Over the Thanksgiving holiday I spent several days in Boston, and I was able to get to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Goya exhibit. (Fun fact: on days when the museum closes at 4:45, you can get in free starting at 4 pm—a perfect length of time if you’re just going to one exhibit.)
When Goya (1746 – 1828) was 46, he contracted a mysterious disease that caused him to become deaf. Historians aren’t sure what it was. It may have been a viral encephalitis. It may have been lead poisoning, the result of massive amounts of lead white pigment that he ground himself, and used for priming canvases. It was so cool to see the above painting in real life. It’s a self portrait of the artist with his doctor, Arrieta, who is gently supporting the sick painter and offering him medicine.
I also got to see this one, of the Duchess of Alba. Goya painted the Duchess–a famous beauty– several times, but this one, from 1797, is one of my favorites. I love how she’s pointing down at the sand, at an inscription that says something along the lines of “Only Goya could have painted this.” (My Spanish-speaking daughter came along, and translated it for me.)
The exhibit runs through January 19th, and is well worth a visit. (Especially if you can get there at 4 pm for free!)
In the late nineteenth century, patent medicine makers printed postcard sized advertisements for their products and distributed them to druggists. Most of these so-called trade cards had a picture on one side, and a description of the product on the other. The pictures ranged from imaginative to bizarre to grotesque to racist. Manufacturers were not required to divulge ingredients, and they often made wildly fraudulent claims. Worse still, some of these patent medicines contained powerful poisons. Many were some combination of sugar, alcohol, and opiates.
Here’s a little sampling for you:
“Liquid bread.” Another term for “beer.”
I don’t think this one’s poisonous, but the note the racist caption, which reads: Your hand is as soft, sweet Mistress O’Doyle, as me harness whin rubbed wid vacuum oil.”
The medicines claimed to cure everything from constipationto consumption.
Shiloh’s consumption cure was introduced about 1873. It contained some combination of chloroform, heroin, and Prussic acid (cyanide).
Then there were the baby medicines for teething, colic, and diarrhea. Dr Bull’s contained morphine:And Mrs. Winslow’s soothing syrup contained alcohol and opium:No wonder Parker’s tonic brought the bloom of health to the cheek. It was 83 proof.And then there was Dr Thomas’ Eclectric oil, which contained opium, alcohol, and chloroform.One of the most successful hawkers was Dr. Ayer of Lowell, Massachusetts. By 1873 he was producing 630,000 daily doses of Ayer remedies. The Sarsaparilla was mostly alcohol (40 proof). The pictures on some of these are just flat-bizarre. Remember, these are ads.
A veiled allusion to improving male “virility.”
Rather than rescuing drowning sailors, these mermaids are salvaging casks of Ayers Hair Vigor.
I’m busy planning Thanksgiving dinner, and as I do every year, am frustrated by the tyranny of today’s menu, and my family and friends’ expectations. People are so hidebound nowadays, demanding turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. It hasn’t always been the case. I found a treasure trove of old Thanksgiving menus from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the UNLV Libraries digital collection, and I discovered that Thanksgiving menus in days of yore had so much more variety. Oysters, calves’ feet, turtle soup, and frogs’ legs factored into many of the menu offerings, as did a variety of boiled meats. And more meats. Not so much with the vegetables.
Come along with me on this trip through time!If we were at the Charleston Hotel in 1849, our Thanksgiving feast could start with clear calf’s foot, au madiere. We might move on to boiled jetty sheepshead, with a sauceHollandaise, to be followed with sweetbreads (no, that’s not Cinnabon—it’s the thymus gland of a calf), roast larded quail, and candied green apples with cream.
Getting hungry? Imagine the pages flying from the calendar, and now it’s November 29, 1883, and we’re at the Teegarden Hotel in La Porte, Indiana.We could start with mock turtle or ox tail soup, then have the boiled cod with oyster sauce, followed by your choice of boiled tongue, boiled heart, or boiled ham. Then another choice: should it be roast beef, turkey, mallard duck, pork, or saddle of venison? But hey—they served vegetables eventually, around the fifth course (celery, cold slaw, beets, “horse radish,” potatoes, succotash).
Some of the menu designs are quite beautiful, like this one from Revere House in 1884:
Or hip late-fifties, like the Sands Hotel and Casino in Vegas, 1958:Some are flat-bizarre, like this one from the Grand Hotel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Note that the chef is reading a “proclamation” to the turkeys (a signed death warrant?), and holding a cleaver behind his back.Or this one, from the Revere House Hotel in Clinton, Iowa, 1884. Note how the turtle in the tureen holds the crab, which clamps down on the frog, its mouth agape, desperately trying to escape. They’re all on the menu.
