My Malady

Various Artists

My Malady

( 2003 )

Mental Monkey Records

MMR004

Out of Print

$15

From Mental Monkey:

33 artists come together to give tribute to their malady. Each track collapses into the next, blending plunderphonics, drones, unconventional pop melodies and straight up extreme noise. Exclusive tracks from: Deerhoof (Kill Rock Stars), The Bran Flakes, Burmese (Tumult), Evolution Control, v/vm, Mixel Pixel, Change! and many more!

Although this is sold out through Mental Monkey, these distributors still have copies available:

Electrocd.com
Insound (MP3 format is available, CD's are backordered)

Source Material:

Since the vocal parts of the song are nearly indistinguishable, I've decided to print them out below. They appear below in the order in which they occur in the song.

"The primary lesions of scurvy relate to bleeding and swelling and inflamation of soft tissues and bone. [...] Bleeding occurs into the skin around the roots of all your hairs, which later fall out. Swollen gums bleed, the jaw bone softens, and eventually your teeth fall out. Hemorrhaghic spots develop in your eyelid linings. There's painful bleeding into your joints, and into the surface membrane of bones, causing crippling pain, and eventually spontaneous breakage of bones. Eventually you're coughing up blood and possibly asphyxiating. Bleeding develops in the intestines, leading to black, and then bloody, horrifically foul smelling stools. Anemia, weakness. Emotional lability. Bleeding into the sack around your heart so your heart can't fill with blood and pump. Bleeding around the brain, compressing it, causing headache, vomiting, eventually coma and death as your brainstem is crushed as your swollen brain pushes itself down into the spinal canal. Perhaps your spirit hovers overhead to watch your body committed to the deep."

-Mark Anderson, "Pathophysiology and Symptoms of Scurvy," 2000

"The sailor's teeth wobbled in his jaw when he pushed at them gently with his tongue. A week later his teeth fell out, and his bloody gums erupted with boils. Exhausted, he was unable to drag himself from his hammock for his watch until the boatswain forced him to his feet by whipping him with a rope end. Once on deck, in the sunlight, the sailor saw that his old wounds and sores from years of work at sea, scars he thought had healed, had reopened. Worn out from climbing the ladder, he fell to his knees and then collapsed on the wooden deck. He was dead."

-Fictional scurvy account by Lorimer

"... the belly and afterward the spleen, do swell up and harden itself, and feel grievous and sharp gripes; the skin becometh black and pale, drawing towards the colour of a green pomegranate; the ears and gums do render and yield a bad scent, the said gums disjoining themselves from the teeth; the legs full of blisters; the limbs are weakened, etc."

-Lescarbot's journals (Nova Scotia), c.1607

"The State of the Blood, in the common Sea-scurvy, is of this Nature, appears from the stinking Breath of the Sick, their rather corroded Gums, high-coloured foetid Urine, sordid Ulcerts, black, blue and brown spots, and Eruptions on the Skin, frequent feverish Heats, foul Tongues, bilious and bloody Dysenteries, which more or less attend it."

-John Huxham: "A Method for Preserving the Health of Seamen on Long Cruises and Voyages," 1757

"During the winter a certain disease broke out among many of our people, called the disease of the country, otherwise the scurvy, as I have since heard learned men say. It originated in the mouth of those who have a large amount of flabby and superfluous flesh, (causing a bad putrefaction,) which increases to such an extent, that they can scarcely take any thing, unless it is almost entirely liquid. The teeth became quite loose, and they can be extracted by the fingers without causing any pain. The superfluity of this flesh requires to be cut away, and this causes a violent bleeding from the mouth. They are afterwards seized with a great pain in the legs and arms, which swell up and become very hard, all marked as if bitten by fleas, and they are unable to walk from the contraction of the nerves, so that they have no strength left, and suffer the most intolerable pain. They have also pains in the loins, the stomach and intestines, a very bad cough, and shortness of breath; in short, they are in such a state that the greater part of those seized with the complaint can neither raise nor move themselves, and if they attempt to stand erect they fall down senseless, so that of seventy-nine of us, thirty-five died, and more than twenty barely escaped death."

