The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7204 p924
29 June 2002

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Football madness [more]
Sons and daughters [more]
Road to happiness [more]

Football madness

The impending final of the World Cup this weekend reminds me that it was in one of my language textbooks, if my memory is correct, that I came across the saying of a Turkish ambassador watching a football match that it was too violent for a game, but too gentle for a battle.

My impression today is that football, for both participants and viewers, has to a large extent degenerated into a deliberate maiming contest, where nothing is barred except defeat. Undoubtedly, the financial aspect of the activity, which involves juggling with massive sums of money and wasting vast quantities of time and energy, must bear the responsibility. At the same time, there seems to be below the surface and often surfacing, a latent madness associated with the game, which infects its followers.

One explanation given of the origin of football is that it started when our savage ancestors showed their contempt for defeated enemies by kicking their severed heads around the battlefield. Certainly in Britain the kicking game is recorded since shortly after the Norman invasion.

In the early stages there were no rules for the conduct of a match and no limit on the number of players. Contestants were drawn from different parts of a town or from members of different trades. In cities the apprentices were the enthusiasts. In the 12th century William Fitz Stephen recorded that after dinner at Shrovetide all the youth of the City of London went out to the fields for a game, each school having its own ball, and each guild of workers theirs. Citizens turned out on horseback to cheer them on.

In 1314 football was forbidden in the City, and attempts were made to outlaw it elsewhere. The Puritan reformers of the 16th century agitated against it. Football was claimed to be a pointless activity, drawing young men away from rational and necessary pursuits such as archery. The lawlessness it gave rise to held moral risks for the whole of society. Property and trade were endangered by rough games in narrow streets.

Chester forbade football in 1539. Other cities followed suit, but progress was slow, as is shown by the fact that in Kingston-upon-Thames attempts were made to suppress football in 1799, but it persisted until 1868. Why Shrovetide should have been the favourite season for it is obscure, since there is no evidence that the church authorities paid any heed to the problem or related it to religious observances at any time.

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Sons and daughters

It is recognised that among humans the production of sons is physiologically more demanding than that of daughters. Sons have a faster interuterine growth rate and heavier birth weight, and mothers producing sons take longer to reproduce again.

In a study carried out in Finland and reported in Science for 10 May, it is demonstrated that in preindustrial societies the number of sons raised in a family reduces maternal longevity, whereas the number of daughters increases it. Finnish church records for the period 1640 to 1870 were consulted to determine figures relating to Sami women living in northern Scandinavia. The Sami lifestyle was based on reindeer herding, fishing and hunting, and mortality was taken to be natural since advanced medical care was lacking.

Maternal longevity was not related to total number of children born or raised to adulthood, but there was evidence of significant gender bias in costs of maternal survival, lifespan being shorter in women giving birth to sons. By contrast, bearing daughters had a positive though statistically non-significant effect on longevity. Analysis of numbers of children raised to the age of 18 years showed a stronger effect of daughters than sons in terms of lifespan. No similar effect was noted on the longevity of fathers.

This gender bias may be attributable to lower physiological costs of daughters and also to the human family system, which involves daughters helping their mothers in domestic tasks. Moreover, a male foetus involves raised maternal testosterone concentrations, which tend to suppress immunological reactions and may play a role in accelerating senescence. This in turn may decrease the rate of survival in old age of mothers who have borne several sons.

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Road to happiness

Consciousness is a strange phenomenon, however you look at it. Karl Marx wrote in 1859: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." His argument seems to me a trifle obscure. And Samuel Johnson is reported by Boswell to have remarked in 1766: "Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness." This, too, calls for interpretation.

When someone fails to make any response to a stimulus of any kind, usually by moving a muscle somewhere, we diagnose the state of unconsciousness. Yet we cannot be sure that the individual is cut off from all sensation. When we come to other species of animals, possibly of plants, we can have even less certainty that consciousness exists or is lacking, in the absence of a definite response to a definite stimulus. Sometimes, when I encounter a spider or a beetle crawling across a road surface in summer, I wonder idly what, if anything, the creature is making of its environment. In many respects we humans are in a similar situation. Just how aware are we of what goes on around us, and what interpretation are we putting on its impact on our lives?

Philosophers assert that consciousness exists, but that it resists any attempt to define it. Sensations, moods, emotions, dreams and self-awareness consciously. According to René Descartes, conscious thought is the essence of mind, and humans are privileged in having some access to their own awareness. The problem in philosophy resides in the need to overcome essential subjectivity governing the conscious mind, a characteristic that makes it almost impossible to measure. Conscious thought, Descartes considered, is the essence of mind.

What one person experiences or perceives can only be conveyed to another by a mechanical process involving speech or gesture. That is why assessing pain or distress in someone who claims to be ill is so difficult, however important it may be in determining a course of treatment or alleviation. Sympathy, unless we are brutal by nature, directs us towards certain actions, but whether they are justified or not remains uncertain. This impasse is inescapable for anyone engaged in health care and therapeutics, including pharmacists.

Meanwhile, we often have to deal with a social situation where individuals take extraordinary measures to alter their own state of consciousness by resorting to drug abuse, whether the drug be alcohol or nicotine or something far more dangerous. The search for Nirvana has always ranked high in the behaviour of human societies, and it is doubtful whether, however hard we try, we shall be able to divert unfulfilled individuals from the search for happiness at any cost.

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