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In 1962, a college student answers an ad: “Mortuary Assistant required”
- wwweston 11y ago>"The black lungs of heavy smokers I would weigh once, then squeeze under cold running water for fifteen minutes until they became baby pink and tripelike, and then weigh again: the difference in the two figures, often a couple of pounds or more, was the weight of the tar and nicotine that quite possibly was the killer." A few pounds? If you'd asked me, I would have guessed the weight of lung-accumulated smoking gunk would be an order of magnitude smaller. (Also, not a bad hack for measuring some of the effects of smoking.) >It wasn't only smoking that lacquered up one's innards with tar. Living in the London of the day was none too healthy, either. Hmmm. Wonder how long I should continue to live in LA?
- InclinedPlane 11y agoModern LA is orders of magnitude safer than London in the '60s and earlier. Those conditions would have been comparable to some parts of China today.
- windlep 11y ago"I can't trust air I can't see", was my favorite line of my grandfathers, who lived in LA for the past 60 years. He always mentioned how incredibly clear and clean the air is now compared to a few decades ago (where I live in Northern California now, even the Bay Area seems polluted and smoggy most days).
- snogglethorpe 11y agoI expect the same is true of many "industrial" cities in developed countries... I live in Kawasaki, just outside of Tokyo, which is famous for its industry. The air now is lovely and clean, there are essentially no pollution issues at all, but 50 years ago, things were apparently very, very, different... In old pictures, it's like a black miasma hanging over everything.... oO;
- chiph 11y agoThese days when I get behind a classic car that has a carburetor, I close the vents. Just can't stand the smell of the unburned fuel they put out. Which is odd because I grew up with them (my first car was a '75 Impala with the malaise-era small-block V-8). These days there are many more cars on the road and individually they're far cleaner than any 70's car was. So much cleaner that collectively they're cleaner than the population of cars from back then too.
- seanmcdirmid 11y agoHmmm. Wonder how long I should continue to live in Beijing? :( (today is a clean air day, but my wife and I had this argument already once this week)
- InclinedPlane 11y agoI posted a link to this in another post, but here's a chart showing how bad the pollution in London during the great smog of 1952 was: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dib2/atmos/london.jpeg http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dib2/atmos/london.jpeg Notice that SO2 and smoke particles are measured in units of milligrams per m^3 (today such measurements are in micrograms per m^3). To put Beijing's air in the context of this graph, the smoke particles in Beijing on a bad air day will go up to 0.2 to 0.8 mg/m^3 and SO2 will spike up to 0.3 for short periods. Compared to the Great Smog of 1952, Beijing's air isn't nearly as bad, but it's still incredibly bad. The Great Smog killed 0.03% of the population of London per day. Beijing's air regularly gets to around 1/4 the amount of smoke in the air as during the Great Smog.
- keithpeter 11y agoLiverpool area, early 60s: we had those thick yellow fogs less often than in London, but with added ingredients from the chemical works up the estuary. My grandfather would be hospitalised in the winter months with bronchitis - on one occasion spending time in an oxygen tent to aid his breathing. Our teacher at school suggested we breathe through handkerchiefs on the way to school if there was a fog. Impressive quantities of tar. Much better now.
- lordnacho 11y agoA friend of mine actually left because of the pollution. It's thought provoking that it could get that bad.
- gommm 11y agoI left Shanghai because of the pollution... And Beijing is even worth...
- javert 11y agoWhat exactly did they do to clean up the air in London? I mean, just pass regulations that factories have to be further from the city, or what?
- DanBC 11y agoThey passed a variety of clean air acts to prevent burning coal within certain boundaries and raise chimney heights. http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/londons-historic-pea-soupers http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/londons-historic-pea-soupers http://www.air-quality.org.uk/03.php http://www.air-quality.org.uk/03.php There are still problems with NO2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32512152 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32512152
- InclinedPlane 11y agoSimilar things to what was done in America. Lots of regulations. The "Great Smog" of 1952, which resulted in several thousand deaths in a matter of days, spurred action, resulting in the Clean Air Act of 1956 and other legislation. It banned many of the more polluting activities which had been common at the time, use of low grade coal and wood in home heating, use of unfiltered diesel engines on transportation in the city, use of coal in power stations near to the city. Factories and power plants were also moved farther away from the city. Here's an interesting little writeup that has some really fascinating graphs on London pollution: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dib2/atmos/urban.html http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dib2/atmos/urban.html
- pjc50 11y agoAmong other things, a switch to gas-fired central heating (with the discovery of gas in the North Sea) and a mandate to use "smokeless fuel" in the remaining hearths. Smokeless fuel is a sort of briquette made of ground and reconstituted coal that's had most of the sulphuric impurities washed and cooked out of it, along with a blend of other things like sawdust and molasses.
