Thread by @ProfDFrancis

"What have the Romans ever done for us?"
============================

[A cautionary tweetorial from ORBITA-HQ. #Foamed]

Actually, their biggest contribution was not the roads, or the baths, or the sewage system, or aqueducts, or the many other things that first jump to mind.

In my opinion, their standout contribution to us in healthcare is that of the learned doctor Caecilius.

Faced with the tedium of having to classify his slaves for work capacity, he found age and sex too simplistic. He created an extra component for the effort they could make.

In the modern era of political correctness, we rarely speak of his innovation, erupting in rage when he saw young slaves standing about idly.

"Nonne Juvenes Habitus Ambulatio?"

Or "Why don't these young men even bother to walk around?"

The NJHA scale was widely used to classify physical fitness of slaves in the mediterranean.

Historians relate the grades as follows

I - VELUT BOS (as strong as an ox)

II - XX LIBRAS FATIGATIS (gets tired when carrying ~10 kg)

III - XX GRADIBUS FATIGATIS (gets tired at 20 steps)

IV - FESSI ET QUIETEM (tired even though at rest)

The Romans were adamant that there was no number "zero". There was no symbol for it. So tip-top perfect health for a slave, bounding about the garden, pulling up trees for fun, would be "NJHA I".

In a kinder modern era, where there are no slaves, the New York Heart Association adopted the NJHA scale, for heart failure, and backronymmed it to NYHA, to ablate the inhumane pedigree.

To this day, Caecilius's scale is in use.

What do you think NYHA class I means?

You are obviously a prodigious Latinists, since you've hit the nail on the head!

Your NJHA class I slave is in tip-top perfect health, and racing round the arena earning you plaudits from the emperor.

So now you know the Romans set up the NJHA scale to protect us from this:

The invention of the "zero" symbol is, in my mind, the only instance where every nation thanks another nation for its introduction!

In the western world we think the Arabs created it.

The Arabs give credit to the Indians.

I am sure the Indians pass credit on Eastwards to the Chinese etc, but they do seem to have the first documented "zero" in history.

It was written by the great Indian mathematician Brahmagupta about 500 years after the fictional Caecilius passed away in the eruption of Vesuvius.

Brahamagupta, by the way, was the discoverer of the formula for solving quadratic equations.

If a x*x + b x + c = 0, he calculated that:

Although Algebra hadn't been invented yet, so he wrote:

Whatever is the square-root of the "rupas" multiplied by the square [and] increased by the square of half the unknown, diminish that by half the unknown and divide [the remainder] by its square. [The result is] the unknown

Anyway all these people were working hard over the centuries to protect us from this nonsense:

And definitely to protect us from a "mean" of an NYHA class that actually lies outside the range of actual NYHA classes!

Does it matter that someone writes a paper saying that when you give people stem cells, they get so much better that they are less symptomatic than the least symptomatic people on earth, namely asymptomatic people?

The problem is that people shy away from fraud when they see it. They try not to talk about it.

Alex Nowbar (now an ORBITA-HQ PhD student) spotted this and a few other impossibilities in that paper.

She led a team that in fact found hundreds of mathematical, logical or simply anatomical impossibilities in published papers reporting magically improving Ejection Fraction with stem cell therapy.

And the curious thing was, the more impossibilities, the bigger the effect size!

She called it the "Staircase of Shame"

bmj.com/content/bmj/34…

We pursued the most outrageous of the fraudsters, Dr Bodo Strauer, of Dusseldorf, and tried unsuccessfully to get his papers retracted. He retired early to escape punishment from his institution.

But now I regret not pursuing the others.

Because one of them has now popped up running the greatest pile of steaming horseshit about treatment of Covid, since the Great Leader promoted the ultraviolet lung therapy.

The full story is here:
cardiobrief.org/cvctcardiobrie…

Ah, I have an admission to make.

Lucius Caecilius Iucundus was a businessman who perished in an earthquake in AD 62, in the town of Pompeii.

For dramatic effect he is often said instead to have died in the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius, even though that was 17 years later.

His earliest interest was, in truth, not amateur physicianry, but rather his garden. Indeed, the first words of Latin understood by many Brits are,

"Caecilius est in horto".

So yes, I did exaggerate his contribution to the NYHA scale. But it still doesn't have a zero!