Ok,

I'll keeping coming back looking for the answer to two questions raised by your subsequent post, "The First Church of Fundamentalist Climate Change":

1. Is "shut up, he explained" Damon Runyon's or Ring Lardner's; and
2. Who was the French physician who pioneered sterile procedures in the 19th century and was sent to an insane asylum for telling doctors to wash their hands before deleivering a baby?

Nk:

Who was the French physician who pioneered sterile procedures in the 19th century and was sent to an insane asylum for telling doctors to wash their hands before deleivering a baby?

I believe you're thinking of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, who was Hungarian, not French.

But a more significant error is that Semmelweis was not "sent to an insane asylum for telling doctors to wash their hands before deleivering a baby."

Although it's true that his theory that hand-washing in an antiseptic solution would eliminate nearly all cases of "childbed fever" was not widely accepted until after his death -- and he was in fact committed to an insane asylum, where he died two weeks later -- the two events were not connected.

Semmelweis suffered a mental deterioration over several years that was probably early-onset Alzheimer's Disease, and he was committed by his relatives. It had nothing to do with his theories on sepsis.

In the asylum, he became extremely violent and attacked the guards; they beat him with clubs, and he died of his injuries.

(I know nothing about the origin of "shut up," he explained.)

Dafydd

Thank you, Dafydd.

That was dredged up from the forty-year plus depths of memories from fifth grade.

The "shut up, he explained" is only slightly less old. I'll see if I can find it. My family is visiting relatives, the temperature is at around 0 Farenheit, and I wouldn't mind re-reading both Runyon and Lardner.

It is from Ring Lardner. It is even the the title of a collection of his short stories.

Hard to find, though. With no offense to younger writers, I am very dismayed when older, good books go out of print. It seems to me that something written in 1920, that a fourteen-year old enjoyed in 1970, would be just as enjoyable to fourteen-year old in 2007.

With no offense to younger writers, I am very dismayed when older, good books go out of print.

In this age of ebooks and HTML...

Why in Gutenberg's name should any book ever go out of print??

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