Superstitions about Black Cats and the Middle Ages

The other day my kids were talking about cats and someone made a comment about black cats. My oldest child just casually threw out the oft repeated fact that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats and associated them with witches.

As soon as he said that I asked myself, "Were people in the Middle Ages superstitious about black cats?"

Because our society's track record for accurately understanding what people thought in the Middle Ages isn't exactly stellar (see the Myth of the Flat Earth). So that sent me down a rabbit hole trying to find out where the superstition about black cats actually came from.

The thing is, the idea that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats has all the hallmarks of a "zombie fact". A zombie fact is something people just keep repeating and everyone just accepts it as fact, but if you dig down and try to find out if it is actually true you will find little to no evidence for it.

So we have two questions to investigate.

1. What evidence is there that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats?

2. When did people start associating black cats with witches? Did this idea actually come from the Middle Ages?

For question 1, you can find plenty of websites repeating the claim that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats. You can even find it stated as fact on Wikipedia. It is something that is considered so common knowledge that it doesn't even require a source citation.

But in a few places there are people who actually try to cite sources in support of the idea that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats. So I started digging.

One common piece of evidence given is a Papal Bull (formal letter from the Pope) issued in 1233 by Pope Gregory IX titled *Vox in Rama*. One author, who was influential in spreading the idea that the superstition about black cats came from the Middle Ages, wrote that in the letter Pope Gregory IX called for the mass killing of cats and claimed that black cats were satanic.

Unfortunately for the claims made by this author you can actually go read the actual letter (and have Google translate it from Latin, the word for cat in Latin is "gattus").

In the letter Pope Gregory goes into excessive and lurid detail about supposed satanic rituals happening in the Holy Roman Empire at the time. There is talk about a frog the size of a dog that the Satan worshipers kiss on its rear end, there is general depravity and sexual orgies, and at one point in the satanic ritual there actually is a black cat that the satanists bow to and kiss (again on its rear end). 

That's it. No call for the extermination of cats. No declaration that black cats are of the devil. There is no indication that these things actually happened, just that these were random rumors that filtered down from Germany to Rome. The actual letter was not set generally to the entire Catholic Church, but only to the Bishops of three cities in the Holy Roman Empire. It's impossible to determine the exact impact of these letters, but there is very little indication that they significantly affected the state of things in those three cities, let alone in the entire Holy Roman Empire.

On top of this, this particular piece of evidence was not mentioned until the 1990s when it showed up in a few books on the subject. This Papal Bull had largely gone unnoticed throughout history until the 1990s. This has all the indications of someone who had a conclusion and went looking for evidence to support it.

Sometime in the late 1800s a few sources began mentioning a connection between cats and witches supposedly widely accepted in the Middle Ages. They were sparse on the details and even more sparse on the evidence. Generally they appeal to three sources for the origin of the connection between cats and witches. Interestingly none of the three sources actually came from the Middle Ages, yet they are used as evidence that people in the Middle Ages thought this way.

The first thing that gets cited as evidence that black cats were associated with witches is the case of the Witches of Belvoir.

In 1618 three women, a mother and her two adult daughters, were arrested in England for murder and witchcraft. Interestingly the charge of witchcraft was actually valid, because by their own admission they practiced witchcraft and attempted to cast spells on the local Lord and Lady (who both died, for unrelated reasons, but still their deaths were the basis for the murder charge). So while actually charging someone for practicing witchcraft is ridiculous, and it is an incredible miscarriage of justice to execute someone for witchcraft, they actually did practice witchcraft.

So where does the cat come in? Well it turns out that the mother did have a pet cat (there was no indication it was black). There were also allegations that she could turn into a cat, but the same reports also said she could turn into a mole and a white dog. For some reason the much, much later sources who mention the cat connection also fail to mention the dog connection. But sources at the time do not fixate on her cat. Her cat was only incidental to the whole thing.

It was only sources in the late 1800s, more than 250 years later, that explicitly played up the connection to her cat. It was also about that time that her cat magically turned black, from it's original nondescript color. A few books from the late 1800s began to cite the case of the Witches of Belvoir as the start of the association between cats and witches, but that was only in retrospect and not based on what people thought at the time.

Another piece of evidence sources in the late 1800s cite for the connection between witches and black cats is a book on Demonology written by an Englishman named Edward Fairfax in the 1600s.

The problem is that while Edward Fairfax did write his book in the 1600s, and he did talk extensively about cats and witches (occasionally the cats were black), he seems to be rather unique in his connection between cats and witches. The other thing is that his book on Demonology was not widely known in the 1600s. The only known copies from his lifetime are all hand written, it was only in the mid 1800s, more than 200 years after he wrote it, that his book was actually published and widely distributed.

It was in the 1800s, the Age of Enlightenment and definitely not the Middle Ages, that his writings became influential. He is also the source on what is considered to be "standard lore" on werewolves. His ideas were particular to him and had no impact on people's superstitions until over 200 years after he died. Yet it is cited as evidence that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats and associated them with witches.

The last piece of evidence cited by sources in the late 1800s for the idea that cats were associated with witches in the Middle Ages was a book called "Beware the Cat!" published in the 1600s. It is a work of satire and a collection of stories, only some of which are about cats.

There is one story where a couple of characters are discussing a witch and one of them briefly speculates that she turned into a cat to escape her pursuers.

That's it. That's the only connection between witches and cats from the book. While the book itself is important from a historical perspective, it is considered one of the first English novels, it was not widely published or even known at the time and very few copies were made. It was not until 200 years later in the 1800s when it was republished in greater quantities that it became widely known.

In all of these sources from the late 1800s the connection between cats and witches is only mentioned incidentally and in passing. It is not presented as a major or critical concept. And in most of cases the color of the cat is not mentioned.

So how did the connection between witches and cats, especially black cats, become so ingrained if it was not really present or mentioned before the late 1800s?

