Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (38 page)

• We read that Abraham Lincoln was born in Illinois, so that’s what we wrote in
Uncle John’s Great Big Bathroom Reader.
But we goofed. A multitude of readers kindly pointed out that Abe was not born in Illinois—he was born in a log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. (OK, but he moved to Illinois when he was very young.)

• If you own the first edition of
Uncle John’s Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader,
you might have noticed that there was no running foot on
page 398
. Actually there was… but it was invisible. We later replaced it with one that people could see.

• BRI member Ed J. pointed out this one: “The one-liner at the bottom of
page 77
of
Great Big
is in error. It states that the odds of the average golfer making a hole-in-one are 33,676 to 1. This would make a hole-in-one very commonplace. It should read, ‘The odds
against
the average golfer making a hole-in-one are 33,676 to 1.’ ”

You’re right, Ed. But we think people still got the idea.

• In
Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader,
we state that the fuel economy of an early automobile called the Davis was 65 mph. We meant mpg. Oops.

• And for all of you who wrote in letting us know that the General Sherman tree (Great Big
Bathroom Reader,
page 391
) is
not
the oldest living thing on Earth, we know. Well, now we do. The oldest tree is actually a bristlecone pine. Believe it or not, we got the original info from the National Park Service.

• We hoped you enjoyed our article on
page 215
in the 1st edition of
Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader
entitled “Manimals Famous for 15 Minutes.” What’s a manimal? We don’t know either.

• Here’s a classic: We once reported that Gandhi was buried in California. Boy, did we hear it on that one. For the record, his ashes were spread in many places all over the world, including California.

• Maybe you’re one of the lucky few who have the first printing of
Uncle John’s
All-Pupose
Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.
To find out if you do, check out the copyright page at the beginning and see if yours says
Uncle John’s
All-Pupose
Extra Strength Bathroom Reader
at the top. Just in case you’re wondering, we did that on pupose.

• In the
Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader,
on
page 73
, we didn’t mean to say that Mt. Everest, the world’s highest mountain, is in India, but that’s how it came out. We know it’s in Nepal. Really.

• In our
All-Purpose Extra Strength
press release to over 5,000 BRI members, we proudly stated that the book would be available in every state in the U.S. and every providence in Canada. Thank you to everyone who informed us that Canada has provinces, not providences. We knew that.

• This one may be our all-time favorite. In
Absolutely Absorbing,
one running foot says that “Ants don’t sleep.” Skip ahead a few pages and you’ll learn that “Ants yawn when they wake up.” Well, do they sleep or not? It turns out that they only rest, but they do stretch before they resume their work.

• And finally, this is for all of you that looked up the word “gullible” and found out that it is indeed in the dictionary: it was a joke, only a joke. Apparently you fell for it.

We’re back with another “regular” installment of brainteasers. Answers are on
page 507
.

1.
If you went to bed at 8 o’clock at night and wound your alarm clock to go off at 9:00 the next morning, how much sleep would you get?

2.
Why can’t a man living in North Carolina be buried in South Carolina?

3.
If you had only one match and you entered a room in which there was a kerosene lamp, an oil heater, and a wood-burning stove, which would you light first?

4.
Two men were playing checkers. Each played five games and each won the same number of games. No draws.

How can this be?

5.
You have two coins in your hands equaling 55 cents. One of them is not a nickel.

What are the coins?

6.
It is a scientific fact that a person eats over an inch of dirt at every meal.

How is this possible?

7.
Jeff bought a word processor small enough to fit in his pocket. It can add, multiply, subtract, divide, and write in all languages. It has a delete device that will correct any error, and no electricity is required to operate it. Amazingly, it costs only 12 cents. How can it be so cheap?

8.
A farmer has 17 sheep. All but 9 die. How many sheep are left?

9.
A man married 48 women. None of them died, he was never divorced, and he was one of the most admired men in town.

How come?

10.
If a doctor gave you 3 pills and told you to take one every half hour, how long would they last you?

11.
If a farmer has 5 haystacks in one field and 4 in the other field, how many haystacks would he have if he combined them all in the center field?

The cost of a single Trident submarine could cover the cost of operating the U.N. for 4 years.

Of all the incredible women we’ve ever read about, Dr. Sara Josephine Baker is one of
the
most incredible. Her accomplishments are astounding, especially when you consider the time in which she lived. Next time you think one person can’t make a difference, remember Dr. Baker.

Sara Josephine Baker was born to a life of privilege in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1873. In those days there were no water treatment plants or indoor plumbing—people pulled their drinking water right out of the Hudson River. Unfortunately, the Baker family lived downstream from a hospital that discharged its waste into the same river. The hospital treated people suffering from typhoid fever—and the typhoid germs went straight into the water. Baker’s father and younger brother both contracted the disease and died when she was 16 years old.

