Six Feet Over

1

A modern corollary to the Pope’s alarm clock can be found in the erratic behavior of a digital alarm clock belonging to a Mrs. Linda G. Russek, of Boca Raton, Florida. Russek’s husband Henry had recently died, and she wondered whether he was trying to communicate with her via the clock. Russek, a parapsychologist, undertook an experiment in which she asked Henry to speed the clock up on even days and slow it down on odd days. Alas, the data were meaningless because shortly after the study began, the AM/PM indicator had gone on the blink, and Russek was unable to definitively conclude anything beyond the fact that she needed a new alarm clock.

2

Delusions of reincarnation typically fit the culture and religion of the deluded—Saddam Hussein claiming to be Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar, excommunicated Mormon polygamist cult leader James Harmston claiming to be Joseph Smith, et cetera. Jesus is your big exception. A Google search on “claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus” turns up thirty-one competing candidates for J.C. incarnate, including the Reverend Sun Myung Moon—rumored to add drops of his own blood to the communion wine—and a Mr. Fukunaga, leader of an obscure Japanese foot-reading sect. Mr. Fukunaga also claims to be Buddha reincarnate. This is less impressive than it sounds because—according to the “Jesus Reincarnation Index” of New Age author Kevin Williams—Jesus is a reincarnation of Buddha.

3

By some accounts, Mom didn’t need to be frightened but merely focused a little too long in one place. In a famous case detailed by Jan Bondeson in A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, a thirteenth-century Roman noblewoman gives birth to a boy with fur and claws; the authorities lay blame on an oil painting of a bear on her bedroom wall. The event prompted Pope Martin IV, clearly a tad hysterical, to have all pictures and statues of bears destroyed.

Crafty moms tried to work the phenomenon in their favor. In the early 1800s, Bondeson writes, it was common for pregnant noblewomen to be wheeled into the Louvre to spend an hour or so gazing at a portrait of some handsome earl or archduke of yore, in hopes of influencing their unborn progeny.

4

And are we meant to? Unsure despite my Catholic upbringing, I consulted The Celebration of Mass, as thorough a manual of Catholic ritual as you’ll find outside the Vatican. While nowhere was it stated that the consecrated host is literally Christ, it is most certainly treated as something beyond a quarter ounce of unleavened wheat flour. For example, one may not simply throw old, stale hosts into the garbage; they must be consumed by the priest, unless they are so moldy as to be inedible, in which case they are to be burned or mysteriously “done away with in the sacrarium.” And finally, “should anyone vomit the Blessed Eucharist, the matter is to be gathered up and put in some becoming place.”

5

There’s a good chance you underestimate almost everything about the sea urchin. For instance, the Encyclopædia Britannica tells us some sea urchins use their little sucker-tipped feet to hold pieces of seaweed over their heads like parasols, for shade. Plus, they have teeth that can drill into rock and excavate entire living rooms for their owners. The teeth are hard to see, because sea urchins sit on their mouths; possibly they are self-conscious about their “complex dental apparatus called Aristotle’s lantern.” One type has spines that can be used as pencils, though not, disappointingly, by the urchin itself.

6

Zimmer’s book is about the dawn of neuroscience: the first men to open up heads and figure out how brains worked. Zimmer once edited a story of mine for Discover, a situation from which he’s probably still recuperating. The guy is smarter than anyone I know. If you were to open up his head, his brain would burst out like an airbag.

7

My disappointment was short-lived, for this was a wondrous book. Here were detailed rabbinical opinions upon “whether or not a cattle breeder whose animal caused damage by knocking something with its penis must make restitution” (undecided); upon the inadmissibility of cleansing the anus “with the snout of a dog”; upon “the misconduct in which a woman places into the vagina of another woman a piece of meat from a fallen animal.” Here were descriptions of “hairy heart” and treatments for chronic uterine bleeding (“take three measures of Persian onions, boil them in wine, make her drink it and say to her, ‘Cease your discharge!’”).

8

A rather barren place, from what I gather. Egyptians made frequent trips to the family plot to supply departed souls with food, clothing, and kitchen items. According to Clara Pinto-Correia, some tombs were even outfitted with toilet facilities for the ka (soul). That No. 2 carries over into the afterlife was apparently a common belief. Correia cites a reference to a funerary fragment expressing anxiety over the possibility that the ka, should its food cache run out, might resort to feeding on its excrement.

