In 1962, a college student answers an ad: “Mortuary Assistant required” | Hacker News Reader

In 1962, a college student answers an ad: “Mortuary Assistant required”

laphamsquarterly.org

277 pointsPetiver94 comments

>"The black lungs of heavy smokers I would weigh once, then squeeze under cold running water for fifteen minutes until they became baby pink and tripelike, and then weigh again: the difference in the two figures, often a couple of pounds or more, was the weight of the tar and nicotine that quite possibly was the killer."

A few pounds? If you'd asked me, I would have guessed the weight of lung-accumulated smoking gunk would be an order of magnitude smaller.

(Also, not a bad hack for measuring some of the effects of smoking.)

>It wasn't only smoking that lacquered up one's innards with tar. Living in the London of the day was none too healthy, either.

Hmmm. Wonder how long I should continue to live in LA?

I've seen estimates that say one pack of cigarretes per day over a year equals about one cup of tar in the lungs.

Here's a video showing extraction of tar from 400 cigarettes.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_csz2dPjyAw

Not all of that tar stays in the lungs - some is breathed out; some is worked out by cillia (and sometimes swallowed, increasing the risk of cancer of the kidney, bladder, and penis).

Modern London pollution is bad and we need to work to reduce it - people still die from the pollution - but the London peasoupers were catastrophic. The US EPA has a great page about London smog, which has a long history: http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/londons-historic-pea-soupers

> Early on, no one had the scientific tools to correlate smog with adverse health effects, but complaints about the smoky air as an annoyance date back to at least 1272, when King Edward I, on the urging of important noblemen and clerics, banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death.

> banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death

This is very interesting... a somewhat longer description that google turned up: http://www.planetgreen.org/2012/03/edward-i-environmentalist...

> I've seen estimates that say one pack of cigarretes per day equals about one cup of tar in the lungs.

over what period?

Over a year. Thanks for pointing that out! I edited my post.

A link to the Wikipedia article on 'Pea Soup', the kind of smog prevalent in London in the 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

"The result was that visibility could be down to a metre or so in the daytime. Walking out of doors became a matter of shuffling one’s feet to feel for road curbs, etc."

And form the article, based in 1962 (though things were surely better by then overall):

"More than once the bus I rode to work had to be led by a policeman walking on the road with a red flashlight, so thick were the greasy, sulfur-dioxide-laden pea-soup fogs that in 1962 were so bad as to send people by the hundreds to hospitals some days."

LA, Beijing... if not good, probably a lot better than this era and location.

Modern LA is orders of magnitude safer than London in the '60s and earlier. Those conditions would have been comparable to some parts of China today.

"I can't trust air I can't see", was my favorite line of my grandfathers, who lived in LA for the past 60 years. He always mentioned how incredibly clear and clean the air is now compared to a few decades ago (where I live in Northern California now, even the Bay Area seems polluted and smoggy most days).

These days when I get behind a classic car that has a carburetor, I close the vents. Just can't stand the smell of the unburned fuel they put out. Which is odd because I grew up with them (my first car was a '75 Impala with the malaise-era small-block V-8). These days there are many more cars on the road and individually they're far cleaner than any 70's car was. So much cleaner that collectively they're cleaner than the population of cars from back then too.

I expect the same is true of many "industrial" cities in developed countries...

I live in Kawasaki, just outside of Tokyo, which is famous for its industry. The air now is lovely and clean, there are essentially no pollution issues at all, but 50 years ago, things were apparently very, very, different... In old pictures, it's like a black miasma hanging over everything.... oO;

Hmmm. Wonder how long I should continue to live in Beijing?

:( (today is a clean air day, but my wife and I had this argument already once this week)

I posted a link to this in another post, but here's a chart showing how bad the pollution in London during the great smog of 1952 was: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dib2/atmos/london.jpeg

Notice that SO2 and smoke particles are measured in units of milligrams per m^3 (today such measurements are in micrograms per m^3). To put Beijing's air in the context of this graph, the smoke particles in Beijing on a bad air day will go up to 0.2 to 0.8 mg/m^3 and SO2 will spike up to 0.3 for short periods. Compared to the Great Smog of 1952, Beijing's air isn't nearly as bad, but it's still incredibly bad. The Great Smog killed 0.03% of the population of London per day. Beijing's air regularly gets to around 1/4 the amount of smoke in the air as during the Great Smog.

Liverpool area, early 60s: we had those thick yellow fogs less often than in London, but with added ingredients from the chemical works up the estuary.

