Blockchain Papers

Peter Ayolov

This article develops the concept of the “Manufacture of Deviance* 2.0” as an extension of the economic model proposed in The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent. It argues that the transition from traditional mass media to decentralised digital platforms has produced not simply a transformation in the distribution of violent imagery, but a new economic relationship between attention, taboo and atrocity. Traditional broadcast media developed institutional and ethical mechanisms intended to restrict representations of real torture, mutilation and death. The online attention economy partially reverses this logic: what is forbidden, disturbing, transgressive or difficult to access can acquire additional informational value precisely because of its exceptional character. As audiences become saturated with conventional news, entertainment and political controversy, increasingly extreme material can compete successfully for the scarce resource of human attention. Violence consequently becomes capable of generating multiple currencies simultaneously: advertising value, subscriptions, donations and cryptocurrency, but also views, followers, notoriety, group membership, prestige and social recognition. The article traces a genealogy from the spectacle of public punishment and execution, through the controversial appearance of uncensored atrocity footage on traditional television, to gore communities, extremist propaganda, cartel execution videos, closed social-media groups and contemporary networks of digitally performed vigilantism. Particular attention is given to the evolution of so-called “pedophile hunter” subcultures associated with Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich and Occupy Pedophilia, in which humiliation and violence could be transformed into reproducible performances possessing recognisable scripts, symbols and gestures. Rather than assuming the existence of a single organisation commissioning such violence, the article proposes a more disturbing possibility: networked media can reproduce violent behaviour without central command because attention, imitation, belonging and social currency themselves operate as incentives. Against this background, the article examines the 2026 Youth Hill case in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, involving teenagers accused of participating in the fatal assault and humiliation of a 37-year-old man after he had allegedly been lured to a meeting. The case is treated cautiously, distinguishing established information, prosecutorial allegations and media reporting from the broader theoretical interpretation developed here. It nevertheless provides a disturbing case through which to investigate the migration of violent spectacle from the screen into physical behaviour and its subsequent return to the screen as content. The article argues that this process resembles, in technologically transformed form, the public scaffold: the condemned sinner, the righteous crowd, ritual humiliation and spectacular punishment return within a global digital square in which spectators can simultaneously watch, judge, distribute and reward the spectacle. The Manufacture of Deviance 2.0 therefore describes a potentially advanced stage of the attention economy: not merely the monetisation of disagreement and outrage, but the conversion of transgression, cruelty and ultimately human suffering into communicative value.

Dare Adegoriolu

Web3, the notion of a decentralised internet powered by blockchain technology, has introduced new scams that are masked in legitimacy and perpetrated through social media. Drawing on interviews and social media data, the study reveals that Web3 fraud thrives among African youth due to economic hardship and weak regulatory oversight. It contends that Web3's ethos feeds a population embroiled in the quest for survival, creating an avenue for manipulation in a largely unregulated space. Here, two kinds of fraud thrive: the use of Web3 as a smokescreen by fraudsters and 'community as bailout' coupled with the 'fear of missing out' (FOMO) as an entrapment, thus revealing how 'communities' become exploitative tools within digital economies of trust. It stresses the need for increased Web3 literacy and clearer oversight as essential to addressing fraud, and situates 'Satoshi-Pablo' as a framework for understanding how innovation and exploitation co-exist in Nigeria's digital landscape.

Taisia Huckle, Kristen Mummert, Antonia C. Lyons, Tim McCreanor · 6 authors

INTRODUCTION: The study aims are to: (i) explore methods for identifying alcohol company marketing in metaverses; (ii) identify current types of alcohol marketing in metaverses; and (iii) identify dominant portrayals and meanings of alcohol marketing in these settings. METHODS: Our design was exploratory, employing various approaches to identify alcohol company marketing across multiple metaverses. In stage one, we systematically navigated through metaverses as an avatar, documenting and coding all instances of alcohol company marketing. In stage two, the research team collaboratively explored and discussed excerpts of this marketing. The team thematically analysed the transcribed discussion, identifying key meanings and interpretations of immersive and interactive alcohol marketing. RESULTS: Stage one: alcohol company marketing was identified in two metaverses, Decentraland and Sandbox. Within those metaverses were five alcohol company marketing experiences: Heineken Silver, Jose Cuervo Tequila, Wisher Vodka, San Matias Tequila, and Mason Martell Cognac. Marketing strategies included immersive commerce, virtual drinking, immersive branding, immersive engagement, gaming, non-fungible tokens (digital assets), education, non-player characters promoting brands and virtual event-based marketing. Stage two: themes identified were: (i) immersive branding, representing continued exposure to brands that were both foregrounded and on the edge of users' awareness; (ii) immersive engagement, including alcohol-related gaming, quests, and alcohol production; (iii) avatars simulating drinking behaviour (virtual drinking); and (iv) immersive commerce representing how metaverse alcohol marketing may drive alcohol transactions. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Alcohol companies are using novel immersive marketing techniques in metaverses. The impact on the experiences and drinking behaviours of users are unknown and require investigation.

