'Varied, Inconsistent and Unpredictable'

Thedore Dalrymple has been publishing a series of books with a simple, blog-like premise: he writes about the books he has been reading. What might be an exercise in self-indulgent tedium in the wrong hands is a sort of brain scan of an intelligent man’s sensibility as he reads. Dalrymple is well-read, widely traveled, witty and endlessly curious. His prose is notable for its clarity. As a retired prison doctor, he knows intimately a stratum of life most of us will never know. His sympathies are broad. Among his chief interests are medicine and crime. He makes an excellent companion and articulates his bookish reactions conversationally. He’s more storyteller than critic. 

His latest book chronicle, The Strut and Trade of Charms (Mirabeau Press, 2025), takes its title from “In My Craft and Sullen Art” by Dylan Thomas. In a brief note preceding the text he tells us the only purpose such books have is “to please myself  in the hope of pleasing a few others, and perhaps to demonstrate that human life is so infinitely varied, inconsistent and unpredictable that no mere theory could explain it or catch it in the coarse mesh of its net.” Dalrymple is no theoretician and isn’t afraid to say when he doesn’t understand something he encounters.  

 

Most of the books and writers he reads were previously unknown to him and to me, though he does read Robert Graves and Vernon Scannell. One of the most intriguing-sounding titles is Classic Descriptions of Disease (1932), written by the American physician Ralph H. Major (1884-1970). Both of us use the third edition from 1945. The book is almost seven-hundred pages long and weighs 3.25 pounds, according to the bathroom scale. Dalrymple describes it as “a compendium of classic, usually first or early, descriptions of disease, combined with brief biographical notes on their authors.” Most of the entries are written by physicians but a few are the work of such literary figures as Martial, Thucydides, Boccaccio and Pliny the Elder. Take tetanus. The first source cited by Major is Hippocrates (c. 460 BC-c. 370 BC), who writes:

 

“The master of a large ship mashed the index finger of his right hand with the anchor. Seven days later a somewhat foul discharge appeared; then trouble with his tongue--he complained he could not speak properly. The presence of tetanus was diagnosed, his jaws became pressed together, his teeth were locked, then symptoms appeared in his neck: on the third day opisthotonos [uncontrolled flexing of muscles in the neck and back] appeared with sweating. Six days after the diagnosis was made he died.”

 

I’m reminded of John Thoreau Jr., Henry’s brother. On New Year’s Day in 1842, he nicked the tip of his left-hand ring finger while stropping his razor – a minor wound we would wash and bandage. Eight days later it had become “mortified,” meaning the tissue had turned black and necrotic. On the morning of January 9, John’s jaw stiffened and by that evening he suffered the convulsions associated with lockjaw. A Boston doctor examined John and concluded he could do nothing for him. No one could have until the vaccine for tetanus was developed in 1924. John, 27, died on January 11 in the arms of his helpless brother.

 

The disease is caused by the bacteria Clostridium tetani, commonly found in soil and dust. The rate of the disease in the century since the vaccine was introduced has dropped by ninety-five percent. Dalrymple writes of the Major volume:

 

“Such had been the rapid progress of medical knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that many of the entries must have seemed rather more recent or contemporary in 1932 than they do now.”