I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks. ~ Janet Flanner, American journalist
Readers of Shelved in the W's may be interested to know that, after a year's silence in which I attended to a serious family illness while at the same time moving to a new job, I have decided to continue writing about health, libraries, the web, and anything else that I happen to soak up.
My new blog is called Gossypiboma - for no other reason than that I liked the word when I first encountered it, with its peculiar, continent-striding etymology, the tang of operating room antiseptic, and overtones of high-minded indiscretion. See my first post at the new blog site for a definition.
Do a search on gossypiboma in PubMed for the fun of it. You'll find a perfect example of how a relatively straightforward concept can become lost in a gauzy tangle of MeSH headings. All of the following terms have been used by PubMed indexers to categorize articles on gossypibomas:
- Surgical Sponges (often with the subheading /adverse effects)
- Foreign Bodies
- Foreign-Body Migration
- Foreign-Body Reaction
- Granuloma, Foreign-Body
- ... and occasionally Bandages.
I hope those of you who have been retentive readers will journey on with me as I set out in some new directions. There is so much information to explore. Let us absorb it together.
William Osler tells us in one of his aphorisms: "An old writer says that there are four sorts of readers: Sponges, which attract all without distinguishing; Howre-glasses, which receive and powre out as fast; Bagges, which retain the degrees of the spices and let the wine escape; and SIEVES, which retain the best only. A man wastes a great many years before he reaches the 'sieve' stage."
Reader, I am more Sponge than Sieve. But I will try to retain the best. And we all want to avoid becoming stuck at the Bagge stage.
