Monthly Archives: April 2013

Laughing Gas Is Your Friend

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

So, tomorrow I have to go in for a small surgery (luckily outpatient, and I am stocked up on pudding cups and Jane Austen movies for recovery…), but it made me think again how grateful I am for modern surgery! Especially anasthetics and painkillers. And when I looked around for something to talk about on the blog today, I found out that ether was first used in March for surgical purposes (though I couldn’t find an exact date!). Also nitrous oxide played a very important role on last weekend’s episode of Call the Midwife…

So here is a very short look at the history of some surgical painkillers….

Nitrous oxide (laughing gas) was first synthesized by English and chemist Joseph Priestly in 1772. He called it phlogisticated nitrous air and published his discovery in the book Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1775), where he described how to produce the preparation of “nitrous air diminished”, by heating iron filings dampened with nitric acid. The first important use of nitrous oxide was by Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, who discussed it in their book Considerations on the Medical Use and on the Production of Factitious Airs (1794). James Watt also invented a new machine to produce “Factitious Airs” (i.e. nitrous oxide) and a novel “breathing apparatus” to inhale the gas.

The machine to produce “Factitious Airs” had three parts: A furnace to burn the needed material, a vessel with water where the produced gas passed through in a spiral pipe (for impurities to be “washed off”), and finally the gas cylinder with a gasometer where the gas produced, ‘air,’ could be tapped into portable air bags (made of airtight oily silk). The breathing apparatus consisted of one of the portable air bags connected with a tube to a mouthpiece. In the town of Hotwells in 1798, Thomas Beddoes opened the “Pneumatic Institute for Relieving Diseases by Medical Airs”. In the basement of the building, a large-scale machine was producing the gases under the supervision of a young Humphry Davy, who was encouraged to experiment with new gases for patients to inhale. In 1800, Davy published his Researches, Chemical and Philosophical where he notes the analgesic effect of nitrous oxide and its potential to be used for surgical operations. (But another 44 years went by before doctors attempted to use it for surgery. The use of nitrous oxide as a recreational drug at “laughing gas parties” became a trend beginning in 1799. While the effects of the gas generally make the user appear “stuporous, dreamy and sedated,” some people also “get the giggles” and probably say some pretty embarrassing stuff….

The first time nitrous oxide was used as a surgery anasthetic was when Connecticut dentist Horace Wells demonstrated on a dental extraction on Dec. 11, 1844. But this new method didn’t come into general use until 1863, when Dr. Gardener Colton successfully started to use it in all his “Colton Dental Association” clinics in NYC. Over the next three years, Colton successfully administered nitrous oxide to more than 25,000 patients.

Today nitrous is most often used in conjunction with local anesthetic in dental surgery. Nitrous oxide was not found to be strong enough for use alone in major surgery in hospital settings. Sulfuric ether came into use in October 1846, along with chloroform in 1847. (Queen Victoria was a great advocate for the use of chloroform in childbirth). When Joseph Clover invented the “gas-ether inhaler” in 1876, it became a common practice at hospitals to initiate all anesthetic treatments with a mild flow of nitrous oxide, and then gradually increase the dose with the stronger ether/chloroform. Clover’s gas-ether inhaler was designed to supply the patient with nitrous oxide and ether at the same time, with the exact mixture being controlled by the operator of the device. It remained in use by many hospitals until the 1930s. (Modern machines still use the same principle launched with Clover’s gas-ether inhaler, to initiate the anesthesia with nitrous oxide, before the administration of a more powerful anesthetic.)

What medical advances are you grateful for today?? And what movie would you recommend I watch to make me feel better?

