This fresco from the first-century ruins of Pompeii show that Ancient Roman physicians knew how to practice surgery. In a world without the scientific method, knowledge of germ theory, or antibiotics, doctors could get a lot wrong. However, they got enough right to establish some medical practices that endured for ages, and have influenced medicine […]
Surgery in Ancient Pompeii Read More »
This is Lucy Wills, a woman lucky enough to possess the resources to do as she pleased. She travelled throughout her life, never married and maintained many long-lasting friendships, and kept up a lifetime of rigorous scientific study — she utilized all these characteristics to develop research that led to the saving of many people’s
Lucy Wills and Marmite Read More »
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 »
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
The Unexpected Effect of Mustard Gas Read More »
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 »
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 »
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
How the Cigarette Industry Played the American Public Read More »
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 »
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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This week we are looking at famous cases of poisoning in history. We begin with the murder of Georgi Markov, who was killed by a small pellet of ricin aimed from an assassin’s weaponized umbrella.Georgi Markov was a writer, and had dissented from the authoritarian government of his homeland in Bulgaria. Using his talent as
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One of the most macabre and unintentional poisonings in history is the sad case of the Bradford sweets killings of 1858. Twenty people died and over 200 sickened when they ate candy that had accidentally been prepared with arsenic. Kind of makes whatever mistakes we might be doing on Zoom this week seem a lot
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Evolutionary history is the focus of my posts for a while, and what better place to start than CRISPR? Last week, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna’s work in using CRISPR for gene editing made news headlines – this is the first time the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two women. The future
CRISPR Gene and The Nobel Prize in Chemistry Read More »
This is Marie-Claire King (born 1946), and just reading about her accomplishments makes me tired. Besides earning her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, she has six other honorary doctorates in science from the most prestigious universities in the world. From her work in discovering the genetic foundations of breast cancer, schizophrenia, and hearing loss, to her
Marie-Claire King and Genetic Studies Read More »
Historians are frequently enchanted by things discarded as useless by the general public. But I think anyone interested in evolution would find the study of non-gene coding DNA fascinating, including the scientist featured here. This is Susumu Ohno, one of the United States’ foremost geneticists and evolutionary biologists, and he came up with the term
Susumu Ohno’s “Junk DNA” Read More »
“The Persistence of Memory” is one of artist Salvador Dali’s most recognizable paintings. The surrealist style is perfectly adapted to depicting the ways our minds preserve our memories — they are suggestive, dreamlike, warpable. For however imperfect or relativistic our memories might be, we owe them for much of our sense of identity.How we humans
Salvador Dali and the Arc Gene Read More »
Charles Darwin’s idea of Natural Selection as the key driver of evolution has been demonstrated many times over. However, in the century and a half since his lifetime, scientists have added onto his theories as various scientific discoveries have been made. Perhaps no one has reframed the picture of Darwinian evolution as much as the
Lynn Margulis and Eukaryotic Cells Read More »
It’s almost Halloween, dear readers, so you’ll be able to suss out my theme for this week without a hitch. On that note, I cannot believe that I have not yet done a post on Elizabeth Bathory, aka “the Blood Countess”.So here’s her story: born into an aristocratic Hungarian family in 1560, Elizabeth Bathory was
Elizabeth Bathory – “The Blood Countess” Read More »
What was it about Eastern Europe in the 1700s that brought about so many stories of Vampires? Some scholars note that Western European countries like Britain might have enjoyed these legends because they could make people feel civilized — those “eastern places” were rural, Catholic, superstitious, and backward in the minds of nationalist Brits.However, there
The Blood Disorder Porphyria and Vampirism Read More »
Those who know me, know that each year in lieu of holiday cards, I write historically themed Christmas carols. And this year, I give you the following, sung to the tune of “Good King Wenceslas”.When the plague spread all about/ thirteen-forty seven.Buboes pussing, fevers out/ Time to bury your kin.Philip tried to find the cause/
A Bubonic Plague Inspired Christmas Carol Read More »
This week’s stories focus on a subject in science history which is indeed topical across the world right now: the discovery of how the human immune system works. And to begin, I am introducing the image of this young girl, named Myrtis by the Greek archaeologists who reconstructed her appearance after excavating a mass grave
The Plague of Athens and the Immune System Read More »
