28th October

Sir Richard Doll was born today in 1912. You probably haven't heard of him but he is responsible for the greatest act of victimization of the 21st century. In establishing a link between lung cancer and smoking, he undoubtedly saved millions of lives but he also caused the sad clusters of determined smokers, dying of frostbite and pneumonia outside pubs and nightclubs and for those mysterious, locked cabinets behind counters in supermarkets. You may have wondered why those poor, lost souls are sticking pins into a waz effigy - that is a likeness of Sir Richard, known as a Voodoo Doll.

In other news ...
A Puritan college in Cambridge, Massachusetts got an injection of cash today from John Harvard who died of tuberculosis in 1638. The aim was that Harvard would one rival Oxford or Cambridge.

Perhaps one day ...

4th October

Karl Baedecker, the German publisher, died today in 1859. This is quite remarkable and an astonishing piece of research on my part (eat your heart out, Eric Hobsbawm RIP). Because during WW2 the Baedecker raids hit the very cities in Britain listed by Baedecker nearly a century earlier. Coincidence? I think not! Clearly, Karl Baedecker was an early member of the Nazi Party. Has nobody else noticed this?

In other news ...
As a kid I could never understand how the gadget developed by Paul Zoll at the Harvard Medical School actually worked. It was designed to control heartbeat and, as far as I knew, was called a peacemaker. I couldn't understand how a six-shot revolver carried by cowboys could be any help at all in that respect. That's why I became an historian rather than a cardiac surgeon and probably just as well.