Re: Scrofulous disease of the elbow
- From: "Don Moody" <dpmoody@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 17:56:37 +0100
"Kim Groothuis" <kimsfamilyhistory@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:mailman.572.1185104558.5496.genbrit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
My ggg-grandfather Joseph HARTLEY died in 1883 and the certificate
shows the cause of death as "scrofulous disease of the elbow for 7
years". He was only 59, so it is isn't that the cause was old age
and he just happened to have a bad elbow. He was a cloth finisher,
in case that is relevant.
In other words 'I haven't a clue what he died of so I'll bung down an
obvious symptom.' Or 'I know what he died of, but it pays me not to
say it, so I'll bung down an obvious symptom.'
Why would you think that he didn't die of old age? At 59 he was old,
very old by the standards of the time.
You know nothing about his diet so you cannot eliminate any disease
arising from that source.
You know nothing about his environment except that he was a cloth
finisher. Meaning exactly what? He could have used chemicals which
slowly poisoned him in his working life. You can't eliminate any such
possibility. Or any other form of industrial injury.
You can't eliminate any of dozens of infectious diseases which
couldn't have been diagnosed in that era even though they did occur.
You can't eliminate many auto-immune diseases.
Since you don't give information about any close relatives, you can't
begin to eliminate any of hundreds of genetic diseases.
And even if you think you might be able to eliminate some possible
underlying causations, you can't safely do that without knowing a lot
more to exclude the possibilities of having two or more conditions
simultaneously, each of which confuses the symptoms of the other(s).
It's a rather traditional trick in medical schools to provide patients
for diagnosis where a student who is not very sharp will jump in with
the wrong answer. And (s)he has the benefit of a living patient of
whom questions can be asked. You don't have that, or the training.
You need to approach this kind of problem in an entirely different way
than expecting to get a modern medical translation of an old
terminology leading you to a single and certain diagnosis.
The first stage is to decide why you want to know. If it is just
curiosity, give up. You don't appreciate the work involved. If it is
something to do with the susceptibility of your or your descendants to
genetic disease, do the numbers. Statistically you have only 1/32nd of
the genes of the person concerned so there is not a lot of chance that
any genetic information about him will be relevant to you if
unsupported.
To support it you are going to have to look into all the intervening
generations, lots of collaterals, factor in death from genetically
irrelevant causes, and then come up with what is no more than an
hypothesis at the end of that vast amount of work. If you are prepared
to do all that, fair enough. Go and do it and come back with scads
more information. There are people who make that sort of thing the
whole work of their professional lives, and if they didn't we as a
society would be a lot more, and more dangerously, ignorant than we
are in the matter of what is a genetic disease and what is not. It
isn't for amateurs, unless they are so rich they don't need to
allocate any time to earning a living.
All diagnosis is a black art, but historical diagnosis is the black
art of looking for a black cat in an unlit coal hole. While
blindfolded. It can be done, but not easily. The reason you are not
likely to be poisoned with aflatoxin is because I did one such
historical diagnosis. I started with being told by Amerindians how
they had got rid of a Jesuit priest. To actually complete the
diagnosis took four years of virtually full-time effort and drew on
the work of dozens of other scientists. The confirmation involved
experiments on baboons. More scientists and more years. If you want a
scare, don't just look at a male baboon with its gnashers on the wire
inches from your nose. Try looking from the same range into the eyes
of a big male baboon in the madness stages of aflatoxin poisoning when
it knows it is going to die and it knows you killed it. And that
experiment involved a whole cage of baboons. Getting that one
historical diagnosis right and confirmed involved tens of thousands of
hours of scientists' time and millions of pounds in money. It was
worth it because if the diagnosis was correct it involved a major
dietary risk for billions of people worldwide. You are one of those
billions because you will have eaten manufactured food and it will
have included products from peanuts or other crops which can be
infected with Aspergillus flavus.
That was an exceptionally demanding historical diagnosis because so
much rested on getting it right and proving it right, but it gives
some idea of the magnitude of the work that can get involved in
historical diagnosis. It isn't a game for the plain curious, unless
they happen to be idle rich. By the time they've finished playing the
game they'll be neither idle nor rich.
Difficult as it may seem to people who think they can know everything,
have a right to know everything, and get into a pet when it isn't
available on the Web in a few keystrokes, the old rule about
information still applies. Ask what it is worth. If it costs more to
get than it would be worth, then stay ignorant and put your time and
money into more fruitful directions.
Don
.
- References:
- Scrofulous disease of the elbow
- From: Kim Groothuis
- Scrofulous disease of the elbow
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