- © 2004 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors
The analysis by Sarah Giles and Sarah Shea of head injuries in nursery rhymes, which appeared in the “Findings” section of the 2003 Holiday Review, caught the attention of not only our regular readers, but also the lay media and general public. Many people, it seems, have an interest in nursery rhymes and their subtexts, origins and hidden meanings. We publish here a small selection of the eletters that were posted with the online version of the article. The complete discussion thread can be found on eCMAJ (www.cmaj.ca/cgi/eletters/169/12/1294). — Editors
As the father of 3 daughters, I feel it is important to find and highlight for them all possible dangers. I am therefore grateful to Sarah Giles and Sarah Shea1 for examining how head injuries are described in nursery rhymes and identifying a hitherto unrecognized but important cultural subtext of these poems. It is of course vital that children be made aware of proper emergency medical procedures should a parent sustain an injury, and I will now be teaching my preschooler the details of CPR.
In the spirit of the Giles and Shea report, I would also suggest penning physically correct nursery rhymes. My proposal for “Twinkle, twinkle little star” would be as follows:
Scintillating photons from faraway star How we wondered what you are. We mounted spectroscopes onto telescopes. A plasma in hydrostatic equilibrium, you are. Now we model them as forms of polytropes.
David Barlow Popley, Hants, UK
Reference
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