Blog Archive for Sarah Albee, Writer of History and Science Books for Kids

Research Diversions

Posted September 1, 2014

By Roger from Derby, UK Preserved Chemists shop in Derby Silk Mill via Wikimedia

I have a new favorite publication. During my recent week of research in New York City, I spent many happy hours poring over nineteenth century copies of The British Medical Journal. I found it so diverting—literally—that it was difficult to stay focused on my area of research. It’s written in a very approachable, conversational style, well, for a medical journal—with lots of first-hand accounts from doctors about their ailing patients. And you find yourself filling in the human details between the lines.

For instance, in the correspondence section of the July 12, 1862 issue, there’s a lively dialogue between those in favor of sending people home with poisons in bottles marked with a “difference in shape and mode of pouring” and those who think it’s a dumb idea. Why sure, the first camp argues, it’s better to package the poison in a specially shaped bottle, so that when Mother sends seven-year-old Suzy to the corner store to collect a half pound of sugar for the trifle and a half pound of arsenic to kill the rats, Suzy will have a fighting chance not to get the two identical substances confused as she carries the packages home all jumbled up in her little white apron. The other camp thinks it’s the person’s own fault if he doesn’t bother to look carefully. As one Mr. Squire at the Pharmaceutical Society put it, “Such a person deserves to be poisoned.”

Then there’s the article entitled “Loss of an Eye from the Bite of a Leech” (May 31, 1862), where a doctor named Mr. Von Graefe (they weren’t called “Dr.” then) recounts that his patient, a five year old child, “had on account of headache been ordered a leech to the right temple.” The leech ended up crawling over to her eye, resulting in, well, just imagine. “Where were the parents?” I almost shouted. Why did no one realize the stupid leech had crawled to her eye? They don’t move that quickly! And why is Mr./Dr. Von Graefe publishing this story of his own ridiculous incompetence? These were the heady days before malpractice.

I could keep going and going. In the 6/14/1879 issue, a doctor describes how a guy purchased a doll for his one-year-old. The baby put the doll in her mouth and fell gravely ill. Turns out, the doll had a long green dress that was loaded with arsenic.

I’ll end with an article not from the BMJ but from my second-favorite publication, The Lancet (4/27/1861). A Mr. Skey recounts three patients of his, girls aged 15, 16, and 17, whom he treated for “enlarged bursae over the knee.” Touchingly, he dubs this malady “Housemaid’s Knee,” because it was “brought on by kneeling on a hard floor or stone steps whilst following their occupation as servants.” I think Mr. Skey might have been secretly hoping his name for this affliction might gain rapid popularity and perhaps accord him, in turn, some name recognition, but I don’t think the name stuck.

Julien Dupré La Vache Blanche

Update: As you’ll see in the comments, my English friend, Annabel, says that Housemaid’s Knee is still a familiar and recognized condition in the U.K. Perhaps Mr. Skey wasn’t even the originator of the name. I’ll have to go do some more research. Thanks, Annabel!!

Top Ten Viking Nicknames

Posted August 28, 2014

Screen shot 2014-07-02 at 10.04.30 AM The subject of today’s hilarity will be nicknames from the Viking Age. (I did a post awhile back about some of my favorite royal nicknames.) As with most people living in medieval times, the Norse had no last names (surnames), outside of patronyms (Ander’s son, Peter’s son). So, as happened frequently in other medieval communities, nicknames were used as a way of identifying individuals. We’ve all heard of Eric the Red, but there are lots of better ones. The list below comes from the people who settled in Iceland during the 9^th and 10^th centuries. Some are too randy to list on this PG-rated blog. Most are not very flattering. Here are my top ten favorites:

Audun Thin-Hair
Gunnstein Berserks’-Killer
Herjolf Bent-Arse
Audun Thorolfsson the Rotten
Eystein Foul-Fart
Asbjorn Muscle of Orrastead
Thorir the Troll-Burster
Thurid the Sound-Filler (I’m guessing she was a loquacious woman.)
Thorbjorg Ship-Breast
Ljot the Unwashed

