If any discussion of medieval medicine gets going, it’s only a matter of time before someone brings up leeches. And it turns out that the centrality of those squirming blood-suckers to the treatment of disease in the Middle Ages isn’t...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-tboYkOFho A preternaturally talented, precocious child, barely out of toddlerhood, in powdered wig and knee-breeches, capering around the great houses of 18th century Europe between virtuoso performances on the harpsichord. A young boy who can play any piece anyone puts...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1fc-h018Uo The Reagan presidency was probably the golden age of anti-drug messaging. America’s school kids were told that a brain was like an egg and drugs were like a frying pan. The First Lady told America’s school kids simply to...
Campaigning for his third term as president in 2022, Lula da Silva ran on a straightforward message: making Brazil “happy again”. Now, halfway through his third term, macroeconomic indicators paint a fairly rosy picture of the country’s trajectory under his...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFY2ydsj3gE Money likes to go where money already resides. This truism is valid in the cultural sector as well, which has seen a lot of its funding opportunities disappear since 2008. And as funding disappears from the field, so do...
Five years after the COVID-19 swept the world off its feet and many are, understandably, reluctant to discuss it. Yet, the fallout stays with us, academically, economoically, and in so many ways. Source link...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QulGsWDQTCM Loneliness is a serious public health issue. The Mental Health Foundation confirms that it makes it harder for people to connect, which leads to fear of social situations, and ultimately makes it more difficult to escape negative thoughts. The...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYbVPEjP5zc “Do what thou wilt”: as the central principle of a worldview, it may not sound like much, but at least there are always a great many people ready and willing to hear it. So discovered Aleister Crowley, the early...
In 1926, Fritz Kahn, a German gynecologist and anatomy textbook author, produced a lithograph called Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace) that depicted the human body as a factory, a chemical plant of sorts. Kahn’s body came complete with mechanical lungs,...
Image by Rochester Institute of Technology, via Wikimedia Commons When New York City hosted The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asimov, the prolific sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, took the opportunity to wonder what the world would look like...
