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….
Category: Science, Technology and Medicine
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…
The Elusiveness of Photography to Convey Animal Suffering During the Early 20th Century
“Facts that need no comment”, states the caption of a series of images that illustrate the chapter on vivisection in a naturist handbook published in 1915 in Montevideo, Uruguay (p. 81). It was an encyclopaedic treatise on vegetarianism and natural medicine that offered theoretical and practical articles and included illustrated instructions for doing gymnastics, taking…
Against Breasts
More than 16,000 mastectomies were performed in England and Wales in 2009-2010, mine among them. Due to the size of the tumor, the surgeon explained, it would not be possible to perform “breast conserving therapy” (BCT)—more often more referred to in the U.S. by the awkward Latinate term lumpectomy, and in the UK as a…
Is this ‘For Us’? Doulas, Medical Racism and De-Potentializing Newborn Screening
It’s the second week of my rotation with a reproductive health advocacy organization. On my desktop, a grid of squares, icons of faces interspersed with actual faces, populate the screen. They are from the east and west coast, and some United States territories. More than half of them are Black or Latinx. Each of them…
On hog plum, healing, and goop cosmetics
A wild forest fruit becomes part of a luxury skincare regimen. What is lost along the way? Hog plum (aka yellow mombin) hails from the tropical forests of Mesoamerica and the West Indies, where people have foraged its sweet fruit and medicinal leaves and bark for hundreds if not thousands of years. They have developed…