It Has Been Said

IT HAS BEEN SAID and collected by WILLIAM B. BEAN* [Note.—We invite collectors of humor to "volunteer" their talents and share in the fun of "It Has Been Said."] Some Excerptsfrom "The Natural History ofError" PSEUDODOXIA ENDEMICA At the end of April I got an urgent call from Walter Bauer, president of the Association of American Physicians. He was stricken with panic because he had forgotten to arrange for an after-dinner speaker. He could cajole none of his friends in the immediate environment of Harvard into a crash program of preparing one in a few days. He called me, and ofcourse I refused. A second call with desperate pleading made me give in. I held him in a curious combination of awe and admiration. For years I had been doing a sort ofwhimsical prospective study on error and had an amorphous mass of raw material. I had a paper on the regular program and was working on it, so I was destined to appear twice—an unusual, even unprecedented event. I saw no tendency of slackening in the perpetration of error; however, my talk, with Brownian motion, I called "The Natural History ofError." Herewith, I rake a few old well-baked chestnuts out ofthe dead embers; I do this in the hope that a good meal, warmed over, is better than a bad meal, hot or not, or no meal at all. Who has not wondered at man's marvelous talent for making mistakes and then perpetuating them? The capacity of the human mind to deceive itself knows hardly any limit. The luminous wisdom ofWilfred Trotter threw no light on his "mysterious viability of the false." Arthur D. Little said that "error and ?Director, Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas 77550. It would be a monstrous and certainly unnecessary error for me not to acknowledge substantial borrowings, only some of which are indicated in the text. When the original paper was published, the acknowledgments read as follows: "I have made inroads upon the works of Allbutt, Arber, Lord Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Christian Cromwell, Curtis, Egerton Y. Davis, H.Jones, Faber, Milton, Osier,J. H. Robinson, Symmers, Taylor, and V. Williams. I have used notes from articles in the A.M.A. Archives ofInternal Medicine, 'The Golden Bough,' The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Kansas City Medical Journal, Lancet, "The Meaning of Meaning,' Nature, the New Yorker, Punch, Science, Today's Health, and the Bible." Perspectives in Biology and Medicine ¦ Spring 1977 | 421 misconception have a feline tenacity upon life." Once, before a society, I read a paper dealing with one aspect of what I called "the melancholy longevity of error." Of the persistent survival of error Bacon said, "For as things now are, if an untruth in nature be once on foot, what by reason ofthe neglect ofexamination, and countenance of antiquity, and what by reason of the use of the opinion in similitudes and ornaments of speech, it is never called down." But Bacon reassured us by saying, "It is easier to evolve the truth from error than from confusion ." Here are some examples. Item one: SPECULATIVE ERROR The ancient Mexicans believed the sun to be the source of all vital force. But, anthropomorphized as Ipalnemohuani—"he by whom all persons live"—the sun needed to receive life from the world. To the Mexicans the heart was the symbol as well as the seat of life. It was natural that the bleeding hearts of animals be presented to the sun to help him run his course through the heavens. Later, human sacrifices were used, not to please and propitiate, but to supply the physical power of renewed energies for heat, light, and motion. They were magical, not religious. The eternal hunger ofthe solar furnace could be met only by annual marauding to capture from neighboring tribes the hordes of victims needed to provide fuel for the sun's monstrous appetite. Their culture came to depend on endless wars and cruel human sacrifice. This, the most frightful plan ever devised for any human society, sprang from an error in comprehension of the solar system, probably beginning as post hoc...