SCIENCE FILE: An exploration fo issues and trends affecting science, medicine and the environment. : Squirrel Nutkin and Other Strange Tales
Three years ago, an article in the British Medical Journal speculated that Mozart suffered from Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, an unusual condition characterized by uncontrollable body movements and verbal, often obscene, outbursts.
A new study by Dr. Gareth Williams and his colleagues at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital now appears to have identified an even unlikelier victim--Squirrel Nutkin, hero of Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.”
SN, as the authors identify Potter’s protagonist in the time-honored journal tradition, has “boundless energy and extreme motor, vocal and cognitive restlessness . . . [and] is particularly fond of rhythmic refrains (‘Hum-a-bum! Buzz! Buzz! Hum-a-bum buzz!’). His increasingly erratic behavior throughout the story, including taunting an owl, cost him half a tail and almost his life.”
The suggestion, Williams wrote, may not be as absurd as it might seem. Some years before Potter published her tale, she wrote in her journal of observing an elderly woman on a train who “appeared incapable of holding her tongue or her limbs.” Since others of Potter’s characters are based on humans, it is likely, Williams contends, that SN was as well.
Williams’ paper had one unusual aspect, the journal’s editors noted, in that “one of the coauthors is a dog,” chosen for his knowledge of squirrel behavior.
Every year, the British Medical Journal saves some of its more unusual papers for the annual Christmas issue, where SN’s adventures appeared. Other reports were equally surprising.
Although our bodies normally shrink during the aging process, according to another study, ears grow larger. That conclusion grew from the chance observation by Dr. James A. Heathcote, a general practitioner in Bromley, Kent, that old men on buses have large ears.
Heathcote and three colleagues used calipers to measure the length of the ears on 206 patients between the ages of 30 and 93. They found that, on average, the size of men’s ears increased by 0.22 millimeters (about nine-thousandths of an inch) per year. Typically, a 70-year-old’s ear measures just over 2.8 inches in length, compared to only 2.4 inches for a 20-year-old’s.
The team admits they have no idea why ears continue to grow when the rest of the body has stopped.
And finally, a team at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh found that as physicians in large hospitals assumed more authority, they shed more items from their coat pockets.
The team approached 49 doctors and received permission to weigh their traditional white coats.
They found a direct relationship between the weight of the coats and the doctors’ positions. Junior house officers, lowest on the totem pole, had coat pockets stuffed with notes, index cards and other reference materials, and their coats were the heaviest, averaging 3.75 pounds.
Coats of the most senior personnel, in contrast, were nearly empty and weighed, on average, less than 2 pounds. “Further work is required,” the team wrote, “to establish the point at which stethoscopes and other contents of white coats become evicted from the pockets.”
And, they added, “Somewhat more reassuringly, only one personal telephone was isolated in this study.”
