ODDS AND ENDS

[1] The June 23, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books has a fascinating review [part one of two parts] by Marcia Angell of several books dealing with pharmaceutical treatment of mental illness. Two dramatic findings stand out: First, there has been an explosion of diagnoses of mental illness, all supposedly treatable with drugs; and Second, careful analysis of double blind studies produced for the FDA strongly suggests that the drugs have little or no beneficial effect on patients, and a variety of harmful effects. If these claims are true [the first one is presumably easily checkable], that is a disaster for the American public, and a scandal for the medical profession. I am, needless to say, entirely unequipped to form an independent judgment on these matters. I recommend that interested parties take a look.

[2] Readers of my bourse on Ideological Critique may have picked up on the fact that I am fascinated by the paleontological dimensions of the Wilmsen/Lee dispute. As a boy, I became enraptured with physical anthropometry. I still recall the slender volume I bought, suitable to be slipped into a shirt pocket, by the famous Harry L. Shapiro, called Handbook of Physical Anthropometry. I would spend Saturdays at the New York Museum of Natural History on Central Park West, staring at the glass enclosed display cases containing Neanderthal skulls and bone fragments. I would look for the heavy ascending rami and shallow sigmoid notches on the Neanderthal mandibles, the slender, graceful ascending rami of the Cro Magnons, the orbital ridges, zygomatic arches, nathions and nasions that signaled the age of the remains. I even took metal working shop at Forest Hills High School so that I could construct a pair of sliding calipers. My plan was to study the anthropometric measurements of first and second generation Chinese-Americans to see whether there were any significant differences caused by environmental factors. It was to be my project for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, but in the end I settled for an elementary math project. It has been sixty years and more since I did all of that, and museums have in the interim become far more interesting, visitor-friendly places, but I have a soft spot in my heart for those stodgy old display cases.