Ashley Cordes

Since 2008, cryptocurrencies, or digital peer-to-peer currencies/assets, have amassed interest and proven unique in their ability to circumvent traditional financial institutions (disintermediation). The system can supersede the nation-state, while also garnering the attention of nation-states and marginalized groups. Indigenous individuals and Nations are among those interested in cryptocurrency, experimenting with it to express resistance to economic imposition beginning in the colonial era. Utilizing an Indigenous storytelling method, this article unveils the technological life and afterlife of an altcoin, MazaCoin, as a ghost of empire, insofar as it links the technological present of financial capital and the past (and ongoing present) of US settler colonialism. Throughout its various complicated reanimations, it expresses a relentless remembering of settler colonial injustices, performing productive haunting work within the twenty-first century cryptocurrency ecosystem. This article offers a reminder that there is much to learn about Indigenous alternative currencies in the cultural economy as the strings of racism, settler colonialism, poverty, financialization, and empire continue to tangle.

Mary Hallab

If, as many critics assert, vampires embody our “worst fears,” they also stand for our deepest wish—not to have to die. In their folklore origins, vampires were part of a folk science of disease and death. They have not lost this association. With the advent of modern medical science, vampires did not simply disappear but instead proliferated and evolved to fill varied and complex roles in popular literature, almost always related to their ability to defeat death. At the same time, popular belief in the inevitability of suffering and the necessity of death, based in a firm Christian, (usually) conservative fatalism, gradually faded to be replaced by an even firmer conviction in the power of medical science to prevent disease and prolong life expectancy. Doctors play a role in the escalating battle in much vampire literature between science and the occult—and not always on the side of science. Because vampires are human, and their longevity is a medical anomaly, they are, even in fiction, a natural object of medical curiosity and speculation. In vampire literature, doctors frequently accompany vampires as commentators, antagonists, or observers, representing science and its transformations and accomplishments for good or evil, enacted in the vampire. Paradoxically, the doctor figures both assert the positive and curative value of science, while at the same time casting doubt on the power of science in a world controlled by mysterious occult forces. Where there was no medicine or no doctors to explain death, or prevent it, rural people relied on their own traditional medicine, which included both natural and supernatural elements—warding off vampires with garlic or crosses, for example. Hungarian folklorist Tekla Domotor (1981) says that for rural people, “taking a keen interest in the supernatural was in reality also a means of conducting scientific inquiry” (14–15).1 It is not entirely unreasonable, as Paul Barber points out, that this inquiry included blaming death on the dead, especially in the case of contagious diseases (3). In Eastern Europe or Greece, when a vampire was said to be killing people or causing other calamities, a self-appointed vampire expert could, often for a fee, prevent or stop these depredations according to traditional methods. But one vampire event in the 1700s reveals—indeed, plays a role in—how a whole worldview was changing, as superstitious or religious explanations were replaced by rational scientific investigation. In a Serbian village, villagers accused deceased soldier Arnold Paul (who had claimed to have been bitten by a vampire in earlier years) of coming out of his own grave, attacking villagers, and spreading a vampire epidemic. He did so in a manner wholly in accord with traditional expectations and was eventually dispatched with the prescribed methods. Two waves of vampire scares devolved from this circumstance. In both cases (3 weeks later and 40 days later), the body was disinterred and surgeons present attested, according to the obvious symptoms, that Paul was indeed a vampire. In the second case, one of the surgeons, an Austrian Field Surgeon Johannes Fluckinger, issued an official report in 1732 that created a media sensation all over Western Europe (Melton 518–19). In his study Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origin of an Enduring Legend (2010), Mark Collins Jenkins speculates that, whereas tales from the East about revenants were fairly common, this one report of “scientific observations” attracted Enlightenment scholars because a conclusion by a reputable doctor seemed to acknowledge that vampires might actually exist: It kindled “a fierce debate throughout the German academic and medical establishment” as to the reality of such fantastic beings who could defeat death (Calmet 237–40; Jenkins 111). These accounts of vampires, that sent shockwaves in the West, were not myths or tales of yore like the Greek stories of lamiae or Goethe's “The Bride of Corinth” (1797), but were accounts of real people, known in their communities, with families, and names—who might really have come out of their graves. Ironically, Arnold Paul's case among others brought these “real” vampires into modern medical science—and killed them. Even the Church-appointed vampire investigators Dom Augustine Calmet and Giuseppe Davanzati, looking at this and similar cases, were inclined to regard vampires as a generally harmless superstition. (Otherwise, they would present a serious theological conundrum.) In 1749, Pope Benedict rejected vampires as “fantasy.” And, in a triumph for natural science, after a survey by her personal physician Gerhard Van Sweiten in 1755 and 1756, the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa condemned vampire belief as “superstition