commit 8f4862d543a1d0ec6e10cb3cb97d1a95d5647c98
parent a1cd833fac78eca02a8af52569381c4d01c076dc
Author: Beau <cbeauhilton@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2024 10:33:58 -0500
add post on casaubon's diary
Diffstat:
| A | site/posts/choaked.md | | | 101 | +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
1 file changed, 101 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/site/posts/choaked.md b/site/posts/choaked.md
@@ -0,0 +1,101 @@
+# The first detailed description of living with esophageal cancer - John Casaubon's 1690 diary
+
+<time id="post-date">2024-04-12</time>
+
+<p id="post-excerpt">
+John Casaubon was an English surgeon in the late 1600s
+who developed an esophageal tumor in late 1690
+and wrote about it in his diary
+before dying in January of 1691.
+It's harrowing, enlightening, and strangely beautiful.
+This blog post is the only place in the world you can read the full transcription of the diary entry.
+</p>
+
+
+## John Casaubon's diary
+
+> Monday Dec 29. 90.
+
+> At dinner I was almost choaked by swallowing a bit of a roasted Sd of mutton
+which as I thought stuck in the passage about the mouth of the stomach.
+But it suffered noething to goe downe and the stomach threw all up,
+though never soe small in quantitie,
+to all our amazements the sckilfull not knowing what 2 make of my condition.
+It being an unusuall afflixion wch. my melancholi suggested it an extraordinarie judgment.
+I could swallow about 2 spoonfulls about half way (as I thought)
+and then it would flush up in spite of my hart.
+Some small humiditie or dropps of what I dranck, rather distilld, or dropt into the stomach
+which afforded a bare living nourishment
+and on a sudden I grew lean as a skeleton and at some tymes very faint and feeble,
+although I recouerd in some measure and had stomach 2 eate, my meate doeth noe gt. good and I am in a kind of atrophie.
+What warme weather may do I cant' tell, but hope well.
+Alwayes after I have bine at Stoole I am for a whyle very faint or weake which I much wonder at.
+It is a sine of gt weakenes certainly and of insoaed decay.
+
+
+## Context
+
+A couple of friends and I wrote a [paper](https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers16030618)
+on the history of esophageal cancer,
+mentioned elsewhere on this blog.
+
+One of the neat things in the paper is the first full transcription of a diary entry from John Casaubon,
+which is the first first-person detailing of esophageal cancer I can find.
+It has been transcribed in partial form in
+[other](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gtc.2009.01.003)
+[papers](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28952239/),
+but I had to know what I was missing in the ellipses,
+so wrote to the archivist at the Southampton City Archives in the United Kingdom,
+who was great and sent me a scan of the relevant page.
+The copyright for the microfilm scan of the diary is owned by the British Library
+(oh, the complexities of copyright),
+but the text itself is ancient and therefore public domain,
+so I finished the transcription and included it in the paper.
+My transcription also does not attempt to modernize or "correct" any of the spelling or punctuation:
+this is exactly what he wrote
+(including using "2" instead of "to,"
+and the absolutely delightful 1600s British phonetic spelling of the word "inside" as "insoaed").
+
+However! I should say, "One of the neat things in the paper was *supposed* to be..."
+
+Somehow, at some point in the revision process, a line in the transcription disappeared.
+None of us noticed the omission,
+focused as we were on other things the reviewers wanted tuned up.
+The transcription is also present in full in my author's working copy,
+so I have no idea how a small chunk was omitted.
+There was no copy-pasta, I sent the working copy to the journal in full.
+In any case, I wrote to the journal to ask that the missing line be added,
+and, after a review process, was refused.
+It doesn't change the scientific conclusions of the paper,
+and would require publishing a correction, so they said no.
+I pushed back, as it is the only truly unique discrete data
+in the whole paper
+(everything else is contextualization, arrangement, and interpretation of prior publications).
+Alas, I suppose my humanist's heart has different priorities than the scientific journal's editors.
+
+So, now, this blog post is the only public place you can find the whole transcription.
+That's a bummer, I wish it was immortalized in a PubMed-indexed journal article,
+but this is the next best thing.
+
+If you are interested in what was lost, I split out the missing section below.
+
+> At dinner I was almost choaked by swallowing a bit of a roasted Sd of mutton
+which as I thought stuck in the passage about the mouth of the stomach.
+But it suffered noething to goe downe and the stomach threw all up,
+though never soe small in quantitie,
+to all our amazements the sckilfull not knowing what 2 make of my condition.
+It being an unusuall afflixion wch. my melancholi suggested it an extraordinarie judgment.
+I could swallow about 2 spoonfulls about half way (as I thought)
+and then it would flush up in spite of my hart.
+Some small humiditie or dropps of what I dranck, rather distilld, or dropt into the stomach
+which afforded
+
+*a bare living nourishment
+and on a sudden I grew lean as a skeleton and at some tymes very faint and feeble,
+although I recouerd in some measure and had stomach 2 eate, my*
+
+meate doeth noe gt. good and I am in a kind of atrophie.
+What warme weather may do I cant' tell, but hope well.
+Alwayes after I have bine at Stoole I am for a whyle very faint or weake which I much wonder at.
+It is a sine of gt weakenes certainly and of insoaed decay.
+