9

I was intrigued to learn that the French for “pus”—even among members of eighteenth-century aristocracy—is “le pus.”

10

I feel it would be wrong to introduce Le Petomane into a manuscript and then abandon him in the very same sentence. I had always thought that the act consisted of popular songs performed on his own wind instrument. But I learned from “The Straight Dope” columnist Cecil Adams that, in fact, Le Petomane, whose real name was Joseph Pujol, could produce only four notes without the aid of an ocarina. This is not to belittle his rectal talents. Pujol could smoke a cigarette down to its butt (or his butt, or both) and blow out candles, as well as expel a fountain of water several feet into the air.

11

In looking up “portable hydrogen gas generator” on Google, I came across a study called “Detection of Flatus Using a Portable Hydrogen Gas Analyzer,” apparently a novel use of the device. The author taped the machine’s sampling tube to twenty postoperative gastrointestinal patients’ buttocks in an effort to detect farts, a happy sign that their plumbing was back in action. Hydrogen is the main component of flatus; you and I are, in essence, hydrogen gas generators of a less portable variety.

12

The terms “idiot” and “lunatic” were acceptable diagnostic terms in England up until 1959. “Imbecile” and “feeble-minded person” were, likewise, listed as official categories in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. England has always lagged a bit behind in discarding outdated terms for the disadvantaged. (When I was there in 1980, it was still possible to shop for used clothing at the local Spastic Shop.) That is, compared to the United States, where it takes, oh, about twenty-five minutes for a diagnostic euphemism to become a conversational faux pas.

13

Medical treatises were eminently more readable in Sanctorius’s day. Medicina statica delves fearlessly into subjects of unprecedented medical eccentricity: “Cucumbers, how prejudicial,” “Phlebotomy, why best in Autumn,” and the tantalizing “Leaping, its consequences.” There’s even a full-page, near-infomercial-quality plug for something called the Flesh-Brush.

14

Astoundingly, Sanctorius was described as a small man. His work habits may explain his ability to stay slim in an era of eight-pound dinners. He claimed to have tested ten thousand subjects over twenty-five years.

15

Credit for the original seal-a-soul-in-a-box experimental format must go to Frederick II, the thirteenth-century King of Sicily and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. In the diaries of the king’s sometime chronicler, the Franciscan monk Salimbene, there is a description of Frederick shutting up “a man alive in a cask until he died therein, wishing thereby to show that the soul perished utterly.” Though Frederick is to be credited for his precocious enthusiasm for scientific method, the cruelty of his experiments invariably outweighed their scientific merit. To wit, the time he “fed two men most excellently at dinner, one of whom he sent forthwith to sleep, and the other to hunt; and that same evening he caused them to be disemboweled in his presence, wishing to know which had digested the better” (the sleeper). At least that one makes some sense.

16

Anecdotal data on this matter comes from a former nurses’ aide named Juli Pankow, who e-mailed me regarding her observation of what she took to be the soul of a dying nursing home patient. The room was dark. She had just heard the woman’s death rattle. “There was a greenish-purple very very faint cloud or haze right above the chest.” From a Google search, I learned that exploded barium can appear as a greenish-purple cloud, though the cloud in question was linked to a NASA project, not post-barium-enema gas, so who knows.

17

In reality, an X-ray of the head could not show the brain, because the skull blocks the rays. What appeared to be an X-ray of the folds and convolutions of a human brain inside a skull—an image that circulated widely in 1896—was in fact an X-ray of artfully arranged cat intestines.

18

To those who find humor in this poor man’s name, I have this to say: His full name was Homer Clyde Snook.

19

I’m trying to work out how this makes sense as a noun meaning “the product of a bowel movement.” This is not Dawson’s personal euphemistic misstep; the usage persists in medical writing today. Should you have had the misfortune of visiting a web page called the Constipation Page, you will have seen the phrase, “the motion or stool is very dry or hard.” Perhaps this is why the term “motion pictures” was replaced by “movies.” Now that I see it on the page, “movie” would have been a far better BM euphemism than “motion.” I’d love to chat, but I need to make a movie.

20

I am an unabashed fan of the SPR (which has been around since 1882) and in particular its quarterly journal. Here are peer-reviewed articles addressing in all seriousness the likes of wart-charming and talking mongooses. Here are time-domain analyses of table rappings and field studies of healers’ effects on lettuce seed germination (“Figure 2: the healer ‘enhances’ the seeds, mimicked by the control healer”). I take it as nothing beyond happy coincidence that the SPR membership roster has at one time or another included a Mrs. H. G. Nutter, a Harry Wack, and a Mrs. Roy Batty.