and fraud.” She removed the consideration of phenomena “not readily explainable in natural terms” from the authority of the clergy to that of government officers and decreed punishments for those who desecrated corpses (Frayling, 29–30; Jenkins 116–17). Debunked by medical science, vampires were demoted to mere superstition, but they did not go away. Instead they became literature. These fabled walking corpses inspired the literary vampires of Western Europe that became part of the fascination with decay, death, and the occult that we associate with the Romantic Movement. Although elevated in social status and appearance, the vampire retained from the past the ghastly and dangerous character of the grave. At the same time, the vampire's medical examiner or hunter or slayer slowly morphed into a more assured and competent expert, perhaps like the sorcerer in Raupach's “Wake Not the Dead” (1823),2 and soon, into an educated scientific physician like the sympathetic Dr. Heselius whose papers retell the story of Le Fanu's “Carmilla” (1872) and convince us to accept her account. Literary vampires are talkative and often quite intelligent, fully aware of the hardships of their problematical existence in the complexities of the real and ever-changing world in which they often find themselves waking. For vampires do have their problems: outcasts from society, caught between the actual and the supernatural, clinging to a human consciousness and sense of self, they yet feel themselves pulled toward the darkness of evil and death. Vampires are set off against, destroyed, or sometimes saved, by the solid, sensible, reliable presence of the doctor, whose job is to know about them and to tell us what we can expect from them. For our vampires now are part of our folklore that, with the help of their varying casts of victims, slayers, and doctors, change and develop into what we, their audience, need or want them to be—sexy, powerful, clever—and physiologically possible. So, although actual belief in vampires has never run high in Western Europe, these fanciful literary figures have “arisen” with science and scientific speculation—that, ironically, requires belief. Vampires provide a focus of speculation for the dreams that modern medicine has created for us. Much vampire literature is a kind of science fiction; hence, the doctor—with the vampire as his double or opposite—or even his victim—demonstrates, to some (admittedly rather vague) degree, our own evolving understanding of medical research and practice, our faith in it (or lack thereof), and our expectations for the future. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when news of vampires traveled to Western Europe, expectations of medical technology were already high. In her introduction to the third edition of Frankenstein (1831), Mary Shelley tells us about the inception of Doctor John Polidori's influential story “The Vampyre” (1819), along with her own novel about Doctor Frankenstein's monster, in the ideas that Byron and Shelley discussed on that famous stormy night in Geneva in 1816. These concerned the restoration of life through scientific endeavor, not through religion or magic, but by means of electricity, suspected by many to be the “Life Force” that pervaded the universe–a belief promoted by the pseudo-scientific electrical cures practiced by Anton Mesmer and his followers as well as more scientific experiments, for example, those of Luigi Galvani, recently popularized in a series of lectures by Sir Humphrey Davy at the Royal Society. But although both Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's Lord Ruthven suggest that making life from dead body parts, or bodies, may not be such a good idea, the fantasy has persisted and has had to be repeatedly crushed as impracticable or even immoral, as it is in so many works, from Raupach's “Wake Not the Dead,” to Stoker's Dracula (1897), to the rampaging dead in the movie Re-Animator (1985). Doctors, in and out of the literature, have been the inventers and popularizers of vampires. Dr. John Polidori, at the time the youngest doctor to graduate from Edinburgh Medical School, accompanied Byron to Geneva in 1816 as his personal physician. As David MacDonald depicts him, he was immature and vain and thought himself as great a poet as Byron, but his efforts to chummy up to Byron were rebuffed. His “Vampyre,” based on a fragment of a story begun by Byron, is clearly an attack on Byron in the character of the vampire Lord Ruthven. The popularity of Polidori's story established the Byronic Hero/Villain (Byron's own creation) as the archetype for thousands of vampires to come, from any number of nineteenth-century melodramatic villains or heroes to Lugosi to the present—Edward Cullen, for example, in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. So, ironically, two living doctors were responsible for the character of our vampire mythology: Dr. Fluckinger brought the vampire into Western Europe in the report of Arnold Paul, which was sensationalized in the press and discussed in such reputable studies as the work of Dom Augustin Calmet, Yet, we might also say that Doctor John Polidori, through his influential story, was the actual creator of the vampire as we know him—handsome, suave, sophisticated, and malign. Vampires often do bad things—kill people, for example. But the most shocking evil of these “monsters” is that they are supernatural humans resurrecting themselves, climbing out of the grave—defying the laws of God and Nature. In addition to their dangerous behavior and disconcerting presence, vampires (folkloric and fictional) seem evil to many because they obscure the forbidden boundary between soul and body, spirit and matter, and thus undermine “a sound predictable reality.” This, of course, is what the Romantics so admired. But according to Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, even in our day, Gothic beings like Brunhilda in “Wake Not the Dead” or Dracula, in cahoots with sorcery or science, blot