Where Is Thumbkin?

I remember singing a song when I was little that was all about phalanges. The song didn't actually use the word phalanges--a pity, too, as it's such a delightful word--but much fun was had by all singing about each individual finger. (You can see the words here.) Here is some more fun with fingers:

• The thumb was called the thuma in Old English (Finger). As a freshman in high school, I remember being highly amused by the meaning of thumb biting in Romeo and Juliet. When Mr. Baugh explained that scene with "No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir," I think the whole class was impressed with Shakespeare's raunchy writing (and ready to read more!)
  
  
• The index finger was called the towcher in Old English, and the toucher in Middle English because, well, you know, you touch things with it. The Anglo-Saxons called it the scite or shooting finger (Finger).
  
  

• In Old English, the middle finger was called long-man, just like in the nursery song (Finger).
• The ring finger was called lec-man in Old English. Lec referred to leeches, so if you're thinking of old-timey medicine (Old English old-timey medicine) it is obviously the "medical" finger. The "Old English" weren't the only ones to label the fourth finger as medical. The Romans called the fourth finger digitus annularis, or literally, the ring finger. The Anglo-Saxons called it the gold-finger (No, not Auric Goldfinger!) This nomenclature influences us to this day. We wear our wedding rings on the fourth finger because the ancients believed that a nerve ran from that finger to our hearts. They also "used it for stirring mixtures under the notion that it would give instant warning to the heart if it came into contact with anything noxious" (Finger).
  
  
  
• The Anglo-Saxons called our smallest finger the ear finger because, naturally, it's the one people use to scratch inside their ears (Finger). I've always called it my pinky, and it turns out that the Scots use the word pinky (or pinkie, if you prefer) to describe anything tiny. According to The Encyclopedia of Superstitions, "a crooked little finger is often considered a sign that the person will die rich, but this wealth is likely to have been made in a dubious way."

I hope I get to enjoy my dubiously made money some before I die!

Finger. (2012). In Brewer's dictionary of phrase and fable. Retrieved from http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/brewerphrase/finger/0
Pinkie. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Print.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Finger-gun.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Our_rings!.jpg
Webster, Richard. The Encyclopedia of Superstitions. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2008. Print.

“Car Door Handle in Lung 4 Years”

The title of this post was a headline I found while looking through microfilm Friday afternoon. It reads like something you’d see on the front page of a supermarket tabloid, but I didn’t find this one in the National Enquirer. This was in a 1943 issue of Ingalls News, the newspaper for Ingalls Shipyard. Paul Trehern, a cost clerk at the shipyard, unknowingly lived with a car-door handle in his right lung for nearly four years before he had it removed. How in the world does a door handle end up inside a person? And how does a person go on for that long without knowing it’s there?

Trehern, a Gulfport native, was riding his bicycle in 1939 when a car driven by a Florida tourist struck him, throwing him against the side of the vehicle. Trehern suffered an inch-and-a-half long wound on his right side and was rushed to the hospital with blood gushing from the injury. When he was thrown against the car, the door handle entered him, punctured his lung, and completely broke off from the car door. At the hospital, a doctor closed the wound with 23 stitches and took X-rays, but found no evidence any foreign object.

Trehern spent the next four years in pain. He was in so much pain, according to the article, that the only way he could sleep comfortably was by sitting in an upright position. Apparently, the pain wasn’t enough to keep him away from sports, though. A high school student at the time of the accident, Trehern was a member of the Gulfport High School boxing team, which is remarkable considering the unknown extent of his injury. Medical authorities of the day who were familiar with the case noted that a body blow in the right place would probably have killed Trehern instantly.

The car door handle was finally discovered during a medical exam at the state sanatorium in Magee, where it was removed by one of the state’s leading chest doctors. Trehern had to give up a rib in the process, but my guess is that he probably didn’t mind it that much.

Fingerprints: The Sequel

It seems our readers just can't get enough information on fingerprints! We recently received a meebo question that asked if fingerprints are an inherited trait.
Well, to answer this question I went straight to the Oxford Companion to the Body and found that fingerprints patterns are not determined by hereditary but rather by "complex, irregular stresses in the skin" that form during the first 13 weeks after conception. So, it seems, Mom and Dad are not to blame for your irregular fingerprint pattern. If you want to learn more about fingerprints, read Elisabeth's post by clicking the link blow.

http://mlcref.blogspot.com/2008/12/pull-my-fingerprint.html

Blakemore, Colin and Jennett, Sheila, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Body. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Welcome, Indeed.

A book that we’ve recently acquired is Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang’s Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life (whew, what a subtitle!). I’m a sucker for dumbed-down medical facts (this is why I watch a lot of Discovery Health, much to my husband’s chagrin), so naturally I found this book to be a goldmine. It’s also filled with funny turns of phrase. I’m pretty much in love with this book.

