The Sixth History of Man

By John Bershof, MD

In the spirit of medieval writer Chaucer, all human activity lies within the artist’s scope, the History of Man Series uses medicine as a jumping off point to explore precisely that, all history, all science, all human activity since the beginning of time. The jumping off style of writing takes the reader, the listener into worlds unknown, always returning to base, only to jump off again. History of Man are stories and tales of nearly everything.

 

The Sixth History of Man is the last narrative in the History of Man Series that uses infection as the underlying foundation. The series will continue but use other disease platforms for jumping off. From a human infection perspective, this sixth book will visit with the King of Pop Michael Jackson, vitiligo and propofol, the famous and infamous sexually transmitted diseases—herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, trichomonas, HIV and the granddaddy of colorful stories, syphilis—with their very entertaining tales, a world of romance, suspense, and thrillers. We’ll hop from science to art to music, going back in time to the astronomy of the Persians, Syrians, the Greek Aristotle and on to Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler. Our travels will take us to the Renaissance of art and music, stopping along a few stations, such as da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Monet. A discussion of why and how humans went from spoken language to written language is on our menu. We will pay homage with another visit with the First Viennese School, parse senility, delirium, and dementia and most assuredly discuss the women who helped build Johns Hopkins Hospital. OK Boomers! and the sociology of cohort generations will help complete this narrative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: May 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798397625333

Book preview

1

PTOLEMY TO COPERNICUS TO KEPLER

Several things stand out that helped usher in the disciplines of science, art, music, and the humanities, and ironically one such event was religion itself—the Protestant Reformation beginning in the early 1500s. The Catholic Church in Rome played a colossal role in snuffing out humanism, the Protestant Reformation, a rejection of Vatican dogma, helped facilitate the rebirth of humanism. The Protestants took exception to the central role the Catholic Church placed upon itself, the Reformation denouncing the Church as an intermediary between man and God. The Reformation elevated the notion that the relationship between man and God was unique and did not flow through the Church, nor did it flow through men of the cloth. This simple Protestant paradigm shift ended up placing more emphasis on the individual, on humans, ergo, humanism. This placing prime importance on humans rather than on divinity ushered in science, art, music, history, and philosophy.

Another event that helped free humans from the Dark Ages was the Age of Discovery from the 1480s onwards, when the Spanish, Portuguese, British, and Dutch explorers crossed huge oceans, sailing into unknown horizons. Pushing the edges of the map, dispelling the long-held dogmatic beliefs about the physical properties of the world, such that earth was flat and at the center of the universe, these voyages created a new view of the world that spilled over into other areas of academic pursuit.

In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the tip of Africa into the mouth of the Indian Ocean, the beginning of an eastern route to the Far East. In 1497 Vasco da Gama not only rounded the tip of Africa through the Cape of Good Hope—it was originally called the Cape of Storms, which did not inspire much hope in scallywags, thus the name change—was the first to eventually sail to the Malabar coast of India in 1499.

Going the other way, going west into the setting sun, although Portuguese sailors had ventured into the Atlantic earlier in the fourteenth century, discovering such uninhabited outposts as the Madeira Islands in 1419 and the Azores in 1427, it was indubitably Columbus landing on a New World in 1492 that was the hallmark during the Age of Discovery. In 1519, Magellan and crew left Seville, Spain, heading west circumnavigated the planet, although despite misconceptions Magellan himself did not finish the voyage, instead dying of all things from a spear wound on the Philippine island of Mactan in 1521. Of the five ships and 270 mariners under Magellan's command, only one ship, the Victoria, and eighteen men returned to Spain three years after setting sail.

Those explorations succeeded in opening alternate routes for the goodies that the Silk Road and Spice Trade had been delivering for thousands of years to markets in Europe, crossing the Bosporus at the great Turkish city Constantinople, those land merchant routes closed down by the Ottoman Empire after they conquered the entire Middle East. It wasn't that the Turks did not care for silk and spices, it was they simply wanted to protect their borders and a bunch of caravans of camels crisscrossing their conquered lands simply would not do. A sea route to the Far East was needed.