My grandfather would be hospitalised in the winter months with bronchitis - on one occasion spending time in an oxygen tent to aid his breathing. Our teacher at school suggested we breathe through handkerchiefs on the way to school if there was a fog. Impressive quantities of tar.

Much better now.

A friend of mine actually left because of the pollution. It's thought provoking that it could get that bad.

I left Shanghai because of the pollution... And Beijing is even worth...

What exactly did they do to clean up the air in London? I mean, just pass regulations that factories have to be further from the city, or what?

They passed a variety of clean air acts to prevent burning coal within certain boundaries and raise chimney heights.

http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/londons-historic-pea-soupers

http://www.air-quality.org.uk/03.php

There are still problems with NO2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32512152

Similar things to what was done in America. Lots of regulations. The "Great Smog" of 1952, which resulted in several thousand deaths in a matter of days, spurred action, resulting in the Clean Air Act of 1956 and other legislation. It banned many of the more polluting activities which had been common at the time, use of low grade coal and wood in home heating, use of unfiltered diesel engines on transportation in the city, use of coal in power stations near to the city. Factories and power plants were also moved farther away from the city.

Here's an interesting little writeup that has some really fascinating graphs on London pollution: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dib2/atmos/urban.html

Among other things, a switch to gas-fired central heating (with the discovery of gas in the North Sea) and a mandate to use "smokeless fuel" in the remaining hearths. Smokeless fuel is a sort of briquette made of ground and reconstituted coal that's had most of the sulphuric impurities washed and cooked out of it, along with a blend of other things like sawdust and molasses.

Pittsburgh was a city of coal-heated homes and coke-powered blast furnaces set in river valleys, and in the '60s and earlier was dark at noon: http://www.buzzfeed.com/kevintang/stunning-photos-of-pittsbu...

Many of the older brick-and-stone buildings are still covered in black stains.

if it's normal for you to drive around without worrying about smog limiting your visibility, than probably it's not as bad as old London[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

A lot of people think of lungs as if they are big bags, but in reality they are more like a sponge. So if you could imagine what the accumulation would be like in a kitchen sponge, that is kind of what it is like in the lungs.

I was a bit surprised to see this admission:

> In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I was also persuaded to commit a series of small crimes during my sojourn at the hospital, and which I hope I can safely confess at this remove of half a century. I stole pituitary glands. About a hundred of them over the months. A research hospital had need of them—pituitaries produce a multitude of hormones, including the one that makes us grow, and I proved myself quite adept at finding them: a quick probe inside the base of the brain with my fingers, and the pea-sized gland would pop out of its cavity like a snail out of its shell. Each time I collected a jar full, a furtive man in a white coat would come around to collect them, handing over a five-pound note in exchange. If ever I felt squeamish, the man reassured me that those to whom the glands belonged would be unlikely to feel the loss, nor to complain.

There was a big scandal in England over the unauthorised removal of organs. Partly this was because doctors weren't explaining properly what they were doing to people who had no understanding of what was involved - "Can we remove some tissue?" instead of "can we take the heart of your dead child?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alder_Hey_organs_scandal

> The Alder Hey organs scandal involved the unauthorised removal, retention, and disposal of human tissue, including children’s organs, during the period 1988 to 1995. During this period organs were retained in more than 2,000 pots [this is a UK term of art for plastic formalin-filled containers of various sizes which are used to store tissues in pathology labs] containing body parts from around 850 infants. These were later uncovered at Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool, during a public inquiry into the organ retention scandal.

This was discovered by people investigating another scandal - the Bristol Heart Scandal.

And it's not as if the science was any good. A lot of it was low quality; partly because the documentation of the organ origins was so poor.

Dick van Velzen did great harm and mostly got away with it.

> Dick van Velzen did great harm

Whilst I agree he comitted a crime, his subjects were all dead anyways. I don't see the great harm myself tbh.

His science was lousy; he caused many people to withdraw consent for tissue donation for scientific reasons.

His subjects were dead but those subjects had relatives and many of them expressed considerable distress. I don't particularly understand that upset by I recognise that they were not lying, they did sincerely feel a lot of upset.

First point is very valid and one I hadn't considered

Second is the one I was arguing against. I certainly don't doubt they did sincerely feel a lot of upset. I suppose I still think it shouldn't matter. It would in that regard have been better had they just never found out.