21

Often the medium was using her foot to manipulate the furniture. However, Spirit Table Lifting aids were available for $12 by mail-order through the likes of the Ralph E. Sylvestre Company (“our effects are being used by nearly all prominent mediums,” brags the 1901 catalogue). Other helpful items included Telescopic Reaching Rods, self-playing trumpets, and Luminous Materialistic Ghosts (“appears gradually, floats about room and disappears”).

22

They did not, however, shew the way to a new theory on royalty rates. Dutton courteously rebuffed Crawford’s request to double his royalties to 20 percent.

23

Gynecological preoccupations are a running theme with the Princedom of Wales. Two and a half centuries later, the Prince of Wales would be caught in an intercepted cell phone call voicing his desire to be reincarnated as his lover’s tampon.

24

The man-midwife, with his arsenal of forceps and knives, was a recent arrival on the obstetrical scene and much resented by the gentle guild of midwifery. “Yea, infants have been born alive, with their brains working out of their heads, occasioned by the too common use of instruments,” warned midwife activist Sarah Stone in her 1737 A Complete Practice of Midwifery.

25

As opposed to the Swallowing Center at Northwestern, or the Swallowing Center at the University of Southern California, or the one at Holy Cross, or the Rusk Institute, or the Nebraska Medical Center. Of course, the original “swallowing center” is a chunk of your brainstem that coordinates chewing, gagging, vomiting, coughing, belching, and licking, all with minimal fuss and no funding from the NIH.

26

I once saw a wax model of a horned human head at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, but I had no idea the condition was sufficiently common for a doctor to pull together one hundred cases for a review paper. But what do I know? Perhaps horns were the plantar warts of their day. Perhaps Sachs held a post at the Horn Center at the University of Padua.

27

Where, says the school’s vice president for research, “professors are allowed to pursue their own interests as long as there’s nothing unethical or illegal.” It’s a sentiment echoed by the powers-that-be at no less than Harvard Medical School, which counted as faculty the late alien-abduction researcher/sympathizer John Mack. “Oh, they’re all weird or embarrassing one way or another,” said a spokesman some years ago when I expressed surprise at Mack’s tenure. “Besides,” he added ominously, “there’s a lot of weird science that turns out to be not-so-weird once it’s proven.”

Schwartz’s $1.8 million NIH grant, of which the university takes fifty-one percent, helps ease any discomfort over the lab’s unorthodox research.

28

The Donner Party spent the winter of 1846–47 stranded near Donner Lake, in the Sierras of California. When it became clear there wasn’t food to last the winter, seventeen of the strongest set out to get help. Another blizzard hit, stranding the rescue party at what came to be called the Camp of Death. The flesh and organs of four who died there—though not, I am relieved to report, the man named Mr. Burger—gave the others the strength to make it over the mountains. Lest you doubt the direness of the situation, a quote from Unfortunate Emigrants: “January 1, 1847. They made their New Year’s dinner of the strings of their snow-shoes. Mr. Eddy also ate an old pair of moccasins.” By the time help arrived, four months hence, most of those left alive had resorted to the food that knows no cookbook.

29

It’s possible that the history of creatively interpreted white noise dates as far back as the Oracle at Delphi, where the priestess sat above a crack in the temple floor, below which could be heard the roiling waters of a spring. Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, has posited that the white-noise-like sounds of the water may have brought on auditory hallucinations. (The more common theory holds that ethylene fumes issuing from the spot were sponsoring the woman’s altered state of mind. Ethylene—better known for making bananas ripe than for making priestesses bananas—can cause hallucinations in concentrated amounts.)

30

Literally, upon occasion: EVP literature holds that Jürgenson has had cameos on the tape recordings of an Italian EVP enthusiast, while Konstantin Raudive has made repeated appearances in the static on the TV screen of a couple in Luxembourg.