Especially the westward ho! Route of Columbus and pals demonstrated definitively that the earth was indeed a sphere, not flat, a heretic proposition that a hundred years or two earlier would have ended with someone's head being chopped off. It was by no accident that the famous sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus treatise on a sun-centric heliocentrism model of our solar system—armed with the provable fact that one could sail around the world rather than sail off the edge of the world—was published in Martin Luther’s Protestant reformation country of Germany and out of the reach of the Vatican.

A key component of heliocentrism was that the Sun was also a sphere and at the center, Earth was a sphere and orbited around the Sun, the planets were spheres and orbited similarly around the Sun. All the sudden, literally like a light being turned on in the dark, the observed motion of the heavenly bodies made sense. Earth, being flat as a pancake and at the center, did not pass the litmus test. Besides, if the Earth was flat as a pancake, cats, which were domesticated perhaps 10,000 years ago, would have pushed everything off the planet by now.

It was first the Greeks—what an advanced civilization were the Greeks—especially Pythagoras around 500 BC—who were the first to propose our planet was a sphere, a globe, a concept later picked up by Aristotle around 350 BC. The only way for those brilliant Greeks to explain such things as solar eclipses and lunar eclipses is if all those objects were spherical and if our Sun was at the center. These concepts survived from antiquity, quietly percolating but going unnoticed or shunned by the Church, suppressed during the Dark Ages, only to re-emerge during the Renaissance. Regarding a spherical world, as the joke goes, God did promise man that good wives would be found in all corners of the world, and then he hauls-off and makes the world spherical, with no corners.

Age of Discovery ships returning to their European ports with hulls full of spices, also returned with hulls chock-full of unusual fauna and flora, such a variety of animal and plant species that for Europeans piqued their curiosity, ushering in the natural sciences of biology, botany, and geology. These emerging science disciplines caught the eye and the fancy of many learned men, including men of the cloth. This is a rather important point to harp upon repeatedly, given that we currently live in an age where some religious leaders and their flock call science fake, or that science is a liberal conspiracy. How dumb can some of these people be? It is ironical really, in a not-too-distant place, in a not-too-distant past, that many scientific discoveries, especially in botany and geology, were discovered by men of the cloth. Where has this lost tradition gone with religious leaders today?

The Protestant Reformation really got its kick-start with the publication of Martin Luther’s 1517 work, The Ninety-Five Theses. It was not just a religious upheaval from the dogma of the Catholic Church in Rome; it was a political, intellectual, and cultural splintering of what was, up until then, Catholic Europe. Reformation leaders like Martin Luther in Germany and John Calvin in France were declaring there was no intermediary between man and God, that spirituality did not flow through the Church in Rome, that the love of God for man and woman was unique, one-on-one.

The cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes—my all-time favorite cartoon—was the brainchild of gifted creator Bill Watterson, a strip that ran from November 1985 until December 1995. The 6-year-old Calvin was named after the just mentioned sixteenth-century French theologian John Calvin, a principal figure in Christian theology reformation and a favorite of Watterson. Calvin was not only the driving force for the reformation in France and Switzerland, but he also proposed that God’s redemption of the individual proceeds regardless of that individual’s cooperation, a concept termed monergism.

As for Hobbes, the anthropomorphized stuffed tiger in Bill Watterson's world of Calvin and Hobbes, he was named after the great seventeenth-century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, best known for expounding upon the social contract people have with each other, and marks the beginning of political philosophy, that area of philosophy that deals with the scope, nature, and legitimacy of governments and public institutions. The social contract thingamajig has to do with individuals in a society giving tacit approval to the state, to elected governments, to surrender some of their freedoms in exchange for protection of their remaining rights. A classic example of this raged during the roaring Covid-19 pandemic in America and elsewhere. The authority of local, state, and federal governments to order social distancing, mask-wearing, and closure of venues is an example of a social contract, doing what is best for society even if some liberties are curtailed. It is the classic Spock social contract, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Another example, also in healthcare, is standard childhood immunizations. Although a mom taking her child to get recommended or even required immunizations might think their purpose is to protect Sally from the mumps, it is really to protect all children from the mumps. These are examples of public health measures where Thomas Hobbes’ social contract is at play. Classic examples of social contracts also include caring for others, paying taxes, and benefitting from public services. A modern word for understanding social contracts is woke, being aware of and actively supporting important societal issues, especially in regard to injustices.