It turns out that in the 1920s there were several puff pieces published for children that purported to explain "silly" superstitions that were common hundreds of years ago. Among these children's books were some that very explicitly made the connection between witches and black cats, complete with drawings of old ladies in black pointed hats holding black cats.

These books consistently claimed that it was people in the "Middle Ages" were the ones who believed these "silly" things. For their "authority" on the matter they usually, if at all, pointed to one of the three sources I mentioned above. About this time they add mentions to a "legendary cat" named Grimalkin, who is supposedly the ancestor of all cats owned by witches. The problem is that "Grimalkin" isn't the name of a cat. It's a Scottish word for wild cats in general.

The children's books from the 1920s that mentioned a cat named Grimalkin apparently just magicked the story out of thin air.

So as far as I can tell, what happened is that in the late 1800s a few more academically inclined books made passing reference to cats and witches, and pointed to a very select set of sources from the 1600s, which in reality were almost entirely unknown in their own time and only gained recognition after they were republished in the early 1800s. Even though these sources were not from the Middle Ages, the books citing them added the comment that these superstitions came from the Middle Ages. All without evidence.

Then in about the 1920s a number of children's books were published with tales of magic, and fairies, and everything, including stories about witches with their black cats. These children's books were not trying to teach children that that black cats were unlucky, or associated with witches, or the devil, they were just saying that people hundreds of years ago believed these "silly" superstitions (all without evidence). But these books were the first ones, in all of history to explicitly state that black cats (and specifically black cats) were associated with witches. They also very specifically stated that these ideas originally came from the Middle Ages, despite the fact that those ideas were not widely known until the late 1800s.

Quite ironically from those books people actually picked up the idea that black cats were unlucky and they were the actual source of all the superstitions about black cats. Quite literally the generation of people who grew up in the early 1900s, and their children, were the ones who first created the superstition about black cats. It did not come from the Middle Ages, it was accidentally created in the 1920s.

The black cat superstition is only a little over 100 years old and did not come from the Middle Ages.

Joseph F. Smith had a classical understanding of time, and that is important

In 1918 Joseph F. Smith had a revelation on the Savior's visit to the spirit world and the redemption of the dead. Leading up to this revelation he had many questions weighing on his mind brought on by recent family deaths and his own reckoning with mortality.

While explaining his thinking leading up to the revelation Joseph F. Smith said,

25 I marveled, for I understood that the Savior spent about three years in his ministry among the Jews.... 27 But his ministry among those who were dead was limited to the brief time intervening between the crucifixion and his resurrection; 28 And I wondered at the words of Peter—wherein he said that the Son of God preached unto the spirits in prison... and how it was possible for him to preach to those spirits and perform the necessary labor among them in so short a time. (D&C 138:25-28)

Part of what made Joseph F. Smith ask his questions in the first place was the fact that he could not see anyway for the Savior to have sufficient time to preach to so many people who had already died. Without realizing it Joseph F. Smith had certain implicit metaphysical assumptions that determined what kinds of questions he would ask and what kinds of answers he would look for. Joseph F. Smith operated with a certain subconscious understanding of time that created a paradox that necessitated an answer.

If Joseph F. Smith had lived much later in our day and had asked the same question, "How could the Savior do more in three days than he had done in three years on Earth?" he would have different options available to answer this question regarding time. But for him, this question presented an unresolvable paradox. If members of the Church did not have the benefit of Joseph F. Smith's revelation and asked the same question today, a number of people would probably invoke the principles of relativity and relative time.

Possible answers could have included things like, "The flow of time is different in the spirit world.", or "Time is only something relevant to mortality, so the Savior was not bound by time constraints in the spirit world." Any of these answers would have lessened the urgency of resolving the three day time constraint on the Savior, and could have possibly lead Joseph F. Smith to consider his questions differently, or even a different set of questions.

Because of the proliferation of Einstein's theories of relativity we have a very different fundamental understanding of time than people previously had. Generally we do not even realize the immense difference in how we collectively understand time compared to even 100 years ago. The idea that time can flow at different rates, or that time is relative to the observer, has so permeated our society that major Hollywood movies can use the idea as a crucial plot point and we do not even consider how strange a concept it is for time to flow differently or fail to grasp the relative nature of time. Even the concept of time travel is a relatively modern concept that we do not realize entirely depends on certain crucial ontological concepts of time that have only entered our collective consciousness in the past 100 years.

For Joseph F. Smith his subconscious concept of time worked very differently from ours. He was not acculturated to a relative or even a dimensional understanding of time. For him time was the same for everyone, everywhere including the spirit world, and, even though it was subconscious and unintentional, how he understood time was central to the paradox that he faced. If he had a different subconscious concept of time then his approach to the question of how did the Savior accomplish in three days what he did not manage to do in three years would have turned out differently. Perhaps he would not have pondered the question in the same way, or he would have gone looking in different directions for different answers to resolve the issues that weighed on his mind.

My point is, when Joseph F. Smith was faced with certain questions, the ones that were the most paradoxical for him and presented the greatest challenge, were the ones that were only present because of how he subconsciously viewed time. The implicit cultural assumptions he unintentionally held placed boundaries on the kinds of questions he would ask, and the kinds of answers he sought. His ontology (his fundamental understanding of the nature of existence) informed the structure of the questions and paradoxes he faced.

In this case the unstated, and unintentional, prepositions of Joseph F. Smith lead him to a question that could be answered by revelation. In fact, his assumptions about the nature of time made his questioning possible. If he had a different understanding of time then he may not have been forced to reckon with his uncertainty in the same way. So his subconscious assumptions on the nature of time were beneficial and greatly simplified the issue he was considering. But it does not always turn out that way.

Quite often we are faced with paradoxes or questions we cannot find an answer for. Frequently the paradox only exists because of the subconscious, unintentional choices we have made in understanding the world. Many times I see people of faith asking some form of the question, "How does XYZ work if ABC?" or, "How can XYZ be true when ABC is true?" For them these are paradoxical questions for which there is no solution. But quite often the paradox only exists because of unstated assumptions they have made without even realizing it. Many such questions, such as the relationship between science and religion, are entirely dependent on subconscious assumptions we have made regarding the nature of science, scripture, authority, and revelation (not to mention epistemology, language, metaphysics, and God himself).

