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Bring out your dead! [was:] Gould & SARS



Title: RE: Gould & SARS
It was the niftiest favor a plague ever did. Newton was a 24-year-old student at Cambridge when the plague struck in 1666, and Cambridge closed and sent everyone home. In that "annus mirabilis" back at the family farm in Woolsthorpe (Lincolnshire), Newton solved all the revolutionary problems in physics and mathematics that eventually earned him his fame. It was during this year that the apple fell on his head -- apparently a true story -- and made him wonder if the force that drew the apple to the ground was the same force that kept the Moon orbiting the Earth.
 
Daniel Defoe was only about six years old when he witnessed the same Great Plague and the Great Fire in London. Fifty-five years later he wrote "A Journal of the Plague Year," a novel (he is often credited with inventing the form in English) in the form of a first-person memoir by a survivor. It's really spectacular and gripping, and even better, it's on-line at
 
http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Defoe/plagueyear/
 
Where else in Canada in Gould's years could he have found an adequate recording studio and piano? Vancouver? Montreal? Which begs the question: Did Gould speak French?
 
Elmer the Newton Freak
-----Original Message-----
From: Houpt, Fred <fred.houpt@RBC.COM>
To: F_MINOR@email.rutgers.edu <F_MINOR@email.rutgers.edu>
Date: Friday, April 25, 2003 9:37 AM
Subject: Re: Gould & SARS

That's actually quite a good question since in today's news we read of the World Health Organization putting a warning on Toronto for all world travelers.  One is reminded of the black death that surfaced during the days of Sir Isaac Newton who promptly removed himself (I think from London) and went to the countryside to weather out the plague.  No doubt our peripatetic Gould would have scrambled headlong into the old Cadillac and stormed up to Wah Wah or Georgian Bay.

Kind regards,

    Fred Houpt