The Fevers of Reason. Gerald Weissmann
flights after eleven cases of Ebola were tracked to an American passenger from Liberia. Sure enough: as of October 23, 2014, WHO had already declared these two countries free of Ebola. Meanwhile, in Dallas, Mr. Duncan’s family was free of Ebola after twenty-one days of enforced quarantine, and the two nurses he infected were convalescing after treatment in the most modern isolation units. That’s the sort of good news a cordon sanitaire can bring.
THERE’S ALSO GOOD NEWS FROM THE LAB. Basic science works: dynamin, a mechano-chemical enzyme responsible for shuttling cargo in cells (Ahearn et al.), was discovered in 1989 by Howard Shpetner and Richard Vallee, then at the Worcester Foundation (now part of the University of Massachusetts). It turned out that dynamin can choreograph the pathway of viruses in cells. Dynamin not only hobbles the sticking of the virus to the cell’s surface, but also promotes uptake of virus-filled vesicles from cell membranes. Dynamin opens the door to Ebola virus, as described in Aleksandrowicz et al., and helps unload the backpacks. Happily, we’ve moved closer from the lab to the clinic: in animal experiments, dynamin inhibitors such as dynasore already have been seen to stop the virus (Macia et al.). Better yet, the newest dynamin inhibitors (the bisphosphonates used to prevent osteoporosis) can already be found on many a woman’s medicine shelf.
Has the time come to use osteoporosis drugs for Ebola? To quote Mary McCarthy’s Pokey, “Who would have thunk it?”
Zika, Kale, and Calligraphy: Ricky Jay and Matthias Buchinger
Phocomelia (from Gr. phōkē ‘seal’ + melos ‘limb.’) = limbs reduced to a very small volume and hidden under the integument like seals’.
—Isidore Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire (1836)
Dr. Schuler-Faccini [is] now focused on [describing] the specific brain abnormalities of [Zika-]affected babies, as well as other associated defects, including neurological outcomes, joint abnormalities, and face characteristics.
—Teratology Society (June 2016)
FETAL ABNORMALITIES CAUSED by the mosquito-borne Zika virus first came to public attention in January 2016, the same month that many of us learned of a “29-inch-tall phocomelic overachiever” named Matthias Buchinger (1674–1739). For this we can thank Ricky Jay, a popular magician of our day who found his avatar in decades of “Peregrinations in Search of the ‘Little Man of Nuremberg.’” Ricky Jay paid a fitting tribute to his hero in an exhibit of his collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which accompanied a richly illustrated, companion volume. Jay has assembled a cabinet of graphic curiosities by and about this phocomelic overachiever, replete with portraits, broadsides, family trees, and coats of arms. Several advertise the Buchinger feats of skill at magic, musketry, skittles, and musical performance; most bear the telltale signature, “Matthias Buchinger born without hands or feet.” Jay has the credentials to make Buchinger matter: Charles McGrath wrote in the New York Times that many consider Jay the “greatest sleight-of-hand artist alive, as well as a scholar, a historian, a collector of curiosities.”
JAY HAS WRITTEN ABOUT BUCHINGER BEFORE, as one in a gallery of curious historical characters. In his 2016 volume Jay addresses Buchinger’s mastery of micrography—the art of writing texts almost invisible to the naked eye—and explains how he accumulated a treasury of calligraphy by this tiny conjurer who had “two excrescences growing from the shoulder-blades, more resembling the fins of a fish than arms of a man.” A connoisseur’s passion convinced Jay that there was always more Buchinger material to be collected. His quest led him to dealers, print experts, and fans of micrography on both sides of the Atlantic. At one auction, Jay and Nicolas Barker of the British Museum competed for a grand collection but, because of its cost, were forced to divide the material. Jay tells us, “This proved surprisingly easy, as I took all the materials of armless calligraphers and Nicolas received the work of calligraphers conventionally digited.”
Enlarged images in Jay’s book show how Buchinger cunningly wove miniature texts into the crannies of calendars, portraits, and coats of arms. Two high-resolution images are exemplary. In Buchinger’s posthumous portrait of Queen Anne (1718), limned in ink on vellum, the curls of the queen’s hair are formed by micrographic letters that painstakingly spell out three chapters from the Book of Kings. In a stippled engraving from a 1724 self-portrait, Buchinger used micrographic lettering to form his florid wig: the text spells out seven complete psalms and the Lord’s Prayer!
Jay tells us that viewers “respond to Buchinger’s micrography as they do to the performance of magic: when they are stunned, or stumped, they seek an explanation.” Biologists will not be surprised that Robert Hooke’s name pops up here; Buchinger lived in the golden age of the microscope. Hooke’s novel images of cellules in Micrographia (1675) and Antonj van Leeuwenhoek’s pictures of “animalcules” in semen (1677) may well have prepared Buchinger’s patrons for a new world of magic in magnification.
JAY WAS DRAWN TO BUCHINGER not only for the little man’s skill at micrographics but also by the story of a fellow conjurer who performed sleight-of-hand without hands: “magical tricks, performances on a variety of musical instruments, trick shots with pistols and swords, and bowling.” From his childhood in Bavaria, where he was called a “thimble,” Buchinger became increasingly famous over Western Europe as a skilled performer. He was a whiz at card play, swordplay, and even at dancing the hornpipe in a Scottish kilt. He entertained audiences at street fairs and manor houses, public inns and royal seats; he appeared in venues ranging from Leipzig to Dublin, the Tuileries in Paris to the Court of Saint James’s in London. A 1726 broadside described him as “The Greatest German Living”—this in the reign of the Hanoverian George I.
Equally surprising was Buchinger’s private life. Jay has quipped that this dwarf without arms and feet had at least one operating appendage: he managed to wed four wives and claim fatherhood of fourteen children. Buchinger’s somewhat Freudian drawing of his family tree is neatly reproduced in Jay’s book. Dated 1734, the two-page cutout depicts the artist’s children—eight living, six dead; born in Zurich, London, or Dublin—as fruit hanging from the branches of a tall, thick paternal trunk. The tree is solidly planted on rootless lumps of soil atop the steles of four women, three dead and one living. Tiny flowers sprinkle the field, micrographic gametes in a pictorial autobiography. That “Greatest German” broadside described it thus:
Great Trunk of Man be not ashamed
That Nature has thy Body maim’d
The Oak could not the Trophy bear
Till that the branches cropped were,
Nor would thy fame hae been so great,
Had Nature formed thee quite compleat.
As for that “Greatest German” claim of fourteen seminal trophies, his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach (1785–1850) had Buchinger beat. Formed “quite compleat” and conventionally digited, Bach fathered twenty children with two wives and had time left over for the Mass in B Minor. But Buchinger over his lifetime entertained audiences far more diverse in rank and geography than did the composer—and with neater penmanship to boot.
Readers figuring out how this “Body maim’d” became a paterfamilias will also wonder how Buchinger mastered miniscule calligraphy without the aid of optical gadgets. Ricky Jay was also puzzled by this and posed the question to several eminent artists. Their verdict came out on the side of lenses: Art Spiegelman, Erich Fischl, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha guessed that Buchinger used magnifying lenses, possibly fixed to a ring-stand apparatus not uncommon at the time. Jay, writing “as a magician” concludes that Buchinger probably did ordinary lettering in public—a stunt in itself without digits—but worked out micrography in private, with magnifying lenses.
“Sure he did,” Jay concludes skeptically, while remaining a fan of a