Sometimes the answer to someone's question simply requires the right information with an acceptable explanation. But other times the paradox lies entirely in unstated assumptions the person has made. These are the most difficult to address, because recognizing our own unstated assumptions about reality, and identifying them as the source of our confusion, is perhaps one of the most difficult human tasks in existence. It is easier to change someone's behavior than it is to make them realize that the intractable paradoxes that seemingly have no resolution are the result of unintentional assumptions they have made about the nature of reality itself. And the most difficult of these already difficult conflicts are the ones that are most closely bound to someone's identity.

In summary, I have used the example of Joseph F. Smith and the questions he faced about the spirit world to point out certain assumptions he had about the nature of time that may be very different from our assumptions today. Using this, I introduced the idea that the assumptions we unintentionally and subconsciously make can, in part, determine the types of questions we ask, and what we might consider to be an intractable paradox. Some questions can be answered through discovering new information, but other more paradoxical questions can only be resolved by considering what underlying assumptions we have unintentionally made about reality. Addressing these more paradoxical questions is a difficult endeavor that takes patience, experience, and practice. But by first recognizing that these unstated assumptions exist we can be more aware of assumptions that make some questions seemingly unanswerable, and ultimately give us a path towards resolving these paradoxes. Sometimes finding the answer to a question requires realizing that we are asking the wrong question.

Questions to Ask Before Asking Questions About Genesis

 A few questions people have posted online recently have prompted me to write this. This started out as a response to someone's thoughts on reconciling the story of the creation in Genesis with what we are figuring out from modern science.

 Before asking any questions about Genesis it is best to first ask yourself a few questions.

1. Who wrote the Bible?

More specifically, who wrote the book of Genesis? The easiest thing to do is assume that it was Moses. But how does that fit with what we know from an LDS perspective? In the Pearl of Great Price the Book of Moses is Joseph Smith's "translation" of Genesis chapters 1-6 up to verse 13. So the Joseph Smith translation took 5 and 1/2 chapters in Genesis and expanded them into 8 chapters for the Book of Moses. There are a couple of different ways of looking at this.

The material added by Joseph Smith could be divinely inspired or mandated material added to the original text by Moses. Or it could be material that originally was in the book written by Moses and later editors removed it when writing the "Reader's Digest condensed" version of Genesis. Either way the implication is that just the text from Genesis was not considered complete and additional revelation was needed.

This all of course assumes that Moses was the one who wrote the version that we have in Genesis. If you start looking into that question just realize that the answer gets very complex very quickly, and it does nothing to make the question "Who wrote the Bible?" any easier.

From the Book of Moses we learn that what was written about the creation and the Garden of Eden was shown to Moses in a vision. The story of the Garden of Eden was not written down by Adam. The story of the flood wasn't written down by Noah. If we assume that Moses wrote Genesis, and there are arguments that he may not have (or there may have been many editorial revisions), then whoever wrote Genesis in the form that we have now was writing 1,000-4,000 years after the events in the Book of Genesis. 

In so many ways the question of who wrote the Bible leads to the next major question that you have to ask.

2. What language was the Bible written in?

Anyone who has learned a second language knows that translation is not always as simple and straight forward as you might think. For many years my dad taught Spanish and something he always told his students was, "Spanish is not translated English!"

Yes, words like "que" are usually translated into English as "what". But "que" does not mean "what". The word "que" has its own meaning and use in Spanish that does not always correspond to "what" in English.

But it gets more complex from there. In most universities, and even in some high schools, students are required to take a few classes of a foreign language. In some cases taking advanced math classes counts towards the foreign language credit. This actually makes sense because as anyone who has suffered through several math classes knows, math is a foreign language. You have to learn how to read, write, and speak math. It's deceptive because math can use all English words and numbers, yet still be a completely foreign language.

The same is true of science. Science has its own language. Many people are completely unaware of this because if you pick up a book on physics or chemistry there will be mostly English words in there (or Spanish words in Spanish speaking countries, or Mandarin words in China, or etc.). But learning the language of modern science is literally like learning a foreign language.

So this brings us back to the question of what language was the Bible written in. Was it written in English? Why not? Other than the obvious fact that English didn't exist yet. Back when Moses was alive alphabets were still being invented!

Not only did Moses not write the Book of Genesis in English, but God didn't even speak to Moses in English! God spoke in a language that Moses understood! ("well duh qleap42, get to the point.")

God didn't speak to Moses in modern English because its not something Moses would have understood. In the exact same way, God didn't speak to Moses in the language of modern science. He spoke to Moses in a language that Moses could understand. Many people will say that if God had shown Moses the creation in vision, then God had to have shown Moses "the correct" way creation happened. Anything else would mean God was deceiving Moses. 

But these things were shown to Moses in a vision. Lehi in his vision of the tree of life saw the love of God as a tree with fruit on it. The vanity of the world was a great and spacious building without foundation. Did God deceive Lehi by representing "the love of God" as fruit on a tree? Or vanity as a "great and spacious building without foundation"? In the Book of John's Revelation, John saw many things, all of which were symbolic. Did God deceive John by showing him symbolic events about the end of the world?

Furthermore, what is the "correct" scientific understanding that God is supposed to have shown to Moses to not deceive him? The scientific understanding during the 18th dynasty in Egypt? Or was it the science of 7th century BC Babylon? The science of 3rd century BC Greece? 3rd century AD Rome? 11th century China? 16th century Europe? Science of the 19th century? The 20th, or the 21st? Perhaps better the 22nd? Or the 31st?

It's awfully presumptuous of us to think that God should have explained things to Moses in a way that Moses couldn't understand just so that we could. It's awfully presumptuous to think that we currently understand the universe correctly. That the way we see things is the way God sees them. It's awfully presumptuous to think that God can only explain things to people in a way that fits with our understanding of reality. Anything else is wrong and would mean God is deceiving them. That's an awfully prideful way of looking at things.

