Tag Archives: natural science

Of Maggots & Men

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Book cover of Super Fly by Jonathan Balcombe

If you were to find yourself with a nonhealing wound and had some dead tissue that needed excising, would you entrust yourself to the care of maggots or to a knife*? Personally, the maggots sound pretty tempting. Between reading about the gruesome history of surgery (see below) and then about the positive outcomes for folks with wounds infested with a serendipitous pile of wriggling maggots (especially in the earlier days when the risk of infection made surgery very much a last choice – though Maggot Debridement Therapy is making a comeback for various reasons), I’d wager you might give more consideration to the humble maggot!

And here’s a glowing review of the maggot by surgeon William S. Baer, during World War I, as he treated a soldier who had been left quite injured for several days on a battlefield – not the most sanitary of conditions – with “compound fractures of the femur and large flesh wounds of the abdomen and scrotum” (Balcombe, 254). At the time, compound fractures of the femur were just short of a death sentence: 75-80% died. By the time this soldier was found, having had no food or water during that entire time and in spite of his injuries, fever-free, Baer remarked:

“there was practically no bare bone to be seen and the internal structure of the wounded bone as well as the surrounding parts was entirely covered with the most beautiful pink tissue one could imagine.”

qtd. in Super Fly, Balcombe, 254

And to what could this “most beautiful pink tissue one could imagine” be credited? Maggots. Yes, before he could see all that lovely healthy healing tissue, Baer had had to remove thousands upon thousands of maggots from the wounds. Honestly, I adore this quote about “the most beautiful pink tissue”, because the evident awe and appreciation present in this quote – as applied to the tissue, sure, but surely also somewhat sideways in praise of the maggots – gets me every time. That’s a 5-star (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) review right there, and I would humbly suggest it gets pinned as Most Helpful wherever people go to read about maggot debridement therapy.

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Uncanny Eels

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Book Cover of The Book of Eels by Patrick Svensson

No one has ever seen an eel in the Sargasso Sea.

This line repeats, over and over, in different manifestations throughout the book. A bit like the eel. We know – we think, given the information we have available – they spawn in the Sargasso Sea, but “no one has ever seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea” (Svensson, The Book of Eels. c.15: The Long Journey Home); “no human has ever seen an eel in the Sargasso Sea” (c.3: Aristotle and the Eel Born of Mud); “no one has ever seen an eel in the Sargasso Sea” (c.15). It’s almost poetic the way this line repeats itself, undulating through the text as though through waves, following it from beginning to end as if to underscore that no, the eel question has not – cannot? – be answered. Even the place whence it comes is ill defined, “[t]he Sargasso Sea is actually less a clearly defined body of water than a sea within a sea. Where it starts and where it ends is difficult to determine” (c.1: The Eel). The eel remains mysterious.

Aristotle thought they spontaneously generated out of mud. Freud – yes, Sigmund himself – dissected 400 eels attempting to locate the eel’s male reproductive organs, before becoming the father of psychoanalysis. (He failed.) Johannes Schmidt, the man who is credited with finding the birthplace of the eel (for good reason), spent almost two decades looking at tiny baby eels (resembling tiny willow leaves) under a microscope, trawling the sea, before concluding that they likely breed in the Sargasso Sea. Shortly after he published his results and was awarded the Darwin Medal by the Royal Society of London, he died of the flu.

Undulating smoothly from chapter to chapter between memories that seem to shift as Svensson recounts them, their accuracy less important than what is recounted and what import they hold for Svensson himself, and historical tidbits about the history of scientific investigation into the eel and the many ways in which, despite our efforts, the eel has continued to elude us. Svensson is clearly fascinated by this creature, Anguilla anguilla, and his recounting of his memories of his father, the two of them finding common ground in the eel, is incredibly tender.

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Entangled Life

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Book cover of Entangled Life by Merlin SheldrakeThere are moments in 
moist love when heaven is
jealous of what we on
earth can do.
– Hafiz

 

So the original plan was to write about sex*, but this. Dang. I’m going to quote from Sheldrake’s book again in this short span of two sentences because I cannot do him justice (though in my defence, the first quote was a quote of a quote): “This wasn’t sex: Fungal and plant cells hadn’t fused and pooled their genetic information. But it was sexy: Cells from two different creatures had met, incorporated each other, and were collaborating in the building of a new life. To imagine the future plant as separable from the fungus was absurd” (Sheldrake, Entangled Life, chapter 5: Before Roots). That’s the first quote I highlighted in the pages because it captured the excitement I felt about this book throughout my reading it, though part of why I hadn’t highlighted anything prior to it was probably because I was going along at breakneck pace.

Alright, so maybe I didn’t start off with a good combination (sex and fungal matter). So if I may just direct your attention to these following points for why you might be interested to read this delightful book on fungi (apart from the fact that it’s a book about fungi – you all know how I feel about mushrooms and their kith):

  1. The author, Merlin Sheldrake, grew oyster mushrooms out of his own book, harvested them, then cooked and ate them (@MerlinSheldrake).
    • His review of the mushrooms? “They were delicious: I couldn’t taste any off notes, which suggests that the #fungus had fully metabolised the text.”
  2. The illustrations within the text were drawn using the ink from the shaggy ink cap mushroom (Coprinus comatus). Yes, this includes an illustration of Coprinus comatus using Coprinus comatus.
  3. The excellently chosen epigraphs. To give you an example, the introduction starts with the quotation at the beginning of this post. That’s bold. So is cultivating oyster mushrooms off your book about fungi. And planning to make cider of another physical copy of your book about fungi.
  4. What more do you want? What more do you need?

It actually gets even better. (Who’d have thought it possible?) Sheldrake is evidently in love with fungi and suffused with a curiosity about the natural world, and that passion is contagious, infecting the reader just as a mushroom might shoot its spores far out and beyond its body, through the pages, to seed in you an interest in the fungal world.**

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