Dear Reader, reading this blog post could be very dangerous. Please proceed with caution.
There’s a Monty Python skitcalled The Funniest Joke in the World where a British writer during WWII comes up with a joke so funny it causes people to die laughing. No one can read it and live. Eventually the lethal joke gets translated into (nonsensical) German as:
Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?
Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
We see two German soldiers keel over laughing, and the “joke warfare” continues to cut its deadly swath.
Here’s where we enter treacherous waters. Because I know of two instances in history of people who may actually have died laughing–and I’m going to tell you the jokes that killed them. So continue reading at your peril.
Chrysippus
Are you brave enough to keep reading? All right, here’s the first one, as recounted by the Ancient Greek chronicler, Diogenes Laërtius: In about 204 BC, the Greek philosopher Chrysippus watched a donkey eat some figs. He cried out: “Now give the donkey a drink of pure wine to wash down the figs!!!”
Ba-dum-BUM!
That was the joke.
He evidently thought his own joke was so hilarious, he promptly had a fit of laughing that killed him. Are you still alive? Good. Phew. I think what saved you is the fact that jokes are very hard to translate, despite the “success” of the translated killer joke in the Monty Python skit. Chrysippus’s hilariously lethal joke was translated from Greek, so it was probably way funnier in the original. Or perhaps, as they say, “you had to be there.”
Martin the Humane
Still with me? Ready for the second one?
In 1410, Martin the Humane, king of Aragon and Sicily, asked his jester, Borra, where he’d been. Borra replied that he’d been in the next vineyard, where he’d seen a deer hanging from a tree by its tail. Borra surmised that someone had punished the deer for stealing figs.
*cricket chirp*
That was the second joke. Martin was supposed to have died laughing after hearing that someone had hung a deer by its tail. It didn’t help that he was suffering from indigestion after eating an entire goose.
Well, now that you know two real-life, actual killer jokes, I hope you will use this powerful knowledge judiciously and responsibly. At the very least, don’t tell Martin the Humane’s joke at Thanksgiving dinner, especially if they’ve served goose. You could have serious carnage on your conscience.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_VII#Chrysippus (see 185)
John Doran, The History of Court Fools (Boston: Francis A. Niccolls & Co., 1858), 377-378.
On a hot June day in 1559, King Henry II of France galloped toward his jousting opponent at full speed. His opponent was the young captain of his Scottish Guard, Gabriel Count de Montgomery. Montgomery had begged to be allowed to decline the joust, but King Henry had insisted.
The two horsemen met. There was a loud crack and Montgomery’s lance splintered. When they lowered the king to the ground and removed his helmet, they found a piece of wood had pierced his eye and another was protruding from his temple.
The two most celebrated physicians of the day were summoned: Andre Vesalius and Ambroise Parė. As the doomed king lay next to them, feverish and in agonizing pain, the two physicians put in a grisly room-service order: the severed heads of four recently executed criminals. They used these heads to try to re-create the king’s wounds.
Ten days later, he died, most likely of sepsis.
This story is not about what happened next—but what happened next, if you’re curious, is that Henry’s wife, Catherine de Medici, punted his long-time mistress, Diane de Poitiers, out the back door and went on to co-reign with a succession of three of their ten children—the frail Francis II, who died in 1560, the frailer Charles IX, who died in 1574, and the foppish and ineffectual Henry III, who would be murdered by a religious zealot in 1589.
No, this story is more about the two rock-star doctors, Ambroise Parė and Andreas Vesalius.
Ambroise Paré
Parė rose to fame as a result of his military surgical career. He’d discovered that battlefield patients who had received mild wound dressings made of eggs and oil of roses healed better than those who’d had corrosive acid or boiling oil poured onto their amputated stumps. Go figure. But this thinking was hot stuff at the time. This was a time when other surgeons believed that victims of gunshot wounds should be induced to sweat, so soldiers were buried in manure up to the neck. Not sure if that was before or after the boiling-oil-to-the-stump.
Andreas Vesalius
Vesalius was an eminent anatomist, which was saying something, because there were so few anatomists at the time. This was a time when surgeons had had very little opportunity to study anatomy using human cadavers, because it was against the law. Executed criminals were about the only corpses available, and there weren’t enough of them around. Most of the existing anatomy books were based on animal anatomy, rather than human. As a younger man, Vesalius had stolen bodies chained to gallows, and crept into cemeteries under cover of darkness, hiding bones under his coat for the purpose of studying them. Many medical schools were obliged to form dodgy alliances with grave robbers and murderers to be assured a supply of bodies for dissection. (You can read my blog post about that here.) But his tenacity paid off: Vesalius published a seven-volume, groundbreaking work on human anatomy.