In the Doctrine and Covenants it mentions that in the last days everything will be reveled, including how the earth was made and the power by which it came to be. An interesting corollary of that is the idea that how the earth was made has not been revealed! That means the story in Genesis is not the story of the literal creation of the world, but symbols in a vision given to Moses so that he could understand. In that way God taught Moses how he, Moses, sits in relation to God. When Moses saw that he realized "that man is nothing, which thing [Moses] never had supposed."

Perhaps we should keep that in mind as we use science to learn things about the universe and how vast it is. When we consider the size and the true scope of reality that we are just now beginning to understand through science, we learn things we never thought possible. The size and scope of the universe is something that I literally deal with on a daily basis. Whenever I see someone, especially Latter-day Saints, insist the earth is only 6,000 years old, or that the earth was created in six 24 hour periods, I just think about just how big the universe really is. I think about how complex it is, from the creation of elements, the formation of stars and galaxies, the complexities of nuclear reactions, neutron stars, gravitational collapse, supernovas, neutron star mergers, basic chemistry, the time it took life to evolve, the complexities of life, the intricacies of evolution, evolutionary niches, the complex reactions that govern our bodies, the chaotic neuron cascades in our brains, not to mention the complexity of history, language, science, culture, and human societies. And there at the center of it all a God who knows and understands it all. Whose hand can hold millions of earths like this. Who watches as millions of earth come into being and millions pass away. God is someone who can know all that, and wants to teach us all of that, but first we have to learn how to understand what He is saying.

In all the vastness of creation it is awfully presumptuous of us to presume that we know how God made the earth because we read something in a book and assumed that we understood what it was saying.

Before we ask questions from Genesis, perhaps we should ask ourselves some questions.

Sci-Fi Sanity Check

A friend wrote me an email a few days ago asking for a sci-fi sanity check. He had been reading a series of sci-fi books where some interesting physics was used to destroy a hostile alien race. He was wondering if the the methods used were credible and could actually be used in a hypothetical space battle. Below are his questions followed by my responses.

Question 1:

"First, they had a fleet of ships fire nuclear weapons while travelling close to the speed of light towards the battle. The idea was that the wavelength of the energy from the blast would experience an intense doppler effect, and hit the enemies at an incredibly high frequency. This gave the weapons far more devastating effects than would have otherwise been possible."

Response 1:

This question is one that I looked at and said, "Oh, there is an easy answer to that." But the more I thought about it the more complex it became. So I went and asked a real nuclear physicist in my department and we both thought about it for a while and concluded that the issue is irrelevant anyway, though there are some interesting physics questions underneath that made us scratch our heads, but none of which would make a better weapon.

The first problem is a misconception of where most of the energy in a nuclear blast goes. When an atom bomb goes boom it does release a significant amount of gamma radiation. That is just something that happens. When the uranium or plutonium fissions it will release a gamma ray, which is very energetic as far as electromagnetic radiation goes, and very dangerous, but the vast majority of the energy actually is carried away by the fission products. That is, the daughter isotopes of the nuclear reaction carry most of the energy in the form of kinetic energy. The gamma radiation will fry you, but the thing that actually creates the blast is the huge number of particles with huge kinetic energies that will rip you apart. The gamma radiation will ionize the atoms in your body, but the thing that will literally blast you to smithereens is the fissioned material with huge amounts of kinetic energy.

The gamma radiation will only carry away like 10% of the total energy from a nuclear blast, the rest is in the kinetic energy of the atoms after they split apart.

So if you accelerated it to high speeds the only part of the blast that would be doppler shifted would be the radiation. The particles that make up the most dangerous part of the nuclear weapon would not be doppler shifted. So the radiation (gamma rays) from a nuclear weapon that has been accelerated to the near the speed of light would get columnated, doppler shifted, and would be more energetic in the direction of motion, but you would have to be going at like 99.9998 % the speed of light before the doppler shift would make the radiation that much more dangerous than it already was. For example if the bomb was traveling at 90% the speed of light then it would only raise the energy of the gamma radiation by a factor of 4. To make a significant difference you would literally need to be going 99.9998% the speed of light. At that speed that energy of the photons would be shifted by a factor of 1000, but only on an extremely narrow beam directly directly in front of the blast. A deviation by as little as 0.5 degrees would decrease the doppler shift by a factor of 10 (an overall increase of only a factor of 100). So aiming would have to be extremely precise, which means the detonation would have have to occur right on target or any doppler advantage would be lost.

But the main issue with this scenario, and the thing that makes everything I discussed above pointless, is that at relativistic speeds the kinetic energy far exceeds any possible yield from the atom bomb. For every kilogram of plutonium there is a theoretical total yield of about 20 kilotons of TNT, which comes to about 8x10^13 joules of energy. A kilogram of lead moving at 10% the speed of light has kinetic energy of about 5x10^14 joules, or almost 10 times as much energy as you would get from an atom bomb.

If you take that up to 90% the speed of light, 1 kg of lead would have kinetic energy of about 1x10^17 joules, or about 20 megatons of TNT, which is about the yield of the largest hydrogen bomb the US ever tested. At relativistic speeds the kinetic energy of the case that holds the bomb would have orders of magnitude more energy than anything the atom bomb could produce. So accelerating an atom bomb to relativistic speeds in order to take advantage of the doppler effect is kind of like strapping a stick of dynamite to the front of a semi truck traveling at 100 mph. It's not the dynamite that will kill you.

The key is that at relativistic speeds everything has such high kinetic energy that normal stuff like atom bombs are tiny in comparison. Just getting a hunk of metal up to relativistic speeds would make it much more dangerous than any atom bomb.