- akgerber 11y agoPittsburgh was a city of coal-heated homes and coke-powered blast furnaces set in river valleys, and in the '60s and earlier was dark at noon: http://www.buzzfeed.com/kevintang/stunning-photos-of-pittsburghs-air-pollution-in-the-1940s#.xyoMpJwwd http://www.buzzfeed.com/kevintang/stunning-photos-of-pittsbu... Many of the older brick-and-stone buildings are still covered in black stains.
- DanBC 11y agoI've seen estimates that say one pack of cigarretes per day over a year equals about one cup of tar in the lungs. Here's a video showing extraction of tar from 400 cigarettes. https://youtube.com/watch?v=_csz2dPjyAw https://youtube.com/watch?v=_csz2dPjyAw Not all of that tar stays in the lungs - some is breathed out; some is worked out by cillia (and sometimes swallowed, increasing the risk of cancer of the kidney, bladder, and penis). Modern London pollution is bad and we need to work to reduce it - people still die from the pollution - but the London peasoupers were catastrophic. The US EPA has a great page about London smog, which has a long history: http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/londons-historic-pea-soupers http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/londons-historic-pea-soupers > Early on, no one had the scientific tools to correlate smog with adverse health effects, but complaints about the smoky air as an annoyance date back to at least 1272, when King Edward I, on the urging of important noblemen and clerics, banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death.
- snogglethorpe 11y ago> banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death This is very interesting... a somewhat longer description that google turned up: http://www.planetgreen.org/2012/03/edward-i-environmentalist-by-a.html http://www.planetgreen.org/2012/03/edward-i-environmentalist...
- riffraff 11y ago> I've seen estimates that say one pack of cigarretes per day equals about one cup of tar in the lungs. over what period?
- DanBC 11y agoOver a year. Thanks for pointing that out! I edited my post.
- riffraff 11y agoif it's normal for you to drive around without worrying about smog limiting your visibility, than probably it's not as bad as old London[0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog
- zhte415 11y agoA link to the Wikipedia article on 'Pea Soup', the kind of smog prevalent in London in the 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog "The result was that visibility could be down to a metre or so in the daytime. Walking out of doors became a matter of shuffling one’s feet to feel for road curbs, etc." And form the article, based in 1962 (though things were surely better by then overall): "More than once the bus I rode to work had to be led by a policeman walking on the road with a red flashlight, so thick were the greasy, sulfur-dioxide-laden pea-soup fogs that in 1962 were so bad as to send people by the hundreds to hospitals some days." LA, Beijing... if not good, probably a lot better than this era and location.
- derekp7 11y agoA lot of people think of lungs as if they are big bags, but in reality they are more like a sponge. So if you could imagine what the accumulation would be like in a kitchen sponge, that is kind of what it is like in the lungs.
- 11thEarlOfMar 11y agoThe worst job I've had was called 'putting up hay'. It amounted to climbing into the loft of a very dust-laden barn with 3 or 4 of my college buddies, catching hay bales as they spat out of the hay elevator, and running them over to stack in uniform 3-d arrays. After a couple of hours, our employer called us down for rejuvenation with Coke-a-cola and glazed donuts, and we'd blow what seemed like pounds of dusty mucous out of our noses and then head back up into the loft. $5/hour seemed like a lot of money at the time...
- aklemm 11y agoHah, I got the same pay for that, but didn't hate the job so much. We got beer after, so that may be why.
- te_platt 11y agoReminds me of tagging along with my older brothers to mow lawns. After a few hours of weeding and taking my turn at the push mower they would take me to get a Slurpee. My own Slurpee that I didn't have to share! Later in high school doing construction work for my dad digging ditches with a pick and shovel, he would walk by and casually ask if I was feeling motivated to do well in school.
- madengr 11y agoYep, as a teenager I cleaned out urethane spray booths and other shit jobs no one else would do. That motivated me to do quite quite well in electrical engineering.
