The Symzonia Review’s Brief look at November
A humorous examination of some noteworthy, and some not quite so noteworthy, events that have occurred in November.
I am adult enough, though just barely so, to recognize that love comes with a price tag attached to it. As Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sagely observed in Hang Fire: “Marrying money is a full-time job, I don’t need the aggravation I’m a lazy slob.” I wonder however what £40 was worth in 1582 because that is what William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway paid for a marriage license on the 28th in that year.
The campaign to make November 29 a federal holiday begins now! On the 29th in 1944, Drs. Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas performed the first surgery on a human to correct a condition known as blue baby syndrome. The patient was Eileen Saxon. Sadly, Eileen only survived for two months after the surgery. While working their way up to performing the surgery on humans, Blalock and Thomas also developed a means of correcting aortic coarctation. I think that was a really cool thing for them to have done. From what I have been told by qualified medical professionals, it appears that the aorta is a somewhat important piece of hardware and finding cardiac spare parts can often prove to be problematic. It’s a bit like having an MG and discovering one afternoon that you need a drive shaft for it. I cannot stress strongly enough how important it is to have a decent parts supplier readily available. Oh, a hospital would be nice, though in a pinch I imagine that a clean table at an International House of Pancakes would probably be an adequate substitute for a sterile operating room, so try not to be too fussy, o.k.? Once you locate a good source for parts (are you listening Dr. Langan? he said in a stage whisper), always keep that person on your Chrismachanakwanzakah card list.
Getting, and staying, ahead of the curve can be a full-time job. Here is one guy who had both the time and the money to do just that. On the 30th in 1786, Peter Leopold Joseph of Habsbourg-Lorraine, Grand Duke of Tuscany, decreed a penal reform abolishing the death penalty. His was the first state to do so.
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