31

A note about spirit guides. You will occasionally read piffle about differences between the EEG of a medium and that of her guide, or control, and how this proves the guide’s existence as a separate entity. In 1981, Gary Heseltine, now an epidemiologist with the Texas Department of Public Health, experimented with the EEGs of two unnamed mediums and their spirit guides Shaolin and Monsanto (the “Comanche chief,” not the fertilizer concern). Heseltine writes that since sensory and metabolic input affect EEGs, you would have to go to the extreme of “paralyzing and maintaining the medium on life support” to control these factors. Even then, he doubted you’d have proof. “Short of a high brain stem transection,” Heseltine concluded, “it is difficult to conclude that differences in the EEG cannot be a consequence of differing sensory inputs.”

32

Oh, for the days when a nation’s highest-paid recording star could be a beefy six-foot-two oysterman’s daughter named Clara Butt. So remarkable was her voice that Madame Butt, as she was known early on, was recruited at a tender age to sing private concerts for Queen Victoria. Her lauded career in opera paved the way for what must have been a much-welcomed shift in titularity to Dame Clara.

33

The Ometer decline has continued, largely at the hands of the textile industry, who have given us the FadeOmeter, the Crackometer, and the Launder-Ometer (not to mention the Atlas Perspiration Tester, the Shirley Stiffness Tester, and the Evenness Tester 3 With Hairiness Module). Further Ometer abuse comes from the Centers for Disease Control (the Flu-O-Meter), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds—their Splatometer tracks the abundance of flying insects, whose decline spells trouble for birds—and Gary Ometer, former Director of Debt Management for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. I was hesitant to phone Gary, for his title led me to expect a man of, shall we say, high scores on the Shirley Stiffness Tester, but he was a good sport about it. Gary blames shabby Ellis Island bookkeeping for his family’s contribution to the Ometer situation.

34

The publicity stunt is one of the lesser-known Edison inventions. In 1903, as part of a scheme to discredit the alternating current system (Edison was a DC man), he got involved in the Topsy-the-elephant situation. The Coney Island pachyderm had been sentenced to die for having killed three of her handlers. (One fed her a lit cigarette, so in my mind the jury’s still out.) The swift and humane execution of an elephant was proving troublesome. Cyanide had failed, and hanging promised all manner of logistical turmoil. Edison called the ASPCA and suggested electrocution. He filmed the highly effective dispatch, and used it as proof of the dangers of AC.

35

Until he figured out that his “halo” was a reflection of sunlight at a certain angle, Watson believed himself to have been singled out for some great purpose. “I told my mother about my halo,” he writes. While Mrs. Watson did not come right out and say she could see it, she did the motherly thing and said it “didn’t seem at all strange to her that her son was thus distinguished.” Emboldened, Watson confided in Alexander Graham Bell. Bell told him to get his eyes examined.

36

I can easily relate to the feeling that one’s spell-checker is possessed. Mine recently informed me that “fucking” is not a word, but that “cucking,” “rucking,” and “funking” were all good words that I might like to substitute.

37

When I got home, I wrote to the Dairy Cattle Complex researcher, Javier Burchard, and asked him if the cows ever behaved as though there were an invisible presence in the chamber. He replied that he’d never seen any behavior that was so abnormal as to cause him “to pursue research in that direction.” This suggested to me that he had in fact seen cows behaving in a mildly abnormal manner, so I wrote back again and encouraged him to pass along any anecdotes. I clearly sounded like I had a dairy cattle complex of my own. “I’m sorry,” came the exasperated reply. “But I cannot give you any cow story.”

38

A gripping moment that capped an otherwise drab existence. A proponent of what Encyclopædia Britannica calls “a plain style of writing,” Greville failed to publish much of anything while alive. Well-born but repeatedly passed over for appointments, he was eventually dubbed Knight of the Bath. (The Knights of the Bath are an official Order of Her Majesty the Queen, who does not take enjoyment from Monty Python–style send-ups thereof. Or possibly she does: John Cleese was offered—and declined—an Order of the British Empire.)

39

Tandy is speaking metaphorically. Humans don’t have erectile hair or feathers on the backs of their necks. Looking into this, I learned that hackle feathers are popular for fly-tying. It took a while to figure this out, because the Google entries would say things like, “This is a Metz Grizzly Hen Neck hackle. It could be used for a Matuka-style streamer wing, however, and it’s a top choice for streamer collars, as it’s soft and pulses when the barbules are ‘unzipped.’”

40

The principle known as Occam’s razor was not, curiously enough, William of Occam’s idea. Occam simply used it—frequently and “sharply,” to quote the Encyclopædia Britannica entry—so much so that it became known as his razor. The entry goes on to say that “he used it to dispense with relations, which he held to be nothing distinct from their foundation in things; with efficient causality, which he tended to view merely as regular succession,” a sentence that cries out for Occam’s editing pencil.

