In A Monument of Charity: St. Vincent’s Hospital and Catholic Health Care in New York City (New York University Press, 2026), Professor Thomas F. Rzeznik offers a comprehensive look into the daily operations of the long-standing, titular hospital. Through this process, Rzeznik celebrates some of the more influential women among the ranks of the Sisters…
Tag: History
The Birth of the Wellness-Industrial Complex: Justus von Liebig’s Extractum carnis as Exemplar
Baron Justus von Liebig carved out his name among one of the most influential yet now-forgotten figures in the history of chemistry. A major contributor to the development of fertilizer and its techniques for use, Liebig made an equally indelible mark on the landscape of mass-marketed foodstuffs, with his development of dried milk, his investigations…
Don’t Judge a Doctor by Their Coat – or Do We? The Fabric of Medical Authority Between Hippocrates and Us
Before moving to the United Kingdom, my life looked very different. I lived in a small town and I worked as an EMT on an ambulance. Professionally, it lasted only a few months, but on a human level – as a student and as a volunteer – it shaped me for more than three years….
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…
Representations and Discourses of Vietnamese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards, Part II
Clothing in Postcards of Algerian and Moroccan Women In many ways, garments were a marker of disparity between Vietnamese and North African colonial portraiture. In Algeria and Morocco, postcards were often organized around the veiled—or rather, unveiled—woman, a theme central to Orientalist art and photography. Colonialist photographers, such as Jean Geiser, Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst…
Representations and Discourses of Indochinese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards (1880s-1920s), Part I
In the opening of his influential book Orientalism, Edward Saïd exposed the dominance and hegemony of Western authors and artists in shaping and formulating the fundamental narratives about the ‘Orient’, emphasizing the binary and self-consolidating character of colonial discourse: A very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and…
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….
Human Health, Animal Health
This past summer, I spent some time in the British Library paging through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical recipe books. My primary interest was finding remedies relating to appetite and the stomach. As someone who is interested in the history of animal-human interactions, however, I could not help noticing that some of these manuscripts contained remedies…
Beyond the Iron Curtain: A Plea for Eastern European Humanities (I)
I write this on the 347th day of the Russian Invasion on Ukraine, from neighbouring Romania. In between editing, I keep in touch with friends and colleagues across Eastern Europe: there is talk of a major Russian offensive this month and Moldova has, wisely and predictably, extended its state of emergency once more. On…
“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…