Still, despite their combined expertise and experience, both doctors clearly felt some pressure not to mess up. Hence the decapitated heads in Henry’s sickroom. But poor Henry was beyond help.
My favorite story of Vesalius’s dissection lecture-demonstrations is when a group of his medical students found a corpse, and, to avoid the prying eyes of law-enforcers, they dressed it up, and “walked” it into the dissecting room, as though it were a drunken student being dragged into class.
Sources: Lois N. Magner, A History of Medicine. New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc. 1992
Leonie Frieda, Catherine de Medici, Renaissance Queen of France. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
The subject of today’s blog is Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832). What? You’ve never heard of Jeremy Bentham? Why, he was an English moral and political philosopher, influenced by Locke and Hume, and the acknowledged “Father of Utilitarianism.” Among his followers were John Stuart Mill and other legal theorists and Consequentialists.
I see you suppressing that yawn.
Well JB had a devilish side. His dying request was that an auto-icon be made out of his dead body.
What? You don’t know what an auto-icon is? Why, it’s a cabinet that holds a mummified human body, as far as I can determine. Here’s a picture of his:
JB in his auto-icon Photo by Michael Reeve, MykReeve at the English language Wikipedia
JB’s preserved skeleton has been fluffed out with stuffing and dressed in his own clothes. Also that’s not his real head; it’s a wax version. His disciple, Doctor Thomas Southwood Smith, who was assigned the task of preserving JB’s remains, tried a “new” way of mummifying the head, following a technique practiced by New Zealand Maoris. But the method went horribly wrong and the face, well, let’s leave it that they decided to make a new one out of wax. But evidently it’s his real hair. His cabinet was moved to University College in London in 1850, and it’s been a source of curiousity and student pranks ever since.
You can click here for a 360-degree, rotating picture of JB. It’s cool, although I get pretty carsick looking at him spin.
Want to train like a troubador? Crush it like a crusader? Become lean as Lancelot? Here’s how!
(Note: this workout is reserved for members of the nobility, males only of course. Before embarking on any physical exercise program, check with your governing feudal overlord to be sure this regimen is right for you.)
Your physical education begins at age fourteen, while you’re employed as a squire to a knight, and consists of vigorous sports such as hawking with a falcon, hurling stones, wielding a battle-axe, and casting a spear.
Most important of all, though, is getting on and off your horse. You’ll need to be able to leap into the saddle without using stirrups. Go ahead! Try it!
Still alive? Great! Now that you’ve mastered that, you’ll need to be able to leap down from the horse, while in mid-gallop, to pick up an “object” with agility. If this happens during a battle, the “object” may or may not be a part of your master’s anatomy.
From this point on, most of your aerobic training will consist of games that prepare you for combat: hunting, wrestling, fencing, horse-racing, javelin throwing, and, the toughest workout of all, jousting. This consists of galloping full-speed toward your opponent (who will be galloping full speed toward you), while wielding a heavy lance aimed at his heart, and while wearing a cuirass, leg armor, and helmet with the visor down.
Caution: fatalities on the course occur frequently, due to suffocation, heat stroke, or getting pierced through by a long, metal, pointed object.
Most people are familiar with the name Edward Jenner (1749 – 1823), a country doctor whose smallpox inoculation led to that dreaded disease’s eventual eradication. Jenner became intrigued by the fact that milkmaids who had contracted coxpox, similar to smallpox but much less serious, seemed immune to smallpox. He experimented with inoculating people with cowpox particles taken from the hand of a milkmaid, and found that they developed a mild case of the disease but were left immune to smallpox. In 1798 he published his findings, and by 1800 his vaccination had spread rapidly throughout Europe and the Americas, and it was considered by many to be the greatest medical achievement of the Enlightenment.
But health practitioners in Africa, China, India, and Turkey had been practicing a form of smallpox inoculation (called variolation) for centuries. The procedure involved taking fresh material from smallpox pustules and scratching it into the skin of a healthy person (or blowing it up the nostrils). It exposed patients to a significant risk of contracting the disease, but still had a major statistical advantage over doing nothing.
Enter Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 – 1782), my new favorite Lady of the Enlightenment. She was the person who first introduced the smallpox inoculation procedure to England, decades before Jenner’s discovery. Married to the British Ambassador to the Turkish Court, she made friends with many Turkish people, learned their language, wore Turkish dress, and observed their customs—most notably, their practice of variolation. She had had smallpox herself, and her face was quite scarred. Her brother had died of it.
