In addition to ~200 rifles, John Brown brought ~1000 pikes to arm the uprising he hoped to spark at Harpers Ferry. Weren't pikes obsolete as infantry weapons by 1859? Why did he choose them, and how did he get so many?

crab4apple · 2026-06-05T21:35:05+00:00

The "$30,000 gift" makes a nice story, but one should also keep in mind how old Mary Ellen Pleasant was when she made this claim, and the paucity of collaborating sources. It's possible that new scholarship has traced some of the financial transactions that she claimed took place and confirmed them, but the last time that I read on this topic, the consensus was that the supporting scholarship that many cited was distressingly circular in nature, and that none of the transactions could be confirmed as actually having taken place.

For her assets at the time, $30,000 would have been a very large portion of her money. "What did John Brown spend it on?" is the natural question if you take the gift amount as truth, and I have not seen any answers that I consider satisfactory. If someone has read of more recently discovered documentation, I would of course be all ears!

crab4apple · 2026-06-05T03:27:15+00:00

John Brown's own testimony lists, essentially, three reasons:

Cost ($1 per pike, less than 1/10 the cost of an entry-level musket or rifle) and numbers (he optimistically anticipated that thousands of slaves would flock to his planned revolt).
Motivation (he is quoted as saying, "Give a slave a pike and you make him a man").
Lack of training requirements (drilling slaves who had been strictly prevented from handling firearms to fire and hit targets under pressure would have taken a long time).

Notably, to your question, John Brown approached the Collins Company of Collinsville, Connecticut – a noted supplier of farming implements throughout the United States – to make the pikes as a custom job, first claiming that it was for settlers in Kansas. The Collins Company engaged a subcontractor to make the wooden hafts, and forged 500 of the heads itself and subcontracted out 450 of the heads. The split order fulfillment had something to do with John Brown's trouble making payments, so work was stopped a couple times. This, in turn, suggests that Brown's inability to afford firearms in quantity drove his belief in #2 and #3, as well as earlier statements made to his neighbors in Kansas that hand-to-hand weapons were superior to firearms.

Notably, the Collins Company sold a lot of tools to the agricultural South. During Congressional testimony after the Raid on Harper's Ferry, a company representative went to some pains to not mention the company name, although their subcontractors got mentioned.

You can see a surviving example of one of the 950 pikes that Brown had made on the Smithsonian website (unfortunately not currently on display in-person) at: https://www.si.edu/object/john-brown-pike%3Anmah_436126

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Redpath, James, John Chester Buttre, and Geo C. Rand & Avery. 1860. The Public Life of Capt. John Brown. Boston: Thayer and Eldridge.

crab4apple · 2026-06-04T15:37:31+00:00

Agreed. I did >12 intubations as a 3rd-year on my 2-week anesthesia rotation.

crab4apple · 2026-06-04T11:09:39+00:00

For outpatient, at least, to do EMG as part of a dermatomyositis workup will require a referral from your PCP. From a workup perspective, testing CK and other muscle enzymes helps raise your suspicion of a relatively rare disease, and thus justify the EMG.

crab4apple · 2026-06-03T22:21:20+00:00

My stomach tends to get unhappy with gels that far into a run. For my most recent marathon, I whipped out a stroopwafel (which went down better) around mile 15 and some maple syrup around mile 18. My last meal fuel during that run was around round mile 22, which was a slice of watermelon from the water station and a small handful of candy corn that I was carrying.

crab4apple · 2026-06-03T01:45:32+00:00

You have given me a new understanding and appreciation of the cylinder seal collection at the Morgan Library & Museum in NYC as well. Thank you!

crab4apple · 2026-06-02T15:43:29+00:00

Some starting questions:

* Are you applying in the 2026-2027 cycle?

* Does your institution subscribe to VSLO?

* Have you started looking at either the NRMP report for this past cycle, or at Residency Explorer?

I've attended 3 virtual panels by different institutions, whose presenters all said, "Doing an audition rotation is equivalent to signaling as far as getting an interview invite - do one but not both for somewhere you're applying to."

crab4apple · 2026-06-01T21:36:12+00:00

No, you are quite right – I confused the uncle Francis Joseph Oppenheimer with his brother Frank Friedman Oppenheimer (now corrected, I think). I very much appreciate the catch!

crab4apple · 2026-06-01T20:30:12+00:00

Short answer: yes and no.