Although the family was left with no income and small savings, Baker announced that she wanted to go to college to become a doctor, so that she could combat diseases like typhoid. But not many women became doctors in those days. Nevertheless, the young woman insisted, and her mother finally agreed.

In 1900, after graduating from the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary and completing her internship, Baker hung out her shingle in New York City. The next year, she took the civil service exam and scored very high—high enough to qualify for the job of medical inspector for the Department of Health.

Perhaps because she was a woman, she was given the worst assignment of all: reducing the death rate in Hell’s Kitchen—one of the worst slums in New York. But among rat-infested buildings crammed with poverty-stricken immigrants, Dr. Baker found her calling. She went from tenement to tenement, searching for people with infectious diseases.

No kidding—when astronauts returned from the moon, they had to go through customs.

She said, “I climbed stair after stair, knocked on door after door, met drunk after drunk, filthy mother after filthy mother and dying baby after dying baby.” Every week, more than 4,500 people in this district died from cholera, dysentery, smallpox, typhoid, and other illnesses, fully a third of them newborn babies. Dr. Baker rolled up her sleeves and went to work.

Focusing on the infant mortality rate, Baker led a team of nurses who went door to door teaching mothers the value of nutrition, cleanliness, and ventilation. She set up milk stations where free pasteurized milk was given away; she standardized inspections of schoolchildren for contagious diseases; she insisted each school needed its own doctor and nurse; she set up a system for licensing midwives; she invented a simple baby formula that mothers could mix up at home; and she devised a widespread club for young girls to teach them how to properly babysit their younger siblings. In short, she set up a comprehensive health-care program for the prevention of disease in children. Her goal: Prevent disease rather than treating it after it occurred.

Baker found that babies wrapped in cumbersome clothing were dying of the oppressive heat or from accidental suffocation. So she designed baby clothing that was light, roomy, comfortable, and opened down the front. This clothing became so popular so quickly that McCall’s Pattern Company bought the design, paying Baker a penny royalty for each one sold. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company ordered 200,000 copies of the pattern and distributed them to policy holders.

She also found that babies routinely received silver nitrate eyedrops to prevent blindness from gonorrhea. But bottles of the solution often became contaminated, or they evaporated so that the concentration of silver nitrate was at a dangerous level, thus causing the blindness it was intended to prevent. Baker invented a foolproof sanitary solution: beeswax capsules, each containing enough solution for one eye. The capsules could not become contaminated and the drops inside could not evaporate. The method was soon being used around the world, and the rate of blindness in babies plummeted.

In ancient Rome, any house hit by lightning was considered consecrated.

After finding that orphanages had a high rate of infant deaths, Baker became one of the first people to theorize that babies who received no cuddling and cooing simply died of loneliness. After a plan was followed to place orphaned infants with foster mothers, the death rate dropped.

Because of Baker’s efforts, the city created the Division of Child Hygiene in 1908 and appointed her the chief. Within 15 years, New York City had the lowest infant mortality rate of any city in the United States or Europe. An astounding statistic: It’s estimated that from 1908, when she went to work for the new division, to 1923, when she left, she saved some 82,000 lives.

Dr. Baker was without doubt the leading expert of the time on children’s health. In 1916 the dean of the New York University Medical School asked her to lecture his students on the subject. She agreed, on one condition—that he allow her to enroll in the school and attend classes. He refused; women weren’t allowed at his college. So she told him to find someone else. But there wasn’t anyone who knew as much as Baker did. He finally gave in, and because he allowed
her
to attend the college, he had to open the campus to other women as well. In 1917 she became the first woman to receive a doctorate in public health from the school.

World War I strained the U.S. economy, and the poor got poorer. Baker pointed out to a reporter of
The New York Times
that American soldiers were dying at the rate of 4%, while babies in the United States were dying at the rate of 12%, making it safer to be a soldier in the trenches of France than to be born in the USA. Because of the publicity this generated, she was able to start a city-wide school lunch program for older children, which became a model for the world.

Suddenly, Dr. Baker was in high demand. An international charity asked her to take care of war refugees in France. London offered her the job of health director for their public school system. But she turned the offers down and was appointed Assistant Surgeon General of the United States, the first woman ever to receive a
federal government position.

There is a species of butterfly in Brazil that has the color and fragrance of chocolate.

What else did this amazing woman accomplish? Following her retirement in 1923:

• She represented the United States on the Health Committee of the League of Nations, as the first woman to be a professional representative to the League.

• She helped apprehend Typhoid Mary—twice.

• She oversaw creation of the Federal Children’s Bureau and Public Health Services, which evolved into the Department of Health and Human Services.

• She helped establish child hygiene departments in every state in the union.

• She served as a member of over 25 medical societies.

• She was a consultant to the New York State Department of Health.

• She served as president of the American Medical Women’s Association.

• She wrote over 250 articles and five books, including her autobiography in 1939.

Dr. Baker’s enduring legacy: by the time she died in 1945, over half of the babies born each year in New York City were cared for at the health stations she established.