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoWhilst a mask seems a good idea, I presume that the organic material that built up in your lungs would be broken down and washed out by the lungs natural processes within a few days or weeks? Perhaps a doctor could clarify?
- chrissyb 11y agoNot a doctor but.. You're falling for a bit of a naturalistic fallacy here. Just as Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral however inhaling its dust can come with very serious health problems, so can hay contain mould which can also cause serious lung disease. http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/diseases/farmers_lung.html http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/diseases/farmers_lung.html
- DiabloD3 11y agoIts stories like this why I come to HN. HN may have started as interesting stuff for the Silicon Valley VC circuit, but you can't survive on a diet of just high risk investing weirdness.
- xtrumanx 11y agoYou don't have to come to HN exclusively. I like the idea of HN or any other website being focused on single-theme. If I want to read about startups and tech I come to HN. If I want to read about something else, I go else where. I enjoyed this post very much but I would be very sad if posts like these became more frequent over here as I wouldn't have a good source of startups and tech anymore.
- onion2k 11y agoThis sort of article, with its's well written, amusing, compellingly "human" narrative is precisely how startups should be writing their blogs. It's exactly the sort of thing founders should be reading to learn the subtle and nuanced art of writing. It's very relevant to HN; not in content perhaps, but definitely in style.
- malnourish 11y agoThe thing is, aside from reddit (and perhaps Digg) what sites are "like" this, but not focused on tech?
- oliyoung 11y agoOnce upon a time http://www.metafilter.com/ http://www.metafilter.com/ but I've not been there in a long long time to say for certain it's like it was, but for obscure but interesting that was/is your place
- rodgerd 11y agoI was a regular visitor for a long time, but as Matt's segued it into (as he himself put it) "a gateway for social justice activism" it's become far too heavy on the pitchfork-rallying.
- nekopa 11y agoThis takes me back to a time when I was 17, and I applied for a job at a funeral home in London- it was offering a ridiculously high salary. It was my first time having an interview where one person sits off to the side and watches you, which I found quite unnerving. I was woefully unprepared for the interview, but it was going really well until the one question I hadn't thought about came up: "So how do you feel about bodies?" Me: "Umm, they're great! I mean, ahhh, well, um, could you define what exactly you mean by bodies?" I didn't get the position.
- bdamm 11y agoA girlfriend of mine once had this job, she said it was a dead end career.
- dbbolton 11y ago>On the other hand, the pathologist assigned to work on the bodies I would prepare was a German, and she was named Fleishhacker, which sounded to Mr. Utton as though it should mean butcher, but actually didn't. It actually does though: http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_en.html#/search=Fleischhacker http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_en.html#/search=Fleischhacker
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- detaro 11y agoYeah. One never would translate butcher to "Fleischhacker", since that word isn't really used outside of last names, but it clearly means a butcher.
- dbbolton 11y agoTo clarify, Fleischhacker is a legitimate translation of "butcher", but only in a figurative sense: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slaughterer#Translations https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slaughterer#Translations I'm guessing that the original author was saying that it doesn't literally refer to a person who cuts meat for a living (like Metzger), which is true. However, it's still a sort of funny name for a person in that profession to have.
- ghshephard 11y agoWe really need to appreciate how lucky we are: More than once the bus I rode to work had to be led by a policeman walking on the road with a red flashlight, so thick were the greasy, sulfur-dioxide-laden pea-soup fogs that in 1962 were so bad as to send people by the hundreds to hospitals some days. One Monday, after a weekend of especially thick smog, I arrived to find no fewer than thirty bodies waiting for their preparation, all of them felled by respiratory complaints.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoThe pH of London air was sometimes as low as 1.4 back then. People were basically breathing sulfuric acid.
- michaelgrafl 11y agoGerman native speaker here. Fleischhacker actually does mean butcher. It's just that most Germans would call a butcher a "Metzger" I guess. Us Austrians tend to call it a "Fleischhauer". To be honest though, I think the term Fleischhacker is used more often to describe a foul playing soccer player than a butcher.
- hessenwolf 11y agoAnd really just flesh-hacker in an engineering accent.
