Intellectual Snacks

HOW DID IT BEGIN? by Rudolph Brasch. 352 pages. McKay. $5.50.

Most people believe that the caesarean operation is so named because Julius Caesar was born that way. Most people are wrong. Julius had a normal delivery, but he is linked to that operation because an early ancestor, Scipio Africanus, was excised from his mother's dead body. To mark his miraculous birth, Scipio's father called him "the cut-out one"--or in Latin, Caesar. Actually, the operation predates even the first Caesar by centuries. It is one of the oldest on record, but was performed only after the mother had died. The first known caesarean on a living woman was performed about 1500 by one Jacob Nufer, an accomplished Dutch sow-gelder, who used a razor for surgery on his wife. She not only survived, but went on to bear him six more chil dren, all by normal births.

These tidbits, as irresistible as peanuts at a party, are among the hundreds of facts assembled by an engagingly unstuffy Australian Reform rabbi in this intellectual's compendium of trivia. Among his findings:

>CLOTHES. Around 1000 B.C. the nomads of Central Asia found that their simple cloth or hide wraps were uncomfortable on horseback; so they invented trousers. Trousers were so closely associated with barbarians that when some Romans began sporting them an imperial edict was issued against their use. As late as 1814 the Duke of Wellington was refused admission to his club because he wore trousers. Cuffs on trousers first appeared in New York City near the end of the 19th century after an Englishman on his way to a fashionable wedding was caught in a downpour and turned up his trousers to keep them dry. Men at the wedding assumed they were the latest style, and many rushed to their tailors to get some of the same.

>FOOD. The custom of three full meals a day has been established only since 1890. Anglo-Saxon tradition knew only two meals--breakfast and dinner--and in the 16th century, dinner was eaten at 11 a.m. While discussing diets, the rabbi rejects the notion that the Jewish and Moslem prohibition against pork started because of fear of food poisoning. The pig was taboo from earliest times because it was worshiped by primitive peoples who also sacrificed it to their idols and ate it in sacred meals. This made Jews, in their passion for monotheism, reject the pig.

>BEAUTY. Few if any of the so-called modern cosmetics are new. Besides shaving off unwanted hair with primitive razors, using rouge, shading their eyes and coloring their lips and nails, women of antiquity stained the soles of their feet with henna and touched up their nipples with purple dye. Perfume was first used at sacred shrines to cover the stench of animals being burned as sacrifices. "Perfume" comes from the Latin, meaning "through the smoke."

The greatest beauty aid of all--soap --was an invention of the barbarian Gauls, who made it from goat's tallow and beech ashes. Though the Greeks and Romans praised cleanliness, neither used soap. As late as 1853, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gladstone condemned soap as "most injurious both to the comfort and health of the people." Fortunately, some prejudices come out in the wash.

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