The first known person to discover an element relied on pee and actually was looking for the Philosopher’s Stone. Henning Brand used up the financial resources of three people – himself, his first wife, and his second wife – in the focused pursuit of finding a way to turn base metals into gold. Alchemy favored […]
Alchemist Henning Brand and Phosphorous Read More »
A 17th-century wooden sculpture of Vishnu beginning the world. Symbolic features include the snake that Vishnu sleeps upon, the multi-headed Ananta, who has existed throughout the cycles of birth and destruction that permeate the universe. Also featured are seven sages so enlightened that they have transcended the episodic cycles of birth and decay, and nine
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This is a portrait of Emilie du Chatelet (d. 1749), a brilliant mathematician and physicist from the French Enlightenment. Multi-talented (by age twelve she knew six languages, she studied fencing and astronomy), Emilie supported her scientific interests like buying textbooks and lab equipment by using her math abilities to succeed at gambling. One of her
French Mathematician and Physicist – Emilie du Chatelet Read More »
Rapunzel Syndrome gets its name from the fairy tale first published in writing in 1790, although earlier renditions go back to the early 1600s. Whereas the character Rapunzel uses her long hair to let a prince into her tower, in the syndrome, the person with the illness eats their hair. The hairball settles in the
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My last post talked about Rapunzel’s Syndrome, in which unfortunate sufferers eat their own hair. Since hair cannot be digested, a mass forms in the patients’ stomachs, often requiring surgery. There is a fascinating but gruesome silver lining to situations such as these, however, which is that sometimes these masses can congeal and take shape
The Creation and Desire for Bezoars Read More »
In the mid-18th century, certain young Bristish males of the highest social classes garnered a sense of worldliness by taking a grand tour of Western Europe. Returning home, they adopted distinct eating habits and attire that would set them apart as more special than their less traveled and wealthy peers. The style they adopted involved
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Death by hanging was practiced in the UK until the abolition of the death penalty in 1964/5. Those who befell this execution did not all die easily, sometimes gasping for breath for a quarter of an hour before their lives mercifully ended. This is why the contraption invented by a man from Early Modern England,
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Tomorrow, July 20, 2019, will mark the 50th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon: the module of the spacecraft called _Eagle_ settled on the _Sea of Tranquility_, a relatively smooth, basalt area of its surface. The poetic name Mare Tranquilitatis was coined by two astonomers: the first was the 17th-century scientist
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One of the most important tools in the history of medical diagnosis has been urine. The examination of pee can legitimately be used to figure out whether a person is pregnant, or has diabetes, or kidney failure. For Medieval people, it was also thought to indicate widened “channels” into the kidney, which accidentally let blood
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Original printing of _Leviathan_, published in 1651 and written by the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679). This classic pronouncement of human nature as basically selfish, competitive, and violent emerged during a period of civil war and corresponding endemic violence in Hobbes’ homeland. For him, humanity was doomed to a life that was “nasty,
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Malaria has been an extraordinary shaper of history. Dated as far back as 30 million years old, this protoza really took off after the agricultural revolution (not surprising, since it thrives in mosquitos, who love the standing waters that frequently accompany cleared out lands). Some scientists believe Malaria to be the single-biggest killer in human
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A strange relationship between mathematics and the occult began early on in Western history, and some of the most advanced intellectual minds fostered the study of numbers primarily as a stepping stone for understanding hidden truths about the physical world. This tendancy goes as far back as Pythagoras, but flourished notably in Early Modern Europe.
John Napier and the Relationship of Math and Occults Read More »
Slippery reasoning that produces horrible results is unfortunately a regular occurrence in human history. While the 17th century witnessed the Scientific Revolution in Europe, sloppy logic (mixed with lack of information) led to some gruesome human experimentation. William Harvey had recently discovered (for Europeans) that blood circulates in our bodies, pumped by the heart, but
Arthur Coga and Sheep’s Blood Transfusions Read More »
Ching Shih might have been the most powerful and successful pirate in history. Born in 1775, she was brought up as a prostitute in the wanning years of the Qing Dynasty. As the ability of the central government to provide stability dissolved, ad-hoc mafia-esque alliances among profiteers arose, and piracy proved to be one of
Ching Shih – The Most Powerful and Successful Pirate in History Read More »
Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (r. 1729-1796) is part of history’s extremely small club of super talented and successful female political leaders. She considered herself both a fan of the Enlightenment and an autocrat – like other women in her situation, she was aware her position would constantly be threatened because of her gender,
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During the nearly half a millenia that the Ottoman Sultans governed their Empire, leaders’ talents of course varied, and predicting what sort of ruler the next Sultan might be could be guesswork. Two phenomena that developed at the top levels of state governance, however, tended to throw the odds in the negative direction. The first
Kafes of Future Ottoman Sultans Read More »
Magic isn’t real, but people have believed it to be, and that makes quite a difference. For instance, at the seventeenth-century French court of Louis XIV, social anxiety among aristocrats jockying for power led to a tense and violent use of magic, fortune-telling, Black Masses, and secetive murders. Over 400 people were implicated in “L’affaire
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Meet Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin, a.k.a. “La Voisin.” Judging from her matronly countenance and placid expression, one might guess this late 17th-century French woman might have led a staid if uninteresting life . . . But nothing could be further from the truth. After her husband’s business collapsed, La Voisin turned to fortune-telling as a way
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Although popular culture promotes an idea that the belief in magic flourished mainly in the Medieval European past, maybe declining with the onset of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th-century, this is not necessarily the case. As Owen Davies, author of _Grimoires: A History of Magic Books_, relays, the so-called “Modern” era of Western history
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There is an idea that personal hygiene declined along with the fall of Rome in Western Europe. Unlike the Romans, this line of thinking goes, the Middle Ages constituted “a thousand years without a bath” (as one popular textbook summarizes). In fact, Medieval washing is a well documented practice, and you can read all about
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