The Standard Freeholder ponders the meaning of pH and Rh … the latter is of interest to us:

The technical “Rh factor” refers to a protein characteristic of blood.

The blood of about 85 percent of the world’s population is Rh positive while that of the other approximately 15 percent is Rh negative (lacking the protein). The two blood properties are not compatible.

That insight came came in 1937 from the research in New York by Austrian-born biochemist Karl Landsteiner (1868-1943) and American forensic pathologist Dr. Alexander Wiener (1907-76). Together, they studied blood-based diseases and refined blood-typing techniques for transfusions. Landsteiner had received a 1930 Nobel Prize for his previous work on polio.

The Rh positive protein creates antibodies against Rh negative blood which negate the benefits of such transfusions.

In their experiments, the two blood experts were doing transfusions between rabbits and monkeys (of a type called Rhesus macaques) when they noted the particularity of that protein in the monkeys. Thus, they called their discovery the “Rhesus factor” -a tag later shortened to “Rh factor.”

“Rhesus” macaques were so named by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Audebert (1759-1800) when he sketched them while also doing drawings of birds, the latter skill being what he had been hired for by French ornithologist Guillaume Antoine Olivier (1756-1814) on a research trip through Southern Asia (also those macaques’ habitat).

Some word analysts have attributed Audebert’s naming that type of macaque to his interest in the Trojan War of antiquity in which King Rhesus of Thrace had a small part.

Another likely possibility could be that, as customary for scholars of his time, Audebert had a knowledge of ancient Greek in which the word “rhesis” (related to “rhetoric”) means “talkative” -a descriptive readily applicable to the screechy gibbering abundantly done by those lively little simians.

• ‘ph’ and Rh’

In a piece about the sorts of folks who hound celebrities for autographs, Barry Koltnow writes in the Orange County Register, inter alia:

After all, autograph-collecting (philography) has been practiced since the ancient Greeks, although I doubt whether any Greek would have asked Paris Hilton for an autograph.

Unlike most of our ‘origins’ commentary, this one has some basis in fact, but it is clear that it is a major misunderstanding among the philographic community. A quick scan of the web will turn up numerous instances of the first “autograph” being sought as Aristotle’s (hence, I suspect, the ‘Greek’ origins for this). But the intro of a page on collecting autographs pretty much clarifies things, if you’re a Classicist:

In ancient times, the autographs of great men were regarded with reverence. The Athenians considered the original manuscripts of their poets the chief treasures of their city, their cultural patrimony, and displayed them in their temples. Aristotle collected manuscripts and maps, and formed the first considerable library of antiquity as well as a museum of natural objects.

Aristotle’s own manuscripts are perfect examples of both the perceived value of manuscripts and the fact that secretarial autographs are an ancient problem indeed. Aristotle died in 322 BC leaving his papers to his successor Theophrastus, who in turn willed them to one Neleus. Neleus took the writings from Athens to Scepsis, where his heirs let them languish in a cellar until the first century BC, when Apellicon of Teos discovered and purchased the manuscripts, bringing them back to Athens. When the Romans under Lucius Cornelius Sulla occupied Athens in 86 BC, he carried off the library of Appellicon, complete with Aristotle’s papers, to Rome. There they were published by philosopher Andronicus of Rhodes, who, while reviewing them, determined that most did probably not represent works which Aristotle himself prepared for publication, but appeared to be notes of his lectures taken by his students.

etc.. What is clearly being confused/conflated is the idea of an autograph in the modern sense (i.e. a signature of a celebrity, athlete, whatever) and the idea of an autograph in its proper sense (i.e. a manuscript written in the author’s own hand). They aren’t quite the same animal …

• A celebrity autograph is a waste of good paper (Orange County Register)

• A Short History of Collecting Autographs (The Raab Collection)