GIZMOS
Photograph by Jens Mortensen |
| Flexible metals in Baby Bright Eyes' head act like muscles, moving her eyes, blinking her lids, and shutting them to sleep. She's equipped with a bear, a bottle, and a fiendish cackle. |
Soundbug
Wave Industries Ltd., $20
Baby Bright Eyes
Playmates Toys, $49.95
The average office desk makes a lousy loudspeaker. But as Samuel Johnson said of a dog walking upright, “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” With the Soundbug, a computer-mouse-size device that plugs into the headphone jack of any portable stereo unit or laptop and attaches to any flat, smooth surface with a suction cup, you can make a desk, a window, or even a metal lampshade sing. Better yet, you can provide the accompaniment for a dog to do a fancy two-step. The source of the Soundbug’s amplifying abilities is a shape-changing metal alloy called Terfenol-D. At the heart of a traditional speaker is a magnet that vibrates, moving a flexible cone in response to an electric signal. By contrast, Terfenol-D responds to a magnetic field by stretching toward it with great speed and force, enabling it to vibrate solid surfaces. Wood booms out, metal sounds a bit tinny, and for a clear crystal sound, you can’t beat a pane of glass. You can even get pretty good fidelity by pressing the Soundbug against your forehead and letting it vibrate your skull.
Another shape-changing metal—a nickel-titanium alloy manufactured by NanoMuscle Inc.—helps animate the recently released Baby Bright Eyes doll. The alloy, which can switch between two different shapes when hit with an electric current, is incorporated into paper-clip-size actuators that smoothly and silently move weights up to half a pound. In response to electric signals from sensors that indicate how the doll is oriented and what she is holding—a small brown bear or a bottle—the actuators contract or expand much as muscles would, slowly moving the eyes from side to side in a highly convincing, if slightly creepy, manner. Four-year-olds are mesmerized by the watchful gaze of Baby Bright Eyes. Anyone older might opt for the off switch—or a bit of doll brain surgery.
—William Jacobs
BOOKS
Clean Hands Save Lives
Lessons from a 19th-century medical crusade still resonate
By Leyla Sanai
The Doctors’ Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis
By Sherwin B. Nuland
W. W. Norton, $21.95
The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis
In a famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci of sexual congress, a narrow duct winds its way upward from the top of a woman’s uterus to the tip of her nipple. The drawing helped perpetuate the notion that mother’s milk arose from transmuted menstrual blood—a popular misconception that remained largely unchallenged long after da Vinci’s death in 1519. So when early-19th-century doctors in Europe discovered a milky white pus in the abdomens of women who had died of childbed fever, they traced the cause of their deaths to “clotted milk” that had backed up and clung to their intestines. This was only one of the bizarre theories put forward to explain a scourge that was then killing up to one-third of women who delivered their babies in hospitals. Another hypothesis was that an indefinable aura hung over the wards.
The pall of death might have continued to hover had it not been for an indefatigable Hungarian obstetrician named Ignác Semmelweis. Two decades before Louis Pasteur discovered that bacteria could cause disease, Semmelweis found that doctors could stop the spread of childbed fever if they washed their hands in chloride of lime between patients. In this captivating biography, Sherwin Nuland, a surgeon at Yale and winner of the National Book Award for How We Die, chronicles Semmelweis’s battle to win recognition for his discovery.
Semmelweis’s lonely campaign began in 1846, when he noted that the death rate among women whose babies were delivered by doctors at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus hospital in Vienna averaged about 24 percent and sometimes rose as high as 30 percent. Among women in wards attended by midwives, the death rate was a mere 2.4 percent, as it was among women who delivered at home. He also observed that the doctors frequently performed internal examinations after spending their mornings dissecting corpses in the morgue. He concluded that the doctors were carrying some sort of particle directly from the dead bodies to the mothers, then transferring it from one woman to another. (The disease is now known to be caused by a strain of streptococcal bacteria.) By 1848, after he had ordered doctors to wash their hands in chloride solution before entering the wards, the death rate had dropped dramatically, to about 1 percent.
Despite making a discovery that would later save the lives of millions, Semmelweis was largely ignored by a hostile medical establishment. Nuland reveals that Semmelweis was partly to blame for his lack of acceptance. Not only did he fail to reproduce his findings in laboratory animals, but he also neglected to write up his results in an accessible manner in medical journals. More than a decade later, Semmelweis did write a book—a 543-page tome that Nuland describes as “logorrheic, repetitious, hectoring, accusatory, self-glorifying . . . in sum, virtually unreadable.” Many of his detractors failed to grasp the fundamental principle of his work, and when they questioned his conclusions, he responded with personal insults, denouncing one professor of obstetrics as a murderer. Sadly, Semmelweis later succumbed to symptoms of Alzheimer’s. In 1865 he was consigned to a mental asylum, where he was probably beaten to death by the staff within hours of arriving.
It is tempting to dismiss this piece of history as an artifact of a dark age, and yet the struggle of Semmelweis is eerily prescient. In 1856 he berated a hospital manager for sending sheets to a laundry that returned them in the same filthy state. Last June, a century and a half later, the London Times reported that 68 percent of nurses surveyed in Britain had no laundry facilities for uniforms in their hospitals, forcing them to wash them in nonsterile conditions at home. That practice has been implicated in the spread of hospital infections. Simple disinfectant use has been shown to reduce rates of infection by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and yet hospitals in many countries, including the United States, often neglect such basic measures. Ignorance and slovenliness may be the demons in Semmelweis’s story, but they are no strangers to the sophisticated 21st century, either.
