I have blogged before about my small child confusion ,when viewing my first ever telethon over just who was alive, who was ghost and who was a ghost brought back to life for just one night to assist this charity telethon.
As an adult, I still think this memory makes the basis for a really great pop oratorio.
The setup :
Somewhere on Manhattan in the late 1950s, a TV studio is ready to go for the annual rheumatic heart disease telethon, but the cast and crew is offstage taking a break before showtime, with the auditorium seats slowly filling up with the in-studio audience.
To entertain and cue the incoming audience, silent, low quality, 1940s-era 16mm film footage of rheumatic heart disease patients and their medical staff in hospital scenes, all dressed in ghostly white, are looping away on the big screen high up in the back of the set.
Suddenly the rear doors to the auditorium fling open up dramatically --- but silently.
Then slowly some eerily silent figures, dressed head to shoes in white, (ditto their assistants) --- identical to the ones up on the film screen, are wheeled in with wheelchairs or assisted with canes, crutches or oxygen assist, down the centre aisle and up onto the stage.
They all of them take off their white hospital clothes to reveal ordinary street clothes , circa 1940, and then they pick a variety of color-coded hospital tops and start to silently mime away in their temporarily assumed roles as patients, doctors, administrators, visitors etc for the opening scene.
The house lights go down as the offset pit music and sfx goes up .
A colored spotlight lights up, at front and centre and a figure goes under it to first talk then talk sing and sing their way into the opening number.
I intend the props and mimed action, taken together together with the action on the film screen, to give enough dates, words and images for readers of volume I of my book to understand the context of each particular scene and song.
And the end of the last scene, the stage figures put on their white hospital garb and again wheeled silently down and out the rear of the auditorium : THE END ....
Showing posts with label rheumatic heart disease. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rheumatic heart disease. Show all posts
Friday, March 6, 2015
Monday, September 20, 2010
Juvenis Interruptus more accurate for RHD ?
Someone ,who admits they are not a Latin scholar, wondered about my use of Juvenis Rumpo to describe RHD (Rheumatic Heart Disease.)
They thought Juvenis Interruptus seemed a more likely term, based on the much better known phrase coitus interruptus.
They may be right.
About four years ago,I had been reading an account of some
notable early Rheumatic heart Disease (RHD) cases of a doctor who had specialized in that very serious and widespread disease.
He had mentioned RHD was also sometimes called "-------" (a New Latin medical term) which could be translated as Youth Interrupted in English.
I remembered his explanation why this little known term was so appropriate , but not his name or the actual Latin phrase.
I merely tried to translate the English term back into Latin, using a half dozen translation engines to get a consensus.
All used Rumpo ---- but I was concerned that when I back-translated the term back yet again into English - it came out a youth torn into two (!)
Technically accurate, I suppose, to describe the break in youthful activities engendered when your loving parents learned you have had permanent damage to your heart caused by a bout of acute Rheumatic Fever, (RF) and that you must not tax your heart.
My brother, for example, had RF when he was four
and years later,when he was 20, a doctor examining him before he ran in a race, noticed he had a heart murmur.
This was something his parents had not known, so he had not been overly-protected : his youth was not interrupted.
But in English, Rumpo is an unknown Latin term, while Interruptus is in fact a very frequently used term to create cod-latin phrases.
In any case, I will be glad to hear comments from people more familiar with Medical New Latin than me...
They thought Juvenis Interruptus seemed a more likely term, based on the much better known phrase coitus interruptus.
They may be right.
About four years ago,I had been reading an account of some
notable early Rheumatic heart Disease (RHD) cases of a doctor who had specialized in that very serious and widespread disease.
He had mentioned RHD was also sometimes called "-------" (a New Latin medical term) which could be translated as Youth Interrupted in English.
I remembered his explanation why this little known term was so appropriate , but not his name or the actual Latin phrase.
I merely tried to translate the English term back into Latin, using a half dozen translation engines to get a consensus.
All used Rumpo ---- but I was concerned that when I back-translated the term back yet again into English - it came out a youth torn into two (!)
Technically accurate, I suppose, to describe the break in youthful activities engendered when your loving parents learned you have had permanent damage to your heart caused by a bout of acute Rheumatic Fever, (RF) and that you must not tax your heart.
My brother, for example, had RF when he was four
and years later,when he was 20, a doctor examining him before he ran in a race, noticed he had a heart murmur.
This was something his parents had not known, so he had not been overly-protected : his youth was not interrupted.
But in English, Rumpo is an unknown Latin term, while Interruptus is in fact a very frequently used term to create cod-latin phrases.
In any case, I will be glad to hear comments from people more familiar with Medical New Latin than me...