-Champlain's journals (Nova Scotia), c.1604

"Caehixia Africana, better known as dirt eating, also appeared in high numbers. The reason why slaves ate dirt stumped the minds of physicians, as well as, slaveholders. They did not realize that slaves suffered from several dietary-deficiency diseases, and that they had to eat dirt to obtain minerals to survive. These diseases included pellagra, beriberi, and scurvy."

-Ahern, Alvarez, DeNunzio, Orgaz: Antebellum Slavery: Health/Mortality

"Almost 25 percent of the 12,123 Confederate soldiers who entered the 40-acre prisoner of war camp at Elmira, NY, died. The deaths at Elmira were caused by diseases brought on by terrible living conditions and starvation, conditions deliberately caused by the vindictive U.S. commissary-general of prisoners, Col. William Hoffman.
"On August 18, in retaliation for the conditions in Southern prison camps, Colonel Hoffman ordered that rations for the prisoners be reduced to bread and water. Without meat or vegetables, the prisoners quickly succumbed to scurvy, with 1,870 cases reported by September 11.
"Before resigning to avoid court-martial for his criminal treatment of sick prisoners, the chief surgeon at Elmira was overheard boasting that he had killed more Rebels than any Union soldier."

-from Prisons, Paroles, & POWs: Elmira Prison ("Hellmira")

"The team has yet to identify among the skeletons the many Africans who are known to have been burned at the stake during the rebellion-plot hysteria that swept the colony in 1741. But what the researchers have found is brutal enough on its own. Of the 400 skeletons [...], about 40 percent are of children under the age of 15, and the most common cause of death was malnutrition. Most of the children had rickets, scurvy, anemia or related diseases. About twice as many infant girls seem to have died as boys, suggesting at least some infanticide. [...] Women who gave birth in these conditions knew that they were bringing their children into hell."

-Brent Staples: "History Lessons From the Slaves of New York," New York Times

"I thus struggled with the disease 'till it increased so that my armpits and hams grew black but did not swell, and I pined away to a weak, helpless condition, with my teeth all loose, and my upper and lower gums swelled and clotted together like a jelly, and they bled to that degree, that I was obliged to lie with my mouth hanging over the side of my hammock, to let the blood run out, and to keep it from clotting so as to cloak me..."

-William Hutchinson: "A Treatise on Naval Architecture", 1794

"And in three months past, die Half our Company. The greatest part in the depth of winter, wanting houses and other comforts; being infected with the scurvy and other diseases which their long voyage and unaccommodate condition bring upon them. So as there die sometimes two or three a day. Of one hundred persons, scarce 50 remain. The living scarce able to bury the dead..."

-from William Bradford's death registry of Mayflower passengers, Plymouth Colony, 1621

"As the 20th century began, cases of infantile scurvy appeared to be on the increase. [...] The young children, typically 6-12 months old, appeared to be paralyzed, but really were extremely reluctant to move from a prone position because it hurt them, and they were in pain if touched or moved."

-Kenneth J. Carpenter: "Vitamin Deficiencies in North America in the 20th Century," Nutrition Today (Nov. 1999)

"In order that we might not die meanwhile, I ordered that at the end of each day's march, one of the weak old mules which carried our baggage and ourselves should be killed. The flesh we roasted or half-fried in a fire made in a hole in the ground. [...] We shut our eyes and fell to on that skinny mule like hungry lions."

-Portola's journals (San Francisco), c.1769

"So lamentable was our scarcity that we were constrained to eat dogs, cats, rats, snakes, toadstools, horsehides, and what not. One man out of the misery he endured, killing his wife, powdered her up to eat her, for which he was burned. Many besides fed on the corpses of dead men, and one who had gotten insatiable out of custom to that food could not be restrained until such time as he was executed for it."

-Journals of the Virginia House of Burgesses, 1624

Reviews:

My Malady review from Vital Weekly

Author:

Frans de Waard

I must admit I feared the worst, when I read the press blurb raving about 'a wide range of chaotic sounds together into one sweeping smorgasbord of interpretations of disease and dysfunction'.