out our neat Christian dualism between good and evil (35). Grisly, Gothic, unnatural medical investigations or treatments that seem to cross heretofore physically impassable boundaries, like stem cell research, cloning, or organ transplants, are repugnant to many as a prideful playing at God that will come to no good. According to W. Scott Poole, modern vampires (like Blade, for example, who needs constant medical attention) embody these anxieties that modern medical technology will make us into something unnatural, inhuman cyber-beings, robots, heartless and evil (Poole 221, 223). One kind of “unnatural” crossing of boundaries in the real world began in the seventeenth and continued through the nineteenth centuries (until even now)—in the mysterious cures of Anton Mesmer. Mesmer convinced many people that treatments with invisible forces like magnetism, that is, electricity (considered by many to be the “Life Force”) and with hypnotic trances would ultimately put an end to all illnesses and prolong life. Think of Poe's story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), in which a corpse is hypnotized to remain sentient and whole (more or less) until the spell is broken. Eventually, Mesmeric healers used only their own “natural magnetism” conveyed to the patient by touch and suggestion to diagnose illnesses, to anesthetize even severe pain, and even to effect cures. According to Alison Winter in her book Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (1998), in the nineteenth century a rather unpleasant medical controversy arose: a number of researchers attempted to demonstrate through mesmerism that the mind, will, soul, and spirit were all just physical things—and others, with similar mesmeric carryings-on, demonstrated the opposite, that is, that the spirit determined the body's well being. In this kind of well-publicized medical context rose Rymer's hypnotic Varney the Vampire (1847), Le Fanu's “Carmilla” (1872), and Stoker's Dracula (1897).3 Dracula often behaves like a mesmerist controlling his victims with the power of his will—as does Dr. Van Helsing. Indeed, the battle of wills between Dracula and Van Helsing seems to reenact the kinds of roaring conflicts described by Winter, between the mesmerists who saw the practice as a kind of electrical projection or even mystical imposition of power from the stronger to the weaker and the more scientific view that the victim (or patient) willingly gave up her or his will to the dominance of another. This medical contest of wills plays out in any number of Dracula spin-offs, as the vampire mesmerizes the weaker characters—but not the strong-minded doctor, who will not relinquish his self-control. Thus, a medical phenomenon highly publicized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides the “lore” of hypnotic or mind control powers—even mental telepathy—for modern vampires.4 Another medical mystery of mind (or soul) and body drawn on in vampire literature was, and still is, determining what death is—that is, when one might know for sure when a body is actually dead. Traditional vampire belief and modern vampire fiction depend on the survival of a more or less intact dead body moved by some sort of conscious animating force that is a fair representation of the living personality—and on someone's ability to detect if it is a vampire. According to Philippe Aries, by the eighteenth century, diagnoses of death (Is he really dead?) and discussions of its nature and its meaning for body and soul—the very essence of vampire literature—were increasingly the concern of doctors rather than clergy. And there was much debate among doctors about the point at which death actually occurs—that is, when does the soul leave the body? (Aries 353–60) This problem became even trickier in the nineteenth century when, because of the many epidemics and plagues suffered in Europe, fear of contagion from the dead led to stringent regulations about the prompt and secure burial of bodies. This in turn led to the fear of being buried alive that obsessed so many in the nineteenth century. Some scholars have speculated that the few “real” vampires reported in these years were simply the result of over-hasty burials like that of Poe's Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) (Jenkins 85–92). By the eighteenth century, dead bodies themselves became the object of serious scientific study. The medical profession regarded dissection as essential to valid medical research and paid highly for fresh corpses, discretely obtained. Grave robbing, or “body snatching,” or even murder for bodies became a lucrative business for some “resurrection men” like the infamous William Burke and William Hare (1827–1828; Jenkins, 76–78). This environment of sensational disappearing corpses provides a believable Gothic context for vampire fiction and its need for doctors. Doctors can stand as reliable witnesses to the vampire phenomenon because they are assumed to have useful factual knowledge about human bodies and their capabilities. In Varney the Vampire, Doctor Chillingworth is there to tell us that, no matter what he claims, Varney is not a vampire. Chillingworth knows this because he paid the hangman for Varney's supposed corpse for medical study, that he then galvanized into life. And besides, as a rational scientist, he knows that there are no such as vampires. In Le Fanu's “Carmilla” (1872) is by being by a Doctor Stoker's Dracula most of the Dracula out of this Victorian when Europe was still by illnesses and epidemics whose nature and were yet One such an for much of his His stories about the and the in that The effect of these tales in his own story “The in which a is the of off as it her only by being very and good. Stoker's fear of death is the this and other such as The of the for most of our But it that there is not much from Even as Van Helsing to he is it by the vampire's many living is Dracula as an battle between science and the and but who which of these is sometimes to Varney and