to dissect to better understand the workings of the human anatomy by disturbing freshly dug graves. The threat of a loved one being desecrated in this way was a very real fear for people in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. It was only the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832 that put an end to the illicit trade. It may be that having dissected their poor victim, the doctor had trouble disposing of the bones and kept the in a cupboard.

Alternatively, it has been suggested that so tainted with the suspicion of grave robbing were doctors, that they were wary of exhibiting an anatomical skeleton in their surgery, preferring to keep it under wraps. We are in danger of straying into the realm of fantasy and it may just be that as murder was a crime most heinous and a skeleton was the natural result of the act. Figuratively, a skeleton could be seen to represent a dark, embarrassing secret that someone is keen to hide from view.

The phrase first appeared in print in 1815 in Joseph Adams’ Philosophical Treatise on the Hereditary Peculiarities of the Human Race; “cautions on cautions are multiplied, to conceal the skeleton in the closet or to prevent its escape”. The appearance of a figurative skeleton in an anatomical treatise is a tad ironic but the sense is clear. William Thackeray wrote in Punch in 1845 that “there is a skeleton in every house”. It is hard to believe that he meant it literally. More likely, he was using it figuratively, a suspicion confirmed ten years ago when he returned to the idiom in his novel, The Newcomes, the Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family; “it is from these that we shall come at some particulars regarding the Newsome family, which will show us that they have a skeleton or two in their closets..”

Cupboard did not appear until 1860. Lady Scott, who also wrote the Hen-pecked Husband, penned a novel in two volumes called The Skeleton in the Cupboard. As a noun closet was used to describe a small room for study or prayer and then from 1610 a room for storage. It seemed to have fallen out of favour in England during the 19^th century, perhaps because it had been appropriated to describe the privy, the water closet. The Americans seemingly had no such scruples. A skeleton in the cupboard of the prurient Victorians, perhaps.

Quacks Pretend To Cure Other Men’s Disorders But Rarely Find A Cure For Their Own – Part Fifty Three

Hunt’s Remedy – William E Clarke

Whatever happened to dropsy? It first made its appearance in literature in Horace’s Odes (Carmina 2.2 13 – 16) and was used by the poet as a metaphor for avarice. 18^th and 19^th century literature is peppered by references to people suffering from dropsy but it seems to have gone out of fashion. Perhaps that’s because it is now known as oedema and is a condition whereby excess fluid accumulates below the surface of the skin, particularly in the legs and ankles, causing inflammation. An obstruction in the blood vessel seems to cause it and it can be treated by locating and treating the obstacle.

Anyone suffering from dropsy would be glad of some form of respite and a popular remedy in the second half of the 19^th century was Hunt’s Remedy. It was not just restricted to the cure of dropsy. According to the accompanying adverts it was the “great Kidney Medicine that cures dropsy and all diseases of the kidney, bladder and urinary organs – never known to fail”. When the medicine came into the hands of a chemist from Providence, Rhode Island, William E Clarke, it was promoted using some really wonderful trade cards showing a healthy male using a bottle of the said potion to wrestle a skeleton accompanied by a scythe. There was no doubting the message of this powerful image.

The adverts went on to say that “by the use of Hunt’s Remedy the Stomach and Bowels will speedily regain their strength and the blood will be perfectly purified”. In case you were concerned what was in it, the advert went on to reassure you that it “is purely vegetable and meets a want never before furnished to the public and the utmost reliance may be placed on it”. The potion came in two sizes – a small embossed bottle, known as Trial Size, retailing for 75 cents and a larger one which would set you back $1.25. The bottles were aqua in colour. One of Clarke’s agents, a Mr W B Blanding, sold 33,120 bottles over the course of two years and it was extremely popular throughout New England. But that was not the limit of its sales penetration. “The Remedy is known throughout the United States and Canada and in foreign countries”.

