Le Quatrième Pentamètre

Bleu Nattier

Some considerations have been lost sight of in the mad race to live forever. An old saying among the Negroes is that "some folks just don't make old bones." That tendency may save you from some worse fate which nature might have in store for you. 

However, people can grow old gracefully. You do see hale and hearty and happy folks still usefully working after the age of eighty-five. 

But they are fearfully outnumbered by the ones with the inability or disinclination to work, tle and kindly and full of wisdom as they grow older. More commonly, I should say, they are irritable and malignant and dull. Never envy the aged. 

Life is a real battle to keep comfortable after the age of sixty-seven. Everyone has an obligation to keep as young as possible. That implies useful work no matter how humble, and some serenity of mind, and normal weight, and daily outdoor exercise, and enough amino acids in fresh fat meat to do a good job of repair on breaking-down arteries. 

And that is a big order. If it can be fulfilled a lot of other things can safely be left to nature. 

She was practicing medicine a long time before anyone heard of physicians.

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The Egyptian Blue

Egyptian Blue is the oldest known artificial pigment.The Blue color has been throughout the history of humanity one of the most quoted, identified by it with royalty and divinity, due to the difficulty of its obtaining.Blue pigments were used from very old, but later than others such as red, Black, brown, or ochre, easier to get in nature and used already in the art.But the most quoted blue pigment came from minerals such as lapis, scarce and rare, and therefore very expensive. The largest lapis deposits are located in the Hindukush of Afghanistan, where they are still exploited with procedures very similar to employees more than 3.000 years ago.The Egyptians cared about those mines large amounts of lapis to obtain the azurite, the dust that provided the blue pigment with which they adorned their artistic works. Its price was so high that even in medieval times still cuadriplicaba the gold.That's why towards 3000 BC they sought a way to make their own blue pigment. Little by little, they were perfecting the technique, which consisted of grinding silica, lime, copper, and an alkaline base, and heat it at 800-900 degrees Celsius. The result obtained is considered the first synthetic pigment in history.The Egyptians used it to paint wood, papyri, and canvases, coloring enamels, inlays, and vessels. But especially in the funerary field in masks, statues, and paintings of the graves, as they believed that the blue color protected the dead from evil in the other life.

The oldest known example of the pigment dates from about 5000 years ago and was found in the painting of a tomb of the reign of ka-Sen, the last Pharaoh of the first dynasty. In the new kingdom, the Egyptian Blue was used abundantly as a pigment being found in statues, paintings of tombs, and sarcophagi.

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Orders must be like treatment itself - simple and strong and expressed in the clearest terms. Doubts assail me. Medicine has in it all the drama of life and death, wonder and awe and majesty, pathos and stark staring tragedy, humor and low comedy. One would need the gift of tongues and of angels to describe it. And literary skill requires an inherited bent with endless practice in making words sing. None of these do I have, so that would suggest the need of a competent ghost writer. Negative! Medicine has too much dignity to allow for the liberties a ghost writer might take. Booth Tarkington was right when he said that as a man gets along in years the respect of his colleagues becomes all important. And one should stand or fall by his own written word. There are other qualms. If a book does not have a certain literary value it won't be published. Publishers are not in business for their health. Still the contentious new ideas might carry a book, if complicated medical terminology could be avoided. When opportunities have been great in medicine some sort of an accounting of stewardship is in order. It isn't right to have so much of what you think you have learned die with you. Practicing medicine in a great and wonderful city for fortyeight years puts one a little in the class of Old Man River. You must know something, if you just keep rolling along. Discarding the seed catalogue, I resolutely turn to my desk, with a cheerful thought paraphrasing Admiral Farragut: "Damn the split infinitives! Go ahead!"