Giles Brindley II
More To Know About Someone You Should Know
Professor Brindley And His Visual Aid
Note: I have corrected, reorganized, and updated the material in this post, which I authored, and integrated it with additional information in a later post about the Giles Brindley 1983 Las Vegas presentation. I recommend that readers bypass the piece below in favor of the newer essay on my AlignMap blog:
~AlignMap Post - AlignMap Post - Giles Brindley : Presentation Is (Not Really) Everything~
Get The Picture?
These photos appeared in yesterday’s Giles Brindley: Someone You Should Know post concerning the skilled physiologist and consummate showman who exhibited his erection at the 1983 Las Vegas meeting of the American Urological Association as the grand finale of his presentation on the effect of injecting a vasodilator into the penis. That these two photos were, at that time, the only pictures I discovered on the net labeled “Giles Brindley,” surely qualifies as at least a minor irony.
That there is some confusion about this internet data is, however, a phenomenon more akin to standard operating procedure.
As it turns out, I am relatively confident that these photos do indeed depict Giles Brindley. I’m just not absolutely certain that they depict the Giles Brindley of urological fame.
The Southwark Consorts of Winds Programme identifies the picture on the left as “Giles Brindley,” but this Giles Brindley apparently composed “Variations on a Theme by Schoenberg, (op. 26).”
The individual pictured on the right, which looks like the same fellow to me, is identified by the Urological Sciences Research Foundation web site and the web site of Zafar Khan, M.D., a urologist, as the Giles Brindley referenced in my Someone You Should Know: Giles Brindley post.
I’ve sent emails to these sites and other sources asking for clarification but as yet have received no responses.
If anyone happens to know if this is one or the other Giles Brindley or if Giles the composer is also Giles the urologist or if neither Giles looks like this or whatever, I’d appreciate it if you would let me know.
In the meantime, if you run into someone resembling the person pictured above, I can only suggest that you be circumspect in your conversation.
Thank Goodness For Esoteric Dissertations
In skimming the net for Brindley information, I found his name mentioned in Enclosing the Field: from ‘Mechanisation of Thought Processes’ to ‘Autonomics’, a dissertation submitted by David Clark “in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science.”1 A photo was mentioned in but was not part of the online dissertation, which was formatted as a text file. A bit of digging, however, ferreted out a photograph, archived at Wellcome Library, London, of “The Ratio Club” at Cambridge. Fortuitously, the single photo was taken at a Ratio Club meeting held May 2-3, 1952 that was attended by a guest, “Giles Brindley (London Hospital).” Giles is the gent marked by the yellow circle. (Also in this group are two pioneers in computer science that are so significant that their names are immediately recognizable: that’s Donald MacKay marked in red and Alan Turing in green. Nice club, eh?)2
This is Giles Brindley cropped from the others.
Of course, I can’t be certain this is Giles Brindley, the uro-physio-exhibitionist, but the age seems about right, the company he is keeping seems appropriate, and the “London Hospital” seems to fit (one of the articles about his Las Vegas appearance mentions his work at London Hospital).
One More Mystery
There are conflicting reports about the precise methodology used for Brindley’s unveiling. Roughly half the sources that describe a technique (many accounts are ominously silent on this point) indicate an unzipping while the other half specify a lowering of the pants. One site insists that Brindley gave his entire talk clad only in underwear which he removed for the presentation. Given that several witnesses noted that Brindley wore sweat pants and that zippers in men’s sweat pants would have been unusual in 1983, I tend to side with the drop trou school of thought although one supposes that be the artifact of personal bias.
Three More Points, One Of Which Is A Birthday Inspiration
In my photo-clarification ramblings, I ran across three additional Brindley tidbits from The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America (New York University Press, 2004) by Meika Loe:
- Fortune magazine noted that Brindley’s presentation put the erection “back in the spotlight.”
- The quote by Dr. Arnold Melman, chief of urology at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, used in yesterday’s post, “I had been wondering why Brindley was wearing sweatpants, … Suddenly I knew” is incomplete. Dr. Melman is also quoted as observing, “It was a big penis, and he just walked around the stage, showing it off.”
-
Most importantly, Dr. Brindley was 57 at the time of his Las Vegas performance, as auspicious age that I reached only today. I do feel inspired and perhaps even stirred.
Footnotes
- The abstract of the dissertation follows:
It is always difficult to perceive something new except upon the model of what is already known. The result is a partial and incomplete understanding that can only be improved by experience. Our present perception of computing remains strongly influenced by its origin as a mathematicians’ machine. A notion of mathematics as the arbiter of what constitutes a ’science’ has long been ascendant. As a result, even when viewed from a more empirical standpoint, computing has been influenced by the aspirations of engineering disciplines to acquire the status accorded to a science. Yet there always has been an interest in computing machinery from a different perspective: that of biology–autonomic mechanisms, understood through observation rather than the proving of theorems. But this runs counter to a prevailing trend in twentieth century biology toward a discrete and computational molecular model. The story of the Autonomics Division of the National Physical Laboratory between 1957 and 1966 provides a particular instance of these tensions. It coincides with a critical point in the history of computing: the time when a distinct discipline of ‘computing science’ took form. The field thus enclosed represented the dominant mathematical and engineering interests, the biological view surviving only in cognitive science. But these models have not proved adequate for the study of what is distinct and unique to this new science: software–an amorphous concept, at once both intangible and yet, it seems, an engineered product. To resolve this paradox it is suggested that a model of software as a form of literature needs to be developed. ~back~ - The photo’s complete roster follows: “From left to right; standing: Giles Brindley, Harold Shipton, Tom McClardy, John Bates, Ross Ashby, Edmund Hick, Thomas Gold, John Pringle, Donald Sholl, Albert Uttley, John Westcott, Donald MacKay; sitting: Alan Turing, Gurney Sutton, William Rushton, George Dawson, Horace Barlow.” ~back~
In the meantime, if you run into someone resembling the person pictured above, I can only suggest that you be circumspect in your conversation.
Don’t you mean circumcised?
Comment by Helen — November 3, 2006 @ 4:42 am