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Nietzsche's Toxicology
CETS writes "If it doesn't kill ya' it makes you stronger, so a little bit of a bad thing might be alright, according to Scientific American which has this article. " If dioxin and ionizing radiation cause cancer, then it stands to reason that less exposure to them should improve public health. If mercury, lead and PCBs impair intellectual development, then less should be more. But a growing body of data suggests that environmental contaminants may not always be poisonous--they may actually be good for you at low levels.""
Practically everything is poisonous in sufficient amounts.
Why all those old rich people keep moving to places like Palm Springs:
Prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures is also harmful, but Rattan has found that heating up human skin cells to 41 degrees Celsius (106 degrees Fahrenheit) twice a week for an hour slows aging in the cells.
Seriously, if you've never been though Palm Springs, CA, you aren't missing much. Its a couple of golf courses in the hottest damn place, its not quite the middle of nowhere, but its in the same zipcode. Though, I might just be bitter about it, because the first job I ever held involved delivering medicines to people, in home, and I had to drive to Palm Springs every other week in a truck with no A/C. Nice enough drive, little to no traffic, and the desert can be kinda pretty at the right times, but if its summer take a lot of water with you.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
This isn't really news -- except to the majority of people who listen to the ecological ideologues rather than checking out the actual data. It's been known for thirty or forty years that places with high background radiation (like Colorado, especially Pueblo and Grand Junction) have suspiciously low cancer rates, and that these cancer rates absolutely contradicted the EPA's most common assumption, of a completely linear dose-response rate. (That is, what is called the "conservative assumption" is that the response to low doses of radiation is linear because at doses above about 30 roentgen the response is linear.)
One interesting thing about this is that, if hormesis is true, as it appeaers, then all those people who have spent a small fortune clearing radon out of their basemants may have actually increased their chances of cancer.
Here's another link, this from Discover magazine.
Mithridatism, the practice of ingesting small quantities of poison to develop a resistance has been practiced since ancient times. The name comes from Mithridates, king of ancient Pontus, who fearful of being poisoned, ingested small quanties at regular intervals develop a resistance. Dashiell Hammett descibes the use of Mithridatism to develop a resistance to arsenic in the Continental Op story "Fly Paper" (1929) which in turn references the practice as per Dumas in "The Count of Monte Cristo". Thus it is relatively well known that trace doses of some poisons can result in relative imunity to the specific toxin. This does not imply that the paractice is particularly healthy or desirable.
It's sorta off topic, but what Freddie baby actually said is "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich noch staerker". The important verb "umbringen" means "to kill, to murder, to liquidate" and it's got sort of the sense of "bringing down" that we'd have if we spoke of bringing down a deer with hounds.
So it's really something like "That which can't catch me and kill me makes me even faster and stronger."
Meaning:
From the military school of life
German is such an expressive language for philosophy that its true ideas cannot be carried over in to English. Double and triple entendres abound in German, and any translation doesn't carry in to English the right way... in light of the full quote, I think Herr Nietzsche meant what you said as well as "What does not overcome me (an implied meaning from the "bring down" part of umbringt) makes me that much stronger (in the sense of being able to overcome more)." Remember, he served in the Franco-Prussian war, and developed a lot of his ideals on personal strength and overcoming (uebergangen) from his experiences.
IAALS.