Dracula are about scientific as it to what we can know and what we can not is their two of scientific by their In Doctor Chillingworth is a rational of science he on of Varney's supposed supernatural existence and scientific means of for the Stoker's Doctor Van in the essence of science to be to any about the physical His his and his high expectations and that science had in to its to Van science had out because it had to what could be and instead of us in that to an mind and not a of the of a Medical science could explain such as the and bodies and were not so Van Dracula can be at a of and a natural being whose ability to death as reported will be as natural In his to Dr. Van Helsing the vampire's existence by to such as an or to a that more to a popular scientific idea, or which he might have a role in the of some or of or that might have help As he it, even with at the was a matter of to do not to on some supernatural essence that only God could that to In the Stoker's Dracula is not by a or by some as in or even by a doctor a but is killed with a by the as a result of the knowledge and of this sometimes but well For all his and like Van Helsing on science, on physical and in Christian and even Stoker's Gothic Dracula and his doctors have continued to and to any number of and many of them to and the complex and of medical science and nature and the Even the well known of Dracula, the presence of a doctor in a vampire movie or book our and us of the by his in of their vampires are human and to which may not always be rational and Chillingworth might but which is often and and in for natural and the of vampires in and literature, and the defeat of vampires a defeat of these natural can be if only we know are good a of science and medicine and is along even into our and their In the movie a to the of in the the vampire is the which not with and but with the of the vampire by the and the of in Dracula as well as the the vampire something like a that is contagious and that can be by of the to the Thus, Van in Stoker's novel the of vampires as natural beings that do not or but remain by and and are to human understanding and in the of the medical as by for example, in the The even vampire and doctor more varied and complex as their mysterious ability to and their and for in vampire literature, the of good and evil, occult and even life and death, to and Some vampire literature of science and about doctors. For one the and of the two may have convinced that death and not in supernatural but in scientific that killed more than they course, even earlier doctors are not all Chillingworth in Varney a rather toward the victims and the vampire he has that of faith in authority and and human of any kind of scientific or religious and doctors to in vampire literature. In the German not to Dracula, a doctor his profession and the of his to provide victims for the who is like of in doctors and medical science is The of the Vampire The and and doctor is a But doctor Dr. who is in reality Dr. a as the result of an for has himself into a vampire much for the value of In the does not on medical science to this vampire a German but the that has in the of his to come to The vampire's evil, like that of is that is, of natural which can also be and and of no to in a doctor useful to provide a to this vampire's traditional and the vampire well as to any that this has into the Dracula in the of his for the doctor to scientific into the for in the century, the vampire may have been not by but by a or a by or as in novel Legend and its movie or by the of an doctor as in novel The epidemics like in the or fear of or related to the result in the of or movie vampires into and even modern medical research is course, most people go to vampire not for a science (or but for the the even the that the fear of the vampire to the of the Gothic supernatural with something like medical science The series of vampire provides an of the value of medical science and with The of Dracula Although Gothic, with and Dracula, this movie seems to the scientific with as a Van who is not by and and who the to and garlic to be But in the the between science and mystical in of the Vampire in which a Dr. up of to the evil vampire Dr. and his In Dracula from the Grave Christian that the to the on a In at the end of the in The of Dracula Dracula medical research to a with the of over the on the of the to be by Dr. Van Helsing with a would the to the medical in the and at the same time that science fiction was so In the their are or of Stoker's and their science is a of to electricity, and science of the nineteenth century as Van Helsing might have known It is the same we so often in the media to us as science, like in or it also our own about what to natural the object of scientific and what It the kind of occult that many have come to the and of the and the of the to much about says of literature in that it of a of the scientific understanding on we view the Indeed, he much literature of the past stories of with the supernatural that science, doubt on the of human and out that science was and that there were of of or It was, he rather of traditional because of the mysterious and mystical so many seemed to of and to The popularity of literature of fantasy and the occult that the is not to with his for or it may As the faded in the they were being replaced by even and more mysterious Gothic vampires of whose presence is only with a and is like to the of a and Vampire But science has no in these from with the Vampire to the no rational or is even by and with his Stoker's Dracula in which a Van and crosses, is almost more Gothic and than Dracula, who as a But Dracula into a and By this time, perhaps the of of a of vampire literature

Christopher Wixson