I own every single published collection of Calvin and Hobbes, including the complete two-volume bound The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. My daughters even bought me my own stuffed Bengal tiger which they named Hobbes. I still have my Hobbes in my bedroom.

When Calvin and Hobbes left the comic pages on December 31, 1995, I was heartbroken. I quit reading the funny pages; they had lost their allure. For those of you who recall the 1971 song American Pie, sometimes called The Day The Music Died, written by Don McLean, it contains that verse the day the music died, which was McLean referencing the death of music greats Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson, who were killed on February 3, 1959, in a plane crash outside Mason City, Iowa. For McLean, the music died that day; McLean was only thirteen years old when Holly and Valens died, but it certainly impacted him. On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1995, when Bill Watterson published the last Calvin & Hobbes; it was the day the funny pages died for me. I remember the very first Calvin and Hobbes in 1985 and the very last in 1995, and many, many in between.

The Protestant Reformation was friendlier towards the sciences although by no means was the reformation the sole reason humanism emerged from the grave. It was by no accident that subsequent to or partly due to the Protestant Reformation sweeping across Europe in the early 1500s, what followed was the acceleration of the Renaissance that has its origins in the fourteenth century, the Age of Discovery with ships at the dawn of the sixteenth century sailing to the edges of the world, the emergence of the Scientific Revolution in the mid sixteenth century, and the Age of Enlightenment in the latter half of the eighteenth century where governments of the People emerged. It was also by no geographic accident that scientists like the Polish-born Copernicus was able to publish his 1543 heliocentric solar system model in the Protestant stronghold of Germany, out of the reach of the Church in Rome. Even Church sponsored inquisitions could not venture beyond the reach of the Vatican. It is a classic example, Copernicus freely expressing his scientific beliefs in Germany without retribution. Similarly, German astronomer Johannes Kepler, fifty years after Copernicus, more accurately defined Copernicus’ heliocentric solar system, giving the planetary motions elliptical orbits rather than circular, again Kepler's treatise published beyond the Vatican’s reach.

Sadly, not every scientist or thinker during that period in history lived beyond the Church domain. There were no doubt Italian astronomers who perhaps had theories like Copernicus and Kepler, but who forever remained in the shadows of the Church simply because they were born in Italy or in Catholic controlled countries, born under the influence of the Vatican, and didn’t want their head removed from their shoulders. Whatever heretic thoughts they had, they likely kept to themselves, daring not to publish lest they be on the receiving end of an inquisition.

Having said that though, some Italian Renaissance men were just too great, too gosh darn smart to be hobbled by the Church. None more so than Galileo, who was a vocal supporter of Copernicus. Galileo was too famous to lose his head when he went against Church doctrine, but he did end up spending the last decade of his life under house arrest at his villa in Tuscany for refusing to recant his support of Copernicus and heliocentrism. Galileo was not forced to drink the hemlock like Socrates was over 2,000 years earlier in 399 BC when he disagreed with Athenian authority. Of course, Socrates' revolt was not over celestial night sky observations, rather, he fiercely denounced all the pagan Greek gods, and most damning, he was no fan of Greek democracy. Socrates' hubris got the best of him, he believed that only the intellectual elite, the philosophers like him, should rule. For his outspoken beliefs, drinking the hemlock was his reward. Hemlock is a poisonous plant, all parts of the plant can deliver a fatal death, due to a plant chemical termed a piperidine alkaloid that blocks nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, that is, it stops muscle contraction. Muscle contraction is especially good for breathing, hemlock poisoning stops breathing, which is not a good thing.