I see where you're coming from with your argument, and certainly I have no qualms about the use of my organs after I die, but not everyone shares that belief and personally I don't think it's right to just disregard that. Sure, it might have been better if the families never found out, but it would have been best if the families wishes (no matter how irrational) were respected from the get-go.

Disregarding irrational beliefs is the first step to making good decisions.

Disregarding someone's irrational beliefs (every one of us has some) just like that is a sign of serious lack of empathy, and an easy way to make enemies. You can try and convince someone to stop holding that irrational belief, but you don't have to disrespect their feelings in the process.

Without irrational beliefs there is no meaning to life.

I don't see how that is even a remotely justifiable belief.

So give me a rational meaning to life :)

One man's irrational beliefs are another man's rational.

Yeah, that's how it works. /s

Regarding the second point. Suppose someone went in your house and rummaged around looking at everything. Would you feel violated? Would it be better if you didn't know?

Or took naked pictures of you without you knowing about it?

Another example: what if someone stole something from you that you didn't need?

Some things matter even if they don't cause concrete harm.

I disagree; in the vast majority of cases I suspect your better off ignoring ephemeral harm.

That said many of the things that creep people out carry risks. But, IMO risk is a concrete harm. EX: False confictions are common so random searches cause concrete and measureable harm in aggregate.

Your second point is not a consequence of the act itself, but a consequence of making it public. What if they never learnt about?

Is this what inspired the organ donation skit in Montey Python's The Meaning of Life?

The Meaning of Life was released in 1983.

Oh I missed the dates, I thought it an incident from the 60s when the article takes place.

I just finished my rotation at the medical examiner's office. The "couple of pounds" of tar in the lungs was probably more mucus than anything. Also, they may well have been washing out the congestion caused by respiratory depression. But it's quite unlikely that it was "tar", though I'm sure plenty of black carbon, or "anthracotic pigment" came out too.

I say this because a smoker who dies of, say, a sudden massive heart attack, doesn't have especially heavy lungs. The heaviness comes from other, secondary issues.

Also, I had never heard of this before. We mainly just weighed the lungs and then examined them under the microscope.

Yeah, this made me wonder, in lieu of a lung transplant, what if they just took out a smoker's lung and gave it a good wash and then stuck it back in again? It sounds like you are saying that alot of other things go wrong with such a lung, not just a buildup of tar.

Or leave it in and use a splash of perfluorocarbon to prophylactically rinse it out a bit, once every couple of years or so.

Even if the breathing liquid does not dissolve all the lung crud directly, the mechanical action of filling and draining the alveoli might clear some of it out or thin it enough for the cilia to move it.

At the very least, once the carcinogens have done their job and induced a cancer washing them out would be a bit of "shutting the barn door after the cows have run away".

Cancer isn't the only smoking related illness, I wonder what it would do for someone with emphysema or the like..

With things like the davinci system I don't even think you would have to take the lung out.

German native speaker here. Fleischhacker actually does mean butcher. It's just that most Germans would call a butcher a "Metzger" I guess. Us Austrians tend to call it a "Fleischhauer".

To be honest though, I think the term Fleischhacker is used more often to describe a foul playing soccer player than a butcher.

And really just flesh-hacker in an engineering accent.

The worst job I've had was called 'putting up hay'. It amounted to climbing into the loft of a very dust-laden barn with 3 or 4 of my college buddies, catching hay bales as they spat out of the hay elevator, and running them over to stack in uniform 3-d arrays. After a couple of hours, our employer called us down for rejuvenation with Coke-a-cola and glazed donuts, and we'd blow what seemed like pounds of dusty mucous out of our noses and then head back up into the loft.

$5/hour seemed like a lot of money at the time...

Reminds me of tagging along with my older brothers to mow lawns. After a few hours of weeding and taking my turn at the push mower they would take me to get a Slurpee. My own Slurpee that I didn't have to share!

Later in high school doing construction work for my dad digging ditches with a pick and shovel, he would walk by and casually ask if I was feeling motivated to do well in school.

Yep, as a teenager I cleaned out urethane spray booths and other shit jobs no one else would do. That motivated me to do quite quite well in electrical engineering.

I got $5.35 working at a plastics factory, making house siding and PVC pipe. I still have a scar from slashing a finger open with a hacksaw while we were starting up a siding line... basically, I would cut semi-molten PVC siding that was moving about a foot a second, because it was still too warped to make it into the cooling tanks, much less the cutters. Had to keep cutting, too, despite my injury.

