The History of Everything (Revisited)

    Just about a year ago, I provided to you a list of books to get you through the pandemic. It included books about a wide range of historical subjects, to which I appended a sub-list that cleverly offered suggestions for every letter of the alphabet. I will now add a few more since it is snowing. 

The Prostate

   I will begin at the bottom. There is a new book about the history of the prostate. Male readers who are still reeling from my post about the Castrati, may want to wait a few minutes (or weeks) until I come up with something else. 

   I have often posted about university presses and this book is from one of them: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The book is by Ericka Johnson and the title is The Cultural History of the Prostate. Here is what it is about, which is more than just the gland:

"What contemporary prostate angst tells us about how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality.

We are all suffering an acute case of prostate angst. Men worry about their own prostates and those of others close to them; women worry about the prostates of the men they love. The prostate—a gland located directly under the bladder—lurks on the periphery of many men's health issues, but as an object of anxiety it goes beyond the medical, affecting how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality. In A Cultural Biography of the Prostate, Ericka Johnson investigates what we think the prostate is and what we use the prostate to think about, examining it in historical, cultural, social, and medical contexts.

Johnson shows that our ways of talking about, writing about, imagining, and imaging the prostate are a mess of entangled relationships. She describes current biomedical approaches, reports on the “discovery” of the prostate in the sixteenth century and its later appearance as both medical object and discursive trope, and explores present-day diagnostic practices for benign prostate hyperplasia—which transform a process (urination) into a thing (the prostate). Turning to the most anxiety-provoking prostate worry, prostate cancer, Johnson discusses PSA screening and the vulnerabilities it awakens (or sometimes silences) and then considers the presence of the absent prostate—how the prostate continues to affect lives after it has been removed in the name of health."

   These days I should quickly add that I am not at all, in the very least, upset that Ericka has appropriated a male subject. If you are, here is a review of the book by a male. He is also a primary care physician in Edinburgh and he has fingered more than a few prostates. He recommends the book and some others and I recommend his review since, among other things he describes the damn thing and lets us know what it does, or is supposed to do, until we get old:

"You can feel the prostate through the thin wall of the rectum, about a finger’s length inside the anus. Visualizing it isn’t easy: imagine a tiny doughnut that sits just under the bladder. Urine passes through the hole in the middle. The usual size comparison (for a young man’s healthy prostate) is that of a walnut. I count the prostate as normal when it’s soft, smooth, symmetrical, with a groove running vertically down the middle, and not jutting back into the rectum.

The gland has a variety of functions. It secretes between a quarter and a third of the fluid that constitutes semen—most of the rest is produced in the seminal vesicles—and its muscular elements contract at ejaculation to expel semen into the urethra and out of the body. It operates as a kind of junction box or valve that controls the flow of fluids, ensuring that urine doesn’t pass out to the testicles during urination and that semen doesn’t go up into the bladder during ejaculation. It helps protect against urinary tract infections, and for some men it’s an erogenous zone.

The tissues of the prostate are sensitive to circulating levels of testosterone, which stimulate it to grow, and so the prostate increases in size throughout life as long as the testes continue to produce that hormone. Prostate cancers, because they’re made of prostatic tissue, usually grow in response to testosterone as well. By the age of seventy, up to three quarters of men have prostatism (some degree of prostatic obstructive symptoms), which in its more severe forms entails poor urinary flow, difficulty initiating urination, dribbling after urination, and nocturia (having to get up at night to pee). These can all be caused by the gradual growth of prostatic tissues and resultant pressure on the bladder, as well as the tightening of the space through which urine has to pass. To widen this channel and improve flow, a surgical procedure called transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) is commonly carried out on older men."

From: "Intimate and Invasive," Gavin Francis, The New York Review of Books, Feb. 10, 2022.

The Bonus: 
   If you are interested in the history of a related subject - Underwear - head to Kenosha which was the home of the Kenosha Klosed Krotch design which "had a seat design of two pieces of fabric overlapping in an "X" to allow access for sanitary and hygienic purposes and not requiring the use of buttons or ties.” More can be learned at Jockey.  Since that is not much of a bonus, I will mention that Orson Welles was born in Kenosha and that it used to be the home of the Society For the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (now located in Nashville) and that Nashes used to be made there. Remember that I told you about 268 new ones that were lost in a shipwreck: The Lost Nashes of Halloween.

The History of Surgery
  If you would prefer to no longer focus on the prostate, you can learn about surgical procedures more generally in this new book written by a surgeon which "reveals the fascinating history of surgery’s evolution from its earliest roots in Europe through its rise to scientific and social dominance in the United States." Here is a review of it, but the title may put you off a bit: "Boiling Oil, Red-Hot Irons, 26-Second Amputations: How Surgery Evolved- Ira Rutkow's Empire of the Scalpel is by Turns Fascinating and Ghastly," Henry Marsh, New York Times, Mar. 4, 2022. Some of the "ghastly" is evident from this paragraph:
Perhaps this explains why progress in surgery has sometimes been erratic. Rutkow quotes surgeons in the mid-19th century who argued against anesthesia on the outrageous grounds that pain was necessary for healing. But many others adopted anesthesia very quickly, including Robert Liston, a leading surgeon in London. In order to minimize the suffering of his un-anesthetized patients, he had perfected the art of amputating a leg in minutes. It is said — although this might be apocryphal — that he had once accidentally severed his assistant’s fingers along with the patient’s leg, both the assistant and the patient dying afterward from postoperative sepsis (as well as a spectator who died from shock).

The History of Sweat

 Our last addition to the "History of Everything" is this book by Bill Hayes: Sweat: A History of Exercise. In it, 
"Bill Hayes runs, jogs, swims, spins, walks, bikes, boxes, lifts, sweats and downward-dogs his way through the origins of different forms of exercise, chronicling how they have evolved over time and dissecting the dynamics of human movement." 
The review from the Guardian is positive:
“Libraries, like gyms,” he writes, “have always been a refuge for me, just as gyms, like libraries, have always been places of learning.” There is a playfulness in Hayes’s writing, which reaches from a rich topsoil of endearing wordplay (“pas de dads”, he calls the sight of two middle-aged men playing squash) to the deepest layers of curiosity and empathy. He takes a profound, historian’s pleasure in tropes that echo across centuries – “The ancient Greek word for ‘gym rat’… literally translates as ‘palestra addict’”, to build an enthusiasm it’s impossible not to share."
"Sweat by Bill Hayes - A History of the Physical That Gets Personal," Zoe Williams, Jan. 28, 2022.

It has stopped snowing so I had better move on.