This is the musical
companion-volume to sick notes -
Music about lotions, potions, motions urges and
purges
Following his immensely
popular Sick Notes (also from Parthenon), Fritz Spiegl takes us on a
fascinating musical tour through medicine, from the 18th to the 20th
centuries. As early as 1928 The Thinnest Girl I Know warns against
anorexia and, to balance it, Mr Double
Stout in the 1850s extols William Banting,
inventor of slimming diets. Also music about vegetarianism, hypochondria, malingering,
phrenology, the 1921 “Monkey Gland Scandal” (wickedly satirised long before
organ transplants became a reality); and a gavotte for a giant vibrator of
1885, “affording the fair sex a similar exercise to that given by the
saddle-horse”. Also
patent-medicine advertising jingles which companies like Beechams
cleverly persuaded patients themselves to sing.
The pertinent commentaries in Spiegl’s witty
style, well known from his numerous BBC broadcasts, books and newspaper
columns, fill in the background - as do his Sick
Notes musical entertainments, with which he and his singing colleagues have
long delighted medical as well as lay audiences.
some five dozen songs on medical themes and subjects,
dating from the 18th to the 20th centuries and sung at many medical
entertainments -
Many of the pieces are Victorian, with
splendidly-decorative coloured covers and title-pages.
musick notes is a veritable
treasure-trove of social history of medicine, as seen through popular song,
enlivened by instrumental pieces and often amusing introductions.
With
a Foreword by Professor Robert Sells FRCS, FRCSE,
Surgeon, Conductor, Pianist, Flautist.
280
pp Hardback
101/4
x 73/4 Inches
ISBN 18421 40868
Price:
What the medical profession
thought of MuSICK NOTES:
“If laughter is the best
medicine, then Mr Spiegl’s collection of songs should
do more to shorten NHS waiting-lists than a whole raft of government
initiatives”
Dr
Frances Calman, Clinical Oncologist.
-----
“For doctors who like to
relive their student days sitting round the piano and singing medical songs,
this book is a must. You get words,
music, and a funny and erudite song-by-song commentary from Fritz Spiegl. Who else would collect The Bile Bean Coronation Grand March or The Wincarnis
Waltz? Anyone with a liking for Victorian Music Hall songs will get
endless pleasure from this collection...?
I enjoyed it immensely - and the piano parts aren’t too hard.”
Dr M. Sarner, Practising
Pianist and Physician.
-----
“...a unique blend of
humour, irreverence and erudition.
Characteristically stylish, totally irresistible and very, very
funny... Who could survive without The Painkiller Polka or The Wincarnis Waltz? Not I!”
Prof. Jeffrey Tobias, Consultant Oncologist, Middlesex Hospital, London.
-----
“...Spiegl and the songs have you laughing out
aloud and wanting more. A must for doctors, social historians and anyone with a sense of
humour”.
Dr John Scadding,
Consultant Neurologist and Musician.
-----
Many other comments in the
same vein from
Dr
David Bowsher, Former Research Director,
Pain Research Institute, Liverpool University Hospital, Aintree
William
Weatherston Wilson, FRCS Surgeon Emeritus,
Royal Albert Edward Infirmary, Wigan
Peter
Wright, Graduate of the Royal Academy of Music and
Past President, Royal College of Ophthalmologists
CONTENTS
LIST:
A Lecture on
Phrenology
Lithotomy Sonata
The
Painkiller Polka
Laughing-Gas
Ju-Jah
Is there a
Doctor about?
The Healh Jolting Chair Gavotte
The Medical
Student
Oh, would I
were a Surgeon
The Clinical
Examination
The
Examiner’s Song
The Pocket
Gray
Mary’s Ghost:
The Anatomy Song
The Doctor
A Medical
Medley
I don’t want
a Doctor, all I want is a beautiful Girl
Doctor Compus [sic] Mentis
The Drug
Stores
Curious Cures
Doctor Nevill
The
Dispensary Doctor
The Thyroid
Gland
Mr Double
Stout
Banting
The Thinnest
Girl I know
Dr De Jongh’s Cod Liver Oil
Germs
The
Vegetarian
Good Luck to
Beecham’s Pills
The Bile Bean
March
The “Wincarnis” Waltz
Betsy Wareing
Complaints,
or, The Ills of Life
My Heart’s
Good but my Feet won’t Let me
Oh Doctor
Ipecacuanha, or, The Doctor’s Daughter
Mrs Winslow’s
Soothing Syrup
Hush a Bye
Baby! Didn’t he Yell!
