History and Science

The famous surgeons of St Bartholomew’s Hospital

by Lucy Inglis May 13, 2013

St Bartholomew’s hospital has provided care for up to four hundred City patients since its founding in 1123 but it was during the eighteenth century the hospital moved from a treatment model based on medieval nursing to that of an active working hospital with many different types of medicine and medical science going on within [...]

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Fun with pigs

by Helen King May 10, 2013

By Helen King Finally, I understand what it is about dissection… Regular readers will know that, among other things, I’m a visiting professor at a medical school. As a recently-founded medical school, this one does not teach through human dissection. Instead, students learn their anatomy through books, computer simulations, models, and ‘surface anatomy’. The [...]

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Poetry, pain, and opium in Victorian England: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s use of laudanum

by stephaniecowell February 4, 2013

by Stephanie Cowell Elizabeth Barrett began to take laudanum, a tincture of opium, for what is thought to have been a spinal injury at the age of fifteen. It is believed she continued to take it through two more serious illnesses in her early 30s (hemorrhaging of the lungs and some extended unspecified illness). It [...]

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Lenin’s Lamps

by Eric Laursen February 2, 2013

By Eric Laursen (W&M Contributor) In Arkady Shaikhet’s photograph “Lenin’s Lamp” (1925) two peasants examine a light bulb hanging from a cord that appears to be strung through the portrait of Mikhail Frunze, Bolshevik and son of a peasant. Electricity seems to be directed from Frunze’s mind and into the hands of the unenlightened peasant, [...]

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Medicinal Compounds, Efficacious in Every Case

by Lisa Smith January 30, 2013

By Lisa Smith, W&M Contributor Perhaps the most famous cure-all of all time is Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, immortalized in song as “Lily the Pink” (or “The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham”).* Although the original vegetable compound aimed to treat women’s ailments, the song suggests—tongue in cheek–that it might have much wider, rather miraculous applications. [...]

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The Broken Mirror

by Marc Merlin January 22, 2013

by Anthony Martin (Atlanta Science Tavern Contributor) “I don’t do humans!” This declarative statement, uttered by actor Jim Carrey in the movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), is also my usual response to anyone who asks how much of my research in ichnology (the study of plant and animal traces) deals with humans. Sure enough, [...]

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The Hottentot Venus

by Lucy Inglis January 14, 2013

Throughout Georgian London there are many ‘freaks’, whose main source of income was displaying themselves: tall or strong women, tiny people, the prematurely aged (probably suffering from progeria) and ‘mer-people’. Sexual freaks such as bearded ladies or hermaphrodites were particularly popular. Anything exotic or ‘other’ caused queues to form in the street outside the chosen [...]

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Lenin’s Map of the Future

by Eric Laursen January 11, 2013

By Eric Laursen (W&M Contributor) In December 1920 Russia was embroiled in civil war, and Moscow was short on food and fuel, rapidly heading into a cold, dark winter. Yet rather than focusing on survival, the Bolsheviks launched a massive ten-year electrification campaign at the world-famous Bolshoy Theater. In defiance of a shortage of ink and [...]

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The Mummy returns

by Helen King January 10, 2013

By Helen King Have you seen the Egyptian mummies in the British Museum? Even if you’ve never been to London, you may have caught the travelling exhibition, ‘Mummy: The Inside Story’, which focuses on the priest Nesperennub, and has so far been seen by nearly 2 million people. Mummies are endlessly fascinating. They give nightmares [...]

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Mastermind of a Ten-Year-Old – How does one explain the child prodigy Mozart?

by stephaniecowell December 30, 2012

by Stephanie Cowell At the age of ten he was catching flies, making up silly songs for his music teacher father, performing before kings, stealing his older sister’s diary, and composing symphonies. He was expert on violin and piano. What made the boy Mozart such a phenomenal prodigy as well as such a human kid? [...]

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Who’s Responsible for Free Will?

by Marc Merlin December 22, 2012

By Riley Zeller-Townson (Atlanta Science Tavern Contributor) Neuroethics is an interdisciplinary field that attempts to understand the ethical implications of neuroscience research. And within Neuroethics, “Free will” is a battleground. About 30 years ago, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet led a study where the researchers were able to predict when human volunteers would press a button – [...]

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12 Days: On the Trail of a Lobotomist

by JackEl-Hai December 11, 2012

by Jack El-Hai (Wonders & Marvels contributor) Like many of my literary quests, my book The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness began by chance and took a long time to complete. Back in 1996 I was the author of a single book about the collections [...]

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How wind power won the American West

by Marc Merlin November 22, 2012

By Carol Clark (Atlanta Science Tavern Contributor) There is something both comforting and mournful about the creak of an old windmill coming to life in a breeze. The metal skeletons and pinwheel faces of windmills tower over the loneliest of places, totems to the people who staked a claim on vast, empty plains, where they [...]

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A History of Diffusing Useful Knowledge

by Marc Merlin October 22, 2012

By Marc Merlin (Atlanta Science Tavern Contributor) The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK): a title which sounds simultaneously so noble and yet so understated that it has to be either a Monty Python concoction or the actual name of an 19th century British organization dedicated to the advancement of human civilization. It [...]

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Two Medieval Women Physicians

by tracybarrett October 20, 2012

by Tracy Barrett Most people think of medieval women healers—if they think of them at all—as herb-women, maybe midwives, basically uneducated even by the standards of their time. But as I reported earlier, there’s evidence that a few women in the Middle Ages managed to get the same kind of training as their male counterparts. [...]

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