The dates of the objects in this composite image are far removed from the origin of their subjects: in the background is the Edwin Smith Papyrus, dating from the 17th-century BCE, but ultimately stemming from about 2500 BCE. In the foreground is a Greek Hellenistic statue of Imhotep, the Ancient Egyptian polymath whom many suspect […]
The Smith Papyrus and Medical Treatments Read More »
Today’s social-media aficionados take a lot of personality tests that we know are pure rot, like “what your birth crystal says about the way you treat your pets” or “what your quarantine eating habits reveal about your financial investment patterns.” The bust pictured here reflects similarly outlandish claims from a century and a half ago,
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This piece of furniture has an epic name: the Great Bed of Ware. Carved around 1600 in Elizabethan England, the exquisitely crafted masterpiece became famous almost immediately – Shakespeare even had one of his characters in _Twelfth Night_ (1601) claim that a piece of paper was so large that it was “big enough for the
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This haunting painting by John Singer Sargent (‘Gassed,’ 1919) shows the horrific consequences of Mustard Gas that nations used against enemy soldiers in the First World War. The hazy yellow skies permeate the atmosphere, as the wounded men make their way across the canvas, many blinded by the hydrochloric acid that survivors attested smelt of
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President Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the United States through the Great Depression and the Second World War, winning four consecutive elections despite the fact that he was believed to have suffered from polio, aka infantile paralysis. His reliance on wheelchairs and other assistance to get around was something that his opponents thought would make him
FDR and his Work with the Polio Disease Read More »
This post is about the juxtaposition of holiness and horror. The statue you see here is “the Vision of Constantine,” sculpted by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (d. 1680), one of history’s most talented artists. Bernini is famous for his beautiful marble renderings of the human form, and most of his beloved works were of well known
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Worlds End and Loyalsocks are magnificent and adjacent Pennsylvanian State Parks in the north-central part of the state. Thanks to the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Worlds End’s forests were replanted, and now Hemlock, Yellow Birch, and Red Maple join other tree species in a remarkably diverse ecology. The American environmentalist and state governor
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May I introduce you to Min Chiu Li, a Chinese-American scientist to whom many of us owe our lives or the lives of loved ones? In the 1950s, Li figured out a critical aspect about how the disease cancer works, leading to the successful employment of chemotherapy.Min Chiu Li came to the United States to
Min Chiu Li and Finding Chemotherapy Read More »
In the remote grassy highlands of northern Ireland is the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church. There, three disprate landmarks – a cross, a grave, and some special dirt – tell a story about hope for an end to suffering.From the Medieval past, the tenth-century Boho High Cross depicts scenes from the Biblical Book of Genesis
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Ah, how to frame the life of Qiu Jin, the feminist martial artist who was beheaded by the last Chinese dynastic government for insurrection in 1907? I think this quote by Jack London best captures her spirit: “I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a
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The Ancient Roman military brought the Empire into being, and its soldiers had far-reaching reputations for their discipline and skill. A look at the severity of punishments for wayward enlisted men goes a long way to explain this — the Roman officers could be as brutal to their own men as they were to their
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Reading about the way the cigarette industry insidiously and effectively played the American public is like watching a horror movie. By now we all (I hope) know how major tobacco companies secretly designed strategies to hide information about the links between smoking and cancer, but reviewing the advertisements and internal corporate documents is like looking
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There are two common denominators of the three scientists featured in this image. First, Anthony Fauci, Harold Varmus, and J. Michael Bishop spent decades of their lives devoted to searching for elusive causes and treatment of disease. Fauci worked on HIV among other illnesses, and Varmus and Bishop on cancer (the pair won the Nobel
The Humanities and Scientific Advancements Read More »
The headline here says the world will end in 1843 — that’s Jesus you see up at the top of the page, literally returning to earth on some clouds to clean the world from sin.Of course, it didn’t happen. This was the belief of the American Baptist preacher William Miller, whose evangelical movement convinced as
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Hey, anyone down for some yoga? For me, it depends on the context.This illustration is from an early 17th-century manuscript and illustrates an _asana_, or yoga pose, that looks an awful lot like the one called _kukkutasana_, or “rooster pose” shown in the second picture. If this seems arcane and not very practical to you,
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We don’t need to wrestle with our beliefs to look at this image of a man undergoing bloodletting (about 1675) to know that this medical practice seems like a bad idea. Sure, the Ancient Greeks might have thought it could cure illnesses, but they had a totally incorrect idea that sickness originated in an imbalance
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It might make us uncomfortable to think about death, but it gives us a space to connect with each other across the eons. Once we reach a certain age, the end of our lives is something every person considers. And that is exactly what the subject of this sculpture is doing.We all know about the
Ancient Egyptians Obsession With Death Read More »
This week’s posts examine attitudes towards death in ancient and Medieval cultures. This engraving of “King Solomon in Old Age,” reflects the most famous Jewish monarch of Israel as wizened but not cheerful. The portrait is entirely in line with the musings of the author of the Biblical book _Ecclesiastes_, who, unlike any other Biblical
Ecclesiastes and its Attitude Towards Death Read More »
Ah, this guy.Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BCE- 43 BCE) — the most famous speech-maker in the history of Ancient Rome — could be whiny, self-important, and blind to the way the powerful families of Rome enchanted him. But he is also truly sympathetic in the way he strived to uphold the political structure of the
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This is a 16th- century depiction of a Central-American ruler called Nezahualcoyotl (d. 1472). Before the Aztec Empire took over the region, the area was partitioned among several kingdoms. Nezahualcoyotl ruled over the city-state of Texcoco, and was famed not only for his political leadership, but also his architectural genius and his poetry. Unusually, several
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