You can’t
hear Angels, Billy
Save our Little
Nell
The Eminent
Doctor Fizz
The Lost
Voice: A Song of the Ammoniaphone
The Quack’s
Song
Medicine Jack
I knocked at
the Door with a Rat-a-Tat-Tat
Here are some samples of the introductory notes:
Germs:
A Food-poisoning Song
he one thing
microbes, bacilli, bacteria and viruses have in common is that they are
invisible to the naked eye. Microbes were named in 1878 by a
Frenchman called Sédillot, from the Greek prefixes micro-, small + bio-, life, though this could also mean “short-lived”. Bacilli
were so called by a German scientist, a Dr Müller, in
about 1850 (and Germanized as Bazillen), when the development of powerful magnification
enabled scientists to see that they were rod-shaped, from Latin baculum, a rod or
stick. At about the same time, in 1847,
the equivalent Greek for a rod, bakterion, gave us bacteria,
Latin bacterium. Perhaps because the bacterium never hunts
singly, many people (regrettably including some doctors) now ignore that word
and wrongly use bacteria for the singular
as well as plural - which strikes fear into those who value the difference and
feel that doctors should, too. Virus
is the Latin word for a slimy, poisonous liquid, in which sense the word was
used from the middle ages to the advent of Louis Pasteur. It was he who, in 1880, gave it its modern meaning, an
infectious organism, again in the singular.
There is no difficulty about the plural of this one, because it has been
anglicized to viruses. None of these niceties bothered the composer
Sylvio Hein and his lyricists Benjamin Burt and Roy Atwell,
who lumped together all the nasty organisms as Germs - though they were as yet innocent of the rich store of
modern food-poisoning terms now available which, thanks to the press, are
widely bandied about. The song was first
heard in 1915 in the Charles B. Cochrane revue Fun of the Fayre, with an American
version, Bugs, appearing soon
afterwards (information kindly supplied by Dr William H. Helfand)
that contained priceless additional words suitable for American menus,
including lines like “Eating huckleberry pie is a pleasing way to die, while
sauerkraut brings on softening of the brain”; and “When you eat banana fritters
every undertaker titters”, etc. In this
form the song was taken to Broadway by Roy Atwell, in the Franz Lehár operetta Alone
at Last (the title translated from the 1914 Vienna production, Endlich Allein). The music, however, was not by Lehár but Hein’s, being Atwell’s personal interpolation
into the operetta in the manner of the “suitcase arias” practice that had been
current in Vienna since the 18th
century. The compelling lyrics, with their neat internal rhymes, cry out for
up-dated amendments, like “It in chicken keeps you slender/But the hormones
bend your gender”, etc. suggested by Glenn Mitchell, via Jonathan Cecil.
The Health Jolting Chair Gavotte (1885)
he Gavotte, a
French dance popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, enjoyed a brief revival in
Victorian drawing-rooms during the 19th, though the example given here would
have been danced without a partner. The
music was “Suggested to the Composer by the Action of the Health Jolting Chair”
- and for some reason that composer preferred to remain anonymous. The alleged
benefits of this American vibrating chair (a “shaker” chair that would have
made every Shaker quake with horror) are extolled in a full page of the printed
music - in the kind of dense verbiage familiar from patent-medicine
advertisements (see also the Bile Bean
March). Purchasers were promised
that it would “afford a similar exercise to that given by the saddle-horse” -
replicating the pleasure many women derived from riding. The jolting of the
chair, the makers claimed, would strengthen “the parts that are usually most
neglected by the fair beings... the consequence of such neglect being an
inactive condition of these parts, which causes a poor circulation of the
blood”, etc. It was the vague but
dreaded “pelvic congestion” which many physicians diagnosed in their female
patients and some relieved by localized massage - with never a whisper of
complaint to the General Medical Council.
This at a time when no well-brought-up lady would have been familiar
with the word orgasm, but knew what made her feel better (it has been claimed
that even Queen Victoria’s personal
physician provided this simple remedy for his royal patient). The Health Jolting Chair makers declared that
its action could be “regulated to give it any degree of severity desired” -
just like that of its modern, miniaturized and battery-driven successor. But with musical accompaniment? Yes, and not for the first time. Several
English Elizabethan songs praise the dildo, and plainly name it, like Robert
Jones, who promises his “Dainty darling, kind and free” (1601) “What I will do
with a dildo...”.
The word was used as early as the 1590s by Thomas Nashe
(a “senceless counterfet”). According that fount of all wisdom, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dresden
Criminal [!] Museum possesses a chair for a similar purpose which the user
operates with a foot pedal; and another, differently powered, is in a museum in
Barcelona, Spain.
The Thyroid Gland
his song of 1921
by the English comedians Weston and Lee, starts:
Have you heard about the latest medical discovery,
The thyroid gland, the thyroid gland...
They take it out of animals and graft it on to you,
And tho’ you’re ninety-seven, why you feel
like twenty-two.
The thyroid had
been known for centuries: the “discovery” was the recent news that a Viennese,
Prof. Eugen Steinach, and a
Russian, Dr Serge Voro-noff, had been attempting
rejuvenation by grafting monkey tissue into humans. It was an extension of work done in WW I,
when autografts of bone helped to mend broken limbs,
though Steinach, Voronoff
and their disciples used not only thyroids but also testicles from monkeys and
rams (against fierce oppposition from English
anti-vivisectionists); even bits of human foreskins and gonads. In the USA scores of
convicts earned early release from San Quentin if they “donated” their
testicles, and some 450 pairs were harvested in the Indiana State Penitentiary.
