Indomitably galling
| 15 July, 2011 | Richard P. Grant |
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Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is no laughing matter–unless you’re an indomitable Gaul, that is.
In the ever-popular Asterix the Gaul comic books, Asterix, his companions dish out magic potion-powered pugilism to various bad guys–Romans, Vikings, pirates and even extraterrestrials. If you’re anything like me, you might have wondered what happens to these victims.
Wonder no more. In what F1000 Member Max Gassmann calls an “excellent” retrospective study, neurologist Marcel Kamp and colleagues at Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf examined assault-based traumatic brain injury in the Asterix books.
Max rates the paper a ‘Must Read’ because “it broadens the horizon of every scientist seeking a more light-hearted view on research.” He also wonders whether, if Julius Caesar had access to the study, it would have benefitted his long-suffering legionaries.
You can also read a bit more about the paper in a piece I wrote for The Scientist last month.
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Like better helmets, perhaps? With a more secure strapping, punch-proof jaw cushioning and inverted vertical landing resistant domes? Perhaps even better leg-wear than those silly skirts?
I think more extensive deployment of ranged weapons would have been a winner, myself…
Ranged weapons? If memory serves, Obelix could catapult menhirs over rather great distances…
Indeed, but there was only one of him–and presumably a limited supply of missiles. I do seem to remember seeing the Romans use artillery successfully against the village–I suspect they needed to think more about their tactics.
Tactics? These comic strips are a fictional revenge against the fact that Romans were militarily superior to the Gauls and that only a magic potion was conducive to some victory. Unfortunately for the Gauls of those times, however, the magic potion is just in the imagination of Goscinny and Uderzo. Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico tells a much different story from Asterix. Comic strips like losers much, and we have mice that win over cats (Tom and Jerry) and roadrunners that win over coyotes. If we make a statistics of ecological interactions between predators and their prey, as represented in fictional representations of reality, the outcome is that the predators should all die of starvation. Just as the Gauls win over the Romans.
Y’know, Nando, I think you have idea for another paper, there.
“An analysis of trophic cascades in cartoons”
There are plenty of topics that can be treated in this way. Like the zoology of monster movies. The fantasy of film makers did not go too far, though. Whenever we discover new phyla, they are more fantastic than the monsters we see in movies. There is nothing like a Loriciferan living in complete anoxic conditions, in those movies, for instance. Or, if they are novel in their body plan, like the tripods in the War of the worlds, they have evident functional problems. And those guys are vertebrates anyway, and it is very unlikely that evolution might have led to such similarities in a completely independent way (in spite of the absurdity of the three legs). There is more interesting stuff in the natural world than in the fictions of any kind.
You know, that sounds like a blog post. With pictures.
*cough*