Study: Abe Lincoln’s Anti-Depressant Made Him Mad.

‘A few months into

his presidency, Abraham Lincoln stopped

taking the little blue pills used to treat his

melancholia because they made him

“cross,” and scientists said on Tuesday it

was good that he did.

Those pills contained enough mercury to

kill him, said retired physician and

medical historian Norbert Hirschhorn,

who authored a study on the subject.

“If Lincoln hadn’t recognized that the little blue pill he took made

him ‘cross,’ and stopped the medication, his steady hand at the helm

through the Civil War might have been considerably less steady,” he

wrote in the summer issue of the journal Perspectives in Biology and

Medicine.’ [thanks, Abby]

Recall that to be ‘mad as a hatter’ refers to mercury and arsenic poisoning as well, which hatters contracted because of the pesticides used to prevent insect damage in the wool and cotton they handled. Interestingly, a Google search on (arsenic AND “mad hatter”) comes up with as many hits about Arsenic and Old Lace as it does to environmental toxicology; it seems my favorite screwball comedy is often mentioned in the same breath as the “mad hatter”. Recall, also, that concerns about arsenic poisoning are back in the news because, as I’ve previously blinked, chromated copper arsenate leaches into playground soil from the pressure-treated lumber used to build kids’ climbing structures.

I’m treating a man with a psychiatric disturbance and arachnodactyly (Marfan’s Syndrome) right now (although, of course, not with mercurics!); Lincoln had Marfan’s. I could only find eleven citations in the medical literature discussing the question of whether there is an association between Marfan’s syndrome and mental health symptoms. (Because Marfan’s is associated with cardiac anomalies, there may sometimes be CNS insults due to circulatory problems that might be mistaken for a primary psychiatric problem.)

For only the most rabid ‘Followers’: added items at the FmH store, courtesy of CafePress.com. Now including baseball caps! As with all the other merchandise, these feature the discreet little FmH logo and signify your membership in an elite little secret cabal… I don’t make any profit on these, BTW. They’re sold at cost, just to get the word (actually, it’s a wordless logo) out there. So far, I’m the only one who’s ever purchased any FmH swag; I’m very pleased with my coffee mug (I recommend the larger size), my teeshirt (grey) and, not least, my baldhead mousepad. Gonna rush right out and order myself a baseball cap when I next deserve a present… The rumor around cafepress is that they’re going to start offering the teeshirts etc. in colors

R.I.P. Mimi Fariña; folksinger who founded Bread & Roses dies at 56. She had a sweeter voice than sister Joan…

Refrain:

Well, if somehow you could pack up your sorrows,

And give them all to me.

You would lose them, I know how to use them,

Give them all to me.

(Refrain)

No use cryin’, talking to a stranger,

Namin’ the sorrows you’ve seen;

Oh, ’cause there are too many bad times,

Too many sad times,

Nobody knows what you mean.

{Refrain}

No use ramblin’ walkin’ in the shadows,

Trailin’ a wanderin’ star.

No one beside you, no one to hide you,

An’ nobody knows where you are.

{Refrain}

No use roamin’, walking by the roadside,

Seekin’ a satisfied mind.

Ah, ’cause there are too many highways,

Too many byways,

Nobody’s walkin’ behind.

{Refrain}

You would lose them, I know how to use them,

Give them all to me.

Bush Is No Reagan; He’s a Harding — ‘Conservatives are claiming the new administration of George W. Bush

is less like his father’s than that of Ronald Reagan. But a close reading of

history suggests it’s more like that of Warren G. Harding.

It’s not just that Harding was an affable but not too bright politician

chosen for office by “fifteen men in a smoke filled room,” or that his

campaign slogan, “Back to normalcy,” reflected his tendency to mangle

the English language (he’d meant to say, “normality”).

Harding became the 1920 Republican standard-bearer after the

front-runners deadlocked at an oil dominated party convention in

Chicago. He won the backing of big business based on his pledge to cut

the tax rate for the top brackets (what Al Gore would call, “the top one

percent”). As President, Harding fulfilled this pledge, even though

Americans making below $66,000 saw no tax-relief.

Harding also filled his cabinet with a combination of old cronies and top

industry officials. Muckraker H.L. Mencken described Harding’s cabinet

as “three highly intelligent men of self-interest, six jackasses and one

common crook.” ‘ AlterNet

I’m trying out ReBlogger; the icon will allow you to post a comment to an item here, and the number in brackets shows how many comments have been posted to that item. Thanks in advance for comments on anything or everything, agreeable or contentious; fire away! And thanks to everyone who wrote with suggestions for a discussion system. Please let me know if FmH’s load speed (sluggish as it is already!) seems to take a hit now that ReBlogger’s in place.