Lady Mary
She had her own six year old son Edward variolated in the Turkish manner by an old woman with a rusty needle, and then later, when back in England during a smallpox epidemic in 1721, she had her four year old daughter inoculated. The method impressed the (initially skeptical) physicians who witnessed it.
In response to the public outrage at this dangerous, sinful, “Oriental” practice, Lady Mary published “A Plain Account of the Inoculating of the Small Pox.” She even persuaded the Princess of Wales to inoculate her daughter (though not her sons—that was too risky).
Lady Mary also gained fame for a public spat with her former friend, Alexander Pope. It’s unclear what the quarrel was about—he might have declared his love for her and she may or may not have laughed in his face. Not easy to do, considering he was probably not taller than four foot six. Still, she was a woman unafraid to speak her mind, and way ahead of her time.
For some reason, I’ve been going to a lot of baby showers recently–I have another one Monday night. It’s fascinating to see all the new-fangled baby contraptions available these days, and to learn what has gone in and out and in again in the way of advice to pregnant women and new mothers. Doctors still advise pregnant women against pretty obvious things—don’t smoke, don’t drink alcohol, and try not to eat an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s every night. I did a little research, and found that pregnant women have been given advice as long as there have been … pregnant women.
Here are five tips to producing a healthy—and most importantly, male—baby. They come from the health manual Ad mulieres ferrarienses, written by Michele Savonarola. He was a sixteenth century court physician to the Este family, rulers of Ferrrara.1. “Most poultry is good for you, except for crane and peacock, which are hard to digest.”
2. “Eels are especially good for clearing the bronchial passages, and they also help with your singing voice.” [I guess it’s implied that eels are a good choice for a pregnant woman.]
3. Fruits are to be avoided: “When you crave a piece of fruit, just think that the most noble and beautiful fruit in the world is the human creature in your womb, so surely you can resist the vituperative claims of your palate for a vile, ugly, bad piece of fruit that will harm what you carry inside yourself.”
4. “In order to give birth to a healthy, warm, and dry-tempered male child, pregnant women should consume warm and dry foods.” [That means no Ben and Jerry’s.]
5. “Beware of using cold water, it is not good for the fetus and it causes the generation of girls, especially here in our region, so keep drinking wine.”
By Richwales (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
When I was in New York last week, walking along Third Avenue, I noticed two twenty-something women in front of me. It was immediately evident what they did for a living. As I passed them I turned and said, “You’re both ballerinas, right? You walk in second position.” They both laughed and nodded.
Nowadays you don’t generally know what someone does for a living based on how she walks or dresses, unless it’s a firefighter in uniform, or a police officer, or perhaps a doctor in scrubs. But in times past, for the 97% of people who made up the “laboring classes,” everyone knew what you did based either upon the clothes you wore or the afflictions from which you suffered—or both.
Mechanic (Lewis Hine, Lib of Congress)
Jack London’s 1903 book The People of the Abyss is a first-hand account of what life was like in the working class slum known as the East End, in London. He bought the clothes of an unemployed American sailor at a second-hand clothing shop. He then spent several months living in workhouses, slums, and hop picking. It’s a fascinating (albeit wrenching) book.
Jack London, in his second-hand clothing
In his book Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain, Anthony S. Wohl discusses a number of “industrial diseases” as having been accepted as an inevitable part of working life. Miners had asthma. Matchmakers had phossy jaw. Lead workers had palsy. You recognized the tailors by their concave chests and stooped shoulders, the potters by their paralyzed wrists, the copper workers by the greenish tint of their hair, teeth, and skin, and the hatters by their unsteady gait and trembling hands. (264-5)
Breaker boys
Hop pickers, 1944
It’s a different time, now, of course, and mass-production of clothing makes it much more difficult to tell who does what for a living. Still, whenever I’m in a big city, I enjoy trying to guess.
Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. All images except top one LOC.
When Goya (1746 – 1828) was 46, he contracted a mysterious disease that caused him to become deaf. Historians aren’t sure what it was. It may have been a viral encephalitis. It may have been lead poisoning, the result of massive amounts of lead white pigment that he ground himself, and used for priming canvases. It was so cool to see the above painting in real life. It’s a self portrait of the artist with his doctor, Arrieta, who is gently supporting the sick painter and offering him medicine.
The exhibit runs through January 19th, and is well worth a visit. (Especially if you can get there at 4 pm for free!)
![By Richwales (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-4.0], via Wikimedia Commons](https://www.sarahalbeebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Ballet_feet_2nd_position-1.png)