Sources: http://www.medievalists.net/2014/06/01/viking-nicknames/

The Book of Settlements: Landnámabók by Hermann Pálsson http://books.google.com/books?id=jj6cIwMCZqIC&pg=PA155&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

Analyze This

Posted August 25, 2014

I’m working on a new book right now, and as part of my research, I have enrolled in an online course on forensics. My professor is one Roderick Bates, an organic chemist and associate professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. I find him delightful. Soft-spoken, with a pleasant British accent, he wears a white lab coat and safety glasses, and he delivers his lectures about heinous crimes involving wood chippers, analysis of body tissues found in chain saws, and body-dissolving sulphuric acid in bathtubs, with a charming exuberance and a hint of a smile playing on his lips.

Professor Bates

In the first week we got an overview of what we’re going to be studying in more depth—stuff like forensic entomology, facial reconstruction, voice recognition, and DNA analysis. Things were pretty simple in Week 1. We saw slides like this:

Even though I’m primarily enrolled to learn more about toxicology, I’m finding so much else so fascinating. For instance, Professor Bates showed us this photo of the late North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. He hadn’t been seen in public for some time, so to quell growing suspicion that Kim Jong-il might be, er, ill, the North Koreans issued this photograph.Professor Bates showed us why it’s easy to see the photo has been doctored. If you look closely at the black line running along the white platform behind their legs, you can see that it is not continuous, and the shadows aren’t falling the same way for the Dear Leader as they do for the others in the photo: Plus, he explained, a close examination of the pixilation confirmed that the image of Kim didn’t match up.

I just completed Week 2, and things have started to get a little more complicated. Now we’re seeing slides like these:

But complicated or not, Professor Bates has remained charming and engaging, and I’m kind of able to follow the chemistry and molecular analysis discussions. I can hardly wait until we get to the toxicology unit!

My Geek Week

Posted August 18, 2014

This week, Dear Reader, I won’t be posting, as I’m doing research for my next book. I’m staying in the empty apartment of a New York City friend and will be spending all my time here, at the New York Academy of Medicine:

And here, at the New York Public Library. Back next week!

Fashion Fail

Posted August 14, 2014

Last month when I was in Paris my husband and I spotted a statue in a small park, and long before we were close enough to read the inscription I said, “That is so the 1830s.” Here’s the statue. In case you can’t see the inscription, the date is 1830.

Not that I should get mad props for ID-ing the fashion era. The period from 1830 to the early 1840s was marked by a very characteristic look in fashionable European and American circles. I loathe it.

1835

Besides being extreme in its silhouette, I find everything about the look so . . . depressing. Everything drooped. Hairdos were curled and plastered to the forehead or else looped in front, like the ears of a morose basset hound. Sleeves slid off the shoulders and then ballooned out into absurd proportions. Tight, fitted bodices set off huge skirts, which were draped and flounced and beribboned. Have a look at some of these and see if you don’t agree with me:

1835

Kids suffered, too. Gone were the relatively comfy skeleton suits worn by boys of the past decades (see my blog here). Back came the corsets and tight collars and heavy fabrics:But it was the little girls who really had it bad. The muslin and cotton dresses that had been so popular in previous decades gave way to heavy brocades and velvets with tightly-laced bodices and multiple petticoats padding out their heavy, uncomfortable skirts. For early Victorians, it wasn’t just fashionable to upholster your sitting room–you had to upholster your kid as well. Have a look:

Anne-Louise_Alix_de_Montmorency,_with_her_daughter,_c.1840

Swarmed

Posted August 11, 2014

Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Roman Dictator
Bibi Saint-Pol, own work

The first time I stumbled across a reference to the disease known as phthiriasis (pronounced “thuh-RY-uh-sis) I was reading Plutarch’s gleeful account of the death of the Roman tyrant Sulla.

Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138 – 78 BC), who had a nasty habit of putting his enemies’ heads on pikes, died a relatively old man, having murdered all the people who might try to assassinate him. And yet, according to Plutarch, Sulla met a ghastly end.

Sulla became sick with an intestinal hemorrhage. Said Plutarch, “the corrupted flesh broke out into lice. Many men were employed day and night in destroying them, but they so multiplied that not only his clothes, baths, and basins, but his very food was polluted with them.”

According to this article by J. Bondeson MD, PhD, in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Sulla may or may not have had phthiriasis. If he did, the bugs swarming out of his guts were not lice but mites, which can infest a person with an already-weakened immune system. As Sulla was so roundly hated by most Romans, Plutarch may have simply wished he’d had the disease. That seems to have been a pattern: most ancient writers agreed that phthiriasis was a disease contracted as a punishment by the gods, divine retribution for tyrants and various enemies of prevailing religions.

J. Bondeson tells us that phthiriasis has a long history. Aristotle wrote about it. Galen did, too. So did Pliny the Elder, but he wasn’t much of a detail-oriented guy and was wrong about, well, pretty much everything. Still, there are lots of accounts of this gruesome flesh-eating disease from ancient times.

In Acts of the Apostles, after Herod Agrippa was hailed as a God, “an angel of the Lord smote him because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and died.’

Doubt has been cast about whether this disease actually existed, but Bondeson cites several reliable cases of phthiriasis dating from the 16^th century, and regular mention of it in textbooks and case reports well into the nineteenth century. In case after case, the victims fell ill with many swellings all over the body that eventually burst, and from which small insects streamed out. Nice. Linnaeus called it “louse fever,” and recommended slathering the patient with mercurial ointment.

Did the disease really exist? Bondeson and others believe so. He cites various entomologists who think the mites may have been a species similar to one that infests birds.

It remains a mystery as to why the disease vanished so suddenly by the 1870s. Some medical historians speculate that that species of mite may have gone extinct. Whatever happened to them, I’m glad they’re gone.

Renaissance Road Trips

Posted August 7, 2014

Ra-smit [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Chenonceau Castle

On a recent trip to France, we passed by many châteaux in the Loire valley, each more magnificent than the next. The Loire valley is not very close to Paris—it’s about 110 miles from Paris to Chateau de Chambord, for instance—and I wondered how long it took sixteenth century travelers to make this journey—and why there were so many castles.

First, the distance. Under the best of conditions (good roads, decent weather, level ground), humans can walk four miles per hour over long distances. Horses can’t do much better–maybe five mph—but a lot less if they’re pulling something or if roads are in awful condition. A horse can canter at 20 mph, but it can only do that for six to eight miles at a time, after which it will slow down and walk, or stop completely. So it would have taken a long time to get from place to place. Under the best conditions, a journey from Paris to Chambord would have taken three weeks. But in fact, it took a lot longer than that. Because in the sixteenth century, the royal court didn’t just hop on a horse and head to their country home. They took everything and everyone with them, loading all the stuff onto the backs of horses and mules.

Catherine de Medici traveled with her ladies and gentlemen, foreign ambassadors, dwarves, pet bears, servants, retainers, attendants, apothecaries, astrologists, tutors, musicians, cooking pots, food, clothing, portable triumphal arches, wall hangings, and furniture.

And second: the reason there were so many castles is simply that the court in Renaissance times –thousands of people–had to move around from estate to estate so as to find new hunting grounds. Once they’d exhausted the food supply in the area, they moved on to the next estate. Also, the sanitation was dreadful. After thousands of people had taken up residence in and around a great estate for a few weeks, filth piled up, and with it, stench and disease.

The royal procession could be miles long. According to Leonie Frieda’s Catherine de Medici, the beginning of the royal caravan sometimes entered a town before those traveling at the back of it had left the last one.

Guest Post!

