Brent Arehart // Everybody knows where babies come from. When two people love each other, a stork brings them a child. Where does the stork pick up the baby for distribution? Why, the baby factory, of course. How does the baby factory make babies? Well, they just make them, you know, like a car factory…
Category: History of Medicine
A Look at a Florentine Book of Domestic Medicine
Claire Litt // A recipe book composed four hundred years ago sits on a shelf in Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (1). Its title, “Anon Raccolta di segreti alchimi […]” (Anonymous Collection of Alchemy Secrets […]) is similar to numerous other manuscripts in the collection and does not hint at all at all at the book’s…
In defense of humoralism
Steve Server // “When you get stressed, all the blood comes out,” she explained. This was one of the explanations I heard from a patient in the OBGYN clinic regarding her ongoing vaginal bleeding, which was likely due to cervical cancer. She told me that she had been eating flour mixed with water on days…
Five Decades of “Semiotic” Fetal Imagery in the US: Part 2
This is the second of two articles on the history fetal imagery in the United States. The first post can be found here. The conflation of fetal rights and human rights extended into the 1990s and continued to obscure the rights of pregnant people. Liberals assembled around the rhetoric of “safe, legal, rare” to accommodate…
From Healing to Feeling: Two Experiments with Electric Shocks
Pauline Picot // 2013. Lyon, France. A young woman is sitting on a chair. She has long, well-groomed hair and is wearing a denim jacket. She knows what is about to happen. She agreed to participate. There is a disposable camera in front of her. She hesitates for a moment. Then she suddenly presses the…
Let Sleeping Surgeries Lie? The Usefulness in Revisiting Battey’s Operation
Jessica M. E. Kirwan // I have been pondering the necessity and implications of retrospectively redeeming a procedure that in its own day’s standards was considered highly problematic.
Part III: Keeping Up (Virginal) Appearances: Secrets, Morality and Women’s Sexual Health
Claire Litt // The Countess of Forlì, Caterina Sforza (1463-1509) is a woman whom history remembers primarily because of an apocryphal story recounted by none other than Machiavelli. In his Discourses, Machiavelli described a coup d’etat during which Caterina tricked her enemies into allowing her to regain entrance to her castle by leaving her children…
Mid-Century Satyrs: Another Dead End in the Pathologization of Sexual Behavior
Brent Arehart // “The ‘stud’ suffers from a pathological need for excessive sexual intercourse, which can only be satisfied by one or more willing partners.” So wrote Dr. Franklin Klaf in 1966 in the opening pages of Satyriasis: A Study of Male Nymphomania. He then went on to make a case for the severity of…
‘War Above the Clouds:’ Fluid Landscapes of the ‘Dodgy’ Soldier
Sanaullah Khan // The Siachen Glacier is one of the longest non-polar glaciers in the world. It was first discovered through a series of European expeditions, which consisted of officers of the British Army, geographers associated with the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), as well as geologists, mineralogists and meteorologists, in the early 20th century. The…
The Grief of Miss Jane Barker: A Seventeenth-Century Anatomy
Kaitlin Pontzer//There may be no wrong way to grieve, but the grief of Jane Barker was particularly odd. When her beloved brother died in 1675, Barker wrote an anatomical poem to commemorate his passing. To be precise, she wrote “A Farewell to POETRY, with a Long Digression on ANATOMY,” in which she was guided on…