Question 2:

"The second thing they did was accelerate a barren planet to a significant fraction of light speed (I recognize there are issues with that too, but they never tried to give a scientific explanation for doing that) and send it through the star where their adversaries lived. The result of the high speed mass applying high pressure and force as it passed through was to cause an increase of fusion (because of the mass pushing stellar material together really hard) which released a tremendous burst of additional energy, causing it to become a supernova."

...Yes? It is conceivable. The star would have to be pretty big to begin with, but in order to get a planet to do that it would need to be going really, really, really, really fast. Like 99.9998% the speed of light. In order to get the level of pressure needed to make that happen you would either need a really big planet (basically another star) or an earth sized planet traveling at 99.9998% the speed of light.

But then we run into the same problem as before. At that speed the planet would have a HUGE amount of kinetic energy. We are talking about 10^44 joules of kinetic energy. To put that in perspective, that is the same amount of energy as a type Ia supernova. So yes, crashing a planet into a star at 99.9998% the speed of light would probably cause the star to undergo a massive amount of fusion setting off a supernova. But in order to do that the planet would need to have kinetic energy equivalent to a supernova to begin with. It's kind of like dropping an atom bomb on an atom bomb in the hope of getting the second atom bomb to go off. If you got the planet going that fast, hitting a star with it would be pointless since just about anything you hit with it would release enough energy that it would create a supernova sized explosion.

If your goal is to obliterate an enemy planet with a supernova sized blast, and if you could get an earth sized planet up to 99.9998% you wouldn't have to aim it at the star in the hope of setting off a chain reaction that would fuse all the hydrogen in the star. Just have it hit anything, a planet or a star, within a relatively short distance, say 3-4 light years, and that will release enough energy to make a supernova equivalent explosion and cook the alien planet. If your goal is to kill your enemy with an atom bomb, and you have an atom bomb, then just drop your bomb. Don't go for Pinky and the Brain level of complexity and drop it on another bomb hoping to set it off.

Is Salt Lake City America's Vainest City? Correcting Forbes

Background

In 2007 Forbes magazine published an article entitled "America's Vainest Cities" which dealt with how Americans have become obsessed with their looks and as a result were having more plastic surgery. Associated with the article was a list of the 10 vainest cities in America, according to their criteria which was largely based on the number of plastic surgeons per 100,000 adults. This was a fairly unremarkable list except for the fact that #1 on the list was Salt Lake City. That result caused a minor stir among some news outlets in Utah. Many expressed surprise, while others said in triumphant self-righteousness "I knew it!". But the furor quickly died down.

The article, and the fact that they ranked Salt Lake City as #1, would have been forgotten and only mentioned in the occasional blog post and local news article had it not been resurrected by a recent article published in Time. The article had the provocative lead "Believe it or not, the rise in Mormon breast implants and $100,000 Jewish dowries can explain why you're alone on Friday night."

While the article in Time dealt mostly with male to female ratios in Utah, it did cite the 2007 Forbes article to support its assertion that Mormon women in Utah were going to great lengths to attract a potential mate. As stated in the article, "A culture of plastic surgery has taken root among Mormon women." So according to the Time article, this "culture of plastic surgery" has resulted in Salt Lake City having the highest number of plastic surgeons per 100,000 adults, based on the Forbes data. This argument was not central to the Time article but it did support a major point.

The Time article has been getting a lot of traction lately with a few news articles and blog posts in response and numerous shares on social media. The first time I ran across the article I glanced over the assertion that Salt Lake City has more plastic surgeons per capita than any other city and did not think anything of it. The second time someone I know shared something that used the original Forbes article I stopped just long enough to do a simple calculation and determined that something was wrong with the original numbers from Forbes.

The Original Results

Below is the original top 10 "Vainest Cities" with the number of plastic surgeons and surgeons per 100,000 adults. The data comes from 2007.

Rank	State	City	Surgeons	per 100,000 adults
1	Utah	Salt Lake City	45	6.0
2	California	San Francisco	175	5.4
3	California	San Diego	115	5.2
4	California	San Jose	70	5.2
5	Florida	Miami	218	5.2
6	Kentucky	Louisville	41	4.4
7	Tennessee	Nashville	48	4.4
8	Virginia	Virginia Beach	51	4.1
9	New York	New York	591	4.1
10	California	Los Angeles	384	4.1

Even though the Forbes article also gave data about the amount of money spent on cosmetics, personal care, hair dye, and other similar items, the ranking was based entirely on the number of plastic surgeons per 100,000 adults. They acknowledged that Salt Lake City coming in first was surprising, but that did not deter them or raise questions about their data or methodology.

They explain their data gathering and methodology in the following way.

"To rank the cities, we collected the number of plastic surgeons in the country’s 50 most populated cities. We excluded residents under the age of 18, leaving out a small number of children and adolescents who undergo reconstructive or cosmetic plastic surgery.... We obtained the number of plastic surgeons in each city from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, a membership organization that represents about 90% of all plastic surgeons certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery."

If we look at the data from Salt Lake City, 45 surgeons and 6 surgeons per 100,000 adults means for their calculation they assumed that in 2007 Salt Lake City had a total adult population of 750,000 adults. According to the 2010 census 23.6% of the population of Salt Lake City is under 18, which means Forbes was assuming a total population of ~980,000 people in 2007. The current (2014) estimate of Salt Lake City's population is 190,884. Already we see there is a problem since Forbes was assuming a population almost 530% larger than the actual population of Salt Lake City. Using 2010 census data I checked how the other cities on the list fared.

Rank	State	City	per 100,000 adults	Under 18	"Apparent Population"	2010 Population
1	Utah	Salt Lake City	6.0	23.6%	981,675	186,440
2	California	San Francisco	5.4	13.4%	3,742,195	805,235
3	California	San Diego	5.2	24.0%	2,909,919	1,307,402
4	California	San Jose	5.2	24.8%	1,790,098	945,942
5	Florida	Miami	5.2	21.7%	5,354,161	399,457
6	Kentucky	Louisville	4.4	24.3%	1,230,936	597,337
7	Tennessee	Nashville	4.4	22.0%	1,398,601	626,681
8	Virginia	Virginia Beach	4.1	27.5%	1,715,728	437,994
9	New York	New York	4.1	24.0%	18,966,624	8,175,133
10	California	Los Angeles	4.1	23.1%	12,179,264	3,792,621

As can be seen in the table above the population used for the calculation in the original Forbes article is much higher than the actual population of the cities. Based on the numbers it would seem that Forbes used the 2007 metropolitan population which includes more than just the listed city. That would not be a problem, but based on their description of their methodology they were not considering metropolitan areas, but individual cities.

