10-June-2023

Part 2 was another great eye- opener, and I really enjoyed it. I’ve finally finished reading Part 3 as well. Part 3 is titled “Brain Invaders and Evaders”, and it talks about some of the dangers that come from small molecules. They may not be large in size, but their effects can have impacts that can exceed your expectations.

The first chapter in this section is called “Like Lucifer”. It starts with a historical introduction about Lincoln and some debates he was a part of. I’m usually not a big history person, but it was quite nice to read. The introduction made an indirect lead into what the rest of the chapter was about. Afterwards, the element Mercury is brought up. It truly is mesmerizing. The author proceeds to mention some of the medicines that contain Mercury. One of them was Calomel, which was commonly used in teething powders. Parents would rub this in their children’s gums when their new teeth started to poke through, thinking it would help the children. The opposite happened. The children’s fingers and toes would ache and swell, and it damaged their skin as well. This was known as “Pink’s Disease”. This turned into an epidemic, and companies realized it was the Mercury causing all this. They soon started taking calomel out of their products, and the epidemics died down. Now we’re looking at the dangers of Mercury, showing exactly how powerful it is, and how it targets the human brain. Its toxic effects were astonishing, to say the least. Children were constantly growing wild, their behavior going from calm to insane. Some had extreme insomnia, others had depression, and a few even had hallucinations. Some other symptoms included hot tempers, fatigue, violence outbursts, and the urge to go into isolation. It’s absurd, and scary, if you ask me. Mercury poisoning isn’t that common today, but it can sometimes be contracted through excessive consumption of certain foods that have methylmercury, like fish. Peskin even stated that “mercury toxicity has in some ways become a disease of celebrity”.

Chapter 8 is called “An Honest Liar”. From first glance, the title really hooked me. The irony in that phrase made me wonder what an “honest liar” is really defined as. The section begins with a girl named Lisa Park. A child from the 60’s, she was raised around mechanics, and learned to fix cars from an early age. Her mother eventually couldn’t put up with the lack of feminism, and made Lisa’s character a cultured, young woman. Lisa eventually met a widower, Johnny, at the age of forty, and began turning his and his children’s lives around. After his wife’s death, he had lost motivation to do almost anything. This led his children to be the same way, as they had no urge to attend or do well in school. Lisa encouraged them to be strong and get back up on their feet. “Speeding around town in a red roadster, she was forever a woman on mission” (Peskin 148). One day, Lisa’s feet stopped functioning, and prickling agitations erupted all over her body overtime. Her ankles and knees were debilitated as well. After many tests and confused faces, it was concluded that Lisa’s immune system was the problem. The shiny sheaths that surrounded her neutrons had been attacked, and Lisa’s nerves were no longer communicating with each other. Gradually, Lisa was becoming more and more confused. She would forget about various details, like her retirement, and her brain would take all sorts of thoughts or fictions and turn them into realities. There was one detail that nearly went unnoticed: Lisa had an alcohol addiction, which filled her with bad habits. Using this new information, the neurologists suspected that Lisa had a vitamin deficiency. Dr. Sergei Sergievich Korsakoff joined a clinic for nervous diseases at a hospital in northeastern Moscow. There, he met Arkady Volkov, who faced Lisa’s common symptoms, also due to an alcohol addiction. He developed the need to remind himself of daily tasks, such as wear this or eat that. Each sunrise meant a new adventure of complications. His arms and legs weakened too, and he’d suffered excruciating pains throughout his body. The logical part of Arkady’s brain, however, seemed to be normal. Korsakoff wrote that Arkady had been diagnosed with multiple neuritis. He had written about the stories Arkady’s brain created and other symptoms, and his name was attached to this condition’s profile, renaming it “Korsakoff’s syndrome”. The experiments run on Arkady revealed that nerves stretching between his spine and limbs were destroyed, falling similarly to Lisa’s nerves that stopped communicating. I had been pondering about the meaning of the phrase, “honest liar”, and after some time, I found a definition for my brain to register. Based on this book, an honest liar is someone who doesn’t intentionally tell untrue information, but instead creates fantasies that never really occurred and thinks that is what happened. It mentions on page 153, how Arkady would tell of things that never occurred. Once, he had elaborated the previous day to be a visit to a far-off place, when in reality, he was too weak to even get out of bed. There are two sentences that say it all: “His memory had been impregnated with shards of truth that grew into full-blown recollections. He had become an honest liar.”

The final chapter of this book is “Filth Parties”. In the early 1900’s, there was a disease that infected and killed millions. It started when someone developed a rash on parts of her face, her muscles melted away, and her digestive system went awry. She suffered a tremendous amount of confusion, leaving her speech severely damaged. Nothing she said or was told made sense, and her life was basically sucked out of her. Soon, more people faced the same side effects, following with mood swings and yet again memory loss. Doctors later found out that this disease was called pellagra, and by 1912, it was one of the most common death causes in the United States. The epidemic expanded to an uncontrollable rate, and they needed someone who could control it: Joseph Goldberger. He was the man who helped solve the mystery of pellagra. Traveling all over the U.S. and creating many mechanisms to disintegrate this harmful infection, he was able to spread awareness of Pellagra and receive assistance in finding a cure to decrease the incidence of it. He and his partners performed many experiments to crack the mystery. After much effort, the team worked out why the U.S. was being dominated by a disease it was once known to be immune to.

I truly enjoyed reading this novel and learning about new diseases I wasn’t aware of before. This book really opened my eyes to a new vision of public health, and I’m looking forward to reading similar stories.