The Hall of Presidents

Special thanks to my children, Henry and Alice, for taking half an hour away from their Disney vacation so that I could visit the Hall of Presidents for this review. When I asked my son afterward if he enjoyed the presentation, he paused for a moment before saying, “I want to say yes but I didn’t.”

Air-Conditioning

The idea for this essay came from my friend Ryan Sandahl, who told me the story of Willis Carrier. I also relied on Margaret Ingels’s book Willis Haviland Carrier: Father of Air Conditioning. The information about the role air-conditioning and cooling fans play in climate change came from the International Energy Agency’s 2018 report, “The Future of Cooling.” Data about the 2003 heat wave catastrophe came from a report first published in France in 2008 in Comptes Rendus Biologies. John Huxham’s account of the 1757 European heat wave was first published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; I learned about it via Wikipedia. For understanding the ways air-conditioning has changed architecture, I am indebted to an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible.

Staphylococcus aureus

I’ve wanted to write about staph since my doctor told me about my fascinatingly aggressive colony of them. I was on so many different antibiotics in an attempt to control the infection that, at one point, the doctor needed to confirm I hadn’t previously taken the drug he wanted to prescribe for me. “This pill is yellow,” the doctor said. “Have you taken a yellow pill before?” Maybe, I told him. “This pill is circular. Have you taken a circular pill before?” Again, maybe. “This drug costs $700 per pill,” he then said. “Have you taken a pill—”

“No,” I said. The drug cost me $2,000 even though we had health insurance, but we’re not here to review the U.S.’s one-and-a-half-star healthcare system. The quotes from and about Alexander Ogston in this essay come from the book Alexander Ogston, K.C.V.O.: Memories and Tributes of Relatives, Colleagues and Students, with Some Autobiographical Writings, which was compiled by Ogston’s son Walter. Most interesting to me were the recollections written by Ogston’s daughters, Helen and Constance, and those written by his colleagues. The stat about Boston City Hospital in 1941 came from a 2010 Journal of the Association of Basic Medical Sciences article, “Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) as a Cause of Nosocomial Wound Infections,” by Maida Šiširak, Amra Zvizdić, and Mirsada Hukić, which also helped me understand the contemporary disease burden of staph infections. I learned about Albert Alexander and his daughter Sheila (now Sheila LeBlanc) from a 2012 Press-Enterprise newspaper article by Penny Schwartz, “Local Artists Share Childhood Bond,” which is also how I came to see some of LeBlanc’s paintings. Much of the information about the synthesis of penicillin comes from Robert Gaynes’s 2012 article in Emerging Infectious Diseases, “The Discovery of Penicillin—New Insights After More Than 75 Years of Clinical Use.” I also learned a lot about staph and Ogston’s role in discovering it from S. W. B. Newsom’s article in The Journal of Hospital Infection, “Ogston’s Coccus.”