We throw around, or more precisely, I throw around Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment as if they are one-and-the-same. They were not, they are not, although they did overlap in a way not easily parsed, and they influenced each other in ways not easily codified. They are like that Venn diagram thingie, they all share some centuries and some discoveries, but they also possess unique characteristics that define their particular station in history.

The Renaissance came first, Renaissance meaning rebirth of knowledge, was a period in European history, historically beginning before the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, traced back to fourteenth-century Italy. It was a period marked by the re-emergence, and an appreciation of ancient Greek and Roman texts. Which is odd really. The fuel for the Renaissance was not new stuff, rather it was old stuff needing to be dusted off, it was revisiting the Greek and Roman literary classics, although not just that. The Renaissance era wasn’t just retro, it also included the Age of Discovery with ships sailing into uncharted waters, giving fuel for the introduction of Copernican astronomy. The invention of the printing press allowed ideas to be more thoroughly disseminated, especially the emphasis on humanism. Humanism, in this regard, was the Renaissance placing prime importance upon humanity rather than upon divinity.

Throughout the Dark Ages, the seat of knowledge rested within the Church, her scholar-clerics dominated intellectual thought using scholastic philosophy in a twisted manner, as a method of defending Church dogma. By the 1300s some Italian secular men began to free themselves from religious bondage. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks, peoples who had an interest in academic pursuits, many men of Persian letters, fled to Italy, bringing along with them ancient texts from Greece, Persia, Egypt, and throughout the Middle East. If you thought the dogma of the Church was bad, it paled in comparison to the absolute stifling world of the Ottomans, a rigid Islamic caliphate.

Perhaps the first best-known pre-Renaissance thinker was Dante Alighieri, born in Florence in 1265, known for his poetic work the Divine Comedy 1320, an allegory on Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Besides being considered, even to this day, one of the finest literary works in the Italian language, especially its brilliant construction as a poem—Dante invented the terza rima, the interlocking 3-line stanza. Divine Comedy is a didactic historical construct that critiques famous figures from antiquity, placing each figure in his or her rightfully earned sphere: Hell, Purgatory, or Heaven.

Dante himself was the protagonist in the Divine Comedy as he traveled from the depths of the inferno through the realms of limbo up into the heavenly world. Nearly everyone who was anyone throughout history did not escape Dante’s critique; stationed where Dante placed them—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Lucifer, Homer, Achilles, Hector, Pope Boniface VIII, Thomas Aquinas, Caesar, Brutus, Cleopatra, Judas Iscariot, Ulysses, and Mohammed—all earning where they landed, and where each landed—Hell, Purgatory, Heaven—I’ll leave to your best guess. Dante, in the Divine Comedy, was the bridge between the darkness and the light. Perhaps the most important aspect of the Divine Comedy was not where Dante placed historical figures, but that he even had the nerve, the chutzpah to write the masterpiece. Of course, those he might have in their estimation maligned, well, they were likely long dead. Dante did not directly mention Jesus in his writings, but he believed Jesus established the Catholic Church, and Dante accepted papal authority in its broadest sense. That is, he saw the various popes and the Church as a representation of Christ but run by flawed humans, which means for instance, a Pope can end up in Hell.

The classic best example of a Renaissance Man was Leonardo da Vinci born in 1452 in Florence, Italy. He was a polymath as well as an artist. Da Vinci’s works, such as his human anatomic drawings like the standing man in the circle, the Vitruvian Man 1490, a brilliant representation of human proportion, as well as several of his most famous painting, The Last Supper 1498, the Mona Lisa 1503, and the Head of a Woman 1508, to name a few of his art masterpieces. They are timeless Renaissance creations, simply timeless achievements in human endeavor. Talent like that raises all of us, raises all of humanity.