The next logical question is to check if the number of plastic surgeons in each city was accurate. I went to the web site of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons to check Forbes's numbers. For Salt Lake City I found only 15 surgeons with an address in Salt Lake City and a total of 47 for the entire state of Utah. There are a total of 26 plastic surgeons with an address somewhere in Salt Lake County but nowhere near the 45 reported by Forbes. I did notice that if I searched for a specific city then the American Society of Plastic Surgeons site returned results from nearby that city, though "nearby" is a relative term. A search for surgeons in "Salt Lake City" returned results from Ogden and Provo, which are both outside the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, but still "nearby". But further down the list are results from Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado. So assuming that the search mechanism on the American Society of Plastic Surgeons website has not been modified since 2007 it would be quite easy to find more plastic surgeons in a particular city than are actually in that city.

I have no insight into how the reporters did their search, but if they were using 2007 metro area populations then they may have rationalized using all or most of the results returned by entering a specific city into the search field. The problem with this is that they may have included plastic surgeons from as far away as Logan and St. George, and then only used the population of the Salt Lake City metro area. This would skew the numbers for all the cities in unexpected ways.

Corrected Results

With this in mind I decided to check all the cities on the Forbes list and also to expand the search to all cities, towns, villages, hamlets or Census Designated Places that had a plastic surgeon listed on the American Society of Plastic Surgeons website. For my analysis I used the total population from the most recent available estimates.

For cities over 100,000 people I used 2014 population estimates, for locations smaller than that I used the most recent estimates, which generally were 2013, but with a few exception for 2010 data and an even smaller number (~5) for which the most recent data was from the 2000 census. This covered a little more than 1400 locations in the US with populations ranging from 132 (Crestone, Colorado) to 8,491,079 (New York, New York). This included five military bases for which there is no population data.

Below I give the results for the original top 10 "Vainest Cities" as reported by Forbes, along with my count of surgeons in that city and a recalculation of the number of surgeons per 100,000 people.

Forbes Rank	State	City	Surgeons	per 100,000 adults	Actual Surgeons	Actual/100,000
1	Utah	Salt Lake City	45	6.0	15	7.9
2	California	San Francisco	175	5.4	50	5.9
3	California	San Diego	115	5.2	38	2.8
4	California	San Jose	70	5.2	11	1.1
5	Florida	Miami	218	5.2	47	10.9
6	Kentucky	Louisville	41	4.4	23	3.8
7	Tennessee	Nashville	48	4.4	31	4.8
8	Virginia	Virginia Beach	51	4.1	15	3.3
9	New York	New York	591	4.1	192	2.7
10	California	Los Angeles	384	4.1	45	1.1

As you can see when we only consider the cities and not the metro areas the rankings change significantly. Just in these cities Salt Lake City drops to #2 with 7.9 surgeons/100,000, while Miami moves to #1 with 10.9 surgeons/100,000. Also both New York and San Jose drop to last place with 1.1 surgeons/100,000. Just this small sample indicates that my new methodology will significantly change the results. If we just consider the 50 largest cities, not metropolitan areas, the top 10 become:

City	Surgeons	Population	Surgeons/100,000
Atlanta	51	456,002	11.2
Miami	47	430,332	10.9
San Francisco	50	852,469	5.9
Boston	36	655,884	5.5
Dallas	67	1,281,047	5.2
Baltimore	31	622,793	5.0
Nashville	31	644,014	4.8
Seattle	31	668,342	4.6
Austin	38	912,791	4.2
Houston	91	2,239,558	4.1

In this case Salt Lake City does not make it into the list of the 50 largest cities since it is currently the 124th largest city in the US. All of the other cities in the original Forbes top 10 are in the list of 50 largest cities in the US. If we include Salt Lake City despite its lower rank it would come in at #3. But if we expand our criteria to include all cities (and Census Designated Places) larger than 100,000 people then the top 10 changes with Scottsdale, Arizona leading the pack.

State	City	Surgeons	Population	Surgeons/100,000
Arizona	Scottsdale	40	230,512	17.4
Michigan	Ann Arbor	16	117,770	13.6
South Carolina	Charleston	17	130,113	13.1
Michigan	Grand Rapids	25	193,792	12.9
California	Pasadena	17	140,881	12.1
Georgia	Atlanta	51	456,002	11.2
Georgia	Savannah	16	144,352	11.1
Florida	Miami	47	430,332	10.9
Pennsylvania	Pittsburgh	33	305,412	10.8
Florida	Fort Lauderdale	19	176,013	10.8

In this case Salt Lake City comes in at #22 right behind Cincinnati, Ohio and Tampa, Florida. It even has a lower rate of surgeons/100,000 people than Metairie, Louisiana which is not even a city but is a Census Designated Place near New Orleans. As can be seen, only Atlanta and Miami are on this new to 10 from the previous top 10 where the selection criteria was limited to the 50 largest cities. This shows that as we go to progressively smaller populations the rate of surgeons/100,000 goes up. This means that a population limited sample, such as the one used by Forbes, even if they used correct numbers, would skew the results since the highest rates of surgeons/100,000 occur in the smallest population centers.

We can see this effect if we now include any population center with a plastic surgeon. Below are the top 10 population centers with the highest rates of surgeons/100,000 people.

