• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 353 0

this. I had five sisters, and I was the youngest. What loving and magnificent sisters I had. But one of my sisters was murdered. Young Bess was returning home two nights before New Year’s through a path in Van Cortlandt Park, when a sexual pervert jumped out of the bushes and exposed himself to her. In shock, she escaped, and ran home one mile, sweaty in the chill weather. Within two days, Bess fell ill and died. I still miss our darling Bess, and feel Bess was murdered by this criminal who took her life away, no less than the monster who killed Kitty Genovese.”…The Genovese murder caused many pundits to dust off a famous remark uttered by Edmund Burke two centuries earlier: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” It seemed to perfectly sum up what happened that night. But Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, could never find anything like this line in Burke’s writings. Which means that this famous quotation—along with, seemingly, half the quotes attributed to Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde—appears to be as apocryphal as the story of the thirty-eight witnesses.

CHAPTER 4: THE FIX IS IN—AND IT’S CHEAP AND SIMPLE

MATERNAL DEATH RATES: For recent figures, see “Maternal Mortality in 2005: Estimates Developed by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, and the World Bank,” World Health Organization, 2007. For historical rates, see Irvine Loudon, “Maternal Mortality in the Past and Its Relevance to Developing Countries Today,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 72, no. 1 (July 2000).

IGNATZ SEMMELWEIS COMES TO THE RESCUE: The story of Ignatz Semmelweis has been told variously over the years, but perhaps the most impressive telling is Sherwin B. Nuland, The Doctor’s Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignatz Semmelweis (Atlas Books, 2003). This may be because Nuland is a physician himself. We have drawn substantially from his book, and we are greatly indebted. See also: Ignatz Semmelweis, “The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever,” trans. K. Codell Carter (University of Wisconsin Press, 1983; originally published 1861). Note: Puerpera is Latin for a woman who has given birth.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: For an overview, see Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “Unintended Consequence,” The New York Times Magazine, January 20, 2008. / 139 For the Americans with Disabilities Act, see Daron Acemoglu and Joshua D. Angrist, “Consequences of Employment Protection? The Case of the Americans with Disabilities Act,” Journal of Political Economy 109, no. 5 (2001). / 139 For the Endangered Species Act, see Dean Lueck and Jeffrey A. Michael, “Preemptive Habitat Destruction Under the Endangered Species Act,” Journal of Law and Economics 46 (April 2003); and John A. List, Michael Margolis, and Daniel E. Osgood, “Is the Endangered Species Act Endangering Species?” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, December 2006. / 139 Avoiding the trash tax: for the “Seattle Stomp,” the Charlottesville woods-dumping, and other tactics, see Don Fullerton and Thomas C. Kinnaman, “Household Responses to Pricing Garbage by the Bag,” American Economic Review 86, no. 4 (September 1996); for German food-flushing, see Roger Boyes, “Children Beware: The Rats Are Back and Hamelin Needs a New Piper,” The Times (London), December 17, 2008; for backyard burning in Dublin, see S.M. Murphy, C. Davidson, A.M. Kennedy, P.A. Eadie, and C. Lawlor, “Backyard Burning,” Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgery 61, no. 1 (February 2008). / 140 The sabbatical backlash: see Solomon Zeitlin, “Prosbol: A Study in Tannaitic Jurisprudence,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 37, no. 4 (April 1947). (Thanks to Leon Morris for the tip.)

FORCEPS HOARDING: See James Hobson Aveling, The Chamberlens and the Midwifery Forceps (J. & A. Churchill, 1882); Atul Gawande, “The Score: How Childbirth Went Industrial,” The New Yorker, October 2, 2006; and Stephen J. Dubner, “Medical Failures, and Successes Too: A Q&A with Atul Gawande,” Freakonomics blog, The New York Times, June 25, 2007.

MORE