Month: September 2018
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The story of chocolate
Merve BerberAnkara, Turkey Chocolatl, meaning “bitter water,” was the earliest form of chocolate. It was a beverage that contained the seed of the cocoa tree (Theobroma cacao) and was consumed by the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations of the Olmec, Mayan, and Aztec during sacrificial rituals to the gods and for medicinal use.1 The bitter seed kernels…
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Unlocking the secrets of longevity: the potential of Cannonau
Samuele CannasPisa, Italy “O gentlemen, the time of life is short! / To spend that shortness basely were too long, / If life did ride upon a dial’s point, / Still ending at the arrival of an hour.”– William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, Act V, Scene 2 Humans have always pursued the search for…
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The health food crusade and the super-food saint: exploring the discourse of healthy eating
Alice RyrieManchester, United Kingdom In our increasingly secular society, the value of health is rising. Moral values that used to be dominated by religion are now a matter of health: “in many ways the church has been replaced by the gymnasium.”1 Due to the rising pressure to be healthy, new problems have arisen about what…
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Food colors: a history of food in art and literature
Sayantu BasuKolkata, West Bengal, India “Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.” This is how Voltaire upholds the significance of food in human existence and in a way summarizes man’s dependence on his daily source of energy. Food has always…
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“It’s vinegar saved her”: folk medicine, food, and the flu in A Time of Angels
Rachel Conrad BrackenRootstown, Ohio, USA The publication of Karen Hesse’s young adult novel, A Time of Angels (1997), coincides with a renewed interest in the history of the 1918–1919 “Spanish flu” pandemic and a proliferation of multidisciplinary studies of contagion and culture.1 Yet A Time of Angels is also a novel about food and folk medicine…
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Tales out of medical school
Charles H. HalstedDavis, California, USA In first-year anatomy class, I shared a rectangular metal table with three other twenty-one-year-old men and our assigned corpse, a blank-eyed, obese, and lifeless white seventyish woman. Half of my classmates were former Eastern prep school boys, the others mostly Jewish men from New York City. There were two women…
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Jan Steen: quack doctors visit lovesick maidens
Like his contemporary Molière, the Dutchman Jan Steen makes fun of quack doctors, often shown in ridiculous costumes visiting young love-sick or pregnant women. In the Lovesick Maiden (Fig.1, Metropolitan Museum) the diagnosis is suggested by the painting of a Cupid above the door, the bed on the right, and the bed-warmer on the lower…
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The arrival of the black horse
Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, United States When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come.” I looked and behold, a black horse, and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living…
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Anatomy plates: More shocking than useful
Jacques Fabien Gautier D’Agoty (1716–1785) was born in Marseilles and learned color printing in Frankfurt while working for Jacob Christoph Le Blond, the man who had invented this process. Perhaps anticipating his later conduct, D’Agoty claimed after Le Blond’s death to have made this invention himself. Moving to Paris in 1736, he had the idea…