Posted in Former Riskies, Research | Tagged nitrous oxide, Regency Medicine | 7 Replies

Happy Hour

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

As I’ve probably talked about here before, I am obsessed with Pinterest! I keep boards of inspirations for stories I’m working on (Elizabethan stuff for the new mysteries; Regency houses and gowns; random stuff for future story ideas–it works much better than folders on my computer, I can see all the goodies all together and find new ones!). I also keep boards about clothes and shoes I love, Kate Middleton stuff–I do love her, interior decorating, random things that strike me as funny, and stuff that is pink (for when I’m feeling down–somehow pink things make me feel better…). I am a very visual person and have a limited amount of attention/time, so I enjoy it more than, say, Twitter, which seems to require more attention. (Though Pinterest has led to me buying a shameful amount of Eiffel Tower objects, as well as striped skirts and mint-green bikinis)

The funny thing is that my board that has the most followers, and has the most repins and likes, is my Cocktails board. I confess I do love a good cocktail–the prettier the better. My most popular pin last week was something called a Petite In Pink, which sounded to me like the perfect summer drink. It’s so simple, just champagne, cranberry, and lemon, lots of ice, perfect for sitting by the pool.

It made me wonder: what would people in the Regency want when they craved a “cocktail”?? (According to the May 13, 1806, edition of The Balance and Columbian Repository, a publication in New York, “Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else.” All I can say is–Word)

When I did a little research into exactly how much our historical forbears drank, well, I was impressed they could get anything done at all.

I had a vague idea that Thomas Jefferson liked a mint julep, so I went looking for 18th century recipes. I found this: The first time a Mint Julep appeared in print was in a book published in London in 1803 where the drink was described as “a dram of spirituous liquor that has mint steeped in it, taken by Virginians of a morning.” So what would a good mint julep recipe be?? And is it really good in the morning? (also the Kentucky Derby is coming up soon! Great excuse for a mint julep party):

A typical Southern recipe:

Ingredients: About 20 mint leaves; 2 tsp sugar; 2 to 3 oz. bourbon; plenty of crushed ice.

Instructions: Put mint leaves and sugar in a pewter Mint Julep cup. Muddle leaves and sugar until sugar dissolves. Add bourbon and stir. Fill a pewter cup with crushed ice and stir until an icy frost develops on the outside of the cup. Garnish with additional mint leaves or a whole sprig and serve immediately. Makes one Mint Julep Cocktail.

In the Regency, everyone was into punches (or “shrubs”). It seems like they gathered around punch bowls like modern people gather around the proverbial water cooler, to trade gossip and news (though I can’t help imagining it was more fun). Punches (or “shrubs”) were the cocktails of the day. They could involve up to 15 ingredients, including fruit juices, spices, wine, and various liquors. I can’t help but imagine what would happen if a Miss in her first Season got hold of a big glass if punch. So…what was a good punch recipe?

For a Victorian-era punch (from David Wondrich’s Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl:

In a mortar or small bowl, muddle a piece of ambergris the size of a grain of barley with an ounce of Indonesian gula jawa or other dark, funky sugar until it has been incorporated. Add 2 ounces Batavia arrack and muddle again until sugar has dissolved. Break up 5 ounces of gula jawa, put it in a two-quart jug with 6 ounces lime juice and muddle together until sugar has dissolved. Add the ambergris-sugar-arrack mixture and stir. Add the remains of the 750-milliliter bottle of Batavia arrack from which you have removed the 2 ounces to mix with the ambergris, stir again, and fi nish with 3 to 4 cups water, according to taste. Grate nutmeg over the top.

Let me know if you have any luck with that one.

From The Cook and Confectioner’s Dictionary (1823):

To make Punch-Royal.

Take three Pints of the best Brandy, as much Spring-water, a Pint or better of the best Lime-juice, a Pound of double refin’d Sugar. This Punch is better than weaker Punch, for it does not so easily affect the Head, by reason of the large Quantity of Lime-juice more than common, and it is more grateful and comfortable to the Stomach.

Punch for Chamber-maids.

Take a Quart of Water, a quarter of a Pint of Lime-juice; squeeze in also the Juice of a Sevil Orange and a Lemon; put in six Ounces of fine Sugar; strain all through a Strainer, three times till it is very clear; then put in a Pint of Brandy, and half a Pint of White-wine.

Which would you rather have? Punch Royal or Punch for chambermaids??

I had so much fun looking at historical drink recipes. I think they must have had a better head for liquor than us 21st cenury-ers have!!!