Leonardo da Vinci is a fine place to start a discussion about the Renaissance. He was born out of wedlock to a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman Caterina di Meo Lippi, not exactly an auspicious start to what would become a legend for the ages. Leonardo studied art in the studio of famed Florentine painter Verrocchio. Da Vinci’s skills and compositions soon eclipsed that of his mentor, his anatomic drawings of humans helped to advance medicine. Who amongst us has not seen that Vitruvian Man, the original on display in Venice at the Gallerie dell'Accademia, an ink on paper drawing detailing body anatomy and proportions? His Mona Lisa on display in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, other than her mysterious smile, introduced subtle modeling of form in portrait painting, as well as introducing lifelike illusionism, as if the painting was real-time. Other da Vinci inventions included the double-hull boat, a maritime invention still used in oil tanker and submarine construction, and he conceptualized flying machines, armored fighting vehicles, and the adding machines to replace the abacus.

Well before the Copernicus’ heliocentrism model of our solar system, there was the first century Ptolemy universe previously examined in The Third History of Man, his celestial night sky a star map for sailors to use during the Age of Discovery. Imagine that, those first century night star maps created by Ptolemy were used by sailors 1,400 years after he had constructed them.

Claudius Ptolemaeus, known to us simply as Ptolemy, was born in 100 AD somewhere in Egypt, in addition to his navigational charts also constructed one of the first original, albeit incorrect, views of our solar system, the geocentric model where he placed Earth at the center of our Universe. Oddly, little is known about the details of Ptolemy’s life; it is believed he was of Greek ancestry living in Roman-occupied Egypt; thus, his first name Claudius is Latin, his last name Ptolemaeus is Greek, and he was a Roman citizen.

Ptolemy derived the Ptolemaic geocentric solar system, placing Earth at the center, but not quite at the center. Nothing was at the center in Ptolemy’s system because, quite simply, the astronomical observation of the other orbiting spheres like the Sun and planets would make even less sense than they already did, since they were wrong. Ptolemy had to fudge a great deal to make sense of the observed solar system sky—not his star charts, just his planetary charts—when he was forced by the dogma of conventional wisdom to keep Earth at the center, or the near the center. In the Ptolemy system, orbiting objects around Earth were in this arrangement from inside out to the edges of the celestial sky: Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and then all the stars which were fixed stars, that is, the stars did not move. Notice Ptolemy placed the Sun between Venus and Mars. Today Earth is between Venus and Mars. Who switched them?

Not sure whom Ptolemy could have blamed for following dogma, if not himself, adhering to the convention of an earth-centric solar system but we can point fingers. Certainly, Aristotle in the fourth century BC was perhaps the first, best-known Greek to passionately place Earth at the center. Aristotle being Aristotle, well you didn’t argue with his legend. One wonders if Ptolemy would have seen things differently if not for the large shadow Aristotle cast. Eratosthenes, who followed Aristotle, was perhaps the greatest astronomer of Greek antiquity, but he seemed to shy away from discussions about where exactly to place Earth and the Sun.

You get a sense that perhaps Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, deep down in the recesses of their brilliant minds, harbored doubt about the earth-centric universe, but if they did, they kept it to themselves.

In the end, Ptolemy’s solar map was a complex system in order to abide by an earth-centric model, more complex geometrically than what was the reality, a reality that came into existence during the Renaissance of the 1500s. This is a perfect example of the previously mentioned Ockham’s razor; the simplest correct solution was rejected over a solution with multiplying complexity. What is very, very odd, is that the motions of the planetary bodies in our solar system are quite simple, objects orbiting around the Sun. For Ptolemy to make sense of things, his celestial map of the planets was very, very complex, planets having orbits around themselves and around each other, and just a whole bunch of circles that at first glance it looked like an asymmetric doily at grandmother’s house.

