Accident in Hardware store: no sense of smell

As I was choosing a new toilet seat in a famous Australian hardware shop, one fell on my face and injured me between my nose and my upper lip. It was a deep cut which has taken a long time to heal. Sadly, I have now discovered that I have lost my sense of smell. But I can still taste my food. I can sort of taste very strong smells, like Jeyes fluid, which seem to go to the back of the throat and I get a bit of the savour of them. 

Things I can't smell: cooking meat from a barbecue, mint (nothing), basil (very faint), roses (nothing), lavender (nothing). I am certainly going to miss my sense of smell! How will I know if the food is cooked? Whether a dish is spicy? Whether there is a gas leak?Recently I entered a baking competition and all the time I was baking those cakes (I practiced) I didn't realise I couldn't smell them cooking and when the family said they liked the smell of the baking I just thought they were being nice or something. I didn't realise I had lost that sense. As usual, I can breathe fine through my nose. I feel sad about it but but hopeful that this state is temporary. 

A smell I particularly miss is the smell of shampoo and toiletries - the smells that waft out of a steamy bathroom. 

Post script - October - still no sense of smell but I got compensation from the shop for the scar. There seems to be no way that my lack of smell is linked with the toilet seat accident. 

Do No Harm by Henry Marsh

Impossible not to read this book at a canter. Each chapter is headed by a different kind of tumour or other trouble that the surgeon might have to deal with - including hubris!

Some of the chapters are about operations that go fairly well, and Marsh describes the miroscopic equipment he uses and how he uses it, but they are also about the patients and their expectations and the medical team and the relationship they have with the senior surgeon - the teaching Q and A. He describes the catastrophic results of a brain bleed or a careless cut. He describes risky operations that can only add a few weeks or months to patients lives, because brain tumours grow back.

In this book we understand that Marsh is highly skilled and has a good reputation, but he also tells us that he has wrecked people, who remain alive in a vegatative state. Knowing this must be terrible, and he prefers not to remember and yet he writes it. Which is brave and remarkable.

He is very critical of the modern NHS which is run by managers who are quite blind to the ridiculous things they do - like sending Henry Marsh on a course to learn what empathy means. (He also had to learn about fire extinguishers, which just might be important one day). A hospital protocol on dress instructs him to remove his watch and tie, although there is no evidence that wearing these items spreads infection. It is simply undressing those self-important doctors, isn't it, to make them kowtow to the management! Because doctors used to run hospitals, and that was probably better. Now they still have a load of paperwork but probably just an audit trail. Like teachers. 


(I met a teacher at a party the other day who complained about getting all the students to write what they had done in the lesson that day and date and sign it - the dreaded diary page. We had to stop the lesson early to do that.  This teacher (also in adult ed) said she had got her students to fill the whole thing in on day one. All twelve entries, pre-signed and dated, saving time to actually teach them in the lessons thereafter. She left adult education and set up privately as the whole thing was ridiculous.)

When the doctors and nurses ran the hospitals they knew the patients on their wards. Now, it seems, the surgeon simply doesn't know where his patients are and has to go from ward to ward tracking them down. The problem is the lack of beds but the truth is that we need a huge number of beds - almost an infinity of beds because every damn person is ill with something or other* and we are all going to die. Tackling the NHS is difficult - I would start reducing the number of operations and procedures carried out on old people and I know that's controversial, but hey, we need to do that. We also ought to allow assisted dying. I digress - these are my opinions not his.

Marsh also questions how greed drives some consultants to carry out unnecessary private operations. Yet the biggest questions he raises are whether we need to perform many treatments that keep people alive, especially when it is just for a few miserable months or with extreme brain damage. He shows operations can take place because doctors and families are afraid to confront reality or hold painful discussions, and says what may seem a “successful” operation can look more like “a human disaster” several years down the line.

Henry Marsh is horribly honest about his bad temper and nasty hissy fits. He almost dares us to like him. OK, I don't like him, but I can see why he has to be that way. What he does is extraordinary. 

And Marsh, at the apotheosis of his career, writes in Admissions: “Each time I scrub up, I am frightened. Why am I continuing to inflict this on myself, when I know I can abandon neurosurgery at any time? Part of me wants to run away, but I scrub up nonetheless … I sit on a stool and lean the back of my head against the wall. I keep my gloved hands in front of my chest with palms pressed together, as though I were praying – the pose of the surgeon, waiting to operate.” Despite the astonishing, near-unimaginable nature of their job, there is evidence from the books they are now writing that surgeons experience – as the glittering career progresses and the life-prolonging operations mount up – a growing sense of humility, a particular amalgam of wonder at what they do and modesty about their achievements.

