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1 {scene: Dr Ginny Smith is driving the Joneses somewhere through Italy}
1 Minnesota Jones: It wasn't easy going, excavating Troy. The dry soil turned to dust as we dug, almost choking us.
2 Minnesota Jones: Schliemann himself suffered most. Each time he dug he went through this exaggerated coughing routine to clear his throat.
3 Minnesota Jones: We called it the "Heinrich Manoeuvre".
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Sadly for period accuracy, the Heimlich manoeuvre was first described in 1974, and there's no way the Joneses in the 1930s could even know that this is a pun*.
In 2006 the Red Cross adopted the more descriptive name of abdominal thrusts to replace the more colourful Heimlich manoeuvre, named after Doctor Henry Heimlich.
* Hey, this is better than those stupid movies that are blatantly anachronistic, but blithely ignore it.
I wonder if it's just a numbers thing - that if you gather 2000 people in one place for an hour or two that it's virtually a certainty that some of them will have a loud coughing fit. Or if there's something special about being in a group of 2000 people who expect you to be quiet that actually triggers coughing.
I bet someone's done a Ph.D. on this topic. (Or if not, they really should.)
[a quick search later]: Bingo. Maybe not a Ph.D., but certainly a study. Andreas Wagener, "Why Do People (Not) Cough in Concerts? The Economics of Concert Etiquette", Association for Cultural Economics International, 2012.
Wagener finds that people in classical music concerts cough approximately twice as much as people generally, and that the distribution in both space and time is highly non-random:
That's interesting. However, he goes on to conclude that concertgoers do it deliberately as an intentional breach of concert etiquette, with surmised motives including:Substantial evidence suggests, however, that coughing in concerts is excessive and non-random. First, the prevalence of coughing in concerts is significantly higher than elsewhere: an average concertgoer coughs around 0.025 times per minute (Schulz 2005; Loudon 1967) – which (under the assumption of a Poisson process) would imply 36 coughs on average per person and day, far more than double the normal cough rate. Sneezes, hiccups, and yawns are in general about as common as coughs (Simonyan et al. 2007). Unlike coughs, however, they are involuntary as they cannot be willfully produced with their complete pattern. Yet, one rarely hears hiccups or sneezes during music performances.
Second, if coughing were purely accidental, it should occur evenly distributed over the concert – which is not the case: the volume of coughing increases with the complexity and unfamiliarity of the music performed; slow movements and quiet passages are more frequently counterpointed with coughs than fast and extroverted ones; and atonal, complex pieces from the 20th century are underscored by heavier concert noises than the more harmonious and familiar pleasantries from earlier times.
I think he's missing a step here. I'd first want to establish that it isn't some aspect of the classical concert environment that actually causes increased coughing in a subconsciously uncontrollable way. For instance, I can imagine that some people are susceptible to the perceived pressure of having to sit silently for a couple of hours, resulting in a sort of adverse reflex reaction which actually makes them more prone to coughing than normal. The old thing that the more careful you have to be, the more likely you are to make some clumsy blunder - because of the unusual psychological pressure.
Anyway, food for thought next time you're attending a classical concert and someone coughs annoyingly.
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