His marvelous accomplishment, in solid contribution to thought and light stimulation to gayety, is so immense in volume as to have one explanation: perfect health.—Archibald Henderson, Bernard Shaw: Playboy and ProphetHis essential healthy-mindedness and peculiar buoyancy never allowed him to sink into [the fin de siècle writers'] bogs of glorified decay, [and] the very mention of his name seems to clear the poisoned air a little.—Maurice Colbourne, The Real Bernard Shaw Beguiling a Victorian public obsessed with the pursuit of fitness, the International Health Exhibition opened in South Kensington in May 1884. Its expressed intent, to educate the public on a broad range of wellness topics, was greatly overshadowed by its dazzling display of proprietary medical commodities, salutary appliances, and faddish cures. While there were legitimate exhibits that dealt sincerely with issues of sanitation, hygiene, food, drink, and even child care, the event illuminated the extent to which personal and systemic therapeutic remedy and indeed health itself had become a lucrative industry. Less than three weeks before he joined the Fabian Society, the fledgling novelist Bernard Shaw visited one of the exhibition's prominent attractions, Francis Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory, to be quantified and measured. Chart 3655, created on 16 August 1884, contains the following collected data: THE MAN. Colour of eyes, blue-grey.Eyesight.. Greatest distance in inches of reading “Diamond” type—Right eye, 23; left eye, 27.Colour sense (goodness of)—Good.Judgment of Eye.. Error per cent. In dividing a line of 15 inches—in three parts, 1 1/2; in two parts, 1/2.Error in degrees of estimating squareness—1/4.Hearing.. Keenness can hardly be tested here owing to the noises and echoes.Highest audible note—Between 30,000 and 40,000 vibrations per second.Breathing Power.. Greatest expiration in cubic inches—298.Strength.. Of squeeze in lbs. of—right hand, 83; left hand, 80.Of pull in lbs.—57.Span of Arms.. From finger tips of opposite hands—5 feet 11.7 inches.Height.. Sitting, measured from seat of chair—3 feet 1.8 inches.Standing in shoes…………………………………6 feet 0.8 inchLess height of heel………………………………… 0.7 inch____________Height without shoes...................................6 feet 0.1 inch.Weight.. In ordinary indoor clothing in lbs.—142.1 Fittingly, Shaw's exposition occurs under the auspices of an exhibition as simultaneously invested in health and product marketing as he would soon become.What to me is most striking about the Galen lab report is that it captures an unusually quiescent image of Shaw, a stasis that is discordant with our sense of him as a vivacious, frenetic blur during those first decades in London, what Archibald Henderson deems “the quintessence of vital energy.”2 Throughout most of his life, Shaw was an active walker, cyclist, and swimmer, not to mention a compulsive reader, writer, and speaker whose engagement with the world around him was marked by a robust, ferocious vigor. Shaw's use of language is itself acrobatic, his agile balancing of ideas, his graceful rhetorical athleticism across genres. In this sense, it is precisely his sanus agitatus that draws and sustains our interest, the rigor of his writing challenging us to keep up, work out, and stay in shape. In 1897, the Vegetarian noted of Shaw that “in the pursuit of his duties he has to work frequently under most unhealthy conditions and to face all weathers yet any observant stranger would turn and take a second look at Shaw's virile figure in the street.”3 Indeed, more than a century later, we are still eagerly looking and, in some cases, still trying to catch up. Arguably, health was the fundamental preoccupation of Shaw's work, Shavianism's probiotic elixir the unifying thread of a prolific and expansive career.The subject of health winds its way through every part of Shaw's early London years, from committing to vegetarianism and contracting smallpox in 1881 to an exhaustive breakdown in 1898 resulting in a marriage to his ostensible nurse. Salient controversies of health, particularly during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, served Shaw well in providing foundational linchpins for his GBS persona and for buttressing claims of Shavian exceptionalism. During those years of activism on behalf of public health reform, he writes and speaks compellingly and prolifically against a scientific system predicated on germ theory, an economic system that mandated poverty, malnourishment, and squalor for a large swath of the population, and a medical service driven by potion pushers, outright frauds, and needless, invasive procedures (in particular vivisection and inoculation) performed by “flesh plumbers and carpenters.”4 These perspectives anchor countless speeches, newspaper op-eds, and magazine pieces but also infuse his work for the theater, including many of his early plays but most directly The Doctor's Dilemma (1906). In blending artistic language with the discourse of health, Shaw is merely responding to his theatrical environment. In chronicling the furor around the English production of Ibsen's Ghosts in 1891, T. Carlo Matos notes that “the theater world of 1890s London is a powerful example of how contagion and epidemiology can work in an aesthetic context, not merely as content but as a means of responding to and mediating art and its role in shaping public attitudes towards a variety of socio-cultural phenomenon.”5 Even in his criticism, especially during his tenure at the Saturday Review, Shaw often used his attitudes on health and his wellness practices as rhetorical frames that enabled him to diagnose what he viewed as a moribund theater.In an 1896 review, for instance, he explicitly parallels doctors and actors in their professional practice, beginning by characterizing the former in his usual terms: “The average doctor is a walking compound of natural ignorance and acquired witchcraft, who kills your favorite child, wrecks your wife's health, and orders you into habits of nervous dram-drinking before you have the courage to send him about his business.”6 After similarly chastising attorneys, boot makers, and tailors, Shaw asserts that, while we “imagine that these people