Word: monkey
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Through the years, even the name went through strange evolutions. Simla Vulpina (fox-monkey), after Martyr's description, turned out to be the Boschrot of Dutch explorers, the rat de bois of Louisiana's French trappers, didelphys in the classic zoology of Linnaeus and finally the modern opossum. This is the Indian name as recorded by Captain John Smith at Jamestown. But even Smith was wrong, said the King's surveyor in Carolina. The word was possum, preceded by a grunt, hence the opossum...
...take a look in a room in Steenbock's attic. What the health officers found there was enough to make their flesh crawl: half-dead on a filthy mattress huddled a tiny, emaciated creature that looked less like a child than some weird variety of furless monkey. It was about 3 ft. tall, weighed less than 20 Ibs. Long, black hair hung in greasy strings around its shriveled face. It was too weak to stand or even crawl. The sight was a shocker in itself, but the real shocker came with identification. The pathetic little creature was Farmer Steenbock...
...After eight months she filed for divorce, but changed her mind. Admitted Brown: "I don't know why she took me back, because I'm a beast. I bought a monkey as a pet and the mon ey bit her. I pulled the phone out by the roots . . . pushed her in the swimming pool . . . turned the fire hose on her friends...
Rough & Ready. Research doctors are now trying desperately to find ways & means of telling the true polio cases from the false. In at least three U.S. cities, they are working with tissue cultures from pieces of human organs or monkey testicle, on which polio virus grows and has a destructive effect. This way, they are able to tell in about a week whether the patient has had polio or not. But this technique is not generally available to physicians or even large hospitals; it is still in the research stage...
Until three years ago, when a team headed by Boston's Dr. John F. Enders reported that these test-tube cultures provided a test for the presence of polio and similar viruses, it used to take a monkey a month to confirm a single diagnosis of polio. That was impractical. Many physicians relied (and still do) on a microscopic examination of a droplet of fluid taken by puncture from the patient's spinal column. In normal, healthy fluid, there are few or no cells-not more than eight to the cubic millimeter. In victims of virus diseases like...