41

SPR cofounder Frederick Myers muses at some length upon “the question of the clothes of ghosts—or the ghosts of clothes…. If A’s phantom wears a black coat, is that because A wore a black coat, or because B [the person who sees A’s ghost] was accustomed to see him in one? If A had taken to wearing a brown coat since B saw him in the flesh, would A’s phantom wear to B’s eyes a black coat or a brown? Or would the dress which A wore at the moment of death dominate, as it were, and supplant phantasmally the costumes of his ordinary days?” Myers’s guess is that A triggers a remembered image of himself in B’s mind, and that therefore A’s ghost would be clad in black, and not the brown coat he wore when B wasn’t around, or his funeral suit, or the field hockey kilt C liked him to put on when he’d had one too many glasses of port.

42

This comes as no surprise to yours truly, who has twice, on separate continents, carried out an experiment designed to prove the considerable curiosity of cows. This is an experiment I urge you to repeat, simply for the giddy thrill of it. Go into a pasture where cows are grazing in the distance. Shout to get their attention, and then suddenly lie down. The moment you do, they will hurry over to investigate, encircling you and staring down at you with unmitigated bovine fascination.

43

Or occasionally, ex-husbands. A celebrity website reports that Elizabeth Taylor saw Mike Todd during her near-death experience. “He pushed me back to my life,” she is quoted saying. Whether this was done for her benefit or his was not clear.

44

My favorite being “The Anesthetized Patient Can Hear and Can Remember,” from a 1962 Journal of Proctology article. “Their physiologic adaptations to the stress of surgery may be profoundly disturbed by what they hear,” wrote the author, leading me to mistake him for a caring physician. Then he went on: “Medico-legal implications are obvious even if we do not care about the patient.” I sat there blinking in disbelief. I did this again twelve pages later, upon seeing the emblem of the International Academy of Proctology: a double-snake caduceus with a free-floating length of rectum standing in for the pole.

45

In checking the spelling of “Kimberly-Clark” on the web, I note that the personal hygiene empire has expanded well beyond sanitary napkins. It’s a global powerhouse spewing forth multiple brands of diapers, adult diapers, disposable training pants, bed-wetting underpants, “flushable moist wipe products,” award-winning disposable swim pants, and “cloth-like towels strong enough for big messes,” though probably not the big mess of umpteen billion used disposable hygiene products.

46

There is, of course, disagreement as to whether they are actually traveling somewhere or simply experiencing a vivid hallucination; a good discussion of this can be found in the Skeptical Inquirer article by Susan Blackmore listed in the bibliography. Blackmore, a parapsychologist turned skeptic, has had out-of-body experiences of her own, which you can read about on the website of TASTE, The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences.

47

That is, in the near-death journals. You can find them in certain fundamentalist Christian publications. I read that in the February 1990 issue of the Trinity Broadcasting Network newsletter Praise the Lord, there’s an article about scientists drilling in Siberia and suddenly poking through to a hollow space from which issued screams and temperatures in excess of two thousand degrees. I spoke to a woman in the newsletter department at TBN, who apologized for not being able to send out pre-2003 back issues. “We disregard them every year,” she explained confusingly. “We shred them.”

48

And now I must reveal to you that Wes is not a defibrillator insertion patient in Charlottesville, but in San Francisco, near where I live. The human subjects committee for Greyson’s study would not allow me in the operating room. So I called UCSF Medical Center, who kindly let me observe an insertion. My apologies to the reader, and my thanks to UCSF Medical Center (number six on U.S. News & World Report’s 2004 list of the nation’s best hospitals). And to the unconscious Wes, who later wrote and apologized for “not having been more sociable.”

49

$345

50

Incredibly, Victorian physicians practiced gynecology and urology on women without looking. Even something as tricky as a catheter insertion would typically be done blind, with the doctor’s hands under the sheets and his gaze heading off in some polite middle distance. Fortunately, budding MDs were allowed to look upon — and rehearse upon — cadaver genitals, and that is how they learned to practice the Braille edition of their craft.

51

They don’t mean to tidy up afterwards.

52

FYI, it’s the newest use for Botox. Because what paralyzes your frowning muscles will just as effectively paralyze your clamping vagina muscles.