Even though Ptolemy’s earth-centric model was wrong, that had absolutely no negative impact on his night sky navigational star maps. His star maps were so accurate that sailors well into the Age of Discovery over a thousand years later leaned heavily on his night sky charts. Where you place your home planet or your sun in your local solar neighborhood has no bearing on star positions a gazillion light-years away. A sailor like Columbus could pull out his set of Ptolemy star charts, look at the map for that time of year, and he could then plot a high seas voyage right off the edge of the earth.

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 1473 in Toruń, Royal Prussia, Kingdom of Poland. His father was a merchant from Kraków, and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Toruń. Copernicus was a bit of a genius, known as a polyglot, having mastered multiple languages, and was also known as a polymath having mastered multiple sciences. Important though, to part of our discussion, in addition to Nicolaus’ formal training in languages and sciences while in Poland and Italy, he also received formal education in ecclesiastical and canon law; in other words, Nicolaus Copernicus was a man of the cloth.

In 1514, Copernicus then age forty-one, began theorizing his heliocentric model of the Universe, of our Solar System, placing the Sun at the center—heliocentric, helio from the Greek for sun meaning the Sun is the center of the solar system compared to earth-centric, meaning the Earth is the center of the solar system—heresy for that age. But even with him placing the Sun at the center, Copernicus still held true to the common belief that our solar system was the center of the universe. Little did he know our star system was on a remote arm of the Milky Way, one galaxy with 200 billion stars amongst perhaps 10 trillion galaxies, each with billions of stars. He continued to work on his heliocentric model and his treatise over the next twenty-nine years, hesitant to publish his theories, either out of fear and retribution from the Church in Rome reaching into Germany, or he wasn’t sure himself of his model. Reformation leaders such as Martin Luther in Germany were aware of Copernicus’ theory, yet they either found no heresy or found no time to find heresy; they had other more pressing matters.

It is said that the heliocentric theory made its way to Rome and Pope Clement VII, who was supposedly interested in the heliocentric model. Seems a tad doubtful that a Pope was overly interested since the Vatican was decidedly in a kerfuffle over a sun-centric world. It was several popes later, Urban VII, who condemned Galileo for supporting the heliocentric model. Eventually, Nicolaus Copernicus agreed to publish his book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium - On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres – in 1542, choosing the German printer Johannes Petreius in Nuremberg, Germany, a Martin Luther stronghold and out of the reach of the Vatican. As the first copy came off the printing press in 1543, it was rushed to Toruń, Poland, and placed upon the chest of the then dying Nicolaus Copernicus, who had suffered apoplexy—a stroke. Legend has it that Copernicus opened his eyes, looked at the beautifully bound manuscript, smiled, and then died.

Tycho Brahe was born in 1546 in Scania, which today is part of Sweden, but back then was part of a union of sorts between Denmark and Norway. His family was of nobility and quite wealthy, providing the young Tycho with the best education money could buy. Apparently, having witnessed a total solar eclipse in his youth, Tycho became interested in astronomy. A total solar eclipse is when the Moon is perfectly positioned between Earth and the Sun, totally eclipsing the Sun and its radiance such that day becomes night, sort of, for a few minutes anyway. I was fortunate to witness the last total eclipse as viewed from the US on August 21, 2017. From my home in Denver, it was not exactly a 100% total eclipse, the arc of totality was further north in Wyoming and Nebraska. The arc of totality of that 100% solar eclipse followed a path from Oregon in the northwest, to South Carolina in the southeast, with Denver being a tad off that arc, eclipsing 93% of the Sun.

And if you were to think that during a total solar eclipse as day turns to night, the Moon should be pitch black, since its facing side, the side facing Earth would receive no sunlight, you’d be wrong. During a total solar eclipse, the Moon, a New Moon, is slightly lit up, not by direct sunlight of course but by refracted red wavelength light from Earth’s atmosphere, which gives the moon a copper color. So, during a total solar eclipse, day becomes night-ish and the nearside of the Moon blocking the Sun turns to copper. It is a hair-on-the-neck raising experience. Pretty slick stuff.

