The Triv of Hist

Q. After all, who wouldn't want Napoleon's penis in a display cabinet?

I had a life-time working in science; amazingly, getting paid (to have fun) for most of it. I was a second-rate player - but not as low as third-rate . . . fair with failings. Principal of those failings being lack of finish: the ideas came readily enough; I enjoyed gathering data and processing them; but copper-bottoming the ship for launching was too much like hard work and my desk-drawer was full of unpublished manuscripts. What I could do was write a book-review! 700 words giving the gist of a book, a mild crit of how well it was put together and a sentence or two of original content to add something to the intellectual history of humanity. The Blob is an extension of this business model: not limited to books but still 700 rambling words about something specific that has floated up over my horizon. There are still rather more typos and clunky phrasing than I'd like. But if there's a copy deadline, the type must be set and printed and done.

Suzie Edge surfaced on Metafilter because of her line in medical-historical tales. That's my jam and so I ordered her book from the library: Vital Organs: A History of The World's Most Famous Body Parts.  Edge started life as a molecular biologist; shifted to medicine (infection, haematology, surgery); then took an MLitt in Modern History; more recently has gone mad on TikTok. It's a bit like The Blob, I guess: getting inspiration from whatever floats past in the media stream.  Someone suggested that the subset of stories about [named] human body parts could be clagged together into a book-length manuscript and waft this past some publishers.

The Q. at the top of this piece refers to one such member.
A. No thanks. It's quite enough to handle my own penis, don't need another.
Seemingly, someone nicked Napoleon's penis before the Emperor was buried and after some peculiar travelling it is now at rest in New Jersey. Most of Albert Einstein's brain is likewise now lodged in a jar in Hamilton Ontario. In neither case was the macabre shipment across multiple state lines authorized by informed consent! We've both 'done' Alexis St. Martin's visible digestive system. Galileo's middle finger is on display [R] in Firenze. If there is going to be a second volume of Vital Organs (and there must be a "second eleven" out there), I've already written Captain Danjou's hand.

Suzie Edge has retailed the [standard story] of Douglas Bader’s legs. These prostheses were defo part of my cultural background when I was a schoolboy in short pants, pretending to be a Hawker Hurricane [neeowwww, budda budda budda] in 1960s England. Bader was a POW in WWII and vowed to be “a plain, bloody nuisance to the Germans”. One example was refusing to attend appel /roll-call in the snow because his feet would get cold. Hilarious stick-it-to-the-man anecdote. Except that, several years after tween me hoovering up Reach For The Sky, his biography by Paul Brickhill, I heard about the POV of his fellow POWs who had been required to parade in the snow until all prisoners were present and accounted for.

This is a peculiar book. Comprehensive history it ain't. It's basically a series of reasonably well-informed cocktail-party anecdotes; not a haiku, but not a critical reading of the several sources, either. I hope it does well because we all need to be less squeamish about dead bodies.  It is written in a jaunty, not to say racy, style with a liberal smattering of dark doctory insider jokes. Rather too many, in my prudish all-grown-up opinion. A lot of water under my bridge since I was sharing Lockerbie jokes with the lads.