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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The product you see here turns out to have been ubiquitous and super important in recent world history: Pervitin was a methamphetamine synthesized by Germans in 1937, and the Nazis were addicted to it.In _Blitzed_, Norman Ohler reveals the macabre dependency of both Hitler and the Nazi military on drugs. The trajectory is fascinating: while
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It’s difficult to make a hero out of Edward Jenner, the doctor who developed one of the earliest types of vaccinations (for smallpox), but did so by experimenting on a nine-year old kid (James Phipps, the son of Jenner’s gardener). That kind of callousness fuels the fire of all sorts of negative stereotypes about scientists,
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The Victorians loved themselves a good Ancient Egyptian mummy, but it turns out that 16th and 17th century Europeans did too — as ingestible medicine. But let me not get ahead of myself.First, one must acknowledge the enormous usage of mummies that Victorians did indeed employ. Starting in the 16th century, “mummy brown” became prized
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This Ancient scientist was championed by intellectuals across time, and by the 1600s was known in Europe as one of the most important alchemists of Ancient history: Cleopatra “Chrysopoeia” the Alchemist (aka not the Pharaoh). Thought to have been active in the third century BCE, Cleopatra was praised in the early 1600s as being one
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This is King Charles II of England and Scotland (d. 1685), dressed in very fancy clothes which made him look very civilized and not at all the sort of person who would consume crushed human skull as part of his medical regimen. But there you are, because, as it turns out, 17th-century English folks did
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Here’s a reconstruction of the oldest European mummy, called Ötzi, named for a region where he was found in the Alps back in 1991. His body had been preserved by his glacial environment for 5,300 years, and has been extensively studied by scientists who have put together a fascinating picture of the Iceman and his