The raging left is alive in Genoa, and one of its number is dead: ” Italian police shot

dead an anti-globalization demonstrator

on Friday, bleakly sweeping aside the

worthy words of world leaders on the

opening day of a Group of Eight summit.” The version I heard is that he was ready to throw the fire extinguisher he was brandishing through the window of a police van, and was shot through the head at close range. We may be looking at an eruption of rage tomorrow that will make it impossible for attendees at the G8 summit inside the barricades to remain oblivious to what is going on in the streets around them, as they did today. Streetfighting may return to the U.S. for the IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington D.C. Sept. 28-Oct. 4. There’s beginning to be a smell in the air like Chicago ’68…

Good Morning, Colombia. Arianna Huffington: “For more than a year, critics of our government’s drug war aid package to Colombia (now

hovering at $2 billion) have been warning of the mission creep that threatens to embed us

ever deeper in that country’s 4-decade-old civil war.

Well, the slippery slope just got greased.” Buried in the House foreign operations appropriation bill is a provision that would remove restrictions on U.S. funding of mercenaries for the Colombian “counterdrug” war. Common Dreams

Psychiatrist claims sunlight link to schizophrenia: “An Australian psychiatrist claims lack of sunlight on the skin

of pregnant women may cause their babies to be

schizophrenic.

Dr John McGrath says it explains a jump in the European

and North American incidence of ‘schizophrenia births’

between February and April each year.” Ananova

‘Gut Feeling’ May Be Connected to Past Experience. This is one of the least surprising psychological research findgs I’ve ever read. Reuters via Yahoo!

Secret’s in the Gray Matter. MRI brain scans of subjects with family histories of early-onset Alzheimer’s dementia and who themselves had gene markers predictive of the disease (all of whom went on to develop the disease over eight-year followup) have showed structural deterioration of the medial temporal lobe as much as three years before symptomatic manifestations of the disease developed. It is possible that the medications we now use to retard the progression of symptoms (after the disease appears) might be useful in preventing or delaying its initial emergence in cases that could be identified this early. Wired

U.S. Suspends Human Research at Johns Hopkins After a Death. This draconian step, effectively shutting down federally financed medical research involving human subjects (at the university that receives the most federal research funds bar none) is virtually unprecedented. In June, a healthy volunteer died in an asthma study after inhaling a non-FDA-approved drug; federal overseers found Hopkins negligent with respect to precautions to protect subjects in the study. The FDA has been ambivalent about whether it ought to review and approve applications to do basic research with human subjects, and used to discourage academics who inquired. Now the FDA says scientists should seek its approval for any study, such as the one in question, involving new or unusual uses of drugs, but it does not enforce compliance, and the human investigations board at Johns Hopkins was free to approve the study without FDA approval. Officials of the university reacted with outrage to the funding suspension despite the fact that a university committee investigating the death found that the researcher had ignored or missed reports in the medical literature indicating that the drug had the potential to cause severe lung injury of the type that killed the research subject. New York Times

The Secret Agents of Capitalism Are All Around Us. You may soon be surrounded by disingenuous paid shills hired to subtly impart their sponsor’s message to those around them by a maketing firm that claims to have perfected undercover marketing. ”In order for a product to really succeed right

now, the product has to have credibility. People have to see it, they

have to understand it in a real way. The only way for them to understand it in a

real way is for it to be in their world. And that’s what we do. We put it in their

life.” New York Times

abuddhas memes has moved.

Are you a noomeejahoor?

Coasts and Islands Facing Era of Strong Hurricanes. New analysis provides firmest evidence yet that cycles in ocean and atmospheric conditions that suppressed big storms from 1971 to 1994 have shifted into a storm-spawning state that may last from 10 to 40 years. The researcher cautions that the analysis on which this is based is speculative. However, the consequences of unpreparedness for this possibility are dire, as the seaboard is much more developed than during the ’20’s-’60’s, the last putative peak in the cycle. “The prospect of more exceptionally strong storms is particularly troubling

because their destructive power rises enormously for even a small increase in

wind speed. For example… winds of 130 m.p.h. have

almost double the punch of winds of 100 m.p.h.” New York Times In a case of what New Scientist magazine famously calls “nominative determinism”, one of the co-authors of the study is named Christopher Landsea.