have professions,” we discover that “what they have is only, in the correct old word, their ‘mystery’—a humbug, like all mysteries. And yet, how we help to keep up the humbug! … Men believe in the professions as they believe in ghosts, because they want to believe in them” (423–24, 425). For Shaw, human beings had redirected their desire for faith in idols and priests toward doctors and marketing men. The commercial theater had also fed upon this need, and even the critic himself is susceptible to their hypnotic prowess. Calling himself the “most ridiculous of all dupes,” Shaw confesses in the review his mistaking of the actor as a skilled craftsman, a “civilizing agent [and] spiritual doctor,” when in fact “it is all a delusion: there is no profession, no art, no skill about the business at all” (425). Just as those who are exploited by the medical industry, Shaw's “desire and hope got the better of [his] observation[, his] imagination of [his] experience” (428). The fraud perpetuated by doctors is akin to the “mystery” of theater; if doctors are ghosts, actors and managers are similar spirits who have offended. For Shaw, then, the critic's job is to “sift the gold of fact and efficiency out of the huge rubbish-heap of professionalism” (425).Gastronomical practice and his dramaturgical philosophy charmingly intertwine in his 1897 review of John T. Day's explicitly antivegetarian play The Fanatic. In it, Shaw expresses his bemusement with “a dramatist who makes the whole interest of his play depend on a passionate faith in the nutritiousness of a cutlet and a glass of wine.”7 Its plot concerns a young woman newly married to a rabid vegetarian and teetotaler who immediately proceeds to feed her such enormous quantities of meatless fare that only, as Shaw writes, “if she were an elephant working out a sentence of hard labor [would] she … possibly be able to get exercise enough to keep pace” (352–53). (The playwright himself had outlined the perils of such overeating in an 1886 Pall Mall Gazette op-ed titled “Failures of Inept Vegetarians.”) When she sickens, a doctor is called in who earnestly if predictably prescribes cutlets and wine. Clear in its answer to, in Shaw's words, the “question … of cucumbers versus corpses” (354), The Fanatic culminates in the doctor's impulsive elopement proposition to his patient and the husband's mysterious yet gracious gesture of dropping dead.Representing in his review the struggle between the husband and the doctor as a “wrangle between … witches as to the merits of their rival incantations,” Shaw asserts that Day's fatal misstep is to misunderstand the collision between “lay ignorance” and “academic error and prejudice” and to “take sides” (354–55). Shaw's appreciation of staging the conflict between one individual “right in theory and wrong in practice” and another “wrong in theory and right in practice” (354) anticipates verbal skirmishes he would soon create in Major Barbara and The Doctor's Dilemma. While he praises the grotesque caricature of the doctor (perhaps unintentional on Day's part), Shaw faults the play's ultimate reliance on “an unsound theory of alimentation” and its concurrent “unhappy relapse” into sentimentality in its conclusion (352). Shaw frequently linked diet and excessive romantic imagination. In an 1898 interview with Vegetarian, he attributes the outbreak of “fire-eating fiction and Jingo war worship, bloody-minded novels [and] cheered music-hall tableaux” to “the spread of meat-eating,” explicitly gesturing to one of its tragic products, the strife on the Sudan that would eventually catalyze the Boer War.8 If for Shaw vegetarianism is essential to counter narcotic sentimentality in general, it is equally imperative in the struggle for a vital theater, similarly sodden with melodramatic convention. When asked in that interview how “vegetarianism and dramatic criticism blend,” Shaw responded, “meat-fed criticism is the best for the managers. The vegetarian article is best for the public.”9During periods when Shaw was debilitated by illness, injury, and outright prostration, GBS reconceives convalescence and medical procedures as occasions of revelation and rejuvenation. In another Saturday Review piece, written in May 1898, the playwright describes being subject to a practice he execrated, vivisection to remedy his infected foot, but, through it, he finally achieves an “[understanding of] the British drama and the British actor.”10 The sedative so splits his character that, when he awakens, only his “sentimental side” initially returns, without his “morality,” “common sense,” or “incorrigible Protestant respectability”: “For the first time in my life, I tasted the bliss of having no morals to restrain me from lying, and no sense of reality to restrain me from romancing…. I acted and lied in the most touchingly sympathetic fashion…. Artistically, I was an immense success: morally, I simply had no existence.”11 Shaw describes a zombie state, bereft of “the chill of a moral or intellectual impulse,” in which his “consciousness [became] absolutely fictitious,”12 and equates it to the anesthetic rather than aesthetic effect of actors, managers, and playwrights in British theater. Inveighing against theatrical bathos as a dangerous blend of vapid conformity and blinding romanticism, it is, for Shaw, the responsibility of the critic to rouse patients etherized on a table and endeavor to cultivate a dialectic theater poised for social reform.Nonetheless, the cost of what increasingly felt like a quixotic struggle for a critic was In a 1897 review titled Shaw his job as that a theater have my that he has … from to a and to have a of some under especially as as those of the as remedy the of the theater, he the a dangerous and it on a at in the part of the When the doctor for the upon up the resulting of [his] Shaw that him who has by actors for three years, the of a as In his review, GBS is to an to the doctor and health system predicated on the with the by an an of and also is that