Saturday, September 18, 2010
"JUVENIS RUMPO" : curing RHD, Rheumatic Heart Disease
Another name for Rheumatic Heart Disease, which until the 1950s was our biggest single heart disease, is JUVENIS RUMPO , which can be loosely translated as "Youth ,Interrupted" .
Every mother ,between the 1910s to the 1960s, had to worry about about whether her children would have to endure the consequences of a severe case of acute rheumatic fever.
Some kids got lots of bouts of strep throat but never got rheumatic fever (RF) - others got it so gently that after the fever, sore joints or jumbled nervous system had gone, they had no reminders - and the disease never came back.
Other children got the disease - once - and quickly died . End of story, almost.
Because if one child got it bad enough to die of it, it certainly meant your remaining children might also have the slight but definite genetic affinity for RF.
Similarly, even moms who had one child with a gentle case knew this didn't mean others in the family couldn't get the worse case possible.
And the fact that 4 kids of five didn't get RF ever, didn't mean number five child won't get it bad.
It was the uncertainty as to who and when , and how badly, and how frequently, someone in your family could get RF that made it a Sword of Damocles to all moms in that era.
Stage two worries were almost as bad.
Your child or children did get acute RF and didn't die.
Unfortunately, surviving one attack did not give immunity as it does in most diseases - in fact it means you are likely to get it again but even more intensely.
Get it again and again, each worse than before and you are certain to die.
That's death by acute RF.
More likely by the 1930s, was that you would survive even repeated bouts of acute RF.
But the permanent scars left on your heart muscle and heart valves meant that your mom would fret that if you played sports or did anything too vigorously - including romantic engagements.
It was felt that sexual intercourse might--- and pregnancy and child birth definitely would --- tax your heart murmur and bring on SBE (endocarditis) and death.
So ironically, Mom would take all the joys of youth out of your life in a loving attempt to bring you to adulthood alive.
But why bother if everything a young person liked to do, wanted to do, needed to do, was forbidden ?
This is why RHD was so frequently called Juvenis Rumpo .
Not because RHD killed outright all the young people it effected - it never did kill more than a relatively small number - but because of the huge pall it hung over the 'best years of their lives' for tens of millions of North American teenagers between 1910 and 1960 .
Fear of the Sword of Damocles was more damaging than the actual possibility it would really fall on a vital spot.
Dawson never did get to enjoy his youth times because he
volunteered to serve in the trenches of WWI.
His life mission was to see that as many other young people as possible did not see their youth be interrupted.....
Every mother ,between the 1910s to the 1960s, had to worry about about whether her children would have to endure the consequences of a severe case of acute rheumatic fever.
Some kids got lots of bouts of strep throat but never got rheumatic fever (RF) - others got it so gently that after the fever, sore joints or jumbled nervous system had gone, they had no reminders - and the disease never came back.
Other children got the disease - once - and quickly died . End of story, almost.
Because if one child got it bad enough to die of it, it certainly meant your remaining children might also have the slight but definite genetic affinity for RF.
Similarly, even moms who had one child with a gentle case knew this didn't mean others in the family couldn't get the worse case possible.
And the fact that 4 kids of five didn't get RF ever, didn't mean number five child won't get it bad.
It was the uncertainty as to who and when , and how badly, and how frequently, someone in your family could get RF that made it a Sword of Damocles to all moms in that era.
Stage two worries were almost as bad.
Your child or children did get acute RF and didn't die.
Unfortunately, surviving one attack did not give immunity as it does in most diseases - in fact it means you are likely to get it again but even more intensely.
Get it again and again, each worse than before and you are certain to die.
That's death by acute RF.
More likely by the 1930s, was that you would survive even repeated bouts of acute RF.
But the permanent scars left on your heart muscle and heart valves meant that your mom would fret that if you played sports or did anything too vigorously - including romantic engagements.
It was felt that sexual intercourse might--- and pregnancy and child birth definitely would --- tax your heart murmur and bring on SBE (endocarditis) and death.
So ironically, Mom would take all the joys of youth out of your life in a loving attempt to bring you to adulthood alive.
But why bother if everything a young person liked to do, wanted to do, needed to do, was forbidden ?
This is why RHD was so frequently called Juvenis Rumpo .
Not because RHD killed outright all the young people it effected - it never did kill more than a relatively small number - but because of the huge pall it hung over the 'best years of their lives' for tens of millions of North American teenagers between 1910 and 1960 .
Fear of the Sword of Damocles was more damaging than the actual possibility it would really fall on a vital spot.
Dawson never did get to enjoy his youth times because he
volunteered to serve in the trenches of WWI.
His life mission was to see that as many other young people as possible did not see their youth be interrupted.....
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