My historical fields of interest lie in the distant past — but for me, it seems almost ancient history to realize that a year ago today on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization decreed that COVID-19 was indeed a pandemic, and the world changed utterly.That was before the deaths of nearly 530,000 Americans (so […]
Jason McLellan and his Research on SARS-COV2 Read More »
All pandemics are horrible, but no two are alike. Certainly this is true for those who have suffered from the bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia Pestis.These poor victims pictures here died of the pandemic that raged across western Eurasia during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and after (from 541- the following
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The myth of Prometheus is one of the oldest in Ancient Greek mythology. In the _Theogany_, dating from around 700 BCE, the author Hesiod tells the story of how the God Zeus took vengeance on his Titan rival for giving humans the knowledge of fire — he had Prometheus chained to a rock, and each
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My four-year old nephew has learned about swear words. Coaching her son about the importance of context, she tells him “words have power, don’t they?” (My sister is very smart).Some words, of course, have more combustibility than others, but readers here no doubt can agree that their power lies in the mind of the person
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One of the most interesting secret societies are the Rosicrucians, an allegedly ancient sect of initiates endowed with wisdom so advanced that members have had to keep their knowledge and community hidden.But, they have a settlement in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — with actual pyramids! — and if it wasn’t on private property, I’d definitely go
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Why I had never heard of Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875) before this week seems crazy to me: he is one of the most fascinating people in American history. So that you, dear readers, also cease to abide in similar ignorance, might I introduce this man?.Randolph was descended on his father’s side from the white Virginia
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In the ancient world if you were worried about your health you might travel to a religious temple of a healing deity to seek treatment. The God-hero Asclepius had at least 700 structures dedicated to him alone. The Ancients ascribed healing to the effects of prayer, supernatural rituals, or medicine — often these treatments
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This marble plaque from the Ancient Roman port city Ostia Antiqua shows a birthing scene, and you will no doubt notice that no men are present. Although the medical profession in Ancient Greece and Rome required extensive training and usually eliminated women from being doctors, enormous exceptions were made when it came to the treatment
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In 1985, scientist, Katalin Karikó left her native Hungary for the United States with her husband and two-year old daughter. The University of Szeged, where she had earned her degree and was working as a postdoctorate fellow, had run out of funding. So the family — who had to sew cash into their daughter’s stuffed
The Ancient Romans were definitely not prudish about sex, but their ideas about when the act was healthy and when it wasn’t are certainly foreign to moderns. The first-century encyclopedist Pliny the Elder wrote that “sexual intercourse is good for lower back pain, for weakness of the eyes, for derangement, and for depression”. On the
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The way medical knowledge has spread across the globe over time is fascinating. Now, of course, the internet makes things easy — that’s why the mRNA technology that produced two of the major COVID vaccines could be developed so quickly. Throughout recorded history, the Ancient Greek tradition was the most influential source of medicial studies
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The Ancient Romans loved their baths — this is a circular pool from the baths in the eponymously named town of Bath in England. Although the custom of public bathing had come from Ancient Greece, by the early 400s CE Rome had 856 bathouses throughout the Empire.These were places of beauty and comfort — heating
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It might look like this is a Medieval European painting at first glance, but it isn’t — check out the writing, the orange and blue dominant tones, the clothing of the small figures, and the directional patterns of the lines. This is an Ethiopian mural from the 1600s.And what it depicts is suggestive regarding a
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This is Polly Matzinger, and even though this is a history Instagram post, she is an active scientist. But her discoveries about the way the immune system works have changed how scientists think about the ways living things fight off harmful pathogens, thus ensuring Matzinger a place in humanity’s historical records.Before I say anything about
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Wanna know a crazy thing that a lot of British and American people were interested in during the late 19th and early 20th centuries?: masturbation. Moralists and medical writers freaked the heck out over “onanism,” a term that Victorians liked using for wanking, jerking off, sailing the taco, flicking the bean, etc, etc.Anti-masturbation diatribes have
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If you are reading this post, I hope you can celebrate the fact that your profession is not as wretched as the Resurrectionists of Britain, and your post-mortem reputation as wretchedly public as that of William Burke, a Resurrectionist so desperate that he became a murderer for his career.In the 18th and 19th centuries, scientists
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Scientists with scruples make for some of my favorite heroes. Here is one of them: Frances Oldham Kelsey.In 1960, in her first assignment on the first month at her new job at the United States Food and Drug Administration, Kelsey stood up to powerful corporate interests and demanded scientific studies to demonstrate the safety of
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Epidemiological studies is a fascinating blend of science and history. There’s a lot of ways we can benefit now from the study of past disease. The pock-marked friars shown here might well have been suffering from an illness that most folks today are blessedly free from: measles.Measles is a human virus (MeV), but, like SARS-COV2,
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This political cartoon of Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) shows him as a circus performer, reaching into the gut of an exotically dressed assistant while masses of people line up to watch the operation. Voronoff detested this sort of depiction, because he took his work extremely seriously. After all, he was considered a leader in organ transplant
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The most notorious surgery of the 20th century is the lobotomy, and the most infamous practicioner of this operation was the neurologist Walter Freeman (d. 1972). For a couple of decades in the mid-20th century, Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies on mentally ill patients, developing a technique of entering the brain through the eye socket
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