A lunar eclipse is when Earth is between a full Moon and the Sun, the Moon has passed directly behind Earth into its shadow, so the shadow of the Earth turns a full Moon into an eerily dark circle in the sky—like a hole in the sky. Because the Moon is not receiving any direct sunlight and there is no refracted red wavelength light bouncing off earth, with a nighttime full moon lunar eclipse the Moon just disappears. It is odd really, because when we look at celestial things like the Moon or planets or our Sun or stars, we see them precisely because they have light, they’re illuminated directly or indirectly. The reason a total lunar eclipse is even possible is because that the Moon and Earth orbit the Sun on the same ecliptic plane, as well as the other seven planets mostly orbit the Sun on the same ecliptic, except poor ‘ol Pluto, which is one reason why Pluto was kicked out of the Planet Club.

Do other planets have lunar eclipses, that is, those planets that have moons? Mercury and Venus are moonless. Mars has two moons, Jupiter’s current count is 92 moons, Saturn has around 83 moons, Uranus 27 moons, and Neptune 14 moons. But their moons are not all on the same ecliptic as the planet they orbit. Notwithstanding the fact that given the distance the Jovian planets are to the Sun, if you were standing on Uranus or Neptune, the Sun would appear quite smallish, almost like a bright star, and your moon or moons would be so much larger than the distant Sun way out in the celestial sky. The geometry of eclipsing doesn’t work beyond Mars and even Martian eclipses are not what Earth eclipses are. Out on Neptune looking back at the Sun, it looks more like a distant star. If a Neptunian moon passed by where you were standing it would be so much larger than the distant Sun that such an event would be hardly cause cé·lè·bre. Pluto by the way, planet or not, has perhaps five moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra.

Why are all eight planets on basically the same ecliptic as they orbit the Sun? Simple really, the Sun has an equator where its greatest gravitational influence exists because it too, like Earth rotates on its axis making its equator fatter than it is pole-to-pole. It's not as fast of a spin as Earth, perhaps one rotation every twenty-seven days, but it does produce a favored ecliptic sweet spot for captured planets. Given how the other planets formed, from cosmic schmutz our Sun threw off or refused to accept, and the gravitational rotation pull of the Sun, all eight planets ended up on a near identical plane as they go about their annual solar ecliptic orbit.

It is always fun to review a year or a single annual solar transit for the other planets, that is, the time it takes to make one solar orbit like Earth at 365 days. Mercury is a mere 88 days, meaning it is traveling quite fast around the Sun. Ancient astronomers knew this, which is why in Greek mythology Hermes, or in Roman mythology Mercury, is the messenger of the gods, moving swiftly across the night sky. Venus takes 225 days to orbit the Sun and owes its name to being just about the brightest object in the night sky, only befitting for the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite in Greek. As mentioned earlier is the slow rotation of Venus, one Venus day is 243 Earth days, and one year on Venus around the Sun is 225 days, meaning a day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.

Earth takes 365 ¼ days needing a leap year every four years to make things copacetic and is named Earth after absolutely no mythologic reason. Earth means dirt. How utterly boring. But it sort of also means the realm of man, so there is that. And our moon, is named Moon, not special either. Even less special since there are as of last count 226 traditional moons in our solar system, traditional meaning moons not beyond Neptune but does includes Pluto. There are another 464 small body moons orbiting other solar system objects like asteroids in the Asteroid Belt, dwarf planets, and Kuiper Belt objects, also termed TNO, trans-Neptunian Objects.

As I’ve said before, we should petition to have our moon get a proper name, like Luna, which is Latin for moon.

