Tea at Trianon: Risk of Blindness

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, December 30, 2024

Risk of Blindness

From Sharyl's Substack:

A new study finds a concerning increase in risk of blindness with weekly use of popular semaglutides: Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for obesity. The type of blindness is called nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy or NAION. Experts describe it as a sort of stroke in the retina of the eye. It is painless, non-treatable, and typically irreversible. NAION is the same form of blindness associated with erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs such as Viagra. I broke that story globally in 2005 on CBS News. With Viagra, I was surprised that it was an eye doctor rather than the original prescribing doctors, such as urologists, who did the detective work that revealed this pattern of blindness. With Ozempic, it is also eye specialists who are noting the vision-related side effect. (Read more.)