4 things you didn’t know about Louis Armstrong

Planning to go to Satchmo Summerfest this weekend? “Satchmo” is one of the nicknames of Louis Armstrong, who is widely recognized as a founding father of jazz. This Friday through Sunday a free festival in the French Quarter celebrates Satchmo’s legacy.

Here’s some interesting health sciences related facts about Louis Armstrong:

A lip muscle injury sometimes seen in brass players is rupture of the orbicularis oris or “satchmo syndrome” (from Maladies in Musicians, Southern Medical Journal)

SATCHMO also stands for “sequence alignment and tree construction using hidden Markov models”, an algorithm used in protein sequencing (see this Bioinformatics article for more)

Armstrong was greatly concerned with his health and bodily functions, frequently using laxatives as a form of weight control. He published a book of diet plans called Lose Weight the Satchmo Way, which you can read in the 1999 anthology The Louis Armstrong Companion: Eight Decades of Commentary (link removed) by Joshua Berrett.

Louis Armstong was also a celebrity endorser of herbal laxatives. Check out HumidCity.com for a pictures of Satchmo shilling for one of his favorites: Swiss Kriss (link removed).