The factory and manufacturing work that everyone seems to miss these days is profoundly unsafe.

I worked at a supermarket in the late 70's as my high-school job, and we didn't compress + band the cardboard boxes -- we burned them in an incinerator out back. Every so often it needed to have the ash cleaned out, so the male employees would take turns with a shovel and the ash buckets. You'd blow grey mucous out your nose for a couple of days afterwards, because masks were for sissies.

Not-so-fun story time: The stock guys left a can of Lysol aerosol in one of the boxes, and when I tossed it in the resulting fireball burned some of my hair off. Occupational safety? What's that?

Whilst a mask seems a good idea, I presume that the organic material that built up in your lungs would be broken down and washed out by the lungs natural processes within a few days or weeks?

Perhaps a doctor could clarify?

Not a doctor but.. You're falling for a bit of a naturalistic fallacy here. Just as Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral however inhaling its dust can come with very serious health problems, so can hay contain mould which can also cause serious lung disease. http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/diseases/farmers_lung.html

Chris is absolutely right, and in addition to mo(u)ld, there's also tons of antigens to provoke inflammatory responses in the lungs, which can lead to asthma and chronic bronchitis.

Hah, I got the same pay for that, but didn't hate the job so much. We got beer after, so that may be why.

We really need to appreciate how lucky we are:

More than once the bus I rode to work had to be led by a policeman walking on the road with a red flashlight, so thick were the greasy, sulfur-dioxide-laden pea-soup fogs that in 1962 were so bad as to send people by the hundreds to hospitals some days. One Monday, after a weekend of especially thick smog, I arrived to find no fewer than thirty bodies waiting for their preparation, all of them felled by respiratory complaints.

The pH of London air was sometimes as low as 1.4 back then. People were basically breathing sulfuric acid.

This takes me back to a time when I was 17, and I applied for a job at a funeral home in London- it was offering a ridiculously high salary. It was my first time having an interview where one person sits off to the side and watches you, which I found quite unnerving. I was woefully unprepared for the interview, but it was going really well until the one question I hadn't thought about came up:

"So how do you feel about bodies?"

Me: "Umm, they're great! I mean, ahhh, well, um, could you define what exactly you mean by bodies?"

I didn't get the position.

Its stories like this why I come to HN. HN may have started as interesting stuff for the Silicon Valley VC circuit, but you can't survive on a diet of just high risk investing weirdness.

> HN may have started as interesting stuff for the Silicon Valley VC circuit

Oh, no no no. It started as a way for pg to read more interesting things, literally about anything. Byzantine coins and cat prints in medieval manuscripts are two that I recall from years past. The site has always been for intellectual diversity above all else. Keeping that going is the thing we care about most.

In other words this article is 100% certified original Hacker News, and it warms my heart (freshly grateful to still be attached to the rest of my body) to see it at #1.

And Erlang. You mustn't forget about Erlang. Lots and lots of Erlang.

How is Erlang these days? It is on my to do list (Kanban board) to check up on whether I need to check up on it.

I have seen RabbitMQ and the like use it, it's still very good for its purposes.

You just described my regular workday...

You don't have to come to HN exclusively. I like the idea of HN or any other website being focused on single-theme. If I want to read about startups and tech I come to HN. If I want to read about something else, I go else where.

I enjoyed this post very much but I would be very sad if posts like these became more frequent over here as I wouldn't have a good source of startups and tech anymore.

This sort of article, with its's well written, amusing, compellingly "human" narrative is precisely how startups should be writing their blogs. It's exactly the sort of thing founders should be reading to learn the subtle and nuanced art of writing. It's very relevant to HN; not in content perhaps, but definitely in style.

I think we can promise you that HN won't soon lack for articles about startups. Or Rust.

So your enjoyment of this delightfully written article (good taste, I must say!) can be apprehension-free.

Techcrunch would be a source of tech and startups?

HN has since almost forever been about more than Tech and startups. Here's the guidelines from 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I never thought of Techcrunch to be about tech and I don't think it covers the aspects of startups I care about. When I say tech and startups, I mean programming languages, software and great hacks a startups use to scale and build their business. Not Series A rounds and acquisitions.

You're right when you say there has always been more to HN than tech and startups but I would says they are the defining aspects of HN.

Regarding that line on the guideline you quote, I really wish it would be changed. It is literally used to justify the admission of anything since how could you argue with someone that something is not interesting. It's a completely subjective and useless method to define what's on-topic. But that's just my opinion.

