Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Quack: A Cautionary Tale of Medicine

Since it may be a while before I get to the next act of Deconstruction, I've decided it would be good to take some notes on other projects I've had going in my mind, at lower frequency in attention, but nevertheless nursed along with an internal mental interest of the characters which seem to arise spontaneously from a persistent line of research. If the research touches on history, as almost every research does, then when more fully understood, the research yields vibrant historical personages of varying character, and in our minds it is useful to tell their stories, as one sees them. The motivation is partly to better understand the original subject of research, but more deeply, perhaps it is also about some kind of justice, the definition of which we will accept, as did the ancient and medieval philosophers, as rendering undo someone what is due to them.

That being said, I've had a long interest in the study of cancer, the disease. Partly this was due to my father's illness and death a couple years back, and also from other family members. But mostly it was due to curiosity of an unsolved mystery---namely the nature of the disease, and the treatments and possible cures of it.

In a very roundabout way, this led me to the story of a historical individual whose story I think would make for a great subject of a streaming television series, with at least one full season and possible more. The individual in this case is a guy named Royal Raymond Rife (1888-1971).  The streaming series would cover the formative years of his life, concentrating on the late 1920s to the early 1950s, but departing this time window as needed for back story, in particular at least as back 1913.

Other important historical characters in the story would include Thomas Rivers and Arthur Kendall, and others I will mention later. In telling the story, we would necessarily learn a great deal about the development of microbiology, and especially viruses, during that time period, which was greatly flourishing and established the many of the principles of that field as we know it today.

Fortunately I've already done a lot of that research and had some time to put together many strands of thought. I have a wide variety of literature to use on the subject, but as far as the story here is concerned, my principal sources will be The Cancer Cure That Worked by Barry Lynes and The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which I originally bought and read about a year before my father got sick from fatal malignant carcinoma.

Ironically there is a tiny bit of overlap with Deconstruction, in that by pure coincidence, Johns Hopkins appears prominently in both stories.

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