Have you got bicycle face?

In a time where the Reproducibility Crisis looms large, and women from all walks of life are sick to the back-teeth of males in positions of power propositioning everything from their toes to their ­– well, back teeth – a sardonic take on events may not be entirely appropriate.

But you know us on the Science Lite desk; it really is all we can do. Now, if only we could find one story to unify this uneasy zeitgeist – impossible surely? Well, lets ask a question before we concede…

Do you suffer bicycle face? Don’t look like that… it’s a serious question. Because while it might sound like the best playground insult you have never heard, it is a genuine medical condition.

Well, that isn’t strictly true. It was a medical condition for a brief period in the late 1800’s, before it was rather swiftly recognised as being entirely erroneous – the physician who proposed it was just plain wrong. But there are, it seems to us, a few different forms of being wrong when it comes to matters of science.

Wrong twice

Firstly there is the plain and simple misinterpretation of evidence. Science has a rich history of being wrong and there have been some real hum-dingers of incorrectness. Cold fusion, the idea of a static universe, neutrinos travelling faster than light – just some of the more recent examples, all of them now regarded as incorrect.

The thing is, being wrong in this manner is science. The knowledge we are armed with today has been hard won – each ‘fact’ being a spike of clarity against the background noise of experimental dead ends, incomplete evidence and muddled confusion. And we should celebrate this – recognising our errors, and correcting theories to accommodate new evidence is one of the founding notions of science.

However, the second form of ‘being wrong’ in science – well, altogether a different beast this one. There is no way to put it mildly, so we won’t bother: Fabrication of evidence. It’s ugly, damaging and many would say immoral. Whether it is direct fabrication from a scientist in order to get work published, or climb some kind of career ladder (…and yes, we are looking at you and your shady stem cells Hwang Woo-suk) or marketers who claim science backs up the dubious claims they make of their product (mentioning no names the entire cosmetics industry), or politicians who use cherry picked and misleading statistics to bolster their latest rhetoric (your number is up insert politician of choice here).

But what does all this have to do with the wonderfully named non-condition of bicycle face? Well dear reader, we’d like to put to you the case of Dr A Shadwell – the originator of said ‘condition’ – and for you to decide which flavour of incorrectness it was. Was it the well meaning, but ultimately flawed, misinterpretation of evidence or something altogether more insidious?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let’s consider the evidence. In 1897, Shadwell decided to publish The hidden dangers of cycling in the long since defunct National Review. In it he goes to great lengths to point out all manner of potential health problems which could be associated with riding a bicycle. It seems from the outset that the article is aiming directly for women, opening the piece as he does with a paragraph about how pleased he is that the women of England have “relegated all unfeminine costumes to the limbo of bad style” when they ride their bicycles. He goes on to mention anecdotal ‘evidence’ from colleagues which speak of ‘nervous exhaustion’ and even ‘dementia’ in women foolish enough to attempt to ride for any distance, but his major concern it would seem was the emergence of bicycle face. He characterises this as bulging eyes, and a tightened mandible and suggests it comes about as the woman attempts to maintain her balance on two wheels; “…for let the attention wander for more than an instant, and the odds are heavy on a spill” he poetically suggests.

The cycle of danger

So – a quaint footnote in the annals of science history, or a rather ugly example of fabricated evidence in an attempt to maintain a male dominated world? We have read Dr Shadwell’s article, lovingly recovered and put online by Gareth Rees (http://garethrees.org/2012/01/10/shadwell/), and we have to say it isn’t written in the vitriolic language you might expect of such an attempt. But we’ll leave you with this; Susan B Anthony – American social reformer who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement – is known to have suggested that cycling was the single greatest tool to help increase female emancipation. Could it be that the National Review ­– a bastion of conservatism at the time ­– was fearful of this and constructed a fictitious condition in an attempt to maintain the status quo by dissuading women from cycling?

Esteemed jury members…it’s over to you.