Here are some of my favorite nuggets from the first chapter, which is about how brain function is perceived, especially in the movies:

According to Aamodt and Wang, the memory loss in the movie Memento is extremely accurate; Leonard, the main character, has severe antero-grade amnesia: “The symptoms suffered by Leonard are similar to those experienced by people with damage to the hippocampus and related structures. The hippocampus is a horn-shaped structure that in humans is about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger” (14).

However, the authors take umbrage regarding the memory loss in 50 First Dates: “Drew Barrymore plays a character who collects new memories each day and then discards them all overnight, clearing the way for a brand-new beginning the next day. In this way she is able to tolerate more than one date with Adam Sandler. This pattern—the ability to store memories but subsequently lose them on a selective, timed basis—exists only in the imaginations of scriptwriters who get their knowledge of the brain from other scriptwriters” (10).

You will be pleased to know that the brain-eating scene in Hannibal is pretty accurate, though: “In a more realistic (but totally revolting) depiction of brain injury, we have the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal (2001), in which gradual invasion (oh, let’s not mince words—the cutting up and cooking of a person’s brain) causes progressive loss of function. Putting aside the difficulty of carrying out such brain surgery without killing the patient, here at least we have a situation in which damage to the brain leads to proportional loss of function” (14).

If I got this much out of the first 14 pages, I can’t wait to read the rest of it. Welcome to Your Brain is available here at MLC if you want to check it out!

Aamodt, Sandra, and Sam Wang. Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life. Bloomsbury, 2008.

Update on Roscoe Pitts!

My apologies if you find the removal of fingerprints boring, but the reference department has been positively aflutter over the additional details regarding Roscoe Pitts and the kooky removal of his fingerprints.

First off, a super-creepy photo of Mr. Pitts (real name: Robert Philipps) and his icky chest incisions:



Ewwww. Kudos to Elisabeth for scouring nearly every reference book in our collection on crime, criminals, and the like!

The descriptions of how the chest skin was grafted onto his fingertips after the prints were sliced off just weren't cutting it (haha, get it? CUTTING IT); I needed to know in detail how this happened. I won't tell you how much time Elisabeth and I devoted to talking about this over the past few days.

I came across a website writte by Jim Fisher, a professor in the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, that explains it better:

Using a knife, the doctor peeled the skin from Philipps’ right fingers then taped his hand to skin that had been pulled away from his chest. Three weeks later, when the chest skin had grown onto his fingers, the hand was separated from his chest. The technique worked, on the tips of Philipps’ fingers were patches of smooth, pink skin. The doctor repeated the process on his patient’s left hand. Philipps endured six weeks of boredom and pain but when it was over he was delighted with the results.

Follow the link for more info on Roscoe/Robert.

Nash, Jay Robert. Encyclopedia of World Crime: Criminal Justice, Criminology, and Law Enforcement. Volume III: K-R. CrimeBooks, Inc, 1990. 2457.

Pull My Fingerprint

I spent part of yesterday trying to determine whether or not John Dillinger had actually had his fingerprints removed. Are you as disgusted and enthralled as I am by the fact that he did?! He paid a doctor to cut off the fingerprints, and then to treat the fingers with first an acid and then an alkaline solution. Dillinger was "unable to use his fingers for several days." (This is a candidate for the understatement of the year.) Roscoe Pitts, a lesser known crime maven, went to even more extraordinary means to rid himself of his tell-tale prints. I will let you follow the link to read the gruesome details for yourself. The less adventuresome reader can learn more about fingerprints below!

• Did you know that it is virtually impossible to tell a koala fingerprint from a human one? We are the only two animals with fingerprints that are specific to individuals.
• There is method to the madness of fingerprints. Loops comprise 70% of a fingerprint's makeup, whorls 25%, and arches 5%.
• A human fetus begins to form fingerprints 13 weeks after conception.
• Fingerprints do not change throughout a person's lifetime.
• Argentina was the first country to establish an official Police Fingerprint Bureau. It was started there in the early 1890's by Juan Vucetich, a native Croatian.
• Anomalies in fingerprint patterns can be a tip-off to the presence of inherited disorders.
• Dermatoglyphics is defined as "the science or study of skin markings or patterns, especially those of the fingers, hands, and feet." It also refers to the markings themselves.
• The New York Civil Service Commission began the first systematic use of fingerprinting in the United States in 1902. They started fingerprinting candidates in order to deter those who used substitutes to take entrance exams.

Now that you've let your fingers do the walking through these printed nuggets (heh, heh), why don't you go treat yourself to something nice? How about a manicure? Or, better yet, why not get your palm read and have your whorls and arches deciphered? (Anyone know a good one?)
Black's Medical Dictionary. A&C Black Publishers Limited , 2006.
Blakemore, Colin and Jennett, Sheila, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Body. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Girardin, G. Russell. Dillinger The Untold Story. Indiana University Press, 1994.
The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather guide. Abington: Helicon, 2008.
Kennedy, Michael. The Oxford Dictionary of Law Enforcement. Oxford University Press, 2007.

McGraw-Hill Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

The New York Public Library Desk Reference. MacMillan, 1998.
World Encyclopedia. Philip's, 2008.http://www.fbi.gov/