Medicine and Science

Secrets of a Roman Sewer

by CarolineLawrence May 15, 2013
Secrets of a Roman Sewer

by Caroline Lawrence Recently I attended a fascinating lecture by Professor Mark Robinson of Oxford University on the subject of Roman organic waste. Excavating the Ancient Sewers of Herculaneum was part of the British Museum’s fabulous ongoing exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum. For a fuller account, please read my History Girls blog post. [...]

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The famous surgeons of St Bartholomew’s Hospital

by Lucy Inglis May 13, 2013
The famous surgeons of St Bartholomew's Hospital

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
Fun with pigs

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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The Black Stork: A physician’s cinematic argument for eugenics

by JackEl-Hai March 8, 2013
The Black Stork: A physician’s cinematic argument for eugenics

by Jack El-Hai, Wonders & Marvels contributor One of the most infamous movies of the silent era, which made a case for allowing disabled infants to die, sparked a national debate between 1917 and the late 1920s before sinking into obscurity. Along the way, The Black Stork rocketed a physician to fame and symbolized America’s [...]

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An Old Doctor, a Convent Apothecary, and an Eighteenth-Century Medical Dispute

by Lisa Smith March 2, 2013
An Old Doctor, a Convent Apothecary, and an Eighteenth-Century Medical Dispute

By Lisa Smith, W&M Contributor In December 1718, Dr. Tolozé, who styled himself an ‘Ancien Medecin’ (Old Doctor), wrote to physician Étienne-François Geoffroy.[1] Tolozé wanted Geoffroy to settle a dispute between him and the nuns of St. Eutrope near Chartres. Geoffroy, he believed, was well-placed to help, being the doctor of a Mme Cossins who [...]

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Medicinal Compounds, Efficacious in Every Case

by Lisa Smith January 30, 2013
Medicinal Compounds, Efficacious in Every Case

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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Mr. President, a Visitor Is Here to See You

by JackEl-Hai January 9, 2013
Mr. President, a Visitor Is Here to See You

by Jack El-Hai, Wonders & Marvels contributor Thousands of people will soon arrive in Washington, D.C., for President Obama’s inauguration. Who are the people who visit the nation’s capital to see the Chief Executive? For the past 70 years, researchers have wondered about the psychiatric makeup of the President’s visitors — especially those visitors who [...]

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12 Days: On the Trail of a Lobotomist

by JackEl-Hai December 11, 2012
12 Days: On the Trail of a Lobotomist

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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12 Days: The Greatest Voice of Her Age

by Mary Sharratt December 11, 2012
12 Days: The Greatest Voice of Her Age

By Mary Sharratt (W&M Contributor) Born in the Rhineland in present day Germany, Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a visionary abbess and polymath, a Renaissance women before the Renaissance. She composed an entire corpus of sacred music and wrote nine books on subjects as diverse as theology, cosmology, botany, medicine, linguistics, and human sexuality, a [...]

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The Censorship of Titicut Follies

by JackEl-Hai November 9, 2012
The Censorship of Titicut Follies

by Jack El-Hai, Wonders & Marvels contributor Disturbing images fill the screen: a man confesses to sexually abusing his daughter, guards taunt a mental patient until he screams, a physician thrusts a grimy tube down a man’s throat for a force-feeding. These are some of the unforgettable scenes in Titicut Follies, a documentary by Frederick Wiseman that [...]

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A Botanist, a Butcher and a Body: Encountering an Eighteenth-Century Vrykolakas

by Lisa Smith October 30, 2012
A Botanist, a Butcher and a Body: Encountering an Eighteenth-Century Vrykolakas

By Lisa Smith, W&M Contributor From 1700-1702, French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort journeyed through the Greek islands and Constantinople. The following tale is his account of a Greek revenant (vrykolakas) on the island of Mykonos (A Voyage into the Levant, vol. 1, 1718). The story begins with the unsolved murder of a local “ill-natur’d and [...]

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Two Medieval Women Physicians

by tracybarrett October 20, 2012
Two Medieval Women Physicians

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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Bonanza denied by pickax and jackass

by CarolineLawrence October 15, 2012
Bonanza denied by pickax and jackass

By Caroline Lawrence (W&M Contributor) In 1849 two good-looking, well-educated brothers from Pennsylvania joined the surge of young men travelling westward to “make their pile” in California gold. Allen and Hosea Grosh endured hunger, cold, toothache, scurvy, rheumatism and so much dysentery that they had to learn to spell the word diarrhea for their letters home. [...]

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Theatres of Anatomy

by Helen King October 10, 2012
Theatres of Anatomy

By Helen King (W&M contributor) I was recently lucky enough to visit for the first time two historic anatomy theatres: the oldest permanent structure, the Padua anatomy theatre of 1594, and the 1638-39 one in Bologna. Before 1594, anatomy theatres were temporary structures, in some cases erected at the expense of the professor performing the dissection. [...]

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17th-century medicine and me: a novelist’s unlikely tale

by stephaniecowell September 29, 2012
17th-century medicine and me: a novelist’s unlikely tale

by Stephanie Cowell Novelists sometimes find themselves writing about areas of which they know little and believe me, I was the last person in the world to write about medicine or science. I had walked out of biology in eighth-grade when my teacher had encouraged us to stick our fingers in a cow’s heart. My [...]

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