his his to his job as a I if I a play without for the of that with the without only by the and of some and the with its my with an in the of an who had his business and how to When the to for the when he the through his Shaw that his seat in the theater is also but salutary to me to towards the who my my and my as I towards the who my my and my when I was no more to him than an stranger with an eye, is to and he it was a I was not any have of that Shaw from this with it for he to of In his for the Saturday Review titled Shaw that, rather than up to as their and theater managers still him as “the of a of on their and their is clear that it his convalescence to an infected that him to this it is his a of habits is to him that he is to When a vegetarian is very him that he is to and that they him and that it him a I to on my life, and on the of three on to that he has to his a Shaw the that he his of in to he the business of dramatic In he would the effect of his years at the Saturday Review that how the of a London had his become and on his The he from writing and and the a through which GBS his and artistic of Shaw's perspectives on health in his from to and The to and to and In with an toward and fitness, he of and His of and and practices of and a Victorian of to as “a of and in which the and under the of vital or the of the moral or Its a sense of and and, the production of For many at the in the as a for intellectual and moral while were more in and as upon the In any as the of or health and was in Victorian … the of personal health a way of the between the as a whole … and the of moral and which the If with their of and Shaw the that the the intellectual as the unifying and in in his words, “it is the that makes the and not the the of and as well as a of “the a to about Shaw an as the he about his a the in the to and he draws a between two of The what he “the of from “the being used for a by as a the being out before you are on the the being a of The second is by a of and “a of and that the world not itself to you and have of of and as well as by GBS himself the of the young following his of prolific writing and the Shaw's are with his as well as in and and attributes “a of at the human and its to the while his interest in health, its in an of His to and she was as upon as moral by a from and … Shaw's was an against and to him the of In any the on its way to Shaw, and of personal and public wellness an the of his the decades many of Shaw's having to a large in the look increasingly and as in as he the Shaw's display of him in a from which he against the medical If his of germ theory and his have as as his on and have for instance, is a and Shaw a in the of the practice as well as on and to the medical system in the to Doctor's Dilemma as a he enough to the of the Health in still for a its of and In the century, health in the and the of medical on and and including many of Shaw's and as to our time as they to of health these in and are increasingly toward the of Indeed, as well as and to have up around the to and from the that the to a of social economic and health, in the the and industry. in to the to the the or the the against and that in the is the natural of not its While he is at of about the of his Shaw thought in these and to those very From Major Barbara to Shaw his to a of health in which and to the in this of Shaw's wellness practices and his engagement with health medical theory and practice, and in all of its the of his have by and of GBS In to of Shaw's and of that work on the was for this of in broad and its as an has enabled us to that a variety of and on The of and the the of Shaw's and all the in of and and to which his work speaks in the of and the of his plays on Shaw is in with Bernard a that Shaw's on a range of topics, from to air to the to which Shaw is a part of thought and activism at the time and how he is a that him of the Shaw as an of and a of about the of his and writing and its with public and In that sense, the a line of and to that of individual plays and of the in which Shaw's with his and following this is a from The the to the and three for the magazine in the early of of the 1 a of of their a caricature created from even The in the hard light of are John and The from and is titled Bernard Shaw, The of a working in and a GBS me as a very to two issues of and in very In “The and in The Doctor's Shaw's toward the figure of the she the play in of the of the even as it as a of and “The on the Shaw's and the the of the of Shaw by a to a public and while at the time and and as on the her to what is at the plays they and the of reading through those to an a the of Shaw these two had a first child during the of this The not believe in in “The Shaw's on Shaw's with the at Shaw's the in the of with his on public health and the of how and to While can be between the playwright and the of Shaw in with a in which … have the to as a about how we to and our in out to the more expansive of health and the of and spiritual also a doctor to be an Shaw in and for his on medical were to the to [his] to it is such a in a with and in to an of the of the the of against the of and on so him to the through the that Shaw's is about and two that their on Shaw's piece, “The the of Shaw's with his The on the of was a powerful in Shaw's about the of the and in his for and and the of two medical Shaw was by what describes as the and of the and his of the human the between health and hope as his also Shaw's moral and philosophy in Shaw and of and in the of to how Shaw's as his in a world out of around the turn of the century, the of the to the sense of a in In that rather the with a to us from the some the The us with into the of Major of my favorite from whose in the with Shaw one in a collision that his but left the to take the that every Shaw with his on the his in the and While the that Shaw the whole as of the of for the is of as we and at in and of of health, and we discover that Shaw is us with how Shavian thought can