State	City	Surgeons	Population	Surgeons/100,000
Colorado	Crestone	1	137	729.9
Maryland	Chevy Chase	20	2,824	708.2
Michigan	St. Joseph	1	276	362.3
California	Beverly Hills	89	34,658	256.8
Pennsylvania	New Castle	1	407	245.7
New York	Great Neck	21	10,088	208.2
New York	Lake Success	6	3,030	198.0
Kentucky	Crestview Hills	6	3,159	189.9
New York	Cooperstown	3	1,834	163.6
Pennsylvania	Lebanon	1	670	149.3

Here the highest population is Beverly Hills California with 34,658, but has 89 plastic surgeons for a rate of 256.8 surgeons/100,000 people. As an interesting #1 is Crestone, Colorado, a tiny community of 132 people. While the 89 plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills might tell you something about that city, the one plastic surgeon in Crestone only tells you that a plastic surgeon happened to open her practice there. As can be seen this list is dominated by tiny communities with very few plastic surgeons that presumably service a larger area. Then there are others like Beverly Hills, Great Neck, Lake Success, Chevy Chase and Crestview Hills that are suburbs of larger cities.

These extremely high rates of plastic surgeons/100,000 for extremely small populations indicates that a better selection criteria would be a limit on the number of plastic surgeons rather than a limit on population. To show this in graphical form I plot the number of plastic surgeons/100,000 people vs. population for the 50 largest cities, cities with more than 100,000 people and for all population centers.

If we consider the above graph there is no real trend, but when we extend it to all cities a distinct trend emerges.

This demonstrates the problem of using a population limited sample.

The Beverly Hills

Upon further inspection there are a few places that stand out from the rest. These are the ones I like to call The Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills, California is in a class of its own with 89 plastic surgeons, but there are several cities just like it with a small population, close proximity to a large metropolitan area and a large number of plastic surgeons. Below are 24 cities that fit the Beverly Hills classification.

State	City	Surgeons	Population	Surgeons/100,000
Maryland	Chevy Chase	20	2,824	708.2
California	Beverly Hills	89	34,658	256.8
New York	Great Neck	21	10,088	208.2
Florida	Naples	15	20,537	73.0
California	Newport Beach	47	87,273	53.9
New Jersey	Paramus	14	26,342	53.1
New York	Garden City	10	22,552	44.3
Kansas	Leawood	13	32,991	39.4
California	La Jolla	18	46,781	38.5
Virginia	McLean	18	48,115	37.4
Minnesota	Edina	17	49,596	34.3
Delaware	Newark	11	32,549	33.8
Maryland	Annapolis	10	38,880	25.7
Florida	Boca Raton	22	89,407	24.6
Florida	Sarasota	13	53,326	24.4
California	Palo Alto	15	66,642	22.5
Michigan	Troy	15	80,980	18.5
Maryland	Rockville	11	62,334	17.6
Arizona	Scottsdale	40	230,512	17.4
Georgia	Marietta	10	59,089	16.9
California	Walnut Creek	11	66,900	16.4
California	Santa Monica	13	92,472	14.1
Michigan	Ann Arbor	16	117,770	13.6
Texas	Sugar Land	11	83,860	13.1

Making this list are small cities that no one making up a list such as "Vainest Cities in America" would think about including but only show up when you look at all of the data. Cities like Edina, Minnesota; Leawood, Kansas; Troy, Michigan; and Chevy Chase, Maryland. Most are not surprising for anyone who lives near one of these places (I was personally not surprised by Scottsdale). I have included La Jolla even though it technically is part of San Diego, since it is, at least by this measure, the Beverly Hills of San Diego. Almost all of these cities have less than 100,000 people but a large number of plastic surgeons. If Forbes had wanted to do a real list of the vainest cities in America this would be a good place to start.

The Centers

Then there are a group of cities that I call The Centers. These cities are usually the center of metropolitan areas, have more than 100,000 people and are surrounded by smaller cities with few or no plastic surgeons. These cities obviously service more people than those who live in that city. These include cities such as Charleston, South Carolina; Albany, New York, Salt Lake City, Utah; Birmingham, Alabama; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Houston, Texas. Some of these centers have a Beverly Hills next door (for example, Sugar Land, Texas for Houston), but others such as Salt Lake City have no other cities close by that contain a significant number of plastic surgeons.

There are a few notable outliers among the Centers that deviate from the rest to the point that they are almost Beverly Hills. Below is a list of cities that deviate significantly from other cities of comparable population that they can be considered Beverly Hills-Centers. Some of these cities have a Beverly Hills right next door, such as Houston with Sugar Land.

State	City	Surgeons	Population	Surgeons/100,000
South Carolina	Charleston	17	130,113	13.1
Michigan	Grand Rapids	25	193,792	12.9
California	Pasadena	17	140,881	12.1
Georgia	Atlanta	51	456,002	11.2
Georgia	Savannah	16	144,352	11.1
Florida	Miami	47	430,332	10.9
Pennsylvania	Pittsburgh	33	305,412	10.8
Florida	Fort Lauderdale	19	176,013	10.8
Alabama	Birmingham	22	212,247	10.4
Virginia	Richmond	21	217,853	9.6
Missouri	St. Louis	29	317,419	9.1
Florida	Tampa	31	358,699	8.6
Ohio	Cincinnati	24	298,165	8.0
Ohio	Cleveland	28	389,521	7.2
California	San Francisco	50	852,469	5.9
Massachusetts	Boston	36	655,884	5.5
Texas	Dallas	67	1,281,047	5.2
Texas	Houston	91	2,239,558	4.1

Properly Placing Salt Lake City In Context

When you properly place Salt Lake City in context it drops from 1st place according to Forbes to #499 out of 1407 cities, towns, villages, military bases and CDPs that have plastic surgeons. With its rate 7.9 surgeons/100,000 it may seem high compared to other cities of similar size. But it is a Center so it has more plastic surgeons than most cities of similar size. But even as a Center it does not rise to the level of being a Beverly Hills-Center since for Centers of a similar size the average is 7.7 surgeons/100,000.