There, it is hard and frightening but he does it. And he doesn't want to stop.

*I am not ill. However, today I realised that I have recently lost my sense of smell. I couldn't even smell the Jeyes fluid I used on the plant pots today. I could sense it in the back of my throat, only. I couldn't smell roses, lavender, mint or basil. Such lovely smells! Why has it gone?

The Prometheans by Max Adams

The book is about two generations who made a huge impact on Britain. Max Adams calls them "Prometheans" on the grounds that they stole the future from the gods, as Prometheus stole fire from the gods. That's as far as the analogy goes - the men of the early 18th C were not punished for their presumptions. Both the Stephensons were remarkably gifted, so were Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday. So were both the Brunels, although the father had the edge as he was a true visionary. Charles Babbage was a visionary too, (he is mainly famous for inventing the "difference engine" or mechanical calculator), and wrote about how industry is organised and managed, and was sociable as well as inventive. John Martin, the massively talented painter of enormous dramatic scenes, wanted to join the practical activities of the scientific community with which he mixed by improving the drains and taking away the dreadful sewage of London, and even envisaged the Underground railway (circle line). 

One of the threads of this history is a biography of the Martin brothers, of whom the youngest, John, was (as mentioned above) a painter of apocalyptic landscapes of the early nineteenth century. Some of his works can be seen in the Tate gallery and they are still thrilling to look at, with lightning, explosions, fires and huge mountains! You can buy reproductions of them at All posters and Wayfair; so I suppose he is still popular although you would need to buy a really large poster to get the full effect of his works.

Like the German Caspar Friedrich, he painted marvellous scenes of nature, but man's place amongst it is not contemplative or inspired, but afraid, or awed, and helpless. His scenes have inspired the apocalyptic effects in a number of films. He came from a poor Northern background (the same town as my mother; I wish I had told her that when we first saw his pictures in the Tate) and his mother held frightening religious beliefs, which particularly affected his brother Jonathan, who was on the edge of crazy all his life.

Whether Martin was a millenarian or not is still the subject of dispute. Certainly his eccentric brothers – collectively known as the “Mad Martins” – were, and indeed his older brother Jonathan was also genuinely mad, setting fire to York Minster and subsequently being institutionalised in St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics. Ruthven Todd, Martin’s biographer, unearthed an advertisement from 1848 for a book on the British Israelites (a fringe group of millenarians) “with designs by John Martin”, though neither the book nor any other link has been found. On the other hand, Martin’s friend Ralph Thomas described him as a “thorough Deist” – that is someone who saw proof of God’s existence not in scripture, but in the marvellous workings of the natural world. Martin also devoted the majority of the last two decades of his life to schemes for the betterment of London, particularly its smelly and polluted river;  he made no connection in these projects to his own religious beliefs. Nor, apparently, did he disapprove of London’s industrial modernity, but thought it “the most wealthy, civilised, and enterprising city in the world”.

Whatever Martin’s private convictions – or lack of them – there was undoubtedly something in the air. Random occurrences took on portentous significance. When, in 1815, a giant volcano erupted in Indonesia, the dust cloud obliterated the following year’s entire summer, and street hawkers sold pamphlets announcing the death of the sun. Percy Bysshe Shelley and his teenage mistress Mary fled London for Geneva where they stayed with Byron (much of Mary’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was written there). Also, in 1816, Martin exhibited Joshua commanding the sun to stand still upon Gibeon at the Royal Academy. Although received dubiously by the Academy’s members, the painting was a hit among the viewing public, perhaps because its depiction of the prophet, marshalling with raised arms the elemental forces that swirled about him, was a tonic for the helplessness most people felt at the time. Martin became renowned for giving his public what they wanted, and was often derided because of it. He was an accomplished printmaker, and his affordable mezzotints hung in homes all around the world. But he was never elected as a Royal Academician, and was condescended to by the artistic establishment. (John Constable called him a “painter of pantomimes”.) By and large, he rose above such sneers. There is evidence, however, that the ambitious working-class artist was conflicted about his social standing: some, such as the painter Charles Leslie whom Martin once embarrassed at a concert by hissing throughout the National Anthem, saw him as something of a radical. This was despite Martin’s close friendship with Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and even Prince Albert, whom he reportedly received at his house in dressing gown and slippers.

Have to interrupt here and say Martin probably didn't want to sing "God save the King" because there was nothing good to say about George IV, who was vain and silly, but the  Saxe-Coburg-Gothas mentioned were men of sense. Prince Leopold was planted on the throne of Belgium and made a success of it.

