{"id":22969,"date":"2021-05-31T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2021-05-31T17:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=22969"},"modified":"2021-05-31T08:22:32","modified_gmt":"2021-05-31T13:22:32","slug":"historical-note-suitable-for-use-in-schools-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=22969","title":{"rendered":"Historical note, suitable for use in schools."},"content":{"rendered":"

You know who was a Marine?<\/p>\n

If you’re one of my readers who was a Marine, the answer is probably “Yes”. I figure the list of famous Marines is drilled into folks at boot camp.<\/p>\n

But for everyone else: Don Adams<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I kid you not. Before he was “Maxwell Smart”, he served in the Marines during WWII. He fought (and was wounded) in the battle of Guadalcanal. He also came down with “blackwater fever”, and was medically evacuated to New Zealand, where he was hospitalized for over a year. After that, he served as a drill instructor until 1945.<\/p>\n

As a side note, I went down a rabbit hole about “blackwater fever” a few months ago when I was reading White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris<\/a><\/strong> (affiliate link). It also comes up in “The Bridge on the River Kwai<\/a>“, which I did finally watch Saturday.<\/p>\n

Blackwater fever<\/a> is a complication of malaria. From what I’ve picked up, red blood cells burst and release hemoglobin, which enters the kidneys and can cause them to fail. I’ve seen suggestions that quinine either caused it, or was a contributing factor: now that we have other anti-malarial drugs, the incidence of blackwater fever has decreased.<\/p>\n

A lot of those old-time African hunters came down with blackwater fever at one time or another: the folk remedy (which seems to have worked for many of them) was…massive consumption of champagne. I would think that would overload the kidneys and make things worse, but enough of those guys seem to have survived (the mortality rate is claimed to be 90%) that maybe there was something to it…?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know who was a Marine? If you’re one of my readers who was a Marine, the answer is probably “Yes”. I figure the list of famous Marines is drilled into folks at boot camp. But for everyone else: Don Adams. I kid you not. Before he was “Maxwell Smart”, he served in the Marines […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,97,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heroism","category-history","category-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22969"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22972,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22969\/revisions\/22972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}