Word: spinal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...privilege of rendering the show's title song, a straw-hat-and-strut number. Kicking up their feet, slapping each other's backs, winking away as if they would never see unhappiness again, Noonoo and Emerson make the song's nostalgic electricity crawl right up the audience's collective spinal cord...
...pain felt? As long ago as 1826, Johannes Peter Müller promulgated the "law of specific nerve energies." He suggested that stimulation of specific pain receptors in the skin, like those for heat or pressure, sends impulses along specific nerve fibers to equally specific parts of the spinal cord and brain. This concept has since been called the "direct telephone-line system." The latest research shows that the system is by no means so simple as direct dialing. It is full of crossovers and redundancies, creating the effects of multiple conference calls and party lines...
...neurophysiologists now see it, when a man gets a shot of penicillin in the buttock, the stab sends an impulse along the nerve fibers to the fourth lumbar vertebra (see diagram). Then the impulse travels upward and soon crosses over to the opposite side of the spinal cord for its journey toward the brain. Along the way it triggers an automatic reflex that causes the man to flinch and tighten his gluteal muscle. After the impulse reaches the thalamus, a major (and evolutionally ancient) junction box at the base of the brain, where it is perceived as pain, it proceeds...
...analgesia, or relief of pain without loss of consciousness, is far more difficult to achieve. For cancer patients with intractable pain of indisputably physical origin, neurosurgeons have devised a number of radical operations. One of the commonest, for pain anywhere below the neck, is cordotomy-literally, cutting the spinal cord-a remedy that is less drastic than it sounds. In the standard operation, the cord is exposed and a small cut is made in the nerve bundles controlling the pain-afflicted area. The so-called cut may actually be a tiny electrical burn. Crue and his colleagues have just reported...
...center of most of the other dance numbers is Shannon Thompson, a girl who can't help but ignite you spinal chord. Miss Thompson is, quite simply, the best musical comedienne Cambridge could ever hope to have. From the first time I saw her (as a stripper in Gypsy, looking something like an eight-foot tall slutty butterfly), I knew this girl could do no wrong. As Lola, the sexiest witch of all time, she grabs more laughs than anyone (including no doubt the authors), ever knew existed in the role. Even here dancing has a certain humorous, self-mocking...