Home is Where the Heart Aches

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Edmund Wilson

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Man’s Place in Nature

“My heart began to pound as we approached the village,” recalls Napoleon Chagnon, an anthropologist at Northwestern University, Illinois. “It was hot and muggy, and my clothing was soaked with perspiration…The small, biting gnats were out in astronomical numbers, for it was the beginning of the dry season. My face and hands were swollen from the venom of their numerous stings. In just a few moments I was to meet my first Yanomamo, my first primitive man.”

The Human Side of Science

The human side of science. It’s a little like the Emperor’s new clothes. It must exist. Science, after all, is a thing made by humans, and its history is crowded with examples of how such human wrinkles as ambition, competition, personal likes and dislikes have punctuated its course. But while The Double Helix went far in dispelling any view of science as an impersonal, completely rational endeavor, many scientists are still of the opionion that the human side of science is ignored, that it is, in the end, irrelevant to the progress of science itself.

Ghosts of Summer’s Woods

There’s something eerie about seeing a cluster of Indian pipes, heads downturned, on a warm summer day. Ghostly and greenless, they remind one more of mushrooms than of the herbs they are. Their white flesh is unexpected and freakish, especially when you realize that they are wildflowers and not some oddly formed fungus.

A Dread Disease: Cancer in Modern American Culture

When the John Jacob Astors offered to give the Womans Hospital of New York a cancer pavilion in 1884, they received a cool reception from the hospital board. Some of the trustees feared that cancer was contagious. Others did not want to associate the hospital with such a sickness. “Cancer may not be contagious,” one board member is supposed to have said, “but the name is.” Irritated and impatient, the Astors decided to finance the building of a new and separate institution for women with cancer. It opened in 1887, only a century ago, as the New York Cancer Hospital, the first such institution in the United States.

Mind as Laboratory

You are an alien.

You have detected some motion at one spot on the planet Earth (it’s the New York metropolitan area). The motions at first appear to be chaotic. At the highest resolution, you detect entities that are rectangular in shape (automobiles). You begin analyzing the vectors and velocities of the entities. There is a terrific data rate. What does your analysis reveal?

The Harper Dictionary of Science in Everyday Language: Scientific Terms Explained So You Can Really Understand Them

The relativity theories of Albert Einstein (1879-1955) deal with the most fundamental descriptions of the physical universe: the concepts of time, space, motion, mass and gravitation. To attempt to “explain” (rather than describe) them here would be an act of presumption, for the following reasons:

A Balanced View of Humankind

Sociologist Samuel Oliner, tweedy, bespectacled, and silverhaired, is the visual ideal of the small university professor, but his handsome features and thoughtful manner conceal a dark truth, certain horrendous experiences of his childhood and teens that are central to his real identity. Oliner rarely speaks of them to friends or to colleagues at Humboldt State University at Arcata in northern California, but seeking to exorcise the demons of that period from his psyche he wrote a memoir, privately published in 1979, titled Restless Memories. It opens with an account of the event that destroyed Oliner’s world and led him, forty years later, to undertake the major work of his life, an ambitious research project, just completed, on the psychological and social factors that make for human altruism.

A Roadside Cough Medicine

In New England the first beacons of spring rise from the ground at just about the equinox, and among those in the forefront are the yellow and orange heads of the coltsfoot. Big, bright bunches of them offer assurance that the drabness of winter is ending, and that color is returning to the land.

The Rediscovery of Experiment

“Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment,” wrote American scientist Robert Millikan on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for physics in 1924. “Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both, by theorizing and then testing, or by finding new relations in the process of experimenting and then bringing the theoretical foot up and pushing it on beyond, and so on in unending alterations.”

The Tursiops Mystery

After seeing so much wretched debris, Bob Schoelkopf found it jarring to encounter a corpse that looked beautiful. It had washed ashore alive at Lewes, Delaware, just before noon, and expired as someone tried to move it. This death raised the body count to thirty, in six weeks.

The corpse arrived in Cape May at 5:00 on July 30, 1987, on the flatbed of a pickup truck aboard the ferry from Lewes. Now it lay motionless on a bed of ice, seven feet long and sleek. Like the others, it appeared to be smiling.

Rio Azul Field Journal

The ancient city of Rio Azul, located along a river of the same name, was once an administrative center for the region, as well as a frontier fortress. It was a part of an ancient Maya regional state whose captial was the very much larger city of Tikal. Its great days were between about 250 and 850 AD, although pioneer farmers occupied the area long before that.

The Slipper and Its Chamber

Be they yellow, pink, white, or combinations thereof, the lady’s slippers are among those special wildflowers whose locations are whispered only to trusted people. It’s not just that they may be rare, but also that they look rare.

Indeed, wildflower enthusiasts are usually careful to catalogue, mentally at least, the locations of these largest of our orchids. One May, when I was looking for some yellows and pinks to photograph, I asked a couple of knowledgeable friends who immediately remembered where they had seen yellow lady’s slippers twenty years earlier. We went to the spot in deep moist woods and, sure enough, they were still there.

Medical Science in the Popular American Press: Beginnings

Medicine has a uniquely important relationship with the public. More than a science, it has a practical side employing theory, yet distinct from it. This practical side always depends on the interaction of two parties: doctor and patient. Consequently, a patient’s ideas about medicine comprise part of the practice of medicine itself. But even before becoming a patient, a person must have some conception of medical theory (science) as well. Doctors, after all, do not operate on unwilling, inanimate objects: people go to doctors for help in certain types of problems because they believe that these problems and their solutions fall under the rubric of medicine. In this regard, the efficacy of medicine depends on the general public’s conception of it.

Looking For God’s Footprints

Sure, it’s easy to make fun. Our planet flies through space more smoothly than any airplane, covered with water yet never spilling a drop, so it must have had a Designer. Our eyes display too complex an architecture to be reached by random mutations, so they must have had a Biological Engineer. Our atmosphere contains just enough oxygen, just enough carbon to support life, so it must have had an Environmental Consultant. New York City offers a brilliantly conceived breeding ground for cockroaches; surely, therefore, we can deduce the existence of a cockroach diety. The so called argument from design–from design, that is, to the existence of God, had barely been thought up before it was being satirized, and you can’t always tell the serious versions from the parodies.