JF Ptak Science Books Post 309
By virtue of my children I think that I can safely say that I am now a stone-cold expert on Spongebob Squarepants, and if I tried just a little I could use it to reference just about anything. (This is also the case with The Simpsons, though I really didn't need much excuse from my older daughter, Emma, who was/is a fan, to watch them.) In one episode of SBSP, Sandra "Sandy" Cheeks, the underwater deep-sea-diver-outfitted "land" squirrel and close friend of SB, decides that since she is from Texas she can do anything, and attempts to wrestle the enormous Alaskan Bull Worm which has invaded their home of Bikini Bottom and taken her tail. (I'm horrified to find that someone has transcribed the hundreds of SB epsiodes, god help them. And just for the record and to show I might be as removed as these folks, I'll point out that in addition to getting most of Sandy's tail, the worm also eats the "Welcome to Bikini Bottom" sign, a wheelbarrow, the homework of two children, the butt of a fish (twice) and most of SpongeBob's pineapple house. There.) So yadda yadda yadda she finds herself wrestling the worm in a cave against SB's ignored and interrupted warnings. She subdues the huge beast, and announces her victory. SB gently corrects her, saying that what she was wrestling was just the tongue of the worm, and that the cave was its mouth, and that it was waaaaay bigger than Sandy had ever imagined. The whole thing dawns on her slowly, [Sandy: "Ohhhhhhhh. This is the tongue, and... (trailing off) the whole thing... is the... worm. (freaks out) RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!! "(she and SB sprint away; the worm growls angrily, chomps down, and chases after them)] SO. So Sandy just misses the big picture that was staring her square in the face, concentrating on the one detail she thought she could recognize and handle.
From recognized oversight comes epiphany!
And such is the case with my reaction to the wood engraving here, concentrating on the use of the apparatus and how out of proportion its physicality was with its function. And until I started reading about it I missed its monumental importance completely, concentrating as I was on the thing I thought I knew.
I was having a wide swipe at a man who is seen by nearly all authorities as being the founder of the physiology of metabolism. The man is Santorio Santorio* (1561-1636, and who was also known as Santorio Santorii, and Sanctorius of Padua), and the image is from his Medicina Statica, or, rules of Health, in eight Sections of Aphorisms...English'd by J[ohn] D[avies], printed in London for John Starkey in 1676. (this is a reprint of the fourth edition of 1737, following the first edition of 1614.) For many years Sanctorius weighed and measured just about everything that went into his body and everything that came out of it. One of the principle instruments used by him in this process is the famous weighing chair, which was (seemingly) laboriously suspended from a device in the floor above the dining room. the net effect of all of this (as we see in the illustration) was that, after eating began, once the chair touched the floor it was the signal to stop.
What I was missing in this, what I didn't put together and what I didn't ask myself was where did this apparatus fit in the history of this sort of thinking? The more substantial question yet was what other sorts of machines were employed in determining metabolism in humans? The answer to the second question is "none"--this is the first time that a machine was used in this sort of analysis. Actually, it is the FIRST man-machine interaction of any sort in the history of medicine. And the answer to the first question is that this was the first time that data had been collected and analyzed such a longitudinal and coherent fashion.
So I missed the whole thing, making fun of this enormous piece of machinery that would be used to tell someone when to stop eating, wrestling the Alaskan Bull Worm's tongue in my own little cave.
* According to the great bibliography of Garrison and Morton on the history of medicine, "Sanctoris was the founder of the physiology of metabolism. He introduced into physiology exact methods of measurement, pulse counting, temperature determinism, and weighing".
My son also loves this serial very much.. The worm story teach many good things to the kids..
Posted by: cockyhen | 15 October 2008 at 10:28 AM
Yes. Spongebob may very well be the "most moral" person on TV--and that includes the so-called religious shows as well.
Posted by: John Ptak | 15 October 2008 at 11:45 AM