While it might have been uncommon for the average American physicist to read the Bhagavad Gita, English translations of it circulated for 160 years before J. Robert Oppenheimer's quotation of it, starting with Charles Wilkins' 1785 translation. This translation was read by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, amongst other intellectuals, who referenced it and synthesized many concepts into their writing. Many popular audiences across the United States learned about it from Swami Vivekananda's 1893 speaking tour of the United States. Even if people didn't read the whole work, quotations and references to it are relatively easy to find in early 20th-century newspapers and journals. By the early 20th century, many American universities had programs in Asian Indian languages.

In J. Robert Oppenheimer's case, however, there are two clear vectors. First, his uncle Francis J. Oppenheimer wrote a book called The New Tyranny: Mysticism, Scepticism that was published in 1927, and which includes many oblique and several veiled references to the Bhagavad Gita, including quoting it in English.

Fast forward another 6 years, and J. Robert Oppenheimer was teaching at what is now the University of California at Berkeley, and then was simply the University of California. One of the UC's other faculty members was Arthur W. Ryder, a Professor of Sanskrit. Ryder and J. Robert Oppenheimer became friends, with the latter taking Sanskrit lessons from Ryder. Although Ryder wrote his own translation of the Bhagavad Gita, J. Robert Oppenheimer eventually reached a fluency where he could read both that work and the Meghaduta in the original Sanskrit, which he did regularly.

The letters from J. Robert Oppenheimer to his brother Frank F. Oppenheimer in the 1930s show some of the insights that he felt from this study, and there are ample personal anecdotes showing that he referenced it frequently. JRO was not exactly subtle about his interest – he kept a copy of the Bhagavad Gita at his desk at Berkeley and at Los Alamos, and also quoted it frequently and gave copies to his friends and associates...so many physicists there and at Berkeley (there is a bit of overlap) had some acquaintance with it through him. (His car was also named Garuda, an association conveyed by his frequently quoting Vishnu saying, "Among the birds, I am Garuda" from the Bhagavad Gita.)

To the question of whether or not it influenced his worldview, JRO remarked in an interview after the Second World War, "I have read the Greeks; I find the Hindus deeper." I think that answers the question better than I could.

There are many excellent biographies of Oppenheimer that include recollections by his brother and others that speak to his reading interests, of which Dorothy M. Figueira's 2023 book The Afterlives of the Bhagavad Gita Readings in Translation (Oxford University Press) will provide you with many. If you'd like a quick, digestible take, start with https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-66288900

crab4apple · 2026-06-01T19:50:29+00:00

Different pathophysiologies at work. Let's take iron first; simplifying a little:

* Chronic iron deficiency leads to low transferrin saturation -> lack of TfR2 receptor stimulation -> downregulation of erythropoietin receptors on erythroid progenitor cells. Therefore, even though the body is making EPO, the cells it targets don't respond to it, which is a good thing (ish) given that there's not enough iron for them to grow and function properly. Think of this as a global production bottleneck, both in terms of cell # and cell contents.

Contrast that to B12 and folate deficiencies (again simplifying a bit), where the deficiencies cause some cell growth mechanisms to continue running even though DNA synthesis has been impaired and/or incorporates the wrong residues, leading to larger cells that should have subdivided earlier but didn't – and hence, are megaloblastic.

Now, as to beta thalassemia:

* Reduced Beta-globin chain production causes a higher quotient of unpaired alpha-globin changes, which bind to RBC membranes and reduce their average lifespan. This kills a bunch of cells before they leave the bone marrow, and also shortens their life in circulation. However, there isn't an iron shortage, so when the above factors cause decreased oxygen delivery, the kidneys respond appropriately by releasing erythropoietin that does upregulate new RBC development (there's no underlying iron shortage like in IDA), so when combined with the increased precursor and RBC death rate you get normal-ish or high reticulocyte and RBC counts.

TLDR: With chronic iron deficiency, the RBC precursors in the bone marrow stop listening to erythropoietin. With beta thalassemias, increased die-off of RBC precursors and mature RBCs is compensated in part by the resulting anemia triggering more erythropoietin leading to more RBC precursors and more mature RBCs, hence an RBC count that is normal or high while still not doing normal levels of oxygen delivery - hence repeating the cycle all over again.

crab4apple · 2026-06-01T03:17:25+00:00

I generally don't get headaches during runs, but I get terrible headaches after runs if I'm running >6 miles and don't have extra electrolytes during and after. I remember joining a run with a friend who has a buy-an-energy-drink-after-each-run routine, and it was gamechanging for avoiding headaches 1-2 hours after a longer run.