The thing is, aside from reddit (and perhaps Digg) what sites are "like" this, but not focused on tech?

Try our platform: http://snapzu.com

We have tons of differentiating features from reddit and HN.

I checked it out, very interesting. The front page was very different than what I was expecting -- I like that. Would it be possible to get an invite directly from you, or should I request one via the site?

Of course! I don't think HN has a PM option so I'll just post a few for anyone to grab, first come first serve:

SPZU-AI1ABLII8IIZP

SPZU-0KUXJ0U86OA7W

SPZU-QNOKQG5Y4U1G3

SPZU-GQI7XVHO2ZSOA

SPZU-6TBV5ATE15JWH

SPZU-WW5ICQ53ZBB4O

SPZU-34MFZ049TSKT9

SPZU-T7G36FFZRYC1G

EDIT: I exchanged the old used codes for new fresh ones.

Really interesting.

I'd like to check it out but all the invites seem to be gone. I guess I'll wait for a real invite.

>Thank you

>Your invite should arrive no later than July, 2026.

HAH! I had a good laugh about that one.

>Seriously though, want in today?

>Just send out a quick tweet to help others discover Snapzu and as a token of our appreciation we will bump you to the top of the list and send you an invite code within 24 hours

Might take you up on this later today. ;)

Once upon a time http://www.metafilter.com/ but I've not been there in a long long time to say for certain it's like it was, but for obscure but interesting that was/is your place

I was a regular visitor for a long time, but as Matt's segued it into (as he himself put it) "a gateway for social justice activism" it's become far too heavy on the pitchfork-rallying.

Voat.

I just visited and unfortunately the content right now doesn't seem to be all there.

And, while I don't describe myself as a "social justice warrior", but a skeptic, seeing this (mostly upvoted) comment regarding the admins kind of turned me off, especially considering the replies.

>These admins are super nerdy, have low self-esteem, not to popular with the ladies, are slightly autistic (on the spectrum) have little to no social life, and have generally weak personalities when it comes to social issues. I can spot these guys a mile a way. So when you team them up with a feminist who is telling them they are awful oppressors, some of them are going to buckle and just ask "OK, what can I do to help?" And that's where this PC/feminist/transgender agenda gets codified into an actual company course of action or policy.

Voat gained a lot of its members when it was hailed as reddit without as much admin intervention. A few months ago there was a concern among some reddit users that admins were deleting posts that criticized reddit's CEO; there are also some conspiracy-theory level accusations that admins were deleting posts in line with "SJW" ideal (when I say SJW, I mean the conception of SJWs held by the people who frequently complain about them).

As a result, many of the members of voat are the types of people who seem to have a chip on their shoulder when it comes to things like being civil on the internet. They are the types of people who obsess over reddit's current CEO Ellen Pao, or who hold opinions which they defend with "free speech" in the way described by this comic[1]. Honestly, in my opinion they're just assholes.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1357/

Ha, rather ironically, I went there and most of the top posts seem to be about Reddit or are on the front page of Reddit.

What makes it different?

I quite liked this other article of his on being banned from ever returning to the remote island of Tristan da Cunha.

http://laphamsquarterly.org/travel/take-nothing-leave-nothin...

I read this article twice and am completely at a loss for what hurtful secret was revealed! Do you know?

the islanders considered the story of hagan and booy scandalous in a "skeletons in the family closet" sort of way, and his book essentially dug up the old scandal again.

>On the other hand, the pathologist assigned to work on the bodies I would prepare was a German, and she was named Fleishhacker, which sounded to Mr. Utton as though it should mean butcher, but actually didn't.

It actually does though: http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_en.html#/search=Fleischhacker

Yeah. One never would translate butcher to "Fleischhacker", since that word isn't really used outside of last names, but it clearly means a butcher.

To clarify, Fleischhacker is a legitimate translation of "butcher", but only in a figurative sense: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slaughterer#Translations

I'm guessing that the original author was saying that it doesn't literally refer to a person who cuts meat for a living (like Metzger), which is true. However, it's still a sort of funny name for a person in that profession to have.

I can't help but speculate whether Frau Fleischhacker was a concentration camp alumna.

>"I also had a girlfriend [in Canada]"

Yeah, right!

A girlfriend of mine once had this job, she said it was a dead end career.

Weird, seems to me like everybody could see their future in it.

Ok, joke aside, the article was well written and as you say it must have been quite an experience to observe death so personally.

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