sweater grows slowly

 There's more ribbing on it now

I think I'm midway through the 11th round there; there will be a total of 18. This is the whole body of the sweater (it's knit in the round, at least up to where you start the more complicated colorwork). 

It's a dk, so it takes a while to knit. (also this is something like 240 stitches). 

I'm doing reading for my classes; I finally dug into the book on the Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy. And it's kind of what you expect...the villain of the piece seems to be the owner of the company that sold the tainted medication, he mixed it up without really testing it (it contained diethylene glycol, which is toxic, as a solvent to keep the medication in solution) and apparently the chemist involved was someone who had been fired from another job because of embezzlement.

So once again, just like in our times, guys who have lower moral standards cause a lot of damage - and at least in the case of "Dr. Sam" (Massengill, the owner of the company) they kind of doubled down and said "oh no, it couldn't be our product" and similar.

The Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) was in action when this happened, but apparently it wasn't strong enough; there was the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (this is why "FD & C" is sometimes listed for food colorants) in the wake of this. 

(I know all these things from my environmental policy and law class; one of my skills is I can learn stuff fast and then organize it to teach others, and I admit, in a weird policy-wonk way, I find these "protection" acts - both of the environment and for things like preventing people getting tainted food - and their development interesting)

And it sounds really....dreadful, how those kids died. (And now I wonder if somehow this event fed into the motivating plot in The Third Man, where Harry Lime had been caught selling diluted penicillin and children died as a result. (I think the film was made after the elixir sulfanilamide tragedy, though there was probably no shortage of "tainted/adulterated medication" in the past)

It's a hard read, which is why I'm reading it during the day at my office and saving nicer things like The Spellshop for before bed