The story went that the key ingredient of the potion was a root which grew in the pastures and roadsides of the United States and was used by the Dutch colonists for medicinal purposes. The recipe was passed to a number of physicians, one of whom used it to cure a Mr Hunt of Manhattan who, suffering from dropsy, took it for a year and saw that “his bloated flesh was reduced and his vigour restored”. Rather like Victor Kiam, he was so enamoured with the drug that he bought up the manufacturing rights and upon his death these were acquired by William Clarke in 1872.

The Remedy was widely available until the turn of the 20^th century when the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act put an end to its rather extravagant claims. Whether it was effective was unclear. Its main ingredient, according to the Medical Record of 19^th July 1884, was apocynum cannabium or dogbane which was used by Native American tribes to treat a wide variety of complaints such as rheumatism, coughs, pox, whooping cough, asthma and internal parasites. Whether it touched the kidneys or dropsy is unclear. However, the quality of the advertising images meant it has a special place in the annals of quackery.

Book Corner – April 2017 (2)

The Red Thumb Mark – R Austin Freeman

I have a confession to make. I have a penchant for detective stories and mysteries. I find them a light relief from the heavier fare that normally makes up my reading list. I like to go slightly off piste from the usual detective novelists – Conan Doyle, Christie, Sayer, Simenon et al – and I was encouraged to try Austin Freeman, not someone I had read before. He wrote 27 novels featuring Doctor Thorndyke and for no better reason than you need to start somewhere, I decided to read the first of the series, published in 1907.

On opening the book I wondered whether I was reading a Sherlock Holmes manqué. The protagonist is a clever sleuth, Dr Thorndyke, who specialises in medico-legal enquiries and has the brain power of Conan Doyle’s creation minus the neuroses. The account of his exploits is written by his faithful friend and unemployed doctor, Doctor Jervis. The real culprit is neither arrested nor brought to justice nor really named, although there are enough clues in the latter part of the book for the diligent reader to be pretty sure of their identity. There is some love interest, although it is done in the rather prim and proper manner you would expect from an Edwardian novel, as the loyal Jervis falls under the charms of Juliet Gibson. The real object of her affections becomes clear as the book concludes.

The mystery is simple enough. Reuben Hornby is accused of stealing some diamonds deposited in his uncle’s safe. He has one of the few keys to the safe – his uncle, John, and cousin, Walter have the others – and it seems a fair cop when a piece of paper with a bloody thumb print matching Reuben’s distinctive dabs is found in the safe. Reuben has his collar felt and languishes in jail ahead of his trial, protesting his innocence. His aunt and Juliet are convinced of his innocence and Thorndyke is brought in to resolve the case.

There are moments of comedy – the aunt is portrayed as a bit of a dotty character and her appearance in the witness stand is the comedic highlight of the book. There is the usual sexist language and treatment of women that went with the age. Polton, Thorndyke’s amanuensis, tidies up the rooms prior to a visitation by the fairer sex because he “evidently appreciated the difference between the masculine and the feminine view as to the proper appearance of working premises”  – a difference of view that persists to this very day, if the discussions between TOWT and I about my office are anything to go by. And there is an intriguing moment when Juliet asks Jervis whether he considered Thorndyke “a dear”. Perhaps the modern habit of trying to determine hints of sexuality makes too much of it.

The solving of the mystery involves the aunt’s Thumbograph. This was akin to an autograph book where family and friends signed and dates a box on the left hand of the page and left their thumb mark on the right. I’m sure it brightened up many a dull dinner party. It also makes an appearance in The Crooked Hinge by John Dickson Carr, published in 1938 and was important as finger prints were the DNA of the modern police force. But, as Thorndyke demonstrates, finger prints are not infallible and need to be seen in context.

It is an entertaining read but perhaps seemed more dated than, say, Sherlock Holmes. The scientific explanations of Thorndyke’s methodology can grate but overall, it reflects well on an author who has rather gone out of fashion.