biomedicalephemera:

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer

Curator of the Natural History museum in East London, South Africa, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was the first person to discover (in a meaningful way) that the coelacanth wasn’t extinct, but was simply the vile-tasting “gombessa” that had been thrown away for decades.

While collecting specimens and samples for the East London museum, Ms. Latimer let it be known to the local fishermen that she was highly interested in any “unusual” or rare fish that they might haul aboard. In 1938, Capt. Henrik Goosen phoned her to come down to the dock, where she encountered a five-foot long oddity, which she describes:

“I picked away at the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen. It was five foot[feet] long, a pale mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots; it had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over. It was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy dog tail.”

She hauled it back to the museum in a taxi (which she notes the cabbie was none too happy about, even when she gave a generous tip - I can’t imagine any taxi driver wanting fish slime on their seats!), and discovered that she could not find the fish in any of the books available to her. She was eager to preserve the specimen, and since the museum had no preservation facilities, she (in another taxi) took it down to the morgue, which wouldn’t have it. She then attempted to contact James [JLB] Smith at Rhodes, but he was out on holiday.

In the end, knowing that it could possibly end up being of dubious scientific value, she reluctantly ended up having the fish skinned and taxidermied. Luckily, the external anatomy of the coelacanth is so different from anything else in the sea, JLB Smith was able to positively identify the specimen:

“There was not a shadow of a doubt,” he said. “It could have been one of those creatures of 200 million years ago come alive again.”

Still, the taxidermy work had removed both the gill plates and the ossicles, which were needed for absolute confirmation that this was the fish of fossils. Now known as Latimeria chalumnae after his friend and the river it was discovered in, the discovery was announced to much excitement in the scientific community and local population. The fact that there was no complete positive proof that this fish was the fish of fossils still made many icthyologists doubtful about the specimen, but JLB Smith was absolutely determined to find proof of its identity.

And thus began the search for the Lazarus fish…

The Search Beneath the Sea: The Story of the Coelacanth. J. L. B. Smith, 1956.

“In spite of all, some shape of beauty moves away the pall from our dark spirits”

-John Keats

The Art of Beauty. Mrs H.R. Haweis, 1883.

Edit: Oops. Wrong blog. But it stays for now. Meant to go on Cabbaging Cove.

mythologyofblue:

Lewis Sayre and his suspension device for the treatment of scoliosis (1877)

(gravellyrun)

discoverynews:

jtotheizzoe:

brooklynmutt:

Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know

Read: Smithsonian Magazine

A must-know list, but it needs more Grace Hopper (she was a firecracker).

Wouldn’t it be cool if we just celebrated them, like, all the time and didn’t wait for random commemorative days like today?

it would be, alas.

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer

Curator of the Natural History museum in East London, South Africa, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was the first person to discover (in a meaningful way) that the coelacanth wasn’t extinct, but was simply the vile-tasting “gombessa” that had been thrown away for decades.

While collecting specimens and samples for the East London museum, Ms. Latimer let it be known to the local fishermen that she was highly interested in any “unusual” or rare fish that they might haul aboard. In 1938, Capt. Henrik Goosen phoned her to come down to the dock, where she encountered a five-foot long oddity, which she describes:

“I picked away at the layers of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen. It was five foot[feet] long, a pale mauvy blue with faint flecks of whitish spots; it had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over. It was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy dog tail.”

She hauled it back to the museum in a taxi (which she notes the cabbie was none too happy about, even when she gave a generous tip - I can’t imagine any taxi driver wanting fish slime on their seats!), and discovered that she could not find the fish in any of the books available to her. She was eager to preserve the specimen, and since the museum had no preservation facilities, she (in another taxi) took it down to the morgue, which wouldn’t have it. She then attempted to contact James [JLB] Smith at Rhodes, but he was out on holiday.

In the end, knowing that it could possibly end up being of dubious scientific value, she reluctantly ended up having the fish skinned and taxidermied. Luckily, the external anatomy of the coelacanth is so different from anything else in the sea, JLB Smith was able to positively identify the specimen:

“There was not a shadow of a doubt,” he said. “It could have been one of those creatures of 200 million years ago come alive again.”

Still, the taxidermy work had removed both the gill plates and the ossicles, which were needed for absolute confirmation that this was the fish of fossils. Now known as Latimeria chalumnae after his friend and the river it was discovered in, the discovery was announced to much excitement in the scientific community and local population. The fact that there was no complete positive proof that this fish was the fish of fossils still made many icthyologists doubtful about the specimen, but JLB Smith was absolutely determined to find proof of its identity.

And thus began the search for the Lazarus fish…

The Search Beneath the Sea: The Story of the Coelacanth. J. L. B. Smith, 1956.

cwnl:

The First Lady of DNA

The story of Rosalind Franklin never ceases to fascinate, and the publication of her biography as told by Brenda Maddox is indeed pertinent: celebrating 50 years of the most illuminating discovery in life sciences, namely the revelation of the structure of DNA. In the 25th of April 1953 issue of Nature, three consecutive short papers ushered in a new era in biology by unveiling an ingenious model of the DNA structure, together with the X-ray diffraction data crucial for its formulation.

The best known of the three papers is the one by James Watson and Francis Crick, who both then worked at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. Watson and Crick proposed that DNA forms a right-handed helix composed of two anti-parallel DNA strands, which are kept together by specific hydrogen bonds between adenines and thymines and between guanines and cytosines. The notion of complementarity was born, and it immediately suggested a conceptually simple mechanism for copying genetic information over generations of cells and organisms.

The other two papers presented X-ray data obtained by two research groups at King’s College, London, one led by Maurice Wilkins and the other by Rosalind Franklin. It was Wilkins who initiated the X-ray diffraction studies of DNA fibres and who obtained the first promising diffractograms suggesting that DNA could be helical.

However, it required the experience and experimental skills of Franklin to obtain high-quality X-ray diffractograms that contained the definitive information that Watson and Crick needed to propose their famous DNA model.

One of my favorite women in science.

I’m so glad that Rosalind Franklin’s work has been getting increasing coverage in the past decade and a half or so…she was an amazing woman who wasn’t afraid to call out her male colleagues (one who was her direct superior) when they were clearly bullshitting things to push their own (incorrect) theories.

For so many decades she hasn’t gotten the recognition that she deserves…hell, even Wilkins was far more lauded than she was, and he was only loosely involved in the theoretical work before Franklin figured out how to image the double helix using her own techniques. She deserves to be as lauded as Watson and Crick, not just for her work on DNA, but for her work on the tobacco mosaic virus, viral mechanisms, and x-ray imaging techniques in general.

Sadly, she passed away from cancer just a few years after this work was completed. Had she lived a longer life, I could easily see her being at least the equivalent of Barbara McClintock or (maybe) Anita B. Roberts. She would have been such a boon to Dorthy Hodgkin’s work.

jtotheizzoe:

Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know

(via Smithsonian Magazine)

Hysteria vs. Epilepsy.

Because of the “convulsions” associated with “hysteric paroxysm” (which were often actually induced by the physicians themselves, before home devices were brought about), epileptic fits and attacks of hysteria were not infrequently confused.

Hysteria & Neurasthenia. J. Mitchell Clarke, 1905.

Zodenta Toothpaste advert. Early 1900s.

Dr. Olga A. Lentz in her dental office. 1905.