If we consider Salt Lake County the rate drops to 2.4 surgeons/100,000 and for the entire Wasatch Front there are 1.7 surgeons/100,000. This compares with an average of 1.6 for the entire nation and about 1.9 surgeons/100,000 if we just consider urban areas. For the entire state of Utah there are 1.6 surgeons/100,000 perfectly inline with the national average.

Below I plot the results for all cities, The Beverly Hills, The Centers, the original top 10 from Forbes with corrected results, and Salt Lake City.

So rather than being a surprising result according to Forbes, Salt Lake City is rather unsurprising. Forbes's strange result that found that Salt Lake City had more plastic surgeons/100,000 than any other city is due to using a population limited sample, combined with some unclear counting that cannot be cleared up without input from Rebecca Ruiz who wrote the original article for Forbes.

If you would like to take a look at the raw data I used, here is a link to a Google Spreadsheet of the data.

The Geeky Extra Stuff

Congratulations on making it this far into my post. You are one in ten, as in probably only one person out of my total ten readers will make it this far. Because I am a scientist and not a journalist I feel compelled to explain the complications associated with my methodology.

The data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons is not the cleanest data, nor is the search function entirely reliable. As noted above, if you search for a particular city it will return results from places other than that city, sometimes from a significant distance away. For example a search for Salt Lake City will return results from Sandy and West Jordan, but also as far away as Twin Falls, Idaho. Also I found that a search for a particular city did not always return all of the plastic surgeons associated with that city. But if you search by state and then sort them by city it showed all listed surgeons. This did not significantly affect the numbers and was rare but noticeable.

Some surgeons were listed more than once because they had more than one office. For one surgeon I noticed that she had five offices spread over a state. I counted each office as a surgeon. These cases were rare but noticeable.

Some surgeons had nonsensical addresses. For example, I found a "New York, South Carolina" with a New York City zip code. There were a handful of cases like this where the city and zip code did not correspond to state listed. By my count this affected nine out of 5129 surgeons. Some surgeons were listed twice with slight variations of the same address, so I only counted one surgeon.

There were others that had variations in their address that made it hard to determine what town, village or hamlet they were associated with. This was prevalent in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Some listed the city they lived in incorrectly. This is different from listing the wrong state as noted above. For example, there were several surgeons who listed their city as "Crestview, Kentucky", but their zip codes and address indicated they were in Crestview Hills, Kentucky. Both Crestview and Crestview Hills are directly across the Ohio river from Cincinnati and are very small communities just a few miles from each other, but are distinct incorporated places. There were some other variations on names that were particular to the location. Other than Crestview this did not affect rankings.

Some listed their address to indicate a particular borough or neighborhood. For example, there were several listings for Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island, in addition to addresses for just New York City. There was no overlap as far as I could tell (i.e. surgeons double listed), so when counting the total number of surgeons for New York I included all those that listed their city as one of the boroughs. I did not try to determine how many that listed their city as New York were in each borough, so the number of surgeons and surgeons/100,000 for the boroughs are lower bounds only. The same was done for other neighborhoods of major cities, such as La Jolla in San Diego, but only as far as was aware of it (sorry, I am not intimately knowledgeable about all neighborhoods in all major cities to the point that I know them by name, who do you think I am? Ken Jennings?).

Not all plastic surgeons had up-to-date addresses with American Society of Plastic Surgeons. A spot check indicated that this may affect ~2% of the surgeons listed, but that would not change the rankings nor classification of cities as Centers or Beverly Hills. I also only used data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) but I did gather statewide data from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) which is another major society of plastic surgeons. Some surgeons are members of both but with a significant number being members of only one. In all states there were fewer members of ASAPS than ASPS, with the notable exception of Texas. Also interesting to note is Florida which had, by a large margin, a higher rate of ASAPS members/100,000.

While I tried to use either 2014 or 2013 data, for a few places that data was not readily available. For all cities with a population over 100,000 and for all cities that fall into the category of the Beverly Hills 2014 data was used. I have assumed that the number of plastic surgeons did not significantly change from 2014 to 2015.

State Stuff

I calculated the total number of surgeons in each state and calculated the number of surgeons/100,000. For both states and cities with more than about 300,000 there is a power law relationship where,

Surgeons = α Population^β

where β = 1.08 and α = 4.4e-06. [Edit: When I put this equation in I accidentally grabbed the wrong numbers from my Matlab output. The values for α and β are now correct.]

Surgeons/100,000 for all cities and states.

Total surgeons for all cities and states.

Answers to Random Questions

Q: Why do you care whether an article in Forbes from 2007 is accurate?

A: I don't. But lately some people (i.e. the Time article mentioned at the beginning) have been using the data to support dubious claims about Utah and by extension Mormons in general. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to undercut the support for that claim when the original data could be shown to be questionable.

Q: Don't you have better things to do?

A: As someone I know once said, "Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...". I don't own a TV, nor do I have a Hulu Plus/Amazon Prime/Netflix account, nor do I have a gaming station. So for entertainment I look up random things on the internet and research stuff like this. It's what I do.

Q: What about all the other data in the Time article?

A: It may or may not be correct (the demographics definitely are correct), but some of the conclusions are not correct, especially those relating to plastic surgery and the statement "A culture of plastic surgery has taken root among Mormon women." My data seriously call into question that statement.

Q: Should Forbes retract their article?

A: I don't care. The original author has long since moved elsewhere, but if Forbes wants to issue a correction, by all means go ahead. If anyone in the Salt Lake City government cares enough about it they can ask Forbes to retract it. But I don't live or work in Salt Lake City.

Q: Are you really an astrophysicist?

A: Yes.

Q: Can I get your original data?

A: Yes. You can find it here in this Google spreadsheet. If you use it for anything make sure you cite your source (me, this blog). I always take points off from my student's lab reports if they don't cite their sources and I will do the same to you.

Q: Did you just threaten to take points off if I don't cite you?

A: Yes.

Q: Did I really just read all of this?

A: Yes. Yes you did.