Newspapers revelled in the sexual innuendo, and at least one novel appeared, The Gland Stealers by Bertram Gayton, its cover depicting a huge ape chasing a small
elderly gent. The Wellcome
Institute has a copy of Rejuvenation and
the prolongation of human efficieny by Paul Kammerer (Methuen,1924), with
before-and-after photographs of a 70-year-old Steinach
patient, apparently much improved. It
started the Viagra gold-rush of its day. W. Somerset Maugham and W. B. Yeats
both had the operation, though Igor Stravinsky was turned down (perhaps too
full of the Rites of Spring already).
The super-rich came flocking, from Indian Maharajahs to King Carol II of
Rumania, whose
21-year-old illegitimate, daughter by Mme Lupescu,
Princess Gerti, was one of the rewards enjoyed by the
65-year-old Voronoff: he married her. A wealthy shipping-magnate, Alfred Wilson,
fared less well. The distinguished transplant surgeon David Hamilton relates in
his book The Monkey Gland Affair (Chatto & Windus, 1986), that Wilson in 1921 paid Steinach £700 for the operation and, full of beans, hired
the Royal Albert Hall to give a lecture, “How I Was Made Twenty Years Younger”.
Unfortunately, on the day of the lecture he dropped dead; and it must have been
the barely-suppressed glee of the newspaper reports that inspired Weston and
Lee’s comic song. The work continued
long after Steinach’s own death. A Swiss practitioner, Dr Niehans,
claimed to be able to restore energy and concentration as well as sexual
potency and pleasure, and in 1953 was consulted by the ailing Pope Pius XII -
why and with what results was never revealed, but surgeon and Pope posed
happily together for a photograph. Voronoff & Co. charged up to £1000 a time and became
immensely rich, yet they were not charlatans but genuine scientists (Voronoff also tried to create what the London Times in 1927 presciently called a
“Super-sheep”). Working largely in the
dark they must have sensed that the time was not ripe for successful xeno-grafts. Voronoff died in 1951, aged 85, doubtless more rejuvenated
by the beautiful Princess Gerti than any of the
giblets he transplanted into his patients.
By this time human-to-human kidney transplants were being attempted - at
first unsuccessfully, but the work of great English immunologists like Sir
Peter Medawar and Professor Leslie Brent soon made
transplantation a reality.
Phrenology
A New Song dedicated to the Heads of the Universities, etc.
t a lecture to a
learned meeting in Paris in 1807 the
German physician Dr Franz Joseph Gall and his collaborator, a Dr Spurzheim unveiled what they claimed to be a great medical
discovery. Their theory was that all mental faculties and human proclivities,
from genius to criminality, from musical gifts to a capacity for love, sickness
and health, were determined by the bumps in the human cranium. For this they
invented a Greek-based word, phrenology, literally meaning “knowledge of the
mind”. Their ideas were taken seriously enough to produce a flourishing
industry, which was for a time diluted by copycat theories like craniology and zoonomy; but
phrenology prevailed and numerous quack-practitioners set up shop, holding
mind-reading clinics and selling porcelain models of heads as well as take-home
mind-maps for self-diagnosis. The Encyclopaedia
Britannica devoted a lengthy and apparently learned article to it in its
1898 edition, giving a summary of Gall and Spurzheim’s
theories. Thus Sexual Passion (for which Spurzheim in
1815 coined the euphemism Amativeness),
was measured against bumps in the cerebellum of an overheated “hysterical
widow”. Love of Children was seated
“on the squama occipitis...because
this part of the skull is usually more prominent in apes and in women”. Destructiveness
“...above the ear meatus... found large in the head
of a student so fond of torturing animals that he became a surgeon”; and Acquisitiveness, in a “... part of the
head Gall noticed to be prominent in the pickpockets of his acquaintance” (a
combination deliciously reminiscent of a printed warning notice seen in the
Royal Liverpool University Hospital in the 1990s: “Pickpockets Operate in this
Hospital”). The quackery prevailed for
much of the 19th century and did not abate until the twentieth, when
neuroscience began to convince people that there is more to the brain than
bumps on the head. But phrenology also
attracted much healthy ridicule, as is shown by this song, which is almost
contemporaneous with the “discovery” - and actually mentions a “Mr Spurzem”. The text
also makes play with the “curtain lecture”, an English phenomenon so named
since the early 17h century, and defined in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 as “a reproof given
by a wife to her husband in bed”; for it would have been unseemly for her (who
addressed him as “Mr”) to admonish him anywhere more public than in their
marriage-bed, decently behind the four-poster bed-curtains. Occasional attempts have been made to
convince the gullible that phrenology “works”, but the only incontrovertible truth
about it, as with palmistry and astrology, is that there is a fool born every
minute.