
From Marginal Revolution: “As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed by the medical and scientific establishment. Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not yet developed enough to feel pain, at least not in the way that older children and adults feel pain. Crying and pain avoidance were dismissed as simply reflexive. Indeed, babies were thought to be more like animals than reasoning beings and Descartes had told us that an animal’s cries were of no more import than the grinding of gears in a mechanical automata. Anyone who doubted the theory was told that there was no evidence that babies feel pain. Most disturbingly, the theory that babies don’t feel pain shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now infamous 1985 case an open heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia.”
This New Zealand-born journalist knew and spoke almost 60 different languages

From Wikipedia: “Harold Whitmore Williams was a New Zealand journalist, foreign editor of The Times and polyglot who is considered to have been one of the most accomplished polyglots in history. He is said to have known over 58 languages. He was proven to know every language of the Austrian Empire, as well as Hungarian, Czech, Albanian, Serbian, Romanian, Swedish, Basque, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Coptic, Egyptian, Hittite, Old Irish, and other dialects. As a schoolboy he constructed a grammar and vocabulary of the New Guinea language Dobu from a copy of St Mark’s Gospel written in that language. By high school he had managed to teach himself Latin, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Māori, Samoan, Tongan, Fijian and other Polynesian languages.”
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