Today on December 14, 2020, a critical care nurse in New York became the first American to receive the COVID vaccine. This begins a period of highly anticipated vaccine delivery in the weeks to come. The photo here harkens to another moment in American history when folks waited with bated breath for a cure for […]
The “Great Race of Mercy” for a Diphtheria Cure in Alaska Read More »
Shown here are Doctors Pear Kendrick and Grace Eldering, and together they developed the first successful vaccine against the childhood disease pertussis, or Whooping Cough.Whooping Cough is of course characterized by the sound of the hollow, forced, and unremitting chest cough that mostly younger people endured until the 20th-century development of a vaccine: it killed
Doctors Pear Kendrick and Grace Eldering Read More »
This week’s posts feature great moments in the history of immunology. Although the death of Vizzini (and corresponding survival of the hero Westley due to his years of building up immunity to iocaine powder, among the deadlier and fictitious poisons known to man) in _The Princess Bride_ might be famous in terms of cultural history,
The Antibody Serums of Shibasaburo Kitasato and Emil von Behring Read More »
In this last post for the week to focus on great moments in immunology, I feature a rare time when biologists actually got their naming system right.Featured here is an Ancient Roman copy of a Greek statue featuring Artemis. Although usually known as the Goddess of the Hunt and wilderness, the moon, and female chastity,
Scientists Despina Moshous and the Artemis Protein Read More »
Today’s Christmas-themed post is all about the mistletoe plant, which had special importance in pagan European times before it became attached to Christian holiday traditions.Mistletoe is a super fascinating species that evolved from sandalwood, and is a type of parasitic plant. It uses its host plant’s water and nutrients, but can also photosynthesize energy from
Christmas History – The Mistletoe Plant Read More »
Christmas traditions have a great many manifestations, and one of the most unusual is a practice from southern Wales surrounding the macabre figure of the Mari Lwyd, which is a horse skull decorated with glass eyes and bows, held up on a pole by a man under a white canvas sheet. (The first photo gives
Mari Lwyd and Traditional Christmas Customs of Southern Wales Read More »
The Schuylkill and Susquehanna railway corridor formed the basis of one of America’s first rails-to-trails, and exists today as a nearly 20-mile path across isolated woodlands. The history of this valley, which lies adjacent to the Appalachian Trail, is a microcosm for much of the coal country of central Pennsylvania.In the 1740’s, Moravian Christian missionaries
Schuylkill and Susquehanna Railway Corridor Read More »
Language changes slowly, words accruing and altering their meanings and pronunciations over the course of decades and centuries. But sometimes we find sudden movements of seismic proportion, particularly with the history of written languages. Thus is the case with the invention of Braille, the eponymous system named for its creator, Louis Braille. And just in
Creation of the Braille Written Language Read More »
Resuming my series of posts on important moments in the history of language, today I give you the genesis and legacy of the word “quisling.” This is a relatively recent term, and means “traitor,” and it is definitely not a complement.Quisling began as a riff off of the surname of the Norweigen politician named Vidkun
The Origin of “Quisling” From Vidkun Quisling Read More »
In _Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan_, the famous first lieutenant Spock airily quips to Dr. McCoy that “as a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create.” At the end of the film, the Vulcan sacrifices his life to prevent the destruction of the entire crew, because
Vaccinologist Maurice Hilleman and Helping the World Read More »
So much about human nature can seem depressing: we unthinkingly follow orders, allow confirmation bias to skew our views, and commit horrible acts of violence against people we don’t even know. However, the opposite is also true, and history has many examples of people who have disobeyed authority and risked their lives for total strangers.
Hugh Thompson’s Fight Against the My Lai Massacre Read More »
We are inseparable from our environment, and we change with our surroundings whether we are aware of it or not. You are looking at a photo of some of the skulls of the approximately 800,000 Tutsis killed by their Hutu neighbors in the 1994 genocide. It is easy to pretend that the inner workings of
The Propaganda of the Rwandan Genocide Read More »
We are (I hope) appropriately dismissive at the ridiculous bogus discussions concerning the treatment of COVID-19 that have appeared in the media. Hydroxychloroquine, bleach, “Plandemic,” blah blah blah quackery. It’s a good thing to be appalled by those who tout cures which lack scientific merit. And so perhaps it would be well to have a
Dr. Albert Adams and His “Curative Machines” Read More »
Today we use the word “scurvy” as a general adjective for something that is corrosively destructive, like “religious bigotry was a scurvy of the Medieval Church.” Of course, these were the attributes of the OG disease, which blighted many people — but notably sailors — until a cure was found in the 1700s.Many of us
James Lind and Curing Scurvy in the 1700s Read More »
You are looking at a detail of contemporary artist Peter Booth’s painting, “Apocolyptic Landscape” (1983) — the shapes are jagged and random; the red, black, and brown coloring evokes filth; and the black and white streaks appear flattened next to some penetrating rondels in red and yellow. It is a fitting accompaniment to discuss another
The Apocalypses by Apostle Peter and Peter Booth Read More »
The 19th century had waaaay too many well-intentioned visionaries whose actual concepts led to horrifying conclusions. Among the sickening ideas is the Panopticon, created by the British philosopher Jeremy Benthem. He meant well — but his aims incorporated authoritarian mind-control.From the Greek “all-seeing”, the Panopticon was a special sort of prison, designed for the benevolant
Architectural Design of the 19th-Century Panopticon’s Read More »
Last week on February 18, 2021, NASA’s Rover “Perseverance” landed safely on Mars. If you got a chance to watch the event unfold at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, you no doubt were moved by the atmosphere of tense but hopeful expectation held by all scientists in the room. The hush as the
The Lucky Peanuts of NASA Read More »
Beauty standards across time vary enormously, as does the degree to which they emphasize qualities that never appear in nature. For instance, in recent decades in American culture, having perfectly straight and dazzling white teeth have signified health and high social status. In much of Japan’s history, it was the exact opposite.Here you see an
Beauty Standards in Ancient Japanese History Read More »
Just last week (12 March 2021) a team of scholars that included a mathematician, a physicist, and a clockmaker (among others) unveiled an answer to one of the greatest puzzles in history — how the famed “Antikythera Mechanism” worked.Since 1901, when a diver off the coast of Greece (Antikythera, to be exact) found an unusual
The Inner-Workings of the “Antikythera Mechanism” Read More »
For Women’s History Month and my 800th post, I am featuring Violet Oakley (two of you readers voted for her yesterday). Oakley was a leading American artist of the early 20th-century: her 43 murals at the State Capitol Building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania are among her most famous works — they were the first public murals
Artist Violet Oakley and Pennsylvania’s Capitol Read More »