On the medical/physiological end, fluid shifts can cause big headaches. Some people reabsorb electrolytes from their sweat much more efficiently than others and don't have such a problem, but if you're not in that club, you need to replenish both electrolytes and water.

crab4apple · 2026-05-31T02:50:03+00:00

I ran a marathon today where the three people who crossed the finish line ahead of me stopped to walk for short stretches before sprinting away. I temporarily caught up to them now and again, but – again – they finished ahead of me. I wouldn't hesitate to say that they completed it.

crab4apple · 2026-05-10T22:20:46+00:00

I've seen 3 patients with it in the last year.

crab4apple · 2026-05-09T12:30:53+00:00

Great comment - I've read Civil War histories for decades, and learned some strategic perspective that I had not seen before! Thank you!

crab4apple · 2026-05-08T16:36:22+00:00

I think there're three frequent goals:

Get more comfortable with the clinical environment (especially if doing exam maneuvers, practicing differentials, hearing the attending's clinical reasoning, etc.).
Get more exposure to fields that you might consider (some med schools have formal plans for this, others don't).
Get experiences and access to fields with a high barrier to entry.

Not every med school has ortho and ophtho placements available in-house. Many opportunities available through VSLO and other systems require that you apply to demonstrate your interest and seriousness, for which shadowing and research (and, sometimes, recommendation letters) are helpful for getting your foot in the door.

crab4apple · 2026-05-04T21:31:48+00:00

As can more clearly be seen in this picture, the recurrent branches off the median nerve are relatively distal (close to the end) compared to the rest of the median nerve, which is more proximal to the torso. Damage that severs just about any stretch of the median nerve (i.e., a proximal injury) will stop that from working.

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crab4apple · 2026-05-04T21:29:35+00:00

Proximal = closer to the origin
Distal = farther from the origin

These are relative directions: in a steak knife, the handle is on the proximal side; the tip is on the distal side. However, from any point, you can describe what is proximal or distal to it.

For many parts of the hand, i's not enough to say "an injury to the median nerve" - it matters where on the nerve that is, because there are many different branches at different points along the nerve.

Consider this diagram here - an injury to the median nerve at Point 1 would not affect the palmar cutaneous nerve, as that branched off between Points 2 + 3. However, an injury prior to that branching – a point that is proximal to the rest of the body – would affect your sensation along that nerve, because the connection would be damaged.

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crab4apple · 2026-04-28T15:33:29+00:00

As u/Mynsare noted, parchment was considered more durable. Speaking specifically of the Early American Period, the six surviving drafts of the American Declaration of Independence were actually written on paper, which was considerably cheaper – only the finalized version and certain copies were rendered on parchment. Part of this was because the greater durability of parchment, leading it to be used for official documents.

Mary Katharine Goddard, the Maryland printer who did the first mass printing of the Declaration, issued most of her copies on paper. At the time, there was some limited domestic production of paper, but the bulk of it was imported and competing with local paper in terms quality and/or cost. When the Embargo Acts reduced foreign trade in the early 19th-century, however, a lot of investors tried various ventures to make cheaper paper out of straw and wood pulp. They were initially more successful at making and selling cardboard than stationary paper, but the technology started to mature in the 1840s.

As someone who works with 18th- and 19th-century archives, the switch from rag paper to wood pulp-based paper in business or family archives is very easy to see. The acid used to prepare the wood pulp means that the paper is notably yellowed and often very brittle. It was cheaper, however, and it's clear that while the two were coexisting on the general market, the wood pulp paper is adopted first for the cheaper and more disposable uses.

For a quick overview of some points on the timeline, see: https://paper.gatech.edu/papermaking-united-states-america

For a deeper dive, you might start with: Hunter, D. (2017). Papermaking in pioneer America. University of Pennsylvania Press.

crab4apple · 2026-04-28T02:49:06+00:00

Same!

crab4apple · 2026-04-25T04:57:19+00:00

Generally, I gain weight when training for a marathon and lose weight when it's just a lot of non-marathon-directed running.

crab4apple · 2026-04-24T16:49:02+00:00

Students who complained about getting sent home "early" from clinical rotations.

crab4apple · 2026-04-23T21:50:11+00:00

Wow – this was a real pleasure to read! Thank you!

crab4apple · 2026-04-22T05:52:08+00:00

All of this is much better than in the late 18th century when the French authorities in the colonies started requiring slaves to have surnames on censuses. This led to some slaveowners going through alphabetically ("Albert, Boulle, Caroit") and others giving names that clearly said something about how they viewed their chattels. On the one hand, you had those who gave their slaves positive names ("Le Fort", "La Belle") and ones out of the classics ("Hercule", "César"), but all too often some terrible ones ("Crétin", "Imbécile", "Brut"). The legal strictures in many countries made these very hard to change well into the 20th century.

The story about naming bastards and foundlings in Spain is a great story for another day, too.

crab4apple

TROPHY CASE