What is your favorite cocktail??? If you were (or have) tried a historical drink what would it be? Are you on Pinterest? What do you think of it? (I really want to know! I am new to it, but love it and am trying to figure out how to use it…)

(Also, if you are anywhere near me, I am having a Great Gatsby party next month, complete with Gin Fizzes, jazz, and flapper dresses!! It is one of my favorite books and I feel the need to celebrate the movie release, good or bad. If you want an invite, let me know…)

(And if you want to see my random obsessions on Pinterest, find me at AmandaMcCabe)

Posted in Former Riskies, Frivolity | 9 Replies

Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

Today marks Shakespeare’s 449th birthday! Well, sort of–he was baptised in his hometown of Stratford-on-Avon on April 26, 1564, and since that usually happened about 3 days after a baby was born, plus it’s St. George’s Day AND Shakespeare died on April 23 in 1616, it just makes a neat little juxtaposition, so April 23 is the Official Day.

Not much is really, concretely known about Shakespeare’s personal life. He grew up in Stratford, where he probably attended the free local grammar school, The King’s New School. His father was a glover in town who was very prosperous for a time (and married an Arden, local gentry), but then kind of went downhill. At 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26 (the hussy!) and gave birth to their first child, Susanna, 6 months later. Twins followed, Judith and Hamnett (Hamnett died at 11, but Judith grew up to make a disappointing marriage). Between 1585 and 1592, he built a successful theater career with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men) as an actor, playwright, and eventual sharer in the company. He made enough money to buy New Place, the biggest house in Stratford, as well as rent respectable lodgings in London (see Charles Nicholl’s book The Lodger Shakespeare about a lawsuit he got embroiled in via his landlords the Mountjoys on Silver Street. His part in the quarrel was tiny, but it’s a great picture of London life at the time). Around 1613 he retired back to Stratford where he died 3 years later. His direct line ended with his granddaughter Elizabeth, but his monument can still be seen at the church there. That’s about it really, though bits and pieces keep popping up to give grist to the scholarly mill. He left 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and 2 long narrative poems.

But what’s really important isn’t what Shakespeare did in his life, but the beauty of the words and the worlds he left us, which have brought such immense joy to so many people and taught us so much about the world around us and ourselves. One of the best nights in my life was spent at the Globe Theater, watching a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, imagining what it must have been like to be there when those words were first spoken, and what that world must have been like. (This also happened to be the first Shakespeare play I ever saw, when I was about 7! An outdoor production where Puck would climb the trees to say his lines, which really impressed me then…) I just saw a production of Love’s Labors Lost (not the best play, but fun) updated to the 1950s, where it lost none of its humor and meaning, and goes to show the timelessness of Shakespeare’s characters. (Really, I think he and Jane Austen, and possibly Dickens, had the greatest insight into human nature of any writer…). Plus there’s a new movie version of Romeo and Juliet coming this summer, and I can’t wait!!!

For a man who left so little mark of his personal life on the world, there’s no end to great biographies. Some of my own favorites are: Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography; Jonathan Bates’s The Soul of the Age; Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life; James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (which mostly sets Shakespeare in the wider Elizabethan world); and Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Since I’m working on 2 Elizabethan projects of my own at the moment, I’m happy to live vicariously in Shakespeare’s Tudor world whenever I can. 🙂

What are your own favorite Shakespeare plays, or memories??

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Sonnet 29

Posted in Former Riskies, Research | Tagged Shakespeare | 3 Replies

Spring Cleaning

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

This weekend, I forced myself to take a look at my jungle-cave of a garage (seriously, there is barely room in there for me to pull in my car AND get out of it!). There are boxes of out-of-season purses and shoes, Christmas decorations, gardening stuff, and of course mostly books. Books I’ve stored, and back copies of my own books, which have gotten out of control. So I am having spring-cleaning giveaways over the next few weeks on my blog to find some of those copies new homes. This week–One Naughty Night, the first in my new Laurel McKee “The Scandalous St. Claires” series. (I said on my blog 10 copies, but I found another stash so I have more to give away…and if you like it and leave a review on Amazon, I will send you a copy of the sequel too!!) I am determined to get organized and make room for more books!!!

