Back in 1999 when I was briefly at the University of Chicago I stayed at the International House, which is a large gothic building with a tower and probably a h

Back in 1999 when I was briefly at the University of Chicago I stayed at the International House, which is a large gothic building with a tower and probably a hundred rooms, and it included a formal library. In this library I found a thick paper-covered volume, entitled something like “Proceedings of the 51st Conference of the International Society of Cardiovascular Surgeons”. Curiously flipping through it, and towards the end of the book, amongst all these other scholarly papers on various aspects of the cardiovascular profession, there was a very unique and curious poem taking like 3-4 pages, entitled “Hiawatha’s Lipid Lowering Drug”. It was nearly impossible to read because it was 3-4 pages of dense, single spaced lines of pure chemical and chemistry lingo, “sterols and etherols, thrombotamates and buyterates...” All I can remember was just a few main impressions and one quote. My main impression was that the poem was written by one of the conference cardiovascular surgeons, after the conference nice and buzzed in his hotel room if not plain drunk. It was also obviously written by a doctor/scientist who knew all the chemistry and terms around lipids and lipid removal. It was also fairly deducable without understanding the terms involved that he was a great advocate of alcohol keeping the heart going through dissolving fat, cholesterol and lipid buildup in the arteries and blood vessels. I also remember the last line of the poem, which was quite impressive after 3-4 pages of recitation of body chemistry and chemicals. The last line was this: “So thought Hiawatha as he staggered from this Congress”.