Abstract
It seems kind of strange that eating parasitic worms causes a cure rather than a disease. Yet, this fact is no stranger than many other man-bites-dog stories about “real life” in contemporary times.1 Such stories arise at moments of changing equilibria in the processes of the social construction of reality. They are especially evident during periods of intense dialectic in which long held theses are being upended by powerful antitheses, and the glimmer of an eventual synthesis is still occluded by ignorance and confusion about what is at stake. The emergent dialectic among the “real” and the “virtual” provides a particularly interesting opportunity to explore the mechanisms of such dialectics. The opening quote from Laurie Anderson is a device to explicate the tension between the real and the virtual, and the mechanics of reconciliation by which a new equilibrium might be forged.
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Ingesting the helminth Trichuris suis (pig whipworm) has been proved an effective therapy for the auto-immune disorder Crohn’s disease. A. Reddyand B. Fried, The Use of Trichuris Suis and Other Helminth Therapies to Treat Crohn’s Disease, Parasitology Research 100, No. 5, April, 2007, 921–927.
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The following provide a glimpse of this: R.T. Trail, The Mother’s Hygienic Hand-book: For the Normal Development and Training of Women and Children, and the Treatment of their Diseases with Hygienic Agencies (S. R. Wells, New York, 1875); C.B. Allen and M.A. Allen, The Man Wonderful in the House Beautiful: An Allegory Teaching the Principles of Physiology and Hygiene, and the Effects of Stimulants and Narcotics: for home reading: also adapted as a reader for high schools and as a text-book for grammar, intermediate, and district schools (Fowler & Wells Co, New York, 1887); E.S. Reynolds, Primer of Hygiene (Macmillan, London, 1894); A.T. Schofield, The Home Life in Order; or, Personal and Domestic Hygiene (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1906).
C. Engelbart, and W.K. English, AFIPS Conference Proceedings of the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, San Francisco, CA, December 1968, Vol. 33, pp. 395–410.
R. Carson, Silent Spring, serialized in New Yorker, June 16, 23 and 30, 1962, published in hardback by Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
See D.P. Strachan, Hay Fever, Hygiene, and Household Size, British Medical Journal, 299: 1259–1260, 1989; S.T. Weiss, Eat Dirt—the Hygiene Hypothesis and Allergic Diseases [Editorial], New England Journal of Medicine 347:930–931, 2002; F. Guarner, R. Bourdet-Sicard, P. Brandtzaeg, H.S. Gill, P. McGuirk, W. van Eden, J. Versalovic, J.V. Weinstock, and G.A. Rook, Mechanisms of Disease: The Hygiene Hypothesis Revisited, Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology and Hepatology 3: 275–284, 2006.
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King, J.L. (2007). Dig the Dirt. In: Crowston, K., Sieber, S., Wynn, E. (eds) Virtuality and Virtualization. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, vol 236. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73025-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73025-7_3
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