Visit my blog and leave contact info to enter…

(And if any of you authors know who might take foreign language copies, let me know…)

This is what I store things in:

If I lived in the Regency, things might be a little more elegant. I could use a leather trunk:

Or an oak trunk (this one is French):

Or a portable writing box: (for a great story about Jane Austen’s almost-lost portable writing desk, go here…)

Or a sewing box:

Or an armoire:

What are your favorite organizational tips??

Posted in Former Riskies, Giveaways, Jane Austen | 4 Replies

At The Movies

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

“Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. … I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out. Roger Ebert, 1942—2013

“The more Roger became a prisoner of his body, the more he seemed to escape into his rich and sophisticated mind. By the agreement of almost everyone I know, his writing in these last years was among the best he’d ever done, more personal and expansive, marked by a still-astonishing rate of productivity. He wrote a wonderful memoir, close in its deceptively profound, plainspoken way to two of the writers Roger most admired: Charles Dickens and Samuel Johnson. And indeed, Roger was nothing if not an Anglophile: Among the least known books he authored is a slender volume called ‘The Perfect London Walk,’ an instructional travel book that, having taken the journey it maps, I can assure you is a rare case of truth in titling.” (Scott Foundas, Variety)

Last week, a great person passed away when Roger Ebert died at age 70. Since he seemed above all to appreciate great storytelling (and to be a great storyteller himself!) I wanted to talk a little about him here.

I love movies for the same reason I love books and writing—I love stories and characters, I love how they can show us deep truths about ourselves and the world around us in a way nothing else can. In Roger Ebert’s reviews and blog essays, I found this same passion, and was always inspired by what he had to say. Every week I ran to his blog to see what new movies were coming out, because he always told us not only what to see but how to think about what we had seen. How to find the truth of every story, good and bad, in our own hearts. (In fact, the number one best piece of writing advice I ever read came from him–”It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” This is true for books as well as something like, say, Tree of Life or La Dolce Vita)

“He saw, and felt, and described the movies more effectively, more cinematically, and more warmly than just about anyone writing about anything. Even his pans had a warmth to them. Even when you disagreed with Roger you found yourself imagining the movie he saw, and loved (or hated) more than you did.” (Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune)

His reviews were always witty and intelligent, clearly written and evocative. Never snobby (he loved a great popcorn movie as much as French indie) or faux-populist. Just clear, beautiful writing evoking what makes a story great, or even what makes it, well, suck. He always just seemed like a super-smart guy who wanted to talk to us all about movies, who wanted to hear what we thought as much as he wanted to tell us his own opinions. (his very active Twitter account can testify to how much he seemed to love that connection!). And his writing on politics and social causes was just as evocative and amazing as his movie reviews. He loved movies, people, and life, and it always came through in his writing.

“The irony is that it all feels so personally sad. It feels so personally, profoundly awful and unfair, and I feel it with the grief nerves, not just the admiration nerves, because people whose books you destroy from overuse as a 16-year-old, you will grieve when they die as if you knew them, whether they are novelists or critics. But still, after all that, I was doing all right until I remembered that he’s not going to write about any more movies. And I’m still not ready for that.” (Linda Holmes, NPR)

He was an inspiration in real life as well. His great love for his wife and family, his kindness and humanity, the way he forged ahead with life in the face of immense health problems that would have made most of us give up, the way he always found wonder and connection no matter what, is an example for everyone in the best way to live our lives and make the most of our precious time and talents.

“‘Start writing. Short sentences. Describe it. Just describe it.”

“Roger said, when I asked him about writer’s block. Then he quoted the first three paragraphs of his ‘Persona’ review and told me that it had completely baffled him in 1967 but this strategy worked brilliantly. Tonight, as I sit here numbly staring at the screen with the hardest writer’s block I’ve ever known, I place my fingers on the keyboard to follow the advice of the greatest man I know, and just describe it.” (Grace Wang)

(You can read his last review, and many tributes, at his website…)

It’s hard when we lose our heroes. It’s hard to know I will never see what he thinks about a new movie again. But I can enjoy re-reading his words, and can be inspired by them all over again. Who are some of your heroes this week?? What inspiration have you found at the movies?

Posted in Former Riskies, TV and Film, Writing | Tagged Roger Ebert | 5 Replies