How was nutritional knowledge popularized on big screens in wartime Japan?
Category: Science, Technology and Medicine
Opening the Japanese Body
How did Japanese people view organs and body? How do you view the inside of your body?
Views of Two Plagues
In 1744, an epizootic of cattle plague broke out in the Netherlands. This was the second such outbreak that the Netherlands experienced during the eighteenth century, the first having occurred from 1713 to 1720. This cattle disease was likely the virus known as rinderpest. Declared eradicated in 2011, rinderpest was a contagious morbillivirus affecting cows…
Mapping fever: disease archives in Ling Ma’s Severance and my class’s Google Earth project
Mapping Fever: Disease Archives in Ling Ma’s Severance and My Class’s Google Earth Project “The city was operating on a different kind of time,” observes Candace Chen, the protagonist of Ling Ma’s alarmingly prescient 2018 pandemic novel, Severance (248). During the devastating global spread of the fictional Shen Fever, Candace—immune to the disease—begins to take…
Harmful or Healthful? Medical Perspectives on Cannibalism in Early Modern Europe
When syphilis broke out in Europe during the late fifteenth century, people debated the disease’s origins. Many believed that it had arrived from the recently encountered “New World” (Eamon 2), but Bolognese surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-88) proposed that the outbreak was caused by cannibalism that had occurred during the French invasion of Naples in 1494….
The Healthy Exotic Taste of the Empire: A Story of Restyling Manchurian Food in Modern Japan
What is Manchurian Food? Here is a short story about what it was, and how it was restyled by zest and curiosity of nutrition scientists, urban consumers, and policymakers in prewar and wartime Japanese Empire (1930s-40s).
Different Takes on Dobbs: Anti-Choice Rhetoric and the End of Mifepristone
My second year of undergrad, I enrolled in a writing course called Political Fictions. The class description said we would be asked to engage creatively with Joan Didion’s texts and compose “personal essays and fictions which respond[ed] to the political climate of our time.” One assignment involved choosing a newspaper article and spin-doctoring it to…
Transformed Food and Dietary Style in Modern Japan (1870s)
How did nutritional knowledge transform people’s perception of food and dietary life in 1870s’ Japan?
“It hath left behind it so foul and filthy broad scars, that touched the lives of four persons”: Stories of Medical Malpractice in Elizabethan England
In the preface to his 1588 treatise on surgery, Elizabethan surgeon William Clowes declared to his reader that “mine intent is not to hold my tongue at abuses” (A prooued practise sig. A1r). Thus began a section in which he discussed several stories of medical malpractice.1 In one, he described a “pernicious pill” that had…
Under the Surface
I’ve only seen it a few times. I don’t mean when you pass someone at the grocery store, their head covered in a silk turban, pale skin, no eyebrows. I mean at close range—when it’s beyond repair. The first time was ten years ago, an older Taiwanese woman brought in by her concerned daughter. In…