The X-ray files

X-ray of Momma's teeth.

I know some of you laughed at me in July when I commented on Momma's new-fangled X-ray - but they really are!

On Nov. 8, 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength now known as Röntgen rays.

Or, more commonly, X-rays.

(Röntgen himself preferred the term X-rays.)

That achievement earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

Röntgen's wife's hand.

Nearly two weeks later, he took the very first picture of his wife Anna Bertha's hand using X-rays.

She allegedly exclaimed, "I have seen my death!" when she saw her skeleton.

Röntgen died of cancer on Feb. 10, 1923. Some speculated it was due to his pioneering work in X-rays, but he one of the few who routinely used protective lead aprons at the time. 

The Lady with the Lamp

Today The Episcopal Church and I remember nurse Florence Nightingale. Nursing roles and education were first defined by Nightingale, following her experiences caring for the wounded in the Crimean War (October 1853 – February 1856). Prior to this, nursing was frequently done by women of little or no means (such as prostitutes) and thought to be a trade with few skills or standards. 

From Holy Women, Holy Men:

Florence Nightingale was born in Florence, Italy, on May 12, 1820. She was trained as a nurse at Kaiserwerth (1851) and Paris and in 1853 became superintendent of a hospital for invalid women in London. In response to God’s call and animated by a spirit of service, in 1854 she volunteered for duty during the Crimean War and recruited 38 nurses to join her. With them she organized the first modern nursing service in the British field hospitals of Scutari and Balaclava. By imposing strict discipline and high standards of sanitation she radically reduced the drastic death toll and rampant infection then typical in field hospitals. She returned to England in 1856 and a fund of £50,000 was subscribed to enable her to form an institution for the training of nurses at St. Thomas’s Hospital and at King’s College Hospital. Her school at St. Thomas’s Hospital became significant in helping to elevate nursing into a profession. She devoted many years to the question of army sanitary reform, to the improvement of nursing and to public health in India. Her main work, Notes on Nursing, 1859, went through many editions.

An Anglican, she remained committed to a personal mystical religion which sustained her through many years of poor health until her death in 1910. Until the end of her life, although her illness prevented her from leaving her home, she continued in frequent spiritual conversation with many prominent church leaders of the day, including the local parish priest who regularly brought Communion to her. By the time of her death on Aug. 13, 1910, her reputation as a healer and holy person had assumed mythical proportions, and she is honored throughout the world as the founder of the modern profession of nursing.

Collect of the Day

Life-giving God, you alone have power over life and death, over health and sickness: Give power, wisdom, and gentleness to those who follow the lead of Florence Nightingale, that they, bearing with them your presence, may not only heal but bless, and shine as lanterns of hope in the darkest hours of pain and fear; through Jesus Christ, the healer of body and soul, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

During the Crimean war, Nightingale gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp," deriving from a phrase in a report in The Times:

She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.

The phrase was further popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem "Santa Filomena":

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

I am certain Nightingale and her Notes on Nursing had an effect upon Mary Mahoney (April 16, 1845 – Jan. 4, 1926) who was the first professionally trained African American nurse in the United States. Of the 42 students admitted to the New England Hospital for Women and Children nursing program, Mahoney was one of four who graduated on Aug. 1, 1879.

In 1908, she co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses which merged with the American Nurses Association in 1951.

If it happens, it happens... We can't stop living

Since I just wrote about Yellow Fever on Monday, I was interested to read that Walter Reed Army Medical Center held a ceremony today in preparation for its September closing. The hospital has treated the nation’s war wounded since 1909.

During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793,
Philadelphia authorities sent carriages around the city
to pick up the dead and dying.

Major Walter Reed, M.D., was a U.S. Army physician who in 1900 led the team that discovered that Yellow Fever is transmitted by mosquitoes, not humans.

(Sadly, Reed underwent an emergency appendectomy and died of complications within those same hospital walls in 1902.)

Although the last North American epidemic of Yellow Fever occurred in New Orleans in 1905, yellow fever epidemics in North America have caused about 100,000-150,000 deaths through the years.

(The New Orleans epidemic of 1853, featured in the upcoming Cécile Rey American Girl book series, killed 9,000 people.)

A 1793 outbreak in Philadelphia resulted in the deaths of several thousand people and forced the administration to flee the city, including president George Washington.

A church in Charleston, S.C. suffered 308 Yellow Fever deaths in 1858, reducing its congregation by half.

In 1873, Shreveport, La., lost almost a quarter of its population to Yellow Fever, and in 1878, about 20,000 people died in an epidemic in the Mississippi River Valley.

In 1878 Memphis was hit with an unusually large amount of rain, which led to an increase in the mosquito population. The result was a huge outbreak of Yellow Fever. A ship took people fleeing Memphis hoping to escape the disease, but the ship was not allowed to dock anywhere due to fear of Yellow Fever. The ship roamed the Mississippi for the next two months before unloading her passengers.

Signal flag called the "Yellow Jack."

Yellow Fever was sometimes known as Yellow Jack. Why? A ship flying a yellow flag meant that there was illness aboard. Often this was used to trick pirates away from potential targets.

Huh. I thought a jack was a pirate flag but turns out it's a small flag flown from any boat or ship.

Anyway, thanks for a job well done Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

 

Tooth envy; or, Sojourner Tooth

www.southtowndentalcare.com

Momma is one step closer to being a pirate!

Captain Jack Sparrow might have six (or more), but Momma now has her Very First gold tooth!

Her dentist was Very Obliging (once he Stopped Laughing) and shared some photographs with Me so I could see exactly was going on - including a new-fangled X-ray!

www.southtowndentalcare.com

Ooh (or should I say Au?), tempting as that shiny Gold Tooth is I think I'll go brush my Vinyl Teeth.

After all, I've only got two.

On the other hand, how do you think I would I look with a Gold Tooth?

Don't worry, I can handle the Tooth.