- techofdoom 11y agoI remember replying to an ad for "technology mortuary assistant required" - it was very odd.. Firstly, there was the tech I could see was very dead, cold stone dead - Pascal was there, Java was there (pretty stinky too!). But there was a slab with loads of new tech that was also dead, it just didn't know it yet - Rust was there, so was Go come to think of it (apparently Google dumped it when they realised it was one of their projects, and could do so), and Ruby on Rails.
- niels_olson 11y agoI just finished my rotation at the medical examiner's office. The "couple of pounds" of tar in the lungs was probably more mucus than anything. Also, they may well have been washing out the congestion caused by respiratory depression. But it's quite unlikely that it was "tar", though I'm sure plenty of black carbon, or "anthracotic pigment" came out too. I say this because a smoker who dies of, say, a sudden massive heart attack, doesn't have especially heavy lungs. The heaviness comes from other, secondary issues. Also, I had never heard of this before. We mainly just weighed the lungs and then examined them under the microscope.
- mathgenius 11y agoYeah, this made me wonder, in lieu of a lung transplant, what if they just took out a smoker's lung and gave it a good wash and then stuck it back in again? It sounds like you are saying that alot of other things go wrong with such a lung, not just a buildup of tar.
- cmdrfred 11y agoWith things like the davinci system I don't even think you would have to take the lung out.
- saalweachter 11y agoAt the very least, once the carcinogens have done their job and induced a cancer washing them out would be a bit of "shutting the barn door after the cows have run away".
- jokr004 11y agoCancer isn't the only smoking related illness, I wonder what it would do for someone with emphysema or the like..
- logfromblammo 11y agoOr leave it in and use a splash of perfluorocarbon to prophylactically rinse it out a bit, once every couple of years or so. Even if the breathing liquid does not dissolve all the lung crud directly, the mechanical action of filling and draining the alveoli might clear some of it out or thin it enough for the cilia to move it.
- DanBC 11y agoI was a bit surprised to see this admission: > In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I was also persuaded to commit a series of small crimes during my sojourn at the hospital, and which I hope I can safely confess at this remove of half a century. I stole pituitary glands. About a hundred of them over the months. A research hospital had need of them—pituitaries produce a multitude of hormones, including the one that makes us grow, and I proved myself quite adept at finding them: a quick probe inside the base of the brain with my fingers, and the pea-sized gland would pop out of its cavity like a snail out of its shell. Each time I collected a jar full, a furtive man in a white coat would come around to collect them, handing over a five-pound note in exchange. If ever I felt squeamish, the man reassured me that those to whom the glands belonged would be unlikely to feel the loss, nor to complain. There was a big scandal in England over the unauthorised removal of organs. Partly this was because doctors weren't explaining properly what they were doing to people who had no understanding of what was involved - "Can we remove some tissue?" instead of "can we take the heart of your dead child?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alder_Hey_organs_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alder_Hey_organs_scandal > The Alder Hey organs scandal involved the unauthorised removal, retention, and disposal of human tissue, including children’s organs, during the period 1988 to 1995. During this period organs were retained in more than 2,000 pots [this is a UK term of art for plastic formalin-filled containers of various sizes which are used to store tissues in pathology labs] containing body parts from around 850 infants. These were later uncovered at Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool, during a public inquiry into the organ retention scandal. This was discovered by people investigating another scandal - the Bristol Heart Scandal. And it's not as if the science was any good. A lot of it was low quality; partly because the documentation of the organ origins was so poor. Dick van Velzen did great harm and mostly got away with it.
- ramblerman 11y ago> Dick van Velzen did great harm Whilst I agree he comitted a crime, his subjects were all dead anyways. I don't see the great harm myself tbh.
- DanBC 11y agoHis science was lousy; he caused many people to withdraw consent for tissue donation for scientific reasons. His subjects were dead but those subjects had relatives and many of them expressed considerable distress. I don't particularly understand that upset by I recognise that they were not lying, they did sincerely feel a lot of upset.
- shiggerino 11y ago>"I also had a girlfriend [in Canada]" Yeah, right!
- Sukotto 11y agoI quite liked this other article of his on being banned from ever returning to the remote island of Tristan da Cunha. http://laphamsquarterly.org/travel/take-nothing-leave-nothing http://laphamsquarterly.org/travel/take-nothing-leave-nothin...
- shiggerino 11y agoI can't help but speculate whether Frau Fleischhacker was a concentration camp alumna.