Part of his popularity might be attributed to his skill at sanitising the decadent and raw products of Romantic culture. He absorbed Edmund Burke’s theory of the Sublime – that sensation of delightful terror elicited by vast, rugged vistas – and tailored it for mainstream tastes. J.M.W. Turner, fourteen years Martin’s senior and an acquaintance, though hardly a friend, achieved the critical recognition that the younger artist craved. The two men were markedly different: Martin was, by all accounts, a charismatic conversationalist and a snappy dresser; the reclusive Turner, according to Martin’s son Leopold, was “untidy; a sloven and unwashed”. 

 http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/aaaargh

Another of John Martin's brother's was called William, and he was an inventor, but being a dfficult character he never received credit for any of his inventions, although one was a miners' safety lamp much better than Davy's. 

In London, John Martin and his wife Susan made friends with all the notable scientists of the time: Humphrey Davy, Michael Faraday, Wollaston, Babbage, and Marc Brunel, Isambard's father. Charles Wheatstone, who eventually invented the electric telegraph (but not Morse code) was one of the friends. I don't know if they knew other notable engineers, for example, John Rennie. They held parties and loved conversation, chess and cards. 

Here I am, thinking still about the Brunels and the tunnel under the Thames. In the National Archives at Kew I found the responses to Isambard's invitation to dinner in the tunnel in November 1827. It must have been cold! Oh well, perhaps they all had woolly underwear and good coats on. Amongst those who wrote apologies were Michael Faraday and John Martin. Faraday said he was away and never got the invitation but he would have loved to have gone. Martin said a friend arrived and he couldn't come. I should have got those letters copied because it's remarkable to see the writing. Strange to think that Brunel kept those letters somewhere in his files all his life. The occasion was his first formal dinner, and the friends he invited included these notables. He was delighted that Admiral Codrington's son - also a naval officer - accepted his invitation. Isambard had a bit of a crush on the navy, although when you think of the size and the importance of the navy at that time, perhaps that's the wrong way of describing it. Isambard was impressed by the navy. That's better. 

Other Prometheans whose activities are described are Shelley, Caroline Norton, William Godwin, (Shelley's father-in-law), Henry Brougham and the Hunts - political radicals who spoke in favour of universal manhood suffrage - these were also John Martin's politics. Marc Brunel, for one, would not have agreed with this radical stance in politics, as he had a fear of mob violence that came from his experience of the French revolution. Isambard was instrumental in putting down the Bristol riots of 1831 - he had himself enrolled as a temporary constable.

The trouble is, none of these people considered themselves Promethean, this is a theme that the author has hit upon, and the book becomes somewhat ridiculous when the author suggests that Prometheanism was a conscious choice or even a religious sect. Adams tells the story of the Swing Riots of 1830 thus:

 "At the end of August threshing machines, always seen as a threat to employment in the southern counties, began to be destroyed. It was the start of what became known as the Swing Riots, a wave of incendiary attacks and riots across southern England lasting almost until the end of the year, in which the burning of hayricks was an iconic feature. [what does iconic mean in that sentence?] The unrest led to 19 hangings, more than six hundred gaol terms and five hundred sentences of transportation. The use of arson as a weapon of protest, symbolic of revenge, destruction and cleansing, had been psychotically perfected by Jonathan Martin. [i.e. when he set York Minster on fire. Arson, apparently, is a crime than can be perfected, psychotically.] Its deliberate employment to terrorize the government  during the Swing uprising seemed now to fulfil Mary Wollstonecraft's dire prediction of the potential evils of the Promethean myth." [I think he is talking about Frankenstein's monster in the book by Mary Shelley]. 

Then "The opening of 15 September 1830 of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was an event almost impossibly overloaded with symbolism." 

This grand opening was marred by the awful accident of Huskisson being knocked down by the Rocket, his leg severed, and dying of the injuries. What does Huskisson symbolise in that scene? The Rocket might symbolise the future power of the common man (having the freedom to travel further) and Huskisson a privileged and landed Tory, but that is rather complicated because Huskisson was on the more progressive wing of the Tory party and was in favour of Free Trade - which theoretically made food cheaper. The political power of his class wasn't knocked down by democratic forces until the next century.


Isn't this a peculiar way of writing history? It sounds as though Wellington might have remarked to George Stephenson, "I say, my man, there's too much symbolism in the air today!" and Stephenson might have said, "Aye, right enough bonnie lad. There's that mooch meaning in ut steam engine as ud turn us all into representations of oor classes."


There were amazing changes going on at that time, in science, art and politics, however, by lumping a load of different men of talent together and labelling them Promethean merely makes the story more dramatic.

"The perfection of his usefulness" - how beautiful

However, the science is well-explained by Max Adams, I think.