Posted July 31, 2014

Screen Shot 2014-07-16 at 9.26.43 AM Today on the blog, please welcome my special guest: kidlit writer-friend, Jane Sutcliffe. Jane and I met through the New England chapter of SCBWI, and she is the author of over two dozen nonfiction books for kids, including the fantastic, recent picture book Stone Giant: Michelangelo’s David and How He Came to Be (Charlesbridge). Her new book, The White House is Burning August 24, 1814, is slated for publication next week (August 5, 2014). Jane lives on a farm in Tolland, Connecticut, with her husband, two sons, three goats, and “one very spoiled dog named Willy.”

Here’s the trailer for the book.

So without further ado—here’s Jane!

Jane Sutcliffe

Paying Attention to the Voices

As a writer of nonfiction, especially history, I often tell people that my job is to listen to voices.

Yeah, I should probably explain that.

I’ve written a fair number of biographies, so I tend to see history from a very personal viewpoint. History for me is like a chorus, each voice telling its own unique story. You’ve got your loud bass voices, the ones belonging to the big names of history. And then there are the smaller, fainter ones. They have their own story to tell.

Those are the voices that fascinated me when I was researching my middle grade book, The White House is Burning: August 24, 1814. They’re the voices of slaves, clerks, and teenage soldiers. They’re the voices of people who were there. They watched the unthinkable happen: enemy troops invading Washington, burning the Capitol and the White House. They watched, up close and in person, as flames lit up the sky brighter even than the moon. I can only imagine what that night must have been like. How could I not listen to their stories?

There was the woman who wrote, “Few thought of going to bed—they spent the night in gazing on the fires.”

A little girl in Baltimore, forty-five miles away, saw the flames and marveled that, “I thought the world must be on fire—such a flame I have never seen since”

I listened to the anguish in the voice of the clerk who could not tear himself from the sight of the city in flames. “So awful,” he called the scene.

I listened to the teenage tourist known only as Miss Brown, who described in horror “the horizon illuminated by the burning Capitol.”

These are real people who experienced that night with real noses pressed against real windows. And they have a story to tell. Listen!

France, Part Trois

Posted July 27, 2014

It’s Sunday and we’re at the airport, heading home. It’s been an amazing trip.

We left Lyon for Normandy on Wednesday. On the way, we stopped overnight in the Loire region and visited Chenonceaux, a Renaissance chateau that belonged to Catherine de Medici.Actually, it wasn’t hers originally. Catherine’s husband, Henri II, presented it to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, which rankled Catherine to no end. After he was killed in a freakish jousting accident, Catherine wasted little time bunging Diane out of Chenonceaux. Catherine told Diane she would swap it for a different chateau, named Chaumont, but when Diane entered Chaumont, she found Catherine had had it redecorated with Satanical pentagrams as part of the motif, and Diane was so freaked out, she never returned to it.

On Thursday we visited the magnificent 12th century Abbey of Fontevraud, where Eleanor of Aquitaine is entombed. Here she is, next to her husband, Henri Plantagenet:Their son, Richard the Lionhearted, is also entombed there, except that this is just one of three burial sites for him. His body was divided up and buried in three different places: his heart was sent to one place and his brain and guts to another.

At Bayeux, we visited the famous tapestry. It’s actually not a tapestry (which is by definition woven). It’s an embroidered cloth, magnificent to see in real life. Nine centuries old and 70 meters long, it depicts the events surrounding the Norman conquest of England and the Battle of Hastings, in 1066. At that battle, William, Duke of Normandy, aka William the Bastard (long story) defeated Harold, King of England, and William became known as William the Conqueror. And French became the official language in England for the next three hundred years.