Although there is no scientific evidence, our Moon quite possibly affects our mood. Certainly, Italians thought so, the Italian word for love, amore, is often associated with the moon. At least according to the American avatar of Italians, Frank Sinatra and his hit song That’s Amore 1953:

In Napoli where love is king

When boy meets girl here's what they say

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie

That's amore

When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine

That's amore

And speaking of the moon hitting my eyes like a big pizza pie…

6 East.

It is probably safe to say when Evelyn’s eyes hit mine, as I was admitting her to 6 East, the moon hit my eyes. At the time, like I mentioned earlier, we were struggling with what we could do for her, or more precisely, what we could not do for her. I was a medical student rotating on a surgery service, a specialty of medicine I knew little about. I was still starry-eyed naïve at the time, surely assuming there was something we could do for her, you know, re-operate, cure her. Even re-operate to buy Evelyn more time would have been a worthwhile goal, although that concept of buying time in medicine was still rather foreign to me. I was still of that innocent, naive medical school age assuming we could fix things, fix everything. The reality of the limits of medicine had not yet sunk in, had not yet harshed my ingénue buzz, one who possesses a sincérité innocente et naïve.

Just as our planet makes its rotations around our star, our service made twice daily rounds on our patients—beginning of the day before surgeries and clinic and at day’s end before heading home. Since surgery start time was always 7:30 am, we’d need to arrive at the hospital at least one hour earlier, like 6:30 to round on all our ward patients and consults, where the chief resident on the service would bark orders, and the intern and the medical student carry out those scut orders.

But for Evelyn, I’d arrive 15 minutes earlier still, go and see her before meeting up with the team. The nurses knew I was coming, I tended to walk very fast onto the ward, so fast in fact — your typical type A personality—that the VA veterans nicknamed me Rambo Doc. In fact, a few years later, the nurses on one ward, the general surgery ward, would become so startled at my walking pace they found it unnerving. With the fast click of my heels, they assumed there was a COR, a dying patient I was rushing to, and they’d chase after me. When they realized no one was dying, it was just me the stupid intern walking too fast onto the ward, in a moment of disconcerting frustration for me, they complained to my senior resident. And I was scolded. Thus ended my days as Rambo Doc, slowing my warp speed stride to something approaching a sashay.

I would look at Evelyn’s chart, read the nursing note, and then the nurse and I would quietly go into her dimly lit room. Sometimes she knew we were there, sometimes she was asleep, sometimes she was confused. I’d check on her and then depart, the team never knowing I would pre-round on her, the ward nurses knowing I was doting on her, yet to their credit they kept my doting secret.

Mars, Ares in Greek, takes 687 days to orbit the Sun, and because it is the red planet in the sky, it was named after the god of war, you know, red for war and red for blood. Jupiter, at 12 years for its annual solar transit, is the largest object in the solar system after the Sun and was so named because its size dovetailed nicely with it being the god of the gods, Zeus in Greek. Saturn takes 29 years for one solar orbit, its name is derived from the Latin for agriculture and the bountiful sunlight to make things grow. Saturn, Cronus in Greek, was the god of the old gods before his son Jupiter usurped him. Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun once, and thanks to William Herschel who in 1781 discovered the planet and so named it by the Greek name Uranus, breaking with the traditional Latin nomenclature for planets which is Caelus. Either way, Uranus means heaven, the god of the sky, so named since Uranus was the father of Saturn and the grandfather of Jupiter. Finally, Neptune, Poseidon in Greek, takes 165 years to make one orbit around the Sun and is so dim in the night sky receiving not much sunlight, it became the god of the sea, the deep, dark sea. Pluto who was kicked out of the Planet Club, needs 248 years to make one orbit around the Sun, and being even darker than Neptune, barely receiving any sunlight, it was appropriately named after the god of the underworld, Hades in Greek.

A few talking points. To be fair to Herschel, his spelling of Uranus was the Ancient Greek version Ouranos, so that rendition has a slight letter O pronunciation at the beginning, more like o-ur-a-nus rather than ur-anus. The first five planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were known to ancient Babylonian astronomers 2,000 BC, predating the Greeks by a long shot. The last three planets—Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto were discovered in modern times, Uranus 1781 by Herschel, Neptune 1846 by Galle and Le Verrier, and Pluto 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh. There are to date five dwarf planets in our Solar System: Pluto, Eris, Ceres, Makemake and Haumea. Pluto and Eris are in the trans-Neptunian part of