Naughty panel 15

You can see the whole panel here, but I made a beeline for panel 15, because I’ve always been curious about the two mysterious naked guys and was excited to see them in, er, the flesh. Medieval scholars have argued endlessly about this scene. Why is there a naked guy smoothing wood with a sharp, dangerously situated blade? And who is the woman in the main panel, getting slapped by the guy in the cape? And why is there another naked guy in the margin art, just below her? She’s one of only two women in the entire tapestry, and the embroidered caption says: Ubi unus clericus et Ælfgyva, which translates roughly as: Hey, look. It’s a clerk and Ællfgyva. According to the audio guide, Ællfgyva was Harold’s daughter and it’s Harold who is smacking her, because she got herself engaged to William. Or maybe it’s the other way around and she’s getting slapped by William for getting engaged to Harold. Some scholars think the second naked guy may just be a naughty joke thrown in by one of the embroiderers, or he may be her lover hiding under the floorboards, or the first naked guy may symbolize Harold in a precarious predicament and the second one is Harold boasting and acting—literally I suppose—too big for his britches, before he proceeds to get trounced by William later in the tapestry. If you have another theory, please let us know in the comment section.

On Friday we spent a somber day driving around Normandy, viewing the D-Day battle sites and cemeteries (both American and German) with our amazingly knowledgeable and lovely guide, Claire. Here she is with Jon:And here’s Omaha beach, one of the D-day landing sites, which is spectacularly beautiful, and haunting.I was surprised to see that it was open to the beach-going public, and that there were some people swimming there. But Claire said that WWII veterans she has toured have told her they’re glad that French people use the beaches recreationally, as it reinforces why they fought that day.

France, Part Deux

Posted July 24, 2014

Bonjour again, this time from Lyon, France. We’re staying in an incredible sixteenth century building on a very narrow cobbled street in the old part of the city. Here’s the street–just out of the frame, on the left, would be the heavy oak door to our “hotel,” although it’s really more of a residential apartment, on the sixth floor. It’s awesome. And it has wifi. (Ah “l’ironie!”)

Can you see that there are a few street signs overhanging the narrow street? Maybe you can’t, but trust me—there’s a long wooden baguette signaling a bakery, and a big pair of scissors announcing a barbershop. A few centuries ago, such signs would have been on most streets, because house numbering didn’t start until the nineteenth century. There might have been an enormous tooth announcing the location of a tooth drawer, or a huge cow indicating a butcher. Barber surgeons usually just set a couple of buckets of congealed blood on either side of their doorway, to indicate their services as blood drawers.

We’ve had an action-packed couple of days. Our last day in Paris, we visited the catacombs (thanks to the recommendation of my friend, Kate Messner). They’re a huge bone repository (ossuary) and were created in the galleries of the former quarries whose stone was used to build the major sites of Paris–including the Louvre and Notre Dame. For decades, out of concern for public health (and because so many cemeteries were so overcrowded, bones kept resurfacing during heavy rains), Parisian officials had bones dug up and moved down to the catacombs. You can’t believe how many there are.

According to the website, the remains of six million Parisians, including many victims of the French Revolution, are there.

When we got to Lyon we visited two museums devoted to the silk-making trade, of which Lyon is justly famous, and the museum of decorative arts, which is situated in a magnificent seventeenth-century villa that once belonged to a wealthy Lyonaise family. They had two sedan chairs, and I got to look right inside this one: I couldn’t get a good picture, but it was lushly upholstered, with chair arms and everything. And I helpfully explained to a confused American couple that this is known as a pole screen:As I have blogged about before, fireplaces were pretty inefficient—blazing hot close up, but inadequate for warming much of a room even a few feet away. So people used pole screens to shield their face from the heat of the fire and to keep their waxy makeup from melting, or their patches from sliding off.

Sadly, the furnished rooms of the mansion had not a single pot de chambre. I know because I asked several of the museum docents.

We also visited the ruins of two Roman amphitheaters. Lyon was an important Roman city in Gaul, founded back in 43 BC. They called it Lugdunum. The larger amphitheater could seat over 10,000 people. Here’s Jon, standing in front of what appear to be the Sky Boxes:And finally, because my basketball-player husband deemed the walking we’d done not quite enough for one day (12.24 miles as clocked by my Fitbit), he decided to “aller faire du jogging.” Actually, he ran up an ancient staircase that happened to be a few feet down the street from our hotel. So as his workout, il a monter les escaliers en courant about nineteen times. Here’s proof:

While he ran stairs, I went shopping.